I haven’t left the apartment in nine months. My current boyfriend, Paul, has tried. He’s tried to lure me outside with tickets to the Hollywood Bowl or the Greek, lobster dinners on the Santa Monica Pier, a drive to the outlet mall in Camarillo for shoes. He combs LA Weekly in search of compelling events. He seeks to entice me with unmuggy, azure-skied days, with dove-gray rain days, with his twilight-walk-on-the-beach idea of romance. He brought me a kite, a neon-lime rhombus with an optimistic mile of spooled nylon string, and proposed Laguna Beach. He bought me a pair of rollerblades, then he bought me a Jet Ski. Actually, his parents bought it, for both of us. But his parents have always liked me. Paul thinks going outside will be good for me, scrub off dull cells of skin, freshen my blood, inspire bloom. You need some sun, he says hopefully, light and fresh air. A change of atmosphere. You’re pale. You need to go outside. He talks about the necessary vitamin D absorption from ultraviolet rays. He cajoles, pleads, pouts, but in the end I give him shopping lists, and he comes back with everything I’ve asked for.
I don’t need to go outside. My computer is right there on my desk, and my work, mail, contact, come to me. Light and sky, a vertical swatch of the Hollywood Hills, all find me through the faux-bay window in the living room. I can plant myself safely in the window seat I rigged up and look out, see pavement, Laurel Avenue, cars, the street cleaner on Tuesday mornings, a sleeping ceramic child and the ugly, treacherous, stolen cactus in our small plot of front yard. Paul has refused to water the cactus, thinking that will get me to rise, but I remind him: It’s a cactus. Go on, withhold water. It’ll just mock us. It’ll outlive us both. Just try to master it, and, more likely, you’ll be the one to get hurt.
This cactus stabbed me once, so I know what I’m talking about.
JOSH, MY FORMER boyfriend, dug the cactus out of the ground in front of me on our only trip to the Mojave Desert. He had a job leading overnight hiking excursions for junior high and high school kids. He had a stock of whistles and white cotton French Foreign Legion–style caps. He’d drive a herd of bored, sweating students out to places like Death Valley, Anza-Borrego, Indian Canyon, in a renovated bus donated by the L.A. City School District, and explain how crashing tectonic plates thrust up the mountains and granite shafts, how melting glaciers once filled the basins with lakes, about global warming patterns and elevation and evolving ecosystems, how the water burrowed itself deeper underground as if looking to hide while harsh, parching winds swept soil into dunes. He showed them bedrock worn down and exposed like picked-clean bones. He taught them about the Pleistocene Pinto people, and the Serrano Indians who lived on pinyon nuts, cactus fruit, and mesquite beans, wove sandals and baskets from the shredded, curly fibers of Mojave yucca, and left behind their pottery and rock paintings. He explained how explorers a hundred years ago dammed up the last trickles of water, plundered the desert for gold, and left a honeycomb of mines. He pointed out arroyos, playas, and alluvial fans baked down to dust, the stump of a basalt volcano, aplite and gneiss glinting in the sun. At dusk he showed them emerging kangaroo rats and desert iguanas and burrowing owls, explained how roadrunners get all the moisture they need from the bodily fluids of reptiles, insects, and rodents they eat, taught them how every desert animal has adapted in body shape or metabolism or special skill to hang on to its place as predator or prey. At night he and his students would all lie in their mummy bags under the black celestial dome, undimmed by any fake municipal glow, and watch the elliptic path of the planets, the zodiacal chase of stars. It’s the vastness of it all, he would always tell them, me, sounding drug-fried or stupid, neither of which he is. His favorite word, vast—vast desert, landscape, atmosphere, universe, space. Earth: a core of rock, a crumbled mantle, a thin forsaken crust, and a mere us between it and the vast and boundless sky. He said it was the vastness that got to them every time, what they succumbed to, the letting go of small things, but I know what got to them was him. I pictured the cynical, trooping teenagers rolling their eyes, elbowing each other, then finally cracking smiles. I pictured them losing their cool urban sheaths and succumbing to his desert varnish, his energized mirage, his pulse. Succumbing to this oasis of a person. He said it was the vastness that got to them, but I know that’s what got to him, rooted him, somehow made him feel peace. I didn’t get it. All that quiet just sounded lonely to me. The idea of succumbing to all that space made me feel aimless and lost. I could never understand why he’d want to feel so insignificant.
