There is a certain type of person to whom it is never a mistake to entrust your time, provided you are willing to go where they want to take you. They are characterized by a peculiar expertise. Among this group are Sherpas, gardeners, film-lovers, passionate computer-programmers, elderly museum guides, bird-watchers, and aficionados of tea. When you accompany them into their element, however far it may be from your own, they invariably infect you with their own overflowing well-being, and the pleasure of sharing their most secret smiles. My friend Dhruv is of this type, and his element is the open country. To watch him set up camp beside some babbling creek—hefting the boxes of old and battered supplies from his car, which seem to contain everything he needs, or contentedly stringing the hammock in which he will sleep, as the dusk grows deep and the insects start up—is to watch a man who seems perfectly at home in isolation; a man whom you feel would trade the comforts and duties of civilization without a thought, to live like a turtle and carry the world on his back.
He is muscled like a David on the frame of a street urchin. At 5’9”—an inch taller than me, a fact he rarely lets me forget—the effect is not imposing. If you can convince him to take off his shirt, which is always long and baggy out of a kind of modesty, watch how he moves. He is not graceful like a dancer, although he loves to dance. His muscles are too compact on his bones for that, beaten too hard for anything but strength. His beauty is all monkey. Take hold of his hand, and you will find that it is always slightly curled, as though about to seize something. Dhruv has climbed so much that his forearms have grown imbalanced. He is not strong enough to uncurl his hands. They hang at his side, vaguely claw-like, but never threatening. His whole body is so cheerful, so energetic in its movement, that it is impossible to be afraid of. Atop it perpetually sits a broad, white grin, as genuine as it is habitual, and above that a proud nose, hooked like an eagle.
I have rarely looked closely at Dhruv’s eyes. We tend to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, or more often on either side of a car, looking out at the vanishing road. We talk to the view as freely as though we were alone. Dhruv asks me riddles and I answer with vulgar jokes. He explains the solution to the riddle, and I tell him he’s wonderful, by saying he’s ugly, misshapen, and truly the most abominable of all freaks to walk the earth. He accepts this praise silently. When I do happen to look in his eyes, there’s something surprising there. They are furtive, almost hunted. They dart from side to side or maintain a steady, blank stare. Usually, if he sees me watching, he can pass this off as a look of trickery. He will then tell me a series of lies to prove this trickery. I am invariably convinced for a moment, until I spot the tell-tale curl of his lip. Then we laugh and I look back at the road. But there is something else in Dhruv expressed in his unguarded gaze. I can’t say exactly what it is. Only I have the feeling that, for all his vitality and ease, there is something he holds close to himself and protects.
Once, in the course of a psychedelic trip, Dhruv and I found ourselves caught in a sudden thunderstorm. I crouched under some rocks to wait out the storm, and fancied as I waited that I would make an excellent trap-door spider. Another friend blundered into a pavilion, and had to endure the rain in the company of a pack of Juggalos. He later told us that the experience had decided him: civilization was definitely a mistake. Dhruv, on the other hand, the moment the rain began, wandered up and away into the woods. He told us later, as he emerged again, dripping and grinning, that he had spent the entire storm struggling to protect a single object against the deluge. With the moisture steaming off his hair into the hot summer day, he uncurled his hands to show us. In the center of his palms, perfectly dry, lay a single, rotting orange peel.
Perhaps Dhruv’s protectiveness concerns something as simple as an orange peel. I can’t say. I’m not certain Dhruv himself knows. He has often told me that he doesn’t like to look inwards; he prefers not to know his own secrets. Lorca, a poet I only know because of Dhruv’s recommendation, once spoke of duende, a concept I only believe in because of Dhruv’s life. Lorca says that “the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought … it is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet. Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.” Dhruv’s not a thinker. He’s got duende. I don’t mean that thought is alien to him, or brooding even. You can tell when he’s thinking by the vague look of astonishment on his face. He is perfectly at home with intellectuals, only he disdains to share their neuroses.
