Even as more people were coming into the area, and federal officers had begun a standoff with a nearby Native American reservation over water rights and sovereignty. Twice I also stumbled across what I believed were right-wing militias on training exercises. Came back to my camp one night to find it ransacked, although I’d hidden anything valuable before I’d left.

I could survive among these new intrusions, but the mental strain became intense. How I blocked the outer world from my thoughts, only for it to intrude. Each time more alien, more different than memory.

By then I had no evidence Vilcapampa cared about me anymore. No evidence that the police sought me. Where I’d buried Langer, no one would ever find him. I began to think about the old house. That was what really began to draw me back at first. A fixation on what it was like now. It might be in foreclosure, but it might not. My husband had kept up the mortgage and property tax as long as he could. I might have a little while before it was no longer mine. Or, at least, it might be derelict.

If I could visit just once, bust in a window, I could take more things for barter. Maybe even have a yard sale, if the neighborhood was safe. If no one had already broken in.

Maybe, though, I just yearned for something other than what I had. Which was nothing. Maybe I believed a purpose waited for me out there. Or some thread I’d lost would come back to me. Because with the way the world kept cracking open I recognized something delusional in words like “yard sale” or “mortgage.” As if, soon, some words would be extinct.

But I couldn’t shake the memory of the photos of my daughter over the fireplace. Which might still be hung with dusty stockings. In all my repurposing of Shovel Pig, I’d lost my only photos of her. I had begun to find it hard to see her face.

[104]

But I didn’t make it to the house. The jeep ran fine. The world did not. Even stopped short, I would have to become fluent in new languages, discard old ones. Languages of the dead and languages of the new. Curfews and lockdowns took unusual new forms. The National Guard had been called out to deal with an unspecified disaster. There was gridlock and confusion surrounding the city, early that summer. There was, too, old friend, the intensifying green-gray tint to the sky, tinged with gold from the distant glow of uncontrollable fires from a natural gas explosion. Or so they said. A general advisory to use a mask, to avoid breathing unfiltered air. With little explanation.

Even as the rain kept coming. Ever-present and meaningless, like thought.

“Landscape isn’t fragile. It’s what we impose upon it that’s fragile. We must be ruthless about the foreground. We must trust the backdrop. Do you know how to do that? Can we trust in that?”