The hour of change. Stripes of brown, and silver, a blinding white, and a grey-blue that keeps morphing. Merl lifts her head, the cracks in the dry playa floor now a red relief embedded in her cheek. Where she touches the earth there is heat, and tingling, and on her back, the sun is beginning to scorch its own pattern into her hide. The summer dress is gone, red poppies dissolved in a moment’s light, only a shriveled ring of fabric around Merl’s neck left behind. She pulls it free, and throws it away. She needs to move. And she needs to find water.
The playa stretches ahead, all the way to the distant purple-hazed mountains. Merl’s arms have such trouble supporting her, each handstep so painful, desert plants pricking her palms. The wheelchair lies twisted on its side, metal fused into a new sculpture. The spokes curve into the horizon, akilter, and the hub of the wheel has blossomed out with aluminum tongues. No one will sit on this chair anymore.
All around, the lightning strike has branded the ground. About four feet out, as far as her arms can drag her, Merl sees where the flash has marked its visit on earth. On this side, beneath her, sand has shifted into glass. On the other side, the ordinary salty sand keeps its wind and water patterns. The glass is getting hotter. She has to find a way to leave.
Her testing finger on the non-fused sand quickly retreats. Hot. And sticky, leaving grainy residue that will destroy even her callused palms much too quickly, long before Merl can crawl toward assistance.
Colored fracture lines in the glass hold the cracked patterns of the earth.
One finger, then two, insert themselves in one of the larger cracks. Merl applies pressure. A small explosion. With a ‘ping’ glass separates at a hair-line crack farther out. The rift in the glass moves a fraction. Merl lowers her face to the glass. She feels a cooler breath of air exhaling in an ozone-rich whiff.
The ‘ping.’ This is indeed real glass, and she can hear the scratches of her steel-toe boots as she shifts herself on the smooth surface.
She turns on her back. Her face to the sun high above, climbing steeply on its path, ready to burn the life out of her. She takes in a full breath, arranges herself in a pentagram on the glass, in the middle of the irregular circle fused into the desert.
She sings.
Sound breathes from her lips, first in small sips and hiccups, swelling as the mouth finds its moisture, hidden deep, and tissues lubricate with the swell of the sound.
She sings.
Sound escalates, vibrates, her monstrous wheelchair picking up the waves like an alien antenna, amplifying the sound.
She sings.
Sound mounts and bursts, her vocal cords stretching and deepening in exercise after exercise, running the scales. A small mouse, scurrying across the playa in search of a grain and shade, stops and twitches its whiskers.
She sings.
As the sun reaches its zenith high above, the sound is ready, bursting forth from burning lungs, superheated pressure shaping itself in a larynx that has survived so many toxic breaths already.
At the stroke of noon echoing across from the Wild West church steeple barely visible from the playa’s flatness, the song zings its final crescendo, sustained, high, pitched to find impurities and the pressure lines that keep it all together.
The glass bursts.
The sound descends.
The singer falls.
The earth swallows, and belches a spring.
Water sucks its way out of deep strata, a hydraulics of pressure geysering in the wild.
The founder of the oasis swims in languid laps, and the playa blooms.
18 hours before the founding of the desert spring. The red sun is setting over the playa. The founder manipulates her chair wheel out of the back seat. A snap, and the yellow frame connects to the hub. Another twist, stressful on an already weak back, and the second wheel appears, held in her brown hand. She brings the complex machinery together, and the spindle of the wheel slides into the axle without a hitch.
A satisfying click, and the chair is upright, balanced, a thing of rounded beauty on the hard-baked sand. She swings herself into it, closes the Prius’s door, locks it, and wheels around.
The bands of the high desert lie in front of her: the border of the salt lakes, the alkaline waters shimmering in the evening heat, the layers of horizon and rising air. Birds swoop through the bands, knitting modern abstract art out of the pastel banding.
Merl releases her hands downward, gives a first hesitant push out into this wildness. The square blocks of the city are far behind, and this will be her realm, for the next four weeks, her artist residency, far away from it all.
