| THE LORELEI SIGNAL |
.
| Written by Jennifer Rachel Baumer / Artwork by Marge Simon |
| Make a donation to this writer |
| City Limits |
Moonlight glinted off structural steel, points of light forming new constellations. Skeletal steel arms stretched
raw and heavy up toward vast and lightless Nevada skies. Even on the perimeter the city lights blocked the
stars, dropped them to nothing more than light reflected off industrial foundations of the new mall.
Mt. Rose Highway. State Route 431. Head east and the road passes through sage and pinion and wild
horses, up rock-strewn asphalt through hair-pin turns to Virginia City, home of the Comstock Lode and the
Territorial Enterprise, where Mark Twain lived and wrote and where every summer camels still race, a
preserved mining town hot and heavy with the smell of sage and the sleepy drone of crickets, where once,
heading back down into Reno, Jenna had nearly driven off the road when an eagle lifted up from the abyss
beyond the highway, gliding up on thermals, improbable as a dinosaur.
Head west, up Mt. Rose Highway, off the curving freeway exit onto the State Route, and the road runs past
the vacant sage and pine lot at the junction where last winter Jenna saw a coyote jogging over frozen
ground on a mist-cold Christmas morning as she and Ted drove out to his folks' in Washoe Valley. Head west
from that expanse of emptiness and there's Tahoe, pristine mountain lake known worldwide.
Home now of the raw, new, concrete and steel, piped-Muzak and Lexus-parking mall.
Lifestyle center. Not a mall. Mall was prosaic, old-fashioned. Not trendy enough. Not, maybe, rich enough for
the trade expected here on the east side of the Sierras. Tourists in Reno no longer had the dread two hour
trek over the mountain to the Mecca of Sacramento to shop; discretionary income could stay in Reno, Biggest
Little City in the World, such a great Lifestyle, Quality of Life, beautiful place to live with air quality and
affordable housing and employment opportunities, come one, come all. Come California. And it did. They did.
Jenna turned off the tired Honda, which gave a whimper and shuddered. There wasn't much to see yet. Just
steel, plunging upwards, foundations like slabs of city washed up in an inland sea, structural steel like a
sketchy outline of the buildings that would follow. A Dillard's, whatever that was. Pottery Barn. Another Home
Depot, surely there weren't enough yet to walk the entire city by going from Home Depot to Home Depot. All
of it upscale. All of it concrete and asphalt and that many more cars that much closer to Tahoe. More traffic,
more pollution, more people, more trash. Landscaped with grass, not natural to the area, the sage and
juniper ripped out because of people's allergies. Because they weren't pretty enough once the concrete and
asphalt and retail came.
She let her head drop back and stared up at the sky, but the stars weren't visible out here any longer.
A hot rush of anger filled her. Anger and pain at all the losses. At squirrels and rabbits, coyotes and scrub
jays, meadow larks and crows forced out, natural growth gone, dirt covered over so the city could expand
and the people who could afford it could shop and the city could petition for a Nordstrom's.
She hated the sick, twisting powerlessness, hated knowing tomorrow she'd drop back into Jenna Freelance
Writer, writing a business article on Retail in Nevada and interviewing Mr. Foothills Lifestyle Center developer
who was already back in Georgia planning assaults on other innocent communities across the country. No one
would listen. Even if they felt the loss of beauty and the essentials of Nevada, the good of the shoppers
outweighed the good of those who just wanted to see empty space and preferred the sound of wind off
Mount Rose to the sound of muzak, preferred the scent of sage to the smell of economy-boosting
discretionary income.
"Damn it." Her fists balled. She was out here alone in the night. Ted expected her home from critique group
soon, but not yet, and this was foolish. "I don't care." She bent, picked up a rock, hurled it and missed
everything and that made her even angrier. She shouted and threw handfuls of rocks, tiny useless sounds
against the steel supports as she raged into the desert-scented night: "Go home! We don't need you here.
Go home, go home, go home. Stop hurting us!"
Sharp pain against her calf brought her out of it. She'd run forward, stumbling, shouting incoherent threats to
nameless, ever-blameless corporations, there was never anyone to blame, economic authorities just did their
jobs, developers developed what the people wanted, what, at least, they said the people wanted, and no
one listened to animals, no one cared about the sound of the wind or the smells of a summer night.
She'd run up against a stab of Rebar poking up out of the fresh asphalt, bent at just the right angle to cut her
leg open. Moonlight lit the blood on her skin, through weave of sandal, down across the tar and asphalt; a
thin red line dripping down onto the dirt past the Rebar. Jenna stared, as if something had changed.
When she stood up, they were there. Three figures stood on the unnatural ridge of hillside torn out of the
earth by the creation of the parking lot. Tall against the background of trees, three figures, one woman, two
men, and Jenna should leave, go home before she found out they were South Reno 13, who liked to tag dead
smack in the center of Reno, which meant either they had no sense of direction or that they were expanding
their territory, she didn't need to know which and Ted was going to kill her if he found out about this, it was
stupid, being out here...
But there was no menace. No feeling of harm from the three who stood against the moonlight. Next instant,
they were gone.
The Honda started without protest. The drive home was quiet. The air smelled like sage.
* * *
"How was critique group?" Ted's attention came and went in three or four minute intervals. He muted
commercials, watched local news with rapt attention. "What'd they think of the story?"
Jenna shrugged. "Metaphor."
Ted grinned at her. "You told me that before you left. Could've stayed here and had glorious spaghetti with
me."
Jenna made a face. "I've had your spaghetti and glorious is definitely giving it spin."
Ted remained un-phased. "If you'd stayed, you could have made something other than spaghetti. Which story
was it?"
On the TV, happy peppy people danced about low fat fast food, living fantasy lives. Jenna dragged her eyes
away from the spectacle. "The one about the desert, and the new mall."
The dislike in her voice was thick and flat, but she'd gotten Ted's full attention. He grinned. "I think we've got
that account," he said as if it was something she'd been waiting to hear. He waited for her delight.
