The Pentecostal girl spends all night talking to the electric wheel in the sky. The sky turns from black to blue while the wheel spins its yarns of reckless wisdom and the secret curvature of time, telling her to board an airplane in Oaxaca and get off again in Jerusalem. So she does. She walks the plotline of her favorite good book, falling into every last hole, longing for voices to pick her apart. One of them tells her to go cry out in the wilderness and she listens. Jordan Valley. A desert one thousand feet below sea level. The lowest place on earth. She takes an unmarked trail with no expectation of ever being seen again. This is where you find her. You’ve been hiking the same path in the opposite direction for hours, attempting your own kind of communion, a wannabe beatnik on a research trip, writing a novel two thousand years old full of black scrolls and gladii. What you’re fretting about at the moment, however, is the misfortune of meeting zero ladies in all this time abroad. Just the other night you attached yourself to a cadre of Brazilian wildmen staying at your hostel and together set out on a tipsy tour of Tel Aviv discotheques and even then the sun came up on you all sober and lonely, looking for falafel. Clearly a statistical anomaly is underway, you think. You’re WTFing the fates when you round a bend and see her sitting there on a boulder by the trailside, a glistening mummering mirage, practicing her tongues. Nearby a pack of ibex with their trumpet ears chew on rocks while the Dead Sea wavers in valley-bottom below. You stop midstride. She has no water and not the right shoes. Neither of you can stop smiling. “Are you even real?” she says, a question you have never been asked before. You are all too happy to lead her home in the obvious direction. “You’re good at this,” she says, impressed with where you put your feet. Two hours later most of your clothes are gone while you float in each other’s arms in water as thick as olive oil, in water as warm as a heart. The Dead Sea is so salty you could fall asleep while swimming and never drown, so salty you could walk across its page. You’ve never imagined this combination of sensory deprivation and complete overload, floating effortlessly embraced in dead water the same temperature as every living body. You can’t tell where you end and she begins. This is when you both make the same innocent mistake: you rub your eyes. The effect is nothing less than being pepper-sprayed, than getting electrocuted in the face. First you laugh, then you cry. The tighter you squeeze your eyelids, the tighter you squeeze each other, bawling around each other’s necks. Who knows how long you drift blind like this in agony and delight? Eventually the entangled two of you are washed up onto shore by little rubber waves. When you’re finally able to open your eyes again, you smile and exchange names for the first time and then get up and rub shampoo on each other’s stomachs beneath the canted public shower. She has a bus to catch within the hour. For years you will imagine bringing her back to your hostel and fucking her loudly on your holyland mattress. Years after that you will be glad you didn’t. She said she had never floated with a boy before. You won’t forget how bad your eyes burned and how bright she was to cling to. There are answers in dreams to questions we haven’t even asked yet.
Dan Tremaglio is the author of two books of fiction, most recently the novel The Only Wolf Is Time. His stories have appeared in numerous publications, including F(r)iction, The Master’s Review, and The Collidescope, and three times been named a finalist for the Calvino Prize. He teaches creative writing and literature at Bellevue College outside Seattle and is an editor for the journal Belletrist.
Help us keep the daily stories coming with Patreon.
