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When the two women first saw the tiny Mexican village beneath low, rolling hills, it struck them as a kind of Eden. It was Jean who first used that word, uttered the myth. Words, those unkempt, wayward fountains, oddly ardent bedfellows, were immediate with her. They flowed out of her like some swollen, deep-running river, close to flood. Red, her lover and partner on the trip, would never have used that word. She said nothing, but her normally quick, sly smile was as slow, gentle and spontaneous as your grandmother’s. She was already a Believer. It came not as revelation but a sudden expiration of breath: yes, they had found it, a kind of paradise. They never knew they were looking for it.
They first told me about the village over beer at my favorite lesbian bar, Maud’s Study, in San Francisco. Where else would we hold forth so merrily on Eden? Only where the most threadbare dreams and shimmering, sacred mysteries all begin – and end. Who am I to know? I’m Lyn Lonidier, perpetual pundit and diehard local of San Francisco, the crazy lesbian poet on the hill in the Mission, drinking buddy to the most scantily-clad followers of Wycca, rockhard bitches, foul-mouthed drag queens, poet tasters and gourmands, and druggy-fuzzy know-it-alls in this town, the madwoman who lives with a pet dog, cat, snake, fish, rat and lizard. I’m democratic, if nothing else. A loudmouth in luxury bursts with an extra room in her little house with a hopelessly overgrown garden and seven trees around it like some religious shrine. I’m the woman people tell their stories to, owner of a room that’s always open to every sad soul who’s had the life and dreams crushed out of her like that blackened, stonedead cigarette.
It was so unexpected, Jean continued. The fraternal din at Maud’s was lower then, and I could almost hear if I tried. I always try. They had picked a town spontaneously on a map, a way they often traveled on their vacations. They craved adventure, the unexpected, and they found it, as life so perversely grins and throws dice. The chosen city in Mexico was roughly central to the jagged country that’s shaped like a crumpled, pungent old boot. So they chose it, center of the world, budget bullseye.
At first, they said, it shocked them: the city was amazingly wealthy, not Mexico’s image at all, with palatial stone homes covered with ivy and decoratively grilled bars over every entry. That was the first discordant note: those bars everywhere. What were they keeping out, or in? Later, they discovered that their spontaneous vacation pick was none other than the home of Mexico’s wealthy upper-class, corrupt bankrollers of the equally corrupt PRI political party that sprouted like a single gorged, nefarious weed from Mexico’s revolutionary socialist past, Zapata and his hoard. It was home to the guerrilla opposition; too, terrorists who called themselves Maoists and blew up a local palace from time to time. That was before they killed a few too many tourists from the States. Killing Mexicans was one thing, but dead tourists meant trouble for the wealthy that remained. So, the guerrillas were “taken out,” as the kids say today, erased like teacher’s chalk on the shrieking blackboard of life’s soundless, unknown heart of violence. All things have their intrinsically dependent opposites in the dynamic of history, for I was drunk enough to be a Maoist.
With no interest in these well-guarded palaces, Jean and Red walked to the outskirts of the city over an ancient wooden bridge, just outside its Plutocratic largesse: a small, creaking bridge that might have been dangerous to cross but for the equally small rushing brook just beneath it. Jean instantly loved the sound of it: a rushing, wailing, softly punctuated burst that never ceased; all elements merged and of the same weight; a medium fashioned of multitudes of pebbles hitting jets of flowing water; the soft clanging hum of a monk’s chant; a sound singing that all things run together into perfect pitch, harmony, equality; how the universe seems certain moments, precious ones, that vanish with the current.
It was the sound that announced the village’s meaning, as the grilled bars had announced the wealth and inequity of the palaces behind them. Over the bridge, they found the tiny Mexican village of their newfound, ancient dream and its music, festival and people. For it was here The People lived – impoverished, short, stunted and thin with shining, blackbean eyes and smiles that broke into the manifold resonances of the have-nots that ever had Eden. Some sort of festival was going on, as it always was, with no more reason for being than Eden itself, and a crowd of tiny folk took them by the hand and led them into a ring of dancers. There was a small wooden ferris wheel that could barely turn, abundant, free-roaming goats, chickens and donkeys with eyes of soft, reflected light, pooling to small, round lakes of limpid, animal joy.
They were invited to dance with these men, many in wide-brimmed hats, who were all at least a foot shorter than they. They looked about at so many upstart animals, impossibly alive faces, spare men and their women fuller in long, embroidered skirts and deep-necked blouses. Suddenly, a man’s voice shouted, “Mamasotos!” at which they all shared a burst of laughter like gunshot.
They did not wish to dance like oversized elephants in a ring, but the crowd’s laughter was infectious. Yes, so they must be mamasotos to this tiny folk. They stood aside, bought thick, creamy Mexican beers from stands, and began to walk about the town, so different from the one across the rickety bridge and that different, again, from the one across the big iron border with the States.
This village was but a few meters from the other town. In the waning sunset and beginning starlight, the magical twilight hour, they saw the diminutive glory of the village. The residents were poor and their houses small; yet, they painted them in rich, saturated hues of deep ochre and umber, earthen, and tended them with scrupulous care. It was not the angry carelessness of poverty in the States. No, each home was a work of joyous folk art: luminously bright, trumpeting its breathtaking detail in latticework, gardens, and woodwork about roofs, doors and windows, with not a single set of bars. It bespoke a reverence for the surface of the world, what one caresses and knows like a lover, nature itself, the everything so easily forgotten.
As they passed from the last street to a profusion of greenery around a lake and the first low, gentle hill that seemed to whisper for its nightfall motion in the slow wind, Jean saw a pair of eyes emerge from the darkness of the last street, not smiling. But she turned her face into the wind and imagined that a donkey or a deer had glanced at them. Red looked more intently, then seeing the eyes vanish, turned full into the sheer power of the windy world. The growing starlight and now the moon were sparkling over the lake, turning it into a sheen of tremulous, first love much like their own; new yet blissfully old, as though we could nearly remember a distant harmony in a past that was our only perfection: Eden. For it must be this low, reachable mountain, a lake, a summer night, a first love and a tiny town where a festival, ancient and eternal, was taking place. Yes, it was what had been lost in the worlds, for there were many, that they knew. Eden, Jean said it, and it was true, written forever in that place where they dreamed and took breath.
