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Sarah felt that if she were reincarnated as a cactus she would pass life in complete and unstopping, if unconscious, contentment: still beneath the comfort of white heat, sips of underground moisture enough to slake her need, barbed thorns providing ample defense against her enemies while her smiling green body welcomed friends. The life. Mind you, Sarah had never been to a desert, nor even flown over one. Sarah lived in Minneapolis. But since childhood she loved deserts. In elementary school, she collected How and Why books on desert phenomena: ecosystems, terrain, geomorphic evolution, fauna, animal life; she kept potted agave and creosote in her bedroom; she crayoned pictures in art class of vast, dry, brown spaces overseen by bitter yellow suns; she watched old westerns not for the action but the vistas. As an adult her fascination hardly abated. In fact, it only grew more intense after her parents refused to let her apply to her top two choices for college: University of Nevada-Las Vegas and the University of Arizona at Tucson. Desert schools. Her parents wanted their daughter home; not just in Minneapolis but in their own domicile. So instead she settled for U. of M. where after five years she defaulted into a criminology degree. But Sarah had no intention of studying crime. She wanted to live in the desert.
After graduating as a criminologist, Sarah got on at the post office, a job she did not love but paid well enough to let her leave her parent’s house. She found a small apartment on Como Avenue, near the Luther Seminary. In her apartment Sarah was free for the first time to decorate as she chose. She began with posters everywhere: the Sahara, the Mojave, the Gobi, the Sonoran, the Kalahari.
“You can’t really tell the difference between that picture and that one," a friend from work, Judy Lund, told her. Judy squinted through the slim ovals of her eyeglasses, a single index finger raised toward the poster as if she were accusing Sarah of something disreputable. Sarah grimaced but for Judy’s sake tried to hide the expression.
Judy turned back, saw Sarah’s face.
“But I guess you can," she said.
Sarah smiled. “You guess right."
A CD titled Music of the Desert played night and day in her apartment, an album of recorded wind noise with the occasional interruption of a thundershower or the intrusion of a pan flute or wind chimes or cowbell. Sarah hated that cowbell. She thought the sound was there only because the CD was manufactured by a new age music house, the same gang that put out Music of the Ocean, Music of the Arctic, and Music of the Rainforest. They were selling to people who didn’t want sounds of the desert but sounds desertish. Sarah played the CD because there were no other desert CDs to be had, but each time she imagined the person who dared stick a cow bell in a Music of the Desert CD: some bearded, earringed New York City sound engineer with artificial red hair composing a symphony to his liking and insisting on it, even if in doing so he took the landscape away from her.
COWS ARE NOT FOUND IN THE DESERT, Sarah wrote on a piece of notebook paper and affixed it to her refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a spade foot toad. Writing the note was cathartic, an act of protest but also self-assurance; most of all, a gesture of faith to the nameless gods who ruled desert spaces and whom Sarah hoped would smile on her as well.
During the day, Sarah kept the heat in her apartment as high as her thermostat would allow: 90 degrees. At night, even in December, she switched the thermostat to Cool mode and set the temperature at 50. It would not go lower. These limitations annoyed her. What if she wanted it to be 15 degrees, or 115? DESERTS ARE NOT CLIMATE CONTROLLED, she wrote on another sheet of paper and pinned it to her refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a frilled lizard. That night she turned off her thermostat and opened a window.
For the first weeks of her experiment Sarah sweated during the day as if she were in a steam bath-- except when she was out delivering the mail. At night she woke in her bed shivering, her fingertips icy. The variation in temperature was a real physical test, one that could eventually threaten her health if not her life. But that was the point. That was precisely the point. DESERTS ARE NOT COMFORTABLE she announced on a third sheet of paper. She pinned it to her refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a turkey vulture.
