AN EXCERPT
The Half-Life of Guilt
Soon to be available where all fine books are sold.
September 3, 2024 ❧ University of New Mexico Press, High Road Books.
~ One
From above, the airstrip is a dark scar on the land, an unnatural feature in the sprawling Vizcaíno Desert with its soft shadings of buff and dun. To the south spreads a vast patchwork of salt pans, milky pastels of green, turquoise, pink, and the sharp white glare of the crystallization ponds. Stippled in between the saltworks and the smallest of the lagoons to the north is the town of Guerrero Negro, ashen and lifeless beneath the midday sun. But the lagoons make brilliant forays of emerald green that wander far into the great dry country as if to reassure it. The deep water of the Pacific from which the lagoons find their source is a simple blue, and though the high sun has faded sky and ocean together, both are so quiet and measureless as to suggest an infinite goodness. Against the long western length of the Baja peninsula, this sea lies, giving, taking, a point, a cove, a bight a bay. The California gray whale migrates along this coastline—south to breed in the lagoons of Baja, Mexico, north to feed in the cold, rich waters of the Bering and Chukchi Seas. March—many of the whales have already left the lagoons to begin the journey north.
From above, the scene is as static as a still life, just swaths of color—those that are natural, shapeless, and those that are manmade, defined by sharp corners and lines and dots for buildings or machinery. But at noon something metallic flares, and a muscular little plane awakens the scene, sweeping down suddenly and running the length of the airstrip before returning slowly to its midpoint opposite a knot of people. There are only three flights a week out to Cedros Island where the saltworks make use of the island’s deep-water harbor for the export ships, and every flight is full and late, and every flight requires the painstaking adjudication of room for passengers, room for goods.
Each seat that is taken from the plane frees up space for another vat of entrails that is carried through the open rear door by small brown men wearing white. When they extract two seats in tandem and swing in a quarter side of beef swaddled in wet burlap, using a grappling hook to secure it to a ring attached to the ceiling, Clair feels they have reached the apotheosis of despair from which the vehicle of Fate will now plummet to the tarmac and re-incarnate as the C-47 waiting before them. It still bears the faded painted pentimento remembering the Tarzana Air Circus.
To say this is the place, the moment, when everything changes, when one direction becomes its opposite, when one feeling meets its nemesis, love to hate, as it does in the heart; when day becomes night, and night then vanishes in a torrent of light, as it does in the desert—that is not an easy thing to know and then to say—without fear. Usually things changed like ships turning at sea, imperceptibly and with heavy reluctance, as if called back to port for some neglected formality. But she thinks she can name that place and that moment. It is here, it is now.
Again, the man walks toward them, unhurried, the heat wavering around him so that he is just another one of the mirages they have witnessed all down the Baja peninsula. He is wearing a cap of some sort, like a chauffeur’s cap with a purple insignia, PSP for Productores de Sal del Pacífico, and his dark shirt has buttons—is not a smock like those worn by the others. He holds a clipboard against his hip, then brings it to his chest as he reaches their small group, Clair and Mason off to the side where the others, with a mixed dose of disdain and respect, have abandoned them. The flight was scheduled to depart at one, and it is now after three. Every fifteen minutes or so, instead of carrying the vats of tripas, or the bushel baskets of vegetables and fruits to the plane, or the bindles and bundles of the island’s residents, this man calls out the names of a few passengers—“Villareal, Muñoz, Caponegro”—and without expression, they hurry across the tarmac and climb aboard. Again, Mason reads the triplicated tickets, the dry wind ruffling the copies, and finally she puts her hand on his forearm and he lets it drop. She is hoping now that there will not be any room for them. The light is assaulting them, like the glare from tilting sheets of metal, yet fixed at the center of the light the open rear door of the C-47 seems an entrance to a tunnel that will lead them into deepest darkness.
Mason begins to pace, eight steps south, eight steps north back to her, yo-yoing patience and impatience, surety and abandonment.
“Does it help?” she asks him.
“I don’t know,” he says, his hand exploring his lower back.
“I could try to find some ice.” She lifts her chin back toward the flat-roofed building no bigger than a gas station, which serves as the terminal.
“Seriously?”
“It’s an idea, that’s all.”
He glances at her, perhaps considering an apology. The light makes two bright coins of his spectacles that magically vanish when he swings his gaze with disgust at the C-47. “This contraption might take off any minute for all we know. I don’t want to give them the satisfaction.” He starts off on his eight-paced tour away from her. “We’d better wait.”
