#13

and to be honest, for all my tragic posing, i hardly even think about it anymore. i'm not even sure i remember being passionately trapped here. there are echoes, like the night after a good sleep when you remember what you were so pissed off about the night before. sometimes i remember that i used to be all worked up about being trapped here, inside my body, locked out of heaven.

now i'm just bored.

#12

generally, the less said about the desert the better. deserts are not to be enjoyed during the day, not even in the fall, when "liveable" is a reasonable descriptor. suffice it to say that i remember something about people eating prickly pear pads, that you can scrape spines off with a flat rock, and that shade is your friend.

but the shack was a surprise. who lives in a place like this? the dog and the shotgun made sense, it was the shack itself i couldn't quite get over. are there really hermits? it didn't help that we didn't share a language. that was unfortunate. and i couldn't really figure out what it was that he was speaking-- not even a language family: nothing. however, for a hermit he was surprisingly reasonable. i guess that while you may have left society for a reason, after a while you sort of get over it. and he must have been at least sixty, which tends to mellow you out.

trust really should have been one of my issues, but as thirsty as i was i kind of only has that one issue. water was a universal language and after rather more than my share of his sitting on the little patch of hardened dirt that served as his porch i was able to take stock of my new world. the dog, it turns out, was also fairly old and arthritic and, strangely, fat. i scratched her belly, which she rolled up at me, lolling her tongue. this, too, is a universal language. we smiled at each other and watched the afternoon sun slide down the sky.

#11

getting warmer. and lighter. and boring. very hard to tell how long this is going to go on, but easier to see. and there's a choice to make-- lines heading out into the distance, to further along the range, way off in the distance, across a broad, flat, yellow plain with almost exactly nothing on it. and, obliquely, they cross a road-- paved, two lanes across, the central paint well-faded from years and years of sun. little cracks. waves of dust across the road, like foam on a shore.

water very much on my mind at this point.

hard to figure out which one to follow, but i'm sticking with the power lines. more likely to see someone on the road, but people who are looking for me are likely to use roads to do it, so i just can't shake the feeling that it's suicide to try.

and it hardly matters. they don't quite meet at the far side, at the mountain. and i'm not marching across that plain like an idiot. there's no shade, just an oven with the sun on top pointing straight at me. follow the curve of the range, stay in the shade. can't be more than a day's walk. and something around here has to store water. i mean, it's a desert. nothing lives without water. don't know if any of them are edible, but i bet i can squeeze some of the cactuses and at least wet my shirt. that's got to be worth something.

#10

it's hard to be fast and silent. and it's harder to do that when you can't see a @#$^ing thing. and when there's blood in your head and you're trying to breathe quietly but move a lot of air. but there are shadows, and shadows are good. and they can hear each other, and are closer to each other than to me, so maybe that's louder. and they're shouting, which makes them easier to count: four. all men. heavy, too, which should work to my advantage, at least until they catch me. no thinking like that now, no thinking about catching and shacks and the smell of rusted metal that mixes with the smell of hot excrement and sweat. and blood. and the hood over your head.
shake it off.
focus on the shadows, the starlight, the scuttling of little desert things as you float past, trying not to break off twigs, trying not to brush against the bushes, trying not to let anything move on your wake. just focus on the breathing, long, deep breaths, as quiet as you can-- running low against the ground, eyes on the ground ahead, ears on the feet behind you.
distance. they have to look; i don't. i think i'm getting distance. hard to tell. also hard to lose somebody if you're running in a straight line. they've got to have figured out that i'm heading to the mountains. there is no way to be sure how many of them there are. hard to figure out if the road went through this range at some point, but i don't think so.

songs run through your mind at the stupidest times. i start timing my feet to genesis. i can't dance. i can't talk. only thing about me is the way that i walk. breathing gets regular, too. rocks approaching. more cover, advantage: me. quickly zagging behind a set, working from them to the first crag. scree. hard to get purchase, but deep. narrow. pick the left side, steep but managable. dusty, loose soil. scrabbling up further, just beneath the ridge.

listen.

slower footsteps, farther away. searching.

further up the side, just beneath the ridge, lots of shadow on this side. rocks. irregular. harder to pick out shapes. getting fairly irregular up here, and, to be honest, fairly steep. hands and feet now, scrabbling. they call it scrabbling. i forget what number they put on a trail when you're scrabbling.

