The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories (16 page)

Instead of answering, she lay down onto the tarp. The Adman readjusted his legs to make room for her. “I just want to look at the stars right now,” she said.

Later, I walked her back to her tent. We switched off our flashlights and listened to the surf for a while.

“You look miserable,” I said, though I couldn't see her face. The only thing visible besides the salted sky was the winking of the campfire, way down the beach. I thought I heard scuttling in the sand all around us, those tiny demons in their armor, dragging stingers behind them. I hated this place.

“Really, I'm fine,” Nancy insisted. “My whole arm is buzzing like it's fallen asleep times a hundred, but I wouldn't say it hurts.” She paused for a moment, and I heard her shift something. “I've never been stung by a scorpion before,” she said. “It's kind of cool.”

“Maybe I should sleep in your tent tonight, just in case.” In one corner of my brain, I knew Nancy would be OK by morning; in another corner, I was convinced she might die in her sleep.

“I'm all right,” she said.

“You sure?” I wanted to stay up all night beside her, with my flashlight trained on her arm, to watch for any new symptoms. Even better would be if I could wake her up every hour or so and ask her whether she felt better. But I knew she would never allow that.

“I'll yell if I need anything.” She leaned down and I heard her unzip her tent.

I flicked on my flashlight; in the profound dark, it illuminated only a small circle of sand, the pebbles and twigs cast their own mini-shadows. I was exhausted. I stumbled along, training the flashlight this way and that, until the tent appeared in the spotlight. It looked like an old drunk sleeping on a sidewalk grate, half-collapsed, a mess of wrinkles and folds. The open vent waved at me. The door flapped, yawning wide.

I remembered now: I had left everything open. Scorpions loved to crawl inside and under. An army of them could have filed through the gaping holes in my tent. I would have to examine every last inch inside.

I duckwalked through the door—I didn't dare put my hands or knees down in the gloom—and shone the flashlight at my dry bags, books, sleeping bag, t-shirt. I was so worn out that I could have happily collapsed into my pile of belongings. But I wouldn't allow that. The sleeping bag, for instance. I should take it outside and shake it, then unzip it and examine every fold. I picked it by pinching its nylon shell and tried to steer it outside. The bag bunched up, got caught on a zipper. Forget it, I thought, and heaved the sleeping bag into the dark. It landed somewhere invisible with a sad rustling sound. I figured I'd deal with it in the morning. I picked up the books and tossed them out too. Next went my clothes. And the extra pair of shoes.

Then, with all my possessions gone, I squat-walked around the edges of the tent, checking under folds and up the walls, in every crevice and wrinkle. Finally, when I was reasonably sure that I'd secured a scorpion-free environment, I lay down. I could feel the grains of sand shift under the nylon. Without a pillow,
my cheek flattened against the ground. My neck ached. I shivered. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head. The starlight seeped through the plastic window. The tent made polite rustling sounds, as if it were trying to adjust itself without waking me.

That night, I didn't have dreams so much as revelations. At one point, I heard a faint gurgling underneath the sand, a slurpy intestinal sound. It was then that I understood the purpose of the oddly colored rocks on the beach. They blocked the entrances to the bowels of the earth. And in a flash, I knew the terrible and most essential fact of life could be summed up in one word: digestion. Right now, in the desert, insects crawled over a coyote carcass and gnawed it clean. Right now, inside my skin, cells shredded and sorted. The tent itself was a digestive apparatus, an intestine of sorts, that was melting me down into a nub. My tent was sucking me away, like a candy. Soon I would be gone.

I startled awake. I was back in the real tent, back in my ordinary sense of my body, with its damp feet and achy back.

A relief, except that I was still on a hellish, vermin-infested beach. I had chosen to be here. That was the crazy thing. I was the one who had done this to me.

When I woke, I knew by the angle of the sun that it must be past 7 in the morning. Why hadn't anyone come by to wake me up? I could hear nothing but the thrashing of the surf. I scooted out of the tent. My possessions lay on the white blankness of sand as if they'd been posed there by a photographer for some surreal art-rock album cover, the sleeping bag curled in a C, a book face down, a flipper. Nancy's tent had disappeared. It was as if she had never been there.