“I don’t want to,” she says too quietly for him to hear. It takes more courage to say this than to contemplate being a passenger on the C-47, to say what she doesn’t like, doesn’t want. Her consolation has always been that others have what they want or need, and taking something for herself is almost impossible. It may be that she has finally forgotten how to want; that pleasure has become a concept fraying to nothing, like those disconsolate pennants, already desert-bleached and wind-shredded, snapping to celebrate the grand opening of the hotel in San Quintin—a hotel entirely empty but for them and a dour cadre of minions scuttling the back hallways. Yet here she has at least said something she does not want. She does not want to wait. For this plane, for this man, for things to get better or maybe only easier.
“You’ve taken a lot of photos. Don’t you have enough?” she asks him on his return trip, allowing fear to overtake duty.
He quivers his head at a slightly cocked angle as if he’s heard her wrong.
“Well, don’t you?” she asks again, this time adopting some challenge in her voice, because suddenly she is tired of their mission, tired of always going on, tired of being the one whose job it is to jolly everything and everyone along; to say that it will all work out, that it’s not as bad as it seems, even when it is worse than she can admit. Tired of waiting for something she can’t yet identify. Tired of waiting to live. Tired of having a mission and not a life.
He is wearing his mustard yellow shirt with the cuffs rolled to his elbows and, crossed over his chest, the mail carrier bag in which he carries his passport, Tourist Card, money, and a small journal for notes that only he can read—the handwriting, if it can be called that, so idiosyncratic that it looks like a lost alphabet whose sounds no one knows any longer how to make. She has always liked the yellow shirt, something he bought himself in Morocco—before they knew each other. Do they know each other now? she wonders nervously. Maybe as much as one can know another . . . . The faint stripes of elegant white embroidery combined with the worn edges of collar and cuffs somehow persuade her that he won’t ever lie to her. And in fact, he never has. But she does not like his handwriting. It makes no effort to be accessible; it is private and self-serving and exclusive. It means to say keep out as much as it pretends to the conceit of mystery. “Do I have enough? What about the docks, Clair?” he asks without really asking. “The ships, the mountain of salt? What about the whole bloody company-town scene?”
“Okay.”
“What about the whales?”
“Okay, okay.”
She wants to touch his face, to wake him up from his quarrelsome mood, but he tacks on an impassive look and turns away. Also, she realizes, she wants to hurt him, but not nearly as much as she wants to love him out of the anger he can’t seem to give up. This might turn out to be what the problem has always been—anger.
But then softly he adds, “What about your work, the plant transects?”
“Right,” she seems to agree. She does care about that, about the mission.
She glances at his belt, and below, remembering the night before, the slowness of his entry; she was not to move—last night’s little game—and he had still not acknowledged her apology. It seems . . . unlike him, though now she is wondering what exactly is like him, and again, whether or not she has any idea who he is.
It is doubtful that they, these officials, know who Mason Comstock is, despite the hard case of camera equipment—or that they would even care. Plenty of touristas arrive with expensive gear, to fish or camp, to photograph the elephant seals battling for breeding privileges, to use up the hours of unavailing lives spending their money in other men’s countries. But how many come to Cedros Island? This place belongs wholly to Mexico, an inner sanctum where things are done that you don’t want others seeing you do. How many more inner sanctums can there be? The afternoon sun detonates off the aluminum camera case and instantly she shifts blinded eyes south toward Guerrero Negro, Black Warrior, where the night before they found a small clean room, painted in colors so bright and so badly by someone in a hurry and indifferent to the debt of perfection, that they did nothing to blot out the desperation of the place, only heightened it. Someone had had hopes once—of tourists, money, domestic complacencies.
Visually the town seems to be sinking into the yellow-gray flats, its flotsam of low-set buildings like crates and boards and furnishings from a wreckage half-submerged beneath an undulating sea of heat. She can see the short ugly lighthouse, the glint of a panel truck; no movement that can be counted on or believed in. She thinks of a Twilight Zone episode she watched as a child, a town somewhere in New Mexico mysteriously emptied of its citizenry. Alien abductions and the pulsating silence of abandonment. The unrelenting flatness of the landscape bends everything down to a rule. It is the landscape of death—the sameness, the visual tedium, the indifference—a world where people might go to disappear, people who would not be missed. West across the lagoon and forming the boundary between the Bahia and the mainland are the great white dunes mounding up. Then the blue sea. The desert around the airport radiates out into a dun nothingness, though, if she tries, she can make out small dark tufts of something living trying to make a go of things. Maybe creosote or ocotillo or the inescapable cholla. Anyway, nothing beautiful. She is missing the easy beautiful things, the orderly green stitching of the vineyards of childhood. This is not a friendly place.
