The Sentence

Let’s say the author sets aside every Sunday, (he calls it the Sabbath, maybe a holdover from the time of certainty he uneasily enjoyed in his youth), to write, and it seems to work, this writing Sabbath, because his shit job, in retail or construction or in a restaurant, always leaves him too tired and dispirited to write at all from Monday through Friday, and then Friday nights he drinks with his buddies, and Saturday mornings are, therefore, pretty much recovery time, and, besides, he has to save his Saturdays for laundry and grocery shopping and unwinding and all that, so the Sunday writing schedule works pretty well for him, except that most Sundays he procrastinates til noon, and, when he finally picks up his pen and notebook and settles into his chair in his tiny apartment, he usually has the same old ideas over and over again, the same two stories he recycles endlessly, into which he plugs settings and characters and which he (sometimes entertainingly) disguises in a variety of styles, though he has but two themes in his life, two psychological or emotional impasses or what we can call stations, like radio stations that broadcast the same familiar bullshit day and night, between which he can choose but beyond which, on the AM dial of his mind, all else is late-night static, so, unless he has some kind of breakthrough, which he has stopped expecting, though for years it felt as though he was always on the cusp of one, he can tune into only these two stations: the station on which, through the velvet hiss of an old vinyl LP, he can always hear the song, a sort of old-timey round, an endless loop, in which the protagonist wanders deep into some unknown territory, (a wilderness; a forest; an abandoned building; an unnumbered and uninhabited floor in a busy building, inaccessible by the main stairs or elevator and somehow, mysteriously and portentously, unknown to the janitor and the landlord; that kind of thing), and makes of the place a beautiful, orderly, but lonely home in which he finds a provisional contentment that he will never be permitted to share with anyone, ever; and the other station, on which one character, usually a man, lives in mute capitulation after some undescribed tragedies that happened not too far in his past  ̶  the kind of tragedies we all endure, the most mundane kind, not the made-for-TV kind  ̶  have left him listless, dull, without passion, defeated, and his life, as the author tells it over and over, is just a repetitive act of mindless perseverance, and the character becomes so disaffected, or alienated, that the world around him (the closed world the author permits him to inhabit, and the only world the reader can see within the narrow aperture of the story) stops making sense and begins to take on a dreamlike unreality, as though underwater or in a nameless gray purgatory in which others are always just disappearing around a corner, just glimpsed at the edge of the frame, (or just out of earshot, or too self-involved, or speaking some language, of which he can’t understand a word, from the far eastern edge of a dingy socialist Europe), and strange things happen, and the author, and the protagonist, do not know why these things happen, and don’t even remember to wonder why, and strange artifacts appear, (which feel somehow like the obscure symbols of an alien allegory, heavy with the penumbra of significance, or immanence, but inscrutable, utterly out of reach), and the protagonist finds himself (or, rarely, herself) participating ineluctably in inexplicable happenings involving bizarre and vast machines (a cast-iron dirigible venting coalsmoke, a submarine commuter train with the flukes of a whale, a sewing machine the size of an apartment building, a footbridge floating out to sea, etc.) and reticent people (a woman wearing a veil sewn from the throatskins of pelicans, a campesino who expostulates preposterous philosophies, an ex-wife whose attorney waterboards the protagonist  ̶  or is it the author?  ̶  to force him to complete some recondite paperwork), and the author asks himself why he has these two particular preset stations to tune into, and if it’s just a phase he’s going through, and whether there is any escape, and, as he writes, as the sun lowers red this Sabbath evening, as his allotted time winds down before he returns to five more days of his shit job, he wonders if it really is enough to just do the work, to put one word after another, or, if an author has to “tap into” something vital and say something true (which is what he thinks he had better do, or why bother?), should he just quit now, or should he trust that he can someday do this right if he keeps plugging away at it?, and he is buoyed by a memory, he remembers that feeling of the deep congruence, let’s agree to call it, that can, what?, bloom?, between content and form, a congruence that feels very, very good, or right (is he remembering this accurately, after all this time?), that keeps him doing this strenuous (and maybe insane) thing every Sunday (but let’s be honest: it is not just the feeling of “deep congruence” that keeps him going; it is also the possibly-puerile fantasy that this will be read, and admired by admired people, and will sit on a long shelf of great books, and, one day, maybe, some other writer whose fire has almost gone out but who perseveres and does the work will take it down and open it and re-read it and use it as a kind of kindling, trusting anew that his  ̶  or her  ̶  oldest, driest, dullest, saddest, stupidest stories  ̶  the ones his shrink and his friends and family are sick of hearing  ̶  will smolder and catch and flare into something bright) with some kind of dogged hope, for what, exactly, he is not sure.

The Secret Divorce

Every morning the young man stowed his backpack in the locker and crossed the ink-black river to the train station. The predawn city was almost silent in cold and heavy fog and he found that, as he crossed the footbridge, the labyrinth of the Old Town disappeared in the gray shroud behind him before the orderly New Town emerged ahead of him, so that in the middle of the bridge he could imagine it was endless, that it came from nowhere and led nowhere, and that it didn’t matter which direction he walked.

Every morning he bought coffee and sat facing the platform and waited for her. He waited all the gray mornings and into the afternoons. He missed her, but the cold and the fog, which hardly lifted, seemed to dull all his senses, and his longing was muted, not urgent. She seemed remote. In any event, he waited.

The trains eased out of the fog, sluicing water, their groaning attenuated and dull, and returned into the submarine gray as though going out of focus. The passengers drifted, silent.

One day a full train arrived, and, after the dark-coated passengers dispersed, one man remained. At first he stood by the doors and peered out into the rain. Then he paced and checked his phone. Then he settled into a bench to wait. Finally, he slept with one hand on his suitcase.

When the young man returned the next morning the man was still there. They avoided each other in the echoing hall. The next day, too, the man waited. Every so often, he went to the curb and looked out into the gray. His hair became oily and his shirt wrinkled.

One morning the young man bought two coffees and approached the man and gave him one. The man smiled and said something in the local language. They raised their cups to each other in the universal gesture of thanks and conviviality.

The last train from the west arrived, and she was not on it. The young man went to the waiting traveler and said, You should come with me. I have a room and supper. The man did not understand the words, but he stood and followed the young man out into the night.

They stopped mid-bridge, between the diffuse blue lights of the New Town and the lights of the Old Town, dim and candle-yellow. Off in the fog and dark, at either end of the bridge, they heard raised voices and the scrape of iron on iron, the clank of heavy chains, and the creak of timber. The bridge drifted free of the embankments, shedding ice. The fog-blurred lights slowly spun and fell away behind them as they floated downriver. Very late, they came to where the harbor widened and the air smelled of brine and diesel. In the deep below them a vast pod of trains groaned out to sea, their hydraulic flukes thrusting, their windows glowing yellow, their passengers breathing ink.

Quarantine

This work is like laying bricks, Phil thought. He sighed. Saved the document. Flipped to the next file on his desk. The Complaint on behalf of the furniture rental company and the Demand Letter seeking unpaid rent on twenty cubicles and desk chairs. He opened the Complaint template in Word, and found that Carey, his paralegal and receptionist, had already filled out the cover page. Plaintiff, Defendant, Judge and Court, dates. He worked steadily, his mind elsewhere. The billing software recorded 0.9 hours. One more brick in the wall.

At five sharp he heard Carey deadbolt the front door and turn the sign from open to closed. She started humming. She came down the hall and stood in his office door, stretching and yawning. She kicked her heels off, put her hands on her broad hips and leaned back. Her clothes stretched against her. It’s that time, she said. She went back to the bathroom.

He turned off the computer and shut the door. He took off his slacks and pressed shirt, and hung them up. He put on shorts and a t-shirt and went out barefoot. She waited at the stairway door in her bathrobe and flipflops. He unlocked the door and they climbed to the attic. The round gable window let in the street sounds, the breathing of cars, the growing volume of laughing customers gathering in front of the bar across the street. He put on a coverall and disposable gloves and stepped into brightly-stained slippers.

Let’s continue same as yesterday, if you would, he said. She studied the canvas, then went to the bed. He looked away, as always. When she said ready, he turned toward her. She lay almost right. He compared her position to yesterday’s underpainting. He went to the bed. Bend your lower knee a little more. Good. I’m going to fix your hair. He moved a thick wing of her hair into the sun. It shifted from almost black to amber. He rearranged the folds of the sheet around her foot. He made several small adjustments to the scene to make it conform to the underpainting.

He started hesitantly. It was always like this. All day laying bricks, and then the freedom of the brush, its lubricated movements in the slick oil paint. He warmed to the work, and then he painted with great speed and fluidity. This was for him the best time. His mind did not stray.

The sounds of the street also warmed to the after-work freedom. Bar customers smoked on the sidewalk below, much louder and happier now that they’d had a drink. The color of the sunlight warmed, from white through yellow, now verging on orange. Her skin turned almost amber as the sun fell, and he found the color for her sunlit profile, a mix of burnt sienna, lead white, cadmium yellow, and, strangely, a very small amount of pthalo blue. The sunlit horizon line of her thigh and hip and the fold of her side were a non-color, neither brown nor pink, as prejudice insisted, but a warm and clayey gold that verged on green. He never tired of this moment, when he landed by intuition on precisely the color that moved the painting from flat and merely accurate, to spacious and vibrant. He worked at an almost frantic pace while the light was right. As it got too orange he worked on the bedding, trying to see the true colors of her shadow on the folds of the white sheet. He worked until seven, the allotted two hours.

He rolled his paint table away so she could get her robe on. He stretched plastic wrap over the palette and put his brushes away, and wiped the knife clean. He bagged the dirty paper towels and latex gloves and went downstairs. She came down behind him and locked the stairway door. They dressed, she in the bathroom, he in his office. They offed the lights, set the alarm, and went out together onto the hot sidewalk. Don’t do nothing I wouldn’t do, she said. She went her way, and he drove home.

His wife had supper ready. The kids were finishing their homework. He felt a moment of pleasure in this order, and then a moment of guilt. This order depended on his income as an attorney and on his wife’s willingness to submit to a role she could very easily transcend. He watched her in the kitchen for a moment. So competent, so organized. So overqualified for this repetitive domestic work. They had met in law school. He was the better student, disciplined and meticulous, but she had the gifts of a TV-drama litigator: articulate, capable of chess-game strategizing, and committed. He always felt unimaginative and stolid around her, and he liked it. And he felt that she had made the greater sacrifice, being a housewife. He thought of himself as a hardworking drone returning every night to this orderly hive and the queen bee. Her willingness to be the housewife flattered him and sometimes filled him with gratitude  ̶  he had never expected to live so well, or to be so adored  ̶  but he felt uneasy, too. How long would she tolerate the boredom? What hobbies would she take up to make her life interesting? What concessions would she demand of him in exchange for her dutiful forbearance?

He changed out of his office clothes and went down to supper. A protein, a starch, and a vegetable. He asked about her day. She made of it an adventure: the errands, the volunteer hour at the kids’ school library, getting the oil changed. She asked about his day, about specific cases, though she couldn’t be interested. His work was all procedural, the most mundane practice, none of the high-stakes courtroom drama that animated her. He asked the kids about their friends and their classes. They said pretty much what they always said, evasive and cagey. He didn’t really listen. After supper he did the dishes and tidied the kitchen. They watched the news, then went to bed, early as usual.

Next day was Friday. He spent half the morning on the phone planning a retreat for members of the Bar. He worked through a discrepancy in his billing with a client. He agreed to a partnership with a big firm on a high-profile pro bono case. Carey bustled in and out, as always fast, energetic, and competent. Her clothes tended toward a dramatic, artsy formality Monday through Thursday, but today she wore jeans over heels, and a loose blouse that showed the top of her elaborate tattoos. He didn’t mind her casual Fridays, but he wore his slacks and pressed shirt as always. Late in the morning he heard the landscaper start work next door. This reminded him that he needed to hire a new landscaper for his building. To the sounds of oiled hedge-shears, he completed his current document. He went outside to talk with the man.

At first, the man did not look up when Phil spoke, then, startled, he set down the tool and removed his hat and held it in both hands at his waist, a strangely formal and submissive gesture. The landscaper was tall and athletic, symmetrical, though stooped in the shoulders. His skin was almost black, a dark coffee brown, white with sweat salt around his neck. Phil had noticed him, but, now that the landscaper had removed his hat and they faced each other he could see that he was many years older than Phil had thought. Sorry to interrupt, but I’m looking to hire a landscaper for my building here, so maybe you could come knock when you’re off work and we’ll talk about it?

The man smiled and shook his head. I’m no speak English, he said. Spanish.

Phil took a moment to adjust. He had spoken Spanish fluently as a young man, when he was a missionary in Guatemala, and later on church charity trips he helped organize. His Spanish wasn’t what it used to be, but the man seemed delighted by his effort. He repeated his request and the man said, in an unfamiliar and almost opaque accent, that he would drop in as soon as he finished.

Phil worked for a while, then the front door chimed open. He heard Carey shift to Spanish. She and the man talked and laughed for a minute, then Phil went to the reception area and asked the man to sit. He refused, indicating his dirty pants. It seemed an important matter of deference that he remain standing, hat in hands, so Phil remained standing, too. The man’s name was Gonzalo, he was from Veracruz. He admitted with some reluctance that he was in the United States illegally. Phil asked him if he would take care of the planting in front of the office once a week, and Gonzalo said yes, of course. Phil had a hard time with his accent, nothing like Carey’s Spanglish or the slow and gentle accents he’d learned in Guatemala, but they communicated well. All three went out to the sidewalk. Phil showed Gonzalo the neat row of squared boxwood and the pine-bark mulch that accumulated trash and needed raking. He showed him the locker where he kept the hose and fertilizer. Carey showed him the big clay urns of flowers she had planted, and the tree-wells full of herbs that barely survived the foot-traffic and the dogs. Gonzalo quoted a price, they shook on it, and he put his hat back on and left on a bicycle heavy with tools.

