BABY ANGEL 

***

I waited for her to arrive. We planned to drive to the desert, camp in the shadow of sandstone boulders. On Monday her tire blew out. On Tuesday, she slept late, too late to set out for LA from Diamond Springs, the gold rush town where her parents lived. Wednesday came and went. The next day I woke up to a text from her: “Tomorrow.” In the morning, she sent a selfie pumping gas in the sun. I danced into my living room. “She’s almost here,” I said to my roommate Mark. We three had known each other for over a decade. But it had been a year since I’d seen her face outside of a screen. 

      I almost didn’t recognize her when I opened the front door. Her long, wavy hair was shorn. Gone were her curated vintage fits. She now wore a loose maroon T-shirt and baggy white carpenter pants. She wore no makeup. Her sunglasses stayed fixed to her face. On the roof, we drank beer and ate oily heros. The sun dipped below the horizon. Her shades slipped down her nose. She pushed them back up. They were her only prescription lenses after she broke her main pair. “I can still see,” she told me. I believed her. 

      The roof overlooked a military base, and beyond the gates, the ocean. A slit of blue between two palms. The view was the reason I told myself that I stayed in this one-bedroom apartment with Mark. We had broken up a year ago, but I hadn’t yet saved enough money to move out. I worried I might never save enough. But on that night, watching Ariana stare into the blue slit, I loved my apartment. 

      The breeze blew the seeds off my sesame roll. Ariana was leaning against the railing, telling us about a recent loss. The city cut down a beloved tree in the yard of her childhood home where she was crashing. “A killer fungus,” she told us. The leaves spangled with yellow dots. “They’re gonna cut down all the sick trees in the neighborhood.” It reminded me of The Virgin Suicides, a movie we both loved. In the film, sisters stage a protest against the city’s workers who come to cut down a precious oak. Mark said, “They’ll do anything to steal our joy.”     

       Pleasure was important to Mark. He wanted to milk as much delight from each day as possible, crushing up sativa flowers in a steel grinder all morning and playing guitar into the evening. For six hours a week, he left the apartment to teach test hacks to college hopefuls. I had once admired his commitment to the anti-capitalist ethic printed on the postcard stuck to our fridge: You are worth so much more than your productivity. He refused to let a boss, or anyone at all, steal his joy. Not tonight. He relit the half-spent joint and passed it to me. The end glistened with his spit. I waved it off. He scrunched his face. “You don’t want any?!?” he said. I was no longer sure how comfortable I felt smoking with him. 

       Inside Ariana unrolled her sleeping bag on the floor of my bedroom. There were vacuum streaks on the carpet. I had yet to purchase a new bed. I let Mark keep the old one, which we had shared for ten years. The sagging mattress was now pushed against a wall in the living room while I slept on a pallet of blankets. To get to the bathroom, Mark needed to walk through my room, and to get to the kitchen or front door, I needed to walk through his room. We left the bedroom door that connected our spaces open, unlocked, so we could both come and go as we pleased. Recently, I began to rethink our open-door policy. I suspected he viewed my room as an extension of his own. Often, when I left the house, Mark opened the big sliding window that overlooked my dresser. He liked the feel of the strong sea breeze, so strong it knocked the potted plants and perfume bottles off my dresser every time he slid open the glass. I asked him to keep the window latched. He said, “Sure.” Now he closes it if he hears me nearing the front door. The only indication that the window has been opened: the odd placements of the pots on the dresser. As Ariana grabbed a pillow from my pallet, I nudged the pots back into their properly shaded spots. “This is fun,” Ariana said. “Reminds me of crashing at punk houses in Oakland.” I filed her comment away in my mind for when I needed to describe my living arrangement to a future date, like a punk house. 

       On the floor, Ariana and I made plans for the drive. We listed last-minute supplies. Although it was past midnight, we set our alarm for 6:00 am. “All I need is a breakfast burrito, a sunrise, and you,” I said as I sliced a high-dose edible in half and handed it to her. We shouted goodnight to Mark through the cracked door and turned off the light. When I closed my eyes, I saw rippled growths of fungus overtaking the trunks of trees outside the library where I worked. I concentrated on the widening splotches as I drifted to sleep.

      Hours later, a nightmare I couldn’t remember jolted me awake. I saw a black figure crawling on the floor near Ariana. Fungus! I squinted for a better look. I saw Mark’s face. “It's you,’ I said. Ariana lay still in her bag, eyes closed. “I dropped my phone,” he said. “I can’t find it.” A light illuminated the floor. “Found it,” he said. He walked out of the room in a beam of blue. 

