WALKING RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS AT NIGHT, as I always do, I felt drawn in a particular direction and, at the end of cul-de-sac in South Pasadena, I saw an older woman sitting beneath the light of a shaded ceiling lamp. She sketched in colors on a pad of paper, a faint smile of concentration on her face. The scene had a stillness that allured, the quiet of a portrait.
As I watched, she left the room. Curious, I jumped the fence and went to the window. Peering through glass on tiptoes, I saw what she had drawn, a series of concentric circles, a shape that fascinated me, detained me, when the police came, no doubt as a result of the woman’s call or of a neighbor’s, I had to hurry to avoid the arrest for trespassing. I got away by vaulting a fence.
Spooked, I stayed away for almost a week. At last, I returned, drawn by the shape she had made. There was something about it, a code in crayon. When I returned, it was a weekend, and a yard sale was in progress. I entered the yard, this time legally.
“Where’s the woman who lived here?” I asked a girl who was in charge of pricing.
“Moved,” she said.
“She’s gone to meet the flying saucers,” a man said, sitting nearby.
“Flying saucers is a politically incorrect term,” the girl said. “She said that they are to be referred to as extraterrestrial vehicles.”
“And she’s not crazy,” he said. “She has an alternative universe mindset.” He looked at me and made a small wheezing laugh of amusement. “During the Joys and Concerns segment of the church service she got up in front of the congregation and said she’s going away with the saucers. Of course, since it’s a Unitarian church, half the crowd looked ready to go with her, if they weren’t there already.” He reprised his contemptuous snort. “That’s why she went into the desert.”
“Which desert?”
That’s how I came to Noah, a piece of nothing on the border of California and Nevada, a burg with a store and a gas pump and about a hundred residents, living in trailers and huts. Most worked in the mines surrounding town or in the casinos on the Nevada border. They were institutional cooks, croupiers and barkers looking to move up to Vegas, or desert people one welfare check from destitution. I fit right in, a man living on unemployment and the funds from my father’s estate. I never knew him, and my mother left me on a doorstep when I was five months. I was raised in an orphanage and when I turned twenty-one I was contacted by a lawyer and told that certain funds would help to sustain me until it was determined that they would not be necessary, though who was to do the determination I was still waiting to know.
That was my past. My present was hot days spent listening to an oldies station from Las Vegas. At night, when it cooled, I would go for walks. In the desert sky stars spread with a glittering profusion that seemed so animated that at times I thought they were crawling. I studied astronomy, consulted celestial charts, and listened to early Pink Floyd.
A few weeks into my residency, she came to town with little more than a couple of suitcases, one more than mine. At least I thought it was her, an older woman, not unattractive, slender. Her name, I learned soon enough, was Ruth Wagner. She approached me one night. This happened a few hundred yards outside of town. She told me her name. I told her mine, and while we had exchanged nods before, now we greeted each other as friends. The night was nearly moonless. Perhaps this had something to do with my attraction, the idea that I walked beside some invisible female principle made universal by darkness, an impression aided by her voice that had not the grain of age but remained supple, smooth, and I will say, even sexy. She said she was from Pasadena, whose streets I had walked in my nocturnal restlessness. I didn’t ask her if she had lived in a particular street in South Pasadena and had left, leaving her things for a yard sale. I didn’t want to pry.
“And so what are you doing out here?” I asked.
“I’m ready to take the next step in my life,” she said. When I asked what that step was, she turned the conversation to me, and since I felt that I had been given an edited version of her reason for being here, I returned the favor. I only said that I’d had some issues with living in Los Angeles, and that I’d come out here to find myself.
And so it was that we’d meet and wander from the town of Noah and toward the New York Mountains, which marked California’s eastern border in this part of the state.
Sometimes we watched the town’s one piece of art, a sculpture made from discarded automobile parts, the result of wrecks or other vehicular mishaps. The sculpture was eight feet tall and depicted a female in the act of running.
“I wonder where she is running to,” Ruth Wagner said.
Sometimes Ruth would disappear for days, and return without explanation. One new moon grew full, and one night she said she couldn’t walk because she was meeting a friend, and I felt a disappointment that I buried in a shrug. That night, I watched the road from the darkness and I saw a car pull up for her. She got in and rode away. I didn’t see who drove, not until next afternoon when I was sitting at the wooden deck outside the general store and I saw a white Toyota pull into town. It was driven by a bald man wearing black, and she was riding in the front seat. As she got out he gave me a nod before he headed toward Nevada.
“Just an old friend,” she said, when I asked.
“Do you want to walk tonight?”
“I can’t. I’ve got some things to attend to.”
“I see. Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine, going as expected. And let me say that I’ve really enjoyed our walks. I’ll never forget them.”
“Are you leaving?”
“No…I’m…I’ve just got some things to do.”
That night, I walked back to the general store and heard from Bill McAllister, who managed the general store and collected the rents on behalf of the estate that actually owned the town, that Ruth had given notice on her trailer.
I went to Ruth’s and knocked but she wasn’t there. A light had been left on inside, and I saw it shine on the makeshift desk and a piece of paper. I recalled that other house I had looked into, a couple of months ago now, and how I had wanted to read what was inscribed there. I tried the door. It was unlocked. I entered the trailer. The place was barren, but then it had always seemed so when I passed by.
Stepping closer to what she had scrawled I saw the letters “EV” written above the same pattern of concentric circles as before, drawn in color, with the reds and yellows and a spot of blue for contrast. As I watched, it seemed to spin. I say “seemed” to acquit myself from the charge of madness. Because, I’m telling you, it did spin, a chambered nautilus, turning, and always working the eye inward, toward a center that would compress the soul, before releasing it to what was on the other side of the beckoning shape.
I don’t know how long I must have looked at the spiral. I became aware of myself as I must have seen Ruth Wagner—or whoever that anonymous female was, seen through the windows of a southern California street—that night; that is, as a stilled figure lost in the possibility of some other reality.
At last, I left. I turned out the light, which I felt had been left on for me. I headed away from Noah and into the desert. The image of the swirling shape—sometimes like twisted Cirrus clouds, sometimes a whirlpool in snapshot—stayed in my thoughts. It guided me. I felt that somewhere inside or above me a hovering binnacle held a small compass that guided my motions, which didn’t seem oriented to any longitude or latitude, but seemed to be aligning themselves to some vertical polarity. As the terrain began a gentle ascent, my thoughts slid backward in a serial manner, like scenes in a movie played in reverse, and like a movie my life was something compelling but ultimately meaningless, beside the point, or, I began to feel, only a prelude to some greater transformation.
I might have gone a mile or more out of town. Noah, behind me, was only a scatter of lights when I saw her, or sensed her, a willowy presence sculpted in moon shadow.
“You can still turn back,” she said.
“I’ve come so far,” I said.
“There’s still time, you know.”
I said I had wasted enough time. We waited, causally, as if at a bus stop.
“How long?” I asked.
“Soon,” she said.
My head tilted back. I looked up at the stars, Virgo and the Big Dipper and the Scorpion, all in the glittering sky, and I saw something else as I looked up, another constellation, smaller but coming close.
I saw colored lights whirl in a concentric pattern, the kind I had seen twice before, but now large and elevated but descending, embedded in a dark source that blocked the moon and some stars. From its center, a light fell and fixed upon us. I waited, as I always had. I waited for answers.
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