Third Zenith

THIRD ZENITH

Every morning Bel and her brother went out to the Sands. Before dawn, when the sun was still steeping – a teabag touch in hot water, saffron strings of clouds cobwebbing the horizon – they left their grandparents’ house, pajama’d, carrying water in old round canteens, rubbing sleep from their brown nut eyes.

They walked down to the street’s nub then veered off into the desert. A tundra of sand lay before them – miles in every direction, violet in the morning light, still cool enough that they could walk on it barefoot. They carried their sandals hooked on their fingers.

Every morning they walked across this night-softened desert, never going anywhere in particular – though they did assign landmarks along the way, sometimes, when they presented themselves: a cactus with upraised bloated arms like a drowned man; a slab of stone plateauing from the ground the size of their grandparents’ mattress; a crinkled shrub like a giant tumbleweed; a shady cluster of bushes where a family of hares lived.

“Can we keep them?” her brother had asked when they’d spotted the babies huddled together for warmth. 

“They belong here,” Bel had replied. “They belong out here in the Sands.”

“Can we stay with them?”

Bel had shaken her head and taken him by the hand. His palm was a cold mitt, and she’d rubbed it. He’d nodded and allowed her to tug him away from the rabbits.

Now, they were walking again.

They were out earlier than usual. The moon was a cupped palm in the sky; grapefruit light hovered low on the horizon, sunken like silt to the bottom of a quiet river; the rest of the sky was the cerise of an onion. They had brought a blanket with them – a woven Saltillo one that made Bel think of the Aztecs. Her brother wore it draped around him as they walked. The smell of it was a runic combination of dew and sand: scorched earth soothed by the cold compress of night. The blanket whispered as its hem dragged across the sand.

They walked for half an hour. They laid the blanket on cold lilac sand. Bel’s brother had kept his sandals on and was shivering. Bel opened the paper bag she’d been carrying, pulled out two tortillas, rolled with cold beans and cheese. The sun was starting to rise: there was a bleach-white line between the pink-orange of the horizon and leftover night purpling.

Her brother liked watching the sun on these mornings on the Sands, but Bel liked watching her brother. He was smallish, brownish, and roundish; his cheeks still had the plumpness of infancy about them – spotted with freckles and moles like the peel of a banana three or four days old. Those were a caffeinated brown, so dark she couldn’t see the pupils within them, although she knew they were there, floating centripidally, because studying a sheep’s eye in science at school had taught her so. There was nothing bony about him.

Her brother watched the sun rise; she watched him watch the sun rise. Bel had heard of something called the Zenith – the moment at which the sun was at its highest point – and decided that there was not just one point but rather three each day: the Actual Zenith, when the sun was highest in the sky; the First Zenith, which was the very last moment before the sun rose fully to announce morning, and the Third Zenith, that second before the sun dipped into dusk and began its retreat into evening.

“We should come to see the sunset someday,” she said as the sun reached First Zenith.

“We always walk back in the light,” he shrugged.

“It’ll be the same, just reversed.”

He shrugged again.

When they finished their breakfast they folded up the blanket and put their sandals on. Day, slow motion. Crumbling aloe shrank away from the heat.

- - -

They went every morning for the next week. Bel did not mention the idea of going at night again even though she wanted to. Her brother would think of reasons not to go, but they did stay longer and longer every morning, on the fourth day until nine or half-past. It was like exercising a muscle, Bel thought – she was stretching her brother out, slowly, so that they would be able to stay until noon and past and he would not mind, would not miss being in their grandmother’s cool kitchen at lunchtime or their grandfather’s basement workshop in the afternoon while he whistled cracklily to the crackly radio.

By the eighth day Bel was bringing along lunch as well as breakfast, and sunglasses and another blanket. More water, hats, lotion to stave off sunburn. Her brother’s cheeks became more and more freckled; her own skin tanned to the color of stained wood. They named more and more landmarks (a Stonehenge of cacti; a rusted-out pickup truck; an abandoned wooden signpost, directionless and sunbleached, bent at its center like a knucklebone) and grew corn-kernel calluses on the soles of their feet which ached when their shoes came off.

The ninth day they walked until the afternoon, about to turn back when they saw shapes far off: spindly things, ashy-white and sapling-slim and stark as chalk dashes against the orange of the landscape.

Bel’s thirsty brother said, “We should turn around soon.”

“Don’t you see that?” She bent her knees a little so that her cheek was next to his, something she’d learned from someone older, but not from her grandmother or her grandfather. “Those white things? Get to those then we’l turn around.”

“I don’t see anything,” her brother said. He twisted his rice-and-beans wrist when she didn’t let go. “Grandma said don’t be late for lunch again.”

“We have lots of time,” Bel said. 

She could tell just by looking at the sun that Actual Zenith was coming up soon. Their grandmother always served lunch just before that, during the summer, which meant that plates were going down now.

