(1977; in situ installation; 30 miles east of Nara Vista, New Mexico)
Here is the ghost town, the abandoned military base crumbling into the flat, sunburned waste. Scrub brush, bare trees reaching. Here is the base’s center, the single intersection: the PX, a gas station, a small office building. All vacant.
Here is the squat brick school, its skin tattooed with graffiti, its windows fringed with broken glass. The schoolyard’s grass is dry and long and wild. A pair of bicycles lie on their sides as if they had flung themselves down, exhausted. A swing set, a rusted merry-go-round. Overhead the sky is wide and flat, marked with white cirrus brushstrokes.
Here is the tall, old man wearing a straw rancher’s hat. He appears at the edge of many of the photographs, his back almost always turned, facing out in the same direction as the lens. In a few of the photos he points off past the buildings toward the smudge of horizon. In one image he sits on a tree stump, drinking a can of beer, looking past the camera, his bronzed, lean face lined from years of squinting into sun and wind.
Two decades before Alex took the photos, the military conducted a pair of A-bomb tests on the base’s northern edge. Alex had found a film of the tests, and one night in his studio he projected it for Jess. What struck her first were the film’s colors—the rich browns and greens of the desert and the uniforms, the brilliant blue sky. And then the soldiers—fresh-faced boys standing in trenches, joking, laughing, playing cards. For a few moments, the camera lingered on them, this loose waiting. Then a jarring cut, shots of dummies propped up in the no-man’s-land above the trenches, stuffed uniforms topped by volleyball heads, hand-drawn faces with crude smirks. Another shot of the sky, a plane passing overhead, its bright contrail painting a straight line across the frame. Two more soldiers, looking somber now, a little tense. They bowed their heads and pulled their helmets low over their eyes. One of them yawned.
Then a flash, flooding the frame white. As the light decayed the soldiers stood, facing the horizon, shielding their eyes. The camera turned with them to find the rising mushroom stalk, the canopied cloud spreading against the sky. After a moment, the soldiers clambered over the walls of their trenches, running toward that dark bloom.
Alex found the place where the tests were conducted. The land was now owned by the man with the hat. His ranch stood far to the south, but he had purchased what remained of the military base as a buffer against other ranches moving in, oil leases, rumors of an interstate that would cut clear to California. Alex contacted the rancher and spent a few days walking the site, taking pictures. The rancher spent most of each day with Alex, asking questions about his cameras and drinking beer. Alex stayed in a spare bedroom at the back of the man’s house. The rancher was lonely, Alex said. His wife had died of breast cancer a few years before. Alex didn’t refer to the man by name, only as “the rancher.” Jess could see that Alex liked the mystery the title conveyed. This man as solitary sentry, standing watch over fading history—his country’s, his own.
When Alex returned from the base, they sat in Jess’s kitchen and he told her about each image, describing the feeling of isolation or the quality of noontime light in the center of the exposed main street. Earlier that day, Christine had presented herself at the front door and in the hours since Jess had finally understood that the relationship was over. She and Alex were colleagues now, talking about work. They didn’t touch, though she longed to brush the backs of her fingers across his stubbled cheek, to feel that sandpaper roughness, the field of soft skin beneath. Instead they sat across from each other and she looked at the images rather than at Alex, trying to place herself alongside him in the photographs, willing herself even just a few days into the past when she could have stood beside him, his hand on her arm, her lips at his ear.
There were other people in a few of the pictures, young men and women, travel-ragged, hikers and drifters. In one photo a young man with a patchy beard drank a can of the rancher’s beer. The rancher stood in the frame’s foreground. The young man was smiling at him, mouth full. In another, a young man and woman crossed in the distance, backpacks hiked high onto their shoulders, trudging like pilgrims through the dust.
Alex looked over Jess’s shoulder at the photo. “There’s a campsite about thirty miles east,” he said, “and another one thirty miles west, and the travelers pass the base along the way. Some of them know the rancher. He’s always got a cigarette and a beer, a well where they can refill their canteens.”
Zero Zone, Jess had said when Alex asked her what he should call the photographs. She had no idea where the name came from; it just arrived in her head. But she liked the science-fiction sound of it, the buzzing double z’s. It seemed to fit the emptied landscape, a place reduced to a null, waiting for something new to begin.
