The dead speak
not in the language of signs, but in signs themselves.
*
In
room three of the Nipton hotel there is Clara. The hotel is the only hotel in town.
The town is the last town in California.
The
hotel has five bedrooms and its walls are made of thick adobe, one hundred
years old.
On
the wall of Clara’s room there is a photograph of Senator William A. Clark, as he
appeared at the front of his train car, on the Union Pacific’s inaugural
journey from Salt Lake to El Paso. His head is tilted slightly and his jaw
struts out. The stiffness of his raised hand is like mercury. Beside him, there
are two women and one man. The women and the man are looking down and past the
senator, as if the tail had blown off his vest.
Clara
loves to look at this photo, loves to look because it so frightens her, the
flippancy of the senator’s gaze.
She
got up from the bed and smoothed the sheets. She smoothed her white dressing
gown and ran her fingers along her own chin and cheekbones. She was still
looking at the black and white photograph. She considered the heavy train car
and, all around it, the grey sky. The women in the photo are wearing hats with
feathers, one with a lace veil over her eyes. Clara looked at the mirror, at
ease because she did not see herself there.
Any
moment Clara would hear the first sounds of a train approaching. This would
signal the arrival of her stagecoach. Charles would help her into her seat.
Tonight
the moon is full. Under any other moon they would go towards the town of
Searchlight, through the Joshua forest, but tonight they would go the other
way, into the Clark Mountains, and onwards to the mine at Mountain Pass.
Now—Clara
heard the train’s whistle. She picked up her purse and her hat, turned the
brass knob to open her bedroom door.
There
were two guests in the hotel, a man and a woman from Switzerland. The woman was
sitting on the sofa and the man was sitting at the desk. The man was looking at
his camera. The woman read from a soft cover book. They had been at the hotel
for three days, in room one, and Clara quite liked them. The man sang songs in
the shower and his voice sounded like a clarinet, and the way the man and the
woman gave kisses to one another—it pleased her.
Clara
walked across the living room and went out the front door. Outside is a wooden
porch overlooking a cactus garden, a labyrinth with a round pathway into the
center.
Daedura
is growing, the desert moonflower. Clara knows where this is beside the
cactuses. At night the great white moth comes to eat from this belladonna.
Clara
stepped into the garden. She looked at the moon, so bright up there in its
velvet canopy, and the train was coming fast now around the bend.
Clara
watched the train’s light pour through the dangling eucalyptus, blaring its
horn at the sleepy town. It had arrived.
And
so too had Charles. Clara could hear the clip clop of the horses’ hooves, and
Charles was waving beside the train. The horses pulled towards the hotel.
Good
evening, madam! Charles called out as the carriage slowed.
Good
evening, Charles! Clara realized suddenly that she had forgotten her stick
inside the hotel, and she would like to have it with her. I’ve forgotten my
stick! Charles smiled, and she turned quickly to go back inside. She was gone
only an instant and when she appeared again she was holding a smooth white
branch, a piece of the eucalyptus. Charles helped Clara into the seat beside
him.
Ready?
He asked.
Yes
ready! Clara said.
To
Mountain Pass? Said Charlie.
To
Mountain Pass! Echoed Clara.
And away they went, through the Ivanpah Valley,
to the mine at Mountain Pass.
*
The
road out of town was quite bumpy, and the wheels of the carriage clanked
along, the horses with their heads down.
The
desert was alive. Clara could see men running and crouching behind the sagebrush.
It was the 10th of August. Stars were falling.
Carlina,
Charles said sweetly (this he sometimes called her, when she seemed
particularly far away). Carlina, have you seen the white moth?
Yes,
often, she replied, happy to think of the moonflower’s nightly courtship. The
moth, and the bats. And yesterday a hummingbird sat with me for an entire
afternoon. I was on the porch and the French couple was at the café, and the bird
sat on the orange jewel-weed (around the hotel’s wooden pillars), on the stems
of it, and it even chased away other birds. His head was red and his chest—green.
Oh!
Said Charles.
And
there are new pigeons in the loading dock. (This is the building beside the
railroad tracks, built by the Molycorp Corporation in 1980. From here they
shipped minerals from the Mountain Pass Mine. The building was made from sheet
metal and its floor was made of wooden boards. When you are inside you can see through
the boards, to the ground several feet beneath you. The building looks something
like a barn. Two little
boys used to play in the space beneath this loading dock; by 2002, the thing was
abandoned.)
All the little boys are signs.
Yes,
thought Clara, this is their blessing and their curse.
The
pigeons have their nests in the rafters, and I think there are eggs even.
