The Suburbs of Eden, Fiction by Katharine Coles

Mario has always pretended to believe me.

I was sitting for him; I had got restless and Mario, right then, was looking at Ace walking back and forth over my shoulders, fluffing his wings, preening, letting out the occasional ear-grating screech. I had Mario's bone-handled knife–in the pose, I held it loosely in my palm, but now I was using it to cut a button from the front of the white shirt I was wearing open. I sawed lightly at first, then harder.

The blade was a keen blue. I was thinking only about results, my own light touch on the handle of the knife. The bunch of threads held, and held. Ace rubbed his head against my nape, took my earring and earlobe gently in his beak, pulled, then let go and right there next to my ear loosed a shriek. I pulled up on the knife; the clump of threads gave.

Looking back, I can feel the blade slip, can feel the combination of surprise and exultation and sudden pain–surprisingly abstract–and despair as it slid over my finger to the bone and into my sternum. The ease. The way it took my breath away. I looked down for a second, then, because I couldn't think what else to do, because I couldn't at that moment remember how long the blade was, how much of its cold length was inside my body. I pulled it out.

I said, "Oh, shit," and Mario looked up from his easel where he was dabbing the blue into Ace's wing, his one lit side, and said, “Maureen, what the fuck," and right then I realized there was blood everywhere on his wife's white carpet and chair–this was Mario's truest infidelity, to paint me there–and the blood was mine.

He said, "I told you not to move."

I said, "I'm sorry."

Later, after the emergency room and the surgery and the three-night stay, after the police who kept looking at Mario and saying to me, “You did this yourself?" and asking me to repeat the story again, just as it happened, Mario took me in a cab back to my apartment. He said, '"What the hell were you doing?"

But I must have known something. While I healed, he brought me tea and chocolate and little sandalwood soaps from the Chinese market on the corner. He lied to my mother, all the way across mountains and prairies on the western slope of the Rockies, endlessly, tenderly on the phone.

He said to her, "She's fine, I'm here." He said, "I Iove her.” When the bandages came off he kissed the tip of the finger I would never feel again, and he made love to me gently, curled against my back, until I could bear his whole weight.

Then, when he had decided I was well enough, he showed me the painting: the white face and black hair; the eyes lowered to the hand holding the knife; the slumped shoulders and casually spread knees; and behind the open man's shirt just the gray shadow of a body from which, over the shirt's white cotton, the red stain spread. It was difficult to tell if the red on the knife was a stain itself or a reflection, so pure a surface had he rendered for it. The bird was unfinished but still, as Mario said, complete: almost oriental, those bare strokes of blue and the baleful red eye.

Though he'd been paying for my apartment for a long time, since soon after I began to sit for him, it was at this moment I realized I was not his lover but his mistress.

I said, "I like the shirt right here"–I pointed–"where the folds are."

He said, "It's a breakthrough." He was looking at the painting. He said, "I'll leave her." He said, "We'll have thirteen children."

I said, "Like hell." I didn't believe any of it anyway.

I stopped pretending to paint, myself. I left everything–failed canvasses, paints and brushes–just where it was.

Mario started staying the night, then every night. And then my mother's call came, and later we sat drinking gin on the fire escape and watching the soot settle on my white shirt, and I said, "I'm going back."

He said, "To that cow town?"

I said, “You won't believe the light."

He said, "I'm not finished with you."

I breathed in. I said, "Then come on."

#

I never claim to know what’s true. I know only what I've been told. The one story my mother ever told me about herself as mother she relayed as if it were an ordinary one, with only the usual amount of bloodshed and anguish. She said, "It's the same everywhere. Only the details change."

Here is the story. It was morning. Every day at dawn my mother had carried the bulk of her stomach, of me, to the dig, up the dry wash and even up the cliff face on the ancient, precarious carved-out hand and footholds.

But today, still ten days from due, she had stayed behind at camp while the others went ahead up to the site. For weeks, they had been urging her to go back to town. They had said, "It's almost time."