I USED TO watch him pack for his trips. He’d squeeze one spare everything into a small duffel bag and reel off the desert’s vast beauties he couldn’t wait to get back to, while in my head I listed ways he might get hurt. A blistering third-degree burn, despite the sunblock. Heatstroke, despite the cap. The skull-splitting fall from a rock. A flash flood while he slept. In my mind he’d go to retrieve a student who’d wandered into a forbidden, abandoned mine, only to have it collapse on top of him in a thundering billow of rock. He always packed a topographic map and compass, but I suspected he’d get lost one day in the pirouetting cactus–boulder–cow skull, cactus–boulder–cow-skull backdrop of the cartoon Southwest. I’d watch him load the bus with plastic five-gallon barrels of water—I want you guys guzzling two gallons per person per day, I’d hear him warn students on the phone in his teacher’s voice, you gotta replace that sweat!—and think: evaporation, dehydration. I pictured him desperately sucking a chunk of cactus. I pictured him writhing with heat cramp. He always packed a shovel, in case the bus got mired in sand, and I’d picture a fresh-dug desert grave, his body wrapped in the shiny green Hefty bags he took along for trash and already melting into his skin in the sun. He had a cooler the size of a steamer trunk packed with food and bricks of ice, and I’d think: starvation, botulism. The first aid kit didn’t reassure me; it confirmed my fears. There were desert tarantulas and desert snakes, and I’d watch him sharpen his jackknife and scissors and imagine him coming back in a limp, drained stagger, his body marked with a cross where some student had X’d over a fanged puncture to suck out and spit the poison from his blood. Every time he came home, a mere him, hair burned a lighter blond, his fruit-leather skin covered in a gritty sweat and his nape bright as tomato from having loaned his neck-flap cap to a student too arrogant to bring his own, I’d busy myself with a special dinner, something cool with mint and cucumber, draw him a tepid bath, bustle and fuss all to avoid a hysteric relief at having him return okay. Each time he came back unhurt I stockpiled the fear, carried it over to the next time, weighed the increase of odds that meant nothing bad had happened yet and so next time, of course, it would.
When we were first together, he’d always asked me to go along. When we were first together I wasn’t scared at all, and I always shrugged and said No, I don’t feel like it, I’m not much of an outdoors person, You go, we’re not joined at the hip, You go, we’re going to grow old together, right?, plenty of time, You go, we don’t have to do everything together, we don’t have to share all the same interests, right? Plus the lack of privacy, the adolescent throng, the harsh and lunar-sounding landscape, the herding and the rules—bag up and ziplock your toilet paper, you guys, leave no trace!—always made it sound more like work than play. And I didn’t want to be part of his work, just one more thing he had to pack and take along. I wanted to carry more weight than that. But then after a while I thought maybe if it was just us two. I wasn’t seeing him that much. He was being successful and busy at his job, scheduling extra excursions. That’s what’s so great about you, Holly, he’d say to me, leaving, You’re so independent. He was away a lot of weekends, then a lot of weekdays, too, and getting an edgy, cramped look sometimes when he was home. So I finally suggested it, my going with him and just us two, and he wanted to know why I’d changed my mind. He wanted to know what I possibly thought I’d get out of it. You’re not very adaptable, Holly, he mumbled into my neck one night over the whir of the window fan. And I said See? That’s the point, I don’t understand the appeal. This will expand my horizon. But when I said that I realized it was his horizon that worried me; his was getting too big and far away for me to be more than a speck in it. A mere me. I was a dot on his landscape, and I wanted to be a vast and boundless thing for him. I wanted him to succumb to me. I went to the outlet mall and bought hiking boots, a special sunscreen with alpha hydroxy. But by that time I wasn’t just worried, I was also getting scared, for him, and he had stopped asking me to go.
Then one bland, humid Friday morning last April, the phone rang with someone telling me that weekend’s excursion to Joshua Tree was called off due to an outbreak of flu at some East L.A. junior high. Josh was outside loading the bus and, when I told him, got his edgy, penned-up animal look, the one that says let me out.
Shit, he said. He sighed, regarded the bus a moment. Then he turned back to me. Okay, let’s go. We’ll go, just us two.
