Last Things (19 page)

My mother sighed. “What was smart about Manson was the way he broke up all the families. The kids belonged to everybody and the mothers were only allowed to talk to them in gibberish so they wouldn’t get attached.”

“What did they say?” I asked.

“Nonsense words, I guess, elterhay, elterskay, who knows?” She found a station on the radio that played scratchy Mexican music.

She told me how when she was little her father had taught her the opposite names for everything as an experiment. “Dog,” she said when she saw a cat. “Too light out,” she said when he took her camping under a starless sky. On her first day of school, her teacher told her to take a chair and she sat on the table, instead. She ended up being held back a year and her father had to reteach her everything.

“Why is a table the opposite of a chair?” I asked. We passed a sign for the park. “They’re approximate opposites,” my mother said.

We passed a restaurant shaped like a castle. I begged to stop, until finally my mother gave in and turned around. Inside, people were wearing paper crowns and eating steak with their hands. There was a sword stuck in a stone outside this restaurant and beneath it a thousand-dollar bill in a glass case. My mother stopped and tried it, but it wouldn’t budge. “This place is a rip-off,” she said. She paid for the meal with our last hundred-dollar bill.

It was late afternoon by the time we made it onto the highway. 101 degrees, the bank sign said. We drove without talking. I felt a little sick. After a while, my mother rolled down the window and stuck out her head. The car swerved across the empty road and I gripped the seat until my mother put her head back inside the car. The engine made a faint sputtering noise. My mother turned on the radio and sped up until the dunes outside passed in a blur. I thought that she was like a dog in that she loved to ride in the car.

Outside, there was nothing to see but sand. I peeled my legs off the sticky seat. The heat felt like a hand pressing against me. “How long until Disneyland?” I asked.

My mother didn’t answer. When I asked again, she waved my question away. We passed a billboard that said “Joshua Tree, 10 miles.” “We never should have come here,” my mother told me. “I should have known.”

In the distance, there was a patch of water shimmering on the road. As we drove toward it, it disappeared.

“Did you see that?” my mother said. “Over by the sign?” Down the road, it appeared again, a ghost of blue water.

My mother pulled over. She took a picture, then got back in the car. “Michael would have loved this,” she said. “He always wanted to see one.” I knew that we had passed into Michael’s desert again, where every rock and cactus was named for him. My mother seemed happy for the first time since we’d left the Cactus Chateau. I imagined a woman walking down a street somewhere, wearing her lucky shoes.

We were two hours from Disneyland when my mother saw a poster at a gas station that made her change her mind. She ripped it off the bulletin board and showed it to me. “Look, Grace,” she said excitedly. “It’s the festival Edgar told us about. It’s happening just a little ways from here.” She took out a piece of paper she kept folded up in her wallet. “The Burning Man!” the flyer said. My mother got out a map and retraced our route. We had missed it by just a little bit, she said. I looked at the place she’d circled and at the star I’d made on the map for Anaheim. I cried and banged on the door to be let out, but she ignored me. Even when I stopped crying, I refused to talk to her. “Fine,” my mother said. “I’ve had just about enough of you.”

We rode for hours in silence, but when we reached the spot in the desert filled with lights and cars and strange machines, I forgot for a moment that I hadn’t wanted to come. It looked like a carnival without any
rides. We drove past a huge stick man made of scaffolding. It rose forty feet into the air, tethered to the ground by thin wire cables. At its feet, hundreds of people were gathered around. “It’s the Burning Man,” my mother said. “Tonight they’ll light it on fire.” We parked behind a line of cars and began to walk. My mother insisted on bringing the corn, so we walked slowly, dragging it along. Everywhere, there was the sound of drumming. A woman ran by covered in white body paint, a tattoo of a vine on her back. My mother pointed to a man whose lips and ears were pierced with heavy silver rings. He was carrying a small boy in his arms and handing out flyers. My mother took one and put it in her purse. “Nice corn,” the man said. I noticed we were the only ones wearing shoes. We made our way through the crowd toward the Burning Man. At its base were flowers and bones and offerings of food. We dragged the corn through the crowd of people and left it at the Burning Man’s feet. As we approached, it lit up in blue and spread its arms like wings. I counted its neon ribs, ten in all. “It’s pretty,” my mother said. I expected it to walk toward us, but it stood still, a pale blue skeleton in the light.

In the afternoon, my mother took me to watch two machines fight. One machine had a live rabbit running in a wheel, and the other one shot flames and blue sparks into the air. My mother and I stood a little apart from the crowd. Everyone was quiet while the machines fought. They made a loud sound whenever
they touched. I was a little afraid of the one with the sparks. It was taller than a house, but not as big. The rabbit was scared too. It seemed to run faster and faster in its wheel. I watched the machines clank and spark. After a long time, they stopped. Little pieces of paper fell from the sky. My mother picked up a scrap and read it. I could see people above on the scaffolding and then the white paper floating down. Some people caught the paper in their hands. It was almost the end of dusk. A man with a silver hand went over to the machines and covered them with a tarp. After a moment, he lifted the tarp and took the rabbit out of its cage. He petted the rabbit and held it to his face. My mother said that the man had lost his hand in an explosion. She said that he stole all the parts he needed for his machines because he didn’t believe in work. Something in my mother’s voice made me afraid she would leave and go with him. Her hand was cold. I thought it had turned to metal in the dark.