Carey left at five. She did not model Fridays. From the hall, he watched her step to the curb, look both ways, then jog across the street to the bar, where a crowd waited to get in. She joined a group her age, hugging and laughing. The shape of her across the street reminded him that she was not his, that she was an employee. The way she stood so straight in her sleek heels and the shape of her body in her clothes seemed too much to share, but he brought himself out of reverie and changed into his coverall and went upstairs to paint.

Under the rafters, the studio was hot in the afternoon sun, and the air was thick with Turpenol and damar, linseed oil and Liquin. He opened the window and the door to the fire escape and turned on the fan. The painting of her, nearly finished, stood on the easel in the middle of the room. He took it down and leaned it against a stack of fifty others. Paintings leaned all along one long wall, maybe two hundred of them, a few years’ work. Most were about two by three feet, many were smaller than a sheet of legal paper, and a few were very large, four by eight feet. He had three series of paintings: the ones of Carey that he did Monday through Thursday after office hours; a series of still-lifes he did when she wasn’t working, Friday and some weekends, all of them set up right here, in this attic studio by the circular gable window; and a few landscapes he did when he traveled, mostly alone. His wife had seen only the landscapes. She supported his hobby. She encouraged him to paint, to unwind, and to develop his talent. One of his small landscapes hung above her desk at home, and several decorated the guest rooms in their cabin, but, as far as she knew, his painting was to him what literary fiction was to her: an enriching, edifying hobby. She said that his landscapes were quite good, and he admired her love of books that he found dreary and difficult.

He placed the most recent still-life on the easel, took the plastic off the paints, prepared the brushes, and looked hard at the set-up by the window. He didn’t really care what was in the still-lifes, as long as there was color and light. He had draped a cloth over a stool and placed a Mason jar half-full of water on top, by an orange. In almost all these paintings the sun angled down from the left, because he usually painted in the late afternoon. In a few minutes he was up to speed. He painted the reflection of the sky in the surface of the water. He looked closely and saw the stippled light through the street trees as a pattern around the rim of the glass. The orange reflected its color onto the white cloth and in the glass. As he worked, the sun lowered, and the lights of the bar came on, bold text in blinking bulbs against an orange wall. The light of the scene changed abruptly, and he moved quickly to adjust. He painted the points of light and their warped, displaced inversions in the glass and water. At six-thirty he called home and lied to his wife, I’m running behind at work, I’ll be a little late. On a Friday? Yes, sorry, I won’t be long. Can I drive your dinner down? No, love, but thank you. I just need another hour. I’m sorry.

He worked til eight, pushing hard. He would have to leave it unfinished. He felt exhilarated and purposeful. He wanted to stay. The painting would be a good one.

He latched the window and the fire-escape door and draped his coverall across a chair. He threw his used gloves in the trashcan, shut off the lights and went down, locking the door behind him.

At home he found his supper under foil. The kitchen shone spotless under the halogen lights of the stove hood. He heard the TV upstairs, manic laughter in the otherwise silent house. As he walked by the stove he felt heat and found that she had left a burner on low. He shut it off and went upstairs. He leaned into the kids’ rooms and said hi. They glanced up from their cell phones and acknowledged him. He went in to his wife and kissed her. She shut off the TV and they talked for a while about plans for the weekend. He thought of the good painting he had left, and longed to get back to it, but he feigned enthusiasm, and they decided to go to the cabin, to get the kids out of cell-range and into the fresh air of summer.

The still-life turned out very well. He wanted to do another, similarly backlit by the blinking lights of the bar, but sunset was getting later, and his wife had been silently resentful of his late Friday night at the office. He focused on the sessions with Carey. He proposed starting earlier so he could get three hours of painting time every day. She resisted, saying that two hours was already a long time to hold still for him. He offered her a raise, and she agreed. He worried that someone would notice the sign turned to closed at four, but he couldn’t have someone walking in while he was in the attic in his coverall. So, for three hours four times a week he painted Carey. He worked out a palette of colors for her skin and the bedding in the slanting solstice light. The paintings became more fluent, and he finished two, sometimes three per week. He posed her with her back to him, and several paintings that June showed her in subtly different poses, though the props changed from day to day: in one, her amber hair is piled on a red silk pillow, and the sunlight makes a faint halo of diffuse red on the bare rafters above her head. In another he piled an armload of books next to her on the bed, and she lies with one arm flung up over her head and her hair drapes across the pillow, as though she had succumbed to too much reading.

As she came to trust him more, he turned her every which way. On her back the sun lit the tattoos across her belly and between her breasts and he struggled to render the fine, intricate lines of the tattoos with the same attention he brought to the almost featureless expanse of her skin. He rarely touched her. He maintained the professional detachment he had promised, though sometimes he was sick with desire.

The days in the office required all of his discipline and endurance. His mind recoiled from his work. He had to force himself to pay attention to the demanding documents. He made an embarrassing mistake on a court filing, and had to issue a correction at the indignant demands of opposing counsel. He did what he could to bill six hours a day, but some days he was so distracted he couldn’t, in good conscience, bill more than half that. His income dropped. He dreaded the empty evenings between the time Carey left on Thursday and their next session the following Monday.

One Saturday, he cancelled plans with his family to go in to work. He forced himself to bill ten hours that day. It relieved his guilt and anxiety. It brought his billables for the month just high enough that his wife was unlikely to question him.

Quietly, citing conflicting demands on his time, he quit his position with the Bar, and he delegated more of his church responsibilities to others. He painted as much as he could.

Gonzalo showed up every Monday. He did a good job. He cleaned up from weekend traffic, the beercans and cigarette butts thrown in the boxwoods. He watered and pruned and raked. Phil liked to go out and practice his Spanish with Gonzalo. He liked the handsome, charismatic man, and Gonzalo relaxed a little around him. Gonzalo was a raconteur and had a way of speaking that drew Phil to him. A tendency to use pungent and suggestive words. A straight-faced delivery and an abrupt smile. Phil loved to hear his endless breezy anecdotes, his swerving commentary, his ribald punchlines, his worldliness that made light of weariness and hardship.

Carey always had a joke ready for Gonzalo. Back in his office, Phil would hear her go out the front door and start talking in rapidfire Spanish, punctuated by Gonzalo’s baritone acknowledgements, sí, pues sí, sí, sí. Then Gonzalo’s loud, wheezing, whooping laugh would burst out as she got to the punchline. Phil couldn’t quite follow what she was saying. He tried to not feel hurt that she had no jokes for him, but, he reminded himself, She is only my employee, nothing more. She answers the phone and e-mails, she does paralegal, she sits by the door, and she lies in the bed with her clayey-golden skin. That is what I pay her to do. I cannot expect her to like me.

He finished several smaller paintings, of her face and shoulders as she looked, sidelit, out the attic window. The light passed through her eyes and it took him several tries before he found a way to suggest that translucence with a few loose brushstrokes. These painting seemed alive, heightened, vibrant in a way that made the rest of his life feel flat and bland. He thought about the paintings all the time. He hadn’t felt so intoxicated since he was a child.

Then he worked on some very large paintings, whole sheets of gessoed plywood he’d barely been able to get up the fire-escape, of Carey stretched on her back, her arms reaching above her head. The shadows of her ribs and hips intensified her exposure and the paintings were almost upsetting, at least discomfiting, as though they showed something forbidden. She did not look vulnerable, but fearless, or impassive, like a resting lion.

One Friday at five she came to his office door and yawned and stretched and asked him, in Spanish, if he had plans for the weekend. He said yardwork, maybe go to the cabin with the kids, an obligation at church. She told him she was going to take a cooking class and go to a movie and hopefully get drunk. He felt so grateful that she spoke to him in Spanish and that she stood there in his doorway laughing when she had already clocked out. She said, Do you have a few minutes I can say something to you? With trepidation, he indicated the chair, and she sat and crossed her legs and let a yellow heeled pump hang off her foot.

She said, now in English, Maybe this is something you want me to shut up and not say it? But, you know, these paintings are very good. Especially the ones with me in them! She laughed, without self-deprecation.

Thank you, he said.

You need to show them.

No, you know I can’t do that. It’s just a hobby.

No way, Mister Phil, these are not hobby paintings. These painting are really fucking good, excuse my rude mouth.

Thank you, Carey.

Look, you got, what, like a hundred paintings up there just leaning on the wall getting dusty and…

Probably almost three hundred by now.

You see? Three hundred! What are you doing all these paintings for if nobody sees them but me? At first, I figured you just wanted to see me naked and I didn’t mind too much and you pay me really good, so I said yes. I thought maybe, you know, you would get some idea and try something, but no, you are so nice and considerate sometimes I think you’re gay. She laughed. I’m sorry. Was that bad to say?

No, Carey. I’m not gay. I just want a model. You’re a great model. I don’t want to ruin that by, uh, inappropriate behavior. By disrespecting you.

I appreciate that. You always seem like a safe man, like I can trust you. It’s okay. I like having the work, and I’m more comfortable with it now than I was. It’s much easier than legal work. She laughed again.

He smiled. Carey, thank you for being so great about this.

Yeah, of course. But so, let’s talk about these paintings. You have to show them. Seriously. When I used to model and in art school I’ve seen lots of paintings, and yours are so good. You have a gift, bro. I’m serious.

That weekend at the cabin he thought about what she’d said. He wondered how the paintings would look in a gallery. The thought kept coming to him, though he kept dismissing it. There’s no way, he thought. These paintings belong to another life. A secret, quarantined life that I love even more than my home life, much more than my career. I can’t jeopardize that. He sat on the porch looking across the meadow to where his kids played in the stream. It’s not exactly that I love my secret life more than my home life, he thought. What I mean is that my secret life makes my home life make sense. Or makes it worth it. I love this life, but it is not everything all the time. It’s nearly perfect, but it’s also very boring, no matter how much I love my kids and my wife. He got up and went into the cabin. His wife lay on the couch reading a thick book. Even in her old hiking pants and flannel shirt she looked put-together and pretty. Her hair on the pillow kept its shape. She wore light lipstick and her pedicure looked fresh as always.

He took a shower and thought of Carey. He heard her encouragement over and over. With patience and discipline he stated his case to himself, as though his most prudent self were offering objective legal counsel to his most reckless self. It said: the paintings must never come to light. They belong to your id. They show appetites that must remain caged. They show a side of you that is incompatible with your professional reputation, and that could destroy your marriage and family, and jeopardize your position in the church and the community. He said to himself, If you had any sense you would destroy the paintings, start over, put this childish phase behind you. You would send Carey away with a generous bonus and hire a kid out of law school. He made a contract with himself. In his journal, which he knew his wife sometimes read, he wrote Choose the right, let the consequence follow! And, on another page, he drew a line from memory of the horizon of Carey’s thigh, hip, and side as she had lain in the sun. The line was abstract, uninterpretable to anyone else, a secret in plain sight, a challenge to the order he relied on, but, he knew, timid and without commitment or real danger.

Lying awake that night he chided himself for his timidity. That abstract line, along with a few anodyne landscapes in his cabin, was all his family knew of the passion that moved him most. The regularity of his wife’s breathing and the endless white-noise of the stream pressed down on him.

On Monday he was working on end-of-month accounting when he heard Carey go out the front door and greet Gonzalo in Spanish. He let them talk for a minute. Gonzalo laughed and laughed about something Carey said. Then Phil got up and went out and greeted Gonzalo, asked him to come in to his office when his work was done.

Gonzalo came in, hat in hands, and stood facing the desk. Phil closed the door and asked Gonzalo to sit. He hesitated, but sat on the edge of the chair with his hat on his lap, looking worried.

I have a proposal for you, said Phil, in Spanish.

I hope you are happy with my work?

Yes, very happy. Please, there’s nothing to worry about. I have an idea, but first I need you to promise that what we say in this room is absolutely private, just between you and me.

Yes, of course. I promise. Not one word.

Gonzalo, this will sound perhaps a little crazy. I am an attorney. I have important and conservative clients. I have a place in this community, and I have leadership responsibilities in the legal profession and in my church. Furthermore, I have a family I adore.

Yes, sir. I understand. But what is the crazy part? Gonzalo smiled broadly. His handsome face changed from stern and humble, to jovial and charismatic and knowing. Phil thought he saw a secret life in Gonzalo, too. Maybe he is one of those people who come to America to do menial work because it pays better than professional work in Mexico, he thought. Maybe this man, who appears to be just a simple laborer, is sophisticated. Who knows what lies behind a poor, black, foreign face?

He told Gonzalo about his painting. He explained that the paintings contained images, of Carey, that would shock and offend his family, his colleagues, his clients, and the members of his church. 

Gonzalo nodded soberly and said, I understand, sir. A gentleman’s private matters must remain private, and must be handled with the utmost consideration.

Yes. Exactly.

You can count on my discretion, sir.

Thank you, Gonzalo. Please call me Phil.

Phil made his proposal. I want you to consider an offer. I have reason to believe that my paintings are actually good. I’m surprised. It started as something I enjoyed, way back in high school. I took a couple of classes in college, and my paintings were good, but I felt obligated to pursue a profession. Painting seemed irresponsible. My wife and I got married when we were in law school. We had two children, and I have felt obligated to work hard as an attorney, and to be a pillar in the community. But I started painting again, to unwind, because I enjoy it. Like a hobby. But it’s taken over. Now I paint whenever I get a chance. I work as few office hours as I can, and I paint almost every day. And  ̶  I hope this isn’t arrogant  ̶  I think my paintings are very good. I never expected this.

And, please, how can I help in this private matter or your secret paintings?

Gonzalo, I want you to be the painter.

The man’s face slackened. He looked Phil over for a long moment. I’m sorry, sir, Mister Phil, I don’t understand.

