Point Omega - Don Delillo [27]
The call came early. Searchers had found a knife in a deep ravine not far from an expanse of land called the Impact Area, entry prohibited, a former bombing range littered with unexploded shells. They’d secured a perimeter around the object and were expanding the search. The ranger was careful not to refer to the knife as a weapon. Could be a hiker’s or camper’s, any number of uses. He set the approximate location of a dirt road that approached the site and when we finished talking I found Elster’s map and quickly spotted the Impact Area, a large swatch of geometry with squared-off borders. There were thin wavery lines to the west—canyons, washes and mine roads.
Elster was in his room sleeping and I leaned over the bed and listened to him breathe. I don’t know why I closed my eyes when I did this. Then I checked his medicine cabinet to make sure the number of pills and tablets in various bottles had not diminished by a noticeable amount. I made coffee, set a place for him and left a note saying I’d gone into town.
Blade seemed free of blood, the ranger had said.
I drove toward town and then veered east for a time and finally down toward the area in question. I left the paved road and followed a rutted track into a long sandy wash. Soon there were tall seamed cliff walls crowding the car and it wasn’t long before I reached a vehicle dead end. I put on my hat, got out and felt the heat, the brunt, the force of it. I opened the trunk and raised the top of the cooler where a couple of water bottles lay in melted ice. I didn’t know how far I was from the search site and tried to call the ranger but there was no signal. I moved around squat boulders dislodged from the heights by flash flooding or seismic events. The rough path here looked and felt like crumbled granite. Every so often I’d stop and look up and see a sky that seemed confined, compressed. I spent long moments looking. The sky was stretched taut between cliff edges, it was narrowed and lowered, that was the strange thing, the sky right there, scale the rocks and you can touch it. I started walking again and came to the end of the tight passage and into an open space choked at ground level with brush and stony debris and I half crawled to the top of a high rubble mound and there was the whole scorched world.
I looked out into blinding tides of light and sky and down toward the folded copper hills that I took to be the badlands, a series of pristine ridges rising from the desert floor in patterned alignment. Could someone be dead in there? I could not imagine this. It was too vast, it was not real, the symmetry of furrows and juts, it crushed me, the heartbreaking beauty of it, the indifference of it, and the longer I stood and looked the more certain I was that we would never have an answer.
I had to get out of the sun and skidded back down to flat land and a wedge of shade, where I took the water bottle out of my back pocket. I tried again to call the ranger. I wanted him to tell me where I was. I wanted to know where he was, with precise directions this time. I wanted to reach the scene just to see, to feel what was there. I assumed the knife was on its way to a crime lab somewhere in the county. I assumed the sheriff had acted on the information I’d given him about the phone calls that Jessie’s mother had been getting from the Blocked Caller. Dennis. I thought of him as Dennis X. Was there legal cause to trace the phone calls? Did the mother remember the man’s name correctly? Would the father still be in bed, swallowed by memories, immobilized, when I walked into the house? The water was lukewarm and chemical, broken down to molecules, and I drank some and poured the rest over my face and down my shirt.
I walked back into the wash under the shallow line of sky and then stopped and put my hand to the cliff wall and felt the tiered rock, horizontal