Now? I said.
I’m packed up. I have the permit. It’s April. I can’t stay here all weekend, he said, gesturing at the street and pavement. He had refused to plant grass on our little front plot, saying lawn in Los Angeles was an environmental insult. I’d thought maybe just a rose bush would be nice, but instead we had a found-rock garden. We’d spot lost-looking rocks in alleys or streets, bring them home. At first I’d thought it was fun, kitschy, but today the rocks just looked forced. Horns honked down on Sunset Boulevard; there was a siren’s rise and ebb, a jet, a helicopter’s anxious drone, the hot gasp of wetted city cement, the smell of exhaust.
What’s the problem, Holly? he said. You said you wanted to go.
I saw us going back inside the apartment where it was safe and where he didn’t want to be, saw spending a weekend together, just us two, with four walls and a roof and a window unit that cooled and filtered air. Then I saw him saying I’ll go, I’ll just go myself, and then going by himself. Leaving me in favor of all those dangers. Wandering off and never coming back. I saw the snake venom coursing through and no one ready with a knife; I saw him dead from exposure and no one there to dig his grave. I saw turkey vultures swooping in to pick his bones clean. This wasn’t him wanting to leave me, I realized with relief; this was him needing me. This was him not wanting to get hurt, not wanting to be alone, not wanting to let go. Wanting to let me in to fill up all his precious space.
I went inside and put on my boots and sunblock. We transferred mummy bags and shovel and cooler and first aid kit and wheelbarrow and gallons of water from the school bus to his truck, left Hollywood, and drove a few hours east from Los Angeles along the 10, where the world went dull and beige, full of highway and dirt without nap, tired motels and shopping malls and hamburger drive-thrus collapsed at the foot of mountains as if dumped off cliffs. Then, somewhere beyond the turnoff for Palm Springs, higher and higher up and farther on Route 62, the dunnish air cleared and the Mojave Desert slowly unrolled into lucid bloom. Magentas, lemons, purples, oranges, whites, from the horizon to us, a sudden extravagance, and the wind-snap of sage, nectar, honest rock, succulent air.
See? he said. April.
I pictured it all dead, I said.
It’s never dead. It looks dead in fall and winter, sometimes, when a lot of it’s dormant. But then it all explodes.
I took off my boots and hung my feet out the window, so my toes could breathe. I leaned back against him, and he put his arm around me, poked his nose in my ear. He kissed my throat and said, See?
Yes, I said.
No, look, a Joshua tree, he said, pointing.
We were passing a lanky, trunked thing, its branches outstretched in stiff torsion, each one ending in a tuft of spines. We passed another one, then three.
Joshua trees, he said. This is the only place in the world they live. And they live hundreds of years. The Mormons called them that. They drove out in their wagons to California and suddenly saw all of these and said they looked like Joshua, his arms up, welcoming them to the Promised Land.
He slowed the truck. The tree didn’t look like a welcoming prophet to me. Its trunk was covered in spikes scaled like a chain mail of daggers. The raised branch-arms looked deformed. It looked like an armored soldier with boiling oil poured down his back, caught in the first moment of panicked, agonized cringe.
We passed more, and then many, and then they were everywhere. It was a whole field of trapped and seared Joshuas trying desperately to grip the sky, shaking twisted, crippled fists at God.
WE STOPPED AT the Oasis Visitor Center in Twentynine Palms. Josh registered the truck at the backcountry board while I examined glass jars of jewel-colored cactus marmalades, cactus pickles, cactus candy. The labels showed a thorny cactus fruit split in half, revealing tender, pulpy insides. I bought granola bars and another half-liter bottle of water and leafed through a book called Common Cacti of the Southwest.
Look, I said to him, showing. I’m learning all about cacti. We should get this.
Holly, he said. He took the book from me and put it back. You’re here. You don’t need a book to show you here.
All right, you teach me.
Just be patient. He smiled at me as I tore the wrapper off a chocolate chip granola bar and ate it. You have to be patient in the desert, Holly. Give it up.
Before leaving, we walked up close to a smallish Joshua tree. A woodpecker rapped at a branch. Josh showed me wrens nesting in the tree’s topmost spines and thumbnail moths collecting pollen from the blossom clusters, laying eggs. He nudged a toppled, decaying limb with his foot; a kangaroo rat scuttled away, and termites surged.
