At the moment they were silent in the car, a rented bottle-green PT Cruiser that must have looked, Elena reflected, like a giant scarab crawling around the sandy curves of the desert road.  Everything outside the window was arid and broken, as though the earth had exploded and settled in to jagged and monumental heaps of dry rock.  Or, maybe, like their marriage, there hadn’t been any upheaval at all, but just a tumble here, a crumble there, until the terrain was all quite different.

            Once she and Harry had traveled well together, taking off for a two week jaunt into the Canadian Rockies when they had known each other barely a month.  Then, the mammoth sheets of mountains had redefined her, making her marvel at the possibilities of a daily existence with this man she didn’t really know and yet succumbed to, almost minute-by-minute, and certainly at night.  She felt reassured in his acceptance of things, his insights, the books he had read. The Rockies had been lush with melting snow; water tumbled abundantly into turquoise rivers and falls.  

            That was twenty –five years ago.   Rivers had given way to sand. 

            “Well, it was good to see the kids,” Harry said, as though she had just suggested the opposite.  The kids.  Harry’s son Paul and his wife were in their forties, the same ages Harry and Elena had been when they’d first met.   Harry’s mother, to their amusement, had then referred to them as “the kids.”  “You kids get in the back,” she’d say, directing the car seating.  She liked Elena.  Once, at a picnic, Elena pulled Harry onto her lap.  He was a big man and she liked to hold him, liked the way his weight smashed her thighs.   She’d wrap her arms around him and press the side of her face against his back, large before her, wanting to take in his full sense of self.  “What are you doing!” the mother had exclaimed, as Elena cradled Harry, but you could see she was pleased. 

            Elena turned from the view of sooty sagebrush to gaze at the voice, husky now, sometimes almost annoyingly whispery.  “Yes,” she acknowledged.  “It was fine.”

             “They’re doing well,” Harry said.  “I think so.  They’re doing okay.”

            “Yes.”  She didn’t care. Maybe Paul would have Harry.   As visiting parents, or one and a step, she had toned down their carping into a humorous routine.  “What I have to look forward to?” the wife had laughed, looking from Paul to Harry.  “Two of a kind?”   Elena wondered whether the wife actually feared such a thing. 

            The rock formations were getting bigger, rock upon rock against the sandy hills, cubistic sculptures of the human condition.   Five big fat eggs in a row like fat blank faces, a squared pair of buttocks, several phalluses.   “Like big penises,” she said.  “Out there.”

            “What?” he said.  “Phoenix?”

            I’m going to leave your father.  Paul would have been surprised if she’d said that.  We’ve stopped connecting.  The problem was she didn’t know where she’d go if she left; she liked the idea of the option, the unvoiced threat.

            “What?” he said again.

            “Nothing!  It doesn’t matter?  Do you want some water?” she said, attempting amends.

            “I’m really dry,” he announced.  “Do you have any water back there?”

            “I just asked you.”  She unbuckled her seat belt and pulled a tepid bottle out of the Styrofoam box.   The car announced her freed status with an alarming boing, boing, boing, boing, until she righted herself, fastened up.    “It’s warm.  We need ice.”  She felt something was out of her control—no more choices, youth gone.  She might as well hold Harry responsible. “And I have to pee.”

            “Well, when we see something,” he said, leaning forward and peering through the top of the windshield.

            “Stop!  Stop!” she cried out, spotting the tourist center down a roadside drive.

            “Where?” he said.  “What?  I just can’t stop—it’s a road.” 

            “There aren’t any other cars.”

            “Here comes one.”  He waited on the shoulder, sitting straight with his momentary upper hand, then swung a wide U, grinding the tires into the sandy gravel before leveling off again.  “Okay.  We’re stopping.  We’re stopped.”

            The sun was searing as they traversed the short space from parking lot to visitor’s center, an airless room with a few taxidermied animals—a roadrunner, an eagle, a hare—desert survivors.  They stared at the map on the wall outside. 

            “321 to Joshua Tree,” she said.

            “I can see that,” he said.  He took a map out of his shirt pocket.  “But maybe it’s 88.”

