The thirsty traveler in the desert had come to the oasis of her dreams:
It was an oasis of natural splendor in the heart of a calm sea of green grass.
The oasis was of small extent, extending but two hundred yards across.
My father's tribe lived in the oasis ten miles east of the old lake.
They will assuredly camp at the wells of Orab if they are making for the oasis.
This oasis is all the more charming to the sight because it is only an oasis.
It is not for a moment to be tolerated that an oasis should be met with anywhere except in the desert.
1.
In today's show, a machine is a car (or a camera) and a plane is a vehicle of passion.
A two-seater plane crashes in the dirt.
We're greeted by burros, an aftermath.
We've seen nothing.
It's gone.
We're sitting in the hot spring.
Oasis: A bar I frequented, desperately, in college; or,
in those years when most people go to college I amassed debt figuring out how to be a person.
We sink into the hot water (with two men). Someone asks me something; me, not her. I don't remember. I sink deeper; taken aback by his question. We're all naked. He is probing in a feminine sense; interested in that which is boundless, fluid, and reverberating.
To experience this is a kind of Hell.
And yet I forget.
Is this an oceanic feeling?
What if I told you my biggest fear was to fully live whatever comes.
Was it her that day in another pool, when we hoped the men were queer?
No –
That was the her, the she, who stole the corals.
Anyway. This one –
– Has she stolen? Sensitive and probing; Her: the boundaries of her personality are like a pile of cat dust; fur, mites, fluffs; filthy, mutable; always in the process of morphing. But her desires are subversive and direct.
I only ever feel my desires partially, or I don't know them in quite the same way a moment after they are recognized; or, maybe they are never realized; or, my sexual desires are far away, in some other body I dream of; and, like most dreams, I awake with a sense of what they are, but forget all else; or, this sense is elemental, and so it disappears, not spoken or even thought of.
Which doesn't mean I didn't have a lot of sex, or enjoy that which I had; or, that I didn't have many dreams.
But –
It is not easy to explain.
*
In the future, you will send me a letter:
I think about you a lot too. I can't remember whether I told you that I went there a couple of times. Once when I was eleven and then again when I was thirteen. Back then, it was just public land and you could do whatever you wanted.
She and I sleep in a vehicle with the back open and the dusty plain spread out before us.
I remember her tidying the things. Despite the fact that while she was in some ways exceptionally contained, her heart was always vibrating like a rodent. Most of the time I could sense this and sometimes it was too much because I hadn't learned to accept things for what they are.
She tells me that a month before we met, she'd asked my boyfriend to punch her while they were fucking.
I fall into a cold river.
She said she told him, "I want you to come at me."
I suppose I wanted this too, back then; but I am not so brave as to displace vulnerability with physical pain.
Maybe I have too much fear –
Maybe I can't stand to feel something I can't predict –
Maybe control is new to me, a relief, and I am not ready to –
I don't know.
She and I leave the spring and walk to the plane that crashed on the plain. It is blue and white. We examine the broken wing and smeared blood.
She licks the blood.
This is unexpected; and yet; I suppose she is again proving her passion, although her motives seem clinical.
I don't say anything. I imagine her saying she just needs to know how it tastes. Or that she had an urge to do it and so she did.
She is quiet. I wait. She can see things I can not see. I wait. She is very tall. I wait. She notices everything and reads in silence. I wait. Her bedrooms are barren and painted either gray-lavender or gray-blue. She favors framed 18th century depictions of swamp birds.
I wait.
I remember her tidying the things.
I remember her saying, "I shouldn't have gone to that school. It was for people who wanted to make something of themselves."
One day, I bought a bag of pig's blood and poured it onto a white plastic chair which I placed at the curb. From my window, I photographed people stopping to look at it. But people in my neighborhood were accustumed to certain forms of violence and they either didn't take notice or didn't approve in a way I hadn't considered.
Maybe this was the photograph I was meant to take. Materialization disappears before it's born.
Such an experiment is only worthy in neighborhoods with a profound degree of stillness.
I read your letter several times.
I was a rather sullen teenager who would take long walks alone towards the sand dunes or up towards the upper springs. Everyone was naked but I refused to take my clothes off, partly out of teenage rebellion, partly because everyone else was an adult, and partly because I suspected that my stepfather was a little too interested in my doing so. He did turn out to be a closet queer as I discovered when I saw him holding hands with his lover years later. I remember I would walk around sullenly, clothes on, amidst all these nude adults.
What did the man in the water ask? And why did I forget?
“I think he said, 'how so?'”
I don't remember his initial question.
“He challenged the assumption that talking was merely an excuse to engage with you because you were naked.”