It’s the perfect ecosystem, he said in his teacher’s voice. All in itself. The living tree is food and home for birds and insects and rodents. And then even when it’s dead, it’s food and home. The energy just keeps cycling, being transformed. There’s life everywhere, if you just look for it.
Oh, God, I said, ducking. In front of me was a fat lizard impaled on a spike through its belly. Hanging on a low Joshua tree branch I almost walked into. Its sleepy lizard eyes were just starting to crust; flies buzzed.
Who would do that? I asked.
A shrike, probably, he said. Or a hawk. Saving it for dinner.
I thought the desert was so peaceful, I said.
No, the desert is so honest, he said.
He saw a bit of trash nearby, a dirty paper flap. He picked it up and tossed it along with my granola bar wrapper into the forest-green Hefty bag in the bed of the truck. He’d brought along a whole collection of plastic bags, from tiny ziplock to body-bag size. Leave no trace.
I screamed at the stab to my leg. Josh always camped with his students at official sites with tables and fire grates, but he’d wanted the two of us out in the middle of nowhere. And there we were, only us and the desert and a sere, planeless sky. We’d parked the truck and put on our French Foreign Legion caps and hiked hot silent miles into the wild brush from the road, as requested by park rules for “wilderness camps.” The Joshua trees had thinned out as we went farther east. We’d passed rock formations that looked like animals and gourds and human skulls, hiked across bajadas and around granite outcrops. Josh pointed out iguana, skulking coyote, rabbits, squirrels. Desert dandelions and mallow, flame-tipped ocotillo, beavertail, prickly pear. He was walking ahead of me, pushing water and supplies in the small wheelbarrow; he’d told me to walk behind, to obliterate the wheel’s track.
Tire marks can live out here for years, he’d said. And they don’t belong here. Scars in the desert heal slowly.
Thank you, teacher, I said. But my footsteps don’t belong here, either. Don’t footsteps count as scars?
We wove our way through creosote bushes and gray-green cactus scrub, breathing hostile air that heated, dusted, and dried my lungs, when I felt my leg seized by sudden hot pierces in the flesh of my right calf, just above my boot. I shrieked. A cylindrical piece of gray-green cactus half a foot long clung to my leg as if Velcro’d, its spines lodged in my skin.
Josh dropped the wagon and ran to me, grabbed my hand before I could reach down.
Uh uh, he said. Don’t touch.
Out of nowhere, I said. This thing attacked me out of nowhere. I bit my lip, determined not to cry, split open, fall apart.
Jumping cholla. They’re everywhere.
He pointed to a shrubby, fuzzy cactus nearby, three or four feet high, pale green and flowerless. It looked like a bristled balloon animal, twisted from those long, skinny balloons into joints, and covered with spiky hair. It looked mocking.
You must’ve brushed against it, he said. You step too close to one of those joints, they sense the moisture or heat or energy or something and attack. They jump and cling on.
This is like getting all your childhood vaccinations at once, I said. I wasn’t crying, yet.
I told you to be careful.
You told me to be patient.
Same thing, he said. He rummaged in his duffel bag. They also call it teddy bear cholla.
Adorable, I said. I pulled the bottle from my backpack and gulped water.
Or silver cholla. They have these silver sheaths on their spines. Look at it, see the sunlight through the spines? See how it shimmers? They’re sort of luminous, huh? Pretty?
Josh.
That’s good, keep drinking your water. You’re breaking out in a sweat. And breathe, Holly.
He came to me with a comb and a pair of pliers. He helped me sit down and propped my leg up on his thighs.
A lot of people think chollas are sort of ugly, he said. Stiff. Stunted-looking. I think they’re sort of cool. They get little violet flowers around this time of year. And they’re edible, you know? They taste great, sweet, you just have to peel them and—
Josh, do something.
Yeah, hold on.
He slid the comb between my leg and the cactus, threading its teeth among the spines. I swallowed a long drink of water so I wouldn’t scream again, maybe my two gallons’ worth.
