Ray had, in the past month, dreamt nightly that some being placed an amber candy like light onto his tongue. He was not sure exactly what this meant, but he had a feeling it meant he must be prepared to receive unexpected offerings. He came to New Mexico because things are undone here, elemental. The sky and the heat and the flatlands. It was a nice change, after Detroit.

Ray’s floors were no good. His father was useless with that kind of stuff––wearing peacoats and filing under his fingernails and keeping a bottle of mouthwash in the glove compartment of his vehicle. He called the plumber for everything. He called the plumber when the toilet water rose an inch above his comfort level. This made Ray uncomfortable: embarrassed him. His father acting like they could afford to offload labor to someone else. Ray had learned everything he could. He wanted to be a person who could fix things himself. He was near superstitious about it––if he was competent, he could never be damaged, because whatever sought to damage him, he would, well, handle.

So, the floors. He lived in an RV on a plot of land, out south, past the New Revival Church and the pawn shop, getting on towards to the White Sands Missile Range. Sometimes when he slept, he heard the whine of a ballistic overhead. This soothed him. He ate here and watched television here and slept alone here and pretended that was fine here. But sometimes he would forget himself, and a loneliness would seize him like a dog on upon his leg, hanging right on.

But, no, New Mexico was good. He liked the pale pink adobe buildings and the flag that looked like a cross with a sense of humor and he liked that the things that died here didn’t die, because they became something else. Cow skulls bleached and astringent from the sun, now a shelter for small rodents. Coyote carcasses a playground for geckos; the bees leaden and fat and flirting around the fallen arm of a cactus. 

His floors hadn’t always been bad. They’d started to rot the last year or so; instead of prying up the floor to find the source, he kept adding to the original material. He’d put down a thick rug first, but that only trapped heat. Made the smell worse. Then came the plastic tiling, the stone slabs, the panels of cork. And now, the argyle carpeting. Flat and grey, but durable. Something that could last. He didn’t know what he was going to lay down on the floor if this didn’t hold.

***

It was his day off from the shop. He went to the diner and sat in his corner spot, as usual. Ray thought it more a vessel than a diner––it was chrome and curved, like those Airstream trailers he used to camp in as a kid, the walls were comprised almost entirely of windows. There were heads of deer and bison hung above the booths, and the waiters wore kick flare pants and tied their floral work shirts at the midriff. It was always hot; the radio was always on. The line chefs were from Mexico and occasionally Ecuador, or else white kids with teeth rotten from meth, and they were always laughing back there, all of them, even the Meth ones, playing music that Ray could only identify as Salsa, but was ranchera. Bolero Ranchero specifically, all strings and talk of barefoot men who have masters: of love, suffering, the ranch.

A group of men walked in, young guys––they wore sweaters draped over their button-ups, blue and green and pink. 

“She is like this 6’10 goth. Punk. Freak. Whatever. Something,” said one,

“Man, she’s so good with mind games,” said another.  “So good. It’s not engrained into her personality, either. She knows she’s doing it.”

Must be here for a bachelor trip, Ray thought. Golfing out at Turtleback.

What most struck Ray when he heard groups of young men talk about women was how much they hated them––really, hated them. And under that sad paintjob of hatred a fear, and sure, Ray feared them too—who wouldn’t? He’d only had sex a handful of times, his awful body lumbering and shuddering inside the warmth of whichever women was underneath him. But also—he was envious of these women; he often took to pausing by mirrors, imagining if what eyed him back down was not a distended stomach and shoulders like a coat hanger, but rounded breasts and thin calves.  To move like that—unfettered grace. A colt that just got its legs yet knew how to use them. Birthed right into a beauty-contest.

A group of girls walked in, then; the same ones who’d been walking in every morning this summer. Ray wished he was a server whenever they came around.

One of them caught his eye. “You’re always listening in.”

Ray pretended not to hear. Stabbed his sausage link.