I could not engage, because I was naked.
“Was the water deep enough that your tits were covered?”
I don't remember. I think so.
I remember her telling me that a person she'd met on Craigslist paid to touch her large feet in the backseat of his car. He'd parked on a street where they would be visible. I think that was part of the exchange.
She charged too little. But she clearly wanted something other than money.
On a separate occasion, I invited her to come over for dinner after she'd fucked someone in a crummy carpeted apartment for a couple hundred bucks. I told her not to shower.
“Just come in the dress you were wearing,” I said.
The dress cute but not unusually provocative.
She had mounted him on an Ikea sofa.
My boyfriend – the one who'd punched her during sex – and I, were fairly domesticated, although this was largely due to anxiety.
Her face was pink and flushed; she smiled and her gums were wet.
We praised her.
She told the story: the person picked her up at her door (she didn't have a car), drove her to his apartment in another section of the city. It was early evening. She removed her underwear and rode him on his Ikea sofa. I asked her for details. She answered methodically. She was “glowing.” She helped me feel satisfied that my life was appropriately bohemian, since I'd eschewed career and family and needed to believe that one day I might engage in a certain pride in recollection.
Fucking is nothing to marvel at; in most cases, a second-degree consent can be reached when the price is right; although, often one learns the hard way.
Entering a stranger's car or apartment is a transgression.
I want someone to tell me that at the moment of death, the woman who has been tortured experiences a pleasure in the sudden absence of fear. I don't think I can ever completely accept this world without knowing. I suppose I am afraid of what I already know, which is nothing. Maybe I will never recall my life the way I expected to, because I have spent so much time pondering this question, even as I move, even as I am doing everything.
I finally succumbed to temptation and pressure and got in the pool naked. I remember this petite blonde woman who was about thirty years old got into the pool next to me. Suddenly I felt this leg caressing my leg from foot to thigh below the waterline; it was nighttime and I don't think anyone could see. I remember feeling a strange mixture of heat, excitement and paralysis. I just sat there totally turned on wondering what I should do, mesmerized, but too fearful to do anything, except accept her caresses under the water.
I am guilty of inundating the past with an uncluttered freedom lacking in the present.
If you were here, you would tell me that the word 'inundate' is a transitive verb that refers to water, especially floodwaters. To overwhelm as if with a flood; swamp. To overspread with or as if with a flood; overflow; flood; deluge.
I can not perform either part.
I've sucked plenty of cock. I was paid well and the men were vetted.
Or, maybe they weren't, really. Maybe I am giving more credence to the net worth of online profiles.
Is class is the only remaining transgression?
I used to do that. Hitching at daybreak. A threesome in a random small town. Linoleum and ashtrays. Large dogs and caged birds.
She would sit queer at an Ivy League college.
But getting into the strange man's car –
I thought she was brave.
She licks the blood off the plane—
We leave the plane, walk toward the pools. We look around at the upper pools. A few trailers and tents are set up for the long term. The atmosphere is feral. Children are present.
We remain on the outskirts.
Back at the lower springs, new visitors have slipped into the pools. The man with the probing question is gone. The new people are from a city. They ask how long we're staying then inform us that it is not enough.
“Is the city on fire?”
“The hills are on fire.”
“I think the fire has been contained.”
“For the moment.”
“Is that why you're here?”
I don't mention that She has licked the blood from the plane.
Some sadness has no origin.
I consider saying that I licked the plane instead. What would that do other than interrupt the banality of hot water music. I am looking for the one who probed me. Where is he?
“I dropped my wedding ring in a koi pond and it disappeared,” says a woman from the city.
That isn't possible. Koi do not have stomachs, being members of the Carp family, so if in fact one did eat the ring, the koi that ate it would be the one floating at the surface the next day, because a wedding ring is going to cause a nasty intestinal blockage. Your best bet is to use a net to hunt for it at the bottom of the pond, because I'd bet the koi in question spit it back out. They don't eat what they can't taste. Depending on the alloys of the metal, try a magnet or metal detector.
“Did you ever find it?”
“No –”
“The hills are on fire.”
A person is just like a radio.
People are living in the woody edges of the city.
We've seen their mattresses, their clothing.
“It's like that now in every city.”
Bridges. Underpasses. Triangles of grass between highway exits.
"My wedding ring fell in my neighbor’s Koi pond. How can we figure out which fish ate it?”
I told you they don't eat what they can't taste.
“We’d really rather not have to cut more fish open than necessary.”
She and I get up and go examine the outdoor kitchen, the stream running through a mud-colored chute.
You’ve got to be a bird to listen to any of this.