She avoids looking at her car as she wheels forward—refuses to acknowledge the heavy scratches that have disfigured the shiny lacquer. The last sign of the urban unrest. Merl’s mind is crawling toward peace, away from the screaming metal sounds that surrounded her when she had run the gauntlet out toward the 80 freeway entry off University. Away from the figures, bearded, some tattooed, encased in dirty Gore-Tex or bamboo fibers, who used scrap metal, bicycle chains or their own high-end car keys to mark her beloved Prius trying to make it up onto the freeway bridge, inching its way past soft flesh and destructive metal.
Berkeley was exploding—and she rode the first shockwave out of town, long before the sidewalks were ripped up, streets blockaded, the city locked down and gnarled in place. She made it. A deep breath. The air is marked by altitude and the slight sour taste of the alkali salts floating amid the dust.
Eventually, she does turn back to the scratched Prius, and, with a press of the key, the trunk opens to reveal a row of sturdy sharp-edged boxes. Whole Foods produce, her nourishment for the next four weeks. Merl’s stars had shone on her, had directed her to complete her shop the day before the glint of metal began to shimmer up and down Telegraph, Shattuck and University Avenues. She had managed to snag almond butter and cans of fava beans, high-protein staples that had by now run out in all Berkeley stores.
In Lakeview, Oregon, just one hour away from her high desert residency home, she had stocked up on all perishables, yogurt, cheeses, fresh vegetables and fruit, in the dependable and slightly old-fashioned Safeway.
Merl hefts the first of the boxes out of the trunk and onto her lap. With a firm twist of her wrist, she wheels over to the cottage door, and a push of her finger opens the door to her personal retreat. Coolness and raw pine wood exhale back at her, and she crosses the threshold. On the other side of the patio, the playa lies wide and open.
24 hours before the first geysering of the desert spring. At Café Gratitude, high up Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue, Carla stiffens. She is sitting in the snug corner made between the cooling display and the bar divider, safely out of the way, not visible to anybody looking in from the street door.
Is she really safe enough? Carla can’t quite parse what is going on outside, why hipsters and street citizens are on the rampage together, what the agenda is, where her own politics lie. Carla loves the Bay Area Public School, the anti-gentrification activists who make their rent by getting grants for performance art and travel the world, loves her mates at Small Press Distribution, the poets of activism and protest. So are these them, the mild graduate students, the human chain links who re-tell their stories of walking and standing with the longshoremen in Oakland’s harbor, freezing the supply chains in their tracks? Or is this a different crowd, a lustier brand, swinging different kinds of chains with a jaunty air, ready to crack their Doc Martens down onto the next cockroach that tries to scuttle across the park?
Carla is bewildered, but understands that her way of grasping Berkeley’s political worlds might have run its course, might have become irrelevant the moment the first bussed-in police officer’s throat was cut, and a geyser of blood drenched the front window of the Himalayan restaurant down the street. The politics might have vanished an hour before this gurgling cut, alongside a wall of posters for screenings of Fruitvale Station, when the first five protesters found themselves astonished when another police officer’s hand did not hold a nightstick, or pepper spray, but a fully loaded automatic weapon. The protesters suddenly understood the finality of the change when the officer had mowed them down, neat as a sewing machine, bullet-holes ripping apart the wooden shielding around the building site.
Carla is terrified. She had come to work this morning, has assumed that somehow, order would establish itself, that these outliers of violence would be reabsorbed into the still generally benevolent world of her youth. But no such luck. A study of post-Marxian aesthetics lays open on the bar above her head, the book still where it had been when the first stray bullet had ricocheted its way around the place. The bullet had lodged itself in a big poster, right in the curly ‘g’ of the “What are you grateful for?” caption. Carla isn’t sure, anymore. But the time for understanding has passed. If she wants to survive, she’ll have to leave this little triangle of space behind, and get out of town.
She wills her legs to help her up. She only knows of one way out. The path of least people, far away from the heaving masses of Shattuck and University. Even here, inside the corridor, she can hear the screaming, sirens, helicopters and shots down the street.