He once asked me where I located myself in Mr. Ramsay’s schema from To the Lighthouse. There the failed philosopher conceives of enlightenment as an alphabet, and each leap in understanding as a move from A to B, B to C, and so on to the rarefied Z, which only one man in a generation may reach. I put myself down as a K, believing, at that time, that I had already just about solved the problems of philosophy (Hegel: good. Everyone else: insipid), and only leaving a healthy portion of the alphabet unclaimed as a kind of charitable gesture; a modest allowance for the aspects of life I hadn’t yet encountered. Dhruv replied, with a dreamy smile, “I think I’m at A. Maybe not even A.”
For everything astonishing about Dhruv, there is one thing that has never surprised me. There isn’t a single person I’ve met who dislikes him.
City is a mile-and-a-half long sculpture of granite and steel, hidden deep in the Nevada desert, begun in 1972 and still unfinished. The man behind the monument is Michael Heizer, a cowboy-cum-artist known for sprinkling his discourses on negative theories of art with liberal amounts of “goddams” and “fuckits.” As far as I can tell, with the exception of City, most of his art up to this point has consisted in hanging large boulders in increasingly precarious places. Heizer, in keeping with frontier traditions, is known for being highly protective of his massive, unfinished work. There are tales of intrepid art-lovers who, in their foolish attempts to break onto the property—hoping, no doubt, to catch a glimpse of the sublime—instead find themselves held at gunpoint by the gnarled old artist, disabused of their cameras, and chased screaming back into the desert. The website is unequivocal: “Please note that City is NOT[!!] open to the public, and visiting City without prior permission of the artist is NOT[!!] currently permitted.”
I had no inkling of any of this when I agreed to join Dhruv on a road trip out west, having learned I was to accompany him almost immediately before the trip began. He was scant with details. We were to meander about in the Rockies for a week or so before plunging into the desert. At a fitting time, he would continue on to California, depositing me at the nearest convenient airport. There would be rock climbing, he said, and probably camping.
Only upon landing in Denver did I learn that our trip was to culminate with a breaking-and-entering into City. Dhruv filled me in halfway through a long climb, as we perched on a narrow cleat jutting out from the side of a cliff. Having promised to teach me how to rappel down once we got to the top, he went on to explain his plan. As an afterthought, gesturing out at the expanse that spread below us, he added, “I don’t really care about views anymore. It’s just stuff, just looking at stuff. It only really matters if it’s hard to get to. The difficulty matters as much as the view, it makes the view.” Then, pouting his lips and scrunching his eyebrows, in Charlie Brown wah-wah voice: “It’s the journey, baby, not the destination.”
Several hundred feet up, the roar of the highway below had become almost inaudible. The silence was only ruffled by the gentle creaking of our ropes and a whispering breeze: pleasant, nautical sounds. Listening to Dhruv in that dreamy air, all self-consciousness seemed to have been lifted from me. Retrieved from its usual clamor, my mind gave way to a steady procession of sensations: breeze, breath, warmth, silence. I would have agreed to anything.
Around Dhruv, one has a sensation like the warm and solid drowsiness that comes after hard exertion, only it’s lighter and more changeful. Your breath comes easy, seems to fill you up like a good meal; doubts and guilt vanish; self-consciousness lifts and is replaced by something transparent and somehow pleasing. Look at your hands: they seem closer, more a part of you. Look out: isn’t the view inviting? There seem to be paths where once there were only dead ends. This is all an effect of Dhruv’s glamor, the way his presence changes you.
City works in a similar way, with its huge mounds and tumbled monuments. A strange order is manifested there. You step from the chaos of the desert into City’s long lines and find that, suddenly, the distant cliffs seem to be leaning towards you, and the ground has been arrayed for your feet, and at every point the dome of the sky is thundering down. You surmise that somehow in this place a secret agreement has been reached between things, near and far, to turn their faces towards a new center, and reveal themselves there.
Dhruv is a center like this. Within the circumference of his glamor, everything turns in you towards something else. Everyone has a world huddled in them—that’s surely uncontroversial—and great artists can sometimes show you a picture of that world and transfix you with it, but Dhruv does something an artist can’t. He invites you into that world; he shows you where to put your hands and feet, and then suddenly, before you know it, you find yourself dangling from a cliff, and up above, right at the edge of the sky, there’s Dhruv, dangling down from you.