She got up early that morning and after the others left she washed her hair in the river. It was hard to bend over; she had brought a pan, she told me, to scoop the water up over her head. All the night before she'd been turning more and more inward, she told me years later, as if listening to me and my movements, to what in my impatience I was saying, there in the dark: Pay attention.

When she was done washing, she took a blanket and laid it out in the soft sand under the juniper. She set out her army knife open to its sharpest blade. She filled a pail from the river and put it nearby to warm in the sun and folded a clean towel next to it.

Like anyone, she must have been afraid–in her case, maybe, as much of a kind of revealed disarray as of any pain. She must have worried about the time, about whether she could be finished before the others came back. She must have been afraid of loss, too, and of blood and of cutting the tough cord herself.

And then, for as long as she could be attentive to them and me at once, she went back to her fragments of painted clay, sorting, arranging, assembling, blowing the dust from their rough surfaces, running her fingers along their edges. And then she lay down under the tree.

I wonder, still, how long she would have lain there afterwards, her child on her stomach and their shared blood drying in the sharp air, exhausted,

drifting in and out of sleep, trying to reassemble herself from the long push into pain and back out the other side, before she roused herself and reached for the bucket and the towel. By the time the others returned at sunset we were lying washed on a clean blanket, just as she had wanted; within a week she was climbing the cliffs again, with me knotted into an old man's shirt tied by its sleeves to her back, a weight she was already used to.

My mother was not a teller of tales, not a person to peel back layers of time and events to reveal herself. It was the archetypal dead who interested her.

"I didn't want to miss anything," she said, the one time she told me this story.

Now I think of my birth as if its my own memory: I can see the canyon, identify the tree and the particular shady blue of the blanket. I don't know any more what parts of it are true.

#

The reason I'm going back: my mother, suddenly, is old.

When she called, I could imagine her on the other end, one hand on the receiver and the other over her faulty heart as if touching herself there would help her describe what has gone wrong. Between New York and the Rockies I pictured the phone line snaking over hills, through cornfields, across open plains and mountains. Such an attenuated connection, her voice growing thinner with each electronic mile. Still, though I can't say how she's escaped it, my mother doesn't know yet what I know: even she is doomed.

And so, driving back west is nothing like driving into my childhood–not with Mario next to me asleep, his black lashes curved like wings at rest over his cheeks; and the birdcage in the back seat; and Ace's cackle over the stereo.

I even know why there has opened such a rift, this break between the present and that mythical childhood spent under blue skies, in a desert where I watched my mother bend her head over the reemerging bones of the long dead. I believed for years, even after I left, that if I could watch her hard enough she would lift her eyes and look at me; she would take me back to the green lawns and ordered cabinets of home. But she will never lift her eyes from the past she holds in her hand. And she will not find what she is looking for; there can't, I think, be yet another new lost city out in the American desert where she roams. Even that space could not be so vast.

She must know this, but she keeps looking for signs of that city anyway. In her mind, at every crossroads, under every piece of ground where her foot falls lies somebody with a history. She thinks any risk, any accident of man or nature, can be survived into myth.

I don't know about Mario. He's sleeping with his head propped on a pillow against the window. He's gone slack-jawed, but when I let up a little on the accelerator, he opens his eyes and shuts his mouth. He says, "Slow down."

I say, "I'm not going to try to stop her."

Mario yawns and looks at me sideways.

I say, "She can die out there if she wants. I just want to save the house." And it's true, I want to save something, and the house is there. I think I can recover it from the slow degeneration of our long-time tenants, the Quales; I believe I can restore it to what it was, its old innocence and its lushness.

He says, "Leave her alone."

I say, "She's sick." I say, 'Things are different out here."

And this too is true: living in the city, the big city, where the violence is human and metallic and mechanized and unavoidable, where there are always witnesses, however speechless, I would shut my eyes in front of my empty canvas and just envision, for example, the sunlight flashing off the back of a snake, the delicately raised quills of a porcupine, a white bone, cliffs rising out of the desert. I know how to tell if a lost people might have lived once, centuries ago, behind where the cliff face is shaded over with branches.