            “Harry!” she started to whine, “It’s so hot!”  She leaned toward him.  “There’s a spot on your shirt.  Blood?  What from?”

            He looked down.  “That’s where I hit myself with the car trunk.  At Paul’s house.”

            She tried to remember—some little outcry at the back of the car—as she was throwing hats on the seats.  “Let’s see.”

            “What for?  As if you’d do anything!” 

            She started to protest his truth, gave it up.  “I need to get out of the sun.”  Her heart felt heavy, like one of the rocks out there.   “Anyway, what can I do?” she asked, knowing that, since she had turned away, Harry couldn’t hear her. 

 

            The next day the Joshua trees appeared speculatively at first, reaching out like sad broken lyres toward the road where Harry and Elena drove through the hot sun in the green rented car.   Behind Elena, in the little Styrofoam box, were thick sandwiches they had purchased at a supermarket, shoved against cold water bottles.  Behind her in another sense was the sustenance of highways that held such stores, and she felt a mild alarm.   Earlier they had seen picnic tables plentifully placed among boulders that were as pink and inviting as fake ones in an amusement park, but now they couldn’t find any others.  The Joshua trees got thicker and statelier, then spiteful looking, twisting in mean contortions farther from the road, before they petered out altogether into dry gravelly mountains. 

            “There’s a cactus garden coming up,” Elena announced, striving to find the value Harry claimed existed in what she saw as the despair of the desert.   “The map shows we can park.  It doesn’t show a table, though.”

            “I’m sure there’ll be one,” Harry said, hungry now.  But there wasn’t.  They parked in the dusty lot beside an expanse of short spiky plants sprouting out of that dust.  The road marker next to the rock they sat on, unwrapping their sandwiches, warned about getting too close to the plants, cholla they were called; they could get spiked and not be able to remove the needles. 

            “Some garden,” she observed, shooing flies that had appeared out of nowhere. 

            “Still, it’s interesting,” he said.   They both waved to another car joining them in the dust.  An old man unfolded himself from the passenger side.  “Long drive,” said Harry.

            “She’s doing it.”  He looked like a caricature of an old man—his hair in white tufts, his back bent, his legs spindly between his hiking shorts and walking shoes. “Her turn.  I was asleep.”  The “her” was an old woman, in the same outfit, who read aloud and loudly about the cholla.  Single file, they started the dismal garden walk, disconnected and together.   Could they—Harry and Elena—look that way?   Elena stared off at the blue blank sky rimmed by her hat.  Across gray sands and rusted sagebrush the horizon stretched with nothing there.  Nothing!  Harry, a disproportionate bookend beside her, was looking off in the other direction.   Behind her, there were the decrepit cholla scattered on a path of dusty gravel, the ancient couple in their nondescript khaki shuffling through.   It was too much!   It was too little. 

            “More water?” she asked.  “There’s more cold.  It gets warm so quickly.”

            He looked at her steadily for around thirty seconds, as though waiting for faraway strands of thought to come together.   “Yeah, good,” he said, patting her thigh.   “Thanks.  I could use something wet.”

            She stood and wiped a crumb from his moustache; he drew back, annoyed, then elaborately wiped down his whole face with his napkin.    “Sorry!” she said and leaned into the car.   She’d have to be alone—or get used to some other old man!

            “Get the camera, too!”   Harry called.

            “Whatever for?”   

            “For this,” he said, sweeping his arm in a wide arc. “For where we are.” 

 

            It was the next afternoon when her accident occurred.  Riding through the desert was bearable—even interesting, as Harry said—by day, as long as there was the refuge of a nice motel at the end of it, and they had found one.   Even so, it was wearisome to drag oneself out of the car every fifteen minutes, and so Elena sulked when, late in the afternoon, Harry stopped again. She’d just sit in the car and wait it out.

            Even the fact that he looked lonely walking across the expanse cacti toward the off-road marker didn’t change her mind.  She had to pee.  “I’m coming, too!” she called and pulled out the keys and caught up with him.   The Mormons had crossed that way, she read, next to Harry.   Box Canyon, boxed in, here.

            “The road’s a bit of a distance,” she said.  “Watch it anyway.   Don’t watch me.  I’m going to go—down there.” 