Red, the taller and more boyish, held Jean as they looked over the lake. She was the one to plan things, chop the wood, make the myth true and incontrovertible. She said they would retire here after their many years in those shadowy jungles of San Francisco, some rough and dirty, some soft as a kiss. They could not own land under Mexican law, but they could lease it for decades. Then they would build their house in paradise, the one with three stories, balconies, and many windows without bars, walls of them, overlooking the lake. Yes, Jean said softly, hypnotized.
But I have left out the heart of their story, an easy thing to do, as we sat so easily at Maud’s, telling stories on another summer night, with doors and windows nakedly open and inviting, not the usual practice at Maud’s. Our Edens are not Biblical: they, too, are older and newer than that rendering of the tale. This particular Eden began in the mid-to-late 60s, when we all arrived in San Francisco for the first time, age of miracles, messiahs on every doorstep, noisy in the streets, lounging in every alleyway. That unspeakably beautiful time when we uttered only oracles and myths, imagining them spanning eternity, and full of flowers, the eternal newly born, flowers and garlands on every self-crowned head, the last time we ever dreamed. Until years, lifetimes later, and the small Mexican village -- or Arusha below Kilimanjaro or Belize or Rio or Sri Lanka before the war or wherever it was, for you’ve told me the story many times. It was a place and you found it, the flower still moist behind your ear, the earring dangling beneath it. Now you must return, if you still can: you’re marked. And if you don’t, you are old and finished by that fiendishly precise measure. Back in the 60s when the fountain first rose up, even I – the foul, mad, old hoary one, covered with my bristles and brambles and poetry– had nought but flowers falling from my lips and pen, my beer mugs overflowing, my house on the hill growing from a tender vine.
More fortunate than most, they stayed together all those years, avoiding all the fateful-faithless traps and lusty, glowing quicksand, growing rumpled into one another – knotted and tree-like – as women do. They saved their money; it was natural to them, unlike the bolder dreamers. They were both librarians: they even worked together and had first met in the library. San Francisco’s public library, as none other, could be such a gentle bud of lesbian love. They were not impressive wage earners nor were they wealthy, but it was enough, saved scrupulously, for just one dream – at least at Mexican prices.
I remember – it was but a year ago – when they packed their few and frugal things and set out for Mexico, the final leg of the journey that still hovered, airborne, in a dream. Red was portly then and had high blood pressure; Jean was still girlishly slim with low blood pressure. Both had leonine manes of thick, white hair that still glowed in the sun. Red had flown to Mexico earlier and negotiated a contract for several acres of property overlooking the lake, just as they had planned. They worked through a Mexican lawyer, and the resulting lease gave them four decades. The lawyer also negotiated a contract with a builder using local workers, children of the throng who had once greeted them on that fateful night so long ago. They had arranged a residence for three months, after which they thought it possible to live in a portion of the house to be; though it would take a few more months to fully construct it.
As I bid them goodbye, I thought, as I often do, of all the dreamers who had not come so far. Perhaps a dreamer needs something of a librarian’s patience and equilibrium to triumph and fly off, still imbued with youthful light, in the bright, cold, harsh sunlight of San Francisco, light reflected from white and pastel buildings, so unflattering to dreamers as they age. I envied them and inevitably, I feared for them and even prayed in my odd poet’s fashion, my own perversely intractable chant of awe and readiness for revelation that vanishes with the next day’s bitter grains of expresso.
Then I rarely heard from them and distantly – e-mail, letters when we felt nostalgic for the past, some exuberant phone calls on holidays. This is what I know: they first spent a long time swimming in that lake. What better sport for Eden? Again, they struck the town with wonder as the giant amphibious, white-haired old ladies from America disported themselves like young otters in the softer Mexican sun. At night, they strolled about the town, as they had so long ago. Many of the exquisite folk art dwellings remained and had vastly grown in number, though the town was still as poor. They rarely went over the bridge to see the stone palaces, which were just as carefully guarded as long ago. There were now many more people living in shantytowns further away from the lake, and the beautiful, tiny dwellings now housed a small Mexican middle-class. When they strolled too far and encountered the shantytowns, far more numerous, they felt distressed to find the residents as poor, thin and dirty as those anywhere in the third world, Bombay to Lima.
Then they began the long task of supervising the builders as well as swimming in the lake. These men, as thin and small as those so long ago, took orders well in Spanish and initially, the architect was present. Though the two women were fluent in Spanish, they could not understand all of the endless exclamations and badinage of the builders. The men appeared to speak frequently in an unknown slang mixed, possibly, with an ancient tonal language spoken in the Yucatan. The architect yelled at them frequently in the same argot, and they felt a tension building that remained a mystery to them. By the end of the day and the long, umber shadows of evening, still a magical time, all tensions had dissipated in fatigue, and the men smiled broadly and went home to their unknown lives. The two women liked to imagine them dwelling in the tiny, exquisite homes that ringed the lake; but often, they suspected many were shanty-town dwellers, particularly the very thin ones who came to work late and were often disheveled, drunk or both, as though they might have slept in an alleyway. Poverty as they knew it in the States had filtered soundlessly across the border in the long, intervening years. At times, they admitted that the town was no longer an Eden and could never have been. They began serving a large, nutritious lunch daily to the men and inquired of various civic groups whether they could do anything to alleviate the town’s poverty and inequity of wealth. When this drew a blank, costing vastly more than they would ever have, they behaved like good librarians and donated a large Spanish collection of books to a free, public library. They remained, in other words, true to their dream and indeed, it took strength and loyalty to persevere.
This I sensed from our contacts, though they had not returned to San Francisco. The house with a second story of windows without bars grew in stature, and they were able to live in the interior and lock the door at night. They moved most of their possessions in and began to feel content.
One late afternoon, Jean’s eyes at last passed over the entire beloved interior of their former home in San Francisco. She had spent most of the day gardening, and she wanted to bathe and rest. Yet, for a moment she lingered over the sight of the bright drapes from Guatemala, the rugs from Peru, and the paintings of the desert from a brilliant Southwestern Indian artist they had once met in Taos, a miserable alcoholic who painted landscapes bathed in clouds of shimmering, cosmic light, a man who seemed to see heaven and earth at once and live unable to reconcile them. She could still see his deeply lined, craggy face, vastly older than its years.
It was all here now: the Berber chairs and couches, the desks and tables in perfect wood that nearly resembled flesh, the handiwork, again, of Indian artisans. If the town was no longer Eden, the lake was, she decided, and so was the house. It was enough: that elusive state never quite what one expected but ever sufficient for life and that bit of integrity without which no dreams survive. She opened the desk drawers, noting as she had so many times, that they moved as things made of velvet, inconceivably fine workmanship. Lying in one drawer was a loaded revolver, Red’s inevitable addition to the house. Even the gun glowed softly in the sunset, for Jean had not pulled the drapes yet. The gun was an unlikely addition to Eden and, with an equally unlikely response; she smiled, then laughed.
