The Color of Night (10 page)

A fine gray dust blew over the desert. It coated every window, seeped in through every crack. All day the machines ate into the stone of the mountain. The incessant complaint of their alarms as they reversed and then returned to the attack. Between the clatter and the monotone came the whisper of pumps, sucking the aquifers dry. The endless racket of mortal engines, striving to build Babylon.

Gray dust caked in the back of my throat. I longed for my old voices, but heard nothing.

Raze it. Raze it. For the gods’ sake, burn it down.

I went to Lake Mead, to look for water. The torpid surface stretched away, farther than the eye could see. There was the rush of the flumes in the sky-high dam, the chatter of tourists, and the cries of gulls circling overhead, a thousand miles away from the sea, dipping and diving to snatch at our leavings.

A casino for scavengers. The gulls flew down with the devotion of marks milking the handles of slot machines. I saw one swoop to snatch a whole sandwich, beak lashing over the shoulder of a tourist’s child. The father shook his fist and gave chase as the bread and meat scattered over the boardwalk and other gulls swooped down to claim their portion.

When the tourists cast their bread upon the waters, the dull lake’s surface boiled with the rubbery lips of carp, struggling with one another over every soggy crumb.

As I left, a beggar accosted me. I shrugged him off without looking, but somehow took him in all the same. Out of his scabby face, his eyes probed toward me. His grubby hand kept reaching. Somehow he seemed to know my name.

When I took a second look, it was Corey. I couldn’t count the days since he’d been fired from the casino, but it could hardly have been so many, for him to have plummeted so far. I gave him a handful of change from my pocket and walked on.

“Mae,” Laurel said, the next time I called, and after a moment I answered her. A little spring opened up in me when I pronounced her name.

And then, I think, we must have had a conversation. Or, at any rate, Laurel began to talk.
It’s been so long
…
banalities of that order. For the first few minutes I listened only to the timbre of her voice.

Laurel had been to a New England prep school, then a couple of years at Stanford before she fell in with D—— and the People. Her patrician manner of speaking probably came from her family, long before any of those other things had occurred. I’d envied that a little, I suppose, in the beginning. But in her passion Laurel spoke differently; her register dropped; the voice took on richer tones. I heard the wildness that was in her, raging to come out.

Then. I heard that then. Tonight, she gave me only her schooled surface, and I said little:
Yes … Go on …
I let the silence pool whenever she stopped speaking.

Without attending to her words, I somehow gleaned some information. Laurel had moved to New York, where she taught school. She was some stripe of administrator now, in a top-drawer prep school in Greenwich Village. Yes, she was single still, or again. But there was a child, a daughter—I didn’t catch her name.

Beneath the careful modulation of her voice I heard nothing of her old fire, but an uneasiness. A hint of fear. It repulsed me and drew me toward it.

“Laurel,” I said. “I saw you.”

“You—”

“The tapes.” I didn’t mean to say tapes, that I had made them, that I had watched her seven seconds on the order of seven hours. I meant to say the television.

“In the news,” I said.

Laurel held her breath and I pictured her pinning her plump lower lip in her top teeth as she masked the telephone’s mouthpiece with her hand.

“The nine-eleven coverage.”

“Oh
God.
” A deeper shade came into her voice, though she wasn’t calling on the gods that she and I had served. “I’ve so been trying to forget that. That—it wasn’t me.”

I no longer needed to play the tape to see it, Laurel with her head thrown back, clawing hands raised against heaven, her bloody jaws. Laurel translated into Fury, the blazing self she was meant to be.

“I don’t see how you
saw
that, Mae.” She was struggling to repair the seamless surface of her speech. “They only played it a few times.” A shudder I could feel across the phone line. “A time too many for me, of course.”

Silence.

“It’s been hard here. It’s … it’s all such desolation.”

“I live in the desert,” I told her, the first and only circumstance of that nature I revealed.

“I don’t see how you found me, anyway. After so long.”