backing into a slot, rock overhead-- perfect. just one turn, long listen. nothing. which is kind of even scarier than something. nothing still. strangely reluctant to leave. flop sweat forming, rivulets and dust. sticky shirt, little hairs sticking on the back of my neck. wipe my face on my scarf. not a bad place to stay, but would rather get to the other side of the mountains first, before the legs lock up, before the mind starts to slow, to tell me that it's okay to sleep. preposterous.

long look up ahead. crag continues as far as the eye can see, which, truth me told, is not very far at all. crag and a bit of sky, but that's it.

footsteps, suddenly. above. dust, sliding onto my head. sneeze aversion suddenly top priority. but they're passing, off to the right-- uphill. maybe best to stay here for a very very long time.

too long.

grey predawn. hands on dirt and two extremely silent prayers delivered shivvering against the mist. i ask for forgiveness for the postures i'm not about to do. the only parts that come to mine at the moment are the braided rope, the braided rope again. in my mind, i exclude the gunmen from the forgiveness i'm begging for all of us, and am immediately ashamed. somehow i've got it all wrong again.

my body is a series of warning lights, all red. creaking out of my crouch and extending into the silence, slowly up the crag. far too light out. can't believe it's so bright out.

eagle up there. at least i think it's an eagle. or maybe a hawk. never been good at those things. circling in a thermal. wonder what that means. i think it means we're near a mountain, which i already knew.

looking back, i can just make out the road, across the valley, weaving in and out of the mountain range as it turns south. nobody on it now. not even dust trails. nothing. am i dead? no wait, there was the bird. can't be dead if there's a bird, that would be crazy.

and thirsty. not hungry, just really thirsty. probably will end up hungry once i get something to drink, which will be when exactly? which reminds me to look for towns on the other side of the range. someone has to live out here. people live everywhere. there has to be someone out there.

are those power lines?

power lines!

just past the crack, over on the other set of little hills over there-- power lines! higher up so i can see. wind farm. hard to make it all out, fading into the grey nothing currently creating a little bubble of reality with squishy, impenetrable borders, receeding into the distance, retreating in the moving light, now taking on an orange tinge, like being on fire.

maybe it's the dehydration talking now.

heading downward now. cutting across a small valley, a gap between the little rows of hills-- a shortcut: the fastest way to the power lines leading away from the wind farm. leading to people, to a town.

#9

i looked back. i shouldn't have, but you can't help it. there were four of them, i think, but i couldn't hear anything-- just the roar of the freeway, little scraping sounds from the brush in the wind.

slowly, i got to my feet, crouching behind the berm, staying well below the headlights. something tickled down the side of my head-- sticky-- taste it: blood. blood and dirt. no idea where i am.
had to be past eleven, but beyond that it's hard to say. farther from the road, there were stars, millions of them, but only a sliver of the moon. footsteps.

crouch. it's instinctive. everything freezes when it senses danger, when it hears footsteps closing in. not enough brush cover, but at least there's some. at least i still have my glasses. there are a lot of little favors tonight.

regular. not stuttering, not darting-- regular. they know where they're going. one set in front, but it sounds like there are more behind. hard to count the faraway ones.
tiny scuttling noises-- night creatures, at home. strange to think that everything everywhere else is normal.

somewhere someone is eating a sandwich and i'm running for my life. so dramatic tonight here in my head. i hit it on something. maybe that's why nothing is making any sense. it had something to do with books, but that doesn't make any sense at all, and frankly right now all the things that don't make sense aren't helping. breathing quietly is helping-- how quietly can you breathe?

snapping into focus, it's been too long out of focus-- not listening. listen again; focus. the steps are still regular, as fast as they were before, or as slow-- regular and moving kind of diagonally, maybe parallel to the road. crunching, like on gravel or sand. lights swinging along the turn-- hard to make out the terrain ahead in the lights. have to stay out of them anyway. follow the swing-- high brush ahead: water. i can follow the water. somehow, it seems like there could be people along the water and most people are good; people are what i want. night won't last forever-- one person in a bright, hot desert is obvious; one person in a town is invisible.

the steps are fading somewhat. can just make out the edge of the light, just make out where the curve swings away. light, dark. wait. light dark. there-- off to the right. slowly, silent is better than, well, not silent. hard not to crunch against the dirt. sharp twinge in the right ankle. didn't realize that before. pushing against the inside of the boot a little; swelling. how bad will that get? still walk okay, though.

