Pasturelands
Hollis in the desert has found freedom, if not purpose. He doesn’t adore the heat, but strutting about shirtless and unencumbered, he is absolved of the urban germs that have historically muddled him. Also, the ridicule. Supervisors, parental surrogates, fork-tongued peers: He’s free of them, too.
The abandoned raceway is a belt of old, bald dirt off an unmarked road, with an outcropping of port-a-potties and forlorn auto carcasses, the vestiges of failed recuperations and motor transplants long past. Most of the property is bare garage. Hollis, the sole employee, receives his freight in weekly shipments and pieces together the kits as best he can. He understands the major components and workflow—frame, engine, pedals, headlamp, banana seat—but the miscellaneous wires and noodling fuel-line system stymie him. Each kit includes a trifold pamphlet from the manufacturer, but Hollis has never bothered to read the assembly instructions because Hollis can’t read Croatian. He isn’t multilingual. He’s never traveled overseas. Had the Croatian word for “moped” not been “moped,” he might never have opened the boxes.
Hollis is contractually obligated to test ride every bike he builds. And every bike he builds, he crashes and mangles: a long, shimmering pageant of trashed machines stretching to the horizon and beyond. Hollis never learned to drive. He certainly is no mechanic. What Hollis is, at this miraculous impasse of his life, is an eighteen-year-old trade-school washout who has no business trying to build mopeds by himself in the desert—which is what this business seems to be.
He was hired after a perfunctory interview that he conducted from a payphone in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Hollis slumped up in the booth, bowels growling, straining to hear the garbled transcontinental queries while his own anxious-baffled expression peered back at him from the opaque glass. He’s not sure who was speaking, or who is his supervisor, or why they hired him. But he must be doing a decent-enough job. Nobody has shown up to sack him. Then again, maybe he’s been forgotten already. Sometimes he daydreams he’ll be promoted, and the Croats will fly him across the ocean so he can tour the company headquarters and drink the national beer and crash mopeds in their native habitat. Maybe he’d even get paid. Hollis is supposed to earn a commission wage, but he has yet to receive a paycheck, probably because he has yet to ship off a single unmangled bike. He’s been in the desert for almost a month, and he is racking up an insurmountable tab at the derelict motel five miles down the road, where he is the sole tenant.
He’s not lonely, not exactly, but he wouldn’t mind some companionship for the long night walks back to the motel. His first week on the job, he had an unfathomable experience. He was schlepping along after dark, sipping his road beer, a miner’s lamp buckled to his forehead to illuminate the route, when he noticed a pale, godly light rising from the flats. The shine was so compelling, so sudden and swift, it knocked him over, blacking him out. Hollis later awoke on his motel bed. All his short-term memory and logistical and animal knowledge had fled him. His pants were folded into a perfect triangle on the floor. The mattress underneath his sunburned body was inexplicably stripped of its sheets.
His television was speaking to him in French.
The Tropicanas East Motel is ten clapboard rooms slathered in stucco and stacked into row. Hollis’s room is the last knot of the centipede, jutting into the Mojave’s tan-black void. The walls are paisley papered, the duvet is a licentious salmon, the rug a nutrient-starved lime. The appliances and light fixtures seem to be fed on irregular streams of wattage, dimming and stuttering without notice or reason. Wattage? he wonders. Voltage? What about motel or motor lodge or motor inn? Hollis is a novice with the vernacular. If this is the Tropicanas East, is there a Tropicanas West? He imagines an identical structure, fruit-colored and mild. The décor is doubled, the amenities, the lost luggage, even the clientele. Right now, a Hollis doppelgänger is prowling a parallel hall with an overfull ice bowl and a trophy blonde on his arm. He looks happy enough, but something in his countenance is awry. He’s misplaced his room key. He’s misplaced his room. He wanders the building’s unknown precincts, detouring down a spiral of corridors, encountering a preponderance of dead ends, and soon he can’t find his way back. The woman is growing irate. His bowl of ice has melted. He reaches for the fire alarm, but before any emergency personnel can rescue them, the hot blonde rears up and bites his jugular…
Hollis shrieks awake. He’s clutching a damp blanket and lying on the rug in a naked soak. The asthmatic air-conditioner is paused between suspirations. The TV is quiet, the clamor unplugged. Hollis crawls across the ugly carpet and puts his face against the catatonic gray screen, scrutinizing his reflection. His jawline has lost definition. His acne has resurfaced. Is the motel reviving his allergies? He licks a finger and runs it along his craggy hairline, the widow’s peak serrated like a room key.