The fear was there again beneath the surface and I wanted to move through my disgust into it, occupy it, and use the fear to hurt her, or rather to make her feel.

There’s a bond between us, never broken. I never lost you, Laurel, and no more could you lose me.

For the first time on the phone, she sounded old. “I can’t do this, Mae. I just can’t handle it. I don’t know what you want from me anyway. Not now. What is there? And besides—”

Besides.

“I’m dying,” Laurel said into the phone.

“You can’t be.”

“Yes I can,” she blurted out. Her voice shifted to irritability, still only on the surface at first. Then something deeper; I thought she might weep. “Mae, I don’t know where you are, but I can’t go back into that crazy fantasy with you. I can be dying like anyone else, and I am.”

It upset me, I am ashamed to say. Laurel, saying a thing like that. It pushed me off my center for a moment, and made me start to plead.

“Don’t you remember … ?”

“Can’t you understand I don’t
want
to remember?” The voice moved from petulant to firm; I felt her hardening her shell. “Mae, I wish you well, but please don’t call.”

In the desert there was starlight but no moon. The dust had settled, for a time, and the air was calm and dry. I heard coyotes, not so far away, but didn’t see them.

Reach out and touch someone,
I thought. I hadn’t yet considered that someone could touch you back.

What if, with Laurel, it had never been enough? The prospect of tenderness endlessly unfolding, pleasure without pain—like meat without salt. It left, untended, the desire to be stabbed in the heart.

So then one day. So then.

O—— appeared at the lodge and asked if I’d seen Eerie. He was fretful, gold skin crimped between his brows. Barefoot, shirtless, he got out of his rock-star convertible, and cast about the grounds before coming toward me. No one else was in sight. Well, there was one of those bikers who liked to hang around the place, tinkering with a dune buggy engine, but all you could see of him was his raggedy gang colors humped over the open hood, the crack of his ass poking out of his jeans.

“Not here,” I told him, which was technically true, depending on your definition of
here.
As a matter of fact I knew just where Eerie was—in the school-bus wing stroked out on the smack Ned had given her—but she wasn’t in the lodge and I could prove it. And if O—— was worried that Eerie might be with D——, I knew that she wasn’t, because someone else was.

I caught O——’s hand, trying for the flower-girl carelessness that Laurel would have used to make that move. But O—— seemed to pull away from the touch, so I let him go and merely beckoned him inside.

“Come on,” I said. Inside the lodge, I showed him all the places Eerie was not, which included D——’s octagon room up top. A flowered sheet hung across the doorway at the head of the stairs, quivering slightly with a breeze coming in from the other side. I stopped to listen but heard nothing, then pulled a ripple of sheet back.

“Don’t let him see you,” I whispered into O——’s ear. Not that D—— would have cared who saw him do what—but if he knew that O—— was present he would have bent his energy on keeping him there and using him for something.

I must have already plotted what I would do next, if I didn’t want that to happen.

However, D—— was asleep, or feigning sleep, or turned deeply inward—the blind mask covering his face with empty eyeholes streaming backward to the stars … Or one might have said his shut-eyed face was peaceful, even beatific. The back of his hand lay on Laurel’s bare belly, just above the first cinnamon crinkle of the hair between her legs, rising and easily falling with her sleeping breath.

I waited near the foot of the stairs till O—— let the sheet fall back into place and came down, relieved, to join me. But I didn’t try for his hand again. I’d need to do it my way and not Laurel’s.

You’re the knife and I’m the butter.

I stepped within O——’s compass and smiled up at him; he didn’t move away this time. O—— was tall, a clear head taller than me, so I had to tilt my head to catch his eye.

“See?” I began. “It’s—”

There was a code word then that covered everything. It expressed that actions had no consequences, that we could all do whatever we pleased, you go your way and I go mine and if we chance to meet it’s beautiful … Here in the twenty-first century
it’s cool
covers all that sort of business, but back then …

“Out of sight,” I said to O——, and apparently those were the perfect words to make him reach for me.