These’re called glochids. These little spines, see? They’re barbed. They lock in under the top layer of skin. That’s how this thing reproduces. The joints cling to whatever passes by. Whatever’ll carry it around. Then it lands somewhere and takes root. Chollas are tough. Ranchers hate them; they’re like weeds. But medicine men used cholla on people during prayer ceremonies. They believed the spines drew out the sickness.
Josh.
Okay, hold on.
He gripped the comb, then flipped the cactus joint off and away from me, leaving a dozen golden needles still imbedded in my leg, and despite myself, I shrieked again.
Why didn’t you warn me? I asked.
I’m sorry.
No, about the cactus. If they’re so dangerous.
Okay. I’m warning you now. This is going to hurt. Take a few deep breaths. Try to relax.
One by one he pulled the spines out with pliers. My leg bristled and I shivered at the fierce, tiny burns. I chewed my tongue and swallowed blood while he tried to distract me by teaching me all about cacti. Their survival strategies. How their spines evolved from leaves as a defense against predators, how the reduced leaf surface helped them endure the desert. How their thick, waxy skins retard evaporation, how they’re misers, hoarding water in their fleshy stems, in their ribs or barrels or pads of tissue, how during and after a rain they gorge on water, expand and swell to hold as much as they can, how their root systems are shallow but extensive, spreading out wide under a thin surface of dirt to pick up and store moisture from the lightest desert shower. He talked in a smoothing, soothing voice while pulling out the spines. Each spine barb tugged with it a small divot of flesh, a brief welling of blood, and with each tug I thought Why didn’t he warn me? Why did he bring me here, drag me out in the middle of vast nowhere, if this was just going to hurt? He was trying to get me to relax and succumb to all the landscape and space, to feeling, to feeling small and not clinging to anything, to letting go. As if that weren’t dangerous, as if there’s any peace in that.
Cacti are actually related to the rose family, did you know that? he was asking. You can see it when they bloom. They blow roses away. Sometimes you can actually watch a cactus flower unfold, the petals open up and uncurl. Actually, they’re more beautiful than roses. You expect a rose to be beautiful. It’s more interesting to find all that beauty in a cactus. The split personality, you know?
I didn’t say anything. I was too angry, I didn’t trust myself to speak. Or breathe, I didn’t trust the only air there.
Okay, he said. Your spines are gone.
He squeezed my calf hard to bring out the last of the blood, blotted it away with a piece of gauze, then applied antiseptic ointment from the first aid kit. I wiped the sweat off my upper lip. My T-shirt, one of Josh’s, was sticking all over; I was sweating too much and too fast for the air to burn it off my skin.
Are you okay? he asked me. He leaned over and pressed his mouth against my damp forehead.
I’m okay, I said.
Drink more water, he mumbled against my hair. I want you guzzling, like, two gallons a day. You need to replace all those fluids.
I nodded, just a small dip of a nod so he wouldn’t move his mouth. But he did. He wrapped more gauze in a bandage around my leg, then carefully disposed of the bloodstained gauze in the Hefty garbage bag.
I WASN’T GOING to make love that night. My leg still throbbed, I felt filmed with sweat and sunblock, I wanted to punish Josh for not taking better care of me. We’d zipped our two mummy bags together and I crawled inside with him, determined to stay separate and stiff as wood. But he named the stars for me, and I pressed against him for a sense of scale. He wove his legs between mine so my bandaged calf would rest on top, and I bent my other leg to help. He raised his hand up to trace the constellations, but the parallax distorted their forms; I reached up with him to clasp his hand, trace the sky with him and share his view, horizon, galaxy. He kissed me and then I could breathe again, fully, breathe in the air that was him, breathe in the having him to hold on to, what always made me feel found and unbound, blessed. His touch always split me open into something tender and sweet. He saw in me something luminous, ready to bloom. But it was all him, and he never realized that. I didn’t deserve such significance. I didn’t deserve him. An elemental, pure, and infinite him, a man who saw the life in a dead lizard, who saw more beauty in a cactus than a rose, who could find the pulse in a petrified limb. A man who didn’t realize that I was just a mere me, and that I lived on, drank from, him. And that without him forever as wellspring, as font, I would shrivel up to a small, withered, petty thing and die.
A CACTUS, I said the next morning. I want my very own.
Come on, you have your very own. He stopped rolling up our mummy bags to strike an iconic cactus pose.
