Lost Lives

1

I was on the ground again and saw things amid the monotony: land formations, bodies of water, vegetation, and human behavior very much of this earth, but which seemed not to be, because it was impossible to verify the existence of any of it as I sped past. I dismissed what I saw as material from dreams, even though I was alert and awake.

Those visions led me to a detour, because I noticed that standing between myself and my destination was that very lake, or sea, which I had seen from the airplane window. It was my chance now to view it up close, just as the lone, circling car I glimpsed from the air had done.

It was turning out to be more of a journey than I bargained for, though. It was my mistake to assume anything this remote would be tailored to suit my convenience. I should not have been surprised to find that the road was unpaved, or that it wound on gritty, icy dirt across a distance that felt much greater than the odometer suggested. The high wall of the Sierras, more imposing when viewed from their eastern side, was about to block out the sun in a few hours. Once the shadows of the mountains fell over the valley, everything would freeze over. It would be dangerous to drive on the ice at night.

I was lucky that when I brought my old sedan into the parking lot, it was still daylight, even though it was hard to tell what time it was and how much light I had left, for there was a kind of sameness under the sun, wherever it was in the gray sky. After I put on my boots, I left the car, the only one in the lot, and headed down the trail, which was well marked at first, but grew vaguer as I approached the lake. No one else was around; my boots crunched against the layer of fresh snow. Tufa spires, formed in prehistory when the lakebed extended this far out, appeared in isolation at first, then in clusters as I moved closer to the water. Soon they formed a kind of maze.

The walls of spires parted slowly, but the arrival to the shore was abrupt. Suddenly it spread out before me. The lake was recognizable as the one I had seen from the plane, but here it was not just some passing sight. It was not going anywhere, and its alien quality was even more apparent up close, the water iridescent with a seemingly silken texture, which proved real upon being touched, soapy, its taste alkaline-bitter. The caw-cawing of gulls diving for flies echoed in the distance, and bursts of wind lapped at the waves. The wan sun, visible now, rested in a haze just above the massive ridge.

It did seem more like a sea. Crossing it would put me on another shore, but would not bring me closer to anywhere I would want to go, only further out toward that void that could not possibly be all this country was filled with. At least I knew now I could get there from here, if I ever wanted to come back.

Snow began to fall. In the way the flakes caught the light, I was reminded why I had driven so far to this out-of-the-way region. There were mountains just across the highway. The snow from that time fell in this way too. I realized it was more than a resemblance: it was identical to that snowfall. I could see it out there in the distance, as if through a telescope, where the highway curved toward the summit pass. The event was still taking place somewhere in a recursion, the distance between here and there the difference between now and then, the way we see the stars.

I turned and headed back toward the parking lot. A deer appeared on the trail, its movements more spirit than beast. It seemed to have sprung out of the earth and glided across the ground before blending back into the scrub. Further down I caught sight of a carcass lying at the base of one of the tufa spires. I did not know if it was the same animal and did not slow down to try to identify it. As I got into my car, the opening and slamming of the door was the only human sound between the ground and the sky. I veered back onto the icy road. The path out felt much faster as the car accelerated, and before I knew it, I was back on the main highway.

2

On a map this region was colored beige, bordered by green-shaded contour lines meant to represent the eastern edge of the northern Sierras or southern Cascades. This side was the rain shadow. Water arrived without rivers or lakes, so what rain fell only seeped into the playa, and what flowed mostly flowed underground. From the road, the land seemed abstractly composed of geometric shapes, so it assumed the same cartographic character it had from the air, and probably contained off-limits military or space reserves. I did know a thing or two about fictional geographies. Growing up in Taiwan, we had maps of mainland China drummed into our heads and were tested on them, maps that were more a matter of wishful political thinking than anything real. I had still never traveled there, despite knowing it better than anywhere else in the world, and with no cultural markers around, this could have been China too, one of its wuxia-novel deserts lit by Buddhist sunrises and traversed by white-clad female assassins riding camelback.

How many of those lost worlds were left to us? Of those not rendered inaccessible by government operations, there now seemed fewer and fewer, cut off by lack of roads, impenetrable forests and waterways, or, as in this case, simple distance. There were no clear landmarks in or out of this zone, topographically speaking, except maybe from the south. One could still head that way unimpeded, without much idea of where one was going, only to be eventually swallowed up by the southwestern sun.

Now there was a sudden transition from high desert plateau to pine forest. The highway moved in parallel with the appearance of water, which, once on the other side of the range, quickened through volcanic plains.