loud animal noise. startle. involuntary yip. horrible to do that. have to keep quiet. freeze for about a million seconds before it's quiet and i feel alone again, but there's no real knowing that. grey against the dark, and water noises. small water noises. a trickle, really, but water.

reach down to put my hand in the water to try to tell the direction. left. right into the sweep of the lights. just like jumping rope-- sweep, dark. sweep, dark. follow the sweep.

too far. freeze. horrible, horrible wash of light. blind, eyes closed, waiting for the wash of red against the retina to fade, fade.

shouting.

not very far away.

male voices, two or three. uphill, and not far enough away.

cold sweat. unable to stop. running again. headlong, splashing along the rocks. very slippery, very uncertain. horrible, horrible idea. struggling for purchase against the far side, pushing through the rim of brush, straight away from the road, perpendicular, logical. this is the fastest i can go the farthest. give up on the stream. mountains against the horizon; there has to be a place, a crack in the mountains, a way through, a way out.

#8

so i'm on an easy rotation, which is kind of hard for me. i'm not a big fan of me, frankly, and it's kind of hard to figure out why. i mean, if i met me at a party, i think we'd hit it off. i think we'd be friends. i think i'd call me if i were having an off day just to hear what i had to say-- i'd say something comforting ad it would sit just right. i even think that if i were stuck in an elevator or on a long car trip with me i'd have a good time. but it's been a very, very long car trip-- years and years and years of me droning the most boring uncensored crap in my own ear and i'm just sick of me. and on an easy rotation, i've got nothing to do but ruminate and i'm driving me crazy.

and it doesn't help that the people i'm on with bring up my issues. like i was looking at the rotation schedule and my heart just sank. all the party people were on last month. i'm on with, to be fair, one of the party people, a guy i hardly know, a guy who's not even in our class who's rotating with us for shadowy/scary/remediation-style reasons, and two people who are like ghosts to me.

one of them is the only person in our class with a kid, and that kid is all she needs in the world. her whole world is her daughter and nothing else matters, which is sweet. but i'm trying to figure out if my life without children has any meaning at all, and i look at her and think no.

and then there's the born again christian guy. the really wound up born again christian guy who never goes to any of our parties because he has something planned with his church group every single night for infinity. and the thing is that even though now i'm a pagan who's going to hell i used to be him until some guy divorced me and i ended up excommunicated from the only place that will ever really feel like home. i used to be him. half a lifetime ago i used to do everything with my church group and no one else in the world mattered. and there he is, sitting across the room wrapped up in his church van going straight to heaven and here i am tugging at my hijab, putting off noon prayer again.

#7

the house at the end of the block is evil. there are several ways you can tell. one is the lawn. the grass, while always quite short, has overgrown itself in large patches, leaving matted grey areas where the stolons cross but no leaves emerge. the other is the house color, which is grey-- a color which reveals nothing. then there is the path to the front door, which is made of cement rectangles almost the size and shape of the segments of sidewalk in front of the house. the windows are each covered with blinds, each the same grey color as the outside of the house. and the backyard fence is chain link covered with tarp which flaps back at the joins to reveal bare ground broken up into small heaps and sparsely strewn with unidentifiable house detritus-- part of a sink, maybe?, a paint bucket?... at the edge of the yard is an outbuilding of some sort-- made of plywood, pressed up against the chain link fence, windowless.
across the alleyway, there is a pump station-- largely brick, largely abandoned. asphalt, heaped at the corners and ringed with weeds, laps at the edge of the building, hemmed in by an answering chain link fence. beyond this is the river, a dry riverbed this time of year with a trickle of a creek in it, lavished with strange migratory birds, patrolled endlessly by joggers and dog walkers like me.
i peer through the chinks in the tarp, trying to work out the objects in the back yard, trying to figure out where the side yard goes, all the time imagining the headlines, ten years from now, the police tape and the news crews and the coroner's van loading up the bodies from the shallow graves in that horrible back yard, the firemen draping blankets on the survivors and herding them into waiting ambulances, the neighbors huddled on the sidewalk trying to explain how they never knew, never suspected.

