Watts Elegy, Southwest

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-764-5
Verlag: ONE
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'This book is a fever dream, a mood, a spell, an entire climate filled with a particular kind of desert winter light - harsh, unsparing, and beautiful' Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters 'Astonishingly and chillingly prescient . . . a rare kind of writing where every page offers something to linger on' FT Eloise has known only two great loves: her husband, Lewis, and the desert. An academic living in Brooklyn, she is mesmerized by tales of the American Southwest, that paradise built on quicksand with less water every passing year. When the couple set out on a road trip tracing the course of the Colorado River, Eloise researches its lakes and dams, while Lewis grieves his mother in the prickly wasteland where he never felt quite at home. Together they cruise past gaping canyons, glittering casinos and motels gone to seed, travelling through the red-gold light of nearby wildfires. They are young and they have each other, and for a moment the whole world seems to shimmer with glorious possibility. But within the close confines of the car a chasm starts to open between them. This is a hauntingly beautiful love story about the mystery of other people - at once an excavation of a relationship, and an elegy for a desert running dry. PRAISE FOR ELEGY, SOUTHWEST: 'Exquisite'TLS 'Haunting and precise' Spectator 'Profound' Service95 'Astounding, heartbreaking, and important' Elvia Wilk 'Strikingly brilliant' Heidi Julavits 'An expansive, ambitious novel' Ellena Savage

Madeleine Watts is the author of The Inland Sea, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her novella, Afraid of Waking It, was awarded the Griffith Review Novella Prize. Her nonfiction has been published extensively in Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, The Paris Review, Literary Hub, and Astra Magazine. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Born in Sydney, Australia, she lives between New York and Berlin.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Watts, Madeleine

Leseproben

The border between Nevada and California was announced by the Cinderella Castle silhouettes of Buffalo Bill’s and Whiskey Pete’s, two casinos twinned on either side of the interstate. A cloud of dust hovered over the horizon line. There were no flagpoles, nor trees, nor anything in sight that might have indicated a wind. How strange, I thought, to be in a place so lacking in markers of movement. It was hard for me to keep clear of the suspicion that the dust cloud indicated something more sinister. Just before turning off the freeway, we passed a field of solar panels, with all their mirror-faces turned up towards the sun, appearing as we sped by like an ocean of light in the middle of the desert. The very air seemed to ripple. We slowed down, took a left, and descended through a haze of cloud into the Mojave National Preserve.

Do we have enough gas? I asked you.

I just want to keep up the pace, you said. Never let the gas tank get below half full, your mother had once chastised you from the back seat as we sat idling in a queue for the Costco pumps. It was the last piece of advice I remember her giving you.

There were three possible routes marked on the map, and I was leading us down the wildest one. We could have driven down I-15 to Barstow, skirting the edge of Los Angeles and doubling back east. We could have detoured from the interstate earlier and passed through Yucca Valley, by the enormous stone geoglyph created by an Australian, which might, if he were lucky, outlast Stonehenge. But I did not want to see the geoglyphs, I wanted to be in the desert. Google Maps said it would only take four hours. How did I know if we had enough gas?

Joshua trees began to appear in ones and twos and then, within a few miles, there were dense thickets of the imploring plants everywhere we set our eyes. Ahead of us lay a vast valley where the clouds cast shadows on the desert floor. The Kelso Dunes passed by on our right, a vision of the Sahara among the sagebrush, and the road stretched out ahead of us like a long dry tongue. You were maneuvering the sunshade in front of your face so that the white light wouldn’t blind you. You didn’t seem panicked about being momentarily unable to see. I was always impressed by how calm you were when you drove. An Audi approached from behind us, overtaking and speeding ahead along the flat road.

Oooh, I’m a big, important man with important places to go, you said as he accelerated. Yes I am, oh yes I am. You spoke in the same tone of voice you might have used to indulge a toddler.

The car disappeared into the dust cloud ahead, and you kept on at a steady pace, Slowdive playing through my phone on the car’s speakers.

Do you need to pee? I asked you.

I think the real question is, do you need to pee?

I need to pee.

Should I stop?

I turned and looked for a thatch of bush behind which I could squat but saw nothing promising. Where would I go?

In the desert.

I can’t pee in the desert. There’s nothing to hide behind.

I won’t look.

What if somebody comes by?

Like who?

I hesitated. Mr. Big Fast Car?

Then I will say, drive on, Mr. Big Fast Car, my lady is peeing.