I might picture the way a river would begin to slide almost imperceptibly faster, glittering, toward its falls. Lightning a hundred miles away, dancing over the desert. A hand turning a human skull or a fragment of a pot as if they had the same value. All as if danger itself composed a kind of paradise.

I know where I learned this.

I would reach out my brush toward the easel then, but by the time the bristles touched down too often it would all be lost–only the gray sky, the gray buildings and everywhere man-made dirt. What I wanted was that old seduction–brilliant, frank, but only if you knew how to read the signs.

And all the time my mother growing older in the usual, still shocking ways.

#

In town, the first thing we do is ride in the padded elevator with the bird and the suitcases up to her new condo.

My mother takes the blanket off the cage and opens up the cage door for Ace and starts to murmur at him. She thinks she's going to teach him to talk, or at least to be a companion, to sit on her shoulder and gently nibble her jawbone. She believes, here as with everything, there's some tenderness that can accomplish what she desires.

I say, "It's no good. He was taken out of the jungle."

She looks at me.

I say, “I didn't know until later. He won't talk."

Ace just hunkers down on his perch with his shoulders up around his ears. It's been a long trip.

She says, “Maureen. You're here to stay."

I say, "That depends on the Quales." I say, “We’ll be back for supper."

She says, “I'm leaving Monday. I'll just be gone a few days."

It's starting already. I say, "You could stay in a motel."

She says, “Not where I'm going." She laughs and brushes my bangs off my forehead.

I shake my head. I say, "It's not like there's anything out there. Not that matters."

She says, “This country is smaller than you think."

Then Mario and I take the elevator back down and get in the car again and drive by the old house. I pull up in front and turn off the ignition. "Here it is," I say.

Mario says, "This is nostalgia. It's shit, pure and simple."

I say, "The Quales have never done well."

Mario has sensibilities. Intrusions pain him. I'm different: I can't concentrate on one thing–everything I see reminds me of something else. This is why, according to Mario, I'll never get anywhere as a painter.

"The world can't be bigger than the canvas," he says. He says, "No wonder you don't paint. Where would you start?"

Mario believes in the pure inviolability of the closed form. Mostly, he believes in his own ideas, in how they emerge whole, one at a time. I'd thought his certainty would have been shaken by now–not, I suppose, by the roil and dirt of Manhattan, which must have made him what he is, but by seeing the way the land unfolds from the man-made coastline as if shaking itself free of something, through the rumpled hills of West Virginia and Ohio into Nebraska, flat and calm and terrifying, and then under Wyoming's high, explosive sky and into the mountainous west.

But Mario has kept to himself. I suppose this is what vision is. This is how he has become successful: by, he says, maintaining his integrity. By never changing his mind.

And so he is famous, in a small way, for his portraits of women askew, with pieces missing but implied. The absence of these body parts, he says, is the same as their presence, but better. The absence makes the bodies more complete. I understand what he tells me.

And for my appearances in his work I have my own small bit of fame. His other model, at least at first, was his wife, Dorothy, whom he always painted wearing a white terry bathrobe, or with the robe tossed over her shoulder or lap. Me he paints always with Ace, in the background or in the foreground, wings outstretched or folded, looking at the canvas through one eye, looking at himself in a mirror that reflects him back. Ace is always the one bright spot against my extreme black-and-white, my pale skin and dark hair and eyes.

I admit, I liked the idea at first, the notion of being that kind of object, even of sharing the galleries with Dorothy, as if between the two of us he portrayed his whole life. I had no illusions then about fidelity or my own occasional impulses toward family unity. I knew where I had come from. I couldn't predict my little act of violence, how it would throw him my way.

So in the beginning, I sat for him feeling whole, self-contained. We were embarking together on something new. Piece by piece, I watched myself being dismantled. I tried to imagine what he was seeing, what wholeness or flaw or defect or gap. I wondered how he could break me open just by looking.

