It's been days since I lost my watch. Tom tossed it over a cliff when we stopped at a dusty viewpoint to stretch the knots from our spines. He simply reached out, took my wrist, undid the band and flung. Neither of us are able to talk about time anymore; it would prompt us to calculate the months left.
Tom's eyes are riveted to the twisted shapes of the Joshua trees. The branches curve in knots like maimed limbs of soldiers, frozen. "We're a great pair, the two of us," Tom told me yesterday. "You a junkie and me an alcoholic dying of a heart condition and neither of us twenty-five." I mentioned that I wasn't a junkie but a diabetic. "It's all the same -- when you get right down to it. You use those needles all the time, piercing them into your skin. And I'd guess we're both manic depressives though personally I'd bet it makes us much more interesting." Tom loves to divide life into binary systems: in college he took all the funiture out of his room for a monastic effect and then furnished it with a lavish bar. Sometimes he would go on binges and see how many objects he could steal or break from the dorms before security caught up with him.
We stop at an Exxon station. It is late afternoon and my tank-top -- one of Tom's white undershirts -- sticks to my skin as unforgiving as if it were wet denim. My sweat makes the material transparent and I suddenly feel embarrassed by my bra-less breasts. Even at night the heat never quite dissipates. In the bathroom I plunge my head under the cold water. I stare into the mirror and think of how kidnap victims always write messages in lipstick in TV movies. I have lost weight on this trip; it shows in my chest. I return to find Tom in the driver's seat, rooting around in the back for his bottle of Glenlivet. He looks up as I open the door. "Hi, bunny!"
"What?"
"If we're going to be married we ought to have pet names don't you think?"
"No."
"Pumpkin? Sugar? Muffin?"
I make that awful Valley Girl gasp of shock even I hate. "Muffin? My father used to call me that. I refuse to marry you if you call me Muffin."
"See, that's the thing. We'll never be bored because we'll always drive each other crazy." I look down without meaning to. Tom takes my hand and kisses the antique diamond ring on my finger. "Keep this ring," he says. "No matter what." He turns his eyes away from me and starts the car. We don't look at each other. The front seat is spacious; we can sit about three feet apart when we wish.
"Have you said anything to Natasha about this?" I speak into the wind.
Tom waves his hand in dismissal. "She's in Africa. And anyway, I think I officially broke it off with her at some point." Since I have known Tom Natasha has been his girlfriend "in title only" though, occasionally, when guilt overcomes him he remains faithful for two month stretches. Once he had leaned very close to my neck and asked "Do I seem asexual to you? I'm supposed to be asexual while my girlfriend is in England." I could smell the cigarettes and liquor on his breath mixed with a gentlemanly scent of fine soap.
Tom hums as he drives. The sky is turning orange in the west while the east has become a storm of blue and purple. I can sense rain, almost feel the electricity in the air. The thunder is still far away; the lightning comes not in bolts but horizontal flashing streaks. The road remains dry. My sunburned skin is chilly, aware. I can see a few stars but it is still light from dusk and the storm. I am reminded of a dense August night I spent smoking on my roof. I had my knees bent against my chest in my standard melancholic pose. People passed on the street, exchanged secrets in soft gasps of laughter, and did not know I listened.
That night Tom arrived on the front stairs of my building: ruffled brownish hair, tripping on his own knees feet legs, sipping Stolichnaya from a sterling flask and in his other hand (tucked safely in his pocket) his grandmother's ring. It had been two years since I last saw him. I spotted him from the roof and dashed down six flights of stairs (two at a time almost twisting my ankle). By the time I got to the front door he had already buzzed everyone in the building and was screaming my name. "I forgot which one was yours." He grinned at my neighbors who were glaring from their windows. For a moment, as Tom and I stood on the stoop laughing, our eyes shining, I believed I had two choices -- then I realized how afraid Tom was to die alone, that nothing other than marriage would suffice.
We hear the first loud crack of lightning. "Have I ever told you the story about the hummingbirds?" Tom asks and I shake my head. "There was a man -- an absolutely brilliant professor. A man who understood Nabokov. When he was bored in conferences he confessed to pretending all of the participants were chess pieces." Tom traces the place the hairline on my neck, making the tiny hairs stand in a shiver. "The professor would play the game out in his mind until something happened that captured his attention. Someone once asked him which piece he was and he said, 'I'm the white knight. Always the white knight but no one realizes it.'" Tom runs the tips of his fingers across my neck and I let my head drop. "Anyway, he liked to sit on his porch and watch the hummingbirds come to his feeder for hours. He knew all the different kinds -- the emerald green males, the ruby-red throats, the males who were shy, the females who were flirts. He knew how many times a minute their hearts beat--" Here he pauses to drum his fingertips. "--How many times they flapped their wings." Another drumming.
