Gold Fame Citrus (23 page)

Then, Luz saw him across the flames: Levi, his square head bare, his light hair shorn, his nearly translucent beard ablaze in the firelight. She had not seen him since he’d given her what was left of Ray. She considered going to him but felt very content where she was, watching.

He was a large man. She had somehow not noticed this in the dune or before. His skin glowed coppery behind his pale tangle of beard, as though the sun had evacuated all the pigment from his facial hair and relocated it to his face. Firelight gathered at his cheeks and his small teeth winked as he chewed something. He held a ration cola, though he was not drinking from it but gleeking into it discreetly as he received the other colonists.

Levi was their north. Their compass needles quivered in his direction. His stance was wide, as though he were readying himself to shoulder a great burden, a burden he would lug willingly and with grace, his little teeth winking all the while. Even Dallas, sturdy as a mountain, appeared at Levi’s side and leaned into him. As they embraced, another gust bolstered the fire, melting their two forms together.

Luz watched the fire, which was somehow blue at its core, flames licking green and black. Later she would ask Cody what they were burning, what made the strange color, and he would show her boxes and boxes of evac pamphlets.
LEAVE OR DIE
, the pamphlets said in bright bubble letters.

She rubbed Ig’s back, round as a beetle’s against her. What it might have been to carry her.

Levi noticed Luz then. His gaze would have been intense if it did not so soothe her. She did not look away. Natural, an instinct, and when was the last time she’d honored the tug of instinct? As if to answer, Ig shifted, then settled. A sense of calm was rising in Luz, and some heat descending, too. What was attraction if not a form of telepathy? The wild luck of two people feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time. That word again:
purpose
.

Ig woke. Luz turned so the little one could see the fire. Ig watched the flames and Luz did too, the two transfixed as moths until Dallas came around, rolling the blue plastic keg, now full.

—

In the end, the damsel had no talent for acting, regardless of how often her coach waved her cottage-cheese arms above her head, setting her bracelets aclack and proclaiming,
Dear, you’re positively
made
for the pictures!

But maybe it was only that she’d never found the right part. After the bonfire outing, Luz and Ig took to walking the spokes of the colony at dawn, before nap time, before the sun of suns took over, shrouded in the white that turned out to be cut from parachutes that had delivered pallets of evac pamphlets.

And as they walked, people watched, and Luz caught something novel in their gaze. It was a wondrous change from those she had, without knowing it, become accustomed to. At work: the exasperated looks of photographers mumbling from behind their massive cameras, the defeated gazes of editorial directors, for there was another girl—a Colombian—who looked just like Luz (spindle limbs, scapula like malformed wings, a fat and drooping bottom lip, even a gap between her teeth) except this girl’s ass was smaller and sat higher and her legs
dangled from it like a puppet’s. The other girl was more expensive and had to be reserved very far in advance, so if Luz booked a shoot it was often because they were compromising, because the campaign had been scaled back or the editorial sliced in half and so they would have to settle for the poor man’s Colombian. “One good thing about Luz,” said her agent, “you never have to tell her not to smile.”

On the street, at parties and restaurants: those looks of preoccupied recognition, the brain nag that they had seen her somewhere, but where? (“You look like I know you,” the woodsman had said.) Not altogether terrible, except for the guesses, other lives that might have been, always painfully better than her own—the indie that swept the festivals, the cellist from the new band, this It girl or that. But she was professional wallpaper, her job to replicate a human being without the mess of one, and so they would scowl at her, a problem never to be solved. The woodsman had sometimes looked at her as though she were a tick clinging to a stalk of grass.

(He had another look, too, but she would not quite allow herself to remember it. Something that made his smile go lopsided, a cord bulge in his jaw, a look that meant all the ways and reasons he loved her were at that instant rising in him.)

