It's a Good Day to Die

"IT’S A GOOD DAY TO DIE"
RACHEL KRAKATOA raced over the washboard surface of the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, heading south, tapping a finger on the steering wheel to a tune in her head. The sun was rising, the sky was blue, the air was crisp. Driving along in her big Chevy Blazer, Rachel took it all in. She took a deep breath. "It’s great to be alive," she thought to herself. "Gonna be an incredible day, she continued, still to herself and looking out the window to all that she saw, not revealing her thoughts to her two companions in the car.
Blue Garden was in the seat next to Rachel, in a half-sleep that produced half-dreams. In and out she moved through them both, the washboard of the road both startling her awake and then soothing her back to sleep. One of her dreams took her to the Caribbean, to the sea in which she floated naked on her back, spitting salt water skyward so that it splashed back down on her face; another found her in a warehouse sorting junk mail.
In the back seat behind Rachel and Blue, Lulu Toast sat wide awake, quiet and alert, focused--silent. As the morning dawned, she became keenly aware of the blood rushing through her veins. She felt it; she listened. She looked down at her arm, her wrist--noted the raised network across the back of her hand. Lulu closed her eyes, breathed deeply, considered the hike and the wrist, the pulse, the life inside: the inner life. She had read somewhere that if you listened long enough and hard enough--and under the right conditions--you could sometimes actually hear your own blood rushing through the veins. She liked that thought; she held that thought. She clenched her teeth. Bit. Tasted blood. Finally, the idea forming in her head found the words to express itself: " It’s a good day to die." After reflecting on the notion, she said it aloud--softly so no one else could hear, just enough to see how it sounded to her own ear: "It’s a good day to die." She looked out the window. She loved the color blue.
Picking up speed in the Blazer, Rachel regarded Lulu’s lips moving quietly in the rear-view mirror. She was about to comment when, suddenly--without paying much attention--she plowed right through a sand dune that had drifted across the road. The wheels went mushy; the car seemed to float for a moment. Rachel was scared shitless. But she held on, didn’t panic, and in another moment was back in control: mechanically, physically, mentally and emotionally. But this too she felt: exhilaration. "I want to do that again," she said to herself.
In her dream, Blue was lifted up and out of the warehouse and flew--on a magic carpet--up and above the car, over the canyons, into the sky--with the ravens and the vultures and the dragonflies. As a child, Blue often flew--in her dreams--on magic carpets. She would float on an air current above her school yard and wave to all of her classmates; and sometimes she would swoop down and snatch up a friend and sail off to wonderful, far-away lands. Now, in her half-sleep-half-wake state, she drifted up toward the clouds--through the clouds, above the clouds, around the clouds, with the clouds--in the clouds.
Lulu noted a certain point on the inside of her wrist--stared at it--and thought that she could detect a slight movement--a rising and a falling of the skin--ever so subtle. She felt with her other hand, and--sure enough--there it was: her pulse. She let her fingers rest there. And feel. A thought came to her head: that’s my heartbeat; that’s my actual heartbeat; I’m feeling my heart in my wrist. She took a breath and exhaled. Did it again, this time holding in the air a bit longer. She let go the wrist and brought her hand up to her chest. Felt the heart beating. Released it. "God, I fell great today." And then: "It’s a good day to die."
Rachel found that she had been gripping the steering wheel very tightly. She relaxed. She looked over at Blue on the seat beside: asleep, it seemed--steady, even breathing; a smile across her face; eyes closed. Is she dreaming? she thought. What’s she dreaming? She looked in the rear-view mirror at Lulu, who was staring out the window, mouthing words of some sort and occasionally biting her lower lip. What’s she saying? What’s she thinking? Rachel Krakatoa looked at these two women friends of hers and felt a surge of love for them both.