It was only once we were wedged into a convenient alcove, separated by a sturdy looking boulder from the drop, that Dhruv informed me, with a mischievous grin, that rappelling was far more dangerous than climbing itself. Most deaths that he knew of could be attributed to the descent. This is because, in rappelling, you support your own weight on a single rope, with the result that it is possible, in a moment of distraction, to lower right off the end. No doubt the intoxication of success has something to do with this morbid statistic; all obstacles shown to be conquered and conquerable, the blithe hero lets the rope sing through his hands, and suddenly, as in a dream, finds himself accelerating, without a rope, almost flying, perhaps with just enough time to realize his mistake, to let out a last sound, to think a last thought, as the ground rushes up…
I began to procrastinate. I hemmed and hawed, and had Dhruv explain the technique of the thing three or four more times. I was confident that it would go without a hitch. It had all been explained to me. Just hold the rope, don’t lower too quickly, and don’t fall off the end. Any doubts were irrational. But despite my assurances, peering over that stony precipice still gave me the jitters, and my head was filled with premonitions of a violent death.
Dhruv himself does not seem to suffer from this kind of anxiety. To matters which commonly awaken fearful quibbles—heights, airplanes, elevators, trains—to situations of implicit faith, where failure, however unlikely, means death, Dhruv is cold. He has no dread of the physical. I think that his confidence comes, in part, from familiarity; the long experience of depending on simple human contrivances for his life. Where I believe that the belay device will work, because Dhruv told me so, he knows that it works. He also knows how it can fail. As for the rest—matters of chance; an undetectably frayed rope; a subtle manufacturing defect in the belay device—he is resigned. Everything that can be controlled is within reach of his own two hands. The rest is not worth thinking about.
There is something both deeply courageous and atavistic about this attitude in Dhruv. It has the whiff of pagan solidity, from a time before firearms and precision-targeted drone strikes, when threats were always visible and the human body was to some extent commensurate to the forces arrayed against it. The man with a knife can be grappled; the distance to be traversed, no matter how immense, can be reckoned in steps. It’s only a matter of making the attempt.
Physical strength—now something of an abstract quality, more often pursued for aesthetic or sexual purposes than for use—is for Dhruv the index of his mastery over the world. Death, for him, is not an inevitability that lurks in the closets of nursing homes, waiting to deliver the feeble and overripe. It is a visible enemy, with obvious ploys—the poorly knotted rope; the scree beside the precipice—something to be defeated, not avoided, every day in each shape it assumes. It’s for this reason that I can’t imagine Dhruv having anything but a violent death. He says he plans to die before fifty. When I asked him what he’ll do if by chance he reaches that age unharmed, he said he’d probably just lie down in a ditch somewhere. I don’t believe that last part. That would be a surrender to death, not a defeat. Dhruv wants to be defeated in the end.
This is the other side of his strange, atavistic courage; the part that can seem morbid, almost a death wish. I have often, against my will, watched him climb without a rope, as I cluck nervous warnings at him, emphasizing how I will be personally irritated by having to clean up his brains, inform the interested parties of his demise, etc. For a time in college he voluntarily exempted himself from being housed, preferring instead to camp under bridges and negotiate temporary stays with indulgent friends. He had a long-cherished dream of getting into a street fight (negotiated in advance), which eventually was realized in Montana by three people at once. Constantly he is on the lookout for opportunities to be reduced entirely to his body, to the position of having to win his way out of a corner, with nothing but his own strength and craft. I don’t think this is a search for the adrenal shock that is the aim of your average thrill-seeker. Nor do I think Dhruv is an everyday masochist, bent on his own destruction without knowing why. Rather, it seems to me that Dhruv sees something essential in this close contest with death; without it, life would lose any semblance of a thing won or made, and become instead an accumulation of meaningless comforts, inside of which cringes a nervous, watchful beast.
