Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

DALLAS

Transfixing, the fire. Extraordinary. Even the little one felt it.

THE GIRLS

We watched.

JIMMER

We were more together there than we had been in some time.

DALLAS

Which is what made us see so clearly.

CODY

When you think of it, the trouble started with them, with Luz and then her man.

THE GIRLS

They were poison.

JIMMER

It’s true that certain combinations of individuals can be literally toxic, on a chemical level.

THE GIRLS

We tried to love them, but they were poison.

DALLAS

Except the little one.

THE GIRLS

We made choices — whatever else they were, they were choices.

JIMMER

In a context of such unity, one feels deviation as an agony.

DALLAS

We could sense this man turning on us.

CODY

Ray wanted to hurt Levi, who was us.

JIMMER

You could sense malice rising in him.

DALLAS

He screamed, but he had no voice.

CODY

We found out later his vocal cords were singed.

JIMMER

A soundless scream portends death, almost always.

THE GIRLS

He went for Levi’s throat.

JIMMER

He was after us, too, for we all felt and breathed and lived as one.

THE GIRLS

A beautiful feeling, harmony. It had to be protected.

DALLAS

Nico stepped in.

CODY

Straight dropped him.

THE GIRLS

The rest of us came like gnats to a wet eye.

Ray welcomed the beating. The way he saw it he had all kinds of evil shit inside him and perhaps the blows might knead it out. For example: he hated Ig. He hated the time she’d had with Luz, the things she’d allowed to happen, the days she spent freely tottering about while he was entombed in a talc mine. He hated how open she was with her wants, her bare manipulations, how even her dishonesty was honest. He hated her cruelty, hated how grand it made him feel when she cast Luz aside in favor of him. He hated her for being so fond of him and for, yes, ruining his life. He hated her because it was easier than hating the bereft dust and the dropless clouds, the sun, the night, the Earth and its thin envelope of ruined air. He took the blows in silence. Their hands were his own, trembling as he struggled to give the men their inoculations. The laughing man on the TV, the dowser, Luz in everyone else’s arms. Sal and Sal’s figurines and Sal’s slut mother. His own mother and her cleaning supplies. The wet bits of cork floating in her vintage California chardonnay. Luz. Luz. Luz. Every single thing she did. His quiet hate was light and there was nothing in his life that could not absorb it and reflect it back to him at the same time, nothing that would not beget more, like the joke or legend of which he recalled only the punch line: turtles all the way down. Except Ig. To hate Ig was to stop the spiral of his rage. Her innocence was the boundary, the vessel, for to hate her was to hate himself, to allow all the blackness inside him to pool around him, to skip his lifetime’s worth of middlemen, to concentrate on her strange skin, her amphibian eyes, her haunting moans, repulse himself with them and punish himself this way.

The beating helped, too. He watched globules of his own blood bead black on the sand.

Luz was unable to stop it. Eventually, the crowd dispersed of its own accord, as if each participant’s savagery had all at once run its course. They drifted away.

Luz sat beside Ray, but did not touch his wounds. What could she have done for him that he could not do for himself? She sat; he lay. Wisconsin a mirage, burned off. They both grieved it in silence.

At some point, Levi summoned them.

“I’m sorry about all that,” Levi said to Ray, the pulp of him. Jimmer was with him in his dome, and Nico, too. Jimmer offered some salve. Ray, his throat singed, gestured his decline.

“Where’s Ig?” Luz asked.

“Yes, Ig,” said Levi. “I’m glad you asked.”

“Where is she?” Luz asked.

“Dal has her,” Jimmer said softly.

“What have you noticed about Ig?” Levi asked. “What do you see when you see her?”

Luz said nothing.

“I know you know she’s different, Luz. Atypical, an anomaly. Do you know why?”

“Let me see her, please.”

“I know why.” He went on. “I believe Ig is touched. Her moaning is of the same frequency as the dune’s song.”

Jimmer nodded his assent. “She hears this place powerfully. More so than any of us.”

Luz said, “Levi, we’ve been through this.”

“We’re going through it again,” Levi said. “But we’re taking a different trail this time. The direct route.”

“What are you talking about?” though she knew. How long had she known? It was hard to say.

“We’ll be taking Ig now.”

“What?”

Jimmer said, “She needs to be here.”

Luz told them this was fucking madness. She said certainly they were insane. “Give her to you? You’re delusional.” No one seemed to hear her.

“We can take care of her. Keep her well.” Jimmer.

“Who is ‘we’?”

“All of us. Everyone.”

“Not me,” said Luz. “Not Ray.”

Ray was looking to his lap.

Levi said, “Ray is a contagion.”

A spasm went through the men, but Jimmer neutralized it. “Please, gentlemen.”

“I apologize,” Levi said to Ray. “This has nothing to do with you. With either of you, really.”

He was right, Luz knew. She was obsolete. She saw it in Ray’s eyes, in Jimmer’s twitching hand, heard it in Levi’s level voice. Luz went into her corridor again. Ray was at one end and Ig was at the other. The algebra of the situation was balancing itself in her mind. Dallas was a better mother than she’d ever be — that was true, even before Levi said, “If you leave Ig, I will let you go. More than that. I’ll give you a vehicle, food, water. I’ll show you the way out. You’ll go on with your life like you were meant to. Like you planned. The two of you.”

There was not much else to say. Or there was plenty to say, but Ray’s vocal cords had been burned to useless, and anything Luz could say felt futile, another handful of hot sand in the mouth. These decisions had been made before this discussion — before the prairie dog crossed their threshold. So though there was much to say, they said none of it.

“You can see her again, before you go,” Jimmer offered.

Luz said, quietly, “I wouldn’t survive that.”

—

The next day there were rumors of rain. Atypically dark clouds a promise in the west, a crackling anticipation lost on Luz. She had gone into herself, Ray could see, though she made some efforts to feign okayness, even saluted the black glass smear where the Blue Bird had been and said, “Good-bye, house.”

Ray was tired. Wisconsin throbbed dimly in the east, and he resolved to put one foot in front of the other, even though they were driving. Levi had honored his word, outfitted one of his better lorries with walls of water kegs and tarps and food. He’d made a map, all alluvial fans and gullies, the way out in the washes. After Nico delivered all this, Luz looked at the well-equipped lorry as though it injured her. “He really wants us gone,” she said.

Ray found a pen. On the back of his hand he wrote, Don’t you?

“Don’t I what?”

Want us gone?

“I do. That’s the problem.”