When Blue dreamed of music (she had always dreamed in sound--as well as in color), she usually saw lines. The lines--and there were many of them--were separate, different thicknesses and colors, often parallel; but sometimes they would approach each other, or even cross over and through--or just lie on top of the other so that you could see only one line--but hear both--or all. Sometimes the lines would end abruptly; other times they would extend forever. Sound always accompanied her dreams--like a motion picture soundtrack--but the dreams she liked the best were the ones in which there was no story line at all--nothing but sound--nothing but noise--nothing but non-visual images.
Lulu kept uttering the phrase--"It’s a good day to die"--over and over again, repeating it, tasting it, and feeling more and more comfortable with each repetition. Anyone who knew her well would probably have been surprised to learn that she was having these thoughts, for, in truth, Lulu feared dying--or anyway, most forms of dying.
Rachel roared down the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, looking for a thrill--for excitement, adventure--love, happiness, a life--looking for sand--for more sand dunes. None in sight, she contented herself with tearing down the gullies and then exploding up the opposite slopes, taking the curves fast, and speeding over the washboard surfaces. She’d heard that it’s actually smoother to go over the rough spots fast: the wheels lift up and, in a sense, almost fly over the ruts.
Blue bumped and rustled in the passenger seat, more awake than asleep now. Her dreams moved about in short spurts: a tree house in the backyard of the home she grew up in; running to school, being late for school; conjugating verbs in a foreign language; bending over a typewriter, writing sentences, fingers stretching for the keys; a brief, erotic moment with a man she knew but had never been involved with--never knew she had even wanted to be involved with--each stroking the other’s face--the eyes, the nose, the mouth and ears and hair--and smiling, and feeling very happy and content about it all; a garden, planting bulbs; a piano, a patio, a dog, a toothache, a kiss.
To the west were the Straight Cliffs and the Kaiparawits Plateau; to the south, Navajo Mountain; the east, the great drainage system of the Escalante River.
Lulu had read somewhere--she thinks it might have been John Cage--that under certain conditions--a sound-proof room, for example--after awhile you can begin to hear two very distinct sounds: one very high pitched, the other just under it. The high-pitched sound, according to Cage, is your nervous system; the low-pitched one is your cardio-vascular system.
Rachel stares at the road, the dirt, the dust. She remembers as a child that when she went to church, in Sunday School, they would often sing a song, "Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam." She loved the imagery of the song--loved it still. She recalled--again as a child--mornings when her mother would be cleaning the front room, and the sun would slant across the room, and the dust, kicked up and disturbed from all the cleaning, would be floating--drifting--along on the soft, little air currents of the house. She always thought of that dust as being the sunbeams that Jesus loved, and thought that Jesus must be quite some fellow for wanting her to move through the air like that.
For awhile in her sleep, Blue stopped dreaming altogether; she dreamed of nothing. Nothing at all: no sound or image or story line; no themes or metaphors. Nothing. Her heart pumped and pulsed; her lungs moved back and forth; air rushed in and out of her body; blood circulated. She drooled a bit. But she did not dream. Neither Rachel nor Lulu were aware of this fact, but she was lovely nonetheless.
Lulu Toast reaches for her water bottle on the seat next. She unscrews the lid, raises the bottle to her lips, and drinks deeply. The gulping sounds resonate in her head; she hears the cool sensations slide down her throat, feels them move past her heart, between her lungs, and--with a splash--come to a rest in her stomach. She takes another swallow, but this time, ignoring the sounds, just feels the liquid--like love, like life, like music and health; like mortality itself--spreading throughout her body. "It’s a good day to die."
Rachel kept her eyes open for the turn-off. She remembered the last time she had driven down this road for the hike--remembered how, once in the canyon, after having scrambled through the first long, dark, narrow section--more like a cave than a canyon really--basically, just a hole in the rock--barely able to see, eyes adjusting, feeling her way, moving her hands almost sensually along the twisting, sinuous walls of the slot; how she--how they--had come at last to the tightest spot yet, where, to continue, they would have to remove their day packs and slide through sideways. In one place, Rachel nearly panicked: The smooth canyon walls pressed against her back and chest. And then it got even tighter: she sucked in her stomach. Exhaled thoroughly, and then--quickly--squeezed through the five-foot long passage in the rock. Once through, she felt an exhilaration that words could not express--until the next wave of panic hit: "What if I can’t get myself back out?" Replaced yet again by a devil-may-care fuck-it attitude: "I’m here now; that’s what counts; that’s all that matters: The Now." And then she filled her lungs with air and screamed a howl of celebration for her two companions, who at once joined her in song.