She was remembering the only time it had ever been fired. I had heard the story at least twice in our long, rambling evenings at Maud’s. It happened many years ago, when they bought their first house together in the hinterlands beyond San Francisco, rural and rustic towns north of Berkeley that were known to be red of neck and Republican. Jean gardened scrupulously and had created a strip of lawn with many-hued roses on rocky, unproductive soil. Then a mole came to dwell beneath them and the roses withered. At night, he dug his subterranean caverns with hairless paws and fed upon their tender roots, growing fat and careless. Jean and Red often discussed their vexation with this mole. The roses seemed innocence debased, then womanhood most vulnerable, then they saw moleblood.
In fury, one day Jean took the gun outside with her and began to flood the mole’s network of caverns with a garden hose. She intended to either drown it or shoot it if it came up for air. As water coursed into the first and then the whole cavernous network, she anxiously called to Red. The hose foamed into the caverns, the minutes passed like eons, and she nervously wondered where on earth the mole was and if it could possibly have escaped. After long, breathless moments, its hideous baldhead at last rose up like a nightmare – pink, drenched and gasping for air – from the one hole that met the surface. As Jean pointed the revolver, she was suddenly almost in shock at the horror of the mole’s ugly pinkish baldness and the dreadful wormlike slenderness of its body: it gaped for breath, its bulbous, blind eyes without irises or pupils in the rare sunlight, its paws upraised to grasp the surface, almost in an attitude of prayer – begging, it seemed, for life -- though it could not possibly have seen her. She had never seen a more revolting creature in her life, yet she realized in alarm that she had never killed an animal beyond an insect before. A moment could not be lost since the mole could now breathe; yet, she was engulfed in a flood of conflicting emotions. With its hideous, gaping mouth; blunt, pink snout; bug-eyed sightless stare and imprecating paws; could there be a more despicable thing in the world, yet a more understandable motive than begging for life? Then she felt a firmer, stronger hand cover hers, the gun discharged, the mole – a bloody, pinkish roar – dropped dead into its hole. She looked up into Red’s face and realized that her lover had shot the gun for her, killing the mole. She laughed hysterically into Red’s shoulder and then said, “Thank you. I couldn’t.”
Arm in arm, they took a long, deep breath, laughed, and went back into the house, praising the roses that would now have their many-hued birth, oblivious to all else. They had but a half-hour of Eden, for that was the time it took for the police to arrive.
A squat, overfed police officer, ugly as a mole, appeared suddenly on their doorstep, demanding an explanation for the gunshot, which a neighbor had reported. They explained it was but a mole that had been killed and showed the officer the hole, the hose, the withered roses. The officer thanked them and left but, incredibly, returned to the reporting neighbor’s home for corroboration. The residence was home to a family that disliked having lesbians for neighbors and was even incensed that the two women argued less than any family on the block. In another half-hour, the plump policeman returned, now full of dark suspicions concerning a couple of perverts, the lesbian Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps, of Molesville. He demanded, somewhat angrily, to see the mole’s body. Red’s face was now as red as her hair and she said, just as angrily, that the mole had fallen back into its hole and she hoped it would stay there. The policeman, now just as red, demanded that they produce the mole in question. Red marched into the garage, then handed him, furiously, a shovel. Chivalrous at last but just as determined to discover the perverse secrets of lesbian lives, the policeman turned even redder, sweated like a horse, and dug. A portion of the mole’s network was unearthed, then another, and still another. “My God, he’s going to kill the roses over this,” Red whispered with ragged breath. At last, just before the roses were destroyed once and for all, the bloody, filthy, pink little body lay before them like an abhorrent giant worm. “Well, you got your mole!” Red said sarcastically.
And to their continuing amazement, the officer picked up the tiny, dreadful thing in a handkerchief, deposited it in a plastic bag and carefully sealed it. “This is going to ballistics!” he said triumphantly and swaggered off. Jean drew Red, who was now purple, into the house.
“My darling,” she said with careful irony, “we will be vindicated -- or at least rid of a dead mole.” At last, the two women laughed, and Red’s coloring returned to normal.
In three hours, however, another policeman knocked on their door. Much younger and slimmer, the officer gave Red a disarming smile and handed her the mole with but a word of explanation, “Regulations.”
“Oh, regulations!” shouted Red, turning red again.
“We must return the remains,” he added. To her utter disgust, Red saw that the mole had been refrigerated for possible trial use before a cooler head had prevailed. Now its tiny, pink appendages stuck straight out from its sides, making it all the more loathsome. She hurled the mole over the officer’s shoulder and into the street, then uttered a string of classical Greek exclamations and curses from The Iliad. “That was unnecessary, ma’am,” the officer said curtly. Red slammed the door shut, unnecessarily, and thus the Day of the Dead Mole passed.
The sun had set when Jean, at least three decades later, closed the drawer with a smile. She was very glad, she reflected, that Red was now taking medication for her high blood pressure.
In another month, the house was finished and the last payment was made to the building company. Jean and Red now stood outside the miraculous, near-impossible thing, saw it whole and beautiful as a newborn child, a poem crafted painfully, with great care. The walls of windows now reflected the gentle Mexican sun, the lake, and a distant ring of small, riotously colorful houses like that fresh, eternal garland of flowers on an ancient, hoary head. Call it Eden.
They decided to hold a celebratory feast for the workmen and their families. On that day, in early twilight, they saw the small men now enjoying themselves with their wives and children, for there was abundant food for every hungry mouth. The wide-brimmed hats tipped to them; the long, embroidered skirts whirled effortlessly in a ring of dancers. With intense satisfaction, they noted new color on the mens’ cheeks, more flesh and muscle on their bodies, no doubt the result of the generous lunches they had served each day. As the festivity progressed, they passed throughout the group and gave a special bonus payment to each man who had worked on the house. This seemed to amaze the men, as though they had never received a reward for work well done. As the twilight deepened to nightfall and the moon’s reflection swayed over the lake like another dancer in the widening ring, for the magical light now pooled and doubled in the wall of windows, Jean remembered that night and festival so long ago. Tears came to her eyes at the thought of this symmetry: was it the only way, she wondered, that any goodness ever came to this old, beleaguered world, in symmetry with degradation? Now it had not merely happened, a gift from other hands. They had created it.