I want these paintings to go public. I want to see if they’re really good, or if I’m just delusional. My idea, my proposal, is that you pose as the artist. We take the paintings to galleries, and you tell them that you painted them, and then, hopefully, we sell some, and I give you half the money.

Gonzalo finally sat back. He set his hat aside and looked at Phil directly. He sat quiet while Phil waited for a reply.

Why are you asking me this? I am just the gardener. You don’t know anything about me. I am not even in this country legally. What do I know about art? I have never even been in a gallery. How can you trust me with your scandal?

I’m asking you because you’re a gardener. Because I have everything to lose and you have everything to gain.

Gonzalo’s face hardened. What am I going to gain? Attention that gets me sent back to Mexico still owing the coyote?

Money. Easy money. To them, you will be the landscape laborer who went home every night to paint. The unlikely genius, let’s say. Not someone they expect. A great story. You can pocket some money, maybe find some allies.

These painting, then, are works of genius?

Well. They are very good.

I imagine there are several very good painters in this city, but they go unnoticed because the artists are not poor Mexican negros?

Please, Gonzalo. That’s not what I meant. I mean, I can’t let it be known that I am the artist. It would destroy my life.

One thing is true about what you’re saying, said Gonzalo. I have not much to lose. Maybe they take my bike and tools. Maybe my filthy old hat. Maybe this roll of cash. But I have no family here, no profession, no church, no real community. So, yes, if I become the artist, if I lend my face and name to your paintings, and the people are offended or even appalled, and I sell some of the paintings to the kind of people who delight in the outrageous, who love to show their liberality and worldliness by owning obscene paintings made by a poor Mexican negro, then the worst that will happen is that I will be deported and that I will return to unemployment in Mexico with a bank account.

Gonzalo, please. I understand that this proposal is not without risk for you. But I promise you that I will protect you, vouch for you, be your sponsor. I am very well connected. I speak Spanish. If the worst happens, I will bring you back to the United States. I will pay your expenses and advocate for you. You have my word.

Gonzalo sat for a while. He sucked on his lips and stared into the corner of the room. He ran the brim of his hat through his huge and calloused hands. Then he stood up. His deference fell off him like a cloak. He stood tall and straight and looked down at Phil as he sat behind his desk. Okay, then, Mister Phil. Show me my paintings. He held his hand out toward the closed office door, palm up, as though to say, After you.

Phil stood. He went out the door, down the hall, and to the stairway door. He unlocked it and they went up.

The attic was close and hot. At the top of the stairs Gonzalo turned toward the room. The latest painting stood on the easel, eight feet long. On it, in the loose, hurried, dripping brushstrokes of Phil’s first sketch, Carey lay sprawled on her back, her head off the end of the bed, her throat exposed, her hand between her legs, her tattoos like text on her glowing skin, in an ellipse of white sunlight. Gonzalo turned away for a moment, then turned back. He studied the painting. He stepped to the paintings that leaned against the wall, most of them finished. He held up one of the smaller paintings, of Carey’s face by the window. He turned and faced Phil.

So what I am going to do is take some of these to a gallery  ̶  I hope wearing a better shirt, but I mustn’t look too good  ̶  and tell them that I want to sell some paintings. Correct?

Yes, basically. I will help with the details and contacts. There’s a lot we need to figure out. But, yes, these paintings will be, publicly, your work.

He looked back at the big underpainting. How much does a painting like this sell for? When it’s finished.

That’s a very big one, obviously. Hard to sell. Most people do not have wall space for one that big.

Most people, Mister Phil, do not have any space at all for a painting of a very voluptuous naked girl doing such a private thing as this.

You might be surprised. That one will be maybe $12,000. Half that goes to the gallery and we split the other half. So $3,000 for you. If the paintings sell well, or if we get picked up by a gallery in a larger city, the prices will increase. Double or triple, I think. But I don’t expect the big ones to sell often. They hang in the galleries and people, certain people, educated liberals who went to graduate school in the big city, young couples with lots of money and an image to cultivate, will see the big ones, like them, and then buy a small one to take home.

Maybe these paintings of the mountains and countryside sell quickly. And these ones that do not have beautiful Carey in them.

Yes. I expect so. People want the art without the danger.

They stood for a long minute. The roof ticked in the heat. Gonzalo stood over the bed, looking at the rumpled sheets. He turned back to Phil. Yes, he said. I am the artist.

*

Phil called galleries, told them that he was doing a favor for an acquaintance who could not speak English, made appointments. He selected a landscape and a still-life and three paintings of Carey, all small and portable. Phil took pictures of several of the larger paintings where they leaned in the attic, with Gonzalo standing to the side in Phil’s paint-flecked coverall.

Phil coached Gonzalo. Rely on your smile, he said. Tell them stories. Get them laughing. Just do what you do. You’re a very likable person and people want to believe. You don’t need to know the gallery business. In fact, not knowing how it works will help you. They will know that you’re an outsider  ̶  here he had to search for a word in Spanish, trying extranjero, then marginero, then fuereño  ̶  a person who is not the scrubbed product of a university art program. Gonzalo looked amused, but he was game.

For the first gallery pitch, Phil wore a nice shirt and khakis. He posed as a do-gooder, eager to help his Spanish-speaking friend get his nice paintings into the galleries. Gonzalo showed up in old but carefully-pressed slacks and shirt, and a new, cream-colored fedora, looking rather too prosperous, Phil thought. The woman who met them at the door wore almost exactly what Phil had expected: a simple black dress and a vaguely ethnic scarf. Tall, thin, and severe. She was courteous but cool, and glanced at her phone as she ushered them into the big white room. Gonzalo spoke right away.

Phil translated: He says he thinks the light in here is perhaps overly dependent on the sun. He worries that when you cover the windows the light will be too dim for his work.

Cover the windows?

He says that his work must not be visible from the sidewalk, from public view.

Maybe I should see the work before we discuss lighting? Phil thought he heard contempt in her voice, but she offered Gonzalo a bright smile, then guided him further into the gallery with a light touch on his arm.

Phil set the paper-wrapped bundle of paintings on the reception counter and untied the string. They had agreed on the order of the paintings. A gentle introduction. The top painting was a landscape, mountains with snow in the background, a fat orange cloud above, and tiered billboards marching down a length of freeway in the foreground. Nature and junky development together, the manmade stuff bright and plasticky against nature, aloof and menacing.

The gallerist stood back from it, then moved close and put on reading glasses. Very proficient, she said. This is oil?

Yes, they’re all oil, Phil said.

Next he presented the still-life. He rested it on its bottom edge on the counter and tilted it back to catch the overhead halogen light. One of the Mason jar paintings, this one with several lemons. The glass and water caught the light coming through the window, and the lemons burned with primary yellow. The gallerist looked and looked. Moved back and forward. Looked across the face of the paint.

Very, very well done, she said. The colors are lovely, the sense of space, the quality of light. I think this one is very compatible with our mission as a gallery.

Phil translated to Gonzalo. Gonzalo laughed abruptly, and said: wait til she sees these next ones.

Phil turned to her and said: he thinks this painting appeals to you because it is decorative and the work you show looks painted for living rooms.

The gallerist reddened. I believe we carry the finest local work in the city, she said. This is all fine art. This is not a decorative arts gallery.

He means no offense, I’m sure, said Phil. It’s just that, you see, he paints very few landscapes and still-lifes. They are the paintings he does when he doesn’t have a model. He works mainly in figure painting. We have a few of his smaller figure paintings here. Gonzalo stood back and asked Phil to hold up the first of the paintings of Carey. Gonzalo put his hat down. He looked at the gallerist. He stepped to her and took her elbows and moved her back several feet. Aquí te paras, flaca, he said.

He wants you to stand back there.

He made that clear enough, she said, then laughed abruptly, a single barking, awkward laugh. She stood with her arms folded, rubbing her elbows.

Gonzalo tilted the top painting rather roughly, imperiously, then took it from Phil and held it up in front of his chest. His dark face scowled above the luminous sunlit profile of Carey. The skin of her face was brown and done in a fast impasto, but the skin of her breasts was pale, painted in a few circular strokes of very dilute paint, almost white. The street outside the window was painted in more detail than anything inside the window, and the sun shone through the white of her eye.

The gallerist hugged her arms tightly to herself and her shoulders rose. She glanced at Gonzalo, then looked at Phil, as though about to speak, then back at the painting. Phil had never seen one of the Carey paintings in such white light. It looked frank, almost aggressive, as though a stripped person stood before them. Phil noticed for the first time that he had painted a faint shadow along Carey’s jaw that made her look determined, or angry. The picture showed something unfulfilled in Carey. Her gaze out the window did not look at all wistful, as Phil had imagined while he painted, but defiant, as though the world outside the window owed something to this naked girl, and that she would take it.

The gallerist stammered. It’s, well, stunning. Very, very good. Yes. Where did you go to school, mister, uh, Gonzalo?

He is self-taught.

Really? In Mexico?

Recently. Just over the last couple of years.

Extraordinary. I should say right up front that we can’t show nudity toward the street, just a few pieces facing the back wall, I’m afraid. We’re in the provinces, for sure. She laughed again.

This is why Gonzalo expressed his concern about the windows.

Well, I understand, believe me, but I can’t paper over the windows. I represent several other artists.

Phil spoke with Gonzalo for a minute. Gonzalo looked irritated and walked off to a corner to look at a landscape featuring fall foliage and beef cattle.

Perhaps this is not the right gallery for this work. His work. He is looking for lots of wall space, the best lighting, a one-man opening.

I would consider a one-man opening if I were dealing with an established favorite artist, she said. But I see just a few paintings here. I would be happy to show his landscapes. Those will sell, I’m sure. This one is really very good. I have space for three of four of them. I would like to keep some still-lifes in the stable for the right buyer. I have a few clients who will venture out into still-lifes now and then. I’d be happy to send them custom invitations.

Gonzalo’s heart is in the figures. He is a figure painter who makes do with more, shall we say agreeable? work when his model isn’t available.

That work will be very challenging to show and sell…

I believe it deserves special effort. The work will sell itself if you can bring in the right buyers. Its quality is evident.

Yes, of course, it’s very good work. I mean no offense. If it were entirely up to me I would feature such work exclusively. But you understand that this isn’t New York. People take offense. They expect something less… forthright.

Well, if you reconsider, you know how to reach me.

Like I said, I’d love to show the landscapes.

There will be very, very few landscapes to show. Thank you. We need to get to our next appointment.

The next gallery received them in much the same way. The curator was courtly and effusive, but, with elaborate apologies, he offered to show only the landscapes and the still-lifes. He blushingly admitted that he couldn’t carry the figure paintings. They were just too daring, he said. Risqué. Inflammatory. Potentially, in this small city, offensive to his best clients. He offered to buy the still-life for his own house, but would not agree to Gonzalo’s demands.

*

Over a few weeks, as they made their way through the galleries, Gonzalo adopted a domineering severity, which he would every so often discard in favor of rambling, demonstrative, loud, hilarious storytelling. Most of the gallerists just stood grinning and listening, while Phil translated, editing as he went.

Word got around. All the gallerists knew of the tall, gaunt, formidable but gregarious black man, the enigma, and his humorless white handler. And all of them expressed admiration for the work and an unwillingness to show the figure paintings. Until they met Judith Wallach.

She called Phil. He heard New York in her elderly voice. She said a few pleasant things about the local galleries, about how far the city’s art culture had come in recent years. She said that, of course, the galleries could not be expected to take on the risk of true art, but that if a private individual, a supporter of the arts, were to be impressed enough by the work, she might consider a large private show in her home. Phil told her that there were many paintings, some very large. How very refreshing, she said, that an artist should be dedicated enough to his work to do lots of it. So many artists today are so exhausted after getting home from selling paint and brushes to dilettantes and students that they barely have enough energy left to play video games all night. But productivity shows commitment and seriousness. She said she found that very, very sexy indeed. Phil set a date.

Phil packed his pickup truck with many paintings, including some of the largest. He drove Gonzalo out of the city and up a valley into the mountains. The road wound up through oaks, then spruces. They turned onto a private road. They were buzzed in at the gate. The road switchbacked up the mountain until it opened into a clearing overlooking the city far below. The long, glassy, prismatic house sat back in the trees. They parked, and Judith came out. Tiny, wiry, aged, without makeup or jewelry. An alert but silent German shepherd kept to her hip and sat when she stopped to greet them. Her greeting was quick, without flourish.

They walked through a lush artificial riparian landscape, past a massive fountain consisting of one thick, canted plate of Corten steel. Claire Townes, she said. The name meant nothing to Phil, but Gonzalo nodded gravely. Shoes here by the door, please, she said. They kicked off their shoes. The house swept toward the view, one vast floor of dark polished wood. The glass walls were invisibly clean. They looked down on the grid of the city.

Dios mio, said Gonzalo.

You can say that again, said Judith. What a privilege to live like this, no? Something to be grateful for.

The living room contained several loose clusters of chairs. Black leather and chrome, spotted cowhide and teak. Designs Phil had seen before but couldn’t name. The dog eyed them from a cushion by a look-through fireplace of travertine. Pristine white partitions separated the spaces. A dining room table with 24 chairs, a kitchen of shining orange enamel, a long broad hallway leading to several open doors. A space much larger than any of the galleries they’d visited. And on the white partitions a few sparsely-spaced pieces of art: some old landscapes, a wall of small cubist charcoal drawings, a very large painting with a pixelated grid, a long strip of pinned-up paper covered with hundreds of tiny cartoon figures engaged in every permutation of copulation and murder, an ancient golden icon, and, in the hall and stairways, many more paintings, small and large. Judith went to a switchplate and flicked on maybe twenty sets of lights, and, one by one, the paintings leapt into clear view. No one style predominated.

Gonzalo stood close to the icon. Byzantine, said Judith. Phil looked up at the pixelated grid. Chuck Close, she said. One of my favorites. There’s another of his downstairs. A shame to keep it hidden, but I had to free up space for a Diebenkorn that’s coming from California. A loaner. But let’s see the art.