      I woke up with an ache in my left temple. My eyes burned. When I rolled over, I saw that Ariana was gone. Her first text: “Needed more supplies.” The second one said, “Look outside.” I pushed the blinds aside. She was bent over the open hood of her white sedan. I opened the glass and whistled. She waved me down. I threw on a black crop top that said Baby Angel in silver rhinestones. 

       In the street, she poured fluid from a green bottle into her car. “She was smoking,” Ariana said. “Nothing a little coolant can’t fix.” She slammed the hood shut and kicked the tires one by one. Her sleeves rolled up, sweaty bangs pushed to the side of her face. “Get your shit,” she said. I didn’t tell her that I had been packing for days. I had looked up every menu of every restaurant we might stop at in Joshua Tree and mapped out every possible camping alternative in case the campground we wanted in the park was full. I didn’t think to bring coolant, but she did. 

***

MILKY WHITE WAY

***

The dash was clouded with dust and smoke. A semi truck passed us on the right. The driver honked. Ariana tapped the brakes. The seat belt snapped against my hips. I leaned over to eye the speedometer: 5 mph under the limit. “Do you think we should drive a little faster?” I asked. “We want to make it before sunset.” She laughed, stared ahead. I tried to look through the sides of her sunglasses to see her eyes, but her hair kept falling over her cheekbones. “We’re not in a rush, right?” she asked. Perhaps her bad driving was a sign from the cosmos telling me to slow down, enjoy the view, and sniff the cigarettes burning all around me. I tilted my seat back. I let my shoulders drop.

       “I'm gonna walk that milky white way,” Elvis sang. “Oh Lord, some of these days,” we belted back. Ariana’s low voice suited the song. We both grew up with parents who listened to Elvis. She in California and I in Georgia. When I visited her studio in Sacramento two springs ago, we listened to his gospel record His Hand in Mine on her front porch. Whenever we wanted to do something we knew was unholy, we asked each other first, “What Would Elvis Do?”

         The first time we met in real life we played His Hand In Mine on repeat after discovering we were both big fans. She was staying at an efficiency hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I drove three hours to see her. At the time, I still lived nearby in Asheville with Mark. Ariana and I met on the internet. We shared a mutual admiration of each other’s writing. We emailed drafts. We ran bubble baths and talked on the phone. When she told me that she was visiting The South to see family, I filled up my gas tank and picked herbs from my neighbor's garden to give to her.

      On the swingset behind the hotel, she told me about her family’s southern roots. How she was estranged from her woo-woo mom. “I talk to my mother every day on the phone,” I told her. “I don’t know how to stop.” The air was warm. I worried about sweat stains under my boobs. We pumped our legs higher in the air and swapped sexual assault stories. 

      Inside, we boiled water and opened a bottle of wine. When the timer on the stove dinged, she threw a noodle against the tile backsplash and cheered when the noodle stuck. On the bed, we slurped red sauce. She told me she had once been diagnosed with schizophrenia by a corrupt family doctor who didn’t approve of her current lifestyle - the drinking, the women she dated, her writing. “Fuck him,” I said. “What’s his address? I’ll beat him up.”

     As we drove, the smoke from her cigarettes stung my nose. “The driver’s window is stuck,” she said. “We can ash in the jar.” There was a jar cradled between her legs, half-full of spent butts. I had quit smoking years ago, but if I puffed alongside her, the smoke would bother me less. When I reached for the yellow pack in the cupholder, she swatted my hand away. “There’s a fresh one in my duffle, in the backseat,” she said. In the backseat, the duffle sat atop a pit of flattened fast food bags, foil wrappers, water bottles, and coffee cups. On the seat, stray fries, hair ties, receipts, and rolled-up socks. I grabbed the pack and didn’t look back. Was she living in her car? Is that why it had taken her two days to make the six-hour drive to LA from Diamond Springs?

       Ariana lit another cigarette. “You know who’s a motherfucker?” she asked, flicking her ash nowhere near the bottle between her legs. “Me,” I said. She shook her head: “Fucking Sam.” I remembered Sam. She had mentioned him in conversations before. He was her manager at the bill collection call center where she had been working for months. “I told him to fuck off right before I quit and walked out the door,” she said. On a call earlier this year, she told me she believed that Sam and she were simpatico, so connected she could read his mind. “Sam wants a sandwich,” she texted me one morning, then sent a photo hours later of him eating a stacked sourdough club. Ariana had always possessed a talent for reading a room, picking up on others' feelings, their vibe. I wondered if she could read my mind right now. I hoped so. If she could, I wouldn’t need to tell her everything that had happened between Mark and me. 

