The girl came up to his door on a hot day that was like all the other hot days that had come before it and damn it he liked his days, hot or not, to be all the same.
She knocked on his door.
"What the hell do you want?"
She knocked again.
"I said what the hell do you want?"
He peered out the hot glass at her form, smeared outline against the whitewashed desert. He looked for a car but didn't see one. That's how you crept up on me, he thought. No car. No engine. How in hell did she manage to get through all this blast-furnace waste without a car?
She knocked.
"What the hell do you want?"
"Why does one knock?"
"What?" He bellowed through the door. "What?"
"I said, why does one knock?"
He opened it. She stood there and smiled through the screen. "Yes. That's why."
"You want to come in."
"Yes." A hot wind blew dust in his face. The sun was so white and his eyes so squinted he could barely discern her face. "I want to come in."
"I'm not going to let you in."
"Where else am I going to go?"
He thought about the miles. At least five of them, those had been the specifications when he built the house all those years ago: a minimum of five miles in every direction and gimme a stack of those thorny hills between myself and civilization. No roads either. Clear a space that I can find with a pickup truck and don't you worry about the state of it. I'll take care of it myself. Long miles of nothing but scrub and white hot sand.
"It's not my affair. Where you're going nor how you came here."
She wore sunglasses. They turned her visage into that of a giant insect. "If you don't let me in I'll get sick at the very least. I could die trying. As you have no road I don't even have that to follow back to the highway. The cell reception out here is not so good. It's better closer to the road but I have no way of reckoning myself back to the road. And you won't allow someone to come here. Getting rid of me entails at the very least you climbing into your truck and driving me through the desert and back to the road. I imagine you'd want to blindfold me first."
He just looked at her.
"To keep the secret. I might tell others. I might lead all the crazies to you."
"How did you get here?"
"I walked."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"If you walked all the way in here you can walk right back out. I won't begrudge you some water if you want to hand me your jug."
"How kind of you. Considering it's a hundred and four degrees out here and approaching noon. The killing hours. Do you want to watch my bones bleach in this desert?"
"Right now, yes, that is what I want. That is what I want most sincerely. Nothing would please me more than to see your bones lying on the desert floor."
She grinned. "That answer doesn't shock me at all. Was it intended to?"
"How did you find your way here?"
"My price is to walk through this door."
"I won't allow that."
"Then you'll never know."
White salt stains encrusted the fine hairs on her upper lip. The big black glasses covered her eyes.
"Supposing I made it out on my own," she said. "Supposing a trucker passed by just as I stumbled out into the highway. Say there was someone on the highway to catch me and take me back to a hospital somewhere and plump me back up full of water and feed me full of painkillers to numb my horrid sunburn and if it wasn't a Statie who picked me up off the highway there would soon be policemen in that room. All of them would want to know the story. How did a young woman such as myself come stumbling half-cooked out of the Mojave? Where did she come from? How indeed. I know the police must know you're here. I know someone knows. Someone has to. If I found myself in this situation…well, you're a brilliant man, aren't you?"
"I don't believe you walked all the way here."
"You don't have to."
"Prove it."
"I can't and you know it." She lifted her foot and hooked a finger into the back of her sneaker. She pulled it away from her heel. "Here's a blister. Is it bloody enough for you?"
"God damn you. Damn you straight to hell. You're all crazy, do you know it? Crazy. Ever last one of you."
"Your Appalachia is showing."
He itched to smack her. "I'll get you your water. And then you can walk your pert little ass right back out to the highway killin hours be damned. Maybe a little heatstroke will teach you to stay away from a man's door. Be good for you, that's what I think. Could be you'll have a little vision in the desert. It's what all you crazies want, after all."
She handed him the jug. It was empty.
"I got no answers. You hear me? I got no answers. Everthing I had to say was in that damn book. I've got nothin to say to you."
Her sunglasses were inscrutable.
"It would please me to see you gone when I get back here to this door. It would please me very much."
She stood there.
"All right, all right. I'll go get your damn water."
She sat down on the stairs, edged into a bit of shade, and waited. She pondered the passing moment, and the moments that had come before it, all of them unbroken in a line. She wondered how many moments had passed since the trucker left her on the highway, how many moments since she'd climbed into the truck, how many still since leaving her home. How many moments measured in footfalls? How many moments stretched between this one and the moment she'd decided to be here? Did the moments make a line or was there some loop happening outside her comprehension, a big cosmic stitch? She remembered the feeling. The certainty.
The door opened.
She stood up and turned around. He stood with the jug in his hand, now dripping water. She couldn't look away from the drips. The white plastic tainted with the weight of the water inside. Light passed through it in a different fashion. She imagined its temperature, how it would feel in her throat, and she was amazed to realize that she could no longer conceptualize cold. She knew it, knew it as a thing, but the heat killed her memory. It was so hot out here she felt shimmers building in her brain. The darkness behind him, the cool shade of the house, looked Stygian and welcoming. She could not see the furnishings.
"Here's your water," he said. "Now get out of here."
He wore a T-shirt and a pair of old shorts and some flip-flop sandals. His hair was mussed. The long journey made it hard to think. She wanted to talk but her mouth was filled with the sensation of his unshaved face. Her words had nestled in her fingertips. She felt the visuals on her tongue and her skin longed to speak and she thirsted somewhere in her navel and her confusion hammered out of the bright light, stretched on the ground and pounded by the string of moments to a malleable thickness. She felt it folding around her. This was part of how he wrote; the strangeness of time in the desert.
"I can no longer conceptualize cold," she said. "I have no memory of it."
He blinked and squinted.
"How's that for outrageous? I grew up in the cold but I can't remember it. It's all words like numb and crystal and ice and snow and they mean nothing. It's like sand. Sand falling through my fingers. I want to conjure the memory of cold and I can't. I can't do it."
He started to open the door.
"My senses have all swapped places. How's that for fucked? I see your face with my fingers. I taste the color of your eyes. I smell your voice." She started to laugh. "This heat is stewing my brain. Cook, cook. Steam. Whew! I've gone synesthetic. Whew!"
"You're crazy." He handed her the jug. "You're a crazy stupid little girl and I want you off my land."
"Please let me in."
"No."
"I'm going to faint."
"Go right ahead."
"No, really. I am."
"Is this some sort of threat?"
She took a drink of the water. The first touch of it on her tongue drove back the shimmers. She drank too quickly. The sensation of cold filled her thoughts along with a floating, and she drank more thinking the weight of the water would be enough to hold her down, to keep her conscious. Water spilled down the sides of her face. Water dripped on her chest. She drank until her stomach felt like a stone. She closed her eyes for a moment and took deep breaths.
"No," she said. "Tell me about my bones."
"Huh?"
"My bones lying in the desert. Tell me about my bones."
"Your bones aren't in the desert. They're inside your skin."
