Lost Signals (13 page)

2
The decision I made, to stand and find my coffee.

3
The idea out there that the universe is nothing more than a giant face. I am drawing our attention to its right eye. Nebula and super nova and spiral galaxies, any of which are indetectable because of scale, are prevented from escaping by the sac of the eye. The thing we are noticing, however, and we have nearly forgotten the point of this, is that one of you, out of disinterest in this writing, is imagining the vast hollow beneath the retracted lid. It requires specificity to isolate this now—the effect of losing interest in the description and the introduction of the impossible space beneath the eyelid. This has caused light and that’s the thing to measure.

4
There is a stone on a planet—it matters what planet and what stone, though we can’t say because we do not know. But it is a startling fact that because of our sentence we have eliminated a great number of stones and planets not referred to. This elimination has brought us much closer to our referent but we remain and always will remain, unable to complete this knowing. The stone knows, however, and is made suddenly aware.

5
There is an idea out there that can be brought to bear on the stone on the planet. The idea follows that in the fullness of infinity that stone has become the first letter d that denied us the coffee. (
What does this refer to
 
?—Ed
.) There is also the lazy guess that the conditions which brought this about are unreproducible.

6
There is the pulling back from the mouth of a recently bitten piece of toast. Then there is the interrupted return of the toast to the mouth. A second bite is deferred due to savouring the first. It was a miscalculation. I am going to say this again
 
: It was a miscalculation. Saying it again was deliberate and an invitation to the hand to put the toast to the mouth even as it is still savouring. A conflict is noted but more importantly it is given a shape in heaven. That shape cannot exist properly because there is no heave and so it reverts to a single wavelength. So that these things can exist we preserve the wavelength but divorce it from these givens.

You will hear
their voices when you try to sleep.

This was written in bright orange paint marker in desperate, trembling letters on the wall of a religious alcove. It stood out among the small paintings of saints and messages of hope that adorned Salvation Mountain. When we first saw it, we thought it was desecration. By the time everything was done, I understood that it was a warning.

We were eight miles away from the Salton Sea, a quick stop to film some b-roll and see the sights out in the middle of the vast nothing. Salvation Mountain was a singular work of insanity or religious devotion, depending on your perspective. Thousands of gallons of paint, hay, glue, and trash sculpted into the hellish desert as a last refuge. It was the first stop on our road to hell.

A little ways up the road was Slab City, an enclave of people who’d reclaimed an abandoned artillery range in the desert, parked their motor homes, and started a strange, off-the-grid community. Sharon and I were there to interview the residents and document their lives for a fluff piece on the late news back in LA. The state government was getting ready to impose some water and land restrictions, and the locals were ready to fight. It was exactly as exciting as it sounds. Still, we’d needed an excuse to get away from the city and spend more time together. Sharon loved camping. I am not a fan of the outdoors, but I loved her more than I hated dirt, so what was a girl to do
 
?

I don’t know if the locals were always open and friendly, but they were nice enough to us. We set up our camera by an old spindly tree decorated with countless shoes strung by their laces. There were dozens of locals hanging around that day, and every one of them demanded to say their piece on camera, hopeful that we’d get the message out to anyone who might sympathize with their quest for freedom and lend support. They wanted us to understand what brought them to the desert and what stopped them from going back to civilization.

That’s all I want, too. I want you to understand what brought us out to the desert and what we left there.

After we wrapped, we got to talking to a couple of the locals and decided to spend the night there. They took us everywhere, insistent that we document the lives they’d created so that the world wouldn’t think this was just a bunch of hippies in the desert trying to freeload. There was an open air installation called East Jesus that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with turning garbage into beautiful art. Houses, bike repair shops, craftsmen and artisans plying their trade. When the sun started going down, they took us to The Range, a stage and open air restaurant where the locals gathered every Saturday for food, music, and stories.

Somewhere around our fourth beer or fifth joint, one of them asked if we’d heard of the crack in the sky over the Salton Sea. She was all leathery skin and grey dreadlocks, told us about how she’d moved out this way back when her husband was still serving with the Marines during the birth of the Cold War. She said there were things he was privy to that got him killed. He would tell her about these experiments they ran out in the restricted area, way back in Patton’s day. Something worse than the atom bomb that was supposed to split atoms in a way that hadn’t been tried before. One of those world-enders that the military likes to call peacekeepers. She said he knew too much about it and that’s why they killed him.

Sharon whispered to me that he probably ran off with one of the younger, smoother artist chicks. I started to pull out the camera to talk to her on tape, then felt a warm hand rest softly but firmly on my forearm

“Just let her alone.” An old man from the next table over squeezed my arm, two gentle pulses. He murmured in my ear, “She’ll stop talking soon enough. You’re here to help us, right
 
? You put Doreen on camera and it’ll scuttle the whole thing. I used to do what you did, way back in the day. I get it. But can you just take the rest of the night off and enjoy the music
 
? We’ve been nothing but nice to you.”

Sharon pursed her lips and nodded at me, hoisting her beer bottle. “Dee’s a workaholic. It’s one of the things we fight about at home.”

I slid the camera back into my bag and picked up my beer bottle. “All work and no play.”

“No such thing out here.” The old guy smiled at me. “And thank you kindly.”

It was one of those
thank yous
that was tinged with a healthy dose of
fuck you
. I didn’t want to wear out our welcome. This was the closest thing to a date night that Shar and I had had in a long time.