Jenna shut her mouth and stared at him. He knew how she felt about Progress with a capital P, progress that
advanced nothing but greed. It just didn't seem to matter to him. As if he thought it was all an act on her
part. Or as if of course she'd change her beliefs when it came to him.
I wish I could, she thought. She wanted to believe someone understood. She wanted to believe she was
close to someone, that somewhere she fit.
* * *
Ted snuggled close, murmured something incoherent that sounded like banana cake, and fell asleep, arms
around her. Jenna stared out the bedroom window at the old apple tree picked out in moonlight while the
evening's events played behind her eyes, muddling themselves together as sleep edged nearer, until she sat
with the other writers from her critique group in plastic chairs at metal tables on the steel and concrete piers
of the new mall and the desert washed up around them in waves, dirt and stones and scratchy sage washing
up to their feet and away again.
"The premise is interesting, but it's only a literary device, one's own power of mind effecting change," Diane
said, but Diane hated fantasy and hated that Jenna sold so much of it.
"I like the construct of the mall as enemy," Sydney said. "But of course you're just resistant to change and it
doesn't work as story."
"I think you are lecturing," one of the editors of a major science fiction magazine said, and she had to be
dreaming, there were no editors in critique group. "It's a polemic, not a story, and it just didn't grab me, alas."
Jenna stared at them. They were hard to see because the night was so dark and all the stars had gone out.
"I think you should stop this one and write something else," they all said together and now somehow they all
looked exactly like the developer of the Foothills Lifestyle Center—you've never even seen him–and they
stood, threatening, but Jenna looked past them at the hillside and suddenly they were inconsequential.
Three beings stood on the artificial berm, limned in moonlight, right as everything else was wrong.
One female, two males. One summer-brown cottontail, one coyote, one crow. Desert creatures. She waited
for the big horn sheep, but it didn't come.
They ran late the next morning, which was normal. Woke after both alarms with no memory of hearing either.
Which was also normal. Ted went off to another day in PR land and Jenna went running through their old tree-
shaded neighborhood and then over-caffeinated in an attempt to be ready for her phone interview with the
developer.
The developer and his PR person.
"Why do PR people do conference calls with writers?" she asked Ted repeatedly and he'd give her a different
answer every time. Because we don't trust writers. Because we don't trust media. Because we don't trust the
CEO.
It seemed to come down to a lack of trust.
This PR person whispered answers to Jenna's questions and the developer parroted them back: about local
contractors and subs, which made the developer tangent away into how lifestyle centers employed people in
downtrodden, retail-insufficient towns. Jenna, who thought that malls needed employees anyway, found this
an insufficient example of community involvement and asked for more. The developer said he'd get specifics
and Jenna heard the PR person panicking and turning pages rapidly, looking for documentation of good deeds.
Uh huh, she thought.
Jenna had questions from her editor for the article: acreage, square-footages, anchor stores, projected
economic impact. Why the developer saw fit to pick on Reno, though phrased as what made Reno a target
market, emphasis on target.
The developer didn't want to answer questions. He wanted to complain. That Reno was under-served in retail
opportunities, which Jenna privately thought should make him happy. That there wasn't enough land for retail
opportunities within the city. When Jenna asked what was occupying the land it turned out to be other retail
that had already been opportunistic. When she pointed out that maybe they weren't under-served, then, the
developer changed the subject. He complained that labor was hard to find (because in the wake of the
housing boom, everyone was now building retail, Jenna pointed out, and the PR guy whispered and the
developer charged on angrily.)
He complained that landscaping was a nightmare, that it was impossible to find water here for all their grass.
Jenna choked on startled laughter and said it was, after all, a desert.
The developer asked what else she needed to know.
Why us?
Jenna asked for a description of the lifestyle center and was suddenly drowning in talk about how 700 acres
would have piped Muzak, outdoor dining, grass, flowers, trees, drive-up access to stores.
"Drive up access?"
"All the stores are approached from the exterior," the developer said. "It's all outdoors, a actually, campus
style buildings."
Jenna thought for an instant, bit her tongue, and said it anyway. "So it's a strip mall?"
For an instant the developer only sputtered, then, "You listen to me," he said but the line seemed to go dead
and abruptly the PR guy was there, no whispering but loud and upset, something about Foothills Lifestyle
Center and Reno and she thought she heard things she couldn't have before the line went dead again but
just before she said "Hello?" the developer said out of the dead line, "What have you done?" and the phone
slammed down.
"Testy," Jenna said, but already the pull was on her, like a sickness, something dragging her from her desk,
she had her keys, her notebook, her purse, hurry, just hurry, just hurry.
* * *
The freeway entrance was blocked off. Detour signs directed her down Kietzke Lane where she did not want
to go. Jenna turned onto Vassar and came to a complete stop just before the old staid post office.
July sun simmered off midmorning asphalt and all the cars piled up together where drivers had abandoned
them. Jenna stalled the Honda, cut the motor and stepped onto the burning asphalt to gape with the crowd.
Across from the post office the federal administration building had recently grown up, cutting down 50 year
old trees, scrub grass, rubble, squirrels, birds and the occasional urban raccoon. Only now it was gone again,
a rubble of glass and framing supports, flat as if a bomb had hit it. The woman next to Jenna kept saying,
"Terrorist attack," into her cell phone but Jenna didn't think so. The building looked as if it had been—shoved
up, off the earth, not exploded down into it.
She watched a blue belly lizard crawl up out of the wreckage and stand puffing its sides, purple in the
emergency lights. No one around her saw it, or cared. Voices filled the morning air, the sun simmered. Sirens
wailed, drew closer, others continued past. The police roped off the scene, the falling building and the rubble
and the lizard—and the green.
She ducked her head to see past the crowd, past the cop who spread his arms, shooing everyone back as if
they were geese or chickens. There was green, growing up out of the falling building, like sage or the tops of
trees, and beside the leaves and branches, a human arm poked up, waving feebly.
Jenna spun, hands to mouth, stomach heaving. All around her people exclaimed and pressed forward,
pushing closer as Jenna struggled to get past them and out. Away.
Of course there were people in there, what did you think?