“You, you––” the girl insisted. She had big eyes and a large black tooth in the middle of her two front teeth which was not a tooth at all but a portal into the darkness of her mouth.

“Sit,” she patted the padded seat next to her heartily. “You know what we are––don’t you?”

Ray came and sat. “I don’t.”

***

Before 45 minutes had been up Ray was in the back of the strip club at the corner of Brass and Ore Street. The building was squat and sad. A massive, red stiletto was placed atop the roof, flashing on and off in the sun.

Josephine, the main girl, who had instructed Ray to call her Jo––“Little Women was my favorite book”––“Only book,” said Mary, an underling––and Jo shoved her from behind––had invited him along.

And so, Ray now loitered in front of the club’s bar, with its hard metallic surface, all sorts of sayings frantically scrawled across it. Fuck your Mom. We will not surveil. Joey Pritchett took a shit here. The end has arrived. Some words had even been carved into the metal itself. Ray felt nervous, but he did not entirely trust his feelings. He felt he knew what it was to be a bird, the branch steady and thin under his clawed feet, and he felt he knew the ecstasy of bounding across a field, all fours, head snapping up and down, after a long walk on a short leash. It seemed no feeling folded itself from him, so he had a difficult time locating which was true.

“Watch one of our shows,” she said to Ray.

“Why?”

“Because” Jo said, “my Mama communes with spirits. There’s old souls and there’s young souls.”

“What am I?”

“Shut up. A young soul. But the rarest kind––this is your first life, you’re brand spanking new. Not a spot on you. But it’s also your last.”

“My last?”

“Yes. This is your first, last, and only life. So, you need learn every little thing while you’re here. And that’s where I come in. I’m a Star Child. I chose to be human; you know what I’m saying? I’m a soul from a long, long way from here. I elected to come to down here, you see? Why do you think I’m kicking around in this fucking dump? No, I’m kidding. I love ugly things. Only things got any truth to them.”

Ray’s work shirt felt hot against his skin. He pulled at its collar.

“I’ve been you; I’ve been me,” she pointed to an oily man spitting chew into a cup, “Hell, I’ve been him. I’m everyone, Ray.”

Ray sipped his beer and watched the girls work. But soon, he grew bored and wandered back round to the oblong space––partitioned by two floral bedsheets––that served as the girls’ dressing room. Each performer had a little vanity mirror set atop a long, wooden dining table. This reminded him of the Last Supper. Pouches exploded with makeup; blackened cotton pads; lipsticks absolutely abused, right down to their nubs; rouge and rouge and rouge. Artifacts from another world. Ray looked at it all. Just then, Jo emerged from the stage, closing the black curtain behind her. She came to him from behind, taking her ring finger––it the only one in which her acrylic nail had not broken off––and dipped it into a little glass pot of silver eyeshadow.

When she came away, there was One landing strip of silver on both of Ray’s eyelids.

***

He got home, two beers past good. Soon the smell, foul, sharp, came to him from the floor. He stumbled around, going to his outhouse for supplies. Wood, carpeting. No, no, this wouldn’t work. And then: it came to him. He dug out a roll of aluminum from his kitchen drawer; unfurling the entire length of it, he laid it over the argyle carpet. When the corners curled up at the sides, away from the walls and hard surfaces, he held them down with his muddied work boots, walking all night on the balls of his feet across the perfect landscape.

***

Next night. Invitation from Jo. Some party out under Mud Mountain. There was a semi-circle of shacks, trailers, all run down. An abandoned farmhouse stood farther out in the desert. Is this where the girls lived?

“Are you sure it’s alright, Jo?” Ray patted down the sides of his hair. “Me being here.”

“Usually its only ladies,” she smiled.

Inside the farmhouse, country music played from a stereo. Jo had a bar of what looked like translucent taffy in her hand, and the girls and Ray were all sat on the floor with their hands stuck out. When Jo got to Ray, she ripped an extra-large chunk off for him. After that, darkness for a while. Ray on the floor, mosquitoes, slapping them away––Mary, the underling, next to him, blubbering about some childhood dog that got dragged under a tractor for a quarter mile. It was alive, but dead.

