Forrest Gander: The Trace

“Sunday night, Marfa lights,” he mumbled with pretend enthusiasm into the pillow Hoa placed over his face. He was comfortable where he was, in bed — except for the fact that he couldn’t breathe through the pillow.

From their hotel in Marfa, Dale drove the rental car east to the viewing station on Mitchell Flat. There were some half-dozen cars in the parking lot and kids ran around on the wooden walkway that perimeterized the station house. Nothing else but desert in every direction they turned. Flatness spotted with dark shrubs, and in the distance, black mountains rising along the night’s glassy horizon. On the far side of the station house, there were platforms and a few yards of sand before the fence line identified the extensive land as private property. A round man in a T-shirt and overalls was eyeballing a telescope on a tripod, and Dale and Hoa stood behind him looking over his shoulder into the sparse scrub in the dark. There was a little dry lightning, a crumbly low tulip-black thunder. The nearly full moon ducked through cloud.

“Catch anything?” Hoa asked the telescope man.

“Not yet,” he answered, still fiddling with the viewfinder. “But we just got here.”

Hoa and Dale stepped from the viewing platform into the sand and wandered out toward the barbed-wire fence. Behind them, across the highway, a train whistle shrieked and shrieked again more piercingly, until the engine was close enough to hear the steely cachunk cachunk of the wheels on the track. Heading into Marfa from Alpine. Still coming, massively loud even at a distance, across the highway. Hoa turned toward it as she felt the ground begin to vibrate, and then the train was there, flashing and hammering past the station house, each car yanked even with her gaze and gone like a series of doors slamming shut one behind another, and by now, everyone who had been searching for the Marfa lights had turned around in place to watch the train juddering and roaring and vaniloquent. Hoa and Dale stood beside each other, mesmerized by the stroboscopic sequence of cars.

“Should have brought binoculars,” Hoa said, turning back to the desert after the last car rattled away.

“If anyone spots something, you know we’ll all be jockeying for position behind that guy’s telescope,” Dale said, dipping his chin in the man’s direction.

“One theory,” Hoa said, “is there’s a lot of quartz in the sand around Marfa, and the sun expands the crystals in the daytime.”

“Really?”

“So at night the crystals contract and give off an electrical charge.”

“Hmmm,” Dale acknowledged. Being a potter, she knew a lot about the composition of sand and clay, and she knew something about geology. He didn’t want to argue with her, but then he couldn’t help from asking, “Isn’t most sand in the desert made of quartz?”

Hoa chewed on that.

“I read there’s something similar near Sierra Mojada, not far from where we’re going. I’ll show you on the map. It’s called Zona de Silencio, where supposedly the sand’s so full of magnetite — maybe from an ancient meteor — that no radio, no satellite signals, nothing like that passes through. Compasses don’t work. It all dies. And in the seventies — ”

“Yeah, I remember seeing something about that,” Dale interrupted a little too avidly. “In the seventies they found talking apes there. And. .” he took a second to improvise, “they were worshipping an ageless writer. Last name was Bierce or something?”

“You’re thinking of that really bad movie called Planet of the Professor Never Finishing his Book.”

Dale blinked, staring out over the fence. There was a living, moving world out there in the desert, utterly invisible to him: forked tongues flicking for a taste of mammalian warmth, nacreous beetles approaching each other tentatively with spread pincers, pocket mice diving into holes, birds nestled in bunchgrass, sleeping with one eye open.

“I thought the Marfa lights were supposed to be car lights reflected from a highway somewhere over in that direction,” he said.

Hoa was still following her own train of thought.

“Actually, there really are exotic species in the Zona de Silencio,” she said as though he had suggested otherwise. “Some rare tortoise and cacti that don’t grow anywhere else. In the seventies, there was a missile launched from White Sands, New Mexico, that went off-course and crashed there. That’s what the book at the hotel says. Anyway, same reports of mysterious lights there, just like here.”

Dale remembered something. “Did you ever hear people call car lights, when they hypnotize you, did you ever hear them called Lucifer lights?”

She gave him a look.

Dale liked to talk about words the way other people talked baseball or indie music or wine. It was a quality she appreciated because she herself had particular defaults in conversation. She had come to realize that she could talk about clay bodies, shino glazes, and wadding techniques at length, in the kind of detail that didn’t necessarily fascinate everyone.

They were quiet for a few moments, but they could hear the clomping and chattering of people behind them. The slate sky was streaked with cloud, the moon still bright enough to damper the stars. It was breezeless but cool.

Dale stretched.

Hoa said, “It may take a lot of Bud Light to see the Marfa lights,” and he said “I don’t know” at the same instant.

There was something wonderful and contagious about the way she was tickled by her own jokes. Her laugh rocketed into a delicious squeak, the whites of her eyes gleamed, and her smile, her even teeth, charged her face with life. Maybe they really were on the road to recovery.

“Head back?” Dale asked.

Just then, Hoa’s phone rang, and Dale could all but see her thought leap out of her mind like a text bubble: Declan! She fumbled with her purse and dug for her phone. Dale knew she was thinking, Declan, it’s Declan calling at last.

She looked down at the screen and her face changed so dramatically, he could see it even in the dark. She clicked the phone to silent and stuffed it back into her purse. Dale started to raise his arm to her shoulder, but she was already turning toward the viewing station. On one side, a huddle of teenagers snickered, and on the other side, lit up by red footlights, the same children who had been playing tag earlier were whining to the big man behind the telescope that they were bored.

The hotel room was cool and Dale was dog-tired, but he couldn’t fall asleep. Now he was wondering what their son was doing. What was Declan up to? Where was he? Dale turned on his side, watching Hoa through the half-gloom of their small room. In their poster bed, her face was turned away from him. He reached over and ran his fingertip behind her right ear, up and back and over that prong of cartilage. She liked to be massaged there. There and her eyebrows. She was the only person he’d ever met who liked to have her eyebrows massaged. He’d never asked her outright, but assumed it was a Vietnamese thing. He traced a gland in her neck that seemed swollen. She didn’t wake, and after a few more strokes he stopped.

On her back now, Hoa slept with her arms folded behind her head, taking a few feathery, snoring breaths and then going quiet, her face nodding upward. Dale was growing accustomed to the dark, and he imagined for a few seconds that he could see her nostrils flaring and relaxing. In the combination of lamplight and moonlight from the window, Hoa’s lips parted. Once, she moved her left hand down under the duvet, and when she brought it back again behind her head, it released the smallest cache of her musk into the dark. Her breath, a soft purr, came in delicate little snorklings that altered in sets like waves.