She steps out through the wooden portal, past well-trimmed evergreen bushes. The street lies empty, some posters thrown into the street all that tells of what has happened. She runs to her left, runs as fast as she can, toward Cedar Street, its mouth opening onto Shattuck just a few blocks up. She is across Telegraph, walks fast up the street, her side pressed closed to the stores that line the street. She hears a shout behind her. Unintelligible. An angry scream. She runs. The shout does not repeat, nor does the scream, and there are no running feet or roaring motors after her.
She does not let up. Finally, Cedar. She veers around the corner. The clothing store stares at her. Its window has been smashed, and a mannequin bleeds out of the opening, one hand straight, pointing upward, to the place Carla is running toward: the streets out toward Tilden Park, up and out, over the hill and into the far valleys.
At least one of her skills is working for her. With the persistence of a marathon runner, she jogs up, can smell the alluring aroma of Peet’s coffee beans as she passes the original site of the chain store. The smell is stronger than usual. The door yawns open, and the windows have fallen out, too. A small heap of coffee beans has been thrown out onto the street, a curve of black brown pebbles creating a first stony beach bulwark, tenderly ringing their old home.
She pounds past, feels some of the outlier pebbles crack beneath her shoes.
The street begins to tilt upward, out of the coastal zone up toward the Berkeley hills. She’s not even breathing hard yet. To her right, above a straggly community garden, she can see a smoke column: what could be burning and smoking like this at the corner or Center and University? She envisions an effigy of cars, their tires bleeding carbon dust back into the air. She imagines the Goodwill nearby, its doors wide open and its racks empty, old clothes fuelling a new Walpurgis day, warming the homeless folk who called a halt to their invisibility. She pictures the police, having switched allegiances, creating a circle of soil around the bonfire with spades looted from the last hardware stores clinging between the restaurants.
Carla does not wish to participate in whatever new communal festivities are arising out of the ashes out there. She runs on. Veers left, away from the action, and higher up the hill. She passes the rose garden.
The oily sheen of the Bay stretches out to her left. The sun is high now, glinting off the flatness before Mount Tamalpais ends the bay’s reign. The smog is heavy in the air, a haze that just about erases the tops of the Golden Gate. And on the waters, about halfway out to the bridge, Carla sees a ship, and she gasps.
The supply chain is on fire. A giant tanker throws black dense smoke into the sky, a sacrifice, a burnt offering of the dying king drifting away from his people. Carla hears the distant pop of the superheated containers, their sides carving out like lilies, innards spilling into the slick-covered waters below. She imagines electronics, children’s bicycles, sun glasses, all floating then sinking out of sight, and, finally, the demise of an old Ferrari that had made its way all the way from Italy, never to roar to life again, a long ship journey only to be vanquished, to drown in a deep underwater canyon.
Carla stands for a minute, gives her calves a rest. No one is around, the air is deadly still. She reaches out, snaps off a pink and white rose, and inhales.
The girl is going to get away, and Jim is not ok with that. Uh-Huh. No way, little bitch. There is too much going on down University, the city is in flames, and if you get too close, you will get fucking burned. Oh yes, he is not stupid. This here, though, nice and tender, ready for the plucking, roses and all.
Jim likes roses: he remembers roses in the band tattoos emblazoned on Kevin’s walls, his older brother’s pad, deep down in the dungeon of their Ohio paradise. He and his brother had dragged their racing gear all over Columbus’s non-existing town center, sticking it to the po-lice man, swinging in the wind. Roses, and heavy bass, and tinkering with washed-out family cars till they hang like low-riders and boomed through town.
Kevin didn’t make it out of Ohio. His ass got kicked one night in a drag race, the revved up Mazda folded into a hunk of metal and plastic stuffing. And right in there, Kevin.
Jim had stood by the side of the Mazda, could see some of his spray paint patches, not quite as accomplished as Kevin’s. He could see his brother’s head, resting on what remained of the steering wheel. He can still remember the muscular arm across his own breast bone, Howard, one of Kevin’s mates, dragging him backward, away from the car. He still hears the sound of his sneakers on the rough asphalt, half-carted away, remembers the weave in Howard’s old jean jacket. He still smells the stink of hot gas one tick before he sees Kevin’s hair go up around his head in a halo of fire, the head jerking upright for one final time, as if he is alive—was he alive? And then the car rocks back on its heels and yowls with the fire searing through its heart.
