They miss her again, because months earlier, Pueblo people had come to the Institute, men in suits except for the elder with a blanket around his shoulders. They wanted the latest information on remediation because of the tailings and contamination and Los Alamos fallout. The unpublished studies were raw data, but rather than tell them they wouldn’t understand, Emine explained it was all unfinished, but in case she was unable to complete the studies, they might be in a position to carry it forward. Here. She gave them her data, copied onto a spare thumb drive.
She was en route to New Mexico now because the Navajo also needed information more than 20 years after the Church Rock uranium disaster. She hadn’t been able to get and analyze samples but she could give them the documents, what was already known, who was responsible, who had blocked the investigation. She thought of that woman, Alula, who grew up here, and her brain tumor and her uranium chunk. The woman wrote letters; Emine didn’t respond.
From the moment she’d stepped off the plane, Emine had the oddest sensation of returning home. The landscape was nothing like the world she’d grown up in, but the land had the same ancient hum, she could feel the earth breathing beneath her feet. She thought of her friend Maria feeling God.
The place captured her. Sun and wind, yes, but this was desert light, not Mediterranean light. She closed her eyes and let the wind touch her everywhere. Oh, the things we do when our mothers aren’t there to see. Fear of aire. She’d thought it was a Jewish superstition but Maria’s mother had the same fear. Aire! If you go outdoors after a meal, the draft will hit you and leave you with a crooked mouth!
Her mother, who gave Oğuz such condescending respect. The Ottomans restricted education to the nationalities. The native Turks, the Anatolians were kept in ignorance. Why? There’s no accounting for the things that Empires do. And such good people. And look, within a few generations how smart, how successful they’ve become!
A weekend in Pamukkale…her mother wouldn’t swim. She seated herself with sunbonnet and dark glasses where she could watch her daughter in the thermal pool, but Emine let her mother fade entirely from view. The hot water hypnotized her. The earth had subsided or the hot springs had overcome the surface of the earth and submerged a civilization. The water rose up over columns and broken statues and bathed them and Emine’s body. She drifted, carried back through time, back even before the 15th century when they left Spain and boarded the ship the Sultan sent to carry the Spanish Jews to his welcoming realm, further back to when the Greeks worshipped and left the images of their gods and goddesses, back to a world submerged like Atlantis but not quite vanished. Rediscovered. In the thermal pools it was as though the gods still gave off an energy that expressed itself as heat. Their divinity entered through her pores. She was becoming non-flesh, pure spirit, ancient, merged with mystery, and she had no mother then. The sun went down. She saw flames on the water and then she moved through the dark and through the past. Suddenly, bright lights flash. Loud music, I Will Survive, and they come—where did they come from?—five, ten, maybe more, in bikinis, screaming and splashing, one of them topless, Germans? Swedes? It didn’t matter who they were. The gods were dead.
And so that’s what it was, in New Mexico, the same sense of mystery that could be so easily shattered. This vibration under her soles, she feared wasn’t soul, but rather the radiation from the uranium fields she had come to track. The so-called greater good, contamination of barren reservation land in the name of national security. Toxic beauty.
Lately she saw the dark side of everything. When she picked up the rental car, they made her mark up a sketch of the vehicle to note any existing damage. She thought at once of how they mark up an outline of a body when a casualty is brought into the ER.
Adobe here for building, not stone. Mesas, not fairy spires. But look, there, sunflowers against a terracotta wall, there would be whole fields of them on the plains of Anatolia and women at work, their backsides in patterned trousers lifting in the air like flowers, too. They should plant whole fields of them here, sunflowers, sucking up the poison, making the soil clean.
And the rocks. Black and red. Slabs and sculpted. She always loved rock.
Pamukkale, where her life course was set at age eight. Rock formations like snow, like cream, and yet solid enough to hold you safe on the earth. Emine frozen with wonder, static ecstatic, the electric shock that both startles and paralyzes, the coup de foudre. Sedimentation, water turning itself to stone by casting out its own constituent part. Building up something beautiful out of what was always inside.
The blinding white terraces, travertine frozen in place like glaciers, icebergs, step by step. the pool of thermal waters flowing out toward the cliffs and the horizon as though flowing on forever, an optical illusion of the infinite.
The rock, invisible, dissolved in the water. The water painting the landscape with rock, the blinding white stone, and contaminants spreading through the karst aquifer.
Things come into solid being to deny their insubstantiability—and vice versa.
The souvenir statue of the goddess that melted when she tried to wash it clean of dirt not knowing it was made of salt.
In the car, the temperature gauge showed the red zone. She shut off the A/C. Opened the windows to the hot wind. The needle moved higher. She turned on the heat to draw it off the engine. What do you expect? Midsummer in the desert. The beautiful desert. Toxic.
Her feet burned but the car kept going.
She followed the road automatically. Sometimes her mind froze. Even the red sandstone cliffs, the broken black malpais didn’t register. The mesas distant on the horizon. Sunflowers and herds of sheep and wide-haunched women. Her thoughts shattered to pieces and flew in all directions. Kerido, kerido, thoughts of her husband and thoughts that went further back to childhood. Her concentration was a stripped gear, it slipped, it didn’t catch. She traveled, letting her thoughts go where they would during the journey, trusting she’d regain focus when she arrived.
Emine remembered the Pueblo elder.
She remembered intercalated gray limestones and marl. Ca-SO4-HCO3 type and meteoric in origin, brown conglomerates, sandstones, claystones.
Oğuz had told her about a bear, and she remembered.
The man with the tambourine. Bam bam and the bear would stand.
“It shouldn’t be allowed,” her mother said.
“But he looks like he’s smiling.”
“A grimace,” said her mother.