Phil and Gonzalo brought in the smaller work first. Judith sat with her back to the view. They held up the landscape they’d been taking around. Nice, she said. They held up a few still-lifes. Excellent, she said. So clear and deep. Beautiful colors. Yes.

They went back to the truck and pulled out the large painting Phil had been working on when he first took Gonzalo up to the attic studio. He had added several increasingly-thick layers of paint since then. He felt that it was one of his best. The projected ellipse of sunlight verged on harsh, and the light reflected off her exposed skin to illuminate the rafters above. The window itself appeared to float in the wall, and contained a sharp rendering of the buildings across the street. The white bedding lay tangled and twisted like an arctic icescape, and her tattoos looked incised, almost branded into her skin. She shone there, sprawled in a way that suggested ecstasy and exhaustion and also despair or agony. She looks dead and alive, said Gonzalo. And soft as a mango. He laughed, all white teeth and craggy black skin.

They carried it into the house, edge forward, then turned it toward her with some ceremony.

She sat still. Holy mother of Christ, she said. She stood up and stared, with her shaking hands clasped in front of her. I’m a Jew, of course, but holy mother of Christ. Now that is a painting. She went back and forth in front of it. She retreated to the window. She went up close and put a hand on it. She ran her fingers down Carey’s arm, to the gold and ruby ring that gleamed there on the edge of the shadow of her inner thigh. So much paint, she said. She put her glasses on and tilted her head back. She got up close. It is so genuinely beautiful, she said. And extremely hot. I feel as though I’m right up next to an oversized lover. I can smell her! She studied the whole length of the painting. Touched it here and there. The sheets are gorgeous. So very well painted. Gonzalo, this is a tremendous painting. She looked up at the man. He looked down at her. Phil translated. Gonzalo nodded to her and muttered his thanks. When she turned back to the painting Gonzalo looked at Phil and smirked.

That afternoon they showed her every painting they’d brought. She did not return to the landscape. She set the still-lifes aside. They moved some furniture and leaned the big paintings around the room. She showed delight, sometimes rapturous, at all of them.

They planned a show. Judith would have the house prepared for ten or twelve of the biggest paintings and as many as twenty of the smaller ones. She handed them a dimensioned floorplan of the public rooms of the house and a lighting diagram. They set a date for the fall. She had a long contact list. She would send out invitations. She left the pricing to them, but suggested that they use what she called big, fat numbers. These people do not want to feel that they’re getting a good deal, she said.

Phil pushed hard for the rest of the summer. He completed several paintings of Carey seated, facing him, close, wearing her office clothes. Her light brown eyes glowed and penetrated. She looked startled, accusative, wary, indicting, challenging, frightened, bemused.

As the day approached, they trucked the paintings up to Judith’s house. Movers wearing white cotton gloves put her paintings in storage and hung Gonzalo’s. Phil was moved by a deep and unsettling excitement as he saw his work go up. Careys reclined, lit from the left, all around the living room. In the stairways she sat by the attic window. Downstairs in the large, almost unfurnished display space, they hung the frankest, most startling work: her body hesitatingly bared. It twisted, as though stopped in movement. It writhed. It was not settled. It seemed to oscillate on the boundary between ecstasy and suffering.

Gonzalo was relaxed the day of the show, though Judith, for the first time they had seen, looked anxious and irritable. Cleaners polished everything. Judith directed the placement of the furniture and the caterers’ set-up in the kitchen. Gardeners made minute corrections to what Phil thought looked perfect. Gonzalo wore an elegant new shirt and his cream fedora and stood out front talking with the gardeners. They laughed at almost everything he said. Phil couldn’t understand much of it. It was too fast and colloquial. Filthy jokes, mostly, and self-lacerating stories of drinking mishaps and miscommunication with rich gringos.

The crews of workers left, and the caterers stood out on the driveway smoking and passing a flask. The late afternoon was quiet and still. Judith went off to rest and change. Phil and Gonzalo sat out by the pool. Gonzalo wanted a drink, but Phil forbade it. You have to be charming, he said. You have to be a smooth-talking player. You have to be the person these rich people feel guilty about.

This will be easy, Gonzalo said. To make them feel guilty I just have to stand by my paintings and smile and be very poor and Mexican and black.

And charming.

Yes. This part of my job I cannot help but do very, very well. I am a professional charmer. He smiled. He kept smiling and looking at Phil until Phil asked him to stop.

Cars started arriving near sunset. Many expensive cars, some with drivers. Many of the people did not look like locals. They looked polished, with their artificial tans and recent facials. Some dressed elegantly, but many looked quite sloppy, in worn jeans and untucked shirts and sandals. They smelled antiseptic and floral and chemically musky. They greeted each other on the driveway. Several stood around the yard talking on their phones, one arm folded across the chest, their heads down, looking at their feet.

They trickled into the house. Phil stood back from Gonzalo. The black man looked out of place in the room. The only man with dark skin. One of the tallest. The only one with a weathered face, with the wrinkles, creases, callouses and scars he’d earned. His cracked yellow nails betrayed his new shirt. His patchy gray hair fought the oil he’d applied. His eyes were rheumy and glaucous, and his gaze, even when he laughed, was hard and appraising. He looked directly at the women. He looked them up and down heedless of their husbands’ presence. He fingered the hand-stitched lapel of an elderly man’s blazer and said, in a caricature of English, Twenty dollar I give you my friend, and slapped the man on the shoulder. He grinned and rocked on his feet. The guests began to crowd around him. Phil translated their questions. Some of the guests spoke Spanish and spoke to Gonzalo directly. One woman looked shocked at something Gonzalo said, and he bowed deeply to her, with evident mockery. But the people laughed, too. A big man with a cultivated South American accent translated one of Gonzalo’s rambling drinking stories, and they responded with abrupt hilarity.

The fog of drunkenness gathered in the room, a kind of convexity held up by Gonzalo at the center. The volume rose. Phil, sober, stood silent, thinking of the evenings painting Carey by the open window with the after-work crowd hooting and laughing in front of the bar across the street. He listened for peoples’ comments on the painting. Their words were lavish, unstinting. Fabulous. Gorgeous. Stunning. Such exquisite control. Such depth and magic. The superlatives rose off the polished people with their perfume and cologne. Women posed with Gonzalo in front of Carey’s splayed body. They canted their hips. They leaned their featureless, symmetrical heads against Gonzalo’s chest. He put his arm around them. He set his massive, gnarled hand right below their breasts, and they stood with their polished cleavage forward as the cell phones flashed and the babble of the crowd grew and grew, amplified by the floor-to-ceiling glass and the polished travertine.

Phil couldn’t hear Gonzalo to translate. Gonzalo did not acknowledge Phil. After some time Judith entered in a vintage lace dress, made up and coiffed, looking energetic and pleased. The people clapped as much as their flutes of champagne allowed. She kissed many people, standing up in the toes of her heels to kiss the men, who held her hands in theirs and expressed their rapturous pleasure. Many women touched her cheek and beamed their flawless smiles and looked honored beyond measure to be included.

Following Judith there was a woman Phil recognized. She wore a tapered masculine tuxedo and a severe short haircut. She smiled tight-lipped when Phil met her eye. He couldn’t place her. She went with Judith around the room. Judith approached the big South American, who stood directly in front of the largest painting, studying it over an overfilled glass of red wine. Judith leaned against him, and he looked down and they spoke with great energy. The man set down his wine and gesticulated wildly. He pointed out details in the painting to Judith, who nodded enthusiastically. Phil was shocked to see that the man’s cheeks shone with tears. Judith beckoned Gonzalo to join them. He did. The two men spoke in booming Spanish. The man gripped Gonzalo’s upper arm and neck and shook him, smiling and crying. The woman in the tux stepped forward and leaned down and Judith spoke into her ear. The woman nodded and stepped to the painting and placed a red dot on the placard. The people in the room cheered, and several congratulated the South American.

Over the next few hours most of the paintings sold. Phil stood alone by the fireplace wishing he were a drinker. Gonzalo continued heedless: leering and lustful, loud and boisterous, almost dismissive of most of the men, demonstrative and natural. Utterly comfortable in his role. He shone in their praise. He throve at the focus of their attention. He charmed and offended. They forgave him.

Late, in the ear-ringing aftermath, they sat and talked. Phil was serious. Gonzalo was still high on the attention. They loved me, he said, then laughed. They loved your paintings. I am now a successful artist, and you are a successful painter. He laughed and laughed.

He wanted to talk money. He knew the exact total. Almost a quarter million. He spoke his cut slowly and distinctly, enunciating each syllable in English, beating them out with his great twisted hand on the armrest of the chair. One. Hundred. And. Twenty. One. Thousand. Dollar. He beamed. More than a peon like me makes in five years of labor. Thanks to God, of course, and he blew a kiss at the ceiling and collapsed back in the chair in raucous laughter.

They reimbursed Judith for the expenses of the party. Phil spent a long day contriving billing to explain his income. He set up a trust account for Gonzalo, as the man couldn’t open his own. He faced the dilemma of how to send the money to Mexico if Gonzalo were deported.

He kept to his schedule. He painted Carey Monday through Thursday. He painted no more landscapes, and only a few still-lifes. Local galleries approached him to negotiate shows for Gonzalo, but he turned them down. Galleries from L.A. and New York called. Then London and Mumbai. He told them that sales had been so strong that Gonzalo was working to put together a new collection. Critics called, requesting interviews. The L.A. Times wrote a short piece on the show and speculated about Gonzalo’s background and his sudden arrival. Many smaller art publications picked up the story. They recited, with barely-concealed fascination, Gonzalo’s identity as an illegal immigrant, black, from Mexico, unschooled, a gardener. They wanted a last name. A birthplace. Confirmation of the gossip. Photographs of the work.

Carey stood in Phil’s doorway. Looks like I deserve a little something, right? He wrote her a bonus check.

He reined in her poses. They had become too sexualized. Blogs described the work as demeaning and objectifying. Internet trolls decried the paintings for being exploitative; for being the work of a black man objectifying a white woman; for not being explicit enough; for Carey’s weight. One said she was a fat slut. One said Gonzalo should be lynched. Send him back to Mexico, they said. Or Africa.

He tried to shut out this noise. He worked hard. The paintings languished for a while. They didn’t have the verve that Phil wanted. He despaired sometimes, late at night and when he was doing legal work.

Gonzalo quit his landscaping work. But he showed up one Monday a month after the show, wearing a fresh summer suit and ornate cowboy boots. He had a new iPhone in a gold case. He walked into the office, shut the door, and sat back in the chair. Mister Phil, how are my paintings coming?

Slowly. It’s been challenging to get back in the swing of it after the show and all the attention.

We need to get the next show scheduled.

I’m working on that.

We can hang the other work, all those pictures in the attic.

Yes, some of them will be suitable.

The ones of Carey.

Yes, maybe a few others.

They are bored of the others. They want beautiful Carey.

I am bored of the others, too. Always have been.

Okay, then, Mister Phil. So let’s get some paintings of beautiful Carey. Good, big, expensive ones. They love to see her naked in their big houses. They love how sexy she is.

Maybe I flatter myself, but I believe they’re drawn by the quality of the art. It is very easy to get pictures of naked girls. People do not spend tens of thousands of dollars for a picture of a naked girl. 

They spend that money for art.

Yes, yes. It is art they love. Art in their houses. Expensive art.

Gonzalo, I am working on the next show.

But not fast. You work what? Three hours a day, four days a week. You paint fewer hours in a week than I used to work in a day making peoples’ yards pretty.

I have a professional office to run. I have a family.

Yes, and a church. Car payments. Yes, yes. But the art is so much better than all that. So much more fun to go to the parties, meet the beautiful women, take their money, wear fine clothes.

I have a life that I can’t just discard.

You don’t have to! Just make your beautiful paintings of beautiful Carey. Your wife will forgive you. Women want a nice big house, lots of clothes and spending money. She doesn’t care if you’re an attorney. She wants a strong man.

Gonzalo, I will produce the work at my pace, and I will keep my life as it is, without disruption, without hurting the people I love.

The next day Carey came in. Did her usual stretch in the doorway. I been thinking, Mister Phil. This art involves three talents. Yours, Gonzalo’s, and mine. The painter; the salesman or actor or whatever he is; and me, the muse. The body in the paintings. I think it’s fair that you pay me a cut of the sales.

Carey, we have an agreement.

That was then. Everything’s different now. Now I can Google Gonzalo and find hundreds of pictures of me, naked. With my face, my tattoos. I used to be a model getting paid to lie still for paintings that sat in the attic. Now I am the subject of your work, and your work has become an overnight sensation, right? Gonzalo is the hottest thing in American painting today. Everyone says so. I provide my body for twenty bucks an hour, but he makes One. Hundred. And. Twenty. One. Thousand. Dollar. in one night of standing around acting like Gonzalo.

But Carey. We agreed. You even said that modeling is easier than legal work, but it pays the same. This is a win-win arrangement for us.

No, no, no, Mister Phil. It is a colossal win for Gonzalo, a nice windfall for you, and modest status quo for me. I get paid to lie around naked. You don’t even put your hands on me or take pictures or whatever I expected you to do. It’s easy. But don’t I provide something you can’t get elsewhere? Don’t I have something that shows in these pictures besides a nice fat ass? Isn’t it true that I inspire you?

Yes, Carey, it is.

Well, then, I want a cut. It’s ridiculous that Gonzalo gets half. He would have been overjoyed to get a tenth. But that’s the agreement you made with him. I want more. I want you to cut me in as a partner. Give me another raise, if you need to hide it from your wife that way. Or write me a much bigger check after a show.

*

He negotiated an agreement to show the paintings in the winter, at a big trendsetting gallery in L.A. They sorted the paintings in the attic. They set aside all the landscapes, and selected only a few of the still-lifes. They separated the Carey paintings into two groups, large and small. They ranked them. They pared the collection down to twenty of the best pieces. The gallery wanted high-quality photographs, but Phil would not consider allowing a photographer in the attic.

