14 Satellites like Sunflowers
Light coming through the hallway window woke me up. My left cheek was pressed into the carpet and I smelled like cigarettes. Jimmy was moving on the other side of the door. I got up and left before she could find me.
On the way home I passed a newspaper stand and saw the headlines. My favorite was: CITIZENS FOR A RABID ECONOMY THREATENS SUPERLAND™. A shock of joy hit me just like the night before. F*ck the anniversary! I thought. I’m making a new one. I flung open the door to our house, a victor.
Annette was in the living room with the shades drawn. Her eyes were dilated from sitting in the dark. She picked up an empty cereal bowl with one hand and raised the blind with the other. Sun came through the window and made the white curtains glow. Her cheeks were red and puffy. She retied her blue satin robe.
“No one needs this shit right now,” she said. “That baby. I remember his first day of school.”
Annette had been on the phone with the family of one of the boys who had been shot. She had dated the younger boy’s brother when they were teenagers. Two rivers. The radio in the kitchen was on loud. They were deepening their coverage of the bomb threat at box-mall-church. Would it affect shopping? Annette walked into the kitchen and yanked the plug.
“Who cares about that damn mall,” she said and went back up into her room.
Grace wanted everyone out at their place by early afternoon. It soon became clear that we’d be lucky to make it by dinner. Because of the bomb threat and some unrelated concerns about rioting, large sections of the city were cordoned off and there were checkpoints on all the major roads out of town. We followed the traffic advisories all morning. Everything was backed-up. Jimmy called and wanted to know what time she should come.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
“What time?”
And my heart, like a sea anemone touched once, curled.
“Whenever. I’m not in a rush to get there.”
I was standing on the sidewalk when Jimmy pulled up fresh-faced and rested with a freshly baked vegan pineapple-lemon cake on the seat beside her. Apparently her response to potential riots, bomb threats and dead sisters was to bake and talk about Honduran pottery collectives.
“I’m really interested in the way cooperative micro-economies…blah, blah, community kiln fire…regional glazing techniques…the hue comes from wood smoke…”
—Good. We’ll need potshards. That way it’ll be easier for future archeologists to reconstruct our civilization—
“By the way, I found a book on Honduran geology.”
She smiled brightly and handed it to me then went on about a friend she had in Tegucigalpa who said he could meet me and how cheap it was to get around now because of all the hurricanes. Through the jungle vine I saw her, Queen of the Jaguars, twirling in a ball gown sewn by harpy eagles and howler monkeys.
It was after noon before we got on the road. The first checkpoint was easy. We told them we were going shopping and they waved us on. At the second checkpoint they made us kill the engine and show identification. They opened up our cooler and poked around in the ice but that was it.
Past the security rings, traffic flowed evenly through a colony of gas stations, day labor agencies and fast food drive-thrus on the other side. Kids sold flowers out of white plastic buckets and flagpoles went by like jail bars.
The original plan was to stay on the phones with Credence and Annette and hook up at a rest area outside of town but the cell reception was already sticky and it didn’t look like that was going to happen. We were out of range before they left.
Driving through the barricades and idling vehicles of my own deathless Rapture I felt like a kid, back before I knew anything, back when sleeping sunburned in a pup tent or running barefoot through the dewy grass was still reality. That old feeling came and went. Jimmy picked up speed on the interstate and the truck rattled. The speedometer was broken and she could only tell how fast we’re going by sound. On the outskirts of town and buildings, mini-malls and franchises went from a stream to a stutter with flashes of field in between. I rolled down the window. A crop of satellite dishes went by all facing the same way like sunflowers. We passed a warehouse with a thirty-foot spinning cell phone on top of it. After that, it was nothing but grassland.
I curled up on the vibrating seat with my arm around the pineapple-lemon cake and slept. When Jimmy woke me I thought for a second that I was fourteen and that she was Credence and I’d passed out again.
“Which exit do I need?”
“This one.”
We turned west and the sun cut across Jimmy’s cheek and thigh. Climbing into the wooded foothills the road dipped and curved under a belt of blue sky. We came into a part of the forest that had been logged several times and replanted in rows. The trees were all the same age, each the size of a telephone pole; they made avenues of filtered light, which appeared and disappeared as we drove. On the left was a gravel service road and we took it. A tall thin waterfall and a hazy valley flickered by then there was nothing but trees, green ditches and fallen branches on either side of us. Jimmy hit a pothole and we lurched forward.
“Go ahead and park,” I said, “let’s go the back way.”
Jimmy pulled over. I got out the cake and we started walking. Ahead in a clearing was an abandoned cabin that had been wiped out in an avalanche in the 30s. The back half of the roof was caved in and the front door lay rotting in the weeds.
“Credence and I used to hang out here when we were kids. I’ll show you the cabin. The trail is behind it. ”
I led her up onto the porch and through the doorway. The floor was covered with dry leaves and when a breeze came they scraped across the pine. I could feel her breath on my shoulder. A strip of light where the roof had caved fell diagonally across the kitchen counter. A forgotten glass bowl sparked in the sun.
“It’s going to be strange to leave,” Jimmy said. “Are you going to talk to tell them tonight?”
Intentions blowing everywhere like dandelion seeds.
“Probably not.”
“What do you think they’ll say?”
Through the hole in the roof I saw a hawk dive.
“See the hawk?”
She looked up. Her face was half shadowed and half lit. Tiny golden hairs played on upper lip. I slid right behind her while she was watching the hawk, put my mouth to her ear and whispered, “Let’s leave after midnight when they’re all asleep.”
She thought I was joking but I meant it. Everything was already so messed up.
We hiked up the trail behind the avalanche cabin. The forest changed as we went. It aged and became dense. Deer’s head orchids and fairy slippers slept all around and soon we could no longer see the cabin or the clearing or the rest of the trail down behind us. The trees grew irregular and roots twisted under our feet. At the top of the ridge the land leveled but was still wet. We walked on a pathway made of 2x8 planks lain over the black sucking mud. Mushrooms and wildflowers lined the soil and grew out of rotting tree trunks. All around rag lichen hung like lace.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing Grace again,” said Jimmy, almost chipper.
The house was before us. There was a wind chime on the porch I had never seen. I reached up to touch it and just before I did, Grace opened the door. Her dark hair streaming over her shoulders and down her dress, which was a Mediterranean blue. In her hand she held a spiral notebook and from each strong and facile finger, a tiny creek flowed.