High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [50]
The shoreline at the base of the gorge was windy, rocky, wild, and utterly deserted. If it wasn’t the end of the map, you could surely see it from there. In tide pools, fish and crabs scuttled through their claustrophobic soup, frightened by my long shadow, waiting to be rescued by the next high tide. On the black sand beach I found shells so beautiful I pocketed them with the thrilling sense that I’d stolen something, but there were no witnesses. No one else to see the sun go huge and round, then drown itself, burning a red path of memory on the face of the sea.
In the morning, the air was changed. The garden of the parador was quiet, the air choked with pale haze: the kalmia had come in the night. It deepened its hold as we travelers boarded the ferry and headed back toward an invisible destination. The white-block hotels of southern Tenerife and the giant cone of Mount Teide were nothing, not even mirages in white air. If I had a desk, a home, a life somewhere, it existed only in my mind. When I first saw Africa it was a cloud, and it’s surely the same for anything at all. It takes time to peer through the vapor and understand.
As our ferry left the port of San Sebastian, the haze closed down behind us, suspending us on a blank sea between lost worlds. The dolphins were there, I knew. I had written them in my notebook, pinning down the record of my fortune.
CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT ROCK GODDESS
In my hotel room in Boston I sat at the window with my chin on my knees, looking down on the Charles River, where white sails zipped under a freeway overpass, rippling like runaway laundry against a backdrop of late-morning traffic and soot-gray bricks.
I couldn’t quite work out what I was doing here, two thousand miles from my daughter, whom I missed so badly I felt as if I’d been shot in the chest, and from my empty Tucson household, where the dust bison roamed freely among the piled-up mail and manuscripts and maybe by now were plotting an unopposed takeover. Instead I was in a hotel, pretending to be a musician on tour with a bunch of authors pretending to be a band.
At the moment I was waiting for two grown men named Hoover and Mouse to come pick up my electric keyboard and haul it to the club in Providence where we would be opening our show that night. Mouse and Hoover were our roadies, hired professionals at my service to tote and tune and do all the dirty work so that I—presumably—could preserve my delicate constitution for the performance. This is a joke; either one of them could play a meaner keyboard than I do, I’m sure, with one or more of his arms in a plaster cast.
I’d asked them to bring the keyboard back here after rehearsal last night, hoping some after-hours practice on my own would render me a passable musician, and then, presto, this very weird scheme would fall into place for me. It didn’t. I ran through a halfhearted “Nadine,” switched the power off, called my best friend up long distance, and asked: “What in the bejesus am I doing here?” My friend said, as friends do, “I don’t know, darlin’, but you’ll think of something.” So far I hadn’t. My keyboard was hulking over there on the table like the remains of some malinspired room-service party ordered up at 2 A.M. and left for dead on its tray.
I was suffering from sleep deprivation, that much I knew. I recognized the signs: life seemed baffling and mostly not quite worth the bother. I don’t have a musician’s sleeping skills, among other things. Our schedule said we were to stay up late rehearsing or performing, then sleep till noon. I’ve never slept past sunrise I don’t think, not on my life, for love nor money nor prescription drugs, so on a schedule like that I had no choice but to stay up till three, get up at six, and sit around my room waiting for scheduled late-morning events like “bag pull” (a new one on me), or the impending