Gold Fame Citrus (36 page)

Citizens, I come to you today from the Mojave Desert. Behind me lies the Amargosa Dune Sea, the only known landmass of its kind, what geologists call a pseudo-spontaneous phenomenon, a superdune, a symbol of the drought that has wrecked the American West. It has collapsed agri-business as we know it, sending millions of refugees, known colloquially as Mojavs, fleeing the Southwest, desperately seeking shelter—and resources. It’s a landscape we all recognize, emblematic of a drama each of us is familiar with. But could this superdune be hiding a secret? . . . Some call him a dowser, some call him a visionary, others say he is a fugitive who may
even
have access to
nuclear weapons
 . . . He is believed to have fled
here
, to the Amargosa Dune Sea, though how he might
survive
here remains a mystery . . . a whistle-blower to some, to others a disgruntled employee . . . accused of
stealing
state secrets . . . accused of
polygamy
 . . . linked to the disappearance of a female coworker . . . train bombing in Albuquerque . . . extremist radical views . . .
ransacking
aid convoys . . .
Sunday Java
unearthed this exclusive photo in which we see the burnt frames of two lorries belonging to the Red Cross . . . Or is he, as some say, a prophet, possessed of a rare gift much needed in this barren, blighted wilderness? We cannot know until he is brought to justice. For now he remains . . .
on the lam
.

Ray listened to them both. Luz was trying not to hurt him, he could tell, and he was trying to determine whether she was in love with this supposed dowser. When Luz told him she had something she wanted him to see, Ray followed her back to the bus, hoping whatever it was would prove she was not. A consolation he would be denied.

She went to the glove compartment and handed him a notebook. Ray sat down and skimmed it. Luz hovered manic as a hummingbird as he paged through sketches and scrawl—a madman’s manifesto.

As he read, Ray fingered the scar at his hairline. Everything’s connected, Luz had said, and it felt so then. It seemed he could wiggle the divot of waxy tissue on his forehead and a little bell would ring at the dowser’s bedside.

Luz sat before him, her knees folded under her, expectant. “Isn’t it amazing?”

Ray did not know how to begin. “What does that mean, babygirl? To ‘liberate’ a bunch of uranium?”

“It’s a way of listening.”

Ray scratched his chin.

Luz said, “He found Ig and me that way. We’re supposed to be here.”

“For what? Why?”

“The Amargosa is a wasteland because they need it to be a wasteland, see? If Baby Dunn and her baby are here, thriving—”

“Baby Dunn? What are you talking about?”

“We disrupt that narrative. It’s about showing us as humans. A chosen people.”

“You said you hated all that Baby Dunn shit.”

“Me and Ig. Videos of us gardening, taking a bath. Make them think they discovered us.”

“You and Ig? That’s insane. Don’t you realize what would happen if they saw you, her?”

Luz stood up. “You’re not getting it. We’re the rallying cry.”

Ray pressed his hands against his face then looked up at her. “Has he been taking Ig?”

“What?”

“I don’t want him alone with her.”

“What are you talking about? I’m trying to tell you how special this place is. It’s in danger. They could come any day. If we don’t do something.”

Ray stood, holding up the primer. “Says Levi.”

“We’re under assault here, Ray. I think I can help.”

“Help
how
? Turning us in?”

“You’re asking the wrong questions.”

“What’s the most likely scenario here, Luz?”

Luz shook her head, disappointed. “Why is it so difficult for you to believe that I could be useful here?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t make sense.”

“You’d think that with all that you’ve seen—are
still
seeing—you could open yourself to the unknown.”

In fact, Ray’s visions were fading. Even now, as he watched Ig bobble around the bus, she was only faintly opal. Luz was a mute slate, and the light pressing on the blankets told him nothing. His heartcolors would be gone by sunset. Ray said, “I heard a story about him on the news, in Limbo Mine.”

Luz scoffed. “The news.” She tossed the news out the bus window.

“He’s a criminal.”

“So are we.”

“He’s a liar. A fraud.”

“You don’t want to talk to me about liars and frauds,” she said.

Ray was silent.

“He finds water, Ray. You’ve been drinking it.”

“He steals it, Luz.”

“You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter what anyone says about him.”

“He hijacks aid convoys. I saw photos of the aid convoys on fire. That’s where he gets the water.”