When it's pitch dark, she and I lie on a sleeping bag beneath the Milky Way. A star drags across a corner. Perhaps there is nothing perfect about the universe or the body, and I'll die in a ditch trying to become something without a form or a future.
“It reminds me of discarded tissues in city parks.”
Every time she walks into the park she counts the tissues left by the trees. She draws them in a book. She has a list and several maps and the maps could continue ad infinitum. Her life goal is to make maps fast enough to keep up with demand.
Thus far, she has completed one section of a city that was once a city.
In the final darkness before light, she's thrashing in her sleep. “Fuck you,” she says, “put it back/right now.”
Here's an aside: she once told me she had heart surgery on Valentine's Day. Is this too literal to include in a story about love?
The surgery lasted nine hours.
Her chest was left with a lateral scar. I think I could accept it on my own body, but perhaps it would be too much to encounter in a dream.
I fucked at least two men with long scars on their torsos. One was knifed by a Nazi, another had no spleen.
As it went, he and I lay in the warm breath of dark:
“I heard a spleen doesn't do much anyway.”
“I will die if I contract pneumonia.”
I once ate a spleen.
It was the cheapest thing on the menu. Just as the spleen was in my mouth, someone I had not seen since prom a decade earlier walked by. He stopped to look at me behind the glass.
2.
My sister was a pilot and one windy day in April she took off with a friend and decided to land at that airstrip. It was a windy day and as the plane tried to land, it flipped over. My sister and her friend were airlifted by helicopter to a small town hospital for treatment of injuries. She kept the newspaper clipping.
Buddy Holly / Richie Valens Jessica Dubruff
I flew in the passenger seat of a two-seater from a small town to a big miserable city where I met someone I ended up living with (miserably, for the most part) for several years.
I'd found a stranger online who happened to be flying his plane to the city for the weekend. We met for coffee. He said that he was traveling to visit a woman and that the flight would be two hours and that he'd charge me $30 for fuel. He seemed to be very fond of this woman, more than a hetero married man is generally permitted to express. I can't remember what he'd said that gave me such an impression, except that it was unusual. I figured he was having an affair or in the process of leaving his marriage.
Buddy Holly proposed to his wife five hours into their first date.
I’m Irish, I’m cheap as fuck.
“Sure, I'll go.”
As we flew over the edge of the ocean, I noticed his knees, moving; fabric, swishing. It reminded me of a certain tolerable person; a regular at a strip club who'd wear synthetic pants and a condom he'd remove later in the bathroom.
But he had a self-mocking honesty the girls liked.
Once we were flying over the ocean the pilot told me his son and his wife were playing out the Oedipus complex and that the person he was visiting was his Dom. He said he like to be spanked. I felt anxious. Such things jarred me at the time, because I realized I'd given him control of my existence.
(I recalled the wet sawtooth treeline against a darkening sky, sexual innuendo with cashier)
Life seemed to be revealing a mysterious force, leading me, circuitously, to somewhere I couldn't yet imagine or tolerate.
Over that weekend, I would fall for someone.
(I always fell for someone.)
And we would kiss and eat ollallieberry pie in the town of Jessica Dubroff twenty years after her death. Neither of us would be aware of it.
February: the hills are covered in daffodils. Fourteen years later, I would walk with another lover in the same town, but the skies would be orange because the hills are on fire.
The hills are on fire.
“Different times of year—”
Bob Smithson died in a plane crash while surveying the site for his next earth sculpture.
We're lying under the Milky Way and the visitors from the city are still arguing about the koi.
Bob Smithson, I say. The Spiral Jetty. Have you been there?
She tells me it was an unusual place.
A couple years later, she writes in an email:
“It was an alien landscape. Pink water and salted ground that looked like snow but it was blazingly hot. There was detritus stuck everywhere in the salt - women’s underwear, machinery, dead birds and bugs (praying mantis).”
I didn’t know this pilot. I'd met him on Craigslist. I wanted a ride to this city, but not necessarily in a two-seater plane. But I'd take what I could get.
“I'm Irish. I'm cheap as fuck—”
When the weekend was over and it was time to return to the town in which I lived, I met the pilot at his Dom's house. She invites me inside. He's gathering his things. He wants to linger. Her house smells like beeswax. Lemon balm tied with yarn hanging from the ceiling. Rows of mason jars. The suburban city I knew in a different past, mostly vanished—
“The jetty itself was falling apart and less memorable than the site which was like no place I had been before. It messed with my sensory expectations. It was also difficult to find and quite remote which added to the strangeness.”
I spend 20 minutes in the Dom's house before we take off in his rental car to the airport for small planes. On the way, he tells me that the Dom told him to be kind to me.