That’s a saguaro, I told him, remembering from Common Cacti of the Southwest. They only live in Arizona.
Hey, good.
At the saguaro festival in July they make cactus wine, I told him. It symbolizes rain replenishing the earth.
I’m very proud of you.
And you’re a lovely cactus, I said, but this way if you ever leave me, I will always have the real thing. See? I pointed to a small Joshua tree in the distance, an isolated straggler. I waited for him to ask Why do you think I would ever leave you?, but he did not.
Ah, he said, smiling his teacher’s smile. It said You are about to learn something, and I was sick of it. But a Joshua tree is not a cactus. It’s a yucca. It’s actually part of the lily family.
All right.
Not every desert plant is a cactus, he said. There’s yucca and agave and bear grass and ocotillo and creosote and—
All right!
He pointed to the ugly killer cholla that had attacked me. That’s a cactus. Chollas are cacti.
Fine. I’ll make do with a cholla. A lowly, ugly, common desert weed.
No.
You thought they were beautiful, I said.
We’re not taking a cactus home, he said.
Why not?
He pointed out that the cactus had already wounded me, that I was still complaining about my throbbing leg, and that getting it home would be impossible.
You’re scared of a few glochids? I asked. Embrace what you fear.
He sighed. I waited. I waited for him to tell me we can’t disrupt the ecosystem of the desert. That tough as cacti are, they’re also vulnerable, that we might get it all the way home just to have it refuse to take root and then die. I waited for him to talk about indigenous nutrients in the desert soil, about fungal spores and etiolation. That we didn’t have room for the cactus at home, or space for its root system, that the concrete would snuff it out, choke it dead.
This is a national park, he said finally. Everything is protected here.
I wasn’t, I said.
We just looked at each other. Then he came and knelt next to me. He put his hand on the back of my skull, wove his fingers through my hair and tugged my head back, put his arms around me. He wanted me to clasp him back, I knew, but I wouldn’t give him that. We just sat there for a moment in silence, a heated, taut desert silence. I waited. He gave up first. He got up, took a bottle of water, and hiked all the way back to the truck for the shovel, twine, gloves, a tarpaulin, returned, and dug. I kept watch. We roped the cholla, steadied it in the wheelbarrow, strapped it to the bed of the truck with twine, camouflaged it with Hefty garbage bags, and drove home without talk. We planted the cactus in our found-rock-garden front yard. A week later I found a chipped ceramic Mexican child sleeping beneath its huge ceramic sombrero near a dumpster in the Fairfax District and brought it home. I tried to get Josh to debate whether the ceramic child was racist kitsch or just kitsch, but he only rolled his eyes at me. In the end we put it next to the cactus, facing the street. I called him our little ceramic son. And, as a little ceramic child, it had no moisture or heat or energy, so I knew it would always be safe from the cactus spines and could sleep in peace.
My leg healed, of course. The wound became a spray of small roseate scars. And the cactus did take root in our found-rock plot, did just fine. For two more months it lived and breathed and grew, did very well. I hoped it would blossom soon, give us showy violet flowers. It didn’t, but I smiled at it every time I came and went, every time I looked out the window. I admired how the sun on its silvery spines made it shimmer, made it luminous. And every time I thought with pleasure that stealing the cactus was the type of unwholesome, dishonest thing Josh would never have done in front of the junior high and high school kids, or by himself. But I got him to do it for me. I got him to break into the desert for me, plunder it to bring me jewels. I got him to tear a piece off the vastness, chain it down to a bound and finite space. Looking at the cactus always made me feel victorious. I would look at my healed leg scars and think I am inoculated now, I’m safe. I felt very peaceful and secure, until two months later, when Josh left me.