That night, we walked a long ways into the desert because my mother wanted to find a place to sleep where no people were. “I think I saw Michael tonight,” she told me. “He left a flower for the Burning Man.” The moon appeared suddenly over the dunes. My mother took my hand. “Here,” she said, pointing to a place at the bottom of one of the dunes. We spread out our sleeping bags and lay down on the sand.

In the middle of the night, my mother got up and put on her unlucky shoes. “Go back to sleep,” she
whispered. She took her keys, but left the water and chocolate behind. Even with the full moon, it was dark where we’d camped. I could see my mother’s footprints, leading up to the top of the dune, then disappearing.

She was gone a long time. I was suddenly afraid that she had left me there. I remembered the story she had told me about the spirit houses and the children who waited alone inside them.

There were flyers scattered across the sand where my mother had emptied out her pockets. Earlier we had gone from booth to booth, collecting them. The moonlight made everything look as if it had a line drawn around it. I thought of astronauts walking on the moon. How far away the Earth must have seemed. Blue for the oceans, green where people were.

I picked up the flyers.
The Time Has Come for Voluntary Human Extinction!
the first one said. I opened it and inside was a test you could take to see how much you loved the Earth.

ECO DEPTH GAUGE
H
OW DEEP IS YOUR COMMITMENT TO OUR PLANET
?

1. Superficial: We should take good care of our planet as we would any valuable tool
.

2. Shallow: We have a responsibility to protect the Earth for future generations
.

3. Knee-deep: The planet would be better off if there were fewer people on it
.

4. Deep: Wilderness has a right to exist for its own sake
.

5. Deeper: Wildlife has more right to exist than humans do
.

6. Profoundly deep: We are too great a threat to other forms of life. Our species should be phased out
.

7. Radically deep: Human extinction now, in order to give Earth a chance. A painless extermination is needed
.

8. Abysmally deep: Humans are a plague to the Earth and deserve to die an immediate and painful death. A horrible disease from outer space would be the most fitting end
.

Someone had circled number 7 in red pen. I folded up the flyer into a tiny square and buried it in the sand. I thought of how my mother had said that scientists should create a superpredator to hunt humans and give the rest of the animals a chance. I shone my flashlight over the sand and into the dark night, but there was no sign of her. In the distance, I heard a strange crackling sound like something running through underbrush. I took out the book of dreams to calm myself. Dreams beginning with L, my finger landed on.

L
OVELY

If through the vista of dreams, you see your own fair loveliness, Fate bids you with a gleaming light, awake to happiness
.

I stood up and followed my mother’s footsteps over the sand dune until they stopped. Then I walked
toward the sound of cars in the distance. The moon slid behind a cloud. There’s never any weather on the moon, my father had told me once. I walked and walked, but the hum of the cars kept moving just out of reach. Everywhere I looked were the crooked shapes of desert trees. I tried to pay attention to the order of things. Remember the three trees bent like dancers. Remember to walk back toward them. Walk away from the bent cross, back toward the bowing man. But sometimes when I turned suddenly, it seemed the trees had rearranged themselves. I stood still and let the night tilt around me.

When I opened my eyes again, the sound of the cars had turned into the sound of the wind. I walked and walked. After a while, I cleared a place at the bottom of a dune and lay down. Sand stung my eyes. I wondered how long I had been gone and if my mother would ever find me. I took off my shoes and laid them out neatly beside me. Above me, the stars moved slowly away. If you lie down in the sand, you might fall asleep and die, I remembered, but of course that was wrong, that was a story about snow. Once my mother had asked me, “Is it better to burn to death or freeze to death?” and the right answer was freeze because at the very end there was a trick that made you think you were warm.

I woke up at dawn to the sound of my mother’s voice. In the distance, I could see her making her way toward me. I stood up, unsteady on my feet. It’s a mirage, I thought, but she kept walking toward me. “Where have you been?” she said, as if I was the one who had gone away. Her cheeks were wet. “All night I looked for you.”

I told her I didn’t want to stay in the desert anymore. I could hear the machines fighting again and the sound of people cheering. My mother rolled up our sleeping bags. She didn’t say anything about where she’d gone, but on her wrist was a copper bracelet I’d never seen before. When everything else was packed, she took it off and buried it in the sand with all the flyers from the booths. We walked back to the car. During the night, someone had covered the hood with pennies. My mother carefully collected them and put them in her purse. As we drove off, I could see people dancing around the base of the Burning Man. Why
are they doing that, I asked her. They think they’re living in the last days, she said.

The next night, we stayed at a hotel that pretended to be a lighthouse. That’s what it was built to look like, at least. There were shells on the dresser and a sprinkling of sand on the shower floor. Above the bed was a picture of the beach at sunset, with footprints along the water’s edge. First there were two sets of footprints and then there was only one. The picture bothered me. I remembered it as part of a story my grandmother had told me once, a story I hadn’t liked. There was a small television in the room, and two narrow beds. My mother poured herself a drink from the bottle she had brought with her. Somewhere along the way, I had started to think there might be a message in the bottle, but when my mother reached the bottom there was only glass. Still, there had been a moment when I had been sure I’d seen the tiny face of the woman who’d gone to sea inside.