Yes, that was worth something, I agreed, perhaps everything, as long as it lasts. Until the old world’s top spins yet again, as so perversely it grins and spins, until the dice fall down. I did not say this to Jean, though we spoke by telephone a few days later. How do we say what’s painfully inevitable but with a story, and those we live are coarse, rough things; mumbling and dirty, they putrefy in the heart until just the heat, depth, pressure and age are reached, the deathly recipe, and then come roaring out, the cauldron of monsters: poetry. Oh yes, poetry roars, is monstrous, deafens with its truth, still filthy in afterbirth. Of such things, terrible and true, are dreams made.
And so, what then followed was perhaps inevitable. A week later, in early afternoon as Jean was looking out the windows, she saw three of the workmen circling the house. Immediately, she went out and greeted them. To her dismay, however, she saw that they were again thin, dirty and disheveled. In but a few moments, it was clear that they were drunk as well. With fear and pity filling her stomach, she asked if they had found more work, to which they replied no, there was never any work in the town. The building was across the bridge, they said, and different crews were used for that area. Jean instantly felt anguish: the town’s poverty and inequity had reasserted themselves. The men never had a chance. “I am so very sorry,” she said helplessly in Spanish. Her anguish was unshared, however; they were now too drunk. A thought began, touched her with light fingers: what would it be like to fail, and then again, fall, fiercely hunger, stagger here, still wretchedly alive, like these men? Their eyes had a dark, strange fluidity – fatigue, anger, fever, utter blankness were there – all shifting, turning into one another. Eyes of the lost. She had seen such eyes before – in the craggy face of the Indian painter from Taos.
She took a deep breath of air; suddenly aware she had stopped breathing. The scene before her had now altered dangerously. The men stared at her boldly and laughed suddenly in derision, then they began talking among themselves, ignoring her entirely, all the while their eyes shifting, burning with fluid, fluent thoughts, too fast, too dangerous, for words. They used a slang term, apparently a reference to her, something that sounded like moneymama. Stunned and embarrassed, she went inside and locked the door. What now? That was the awful question still turning, fluid, shifting all about. She immediately went to Red and told her of the encounter, but when her lover looked out the window, the men were gone.
Late that night, they returned in greater numbers, now very drunk and loud, and the din awakened the two women from their sleep. Red shot out the door to face them; ready, inconceivably, for attack. In Spanish, she berated them angrily for the disturbance and told them to leave. They replied by asking for money. Furiously, Red refused; telling them that money was for work well done, not drunkenness and harassment, admonishing them to find work. No, they said, there was never work in the town. Red said they would get nothing here and ordered them to leave, then returned, red-faced and breathless, to bed. The last thing Jean saw was the gleam of the men’s eyes, hatred and impotence congealing, in the glow of the flashlight. The two women listened uneasily and talked for a time, pondering this terrible end to their efforts. But they sensed it differently – a nausea and dull anxiety filled Jean; for Red, rage blotted out all else. Here was another thing to fight for, and without a thought, she jumped into the fray. Jean’s anxiety increased as she sensed these changes, for she knew that Red, when angered, could not stop fighting. But Red was now much older, and her heart did not have its former strength. Now Red, too, held danger. The implications suddenly spread out before Jean like a huge, dark tree, full of unknown, resonant power.
It seemed impossible to sleep and yet, toward morning, they did so. Jean had a strange, recurrent dream. She knew she was asleep, dreaming, but her eyes were half-open, and she could see the room in darkness. The dark was filled with unknown, moving things. Swift fingers moved about, legs ran back and forth pointlessly, and nothing came into focus for the dark. There was a haunting sound: an ancient stringed instrument cried out softly in an unknown melody, each note so piercingly sweet and painful that she knew it would always exist, outside of time. It could never be diminished or forgotten. It partook of no dynamic process but simply was: dark, melodious, eloquent beyond words but not music, exquisite eyeless pain, horribly sweet, beautiful, ceaseless. Jean’s consciousness seemed to float, and at last she saw the house from outside through fractured moonlight, the windows broken.
When she awoke, her stomach and entrails felt as though she had been on a moving ship all night, seasick. The two women talked for a long time, deciding that they must try to regain control of themselves and the situation and do what was necessary to find some satisfaction in their new life. Now Red began exhorting them toward self-control and action. Grimly but calmly, they spent the day in their usual pursuits – reading, writing, gardening. Slowly, they began to push back the night. Towards evening, however, a silent fear began to possess them, and they found themselves strangely distracted and irritable. They took no pleasure in the sounds of nightfall, the rippling motion of water in the lake and the alternating, rhythmic cries of birds and insects. One creature, bird or insect, was suddenly dominant. It made a wailing cry that seemed to soar, brilliant and resonant, to a height; then plummet downward – low, tremulous and deep as a piano bass chord. Jean followed its exquisite, painful beauty helplessly, as she had the stringed instrument in her dream. Her breathing stopped each time she heard it. They did not look out the windows, which were carefully covered with drapes.
Toward midnight, as they were preparing for bed, a rock was hurled through the second story’s wall of windows. Instantly, they knew they had been expecting this sound all day, perhaps from the beginning of the house’s construction. Red grabbed a flashlight and ran outside, finding more than a half-dozen men drunk and laughing. When she began yelling at them, they said they could now offer their services to fix the window -- for money, senora mamasoto, for money. Red continued to shout that they would get no money for destroying property and ran furiously back inside the house, opening the desk drawers in search of the revolver. As her hand clutched it, another rock came crashing through the window. Red bellowed in rage like an animal and ran back outside, still crying out. She shot the revolver over the men’s heads, the shots roared in the black sky, and the men ran off.
Then she came back inside and called the police. Jean only sat in a chair before her, stunned and frightened. Her eyes never left Red’s face and she watched, in terror at her lover’s rage and the havoc it could produce for her heart. “Calm down, honey,” she said over and over again. “You can’t get sick over this.” But Red was possessed by her rage and would not listen.
Finally, she reached a police officer who took her complaint by telephone. When he heard their address, he suddenly became evasive, however, and said that it was a very busy night and no one could come immediately. “We’re under a bloody siege,” Red said in Spanish. The officer’s tone altered artificially, and he said it was not, perhaps, such an emergency, senora. The men were obviously just having some fun. They were drunk. What did she expect from drunken men? Surely, her husband did the same. Red became even more enraged. She said thank god, she had no husband and accused the officer of passivity and making excuses for the men, infantalizing them. She added that even he himself was a child if he did not take responsibility for upholding the laws against reckless, willful destruction of property. This seemed to go straight over the officer’s head and he merely repeated, again, that they were men and she, a woman, as though it was a law that superceded all others. Red shouted that someone had better come or she would speak to his supervisor and every district congressman or woman, at last slamming the phone down.