Hollis throws the blanket over the TV, and he goes back to bed on the floor.
He’s not completely alone. Every few days, they come trekking across the flats in pairs, fashionably malnourished girls wearing tank tops and thrashed denim cutoffs, their eyelashes gloomed up with demonic mascara that somehow never melts in the swelter. They spread blankets on the modest embankment that overlooks the racetrack, and they watch Hollis all afternoon, impervious to the desert’s hostile climes. They never talk, not to him, not to each other. Hollis has christened them Beach Goths, despite the fact he has never witnessed a beach or its sunbathers firsthand and so maybe lacks the credibility to bestow glib nicknames. These girls: He lusts after them, but fears them even more.
He bathes multiple times a day via the garage’s emergency chemical shower. Every evening, he launders his clothes in the motel bathtub. His hair is sculpted into a hard-gelled alpine peak so it will not wilt in the sun, and he rigorously applies high-SPF lotion to safeguard the expensive tattooing that runnels his right arm and half his left. Sometimes, when he is emboldened with IPA hops, he goes tripping up the embankment and offers the girls lukewarm beers that the delivery truck guy sells him at radically engorged prices. The girls say nothing. They just gaze testily at Hollis’s sweat-globbed hairline, which he fears, too, is prematurely retreating faster than the rest of him.
Hollis acknowledges that, by most public standards, he is not lothario material. He’s only had a handful of girlfriends since puberty invaded, and he never got more than a handful of any of them, just a little top-of-the-pants action and some spirited chafing. Still, he spends an inordinate amount of time worrying about the logistical impediments to bringing multiple girls back to his dilapidated motel room and bedding them in tandem. The mattress, rife with mildew, is narrow and lumped. The prospect of navigating more than one vector of affection is incapacitating. From the dim pit of his paralysis, Hollis imagines the scene: the two girls achieving hot-mewling ecstasy together on his lardish mattress while he sleeps chastely on the floor in a pair of crisp boxer shorts he is too shy to remove.
The motel’s acne-ravaged desk clerk is even younger and more besieged than Hollis. The kid sits in the lobby all day, studying college-prep materials and incessantly fingering the red-raw carbuncles on his chin. On the weekends, when the solitude overwhelms him, Hollis comes out to the front desk and heckles the kid with halfhearted sport. The kid is grateful for the company. If the indoors feel exceptionally morose, the young men drag rusty, fraying lawn chairs out into the evening, and they sit and watch everything: the crusted ocher sunset, the branching cloud systems, a landscape of cracked corduroy and diarrheal hues. Hollis moved to the desert to escape the industrial polymers and experimental compounds that contaminated the blond suburb of his birth, but lately the natural vistas have loosened some infernal wetness inside him. His eyes and nostrils seep, his nauseas are riled. It’s not just the motel. Apparently he is allergic to melancholic sunsets, too.
Tonight, he wears black wraparound sunglasses and a bandana over the bottom half of his face, snot swashing out. His sensitivities refuse to be stanched.
The kid redirects Hollis’s attention to the dark snarls of ink up and down his arms. “Your tattoos.”
“What about?”
“I need some,” the clerk says.
He lifts his shirt. His torso is zippered with red-puffed medical scars that remind Hollis of zebra paint. The clerk explains he had a condition as a child, and the condition required a procedure, which begat another procedure, then another and another. He could use a little camouflage. The lawsuit is still pending.
Hollis shrugs. He has always been preternaturally squeamish about the body—his own, other people’s, the fetid slippages, veiny meats. He can’t look at the kid or his patchwork.
“People say ladies dig scars, they love a tarnished man.” The kid carefully lowers the shirt, which advertises a law firm of dubious pedigree. “Sir, they do not.”
Hollis tries to focus on the vast distance ahead. He’s just a young guy sitting in a beach chair, he knows, in a young-guy-sitting-in-a-beach-chair-and-reveling-in-the-vastness kind of way.
“You walk home from the garage every night,” the desk clerk says.
“It’s not that far.”
“Be faster if you borrowed one of those bikes. What’s wrong with them? They poorly made? I always knew those things were unsafe. Could be a litigical matter.”
Hollis’s chair creaks beneath him as he rocks around uneasily. The evening is perforated, incomplete. It feels like a larger mechanism in which Hollis does not yet fit, lost among the shanks and gears and latches. He doesn’t know what he does or what he could accomplish. The kid scooches closer. Hollis smells the oatmeal on the kid’s breath. His spatial and olfactory phobias start to flare.
