Forrest Gander - The Trace

And she was with him now, wherever else she was. Traces of her skin on his skin, her hair in his hair, her fluids in his body, all the wine and saliva and crumbs that had passed back and forth between their mouths innumerable nights, and words and each other’s dreams. Hoa’s dreams. Dale knew that he carried them inside himself, in his memory, even though they only ever existed as fugitive chemical trails in Hoa’s brain, quick-fading memories she told him once and later forgot. They were among the most vivid of his intimacies with her, those dreams for which he had become a repository, her picaresque and silly dreams which he would forever carry.

Dale bored through the rock in front of him with his gaze. He was watching for Hoa to return across the flatness of desert. As soon as he knew that’s what he was doing, he heard her, she became audible to him even before she was present. He heard her voice, the warm familiarity of her voice. The words weren’t specific. And now he saw her coming toward him, a quivering figure imprinted in the throbbing air. He saw her twinned, coming at him along the dirt track, sometimes in one rut and sometimes in the other. Two of her. Then a shadow lifted and the human figures wrinkled, melting, and resolving into a single cactus a few dozen paces from the cave’s mouth. It came no closer to the cave, although it broke again and again through shimmering veils of heat and light.

A general multilayered chirping filtered into a single, high, constant trill, a soft background sound into which occasional swallows tested their voices. And then the ratchet of a toad — Dale’s old friend the pouched toad — a few bars of its corrido at a time. A moon was drawing up from the floor of the desert. Unburied lumen. In the upper arch of the cave’s mouth, Dale caught the gleam of a spider’s thread. He heard the thin chir of a bird outside. Then he heard Hoa’s voice call it an elf owl. Through his closed eyes, he studied the early evening.

With her eyes closed, that was how Hoa danced. Like she was blind. Her elbows would lift outward, her hands dangling in front of her, her fingers spread, each reaching separately for the music as though someone had snatched away a keyboard she was still playing. They had neither one of them mastered any formal dance like the salsa or even the box step, and whenever they slow-danced, they would find themselves pulling in different directions. He tried to lead with determined regular rhythms but got bored quickly and would introduce a counterpoint or a whirl and one of them would stumble. He’d step on her toes. He’d pull her against him, then lean her back so far their dance shifted from the provocative into the salacious. But to a harder rock-and-roll beat, Hoa would sway like a cobra in front of him, unsighted, with her hands dangling like tendrils at her waist, and that itself was provocation enough for him to reach out to touch her as they danced, to let her feel his fingers brushing her belly, her thighs, the curve above her hip.

He sensed there was a rattlesnake in a nook of the cave wall, but he couldn’t fix its position. The wall was a shifting kaleidoscope of darkness and darker darkness. Staring through his eyelids, he began to experience the balled snake in one place and then in another. Soon, the whole cave wall began to expand, to inhale, to nudge a little closer to him so he could see more of the rock’s color — the iron coming out like a flush — and then he saw through the wall to the other side, to the sea of creosote and yucca flowing out across the desert. There, the landscape was a negative of itself, the air obsidian and the desert phosphorescent white. It was a gift, this vision. It was a glimpse he had been granted of the world through the snake’s brain, a world rendered not by light but by the heat inside each thing.

A wobble in the atmosphere of the cave caused Dale to moan and draw his legs up under him. Gradually he came to know that he was surfacing, coming awake again. He felt his shoulders against the rock and leaned back for support. He was trying to stand. Slowly, slowly. A hobbled journey toward the vertical. A sharp pain flashed in his ankle. What was going on outside the cave in the late afternoon? Something. Some kind of inferno. Some excess in the desert’s far appearance.

Once more he opened his eyes. His right shoulder knocked against rock and he was standing inside the mouth of the cave. He knew nothing but the blur of light and then a quivering that was also made of light. Lurching outside, barely keeping his balance, he saw, beyond the two-rut trail from which he had climbed, an expanse of desert sparkling and alive and real. A red-tailed hawk soared overhead. In the dreamy far-off, outlying ridges and skirts rose into sharp, naked peaks, with further ranges stacked behind them in shades of purple.

Dale looked at his hands, his filthy pants, his dusty, untied boots. He was sitting against the cave wall again, his eyes were open. He closed and opened them purposively. Hoa? He got himself to his feet again. Out in the desert, something was happening, a sight beyond his comprehension. He tried to blink the haze away. He concentrated on breathing in and out, in and out.

His eyes opened once more. He was upright, observing a luminous, gilded whirlwind in the desert flats beyond the trail. He watched, thinking: I am awake now, my ankle aches, my eyes are open, I am thirsty, my throat is swollen shut, I am standing with my weight on my left leg. Breathing in, breathing out. But was he awake? He wasn’t certain. While he stared, other golden vortices began to form in the desert, until five of them, spectacular and tall, were stalking, circling each other like wrestlers. A carbonized setting sun embedded itself behind all the stormy drama. Then he understood that the air itself was sand, a tumultuous cloud of floating, crystalline sand. He reeled forward one more step, impressed by the vivid stab in his right ankle. Awake, yes I am. Two of the nearer whirlwinds approached each other, one tilted forward and the other bent back, their tops indistinct, merged with a strata of turbid haze. They jockeyed nearer and nearer, crossing the desert, and then in a violent convulsion, the whirlwinds seemed to grab hold of each other. It was impossible to tell whether they collided or merely passed so closely that one velocity countermanded the other. In the next moment, the two shapes staggered, trembled, and fizzled into a huge sigh of painterly shimmer that blurred the sun and darkened the desert. The remaining giant funnels continued on their separate ways in an erratic twilight. Dale dropped through one level of awareness into another and found himself sitting again, staring at his boots. He became conscious of his own shallow breathing and made an effort to take a bigger breath. He held it a little and let it out. Weed. Mota. That’s what he smelled.

* * *

Veena put on her gloves and goggles, stood on the stool, and pulled the plug on the upper peephole. Between her gloved thumb and finger, the tip of the plug was cherry red. She kept her head back while a clear flame shot three inches out of the peephole.

At 1560 degrees, Hoa adjusted her infrared goggles and yanked open the firebox door, throwing in staves as fast as possible while the heat whelmed her chest and face. Five medium and five thin staves, one after the other, keeping heat loss to a minimum. The fire was the color of electric goldfish. When new staves met the flame, Hoa heard them crinkle and dissolve.

At 1650 degrees, a gaseous orange flame blasted from the peephole. The acrid, ashy smell began to give the stokers a high. The kiln temperature rose quickly now, so quickly the flame, needing more oxygen, began to suck it from the clay vessels themselves. When the pyrometer read 2010 degrees, Hoa eased herself between the stacked wood and the kiln to open the damper, the hair on her arms singed, and she emerged flushed, wiping sweat from her forehead. The solid kiln looked pregnant, its bricks expanding outward, smoke and light pouring from gaps where clay mortar had fallen away.