           A week before Ariana’s visit, I had shared a tent with him on a camping trip with friends and woke in the middle of the night to him sexually assaulting me. In the days after the assault, I spent many sleepless dawns on my phone looking up apartment rental listings. The assault gave me hard evidence that our living situation was untenable, even if I needed a few months to save for a deposit. I could wait out anything.

      Less than an hour outside the city, she said, “Let’s eat.” As we exited the freeway, we inched past what appeared to be a massive cemetery on a hill. Soon, strip malls flanked us. “This place gets good reviews,” she said. We pulled into an empty parking lot. A bell twinkled when we pushed our way inside the diner. Above the cashier stand, there was a picture of the Virgin Mary holding a baby Jesus. Behind the desk, a painted portrait of a cross. I tugged my crop top down over my belly button. In the dining room, my legs skidded across the booth. Another large picture of the Virgin Mary overlooked a bubblegum machine.

      The waitress placed two red cups of water in front of us. It tasted metallic. When the waitress asked, I ordered enchiladas. Ariana said, “Guacamole.” The waitress looked at her: “Anything else?” Ariana handed us our menus. She straightened her sunglasses. 

       Alone at the table, I told Ariana about an essay I was writing on rats. “The brown rats that live in LA are vegetarian,” I said. She wasn’t listening, her gaze fixed on the Virgin Mary. She excused herself to the bathroom. When she returned, a plate of guacamole greeted her. I offered her a bite of my enchiladas. She pushed my plate away: “I’m not hungry.” She stood and headed towards the bathroom. The waitress watched as she walked in and out of the bathroom again and again. On the check was a bible verse, 1st Corinthians, something about loving trumping all. The persistent holy gaze was creeping me out. So was Ariana. I suspected she might be high. I almost hoped she was. The story about her old diagnosis looped in my brain. But when the bathroom door swung open, I pushed the thought aside. Back in the booth, she packed up our leftovers in styrofoam. She scooped the guacamole into a large rectangle. She sank two of her fingers into the green goop, rooted around as if feeling for a potato, then shut the lid. 

***

THE SAINT

***

      The second time Ariana and I met up in person I drove six hours from my apartment in Pasadena to her house in Sacramento. Mark and I slept on the floor of her bedroom next to an upright piano. Ariana snored lightly. I tossed through the night, sleeping bag crackling. Mark read by flashlight in his own bag. No matter how late I stayed awake, he outlasted me. His endurance once offered a soothing promise: I would never be awake past midnight alone. The next day, we ate burritos and sang Amazing Grace around the piano. Ariana cracked jokes all afternoon. One went like this: “Elvis may never die, but your abusive stepfather will.” 

             Over the next few years, our meetings were often literary. We came together to host an event, edit, or collaborate on a project.  Her prolific output motivated me. She checked in on my projects and asked for excerpts. After every piece she read, she wrote back, “I want more.”

        We both wanted more from each other. One night in LA she kissed me under red lights at a dive. We left our beers half-drunk on the bar. In the car, on the way back to her place, we both felt woozy. We realized we had been roofied. We passed out on the floor in front of her couch. 

       The last time we camped together in Joshua Tree, we recalled the Night of Red Lights and laughed about the experience. We joked that the bartender was actually a saint, looking out for our long-term relationship health. He drugged us so that we wouldn’t fuck that night. Now we’ll be friends forever. 

***

THE CONGREGATION

***

The temperature climbed. Out the window, freeway privacy walls gave way to crusty hillsides dotted with yuccas. I flicked open the air vents. The plastic slats were gummy. Touching them made my fingers sticky. At the gas station in Cabazon, we filled up the tank and emptied the jar of butts. Tin dinosaurs towered in a dusty field outside the bathrooms. I said, “You must be tired. Let me drive.” She said, “I’ve never been more awake.” In the distance, white wind turbines spun. “A congregation of angels,” she said. The turbines looked as if they were turning even slower than we were moving. But their sluggishness was an optical illusion. I read somewhere that the blades spun fast, 100 mph or more. The car’s speed was also an illusion. That’s what I told myself: no rush.

      The sun was low when we rolled through the entrance of Joshua Tree National Park. No attendant was manning the kiosk. For the better. They might wonder why she was wearing shades at dusk. We stopped to snap a picture by a clump of Joshua trees. As we drove deeper into the park, she began singing a song I didn’t recognize. “All delighted people. Please tell him I am missing,” she trilled. “From the mouth of Gabriel.” 