JOSH WAS KILLED in a plane crash. Not the kind where you’re on the plane. The kind where you start a fight with your girlfriend who loves you to death but who you say won’t let you breathe, is too clingy, so you decide to go off hiking by yourself because you need the space, you don’t want to do every single thing together, all the time, take and share every single breath with the woman who loves you to death, so you drive out to the Mojave by yourself in your truck, park it, and trek across the desert like Moses, through a field of Joshua trees with their grotesque, outstretched-to-God arms, to sleep under the stars and feel profoundly, vastly insignificant, and far overhead a Cessna Skyhawk SP with engine trouble sails downward, into the welcoming arms, and doesn’t see you because you’re a mere dot in the landscape, and you don’t see it, you just barely awake at the sputter, the swooping whine of what perhaps sounds like a very large desert bird, a hawk, or a screeching owl, or maybe the death cry of a lizard pierced by spikes, and so just as the plane crashes down—then you see it, yes, but it’s too late—and lands on top of you in a blaze of oil and shredding metal and burning yucca, creosote, ocotillo, maybe your last thought is I should have kissed the woman I love good-bye when I left, or I should have never left her to go outside where it’s harsh, unforgiving, dangerous, or at least I should have brought her with me so we could die together. That kind of plane crash. When they dug him out of the cratered brush and found his driver’s license, unsinged but the laminate melted into his thigh, they called and told me, and my first thought was It’s not fair to die in a plane crash if you’re not actually on the plane. Then I realized I was shaking and couldn’t walk properly, so I crawled into the bathtub. The porcelain was cold, wonderfully solid, anesthetic, and I could pull the shower curtain around to make myself a terrarium. I figured I could sleep there, bathe there, have a water source, have someone bring me packages of ramen to make, I could even shit and pee right there forever, a perfect ecosystem, for the rest of my life, and not ever have to go anywhere or outside again. That worked just fine for three or four days, except for the ramen because I didn’t have any, so I just drank a lot of water from the faucet instead, and then Josh’s younger brother Paul drove down from Santa Barbara, banged on the front door for a while, then decided to break through the bathroom window to come get me.
He made me get out of the terrarium-tub, and then he decided to stay the night, just to make sure I was okay. He was a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara, studying biology or pre-med or something. Josh had shown me photos of his brother. Paul was seven or eight years younger and unripe-looking, a laundered sweatshirt and ironed jeans, a Josh’s kind of hair but combed and darker, a Josh’s face but paler, unvarnished. He looked just like the photos, but now he also looked scared, stunned. He got me towels and one of Josh’s clean T-shirts and made me take a shower, which seemed ridiculous, given that I’d been living in a bathtub for four days, but fine. When I came out he told me not to worry about anything, that everything had been taken care of, their parents had had Josh’s body brought home to Ventura. They’d wanted to find me, have me come for the service, but I’d never answered the phone. They’d always liked me. They thought I was a stabilizing influence on their wandering son. That I could root him. Now they were worried that I was all right. So after the service, because there wasn’t time before, Paul had driven down to check. He could stay a few days, he said, then drive back up. I said okay. He’d found sheets and a pillow for the couch. He asked me if I wanted to go out for pizza or something. I looked outside the living room window, at the ugly, treacherous, stolen cholla cactus in the front yard. It had beaten me, gotten me back. I’d stolen Josh, too, and the cactus had punished me for both of them. No, I told Paul, I really didn’t feel like going out.
I climbed into bed. Since Josh had left I’d slept far to one side, almost on the edge, so as not to disturb his blanket and mattress space. So his imprint was still there, and a strand of hair, the smell of rock. I thought of his body burned into the California desert, if the heat had turned the desert sand to glass. I wondered how long the scar of his footsteps’ trek would last. I wondered if they searched for and found every last shred of him, packed up every scrap in tiny ziplock bags. Leave no trace. Or if a limb was left behind. A dead, rotting Josh limb, now food and home for the termites and kangaroo rats, his energy recycled, transformed. He would have liked that.
I got up and went back to sleep in the bathtub.
AFTER A FEW weeks, Paul had the idea to transfer to UCLA. He decided to just forget about fall quarter at UCSB so he could stay in L.A. and hang out with me, then start winter quarter down here. What he really wanted to do, he confided one night, was drop out altogether and do something really cool and free-spirited like Josh. He didn’t really want to be a doctor, but his parents were pretty invested in it. In one of their sons achieving, being successful. And now, you know. . . . His voice trailed off. He asked me if I had talked to my parents. If maybe I wanted him to call them for me. And I said No, they never even met Josh, I haven’t even seen them for a few years. We’ve never been very close. They’re not your kind of parents, all nurturing and invested, I told him. My parents were always off being very busy, always leaving me to go off by themselves.