Jim’s Keds got all scratched up, fouled by road dust, heat, and the mud by the side of the road. He still wears them, right now, long past their preppy shine and into the deeper rock-n-roll, sneaking up on little Miss Sunshine with the rose in her hand.
Carla holds the rose between thumb and forefinger, carefully, attending to her beating heart, stilling it, like her coaches have taught her. Her head snaps to the left, sensing movement. Blond dreadlock boy is coming up sideways, coming at her like a crab, scurrying across the street. Grey sweatshirt with hoodie, cigarette slim jeans, half street kid, half street cool. Not exactly threatening, not on a normal fine day, not with the flow of the city around them. But today, in the middle of riots, fancy homes up on the hill with shut faces and turned away eyes? A different story. Not an ending she wants to wait for. She inhales the rose’s perfume, tosses the flower, and picks up her speed again. A few vast sprints put her well out of reach of the crab, even as he abandons all nonchalance and lunges for her.
“Bitch!” he screams, and she, normally well terrified by confrontation, bellows.
“Wanker!” A deep and satisfying vibration of her diaphragm.
22 hours to the founding of the new desert oasis. Howard drives on, unperturbed. His wheels, a gallon bottle of water next to his seat, two big bags of Doritos, and two six-packs tucked away in the cooler in the bed of the pick-up. He had left the landscaping job in Oakland’s Lake Merritt Park right on the dot, at 2pm, shift change. Till then, he’d been in his usual haze, picking up and packing out garbage all morning long, ears and eyes closed to all else. But it hadn’t been easy: life on the waterfront had been quite a bit more hectic than usual, what with screaming sirens and joyriders flooring and wrecking cars all about, with lots of people running, not for fun or stamina, but with fear and abandon. He’d seen someone with a TV set in his arms, obviously looted. And when he did straighten, looked toward the horizon, he had seen a plume of black smoke, from somewhere near Broadway. Huh.
On the stroke of two, he had put away his tools. There wouldn’t be cash for him, he knew, and he was a bit doubtful if the city’s check would come through this time. He contemplated driving over to his digs, but, his ears full of the siren’s wail, he decided against it. He climbed in, hands on his steering wheel, and nosed her out and up, back streets to the road over the hill, ready to plunge down near Orinda. Time to get out.
At the turn-off to Tilden Park, he surprised himself by braking for a hitchhiker. She was good-looking, sure, but he wasn’t that kind of man, and she had also looked frightened and strong. Not a bad combination. He could tell that she had run far, had seen her calf muscles bulging and the sweat outlining her arms and neck. Mousy, small woman, but steely, in her own way.
“Where to?”
“Just out of here. I just came up from Berkeley. It’s dangerous out there.”
“Okay. Buckle up, and here we go. Direction outta here.”
They had talked just a little bit, after the first fifteen minutes saw them safely past Walnut Creek, and onto the road to the Martinez Bridge. Fifteen minutes of companionable silence, and of the concentration needed to make it past a herd of fleeing cars, keeping the pickup lined up and ready.
So here they are, rolling. The bridge, and then the turn-off to Vacaville. Past the prison exits. Howard avoids looking at the exit sign, floors the accelerator a bit. He knows people in there, a hot hell hole. He’s escaping.
Carla, that’s her name. She talks, after a while.
Nervous chatting, for a bit, was it this or that that started the riots, who is right, protesters, tax payers, police. Whatever. He does not give a damn, and, soon, she picks up on it, and lets it go.
“I am thinking Oregon. Up the 5, clear ride, then over at Mount Shasta.”
“I haven’t been there. Sounds good. We’ll need liquids, I imagine, and some food.”
“I have some sleeping bags and pads in the back. We’ll be ok with them. And I’ll stop at a Walmart once we are on the 5. Do you have some cash?”
“I have my credit card with me.”
“And you got credit?”
She looks at him, uncomprehending at first. Then it dawns.
“Yes. Good limit. Unless they stop credit altogether.”
“We better make it to a Walmart fast.”