He fended off interviews, except for a few. He insisted on translating for Gonzalo, but the more reputable publications wanted their own translators. Phil did what he could to control access to Gonzalo, but articles appeared every few days. To Phil’s relief, Gonzalo said almost nothing about the paintings, he just repeated the same flat assertion that he loved to paint, and that he just wanted to show the truth as he saw it. In the articles, Phil could sense the critics’ frustration with Gonzalo’s windy, aimless storytelling, but their admiration for the paintings overrode their inability to learn about Gonzalo, the man. They always asked him about his influences, but he waved away these questions, preferring to tell off-color stories of womanizing and drinking. But one prominent blogger kept pursuing the question until Gonzalo answered. He said I admire the art of Claire Townes. Phil recognized this as the name of the sculptor of Judith’s entry fountain, and Googled her. She had a solid reputation as a minimalist who preferred massive, simple forms and the heaviest materials. Her work stood in front of many corporate offices and in the gardens of the wealthy. Within days of that interview, several art writers concocted elaborate theories about the connection between Townes’ work and Gonzalo’s. They pursued her for comment, but she said she didn’t know Gonzalo. In the absence of an illuminating story, speculation thrived, like mushrooms in a basement.

Then they found Carey. She said nothing, but Phil found a picture of her on an amateurish local art blog. In an article that was largely art-theoretical gibberish, the blogger identified Carey as the model in the paintings. Phil called her into his office. She was evasive, then came clean with startling intensity.

I told you I want a cut. These paintings are mine, too.

We have an agreement, Carey.

It’s a shit agreement, Phil. You win, I get almost nothing.

They argued. Phil tried to avoided conflict, but Carey was very emotional. He felt himself waver. Ended the meeting.

He called in Gonzalo. The three sat in the conference room. Gonzalo lounged back in his chair in a pale yellow suit, emanating cologne and impatience. Carey sat rigid in a black dress, her hands clenched on her lap. Phil tried to direct the discussion. He proposed that Gonzalo and Carey split half of sales, and that he would keep the other half. Gonzalo looked disgusted, even contemptuous. Carey looked offended.

Phil persevered, explained the gallery-sales model, defended his share on principle. Carey said that she had read a hundred articles, and that everyone agreed, the landscapes were good but not remarkable, the still-lifes were very good but marred by a certain decorative easiness, and that the large paintings of Carey were great. Truly great. Among the finest paintings made in America today. She asserted, over and over, like a mantra, that without her, there would be no great paintings.

Gonzalo also stated his case in the flattest possible terms. The paintings were very good, true, but they were attached to his identity. They sold at such high prices because the buyers believed they were the work of a poor, black Mexican. The buyers considered themselves enlightened for having discovered him. His poverty and uncultured crudeness and blackness made the paintings remarkable. The buyers were less interested in art than they were in presenting themselves to the world as sophisticated and tolerant.

And Phil insisted that the paintings were his. That he had so far in his life been only a hardworking and capable attorney, but that in these paintings he had discovered something excellent in himself, and, though he found Carey and Gonzalo important in doing his work and selling it, he wouldn’t need them at all if he didn’t have a life to maintain. He regretted the words as he spoke them, but he told them that they abetted his secrecy, and that they should be grateful for the easy money.

Gonzalo leaned forward and spoke very softly in clear Spanish, without colloquial distortions, looking directly at Phil. Mister Phil. I get fifty percent or I expose you.

Rage rose in Phil. You expose me and then what? You lose your easy income? Get deported? No more alligator boots and linen suits.

No, no, no, Mister Phil. You misunderstand me. I don’t expose you as the artist. I indignantly maintain that I am the artist. I expose you as an attorney who hires a wetback. I expose you as a member of a conservative congregation who sets up illegal trust funds for non-taxpaying Mexicans. I expose you as profiting from my art.

Phil’s breath became shallow.

Carey stood up. Phil, I can’t say nothing about Gonzalo’s portion. He’s gonna do what he’s wants. I think we can see that. He’ll get what he wants because you made a stupid deal with him and he outplayed you. But I got one demand. You pay me at least as much as you pay him or I’m out. As far as the art people know, I am Gonzalo’s model. Pretty soon they’ll figure out where I work and they’ll look up and see that circle attic window, and they’ll know that Gonzalo’s studio is in your attic. But Gonzalo’s just the salesman. I’m the muse. I deserve at least as much as he gets. You got your law income. I know how much you make. Even if you billed one hour a day you’d make way more than we do. So I don’t think you’ll suffer any. But I get at least as much as Gonzalo. Looks like that means you give him half, and you give me half.

*

That afternoon at four she stood in his doorway and yawned. The fabric of her dress stretched against her. It’s that time, she said.

The Dry Land

The man and his dog walked three days deep into the canyons. Up a long wash, then up a tributary canyon where they were stymied for a day by a rockfall, then a pouroff, then a wall. But with the rope they made their way onto a narrow plateau between two great canyon systems, a day behind schedule. On the topographic maps the plateau appeared nearly flat, but it proved to be a sea of undulating sandstone strewn with head-high boulders, raked, as though by some great gardener, into long, straight windrows that nearly blocked their way. The man had suppressed worry ever since they’d struggled to make the top, and now he suffered moments of panic. Only four days left before he needed to be home and back in the office, and the desert had contested every step. He struggled hour after hour to reach the watershed that looked most likely to lead back to the wash, but the boulders led them farther and farther from the path he’d sketched. Now he relied on the GPS. It showed his progress as a looping, knotted line, like unspooled rope. The dog’s feet were raw, and he quit chasing lizards.

Then, on their fourth day out, an hour before sunset, the man found a narrow way between boulders, and this led to a long, flat stretch of slickrock. Finally making forward progress he relaxed and enjoyed the late light, somehow both orange and purple. He pushed hard until he couldn’t see the way ahead. Exhausted, he fed the dog, ate a handful of nuts, and went to sleep.

After midnight he awoke to the dog’s movement. The moon was high and almost full, and the dog stood looking southwest, his ears and tail rigid with alertness. He whined. The man sat up and the dog moved close and pressed against him, and kept looking at the black horizon. The man held still to silence the rustle of nylon, and he felt, or almost heard, the faintest shudder of thunder. He sat for some time listening, and when he looked up again he saw the strobing of lightning on the horizon. His knees had almost seized as he slept, and his feet were bruised, but he stuffed the sleeping bag into his backpack and walked north, toward a distant pile of boulders he had noted.

The thunder focused and deepened, one crack and thud after another. On a rise the wind caught up to them. A towering cloud showed pale in the moonlight. They hurried. As the first fat drops slapped around them, they pushed under the overhang of a colossal boulder, sharp-edged and new. In its lee they crouched on a flat patch of sand. The water came abrupt, as to fill a vacuum. At his arm’s reach it sluiced off the boulder and its splash soaked his feet.

The wind was at their backs most of the night, but the water whipped and tore at the narrow strip of sand, like a sea against a beach. Manes of water tossed around the edges of the boulder and soaked them. He kept the sleeping bag dry in the pack, but the dog shivered, from fear and cold, and the man drew his knees up under his sweater and jacket, items he almost hadn’t brought.

He settled as best he could into meditation and felt himself on the verge of something like prayer. He almost voiced his wish that the rain stop and the sun return. Twice the storm slacked, but the wind returned and the rain was merciless. Then the lightning, which had been distant, struck the prow of the plateau. The dog went rigid with terror. The lightning stamped toward them, from boulder to boulder. The man knew he was in danger under the boulder, but he was cold and exhausted, and he didn’t move. He drew his feet back as far from the edge of the water as he could and sat.

As he stared into the night an explosive flash lit an utterly foreign landscape. His retinas burned with a blue-lit catastrophe of water and red rock. The slickrock they had walked ran with a wind-ripped sheet of red slurry and strewn gravel and cobbles. The dog bolted into the black.

The man called and called, but the dog did not come back. He found his headlamp and shone it outward, but it showed nothing but tattered pennants of red water. Water ran a foot deep down a shallow swale just beyond the strip of sand. It carried fresh-fractured rock with it. A mangled bush of Mormon Tea rushed down. A trunk of juniper. He could see no further.

In a lull in the rain he shouldered the pack and stepped out, following the beam of his headlamp from high spot to high spot. He came to an edge. The headlamp showed only a black void below. He walked along the edge, calling the dog, until he came to a narrow rush of water. He went to step across, but he slipped on the slurry and fell to one knee in the water. It pushed him toward the edge, and when he swung his other leg out to steady himself it did not find stone and he spun into the void. Something snagged his ring and yanked his left arm over his head, but when he closed his hand he grasped only water.

*

Rebekah was a week into the wilderness survival course. They had walked ten hours a day, starting at the foot of a broad wash, itself deep in the desert at the end of a long sandy two-track, many miles from a remote town. She felt at odds with the group. There were three buzz-cut soldiers, boys really, on a military training program. She found their jargon-laden talk of machinery and weapons, their leering obscenity, their impassive faces, and their stoic competitiveness repellent. On the first day, the instructor, a lanky, middle-aged, pony-tailed man wearing buckskins, had made an unmistakable pass at her as she lagged behind the group. The two other women were twice her age and close friends, and were unforgivably fit and capable. They barely acknowledged her except to help her through difficult climbs. She felt alone, persecuted, and fragile.

And she was hungry and exhausted. Each student carried only a few approved items in a short blanket knotted over one shoulder. The coarse buckskins she’d sewed chafed at her shoulders and waist, and her moccasins were wearing thin and her feet were bruised. She slept  ̶  or, mostly, lay awake thinking obsessively about food and the pain in her neck and feet  ̶  in her Pendleton coat in the canvas blanket in the sand. They ate only a meager ration of trail-mix and jerky and what they could forage. And, at the end of the first week, following the course syllabus, they split up. The instructor took each of them separately to pre-selected, sheltered spots too far from each other to communicate. He would come by every so often to check on her, but for now she was alone.

Hungry, she devised a willow weir. She cut and stripped a bunch of wands. She rolled the lengths of stripped bark between two flat slabs of sandstone, and twisted the softened fibers into a kind of primitive twine with which she tied the wands crosswise until she had enough of the rigid mesh, or grid, to span the stream propped up with rocks. She flushed trout toward the weir. She wept with happiness when one of the fish, against her every expectation, became stranded and she managed to kick it out of the water. She cooked it on a stick and ate all of it but the bones and fins, then slept for hours.

The next day she took stock. She had a handful of nuts and the weir and a vague recollection of tips and tricks she had Googled before the trip: designs for snares and traps, making a comfortable bed, uncertain notions of edible plants. She ate half the nuts and was still hungry. She spent the morning chasing trout toward the weir, but none stranded. Then she used her knife to fray the edge of her blanket, and picked a string out. She propped a slab of stone on an upright stick, tied the string to the stick, spit a chewed-up nut onto the ground under the slab, and hid behind a boulder holding the other end of the string. She waited all afternoon, but no animal came. In the morning, the nut paste was gone.

Fearful that the instructor would show up, she stripped and took a quick bath. Her ribs and hip bones were sharp. She had lost more weight in a week than she had ever lost in a year of dieting.

Clambering up to her blanket in the sandy alcove left her panting. She barely slept.

That night a storm came up from the south. She was dry back in the alcove, but lightning hammered the facing cliffside, and a great rush of water came down the stream. She couldn’t see it in the dark, but the stone shook under her as she lay, and she was terrified that the water would reach her. But in the morning the rain passed and she was safe. From the alcove she looked down on the stream. The flood had torn out most of the willows, and those that remained were flattened and bedraggled and burdened with the flotsam of the desert above. Fresh-broken rocks bigger than her head lay tossed along the floodline, ten feet or more above the normal water level. A cottonwood trunk thicker than her waist lay splintered and wedged between boulders where the day before there had been no tree. The weir, of course, was gone.

All that day she spent making a new weir. She chased fish for hours, but the streambed was now littered with new, sharp-edged stones, and her feet became raw and cut. As the sun lowered she sat behind the boulder holding her string and waited for an animal to come to her bait. None did. She ate the rest of the nuts but one and went to bed.

*

The man fell and bounced. He stretched his arms into the black and reflexively grabbed something. A branch. He hung on to a juniper tree. He couldn’t see anything. His headlamp was missing. The water roared by him. Rocks knocked together and rasped. He felt around with his feet. He was on a steep slope of scree. The juniper grew uphill of a boulder. He let himself down into a sort of saddle formed by the roots of the tree behind the boulder. He stayed there as the sky lightened and the rain abated.

He found himself at the top of a small boxcanyon. He had fallen over the lip of a pouroff now a tantalizing ten feet above. He looked for a way back onto the plateau, but the sandstone lip was continuous, and the overhanging rock had no obvious handholds. The canyon was full of small trees and jumbled boulders. The sun came over the edge, and he spread his things out to dry. He found a flat area and slept.

Later, he picked his way downstream. It was slow going. The boulders canted every which way, and the canyon descended steeply, from pool to pool. He could not judge the depth of the water because it was thick with redrock silt. For hours he moved downhill. The boxcanyon opened into a wash. The sand was waterlogged, but the walking was easy. He rested and ate. He wanted to lighten his pack and walk back to his truck as directly as possible, but he held a small hope that the dog would find him, so he didn’t discard the dogfood. He took GPS coordinates. He was far east of his intended route. He had walked off the edge into a quadrant beyond his plans. He figured he was in the next canyon system over from the one he had walked up. But where the plateau should be in front of him there was an unfamiliar wash heading west, as though he had somehow walked under the plateau in the night. He couldn’t make sense of his location. He sketched on the back of a map, trying to reconstruct his route, but he could not explain the topography in front of him. The desert fell away to the west, ridge upon ridge, contorted and grotesque, as far as he could see. But where the plateau should be the way was open. He walked downstream all day, mostly easy walking on packed sand. He used the rope a few times, but he walked miles. Late afternoon the wash widened and he found an easy route up a fin to the desert above. He scrambled up to take his bearings. At the top he could see many miles in every direction. The canyonlands rose on all sides. He seemed to be near the bottom of a basin a hundred miles across. It made no sense. The sun was in the west and all the canyons eventually flowed south, so he felt confident he was oriented, but the mountain should be to the north and he could not see it, and his mental map of the desert, which matched the maps before him on the ground, did not match the terrain he could see.

