Anne herself was nearly two hundred miles to the south, walking stiffly back across the parking lot that surrounded a big Denny's restaurant just off the freeway. She had used their toilet and bought a cup of coffee to go that she did not intend to drink. Instead, she crawled into the back of the bus, tugged the curtains shut, wrapped herself up in the quilt, and slept.
For once, no one came tapping at the windows ordering her to move on, and she woke hours later, sore all over from Glen's violent attentions and feeling the black burden of a massive emotional hangover, but at least rested, and ravenous. She swallowed a couple of aspirin with the cold coffee and went back into the restaurant, where this time she ordered a full meal. She drank some of the strong, hot coffee that had hit her cup almost before the seat of her jeans had come to rest on the bright orange vinyl, and then she got up to use their rest room again before her food arrived. When she saw the woman in the mirror, she wished she had stayed in her seat: Her hair looked as if it had gotten in the way of a lawn mower, her lips were swollen, her eyes bloodshot, and her jaws and cheekbones had patches of what looked like angry red sunburn that hurt to the touch—Glen had evidently needed a shave. She splashed a great deal of cold water on her face without looking again in the mirror, and ran her wet fingers through her strangely cropped hair. She'd certainly lost the knack of doing her own haircut.
She took her time over the meal, and as she paid the bill, she asked the waitress for the nearest no- appointment haircut place. When the woman gave her the information with only the briefest glance at Anne's head, she earned herself the heftiest tip she'd ever had from a lone woman.
It was a day for freedom—what remained of the day, anyway. A haircut and shampoo left her with a brief cap of hair hugging her scalp, after which a visit to the Recreational Equipment store she stumbled across entertained her for more than an hour and provided her with a long black metal flashlight, a brilliant yellow fleece pullover manufactured out of recycled soda bottles, two pairs of heavy socks, and a delightful gadget with knife blade, pliers, two kinds of screwdriver head, and a can opener. She topped off the holiday mood with a night in a motel, where she took first a deep bath and then a hot shower, watched some delightfully inane and utterly incomprehensible television, and slept for eight hours in a bed designed to fit a
The next day it was raining, and she resumed her flight south toward the desert.
Rocinante chugged her way steadily past the well-fed rivers and rich soil of Oregon, and gamely threw herself at the mountain passes. Laden trucks tended to pass her going uphill, but she made it, and Anne dropped with a sigh of satisfaction down into the disturbingly unnatural green of California's central valley, where rice paddies grew at the base of desert hills.
California was even more endless than she remembered, with barely half of it behind her when she finally pulled into a rest stop and allowed Rocinante's poor overworked engine to fall silent for the night. She made up the bus's converting bed and lay on it while the trucks and a few cars pounded by on the freeway fifty feet away, setting the crystal mobile over her head to jingling. At two in the morning she gave up and walked over to use the rest area toilets (avoiding looking at the mirror under the harsh fluorescent lights) and then she walked up and down the dark and deserted picnic area for a while before perching on the edge of a splintered wooden table to watch a feral cat teaching her kittens how to raid a waste bin.
Anne did not know what to think about what she had done the previous night. The sudden elemental upwelling of rage and sheer animal fury frightened her and filled her with self-disgust, that she could be so consumed with the desire to inflict damage on another person, and then by the need to be hurt herself. Her shoulders ached, her wrists and arms were dark with the bruises from Glen's violent hands, but they were nothing next to the inner turmoil.
She did not understand her relationship with Glen McCarthy, had never fully understood it. She had long realized that sex with Glen, a man she both liked and loathed, was her way of cutting herself off from her normal self. Sex was invariably a complicated human endeavor—even when monogamous and marital it was the delight of anthropologists and psychologists, and in this case it seemed to have become necessary to complete the transformation of the cerebral and responsible Anne Waverly into the flightier, rootless personalities of Ana Wakefield or Anita Walls or whatever name Glen had picked out for her. Beyond that, however, she was wary to go: too much analysis, too close an understanding, might well make it impossible to participate in the powerful symbolic energy of the act, leaving her unable to cut her ties and walk away from Anne Waverly.
Now, though, the thing with Glen seemed to have moved from the merely complex to the truly bizarre. It was fortunate, she reflected, that she had already decided to be done with Glen. The next time she might easily find herself going after him with a kitchen knife in her hand.
It was cold and, easing her stiff knee, she got down from the picnic table to return to the folds of Rocinante's bed, and perhaps to sleep.
Still, she thought as she pulled the quilt over her head, she had to admit: it had certainly had its moments…
Late the next afternoon she finally left the interstate and hit the desert, and began to breathe again.
She had forgotten how beautiful it was, how bare and clean and disdainful of human beings. Living a life that was divided between a cabin in the tall trees and concrete buildings in the city, Anne was never greatly conscious of the sky, and the sun and moon were things glimpsed and treasured and quickly forgotten.
Not so in the desert: When the sun was up it was
All these things Anne had managed to forget, and she was caught out by the rapid fall of night before she could find a good side road down which to park. Instead, she found herself peering forward in Rocinante's dim headlights; she eventually gave up and pulled into a wide shoulder used by trucks.
The road was a minor one, and the cars only occasional, heard at a distance and swishing past to fade equally slowly in the other direction. Anne heated up a can of refried beans and wrapped them with some lettuce and tomatoes in a couple of tortillas, and carried her dinner outside with a bottle of beer to sit on one of the old telephone poles that had been laid down to mark the limits of the pullout.
The night was so still, she could hear the bubbles rising in the bottle from the ground between her feet. She left the second tortilla on the plate because the crunch of teeth on lettuce offended her ears, and because she wanted to listen, and to see, and to breathe.
She wrapped her arms around herself and raised her face to the stars, tentatively taking stock. Her scalp and the bare nape of her neck felt cold and light without the thick covering of hair. Her many aches were already fading, and she was beginning to accept what she was embarked on, starting to feel better about the whole thing, abandoning her classes and the puppies and haring off after Glen's community. No, better than acceptance: she was feeling good. Clean and strong, in fact. Reborn.
With that knowledge, in this place, she could finally admit to herself the deep, hidden reason that her nerves had been stretched to the point of snapping ever since she had seen the contents of Glen's envelope: the desert itself.
Since the days of the Hebrew fathers, and no doubt for unrecorded millennia before then, the desert had called out as a place of refuge for the disenfranchised, the oppressed, and the just plain mad. God spoke out in the desert—or perhaps humankind could simply hear the divine voice more clearly in a place clean of the distractions of busy life.
Anne Waverly had once loved the desert places. They had reached out to her as they had to countless others, men and women who had removed their followers from the temptations and distractions of life in the green places and settled them to grow in the hot, rocky soil of Egypt or Israel or Rajastan. She had loved the southwestern desert and revelled in its purity and silence, in the harsh simplicity of its choices, and would no doubt never have sought out a cabin in the deep woods had life been good to her.
Instead, the desert was where Aaron and Abby had died, and where Anne herself had walked so close to her own death. The desert was inextricably linked in her mind with the color of fresh blood and the nauseating smell of putrid meat.
She knew this. How could she not be aware of the cold feeling in her gut whenever she had to drive through eastern Oregon, or when she was forced to go to Texas or Arizona for research or to give a lecture and fly over all that vast dead land? She loathed the very idea of the desert, and given a choice would never have set foot again