            “No one’s here,” he said.  The silence made it true enough.

            But she was self-conscious, listening to her own stream in the dust, and scrambled quickly back up the sandy mound, slipping, losing her footing.  She fell headlong over a huge cactus and screamed, then sobbed softly, suspending herself in an arch over the spiky plant.  Harry, who had started back toward the car, rushed to her.  “Are you hurt?”

            She tried to straighten.  Blood dripped from her breast onto her sandal.  She was afraid to unfold further.

            “My god,” he said.

            She watched the spectacle of herself, the blood dripping from breast to shoe.  “I feel pierced all over,” she said.  “I’m afraid.”

            “Wait—“he said.  “I’ll get some water from the car.  Don’t we have that towel you stole, too?”

            She didn’t know what she had done.  She saw her life turned around—nipples pierced by spikes, breasts ripped apart.  No plane ride home, stuck in a hospital somewhere, maimed.  She leaned on her hands into the sand, staring at the wet spot on her shirt, not sure whether the stab in her left breast was as sharp as the image of blood in the sand.  She could hear—it took forever, it seemed—the beep-beep lock of the car and knew he was on his way back.  He helped her up.  He fumbled, trying to get her bra undone, the most unsexy of seductions, and yet so comforting, to think that he could do it.  The bra loosened, he pulled both up, bra and shirt, and exposed the wounds, a huge one in her left breast, another next to her armpit, both swelling around the punctures in aggressive, unpretty ways, other points of blood, but just pricks.   She felt throbs of panic.  Harry wet the towel—stolen, as he said, from the motel poolside-- with a bottle of water and gently wiped her down.

            Now she didn’t care—didn’t think about it, really—that she was standing in the middle of a large flat space bare-breasted.

            “I don’t think it’s really bad,” he said.  “How do you feel?”

            “I really hurt,” she said, frightened that the pain might permeate beyond the punctures, relieved there was no more blood.  “Do you think it’s poisonous?  That plant?”

            “Probably not.  I don’t know.”

            “There’s that medical center we saw last night,” she said.

             She drew a picture of the plant for the doctor.  Yucca, probably, he said.  Not harmful.  Except that it had functioned as knives and she had the wounds; they would heal.   Aloe, Harry guessed, maybe even helpful.  The plant turned out, when they looked it up, to be a succulent, agave, one of the nurturers for the original tribes. “They ate the stalks,” the tidy man at the tourist center told them.  “Also used the spikes to sew, to piece things together.”

            “A sympathy wound,” Harry said, taking her hand.  “Now we both have chest wounds.” 

            She had forgotten his. 

 

            When they arrived at Palm Springs a few days later, Elena, subdued by her subdued swellings wanted to sit at the motel pool, mostly because there was a pool, a new and lovely one, and she hated wasting something she had more or less paid for.   The vision she had arranged in her head, of her new green bathing suit with its calla lilies next to the palm trees and blue water, was sabotaged by the reality of the room’s vanity mirror, aggressively large and too illuminated.   The suit covered her recent punctures, but the flesh of her arms hung loosely around the edges of the pretty print straps; she tugged at the leg holes, wincing. The first time they slept together Harry, long and lean beside her, had smoothed his hand over her firm belly, her tanned legs. “I can’t believe you,” he had said.  

            She felt like crying.   Across the room Harry was pulling on a pair of puffy nylon trunks, adjusting them under his big belly.  “How’s your chest?”  she said to the mirror, his image as flawed as her own.   Even from here she could see the large wound on his right breast.

            “It’s okay, I guess.  It’ll take a while.”   He put his oxfords on, over his bare feet, picked up a towel.  He waited, in front of the TV unit, as she applied pink lipstick.  “That suit looks good,” he said, and she turned to see if he was being sarcastic.  She grabbed her lingerie robe, which he helped her into, like a prom wrap, and they paraded down the carpeted hallway back into the sun.

            Elena’s hat was in the car.  She wrapped her nylon robe around her head like a turban—the dryness of the desert!—and awkwardly straddled the pool chair before she could find a modest position. “If you’re not going in?”  Harry said, setting his watch, his cell phone, his glasses, his hearing aid carefully on the little patio table.  “It’s only four feet, tops,” he said.  “You could walk across it.”

