Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“No.”

“No. Because you aren’t even thinking about her. That would involve too much foresight and consideration on your part. That would imply a plan and some sitting and thinking about what would be best for someone other than Luz, and you haven’t ever done that, have you? Now, I’ve made mistakes. I’ve lost people. But you’ve thrown them away. There is an important difference. You’re waiting for someone to come scoop you up. Well, you want to know who comes along and does the scooping? Scavengers. You’re busted up, anyone can see that. But tell me why you’ve got to bust up this little one, too. Are you lonely? You want a companion down there, in the sinkhole you’ve become? Shame on you.”

Luz touched her pocket absently.

Jimmer ripped her hand away. “You want more? Go get more — chew yourself into oblivion!”

“No—”

“Go on — I mean it! Bon voyage!”

“I don’t want it.”

“And when you go, don’t come back. Not for Ig and not for anyone. Kill yourself quick instead of slow, and save us all the hurt.”

“I don’t want it,” Luz told him and told herself.

But she did want it, wanted it badly, wanted it even more in the following days, when she was not to go back to Ig. She was not helpful, according to Jimmer, or rather she would be tremendously helpful if she would just stay the fuck away. Her waking hours yawned before her without Ig to suck them up, and without the root, each day was a greenhouse for worry. But she did not seek out more. She read Sacajawea’s birth of Little Pomp and John Muir’s campaign for Yosemite until her eyes gave in to headache, until tremors began in her bowels and shuddered outward from there. Soon, her only project was making it outside to evacuate in a timely manner and back in again. Each of the four stairs rising into the Blue Bird took on its own personality, presented its unique challenges — the staggering height of the first, the tricky wedge of the third. She vomited everything she had in her and otherwise emptied herself, first in privacy and then, when she could not make it to privacy, out in the open. People gawked, but Luz did not notice them. In this way word spread that Luz was sick. One day Dallas came, and another Ray, each bringing water and news of Ig’s progress. The second time Ray came he stayed, insisting on placing a bucket beside Luz and tending to her.

Cramps turned her inside out and, forgetting, she asked where all the pain was coming from. “You’ve been chewing a tranquilizer,” Ray said. “You’re going through withdrawal.”

Eventually, Luz spoke only to moan apologies. “I was supposed to be better than her people, but I’m not,” she said. “Not… not… not.” Her wet head in Ray’s lap was his forgiveness.

When Jimmer came, Ray asked after Ig.

“Sleeping,” Jimmer said. “Dallas is with her. You’re welcome to go see for yourself. The little one would like that.”

“I’m needed here,” Ray said, an unconvincing line from a badly written play. The truth was that anything that came out of Luz was easier than Ig’s pleading eyes, pinched between the featureless venom-fat pustules of her face, asking, Why are you hurting me?

Jimmer allowed Ray his dishonesty. Intervention was a young man’s game, and he’d already exhausted himself with Luz, the wretch. “How’s she doing?”

“She comes in and out,” Ray said. He touched her dank brow. “She keeps forgetting where she is. She’s always shivering.”

Jimmer felt Luz’s wrist, then put his head near hers and listened. He placed a bundle of sticks in a shell, lit it, and wafted the smoke toward Luz, who was no longer with them but off in an arctic tube where a sourceless echo said, You are supposed to be here, and, What does that mean, babygirl, to set a bunch of uranium free?

At dusk, Jimmer returned, empty-handed. Luz was caught in some demonic REM cycle — catatonic as a corpse, then suddenly her yellow-edged eyes open but unseeing, still watching whatever scenes played out in her mind. Each time she awoke Ray gave her water and she took it, briefly, before collapsing again. Ray told Jimmer this. And also that if he lost Luz he’d lose everything.

“If she makes it through the night she’ll come out,” Jimmer said.

“You’re sure?” asked Ray.

“Let’s get her through the night.” There was something Jimmer was not saying, but Ray could not bring himself to demand it.

And so the two of them sat quietly for some time. Jimmer grew angry at the approaching mountains and all the sorrow they brought, while Ray found himself inclined to pray. He was rusty at it, his prayers not his own but borrowed from the boys in the desert, recycled entreaties once offered to him, god of chemical reprieve. They went, Just let everything be okay, could you? I’m hurting here. Isn’t there something you can do for me? There’s got to be something you can do for me. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat — I’ve got fear like you get the shits. It comes for me in the night, a black thing. It curls around my head. Mine are little winged demons, a cloud of them. I see them everywhere. Don’t you have some way to make them leave? I only want my old self back. I can’t remember what it was like not to hurt.

Suddenly, light invaded the rear of the bus, a riot of dust tumbling in. Ray stayed where he was, Luz’s head heavy in his lap. He would not stop touching her, not now and not ever.

Though Ray did not look up, he knew Levi’s easy walk, the splay of his thick hands, his hard gourd of a torso. Levi approached Ray where he sat with Luz. Ray kept his gaze down, on Levi’s right foot, where his two smallest toes should have been, where a knob of jaundiced skin twitched instead. The dowser spoke to Jimmer only. “This is not a good idea.”

Jimmer said nothing.

“Stop this, Jimmer. It’s fucking nonsense.”

Just then, Luz woke with one of her desperate gasps. Ray held her, whispered her all kinds of prayers. To the others he said, “She’s nearly through the worst of it, I think.”

The dowser said, “What the hell do you know about it?”

“I’ve been here with her.”

“So I’ve heard. She could die. Did you know that?”

Ray looked up to Jimmer. “Is that true?”

“I don’t know,” Jimmer admitted.

Levi squatted down beside Ray. “It’s true,” he said tenderly. He took some root from his pouch. “She needs this.”

Luz, only half there, would surely take anything anyone gave her.

“No,” said Ray. “You can’t do that.”

“I have to,” said Levi. “You’ll kill her.”

Ray said, “Jimmer, tell him he can’t do this. She’s come too far for this.”

“He might be right,” Jimmer said. “No one has ever stopped cold.”

“No,” said Ray, hunching over his girl. He said this many times.

Levi put a large, soft hand on Ray’s shoulder. “Her death will be on you. I’m not sure you’re grasping that.”

Ray shrugged his hand off. “On me? How do you figure that, friend? You’re the one force-feeding her that shit.”

Again, Jimmer said, “No one has ever stopped.”

Then, from the dusty halo churning at the rear of the bus, someone said, “I stopped.”

“Dal,” Jimmer said.

It was Dallas, Ig in her arms, a lumpy puppet.

“When?” Levi demanded.

“After,” she said, an aquifer of understanding between them.

Levi opened his mouth. But then, as if absorbing the blast wave of these two syllables, he lost his balance, tumbled out of his squat beside Ray and onto his rump on the floor of the bus. Somehow, he was still all coiled potential there. He might have sprung up in rage and embarrassment, might have shaken Dallas, might have hit her, hit Ig, might have shrieked in her face all his injured rage until the sound itself forced her out, and Ig too. They waited.