I probably should not have been driving in those mountains as the sun went down. At least the skies had cleared, as had the highway. Still, I had to be wary of ice, as I could tell, even from inside the car, that the temperature was falling. The forest, sparse at first, grew dense, until trees hemmed in both sides of the road. From a cliff turn, I could see them blanketing whole mountainsides, spreading across the northern third of the state. Eventually they thinned out as the car descended into a narrow valley filled by a small town, built lengthwise along what looked like still-used railroad tracks. Now on a local road, which seemed to be the main street, I passed through a downtown, although no one was there. The highway I wanted was probably not far, but it was getting dark, so I followed signs that took me back out of town into the hills. About a mile along the track, past an old but well-preserved depot, was a neon-lit railcar diner, next door to a hotel on a bluff overlooking a ravine.

The sign said to check in at the diner, so I headed to the railcar instead of the main structure of the hotel. The cash register indicated it was doubling as the hotel front desk, but after waiting a few minutes for someone to show, and realizing I had not eaten since Reno, I moved into the dining room. Heads belonging to the only people I had seen in this town turned. I did a quick scan: I was the only nonwhite person there. I sat down at the counter to an unobstructed view of the grill, run by the diner’s sole cook and server, who was also doubling, or was it tripling, as the hotel desk clerk, and ordered the meatloaf with brown sauce. When things slowed down for a moment, the cook-server-clerk caught her breath, leaning a freckled, sunburnt elbow on the counter next to me. This gave me the chance to ask if she was the person to talk to if I wanted to check in for the night.

“You have a reservation?” she asked in a smoker’s rasp.

“No, but the sign says there’s vacancy.”

“You’re in luck. Finish up, and we’ll take care of you when you settle the check.”

“By the way, this might be a weird question, but where am I?”

“You’re in California, hon,” she said, her tone changing to one of concern. “That phone of yours doesn’t tell you?”

“No signal.”

“Get a good night’s sleep and we’ll figure it out tomorrow. Trust me.”

Considering the lack of other options, the food was better than it had any right to be, or I must have been hungrier than I thought. Honest deals still existed, I supposed, if you knew where to look or were lucky enough to stumble upon them.

I checked in with my car information and a security deposit, then went back to the parking lot. The temperature was now frigid, and the scent of pine filled the thin night air. A group of goateed men in flannel shirts had gathered at the edge of the bluff, drinking beer with their backs turned to me, except for one, who nodded my way. Was that fear I saw in his eyes, or was it only a reflection of my own? The danger of being a woman traveling alone in these parts had occurred to me a long time ago, but as I grew older, I began to wonder if the true threat in these situations was in fact myself. They seemed more like locals than tourists, and I was the one disturbing their everyday reality, the unknown in their stunted, hermetic worlds. Back in the diner, I had heard the sound of the train. Maybe they were the station maintenance crew. I kept my distance and headed to the other side of the lot, toward the sound of running water.

I could not see anything, but down a gradual slope the pavement gave way to dirt. As I stepped onto ground that was soft with pine needles, the sound of gurgling water filled my ears. My eyes grew accustomed to the dark and made out the glistening surface. There was no moon out tonight, or it was blocked by the trees, so the water must have just been refracting the ambient light. It was too dim to see to the other side, which might have been no more than a short hop away, but the way the darkness mimicked the slow current, the creek seemed to stretch out indefinitely.

By the time I headed back up, the men had disappeared, leaving beer bottles lined neatly upright on the pavement. Maybe they had gone into the diner or the hotel, or wherever they bunked down for the night.

The room was in decent condition and well furnished. Importantly for me it included a desk, but did not seem to have been dusted in years. To let in some air, I opened the window, and the room filled with the smell of deep woods and the sounds of chirping bugs. Before I even cleaned myself up, I sat at the desk in order to get some semblance of the words down before I forgot them all. I must have left my own pen back in the hotel room in Reno, but the complimentary one from this room would do just as well. I had almost filled up an entire composition book: only a few blank lines remained, and I did not have another one with me. Luckily, there was a writing pad to go with the pen.

The words caught up to myself. I ran out of boxes, each one reserved for a single character, before I switched to the pad. I managed to get down every sentence I had been carrying in my head since I was in the car. How did they get there, I wondered, and stay there?

I put down the pen and listened to the silence.

The hint of a lag was deliberate. This was the record of a mind in touch with itself, yet at a remove: observing the observing.

Alvin Lu's new novel, Daydreamers, is forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2.

Published July 15 2024