The Honda started and there was a hole in the traffic around it, enough room to get out of the snarl of cars
and back on the street.
Ted didn't answer his cell, it just rang over to voice mail. Jenna tossed her own phone in the passenger's
seat, and drove, fast, toward the new mall, the hurry still dragging her, the panic she'd heard in the
developer's voice.
* * *
Everywhere at the crossroads, steel had fallen, concrete cracked. Jenna abandoned the Honda half a mile up
Mount Rose at an old grocery-anchored shopping center and even then getting close meant getting past
sheriff's deputies and flashing lights.
Her progress was sure-footed. She was as confident moving across the sage and scree-covered hillside
outside the mall as other people were helpless and flailing. She was in her element, same as she ever was in
the desert, without others.
Midday summer sun colored everything flat hot white, unreal and overexposed. Jenna slipped between the
crowd and headed for shouting whenever she heard it, using altercations to pass distracted sheriffs. She
dodged past hands struck out to catch and stop her and wriggled free of someone who actually caught the
back of her t-shirt. The air was full of voices, reporters swearing, cameramen muttering about feeds, small
voices she couldn't make out but for their jubilance and celebration.
Closer and closer, she saw only people, no mall, only the shifting crowd and flashing lights.
Because there was no mall.
It was gone.
Vertigo hit her, so hard she stumbled, one hand out for balance but there was nothing and no one to grab
and she fell to one knee, sickness vomiting up inside her at what she couldn't be seeing.
Crossroads. Two hundred acres of sage and pinion where she'd seen the coyote on Christmas morning.
Jenna gagged. Nobody came near her. Over the roaring in her ears she could hear the crackle of police radios,
people screaming into cell phones, reporters arguing. And the voices again, clearer, and closer.
Where the concrete and steel had been, the ground grew up, unnatural as the carved-out hillside had been,
as if overnight the desert had come in and raised the foundation. Reclaimed—itself. Destroyed and covered
over the intruder as the mall had overcome the desert.
"Are you all right?" someone asked.
Jenna nodded but couldn't look away. Someone helped her to her feet. "What do you think?" the man asked.
"I don't know." Her voice sounded dry as the desert. Ancient.
Voices. We're here.
"What?"
He hadn't spoken, looked at her strangely. "Bulldozers, maybe?"
She nodded. "Must be." Impossible. That would leave tracks. She wanted him to move away, be quiet. Let me
think.
"I just don't see how they did it," he said to someone else.
What have you done? The snarl in the developer's voice, she couldn't remember his name, suddenly, just The
Developer, had to have it in her notes, didn't she? "What have you done?"
"Who are you?" someone behind her asked. "Are you press? Because I can tell you everything, I saw it all..."
"No, excuse me, I'm not, I have to go..." She pressed back through the crowd that parted around her like
tide. Like sage in the wind. Voices, press, police, people. We are here. We've come. Joyous voices, like
something good had happened.
Before she reached the far edge of the crowd, before she could make a break for her car, she heard the rising
susurrus of voices: someone caught. Someone buried. A body. Limbs.
No.
What have you done?
A cry caught in her throat.
At the edge of the crowd, farthest point away from her, three figures unnoticed by the crowd: coyote, crow,
hare.
* * *
This time Ted answered on the second ring. He didn't hear the tears in her voice. He never did.
"I can't talk." His voice was rushed and frantic. She heard him fumble for something on his desk and the
phone clattered down, sharp and hard. He was back an instant later. "Something's happened at the
townhouses we've been doing PR for on Moana, it sounds like—yes, okay, I'm coming—Jen, I'll call you back..."
Gone, the silent, nothing-there of a gone call before she could say anything, Jenna's mind still reeling and no,
not again, but she hated those townhouses, someone's idiotic idea to take down 50 year old cottonwoods on
a vast empty lot, beautiful place that looked rural in the heart of downtown Reno, take all that beauty and
slice and hack it into cookie cutter condo town homes side by side like urban nightmares and not a tree in
sight.
She closed her eyes and shivered in the too-hot car, and thought of the arms that had reached up through
the rubble of the admin building, body bags, fallen concrete and steel and people's lives.
And? The voice indistinct. Could be imagination, that voice, but soft, like the voices on the site of the mall, like
the voices half a mile down Mount Rose where everyone still gathered around the mystery there.
And. Small voices, unheard. Small creatures, caught in the trap of too many people, too many in-fill projects
and why should anyone object to utilizing a vacant lot, surely that was better than expanding even further
into the desert, wasn't it good stewardship?
But there's no more water there than anywhere else, Jenna thought. No more room. And what makes you more
important than an urban raccoon, a small rabbit born in-city, a squirrel looking for a tree, not somebody's damn
balcony or a federal administration building's parking lot.
What have you done? the developer had demanded.
What have I done?
Why couldn't she remember his name?
She started the Honda and drove windingly, slowly, unwillingly toward Moana Lane.
* * *
The trees angled out from the roofs of the town homes, thrust gnarled, flinty branches through shattered
windows, forced roofs askew. Thick with summer leaves, the trees towered even taller than she remembered,
well above the two story townhouses, and they had shot upwards, fast and angry, growing before anyone
could react or come to terms with the trees reappearing and get out of the way.
Bodies hung skewered and broken from the branches, impaled, bleeding. Whatever happened had happened
fast, and not intentionally. The trees had simply grown, taken the space they needed, fulfilled their own
needs. The handful of people killed by their need had been no more marked than a nest of rabbits in an in-fill
lot a developer had a need to turn into overpriced town homes.
Jenna didn't look away. Her vision clouded and ached with the deaths and her hands curled tight around the
steering wheel until it actually creaked and gave, ever so slightly, an indent of her palms and fingerprints left
behind, a mystery for the police when they finished this aching, impossible day and began to wonder what
had happened to the woman driving the Honda.
It took her over four hours to walk the ten miles between Moana and the crossroads at Mount Rose. She
wandered through residential neighborhoods, feeling the pull of old homes, established trees towering, roses
blooming, not indigenous maybe, but there long enough, no longer a shock, no longer raw upheaval.
