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Kendall

R.L. Ugolini

    Dr. Jorgovski glanced up at me from his camp chair, his elbows resting on his knees, fingers splayed in mid-gesture as he reached toward the small circle of students.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    I was late. Desert gravel crunched under my boots, the noise grinding against my skull in eddies of persistent abrasion, as wind erodes rock. I took the remaining seat, left waiting for me in this extemporaneous outdoor classroom.
    Yesterday, the eighth morning of a fourteen-day field trip, we woke at a campground a hundred miles away, but under the same barren sky – always under the same void – no answers would come from any heaven I knew.
    And the professor had started the day just like this, delivering a lecture that would only end when we popped tents in the hasty twilight.
    Jorgovski’s evolutionary geology class was a requirement for graduation. A fun course, they said. You’ll pass. No problem, they said.
    To the east, a white winter sun swelled on the horizon, lingering on the edge of anticipation and creation. Heat, light, energy – the promise of a new day. A mile down the empty plain, an anonymous shantytown still slept, dreaming of hope when there was none.
    So dawn greeted another nameless nothing.
    “Good morning, ah, Kellogg.” Jorgovski squinted into the sunrise. “There’s breakfast.”
    Kellogg?
    A fleece-covered elbow nudged me. Guillermo. “I think he means you, chica,” he whispered, smirking.
    But who was that? I didn’t feel much like myself. I played an unwilling host to one great aspiration, one driving imperative, over-riding all else.
    I shivered. Damp, sloppy air seeped through my clothes, sandwiching between layers intended to keep out the chill. I rubbed my hands together, my palms grating over tight, cracked skin. My fingernails were blue – the color of a dead baby’s lips. The high desert weather – its extremes of fire and ice – was aging me. I was twenty. I was eighty. Little more than a week, exposed and isolated, I felt broken. Used.
    The smell of bacon grease and muddy coffee thickened the air, attempting to civilize what could not be civilized. My stomach rolled. “I’m not hungry.”
    I leaned forward and clamped my head in my hands, squeezing, squeezing. My temples throbbed, my bones ached.
    Jorgovski cleared his throat. “Then, as I was saying, the events we’ve been looking at,” his sugar-sweet drone buzzed my ears, “...are perfect examples of adaptation or extinction – either you can compete, or you can’t. Yesterday, we saw a classic example of the Frasnian/Famennian horizon. As an extinction event, it was fairly rapid. Geologically speaking, no time at all. Kimble—”
    Me again. But not me. I looked up.
    “Describe for us one of the primary faunal indicators...”
    His question swam in dark, murky waters behind my eyes as my tired, frantic brain tried to parse the geo-jargon into words I could understand.
    “Kimball? Kimball, this class is pass-fail. Say something, anything – right now you can only improve on your grade.”
    Oh, God. I needed this class.
    “Think back. There was a particular subspecies of coral...” The timbre of his voice offered confidence I didn’t deserve.
    I dredged my memory for the names of tiny, shelly bugs, four hundred million years dead.
    On Guillermo’s other side, John shifted in his chair. “Reef communities consisting of—”
    Jorgovski cut him off with a wave. “Let’s see if Kimble can get this one.” His eyes sparked and he steepled his hands, tapping them against his chin.
    I remembered the coral – frozen in time in a limestone so brittle, so sharp, it had cut my little finger. Sucking away the blood, clinging to the unstable hillside, listening to Jorgovski lecture. An entire slope of coral preserved where they grew – a death assemblage.
    And I remembered the way he described the ancient sky, a seductive tropic atmosphere, in contrast to the cold void above me. The hot Paleozoic sun, so near, so intense, warming the shallow seas.
    Drowning. Suddenly, I was drowning in air. Short, labored breaths rasped my lungs and my hands pressed my chest.