After Alex’s crash, word came around that Christine, in anguished rage, was threatening to burn all his work. Jess hid the Zero Zone photos in a portfolio under her bed. She had named them; she felt that some part of them now belonged to her.
Those first few nights after the crash she turned and twisted on her mattress, desperate for the oblivion of sleep. She lay sweating in the dark, picturing the image from the newspaper, Alex’s car sheared by the tree, and then the Zero Zone photos below her bed, heat spilling from the prints, spreading up across the sheets.
When she couldn’t take any more, she carried the photos down to the Scout and drove through the day and the following night and morning, out into Arizona and New Mexico, finally parking her truck by the western campsite. She gathered the gear she had hastily packed and started along the trail. Two days’ walk, Alex had told her. That was the word he had used, walk rather than hike, and it made sense to her immediately, traversing the flat, dusty ground. This was nothing like the hikes they had made over the years, into the Angeles Forest, up to Yosemite, climbing the hills around Palm Desert. Days of ascent and discovery, nights in the tent with the flaps tied back so they could watch the wheeling stars. This was different—quiet and severe. The flat ground, the vacant landscape, the dark line of mountains in the unreachable distance.
She walked alone, struggling to keep her head above her chaotic stew of grief and anger and guilt. After a while the walk began to seem like a pointless exercise, trudging to nowhere from nowhere. She fought the urge to turn around and drive back to L.A. But what was there for her now? She didn’t know. So she continued walking, slowly falling into a rhythm of movement that began to lay a pattern for her breathing, the tide of her body swaying from side to side.
She passed other walkers, young and old, alone and in groups, but she couldn’t speak, or even nod in passing. It just wasn’t possible to engage in any way. That night she slept in Alex’s old tent, shivering in the cold.
The following morning she arrived at the abandoned base. She walked the streets from Alex’s photos, peered into the same broken windows. She met the rancher, whose name was Lincoln. Jess thought of his wife, a woman in a bedroom mirror, her fingertips on her breast, feeling the curve of something new, a small hard lump.
She was able to talk to Lincoln. She recognized his grief, though it was older, more lived-with than her own. She wanted to ask him how he had gotten this far with it, how he managed to keep it from consuming him entirely.
She stayed at a motel about a ten-minute walk from the ranch. Lincoln offered his spare room, but Jess couldn’t sleep in another bed where Alex once slept.
She spent two days walking the base and that stretch of trail, trying to understand why she had come. There was something she couldn’t decipher in that final conversation with Alex as he showed her the photos. She hadn’t understood his intentions that night. They were both in such unfamiliar territory, the kind of place he was drawn to photographing, the charged, quiet moments after a noisy end.
The second afternoon, standing on the trail, something sparked in the corner of her vision. Jess turned to see a wispy shimmer, an orange and yellow ripple of light that flapped once, like a flag, and then disappeared.
Coming up a few steps behind, Lincoln answered her unasked question.
“There’s still radiation in the air,” he said. “Not enough to cause any trouble, but you see things sometimes. I tried explaining it to your friend when he was here, but he couldn’t see it.” Lincoln took a sip of his beer. “He said that he didn’t have those kinds of eyes, but he knew someone who did.”
By the end of the week she had designed the structure: a concrete room, ten feet high, twenty-five feet long, thirty feet wide. She drew a narrow wooden door in the eastern wall, and long, slender rectangular openings in each of the other three, horizontal apertures five feet above the floor.
Gabe and a few of his students drove out, and they spent two weeks transforming Jess’s drawings into a physical space. When it was finished, Jess found that it worked as she’d hoped. The room gave focus to those unique moments of light. In the early morning it captured the sunrise, the openings in the walls warmed orange and red. By midday, streaks of flat white light entered from various angles, crossing the space, converging slowly, intersecting and flaring before moving on and away. In the evening a velvety purple glow filled the space as the sun disappeared below the western window.
That final morning, just before leaving, Jess stood on the dusty path looking west, the way she had come. It seemed like months ago, years. The room stood just to the side of the path. A place to rest and reflect on what had been lost before striking out again.
Walking away, Jess looked toward the sunrise. Far in the distance she could see the tiny silhouettes of other travelers, new pilgrims approaching.