He went back down into the wash and walked downstream, roughly south. He camped, and early in the morning he continued walking. He walked until his knees ached. As the sun lowered he realized he had been walking east for a long time. He could not recollect a broad wash running east. He went to bed, but kept waking on the edge of panic.

*

She expected the instructor to check on her, but he did not come. Two long days had passed since the storm, and she was weak with hunger. Her instructions were to wait, to not stray out of sight of her campsite, but she couldn’t wait. She put her few things in the blanket and slung it over her bony shoulder. She arranged some small, round, black stones in the shape of an arrow pointing the way she planned to walk. She took the weir and the string for the trap and walked back up the canyon the way she had come when she was assigned this campsite. The walk out of the canyon was easy. On top, the slickrock heaved away on all sides. Basalt boulders lay here and there, and she could see the tops of a few trees that grew in deep cracks in the rock. She set off the way she remembered coming. She walked toward the morning sun. The desert here was mostly undifferentiated. One stretch looked much like the last. In the far distance she could see a mesa she recognized. To her left, north, was the mountain, out of reach but always, reliably, north. After a while she came to a deep cut in the rock. The tops of cottonwoods came almost level to the slickrock. She could not see the bottom. She skirted the canyon for a while, then crossed on what must have been a natural bridge. She reoriented and kept walking.

By noon she knew she’d walked too far. She had missed the place where they had last camped as a group. She drank from a pool in the rock. She backtracked for an hour but came to a buckling in the stone she couldn’t climb over, and which she certainly had not descended. To the south the wall grew in height until it was a towering cliff. To the north it continued out of sight. She followed it until she could climb it. Above the wall the slickrock gave way to a thick band of crumbly ochre stone she did not recognize. She stood on top of the wall and looked out over the desert. For miles below her she could see the rippled, quilted surface of the slickrock. Above her was scree, then mesas. She sat for a long time puzzling over how she had got here. She had walked east all morning, except around the slot canyon. She had not seen a wall or scree slopes or a mesa. Then she had turned and walked back westward and come to this place. She could not see a single feature she recognized. She climbed back down the wall and walked. She decided to find a high point and make a fire and hope they saw her. There was very little vegetation in the slickrock. She gathered whatever wood she found and headed for a dome of rock. It looked like an ocean swell. Climbing it she felt faint.

*

He came to a running steam. The wash had been very flat for some miles. The stream flowed down into a side canyon. He followed it. Eventually, the water would cross the road. He walked and walked, but the stream fell over a cliff and he couldn’t follow. The canyon was too deep and steep to climb out of, so he had to turn around and retrace his long walk. He was nearly exhausted, and this setback filled him with fear. He sat on a rock and swore and screamed and cried. His voice came back to him and he heard nothing else but the water and the hiss of the wind through the pines. He had no idea where he was. Just somewhere east of the maps. Finally, he walked back up and out of the canyon. He stopped and laid his food out. Two more days if he stretched it. He filled his bottles from a pool and went to bed. As he settled, his calves cramped. He slept for a while. He woke and looked at the moon, now full. The stars here had always been a source of wonder for him, he had always referred to them as a sure sign that the desert was his sanctuary. In the office or at a party when he mentioned the unparalleled brilliance of the stars above the canyonlands he had always been sure of his listener’s agreement, even reverence. But now they shone from the bottom of a black abyss, and he felt that he might fall off his stony bed and plummet forever into the silent void. He was like an insect clinging to the underside of a ceiling.

He studied the Milky Way from horizon to horizon. A brilliant band cut off at either end by hard horizon-lines of black. Then it was as though a cluster of stars at one end of the arc danced and reddened and he realized he was looking at a fire, not very far away. He kicked out of his sleeping bag and yelled. The echo came back to him. He stared at the fire. He didn’t blink. It faked and spun in a gust. He could not see anything in its light. He yelled again. He stuffed his belongings in his pack and walked. He stumbled over and over. He tried to light his path with the GPS, but the light was very faint. Finally, afraid he would step off an edge, he stopped and yelled some more. Something moved in front of the fire. The scissoring of legs. He yelled several times. He reached around in the dark for small stones and lined them up to point at the fire. He barely slept.

*

The fire was small. She stayed up for a long time adding sticks to it. A gusting wind kept fanning it. She sat and hoped someone would see it. She moved around the fire in case she was screening it from someone’s view. She thought she heard something over the wind. Maybe a coyote, or maybe a voice. She got up to look, but even the brilliant moon showed her nothing.

She was awake all night. As soon as she could see she circled the area looking for material to burn. When she got back to her blanket, last night’s fire was only a black smudge on the rock. She piled some duff and a few windblown twigs and soon had a sooty little fire going, but it cast very little light. She stood and turned. Then she saw a figure approach, still a long way off. She strained to see who it was. As the sun rose she saw it was a man carrying a backpack. Not one of her group.

She ran and gathered a little more to burn, but when she got back to the fire the man was near. She just stood and shivered and waited.

*

A woman as though from lost time: dirty, wearing buckskins and moccasins, gaunt and wild-haired. She stood and stared at him as he walked up. On the ground by her fire nothing but a blanket and a Pendleton shirt. She wore an elk-antler knife on a lanyard around her neck. Her skin was brown. Her elbows knobby and outsized, her collarbones articulate and sharp. She stood unblinking, wary.

The man stopped. He could not look her in the eyes, except glancingly. The scene bore on him strangely, as though on a screen, but with a clarity he did not know. He apologized for intruding. She would be scared.

She said it was okay. She gestured as though inviting him into her house, indicating that he should sit, rest, be comfortable. She crouched opposite. The fire died, leaving only blown ashes. She put on her jacket. They stammered a few words of polite conversation.

She told him she was lost. For a minute, he commiserated with her plight, then admitted, shamefaced, that he was lost, too. They sat in the intractable desert. She told him she was very hungry. That she had not eaten more than snacks in days. He gave her his last granola bar and a piece of jerky, gritty with sand. They ate this weak meal in silence. She got up and went to a depression in the rock and knelt to drink and her shirt rode up and he could see every knob of her spine.

They spoke at length about where they had been. They drew a map in the flat sand of a playa. They may have walked into the desert at the same place, where the county road crossed the big wash, but they weren’t sure. She described where her group had been dropped off. Low cliffs, the wide, sandy floor of the wash, a few willows and cottonwoods, a very long walk north with the mountain always ahead. He asked for details, but all the sandstone she’d seen flowed together in her head. She asked him about his route, but everything he said sounded typical of a thousand places in the desert. They did not know how they had got here or how to return. They agreed to walk south until they reached the county road. As they looked that way in the early morning they saw only a tortured maze of stone: mesas, cliffs, meanders too deep for the low sun, wall upon wall of stone, the folded and mangled earth irreducible to geometry or map. She said The only thing a person can do is put one foot in front of the other and keep going until you get where you want to be or until you can’t keep walking. They gathered their things and walked.

After the meal she felt revived, almost strong. Certainly, she felt light on her feet. She offered to help carry some of his load, but he refused. Finally, he gave her half his water. He took the bag of dogfood out and went to empty it on the ground, but she stopped him and carried that, too.

They were relieved to have found each other. They walked for hours, into the afternoon. The going was mostly easy, just rolling pinyon and juniper forest. He walked ahead. When he slowed to let her pass, so as not to seem arrogant, she slowed too, so he walked ahead the whole way. They barely spoke. As they began looking for a shady place to rest and eat, a jay landed on the branch of a pinyon ahead of him. They jay shrieked and flapped. He kept walking. The jay flew ahead to the next tree and shrieked some more and held its wings back in a strange way. He kept walking. But she stood and watched the jay. She asked him to hold up a minute. She walked back to the tree the jay had first landed on. The jay flew back, apparently in a panic, and landed close to her, again squawking and thrashing. When she moved toward him, he hopped away among the branches, but when she moved away from him he flew to intercept her again. She backtracked along their path to another tree. The jay’s display became frantic. An old and wind-twisted tree. In the crotch between the lowest branches she found a hollow. With the jay bounding around her head she put her hand in the hollow and lifted out a fistful of pine nuts. The jay’s winter stash. They filled his Ziploc bags with nuts, took every one they found.

He wondered where she’d learned that trick. Just intuition, she said. She was just very hungry, and had started thinking very clearly these last several days. They left the jay behind and sat in the shade and ate pine nuts. Each little seed took work, and their fingers were black with pitch.

They walked all day, hours beyond weariness, downhill and south wherever the terrain allowed. The sand gave way to white stone. They followed a broad swale for a long time and the sides rose around them until they found themselves in a canyon a thousand feet deep. They camped that night on a sandbar at a bend in the canyon, under massive cottonwoods. The beauty of the camp was dull through a scrim of fear. They slept hard.

Another day walking. The canyon narrowed and meandered. Several times they had to climb down jumbles of boulders and scout routes around pouroffs. Then the ground disappeared before them over a chute of scalloped stone. The canyon continued hundreds of feet below. Til dark they searched for a way down, but every route ended in a shear fall far longer than his rope could reach.

The next day they walked back up the canyon, looking hard for a way out. Banks of scree and unbroken cliffs on both sides. They came to a towering slab that had broken from the wall and stood free with a narrow gap behind it. They knew the promise of such formations and found a steep ramp of sand in the gap and eventually made the clifftop. The climb was harrowing, and only their desperation made them take that route. It became so steep and narrow toward the top that they were forced ledge to ledge pulling their gear behind them. He shook with fear and exhaustion when they reached the top, and she was faint. They ate the last of his food on an exposed rock face. From the promontory they could see miles of the lower desert, but could see no way down, nor any sign of the road. To the north they didn’t recognize a single landmark.

The sun fell. She made a trap, baited it with dogfood, and sat back behind a tree holding the string. When it was almost too dark to see, a packrat approached, going from rock to rock. They barely breathed. The rat circled the trap and sniffed the stick and the string, then darted into the space below the propped rock, to the dogfood. She pulled the string and the rock crushed the animal. They made a fire and cooked the rat on a stick and swallowed the meat unchewed. They drank their fill of water and slept.

Two days they walked looking for a way to the lower desert, but the cliff arced miles into the distance, and they did not find a route. They gathered wood and took turns tending a fire. They were weak with hunger. They stopped talking of where they were. They bent all their effort and every thought to moving south, toward the road. They walked looping paths. They followed drainages to impossible drops. They skirted mesas for hours only to find the way blocked by unwalkable scree. Over and over they followed routes that led nowhere.

Three days after the food ran out they found more pine nuts. They ate until their stomachs hurt. They gathered what they could and found a way into a canyon they must have crossed through but it didn’t look familiar. They found the stream dammed by rockfall. Cattails ringed a marshy pond. They dug roots until they had a large pile, and roasted them on coals. They stayed there a few days sick with stomach pain, but regaining strength. She took an exploratory walk and returned with her blanket full of prickly pear fruit. They burned the tiny spines off and ate as much of the sour fruit as they could. They harvested hundreds of the fruits, a very long day of painful labor. They tried to dry the sliced fruit on rocks, but ants and flies got to it and most of it went bad. Some they roasted and dried. The spines got in everything, a torment, but the fruit gave them strength and hope. While they stayed at the pond, they kept a large fire going, day and night. Days, they fed it with green pine, and nights they piled it with deadfall. Surely, someone could see the smoke from miles, but they saw no sign of rescue. A few times a day they heard a jetliner in the distance.

They set many snares along streambanks and in other places they thought an animal might pass, but they caught nothing. A week or more went by. The season of the cactus fruit passed. They made an industry of pulling and roasting cattail roots. She sobbed as she worked because a day’s hard labor produced barely enough flavorless starch to get them through the night.

Then one morning he walked upstream and found a jackrabbit hanging in a snare. It was stiff, dead for a while, but they ate it. They felt strong the next day.

It was getting cold at night. He was comfortable in his sleeping bag, but she had to borrow his sweater and extra socks. Even so she was cold. They decided to look for a more sheltered place. They walked west and came to a small canyon. They walked upstream. The canyon opened at a bend. In the cottonwoods they found a southfacing alcove a hundred feet wide, deep and dry, with a sandy floor. The ceiling was stained black by long-cold fire. Near the back wall they found several ancient fire-rings. They made a fire and sat. As they lay down later they noticed black and red figures painted on the wall above them, a long gallery of them.

The little valley was lush and comfortable. The low fall sun came in under the overhang and warmed the stone. There were acres of cattails in a marshy area nearby, and trout in the stream. They worked for several days harvesting cattails. She built a weir, and placed it in the stream at the end of a channel he built of stacked rock. They set snares all up and down the valley. On a huge fallen slab they kept a smoky fire and tended it whenever they could.

One morning they woke to frost on the ground. She was cold, and had singed her blanket in the night as she huddled close to the fire. She spent that day gleaning the dry verge of the cattail beds. When she returned in the late afternoon she found that he had started building a house.

He had gathered flat sandstone slabs from a nearby scree slope, and had stacked them nearly knee-high in a rough semi-circle at the back of the alcove, leaving a narrow opening for a door. Over several days, between other tasks, he fetched and stacked stones and mortared them with mud from the stream. His work got better as he went. Finally, he set juniper poles across the wall and piled armloads of cattail reeds on top. Then alternating layers of reeds and mud until the little hut was enclosed, though they had no way to close the doorway.

