James Hannah - Sign Languages

One day Chris realized how unbelievably flat it was, and he wondered how long ago the others had come to the same conclusion; he knew he was the last. He stared through the Gurley level. They were weightless by now. The liquids and salts that held them down all gone, replaced by special brews and tablets. Walliston sitting in the open door of the Suburban, its huge balloon tires lifting him three feet off the ground.

Turning back, his eyeball was again sucked into the light and wavering heat of the tube. He’d spat out thousands of numbers in three months even with a week in the nearest city seven hundred miles away to the south and west. There had been St. Pauli’s Girl there, too. And noise and the thick Eurasian woman who took you in her mouth and pulled your balls down to your knees until pain forced a shriek. The shriek eaten by her and all the crash of buses and mopeds outside in the yellow hazy air.

Paddy lay up under the truck, his eyes safely behind a forearm. His last two-hour stint at reading the rod done. So, finally, Walliston would step down and slowly wave his arms, the watch crystal catching the declining brilliance in a threat of tomorrow’s slow climb and fall.

In the distance Chan #1 shouldered the rod they seldom had to telescope past its first section. Most of the numbers falling between 4.2 and 5.0. The dry streambeds packed with sand.

He watched Chan #2 clap and dance around his brother rod-man. Their loose brown-and-white clothes whipping in some wind not found here a hundred yards to their west.

Sometimes he wanted all the things he’d never liked. There could be snow covering this landscape of sere waist-high brush and scattered piles of dull stone. Where’s the party, chief? they’d kidded earlier. That and all the other old surveying jokes. But they no longer enthusiastically completed field books at night in the bare front room of the hotel. And now no one dropped by to look at them; the first foreigners in over four years. The last man an Argentinean who’d arrived in a flurry of language and left again immediately. No one sure of what he’d wanted though they’d all come running to offer suggested routes, times of day to depart, evaluations of tire treads and jerrycans.

Once they’d figured that six more months would see them through. But there were the delays of equipment repair, gasoline replenishment, sandstorms rising out of the west like mile-high red surf. The light gone, not filtered away but absent. The vast red wave cascading down, filling everything. Ears and nostrils. Unopened beer cans and toothpaste tubes. Carburetors. The fine screw adjustments of instruments.

Deutschmarks filled their accounts in the distant city. New clothes came one day and they hurried inside to change and laugh. The three of them played cards with the faded deck, the plastic backing sanded away already. The two Chans laughing and talking at them in their broken Empire English. Pointing and shaking their heads as cigarettes changed piles. Paddy’s Salems producing a groan from the other two who scooped them in begrudgingly.

Making use of the long light of summer, they worked six days a week. From six until noon; four until eight. On what they estimated was Sunday, they stayed in the hotel near the one well in the middle of town. Town from their windows on the second floor consisting of two perpendicular streets.

From his window Chris saw mud roofs, a foolish tethered goat that bled from its bound leg. Stupid to struggle, he thought. He smelled sand and heat. At the town’s edge the afternoon sun destroyed everything beyond with fantastic undulations. He rubbed his eyes.

They forgot things. Couldn’t recall old addresses, the tight curl of pubic hair, the whorls lost in the buzz of a thousand prayer wheels spinning atop courtyard walls. Endless prayers, he thought, ironically generated by the gods for the gods. A wonderful joke by the people living in solitude on such an endless, arid plain.

This desert did what he soon hoped it might with the same anxious expectations you have in a doctor’s waiting room. Is this the time or not? And, finally, just come on, just come out with it. He shaved before dinner. They ate without the Chans on these supposed Sundays and only the plump owner and his plumper wife broke the silence, laying mismatched silverware and enigmatic platters with the double lightning flashes of the SS crowding their borders.

There was simple reduction. No trees. Some water. Few birds. The scurry of lizards inside and out. Their own voices low out there by the Suburban in the late afternoon as they folded the tripod, loaded the rod in its case. The Chans already in the truck turning the radio from hiss to hiss. Walliston was from Ohio. He had one old son who drank. Paddy was fifty-six and his teeth occupied all his attention. If Chris looked into Paddy’s eyes they never really looked back but down a little at the perpetual curl on Paddy’s lips. Tongue prying. Thumbnail picking.

There were these hardships but no dangers. The company’s universally recognized logo on the truck obviated a lot. Camaraderie had flared and flickered. Walliston slept the unbelievable sleep of hard work well done. Paddy paced, felt his jaw, masturbated regularly into a sock that Chan #l’s sister would wash later in the red water from the well next door.

Then the Suburban broke down, the transmission full of sand that had slipped past seals and evaded the lubrication of heavy oil. All in a little more than three months. So now Paddy took things apart, lost bolts off the blanket, scrambled out from underneath, and pounded his jaw, fists a blur.

But Chris only looked on. From their first meeting in the city to the southwest he had said he knew levels and transits and inhospitable places — though he’d lied because he’d been stationed in Louisiana and Kentucky — but not a goddamned thing else.

He watched Paddy kick the tires and scatter the ugly chickens and he thought about how easily the Deutschmarks accumulated. Level loops were the easiest thing. Not like construction or highway surveying. Anybody could learn in half a day. How to set up, level out, read the rod — hold it if you had to — and fill in the field book. Backsights, foresights, the whole theory of elevations.

They’d have to wait for the scheduled resupply in five days, and someone would go back on the dilapidated Chevy flatbed, the local irregular bus, into the larger Goatville to cable for a mechanic. “Fuck it,” Paddy stuttered over aching teeth, grit on all their tongues, fur in their throats.

So Chris went back early and sat on the minuscule balcony and drank St. Pauli’s Girl and thought and remembered and let the remainder of the day’s heat suck it away. Take this year and that one too. Take her and him and leave me only residue, salt. Evaporation. Only movements are essential to remember in the desert. One has to be careful with the body. The mind is expected to wander in search of something to latch on to. That brush. The distant hills like memories of hills. All colors shades of red. His past wasn’t very much at forty-four and so mandated a slow yield to avoid the heat and distances from just taking it all at once. He was regimented, the loss was scheduled. This space had absorbed a Roman legion, he’d read in a magazine he’d bought in the city after the Eurasian woman had caused him pain. At the old dam farther south it had never rained. It had never rained. What dimension vacuum do such facts create?

It gave looming mirages back. But they weighed nothing and were themselves taken from somewhere else and brought here by fractured light. Fata morgana , the Italians called them.

They had the usual goat stew and thick-skinned beans and sharp sour cheese. St. Pauli’s too. After dinner he lay down in the faded blue room. He looked at the two posters he’d bought in the city. In one a naked woman was bent over, her face leering over a shoulder, her royal-blue fingernails pulling her shaved pussy apart. In the other a red Porsche sped down a winding coastal highway, the water far below almost transparent. Above the road there were pines and cedars. He rose from the bed and walked across to the posters. If you looked closely, you could almost make out the man driving behind the reflective sheen of the windshield. The woman had rows of pimples on her ass. He took the posters down and carefully folded them at the rough table. He hoped he would get to go cable for the mechanic so he could buy some new decorations.