She left the neighborhoods for the hot, tar-sticky, midday sauna of South Virginia Street, car lots, computer
stores, chain restaurants, the old, not-good-enough-anymore mall and past neighborhood centers beyond it,
bookstores and coffee shops, concrete and freeway exits. Further and further the city stretched beyond its
boundaries, the road continuing over what had been farmland. She passed still vacant fields, dotted with For
Sale signs, zoned for casinos, zoned for new money, new people. Her feet burned on asphalt. Her skin
burned from greed and covetousness and maybe, sometimes, from a hint of evil.
Cars passed her, shimmering heat, exhaust visible as the sun sat high overhead in the July sky, southwest,
blinding, promising, a part of what was desert, what was home.
* * *
She reached the crossroads near six. Her cell had shrilled repeatedly along the way and largely she ignored
it. The calls hadn't made much sense, editors demanding stories she had never been assigned; Ted asking
her to write for him, PR for the new mall; the developer calling even though he didn't have her cell number,
asking over and over what she had done, what had she done, how could she, didn't she understand...?
I don't understand, she thought, not his calls or the editors or the angry people who had called to tell her she
was too green, too tree hugging, people she'd never heard of, people who couldn't be calling her. And Ted.
Ted calling, distracted, frantic, still at the site of the townhouses, trying to figure out what in the hell to say to
media who, for a change, didn't give a damn about the PR people on site, they could see what was going on,
they just couldn't believe it.
Ted, calling at last to ask who she was, falling away as everything was falling away, the editors, the jobs, the
Honda, the house in the old tree-shaded neighborhood. Ted. The Jenna-ness of Jenna.
She walked, too hot, too exposed, stalked up the edge of the field that was no longer mall, no longer lifestyle
center. The developer and his advisors, attorneys, CTO's, CEO's, CFO's, CPA's and hired mercs for all she
knew stood in the center of the field, voices raised, fists bunched, stringy muscles pumped. They saw her and
shouted at her, the developer's voice high pitched and furious, the buzzing of a trapped wasp, and she didn't
question how he knew her, didn't ask why he couldn't break free of his pack and come after her, she just
walked, into the blinding high afternoon sunlight. There were voices everywhere again. The police yelled after
her, Hey, lady and Hey, miss! Miss! Because she couldn't walk across their crime scene, surely there were
clues, she was probably transporting clues from one spot to the next on the bottom of her shoes, how dare
she? Jenna walked, letting them fall behind, knowing they would stop following her as soon as she reached
the far side of the field and climbed the artificial hill, somehow still there, somehow still higher than the
unnatural mound the new earth had formed.
She heard the other voices, smaller voices, joyful, celebratory voices, welcoming her back, calling her back into
the fold.
* * *
Entering the field felt like going home, dropping a pretense she could no longer maintain. The ground under
her feet vibrated, quick shocks of electricity and energy. She'd lost her shoes during her walk, stepped out of
them and kept going. If she looked at her feet, they might be torn and bleeding, and they might just be part
of the desert floor. Or they might be hooves. When she tried to stretch her aching fingers out of bunched
fists, they didn't open. They were hard, and dark and remained curled. Unnatural. Or natural.
She heard the voices again. Not the developers or the police. They were across the field from her now, lost in
their own worlds, voices, tiny insectile hums, less important than the sound of the crow's wings overhead.
The voices she heard were crow and coyote and hare, voices of the desert calling her home, telling her it was
all right to let go of the shape, the illusion, the dream of something else, all right to become again who she
was.
The voice she wanted to hear—Ted's, calling for her, wanting her with him—was silent. Ted was back on
Moana, he didn't know she was gone, wouldn't miss her until he tumbled back to their empty house late and
tired, looking for her, for food, for justification.
I'm sorry, she thought. I don't think I belong out here anymore. Because past Ted, past the writing, past the
small group of friends she'd met almost by accident, she couldn't remember anything else. Not parents, not
pets, not a job or any other place she'd lived.
Instead she remembered days and nights, freezing and thawing, summer and winter. She remembered full
moons and crescents, eclipses and stars, solstices and equinoxes. She remembered horses passing over the
fields, and hawks and eagles and small creatures who needed her somehow, needed her in a way the people
in her life never could.
She remembered guiding without violence, urging the city back and away from sacred sites, taming the
shimmering violence and greed, remembered when reclamation didn't include killing the intruders.
She couldn't remember when it had all become lost, but she could guess. How long had she been with Ted,
Ted faithfully representing builders, developers, economic authorities, promoting growth. He was good at
what he did and she'd hoped to bring him round to the other side. She'd loved him, too, the Jenna in her had,
the bit she'd allowed to slip and slide into human, the part that had forgotten where she'd come from and
what she was.
Until the pain became too great and she called the desert spirits to her, called forces into play she could no
longer control, and in the process, woke herself to herself.
Go home, she thought at the developers, at the police, at the builders and reporters and the others still
scattered about the field. You're not wanted here. There's nothing left for you. I won't allow you to hurt anything
else.
Across the field the developer turned in her direction; his eyes looked inhuman. He snarled and his lips pulled
back, exposing fangs in a skull face of naked greed. She recognized the ancient mask of chaos across his
features, and as well the fear of the vast desert, the need to fill it all in, corral it and control it and somehow,
eventually, understand it. In that instant she almost felt pity, but she recognized an ancient enemy in that
face, and understood the battle yet to come.
The others surrounded her. Their voices stilled. She'd called them: they'd come. Now they'd called her, and
she was here. If anyone turned and looked, now, the knot of people left milling around on the not-mall of
folded, reformed desert, they'd see four figures standing on the carved-out hill: crow, coyote, hare—and big
horn sheep, fitting in somewhere at last.
raw and heavy up toward vast and lightless Nevada skies. Even on the perimeter the city lights blocked the
stars, dropped them to nothing more than light reflected off industrial foundations of the new mall.
