“Maybe. I guess so.”
“For weeks, months, there will be thoughtless customers who’ll want to talk to them about it, as if that one horrible event is all that matters in sixty-one years of serving the public. The Bellinis are good people, and so they’re haunted by this, by what they saw. And because it wasn’t their fault, there is nothing whatsoever they can do to make amends. All they can do is go on, producing the best baked goods and selling the most wonderful specialties, hoping that the horrible images, the hideous memories, will one day fade. We mustn’t make them close their store, must not tear it down, but instead give them all the support we can—and say a little prayer for them every day.”
At last she conveyed the first bite of the treat to her mouth. She ate it with obvious pleasure.
She had taken a second bite by the time I ate my first, and she asked if it was good, and I said that it was delicious. I realized that her face and mine were wet with fresh tears, but we didn’t stop smiling, and we kept eating until there was no more, because it was good, it was very good, it was life.
PART 5
THE WAY AND THE WAY NOT
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Those of us who survived the Oasis and what came after it would later learn that Bodie Emmerich commissioned extensive geological surveys, mostly via satellite, in three states—Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico—searching for a remote location with an aquifer suitable to his purposes. Ajo lies 140 air miles east of the mighty Colorado River, forty miles or so south of the less impressive Gila River, and over a hundred miles west of the Santa Cruz River, far from any apparent sources of water. The town of Sells, sixty-odd air miles from Ajo, has ample water, and tinier towns in the southwest reaches of Pima County get by with captured rain and deep wells. The geology underlying Emmerich’s retreat was unique and strange to the area; it was as if, hundreds of thousands of years earlier, forces hostile to humankind even before we existed had worked diligently within the earth to prepare the site where, countless millennia later, a man of nearly infinite resources could build an elaborate temple to himself and devolve into his own perfectly evil god.
Relying on Panthea Ching’s conviction that no one who lived in the Oasis would be awake in the afternoon, we descended from the rim to the floor of the crater and crossed a field of shattered stone that time had worn into smooth gravel.
The gardens covered perhaps two hundred acres at the heart of that massive bowl in the land. Wide pathways paved with limestone wound among hundreds of queen palms, majestic phoenix palms, flame trees and golden willows, dove trees and honey locust, Metrosideros and Australian umbrella trees, and others that I could not name—all of which had perhaps once been diligently maintained but were now overgrown and in a few cases diseased. Shrubs sprawled unattended. The flowers were withered in some beds but riotous in others.
The giant wicker man loomed in the middle of a grassy circle of several acres, which had not been mown in a long while. The figure wasn’t crafted of wicker but of sturdy wood made to resemble wicker, and it bestrode the meadow like an evil Gulliver intent on crushing as many Lilliputians as possible. Along one of the paths, the twice-life-size Tyrannosaurus rex, welded together from steel plates and given an enduring polish, threatened us with teeth as big as sabers and fierce reflected sunshine that stung our eyes. The tiered Aztec temple—which the news media would eventually report was authentic in every detail—had been crafted of stone blocks quarried in central Mexico and decorated with disturbing pictographs in the Nahuatl language.
We didn’t enter the temple. However, forensic pathologists who were later assigned to the case found that human blood saturated the porous stone altar. From the diaries of Bodie Emmerich, it became known that the temple wasn’t constructed with religious intent; he had it built because he’d seen a photo of such a place and thought that it “looked cool.” Years later, after sufficient psychedelics and other drugs, after self-worship “elevated his consciousness” and he had begun calling himself “the Light,” he’d come to see that even among his spiritually awakened brothers and sisters who lived with him in the commune, there was now and then one who had sold his or her soul to “the dark side of Mother Nature, to the tormented half of that bipolar goddess who struggles against her own creations.” Evidently, this dark aspect of Mother Nature, which he called “the Queen of the Void,” lived within dead things, as well as in stone and all that was inanimate, and must be defeated if the planet was to be saved. As you might imagine, when followers of the Light were suspected of having sold their souls to the Queen of the Void, they were considered to be beyond hope, a threat to the world, and were conveyed to the Aztec altar before they might infect enlightened people with their dark faith. Emmerich’s diaries noted nine such “existential excommunications,” as though he understood what either of those words meant.