“I’ve seen those girls on the road,” the kid says. “I keep expecting to wake up one morning and find them tumbling out of your room, one after another, clown-car style. You’re living the dream.”
“Maybe the dream is not livable,” Hollis mumbles. “That’s what makes it a dream.”
He tightens the bandana and straightens the sunglasses. He can feel his incongruent hair trying to inchworm off his scalp. The scrubland is screaming belligerent Swedish at him.
“I need a new room,” Hollis says.
“Is the A/C broken? I can throw a new unit in the window. I’ll put it on your tab.”
“Just give me a new room,” Hollis says. “You have nine empties.”
“Nine empties I don’t wanna clean.”
“I need scenery. Different scenery.”
Hollis lifts the bandana and spits a clot of phlegm at the nearest cactus. His jawbone is almost completely eroded. His hair is avalanching. The tectonic plates that uphold his cheekbones at mismatched angles may never align.
“A lot of weird shit happens out here,” he says. “I bet you know stories.”
“You know what’s weird to me?” the kid says, gingerly touching a finger to his rawly pimpled cheek. “Frisbee golf. Somebody thought they could make a new sport out of the two most boring sports alive. If you were looking for normal, you should’ve stayed in Massachusetts.”
“Scranton.” Hollis nods. “Another planet.”
He fits his legs together, stacks his arms, and rests his forehead on the ledge. His various components, his coils and fibers, his warp and weft, are clenched quiet. Large portions of his brain have calved off like chunks of iceberg and dissipated in the tide. Fucking Swedish, Hollis thinks.
The desk clerk stops pestering his acne long enough to inquire: “Are you crying?”
Hollis brandishes a wild arm, swatting him away.
“All this fucking cactus pollen.” Hollis sniffles. “I have a smell thing, a chemical sensitivity thing. It’s not my fault.”
The desk clerk backs his chair away. His voice is subdued, soft with pain.
“Sometimes when I want a little privacy,” he says, “I go out to the storage shed for a while. The desert likes the tears. It’s not a superfluous place.”
Hollis shakes off the sunglasses, knuckle-drying his eyes. “Superfluous?”
“It’s from the college-prep workbook,” the kid says. “I’m improving my vernacular.”
After the sun recedes, the desk clerk gives Hollis the new key, and Hollis packs up his sleeveless T-shirts and boxy cargo shorts, the primpy hair product and stockpile of complimentary soaps and unused condoms obtained at a bus station in Colorado, and he carts everything to his new room. The room overlooks the empty dirt parking lot, the empty dirt road. The brown despotic land is splayed far and flat under a riot of wistful light. Hollis lowers the shades. He arranges his items in the cheap plywood dresser. He tries the shower, tries the sink. The TV is another dusty vacuum-tube model shackled to the radiator like a political hostage. Hollis pushes the power switch. The box speaks to him in German.
Hollis nods glumly and returns to his original room. He doesn’t bother to bring any of the stuff back with him.
The sprawling midafternoon desert has the compressed hum of a tiny, airless room. Hollis is disoriented by the desolate acoustics, and he resorts to scrunching cotton wads and assorted paper products into his ears, damming them up, but he soon finds the internal swish of muffled blood disturbs him, too. Everything out here is contradiction. Monochrome and variegated. Elemental and cumulative. Mysteriously banal. Hollis feels that way himself, traipsing around the panorama with TP bursting like piñata stuffing from his head. The moped casualties continue to mount. Hollis unstraddles this morning’s wreckage and sweeps the scatter into a box, then adds the box to the steep pile in the garage’s loading bay. This is how the smug pyramids were built, he thinks. This is where I will someday be buried. The freight truck is several days behind schedule. The Beach Goths have stopped visiting. Hollis is out of beer and suntan lotion and moped kits. He has nothing to build or break.
For the rest of the day, he sits at the garage’s workbench and stares at the one memento he brought from Scranton: a fuzzy photograph of the irascible grandmother who raised him, the pair living in a two-bedroom basement apartment with constipated plumbing and a blind dachshund named Neiman Marcus, after Hollis’s mother succumbed to ovarian cancer. He was a toddler when she died. He doesn’t have any photos of her, nor memories, really, just this proxy image in which his grandmother displays the boorish self-consciousness the elderly often adopt when someone thrusts an unforgiving camera at them. From some angles, she appears to be smiling. Other ones, she glowers. But at every vantage, she doesn’t seem to recognize Hollis at all.