Mt. Rose Highway. State Route 431. Head east and the road passes through sage and pinion and wild
horses, up rock-strewn asphalt through hair-pin turns to Virginia City, home of the Comstock Lode and the
Territorial Enterprise, where Mark Twain lived and wrote and where every summer camels still race, a
preserved mining town hot and heavy with the smell of sage and the sleepy drone of crickets, where once,
heading back down into Reno, Jenna had nearly driven off the road when an eagle lifted up from the abyss
beyond the highway, gliding up on thermals, improbable as a dinosaur.
Head west, up Mt. Rose Highway, off the curving freeway exit onto the State Route, and the road runs past
the vacant sage and pine lot at the junction where last winter Jenna saw a coyote jogging over frozen
ground on a mist-cold Christmas morning as she and Ted drove out to his folks' in Washoe Valley. Head west
from that expanse of emptiness and there's Tahoe, pristine mountain lake known worldwide.
Home now of the raw, new, concrete and steel, piped-Muzak and Lexus-parking mall.
Lifestyle center. Not a mall. Mall was prosaic, old-fashioned. Not trendy enough. Not, maybe, rich enough for
the trade expected here on the east side of the Sierras. Tourists in Reno no longer had the dread two hour
trek over the mountain to the Mecca of Sacramento to shop; discretionary income could stay in Reno, Biggest
Little City in the World, such a great Lifestyle, Quality of Life, beautiful place to live with air quality and
affordable housing and employment opportunities, come one, come all. Come California. And it did. They did.
Jenna turned off the tired Honda, which gave a whimper and shuddered. There wasn't much to see yet. Just
steel, plunging upwards, foundations like slabs of city washed up in an inland sea, structural steel like a
sketchy outline of the buildings that would follow. A Dillard's, whatever that was. Pottery Barn. Another Home
Depot, surely there weren't enough yet to walk the entire city by going from Home Depot to Home Depot. All
of it upscale. All of it concrete and asphalt and that many more cars that much closer to Tahoe. More traffic,
more pollution, more people, more trash. Landscaped with grass, not natural to the area, the sage and
juniper ripped out because of people's allergies. Because they weren't pretty enough once the concrete and
asphalt and retail came.
She let her head drop back and stared up at the sky, but the stars weren't visible out here any longer.
A hot rush of anger filled her. Anger and pain at all the losses. At squirrels and rabbits, coyotes and scrub
jays, meadow larks and crows forced out, natural growth gone, dirt covered over so the city could expand
and the people who could afford it could shop and the city could petition for a Nordstrom's.
She hated the sick, twisting powerlessness, hated knowing tomorrow she'd drop back into Jenna Freelance
Writer, writing a business article on Retail in Nevada and interviewing Mr. Foothills Lifestyle Center developer
who was already back in Georgia planning assaults on other innocent communities across the country. No one
would listen. Even if they felt the loss of beauty and the essentials of Nevada, the good of the shoppers
outweighed the good of those who just wanted to see empty space and preferred the sound of wind off
Mount Rose to the sound of muzak, preferred the scent of sage to the smell of economy-boosting
discretionary income.
"Damn it." Her fists balled. She was out here alone in the night. Ted expected her home from critique group
soon, but not yet, and this was foolish. "I don't care." She bent, picked up a rock, hurled it and missed
everything and that made her even angrier. She shouted and threw handfuls of rocks, tiny useless sounds
against the steel supports as she raged into the desert-scented night: "Go home! We don't need you here.
Go home, go home, go home. Stop hurting us!"
Sharp pain against her calf brought her out of it. She'd run forward, stumbling, shouting incoherent threats to
nameless, ever-blameless corporations, there was never anyone to blame, economic authorities just did their
jobs, developers developed what the people wanted, what, at least, they said the people wanted, and no
one listened to animals, no one cared about the sound of the wind or the smells of a summer night.
She'd run up against a stab of Rebar poking up out of the fresh asphalt, bent at just the right angle to cut her
leg open. Moonlight lit the blood on her skin, through weave of sandal, down across the tar and asphalt; a
thin red line dripping down onto the dirt past the Rebar. Jenna stared, as if something had changed.
When she stood up, they were there. Three figures stood on the unnatural ridge of hillside torn out of the
earth by the creation of the parking lot. Tall against the background of trees, three figures, one woman, two
men, and Jenna should leave, go home before she found out they were South Reno 13, who liked to tag dead
smack in the center of Reno, which meant either they had no sense of direction or that they were expanding
their territory, she didn't need to know which and Ted was going to kill her if he found out about this, it was
stupid, being out here...
But there was no menace. No feeling of harm from the three who stood against the moonlight. Next instant,
they were gone.
The Honda started without protest. The drive home was quiet. The air smelled like sage.
* * *
"How was critique group?" Ted's attention came and went in three or four minute intervals. He muted
commercials, watched local news with rapt attention. "What'd they think of the story?"
Jenna shrugged. "Metaphor."
Ted grinned at her. "You told me that before you left. Could've stayed here and had glorious spaghetti with
me."
Jenna made a face. "I've had your spaghetti and glorious is definitely giving it spin."
Ted remained un-phased. "If you'd stayed, you could have made something other than spaghetti. Which story
was it?"
On the TV, happy peppy people danced about low fat fast food, living fantasy lives. Jenna dragged her eyes
away from the spectacle. "The one about the desert, and the new mall."
The dislike in her voice was thick and flat, but she'd gotten Ted's full attention. He grinned. "I think we've got
that account," he said as if it was something she'd been waiting to hear. He waited for her delight.
Jenna shut her mouth and stared at him. He knew how she felt about Progress with a capital P, progress that
advanced nothing but greed. It just didn't seem to matter to him. As if he thought it was all an act on her
part. Or as if of course she'd change her beliefs when it came to him.
I wish I could, she thought. She wanted to believe someone understood. She wanted to believe she was
close to someone, that somewhere she fit.
* * *
Ted snuggled close, murmured something incoherent that sounded like banana cake, and fell asleep, arms
around her. Jenna stared out the bedroom window at the old apple tree picked out in moonlight while the
evening's events played behind her eyes, muddling themselves together as sleep edged nearer, until she sat
with the other writers from her critique group in plastic chairs at metal tables on the steel and concrete piers
of the new mall and the desert washed up around them in waves, dirt and stones and scratchy sage washing
up to their feet and away again.