"Eventually one summer he stopped going to his lectures." Tom circles patterns on my skin with his stubby nails. I am reminded of the game I used to play at slumber parties where a friend draws shapes on your naked back and you try to guess them. A circle, a square, an oval, a heart, a face.
"Was this a Camden professor?" I mumble.
"Maybe." Tom's hands are now rubbing my neck. "The students came to his house to observe him. Some thought he had just gone crazy. Others thought he was a kind of maharajah. At the end of summer he was gone. So were the hummingbirds."
"Is it true?" My neck is completely limp. Tom's fingers could almost meet his thumb if he were to tighten his grip.
"Some of the students thought that the professor had played a joke on them and were angry. Others were just bewildered and many didn't care except that it made interesting lunch conversation. The professor -- they discovered in a letter he had written -- thought the hummingbirds were all engaged in a tremendous game of something like chess. But you had to play by instinct instead of logic. He felt he had become a hummingbird." Tom paused. "I don't know if it's true. It's something my father told me when I was a child and he was going through one of his post-modern obsessions."
"That's what he called me -- post-modern."
"And my mother thought you were just amoral." Tom lights a cigarette.
"Am I? Do you think? I didn't used to be," I say.
"No more than me."
It has begun to sprinkle. Tom leaves his hand on my neck. I place one of my hands on his thighs and trace circles on it. Touching Tom always makes me feel as if I'm cuddling just after making love. We stare ahead at the double yellow lines, let their constancy erase our thoughts. From behind the windshield of this old Mercedes, we plan to travel the world as much as possible. Tom's grandmother wires us money whenever we need it; we have already grown tired and used to spending it. His family humors me as Tom's fling all the while hoping he will return to the high class British Natasha. Tom and his father are my only allies. We began our trip in Vermont. In Idaho I met Tom's parents who live as ex-patriots taking refuge from British academia and Tom introduced me with a clumsy bow: "absolutely, the finest, truly the most brilliant--anyway, Mum, Dad this is Ally, the woman I'm going to marry." We then headed south to Joshua Tree. We will curve toward Vegas so that we can get married with Tom in an Elvis costume.
***
On principle, we always stay at the nicest hotel in town. Tonight it's a Four Seasons. We sit at the bar with our vodka martinis. "The thing is," Tom tells me, "That Othello really is a chess move. A queen's gambit. You sacrifice the white queen to kill the black king." Tom waves his arm over the bar and knocks over both of our drinks. His eyes get bright. "Showtime," he mutters. I quickly mop up the spilled vodka with cocktail napkins and place the broken glass in my hand. It's time to get Tom out of the bar. I give the bartender a hundred dollar bill.
"Let's go drink in the room," I suggest. "I'm sick of martinis."
"How," Tom's voice booms, "Could you be sick of such a fine cocktail?" He takes my hand.
A piece of glass cuts my palm. I try to put the broken glass back on the counter but Tom won't let go. A thin red line of blood bends across my fingers. I stand from my chair and try to get Tom to take my arm. "Come on." Two men and a woman having drinks at a table eye us nervously. One of the men stands. "I want to go drink the rest of our scotch," I insist. I wrench my hand away from Tom and dump the glass on the bar.
"Are you okay?" The man from the table stares at Tom. He hands me a paper napkin for my hand and I mouth thanks. I just want to get Tom out of the bar before he breaks anything else.
"Sir, it's obvious to me that you are indeed a spy," Tom announces. The man puffs himself up. He looks like a pretty typical Western man to me: jeans, cowboy boots, button down shirt, broad shoulders and blue eyes that might seem caring under different circumstances.
"What the hell--"
"I know this from my experience with the CI--" I kiss Tom to shut him up. I grew up in the West: I know how popular all conspiracy theories are out here. Tom tries to pull away from me but I reach my tongue into his mouth.
"Excuse us," I say to the gentleman and then press my mouth to Tom's as we stumble like a single injured creature from the bar.
Tom collapses in a lobby armchair knocking over a lamp and breaking the light-bulb. "What the hell was that about?" he asks. He stares at my lips which I have painted with pink lipstick. "You're looking rather lippy."