    Too much time had passed. I shot a glance at Jorgovski. In that instant, I saw the fire in his eyes wink out, leaving only the glint of the winter sun.
    “John.” He nodded. “You were saying about reef communities—?”
    I was going to fail. I was going to be sick.
    No. A laugh shook my aching sides. Kellogg, or Kimball, or Kimble would fail.
    I had become a nameless nothing.
    I listened as John explained. Words pierced the shadows of my mind – “climate change raising ocean temperatures,” “survival of the fittest,” “eat or be eaten.” I ruminated every word as I tried learn. Yes, yes. The answer was clear now. It was clear yesterday, too.
    But in a moment, it would all be gone again.
    What was wrong with me? I didn’t know myself anymore.
    Yesterday, sitting sidesaddle on a steep talus slope, picking apart thin, friable layers of slate, looking for microfauna...I’d felt the Earth spin, like a rug pulled out from under me. Base instinct flattened me against the rock, and I grasped for purchase, sure I’d be flung into space.
    Had no one else felt it?
    “Good, John.” Jorgovski stood and stretched. “Now, then. Today, we’ll collect Devonian shale to run isotopic separations back on campus. But, that’s after lunch. I have a treat for us this morning.”
    My rusty joints flaked with each step as I helped load gear into the Rover. The finish on the back of the vehicle rippled like cellulite on an old woman – pocks and dimples from the occasional rocks locals threw at us. We weren’t the government they hide from in these hills, but they had no way of knowing.
    “Grab your towels and follow me.” We hiked single-file beside the crumbling blacktop, bearing toward two freestanding concrete bunkers a couple hundred yards away. Our heels kicked up half-hearted plumes of dust in the still air. Cobbles lacquered in brown desert varnish rolled under our tread, exposing tender underbellies of bloody orange.
    “Hot springs, guys. One of the best, and a little known secret.” Jorgovski directed the group toward a building with the word “MEN” stenciled on the door in black paint.
    “Professor?” Guillermo arched an eyebrow in my direction.
    “Ah.” Jorgovski started, as if noticing me for the first time. “Er, the women’s bathhouse is that way. Have a good soak.” With a dismissing wave, he and my male classmates disappeared inside.
    I was alone.
    I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my windbreaker. My stomach felt warm through the microfiber lining.
    No. I was not alone.
    My fingers curled around my cell phone and I scanned the horizon for signs of a tower. Maybe today I’d get a signal. I wiped lint from the display and called my boyfriend back on campus.
    Nothing. Of course. I wavered between disappointment and relief as I pocketed the phone. I had to try, but what would I have said if I’d gotten through? “Hey, it’s me”? Who was that?
    Outside the building labeled “WOMEN”, fresh tracks of a small animal, maybe a feral dog, cut across my path – an earthy reminder that I was far from home.
    I paused.
    High walls surrounded the bathhouse but the structure had no roof. Steam escaped skyward in little puffs, carrying muted echoes of mermaids at their bath.
    There were women inside. Locals, most like.
    I groaned, not in the mood to soak in a communal spring with suspicious strangers. I felt tender. Soft. Like extinct microfauna – like a tube worm in a school of hungry, armor-plated fish.
    But the smell of moisture, the silky feel of humidity, teased away my reluctance and I entered. The anteroom was austere –three showerheads and one lone bench. I sat and unlaced my hiking boots. In the next room, voices hushed.
    I undressed slowly, then forced myself under the icy, biting drill of pressurized water pumped in from archaic municipal lines. Desert dust sluiced from me, pooling around my feet. My arms burned an angry, frosty pink.
    Clean, or, clean enough, I grabbed my towel and made for the warm inner chamber, my bare feet slapping in shallow puddles.