"The premise is interesting, but it's only a literary device, one's own power of mind effecting change," Diane
said, but Diane hated fantasy and hated that Jenna sold so much of it.
"I like the construct of the mall as enemy," Sydney said. "But of course you're just resistant to change and it
doesn't work as story."
"I think you are lecturing," one of the editors of a major science fiction magazine said, and she had to be
dreaming, there were no editors in critique group. "It's a polemic, not a story, and it just didn't grab me, alas."
Jenna stared at them. They were hard to see because the night was so dark and all the stars had gone out.
"I think you should stop this one and write something else," they all said together and now somehow they all
looked exactly like the developer of the Foothills Lifestyle Center—you've never even seen him–and they
stood, threatening, but Jenna looked past them at the hillside and suddenly they were inconsequential.
Three beings stood on the artificial berm, limned in moonlight, right as everything else was wrong.
One female, two males. One summer-brown cottontail, one coyote, one crow. Desert creatures. She waited
for the big horn sheep, but it didn't come.
They ran late the next morning, which was normal. Woke after both alarms with no memory of hearing either.
Which was also normal. Ted went off to another day in PR land and Jenna went running through their old tree-
shaded neighborhood and then over-caffeinated in an attempt to be ready for her phone interview with the
developer.
The developer and his PR person.
"Why do PR people do conference calls with writers?" she asked Ted repeatedly and he'd give her a different
answer every time. Because we don't trust writers. Because we don't trust media. Because we don't trust the
CEO.
It seemed to come down to a lack of trust.
This PR person whispered answers to Jenna's questions and the developer parroted them back: about local
contractors and subs, which made the developer tangent away into how lifestyle centers employed people in
downtrodden, retail-insufficient towns. Jenna, who thought that malls needed employees anyway, found this
an insufficient example of community involvement and asked for more. The developer said he'd get specifics
and Jenna heard the PR person panicking and turning pages rapidly, looking for documentation of good deeds.
Uh huh, she thought.
Jenna had questions from her editor for the article: acreage, square-footages, anchor stores, projected
economic impact. Why the developer saw fit to pick on Reno, though phrased as what made Reno a target
market, emphasis on target.
The developer didn't want to answer questions. He wanted to complain. That Reno was under-served in retail
opportunities, which Jenna privately thought should make him happy. That there wasn't enough land for retail
opportunities within the city. When Jenna asked what was occupying the land it turned out to be other retail
that had already been opportunistic. When she pointed out that maybe they weren't under-served, then, the
developer changed the subject. He complained that labor was hard to find (because in the wake of the
housing boom, everyone was now building retail, Jenna pointed out, and the PR guy whispered and the
developer charged on angrily.)
He complained that landscaping was a nightmare, that it was impossible to find water here for all their grass.
Jenna choked on startled laughter and said it was, after all, a desert.
The developer asked what else she needed to know.
Why us?
Jenna asked for a description of the lifestyle center and was suddenly drowning in talk about how 700 acres
would have piped Muzak, outdoor dining, grass, flowers, trees, drive-up access to stores.
"Drive up access?"
"All the stores are approached from the exterior," the developer said. "It's all outdoors, a actually, campus
style buildings."
Jenna thought for an instant, bit her tongue, and said it anyway. "So it's a strip mall?"
For an instant the developer only sputtered, then, "You listen to me," he said but the line seemed to go dead
and abruptly the PR guy was there, no whispering but loud and upset, something about Foothills Lifestyle
Center and Reno and she thought she heard things she couldn't have before the line went dead again but
just before she said "Hello?" the developer said out of the dead line, "What have you done?" and the phone
slammed down.
"Testy," Jenna said, but already the pull was on her, like a sickness, something dragging her from her desk,
she had her keys, her notebook, her purse, hurry, just hurry, just hurry.
* * *
The freeway entrance was blocked off. Detour signs directed her down Kietzke Lane where she did not want
to go. Jenna turned onto Vassar and came to a complete stop just before the old staid post office.
July sun simmered off midmorning asphalt and all the cars piled up together where drivers had abandoned
them. Jenna stalled the Honda, cut the motor and stepped onto the burning asphalt to gape with the crowd.
Across from the post office the federal administration building had recently grown up, cutting down 50 year
old trees, scrub grass, rubble, squirrels, birds and the occasional urban raccoon. Only now it was gone again,
a rubble of glass and framing supports, flat as if a bomb had hit it. The woman next to Jenna kept saying,
"Terrorist attack," into her cell phone but Jenna didn't think so. The building looked as if it had been—shoved
up, off the earth, not exploded down into it.
She watched a blue belly lizard crawl up out of the wreckage and stand puffing its sides, purple in the
emergency lights. No one around her saw it, or cared. Voices filled the morning air, the sun simmered. Sirens
wailed, drew closer, others continued past. The police roped off the scene, the falling building and the rubble
and the lizard—and the green.
She ducked her head to see past the crowd, past the cop who spread his arms, shooing everyone back as if
they were geese or chickens. There was green, growing up out of the falling building, like sage or the tops of
trees, and beside the leaves and branches, a human arm poked up, waving feebly.
Jenna spun, hands to mouth, stomach heaving. All around her people exclaimed and pressed forward,
pushing closer as Jenna struggled to get past them and out. Away.
Of course there were people in there, what did you think?
The Honda started and there was a hole in the traffic around it, enough room to get out of the snarl of cars
and back on the street.
Ted didn't answer his cell, it just rang over to voice mail. Jenna tossed her own phone in the passenger's
seat, and drove, fast, toward the new mall, the hurry still dragging her, the panic she'd heard in the
developer's voice.
* * *
Everywhere at the crossroads, steel had fallen, concrete cracked. Jenna abandoned the Honda half a mile up
Mount Rose at an old grocery-anchored shopping center and even then getting close meant getting past
sheriff's deputies and flashing lights.
