I closed the door on what had been Vernon. The wind had come back and it was like a visible thing hovering around the pipe-stem tops of the cement tee-pees and in front of my face, roaring in my ears. My heart slammed away in my chest as I went across the grass to the car.
There was more to do — so much more. Fire shot down my side and my kidneys ached like cold stones inside me. The car was a thousand miles away.
But I got there. Somehow.
Ella helped me to get the car door open, and I collapsed against the seat, panting directions at her. She pulled the car out into traffic.
“You should know that I have a warrant out on my license for unpaid speeding tickets, and if we get pulled over . . . ”
I started laughing. Blood spattered across my hands and dusted the dashboard. We headed East, linking up with Interstate 10, and I had a vague impression of blurry red taillights and the presence of other people — actual, living people, driving alongside us, moving through their lives while I seemed to be moving away from mine. My vision expanded and contracted like the aperture of a camera. My mind was going in a thousand directions at once, running across and down the red and white light-rivers of the freeway, through time and faces.
This time I see it a little clearer. I can make out more of it against the algae glow below, and as it flashes by I see a skeletal flipper or hand — translucent flesh that glows emerald . . . and . . . there is a face. A human face, but not human, a floating, grinning skull layered under crystalline flesh, throbbing veins like spun-glass across the bones, weaving filaments of hair that catch the green in their see-through stalks and draw it out pooling. I scream inside my copper fishbowl, but the sound doesn’t go anywhere. It just falls with me, sucked down toward the light, as if the light has an aweing, unearthly gravity that draws even sound to its center.
The lobby of the Orchid Hotel. The potted palms. I was staring at one of the potted palms. It had so much dust on it, it looked like it was made of ashes. I wanted to touch it so that it would dissolve into the air.
Driving back to Los Angeles the day Sarabeth died, the brown sooty layer of smog beyond the street that made ghosts out of the mountains. The buildings like matchboxes, waiting to go up in flames.
The side of Ella’s face, concentrating on the road ahead of us, the red ember of her cigarette moving, arcing toward and away from her face, brightening as she tapped it out the window, dimming as it came into the car. Her face blurred, and became Sarabeth’s face, her cigarette Sarabeth’s cigarette — it’s funny, but practically all the people I know were strangers when I first met them. The coal brightened. Sarabeth’s face burnt up like a piece of film and behind it there was another face . . . my mother’s face. I was there again, standing in the warm silence of her room, with the dust all around me in the beams of sunlight that came in through the blinds, her pale face on the pillow, the cream-white of her skin blossoming blue and purple. I was ten years old, and my heart was racing. I padded over to the bed, very quiet, and bent over her. I hadn’t known what I wanted to do — maybe, some part of me had — but it wouldn’t let me know. I bent low over her face, watching her eyes moving behind the bruised eyelids, bringing my hand down to brush away a lock of brown hair.
And then saved from what I was going to do by her eyes opening and looking into mine. The blood rushed into my face. I thought — I don’t know. I thought she would know what I had been about to do, would have been able to see it. Was that what I had thought? I knew I had been caught at something, that was all. I was paralyzed, inches away from her.
“Baby, mommy’s sleeping. Mommy doesn’t feel well, okay? Go outside and play.”
Maybe she saw something in my face then, because she raised her hand from the bed and I felt it warm on the side of my face. She pulled me down to her, gently, and kissed my cheek.
“Mommy needs her sleep, baby. Go outside and play, okay?”
Her eyes closed, her hand fell away from my face as if she had died, and I backed slowly out of the room.
On the roadside, on my knees in the dry brush. Ella bending over me. The far-off pressure of her hand on my back, of her voice.“Don’t you die on me yet. Not until you pay off. Not yet.”
An ink carp swimming on flesh.
I am not going to die. There is nothing left of me to kill anymore. Nothing. Or is there?
Staring at myself in a motel mirror. Who is there? Nothing. Death. I want him to see it in my eyes. If I could force my irises into the shape of skulls, I would.
Pushing the needle into his arm.
He wanted it. The whole time, he wanted it. In that moment I had shown him more love than he had ever had in his life.
Back in the car. We passed a gas station hovering like a fluorescent UFO at the edge of the freeway, its lights licking at skeletal scrub in the desert beyond.
The aperture opened.
I was going to live. My kidneys had stopped aching. My chest still felt no more solid than a bamboo birdcage, but I coughed and this time there was no blood. What I needed was rest — at least if I slept I could dream the dream again, instead of catching it in flashes, in broken snippets and images riding along at the edges of my mind, drifting along just outside but always there, always.
The sun showed over the horizon and turned the desert hazy lemon and blue. We pulled into a tiny motel, just four small cottages across a neglected highway from a gas station and convenience store. The air was desert morning cold, and the orange lights from the curtained windows of the first cottage looked as warm as campfires. I watched Ella registering, kept my eye on her dim shape beyond the office curtains, thinking to myself don’t lose sight of her. Whatever you do, keep her in sight.
It seemed at that moment like the most important thing that I could ever do.
She came back with the keys to one of the cottages in her fist. I refused her help getting out of the car, wanting to test my legs. I found them surprisingly strong, but tired. Ella carried the suitcases.
There were two twin beds in the cottage, and I fell asleep on the closest one without even looking around at the room. The last thing I heard was Ella closing the door.
The dream did not come to me that night. What came was a black and visionless sleep full of pain but without a narrative to wrap that pain around. I was aware, the entire night, of pain. I was tossed into a dark place with pain. It floated around me in the dark, never leaving, never taking shape.