Shipwrecked Out in Tonopah

Die Booth

Our car is big as a boat and eats up the road. Out in Nevada, everything is blue and gold. The scenery is blurred as a smudged Polaroid: the foreground smears with speed, but the mountains behind are so vast they are constant. Corn-colored light hits the sunset side, highlighting half in prehistoric relief. They have been here a long time. 

I haven’t been here a long time. Before I came, I didn’t realize tumbleweed was real. The sun is falling down. Kenny wrestles with the map; his steering veers the white Chrysler all over the road. It’s not really white anymore. We have written ‘Thelma and Louise’ in the desert dust plastered to the boot. It’s a convertible, a California hairdryer, but we’ve only had the top down once in two weeks. It’s not that cold—like an English summer—but it is January. I want to have the top down anyway, and pretend I’m warm, with the hairs standing like wires on the backs of my arms.

The overcast sky over here is pink instead of gray. The clouds are a cloudy pink lemonade. They make dull days more bearable. Ever since I stepped off the plane, I have been in a sci-fi frame of mind. The pylons are shaped like cartoon cats; they have two spindly spread-eagled legs, dinosaur arms, pointy ears, an inverted “V” for a mouth. I watch their regiments, silhouetted against the pink sky and remember to draw one in my notebook in case I should ever forget what they look like.

Kenny folds the map back wrong: he cracks its spine. The next town is Tonopah. We’ll stay the night there. The radio washes in static waves. He feeds it a cassette, and the tape says ‘Shame’. 

From desert to snow in one day’s drive, and I’m feeling like I’m not even here. I push the button that slides down the window, and the blast of air is refrigerator raw. We’ve passed army bases, high security penitentiaries, openly advertised brothels (they’re called bunny ranches). Every town has a real saloon: last one was two hours ago, swinging doors and a sign with a grinning skeleton coughing up a speech bubble, ‘Don’t drink the water’.  Now we’re stopping for a toilet break. The horizon is a knife’s edge. Spirit level, ghost white. You can see for miles and miles. It looks like there’s nothing out there. While I’m having a wee, the snow melts and steams. I spot two dots on the blank page of a field. Coming closer. I say to Kenny, “Look, what are they? Oh God, they’re wolves.” I go to photograph them, but they see us and start to run away. They can feel our technology encroaching. I’ll end up with a print of a blank white expanse, punctuated by two commas, the intakes of breath in my accompanying anecdote.

When we reach Tonopah, the frozen velvet of night is crawling. You could crack it with a toffee hammer. We park in the car park of the only motel. I’m shivering in the shorts that had been sensible this morning. Funny how things change. Me and Kenny hole up in our room, which has two double beds. The lady at reception didn’t bat an eye, but all week we’ve had stares— at us, at our hair, people shouting ‘hey girls’ from behind. We get on the telephone and order a whole cooked chicken from the leaflet on the dresser. It’s delivered to our room. Kenny opens the door a crack, as if he’s scoring drugs. The chicken is cold. There are crunchy ice crystals in its flesh. When you freeze to death, your bodily fluids freeze and expand and rupture the walls of your cells, so even if you thaw out you will not be okay. 

When I wake in the morning, there is a shaft of light filtering into the room, a defined beam like the finger of God channeled through the gap where the curtains don’t quite join. I want to go and see the sunrise. Kenny is asleep. So, I go. I put on my clothes and my coat and my boots, and I pull the latch on the door and leave.

Outside the air is so cold it makes my lungs ache, like sucking that overchilled Drive Thru Coke through a straw. I wonder how high we are. The air is thin. The sun is creeping up the sky again. The clouds are on fire, bursting and boiling, like someone has poured in saffron ink and stirred them up with a stick. Already some blue is washing through. I can see them clearing as I watch. I start to walk off the main road because this is bound to be an early-rising town, even on a Saturday. I don’t want to meet anybody. 

So I’m strolling over somebody’s soil. I’m walking towards this framework of wood. Where the beams intersect, they make infinite combinations of Stars of David or pentagrams depending on how you hold your head. They might be a good luck charm for the pursuit of riches, because the thing looks something like a mineshaft. I’m going to see. 

When I get near, there are too many struts and posts. I’m treading carefully now because the snow is thicker on the ground in the shade. I don’t want to fall down any chasms. I corner round the pit marker, and I see a boat.

The boat is on its side, with vegetation pouring out—some evergreen, some dead as dead can be. The struts of the upper portion are missing boards. Inside, it is perfectly curved, as if something should fit, snug and exact, into it. The paint has mostly rubbed off, so discolored it is colorless—the anonymous gray of a dull English day. But in places where it clings to the hull it looks like ruffled feathers, or fish scales—a tropical blue, far away from home. A boat with wooden ribs exposed, a shipwreck hundreds of miles from the sea.

There’s still no sign of life near me. Everyone else on earth could have disappeared for all I know. So I’m building a guardian for the boat, to keep it company when I have to go. I’m sculpting from snow. I mound it up, dig in grooves and pat it down smooth. My fingers are so cold they are burning. I’ll have to warm them under the cold tap soon, before my blood freezes. They have gone raw red. I’ll worry when they turn tropical blue. I fashion a body, lying down, and a head erect as a prize-winning greyhound. I plane seated flanks with the edge of my hand until they are round and unruffled. Then I claw my fingers into a comb shape, and dig into the snow for mane and tail. A final touch: I search along the length of the boat, comparing the icicles that hang like arrested tears. I snap off the biggest and place the horn on the forehead of my snow unicorn. Then I put my arms around her neck just once and leave her in the cold.

I can’t close my eyes to reflect on this right now. I can’t ever close my eyes again: I may miss something important. I’ll wait until the flight home where the plane’s windows can be eyes for my reflection.

I see clearly from above, mountainous fossils embedded in snow. Spines and fins and sprawled metacarpal tracery of wings pinned into ice. Planes are like stars in the pink sky. Cat pylon, pickups, pawn and porn. Roads are ruled lines; signatures skated away like runes melted into yellow snow. Machine-embroidered zigzags, linear frost flowers, white on black on white, weak frost on tarmac, sticking but not quite. Like rubbed-away brass on a brass rubbing, wax on waxed paper, leafed and rippled blown wet sand, bird footprints sidling. Bubble-blown, marbled ink floating on detergent’s surface, a spreading, blossoming, blooming stain of cold; the markings on a quartz stone. A circuit board in monochrome, a math equation, alien tiled tessellation, for miles and miles and miles. Water and roads, figuring, fingering, like networks of radiating veins, smelling faintly sugar-rice paper sweet, crisp tissue paper Christmas garlands, softly dusty. I think I may puke from looking out a window, so vertigo. White on black on white, then white, white, white. The huge bird; tiny me. With so much turbulence, and you not sitting next to me, how can I tell when we’re crashing?

How can I go home to a place with no lemonade skies, no Taco Bell, no space? I’m flying away from my desert shipwreck, but as I close in on stasis again, the shipwreck comes home in me.

How can I tell when I’m crashing?