On the way back to school—where a sack lunch is waiting for us, not enough to feed this ravenous boy—Antonio and I hold our cards to the sunshine that comes and goes in our window as we turn the desert corners, trying to catch the light.

In a decade’s time the Valley of the Moon will go unvisited, the desert all around built up with new subdivisions, only the old man’s fenced lot untouched, his towers and caves of cement and chicken wire crumbling. This dereliction seems inevitable, both because of his age and the age in which he found himself, too late in the century for fairy palaces in the desert on the edge of town. And then some high school students will find him, kids who themselves remembered a childhood tour; they’ll find the Mountain Gnome sick and half starved, living in one of the unheated caves of his strange Hobbit-house. A sort of coalition will form for his assistance, and it seems only moral justice that he dies with some sense of the gratitude he’s engendered, from a lifetime of his own peculiar gift-giving. The Valley of the Moon is there still; you can visit it, and though not much of the Gnome’s handiwork has lasted, some sense of possibility, a whiff of strangeness lingers, conveyed perhaps by the sense of how much this place meant to those who’ve preserved it. Though it would be hard now, looking at the mere physical remains, to understand quite why it moved them so.

9

Samson in the Temple

Drama class is my high school’s haven for the odd and misbegotten, the dreamy and peculiar. Under the stage lights, in the workshop or at the makeup mirror, we turn out to be possessed of gifts no one could have foreseen; we turn out to be somebody after all, down in the Drama Department, which feels like a separate world from the rest of Rincon High School, squirreled away in a basement corner, darker and cozier than anything else in those acres of linoleum and fluorescent lights.