Blue’s dreams returned, but they became increasingly less real, less tangible than before: no images, only sound and thought: non-musical sound, non-verbal thought; she dreamed of diphthongs and fricatives; of wind and waves; she dreamed of colors--of the color blue--but not of the blue sky color blue, or the blue ocean color blue--she dreamed simply of the idea of blue--blue as a concept: Blue dreamed of blue.
Lulu saw a film once in which she traveled to the very core of the human body. She started with a hand, the skin, then underneath the skin, the blood vessel, the capillary, through the cell wall, the strands of DNA--the double helix itself--all the way down to the atomic structure, the electron shield--that outer swarm of shimmering points--through the vast inner space to the nucleus--the pulsing, throbbing bond of protons and neutrons: the universal module. Lulu wondered if, when she was dead, the electrons and the nucleus of the atoms would still swirl and pulsate as they did when she was alive. And if so, what then was the difference--on the atomic level--between death and life?
Suddenly the turn-off appeared. Rachel, speeding along and humming a tune, tapping a finger on the steering wheel, nearly missed it, braked quickly, came not quite to a stop, and pulled onto the narrow one-lane dirt track--just two wheel-ruts with weeds in between. Almost immediately, she became agitated--quietly angry. For right beside the turn-off, there in the sage, stood an official-looking sign that read, "DRY FORK." That’s new, she said to herself, followed by the thought: I’ll take care of it on the way out.
In the past, when Blue was waking from a dream, she had found that she could, at times, enter into her subconscious and exercise some degree of control--could maneuver the dream toward her wants and desires--could hold the dream close, allow it--and herself--to linger in any moment--any place she chose--for any amount of time. She did so now, and directed her dream--and herself--back to her earlier erotic moment with the man: she held his face--his beautiful, smiling face in her hands--held it for a long time--kissed it all along the jawline, tucked her head under his chin, lowered her face farther still to his bare chest, and then held his hand in her hand.
"Come on, Death," Lulu said to herself. "Give me your best shot. I’m ready."
"Almost there," called out Rachel. "Just another couple minutes."
Blue woke up.
Lulu had been following the road with her eyes, looking off tot he east and to the sun rising higher in the sky; to the west, to the few distant clouds. She leaned forward, her face between Rachel’s and Blue’s. Rachel continued driving slowly down the narrow track; Blue was still waking. Lulu, her voice seeming to come from out of nowhere--surprising even herself--suddenly announced: "It’s a good day to die." She leaned back in her seat.
Rachel looked in the rear-view mirror, attempting to make eye contact. Successful. Blue turned around in her seat and faced Lulu, a look of concern on her face--or maybe just a question. They too made eye contact.
"Don’t joke about something like that," she said, seriously.
Lulu held her look. "I’m not joking," she said, with equal seriousness. She sought out Rachel in the mirror. "Am I?"
The vehicle, arriving at the trailhead, rolled to a stop. Rachel killed the engine and pulled the emergency brake. There were no other cars in sight; they had the place to themselves.
Lulu leaned forward again, her face once more between her two companions’. She placed an arm around each of their shoulders, looked at Rachel; nodded; smiled. "Right?"
Rachel held her look and paused, choosing her words carefully before speaking. "It’s a good day to be alive, too," she said finally, not in disagreement, but rather as a confirmation.
"It’s a good day, period," added Blue.
"Exactly."
"Exactly."
And on that note, the three women looked each other in the eye--and everywhere else. In a moment the car doors flew open, and they stepped out of the Blazer and into the uproarious sunlight to begin their hike into the canyon.