In Dranamos
A desert is a place without expectations — Nadine Gordimer
It began with the birds. Dead birds. Dead grackle chicks. Had they tumbled out of their nest in the thicket by the wooden fence? Were they ousted by a greedy sibling? Dislodged by marauding ravens and beaked to death? Was it Shadow, the feral feline, Harry the hawk or Carlos, the coyote that prowls the inky depths of night and keeps tongues wagging well after backyard gossip turns to very small talk?
The grackles’ eye sockets had been picked clean, their belly feathers plucked, their slender legs broken at the knee. They lay there on the patio, four of them, disfigured, stilled, frozen in time.
I then found a dead lizard at the bottom of the pool; a ten-inch striped little beauty with long, willowy digits and an endearing expression. Saddened, I’d cupped it in my hands for a while. Sadness turned to unease. I buried it in the shade of a honeysuckle bush.
No, it wasn’t superstition or histrionics that triggered the disquiet, sparked the premonitions. Years earlier, I’d come upon a dying seagull, an old bird that flapped its wings listlessly, its lifeless eyes turned skyward as it gasped its last breath of sear air. The sight of the expiring ace flier filled me with dread; it also educed a sadness I’d never known. I remember getting chills.
Six months later, my mother died of pancreatic cancer. We buried her ashes in a family plot where grandma Henrietta and uncle Johnny would later be laid to rest. It’d rained that day; it would rain every time I came to the cemetery. And I’d grumbled because my shoes got wet and caked with mud.
All during my mother’s ordeal, and after her death, I’d harked back to that fateful morning stroll on the dunes at Jones Beach when the seagull expired at my feet. The sight of dead animals, especially birds, would forever elicit surges of melancholy and angst. What I sensed was visceral, dark, menacing.
Years later, as assignments took me to Central America, the sight of dead birds took on a new aura. Alive, birds symbolize freedom. Dead, especially when placed on your doorstep, they telegraph a warning, the threat of a looming calamity. Several investigative reports I’d published had earned me ill-omened accolades: a dead pigeon whose unfurled wings had been stapled to a small funeral wreath and propped against my hotel room door at the Casa Grande in Guatemala City; two dead sparrows similarly arrayed on the stoop of my rented studio in Copán. I’d managed to keep one step ahead of my would-be assassins but I would never look at dead birds the same way again.
*
It was not surprising that the sight of the mutilated baby grackles, less than a week after I’d moved to Dranomos, would stir feelings of anguish. I’d come down from the small cloud-shrouded mountain village of Patchahei to this high desert plateau where the sun percolates for months on end. Long, bitter, snowy days and frigid nights at 4,000 feet had taken their toll and the prospect of gentler winters had beckoned me down from the summit. Little did I know.
Then, one day, I heard it—a whisper, a murmur, throaty, high-pitched, like the sigh of a mortally wounded beast or the lament of restless spirit. It ebbed and flowed like the tide, like the rustling of leaves.
I also thought I’d heard, merging with the reedy crescendo of moans and whimpers, what sounded like laughter—no, not the resonance of gaiety, not the giggle of children or the chortle of men telling salty jokes. What reached my ears in that austere expanse of rock, sand, stunted Joshua trees, clumps of sagebrush, and tumbleweed, I thought, was a sequence of long, otherworldly, sepulchral wails.
*
I’d spent the winter settling in, arranging the furniture, lining my books on shelves, displaying knick-knacks on the mantelpiece and other outcroppings, adorning the walls with pictures I’d painted and lithographs I’d collected over the years. A happy loner too busy to be bored, I’d put off any interaction with neighbors, few as they were, until spring. Now and then, I’d spotted a couple of lonely figures dashing in and out of their houses, leaning forward against the winds, scurrying across my field of view as if they were being pursued by some menacing presence. It’s not that I’d waited for the Welcome Wagon or a friendly invitation to brunch. I could dispense with such niceties. I’d just found it odd that my presence in this gated hamlet, this remote, desolate mesa ringed by barren, cratered hills had gone unnoticed, if not ignored. So I’d gone back to work on what would perhaps be my magnum opus, my one-way ticket to the blue Mediterranean, the deliverance that penury and anonymity had so far denied me.
*
I always thought that every man has a “tale” locked up within him that, as it unfolds, struggles to emerge. “Every life is a bestseller.” I’d come up with this aphorism when I lived in Queens, New York, on the 14th floor of a 15-story high-rise. At night, across the central piazza, a building of equal stature revealed through dozens of lit windows a collage of silent dramas. Surely, the diminutive creatures in my field of view, some unwinding in their living rooms, some readying for bed, others quarreling or fixing dinner in closet-sized “galley” kitchens, each acting out a preordained scenario—all engaged in life’s mind-numbing pantomime—have a compelling story to tell that will never be told. And I’d realized that I too, at some point, must have been the object of someone else’s idle or amused scrutiny.