Way down the beach, people milled about, clumping together and then coming apart. The sea flashed with light, stabbing my eyes. The people, silhouetted against the waves, seemed to wink in and out of existence. I thought I saw one of them quivering with sobs. Out past the rolling surf, Sam's red kayak bobbed, heading toward the horizon. Something had happened. I sprinted down the beach, sand flying up and sparking against my calves.

But then, I slowed to a trot and snorted with relief. As usual, I'd been too quick to panic. They were packing. One of the Biologists stood over the pile of water sacks, his finger pecking the air, figuring out how many we'd each have to carry. Nearby, Sam dragged the latrine along behind him, like a pull-toy. And the red
kayak out in the cove, bobbing in the waves? That was Nancy. I knew her by her hair. It flew around her face in a whirlwind.

“Hey,” I yelled, waving my arms. And then, because she hadn't seen me yet, I jumped up and down. “Hey, hey, hey.” And every time I landed, the sand caught me.

“What are you doing?” Sam scolded. “We're just about ready to go.”

So I ran up the beach again, to my fallen tent. I picked up a book, shook it vigorously, and sand rustled from its pages, but no scorpion, no scorpions anywhere, for it was a new day and I had just chugged the last of the coffee from a plaid thermos like the ones in 1950s
Life
magazines, and we were not dying in the desert, we were on a lark! Now I held snorkel mask in my hand—it reflected the sky, the blue leaping across its surface. It sent up a perfume of the ocean, the briny smell of childhood vacations. A cactus in the distance caught sunlight in its spines, glowed with a golden nimbus. Just when I had no time for it, everything around me had swelled into beauty. I picked up the sleeping bag, and remembered how it terrified me the night before, with all its folds and secret places. Now it was warm as dough. I shook it out gaily, enjoying the way the breeze took over and lofted it up. Then I stuffed it into
its sack, without worrying too much about my hands disappearing into wads of fabric.

I peeled off my sweatpants and took possession of the air with my bare legs. I was out in the middle of the world in my underpants, a t-shirt and sneakers. For a moment, I flirted with the cliff beside me, and I let the ocean see a little more of my ass than was proper. Then I picked up a pair of shorts, gave them a cursory shake and lifted one leg to step into them.

I froze. I slowly lowered my leg, and adjusted the shorts ever so carefully so I could peer down inside. A scorpion clung to the seam just below the waistband. It was the gold color of sand, half the length of my pinkie. Its tail curled so tightly that the creature looked like it would sting its own head. My heart began to pound everywhere in my body—my cheeks, my feet, my eyes. I had come so close to putting my leg into that tunnel of fabric.

I shook the shorts gingerly. Nothing fell out. I tried again. In the end, I had to pull on my sweatpants and go fetch Sam. He followed me with a stiff-legged gait of annoyance, picked up the shorts, sized up the scorpion, and gave a shake. I expected it to fall out immediately, cowed by him. But it didn't. He flapped more vigorously. Then he found a stick and used it to fling the shorts back
and forth in front of him. The shorts flew at waist height, whooshing up specks of sand that turned into glitter in the air. Then he waved it up high, against the blue, so that I was afraid the scorpion might fall on his head. Sam seemed to be intoxicated, as if he were waving a flag after a revolution, the flag of his own newly formed country. It would be a land of gringos with their hair burned blonde, and wilderness guides who carry tidal charts in their shirt pockets, and people who figure everything will be OK once the poison reaches their heart. This was Nancy's country too. But not mine. My country, for better or worse, was America.

Sam checked inside the shorts again and sighed, to let me know that the scorpion was still there. “We're going to have to use water,” he said, and I followed as he carried the shorts down to the ocean. He balanced on a boulder, leaned out, and dropped them into a shallow place.

