Out in the desert I see my step-father's face in everything: cacti, the devil's forehead climbing rock, the 15-passenger van that we have rented, on the shell of a passing tortoise.
In reality, I haven't seen him in over 10 years. The day I left home and entered college was the last time I saw him. He just showed up at my dorm on Old Campus in New Haven. Booker T. Washington. Of course, not THE Booker T. Washington. Book, as my brother and I referred to him, had changed his name from Booker T. Wolfolk.
He drank a lot. That's all I could say and what I remember most: his hard drinking side.
Out in the desert, I didn't remember much about him. Vision was waning.
"Hey, Bri, have you had any water lately? You don't look so good?"
"Book?"
"Why don't we get you back to base camp so you can take it easy?" The girls were far in front of us. We were acting as sweepers for the stragglers who couldn't make the entire trip up the rocks.
Moriah's question wasn't really a question. She was ordering me back along the trail to link back with the other adults who couldn't make the trip.
"No, I'm...I'm...cool." In actually, I was very hot and my head hurt something terrible. Pounding like a ball peen hammer between my eyes. I was swigging water like it was nobody's business--at least for the last hour or so. Why was this happening?
I was thinking of America at that point. "I've been to the desert on a horse with no name./It felt good to be out of the rain./In the desert, you can't remember your name/and there ain't no one there to give you no blame." I couldn't remember if it was "blame" or "pain." Whichever it was that was wrong. What the hell did that mean anyway? I could remember a whole bunch of stuff but my head was getting real light.
Earlier in the day it was about coyotes. The damned coyotes who had nearly taken over the camp who were ravenous in my imagination. Now, it was dehydration. They told us about that. At least they told us what to look for in the girls. I had forgotten about me.
Moriah told me to just sit. Stay still. They were sending a team out to come and get me in one of the jeeps. How did she communicate with them? Was she psychic, too? Sending signals back to the base without a walkie-talkie?
Our group of girls was ahead by some distance, bouldering up one of the rocks. I wanted to see the pool of water where they were headed that had frogs or tadpoles or mosquitoes or whatever would live out in this god-foresaken place.
"Book."
"What book are you looking for? Something in your daypack?"
For some reason that's all I could say. I knew I wasn't making much sense, but it was hard getting the words out of my cottony mouth.
In Concord, Massachusetts Henry David Thoreau began falling in love with his benefactor's wife. Lydia Emerson was a woman of her time, trapped in a loveless marriage with a man who was one of the first real celebrities of the time. I was wondering, out at Joshua Tree National Park, what made Thoreau head out to the woods near Walden Pond--alone. Two years, two months, and two days. What the hell was fracturing at this point was my own sense of isolation, even in the desert all around with a large group of girls from near Hancock Park LA, like a swarm of industrious bees?
"Book?"
"Hey, Bri, just sit still for a bit, will you." Moriah's canteen extended from out of nowhere it seemed, voice disembodied from where I was hearing it. "Just swig this down and keep drinking. They'll be here soon."
My step-father pulled hard from the flask, grinning at me, handing the pint to me. He was there as clear as day.
This is the story of my life until then. My education. What went wrong. Light failing. How death comes to you like the roar of a fire or like a pin-hole in a shoebox to view an eclipse by. Something so small as we fade/to/black.