I take Tom's hands in mine and pull him up from the chair. The man from the front desk comes over and helps me get Tom to stand. It's not so much that Tom is too drunk to walk as that he doesn't feel like it. Once he is up and cooperative I slip the concierge another hundred. In the elevator Tom says, "I should have joined the CIA. Then maybe this would all be different." Tom took the CIA test as a joke his junior year in college and scored so highly on it that they kept trying to recruit him until his mother called to explain his heart condition.
Outside our room Tom spots an emergency telephone at the end of the hall. Before I can do anything he has gleefully ripped it out. "Five light fixtures, one bar stool, twelve glasses, two doors, a window and one telephone." He smiles hugely at me. "And we've been traveling less than a month."
"And a gas pump."
"Christ, I almost forgot that. But that was an accident." I open the door for Tom and he gallantly motions for me to enter by swinging the telephone a few inches from my forehead. For good measure, he smashes the TV with the telephone so there is a huge hole in the middle of the screen.
"It's just a thing I'm going through," Tom says. "This breaking things. A phase or something. Really, it's very liberating. You ought to try it." Tom lies down on the bed still clutching the telephone. "Why don't you do the bathroom mirror?" I take off his shoes and lie down next to him.
Tom stares at a spot on the floor. "You know what that reminds me of?" I shake my head. "My uncle, right before he died, coughed up a lung on my grandmother's carpet."
"Ugh." I press the paper napkin into my palm.
"He was staying with my grandmother. And he was very sick and literally just coughed up a lung on her carpet. Then he went out and found this Yugoslavian whore and married her the day he died. Because he was a kind of tax shelter for my grandmother and he really hated her so he willed everything to this Yugoslavian whore but she had the same initials as my grandmother. So my grandmother just crushed this poor girl and had her deported and she got absolutely nothing."
Tom keeps staring at the spot on the carpet. "It's ridiculous," he tells me. "This whole business of dying. I'd rather get on it with it."
I move on top of Tom so we both lie with out stomachs facing the mattress, as if my body could provide a shield. I wrap my arms around his shoulders and hold him. It seems to me that he is shaking. I clutch him more tightly and realize that it's the muscles in my arms that quiver.
***
We spend dusk on a back road, naked from the waist down on our picnic blanket. Tom rocks inside me and I close my eyes. He pauses. "I can see the first star."
I crane my neck backward to see a twinkle of light in the midst of crisp blue. I laugh. "It's Venus."
"I've never seen it before," Tom whispers. "I mean, I have, but I never knew I was looking at Venus." He resumes his quiet rocking and I sigh.
"It's perfect here," I say. "It's one of the only places I've been that feels like home."
"Right here?"
"This moment."
"You're right."
We make love the way an old man sits on the porch on a swing waiting to hear the crickets, a singing that echoes more beautiful, but elusive, memories. I could inhale this balance between light and dark in time with Tom's thick breath. When he rests on top of me I ask, "Do you remember that philosophy class? What was it Heraclitus said about dusk?"
"That it's never the same river twice?" I swat Tom's butt. The ring has twisted around on my finger and he yelps. "Or maybe it was something about stars being like diamonds."
"No, that's a bad pick-up line. 'Was your daddy a thief? He stole the stars and put them in your eyes.'"
"It worked on you."
"Are you sure?"
Tom takes my hand and gazes at the ring again. "Indeed," he tickles my ribs, "My great-grandfather was a thief and he stole these diamonds for this ring."
"Is that how your family got their money?"
"Old Miners' diamonds? No. The ones on your ring have more cuts in them so they're actually worth less. But they sparkle more."
***
The car swerves and my neck is thrust forward, then back. I feel the car thud into something and Tom stops on the side of the road. I get out because Tom has gotten out, because it is what he expects from me. The accident snaps us both into complete sobriety. I want to throw my arms in front of my face and blind myself. Tom kneels over the twitching body of a doe. Once I look my eyes can't leave the black eye swirling wildly in its socket. Tom strokes the deer's neck standing behind it to avoid the thrashing legs. The deer is trying to get up but it is too injured. There is blood on its black nose, covering the fur on its belly. "Fuck," Tom mutters.
If Tom were the kind of man I grew up with he would have a shot gun in the car. "What should we do?" he asks.
I say nothing.
"You grew up out here. What are you supposed to do when this happens?"
His arms have tightened on the deer's neck. He doesn't want it to get up and scramble off the side of the road to die. "It never happened to me before." I've never seen a live deer this close. I'm surprised by how lovely its body is, the muscles surging under its fur. I think of how powerful it must have been and think of it bounding through the brush.