Sarah took to carrying a canteen of water around her apartment. She had to remind herself to drink in sips only, in order to make her precious supply last and to guard against nausea. Small sips. She mopped her forehead with the drenched tail of her Oxford shirt. She checked her backpack for salt pills. At night, Sarah traded her bed and bedroom for the living room rug and a three hundred dollar, cold weather sleeping bag from REI. In such kingly gear, she survived the freezing nights comfortable enough except for when she had to get up to pee. To condition her bladder muscles, Sarah waited for as long as possible each time, squeezing her thighs together, fighting off the pain and the pressure. You need to be tougher, she told herself. When she couldn’t take it anymore she shimmied out of the bag and hurried to the toilet trying to stay a step ahead of the desert air. But it caught up with her every time. On the pot, she shivered down in her bones. Her teeth clattered, bumps raised along her skin. Against her rump, the toilet seat felt like the wall of a freezer. Sarah consoled herself: I’m getting tougher. I’m getting tougher. Usually, she ran as fast as she could back to the sleeping bag, but some nights, sure she could not sleep yet, she started a fire with the burner on her gas range. She set the dial on high and watched as the blue flame exploded in tangy fingers beneath the coil. She held her hands over the burner, palms down. She rubbed her palms together, held them out again. “Cold out tonight," she said aloud, proud that she was enduring the elements alone.
After those first thrilling weeks, Sarah began to feel like a fraud. Delivering the mail, even in Minnesota, even in the winter, was a cushy workaday life compared to being a desert explorer-- compared to her weekends, for instance, when she risked heat exhaustion at day and exposure at night. She wanted to test herself even further. On the Internet, she found an outfit called Real Life Desert Adventures. For four thousand dollars she could participate in a three-week hiking tour of the Chihuahuan Desert in west Texas. It would be a tiny group, with their own personal guide. They would suffer the heat during the day, and camp in the cold at night. They would see the land and live off it. No granola bars, no canned peanuts, no jelly sandwiches. They would eat snakes and rodents. They would refill their canteens at certain convenient oases. Airline tickets and necessary ground transportation were included.
Sarah signed up and paid online. She requested a March date, as this would give her two months to prepare. The next day, she received a curt e-mail from someone named Avilar: “Glad you’re aboard! See you soon! Thanks!" Sarah began to plan, to dream, to anticipate. She couldn’t sleep at night, imagining finally, actually being there. Not having to pretend anymore. Everyday she rushed to her mailbox, expecting to find the airline tickets and expedition profile promised her by the web site. But there was nothing, ever, except bills and junk mail. After two weeks she wrote an e-mail to Avilar. A week later she was still waiting for an answer. She finally did receive a answer--albeit not one she was expecting--when her credit card bill came and she saw that she had been charged not $4000 but $7000 by Real Life Desert Adventures, along with an assortment of smaller charges from countries as diverse as Australia, Finland, Guam, and Saudi Arabia. Sarah cried all night, her tears so cold she thought they might turn to frostbite.
Sarah canceled her credit card. She quit the post office and took a part-time job at REI--a mere two shifts a week--and that only for the sake of the employee discounts. She bought two gallons of sky-blue paint and coated the ceiling of her apartment. When the blue dried she added occasional drippy spots of white. Desert clouds. She attached stickers to the ceiling: star shapes, moon shapes, planet shapes. During the day the stickers were invisible, but at night in the dark huddled in her sleeping bag, a whole galaxy appeared overhead. She purchased forty bags of builders sand and emptied most of them in her living room. The rest she poured over the floors of her bedroom and bathroom. Her furniture she removed before she even lay the sand down. Except for her kitchen table and one chair, every piece she owned she carted to Goodwill. DESERTS ARE BARREN, she wrote on a piece of paper, underlining the final word and adding an exclamation point. She pinned the paper to her refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a jerboa.
Sarah considered increasing the temperature in her apartment by adding a few kerosene heaters. Or maybe some sun lamps, for the white glaring effect. She thought about buying a fan, not to counteract the daytime heat but to better circulate the cold night air, to mimic those desert mistrals. The kitchen she kept unchanged except for the addition of a simple thermometer she hung on the wall behind the sink, a much more informative device than the useless thermostat. While she deliberated over the heaters and the fan, Sarah bought several cacti and some sagebrush and distributed them throughout the living room. From Petco she bought ten common lizards and let them loose in the apartment. Thrilled, she immediately went back out and bought rats, moles, mice, and three scorpions. She bought a kitty litter box, filled it with water, and set it against the far wall in her living room. “The animals," she said aloud, “will need a watering hole."
