A White Macaw

Before Jim came to Nipton, he lived in the hills. He and a friend had come west in 2007. They came looking for the river of gold.

Did you ever find it? What did you eat, what did you drink?

Jim hikes for a day or more by himself in the desert. Once he got to the top of a mountain and found it covered in crystal. An angel puts a hand to her face and begins laughing.The river has become blood.

Brenda came to Nipton when Jim was here already. She came to say goodbye to her brother, Jim’s friend. By that time, the two of them were working as maintenance staff for the little town.

But she didn’t have to say goodbye. This is the last town in California.

Who would have thought to end at the beginning?

Brenda is working now at the Nipton trading post. Her eyes and her hair are like reeds.

There is a young man name Ellis.

Susan and Fernando run the Oasis café. In East LA in the 1970s, Susan’s family received food rations from the government, like all the others. Blocks of yellow cheese, powdered milk.

We instinctively knew not to eat that food, Susan says. We gave it to our neighbors.

What did you eat?

We foraged.

Her son and daughter-in-law have a newborn son they’ve named Quetzalcoatl, a god of the wind.

The best burger in the world is at this café. It is topped with blue cheese, and it is wrapped in a tortilla. It’s like you’ve never seen. This is the world’s end.

In Nipton, there is beginning to become a language not spoken, but felt. Brenda and Jim do it all the time, and not just with one another. They are beginning to do it with everyone. It is like telepathy but it is much more. I’d like to call it a radical empathy. A silence beyond sound.

It began with the crystal. It began with the planets ringing, the creatures in Mercury’s caves. From everything, something came.

Their language begins in the hair. A person embodies, absolutely, that which is inside the person giving.

It happens by way of light.

I’m speaking here of taking on the entire world which is within another person at every moment. It happens by way of breath.

This is why the angel laughs.

This is why a rooster cries and sings.