He confided to me one of his earliest memories as we drove away from the climb, into the mountains, having rappelled down the cliff without incident despite my fears. It was of a summer camp that he had attended as a child in India, which was held entirely outside, on a dilapidated old running track, in heats which regularly exceeded 100 degrees. One day, for a series of reasons which Dhruv had forgotten, but which he suspects were not his fault, he came to camp wearing shorts instead of pants. In response to this grave affront, he was ordered to run continuously around the track, all day in the blazing sun, as his more orderly compatriots enjoyed camp activities on the field.
I watched the shadow of the mountains fall onto Dhruv’s face as he spoke, eyes turned to the road. Something like a smile was lifting the corners of his lips. “It sounds terrible,” I said, which made him laugh. “I might have died,” he said. “They hardly ever let us get water. They would be sued in a second if it was in the US. I ran all day. They had to tell me to stop … it was so hard … it was excellent …”
We were hundreds of miles from Michael Heizer’s City. I was flush with wellbeing, going somewhere after months of quarantine isolation, and seeing an old friend after years of separation. As I watched Dhruv’s glad eyes darken in the shadows of dusk, headlights flicking on all around us, I felt again the frisson of being in the presence of a powerful atavism. This was the man who would take me, kicking and screaming, into the heart of Michael Heizer’s City. I do not understand Dhruv, but I trust him completely.
A day later we were cooking a stew at the foot of Mount Elbert, the highest summit in the Rocky Mountains. A fog had gathered on the surface of the lake and begun to roll towards us. The chill of the mountain dusk and the crackle of the fire filled me with energy. I serenaded Dhruv with Sinatra songs mixed indiscriminately with snatches of opera remembered from cartoons. He said my singing was abominable. I sent a little smooch in his direction.
Dhruv was quiet as I cooked and sang. He walked aimlessly about the camp, his head swiveling slowly from side to side. It is a state familiar to me. Dhruv will occasionally draw inward, regarding the world as though surprised to find it there. It’s hard to reach him when he’s like this. If you call, he will raise his head towards you, but the eyes will be looking past you, and any remark will be met by a blurred sound of assent, or nothing at all. I don’t know what he thinks about during these times. I doubt he would tell me if I asked. He would laugh and change the subject, and if I persisted, he would return to himself completely, as though nothing had ever happened.
But there’s something lonely in his silence, something lovely and soft, about which he is intensely private. It’s not the yearning of a narcissist, who cherishes his loneliness, as a time to despise and adore himself. No, Dhruv is not fascinated by himself. More often he seems indifferent, and his moments of withdrawal are perhaps not a looking inward, but only a stepping aside. It is as though he has never really grown familiar with things, as though repetition has never dulled. Rather, he always seems to be quietly watching the world, as something infinitely strange and constantly new. When he is not contesting with it, grasping it in his rough hands; when there is nothing to do or win, Dhruv wonders at it. Then there is a loneliness in him. Sometimes I think he wonders too much to trust.
Walking around the camp in the shadow of Mount Elbert, Dhruv looked for all the world like a lost child. I love him most when there is this kind of confusion in his eyes. I feel I am in the presence of a melancholy, wandering spirit, set to roam in a world half hidden from him, hearing and seeing as though at a distance, unknowing, alive. I want to draw this spirit close, give him refuge in myself; I want to astonish him with friendship, but I know he would refuse me. I would be too unfamiliar, too unknown. So I love him from afar, with one eye on the pot. I know that when he returns, his smile breaking out like a whale surfacing, I can poke him in the ribs, invite him to eat. It can be a kind of homecoming.
Bob Dylan is on the stereo, one of his recent albums. Dhruv likes even Dylan’s worst stuff. Currently he is subjecting me to a seventeen-minute ballad about the assassination of JFK, “Murder Most Foul.” The lyrics are mostly incomprehensible, but it is clear that Dylan thinks murder is bad. We’re switching off songs, and when mine goes on, Dhruv grimaces and turns the volume down. I protest. He shrugs and says it’s because he doesn’t like music. We listen for three or four minutes to the few parts of the song that can be heard above the noise of the road. It sounds like an ambient piece made up entirely of snare drum and snatches of the upper register of a guitar. Dhruv’s song goes on next. It’s “Brownsville Girl,” run-time: eleven minutes. He turns it up and makes drum noises with his mouth. We are driving 100 miles an hour through absolutely nothing. The desert is flat and brown and littered with dead-looking cacti. My song comes on and he turns the volume down. Of course. He doesn’t like music.
