7 August
Lost somewhere in those deep, bright days, another cupola of low-sun hues arced high above our heads. A magnificent array of scarlet, saffron and rose blending together to become just another quiet morning of just another quiet summer of just another quiet year. Surrounded by backlit sailcloth, we looked out one last time through the smoke flaps at that perfect sky floating past. The heat of the sun held fixed behind an invisible lens, keeping the air around us cool. The limpid breeze down from the mountains carried with it intricate reports of the sweeping, high-desert vistas it had crossed. Stepping outside, I found myself stood in a sort of muted deference. Descending toward the Earth, the colors of the atmosphere traversed the range, fading from vivid to paler tints, encircling the horizon from east to west and back again. It was an impeccably formed spectacle.
But, subtle changes in light and air soon became increasingly apparent, giving indications of how quickly such scenes pass. Before long, the sun had progressed along the ecliptic, transposing the colors of morning into intense chrome-yellows and golds then, eventually, into an unyielding deep blue. The heat had broken through with unmatched ferocity. And, the steady sounds of a tranquil desert soon gave way to the din of footsteps tripping over themselves, a shoddy internal combustion engine gurgling away and the faint groaning of a miserable cowman.
The streets of Marfa had gone dead once again. That dusty little outpost in the barrens of West Texas had returned to insulating itself from all the troubles of the outside world. Through mountain gaps and across windswept valleys, all the highways that lead into this one stoplight town remained empty. We stood on the city’s eerie streets, staring at our shadows and shopping the empty window displays that lined the sidewalks. We drove to the Hotel Paisano to search for James Dean but he never showed. There was nothing here. And, it was perfect.
AG disappeared into the hotel to buy a deck of playing cards for the road. I waited outside on the corner, flipping the pages of a tattered dime store novel, fidgeting with a cigarette lighter I had learned to carry from years of watching spy films. Minutes passed, the rasp of the flint and hinge the only sounds echoing down the street. But, then just as Raskolnikov was inserting his axe into Ivanovna's nefarious little head, there was a clamor. A tangle of orange pelt rose from a collection of garbage bins on the corner opposite. It was some sort of man and somehow it had started back to life. Swiveling about as if independent from its body, the fiery mop turned in my direction. We stood facing one another for ages, neither speaking a word. Each weighing the mettle of the other. At last, the drifter beckoned and, despite my best efforts, I soon found myself stood before him. At close range, the figure was dressed in regimental rags. His gnarled legs and worn feet supported a stumpy body hunched over a blackened pot filled with what I chose to believe was warm tsampa. His weathered face was adorned with a moustache of the Napoleonic Hussar style. From some unknown nether-region, the vagabond manufactured a Benson and Hedges, the longest of all cigarettes. It’s also the smartest financial choice if you’re looking to kill yourself in the least cost-efficient way. I lit his smoke and we stood in dead awkward silence, surveying the road and, at the end of it, the moon still visible. Momentarily, the vagrant began to speak.
----- You’re like the son I never had.
His heroic moustache flagged valiantly in the wind.
----- Yeah, I know.
I nodded, pensively surveying the city while he toked on his 120mm looking all to briefly like the Man with No Name. An unknown number of uncomfortable moments passed until the drifter spoke once again.
----- Hell, maybe the only thing left to do is make the world a little less lonely for everyone else.
A flash of bronze indicated he was smiling. And, immediately I made plans to leave. Yet, before I could escape, the vagrant reached out. In his claw hand, he held what appeared to be a crumpled piece of coated magazine paper. As I am a tender and caring man, I took the document from his caked talon. But, not without trepidation. There was an uncanny familiarity to him, as if I had known him in another time. Wordlessly, I walked away, wrinkling the paper into my back pocket.. As we left town, a frail woman sat in a window frame. Sad to see us leave, she casually, flicked “le bras d’honneur” in our direction.
The northward passage forged ahead, ascending to the top of Mount Locke. The observatory grounds were at rest, its geodesic domes closed up, its transient quarters abandoned. There is a strange sort of peace to be found in places no longer inhabited, a sort of reverential stillness. We roamed the pathways then climbed Mount Fowlkes for a view of the entire panorama.
In the clean air and absence of all sound, we watched as grey clouds began to crowd the once undisturbed space above. Building themselves into ominous towers, the nimbus carried with them a chilling effect. The rain clouds that now covered the heavens had robbed the desert of any light, leaving only a portentous air to settle in over the hills. The irascible calls of the scrub jay had long died away. The gentle wind had ceased to rattle the limbs of the fragrant piñons. Vegetation darkened to a dead grey. Mountains turned a drab slate-color, their slopes soon becoming amorphous. From deep in the earth, a roar began to rise. Or, maybe it was reverberating from somewhere beyond the hills. A mantle of dreariness enveloped the scene and I wished I had worn more rain-worthy boots.
At first, tendrils of Virga reached downward, just brushing mid-sky. We watched it form far out over the distant peaks then move closer, teasing the arid ground along the way. Those lands, calling out for relief would remain unsatisfied. Then, at last, the rain came. And when it did, it came in sheets. We hurried back to the jeep and quietly watched the undulating walls blanket the mountainsides and the plains.
•••
On a desolate stretch of highway, just west of the town of Toyahvale, a one room cathedral sat nestled alone on the flatlands, her whitewashed exterior just visible among the vapors coming up from the desert floor. Once a symbol of hope to the citizens of her parish, the long extinct mining colony of Calera, Mission Mary now stood as a pharos for weary travelers and forlorn drifters. With a congregation consisting only of passersby, those on the way to somewhere else, her bell no longer sounded out across these lowlands. Now, only the buzzing of Dog-Day Cicadas ringing away from the undergrowth kept these parts company.