Hollis never met his deadbeat father, but he likes to believe, without evidence or discernment, the man was a decent gent who feared his own glum nature would contaminate the domestic scene, and so he abandoned it, and them, in some misbegotten act of nobility. Hollis feels guilty about repeating the pattern, and he still plans to mail his grandmother a handwritten note of apology, along with a big, meaty check. But first, he needs to be paid. Which means he probably needs to start looking for a job that does pay.
Today’s visitor is not a mall-haunted teen vagabond, but a middle-aged woman wearing a white lace gown of delicate fabric and shading herself with a frilled umbrella. Every inch of undressed flesh has been spooled with damask doily gauze, except her pale, powdered face. She resembles a bandaged fire victim who has emerged from a romantic impressionist’s stuffy watercolor, sans rowboat. Hollis wonders if she suffers a rare pigment disease or freakish sun allergy. Rather than basking in the allegiance, though, he feels crowded out of his own condition.
“Hiya,” he says sheepishly.
“Keep it on a leash,” the woman replies.
“Huh?”
“That dick-shaped brain of yours.”
Hollis is too startled to respond. He tries to blink or nod, a show of easy humor and fortitude—either or both would suffice—but his head is locked up. He wishes he had a beer or three to lubricate his dry throat, his dry brain. Up on the hilltop, he notices, a crew of girls watching.
“Are you with the Croatians?” he manages to ask.
“My people are Scotch-Irish,” she says. “Great drinkers, fighters, feelers. All of them are dead, of course. Now it’s my turn. You’re a mechanic, yes? You work on machines? Fix their guts?”
Hollis shrugs. “That’s the job.”
She smiles tightly and surveys the track, the boxes, the banquet of broken parts.
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
Hollis is aware of a hotness amassing in the blank cavity behind his eyeballs. His tear ducts begin to irrigate. He’s patting around his shirt pockets, trying to locate his sunglasses, any kind of deflective surface to contain the furnace burn of his thoughts.
Only after the woman clucks her tongue and ascends the hillside, disappearing along with the girls, does Hollis realize: The sunglasses are already arc-welded to his face.
Hollis dreams without vernacular, without soundtrack, without history, without himself. The event is only landscape, a gray shingled acreage that is not quite a desert, not quite a sea. Is the landmass moving? Is it alive? If he had a corporeal presence, he would dig in his foot and stir it or stopple it, but all he can do is look. The surface is rain-rusted and half-churned. What Hollis is looking at, he realizes, is crumpled slag. The thousands of mopeds he has built and broken and abandoned: They are decomposing in the infinite pastureland of his dormant brain. Hollis is not allowed on site. He must wait in this dream limbo, robbed of substance and action, possessing only a disembodied gaze and an urge to speak. But he has no mouth to speak with.
He awakes on the bathroom floor. Through the doorway, the TV is jeering him in Swahili. Hollis gets up, yanks the power cord, and puts the TV in the closet. The sound won’t stop. The prickled carpet, the cold lamp, the erratic electrical sockets, the uncongealed bed. Everything is disparaging him, a chorus of dissonant tongues. Hollis might even be tempted to join in himself, if only he knew the language.
He sits all day on the hilltop with a pair of military binoculars he borrowed from the motel clerk, scanning the middle distance for some stray fuddlings of life. His only company is the congregation of cacti that loom, nervy and shrewd, in pitchfork profile. There is an additional item he must contend with. He found it at the bottom of one of the moped boxes, which he was trying to flatten and consolidate this morning in a fit of busywork while he waits for something indelible to occur. All the bikes he’s built, he’s broken: Hollis is obligated to buy them. He is not an employee or independent contractor. He is a wholesale distributor—wholesaler? retailer? broker of brokenness?—and his first and second and third payments are weeks past due. He reads the invoice one last time, crumples it, and impales it on a spiny cactus flank.
When the woman in gauzy snowflake apparel returns, Hollis doesn’t say anything. He lobs the binocs onto the front seat of a decimated convertible and applies a final shellacking of gel to his hair, but forgets sunblock. He’s replaced his Ray-Bans with a pair of sturdy welding goggles. The light, the light. There’s simply too much fucking light.
He follows her out.
The palette this deep into the desert is a blend of brown-orange and brown-red and brown-black that, taken together, scramble the visual frequencies in Hollis’s head. Everything vibrates. The microscopic bugs that are trapped in his cochlea burble and fizz at an inhumane volume. The scenery is glitchy and perturbed in a way that seems, to Hollis, very much alive. But it’s a different kind of living. It feels boundless and eternal. How long has it been waiting for him? How long will it allow him to stay? He and Marigold have walked for hours without encountering any official roads or iconic landmarks, no manmade features or, for that matter, any men. A rumpled cloud system has stalled overhead, and a dark jellyfish shadow imprints everything in eyeshot, the darkness undulating and swelling on a current that Hollis can’t sense or decipher. But maybe that’s because he’s preoccupied, now, by the houseboat.