We had travelled about 500 miles from Mount Elbert in this manner, heading towards the northwest tip of Arizona. There, Lake Powell awaited us, an enormous man-made reservoir filled with the waters of the Colorado river. Unlike other reservoirs, which tend to look like unusually boring lakes, Lake Powell is complex and beautiful. Its dammed waters flow through a series of natural canyons, creating a labyrinthine system of islets and grottoes. Long fingers of water stretch out from the main body into cracks in the canyon wall. The whole thing is navigable given a small enough boat.
It was 100 degrees on Lake Powell, though you wouldn’t know it without a thermometer. A cool wind skates across the surface of the waters there, gathering droplets to fling before it, and these coat you in a protective layer against the white-hot sun. From the middle of the bay, where Dhruv and I had drawn our kayaks abreast to take counsel, not much can be seen besides the brilliant blue of water and sky. Motorboats captained by hefty American men were speeding in every direction, throwing out long lines of wake which battered our little kayaks. We had launched into the lake’s westernmost fringe, planning to row south into a narrow canyon, which was supposed to give access to Antelope Island, our campground for the night.
Dhruv had us circling the bay for several hours before we finally found the canyon that led to Antelope Island. The sun began to set as we paddled down that thin strait. The red cliffs rising on either side of us were deepening into purple. Occasionally a laggard motorboat would speed past us in the opposite direction, returning home to the marina, but besides this the only sounds were the oars gently breaking the water, and the rustling of a slack breeze.
I let Dhruv go ahead to scope out a spot to camp, watching him from the middle of the channel. He beached his kayak on the sloping rock of Antelope Island and scrambled nimbly up its sides before disappearing behind a boulder. I had told him I wanted to fish, but in reality I was troubled by the hint of sadness that seemed to be gathering in the cliffs around us, and wanted to stay a moment on the water.
I cast my line and watched the reel spin. It let out for much longer than I expected—the water was deep here. At that moment the entire trip seemed a shock of color and noise that had burst in front of me and would just as quickly disappear. Dhruv was a kind of magnetic center at the heart of this burst. Without him the images would fall apart, decompose into thoughts or abstractions and scatter across time. The thought made me shiver.
From afar I watched him stretch and lug the tent from the kayak, his body as animal as ever, but more distant somehow, darkening into a silhouette before passing out of sight. That small body seemed to hold everything sensual, everything intoxicating and bright that had accompanied us. I was grateful for it—I loved that body, that grappled the world to itself, and me to the world. But as I watched him scramble back down the rocks, pausing to send a big wave in my direction, I felt a sadness too. I saw just how easily Dhruv could leave, how his body always seemed to be turned as though just then departing.
The ease that I feel in Dhruv’s company has something to do with this spirit. There is nothing grasping or possessive in him; he’s always on the move towards something else. This fills him with life and sets you trembling with it, but at the same time soothes, because you know his gaze is always turned out, away from you. You owe him nothing and he has no obligation to you. If you happen to be walking the same path, he will be glad for you, but at the crossroads he will just as gladly depart.
In the last days of college, when he and I and those we loved were about to be scattered to the winds, I remember this fatalism. He was sure that we would never meet again. He told me this offhandedly, as though it were a simple thing, explaining that it had always been the way for him—he lived for a moment somewhere, loved and was loved, and then left. Things pass on, they slide into their opposite. We wouldn’t call, he said. What would be the point? It was no use trying to hold onto each other. Time only marched away.
I must have sat out there on that kayak for at least an hour, without even a single nibble. I think the worms had got wet somewhere and died. It’s a melancholy thing to feel the loss of something while you still have it. In a few days I would be back home, and Dhruv somewhere else. The only thing left for us was City.
