Emine didn’t like being alone, but in New Mexico she found a certain rapture in loneliness. The chittering of the prairie dogs, the clouds she simply could not describe but tried to in an email to Maria and Rennie. Sometimes you see white or gray stripes that mimic the mesas on the horizon but mostly clouds aren’t a backdrop. They’re a living mass that moves toward you in pregnant billows, in startling 3-D. You can’t capture it in a flat photograph. I’ve seen some paintings, though, that almost do. And, she thought, Petey Koh could probably simulate the effect on the computer.
She wrote them from the motel lobby, the night of the thunderstorm when she simply had to pay for a room. She stood outside beneath the overhang watching fantastic lightning strikes over the desert while the wind lashed her with rain. Back inside, she changed into dry clothes and wrote some more: I’m in Gallup, near Red Rock Park which is in New Mexico but reminds me so much of Red Rock Canyon on Route 14. Is it possible I’m homesick for a place I never considered home? I miss you both.
No reply from either one. So out-of-character for Rennie but of course it was entirely true to character for Rennie to be so damn sensitive, her feelings probably hurt by the joint email rather than one sent to her alone. But was that a reason not to answer? Being cut off this way annoyed Emine more than she wished to admit.
Not that I’m such a nice person either, she thought. What about Alula Wright? Arbitrary the way she ignored her. That woman came along and something inside Emine just rebelled, said Enough! It occurred to her now she’d felt powerless with life—everything—beyond her control. Every now and then she claimed—she needed to—the only power she had. To say No.
Now she would put off as long as she could the return to Istanbul. Where she would have to see her family. And his. What would she tell them?
And then? Without Oğuz, without work, what on earth would she do with herself? The steering wheel slid against her palms, through the curve of fingers, smooth as her husband’s penis. How crazy it was for them to be apart.
The Grand Canyon was too huge to take in. America, where bigger had to be better. Emine’s eyes were drawn instead to the junipers along the canyon rim. She thought of Petey Koh again, wondered if he would stay married to his anti-social wife.
She was married too. Sometimes she felt her heart catch and stop. Oğuz.
As long as she kept moving, no one knew where she was. No one could reach her. His silence meant nothing.
Bryce Canyon. The hoodoos, misshapen red pillars, wind and water-carved, rising up amid the fir trees from the canyon floor. But if the hoodoos of her own country were touched by fairy-folk, something other than human, this landscape was simply inhuman. Instead of Cappadocia’s soft colors, the playfulness, the invitation to enter its honeycomb of refuge, here there were jagged walls, splendid in their savagery, red like open wounds. It all took her breath away, canyons and cliffs, on and on, more and more and more till she thinks you can only look at so much sandstone.
Zion National Park. She rode the shuttle. Recorded commentary she could hardly hear over the children shouting, tourists talking. She was getting a headache: the mechanical voice, the rock walls almost too high to take in from the windows, columns and peaks, the patriarchs, Abraham Isaac Jacob almost hidden behind the Angel Moroni millions of year sand dunes sandstone sedimentation minerals groundwater….Is it possible, she thought, I’m getting tired of rocks? The voice tells her: The person responsible for your safety is you.
Cows grazing on the lawn in front of the luxury condo development. Lovely pastoral scene, but she doubts the residents appreciate the cowflops.
Fields striped with shadows of clouds.
A sign: Caution: Open Range. And she misreads it: Rage.
A car tailgating so close behind a truck, it looks like it’s being towed.
A bicycle on a rack behind an SUV, the front wheel spinning.
She drives with ease on paved roads where once Native people planted squash and whatever else and found a way to live on this wild terrain. She thinks of the Mormon emigrants, how awed they had to be by these canyons, how brave and full of faith to venture across so hard and dangerous a land. The road vibrates through her body day and night and she thinks with admiration of bus drivers and long-distance truckers.
What has happened to her that a landscape makes her think, first, of people?
She allowed herself to cry. This was ridiculous, being a tourist. She should head back to Desert Haven, one last time, to say goodbye. No need for a motel there. Rennie hadn’t bothered to email but surely if Emine showed up she’d be welcomed.
California and the desert scrub sparkles with shards of glass. No hiking here, over mile after mile of broken bottles. Across Death Valley and on to Desert Haven.