He'd say, "They're not portraits. They have nothing to do with you." I stopped painting altogether. Instead I'd look at his paintings of me for what they said about form and the world. What, if anything, they said about my life.

Now he says, "You're opening up a can of worms, if you ask me."

#

Me, I just sit there behind the steering wheel and look across him toward the old house, which, when my mother moved us to a smaller house up the hill, we rented out rather than sold to the Quales because the place had been in the family for almost a century, which out here is a long time, and besides the Quales couldn't afford to buy and my mother felt sorry for them. Now the paint is peeling off in strips and little chunks, white over the brick and a faded blue on the wood shutters and front door.

I say, "It hasn't been painted since we moved out."

Mario doesn't say anything.

I say, "It’s been years."

Mario settles further down in the seat. He has his Caterpillar ventilated hat pulled down over his face.

I know what's eating at me. I say, “You know, when she goes out like this it's a serious thing."

He says, "Yeah."

I say, "She doesn't know what she's looking for."

He says, "Who does?"

I say, "That's not what I mean."

But Mario's just seen my mother for the first time. She is tall and thin and elegant with silver hair. She was wearing a suit she made look like a Chanel though it probably wasn't. When she pursed her lips at Ace, she looked prim and composed, and the bird looked, next to her, sloppy, ill-mannered, unmade. In other words, Mario has no reason to believe me.

He says, “You worry too much."

I say, “No marshmallows. No pastoral." I say, "We're talking about the desert here. She climbs cliffs looking for bones. She goes alone. She doesn't use ropes. You have no idea."

I am thinking of myself, too.

The low tam junipers edging the front yard are now overrun completely with morning glories. I used to comfort myself by imagining we were staying in town under this real roof, that we would begin a normal life. I can't blame the Quales, really, for letting the shrubs go. But the morning glories are climbing the honeysuckle by the porch, the pyracantha under the windows. It is late morning, and the white trumpets of flowers are still half-open, pale and innocent looking.

I say, “They're poisonous." I am surprised to see, through the leafy vines, a little juniper green here and there. Signs of survival, too small and blotted with brown to be triumphant or even hopeful, but indicative of something nonetheless.

I want, at least, to take that little sign as a positive one, though I think I'm old enough to know surviving isn't always the point. I want some indication to stand against the crabgrass in the yard and the refrigerator and scrap lumber and pieces of rusting old gutter, signs of projects begun and abandoned, in the driveway and carport. There's nothing left of what I yearned for, all those years ago. Something's been building up here. Most of us work to keep it at bay: this going back to the earth before our eyes.

I think of my mother's tidiness, her precision, the decorum with which she shuts the door or backs out from under the tent flap. The way in which her smallest gesture has meaning, if only one can learn to read the signs.

To Mario, I say, "Mr. Quale has been ill for years."

He says, "That’s no excuse for filth."

Most of us no longer speak from the heart. We are reasonable beings.

Sometimes my mother does what I tell her, though the results are not necessarily what I imagined. Her new condominium, for example, built right up on the mountain, a high-rise, the last building on the highest road, is not what I had in mind when I told her even the small house was too much for her–too much, I meant, for me to let her stay in. Last Christmas, when I was back, it snowed seventeen inches in one afternoon, and she insisted on driving us down the mountain to the grocery store in the middle of the storm. Outside the car was a cloud of snow from which, as we approached, lights and houses emerged briefly before fading back into the white background.

My mother was driving fast. She looked over at me; I was holding tight to my

purse in my lap. She said, “Watch this," then gunned her four-wheel drive wagon, put it in neutral, turned the wheel, braked hard, and slid half-sideways all the way down the hill. Her leather-gloved hands rested delicately on the wheel; her face wore a look of unmixed glee.

Her condo is on the tenth floor; spread out below her, the city looks peaceful and just. There have been rumors that the slope beneath the building is not stable, and my mother knows them to be true. She paid a lot to live here anyway.

#

My mother got her Ph.D. in anthropology back when women were thought to be uninterested in the insensate or the academic.