Her brother shook his head, softly, like he was trying to get water out of his ears.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“It’s okay,” Bel said. She was proud of herself: here was where other sisters, meaner sisters, would tell their brother to stop being a baby, would drag them by the backs of their shirts puckered in their fists, tight-round their cantaloupe bellies as they dug their heels into the sand. Here was where a sister not as good as Bel was would leave their brother alone in the desert, between the hyssop and the yucca, and carry on without a glance over her shoulder. “Let’s just get closer and I’ll tell you what it is.”

He pushed his palm against hers.

They inched closer.

What looked like desert whiskers were the skeletal remains of teepees: the frames of houses wrapped in skin – deer, coyote, wild things caught and eaten for meat and peeled for shelter and thanked. They were so old, Bel thought, that their walls had worn away, blown away, pecked by birds and eaten by insects.

“They’re frames,” she told her brother, whose palm was sweating coldly in her own, “of old houses. Houses, like tents, but without the fabric.”

Her brother nodded but his dark eyes were slanted. They stepped toward the structures, Actual Zenith looming buzzard-like over their heads. Bel felt her scalp burn at the parting of her hair and envied her brother, for a moment, his mop of calf-top curls. She wanted to take her baseball cap out of the canvas bag she carried over her shoulder, but did not want to let go of her brother’s hand. She let the high-sky sun hiss on her scalp, eyes fighting the mirage haze hovering on the horizon.

The whiteness of the things was like arctic ice – bizarre in a place as hot as the Sands.

Bel did not realize how tall the structures were until they walked under them, how moonshine-white they were until they saw them up close. They were long and smoothed by the friction of sand, glass-blown and stark and terrifying. Bel saw grooves in their smooth surfaces that could have been made by dirty talons: buzzards’ sketches.

They were tied together with ribbons of leather, shoelace-thin, like the ones her grandfather strung his boots with.

They were tied together into chairs and wagons, a hat rack, a spinning wheel.

The children lolled among them, fixated on these gaunt configurations, these bone machinations – furniture bones out in the desert.

Skeletons of inventions.

Bel did not touch them, but her brother was reaching out to stroke them like they were the arched spines of agitated cats. Their reflections were toothpicks and fingernail clippings and old short scars in the black of his eyes.

“We can go back now.” 

Her brother kept touching the bones. 

His sandals filled with sand along the tops of his feet – something he had always disliked.

“We’re leaving now. 

“Come on. 

“Grandma will be mad.”

Her brother kept touching the bones.

- - - 

It was a forest, they had wandered far into it. It took some time to get out. 

When they neared the outer rim of skeletons Bel turned and saw her brother weaving languorously between formations. She called to him. When he did not answer, she turned around, grim-gutted, sunburned, worrying.

She found him wedged up next to one of the structures. Rounded-rib wheels with clavicle spokes skinny as drinking straws; a frame of femurs and vertebrae; at the head of it was the skull of something (antelope, addax, bighorn sheep?) with long, curving, pointed horns. Handlebars. Its empty sockets – eyes, nose, jaw – faced inwards.

Her brother was eyeing it reverently. There was a sheen on his face, gluey like dog spit. Bel shoved her canteen towards him.

“Drink some water,” she said, pushing the container against his chest until he moved his soft arms to grip it. “Drink,” she repeated. “You’re overheated.”

“Bel,” he said. “It’s a bicycle. A bike, Bel.” He didn’t drink. Bel leaned over and unscrewed the cap of the canteen for him and lifted it to his mouth. It dribbled around his lips and down his chin.

“I see it.” She took her brother by the wrist. “We’re leaving now.”

He did not protest, but he also did not drink; did not look in front of him as he walked – only back and back and back over his shoulder. Back at the cemetery of bones with longing and slivers of white in his eyes as the sun stretched to its Third Zenith and Bel wished she had left him between the hyssop and the yucca like a good sister would have.

- - -

The next morning (and the one after that and the one after that) Bel feigned flu. She did not want to take her brother out on the Sands again yet – his face was still swollen with yearning, still red from the sun. Their grandmother chided Bel when she saw it, taking her grandson’s face into her hands as though it was a vase full of fast-wilting flowers she was desperate to preserve. She examined his bloated tongue and rubbed his skin with aloe. He spent the night on the living room couch and didn’t move even when Bel brought him glasses of froggy tap water.

- -

Bel was in the bathroom, on the floor in front of the toilet with her legs crocus-curled beneath her and her head throbbing. The tiles were cold and smooth against the thin skin of her shins – so different from the heat and dog-tongue roughness of the Sands.

The thought of the sun hitting First Zenith without them watching also made her feel sick. It had never happened before: they were always there to welcome the day to the Sands like ambassadors. She knew they had nothing to do with the rising of the sun – how could a star so huge and hot depend on two children? – but she still worried that something bad would happen without them there. Something would be jilted by their absence. The sun would rise crooked; it wouldn’t reach Zenith at all.