They waited. Nothing happened. And Red fumed still more. Passivity was far worse than action for her. Jean stared at her in abject terror. Red had never been enraged like this before, even prior to her treatment for blood pressure. Now Jean knew she could lose far more than the house. She could lose Red, everything. She touched, caressed her lover, trying helplessly to calm her. But another spasm of rage convulsed Red, and she leaped up, pounding her fists senselessly on the walls. Jean felt terror so dark, so consuming that everything vanished and she sat still, gasping for breath, thinking of nothing but Red.
The police did not come until the following afternoon. Inspecting the broken windows, the officers smiled and shook their heads in bemused amazement at the drunken revel enjoyed by the men. Red’s eyes and mouth were dark with wrath, and she demanded action that would protect them from further harassment. The officers again smiled, and one uttered a low whistle, as though they were being asked the impossible. Then they requested a donation to some sort of policemen’s benevolent association, a bald request for a bribe. Red ordered them out of the house. “Money!” she shouted. “Goddamned money! Give it to thugs or thieves, your choice.”
Red snapped instantly back into action by calling the lawyer. Jean sat beside her, still terrified, listening to Red’s responses. The lawyer, it seemed, asked a strange series of questions: Who did they know in the community? Anyone from across the bridge? Had they made any donations to the PRI Party? Did they have any relatives who were native Mexicans? Red’s answers were all negative, then she asked, “Are you saying they don’t enforce the laws if you’re not living among the wealthy or have connections who do?” The lawyer suddenly became evasive and replied no, of course not, senora, but he ended the conversation by recommending that they make the requisite donation to the police as a last resort. His tone clearly implied, however, that they should do so immediately; it was their last resort. He reminded them that they were two women alone in the unpatroled area.
Again, Red slammed the phone down and looked for the first time at Jean. Jean instantly seized the initiative and told her that her blood pressure was much, much too high and that they must see a doctor immediately. Red agreed sarcastically, saying yes, the men would not be back until they were drunk again. Her voice was ragged, her eyes glittered as though feverish, and her sarcasm ran like a bull. Jean grabbed her arm and pulled her to the car. But at the last moment, Red shook herself loose and walked, insanely, back into the house. “No, I won’t leave!” she said. “Not for a moment. It’s ours, we worked for it, and they’ve never worked for anything but their damned booze! I’ll shoot those bastards if I have to!” Jean stared at her in terror, hardly hearing her words. In agony, all she registered was that Red was refusing treatment and placing herself in greater danger. The implications were now as thick as a forest and she was lost. She could not think. She merely held Red, and the two women knew nothing but the other’s breathing.
That evening after dark, another rock came crashing through the window. Red ran outside so fast that she forgot the flashlight. She did not shoot over their heads, but with slightly greater precision. In the dark, however, she was far away from her mark repeatedly. “Go away and never come back!” she roared in Spanish. “I’ll kill every one of you.” The men dispersed again. Then she lurched back inside with the gun and fell onto the sofa. “Well, this is the new Wild West,” she said. “You need both a gun and a flashlight, and I forgot the damned flashlight.”
“Thank god!” Jean cried. “Now you listen to me! Your blood pressure is much, much too high, and you’re acting like a madwoman. You could have killed them and yourself – think of that! I won’t have it! You come with me now to the emergency room of the hospital. Those men are gone but regardless of them, I won’t lose you! I don’t want a dead lover, and I don’t want dead Indians. The last thing I care about is this damned glass house!”
“OK. OK,” said Red, suddenly pliable in exhaustion. “You’re right. I don’t want to kill them, and I don’t want to die over a herd of pigs.” They both took a long breath and held eachother, filled with a new purpose. Then they left immediately.
Their wait in the hospital was full of constant din, trucks roaring by outside like a fleet of jets, babies shrieking, five bawling, cursing men who had been knifed or shot, and even chickens and goats running insanely through the door as it opened. “Well, we should have gone to the one over the bridge, as usual,” said Red. “Is this a hospital or a barnyard?”
“It’s Mexico, my love,” Jean said with a smile. “It’s our new barnyard, Mexico.” Red smiled helplessly, and Jean saw that her coloring was somewhat more normal. Then they noticed a baby pig that had wandered in. Carefully and delicately, it defecated in front of the roaring television.
“The only creature with some restraint in all of Mexico,” Red commented. The two women screamed with laughter and horror as the smell reached them and rushed for paper towels from the bathroom to clean it up. No one else seemed to notice. “It’s for Mexico, honey,” Red said. “It’s our donation to its benevolence.”
They were fast asleep when Red was finally called by the doctor. A tiny, ancient, silver-haired Mexican, the only doctor on duty, told Red that her blood pressure was so high she would be dead in a matter of weeks or months if they could not, somehow, bring it down. He confessed that he was uncertain of how this could be done since she was already on medication. The most extreme measures, which must be done in a hospital, were inherently temporary and impractical. He finally decided that he would add another drug, a calcium channel blocker, as well as increasing the doses of her other blood pressure medications. At night, if the noise continued, she must also take a tranquilizer, a sleeping pill or both.
“Well that should make me a sweet little zombie, fast asleep in a half-destroyed house!” Red exclaimed. “When I’m completely demented, I’ll come back here and hang out with the pigs.” The doctor looked at her in bewilderment, and Red realized that she was too tired to speak Spanish. She had been speaking English.
When they left the hospital, they agreed that they wanted nothing but sleep. It was a good sign, Jean decided. She immediately began to argue that they must, after sleeping, return to the U.S. so that a more competent doctor could treat Red. Red agreed but first, she said, she wanted to be treated by a more competent policeman. She marched into the police station and asked to see the two officers who had visited them at the house. “I want to give them,” she said carefully in Spanish, “a donation for the policemen’s benevolent association.” This produced an immediate response, and they were escorted politely to the two officers. They found them drinking beer, eating enchiladas, and listening to loud mariachi music. The air was thick with marijuana smoke. “I see it is another very busy time,” said Red, pulling a wad of money out of her pocket and handing it to the officers. “For your benevolent association and more good times. Now, will you please be benevolent and stop those men from destroying our house?”