She used to say, when called upon to explain herself, "I never married," with her eyebrows raised a little and a slight smile on her face, and though she said it quietly as she said everything, my grandmother if she were there would say "Miriam, hush," as if she were reprimanding a boast. Even I read in my mother’s expression such pride I'd repeat the phrase myself–"My mother never married"–with the same little smile, until I started school.

For years I've kept a photo on my bedstand: my mother stands on a terrace overlooking the sea. She's in Cuba. I can't quite remember why. Her specialty was the Anasazi, and in this photo for once she is not dressed for work. She is turned a little sideways; she has her hip cocked like a model's. It is late in the day. Her hair is the same honey color as the sun on the rocks behind her. A breeze lifts her white chiffon skirt and sash, and the man next to her has lifted his hand to catch the sash's end flying into his face. He is dark, wearing a tuxedo. He is laughing and looking at her while she looks right at the camera.

This is what I have.

When people said, talking low where she could overhear, “The child has no father," my mother would break in and say, "Of course she has. He just isn't here."

#

Now she stands on her balcony like any woman and says, "Just look at the view."

Her decor is pristine, all in whites and pearl grays. Against the pale walls and above the glass cases filled with the scraps and debris of dead peoples–pot shards, chipped stone, pieces of rock worn with use, the inevitable bones–my paintings look lush, overgrown, chaotic, unfamiliar. It took me a minute to recognize them as mine. It's been a long time.

Ace, too, adds a touch of the exotic. He's settled in now, perched on the top of his cage. Whenever anyone walks by, he leans far out in the opposite direction and cackles.

"Just like you told me," she says, "and you were right."

I say, "How do you feel?"

She puts her hand over her chest and says, "It's like something is opening there, something I could fall into. It takes my breath away literally." She smiles, as if this satisfies her. She says, "I feel fine."

I say, "Don't go," I don't want her to stuff a pack with a sleeping bag and

food and water for days in the desert and carry it where no car can reach her. I say, "There's nothing out there."

"Except axe-murderers," Mario says.

I roll my eyes, say, "This is not New York."

"Adventure Magazine," he says.

I say, "Well."

My mother says, "He's right. You never know." I can tell she likes the idea. She says, "Those stories are supposed to be true, aren't they dear?" She's talking to Mario.

I want to say act your age. I want her to sit in a chair by the window.

"This Mario," she says, tilting her head toward him, "is he alright?"

He looks at me with his eyebrows raised. He doesn't know what I will say. I think of the red scar, still angry, on my sternum; the scars behind that one, in the dark where I cannot see; the scar on the finger I will never feel again.

I think of his hands on me, of Dorothy, his wife, in her white terry robe, which in fact she was wearing the one time we met, when Mario and I picked up his last boxes before we left town.

"He's good," I say. I mean it. I say, "But here, he won't last."

He rolls his eyes.

She says, '"Why don't you have a baby?" She looks at me, says, “You don't have a whole lot of time."

#

Eulalie Quale has dirty brown hair pulled back in an elastic. She's only maybe forty-five, but she's wearing one of those print housecoats from the fifties.

Real low, she says, "Mr. Quale is resting." She doesn't stand aside for us to come in.

I say, "l'd like to work this out."

"We had an agreement," she says. “Your mother never liked us, but she's been good to us anyway." She says, "I know what's right. I know it's been a year since we paid." She tilts her head back and looks at me. She says, "I know all of it. There's nothing you can pull on me."

I didn't know any of this. I lean against the doorjamb. I say, "I could give you another chance." I'm seeing the place as Mario would, decrepit, nothing but work. And the whole town–hills going brown now in late summer, the slight haze, the way there's no city, not really–or maybe it's that the city is everywhere, not in any one ideal eroding heart but embodied in each neighborhood. It's suburbs on suburbs, Mario says. A sprawling small town. Even what used to be downtown, quaint and old-fashioned with its Woolworths and old Mormon co-op all the way through my childhood, is now just two big malls. The old iron co-op facade was restored and built right into the outside of one of the malls, but everyone just parks in the indoor parking terraces and walks into the stores from there, so nobody sees the regilded iron arches. It's not the same.