There was a long warm period, then frost every night. She moved into the stone hut and slept on a bed of dry cattails. As it got colder she tried heating the hut, but the smoke was unbearable and the warm air went right out the door.

Sometimes they found trout behind the weir. In what must have been late November or early December, he came home from checking the snares and found her crouched over the fire cooking three good-sized trout on sticks. She said it must be her birthday, it must be Thanksgiving, and they ate the fish, and a handful of toasted pinenuts each, and a bowl of cattail mush. He went to his pack and came back holding something before him hidden in his fist and smiled and handed it to her. It was a square of chocolate wrapped in foil. He had saved it these months thinking it might help in a time of despair. But, he said, what better time than a time of gratitude. Or happiness, she said, and they split it. The sugar was deeply exotic, extravagant.

The low sun reached the very back of the alcove, but it did not warm the hut. She had tried and tried to weave a door of cattail leaves, but everything failed, fell apart in the first wind. One night he took his sleeping bag down from the tree where he hung it to keep it from the rodents and laid it out by the fire. He sat down and took off his tattered boots. She turned and stood by him, and then knelt close behind him and he couldn’t breathe right. She lay behind him, fit to him, with her back to the fire. Neither one dared move and the early-winter night stretched on longer than any they’d known, but they were warm.

They were lucky with trout for a couple of weeks. They worried that they’d eat every one and have none left. But they filleted them and smoked them, and kept them on the roof of the hut under bundles of cattails. They caught several rabbits. He tried smoking the meat and saving it, but it rotted quickly. Deer had come down from the plateau, and many dotted the meadow beyond their canyon. They heard turkeys, but didn’t see them.

He made forked fishing spears from a design he’d seen in a scouting manual when he was a boy. He tried to find wood long and straight enough to make a throwing spear, but soon quit. He tried to make a bow, but all the wood he tried broke, and the arrows were crooked, and he could not make a sharp point or devise a way to attach the turkey feathers he’d found. Prompted again by the scouting manual, he notched two heavy sticks, and bound them crossed, and sharpened the four points. He doubted he could hit an animal with it, but he didn’t know what else he could make for hunting larger animals.

A little way upstream they found a short boxcanyon, walled by cliffs. Just a thicket of chokecherry and serviceberry with a seep at the back. They foraged for fallen fruit, but found none. She gathered bare seeds from the ground and planted them all up and down the canyon. While he was there he thought of her weir, the way it funneled the fish into a narrow space they couldn’t escape. At great effort over a month or more, he cut hundreds of willow wands and speared them into the sand at a narrow neck in the canyon just above the boxcanyon. He wove the wands together as best he could. They formed a fragile fence higher than his head.

One warm day they walked a long way around the deer meadow, back in the trees to flush the animals onto the grass below. Of the dozen deer they flushed, a single yearling bounded away from the herd and into their canyon. They walked side by side upcanyon, and the yearling ran ahead until it came to the willow fence. Throwing rocks, they herded it into the boxcanyon. They ran and closed the way out. They could hear it crashing in there. On his signal they moved forward. It panicked, springing back and forth at the back wall, crashing through the bushes and the spring. They stood til it calmed, then stepped forward again. In this way, over an hour or two, they closed in on the panting deer. When Rebekah stepped around a chokecherry, the deer bounded straight at the man and he threw the four-pointed crossed sticks. He missed and the deer escaped back down the canyon. But the near-success encouraged him.

Midwinter they rationed the food. They ate the smoked fish and a little cattail every day. They found a few pines with nuts, and walked longer and longer distances trying to find more. He became lethargic, didn’t get out of the sleeping bag some mornings. Her eyes sunk and her arms, that had been muscular, were now like sticks. They had trouble keeping warm. Most days were dry and clear, and the alcove absorbed the heat of the sun all day. But a few times it snowed, and the overcast could last for days. Then they despaired. They barely spoke at all, and never to complain.

He liked to sit in the sun at the mouth of the canyon and look down on the deer in the meadow. Over the winter they browsed closer and closer to the mouth of the canyon. He watched their daily pattern: in and out of the oak thicket all day; then, at dusk, single-file down to a narrow place in the rocks where they drank; then they browsed the meadow into the night. He didn’t know when they slept, or exactly where. They grew accustomed to his presence up on the rock. When he moved they watched him, but they were not alarmed. He began taking walks down into the oak thicket, back in the trees, and soon found their beds and the tunnel-like passages they made through the dormant trees.

One day, while the deer were drinking, he took a heavy sharpened stick into the meadow and stuck it in the ground. He returned to his lookout, and watched as the deer returned to the meadow to browse. They approached the stick and smelled it, but didn’t appear alarmed. Every day he took something down and left it, and pretty soon they stopped paying any attention to these things.

Late one night, by moonlight, he took a mat of woven and tied willow wands, like the weirs Rebekah made, but with larger squares, and laid it in the trampled mud where the deer drank. He left it there. The next day at dusk the deer went down to the water as usual. They paused and sniffed the netlike grid, but soon stepped over it to drink. After a few days they paid no attention to it. They just stepped into the square spaces and continued their routine. That night he took a heavy armlong club he’d shaped and went down and tied his rope to the mesh and took the other end up into the rocks, where he found a comfortable place and waited. The rope draped down the jumbled boulders and into the icy water, and only a few muddy feet of it lay on the shore where the deer drank.

All the next day, cold and cramped, he watched the deer browsing in the meadow. At dusk they moved toward him, first one, and then the whole herd. The first to reach the muddy beach paused, then went to the water. The others crowded around, jostling to drink. Their hooves cracked the shelf of ice that had survived the day’s warmth. The man wrapped the rope around his hand several turns. When the deer turned back to the meadow and several stood with their hooves in the mesh, he pulled on the rope as violently as he could, he threw himself backward with all his remaining muscle. The rope snapped taut and the rigid mesh flipped upward, and the deer bounded away except two, whose legs were caught in the willows. He leapt down the boulders pulling in the rope as he went, trying to keep it taut. The deer panicked and thrashed, but the mesh rode up their legs. The weir bent and twisted as they struggled, and the more it twisted, the less room they had to move. He went straight through the frigid water, nearly tripping on submerged rocks. The deer tried to bolt in opposite directions, and both went down.  He swung the club at the nearer deer and broke its leg. He hit the other deer across its neck at the shoulders, and the animal convulsed. He swung and swung until he finally connected with their heads. They lay still in the freezing mud, bloody and bent. He panted. His heart raced. His hands shook and he felt a surge of joy and nausea. He tasted blood and his jaw ached, and pain came up from his knee. After a while, he left the deer tangled in the grid and hobbled home. He couldn’t sleep that night. Rebekah put her arms around him for the first time and tried to hold him still. Her arms felt like poles of wood, and her hands were coarse and hard.

In the morning they went down to the meadow. He stood holding his knife looking at the bloody deer. Their heads were crushed, and blood had run into the muddy hoofprints and frozen there. She cut them free. He watched as she rolled one onto its back and cut around its anus and tied it off with string. She held the knife blade-up and slid it under the belly skin, then cut up to the throat. She cut around the legs and at the base of the jaw. She struggled to get the guts out. The carcass was stiff.  With the other deer, he tried to do exactly what she had done, but his knife was dull and he made a mess of it. She helped. It took all day, but finally they had two clean carcasses and two skins. They hauled the deer on a pole between them up to the fire-ring and hung the carcasses from a branch. She stretched the hides on a flat rock in the sun.

The venison saved them. Spring came and they gorged on cattail shoots, ravenous for something fresh and green. Finally, the chokecherries ripened. They were almost too tart to eat, but they contained some nutrient they lacked. They spent days cooking chokecherries, rubbing the pits out of the scant pulp, and drying the pulp on rocks around the fire. By June the alcove was in shade all day. They gained weight. The deer left the meadow for the summer.

She spent her days gathering fuel and processing food. He walked daylong loops around the camp. He returned with his pack full of acorns, but they couldn’t find a way to make them edible. He set snares everywhere he found a game trail. He noted that the trails converged on a long stone shelf that led down into the desert. He followed the trail and came to a trampled area below a white band in the stone. Smooth, dished, fist-sized depressions dotted the white stone. He tasted salt. Chipping at it with a stone he uncovered a band of nearly pure salt, shining white and flecked with pink. He filled his bag. When he gave her some on his finger she jumped in place and laughed and cried and put her arms and legs around him and kept her face on his neck for some time.

She used the last of the precious dogfood to bait a snare and caught a raccoon. She cut the meat into thin strips and salted it and hung it around a mound of coals. They ate it with dried berry paste, and it was delicious.

The mesa that loomed to the north had appeared unclimbable, but one day the light was right and he saw ancient eroded steps hammered into the stone. The way was very steep, but most of the steps were in good shape and he quickly made the top. He hadn’t been so high since fall. He looked down on the desert. For many miles to the south the canyonlands lay in gothic shards and baroque volutes. Beyond the sea of stone he thought he could see the lower desert, its red buttresses and blue depths. East and west the endless cliffs. North the mountain. All winter, after they had quit trying to find a way south, he had imagined that they had wandered so far off course that they were no longer in sight of the landmarks that could guide them out of the wilderness, but the mountain was right where it should be.

He returned to camp and sat down by her as she worked on the stiff hides. She rubbed them back and forth on a now-polished pole, working them into pliability. He said they should try walking north, that he could see no way south back to the road. She protested that the way north ran into cliffs and a waterless walk of at least several days. They were afraid to leave the alcove and to abandon all their work. They agreed to try harder to attract rescue. Nine or ten months had passed, and they had seen no sign of people.

Back on the mesa, at its very prow, he arranged rocks into an arrow pointing at their camp. He gathered wood, dragging gray logs and sticks from a wide area. He piled branches waist high around the trunk of a big pinyon that stood alone near the prow. In the afternoon he lit a fire under the pile and fanned it til it caught. The flames rushed pale into the green branches of the tree and a dense, sooty smoke rose straight up in the clear air. The column of smoke stood plain against the sky. The fire burned so hot he couldn’t approach. Insects and mice fled all around. As the wood settled and flaming branches fell, he flipped them back into the fire. When it started to die down he threw armloads of green branches onto the coals. As the sun set he added dry wood. The fire was brilliant, almost white in the night. It reached far above his head.

All night he fed the fire. At sunrise he added green wood. Wind came up and tore at the column of smoke, but he was sure it would be visible for fifty miles. He took a nap, then stoked the fire again. A towering monsoon cloud formed in the south. It grew and grew, black and seething. It came up the desert at a terrific pace, driving a lightning-whipped wall of dust before it. He clambered down the cliff and ran home. The rain drove him back into the alcove. He sat with Rebekah and they watched the stream rise. The weir, stones and all, leaped downstream as though on a cloth pulled from a table. Splintered sections of the willow fence somersaulted by, propelled by water and rock and yanked trees. Foot by foot the beach washed away.

The rain stopped. The stream rushed, then subsided. The sun set on wreckage.

Sunrise, they went around looking. The meadow was a shallow pond. Where he killed the deer, what had been a still, narrow pond by the stream, was now a red-stained torrent. Rocks shook and rumbled.

She walked upstream to the boxcanyon, to a sunny spot. From where he sat he heard her yell. He ran to her. She hardly ever made a sound. She stood by the flat rock they used to dry fruit and hides. As he approached, she pointed at the rock. A huge snake lay in the sun. Gopher snake, she said. They watched. It barely moved. She leaned back against the man. He put his hands on her hips. She moved them under her shirt to her ribs. He didn’t move at all. She turned in his grip and faced him.

Monsoons every afternoon. He tried to get back on the mesa but the stone was damp and slick. He tried another signal fire, at the base of the mesa, but it made as much steam as smoke, and the wind dispersed it.

He walked three days north, contouring around the mesa. The walk ended on a narrow stone shelf with cliff above and the most tenuous scree below. He had placed cairns, but even so he strayed from his route several times on the way back home. He felt deep relief when he dropped back down into the familiar canyon and saw her there working.

The monsoons finally stopped. The meadow grass green and tall. Ibis stalked its marshy edge. Blackbirds trilled like cellphones and ducks rasped in the cattails.

He took another three-day walk, this time around the other side of the mesa. The way led to the foot of the red cliffs. He looked and looked for a way up, but the heights and vertical climbs left him shaking with fear.

The nights grew cooler. One year, he said. She smiled. What is a year, she said, exaggerating the wonder in her voice. It’s one of the many words we have, he said. It’s a good word because it has a definite referent in the cycle of the seasons. She looked at him and smiled. She would not stop looking and smiling. She stood and leaned over him where he sat and held her hair back and licked his lips and put her tongue in his mouth, then stood and laughed. He said, Most of our words do not have referents now. Give me an example, she said. He said, Cellphone. She said, There are still cellphones. No, he said, There are not.

She was sick in the morning. She knelt by the stream and her body heaved. Later she was okay. Every morning she was sick. They understood.

She learned how to work with cattails. She wove them into mats and stacked the mats in the hut. She finally made a functioning door. She hung cattail mats three deep all around the inside of the hut. He said, We can’t do another winter here. We need to find the way out. She said, If we don’t find it we need this to return to.

He took a long walk west. He hadn’t til now because the way was very exposed, a long pitch of stone almost too steep for his badly-worn boots. As he walked off level ground onto the canted plane of stone he felt hot and panicky. The stone fell steeper below him. If he lost his footing and started falling there would be no way to recover. He leaned into the stone and went using his hands. As the stone became steeper he found himself at the very limit of his grip. He went back. He drew on the back of a map. The canyon, the meadow, the stream where it fell through the rocks, the mesa and the long routes he had walked on either side of it, the terrifying pitch of sandstone. On all sides barriers except the way they had arrived a year ago. He tried to draw the route they’d walked before they found the alcove, but it was a jumble in his memory, and he had long since learned that whatever map his mind contained would be schematic, a radical reduction of the solid world it represented, the way words stand pale for things, the way daytime fire is pale in the sun.