Her progress was sure-footed. She was as confident moving across the sage and scree-covered hillside
outside the mall as other people were helpless and flailing. She was in her element, same as she ever was in
the desert, without others.
Midday summer sun colored everything flat hot white, unreal and overexposed. Jenna slipped between the
crowd and headed for shouting whenever she heard it, using altercations to pass distracted sheriffs. She
dodged past hands struck out to catch and stop her and wriggled free of someone who actually caught the
back of her t-shirt. The air was full of voices, reporters swearing, cameramen muttering about feeds, small
voices she couldn't make out but for their jubilance and celebration.
Closer and closer, she saw only people, no mall, only the shifting crowd and flashing lights.
Because there was no mall.
It was gone.
Vertigo hit her, so hard she stumbled, one hand out for balance but there was nothing and no one to grab
and she fell to one knee, sickness vomiting up inside her at what she couldn't be seeing.
Crossroads. Two hundred acres of sage and pinion where she'd seen the coyote on Christmas morning.
Jenna gagged. Nobody came near her. Over the roaring in her ears she could hear the crackle of police radios,
people screaming into cell phones, reporters arguing. And the voices again, clearer, and closer.
Where the concrete and steel had been, the ground grew up, unnatural as the carved-out hillside had been,
as if overnight the desert had come in and raised the foundation. Reclaimed—itself. Destroyed and covered
over the intruder as the mall had overcome the desert.
"Are you all right?" someone asked.
Jenna nodded but couldn't look away. Someone helped her to her feet. "What do you think?" the man asked.
"I don't know." Her voice sounded dry as the desert. Ancient.
Voices. We're here.
"What?"
He hadn't spoken, looked at her strangely. "Bulldozers, maybe?"
She nodded. "Must be." Impossible. That would leave tracks. She wanted him to move away, be quiet. Let me
think.
"I just don't see how they did it," he said to someone else.
What have you done? The snarl in the developer's voice, she couldn't remember his name, suddenly, just The
Developer, had to have it in her notes, didn't she? "What have you done?"
"Who are you?" someone behind her asked. "Are you press? Because I can tell you everything, I saw it all..."
"No, excuse me, I'm not, I have to go..." She pressed back through the crowd that parted around her like
tide. Like sage in the wind. Voices, press, police, people. We are here. We've come. Joyous voices, like
something good had happened.
Before she reached the far edge of the crowd, before she could make a break for her car, she heard the rising
susurrus of voices: someone caught. Someone buried. A body. Limbs.
No.
What have you done?
A cry caught in her throat.
At the edge of the crowd, farthest point away from her, three figures unnoticed by the crowd: coyote, crow,
hare.
* * *
This time Ted answered on the second ring. He didn't hear the tears in her voice. He never did.
"I can't talk." His voice was rushed and frantic. She heard him fumble for something on his desk and the
phone clattered down, sharp and hard. He was back an instant later. "Something's happened at the
townhouses we've been doing PR for on Moana, it sounds like—yes, okay, I'm coming—Jen, I'll call you back..."
Gone, the silent, nothing-there of a gone call before she could say anything, Jenna's mind still reeling and no,
not again, but she hated those townhouses, someone's idiotic idea to take down 50 year old cottonwoods on
a vast empty lot, beautiful place that looked rural in the heart of downtown Reno, take all that beauty and
slice and hack it into cookie cutter condo town homes side by side like urban nightmares and not a tree in
sight.
She closed her eyes and shivered in the too-hot car, and thought of the arms that had reached up through
the rubble of the admin building, body bags, fallen concrete and steel and people's lives.
And? The voice indistinct. Could be imagination, that voice, but soft, like the voices on the site of the mall, like
the voices half a mile down Mount Rose where everyone still gathered around the mystery there.
And. Small voices, unheard. Small creatures, caught in the trap of too many people, too many in-fill projects
and why should anyone object to utilizing a vacant lot, surely that was better than expanding even further
into the desert, wasn't it good stewardship?
But there's no more water there than anywhere else, Jenna thought. No more room. And what makes you more
important than an urban raccoon, a small rabbit born in-city, a squirrel looking for a tree, not somebody's damn
balcony or a federal administration building's parking lot.
What have you done? the developer had demanded.
What have I done?
Why couldn't she remember his name?
She started the Honda and drove windingly, slowly, unwillingly toward Moana Lane.
* * *
The trees angled out from the roofs of the town homes, thrust gnarled, flinty branches through shattered
windows, forced roofs askew. Thick with summer leaves, the trees towered even taller than she remembered,
well above the two story townhouses, and they had shot upwards, fast and angry, growing before anyone
could react or come to terms with the trees reappearing and get out of the way.
Bodies hung skewered and broken from the branches, impaled, bleeding. Whatever happened had happened
fast, and not intentionally. The trees had simply grown, taken the space they needed, fulfilled their own
needs. The handful of people killed by their need had been no more marked than a nest of rabbits in an in-fill
lot a developer had a need to turn into overpriced town homes.
Jenna didn't look away. Her vision clouded and ached with the deaths and her hands curled tight around the
steering wheel until it actually creaked and gave, ever so slightly, an indent of her palms and fingerprints left
behind, a mystery for the police when they finished this aching, impossible day and began to wonder what
had happened to the woman driving the Honda.
It took her over four hours to walk the ten miles between Moana and the crossroads at Mount Rose. She
wandered through residential neighborhoods, feeling the pull of old homes, established trees towering, roses
blooming, not indigenous maybe, but there long enough, no longer a shock, no longer raw upheaval.
She left the neighborhoods for the hot, tar-sticky, midday sauna of South Virginia Street, car lots, computer
stores, chain restaurants, the old, not-good-enough-anymore mall and past neighborhood centers beyond it,
bookstores and coffee shops, concrete and freeway exits. Further and further the city stretched beyond its
boundaries, the road continuing over what had been farmland. She passed still vacant fields, dotted with For
Sale signs, zoned for casinos, zoned for new money, new people. Her feet burned on asphalt. Her skin
burned from greed and covetousness and maybe, sometimes, from a hint of evil.
