Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

That secret intelligence flashed in his eyes. “That’s another one of them questions,” he said.

And that was how the last of her whole lush and infinite miracle world dissolved, finally, leaving behind only its brutal scaffolding: sun of suns, drought of droughts, no rain, no rivers, an impossible pile of sand approaching an unforgiving range. Barren and bereft and lifeless, just like the pamphlets said. Leave or die. No more complicated than that. No other dimension, no buried menagerie and no trick of the eye or ear or heart could make it otherwise.

When Ray visited later that day, he visited a dingy solar-powered school bus in a madman’s colony, an outpost in the cruel tradition of outposts, peopled by prostitutes and loners and rejects and criminals and liars, their sheriff a con and a thief and surely worse.

Luz felt this disillusionment severely, with no root to blur its edges.

She stroked Ray’s temples. “Do you miss your heartcolors?”

“More like I thought you would. I was afraid you’d be disappointed. I don’t have any desert visions after all.”

“Me neither,” Luz admitted. “I wanted to, but I don’t.”

She took Ray’s hand as though it were an egg. “You were right,” she said, “about Levi. About the primer. There aren’t any new animals out there. No spontaneous rivers or wandering trees. Probably no warheads pointed at us, no Operation Glassjaw. I wanted there to be — I wanted to be important. I wanted all day, every day, especially with you gone. Especially for Ig. But there isn’t. There just isn’t.”

Ray looked at her in their old way, the trembling swell that meant all the ways and reasons he loved her were at that instant rising in him. They kissed: horse and wagon and a new wondrous not knowing which was which, another swell, a swan dive, a splash of warmth from her flush cheeks to her throat and to the filling pools of her eyes. She pulled him to her, guided him into her, present, untentative, nothing abstract about it. Luz kept her eyes open, whispered, “It’s you, is it you?” Ray said, “It is,” more certain than he had been in a long time. Neither came, nor pretended to. They simply uncoupled after a time and lay together, wet with each other’s sweat.

Luz said, “Stay here, next to me.” He did, though he was somewhere else, too. “What is it, Ray?”

“Nothing. I can’t say. Nothing.”

“You can. It’s us. Only us.”

Ray put his hand in her hair. He kissed her forehead and saw that she was right.

“I just… I don’t know how to say this. I just have this feeling like she knows…”

“Who knows?”

“We shouldn’t have done it, Luz. We shouldn’t have taken her.” In his mind, beneath the shame of his approaching confession and the relief it promised, he marveled at all the ways he was still capable of letting Luz down. But he went on. He said, “I’m afraid of her, I think. Of Ig. There’s something… odd about her.”

He imagined her disappointment would be an audible thing, barely, like the sound of pigeons flying low through an open empty promenade, the hiss of sea foam dying at high tide, the scrapes of Sal’s carving tools against ancient soapstone, the rasp of salty bleached sand beneath a board strapped to a healer’s feet. He closed his eyes and waited for Luz to give up on him. This newly awakened Luz, her severe eyes always threatening to cry, could retreat into herself whenever she wanted.

But she did not retreat. “I know,” she said. “I’ve seen it. We’ll go. It will be better when we go. We’ll get her someplace stable.”

Ray nodded. “Someplace with walls and water.”

“Water walls.”

“Waterfalls.”

“Rainbows in the mist.”

“Misty mornings.”

“Misty mountains.”

“Mountain streams.”

“Marshes.”

“Creeks and eddies.”

“Rivers and inlets.”

“Lagoons.”

“New moons.”

“No sand.”

“No sand.”

“Estuaries.”

“Where, Ray?”

“What about Wisconsin?”

“Yes. Yes, Wisconsin.”

“You have to tell him.”

The ripple took the colony to a road, and that road led them to a ghostly horseshoe of crumbling whitewashed adobe. At the center of the square stood three dead salt cedars, their trunks and low-hanging limbs papered in playbills bleached to blank, except the buried layers, which read NOW PLAYING AT MARLA BENOIT’S AMARGOSA OPERA HOUSE.

The lock on the entrance had been popped off. In the lightless lobby of the theater Luz opened a door marked MADEMOISELLES, thinking that to use a toilet might be nice, before she got on with this unpleasantness. But it seemed a bag of dry cement had exploded inside the ladies’ room. Shards of mirror rivered the floor. The far wall yawned where a sink had been. The toilet lay on its side, cracked in half. Similar scene in the men’s room, so she went back outside to squat.

In the theater itself it was very dark, and she had to stand for some time before her sun-clenched eyes accepted the rows of red velvet seats crusted with dust, veins of wires overhead reaching for a long-gone chandelier and Levi sitting on the apron of the bare stage. The curtain crumpled behind him, fallen its final fall. A toothless organ waited in the wing at stage left. Luz did not feel afraid, as she’d thought she might.

Levi said, “I remember this place. I saw a documentary about it in school. Marla Benoit moved here from Paris, married a miner. They were on their way to Goldfield and got a flat tire here. He got a job in the talc mines. She convinced the Borax Works to build her an opera house. People came to see her, later, but for a long time she danced alone every night. She painted herself an audience so she’d always sell out.”

He nodded to the close, filthy walls. It was true, an audience had been painted there and remained beneath the grime, crowded into boxes and balconies, aficionados in their finery, pearly opera glasses resting on the breasts of the ladies, some teeth still relatively bright. A bishop, captured in midwhisper, leaning in to another clergyman who would never hear the secret opinion of his holiness, his snide disapproval or breathless admiration. A madame with a starched ruff and a cat on her lap, both cat and mistress ever alert to the production at hand, the cat’s tail ever curled in contentment. In the rear balcony sat a king and queen, eternal patrons, never to age or philander or remove their pale hands from the arms of their chairs. A swarthy gentleman in emerald bloomers, leading a lace-shrouded señora by the hand. Running late perhaps, as they always were, but now forever stranded in the entryway without any usher to soothe their embarrassment. (“Forgive our Luz,” her agent said into her earpiece, “she was on island time.”) The Spanish couple’s late arrival surely disturbed two milk-skinned women, their paper fans paused. Behind them a man with a sly thin mustache, a playbill in his hand, eternally considering whether to adjust the gold chain of one maid’s necklace, never to determine whether she would be scandalized by the flirtation or welcome it. A juggler from the Orient, pins aloft, his bare chest gleaming with effort. A lone lord in a cobalt vest, his hand to his beard, ignoring the elderly noblewomen murmuring at his elbow. His eyes closed, he listens — only listens — to the sighs of the stage below, made of pine hauled from Illinois by twenty-mule team, to the creaks of the chairs upholstered in devoré velvet sailed from New York to San Francisco around the finger of Patagonia, then sewed by Marla Benoit, by lamplight, she herself listening for the return of her whiskey-sick husband or word of a mine collapse, never uncertain which she might prefer. Eyes closed, the listening lord hears the tinny kiss of the prima ballerina assoluta’s needle to its primitive thimble, both procured by trade from a Shoshone weaving woman. He hears Marla Benoit load mesquite into the woodstove in winter, the antelope-leather soles of her pointe shoes whispering across the stage in rehearsal, her ravenous moaning from beneath the petite president of the Borax Works. Then, he hears nothing for a very long time, save for a family of kangaroo rats nesting in the walls, Mojav looters disemboweling the building of its copper pipes and chandelier, an overheated Bureau of Conservation survey team and then, finally, the boyhood memories of a cuckolded dowser.