Before sunrise, on this sweet new day we won't ever see happen.
So we'd been led to believe. Maybe too safe.
It's because of all this, we brought nothing that could save us.
Around another corner, along another stretch of expressway, down an off-ramp, we drove, until Mr. Whittier said, “Turn here.” Gripping the chrome frame of his wheelchair, he jabbed a beef-jerky finger. The skin withered and shrunk, the fingernail bone-yellow.
Comrade Snarky poked her nose up and sniffed, saying, “Am I going to have to live with that patchouli stink for the next twelve weeks?”
Miss Sneezy coughed into her fist.
And Saint Gut-Free steered the bus down a tight, dark alley. Between buildings so close they splashed back the brown spit of the Matchmaker, tobacco spattering the front of his bib overalls. Walls so close the concrete skinned the hairy elbow the Missing Link had resting on the sill of his open window.
Until the bus pulls to a stop and the door folds open to show another door—this second door steel, in a concrete wall. The alley so narrow you can't see down any length. Mrs. Clark slips out of her seat, down the steps, and jerks open a padlock.
Then she's gone, inside, and the bus door opens on a slot of pure nothing. Just black. The slot just wide enough to squeeze through. From inside, you catch the needle-sharp smell of mouse urine. Mix in the same smell as opening an old, damp book half eaten by silverfish. Mix in the smell of dust.
And from the darkness, Mrs. Clark's voice says, “Hurry and get inside.”
Saint Gut-Free will join us after he leaves the bus parked for the police to find.
Ditches the evidence. Blocks, maybe miles away. Where they'll find it, untraceable back to this steel doorway into concrete and dark. Our new home. Our desert island.
All of us crowded into that moment between the bus and the pitch-dark. At that last moment outside, Agent Tattletale tells us, “Smile.”
What Mr. Whittier would call the camera behind the camera behind the camera.
That first moment of our new, secret life, the spotlight hits us, so bright and fast it leaves the dark more dark than black. That instant leaves us grabbing hold of each other by the coats and elbows, trying to stay upright, blinking-blind but trusting, while Mrs. Clark's voice leads us through that steel doorway.
That video moment: the truth about the truth.
“Smell is very important,” Mother Nature says. Lugging her cardboard box, her brass bells tinkling, clutching the dark, she says, “Don't laugh, but in aromatherapy, they warn you never to light a sandalwood candle around bayberry incense . . .”
Under Cover
A Poem About Mother Nature
“I tried to become a nun,” says Mother Nature, “because I needed to hide out.”
She didn't count on the drug test.
Mother Nature onstage, her arms are vined with red henna graffiti. From her fingertips
to the shoulder straps of her tie-dyed, rainbow-colored cotton smock.
Around her neck, a choker of brass temple bells has turned the skin
green. Her skin shining with patchouli oil.
“Who knew?” Mother Nature says. “And not just urinalysis.”
She says, “They test with hair and fingernail samples.”
She says, “That's plus the background check.”
The morals clause. The background check. The credit check. The dress code.
Standing onstage, barefoot, instead of a spotlight,
instead of a smile or frown, a movie fragment of night sky washes across her face.
A galaxy of stars and moons.
Her lips red with beet juice. Her eyelids smeared with yellow saffron dust.
There, a shifting mask of pink nebulas. Of planets with rings and craters.
Mother Nature says, “They ask for too many letters of reference.”
Plus a polygraph test. Four pieces of picture ID.
“Four,” Mother Nature says, holding up the hennaed fingers of one hand. Her
bracelets of brass wire and dirty silver, rattling windchimes around her wrist.
She says, “Nobody has four pieces of picture ID . . .”
To become a nun, she says, you have to take a sit-down test, worse than
the SATs and the LSATs, put together. And full of story problems, such as:
“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
All of this, Mother Nature says, just to find out:
“If you're marrying Christ on the rebound.”
Her long hair pulled away from her face, braided and falling down her back,
Mother Nature says,
“Of course, I failed. Not just the drug test—I failed everything.”
Not just as a nun, but throughout most of her life . . .
She shrugs, her freckled shoulders under the tie-dyed straps,
“So here I am.”
The constellations shifting and crawling across her face, Mother Nature says,
“I still needed someplace to hide.”
Foot Work
A Story by Mother Nature
Don't laugh, but in aromatherapy, they warn you never to light a lemon-cinnamon candle at the same time you light a clove candle and a cedar-nutmeg candle. They just don't tell you why . . .
In feng shui, they never let on, but just by putting a bed in the wrong spot, you can focus enough chi to kill a person. You can give a late-term abortion with just acupuncture. You can use crystals or aura work to give people skin cancer.
Don't laugh, but there are back-alley ways you can turn anything New Age into a killing tool.
Your last week in massage school, they teach you never to work the transverse reflex zone at the heel of the foot. Never touch the arch of the left-foot dorsum. And especially not the outer-left-most aspect. But they don't tell you how come. This is the difference between therapists who work the light side versus the dark side of the industry.
You go to school to study reflexology. It's the science of manipulating the human foot to heal or stimulate certain parts of the body. It's based on the idea that your body is divided into ten different energy meridians. Your big