AG knelt to study a line of rocks that outlined the structure’s foundation, each inscribed with the names of those who had already passed this way. I stared out across a flood of Creosote Bush extending off for miles. It ran until it was halted by the distant mountains punching up through the Earth’s crust. There was no shelter from the sun here. Only the tiny church provided any respite.
Pushing open the wooden doors, we found a single room lined with rustic pews and a cross hanging above a pulpit. Light pouring in at different points created a somewhat sentimental scene. The noise of the cicadas had all but ceased, as if they no longer existed. And, except for the occasional clatter of the building’s nooks trapping the breeze, the sound of the desert outside had been silenced. We sat for a few moments, whispering in short sentences to observe the perceived veneration of the place, interrupted only by the creaking of the rafters above. The things this building had seen down the years. An image of this tiny chapel, empty, standing stoically as a thunderstorm grew on the horizon took precedence. AG returned to the outside to photograph the landscape. And, through the casements, I watched her for a few moments. Reaching into my pocket to search for my lighter, I found nothing but a crumpled piece of yellowed magazine paper that had been torn from the pages of a 1961 Reader’s Digest.
28 November, 1960. A West German observatory announced that it was receiving a strange, isolated signal on a Soviet space frequency, a transmission of a singular note from a renowned national symphony. It would later be discovered to be a sort of synchronization cipher systematically linked between all Russian radio listening posts in preparation for launch. At a point when the first station was shown to be at the ready for transmission the first note of the symphony was then sent in conjunction. When the second was operational the first and the second notes were broadcast with the process continuing as such until the last station had been readied at which time the symphony was relayed in its entirety. Days later, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia of the Torre Bert listening station in northern Italy picked up, in hand-keyed Morse code, three repetitions of a distress signal articulated as, S-O-S to the entire world, emanating from an unknown spacecraft which Doppler calculations confirmed to have almost no relative speed. This would have then been interpreted as an indication of the trajectory of said spacecraft being positioned on a course moving away from the Earth. These emissions were followed by an oral communication translated as:
---- Conditions growing worse.
----- Why don't you answer?
----- We are going slower... the world will never know about us.
The signal grew increasingly weaker and was not to be intercepted again. Apparently, the brothers Battista Judica-Cordiglia had just recorded evidence of a manned Soviet spacecraft having inadvertently veered off course due to what would later be confirmed as a misfiring of the craft’s retrorockets which lead to its successive and permanent departure from the Earth's orbit. Approximately two months later in February 1961, speculatively reported to be the 2nd or the 4th of the month, another incoming transmission was received, which experts interpreted, at the time, as the dying breaths of an unconscious man followed by a later signal from the same frequency construed by a cardiologist to be a failing human heartbeat. In the course of the following years, these Cosmonauts, it was later revealed, were methodically erased from official Soviet pictures and descriptive materials of the national space exploration program, leading to all manner of speculation about these and other Russian astronauts whose histories were less than perfectly known. If such reports are accurate then it would be conceivable that there exist long-dead Soviet spacemen hurtling silently through space in a metal casket at thousands of miles an hour - the victims of a Soviet space shot that went wrong. Their bodies perfectly preserved by sub-zero temperatures, past scalding iron rain, lakes of methane, oceans of electrified hydrogen metal they hurtle, damned to the role of lonely wanderers in space for centuries to come.
I stood counting the number of shoes on my feet. Years and years had passed, but I had seen this story once before. Although I could recall neither the time nor the place, the haunting imagery was unforgettable. And, the likelihood of it turning up in the desert seemed improbable. Tenuously clipped to the upper right corner of the page, a frame of medium format film depicted a small boy stood next to a balding man wearing a pressure suit. There was probably some profound meaning to it all but who has time for such things?
I turned to look at the rays of light slicing through the doorway and coming in through the windowpanes. In that moment, directly overhead, our star was emitting a kilowatt of energy for every square meter of the Earth’s surface. Every second, one quatuordecillion photons, give or take, were crashing into those bits of landscape all around that tiny church. When they arrived in that valley, these particles were colliding with the earth, the scrub and the clay. With the nitrogen, the oxygen, the argon and the carbon dioxide. The scattering properties and spatial arrangement of every atom that, together, comprised everything around us determined precisely how the light should be absorbed or reflected back into our eyes. Every instant, the frequency and amplitude of these light waves were causing our photoreceptors to convert them into electro-chemical impulses, producing the perpetual scenes that lay before us in that place. The desert, the church, the paper and the girl, all being created with each passing second through these continual processes. From that empty desert plain to the Vostok prototype plunging hopelessly through the blackness of the cosmos above, these things were happening end over end, creating our brief segment along the arrow of time. Without these things, there would be only darkness. At every moment of life, the Universe is beautiful. Maybe we should all be quiet and appreciate it. Or, if anyone absolutely must speak, please do so quietly so we can all hear you. With that, I lit a candle, uttered the Traveler’s Prayer and made my way back into the desert.
Outside, I went ahead to start the Jeep. AG wrote our names on a rock and placed it at the foot of the entrance. We took one last look at Mission Mary. Then, as Spiritualized’s Always Forgetting With You played softly on the radio, we made our way towards home.