“Oh, si, si, senora,” they responded, rising instantly to their feet and even removing their hats politely. “Your donation will help so much with the poor babies.”
“I think I know just what kind of babes he means,” Red said in English to Jean. “To the benevolence of your whorehouse, gentlemen.” The officers handed her a card with another telephone number and told the two women to call immediately if the men returned. Jean and Red left. “We’re better off paying the police than those assholes,” Red concluded. “They’ve got firearms, and they’ll shoot with such benevolence.”
“Why don’t those men have guns, too?” Jean asked.
“I don’t know,” said Red. “They may not have the money to buy them or opportunity to steal them. They probably have knives.” Jean instantly made Red promise that she would return to the U.S. for treatment, that it was the only solution.
“There has to be some way of doing this so that no one gets killed,” she concluded. They returned home and slept, deeply and dreamlessly, for many hours. It was close to midnight when they were awakened by a sound: glass breaking on the second floor.
“’The Wild West’, episode two,” said Red, now rising slowly. “I can feel that new drug. I think I’ll stay calm.” She did not go outside this time but rather, called the police on the new line, telling them in Spanish to come quietly without headlights and catch the men in front of the house. The police now came immediately and pounced on the men like animals in the dark. The men tried to run, but the police shot three of them and tackled two. Then they pistol-whipped them all into near-unconsciousness. The wounded men were simply manacled and dragged into the police van without medical attention. It seemed doubtful any would survive. Two of the men managed to escape, one by jumping into the lake and powerfully swimming underwater. As the last men were dragged away, the two women saw agony and terror on their faces. The sight was horribly shocking. They had never expected such brutality from the police, which they immediately recognized as more criminal than anything the men had done. As the police drove off with their bloody plunder like hunters carrying animal carcasses, the two women sat, stunned and speechless, in the house, which was securely locked.
“I don’t want to see anything like that again as long as I live,” Jean said at last. “Don’t ever call the police.” Red replied by tearing the card to shreds.
“I had no idea they would do that…” Red felt nothing but shock and compassion. “I’m so sorry, honey.”
“What have we done?” asked Jean sadly. “Everyone is scared stiff of the police down here. I can sure see why.”
“What can’t money buy here? I actually paid to have them tortured and killed.”
“How can this be happening? How can they do that?”
“The men are from the wrong side of the bridge. Apparently, that’s how and why,” said Red in exhaustion.
“Oh my god,” said Jean in wonder. “And we actually chose to live here. I want out! I just want out of here.”
“Not tonight, honey,” said Red. “Let’s just get some sleep. We need it.”
“God, we need it! I could lose consciousness forever and not care a bit.”
They lay in bed in the dark, holding eachother, stroking, kissing, trying to find the center again, the love, intimacy, trust, that was nowhere. How utterly foolish they were, they thought, and perhaps said it. They took off their clothing and continued touching, holding, throwing back, again, the dark. Then they made love uncontrollably as they had when they were young, explosively, with the violence of love when all is lost. Again and again, Jean found her legs over Red’s shoulders, having orgasms. Until the morning light, they coupled: they could not stop. The fear and anger, the frustration, were all released; for here, now, Jean could trust Red again. She could trust her to live, to give and take pleasure, inspite of all they had lost in this brutal, impossible place, there was the love, always that, the feel and surface of the body, naked, the skin purely, to be touched and caressed and to respond, an explosion of love uncontained until the dark, the unconsciousness, though it became day. They were unconscious, sleeping, lovers, that forever, if nothing else, lovers.
They slept deeply, lovingly, in the bright sunlight and awoke again at night, their life cycles now reversed. Immediately, they kissed and smiled, felt relaxed. “I think my blood pressure went down,” Red said.
“That’s good to hear,” Jean said. They touched eachother’s faces in silence and thought that the tumult was, perhaps, at bay. They had blotted it out with love. They lay together in the dark until they heard the inevitable sound of windows breaking on the second story.
“Oh, my god,” said Red. “They saw what happened to their cronies, and they came back for more. I don’t believe it!”
“Get the gun and the flashlight,” Jean said. “It could be worse now.” Without turning on the lights, they found the gun and the flashlight. They were still naked and didn’t even think of clothes. Looking outside, they saw that two men stood boldly in front of the house. Jean saw that strange look again in their eyes, as though it lived there and nothing else existed. Even in the dark, it was there, fluid, fluent, changing. It was part of the dark. It was the dark.
Red shot the gun over their heads again but aimed closer. The men twitched at the roar, then just stood there, dark, panting, awful with that intoxicated, lost energy in their glittering eyes. “They have no idea what they’re doing,” Jean said. “They’re just waiting to be killed.”
“Turkeys waiting to be strangled on Thanksgiving,” said Red. “’The Wild West’, episode three. We’re the lesbians, they’re the Indians. Let’s shoot.”
“Now just you wait a minute! We have other choices here. We don’t have to play this game,” Jean said. “We don’t have to kill Indians. We can just leave. You need to go to the U.S. anyway.”
“I won’t give up, dammit!” Red said. “I won’t just sit back and let them take what’s mine.”
“You won’t? Even when it makes you kill Indians, when it leaves you dead of a heart attack? You still won’t leave?”
“No, I won’t give it up. I’m just not a little girl who lets the big bad man take my house away from me! Dammit, I won’t!”
“Oh god,” said Jean. “I don’t think I can leave you alone here with them. If you won’t leave, I can’t. Oh god…” she nearly sobbed.
“Welcome to ‘The Wild West’. Take the gun.”
“Why?” Jean asked, terrified.
“I might not always be here. You need target practice. Shoot.”
“I won’t kill an Indian! I’ll stay with you but by god, I won’t kill.”
“So just aim a little closer, then miss. That’s what I’ve been doing.” Jean took the gun uncertainly and tried to aim it close to one man’s ear. It would roar deafeningly. Maybe he’d finally run. She fired; the gun roared. The man just twitched and stood still like an animal to be slaughtered, panting and sweating, impossible.
“Don’t you see?” Jean said. “They don’t even want to live. It doesn’t matter whether we shoot them or not. They’ll just be there, eyes in a slaughterhouse.”
“Look. Here’s what we know. One, we’re not calling the police. Two, they don’t care whether they live or die. So, threaten them with a fate worse than death. Aim closer to the testicles. That should be good for something. They can’t lose those cajones.”
“I don’t believe this is happening. I must still be asleep. I know perfectly well that I didn’t come to Mexico to shoot Indians. In the ear or the testicles.”