Sarah decided in favor of the heaters and the fan. At the same time she added to her assortment of creatures. From Petco she purchased twenty more mice, six turtles, and a clan of bats. From Internet auction sites (through which she now performed careful seller checks), she located two kangaroo rats, two tarantulas, a gopher snake, four whiptail lizards, three chuckwallas, a family of ground squirrels, and two million assorted desert insects. This last item she bought as a single lot. They arrived all at once in eight tightly bounded packages, each the size of a breadbox.
Friends, once amused by Sarah’s fetish, stopped coming to her apartment. Rumors began to circulate among the post office crowd. Sarah’s parents, who had not seen her for months, called and asked that she please visit. Even if for only an hour or two. Half a day.
“I have so much to do," Sarah said.
“Like what?" her mother said.
Her parents did not know she had left the post office. They did not know about REI.
“I have to fix my apartment."
“Do you?"
“Yes. You know-- maintenance stuff."
A long pause from the other end of the line.
“Don’t they have supers for that?"
“I’m not going to trust a super, mother. Not with fixing my place. The only way to do it right is to do it yourself. You know that. You taught me."
A gecko, lined black and yellow, stepped across Sarah’s toes. A rat scooted by.
“I guess," her mother said. “I guess." Another pause. “What kind of maintenance are you talking about? Do you want Dad to--"
“No," Sarah said.
“But--"
“No, mother."
“Okay, but are you sure you’re up to it, honey?"
“Mother," Sarah said.
“All right, all right. Just give us a call, will you? Sometime?"
“Yes, mother. Gotta go. Maintenance." She was putting the phone into the wall unit. She didn’t hear her mother’s farewell.
Sarah was not lying. She did indeed need to conduct maintenance on her apartment. But what she did not tell her mother was that by “maintenance" she meant opening one of the eight cartons of insects, or affixing additional star stickers to her ceiling, or refilling the watering hole, or tossing a mouse in the direction of the newly arrived shovel-nosed snake.
One afternoon, Judy called. When Sarah worked at the post office she saw Judy five, even six days a week. They rendezvoused for lunch breaks, they went bar hopping in the summer, they double dated. But Sarah had not seen her friend for weeks.
“Hey," Judy said.
“Howdy."
“How are you?"
The strain of enthusiasm was hard in Judy’s voice.
“Great," Sarah said.
“I’ve been thinking about you. And I’ve been meaning to call. Sorry it took so long. I really have been meaning to."
Sarah shrugged. It didn’t matter. Judy couldn’t see.
“Why me?" Sarah said.
A moment of silence.
“Do you want to do something this afternoon? Drinks or something? A game? We haven’t seen the Timberwolves in probably a year."
“I don’t need to see the Timberwolves."
“Of course not. But, you know, getting out. That’s what I’m talking about."
“I just got back."
“From where?"
“Petco."
Judy made a noise. She spoke carefully. “What’s at Petco?"
“Rats. For the snakes."
Judy said nothing.
“And I’m a little worried about the scorpions."
“Sarah," Judy said.
“I haven’t seen them in a few days."
“Sarah--"
“What?"
“I know you love your place--it’s damn cool, really; it really is--but don’t you ever feel the urge to get away? Don’t you feel confined, maybe even trapped? Don’t you want, even need, sometimes, you know, to just exit?"
Sarah was so startled she didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t believe Judy was asking her this. She almost hung up without speaking, but out of a last tribute to what was once a vital friendship she summoned the will to clear her throat and say: “No, but thank you for that kind offer." Then she threw the phone at the wall. She hunted through her apartment for a piece of cardboard. She found one in a kitchen cabinet, beneath two frying pans and a sleeping red spotted toad. She made a sign, the biggest yet. She wrote the message in black indelible laundry pen. A DESERT HAS NO EXITS. She didn’t mess with magnets, but attached the sign directly to the refrigerator with masking tape. The sign blocked out all the others, but Sarah didn’t care. This message said it all.