Every evening, Mario says, "Where do you go at night?"

Now Eulalie Quale says, "It's too much for him anyway, all of this." She gestures out at the overgrown yard, the choking tams and the building materials leaned moldering against the carport wall. "It only makes him worse to see it. There's nothing here he'll ever finish." She says, "I have a sister up north."

Even from here, just on the first bench of the foothills I can see all the way across the valley to the Oquirrh Mountains. The day is so bright I have to squint to raise my eyes to look.

I lower my eyes again and shrug at her. “Whenever you're ready,” I say.

She says, "I'm ashamed it’s come to this." She stands aside and I walk in. "Just so you know," she says.

Nothing is changed except it's all older and dirtier–grime on the windowsills, on the white-painted iron banister curving upward, ground into the old figured carpeting. It’s all smaller but I am ready for that.

Mr. Quale is lying on the couch in what used to be my playroom. There is still the wall of built-in cabinets where I kept my toys, but their white paint is grayed with dirt and age. Mr. Quale's eyes are wide open, staring at the ceiling. He doesn't move to look at me when we come in. The room smells of sweat and the accumulated oils of the human body, too rich and spoiled and thick to breathe in.

Mrs. Quale shrugs and gestures around her. "It's been all I could do," she says.

I say, "Of course," as if I understand. I touch her shoulder. “You just let me know," I say.

She says, "We'll leave most of it. I've been ready"–she gestures around her–“a long time. We'll be out by tomorrow."

I say, “l know the way. We'll let ourselves out."

#

When we get back, my mother is sitting next to the window, looking out at the lights of the city below. She says, "It’s just like I told you."

Mario and I stand in the doorway behind her and watch. She looks the way I think she should.

I cry, "l think I'm in love," and Mario puts his hands on the front of my T-shirt and kisses me. In my ear he whispers, '"What is this shit?"

My mother says, "The trick is to stop waiting."

Mario says, "What?"

She's still not looking at us. She shrugs her shoulders.

I wonder what she knows. I say, "You're being a child."

She says, “Yes.”

Mario still has his hands on the front of my T-shirt. He leans down, puts his forehead against mine, says, "I'm getting a divorce.'"

My mother turns around, eyebrows raised, and says, "You're married?”

I say, “Not to me.”

“Of course,” she says.

 #

I say, “We can put a studio in the attic. We can punch out skylights.” Suddenly, now that the possibility is there, I want him to stay. I say, “We’ll put Ace up there, in the sun.” I want to know what we would be like if we had this much space between us.

We are on the front lawn of the old house. The Quales are gone, as promised. It looks like they’ve left most everything behind. I am lying on my back; Mario is sitting propped up on his elbows.

He says, “There’s room for kids.”

I look over at him. He’s wearing a faded black T-shirt and his black leather vest.

I can imagine Mario staying long enough to get the test results. He would be happy, I know. He would stand behind me and cup my belly in his hands. He would close his eyes and picture what he held there. He would go to Lionel Toy World and walk aisles for hours and come home with a carload of basketballs and dolls and little plastic automatic weapons.

And I can see me holding a child in a high room with skylights, a cradle and an easel. The room has white walls and is filled with sunlight. On the walls are all the framed posters with which, as a younger woman, I surrounded

myself: movie stars, the glamorous, fated ones. I liked their imperturbable loneliness, their turbulent affairs, their sense of being watched, the way they were composed within the frames. All they had, and all they never expected. Marilyn Monroe. Rita Hayworth. Ann Margaret, looking down at me. These were what I began with, all the way back in junior high, when I started to paint: not art from life, but art from still-life, from the posters of famous, distant faces.

The canvas on the easel is white.

In my head I split the picture: the nursery on one side, blindingly bright, and Mario on the other. On his side it is night in New York. The streets he stands on are black and wet and shining. This is easy.

“I don’t know,” I say.