#6

i've never really been able to talk about being dead. words kind of stop at the threshold. i think that's important. i think it's because if i could talk about it i would be a prophet and i am not a prophet. my life is not the sort of road map you'd want to give to people who are trying to figure out how to be a person; it's more of a counterexample full of cul de sacs and wastelands and places better not discussed. let's leave it at that.

so when i tell you that i preferred being dead, that i was happier there than here, will you understand that there is no need to call the cops? i'm not telling you i'm planning to off myself or anything. that would be rude. i am here for a reason, i suppose, just like you are. and i can accept that the reason can be secret and i can accept that the reason can be small and i can accept that the reason can be a puzzle i don't ever solve. but it is hard to accept that i am still here.

the world is a prison to the believer. words like this are the reason i am muslim.

when you come back from something like that, when you've been dead and you can't explain where you were or what you felt and then you're slapped back into the world like a fish flapping on the deck of a boat let me tell you you go looking for other people, anyone who understands what you're feeling without you having to reach into yourself and pull out another tangle of words that sound stupider and stupider each time you say them-- like when you hand a firstborn child into the arms of its mother who thought she knew what love was when the child was in her belly but as she sees her baby for the first time she realizes that she had no idea what love was, but that is a person and this said be and made the universe, and like the universe were made of exploding white hot suns full of that love

and by that point you just sound like a crazy person. and everyone is backing away from the crazy person.

so you stop trying to tell people what it was like to be dead. because you're not a prophet. and you sound like a crazy person. God who loves you with the intensity of a universe full of expoding suns has placed a hand over your mouth and filled it with crazy so you can't tell anyone because you are no prophet. so you try to accept this and move on.

but prayer is hard. prayer is very, very hard. because you and God are not really getting along lately. praying feels like banging your fist against a door that won't open. it feels like shouting at a waterfall, like your mind trying to convince itself that the blackness of the sky is endless but seeing only blackness, only flat, only a nothing that is far too small for all that everything.

and God sends you butterflies and cool breezes and a cricket to sing to you while you're typing and you put these things in one hand and heaven in the other and it is impossible to draw the conclusion that they in any way balance one another out. so you pray, dutifully. you press your head against the ground and fill it with arabic and try not to hope that God will touch you in your prayer, will hold you in his everything, will knock the breath out of you and finally let you see Him again.

you can tell yourself that God is everywhere but it is the night sky again-- you know it is true but it can not and will not scrunch all that truth into your tiny, tiny mind.

#3

now i don't want you to get the idea that i'm the kind of person who goes to plays. here's the deal-- i'm the kind of person who wants to be the kind of person who goes to plays.

i used to have this nurse (when i was sick, but there's another story) who always went to plays. she and her friends would just pick them out of the newspaper and go. i don't remember much about them, other than that they were a little hit and miss, as you'd expect given that strategy. the only one i remember anything about is the one where they got all the props and costumes and things from the 99c store. who can resist?

so i kept telling myself that i was going to go, i was going to go, i was going to start going to plays, i was going to become the kind of person who goes to plays...

this was the first one.

it took weeks to pick the show and a couple of days to convince myself that i was really going to go. but we plan and we plan and God is the best of planners. i don't know why, will never know why, but my car just laid down and bled to death today and here i am with my cats and my pizza and a glass of iced tea half an hour too late to even think of going.

but my husband--kept updated at nanosecond intervals throughout my awful, awful day-- promised that tomorrow we'll try again.

#2

pulling into court today i noticed a gas smell which was emanating from a line trailing behind my car and ending in a puddle under the engine which, thankfully, wasn't on fire (yet...) so it is fair to say i was preoccupied. did i mention i had theater tickets?

i'd gotten the call a little over an hour ago, which is apparently fair by the rules of the court. last time i was in court, i asked the judge to explain what "on call" meant on my subpoena and she told me that i had a choice: either sit in the hallway while they go through jury selection and every witness before me every day until my turn came or agree to show up at court all scrubbed and ready to go an hour after getting a call from the DA. not a great deal but rather better than the alternative. hard to hold down a job under such circumstances, especially now that i've left the coroner's office, now that i'm starting over, but it beats the alternative.

the trick is the iPod. mine's full of audiobooks, which is a great way to pass the time in the hallway, avoiding the jurors (whom i'm not supposed to talk to at all and, believe me, it's very, very hard for me to just shut up for any amount of time). so iPod it is.

