Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

“Baby, are you going to talk to me?” he asked.

The pounding, the memory, the bilagáana, the splashing, Shidine’é, my long walk through the hurt which puddled and splashed in the water.

“Baby?”

Jordan’s eyes remained blue as the sky when his pupils dilated and darkened below the water. A single bubble formed at the tip of his nose until it finally let go and surfaced and popped. His mouth remained open. His chest hairs reached for the air, but the water kept them silent. Jordan’s arms went limp and I watched his fingers release the shirt he grabbed onto — mine — the tattooed bands of his arm exposed.

The water calmed before the voices stopped.

I have not returned home since the incident in Santa Fe.

My dad is worried about my well-being so far away, so far from the sacred mountains that protected our people from going crazy. My dad asks about the voices in my head. “Are they still talking?”

I tell him they’re gone. I lie. The earphones are what muffle them, but the ghosts are still here.

The subway stops at 125th Street and I see the blond smile once more.

He holds a blue box in his hands, takes out a cigarette, and waves.

I smile and wave goodbye, but I don’t think he catches my gesture.

He walks up the stairwell and into the light, his shouldered bag and a ghost-trail of smoke following behind him.

Each day, I make sure my phone is fully charged when I enter the subway stations of New York. Each day, I make sure to close my eyes and hold my breath when the train travels under the water. Each day, I walk with the guilt and grief of yesterday in hopes that music will muffle the memory of Jordan. I’m told I am a child of water. Both my parents’ clans represent the redness and bitterness of a monster who lives deep inside me — that monster is filled with dryness and guilt, and a regret steeped in eternal shame.

Ten Thousand Waves

They came for new bodies.

Droves of them from all over the world flooded the place every day, looking for salt scrubs, Japanese foot treatments, and hot herbal wraps that would make their bodies sweat and flush out all the toxic things that had been collecting on the inside. They wanted clean organs, clean blood, fresh polished skin. The chance to begin again. Afterward, they emptied into the steaming tubs and saunas, and laid their just-dunked bodies like soft noodles onto tatami mats in the relaxation room where, through heavy lids, they could look out giant circular windows and see the engraved wooden signposts over treatment rooms and private tubs called Cloud and Willow and Waterfall.

When they came to, they helped themselves to free goodies in the changing rooms: pine- and citrus-scented lotions and shampoos, facial mists and oils made out of tea tree, oregano, rosemary, and jojoba. And once all the body thirst was satiated, there was all that gorgeous nature of the mountainside to drink up too — soft, loving, and quietly wild. Amid the pine and juniper trees, deer and rabbits and coyotes and hummingbirds flapping around globes of sugar water. Thousands of black basalt stones piled up on rock walls were arranged in pretty swirling patterns along the footpath between the locker rooms and the main bathhouse, remnants of nearby volcanoes that had erupted millennia ago and had since been cooled and smoothed by streams and rivers into beautiful polished circles.

All the massage therapists at the spa knew the wild around the place was in check, just like they were, because while they were encouraged to use their intuition with clients, they were also instructed to use soft voices around all the poor frayed nerves coming at them, to wear black, and to move soundlessly among the guests. Like ninjas , Bella thought when she was given the details on “proper therapist behavior” by the spa director on her first day. It made sense that all those tired and healing bodies might need witnesses who touched and loved, but quietly; invisibly if possible.

She was the latest hire, and she kept quiet that first week. It had never been a problem for her to go deep inside herself, and to do what she did best, which was communicate in the nonverbal ways; the ways of the body. Each had its own special story and history where a person had lived hard or fractured something or ignored a pain for too long. She touched all those places — the rock-hard knots, lopsided backs, curved spines, faded tattoos, pale thick lines over wrists, star-shaped scars on shoulder blades and stretch marks along stomachs and thighs — with all the love she could muster. Loving strangers’ bodies was the closest thing she felt to God. When she held a part of the body, it was the same to Bella as holding time and memory in her hands.

The man looked harmless enough. He was smoking a Camel nonfilter, the same kind Bella smoked by the dozen after her evening joint. They were sitting at different tables at a chocolate shop in town and she had been so engrossed in her elixir and the changing purples and reds of the sky that she was surprised to find she wasn’t alone.

“Sky’s emotional right now.”

“Excuse me?”

“Locals call the sky New Mexico’s version of the ocean since we don’t have one. Others see God in it, magic, aliens, blah blah blah.” The man took a long drag. “So the painters come, the artists come, all sorts of folks looking for healing, for hope. But I think mostly it’s the crazies who come. And boy do they come and come and come.” He looked up and shrugged. “Looks like plain old sky to me.”

The man had that unkempt and dusty look to him like so many others in town. Bella figured it had something to do with the high winds and all that dry high desert going straight into people’s clothing, hair, and skin. Maybe into their heads too, scrambling things lawful and logical up there, because it seemed to her in the three months she’d been in town that locals liked being uncivilized and a certain sort of dreamy. She wondered what else it might do to people to get all that dust and rock and time into their bodies and bones. And even older and wiser things. Dinosaurs. Volcanic dust. The sun, perhaps.

The stranger looked familiar. They must have met at that AA meeting she’d gone to the week before. Bella had heard that people in AA were worse than Jehovah’s Witnesses, circling around newcomers and demanding phone numbers and commitments to attend more meetings. “ Don’t stop until the miracle has happened , they’ll tell you,” an old coworker warned, but Bella suspected he just wanted her to keep drinking so she would let him have sex with her whenever they got drunk after work. In reality, the experience hadn’t been the worst thing in the world. The idea that addiction could be a disease comforted her somehow and she knew a part of her wanted it to be true. Still, all that talk of God and Surrender and Forgiveness was too much, and she decided not to go back.

“You don’t have to do this alone!” the man had called out as she made her way down the stairs of the shop. “Let go and let God!”

You should mind your own business, you freak, she thought, getting into her car. She smiled and waved robotically as she drove past the man and turned out of the lot. The whole group seemed like some scary cult with everyone pushing God when she’d already had God stuffed down her throat when she was young and it had never done anything to protect her. Not when it had really mattered.

As she sped past Owl’s Liquors, her forehead and chest blossomed with sweat. She hadn’t had a drop of alcohol in three whole days, and that Want started to infect every space of her body again, showing her where she was empty, hungry, and in the deepest kind of pain. A pain older than anything in her life that could have mattered. “It’s like coming in from an ice storm,” a young blond lady had said to her after that same meeting. “You begin to thaw, and your feelings, your fears, all your old pain, numb and frozen — they start to move and all that moving hurts.” Bella hurt all over, but her head hurt the most. She turned around, then pulled over in the parking lot at the local honey shop. All those needling questions were swarming around her head like tiny hummingbirds, sharp and picking her clean with their beaks. She pressed her forehead against the steering wheel until the bone couldn’t take any more.