“He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Him and his guys cracked my fucking skull.”

“No—”

“He might have killed people, Luz! There’s a missing woman—”

Luz said, “Why are you trying so hard to belittle what we have here?” She put something into her mouth.

“What is that you keep chewing?”

“It helps me breathe.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Goddamn it, Ray! You’re treating me like a fucking toy. After all this, I’m still a doll to you. It’s easier for you to imagine some criminal conspiracy than to think I could be useful.”

“It’s not about you, Luz—it’s about him.”

“I know it is! I thought you were
dead
, Ray.”

“You’ve said that. And I’ve said I’m sorry.”

“I will keep saying it until you understand exactly what it means.
I thought you were dead.
I thought you were dead because that’s what you wanted me to think.”

“I didn’t—”

“I thought you were dead. Dead, Ray!”

Ray hurled the primer to the far end of the bus. “And who told you I was?
He
did. He was the one on that lorry—the one who attacked me—”

“Don’t.”

“I’m fucking sure of it.”

Ig was not crying—she was watching—but Luz went to her as though she were. She lifted Ig and held her. She had never been more a mother than when she opened the back door of the Blue Bird and in a voice fossilized with resolve told Ray, “You need to find another place to sleep.”

Ray drifted through the colony. Where exactly did Luz expect him to go? He passed RVs with foil over all their windows, tents, the black hand of ash where a fire had been. He passed a man in a teepee, napping, his features obscured by sun and sand and fuchsia mottling like some new map across one side of his face. Ray walked in circles, and each time he passed the man Ray glanced at him. The sun relentless, he eventually lay in the teepee’s shrinking shadow and tried to sleep.

When he woke the old man stood above him. “You were thrashing around,” he told Ray. “Shouting things.”

“Was I?” Ray tried to blink the stains from the old man’s face, angered by the last remnants of the visions that had led him here, their whimsical obstruction.

“Arsenic poisoning,” the man said. He retreated to the shade inside the teepee and gestured with his jumpy hand for Ray to join him. “You’re Luz’s man.”

Ray shrugged. “I was.”

“I’m Jimmer.” He extended his hand.

“Ray.”

“Back from the dead. Where are they keeping the dead these days?”

“Limbo Mine. You know it?”

“Not from experience.”

“Glad to hear that.” Ray tried to avoid staring at Jimmer’s face.

“Domestic dispute?”

Ray nodded.

Jimmer nested a cloth inside a fisherman’s cap and donned it. “Luz said you were a surfer. Do I recall that correctly?”

“Used to be.”

“Well, let’s not sit here staring at each other.”

Jimmer instructed Ray to shoulder two flattened oblong petals of tin, each with four holes punched in it, two loops of rope tied through these. Together, they walked into the dune sea.

“See those?” Jimmer pointed back across the shrinking valley, toward the troubling range where clouds made a calico of the sky. “Gonna have a helluva sunset tonight. One upside to those mountains.”

They walked on, the colorless sand sucking at their feet. After some time Jimmer pointed at a steep crescent peak two ridges over. “That’ll do,” he said. They pressed on, drizzling sweat. Struggling up the final slope, Ray’s calves began to spasm. “I wouldn’t mind a lift,” he said. “A towline, even.”

“They’ll install all those soon as this thing stops.”

“You think it’ll stop?”

“Never.”

They reached the top of the big ridge, lungs screaming.

“Air is stingy up here,” said Jimmer.

Ray said, “I feel it.”

The sheets of tin were baking as Ray laid them on the sand. Jimmer showed him how to bind his feet to his board with the rope loops, across the toes, around the ankle and back across the heel. They sat this way, on the lip of the dune, tin obelisks strapped to their feet, the colony below miniature in the shadow of those wicked granite teeth beyond, until Jimmer said, “After you, young man.”

Ray stood and leaned down the dune. The sand shifted beneath him, ceded to gravity, and he slid. He glided, faster and faster, beating his arms for balance until the dune bit the edge of his board and threw him down. He came up cackling. Jimmer followed after, bit it, came up shouting, “Goddamn it, that’s important!”

