Helllp! Hello?! Help me! Helllp!
More yelling. Me yelling. There are only so many variations on help, and I use them all. I am crawling, yelling, and crying. I don’t want to cry (can’t afford to lose the water), but I can’t stop. I’ve become a baby. In a basin. The wrong path has led me to some kind of wrong basin (a very dry, wrong basin). Scorched earth, zero hydration. It’s like a thousand-year drought, a baked lake, the size of a baseball field and bordered by mountains.
My tears water the basin. They do not caulk the fissures. There are cracks everywhere: the ground webbed in them, labyrinthine, the ghosts of no-rain past. They give me the creeps; electric shivers down my sunburnt skin. They’re like grooves on a dusty brain. Like the earth is trying to think but can’t. I can’t either.
Good. Don’t think. Use animal instinct. Pretend you are an animal. What kind of animal? I feel like a bug. In a basin. A dry drain.
It’s heavy to be a bug. Much heavier than I’d imagine. Why do I feel so heavy? Antennae? Wings? Self-pity?
Self-pity. Un-bug-like. And not an earned feeling. After all, I’m the one who got myself into this mess. Still. Self-pity, punctuated by self-blame (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of something? Dehydration?).
I think of my father. Livid after his accident. When he could finally speak, he blamed himself.
“So stupid!” he said. “I really messed up!”
“They call it an accident because it’s an accident,” I said. “If it wasn’t an accident, they wouldn’t call it an accident.”
I was repeating something that his father, my grandfather, once said to me.
“So stupid!” he said again.
Behind the anger, I think, was self-pity. The feeling of being very small. Less frightening to be angry and not feel so small. Some sense of control in that. Less like a bug in a basin.
I am going to die out here. I might. I could. Die. All this time I should have been practicing for dying. What was I doing instead? Reading reviews of sweatpants. For hours.
But how do you practice for dying?
Monks do it. You have to devote your life to it like they devote their lives (and even they’re not ready). Every bug in line. Into the fissures.
It’s brave of us to die! I know we have no choice, but that doesn’t make it less brave. How tenderly I feel for all of us when I think of this. It makes me want to give up gossip forever. If I get out of the desert alive, I’ll do my best.
How do you do it, Dad? How do you die?
He doesn’t know either.
I have watched him at funerals. It seemed far off, that he would. Die. Later, later, there would be time for that later. He was immunized by time. And if he was immune, then I was extra-immune. Graveside, we stood there like winners. And the one in the ground had lost. But the win was temporary, and time was speeding up. Everybody into the ground. Everybody already in the ground.
No, animals don’t think these things. Be like the desert hare. Better yet, be a mountain lion.
What does the injured mountain lion do? She licks her wounds. What else? She tries to conserve her energy. Yes, and how? I don’t know, something involving her cubs. She makes her cubs do something.
But what about the childless injured mountain lion? How does the childless injured mountain lion conserve energy?
She stops moving.