“That is a houseboat,” he says, staring up at the triple-decker luxury liner, propped on steel stilts, hundreds of miles from any sizeable body of water.
“Not a boat,” Marigold says. “It’s a yacht.”
Hollis’s mind is running a vivid montage. Regatta races, beer commercials, news reports of drowned billionaires, Bermuda Triangle lore. Never much of a dapper dresser, he’s discomfited to not be wearing a salmon polo shirt and seersucker trousers. On the top deck, the cabal of young women in shark-chewn denim and stark mascara are lounging in foldable chairs, sipping highballs and casting their witchy spells like some intractable party mirage in dry dock. They have been raptured up into some new demesne of the unknown. Hollis is so transfixed, he almost doesn’t notice the sleek, crotch-torpedo motorcycle parked in the shade of the houseboat-née-yacht. It’s the kind of bike Hollis has always coveted, but will never be able to afford.
“Ah, that dreary old thing,” she says. “That’s Lawren’s other baby. Unfortunately, he can’t ride it anymore. It just sits out here to bait the heathens.”
The bike is too much for Hollis. The cloud coverage cracks open, his eyewear fails. A chute of light reaches down and burns a ragged canyon across the equator of his doughy brain. Soon his welding goggles are filling with fluid. He can’t shake them out fast enough. He’s suppressing a violent sniffle. A whole onslaught.
“You got an extra umbrella?” he asks.
“It’s a parasol,” Marigold says.
Hollis is clutching his blind-aching skull now, two-handed, like a volleyball he’s trying haplessly to deflate.
“You poor beast,” Marigold says, taking him by the jittery arm and dragging him to the starboard ladder. “Let’s go say hi to the dead man.”
The yacht’s basement-née-bedroom is painted mulch red, like a rustic hunting lodge, but instead of diagrammatic antlers and lacquered tusks, the walls are festooned with Pop Art flourishes. Mug shots of scandalized movie starlets, banal kitchen relics in radioactive DayGlo, postcard kitsch. A trio of girls are cross-legged on the shag carpet, thumbing old tabloids and fitness journals. A fourth girl is lackadaisically pedaling on a portable aerobics bicycle while reading a rain-bloated Russian novel. Hollis is loosely aware of a nauseating spice smell in the vicinity. He locates it on the bedside table: a bowl of potpourri. Apple cinnamon. The worst.
The dead man, Lawren Molie, is on the bed. He’s dressed in tennis shorts and a tasseled deerskin vest, poodle curls of chest hair erupting out. His skin is tan and poreless. He has handsome chrome hair and the aggressively angled cheekbones of a matinee idol.
Vulva-ular, Hollis thinks, absently.
He can’t bear to look at the man, so he keeps gazing down at the amoeba-esque blotches of sweat on his own shirt. He mutters some embarrassed business about his glands.
“Welcome aboard,” Lawren says hoarsely. He raises a weak arm and attempts to fist-bump the air molecules. The other arm grapples his abdomen. “Will somebody cut me open already?”
“Patience,” Marigold says. “Social niceties need to be honored. They are all we have now.” She turns to Hollis. “You’re looking at a real legend, Rockabilly.”
“Huh?”
“That’s her condescending pet name for you,” Lawren says. “The stupid tattoos, the stupid hair. You’re not a person to her, Rockabilly. You’re not even a social security number. You’re just a cute nickname.”
The woman pats Hollis’s greasy head-top, subtly tamping his stupid bangs into place. “Not everything needs to be a compliment. We may look like middle-aged cadavers, but we’re not vicious people.”
“We’re from Connecticut.”
Hollis glances out the porthole window, as if he might be able to glimpse the Nutmeg State among the tumbleweeds and cholla.
“I think I’ve heard of it,” he says.
Marigold smirks, then the smirk turns pensive, nostalgic. “We were pioneers. That whole druggy New England-suburban-libertine-counterculture scene? Lawren wrote a hit song about it. New Canaan Goddamn.”
“It’s been forty fucking years,” Lawren gasps, a pain-pinched voice.
“It was a kind of psychotropic anthem for WASP revolutionaries. A lot of folks sneer at the idea of Connecticut now, but those were heady days, Rockabilly. Sometimes I think the cultural hangover is what’s killing poor Lawren. Or at least part of him.”