She sat on the faded brown linoleum, hugged her knees tightly to her chest, and looked up at the sign. She realized finally what it was saying it to her. Even now she hadn’t made the necessary commitment. Even now she had been a coward: trying to live in two worlds at once, with their two sets of rules. But a desert has no exits. She located the red molded plastic body of J.C. Penney toolbox hidden in the crack between the refrigerator and the wall. She took out a hammer, a wrench, a screwdriver, a box of nails, and a box cutter. She attacked her front door and her windows. Within the hour, the knob was gone from her door and the opening mechanism destroyed; the windows were nailed shut and the locks jammed in a permanently closed position. Sarah then pulled the base unit of her cordless phone from the wall and pounded it into black plastic slivers with the hammer. She threw the phone itself into the sink and turned on the water. She also threw in the toaster and her clock radio. She let the water rise to the lip of the sink. She unplugged her refrigerator and with a box cutter sliced the plug from the cord. She moved to what had once been her bedroom and stood before the dumb black face of her computer monitor. She spat at it and then started smashing it with the hammer. When she was done with the monitor, she unplugged the CPU from the monitor and the wall. She tossed it toward the ceiling and let it crash to the floor. She poured sand into its cracks. She kicked it with her hiking boots. She left it on the desert floor to die.
Sarah returned to the kitchen and turned a burner on. She proceeded to melt every credit and identification card in her wallet. She burned every dollar. She took what coins she had and flushed them down the toilet. Then she lifted the lid off the back of the toilet and destroyed the machinery inside. The only appliances she left untouched were the stove and the kerosene heaters, still billowing at full strength.
When she was done the apartment seemed as mercifully quiet as it had ever been. She heard only tiny, intermittent, disappearing evidences of hidden life. Rodent and reptile feet. For minutes Sarah did nothing but hold herself and enjoy. She’d done it. She’d done it. She felt a fat bead of perspiration maneuver from her ear lobe to her neck to her shoulder. She touched it with her index finger. It was dewy and slick. She brought the finger to her mouth. She tasted. Salt. A little miracle. Sarah glanced at the thermometer above the sink: 126 degrees. Sarah took a sip from her canteen, collected her backpack, and went to the living room, where her only seat would be sand.
A desert quail flew off a cactus and landed on a yucca behind her. A skink poked its nose, then its head, then its whole brown and lime lined body out of the sand. It scooted across the terrain and disappeared into a different sand hole yards away. From Sarah’s right came the dry, maracas-like, bead-inside-paper sound of a rattlesnake giving warning. A second later it moved. It sunk its fangs into the thigh of a passing baby jackrabbit. At first the jackrabbit merely looked astonished, then its expression changed into a silent cringe of agony even while it pecked at the rattler with its nose and teeth. But the snake’s poisonous mouth stayed locked to the jackrabbit’s leg. It was no contest. The jackrabbit stumbled. The snake bit harder. The jackrabbit’s eyes clouded. It stopped fighting; it stopped pecking; it stopped jerking. It lay still. The rattler released its fangs; then, unhooking its jaw, expanded its mouth to a ghoulish size and began the slow process of swallowing the dead mammal whole.
Sarah checked her backpack. Knife. Matches. Compass. First aid kit. Sun hat. Salt pills. Topographical map. Emergency flares. Everything present and accounted for: what she needed. She felt much better, so much calmer now. After all, she had just spied dinner. For later, that is, when she was ready. She would stalk it through the windblown drifts. She would stand and wait hours, if necessary, for the crucial telltale signs of movement. She would not be scared by its noises. She would not be scared by its head. She would not be scared of its fangs. She would find it. She would fight it. She would kill it with her own knife in her own hand. Then she would skin the snake and carve it into chewy, evenly measured sections. She would fry the lean meat over an open fire, and enjoy it with sips of canteen water beneath a glittering canopy of stars.
John Vanderslice holds an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He lives in Conway, Arkansas where he teaches at the University of Central Arkansas. His fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Crazyhorse, Laurel Review, Southern Humanities Review, and South Carolina Review.
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