He went back up the mesa. He searched all the surrounding country for a way, but it was unintelligible. The ground was black where he had set the signal fire. The area was clean of deadfall. He went to the other side of the mesa and gathered wood and lit another big fire and tended it that day and night and into the next day. Peak hiking season, and hunters would be out, though he doubted they hunted anywhere near. When the fire smoldered he went back down to the camp.

They did better that winter. The snares were productive. He treed and killed a family of raccoons and she made jerky. She had put away a large supply of cattails. She wore the deer pelts, and slept in them. Out of the raccoon furs she made hats and sleeves for their hands. Even when it was overcast they were comfortable in the hut. They huddled together on the pelts under his stinking sleeping bag. She got big and tired easily. He wished he could do something for her, but she seemed out of reach. He worked and sulked and daydreamed of being rescued.

By the time the cattails put up shoots she was almost immobile with back pain. She spoke to him aggressively or not at all. He took over her food work, but did it all wrong. She barked at him, then apologized. He was mostly stoic. He built another stone wall, a new room adjoining hers. As it got warmer he moved in there, took a pelt for himself and left her with the sleeping bag.

When the day came, her breathing got heavy. He asked if he should boil water. He had some vague memory of a need for boiling water. Maybe from a book. She said, Your pan holds three cups. What are we going to do with three cups of boiling water. He said he didn’t know. Sterilize his shirt, maybe. She said, Keep your fucking shirt on. What can I do, then, he asked. She said, Just go away and find a doctor. But don’t go so far’s you can’t hear me in case I need something.

He sat looking over the meadow at the deer. He heard her swear and moan every so often. More and more often. He went back to the hut and called in, Do you want something. She said, Rub my back. He did for a long time. His wrists hurt. She turned this way and that, finally squatted with her hands on the wall. She soaked the sleeping bag. She got loud, but to him she sounded under water, or in another room. The baby boy came all at once. He took away the heavy sleeping bag and got her water. The baby ate and slept. She lay on her side facing away from the man. He wanted to leave. He felt nothing he had expected to feel.

The monsoons came again, then the cottonwoods went yellow. She did everything she had done before, but now holding the baby. Watching her, he felt weary. When he took him from her, the baby wailed for his mother. The man asked her what they should name him. Is he a referent, she asked. Everything she’d said to him was aggressive. But then she smiled. Let’s think about it, she said. No hurry. No certificates to fill out.

For a while it felt like a truce, but then she warmed to him, and then he felt he loved her, and she noticed, and they were better than they’d been before. The canyon walled out so many dangers. He felt protective, and protected and grateful. As it got colder he felt dread, too, but he worked hard to find meat and pelts, and he did rest knowing that he couldn’t do much more.

He had started tallying days with charcoal on the wall. He counted the days since the boy was born. They decided that he had been born on the solstice. It seemed poetic. They didn’t know, really. More or less the longest day of the year. How about Solstice, he suggested. For his name. She looked at him with a tight-lipped smile. How about Steve, she countered. He was embarrassed. It just seems weird to be out here in all this rock and stuff and call him some name, he said. She said, It just seems weird no matter how you cut it. Just because we’re camping doesn’t mean we have to name him all Native American or whatever. Camping, he said. Roughing it, she said.

Some time later she was working on baking a bowl she had shaped from a lump of clay he had brought home. It just slumped and cracked in the heat. She was frustrated, but wry and a little amused. How about Screaming Hawk, she said. He laughed. They came up with many names as they lay under the pelts and sleeping bag that winter, but they took to calling him Steve. It was a sardonic joke at first, but it stuck. He called him Steve, My First-Born in the Wilderness. She called the man Steve’s Dad. Steve’s Dad called her Becka.

Every seven days he climbed up the mesa and made a signal fire. By Steve’s first birthday he had burned almost all the wood off the mesa. They saw no sign of rescue.

They became adept at fishing and snaring. They found reliable ways to preserve and store the few ingredients the desert offered. A few times they ate venison, but mostly they lived on trout, jackrabbit, cattails, pine nuts, and berries. Their daydreams of hamburgers and candy faded. They had long ago come to a silent agreement not to speak of food fantasies.

Every few months he became fevered with finding a way out. He walked many, many miles trying to reconstruct their route to the canyon, but each walk ended in exhaustion and bafflement. His boots came apart. She made him moccasins. He couldn’t walk as far in the thin shoes on the stony ground, and they didn’t grip as well, so he stopped going up the mesa.

Their third winter in the alcove was hard. There had been almost no pine nuts that year, and very few rabbits. Steve ran everywhere. He became angry and aggressive when they spent cold days in the hut. They ran very low on food. Steve became slack and lethargic. He slept almost continually and looked vacant when he was awake. Desperate, the man walked to the next canyon with his pack full of snares. He set the snares and walked through the oak woods at the top of the shallow canyon. Deep in the thicket he found a way up and out the other side of the canyon. He must have missed it when the trees were green. The next canyon was lush, full of birches, chokecherries, and maples. At the bottom he found a long pond full of fish, enough to get them through to cattail season.

So it went, day after day, month after month, the unrelenting work of eating and staying warm and raising the boy. Then they had a daughter. They added another room to the hut. They discovered how to use ricegrass. The rabbits flourished again. The pinyons produced an enormous harvest of nuts one year. They struggled to save their food from packrats until the man built a ladder to reach a ledge above the alcove. He discovered a granary up there, right above their fire-ring. Birds had long ago found the corn, but he fixed the walls with mud and they kept their food there. The girl grew. She followed Steve and mimicked him. They called her Marcy. When she was difficult, Rebekah would hand her to the man and say, Have Marcy.

When Steve was about five years old, his father took him out to the pond canyon to fish. There was a large flock of turkeys there, very wary and impossible to approach, but they spent a few days building a tent-shaped enclosure of woven split willow and lured in a dozen of the birds with boiled ricegrass grains. Steve and his father danced and whooped. The man had never, in all his life, felt so jubilant. It took them several trips over a few days to carry the big birds back to the canyon. They built a pen and clipped the turkeys’ wings and fed them grass and seeds and acorns. Steve cared for the birds himself. They met the boy every morning at the gate of the pen where he fed them. He worked hours every day gathering food for them. They repaid him with eggs and something close to docility.

Once, when a large amount of cattail root became moldy, the man said, What is the point of this. Rebekah held her hand palm up, toward the children. What is the point for them, he asked. She shrugged. And what was the point before they were born. She said, Shut up your stupid shit. We were going to get rescued. He went out past the meadow and lit a big tree on fire. It burned for two days and took a patch of oaks with it. The smoke of a thousand cookfires went up into the sky by day, and by night a house-high flame lit the canyon walls, but still there was no rescue.

Each passing day was a diminishment. He broke a tooth and knew it was gone forever. When he was about forty, over a few months he lost his ability to focus on small objects closer than arm’s reach. Teaching the children a song, he forgot some of the words, and Rebekah didn’t know the song, so it was lost forever. He discarded old words: once, in talking with Steve, the word Soviet came into his mind. He hadn’t thought of the word in years. He considered what it meant. An old dead political system from the other side of the world. He considered explaining the Soviet system to Steve. The roundness of the world, the billions of people, the years gone by, the revolutions, the nations in a standoff, the base in Greenland, the missiles in Cuba, the suited men, the red telephone, children huddled under desks, Soyuz, Khrushchev, Kennedy, Kennedy dead, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, the FBI, the NSA, cellphone surveillance, desk jobs, pornography, dating, alcohol, dying alone a ward of the state. None of it intelligible. Concepts and words without context or referent in the solid world at the child’s fingertips. A great gift to be a child free of such things. But also a tragedy to be isolated and ignorant of the machinery of politics, to have no inheritance of admonitory political myth, no monsters, no enemies, no suspicion or will to power. Not one person in all the world to forgive except his own parents, who are doomed to be the greatest and the most contemptible people the child will ever know.

The man took the pack and ten days’ food, mostly cattails to leave the most nutritious food for his family. He took a bone needle and several lengths of nylon string from his old climbing rope, and pieces of leather for his moccasins. As lightly as he could, he kissed the children goodbye. He put his arm around Rebekah. He walked out of the canyon and down the meadow, down through the tumbled boulders following the stream. He set off across the slickrock on a bearing that he thought would lead him to the canyon system they had walked out of seven years earlier. When he came to a canyon, he built a tall cairn. He went down the canyon. It dead-ended. He climbed out and tried another. He tried canyons until one led him to a larger canyon. He walked for days, building cairns as he went. He stopped to re-sole his moccasins. He found himself at the end of a canyon, at a hundred-foot pouroff. He forced himself through his fear of heights and descended through balanced boulders to a scree slope. He lost his footing and fell on his back and rode his pack on the loose scree to the valley floor, just a little bruised. He built a cairn. He walked down the valley. It bent west and narrowed. For a long day he walked in water, sometimes swimming for long stretches with his pack held high. He slept in only his buckskins, fetal and shaking by fires. He backtracked. His food ran out. He spent a morning looking for pine nuts and found ten of them. He came to a cliff. Standing out from the cliff a few feet was a slab of stone. He recognized it. He descended to the valley down the steep ramp of sand behind the slab. In the valley he knew to turn upstream, not down. He walked and walked.

Two days later he walked out of a canyon into the desert. Sand and sage sloping away to the south. He stood on the edge of the two-track. He turned west. At the next wash-crossing a circle of RVs. People in the shade of awnings. The smell of lighter fluid and cooking meat. Bright red coolers banked under a juniper. Children staring at him as he walked. The sharp smell of beer. The pink fat woman standing frozen with a yellow bottle of French’s mustard. The men coming at him fast as the horizon swung up and he slept in the sand.

The man didn’t speak to them. They knew what to do. They gave him lemonade, so sweet his broken teeth ached. He drank and vomited. They got the pack off him and put him in the back of a pickup. He slept all the way to the town. A helicopter picked him up. He felt okay, but he just sat and watched, and they assumed he was injured and dehydrated and probably insane. They strapped him to a stretcher and put him on a drip. The plastic antiseptic smell of the cockpit. The EMT’s deodorant. The blue light of her teeth. Shampoo. Aftershave. Urine, presumably his. The rhythmic beeping of something, and its banks of lights. The lifting and tilting of the helicopter. Its sound, unlike anything in his recent world, continuous, droning, designed, relentless, reliable. He slept and woke. The EMT asked him questions and he looked into her blue eyes and thought about what she was saying, but he didn’t answer.

He lay in the hospital bed, trying to get used to its softness. He kept waking with a start because the mattress, as it molded to him, felt suffocating. He ate Jello, then mashed potatoes. A pair of Federal rangers came and asked him questions, but he just watched them talk and didn’t answer. A social worker came and went. He graduated to whole meals. He had diarrhea. A doctor came a few times a day to check on him. Asked him questions and felt him over for injuries. Asked him if he spoke English. Habla Español, he asked. The man just stared. Parlez vous Français. Sprechen sie Deutsch. While the man slept the doctor came in quietly and clapped his hands by the man’s ear. He jumped awake. You can hear just fine, he said. You see us. You’re half starved, but pretty healthy. Fit as a marathoner. When are you going to tell us who you are and what the hell happened out there.

The rangers came back with a high-strung woman in a suit, an attorney. They spoke to him for a while, but he ignored them. He felt contained, without needs, remote.

A woman in jeans came into the room and took many pictures of him and left in a hurry.

A nurse washed his hair. She talked to him without expecting an answer. You have every kind of mess in this hair, she said. She asked if she could cut it. He must have acquiesced with his eyes. She got scissors and a mirror. She said, Take this. He took the mirror and held it up to himself. Gaunt, almost skeletal, brown and ropy. He recognized his eyes. His hair was striped with gray. His beard with the beads Rebekah had braided there. He had never seen them. The scar from when he ran into a branch in the night. He had never seen that either. He drew his lips back to see his teeth. A few chipped and one missing, but nice and white. His Adam’s apple sharp and protruding. The nurse cut his hair close and rough. Sorry, she said. I gotta cut around all these sticks and sap, or whatever it is. And your beard, she asked. He nodded. So, you do speak English, she said. Or understand it at least. Where you from, hon. She sat on the edge of the bed and put a towel around his neck and washed his beard in warm, soapy water, then cut it off as close as she could with scissors. Gonna have my girlfriend come up here and finish this right, she said. If the rules allow it.

She left the mirror. He looked old and haggard. He ate lots of food. The rangers came and went. A police officer was stationed outside his door. His photograph had appeared online. People were curious about the man who had stumbled out of the desert half-starved wearing buckskins and rags. He got out of bed. News vans were parked outside. He went to his door. The policeman stood up and looked at him. The man said, Looks like there’s lots of people want to talk with me. Yessir, the officer said, and got on his radio and called someone. The man sat on his bed and waited.

The rangers, attorney, and social worker came. They asked him lots of questions. What is your name. Brigham Snow. How long were you in the desert. Seven years. How did this happen. I was hiking. I got lost. Where were you. I don’t know. I looked always for the road and then one day I found it. How did you survive. I ate trout, cattails, chokecherries, ricegrass, turkey eggs, venison, raccoon. I was pretty much an Anasazi. You should contact your family. Yes. I am scared to do that, but I miss them. When you are recovered, can you show us where you lived. I moved around continually. I am not sure I could find my way back. Under boulders. Under ledges. In canyons. Wherever I could find shelter.

When the doctors were satisfied he was well, the rangers took him out to the parking lot, made a way for him through the crowd of reporters and spectators, helped him toward a waiting police truck. Lots of cameras. Shouted offers to pay for his story. Manufacturers of outdoor gear pressed their cards on him. He turned before getting into the truck for the long ride back to the city. Into a microphone he said, I am glad to be safe. I want to thank the people who helped me.