“We think it’s my appendix,” he says, wincing. “But we’re not doctors. We’re not anything anymore.”
Marigold is twirling her folded parasol like some kind of hokey vaudeville, trying to gin up some yuks for the dying man.
“The song came to Lawren in a dream,” she says. “We knew a guy, a struggling lounge-singer type, and he recorded it for a tiny startup label. The song hit big, and it changed our lives. It was a miracle. A very fast miracle. Then, just as quickly, it vaporized. Lawren wrote a few more tunes, but that easy magic never visited us again. I know it’s a cliché, but it really is like getting struck by lightning. The fact that it happened precludes it from happening again. That’s the statistical bitch of it. The singer, Del Bone? He killed himself in the 1980s, long after the rest of the legends. He always was a little late to the point.”
Lawren is whispering at the ceiling. “Hey, Del? You beautiful demigod. Please guide me to the other side.”
“Oh, stop.”
Marigold quits her twirling.
“Del actually got off easy,” Marigold says. “We made so much scratch from New Canaan Goddamn, the IRS put our titties in a vice. We decided to hide out on the high seas for a few years. The ocean was a delightful experience, but like most delightful experiences, it became rather tedious when the drugs ran out. And there are pirates—actual goddamn pirates! We snuck back to dry land and towed our yacht way out here, where the buccaneers and federales won’t find us. We’re ghosts now. Spiritual marauders. The desert is the last place on Earth where you can go to forget your dreams, because it’s a dream itself.”
“And the girls?” Hollis says.
“They crawled out of the fiery bunghole of hell, reeking of sulfur and coconut tanning oil. They are the true wardens of this place.”
Marigold goes over to the closet and pulls out an old battery-operated keyboard, crud-clotted and quarter-scale. She sets it on the bed and perches herself on a stool, fingers bending into spider-splayed shapes.
“Oh, god,” Lawren groans.
“Quiet, you.”
“Mari, you’re gonna kill me twice.”
Marigold pounds an ominous tri-tone that rumbles the room. Then she plinks a few upper keys, fingers a major chord, and teases out the contours of a cloying melody that Hollis half-recognizes. His grandmother used to hum along with that radio dreck while beating down her dog’s wiry coat with a hairbrush. Hollis can’t help it. He flinches, sniffles. His eyes are misting. He wrestles the goggles back onto his face.
“You okay, Rockabilly?” Marigold asks.
“It’s the potpourri,” Hollis says, scrubbing his face with his shirt. “It’s the shitty toxins and germs and sad-ass stories.”
The woman grins bleakly at him, drizzling a few low arpeggios and restarting the tune at an accelerated tempo, leapfrogging octaves and crescendoing towards some kind of harmonic escarpment. Hollis whips his head sideward, unable to fling the wetness away. The woman’s fingers dash upwards and depart the keyboard, tinkling bare air.
“Has something gone wrong with our surgeon?” Lawren asks. “Is his appendix trying to annihilate him, too?”
Hollis does a double take. “Surgeon?”
“I told you. Lawren’s appendix is morbid, sick,” Marigold says. “There isn’t a hospital for a thousand miles. The feds are hunting our scalps. We’re uninsured and broke. You’re our only option.”
“I can’t—”
“How hard can it be? You said you’re a mechanic. The human body is just a machine. A blundering, rote machine. What are you afraid of? You’re not the one dying.”
“Dying,” Lawren sighs. “She says it like it’s the answer on Wheel of Fortune. Do people still play Wheel of Fortune? Do people still die of disobedient organs like in the fifteenth fucking century?”
Hollis feels all the ravenous attention in the room—from Marigold, Lawren, the girls, the treasonous appendix—staring him down, nailing him flat. He looks up at the wall, where some kind of shrivel-cured varmint has been bronzed and photographed and trapped in a frame. He wants to ask it for advice.
“Earth to Rockabilly.” Marigold picks up the umbrella and jabs him with the tip. “Do your job. Cut that measly business out of him. We have just enough money left in the coffers to pay you. The last of our residuals. RIP.”
Hollis stares at her a long minute, chewing the juicy, eel-like muscle of his tongue.
“How much money?” he asks.
“Too much,” Lawren says. “It’s always too much.”