            But she leaned back, inhaling the pool’s refreshing wetness, its chlorine.  Soon there were the voices of young women behind her; they were discussing men and slapping sun tan oil on firm flesh.  She guessed they were shapely and pretty and under thirty.   Elena felt invisible, and peeked, once, from under her sunglasses, to see what Harry was doing.  He was just standing in the water, looking around, then he’d stretch out and swim across the width and stand again, the black trunks puffing out like underwater sea creatures.   She felt divided from him, as over an expanse of sea, as divided as the young women were from her, and a little sorry.  She could see the bruise. When he turned her way, she waved.  He waved back.  

             In their room again and dressed, Harry sorted through the flyers he had picked up from the lobby. “We need to stop for some wine,” he said.

            Elena was unpacking toiletries, arranging them in the nightstand drawer--her book, her eyeshades, her lubricant.   The packaging called the lubricant personal fluid.  So many euphemisms—after buying feminine hygiene products, you bought personal fluid, even though you were still trying to be feminine, and hygiene was amazingly easy—no odors, no fluids of your own.

            “Let’s do the air-tram thing,” she said, brushing her hair.  She drew the brush gently across Harry’s head

            He ducked from under it.  He’d always been that way—one brush in the morning was enough for him.  Elena felt herself in constant need of fixing.  “ The Air-tram?  Now?”

            “It’s only five o’clock.”

            “It’s miles outside of town.”

            “It isn’t.”

            “It is.”

            “It isn’t!  Where’s the map?  Is one of those colored things the air-tram?  Isn’t there a drawing?”   She could feel them drifting off, drying out again.   “It’s just next door, I think.   I’ll show you.”

            “Look,” he said, blinking slowly with forbearance.  “I know where we came in—the highway split, remember.  The highway split.”  He put his hands together as though in prayer, then opened them into a V.

            She glared at him.  “Don’t do that!  Look.  I’ll show you.”

            “Okay,” he said, slapping the pamphlets down like a hand of cards.  “You know everything.  You work it out.”  He got up and went into the bathroom, but came out again, calmer, wearing a fresh shirt.  “Let’s go,” he said, standing at the door.  “Maybe there’s time.” 

            She grabbed her handbag.  “I think there is!” she assured him.   “It’ll be nice up there.   Maybe there’s some snow left.”  She hoped so, anyway.

 

 

            What she had once admired as Harry’s appreciative focus on all things, on even small things, had now, to her, dissolved into fixations.  There was still a road on the desert park map they hadn’t driven and so would explore this last day, before their return that evening to the airport and home. 

            “Look at the view,” he urged, rounding the hairpin curves.

            “I can see it!  Don’t you look until we stop!”  The road was narrow, with no shoulder.  He swerved across it, to the pull-off going the other way.  Her heart thumped.  “Why did you do that?” she panted.  “There could have been something coming.”

            “There wasn’t,” he said.  “Look at the view.”  Browns and tans, swirling downward into a canyon.  “You’re too nervous all the time.” 

            They were perched on a precipice. 

            “Take it easy,” he said. 

            “I want to live to get home.”  As she said it, she realized it was probably true.  She pictured them back in the living room, in their matching blue chairs, the books scattered on the floor, the TV clicker.   It was almost impossible to imagine both chairs empty, or worse, now that she thought of it, one.

            He made a sound with his tongue, suggesting sadness, a missed point altogether, or maybe one taken.  “I thought it was a view worth looking at.”  The tires ground up the gravelly sand as they pulled out and across the road again.  She checked the map to see how much of the squiggle was left to traverse.  He beat it the map down with his hand, crossing the car, briefly, over the centerline.

            “Look out!” she screamed.

            “Jesus!  You scared me!” He yelled back.  “Will you let me drive?”

            “You’re not paying attention.”

            “I am paying attention!”   He sighed deeply, rounding the sharp curves.  “Why do you—” He didn’t finish; he gave it up, as though the issue were hopeless.

            “Carry on,” she said.  “I’m getting some water.”  Boing, boing, boing, boing warned the unfastened seat belt.