Dhruv eventually shouted me back to the shore, promising a meal. Up behind the boulder he had built a perfectly lovely camp, and a soup was bubbling above the blue flame of a stove. It felt like a homecoming; I couldn’t have kept up a tragic tone if I tried. As we ate, perched on the soft belly of Antelope Island, the stars winked on one by one above us. From our height you could see every horizon and the sky was enormous. Dhruv turned in soon after finishing his soup. He had already seen the Milky Way. For a time a soft light filtered through the canvas of the tent, revealing his blurred outline bent over a book, but soon enough it jiggled and snapped out.
I looked up at the thousand lights, and the comets, and the thin clouds that drifted between them, and all the while a Rilke line was running through my head, over and over:
O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces—
Rilke’s great theme is transience and death. In the Elegies, the night is an enormous void that hangs overhead, shot through with impossibly distant stars. That emptiness—the world beyond us; impermanence; death—gnaws. I don’t see it like that usually. Usually I’m helplessly comic: ends become beginnings, everything is resolved happily into the whole—you get the point. I’m drawn to tragedy because it’s not how my head is shaped. It’s something in a book for me, a thing of art. But, though joy billows off him like steam, I don’t think that’s how it is for Dhruv; I don’t think he shares the sight he grants to others. He is looking up at different stars.
When I was a child, I often tried to see the stars properly, at their actual distance from us. I would practice with a penny, holding it right next to my eye, and then slowly pulling it away, to see how it shrank with distance. The same procedure applied to the stars. What you do is imagine them right in front of you—enormous, consuming the entire world many times over—and then slowly push them away in your mind until they become the tiny dot in the sky. If you do this right, the moment your mind’s star lines up with reality, you will suddenly perceive, with a dizzying sense of vertigo, a vast emptiness above you—so immense it feels you should peel right off the earth and fall into it.
Something like that vertigo took hold of me there, as I gazed up into the night. Dhruv suddenly seemed distant, no longer foreshortened in my mind’s eye, his body arcing up and away; though I knew he lay close by, breathing slow in sleep.
For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah we breathe
ourselves out and away; from ember to ember
we give off a fainter scent.
Dhruv was evaporating and so was I. The days ran like water through our hands and gathered into dark balls of night. They strung out one after another on a long but finite chain, and each one would evaporate. The fog lifts. Everything goes clear and there are no fish.
Michael Heizer built his city to last ten thousand years, but eventually it will crumble. Over its ruins the stars will whirl a billion years more, and then they too will crumble into night. Dhruv’s clarity and brilliance, the ease I feel around him: all of this is founded on loss. He is not a durable thing, even in human terms. He is too in love with movement, too canted into the wind. He moves me because I clutch too tightly to things. I want to hold onto every night. But he uncurls my hand and grasps it. His is a calloused hand, supple and thickly lined. It is marked by long acquaintance with the earth. But even those callouses will eventually find the hold on which they rip, and that will be a sad day. I will climb no more mountains after that. And Dhruv—what will become of you then? Will you be happy? Will you remember Antelope Island, and the friend you took there? Will you wait a while at City? Or maybe none of this will matter then, and you will be different and I will be different, and even the stars might be different, changed just a little, in your absence.
In the tent the night could no longer be seen, and sleep crept slowly into me. I felt the warmth of Dhruv’s body beside me with a great intensity, and for the first and only time, that sleeping bag and body seemed like a gated double fence, enclosing Dhruv and keeping him from me.
Nobody in Tonopah had ever heard of City. We asked everybody: the guy at the first gas station, the guy at the second gas station—even the proprietor of The World Famous Clown Motel. Either Heizer had completely covered his tracks, or the citizens of Tonopah were woefully ignorant of the twentieth-century Land Art movement. The World Famous Clown Motel, incidentally, boasts the largest collection of clown-based or influenced objects in the world, according to piece of paper taped the wall. I found it while searching for a place to stay in Tonopah, which is the closest town to City—a mere four hours away.