Is
that so? Charles said, leaning in and touching lightly the crown of Clara’s
head with the top of his wool hat.
*
Mountain
Pass was discovered in 1949 by two men searching for uranium. Instead of
uranium, they found minerals for which uses were not yet known. It was ten
years before the first color television, before the mine’s Europium made
America red.
All
of this was after Clara’s time. She had been on the silent screen. The
picture was always grey.
*
I don't
suppose two people ever looked death in the face more clearly than my mother
and I the morning I was born. We were both given up, but somehow we struggled
back to life.
*
Now
the stagecoach is headed up a sandy trail, a shortcut. The valley behind them is
glowing green. The inside of the mountain spilled as from a goblet onto the
desert floor. Below the surface, the mycelium is starting to come loose.
Charlie
had the horses running.
Charlie,
the stars are really coming down! Clara cried.
Yes!
He was almost shouting over the horses’ hooves and the Mojave.
I
was thinking to meet—Clara’s voice trailed off.
Yes?
At
the rotunda, she said quietly. Charles was unable to hear her, but he knew well
what she meant.
Well,
we won’t be long, he said at last. Don’t worry, we won’t be late.
Clara
was silent and holding onto Charlie’s arm. Men and women were running
everywhere through the valley.
We
are more and more our own gravediggers! Clara shouted.
We
shan’t be late! Charlie screamed.
The
wind now was a blur. The horses fixed their eyes into the earth.
*
It
was a miracle they made it to the mine. The horses are standing at the edge of
an enormous hole, one thousand feet deep and five thousand from end to end.
Clara and Charles sat in the stagecoach, Clara holding her stick in both hands.
Charles leaned back into his seat, and let the reins hang loose.
It’s
big, Clara finally said, and Charles agreed. Neither could have imagined such a
hole. It was like waking up in the middle of the night and knowing you’ve been
elsewhere.
We
aren’t too late.
No,
not too late.
At
the bottom of the hole, a serpent was thrashing in its green water. Clara saw
this and said nothing to Charles, who was leaning back in his seat, eyes
closed, hands in his lap. And there, suddenly, just below the surface, there
was the sign of the bird.
Moonsberry,
Clara whispered, and she put both hands to her lips. She whispered again. Unfolding
its wings, the light was as a wide spoon.
It
moved carefully. Clara felt the bird slowly upon her, the curve of its chest
folding into the place where her hips turned, making little rivulets. There was
the sense of lilies falling, taking the place of the air and of voice. Clara
could feel something already inside her open and enter again, as if for the
first time. It was a way to dissolve; here there is no frontier and no horizon.
Charles
now is asleep with his hat pulled over his eyes. Clara touched him gently on the
arm. Charles. She whispered the way a little girl whispers at night to a golden
retriever, and he woke up.
Oh-oh!
He said. Okay, ready? Clara leaned back in her seat. Next time, madam, we’ll
take the car.
Clara
was at ease.
*
It may be that everything terrible is,
in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us.
*
Clara
slept and Charles peered into the Ivanpah Valley. How some source had labored to install the mirrors. In the daytime, sun reflected
onto the three towers from thousands of the things own faces. It was like a steam.
Beneath
the moon, the men and women were dancing. Their hands went up as one.
Charles
felt a pull on the back of his neck, and suddenly the three turbines roared to
life. Somehow, without the sun, the towers burned. With every breath they struggled
upwards towards the sky. This was the last of California. The wave would break.
_______________________________________________________
1}
Guillame Appolinaire (trans. Revell)
Ocean of Earth
For G. de
Chirico
I built a house in the middle of
the Ocean
Its windows are the rivers that
flow from my eyes
Octopuses swarm over every wall
Hear their triple hearts beating
and their beaks pecking the panes
Humid house
Fiery house
Song season
Airplanes lay eggs
Look out for the dropping anchor
Look out for the squirting ink
You’d better climb down from the
sky
The honeysuckle of the sky
creeps up
Earthly octopuses throb
And we are more and more our own
gravediggers
White octopuses of chalky waves
o white-beaked octopuses
There’s an ocean all around my
house and you know it
And you know it never rests
2}
 |
| [[Molycorp mineral loading dock at Nipton, CA. In 1984, a man bought this town, moved here with his wife and young son.]] |
3}
 |
| [[Senator William A. Clark arriving in Las Vegas. Union Pacific, 1905]] |
The men and women who appear on the Ivanpah valley floor are the ancient Pueblo Indians and the modern Shoshone and Paiute.
*
Believe not in what
is coming.
*
In
1890, the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Jack Wilson—the woodcutter—received a vision. The vision was a dance to make
the living and the dead as
one.
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