       Ariana had always been a more studied Christian than I. Even when I was a devout believer, I lacked the discipline to actually read the Bible, but Ariana had memorized whole passages. She could play hymns on guitar. I transcribed the lyrics she sang in my notes app as she sang. Maybe I, too, needed to hear whatever came out of the mouth of Gabriel. 

      She slowed the car to a stop. Golden dust surrounded us. I half expected a genie to emerge from the cloud. Instead of a little blue man, there was Ariana, holding a Red Bull. “Pray with me,” she said. 

 

        - "Pray?”

 

        -“He’s all around us.”

 

       -“Why do you want to pray?” 

 

       -“He’s here, with us, can’t you feel him?” 

 

       -“No” 

 

       - “I’m talking to him now. You won’t hear it if you’re not open to it. Sit with me.” 

 

She plopped down in a sandy clearing. “Pray with me,” she said, louder. “Sit.” I squatted down next to her. “Do you remember how we opened a portal last time?” she asked. My chest ached, like one of those boulders in the distance had rolled over on me. 

 

       -“Do you hear him?” she asked. 

 

       -“Yeah.” 

 

I sat stiffly next to her. I no longer wanted to see the stars. I no longer wanted to be in the wilderness with her and God after dark. My voice cracked: “I’m getting a migraine. I need to go back to town.” My words broke through her prayer. She felt around her bag for her keys. 

***

GRIEVOUS ANGEL 

***

The gas station sign burned bright blue on the side of the highway. I stacked sleeves of Aleve on the counter next to a six-pack of Modelo. Earlier, I had seen bottles of red rolling around in her back seat, but I was too scared to drink wine tonight. Wine felt too close to Jesus’ blood. I planned to hide the bottles once we arrived at Joshua Tree Inn. 

         At the motel, the only room available was the most expensive, the suite where country singer Gram Parsons died by overdose in 1975, two years after the release of his alt-country record Grievous Angel. Parsons’s death is as famous as his music thanks to his friend who kidnapped Parsons’ corpse and set it on fire by a big rock in Joshua Tree. I didn’t think it wise to share this lore with Ariana.

      Our room had a single California King. She sat in the middle of the bed. Next to her, a guitar, a bottle of wine, and a styrofoam box of guacamole. She strummed impromptu ballads. I clapped for her. Her lyrics were canny, like Mad Libs. She left her polyester stage only to pee and crush butts on the patio. When I noticed she was mouthing words into the mirror every time she went into the bathroom, I asked if I could use the bathroom for a minute. Behind the closed door, I sat on the toilet and googled signs of psychosis. I draped a towel over the mirror.

        The AC spat icy air into the room. She played on. In between songs, she told me about her recent visits with the Archangel Gabriel. He’s helping her find her inner light. The fan wheezed overhead. “Gabriel was the patron saint of cell phone towers,” she said. I laughed. She reminded me that her beloved Gabriel transmitted important messages, like the birth of Jesus. “Dude was a gossip,” I said. When she asked me to take her picture, I framed the shot to capture the whole bed. She looked relaxed on the duvet in her dusty white pants, sunglasses, and guitar. A slight smile on her face. She looked happy. I wanted to believe in the experience the photo documented. Two hot, healthy women spending a night steeping themselves in rock ’n’ roll lore. 

        She sang louder. My whole body shivered as the fan cut shadows above my head. I walked over to the light switch and turned off the fan. “Did you see that?” she asked. 

 

       -“See what?”

 

       -“I turned it off.”

 

       -“The fan? I turned it off because I was cold.”

 

       -“I can’t believe I really did it. I’ve always suspected. Did you see?”

 

She asked the question again, and I smiled. “Yes,” I said. I knew the power of having one’s reality confirmed. I sat next to her on the bed. I focused on slowing my breath. Tomorrow, we'll be back in the city. Tomorrow we could call her parents. All I needed to do was wait out the night. And I can wait out anything. 

       Once she fell asleep, I walked out onto the patio. A star show might save me, but I could make out only the moon. In the weeks before the trip, I had fantasized about seeing stars, throwing myself into nature, and telling her about what had happened the previous week with Mark. I needed advice. I needed a hug. 

    On the corner of the patio, I spotted a huge brown splotch on the concrete. The nightmare from the previous night played in my mind, the terrifying dream itself, and the memory of Mark crawling on the carpet near Ariana’s sleeping bag. I did and did not believe he was searching for his phone. On the Night of the Dropped Phone, a world of possibility opened for me. It was now possible that Mark might assault someone other than me. He may have already done so. My world teemed with possibilities. 