But it can be beautiful, she reminds herself. Only a few days ago, it was beautiful.
Mason is on his knees, throwing open the camera case, fitting a lens to the Leica M6. Then he starts shooting, mostly the man with the clipboard, approaching, returning to the plane, conferring with the men who are loading the supplies for Cedros; but also pictures of the mountain of goods still waiting, and then, swinging around, of the second airport official leaning against the doorframe, smoking. It is some category of attack, for there is a maniacal intensity in his eyes, though, like the other travelers, he has managed to void his face of expression. In that one respect, it, too, is flat like the land with its salt lagoons, the line of the horizon lost in the broad brushstroke of heat and light. An immense futility begins to settle within her.
“Stop,” she says under her voice. “Please.”
He doesn’t respond except to aim the camera at her and snap one off. It feels a little like being slapped and she actually winces. The Leica is quiet, but not so quiet that she can’t hear each of his threats pelting the air. Some line has been crossed, a last wrong step taken, and he is frightening her, even while, on some level, she is also aware this is an act of childish frustration and impatience that will pass.
Standing nearest them is a stubby middle-aged woman who looks Indian, a descendent of the local Cochimí, Clair supposes. Her nose is straight and flawless, with large, perfectly flared and symmetrical nostrils, the skin glistening with sweat, like a bronze cast. Above the high cheekbones are two solemn eyes that glare without actually glaring at Mason as she pulls her boy to her. The boy has dropped his head; Clair notices that he has a cleft lip.
“Will you just stop?” she says again to Mason. “Can’t you see it doesn’t do anything? They don’t care. This woman might care because of her boy, but no one else cares. This isn’t our country. You’re playing the ugly American. You’ve become the ugly American. I just don’t know what’s going on with you. Is it your back?”
Touching his palm to his lumbar spine, he paces away from her. “This bloody country,” he says.
Mason is always walking away. He is a fine-boned man with fingers that feather over things—cameras, breasts, the guitar he plays now and then—and all of what strength he has moves like coaxial cable through his body charged with intensity of purpose. That purpose seems to always lie somewhere else. He never cares much what he eats or where he sleeps, but he is curious about the men who have caught the fish or the women whose hands have formed the tortillas or the machines that have excavated the lagoons—he is interested in the action even though he puts an end to that action in film. It is one of the things she likes best about Mason, the way he goes to sources, to first acts. Clair has decided it is a form of control, that capturing on film, that exhumation of sources. If you know where and how something began, then maybe later you can contain its consequences, frame them and fix them, prevent escape. An obvious concept, she has to admit, if only by reason of perpetuity, which to her thinking is a welcome thing. Like her father, she likes what lasts, especially the beautiful ways, the beautiful ideas. But even if the world were full of beauty, there were plenty of people ready to despoil it.
“Pineda, Anza, Ugarte, Maldonado,” calls the man with the clipboard.
Mason takes his picture, and the man neither attends to it nor ignores it. It is as if they do not exist, and that drives Clair to a kind of unsettling nerviness because as much as she does not now want to board the plane, it is worse to be excluded from the rest of the assembled humanity, from the piles of goods and consumables, from the stuff of the world. Something invisible is killing them off, unanticipated forces, a virulent sun. The wind, dry and restless, gusts into them and stings their eyes so that she is convinced that the salt is there as well, in the air. The salt is everywhere. And salt kills as much as it preserves.
If they could just board quickly, not think any longer about all of it, just get it over with . . . . She fingers the scar on her ear and again remembers the night before when he had forgotten about his back. When the fight-or-flight response has been stimulated, endorphins are released and the perception of pain diminishes. From what long-ago book did that now surface? Mason was not fleeing; he was attacking, feeling no pain. And today Clair has become a flight risk.