    The bath was a perfect oval, the cement painted a cheerful, sanitary turquoise. Concrete benches had been molded into the sides. Pipes controlled the underground hot spring, forcing sterile regularity upon nature. Wild, sulphury water fumed in the pool, captivated, trapped.
    On the far end, three wrinkled women bunched together, mid-conversation, as if crouching over a cauldron. Ancient sirens. Water witches.
    The middle one, an ancient Madonna, a desert matriarch, looked up and waved me into the room with a claw-like hand. “Don’t be shy.” She spoke slowly, lilting. Her voice shimmered.
    The others, one tall, one small, turned their attention to where I stood and I was knocked back by the weight of three pairs of coyote-eyes. I could almost feel them sucking my marrow, gnawing my bones.
    My arms crossed over my breasts – a pointless gesture, considering. I hunched forward and scurried into the pool. The water felt thicker than it should – heavy, rich.
    A shallow sea. An unwilling womb.
    Minerals, I told myself. I was buoyant. I let my arms float at my sides and avoided eye contact. But I saw them in my peripheral vision. I watched them.
    “Como se llama, child?”
    In the borderlands between somewhere and nowhere, scraps of blended Spanish and English spoke more of circumstance than ancestry. The Coyote Mother’s carved cheekbones, dark hair, and sunset-colored skin hinted at a proud people long gone. Those eyes, though. Those eyes didn’t seem to belong anywhere on Earth.
    “Me llamo Helen,” I said, adopting her Spanglish as my own.
    My words echoed, lies upon lies pounding my eardrums. Helen was my mother’s name. Why it came to my lips, I wondered – why my name did not, I knew.
    In the far end of the pool, frenzied whispers devoured my reply like piranhas feeding. Sibilant speculation drowned out all else, then suddenly withered.
    “That is your vehicle?” Her hungry gaze licked the eastern wall. “The one on the edge of town?”
    “Yes. Well, it’s the university’s.”
    The old woman blinked once, then smiled, her amber teeth small and sharp. Her spine straightened and water beaded down sun-furrowed skin cleaving tired breasts. “Then you are not the municipales.”
    I shook my head. “I’m a student. My class is on a field trip. Geology.” The explanation died on my tongue.
    “Ah.” She looked at the women flanking her. “Estudiante.”
    A patina of sun and time lacquered their skin, perhaps making them sisters, in nurture, if not by nature. But there the similarities ended. To her left, the tall one. Her puckered skin hung from long arms and her eyes almost crossed over a sharp beak – a lost condor. And on the Coyote Mother’s right, the small one. Her skin plumped and flushed under a dark fuzz that pelted her cheeks – a skittish hare.
    Backed by her pack of familiars, the Coyote Mother’s glassy eyes reflected a keen predatory excitement. “Tell us about our hills.”
    I felt small and distinctly mammalian under her gaze. A fingerling of cold water probed the geothermal current and I drew my knees to my chest. “Well—” Where to begin?
    “Begin at the beginning.”
    How—? Mind readers. Desert spirits. No. Women, plain and simple.
    The Coyote Mother clucked her tongue. “Hija, what is it? The teacher work you too hard?”
    “No. No, he doesn’t — he’s been...kind and patient.”
    “Then, you’ve learned. You can explain to us abuelitas, surely.”
    “In the beginning...” No, not that way. I patted my cheeks, wetting them. My fingernails were pink and pliable now, blood coursing just beneath the surface. The sound of my pulse rushed in my ears like a far away tide.
    “We’re studying Devonian rugose coral reef communities to learn about extinction events...” The words rolled off my tongue and I relished the mouth-feel. I was waking – warm water was melting me from the inside out, chipping the ice from the frozen gears of memory.
    Blank bewilderment stared back at me. The same look Jorgovski must have seen on my face this morning.
    “‘Extinction’?” The Coyote Mother’s tongue flicked across her lips.
    I nodded. I encouraged. “Extinction — when a thing no longer exists in this world.”
    “‘Thing’?” The Condor clipped the word in her teeth.