Topside, the yacht’s tanning deck and lounge have been converted into an experimental operating theater, although the wet bar still prevails. Among the shelves of mud-colored libations, wines of rare import, unclean shot glasses and half-full snifters are the surgeon’s tools: putty blades, steak knives, basters, clamps, a perforated string of moist towelette packets. The floor is mostly library. The girls raided the hull archives and brought up a host of medical textbooks from someone’s misrouted Victorian education. Each mildewed volume is folded open to a different watercolorist’s opinion of anatomy. There is surprising variety in hue, shape, terrain. Hollis skims the maps with a kind of metastasizing panic while supping a Long Island Iced Tea. His third. Maybe his fifth.
The patient is shirtless and reclined on a jointed beach chair, rattling his tumbler of ice. “Hey, Doc? Dead man needs more anesthetic.”
Hollis tops him off and refills his own glass. He seems to have collected a small armada of them. He squints one eye, reducing the legions. Under a canopy of permanent shade, Marigold is warily watching the stalled triage.
“Are the tools sterilized? Is everybody scrubbed up? At this rate, that appendix is going to get so old, it will crawl off and settle in a retirement villa in Florida.”
“I remember Florida,” Lawren says. “That was the one with the astronauts and venereal diseases.”
Hollis leans over Lawren and peers into the man’s magnificent chin cleft, which holds a single slug of sweat, shuddering, like a ball bearing in a cement mixer. The girls have finished razoring the stately gray-silver hair from his torso. For some reason, they’ve cleared the entire field, abdomen to Adam’s apple, and now they are wiping off the extra smears of shaving cream and chopped fuzz with wads of Marigold’s gauze. Another girl is on standby with an empty bedpan, a box of Band-Aids, a sewing needle, a spool of thread. There isn’t enough thread to stitch a button onto a coat. Lawren’s chest seems to be quivering at the same frequency as Hollis’s fidgety heartbeat, his gunked-up lungs. He beckons Hollis closer.
“If you ask me, Florida has too many pink birds,” Lawren whispers. “They’re everywhere, and they think they know everything.” He pushes Hollis away. “I miss them already.”
Hollis gives one last scan of the textbooks’ whorls of salmon-coral-fuchsia, the strange masonry of fruit-shaped organs. Then, with a red Sharpie in his drinkless hand, he begins scribbling a treasure map on the man’s chest. Hollis’s cartography skills have not exactly been whetted by the quintet of Long Island Iced Teas. He swaps out the Sharpie for the putty knife, then the steak knife, then the other steak knife. He puts them down, picks them up, puts them down. He wants to offer a knife to one of the girls, but Marigold has already warned him not to hand them any sharp implements.
“They get a little gore-crazy. They’ll chum us all up.”
“Gore makes me crazy, too,” Hollis says. “I’m not good with body stuff. I have this germ thing, this smell thing, this blood and bone and leaking dead rich guy thing.”
He makes a sly pivot and attempts to pass the knife to Marigold. She smiles and raises a snifter. Her booze tremors are so bad, very little cognac makes it to her lips. He returns his attention to the tummy schematic, which more and more resembles the shattered jigsaw of postwar Europe. The desert is ramping up in Hollis’s head. Mites and summer lice are nesting in his dehydrated thoughts. A supply of medical masks has materialized, and the girls have shrouded their mouths. Behind the puckered fabric, Hollis hears them snickering.
“Do you need one last pep talk?” Marigold asks.
“I think so.”
“You are a drab, brainless fuckup,” she says.
“That’s your pep talk?”
“I didn’t finish, Rockabilly. You’re the drab, brainless fuckup who is going to save my husband’s life. Lawren and I used up our one allotted miracle with that ridiculous song. But who knows? Maybe you, too, have one hibernating inside you.”
Marigold clinks her snifter against Hollis’s glass, which is actually some kind of plastic medieval chalice from a Renaissance faire. He knocks back the final ice-slushy dregs. He feels his inner cavity filling with a substance—part burning liquid, part intransient vapor—that could almost be mistaken for confidence. Now he is the brain-eating mite. He is the windless desert. He is the scalpel in his hand. Hollis traces out the NATO map of Lawren’s chest and identifies the country where the malfunctioning organ is hiding.
“Croatia,” he says in terrible awe, then gets up and leans over the deck railing and regurgitates a kaleidoscope of sunset-colored vomit down the yacht’s portside.
Mercifully, that is the last thing he remembers.
