twig nearly poked me in the eye, but I swerved in time. I listened hard for baby sounds, then for any sounds at all over my erratic footsteps and the party noise filtering in through the trees. That woman was still singing.
“Baby,” I whispered, “oh please.”
I began to run, twigs lashing my arms, dead leaves under my feet. I ran in concentric circles. Nobody was there. My feet broke everything I stepped on, snapping dry beneath me. I started to cry. All the colors merged together into varying shades of gray in the twilight. I ran faster.
I nearly stepped on something glowing next to my foot, the shine of tearable flesh. I stopped. That baby was there, sitting perfectly still on a bare patch of ground, eyes open. Yes, the right baby. Not some random baby in the woods.
I bent over and carefully picked her up. We were both shaking. I held her by the armpits and inspected her all over in that raw twilight. I felt her firm, real body beneath her clothes. This little person.
She moved in my hands and looked back at me. Straight in the eyes, just like she was waiting for me to name it. You know. The damage.
He who hesitates is last.
—Mae West
Sometimes he made me tell people how we met, which I hated. He’d make me tell the story in a bar, where you’re supposed to be funny, with a punch line. Close to the end, I took him aside and said, “Cliff, our relationship has no punch line,” and he said, “Yet.” So I told the fucking story, and I’ll tell it now that the story’s over.
I was new to Santa Fe, looking for a job and friends. I had moved there partly because it was beautiful, and partly because I had lived in Iowa my whole life. Santa Fe had cacti, yet it also had snow. It had a bunch of interesting people who wore silk scarves around their necks during heat waves and hiked in cowboy boots. I wanted to know what made people do things like that. I was almost twenty-five.
It’s hard to meet people in Santa Fe because everyone just assumes you’re a tourist and doesn’t waste time on you. So I mostly took walks alone, or drove around alone, or ate mushy chile rellenos alone in a restaurant called Dave’s Not Here. They named it Dave’s Not Here because they were sick of people asking for him, Dave. Nobody knows where he is, or, by now, who he is.
One evening in the early fall I was driving down St. Michael’s Drive when this man stepped backwards off the median, right in front of my car. I stood on the brakes, but I knew instantly that there was no way, that it was too late. His head turned and our eyes caught through the windshield. My mouth opened. Before the car slammed into his body, he jumped into the air. A football dropped from above and nested itself firmly in his arms before he disappeared.
He was gone. I hit a man, I thought, and sent him to Heaven. I don’t believe in Heaven. The car was still skidding forward.
Then the most tremendous thud dented in the car roof, right above my head. I screamed. The car stopped.
Everything was very quiet. I looked up at the roof. I realized that I would have to get out and look at it, the corpse on the roof of my car. I would have to look at the unfamiliar face of a man I had killed. For a second, I wondered how I could die, kill myself, without ever opening the car door.
There was movement above. A sneaker appeared in front. It gingerly reached down the windshield. It snaked around. It jiggled the windshield wiper. Then the whole body slid down onto the hood in a blue blur.
The man was now standing on the ground, feeling his body and neck with one hand. The football was still in the other hand. He looked at it, then dropped it on the pavement. He walked around the car, toward me, and tapped on the window. He asked, “Can you open the window?” He asked, “Are you okay, ma’am?” Then, “Can you answer me?” Other people started running up and pulling out their cell phones.
The man finally opened my door himself. Dust blew into the car and I squinted through it at him. His blue eyes were earnest. “Ma’am? I’m okay. Are you okay?”
I reached for him. He stepped forward to help me. “Ma’am?” I kept reaching past his outstretched arms. My fingers touched the rough fabric of his clothes and I put my hands underneath them, on his skin. I stroked his entire body—his legs, chest, arms, hips, groin, with a kind of wonder at the way a body can just be, or not be. He didn’t know what to say. Before I fainted, I touched his face once, twice, three times as if it were the holiest thing I had ever seen.
THAT DAY, after I almost killed Cliff, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight. I followed him home. Really, by foot. He kept turning around, saying, “I’m fine.” After a while, he let me walk with him. He tried to get me to tell him my name, my job, all that. I said, “I’m worried about your head. Don’t fall asleep,” and he asked, “Ever?”
“Listen, I’m feeling just fine,” Cliff said once we walked up to his apartment door. “I just have some bruises on my legs. Don’t worry. Let it go.”
“I can’t. You must be hurt. I hit you with a whole car.”
“I have to do some work now.” He unlocked his door and stood with his hand on the knob.
“Can I watch you?”
Cliff sighed through his nose.
“I don’t really know anyone else in town,” I said.
He waved me inside. While he got me a glass of water, I looked around. I noticed the giant photograph of Karl Marx hanging over the kitchen table, and the bumper sticker over his desk: “Jesus, protect me from your followers.” His TV was sitting inside a kiva fireplace in the corner. There was a framed photograph of Ho Chi Minh next to a scrawled picture in magic marker of a big green monster wearing an orange sweatshirt. Written above the googly eyes and jagged head was the word “Gog.”
“My niece,” Cliff said. “I don’t know what that means, Gog.”
He sat down at his desk. The chair squeaked. I sat on the floor and studied him. He had deep blue eyes and short, light brown hair. Maybe in his early thirties.
“I really have to finish this chapter.” He held a piece of paper in his hand.
“What do you do?”
“I’m an economist. I’m working on a book.”
“What’s it about?”
“The economy. Doom.” I guess I didn’t have any expression on my face, because he threw his hands up and turned to his desk.
I watched him work. Every now and then he looked up and said, softly, “Please please leave.”
So I went home. But I came back.
THIS STORY is about drugs. I’m telling you now because I was surprised, too. But there’s more that you need to know.
Cliff thrilled me. He knew words like “anarcho-syndicalism.” He stood in front of the television set during the evening news and said, “Fuck,” whenever scenes of genocide or military strife flashed on the screen. I stared at him. This was real to him. I looked back at the images and tried to stretch my imagination so that it was real for me, too, all the rape and starvation and guns.
Cliff hunted deer every year, up north near Cimarron. He used every part of the dead deer, even tanning the hide himself. He used the deer brain to do it by mashing it up with a bunch of salt. It’s called a “brain tan.” He told me that every mammal on the planet magically has just enough brains to tan its own hide.
Once we went up to Ojo Caliente to jump in their hot springs. Afterwards, at the package store, Cliff broke out in fluent Spanish. I stared with my mouth open. He and the shopkeeper talked for so long, I just sat in the dust and waited until they were done. The whole ride home, Cliff kept accidentally