I think of my mother, beautiful and innocent and alone, high up in her quiet rooms smelling of new carpet. She’s on her knees in the living room, stuffing her sleeping bag into its little red sack. She is going out into the dark.

I say, "I have enough to worry about." I say, "Maybe it's only me. What I remember about childhood is how dangerous it was. We were monsterous." I'm not thinking about myself.

He says, "She can't just stop."

I say, "Maybe we're right to resist."

When we make love that night on the filthy rugs of the old house, I leave out my diaphragm and Mario, usually an efficient lover, can't get enough.

"Baby,” he keeps saying, "come here."

#

I help my mother load up the car. I see it as the only way I can keep an eye on her. Though she'll be walking under its weight for four days, I take her backpack from her and carry it in the elevator down to the garage.

I say, "Do you have enough food? Water bottles?"

She smiles a little, says, "Yes."

I want her to say, "Yes, dear." Her voice sounds too young. She looks like a little silver-haired lady, but under the hair her face has almost no lines. I wonder what on earth happened.

I say, Who else is going?"

She says, "I've done this before."

I say, "That' s not the point."

She says, “You could come along."

I say, "No."

She says, "It doesn't matter, you know, if I come back emptyhanded."

I say, “No." I lean over and kiss her on the forehead. I say, "Hurry back."

#

This is not a dream, though it haunts my sleep.

It's my bedtime. My mother has come with a book to read to me. I am a child and she is still young, her hair in a gold braid down her back. I'm in a cot in a large tent, big enough to stand up and move around in. In the middle of the tent is a table with a lantern on it and a tin mug with my mother's brandy. In its light the tent feels cozy, enclosed, like a real room, but we know the lantern casts our shadows against the canvas, a domestic scene for everyone to watch: the cook, the archaeologists, the graduate students passing on the way to their own tents.

The book my mother has brought is a picture book but one for adults, with photographs and text about dead cities, all lost to some great, careless gesture of nature or man, or just to a natural winding down of something that once held tight. Now these cities, buried for centuries or millenia, are being dug painstakingly back into the light.

My mother opens to the section on Pompeii. “See,” she says, “how perfectly preserved it is." I'm looking at the pictures. I can’t imagine why we would want to know about this, why we would go to all this effort. The people in the pictures have been burned permanently into their own shapes, at the same time unrecognizable and all too acutely recognizable as human. Some are sitting, some lying down. Two of them prop their elbows on a table, where they lean over some kind of game. The walls are still brilliantly painted.

She shows me pictures of the tools, some of them as delicate as dentist's tools, with which the anthropologist carves the bodies back out of the earth. I have seen them all before in my mother's thin hands, flashing in the sun.

With her finger, my mother traces a map of the city, the district where the markets were, the brothels. "Here are the suburbs," she says. She laughs, but

I don't know what about. She looks up at the ceiling of the tent, shuts her eyes. "A discovery like that," she says.

I look back down at the book. The absolute, lifelike gesture held stilt for centuries. Street upon street, a whole city.

I will never walk over the surface of the world safely again. These figures are everywhere under our feet, whether we find them or not. There, under my cot, in this tent full of warm yellow lantern light.

My mother leans close to me, her mouth in my hair, her hand tight on my upper arm. "Any one of these," she says, closing the book. She says, "This is what we mean when we say 'Eden."' She says, "But they've got it wrong. Nothing is ever lost."

And this is where the dream takes over: at that moment, I hear rain on the tent, the wind slapping it against the canvas, and I know the river is rising, filling with red dust from the desert, water rushing in rivulets, through washes, from all over the desert toward us. We can’t escape.

I say to Mario, "You don't know what we've survived out there.”

"And here you are," Mario says. He is holding me in the crook of his arm.

I say, “Yes."

Looking at him, I can see he has no idea.

I think of the first time I took a subway from downtown, 10 a.m. and the station deserted except me and one man. The station smelled of human urine and I thought, this is it, I'm here. I sat down at the other end of the bench

from the man and looked at him. He was leaning forward over his crooked arm and fist, like Rodin's "Thinker," I thought at first, and then he let go of the rubber tube in his teeth and pulled the syringe out and leaned back into himself.

