I’m itching to get to my medical clinic, where there’s always more to do and it always matters. But I’ve learned to resist that impulse. Years ago, when Sasha and I were struggling with Lincoln, my habit of “fleeing” to my clinic almost cost me my marriage. Since then, I’ve subjected my impulses to leave for work to a three-step protocol: 1） Is it necessary that I go at this moment? 2） Is there something at home that I want to avoid? 3） Will I be letting anyone down by leaving right now?
A quick application of my protocol informs me that I won’t be going to the clinic until tomorrow.
I carry Miles’s small suitcase—its size hopefully indicating a short stay—to our guest room and check the corners and under the bed for scorpions. I find Miles alone on our back porch, staring into the distance. “They’re so quiet,” he says, and I realize he means the hot-air balloons floating a few miles to the west. “Are they all up there to look at Sasha’s art?”
“Not necessarily,” I say. “The art looks beautiful from above, but so does the desert.”
“Can you look at the art without being in a balloon?”
“Absolutely,” I say, lunging for some way to pass the time. “We can take a look now, before dinner, if you don’t mind a walk.”
MILES
We left Sasha chopping vegetables in the kitchen. She looked the same—willowy figure, eyes narrowed against the sun, red hair gone pale with gray. But I was uncomfortable around her, and I sensed that she felt the same. My journey to visit Sasha, to understand Sasha, had been the focus of weeks of anticipation, but the logic for my visit seemed to evaporate the second I got off the plane. Why come all this way to see a cousin I’d never really known or liked?
In what she clearly meant to be a happy surprise, Sasha told me that Beatrice, my half sister from my father’s second marriage, would be coming to dinner that night. Beatrice had graduated from UCLA the year before and become close to Sasha’s family in her time there. But the prospect of seeing Beatrice filled me with shame. I hardly knew my half sister. And what could she know of me beyond my spectacular failure?
Once Drew and I left the house, I began to settle down. The sun was low, the light rosy, the scrubby flora a parched, iridescent silver. The emptiness of the desert felt biblical, as if nothing had ever happened there—as if all of history were yet to come. To my relief, Drew seemed content to walk in silence. Maybe we shared an impatience with small talk, being a heart surgeon and a drug counselor. The body and its needs: the thing itself. Beyond the tragedy of Drew’s college years, I knew little about him, but the not-knowing was comfortable. I found that I wanted to know him.
My first thought, when we happened on a flailing assemblage of colored lawn chairs, was that someone had dumped a pile of trash in the desert. Then I got it. “Is that a… sculpture?”
Drew laughed. “Part of one. They connect over a large area.”
“And it’s… all plastic?”
“Yep. Refuse from our whole county.”
“Sasha… attaches it together?”
“She designs a lot of it,” Drew said with evident pride. “But she and the other fabricators are a co-op; when collectors or museums acquire the bricks and photographs, everyone divides the proceeds.”
We followed a tributary of bright blue pipes that seemed a lurid blot upon the landscape. Eager to conceal my reaction, I asked, “How did she start?”
“Well, she’s always liked collecting things,” Drew said, and then, as if overhearing my caustic internal reply—Oh yeah. She collected a few things from me—he said, “I’m guessing you know what I mean.” I nodded, chastised.
“When the kids were little, she made sculptures out of their old toys,” he said. “Also collages out of paper artifacts: receipts, ticket stubs, to-do lists. And it just sort of evolved from there.”