    “Life,” I said. “When life is extinguished.”

    “No hope?” The Hare fingered her throat. “None at all?”

    From nowhere, tears – melt water, glacial runoff – blurred my vision and slopped down my face. Climatic change – warming – I reminded myself, can cause extinction events. “None.”
    “Why, this ‘extinction’ makes you triste, makes you sad?” The Coyote Mother bent her aging frame and leaned toward me.
    Drops spattered from my chin. Tiny nothings, on a long journey back to some warm, shallow sea. Just like those microscopic bugs. Nothing more than larva. Embryonic.
    Why should something so small matter?
    I bowed my head. “It’s just a shame. The helplessness of it all. The pointlessness of it.” My hand, already pruning in the hot water, smeared away my tears. “The things—”
    The Condor sucked a breath, feathers ruffled.
    “Fine – the life forms, then – became biologically irrelevant.”
    The women exchanged a look, but said nothing.
    “Listen, they were unable to compete. Survival of the fittest?”
    “Ah.” The Coyote Mother nodded. “Yes. Of this I have heard.”
    “A pity.” The Hare sighed, her shoulders hunched.

    “Yes,” cried the Condor. “Yes.”

    The Coyote Mother clawed the air, signaling for quiet. “All of a sudden, nothing?”
    “Well, yes. No. The events sometimes took millions of years. But, geologically speaking, no time at all.”
    As if I’d uttered magic words, suddenly, the spell hanging over the bathhouse lifted. The water calmed until its glassy surface reflected the sun now rising over the eastern wall.
    The Condor and the Hare stood, water sheeting back into the pool. Without the mineral-rich buoyancy, their bodies betrayed them. Empty breasts sagged, buttocks rippled. A Cesarean scar, thick, blush-colored – the size of a fat night crawler – was frozen as if locked in amber, in an eternal climb up the Condor’s abdomen. The two women hobbled through the anteroom door.
    I was alone. And not alone. The Coyote Mother stayed behind. She eyed me, lips peeling back from her canines. “Nine weeks, then?”
    “Nine days.” Five to go.
    “No, no, no. Much longer than that.”
    “I don’t know what you mean.” Lies upon lies.
    “Don’t you? I wonder.” She clucked her tongue, her gaze darting, refracting with the water.
    From across the barrens, bawdy masculine laughter penetrated the small warm sanctuary.
    My own reflexive modesty pulled my hands to cover, not my tender breasts, not my thatch of hair, but my quickening belly.
    With a hiss, my companion weighed my reaction. “One of them?”
    “No!” God help me, no.
    “Mmm.” The woman let her legs float, her wrinkled toes breaching the surface. “Water, hot as this, isn’t safe...you could lose it.”
    My skin was silky, slithery. I could dissolve here...devolve. I could lose myself. My fingers riffled the water as I considered the Coyote Mother’s words.
    “Nature’s way, querida. Come,” she said, pulling herself from the pool. “Let’s go. You’ve had enough.”
    I followed the old woman into the shower. The cold returned to my limbs as I stood under the punishing spray, but I waited. After a moment, I cast a glance at the door — no lingering shadows. The Coyote Mother was gone, without a trace, as if she never was.
    Wind blew through the bathhouse, whispering in flute tones, bringing again the raucous laughter of men. Then a voice, just outside the walls. “Kimball? Are you in there? Meet us back at the vehicle in thirty.”
    Jorgovski.
    I drew a breath to yell my name through the open roof, to correct him, but let it go. I knew who I was.
    Instead, I tried my cell again. No answer.
    Wrinkled hands rubbed fleeting heat into my arms, thighs. The skin on my hips was cold, but my belly was warm.
    Warm like the spring.
    I knew what I needed to do. My head no longer ached, my mind was free of fog. I was ready to take on Jorgovski’s class – extinction events were simple matters of climate change.
    My bare feet padded across the cement floor and I stole back into the poolroom. The answers were there in the warm, shallow sea. Just a few more minutes.
    Geologically speaking, no time at all.

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