And they do. Out here, life looks normal. No TV set in sight, and the store is well stocked. They grab two trolleys, fill them up, food and drink and mosquito spray. Howard wishes he’d grabbed a can from his job. But that’s not his way, and Carla seems undisturbed by the prices. She pays. They tank up. Onward.
Past Redding, the road thins. They are now on the 299. To their left, Mount Shasta stands solid, and protective. Howard loves riding under her: he feels the presence, and is reassured. His shoulders drop some more, and he rolls down the window, letting in the heat. His arm hooked over the door, he stretches, and the creases in his neck loosen.
“God’s own country.”
“Militia’s own country.”
“Welcome off the grid, baby.”
“Shall we put the radio on?”
She is getting really nervous now, he can see her twitching in her seat.
They try, for a while, catch relatively little. NPR has a story: riots in the Bay Area, hot spot Berkeley, disturbances in SF and Oakland, short segment, little new info. They feel a bit silly, but then each remembers glimpses of what they saw: Howard, a young girl with a cut on her face, dragged behind a grown man carrying nothing but a big water bottle. Carla, the eyes of the crab by the rose garden, the sly assault.
They turn the radio off. No conversation. They drive, eyes strafing by giant trees and giant mountains, gophers daring to cross the road in a flash of fast living.
Early evening, Howard turns off the road. Pit River camp ground.
“Nice place, pretty small. Not many likely to be around. Good?”
The first words uttered in over an hour. She nods. There’s a whole roadful of emotions swarming over her face as he’s slowing down, and he can see that, at least. She’s thinking.
He’s not, not really: the rocks and the trees, and the squirrels and the sun is all he needs. But when one looks up, stuff happens. So he feels some sadness for this young woman by his side, her insides twisting in wild film strips only she can see.
He wants to tell her about stillness and just looking, but he can’t find the words. All he can do is save her, bring her to the river with him, and offer quiet by the rushing water.
18 hours to the geysering. Howard and Carla drive around the campground, at the bottom of the valley the Pit River, the Achuma, has cut for itself. Large trees and the constant roar of the white water fill their eyes and ears.
They are not quite alone. Two large Campervans share the grounds, and three dome tents peek out from other bays. But there is space for them, and they back the pick-up truck up one of the gravel spurs. Howard unrolls a pad and a sack for himself. Carla decides to stay in the truck bed, an arrangement that works fine for them both.
Soon, they sit by the rushing river, drinking Diet Dr. Pepper out of cans, and gnawing on peanut butter sandwiches assembled with Howard’s pocket knife.
“Where are you driving to, do you know?” Carla asks.
“There’s a place in Oregon, high desert country, by the alkali lakes. There’s a campground there, far away from people, but with reliable water. And hot springs. It’ll be good.”
She nods. Sounds good, as good as any. What they had heard on the radio, snatched from the waves, didn’t sound good, not good at all. Too many weapons, protests, the National Army in the Bay Area, and she had heard about fires at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Carla is exhausted. Howard is silent, though he wants to talk, wants so desperately to talk to her, to tell her, to make her see why it is becoming so important to him to keep her safe, and he turns, but he can feel her keeping her distance, he can feel that she can feel his urgency and that it makes her shrink. He retreats, turtling his neck and swiveling away. He plants his feet inches from the waterline. He eats.
The water calms him. He dozes.
His mind glides over accidents, explosions, the fiery scorch of his past. Kevin going up in a glory of fire, a Phoenix in Ohio. His arms hold Kevin’s little brother close, a heart beating next to his own.
Two years later, another crash, on the turnpike. Howard’s own first van lies twisted and grotesque in the far lane, a broken Mammoth, with a crushed Volvo in its mouth. There will be fire, soon, and this time, the figure in his arms is a young woman, unknown, unknowable, her face black with soot and slack with shock. She isn’t blistered, has survived the whoosh of the fire drumming the sky, but her figure is strangely lax in his arms, and something is terribly wrong. Ambulances, hospital, eventually, insurance agents. All is taken care of. He has never seen her again. And now, with the smell of turpentine and smog still in his clothes, there they are, white and drifting on the river: the flowers he has trampled, floating.