I wonder: did she sense something?
“The Spiral Jetty. Have you been there?”
“I took off my shirt (I didn’t wear a bra) and walked around taking photos. Also notable was shiny, black oil oozing from wounds in the earth. It was flat and long.”
I don't know what caused Robert Smithson's plane to crash.
After an hour of flying, the pilot decides to land in an airport just above the state line. A storm is brewing in the mountains.
We rent a car and drive to a Christian diner famous for cinnamon buns the size of pies. I've never heard of a Christian diner.
He tells me more about the Dom.
“ is very maternal, but she hates children.”
A group of two dozen men took over the central dining area. Three tables pushed together to make one long table. Plotting to bomb an abortion clinic.
The pilot isn't bothered by the Christianity, nor the men at the nearby table, nor sitting in this booth eating chicken fried steak as he recalls a weekend of running laps around a motel bed in his urine-soaked boxers.
3.
She leans over the railing wall inside the transit station, her face tinted from Acutane. She's smiling because she is beautiful now, despite the orange hue. She has a boyfriend who's in a band. He has given her a chi machine. She lives in a low-rent bungalow near the station, with her childhood friend. It's a one-bedroom. Her friend sleeps on a mattress in the living room.
I have to work at 9 in the morning. Sunday shift at a peepshow on the edge of Chinatown. We get stoned and she puts me to sleep in a twin bed with a white wooden frame designed for a young girl. She wipes my face with a wet washcloth and places my feet in the chi machine. At certain moments, I'm certain I'm in love with her.
I drift away.
She disappears.
At the crack of dawn, I find her roommate vigorously cleaning the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush.
9am. Lusty Lady. A young Asian woman occupies the booth in front of my window for an hour. She bows and smiles. She blows me a kiss.
Years later, I am driving West during the summer of the pandemic, sleeping in my car. I stop in the Utah desert to visit Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels. I think of the Sun Tunnels as a femme counterpart to the Spiral Jetty.
Sitting inside one of the Sun Tunnels, the temp is 97° at 8:26 AM. The only other human is driving a construction truck on the horizon. Farmers. Mormons.
I don't think about being raped in the Sun Tunnels. Perhaps this is the power of feminist art. By positioning the tangible femme as the dominant auteur, the intangibles of the space shift.
The Sun Tunnels provide safety and yet invite you into a potentially dangerous place. I who obsess about violence and death and do it anyway, I don't think about about potential victimization inside the Sun Tunnels.
I boil an egg: my contribution to Land Art. The Sun Tunnels make it possible to sit in the desert for hours. They give structure to vastness.
Something like that.
What did you think about at Spiral Jetty?
“There was some adrenaline because it felt like you could die easily from heat and dehydration and just become another object stuck in the salt. But the dreamlike colors made it seem like it would be gentle.”
Do you hear a mountain lion whenever the leaves crack?
“No. I would have if I’d been alone. The remoteness would have felt both secure and risky but the other risks- of heat stroke or dehydration or getting lost would have seemed more likely and pressing. It certainly did seem like a western masculine landscape. But also like an oddities museum of the ruin of civilization.”
I once knew a girl named Patience.
You can turn the sidewalk into Stained glass it won’t make a difference.
Oasis?
Condom wrapper. Paper plate nailed to a tree. Plastic hangs like a skin.
How do I get down from here?
Do I smell eucalyptus?
“No,” the man says, the probing one in the hot pool. “That’s donkey piss.”
A pack of feral cats lives beneath a blackberry bush. Someone built a lean-to small enough to fit beneath the bushes. A witch cave. Another person brings meow mix and bowls of water. The next day the skunks arrive. Then the raccoons. Then the rats and the squirrels. The cats abandon the blackberry bush. They move to the nearest parking lot with a dumpster. They live beside it until the owner of the parking lot chases them with a broom. They retreat to the interstitial forest. With the condom wrappers and scrunchies.
She tells me she has seen these cats and included them on her map of discarded tissues in liminal wooded spaces. Of the city that is no longer a city.
In the universe above our heads.
Some suburban lawns have more than pink flamingos. Some have rows of Mr. Potato Head, a frisbee and a Holstein cow. Tropical fish hanging from a tree.
“Were you afraid?”
“I'm only afraid of time.”
Time can be so unsentimental.
I hope Saline Valley remains Saline Valley. The Shoshone Indian tribe wants the land back, saying that it is sacred for them. Ordinarily I would be all for that but these Shoshones are evangelical Christians and they have announced that the first thing they will do is end the clothing optional policy so that thirteen year old boys cant get picked up by cute blondes anymore.
Life changes and we hang on as long as we can.