“Now we deal with what is. Of course, we didn’t come here for that, but that’s what we found. Do you want those police back here? You’ll puke your guts out. You. Shoot now. You do it.”
“Oh god,” Jean said and aimed to miss. The bullet landed in the ground between one man’s legs. The two men suddenly clenched up in terror like cloth puppets and ran. Jean and Red lay on the floor in the darkness in silence. “It worked,” said Jean.
“You bet it did.”
“But now we’ve escalated. And now they know we don’t want to kill them, and we won’t call the police. That will make them escalate, too. Just what do you think you’re going to do about that?”
And then they talked, talked wearily, endlessly, and a bit insanely for hours, just lying on the floor in the dark. Over and over, they asked the same questions: why can’t we leave? Why not? Is it better to kill Indians? But we won’t kill them! We’ll just hold out longer. But will it work? And what about the consequences of its not working? Everyone wants to survive: you just push the right buttons. Leave now! Just leave for godssake! I’m not leaving this place to that slime! But why us? We were good to them. They’ve forgotten already. But why, why us, why anyone? Because we have money. Because we’re foreigners. Because we don’t like killing people. Because we can’t shoot worth a shit. Because.
And below, beneath, it came again and again to Jean. Because we’re women and they’re men. Women who won’t do what they want. Because we’re lesbians. Because it’s me. Because I’ve never wanted a man enough to take him joyously, tenderly between my legs the way I take Red, the way she takes me. And I already want her. I want her to blot it out now and make love to me. Love me. Now.
Jean touched Red again softly, tenderly. The two women said nothing and caressed one another in the dark. Again, they made love uncontrollably and pushed back the night. Until it would come again. What was it now but flesh, skin, joy, and then the dark, the men, a gun, roaring? “Let’s just sleep now,” Jean whispered, “until it starts again.” For surely, surely, it would start again. Sleep in the light, warm with love, shoot in the dark, chaotic, senseless, inevitable, now unconscious, asleep.
They awoke in bed, still naked in eachother’s arms, the gun lying on one side of the bed, the flashlight on the other. They looked at eachother and knew they had slept deeply and well. “It’s starting to agree with you,” said Red. “You look wonderful.”
“No, it doesn’t agree. I’ve just given up. I can’t get you out of here, and I can’t leave you alone here.”
“You shouldn’t. The sex is just too good to leave.”
“That’s the odd part. I haven’t figured that out yet. We should be half dead with anxiety.”
“You’re lowering my blood pressure. I thank your goddess-like sexual power for restoring my health.”
“Let’s eat,” said Jean. Without turning on the lights, for it was dark now, they ate and drank, touched and talked. Again, they never thought of putting clothes on but walked about, naked. What was it now but sleep, sex and shooting? They didn’t even bother to observe that everyone had gone crazy, themselves included. It was too obvious.
“Well, are we so perverse that we will call the police?” asked Red.
“No, no,” said Jean. “We’d have to be foaming at the mouth. We’re quieter madwomen than that.”
“Except when we shoot the gun, of course,”
“Excepting that.”
“Let me say,” said Red, “that I’ve never enjoyed our endlessly orgasmic bodies more in my life. I think I love you like a bull.”
“Good. You’ve been acting like a bull since this thing started. I like the tender, sexy bull better than the mad one with the high blood pressure. You can break into my chinashop anytime. You’re gorgeous. You’re unearthly. I’ve never wanted you this much.”
“You’re the St. Teresa of orgasms.”
“You, too.”
“Two of them! Two roman candles going off in the center of Mexico!” They laughed uproariously. “Is this what we came to Mexico for?”
“Don’t even try, my love, to make sense of this. It will never make sense. We were librarians for 30 years. We did not come to Mexico to shoot Indians, have spectacular sex and stop wearing clothes.”
“Apparently, we had no idea what we were doing.”
Silently, they went to the second story, gun and flashlight in hand, to assess the damage. Nearly the entire wall lay in shards about its wooden frame. Cold, hard, glittering pieces of glass flashed fiercely over the floor. There was nothing left for the men to destroy. “This looks like a vomit of diamonds from a dragon’s maw,” said Red.
“Is that what it looks like? It’s our dream in a million pieces. What are they going to come up with next? Do you think they’ll bring fire to burn us out? Fire’s cheap enough.”
“Then we walk out shooting, and they don’t get the house.”
“Then what’s next?”
“I don’t know. I just know it’s happening with the most wonderful woman in the world.” They kissed hungrily, their bodies pressed together.
“We shouldn’t get started yet,” Jean said, breathless. “We can’t shoot and make love at the same time.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. With discipline, we could.”
“They’ll be here any moment. Let’s get out of the ruins.” They walked back downstairs and lay on the floor in the dark. Some indefinable time later, a huge crashing roar boomed straight through the door. The two women looked at the door in shock.
“They’ve got an ax,” Red roared. “They’re coming through!” She held the gun firmly and pointed straight for the door. The two women now crouched behind the livingroom couch. They did not shine the flashlight. Not yet. They waited.
“If they come through, I’ll kill them,” said Red. “I have to now. I’m so sorry, baby.” Jean waited, stiff with horror, clenching Red’s arm with her hand. Even in the dark, she could see that Red's rage had returned in full force. Her face and lips were nearly black in the dark. I should have made her go back with me to the States, Jean thought. I should have been stronger. I should have resisted her. I should never have let it go this far. We could have gotten away with our lives and not killed anyone. Jean didn’t even look at the door. She watched Red’s face in terror. The whole world was a door crashing, bursting open under the force of an ax.
But, incredibly, Red relaxed and leaned back on the floor, the gun falling to her side. In horror, Jean saw that she was not breathing, and her face was ashen in the dim light. No, no! she thought. She tried to give her air, mouth-to-mouth, all the while the door, the door! Now she could hear it cracking, bursting, falling to pieces, done, finished, and so was Red. Without a thought, she reached for the gun.
Two massive, dark men grunted, stumbled into the doorway, covered with dust and dirt, stinking like animals. The smell of alcohol and sweat was instantly all over the room as they lurched blindly, stupidly into the space, the sacred space they had been denied and now conquered with their brutality, stupidity, reeking their musk. One was very young, she saw, the other much older, with great crevices and scars on his face. Neither were men who had worked on the house. They were strangers. They both sweated profusely and looked insane, demented, ooze pouring off their bodies and faces. Out of the dark…her thoughts no longer completed themselves.