At that moment, brimming up and over a shallow barranca at the edge of the runway and out onto the tarmac comes a small herd of goats, their little bells tinkling. The men loading the C-47 set down whatever they are carrying and wander languidly toward them, laughing a little, separating as they approach the animals and forming a kind of human corral with their hands extended to their sides, palms out, and a soft chucking sound coming from their throats; the goats dropping their heads, indecisive, veering left and right, and finally cutting back toward the barranca. They are a solemn people, their laughter unexpected and . . . comforting. In the distance, Clair makes out a figure so far away that it’s like a piece of white cloth torn away and sailing on the desert thermals. The goatherd. Probably a boy. She thinks of Ethan. Her boy.
Ethan. Over the course of his six years, she has taken fewer and fewer risks, even though she had once announced that she would not let having a child alter her lifestyle. Her life—of course—but not her lifestyle. Yet she has noticed the quiet deductions, the trips she doesn’t take, the recreational drugs she usually declines, the Volvo wagon that has replaced her Alfa Romeo Spider.
Another seat is removed from the C-47. It is looking more and more like one of the things she should not do because of Ethan—board this plane. There it sits on the tarmac, nose up toward heaven more steeply than seems right, making anticipatory pleadings, while the seats that have been unbolted and lifted out gather along the edge of the tarmac like chairs in an open-air theater awaiting an audience that everyone seems to know will never come. From around the far side of the terminal a stray dog ambles out of the shade and weaves aimlessly toward them until, passing the line of seats, it sniffs one, hops up, and promptly falls asleep. There are a lot of strays in Mexico.
The air ticks with heat, and the heat becomes time, and the time is everywhere and nowhere, a sudden menacing surfeit of the incomprehensible. There is too much time suddenly. How is it that everything has wound itself down to this? How is it that time no longer makes sense? She has lost sight of the shore of herself . . . she feels . . . at sea . . . lost.
Mason removes his spectacles and rubs his eyes. Ordinary eyes, narrowly set—she often cannot picture them, their exact color, or whether they have the limbal rings that make eyes more beautiful, or if there are flecks of contradictory color—but she always feels their concern. Absently, he says, “By the by, I’m English,” long minutes after her remark about the ugly American, and she decides that it is best not to respond to this stupid and feckless invocation of a past he has long rejected, and which she knows so well that she can recite it as if it’s one of the children’s books Ethan used to insist she read again and again. By the time he was four, Ethan had memorized them, line for line, so that he could pretend to be the parent reading to the child he resented having to be. Maybe there was some of that same resentment in Mason. A holdover.
She can remember the exact moment that she fell in love with him. Or rather, the image that tightened her heart beyond release. It was a newspaper clipping about the Greenpeace fight to prevent the Brent Spar, a buoy designed for storing and off-loading oil, from final burial in the North Atlantic Sea. The oil company had identified a deep trench along the North Feni Ridge as the optimum dumping site, deep enough not to cause trouble for shipping traffic, and purportedly not so abundant with life that any great loss would be incurred. Diverse life, perhaps, but not abundant life. Mason was part of the media flotilla that had headed out to the buoy to cover Greenpeace’s three-week occupation. There were heavy swells, birds littered against the flat gray sky. In the clipping, Mason is sitting along the port side at the bow of an inflatable, a camera nesting under his chin in the neck opening of his lifejacket, and his hand, with its delicate long fingers, is splayed over the tube, trying to hang on—vulnerable, clinging, half-effective, but determined. It seemed to define him completely. 1995, spring—three years ago.
There are two kinds of ambition, the kind that wants to best another and the kind that seeks to do the best one can. Mason wants to do the best that he can, and there is something pure and icy about it. Nothing can melt his resolve.
He is a tense man, a man who fidgets under certain circumstances, bouncing a knee, or winding and unwinding his ankles, or unconsciously nudging back the cuticles of his fingernails. When he is particularly edgy, he taps his index finger on the inside of his ankle—he often sits with his left leg crossed up and resting over his right thigh. He paces. He talks with his hands, not in passionate gestures, but with his fingers in a sign language only he can read. When he needs her, he calls too often or not at all, leaving long messages that sound vaguely like remonstrations to her or to himself, she is never sure. Once she noticed penciled into his calendar the letters “DNC” three days in row. “What does that mean?” she asked him. “Do Not Call,” he said without further explanation.
None of it bothers her, only endears him to her, this tense and driven man who in the end will probably fail at the causes that prompt his pictures, but not at the pictures themselves. The pictures are successful monuments to the ends that are gathering like the last muster around them. Soon it will be our turn to end, she thinks, our loves, our lives, our species.