He staggered out from the farm then; the girls stripped off their cutoffs and t-shirts, were chasing each other, kicking up dirt in the brush. And then, beyond, blackness––and pinpricks of people dancing underneath the buttresses of the clay cliffs that rose around them in greeting. God’s personal amphitheater.

“Come play,” Mary shrieked––recovered. Her body surprised him, the curdling above her knees. Jo was incapacitated, retreated to some corner of the farmhouse like a sick animal. It seemed Mary had taken her place, running around with a big stick, barking at the strippers not to run too far off. Driving on I-40, Ray often imagined which car would crush his and which he would crush if he were to jerk his wheel. He thought people were like this—not strong or weak by nature; their strength only determined when put up next to another person.  Ray’s truck may be strong in of itself, but nothing when put up against a semi. He liked being around women for this reason—dominoes of strength. Because he would think one was strongest, only for the next one to be strongest when the first had departed. He could never tell who stood where, that’s how relative they were to one another. He couldn’t imagine ever feeling lonely in a set up like this.

Someone screamed through the dark: “I have no face, I have no God Damn motherfucking face.” And then there was a torch of light and they all followed it and it was not a torch but a big, plastic, yellow flashlight, and one of the girls from the club––her shift was after this, Ray remembered, I have to get loaded before the regulars, she had said with a laugh, but it sounded sad, real sad––she was carrying heels tied around her neck with a dusty shoestring––started to shriek again.  She put the flashlight right into her eyes.

“I have no face, I have no face, I have no face,” she said, her features covered by the flashlight. She took it away, suddenly, and Ray saw the glow on her teeth like an X-ray image. He thought of his father.

“It’s wonderful, it’s so wonderful,” she shrieked. And she tore off laughing.

***

Scratch of the reeds on Ray’s ugly, fat ankles, and the heat and the dark and Ray stepping into the tiny coin of a pool of water that used to be hot but was hot no longer. Tourist attractions in the off season––hot springs.

He was in the pool, and he was dunking his head, and then he wasn’t in New Mexico at all, but back in Hollywood. The one in Florida. His father supine in a hospital bed. Bits of food around his mouth, hair growing out of his ears. And Ray had thought, this is you real face. Why didn’t you let me see it until now? Then in the car on the way back from a Mountain town with his father, dead of night, winter. I Like Ike bumper sticker.  His mother’s St. Christopher pendant hanging on the dashboard. Just a silver circle attached to a chain. Meant to protect people on their voyages. She had shot herself the summer prior.

Then back in pool. Trying to get to bottom but couldn’t see. Overalls keeping him afloat. Took them off. Work shirt, from gas station. Took that off too. Briefs next. He was close to the bottom of the spring. His mouth fell open. He realized he must part with the silver eyeshadow. But when he brought his hands––strange, heavy––through the water and to the eyes, he felt it. The eyeshadow was already gone.

***

He didn’t go to the diner the next day. He woke with a towel around his mid-section and a ham sandwich half made on the Formica counter. It took him a moment to gain his bearings. The room came to him like a camera racking focus––rusted shit in the yard, quilt, the chair. Aluminum across the floor ripped right through. Oh, Right. He thought. And then, the smell. He dropped to his knees, tearing first at the aluminum, the stupid aluminum, it was not her, then the carpet, then the stone, then the tiles, then the rug, and, finally, heaving all the materials away from him, he came upon the original wood flooring of the RV. He stopped. In the reflection of the wood, he saw himself. His red-rimmed, blue eyes. The sag of his cheeks. He looked at his face once more. It was ugly, and true.

Britt Astrid Alphson earned her MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University, where she was a Henfield Prize nominee and taught as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. Her work has appeared in Hobart Pulp, Crybaby Press, and The New Limestone Review, among others. She hosts the Scout's Salon reading series.

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