Still, she stayed on the bathroom floor, or in her bed or at the table in the kitchen, sipping ginger ale from green cans or peppery broth from her grandfather’s clay mugs, or chewing papery crackers. Her brother asked to go to the Sands every morning and every morning she told him no.

At night Bel dreamed of it. In the middle of the blazing desert, the bone mechanisms sprouted from the ground like twisted stalks of corn, sparse pointed haunting. She shivered as she dreamed despite heat, felt the hairs on her arms and neck rising, her feet and fingers numb no matter how she flexed them. She was always trying to get out but could never remember which way to walk. Wandering through a forest of femurs, hips, humeri.

She searched for her brother there.

Bel passed catapults with their arms done up in splints, a fractured field plow, a bassinet of bone. The sun stayed frozen at Actual Zenith.

The first times, she dreamt of the bones she woke up before she could find her brother. 

The sixth time, he was there.

He was riding the bone bicycle. It made crackling sounds as it moved: snapping kindling, soldiers tramping dry underbrush, baseball bats splintering on impact with too-fast pitches. The wheels rotated slowly, sinking into the sand, but her brother kept his balance. His hands gripped the antler-handlebars with agency unfamiliar; his feet – shoeless and sand-swelled – worked the pedals with intent. The pedals were patella the size of tea saucers.

“It’s a bicycle, Bel,” he said when he saw her. The thing scuttled over the surface of the sand like a crab, hissed like a snake. “I could ride it to Third Zenith, if I wanted.”

“No,” Bel said. “It can’t take you there.”

“It can, though, it can!” her brother insisted, pedaling harder. His moled cheeks crinkled into a smile and the bike crinkled along with them: crumpling newspaper, discarded gift wrappings, the brown bags they carried their lunches in. “It’s the only thing that can!”

“Why do you want to go there?” Bel asked, pleaded. “First Zenith is your favorite, isn’t it?”

“I like the sunset now,” her brother said confidently. “I like it best,” he repeated.

“We have to go home.”

“Okay.” He pushed his heels into the patella pedals. “Get on. The bicycle will take us to the Zenith.”

Bel shook her head. The bicycle was ugly; it scared her.

“Home is on the ground,” she said, “on the Sands and at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. The Zeniths aren’t a place. They’re just times. We can’t go to them.”

“On this we can.” Her brother leaned forward, patted the addax skull on the head. Bel saw his eyes. They had become chalk-white joints of bone like the one in a ham steak. They sat in his head, dead as marbles.

The addax skull, with its spiraled handlebar horns, turned on its stem to face her.

In its bony sockets were her brother’s eyes, mocha-dark.

- - -

She woke to the heat of the Sands. There was sun leaking through her curtains (purple curtains, purple sun, purple fear in her belly).

Bel fell to the floor. Knocking her knees, thinking of bike pedals, thinking of patella. Sun sun sun and she wasn’t moving quick enough. The sand in her eyes was thick and she rubbed it away with her knuckles, expecting them to come away bruised from pressing on a pair of hard eye-bones. Worse than wooden eyes, worse than glass; she blinked and saw through them and remembered that her eyes weren’t calcified. Shoving her feet into a pair of rain boots that her grandfather called impractical, she stumbled to the door and fumbled for the knob.

The steps were carpeted and she lost her footing on the second one, riding the rest of the way down on her backside and falling. Ribcage violins and elephant-earbone trumpets, she tumbled out the front door and sprinted for the Sands.

The sand was still cool, but shifted oddly beneath her booted feet. Unable to feel the mutable grains with each step, kissing her feet in a billion places, she felt disoriented, lost. Her brother was in the graveyard, she knew it in her skin and her muscles, and her bones, too; it itched her to think about it, covered her with scratchy unclean wool and suddenly she was too warm.

Sun was long past First Zenith as Bel passed the drowned-man cactus, the mattress-rock, the giant tumbleweed, the hares’ house. Her brother must have passed them too this morning.

It felt like days before she saw the bones whiskering softly up from the ground in the distance. The shadows they cast were round dark scallops on the sand. Bel breathed the flat warm soda pop desert air.

Bel reached the center of the graveyard and looked around. She was standing in the core of it now, the very marrow, and she knew that nearby was the bicycle, and her brother. 

Now she said his name.

Bel listened for the displacement of sand by little-boy footsteps; for breathing or talking or the dry desert cough that came after too many hours in the Sands with too little water.

What she heard was splintering wood; the pop of a dislocating shoulder, the hinges of an old coffin.

Arthritic sounds around her, smells of plaque and drilled teeth, Bel wished for Third Zenith, for dark. To her left there was an old-fashioned tub and washboard, pieced together with tight-pressed ribs; to her right, the skeleton of an umbrella, its calciferous supports thin as piano wires.

Straight ahead through brambling clusters of birch-sapling white was the bicycle – and beside it was a second: small and cream-colored with timid fingerbone handlebars, turning careful infinite circles in the sand.