Still, Mason is irritating about his work, the kind of environmentalist who gives environmentalism a bad name, who makes legislators balk and friendlies close their checkbooks; the kind of photographer who is resistant to ordinary human needs. He once spent three months in a sea kayak paddling the Inland Passage. He had packed the bow and stern with waterproof bags of rice, living on that and whatever fish he could catch. He has to be reminded to hug her, but he seldom fails to slap her bottom when she leans over the sink to brush her teeth in the morning—when she only wants to wake up in the privacy of her own body and set her feet on a path into the day. Why is it, she wonders, that he thinks he can have the one without the other? Or is it only that lust is so much easier than love?
Ends have a way of reaching back for beginnings, as though, had she been more careful, had she properly noticed something back then, the end might have been avoided. Not this C-47, which suggests the most mundane of endings, the one each of them will negotiate alone one day. Something else seems to be ending. Who was she to say whether what was to end was a good thing or a bad thing? Somehow the bad things were harder—much harder—to give up, as if they are deserved, while the good . . . the good is often what you think you managed to get away with.
“Zuniga, Cosio, Torres.”
Mason gives a snort of derision. “Aero Fatale.”
“Please,” she says to him, “it’s already hard enough.” The air is so dry that her mouth is pasty, her lips torn strips of parchment, and she digs through her backpack for one of the pieces of hard tart candy, Jolly Ranchers, she’s been sucking on to keep the saliva coming, finds a red one—watermelon—then decides to offer it to the boy. His mother nods and, furtively, the boy takes it, his small fingers dirty and eager. But in that instant Clair worries how he will manage the hard candy if his palate is as divided as his lip. To his mother she says, “Está bien?” and points a finger toward her own mouth.
The woman’s face darkens and that is the end of their international commerce. Now unsure what he can do, the boy begins to cry, puling softly against his mother’s side, the Jolly Rancher cocooned in his fist.
Even here in this culture, faraway and less simple than it seems, it is best not to notice things, the mistakes and tragedies, the unattainable wholeness, the imperfections that throw belief into question and God out of favor.
Mason, observing the misunderstanding, squats before the boy and assures him that the candy will not hurt him and then, rising, he tells the woman in Spanish about a group of doctors who travel around the world solely to correct this problem. The woman smiles. She knows of it; they already have a plan to meet with them.
❧
Divided things are supposed to fuse—palates, fontanelles, hearts and houses, nations. But sometimes they fuse in ways that are not good, not healthy; not knit together like the held hands of lovers after a fight, or the plates of an infant’s skull, but like tectonic plates, one sliding beneath the other. Then, along that subduction zone, there are earthquakes and volcanoes, the lifting up and the tearing down of mountains, the emergence of islands and the submergence of continents of life that might have been or that still want to be. A geologic agreement has silently taken place, one is held down by the other, and eventually where they touch the protests begin and never seem to end.
Nina . . . She probably thinks of Nina too much. It is almost entirely involuntary. But they are twins, after all. Nothing can change that.
❧
They are the last standing at the edge of the tarmac. The man with the clipboard reads their names without looking up, “Bugato. Comstock.” The brim of his cap is low on his forehead, but she can tell that he doesn’t bother to read their tickets. They are the Americanos, the only ones here, and there is never any question, the Americanos always pay. He doesn’t ask what they are doing, going to Cedros, to a place that, in no conceivable reality, is a tourist destination and that might not even have a hotel, perhaps only cuartos for itinerant cannery workers or visiting family; or why, if they are going to this disagreeable place, if for some reason they must go, they are only staying four nights. What job can one accomplish in three days and four nights? He doesn’t ask what this graceful young woman with her worried eyes is doing with this cabrón and his cámera cara. That is how she knows they must look, the roles that have taken them over. He doesn’t follow them to the plane; he’s already heading back to the terminal, already saying something to the man leaning in the doorframe rolling his cigarette butt between thumb and finger with a kind of nostalgia, both their jobs done now and the plane, with its human and sundry cargo, fragments of the abruptly concluded present.
Clair and Mason gather up their bags and walk alone to the open door of the C-47.
❧
The Half-Life of Guilt
by Lynn Stegner
September 3, 2024 | University of New Mexico Press, High Road Books.