***

NACHOS

***

In the chair by the door, I read in the weak dawn light and waited for Ariana to wake. Not until housekeeping banged against the door did she rise. I avoided looking at myself in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth. My eyes were puffy. I draped the towel back over the mirror. On the bed, Ariana was staring into her blacked-out phone screen. She giggled. I grabbed the car keys from the nightstand, and she didn’t protest my sitting in the driver’s seat. 

      Slouched next to me with her feet on the dash, she doodled in a spiral notebook. The smoke from her cigarettes mixed with the chicken shit filtering in through the vents. Fertilizer, we guessed. A scent we both knew well.

      When I visited Ariana two years ago at her place in Diamond Springs, we ate chicken pot pies at a famous local diner. She had left Sacramento for Diamond Springs to recover from a recent breakdown. Over puffed pastry crusts, she told me that the breakup with her girlfriend had cracked her brain wide open. Home with her parents, she could finally focus on healing. At night, she went square dancing with her mom at a local club, and during the day, she tended chickens. The chickens who lived in her front yard didn’t mind that she was heavily medicated. Neither did the chicks who slept in a straw-lined box next to her bed. She warmed their bed with a sun lamp that made the whole room glow red. In the morning, she cooked us soft scrambled eggs with mushrooms and dill from her garden. Her newfound rural life seemed idyllic even as it pained me to see how the meds had slowed her down. 

      As we merged onto the freeway, I pressed my foot against the gas. 80 mph until we hit a jam outside L.A. An upturned pickup truck was slung across the left two lanes of the freeway. When we changed lanes in front of a van to avoid the wreckage, the driver flipped us the bird. Ariana said a prayer for us all. 

      I parked outside my apartment, but Ariana did not want to come up. She did not want me to call her mom. We hugged goodbye on the sidewalk. ”I’ll text you when I’m home,” she said. Upstairs, Mark played bass. The floor vibrated beneath my feet. He jumped when he saw me standing in the kitchen. “Where’s Ariana?” he asked, turning off the amp. I tossed my bag on the floor. “She left already. Long story. I’ll tell you over nachos.” In the bar’s parking lot, there was a lifted truck with decals of a stiletto-clad angel and devil on its mud flaps. I snapped a photo of the flaps and shared it with Ariana. 

       The first sip of my margarita burned when I swallowed. I couldn’t remember the last time I drank water. Mark pushed his glass towards me. This act of casual care, so familiar to me, made my arm hair stand up tonight. “The red flag was the coolant,” I said. “There was something wrong with the engine, and it kept overheating and smoking.” In between bites of rice, I described the Virgin Marys, the prayers, and the incident with the overhead fan. I didn’t ask him about the dropped phone. I still needed to tell someone about what happened in the desert.

        My hands shook when I reached for another chip. “Not like you to do something so risky,” he said. “I’m surprised the car didn’t break down.” Drips of queso dotted his beard. I scooped a glob of dip into my mouth. The cheese singed my tongue. I scooped up more. Mark asked nothing about Ariana or the trip. He wasn’t my ideal confidant, but he was here next to me. I needed to say it all out loud, just to confirm that what had happened to me was real.

       Later that night, Mark left on a date. The apartment was all mine. I lit a candle in a tin and took a hot shower. The room filled with steam. In my robe, I rubbed jojoba oil on my face. I filled a pitcher with cool water and set it beside my pallet. On my phone, I searched: What is the role of Gabriel? I wanted to feel close to Ariana, even if only for the seconds it took my phone to light up with the answer. “A helper and a carrier of messages.” I tapped on the link to learn more, but my gaze drifted. The phone slipped out of my hand. My body was finally ready to sleep. I reached over to close the door that connected Mark’s room to mine. I stared up at the cheap brass knob, the cricket-sized lock in the center. They glinted in the candlelight. I hesitated. Locking the door meant admitting I needed to lock the door. I wasn’t ready to face my own precariousness. I rolled over. 

 

*

 

Three weeks later, Ariana’s mother called late in the afternoon. “Have you heard from her?” she asked. Ariana never returned to her parents’ house in Diamond Springs the night she left L.A. Instead, she drove to Chicago, then Idaho. Once she crossed into Texas, she stopped sharing her location with me. I asked every time we talked on the phone. She believed her parents were tracking her. I didn’t tell Ariana about the call from her mother. 

         That afternoon, after I hung up, I smoked one of Ariana's cigarettes out of my bedroom window and said a prayer for all of us. Even for Mark, who said nothing when he found out I locked the door for the first time last night. Mark didn’t rattle the doorknob or even knock. In the morning, I boiled a pot of oatmeal and set a bowl on the counter for him.