Cars passed her, shimmering heat, exhaust visible as the sun sat high overhead in the July sky, southwest,
blinding, promising, a part of what was desert, what was home.
* * *
She reached the crossroads near six. Her cell had shrilled repeatedly along the way and largely she ignored
it. The calls hadn't made much sense, editors demanding stories she had never been assigned; Ted asking
her to write for him, PR for the new mall; the developer calling even though he didn't have her cell number,
asking over and over what she had done, what had she done, how could she, didn't she understand...?
I don't understand, she thought, not his calls or the editors or the angry people who had called to tell her she
was too green, too tree hugging, people she'd never heard of, people who couldn't be calling her. And Ted.
Ted calling, distracted, frantic, still at the site of the townhouses, trying to figure out what in the hell to say to
media who, for a change, didn't give a damn about the PR people on site, they could see what was going on,
they just couldn't believe it.
Ted, calling at last to ask who she was, falling away as everything was falling away, the editors, the jobs, the
Honda, the house in the old tree-shaded neighborhood. Ted. The Jenna-ness of Jenna.
She walked, too hot, too exposed, stalked up the edge of the field that was no longer mall, no longer lifestyle
center. The developer and his advisors, attorneys, CTO's, CEO's, CFO's, CPA's and hired mercs for all she
knew stood in the center of the field, voices raised, fists bunched, stringy muscles pumped. They saw her and
shouted at her, the developer's voice high pitched and furious, the buzzing of a trapped wasp, and she didn't
question how he knew her, didn't ask why he couldn't break free of his pack and come after her, she just
walked, into the blinding high afternoon sunlight. There were voices everywhere again. The police yelled after
her, Hey, lady and Hey, miss! Miss! Because she couldn't walk across their crime scene, surely there were
clues, she was probably transporting clues from one spot to the next on the bottom of her shoes, how dare
she? Jenna walked, letting them fall behind, knowing they would stop following her as soon as she reached
the far side of the field and climbed the artificial hill, somehow still there, somehow still higher than the
unnatural mound the new earth had formed.
She heard the other voices, smaller voices, joyful, celebratory voices, welcoming her back, calling her back into
the fold.
* * *
Entering the field felt like going home, dropping a pretense she could no longer maintain. The ground under
her feet vibrated, quick shocks of electricity and energy. She'd lost her shoes during her walk, stepped out of
them and kept going. If she looked at her feet, they might be torn and bleeding, and they might just be part
of the desert floor. Or they might be hooves. When she tried to stretch her aching fingers out of bunched
fists, they didn't open. They were hard, and dark and remained curled. Unnatural. Or natural.
She heard the voices again. Not the developers or the police. They were across the field from her now, lost in
their own worlds, voices, tiny insectile hums, less important than the sound of the crow's wings overhead.
The voices she heard were crow and coyote and hare, voices of the desert calling her home, telling her it was
all right to let go of the shape, the illusion, the dream of something else, all right to become again who she
was.
The voice she wanted to hear—Ted's, calling for her, wanting her with him—was silent. Ted was back on
Moana, he didn't know she was gone, wouldn't miss her until he tumbled back to their empty house late and
tired, looking for her, for food, for justification.
I'm sorry, she thought. I don't think I belong out here anymore. Because past Ted, past the writing, past the
small group of friends she'd met almost by accident, she couldn't remember anything else. Not parents, not
pets, not a job or any other place she'd lived.
Instead she remembered days and nights, freezing and thawing, summer and winter. She remembered full
moons and crescents, eclipses and stars, solstices and equinoxes. She remembered horses passing over the
fields, and hawks and eagles and small creatures who needed her somehow, needed her in a way the people
in her life never could.
She remembered guiding without violence, urging the city back and away from sacred sites, taming the
shimmering violence and greed, remembered when reclamation didn't include killing the intruders.
She couldn't remember when it had all become lost, but she could guess. How long had she been with Ted,
Ted faithfully representing builders, developers, economic authorities, promoting growth. He was good at
what he did and she'd hoped to bring him round to the other side. She'd loved him, too, the Jenna in her had,
the bit she'd allowed to slip and slide into human, the part that had forgotten where she'd come from and
what she was.
Until the pain became too great and she called the desert spirits to her, called forces into play she could no
longer control, and in the process, woke herself to herself.
Go home, she thought at the developers, at the police, at the builders and reporters and the others still
scattered about the field. You're not wanted here. There's nothing left for you. I won't allow you to hurt anything
else.
Across the field the developer turned in her direction; his eyes looked inhuman. He snarled and his lips pulled
back, exposing fangs in a skull face of naked greed. She recognized the ancient mask of chaos across his
features, and as well the fear of the vast desert, the need to fill it all in, corral it and control it and somehow,
eventually, understand it. In that instant she almost felt pity, but she recognized an ancient enemy in that
face, and understood the battle yet to come.
The others surrounded her. Their voices stilled. She'd called them: they'd come. Now they'd called her, and
she was here. If anyone turned and looked, now, the knot of people left milling around on the not-mall of
folded, reformed desert, they'd see four figures standing on the carved-out hill: crow, coyote, hare—and big
horn sheep, fitting in somewhere at last.
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Jennifer Rachel Baumer lives, writes and procrastinates in Reno, Nevada, where she
lives with her husband Rick and a house full of opinionated cats. To date she's
published nearly 90 short stories, mostly genre, over 700 nonfiction articles and eight
ghostwritten nonfiction books.
Her fiction can be found in the Aoife's Kiss anthology Shelter of Daylight, in Not
One of Us and Talebones, in On Spec and soon from Drollerie Press.
Her very short writing blog is located at jenniferrbaumer@blogspot.com.
lives with her husband Rick and a house full of opinionated cats. To date she's
published nearly 90 short stories, mostly genre, over 700 nonfiction articles and eight
ghostwritten nonfiction books.
Her fiction can be found in the Aoife's Kiss anthology Shelter of Daylight, in Not
One of Us and Talebones, in On Spec and soon from Drollerie Press.
Her very short writing blog is located at jenniferrbaumer@blogspot.com.