Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

“She’s in Europe this week,” Mom would say, or, “Aunt Mimi is spending Christmas in Hawaii this year, isn’t that great?”

I remember Mom hesitating then, after she told me about Hawaii. She looked at me over her knitting, and said, “Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to do, Katrina?”

That was code for Get your shit together so you too can go to the beach . Joke’s on her though: I don’t even like puddles. There is nothing whatsoever I like about being in or even around a body of water — flowing, stagnant, whatever.

Not after what happened toward the end of my stay in Santa Fe that long-ago summer.

It was the evening before the Santa Fe Fiestas; the burning of Zozobra. Tic and his friend Rachel told me about it, describing it as a local ritual of symbolically burning away people’s “gloom.” More importantly, the party on the plaza after the burning was the best of the year.

“It’s kinda like New Year’s in summer, drunken Santa Fe style,” Rachel said.

Even though I’d lost most of my privileges for flunking the drug test, Aunt Mimi let me go and I didn’t even have to beg.

“Zozobra is something everyone should see,” she told me, all matter-of-fact, when I asked. Then she looked at me over her glasses, thin readers with paisley frames that sat atop her head on her wild gray hair when they weren’t on her face. “You can go, but on one condition.”

“What?” I asked, crossing my fingers behind my back.

“Pee in a cup tomorrow,” she said, then added, “and be home by eleven thirty.”

“That’s two conditions,” I replied.

“Well, you don’t have to do either,” she said, turning back to her book. “We could just stay in and read.”

“Fine,” I conceded, and turned to go.

“That’s eleven thirty p.m., young lady,” she called after me.

An hour later, just outside the Fort Marcy baseball field where the burning would take place, Tic offered me a hit of acid with what looked like a Looney Tunes graphic on it. I asked him if LSD would show up on a drug screen.

“Nah,” he said, smiling. He licked the tip of his finger, stuck it to the hit, and raised it to my lips. Our eyes locked and I took his finger in my mouth, all of it. He tasted like salt and chocolate and everything I wanted but didn’t know I wanted until that very moment.

As we crossed the bridge over the arroyo and entered the park, Tic ran his hand up under the back of my shirt. It was all I could do to keep myself from dragging him down into the shadow of the bridge and ripping his clothes off with my teeth.

Zozobra blew my fucking mind — a fifty-foot marionette that moaned and rolled his paper-plate eyeballs while the crowd chanted, Burn him! Burn him! I yelled along with them, keeping one finger curled through Tic’s belt loop so we didn’t lose each other. The crowd pressed against us from all sides, the fever of thousands of people straining to see, yelling and pushing, like some massive animal wanting blood. The sun disappeared on the far horizon, casting a long red glow that foretold the spectacle we were about to witness, and then the lights in the park went out.

The fire dancer and the Glooms — local kids dressed in sheets, Tic explained (“I was a Gloom one year,” he boasted) — made their way down the stairs. The Glooms waved their arms all ghostlike as they walked. Fireworks exploded, reflecting off my body, Tic’s body, everyone’s body. Over the mountains, lightning cut the sky into jagged shards. The crowd pushed and roared, and I could still taste Tic on my tongue.

Then, Zozobra caught fire. A falling arc from one cherry-red firework rained on his orange tissue-paper hair, melting and lifting it into a flame toupee. Pushed on by a rising wind, the flames licked across Zozobra’s ear and wrapped around his face. That’s when it hit me, the acid... the world suddenly sparked and animated. I was transfixed by the flames. Watched as they became spirits and animals and, for a split second, the falling face of my dead father.

Zozobra was fully aflame when the sky overhead split in two with lightning. Then the rain came. First it was a thin drizzle, then a downpour with fat raindrops I hadn’t imagined in the desert. Tic hugged me close as though to keep me dry, and the rain washed through my eyes, distorting the already distorted world. The lights came up; raindrops buzzed through the beams, as smoke rose from the blackening mess that was Zozobra. Pushed by the crowd, we started toward the exit, and when we left the pool of lights over the baseball field, the rest of the evening snapped into pieces. It’s broken, in my head. The memories are like snapshots laid out on a table, each image dim and smoky.

I lost Tic for a moment as the crowd surged; then I saw him, but from a distance. He was walking rapidly away from the plaza, where I thought we were headed, hunched against the rain. I rushed to catch him, wondering what he had in mind and trying to focus my eyes against the acid and the rain as the night pulsed and swelled.

I called out once, and Tic turned around in a pool of light from a lamppost. His face swam in my view, his features crawling... he didn’t look like himself... suddenly he’d acquired a cap. Where did you get the cap? I think I asked or yelled, or maybe I just thought it, and then Tic turned and jogged away. I tried to call to him, Wait up, but the night split with lightning again and an instant crack of thunder. My words were lost.

Then I was falling down an embankment, sinking to my ankles in sand, losing my shoes. I was in an arroyo, and everything was so black. The air pulsed with visions of demons, monsters... dinosaurs? I thought I saw one and rushed up to it, ignoring whatever scrap of reason was still lingering at the edge of my brain. It was a tree, the most beautiful tree, and it seemed to glow from within. I stopped to feel its branches, distracted in a second, and then I saw Tic off to one side in the shadows. I went up to him and wrapped my arms around his waist.

I think I spoke his name. Over and over, shaping it in my mouth. I could taste the letters... I had never tasted letters before. But Tic wriggled free and grabbed me by my upper arm, pushed me away. Looked into my face. He was in shadow beneath the cap he wore, and I think I asked him again where he got it. Then I reached for it; pulled it down on my own head.

This is where I’m still very confused. I saw it with my own eyes, but what did I see? Long dark hair fell to Tic’s shoulders from beneath the cap, and then his face morphed into something unrecognizable. He grabbed my other arm too, and gripped until both arms were on fire and I couldn’t get loose. Stop! I wanted to scream, and maybe I did, but Tic just stood there... he wasn’t Tic but he also was, both at the same time. It looked like he was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of... at first I didn’t know what it was. Thunder? The rain?

More lightning and I saw movement to my left. Something coming. Tic tried to drag me away from the tree and into the middle of the arroyo, the sand sinking beneath us, but he fell and pulled me down with him. I was so fucked up, my head imagining people in the dark, and then I saw the water. It was a trickle, but the roar was getting louder. Tic scrambled up and something about his movements frightened me and, freed from his grip, I jumped back. He lunged, tried to grab my arms again, but I ran. All my energy, despite the world looking like it was being painted into existence before my very eyes as I moved, propelled me through the sand both sodden and sharp, until I reached the embankment.

Tic’s hand was on my shoulder then, and my arm. And with the last bit of my strength, I shrugged him off and spun. Pushed him backward, then scrambled up the lip of the arroyo.