Dhruv seemed physically repulsed by the idea of staying at The World Famous Clown Motel. He doesn’t like clowns, or anything uncanny for that matter. Watching a horror movie with him makes you fear for your life—not because of the film, but because every jump scare produces an extremely violent, bodily effect on Dhruv, jettisoning him uncontrollably away from the screen and delivering a fat whomp to whatever might be in his way. But he gave in after an hour or two of repetitive chanting of the words “Clown Motel.”
The World Famous Clown Motel lies at the very end of Tonopah’s single street, on a small rise that looks out over the wastes. Those wastes stretch on for miles and miles, and are only broken close to the horizon by a cluster of small, brown hills. Everything in Nevada is this same uniform brown, except for the Clown Motel, which is painted, as you’d expect, in a nauseating combination of yellow and purple. A couple steps down from the parking lot, in a shallow brown depression, lies the old town graveyard. This was almost a bridge too far for Dhruv, but I had already booked the room, so he accepted the situation with a sigh.
There are no birds in the desert morning; everything is clarity. I woke early and walked in the graveyard, waiting for Dhruv. There were no clouds in the sky, no cars. The road to City ran straight west, all the way to the horizon, and the sun, anticipating our aim, rose up the other way. It was in the graveyard, waiting, that I felt the first tremor. Eventually that shaggy head bumbled through the door, black against the purple and gold. It shone in the light from the east.
Dhruv explained the landscape as we drove Route 6 to the west. To me, it looked like a bunch of dirty rocks, varying slightly in size, with the longest, straightest road you’ve ever seen running between them. But Dhruv knew more. He explained that the long, flat expanse we drove over was once an enormous canyon, which had been filled over millennia by a steady trickle of dust. The rough outcroppings we saw were in fact the peaks of mountains, thrust up through thousands of feet of dust, like volcanic islands in the sea.
Beside the car suddenly appeared two pronghorn, heading towards the green mountain which was growing in the distance. I know what they’re called because Dhruv said “Pronghorn!” and pointed. The pronghorn, he explained, is the fastest land animal in the western hemisphere. He knew how they had been made too. At one time there had been an equally fast variety of tiger that the pronghorn had evolved to outrun, and which was now extinct. The pronghorn remained on, with no more use for its speed. Now its only predator was man.
The tremors increased as we passed over the mountain. The road was treacherous, pitted with holes and covered over by tumbled trees. I interpreted my feelings as anxiety. Now that City was approaching, I was uncertain whether it was a good idea to break in. I imagined Michael Heizer leveling a gun at me. I didn’t want to see City bad enough to get shot or arrested. I didn’t even know what it would look like.
Bob Dylan was loud on the radio as we came down onto the dusty roads of the valley floor. He sang:
Well, I keep seeing this stuff and it just comes a-rolling in
And you know it blows right through me like a ball and chain
A gate grew up out of the road in front of us. On it hung a large white sign that read “No Trespassing.” I voiced a little of my apprehension to Dhruv, who laughed and smiled, and got out of the car to examine the gate. His eyes looked out and over it and away. There was nothing shifting in them, nothing withdrawn. He was searching for a path, and that brought everything in him to the surface. A broad, white grin was stretching his face when he returned to the car. “We’ll drive around it,” he said, “and if they catch us we’ll just say we never saw the sign.”
We drove around it, agreeing to take the road that went more obliquely towards the trees. A sliver of the house behind them was visible now, and beside it a jumble of construction vehicles, their characteristic yellow muted by a covering of dust. “This is the last road,” I thought, “the last chance to turn back.”
The tremors were increasing, and had begun to hollow a pit in my stomach. Images of black futures crowded in on me. A judge in dark robes, eyebrows at an angry slant; ants swarming over an oozing bullet-hole. I watched the phrase “We never saw the sign” smack against that wall of futures and fall to the ground.
The car began to slow. Dhruv was looking past me to the southwest, his eyes dancing. I turned: a series of small rises seemed to be mottling the horizon. They were stained a dark gray which separated them from the land around. Their lines were clear and full of intent. “I think that’s it,” said Dhruv, his voice like a bell and full of excitement. He brought the rumbling car to a halt.