I thought, This is it. I stayed right where I was, waiting for the train. I say, "That was only one time, I guess. That's what it was like, is all."

#

The next day, I call a guy who advertises in the classifieds to haul the Quales's trash. "Bring your friends," I say. I want it gone tomorrow.

I say to Mario, “You wouldn't believe what she put me through." I say, "You don't know what it's like out there. It's not only the flash floods. The land can get you, or the scorpions. Avalanches. Lightning. Poisonous snakes." I am thinking of her bending down, putting her hand flat on the earth. I think of her reaching her hand up over the top of the cliff, not knowing what might be there. I say, "She could have a heart attack, and that would be it."

He says, "She told me it's not that serious. A murmur, that's all."

I say, "Of course that’s what she told you." I say, "I've seen them all in a single day. When the water rises, down there, it turns red as blood."

He says, "She'll be fine."

On Sunday, the trash is gone from the yard and house–every artifact hauled away, only the layers of dirt left to remove. Mario and I start in the attic and work down: ceilings, walls, windows, windowsills, baseboards, wood floors, stairs. Mario pries open windows, tightens the screws on towel racks, drills

holes, carries buckets of hot, fresh water. I have never seen him like this. When he turns the screwdriver, the muscles in his forearms clench.

#

We are at my mother’s, waiting for her to get back. Sometimes I get up and go out on the balcony, but I have no way of knowing if any of the cars on the road below are hers. We've been watching a news show: someone has just discovered a new, lost city in the Andes. The camera shows him with his hands full of gold jewelry, little carved charms. He will never, he says, stop looking. This ruin he found in a dream, and then he went where the dream told him and there it was.

Mario is sitting forward, his elbows on his knees. He keeps saying "Jesus," every time the camera focusses on a house, a temple, an observatory for watching the skies. Everything has been overgrown. On the T.V., we see Peruvian peasants, shirtless and sweating, hacking at vines and foliage with machetes, pulling densely leaved branches away from the faces of statues. Mario reaches for me.

There is the sound of the key in the lock. We don't get up; we just turn to the door. My mother is standing there, looking like she always does but smaller. Her white shirt is pink from being soaked in the red water but still it looks somehow pristine. She has a panama hat in her hand. She throws it down on the couch.

I say, "I'm sorry." She looks exhausted; her face is gray and has wrinkles I've never noticed, but there's something she's holding back.

She says, “I'm going to bed."

I say, "What?" I think she's been listening to the radio.

She says, “It's okay."

I say, "Go to bed." She's breathing a little fast.

Mario says, "Maureen."

My mother says, "It's okay." She raises an eyebrow. She looks, suddenly, the way she always did, except for that way she's breathing, like she came up the stairs instead of the elevator.

I say, "It's possible."

My mother looks at me and winks. She says, "Thanks for waiting up.”

Back at the house, Mario and I zip together our sleeping bags and spread them on the floor of what will be the bedroom. We lie down.

Mario says, "It doesn't matter."

We make love again, this time quietly, slowly. I try to feel, deep inside me, if anything takes.

And then he is asleep, his head on my shoulder, and I am looking out into the dark, feeling the house tick around us.

I keep imagining the high room and the canvas: first it is pure white, and then the vines begin to curl in with their pearlescent flowers, the hint of limbs underneath. There is an empty white bathrobe; the wedge of sky stitched by lightning, a cool blue; Ace's wings stretched out; a couple playing cards; a couple with their mouths pressed together; water rising redder and faster and washing the dirt away.

What emerges: a city at the crossroads–I know none of this is right, but it's what I see here, on the edge of sleep its inhabitants waking refreshed and going about their business of cooking, weaving, nursing their babies.

The whole flat earth and what it holds. The world of the body, all around, waiting for us to put a name to it. Waiting for us to recover.

I turn to him again. I will wake him up. I will wake him.