Doreen smiled at us through the whole exchange. “Are you two married
 
?”

“We’ve been talking about it,” I said.

“For a long time,” Sharon said. “A really long time.”

“It’s legal now, right
 
? What are you waiting for
 
?”

“What
are
we waiting for, Dee
 
?”

“What was your marriage like
 
?” I asked Doreen.

She jumped right back into her conspiracy story, said the night before he disappeared, her husband told her to watch the sky at noon because something was going to happen that would change the world. She took their car up to the top of a ridge with a pair of his field glasses and watched where he told her to watch. There was no explosion, she said. Just a weird ripple in the air that she kept calling the crack in the sky. He didn’t make it home from work that day. Nobody came to inform her that he’d deserted or died. They just erased him. No benefits for her. No memories. She said they stole all of his photos while she slept, his clothes too. Like she’d never been married.

“That was the worst part,” she said. “All of those years, everything we built. All of the little things, you know
 
? His face
 
? His smell. His . . . you know, everything.”

She seemed lost in the moment.

“I had friends, people I used to write to every week. They’d get suspicious if I stopped, you know
 
? I think that’s why they didn’t come after me, too. Ray’s only friends were in the service, and they were loyal to the Corps. If they had anything to tell me about what happened to him, they didn’t say boo.”

The old guy wandered back to our table and laid a hand on Doreen’s shoulder. “It’s getting late, Doreen. I don’t want you walking across the street in the middle of the night. Let me get you home.”

She reluctantly stood up. “If you have radios, you can go out there and hear it. Probably film it too. Forget this water rights stuff. There’s bigger things out there the people need to know about. Go out there by Bombay Beach where the ground is burned.”

“All right, Doreen,” he said, turning her by the shoulder and casting a glance at us as he walked away.

“Such interesting people,” Sharon said.

The music and festivities were still going, and the booze had worked its way nicely into my blood. Sharon asked me to dance, and we did. We forgot about Doreen and got lost in a haze of smoke and hooch and good music. When we went back to our little pup tent at the end of the night, I asked Sharon what she thought of the story.

“Probably a crack in her brain from too much acid.”

“Yeah, but we should check it out, right
 
? We’re headed that way anyway to get back home. Might make an interesting pitch for another story.”

She kissed me on the lips. “I’m really high.” I kissed her back and we found our way out of our clothes and into our sleeping bag.

The next morning, I woke up cold. The old woman sat cross-legged outside our tent, staring at us.

“You believed me, right
 
?” Doreen asked.

“Sure.” I wiped sleep from my eyes and nudged Sharon awake.

“You ladies can see it. Turn your head to the ground and use your peripheral vision. If you’re near the north end of the Sea, you can see the crack out of the corner of your eye. It’s still there, letting things in. He died for it. They took him because he knew too much. You drive by Bombay Beach and you’ll see the burn in the ground from where the bomb went off. Around midnight, you turn your radio on AM to the end of the dial. The voices will come. That’s your story right there. People need to know.”

Her eyes were shiny and wet, somewhere far away. She wasn’t looking at us, just staring through the tent off into some past catastrophe.

“We need to get dressed and ready for the day, Doreen,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. Then, “Oh
 
! Oh my, where are my manners. You ladies get dressed. I’ll make you a sack lunch to take with you.”

“That sounds nice, Doreen, thank you.”

She tottered to her feet and crunched away through the gravel.

“Why would you bother that sweet lady to make lunch for us
 
?” Sharon whispered.

“She left, didn’t she
 
?”

Sharon took my hand and caressed my cheek. “This was nice, Dee. I’m . . . I really hate camping, you know. But this was nice.”

I smiled at her and spun around, snapping a picture of the two of us with my phone. We looked terrible. No makeup, bedhead, bleary-eyed. But she had that smile that I loved so much, that half-grin, those fretting eyebrows, tongue half-out. That was the last good picture of us. The last good moment, really.

We loaded the car to head out, shook a few hands, took contact info, promised we’d do what we could to get their story to the masses. We had just started to roll out on the main road when Sharon tapped my arm.

“There’s our crazy friend,” she muttered.

Doreen was flagging us down, waving a sack wildly above her head, doing that weird chicken walk some older people do when they need to move quickly. Her face was more wrinkle than skin, her smile more open space than tooth. I rolled down my window and she thrust the sack through into my lap.

“Hi, Doreen,” I said.

“There’s notes in there that you’ll need. Didn’t have much for food, so I hope you like peanut butter and apples. Couple bottles of water. And some masks. You’ll thank me later for that.”

“Okay, Doreen. Thank you for all of this. We’ve gotta hit the road.”

“To Bombay Beach
 
?”

“We’ll . . . yeah, we’ll probably make a couple of stops on our way out. Promise. We might be back out this way if things pan out, okay
 
?”

“Oh, I hope so. I hope so. As soon as the sun starts going down, they’ll start singing to you. Believe me. Just listen. Open ears, open minds.”

We were five miles outside of Slab City when Sharon opened the bag and started poking around. The sandwiches she’d made us were remarkably clean-cut, perfect squares with the crusts cut off, thin slices of apple and peanut butter in between slightly crusty white bread. There were two more apples inside the bag, and another smaller brown bag. Sharon opened that one to find two painters’ masks nested inside of each other and a faded picture of a man in military uniform. It was a formal portrait, his jacket starched, his hat perfectly poised on a head that was mostly scratched and faded into obscurity.