But at the dune she was regarded in a way she had never been regarded. The girls thought her and Ig cute, and said so, but also seemed a little repelled. The men were harder to decipher. Since girlhood, the gazes of men and boys had been a kind of consumption, gulping her in not because she was beautiful—because with her bad skin and bad teeth she was not beautiful, not without the tricks, “certainly not street pretty,” her agent often barked into her earpiece—but because she was thin and her bones showed in places like a partridge on a plate. But at the dune, instead a glance to her face, then her feet, then to Ig slung around her. Pity? There was some. The story got around, she knew: a
wife lost her husband, a widow with a baby. But something beneath the pity. A smile that, she realized in time, meant the child was triggering the saddest memories of their happiest moments. That old man called Jimmer, the heart side of his face purpled wurst, whose left hand moved without him, mumbled either “Mine’s grown” or “Mine’s gone.”

Usually, the men said nothing, giving her a wide psychic berth for reasons she did not understand and would not understand for some time.

No matter. Here, the damsel delivered her greatest role. She played long-suffering, she played pure. A mother.

Only—and her coach had said this would happen, the miraculous transmutation into character, a notion that Luz had always found a little frightening—she wasn’t playing. Another surprise. Here, she was a good woman.

Like a mother, Luz worried.

DALLAS

There’s nothing wrong with the child, nothing wrong on this Earth and surely not here. I believe that. Take her to Jimmer in the teepee if you don’t believe me. He’s our healer.

JIMMER

Was the little one baptized, and if so did she drink of the baptismal water? Did she cry when she was born? She’s not anything-handed—which arm did you first put through the sleeve when you put on her baptismal dress? Don’t worry, doll, no one ever remembers. Did she have much hair when she was born? Children born with too much hair cannot think straight, for the hair tugs on their brain and drains it. On the other hand, children born without any hair are dim, because the
hair is still inside the head and it clogs the brain. Did you tickle her much? You mustn’t tickle a child before she speaks, it can cause a stammer or even muteness. Freckles come from drops of rain drying in the sun, though I assume that’s not the case here. Did you and the father speak much the day she was born? What day of the week was that? A Saturday baby will be stupid, but only for a bit, because Saturdays are lazy days. If we scrape the dirt from her nails and put it in her water she may be cured of that petting, but I advise against it. For the insomnia you need to get your jing flowing again. Yes, there’s a blockage above your kidneys. That Holiday Rambler there, with the brassiere flag. The girls live there. At the very least they’re up all night. Sew a salt crystal into your hem, for the heartache.

THE GIRLS

We come from all over. We’re here because we want to be, our contribution. We don’t use money, not in a five-senses form. We’ve never been this good at anything, never particularly good at sex, even. Speak for yourself! The Rambler is not a brothel. Think of it as a bathhouse. Think of it as a sanctuary. Think of it however you like, or not at all. We relax you, we do what comes to us and what comes to you. A haven from inhibitions and negativity. You don’t know how negative thoughts weigh you until you float free of them, then there’s no putting them on again. The Rambler is a medical tent. We knead the worry out of you! There’s no shame here. We embrace after each orgasm. Orgasm is God in the body. Before we got here, we were sensual atheists. Orgasm is a leap of faith. They call it a leap because you have to leave your body. We’re not shackling anyone with our expectations. But we are willing to receive seed when it seeks us. We have to be. There are no divisions here, no lines between the erotic, the sublime and the divine. No space for the worldly. There are clusters of nerves all over the body
and each of these can be stimulated to heaven. We can coax an orgasm from the earlobe, the Achilles’ tendon, the tip of your nose. We can come by watching others come. Just sitting is fine. Sit as long as you like. It’s nice to have some company. Relax. Give us your burdens.