You pulled over. I walked to the back end of the car, where the Hertz sticker glimmered off the sandy, gray curve of the boot. The quiet was punctuated by nothing but the wind twisting through the Joshua trees and the dull boom of an L.A.-bound plane flying overhead. I pulled my dress up to my hips, my underpants down to my knees, and squatted low. The road was hot against the hand I put down to steady myself. I felt the grit of sand beneath my fingertips, lodged into the pores of the tarmac. I let go. That was when the bikers drove past, the actual source of the sound of the booming plane I thought I’d heard. Eight of them, in their glorious black leathers, roaring by.

Nobody honked, you noted when I opened the passenger side door and settled back into the seat beside you.

You started the car and took off again, and then a moment later you took a look at the numbers behind the wheel. Hey, I don’t mean to alarm you, you said, but can you find us a gas station?

Why would I be alarmed?

We need to find a gas station, that’s all.

I don’t have reception, do you?

No.

I don’t think I can search for one. We passed one just before, but it was abandoned.

It’s okay. There’ll be a gas station.

Do we have water?

I have a kombucha in the back, you said.

I remembered, then, everything your father had ever told me about driving in the desert. One summer, I had gone home with you to Arizona, and I had wanted you to take me out to see the Montezuma Castle Monument. You asked your father if you could borrow the car.

Your father just stared you down, before saying, Don’t be a tourist, Lewis. That’s how people die.

Neither of us knew how to change a tire. We had only a bottle of Poland Spring and your kombucha. It was thirty degrees outside. Eighty-six in Fahrenheit. Was thirty degrees too hot? If we broke down in the heat, out of air-conditioning, with only a couple of bottles of water between us, would we be in danger? There would be no shade. The temperature in the car would skyrocket. We would start to sweat. Depending on where we broke down, we would likely still be out of range. Getting help would depend on a passing car or on walking down the road until we found a few bars of reception. We’d drink what we had, but when it was gone, we’d still sweat it all out. Soon our core temperatures would rise. Our heads would begin to throb as we picked our way along the road. Our hearts would try to pump blood to our brains, but soon the dizziness would set in. I might faint—it would be just like me—but you’d power through. Soon enough hallucinations would begin. As the temperature rose, your organs would fail. Purple splotches appearing on your reddened flesh. You would shake. And then, eventually, you would stop moving. People die every year, within half an hour or so, just like that. That same summer I’d first gone home with you to meet your parents, a man and his grandson had died at Gila Bend. The two went hiking with no water or food, and were found dead in the July heat, only a few miles from the trailhead. Don’t be a tourist, your father had said, and I knew that we hadn’t brought nearly enough water with us. But November wasn’t July. I had absolutely no idea if we were being stupid. The more frightening thing to me was that plenty of people die in these deserts and the landscape swallows up their corpses, leaving little trace. It doesn’t take long after death for insects to colonize a body. Ants crawl across forearms. Flies move into nostrils. The gases and fluids inside the body cause the limbs to balloon. Shirts pop their buttons, bellies expose themselves, and fluids leak from every orifice. Then the vultures arrive. The beak of a vulture is perfectly designed to tear apart dead flesh. The stomach opens, and out tumble your innards. So many vultures crowd in that what once was your body is covered in black, moving feathers. They hiss at one another. Dust flies up from the disturbed ground. Shoes and socks are strewn to the side—they are not wanted, not edible. After a couple of days of feeding, the vultures have not much left to eat but a few bits of flesh on bone. Maggots consume what’s left. After a while what’s left of the body is so light that the birds can pick up parts and move them around, to check for any remaining meat still hanging from rib cages, from thighs, from the skull. The bones are scattered as far as a vulture can carry them. In the end, all that might be left of your body in the place where you fell might be one or two bones, the bleached rubber sole of a boot, the zipper from your jeans, the buckle of your belt.

Look, you said, a proper town is up there.

At Roy’s Motel and Café, the only open business in the town of Amboy, we saw all the motorcycles of the bikers who had passed us an hour before, parked neatly by the doors. The café was just about all that was left of the old Route 66 town. It must have been such a loss, I thought, when the highway system was built. Have you ever heard the reason highways are the width that they are? I asked you as you took the hose out of the petrol pump.

You thought about it as the gas glugged in. Is it because of the police in some way?

It’s because they were built during the Cold War, and they figured they’d need to use them to evacuate cities and move tanks in, in the event of a nuclear incident. They also wanted the roads to be very straight every few miles or so, so that airplanes could use them as a runway when the attack came. The glugging came to a stop with a loud click, and you removed the pump. I got my purse out and walked into the store. The thing was, I knew the story about airplanes landing on the interstates was an urban myth, and I wasn’t sure why I’d told you the story as though it were fact. I guess I liked what it suggested. The interstates as analog for social psychosis, for paranoia and fear. Highways as...