I clambered up onto the boulder beside him, feeling its roughness, like super-tough sandpaper, against my hands.

“I hate to do this,” he said. “It's wrong to kill them. They have more right to this place than we do.”

The fabric of the shorts turned from blue to black and sunk under the surface of the water. A bedraggled scorpion emerged
from the folds. Sam thrust the stick in its path, so it could climb to safety. “Here, please,” he said to it. On one last island of dry fabric, the scorpion stood its ground, threatening Sam's stick with its whip of tail. It was a tiny clenched fist of a being, all anger and swagger. The island under its feet darkened and sunk and water welled in, and the scorpion melted, as witches are supposed to do, though it didn't entirely disappear. A soft yellow rind remained, bobbing on the surface of the water like a bit of egg, a crumb, a curd, something stuck to the edge of a plate that comes off in the sink. And then what was left of the scorpion tumbled away and it was gone.

Our family may not be prettier than yours. We may not be smarter. But we do know how to avoid traffic jams. “You'd have to be a lunatic to get on the Pike after 3 o'clock,” my mother used to say to me, when I was too young to understand the word “lunatic.” But I took her meaning. There were people out there pushing and shoving to get to the same place at the same time. We would not be among them.

My mother has a theory: eccentricity is efficient. When I was about eight years old, she hoisted a Turkish flag onto the antenna of the family station wagon. “This way, when we park in the mall, I'll always be able to find the car,” she explained. “Who else is going to have a Turkish flag?” And so, for several years, my family traveled around like some rogue embassy, the sickle-moon of a faraway nation fluttering above as we drove, motorcade style, on a mission to find a new set of bed sheets.

Years later, I sprawled across a beanbag chair in my high-school library, studying
People
magazine. Eleven kids—about my age—had been smothered at a Who concert. As I examined each of their photos, lined up yearbook-style on the glossy pages, I was gripped by an uncharitable disdain for those kids. I might be an oddball, some might say a geek, but at least I wouldn't have been caught
dead in a stadium-rock hall in Ohio, wearing feathered hair and designer jeans. Those kids had in fact been caught dead in just such circumstances. And that seemed like the real tragedy.

At the time, of course, I thought I had developed such opinions on my own. But now it's clear to me that my devotion to the uncrowded and off-season, the underground and the strange, derived from my mother's obsession with traffic. Always, always avoid the crowds.

A decade ago, my father lay in a rented hospital bed in my parent's house, dying. My mother and sister and I took care of him, circling around the room fetching Chopin CDs or hand lotion or morphine—anything to mute his pain. It was late November, that stretch of days that dangles between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even if your father isn't dying, it's easy to feel awful in that ditch between the holidays, with the frayed leaves eddying around your feet.
It's A Wonderful Life
plays round-the-clock on cable, mocking you with repeated visions of Jimmy Stewart cocooned by his brood of devoted children. Psychiatrists' schedules fill up. Everyone is convinced that everyone else is going home to a happy family.

That year, it seemed I was always driving to the grocery store to fetch cans of protein drink, which was all that Dad could keep down. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” echoed down the produce aisles. Signs wished the shoppers happy holidays and joy to the world. The food itself seemed like just more gaudy holiday decoration—the dollops of turkey and the confetti-ed cookies and the cranberry sauce, which would roll out of its can like a giant ruby. Dad would never, ever get to eat any of this stuff again.

He died in early December. While other people were decorating their trees, we shopped for a headstone. After the funeral, we sprawled in the living room too tired to put away the cheese plates. “Girls,” my mother said to us, “let's not have Christmas this year.” We'd always been fuzzy about holidays, moving around dates to suit our needs, but I had no idea that you could cancel Christmas entirely. My mother did know this. That is her genius. She never seemed so brave to me as at that moment when she—wearing slippers and a sweatshirt, pale, exhausted—decided we didn't have to do what other families did. At that moment, she hoisted a flag over us more exotic and beautiful than the Turkish moon. The three of us, she seemed to say, would become a little country all our own. No apologies. No regrets. No rush hour.