Onward they slid. They trembled. They tumbled. They moved first like tentative leaves falling softly from the summit, then in wide dreamy arcs, and finally swift and daring as diving swallows. Sensation throbbed in their groins, their abdomens, their inner ears and trembling glutes. It was a kind of flying, gliding across the sand, swishing down and the air suddenly nipping, cooling where they sweated, which was everywhere. They crowed
Wheeee
at the summit and
Again
at the base. When they fell they somersaulted, coating themselves with albino dusting. When they gathered speed they thrust their giddy fists into the air, for it was a surprise every time. They carved the dune and climbed it again, climb and carve and fly and sing, letting loose all the joyous cries that might have otherwise died inside them.

In time, Jimmer and Ray sat at the summit, panting. Ray surveyed the colony below, looking, he realized, for a way out.

“I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to do this,” Jimmer said. “I went snowboarding once, as a kid. Once. Course I mighta dreamt it. Always wanted to move somewhere with snow.” He made an
hourglass of his hand, let sand slip through. “But I had a nice little homestead. I had a canyon all to myself. I put a statue down there when my boy went, then another, built a bridge, a walkway, carved a scene into the cliffside, I couldn’t stop. Wife left; I hardly noticed. Though she would say I’m the one who left.”

“What happened to it?” asked Ray. “Your canyon?”

“The dune came and took it. What I remember most was how quiet it was. I’d always wanted to go out there with a shotgun. Blow it all to smithereens. But the dune just slipped over it, like a clean bedsheet. Merciful, I guess I thought.”

For the first time, the word seemed right to Ray, especially here, in sight of those toothy peaks, so forbidding opposite the soft swooping embrace of the dune sea. The heartcolors had left him now, but the sun had set, and as Jimmer predicted, the clouds snagged on the new range, aflame. Ray did not miss his visions—he missed Luz, wanted to ask Jimmer the secret to keeping her, though he thought he knew. When he’d been able to pry her away from Levi, the old Luz surfaced. In the weeks since he returned, Luz and Ig had spent every night with Ray in the bus. He didn’t want to know all that had happened between Luz and the dowser—didn’t blame her, no, but didn’t want to know the details, either. She’d tried to tell him sometimes, in the dark, but he’d stop her. It doesn’t matter, he’d say. It all happened for a reason, she’d say. But really Ray did not want to invite the man between them that way. And though he would never say so, it was, he supposed, a story he knew from before, the same that sent them up into the canyon. But this new devotee Luz was bristling, unpredictable, and he didn’t want to spook her. Nights together or no, something pulled her back to Levi, Ray knew, and he had been intent on giving her no reason to follow that pull—no guilt and no conditions. Everything clean between them. But that was ruined now.

Below, someone had started a fire. Black smoke helixed skyward and disappeared. Nearby, on a big, palm-flat rock, was the dome Ray knew belonged to Levi. Alone, apart, the first time it’d been so, Jimmer said. The dome glowed from within as darkness came, lovely, Ray had to admit.

—

Luz tried to nap but the Blue Bird was poisoned, the bad air from the fight pressing heavy on her. She tidied up the bus, returned the abused primer to the glove box and took Ig for a walk.

Levi’s dome had been relocated to a flat, rust-red rock from which radiated tremendous heat. In the center of the dome was a pile of stones baked in a nearby fire. Luz entered and was immediately surprised by the intensity inside; she had not known it could get hotter.

Levi lay nearly naked on his stone floor, shining. “Sweat lodge,” he said. “The heat in this rock was absorbed before you or I were born. Slow the heart rate. Essentialize the thought processes. Reduce to its basicmost pathways. Go through fight or flight and out the other side. To clarity and truth.”

He invited her to disrobe and feel it. She felt a primal urge to do just that. The happiest slivers of her girlhood had been spent on a beach towel on a rhombus of dead lawn in Pasadena, thinking of nothing except absorbing the sun, of the air moving around her setting a chill to the sweat shimmering on her upper lip, of evading the sundial trajectory of the finger of shade cast by the single palm in their neighbor’s yard, of an insect screaming near her ear or a snowball of sweat rolling from the scoop of her sacrum into her butt crack. But mostly, there on the towel, she had wondered what she would look like one day, when she was tan or when she was thin, and would there be lines
here or creases here? Would there be unwelcome hairs, cellulite pocking? In all her hours lying in the sun and thinking, she had never concentrated on important things, never asked herself difficult questions. She wished now that she had.