JIMMER

For arthritis wear the eyetooth of a pig. Chew newspaper to stop a nosebleed. A salt mackerel tied to the feet cures bunions. Cut off a head cold by tying a long stocking around your neck. Rub warts with pebbles, rub warts with chicken blood, rub warts with a slice of raw potato and stow it in the eaves, rub warts with thistle leaves and throw them into a grave, scratch a wart with a nail from a coffin until it bleeds. In the Army I carried the Ninety-First Psalm in my pocket and the bullets never touched me. Do not wear a man’s hat unless you intend to keep him. Did you whistle when you carried her? Pardon my French, but this will retard surefire. In what direction did you sleep while expecting? Feet to the north could tie the child’s tongue. Have you taken the short end of a wishbone lately? Bad things come in threes, miracles in pairs. Never point at lightning. If you kiss a man with the raw heart of a turtledove in your mouth he will fall in love with you and never out. The first to go to sleep after consummation will be the first to die. If a body of a drowned person cannot be found, toss a loaf of bread in after it. The loaf will hover above it. Some of this is not so useful these days.

THE GIRLS

It’s arsenic poisoning, Jimmer’s face. Have you never seen a case? You’d think he’d be more grateful, ugly as he is. Though that twitchy hand can do some tricks between your legs. Can it? Ig is not what you would call cute, is she? Cute is the worst way to be. Cute is an act of erasure.
Cute is gynophobia writ large. We all have a snake or two in our hair. Even you. Especially you.

DALLAS

The girls were lost before they came here. Wanderers, like all of us. They have a very specific definition of ministry, let’s say. But who am I to tell another woman what counts as divination? For that matter, who are you?

JIMMER

Dallas has an ardent soul. Very awake. One of the few who truly grasp the mystery of the dune sea.

DALLAS

At the dune sea two cartographers can walk the same trail and draw different maps.

JIMMER

Two artists can sit side by side, sketching the same peaks, sharing the same tin of charcoal, and their drawings will emerge as though they were sketching two different ranges on two different continents.

DALLAS

That sound you hear at night, the singing, it’s a vibration. You’re hearing the dune move through you.

THE GIRLS

The food comes from the greenhouses. You’ve seen the Volkswagens? Rolled over a VW mechanic and gutted them for grow pods. Tomatoes, kale, strawberries. You’ve met Cody? Our grower savant?

CODY

Here you’ve got your snow peas, your watermelon, over there your cantaloupe, your leafy greens. Everything organic, everything heirloom. No tubers, no winter squash, no rice or wheat or trees, of course. Before this I was an urchin, you could say. I’d never belonged to anything. When the Amargosa rolled over my school it was the first time I was capable of considering the existence of a benevolent God. The Wide Rock School for Errant Boys. Basically a labor camp. One of those places where they use wilderness as a cage and see no irony in it. Blueberries? Sure. I think I can manage blueberries.

JIMMER

The dune sea does not exist, insomuch as we define existence. How is that little one? Put a nub of brute root under her pillow.

CODY

The root is Levi’s creation, I can’t take credit for it. Basically he spliced cannabis with cocoa. There’s some peyote in there too, or a cousin of it. No paranoia though, no freakery. A truly flawless hybrid. Inspired. Genius. Chew the root to clear your mind. Levi takes them on vision quests.

THE GIRLS

They go at night, while we sleep. Levi needs peace to dowse. He and Nico take the empty kegs and fill them at the ephemeral rivers. They distribute the full kegs at bonfire. He dowses with his hands, rather than a rod. The phallus would defile the process. Men have wagged their rods at the Earth plenty.

JIMMER

The kids call them vision quests. I call it listening. He uses his hands because he can’t find branches. When was the last time you saw a tree?

DALLAS

For Levi, using a tree branch to find a river would be like using a severed arm to find a shallow grave.

JIMMER

A gifted dowser can divine with anything for anything, so long as his desire is honest. He can dowse for oil or ore. He can tell whether something is safe to eat or drink. He can find lost objects or missing people. He can solve crimes. He can find anything buried: unmarked graves, mineral deposits, long-healed injuries, subconscious fantasies. He can feel sickness, he can feel lies. Intuition enters the mind in a way Western science has yet to explain. Moses was a dowser, probably Jesus too. Though they did not have the benefit of dune buggies.

CODY

Oh, no. We’d be fucked if we were still on gas. Nico rigged the buggies with solar and wind. Like sailing on land. He’s a genius with machinery. Don’t I know you from somewhere?