One carried a knife, one an ax. On one man’s face, the lips pealed back horribly in a demented smirk, and he whispered in Spanish, “Mamasotos, where are you? We know you are here. We will find you.” His voice was a whispering sing-song, softly wheedling its awful words. From the floor, they looked like immense, raging black bulls that had come, dripping, from Hell, their minds and hearts dissolved in fire. Lurching, stumbling, a nightmare, they came. “We have come to give you pleasure, mamasotos, and take your money and your souls. Beautiful, beautiful mamasotos,” the Indian whispered sing-song.
“Shut up, you idiot,” the older man said; though he looked every bit as demented. They were so drunk; they could barely stand or walk. They stumbled; they blundered; yet, the young man who whispered idiotically looked quite dexterous with his knife. He whipped it around himself lovingly as though it were alive, a graceful, gentle motion.
“And I will turn you into mamasitas, red ones, all bloody, lovely to the touch; and I will touch you harshly, all I want to, mamasitas."
Jean aimed the gun carefully, yet a flood of thought, of agony, of horror stopped her. At once: Red was dead, and all was lost. What did anything matter? “Mamasotos, mamasitas,” whispered the Indian in his singsong, insane.
Then a memory, a fierce one, full of love and rage, filled Jean. She felt, again, that strong, firm hand cover hers as it had so long ago, pull the trigger, blaze a hole in the dark, turn a man into a corpse. The other man screamed, dropped the ax and ran out the door.
Jean moved to Red and again touched her face. It was already cold, for Red had died when the gun fell out of her hand. “My darling, my love,” she whispered with unspeakable tenderness, then rose to look at the dead man’s face. His mouth was open in surprise, his eyes utterly blank. For a moment, she envied him. Now he was blank, unfeeling, gray, gone from this awful world.
She returned to her lover and caressed her again and again; kissed her cheeks, throat, hands, thighs, at last held her in her arms, wordless, and fell into the dark herself. There was a sound, a low moaning, constantly uttered over them, and later she recognized that it came from her own throat.
Now they were all dead, all gone. It was over. It’s over, my darling. Now you can stay here. You’re free, she thought, insanely. Everyone’s dead now. It’s over. Such thoughts she had, over and over, until first light broke upon her. Her eyes opened upon that endless garden of beauty. Different insects now, different birds uttered rhythmic cries, always a swelling rush of sound. She listened for the wailing one she had heard before. It was everywhere at once, wailing, wailing the notes one must helplessly follow, so sweet, exquisite, so painful, ceaseless.
The soft light streaked gently, horribly, oozing blood spilling outward, wordless and inevitable, across the room. The room held the horrible light. It could not refuse. She looked up and knew she was back in the old, small, unspeakably terrible world. She was alive, a living horror. The only one left. The one who fired the gun. If she could, she would push back the day, the light, and be a creature of the dark, dripping and stinking the blackness, like the men who had axed through the door.
She walked, naked, the gun in her hand, outside and looked at the lake. What a senseless, foolish, insane profusion of beauty it was. The wind stirred over her naked skin and blew her hair. And now they, the beautiful things, were all beginning again in their innocence, their insanity. How awful was this light and how awful, too, the beauty it illuminated. So little sense, justice, compassion, did it have. It did not strive to be better. It just was: beautiful, haunting, touching the multitudes of her being as though she were a stringed instrument. The world was just a young creature, thoughtlessly moving its gorgeous limbs, rushing, galloping, becoming the soft, gentle Mexican light that had utterly deluded them all. Beneath it, she was alone, destroyed, naked with a gun.
Then an unspoken purpose stirred within her. Not knowing why, she bent over Red and placed the gun in her hand, bending her finger carefully around the trigger, then let the gun rest over her stomach. It was what Red would have wanted. Again, the low, moaning sound escaped her, and she held her lover to her breast and kissed her one last time. Red was ice-cold, already becoming someone else. This meant she could leave. The spell was broken.
Then it all began moving much faster, whatever it was. A clock was now ticking, ticking in her head, however it happened. She dressed, packed a few things and got into the car. Helplessly, she turned for one moment to look back at the house with its demolished second story and, yet, its soaring, majestic beauty. Its immense, foolish, senseless, majestic beauty beneath the inevitable light. How riotous, burgeoning, alive and mad that beauty was. The house rearing up, majestic and terrible, was now a tomb, a headstone, to the grave holding her lover’s body and that of the Indian who had desired nothing more than the pleasure of killing her.
The engine fired, and she drove for the border. By early afternoon, she was there, smiling and waving her American passport, passing effortlessly over the border and back in the States, no better, no worse, than Mexico, for where, after all, were women safe from men? Yet, it was farther, oh yes, much farther away from that hauntingly beautiful house where her lover’s life had ended, and she had killed an Indian.
Then it went still faster. She took a cheap motel room in Southern California, lay on the edge of a flimsy, pink bed, and lost consciousness for sixteen hours. She woke in a frenzy of hunger and thirst, saw the hazy-gray light of Southern California and its blank-buzzing, crisscrossing, game-like terrain; artificially imposed on no more than a desert. It was every bit as ugly and tawdry as it looked: this judgement gave her satisfaction. Then slaking the thirst and hunger in a diner, she was back on the road north, full of ocean, palms, sand and more light reflecting on waves to the point of a knife, until a dark fog invaded the road. It was night in Big Sur. Snaky-white fingers of fog beckoned her over the cliffs, yet she drove on and on.
Until she came through my doorway, hardly looking about her, not even seeing the dog, cat, snake, rat, fish and lizard, though they all eyed her. She came to me, to the room that was taken for granted, for it completed the symmetry; the space of healing and gentleness that had to be there. Then slowly, slowly, the feelings poured out, the tales we tell one another, those coarse, rough things came forth; crushed and wounded, halting, stumbling, understood in a flood, then incomprehensibly strange, eerie, bizarre and brutal. It was a story like that.
Later, I looked about the room where she would be staying in the long days ahead. It was simple, just a bed, a chest of drawers, not much on the walls, no memories abounding, a place no dream ever made. I judged it sufficient for her to recover, with luck. I was there, in my small wooden house in San Francisco behind the overgrown garden. I’m no dreamer, and I don’t travel for long periods. I’ll always be here, as long as I breathe and write poetry, to keep the room open. She’ll be here for some time. Luck was with us, though. She made it out of there and all the way here, the longest distance she’d ever crossed in all her worldly travels. Yes, it was enough, that elusive quantity without which, we’d have nothing but beauty and dark.