Falling Idols

Somewhere on the other side they began their slow descent.

*

Let me tell you about wonder.

The earliest scientists saw the world as comprised of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Ever the symbolists, they weren’t being literal. These four elements were the broadest categories for all that is and all that lies within it, from matter to energy to force to potential.

Binding it all together, they agreed, was the fifth element, the quintessence: spirit. Whatever it is, this is the one that still makes modern physics edgy even though its spokesmen agree that without it, we couldn’t exist. Our molecules would fly apart. Even the bulkiest of us, on a subatomic level, is mostly empty space. Head included.

If spirit is the fifth element, then wonder has to be the sixth, because without it no one would ever have cared about naming the other five.

Wonder comes naturally to a child, and when I was a boy, every day I found some new thing to wonder about: What I was made of. Why grass was green, sky was blue, blood was red. Why my neighbor and best friend Gabrielle had a body different from mine. And finally, one day, why I could not die.

*

She grew more appalled with every mile. Knew Utah was a spartan place, if here and there grand enough to film a western, but really: What had happened to Austin’s mind? Out this far he must be living as poorly as an Indian on a reservation.

The town of Miracle — the area’s last stab at civilization — was behind her. A bizarre place, home to several hundred original residents or diehard newcomers. During its brief fame last year as a New Age mecca it had bloated and bustled with seekers after enlightenment, visions, or cures. Opportunists had been quick to capitalize. Moribund storefronts had been given new life, crystal sellers and self-styled healers and tacky bookshops affixing themselves to visitors’ hopes like ticks on a dog. Now they floundered. The dust was taking over again. On the sidewalks she could see the same faces she might find in any rust belt town whose factory whistle had blown for the last time.

The hokeyness of it, the platitudinous kitsch … it was the last place on earth she’d expect to lure Austin.

But three miles later and here she was — rough miles at that. The road wasn’t even paved. Dips in the hardpan pounded at the rental car’s wheels, while the windshield had begun to collect a powdery film of reddish-brown ochre. Tufts of scrub grew low to the ground, as cheerless and hardy as steel wool.

In the distance it was all barren majesty, as far from everyday life as the dark side of the moon, and equally hospitable. Buttes and mesas and red craggy spires skewered the landscape, graven out of stone and left behind to challenge the vastness of pure sky. She might’ve found it beautiful on a movie screen, where men would shoot each other or die of thirst and collapse beside the bleached horned skulls of lost cattle. Great fun. But in real life it was a terrible place. She’d been a fool to come here. A bigger fool for listening to Austin in the first place. Ever.

Gabrielle rounded a curve, a hill. Saw the shack before she saw him. Naturally — the shack was bigger. But not by much. Two rooms’ worth, hammered together ages ago from rough planks, all color baked out of them by the same sun whose gleam caught the bare metal of the stovepipe for an incandescent moment.

He was sitting on the ground out front, one knee drawn up for him to lean on, other leg extended at an angle. Head down and a curtain of hair over his face: Austin, eleven years wiser, was he, or eleven years more deluded, self-destructed, and confused? In his hand a stick, but wherever he’d picked it up, it wasn’t here; not one tree in sight. If you needed to build a quick coffin you’d first have to dismantle living quarters.

She slowed, wheeling off the road and following the scored tracks left by what she assumed was Austin’s car. She stopped but her dusty wake kept coming, a gritty drift of red, and she stayed put behind the wheel until it passed, obscuring Austin for the moment. Gabrielle soaked up the last of the a/c before turning off the engine and cursed the sun.

The cloud thinned and Austin emerged from its murk.  He hadn’t moved but it looked as though his body had refused the dust, or else the dust wanted nothing to do with him. For living in a sty, he looked remarkably clean, only weathered like the wood behind him.

When she left the car he seemed not to notice, staring down at the ground before him instead, where he was using the tip of the stick to draw spirals in the dirt, from center outward with a clockwise twist. He’d draw one and wait, while she remained beside the rental, last link to normality. The air at the center of each spiral would shimmer like heat-haze on a horizon before coalescing into a tiny whirlwind. He would let it spin for a few moments, fattening on its own momentum, then bring down his other arm to snuff out the fledgling cyclone with his palm.

His mind must be gone, she thought. He thinks he can draw tornadoes now. Gabrielle blinked a few times, left her eyes shut, and when she reopened them he’d tired of the game and she was no longer sure it was what she had really seen.

Austin told her he was glad she’d come, nice to see her again after all this time, she was looking good. All the usual smalltalk suspects, except they sounded poised on the brink of mockery. Or was she projecting? She crossed arms and used a shoetip to drag a crude spiral in the dirt, and when nothing else happened kicked it out and nodded at the pathetic shack.

“I’d hoped better for you, Austin, I really had.”

“I know you must find it a Green Acres kind of shock, coming here,” he said. His raspy voice lilted up several notes: “‘Noo Yawk is where I’d rahther stay…’”

“Austin? For future reference? When you act smug, first make sure you have something to be smug about.”

“For instance? A marriage I’m starting to doubt, an apartment in a rent-controlled building, the title of Religions Editor at some magazine more people look at than actually read? Are those what you had in mind?”

“Maybe it’s not much,” she said, clipped now, “but it’s my life.”

Of all the things she didn’t need, it was for him to start looking at her with pity. Pity. Brown eyes going liquid with their wisdom and insight and compassion and lord knows what else, Austin thinking maybe now he looked like a black velvet Jesus.

“I remember a Gabrielle,” he said, “who wanted to spend her life trying to scratch beneath its surface and understand what was really going on underneath.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I did. And you know what I found? Responsibility and bills. I found adulthood.”