*
It had all happened so fast. I’d taken early retirement, left New York and set out on a five-day, 3,000-mile drive across America. Its vastness and awesome beauty had filled me with elation and appeased for a while the emptiness within. The emptiness returned when I reached the desert. Behind me was the narrowing perspective of an arrow-straight road stretching to infinity. Ahead lay a barren, petrified expanse. Alone in its vast, sallow bosom, overwhelmed by the immense desolation around me, I stopped, got out of the car and gazed at the limitless blue vault above, dotted with strange cloud formations, some lenticular, others wispy and elongated like lines of cocaine, others yet splaying like supernovas or metastasizing cells. I surveyed the tawny parched earth at my feet. Everywhere, stunted saguaros and clumps of rattlesnake weed clung stubbornly to life in this lifeless citadel. I felt lost. I wanted to scream. The scream died in my throat as I spotted a poppy, its dainty orange petals quivering in the breeze. I remembered the blood-red poppy fields of Abu Gosh, outside Jerusalem, where I’d gamboled as a boy, taking in their heady aroma, drowsing under a blanket of undulating crimson blossoms and dreaming Technicolor dreams. I remembered the wistful French song of my youth, “Un Petit Cocquelicot,” and I remembered Paris, the city of my birth. Words, images, colors, and aromas danced inside my head, faint, disjointed, stranded at the limits of consciousness. I felt my tongue forming silent thoughts, like prayers or mantras. Emboldened by self-discovery, delivered from their cerebral bonds, the words gushed forth. It was a soliloquy of stupefying candor and sorrow, part confession, part supplication, words driven by longing, by despair, by a fear of madness, words one only dares to utter in the desert’s deafening silence. I looked up at the sky. Then I looked at the poppy and the babble ceased. It had wilted in my hand. But its subtle scent lingered on the tip of my fingers, in my nose, on my lips.
“I should have never plucked it,” I heard myself saying as my eyes now strained against the milky glare of day.
*
Somewhere at the edge of a gray town, a cookie-cutter copy of a thousand gray tank towns, on a gray street senselessly named after trees and flowers that never grows in these parts, deep inside a gray room adorned with mementos and frozen glimpses of time misspent, the self-probing continues. I’m not in Paris or Jerusalem or New York but in a grim, far-flung Gehenna in the middle of nowhere. I’m out of range of the ultimate cause so I seek answers in the gray shadows on the ceiling and hang on to rapidly dissolving shreds of graying memory.
The poppies are now in bloom. I scan the high sierras that surround me, dwarf me, fence me in, deny me the privilege of a horizon line.
Somewhere in the distance, breaking the stillness, a lone motorcyclist rumbles by.
*
In Dranomos, I’d quickly learned, neighbors have no tales to tell. Ghostly, furtive, aloof, poker-faced, they seem to live like me—hermits in a wasteland of topographic banality and cultural sterility, un-ordained hermits who survive in self-created cloisters where time, frigid winters and long periods of lung-searing heat and drought mummify the body and scorch the soul.
It would be a while before the doves began cooing again at the advent of spring, but by then I knew that the wind, the heat, the unbearable sameness of it all had rendered everyone insane and that I would escape a similar fate only by fleeing from this morose howling wasteland. What I hadn’t reckoned yet was whether I’d make my getaway trussed in a straightjacket, screaming as the wind added its shrilling voice to the sinister chorus of evil laughter, or carted away on a gurney, inside a body bag.
Last week two lizards and two field mice drowned in the pool.
Yesterday, I retrieved a dead bat.
Early this morning, my old friend Guido died of leukemia. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered, as he had instructed, from a cliff where eagles nest. Guido believed birds are the reincarnated souls of men freed from their earthly shackles.
*
I turn my gaze heavenward at a searing, implacable sun. Then I look at my shoes, caked with brown desert dust. I remember the damp, slippery clay by my mother’s grave. It’s the nature of coincidence to convey a hint of irony.
I let out a scream but the wind swallowed it as grackles, agitated and hostile, fly restlessly to and fro.
Born in Paris, W. E. Gutman is a retired journalist and published author. A former writer at the late-great futurist magazine, OMNI, he reported from Central America from 1994 to 2006. He lives in southern California.