Paul was sleeping in the bed by then. I’d given him Josh’s space. I was sleeping in the bathtub, but I’d leave the door ajar and the shower curtain tugged open to talk at night until we fell asleep. And after a few months he decided he didn’t really need to get his own apartment, that he should probably stay with me so I wouldn’t be all alone and he could take care of me. I gave him Josh’s clothing to wear, all of which is too big for him and full of threadbare spots, but he likes it. He wears Josh’s French Foreign Legion caps. Josh would have liked that, too. Their parents call every few weeks to see how we’re doing. I hear Paul tell them he’s worried about me. They tell Paul they read an article that says the first year is the hardest, but then it gets better. They tell Paul they’re going to send the article, so that I can read it. They say they want to come visit us. None of them seems to realize it’s my fault we all lost him. That it’s because of me we all have to cling to each other and shrivel up and pay.
Paul tries so hard. He goes to the grocery store and makes us pizza from scratch. He goes to the laundromat. He downloads all of the newest releases, because I won’t even debate the idea of going out. He seems to think I’m very fragile, about to wilt and expire, or explode. He says he doesn’t like to leave me alone, but I think he just doesn’t like to go out by himself. I urge him to go. I tell him We don’t have to spend all of our time together, do we? I tell him to make some friends from school. I tell him he needs to give me more space, and his scared look has started coming back.
I’M ASLEEP THE night he comes home sometime in April, after hanging out with his new friends from school. I wake up because he’s loud and stumbling, a little drunk, and comes into the bathroom to tug on my arm. Please, Holly, he says, wake up. Please come sleep in the bed with me tonight. He strokes my hair and my shoulder. We’ve never touched. We’ve been together almost a year, and we’ve never even slightly brushed against each other. I barely even sense him in the apartment, rarely sense his energy or heat. He starts crying now, I miss Josh, he says, trying to grip me, I’m lonely, please, isn’t it time, aren’t you lonely? and I think What difference does it make? I let him pull me out of the tub’s cool hug and pull me into the bedroom. We get in the bed together, both of us in Josh’s T-shirts, and he’s fondling, clutching at me. My skin just feels numb. It’s dead skin, and he’s rubbing me as if trying to make it alive. He enters me, I’m dry as dust and I don’t even feel it. He’s trying to get further inside me, and I realize, then, what he’s really trying to do. Get me to unfold, to pulse. It’s April, and he’s trying to get me to flower again. He’s trying to peel back a layer of me to get where it’s pulpy and soft. He’s feeling so much, and he’s trying to make me feel, too, expose me to where it’s dangerous and full of unseen, searing threat. He’s touching me as if he’s capable of that. But he isn’t. He’s weak, insignificant, a pale imitation. And he’s just clutching at me because I’m here, not because I mean anything, am anything to him, really, he’s just clinging to whatever happened by. Anyway, I won’t let it happen. I suddenly see myself making love to Josh, then, opening up to all of it, I feel myself start to get wet and I chew my tongue to bleed and keep me from it, so I won’t cry, fall apart, split open into the tenderness and the sweet. I hold myself stiff as wood, I gulp and gulp to hoard up all the wet, keep it inside of me, and when he finally finishes I gasp and prickle with relief.
I LIKE TO keep the front door triple-locked, and it takes me a moment to remember, deadbolt first, that’s right, then knob. I leave the chain on and peek out through the gap at the empty street, the sleeping ceramic child, the cactus. It’s grown bigger. It’s taller than I am now, cuddly and blameless-looking, its spines silver and luminous in the moonlight. I unchain the front door and step outside. The outside air feels exactly the same as the inside air, and I think Of course, there is no difference. It isn’t safe anywhere you go.
The cactus is waiting for me, and very welcoming. It isn’t punishing or mocking; it’s kind. It knows I want my spines back. It knows my moisture, heat, energy, and yearns toward me. It yearns toward my legs, first, my thighs, then the insides of my open arms, my throat, embraces me even before I’ve pressed against it with my breasts, attaches to every inch of my skin with its greedy tines. The cactus needs me. It finds me significant, and I embrace it back, hard, to feel its spines enter and become mine. Each pierce creates a vivid bloom. Each spine taps my blood, then my bones, and this makes me feel boundless, and vast. And this is something I can succumb to, this is something I can feel.