No Gun Ri, soon a cactus will exist for each person who died). In fashioning the garden, he has begun to settle his burden, attaching that vexing recollection to something beneficial: a slow transformation which, in time, he prays will alter the darker ruminations — hopefully placating the restless procession within his dreams, the straggling forms signifying his culpability — ushering forth pink spring flowers nestled in the midst of cacti spines instead of the living turned abruptly dead, irrelevant, discarded by history yet present to him still.
At some future point, he believed he would sleep contentedly in his bed and nap warmly inside his hut, untethered from regrets, free to enjoy his days while anticipating flawless golf swings — doing so as the sun nourishes his garden and shines down on this ever-widening, arid development. Then he would never again doubt the choices he has made for himself, even should Lon recline beside him, muttering, “It won't stop, Hollis — won't stop until there's no desert left. Not so long ago this was wilderness — the last spot on earth we would've inhabited.” No, he had planned to avoid any second guessing after the garden is completed; he ‘d already told himself it was meaningless to think much about the past, or to contemplate how these streets and homes and golf courses were simply blueprints in an office somewhere, a design requiring cheap property. He has made himself forget that all of this real estate, not long ago, was once farmland owned by a sole Mexican family (probably a large family, with at least one child who saw fit to bury a handful of toy soldiers in shallow, fortuitous graves), disregarding whatever leftovers are evident at the fringes — orange trees beyond the development, cattle gnawing along the outer limits like exiles from another place in time.
“Look, everyone gets their moment under the sun,” he wanted to tell Lon. “They've had theirs, we're having ours. You know, maybe everything is just exactly as it's meant to be. Have you considered that?”
But while he may wish to think otherwise, Hollis will always be conscious of rarely encountering few colors other than his own pallid blush, his very wrinkled kind. And, too, he can't envision last night's snowfall as anything less than an emblematic one, a paradoxical showering, covering what, in its origin, was meant to be brownish and coarse yet has since been concealed by good roads, consummate planning, gated uniformity — that snow chilling Nine Springs with its inexplicable arrival, hinting at the impermanence of those now sequestered here; how it descended with such assurance, claiming the earth — how, then, it faded almost as quickly, melting away, disappearing into the ground, turning the loamy soil to mud, and offering precious little else before finally departing.
SAFE PLACES TO DIE
11
Before her chemotherapy began, Debra had made up her mind: she wasn't going to start treatment with any reservations or the slightest amount of dread, nor would she deceive herself by pretending the chemo wasn't destined to underscore the magnitude of her illness (surely quelling whatever sense of control she had had over her own fate, at times producing vast feelings of discouragement). So, she had decided, there wouldn't be an internal struggle against what was about to occur; rather, she had accepted the therapy as an essential step toward recovering her health, while also relying on a practical-to-a-fault, no-nonsense mental inclination which — she reassured herself — was befitting of a West Texas woman. “You should know by now, we're pros at separating the meat from the bone,” she ‘d told Hollis. “We've got bullshit scrapers embedded in our souls.” That pragmatic side of her was key, for she believed it gave her a better opportunity to rise above the vagaries of her situation and tolerate the fact that her life was evolving in a manner which she could have never predicted. Moreover, she wouldn't allow herself to entertain hysterics — not even when she recognized twinges of panic or anxiety in Hollis — because she knew the treatment was inevitable and that she must be wholly resigned to its assault on both the disease and her body. As such, she had understood beforehand that the chemo was, in the very least, a wayward ally of sorts, albeit a horribly toxic and draining one.
Then while sitting for hours on end at the Arizona Cancer Center — relaxing in an open, brightly lit space, tended to by a small staff of attentive clinical and research nurses — she and Hollis had been relieved that the Patient Treatment Suite wasn't like the place they had secretly imagined. Without saying so, they had each shared a similar fantasy of a sterile yet archaic ward, a cramped environment lined with stretchers which were partitioned off by white plastic curtains — where stoic nurses strolled from patient to patient, filling out charts as the very ill grew sicker following the administration of chemotherapy. But, in truth, the cancer center had four modern treatment areas (three with reclining lounge chairs and a television mounted on a wall, one with stretcher beds for those who wished to rest throughout the therapy). Instead of voicing discomfort or writhing from pain, the other patients around Debra passed the hours in relative peaceful-ness — eating potato chips and pizza slices and hamburgers, watching afternoon talk shows, listening through headphones to portable CD players, flipping the pages of newspapers or magazines, talking and playing board games with family members, napping — while the drugs went into their arms as if dripping from a leaky spigot, the chemicals burned up their perfectly good veins, and the IV bags hung above every seat.
It was, for Debra, like a large communal living room, or a weigh station occupied by people who were replenishing themselves amid the dubious journey none of them had asked to embark upon; although what was evident to her during the first rounds of chemo — what she could easily discern from her lounge chair — was that while all of them were there together, many had been on the journey longer than she had (her husband didn't need to help her to and from her seat, the nurses hadn't yet begun searching her arms for undamaged veins in which to stick the IV needle). Still, there was something calming about the suite, boring even. The drugs, too, weren't much of an ordeal; she had assumed she would feel the chemo entering her system, except, as it happened, she felt nothing whatsoever — other than the slight prick of the needle breaching her skin.
And so — with Hollis sitting beside her, his chin tilted upward at the television — she read a Nero Wolfe mystery novel, or worked crossword puzzles. In those weeks when chemo brain finally hampered her ability to concentrate on words, she would choose a chair near the wide, expansive windows, surveying the mountains and sky, often studying the patients and staff who came and went across the center's parking lot. She and Hollis also took walks, bringing the portable IV along with them as they stopped at the nurses’ station to chat, or headed down the hallways, or, on occasion, paused inside the clinic's quiet, simple, and usually empty chapel (the two rarely ever speaking there, preferring instead to keep silent beneath the vaulted silt-cast ceiling, the stained-glass window, a cascade of bells). Yet after months of chemo, Debra had never lost sight of the fact that the twenty-nine other chairs in the suite displayed the various shapes of men and women who were praying for the same outcome; as a result, she knew she wasn't alone, and from that understanding she had gleaned a modicum of solace. For just like her, they had left their daily routines behind, and, once a given round of treatment was done, they could again resume a fairly normal existence.
Hollis, too, had been mindful of the patients which filled the suite with Debra — several he had grown fond of encountering, others he recognized but hardly acknowledged. More striking to him, however, was the diversity of the continually changing group. Aside from retired, middle-aged, or university material — male or female — there were white and black patients, mainland Chinese and Mexican locals, a Japanese housewife and a Saudi Arabian graduate student. A handful of different languages were spoken in that room, a cross section of the world had somehow found its way into the desert and past the sliding doors of the cancer center. But over time — as Debra's illness progressed, as the chemo only slowed its advance — new patients began appearing in the places where familiar bodies had previously sat; then it felt like a lethal game of musical chairs was being played out, one in