            “What?” he said.

            “In the back,” she shouted.  “For water.”   Boing, boing!

            “What?  What are you doing?”

            “Slow down.  Ouch, ouch!”

            “What’s the matter?”  The car jerked and righted itself.

            “Nothing,” she said, settling back into her seat, fastening the belt, silencing the noise.  “I bumped my boobs.”

            He glanced at her, sympathetic:  “But they don’t feel as bad?

            “Not as bad as I thought.  Just sore.  What about you?  Your wound?”

            She saw the truck coming as Harry glanced down.  “Look out!” she cried, grabbing the wheel and pulling at it.  She had jerked them from center to right, just as the truck attempted to avert them—all so bizarrely quick she barely heard Harry cry out “Let go!” 

            But it was too late!  The crash was resounding, so crash-like it sounded contrived, the worst sound metal could make against metal, engine against engine.  The glass splashed around them like a waterfall.  Elena bumped against the visor and sank back. 

            Harry was leaning over the steering wheel, arms hanging.  His head tilted toward her, his eyes were open.  A thin stream of blood ran sidewise across his forehead.

            “Harry?”  She was still breathing, could feel her arms and legs. 

            “Harry!”  She pushed at his arm, almost punching it, and his head lolled in its own weight.   A drizzle of blood crept past her wedding band, and, when she tried to pluck out the intrusive piece of glass, she saw the water bottle, wet and icy, still in her other hand.  “Har –ree!” she screamed.  “Oh God, oh God!” 

            He was inert, his mouth open, too.  It looked dry.  She poured some water into it –“Drink, Harry, please, please drink!”--and watched his mouth fill like a cup and overflow, dripping onto the mangled wheel.   Through the crushed windshield s a pick-up truck was wedged against them, black against the metallic green of their car, the hood on Harry’s side crushed like a Japanese beetle.

             There was frantic pounding on her side window.  “Lady!  Lady!  Are you okay?  Can you open your door?” 

            She found the handle and he pulled.  The man was slight, with thinning red hair and mechanic’s overalls, Cameron embroidered in red script on the pocket.  “I’ve called for help,” he said.  “Can you move?”  He held the door and indicated, with a hand that shook with tremors that she should get out.   “What about him?”

            “He won’t move,” she said.  “I can’t get him to.    I don’t know what to do!”    She held up her bottle.  “I need more, in the back.”

            The man Cameron slid into the seat she vacated and pressed a shaking thumb and fingers around Harry’s wrist.  “Christ,” he said, letting go.  He seemed to sink into himself.  “He’s had a heart attack, I think.  He doesn’t seem to be breathing.”

            The sun hurt her head. “It’s too hot,” she said.  “I need to sit there.”

            He looked up at her, his small head arched like a bird’s.  “I’m sorry, lady.  Jesus!  He was on my side--.”

            “I did it,” she said.  “It was my fault--.”  She sat back in her seat.  The man stood holding the door open, almost embracing the car door.   She couldn’t imagine what would happen next.   “What will happen?” she asked.  She’d have to call the airport.  What of the car rental?  And then what?

            “I don’t know!” he said in anguish.  “Come wait in my truck.  Someone will be here.”

            She flicked him away like the flies around the sandwich—she thought of them with her gesture—just a few days before.  Her eyes welled; she shook her head and closed the door.

            A hot breeze from the broken window stirred a few strands of Harry’s hair.  They made Elena sob.   “I’m sorry,” she said.   “I am so sorry!”   It was strange to think of who she was, now in this mangled heap with the silent Harry.  “Honey, really, I didn’t mean any of it!   I never even said anything, did I?  Did I?  Why did you leave me?”

            She was so dry!  She poured water into her mouth, swallowing some, letting the rest run down her neck and into her shirt.   She opened another bottle and poured water over Harry’s head, then over her own, leaning her wet head against Harry’s.  She wanted to lift him, position him heavily onto her lap, but he wouldn’t budge.  She reached one arm around his hunched shoulders, the other around his middle, the pressure of the embrace forcing her own left breast to revive its painful wound.  She held tighter.  She wanted to feel that wound.  She wanted to wait here with Harry for as long as it took.

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