the other trick is the hijab. (hides the headphones pretty well). also throws people off. not that that's why i wear it. you know why i wear it; i don't have to tell you, right? i mean sometimes i feel like everybody is staring at me but i don't think that's true at all. i think they take one glance, think "muslim woman", add a whole bunch of assumptions (can i speak english? what war-ravaged country am i from anyway? have i heard of jesus?, and would i mind accepting him as my personal lord and savior?) and move on.

which brings me to enterprise rent a car.

so after two hours on the stand during which i swear that woman was going to make me explain each and every photograph taken of this poor dead woman ever taken (and, as a murder victim, there were slews of them) and i was--no kidding, folks-- on number 49 before we broke for the day with the worst news i could ever recieve-- be here tomorrow at 10AM-- i head back to the leaking wreck that was until today a perfectly reliable car (i think maybe it has cancer) to call triple a. i kept having to rewind the nine, my court-themed audiobook for the day, as my mind kept wandering along the general them of "today really sucks" but as we pulled into the enormous dealership that somehow wasn't closed for the day already and the nice man pointed me to the enterprise rent a car right there in the next building things started looking up.

the rent a car lady was up to her armpits in us and having none of our charm, humor, patience... she was a blur of clear clipboards and funky/chunky earrings and we were huddled masses yearning for cheap, scuffed up compacts. imagine how long it took for me to spill my rotten lousy wreck of a day to the pleasant-looking woman my age ahead of me in line. finally getting around to caring who she was and what her life was life, i got a whisper back that she was a cop. we do a little cop bonding (my dad was a criminalist! i used to work for the coroner! we're all on the same side...) and i get a couple of really good tips on plays.

but the cars were almost ready and my new best friend and i drove off into our respective lives.

#1

so the first thing i noticed about court was how bored everyone is. after the google map treasure hunt to find the place, after the waiting for the metal detector, after the panicky scramble to figure out what floor the courtroom is on, after the elevator ride where you're trying to figure out who are the jurors, who are the secretaries, who are the families you arrive in the hushed, wood-paneled space where everyone knows what they're doing but you.

it took me forever to figure out that the woman with the big desk was the judge's secretary and even longer to figure out that if you're getting asked a bunch of there-is-no-way-to-answer-this-question questions you just look up at the judge and tell him "there is no way to answer that question" and he will make the lawyer ask you something that makes sense. and after a while you start to hope that the lawyers are smart, that the cross examination is thorough, that things get clearer and clearer for the jury as you go, but i've only seen that once before.

the jury are fun to talk to. they're attentive, particularly to the CSI-style background information you have to teach them in order to make your point-- gunshot residue, soot and stippling, time of death... they eat that stuff up.

the other thing it took a while to get used to was the absence of people who don't work there. i mean, there are all the jurors, there's the bailiff and the judge and the defendant and the prosecutor and the defence, a witness or two milling around in the hallway and, most of the time, no one else. well, almost no one. sometimes there are women; usually two. i think they're the mothers-- the mother of the defendant and the mother of the victim. (i'm a coroner-- or at least i used to be, more on that later-- so these are all murders...)

generally i'm called by the prosecution; usually so that they can put up pictures of the decedent (the dead person, the victim) and make the mom cry. usually, the cause of death is not at issue; there's a bullet hole in the guy, a bullet in the guy, a bunch of people who saw him get shot, a big pool of blood on the ground... most people can put that together. almost never are they trying to tell me that somehow i screwed up the autopsy, that they somehow know people's insides better than i do or what happens to them after they die better than me or how to tell how sick they were or how long they were going to live. these are never the questions.

when there are questions, real questions, things that really would make a difference, they tend to sit in the category of unknowable, like what was she thinking as she died? or why didn't she hit him back? or the more concrete issues such as when exactly did she die (because the science behind figuring that out is so imprecise that the only true answer is i can't narrow it down any more than i already did).

i always want to tell them that death is a mystery. i always want to tell them that i do natural deaths, too, and that when you open them up there are usually at least three (or four or five) things wrong with the body that in and of themselves could have killed the decedent and that i'll never really know which one pushed him over the edge. or that i've taken care of living people who are sicker than some of the dead people i've seen and i've dissected people who died naturally who were far less sick than the body in front of me. i always want to tell them that death is one of those things that if you look harder at it it makes less sense.

but i sit up straight in the witness chair, pull the microphone close so they can hear me, spell every medical word i say and slide the mystery back behind me. they don't need to know.