To fully grasp the weirdness of the Oasis, where the man who called himself “the Light” sat chanceled above those who adored him, and where he served as the warden to those he imprisoned, you must appreciate the circumscribed territory in which the town of Ajo is located. To the north lies a restricted area, the vast Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range. To the east, the Tohono O’odham Nation Indian Reservation allows neither bombing nor gunnery. To the south lies Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which doesn’t actually produce music. To the west, the 860,000-acre Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge shelters desert bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, jackrabbits, pocket gophers, kangaroo rats, various lizards, and the ever-popular lesser long-nosed bat, which has a somewhat smaller schnoz than the long-nosed bat that, evidently, lives elsewhere.
Surrounded by a military installation, a tribal reservation, a national monument, and a wildlife refuge, the resultant irregularly shaped tract of unrestricted land measures about twenty miles north to south and fifteen miles east to west. Ajo sits in the center of the northwest quadrant of this jigsaw-puzzle piece of Pima County. Theoretically, therefore, Light’s Oasis should have been no farther than perhaps eight miles from Ajo, but it proved to be much farther than that, inexplicably far.
Because Bridget didn’t hurry toward the Oasis, because none of us urged her to drive faster, because we stopped at a convenience store on the outskirts of Tucson for candy bars and colas, and because we stopped again in the town of Sells for gasoline and sandwiches and a bathroom break, it was 2:53 p.m. when we reached the junction where State Route 86 met Route 85 at the miniscule, aptly named town of Why, ten miles south of Ajo.
We turned north on State Route 85. Four miles short of Ajo, Bridget slowed. She squinted into the sun-scorched land to the right and turned off the pavement onto a hardpan track, pulled forward by psychic magnetism. The way led—or seemed to lead—northeast, but the sameness of the landscape and a solar glare reflecting off every surface conspired to disorient us. Like cobras writhing to the music of a flute, heat snakes rose from sunbaked stone, so that what lay ahead of us appeared to be behind a transparent curtain that rippled as it was drawn aside, though it never fully opened.
Sparky was the first to suspect that somehow we were traversing the same few miles again and again, as if we had driven into a time loop, à la the movie Groundhog Day. “We’re going nowhere but where we’ve already been. That rock formation, that cluster of cactuses, that pile of rubble that once might have been a mission church—damn if I haven’t seen them all more than once before.”
His declaration seemed to wake the rest of us from a trance, for now we noticed and confirmed what he had observed.
“According to the odometer,” Bridget said, “we’ve gone eighteen miles from the highway.” She checked her watch. “How’d that happen?”
“There!” Sparky said, pointing through the windshield. “That prairie falcon. At least twice before, I’ve seen it execute that same gyre, make that same dive for prey.”
As the falcon soared off the land with whatever vole or lizard it had taken, I, too, remembered seeing it do that before. A fear of the unknown rose from under the primeval stratum of my mind, not unlike what the earliest humans might have felt when suddenly the day darkened with a solar eclipse.
Only then did I realize that the sun had seemed to move around us in curious ways that couldn’t be explained by the turns in the hardpan track. I said, “If we’ve gone farther east than northeast, or farther north than east . . . then we should be either on Tohono O’odham land or on the bombing range. But there haven’t been any warning signs.”
Bridget brought the Mountaineer to a full stop.
No one bombed us. Neither did a hotel-casino beckon with neon brighter than the day. If we were anywhere, we were still in the approximately three-hundred-square-mile jigsaw piece where the good folks of Ajo lived and copper was mined.
In her soft voice marked by the calm confidence that ought to have been a synonym for Ching, our back-seat seer said, “The loop is the simple mojo of the Nihilim, the only sorcery they’re capable of in their fallen condition. It’s a deception of the eye and mind akin to their ability to masquerade as human. They wish to protect this place from those who aren’t invited. People who come this way think they’ve driven a lot farther than they really have. Finding nothing of interest and fearing they might stray onto the bombing range, they turn back. For a time, the illusion foiled even us in spite of our gifts. But now that we’ve all seen through it, we can escape the loop. We’ve gone only a mile from the highway, not eighteen. And the Oasis waits a mile from here, a mile at most.”