Carla knows nothing of these dreams. She wants to run, to find the horizon. This glade and the river’s noise enclose her, and she startles with each shiver in the bushes. She has tried a few times to ring friends in the Bay, but no call goes through. Her mobile is useless, now, her world shrunken to a peanut butter jar and the knife, to her muscles and her ability to focus. She hugs herself, hard, the sinews and long muscles of her torso warm and taunt against her skin.
“Goodbye.” She whispers to her mum, her dad, her friends, after Howard has turned in for the night, has left her alone by the rushing river. She crouches, her mobile in her hand, open, lit, and creates a little raft of sticks to hold the phone in the smoother waters near the rushes. It sails off, a little lit rectangle in the falling night, bobbing from time to time. Carla can’t see if it turns a corner in the river, or drowns.
6 hours before the song ruptures the playa. Howard awakes, rolls out of his dreams of scorching fire, his throat aflame, screaming and caught in the folds of his sleeping bag. In a second, Carla is off the truck and by his side.
Howard keens, still half asleep, and Carla holds him, rocking him.
They sit, and rock, the world shifting beneath and above them into morning. Stars fade slowly, and a green gold glow creeps over the horizon.
The keening stops, and Carla feels Howard’s muscles uncramp, relax, fall heavily toward earth. His face is blank and the eyes won’t look at her. She withdraws her arms, and they sit, side by side, on the sleeping pad, looking out at the green walls around them.
Something small rotates into view, a shadow against the slowly vibrating leaves on the bushes. They both stare. Another move, an angular twist of an articulated leg, down, over, up. A small lizard, a salamander, emerges, black with yellow spots, as if bees’ wax has dripped from an old alchemist’s table. The salamander moves across the clearing, stays off the sharper grit that surrounds the tent site. It stops. Maybe it detects their heartbeat, or their thermal signature. Frozen in the air, only the eyes and tongue move, a small pendulum. Howard and Carla are measured, seen. The rising sun’s rose sky reflects in the silvery coils of the salamander’s eyes. The creature moves on, toward the sounds of the river.
It is time to pack, and get on the road again. The truck is readied in minutes. Howard and Carla step down to the river for a few minutes, their ears full with the rushing and falling of water. Then they climb in, Howard with the achy morning hitch that dropped into his bones so many years ago, that night in the van, breathing petrol fumes into a woman’s life; Carla, nimble, holding onto the overhead struts of the truck as she swings herself into place. Next stop, past the green and blue, into the banded lands: Oregon’s alkali lakes. Behind them, far behind, the skies begin to change.
An hour after the emergence. The founder arcs her back, her legs a sea anemone beneath her, beside her, floating white in the blue. She has tried to crawl onto the land, but the new lake’s edges are sculpted glass, bulbous forms with sharp edges. Merl does not want to cut unknowingly into unfeeling flesh. The water is warm, thermal, but not scalding or unpleasant. It is drinkable, too, tastes delicious and health-giving, with an edge of metal. The mineral content makes her float easily, and she watches hair and limbs entwine around her, delighting in sensual rolls and curves, her strong arms carving furrows through the water.
Merl sings, to herself, not the keening of the rupture, but a pleasant vocalization, old melodies and newer harmonics melding on her tongue. The sun is high above her, and she can no longer hear the church bells, or any sounds. Only the water lapping at the glass rim.
Later, change.
Two heads appear above her. Merl is nearly transparent now, her tissues swelled and full with the desert water. The heads talk. She tries to focus her thoughts to decode the sounds. And raises a hand, a greeting, a blessing, an invitation. The heads withdraw. Merl sings.
Later still. A new sight. A raft is lowered into her lake. Antlers and sticks make a filigree nest, old amazon book box air cushions provide lift, and, in the raft, jars of peanut butter, white bread, and packets of beef jerky stand in neat rows, surrounded by nutritional bars and small sealable containers with toilet paper tissue. Merl sings to it.
Larger sounds. A wave. One being has jumped in, and she is no longer alone. After a while, the second. The beings are naked, like her, brown sinuous shapes darting around her. She does not wish to stop singing, and there is nothing to say.
They all touch, and drift. The sky changes color above them now, pearlescent shades bow to a deep red, then a white flash. The air moves. They float.