"Can you hold it for a second?" Tom's voice cracks.
I move around to where Tom is standing and put my hand on the deer's neck then take it away. "We shouldn't touch it. We're scaring it."
"We could bring it to a vet," Tom says. I hate the idea of us cramming its injured body into the back seat of the Mercedes. Tom starts rummaging through the car. "I'll make space for it," he tells me. "We can find a vet."
I let go of the deer and try to coax it up. Don't die here, not like this. Not with us. The deer gets its two front legs up but its hindquarters are too injured for it to stand. Still, it starts to drag itself away from us. "What are you doing? Don't let it go. We'll never be able to help it."
I cluck to the deer as if I were urging a horse into a full gallop. It turns its head to me and it doesn't seem quite as afraid now that no one is trying to touch it. "Didn't you see it?" I say to Tom. The deer scrambles frantically. The tears fall hot onto my cheeks.
"It just ran out. I tried to swerve...if you hadn't been asleep--"
"I wasn't asleep."
"You might as well have been."
The deer is dragging itself, an inch at a time away from us. I close my eyes and count to twenty. I can hear the terrible sound of its hooves against the dirt. It still smells like rain. I convince myself that when I open my eyes it will be dead. It isn't.
"Tom," I whisper. "It's not going to make it."
"Are you sure? How can you tell?"
I stare directly at Tom's eyes and can see them glisten. He paces without realizing it and runs his hand through his hair. "We should kill it then. I suppose. We don't want it to suffer."
"How?" I ask.
"I don't know. A rock maybe. Do you have your pocket knife?"
I stand. My body trembles. "Can you just stay in the car for a minute? Please." Tom leans against the back of the Mercedes and lights a cigarette. I try to remember stories that my uncles have told me about killing deer. They always had guns. I get my pouch with my insulin and syringes. The deer isn't that big. It can't weigh that much more than a human. I fill a syringe all the way with insulin and walk slowly toward the deer. It tries to move faster. If a person takes too much insulin they go into a coma. I have no idea if it will do the same for the deer. I insert the needle into its neck; the deer's flesh puts up more resistance than my own. Some of the terror goes out of the deer's eyes. It's not quite dead but it has given up fighting. I put the syringe in the back pocket of my jeans and get into the car. Tom doesn't move. "Come on," I say. "We're leaving."
"We can't leave it like this."
"Then what's your solution?" I start the car and he gets in.
***
There is no moon tonight. Even with the smell of rain hanging over us, the land is dead. Empty. I suddenly feel the opposite of claustrophobia, as if there is too much space around me, as if that openness will collapse over me, suffocate me. I take the bottle of Glenlivet out of Tom's hand and swallow. "I can't do this," I say. I slam the brakes on the car. I'm glad we're both wearing seat-belts because the skid marks must be twenty feet long. The engine dies and I leap out of the car not bothering to shut the door.
Sprinkles of rain fall on my body as I run away from the car. I look up and see a flash of lightning. The thunder comes a few seconds later. The storm breaks and it starts pouring. I stand in the desert letting the rain soak my skin. I can't see even one star.
I decide: You love people when you have to. And if you're lucky you're be left with more that a burned shell that sears with the pain of memory before it goes numb.
Only when it has stopped raining do I return to the car.
"I'm sorry," Tom tells me. "You don't have to do this. It was too much to ask." His voice is gentle; he has been crying. "Come on," he says. "I'll drive."
I can't say anything so I try not to start crying.
We drive in silence, both of us jumping at the shadows on the side of the road. The Joshua trees look even stranger at night. In the wind, their limbs make broken gestures. I put my hand on Tom's leg. "I can't die with you."
"I know. I don't want you to."
Tom wraps his hand around mine. I see the car as if I were not inside it. I see it moving across the desert, getting smaller in my line of vision. I watch it disappear without actually getting anywhere. I'm aware of the syringe I put in my pocket and I take it out, put it on the dashboard. Tom squints his eyes as if he were trying very hard to see something far away. His hand reaches for the syringe. He turns it over between his fingers, one hand on the steering wheel, as if he were distractedly fumbling with a pencil.
Then he taps the syringe on the dashboard as if he were packing down a cigarette. "Ally," he begins. "If it gets--" another tap of the syringe. Tom opens his mouth as if he were about to finish his sentence but doesn't.
I cover his lips with mine and flicker my tongue.