When you step from a car out into the desert, everything suddenly seems to recede from you and grow enormous, as though to emphasize your disproportion to the world. Stripped of that small frame where everything is within reach, where a roof blocks out the dome of the sky and movement comes at a twitch of the foot, you re-enter your body with shame, and shudder to see how it plods forward in the most insignificant of steps.
I tried to still the tremors by voicing some tentative doubts, but Dhruv had already locked the car, and strode out towards the gray shapes to the southwest. I followed him automatically, as I had done so many times before. The familiar situation eased me for a moment, and in that moment the wall of futures drew back a little, lifted an inch like a curtain; I thought I glimpsed something behind them … but in another second all that was forgotten, and the black wall seemed to crowd even closer than before.
A barbed wire fence had risen before us. Every thirty feet, as far as I could see, was hung a white sign that read in triply bolded characters “NO TRESPASSING!!” Dhruv gave a contented sigh and said, “Well, I guess now we can’t say we didn’t see the sign.”
The loss of this last crutch brought all the objections that had been swirling in me to the surface. I let them loose all at once. This was a silly idea, I said, that was very high risk and very low reward; we had no idea how far we had left to go and it wasn’t clear that those shapes even were City; we had already had a wonderful trip anyway after all and wouldn’t getting shot by a wrinkly monomaniac at the end of his rope do a bit of an injustice to that; and wouldn’t we be better off just going back home and forgetting about City? Wouldn’t that be enough?
I saw my words roll off Dhruv and disappear. His eyes were knowing and glad. I paused to take a breath, and he took advantage of the momentary silence to propose a deal. “Why don’t we flip a coin? Heads we go, tails we keep talking about it.” I pondered it for a moment. It felt impossible for me to go over that fence. Even imagining it, feeling the necessary muscles tense in my legs, gave me the sensation of being forced headfirst into a sack, with the darkness closing in all around. I counter-offered: “We’ll do two flips. Two heads we go. One heads and one tails we keep talking about it. Two tails we leave.” That gave me some leeway, at least. Dhruv accepted. We both liked the deal.
As he fished around in his bag for a coin, Dhruv told me about a thing he had read recently, which he called the “irrational moment of decision.” The thought was that after all the internal dispute that goes into making a decision—all the arguing of pros and cons and trying on of different perspectives; all the hemming and hawing and confusion and vacillation—there comes a moment of pure, irrational contingency, in which all that drops away, and the decision is suddenly made, suddenly makes itself for no reason at all. He casually flipped the coin as he spoke; it came up heads.
I play-acted some outrage and demanded the right to make the next flip, but in reality I wasn’t mad at all. Something was clarified in me the moment I saw that heads, and Dhruv’s laughing eyes above it. The black wall seemed to thin and become a screen, on which a silhouette was thrown, outlined in light.
I was still trembling when I picked up the coin, but the sensation had changed. It no longer felt like anxiety, but something else. And as I turned the coin back and forth in my hands, from heads to tails, I looked out for the first time beyond the fence which stood in our way and saw as an indisputable fact that those gray mounds rising in the distance were the first forms and indications of Michael Heizer’s City, silently waiting for us, as they would wait for all time.
I flipped the coin—it spun—it began to fall. And all at once I recognized the tremors, and I recognized those distant strange geometries, and I recognized the man in front of me, whose rough hands had bid me: flip.
A hole appeared in the sack in front of me; the dark wall drew back—and behind it ran a stream of daylight, backwards, into the sun. An old sedan rumbled down a dusty mountain road; a dark figure flew from the end of a rope; white teeth turned in the flaring of a fire. The images were combining and separating and changing, and they flowed in the light as easy as breath. And though they mounted up they were not lost, and they did not fall away, and they gathered in the sun, compounding themselves there, and flowed back again to me. It felt like a homecoming, like an end and a beginning.
I understood the tremors were only a foretaste of the memory that getting to City would become. I understood, through a strange trick of perspective, that what I saw would slip from me, and be lost, and then return again. Dhruv would leave and return, City would leave and return, and in all their brief absences they would notch the stars.
Then the coin came up heads.