The endless pastureland in Hollis’s dreaming brain, the one that previously held a throng of mangled mopeds and grayness, has been tilled and seeded and now sprouts a minor civilization of municipal buildings, strip malls, subdivisions, rhinestone discothèques, and not a few parking lots. The locale looks a lot like Scranton. So does the population. The young peerage who used to mock Hollis in trade school occupy the managerial positions, the corporate desks and lecterns of power. They are his supervisors, his landlords, his overlords, his presidents, his custodians, his amnesiac lovers, his forgotten friends. Meanwhile, his grandmother sits in a budget enclave for neglected retirees, waiting for her deadbeat grandson to send her a birthday card and lotto scratch-off. Even if he wanted to visit, Hollis wouldn’t know how to get there. The roads have been diverted away from the desert. The old, weird Mojave has been packed up and shipped overseas. There is nothing left but a few indignant grains of sand and a pile of mangled appendixes. And Hollis. Sad, lonely, slumbering Hollis. A tenant without a lease or landscape. A dreamer without a dream.
When Hollis returns to the world of the living, or the almost-world, the almost-living, the sun has vanished and the desert is dark. The alcohol is still swirling inside him a little. Now he is the one who is shirtless and flattened. He’s staring up into an empty black hall that gradually coheres into a night sky. A dirty rag is taped to his stomach. His middle parts feel wrapped with barbwire, and the barbwire is winching him tighter and tighter. The nighttime is erratically lit. The shaky light seems to flow out of his forehead. Hollis, pushing through the ambient burn that swells his insides, struggles to sit up. He wants to vomit, but he hasn’t any stomach left. He swivels his headlamped head. He doesn’t see the yacht or racetrack or motel. Only Marigold. She’s sitting on the desert floor, a plastic cooler in her lap.
“You’d think a person with a skin condition like mine would prefer the nocturnal world,” she says. “But that’s not the situation at all. I don’t feel at home in the night. I don’t feel at home anywhere, really. Not even the idea of Connecticut is habitable to me now.”
Despite the persistent darkness, she’s wearing an overlarge sunbonnet. She’s tapping her fingers on the cooler top. Plink plink plink. The melody is gone. The song is vanquished. Just the muscle memory, the irrational tic of it, remains.
“How are you feeling, hero?”
“My abdomen hurts,” Hollis says.
“You were superb. A command performance. Somebody should write a hit song about you.”
“I saved him?”
“Of course not,” Marigold says. “He died on the table like a fish.”
Hollis is trying not to fold over from the deep smelted pain. He’s trying not to crash and mangle or burn up on the incendiary surface of the somnolent sun.
“Don’t worry, it wasn’t your fault. Lawren’s heart attacked him. Maybe he was shocked the surgery was a success. You shucked that little bastard out of him like a pro. Like you’d done it a million times. We were so proud of you. I mean, sure, you may have pierced his intestines and unleashed a tide of bile throughout his pulmonary system. But I prefer to think his heart seized up before the toxic shock set in.”
Hollis looks down at his bandaged belly, seeping wet maroon paste.
“Did I get chummed? Am I dead, too?”
“It was the silliest thing,” Marigold says. “Somehow you got the idea that we were conducting an organ transplant. Maybe it was the stress? You tried to shuck yourself, too. It would’ve been heroic, if it wasn’t so inordinately dumb. I suppose this is why surgeons aren’t encouraged to drink on the job.”
She slides the cooler over to Hollis. The white plastic shell has a red palm print splotched on its side.
“You stole your own kidney,” she says.
Hollis is too weak to lift the cooler. He just sort of rocks himself against it, but the top is shut tight. The cooler is so light, it might as well be empty.
“Since the patient didn’t survive, I don’t see why I should pay you,” she says. “But at least you can bring home a little memento. It’s like the gold at the end of the rainbow. Although there never was any rainbow. And I guess it’s not really gold.”
Marigold rises and pads off in her bare feet and big, floppy bonnet, the spectral swathing of her disappearing, moth-like, into the dark corridor of night.
He worms and wriggles and kneel-crawls and backstrokes back. The trip takes him hours, dragging all that pain and embarrassment all that distance, Hollis dry-heaving into the dirt, the macabre cooler tucked under him like a crutch. By the time he finally finds his motel, the sun is punching a hole through the morning haze. The cacti are distant and aloof. The insects have scuttled free of their quiet, subterranean slums. Hollis claws his way up onto the lumpy mattress, dribbling ounces of himself everywhere—his blood and plasma, his phobias and allergies, his fuckup-idiot spirit, which may well be his one true purpose on Earth. All of him is absorbed by the room. For the first time since he arrived in the desert, Hollis feels the spotlight leave his brain.
“Hello,” the TV says.
David Nutt is the author of Summertime in the Emergency Room (Calamari Archive) and The Great American Suction (Tyrant Books). He lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife and dog and two cats.