Salt of the Earth

It smelled like rotting fish, potato chips, and the bottom of New York City’s oldest dumpster, but it also relaxed something deep inside of me, a muscle in my soul that no amount of meditation can touch. And the birds we saw – oh, the birds we saw! Pelicans, storks, and cranes. Long-legged blue-tinted creatures with stoic poses. Brooding and shy beings with stunning beaks longer than their bodies. In the early 2000s, we ran home to this place.

We ran out with our binoculars and played house in the scorching sun, surrounded by this sea so chock-full of minerals. Me, you, and Cedar. We had our little family separate from the suffocating, often cruel, and sterile one we left at 348 Thermal Place. We sprinted away from those beige walls that wore an assortment of crosses and hanging quilt blankets, antique furniture that only guests were allowed to sit on, and a floor so spotless that pets couldn’t even be a fleeting thought. We traded in that house for one that had no walls at all, furniture that reeked of oil and the seafood section at the grocery store, and a floor made of literal dirt, the driest you’ve ever seen in your life.

But we liked it that way. It was other-worldly, the silence so stark that it was as if we were surrounded by a force field. We were hugged by the uncertainty of tomorrow and fueled by blissful rebellion like the loose strand of hair from a preacher’s wife’s tight headband.

I wish I could bring that safety to you now, in this freezing-cold ICU in Los Angeles. I’m still grasping your hand like it’s a rollercoaster hand-rail, my stomach inhabited by a giant, greedy butterfly that shakes from side-to-side. Your arms are full of a decade’s worth of poke tattoos, canvases for the artistic visions that pop up and dance in your brain like the random energy of atoms.

That’s when I see it: sketched messily on the underside of your upper arm is the old armchair. That soggy, pungent, sulfur-oozing piece of furniture that somehow came to serve as a symbol of our childhood. I can’t help but laugh and laugh, shaking my head at the ridiculousness of it. You remembered that chair? You thought of it fondly? Salty tears are falling from my eyes, and the very first one lands on the image's very seat.

And in a moment, I am traveling through time.

It was summer of 2007 in Salton City, California. You were 14, Cedar was 6, and I was 10. Three kids with incredibly strict and rigid parents living in the middle of nowhere. Imagination was a necessity.

“It’s time to play ‘Chair-if-You-Dare!’” exclaimed Cedar, kicking his tattered Converse as far as he could. He shrieked as the right shoe landed in such close proximity to the water that any ripple would splash the toe.

You groaned. “This is the stupidest game.”

Cedar grabbed you by the shoulders and pushed you toward the chair. “Loser has to sit on the chair for 1 full minute."

But just as you were about to make contact with the chair, I swooped in to save you, helping you gang up on our little brother.

Cedar could never play his own game. We dragged him, kicking and screaming to the chair. He managed to clock you just above the left eye, which only fueled you more. We sat him down in the chair, and he wailed. It was less than a minute before the smell became too much even for us to be next to it. He ripped off his pants and threw them in the water and sat on the dry ground in his underwear, refusing to look at us.

Of course, we got you plenty of times too. Like that one time before you went on a secret date at the drive-in movie theater? You almost killed us. I laughed silently as you angrily sprayed Germ-X all over the seat of your pants and lay down on the hard ground for the sun to dry you off.

That chair. Oh my god. Who even left it there?

I wipe my eyes, which at this point are co-habited by tears of laughter and fear, and avoid the look of judgement from a nurse at the nearby station. I always thought you hated that game and hated us for making you play it.

“Lenore.” I hear a voice from behind me. It’s Cedar. No longer the little boy who lagged behind us like a Golden Retriever puppy, following our every move, he looks at me with eyes that are too heavy for the weights that 17-year-olds should be carrying.

He sits down next to me quietly, catching on to the fact that I cannot physically speak right now. It’s not possible to turn thoughts into vocalizations that capture the immense pain that seems to be dissolving into me.

Our mother follows shortly behind Cedar, buttoned up in a white blouse and a long denim skirt. Her eyes are hollow but dry.

“Have you come to a decision yet?” The doctor approaches us all softly, directing his question at me.

“A decision?” Cedar interjects. “A decision about what?”

The doctor doesn't say anything.

“Hello?” Cedars is getting angry now. “Hello! You can’t just ask a question like that and then not explain what the hell is going on. This is our sister!”

“Quiet, Cedar!” Our mother raises her voice, her emotional emptiness like a drought worse than any the Salton Sea has ever faced. “Excuse me, sir. I will be making any decisions because I am her mother.”

“So, with regards to that…” he begins nervously as a woman with a black suit approaches his side. “We need to discuss some legalities that you all may not be aware of.”

Our cellular aging was certainly expedited by the unopposed UV rays. With no trees or buildings to produce even the wimpiest of shadows, it was like we were on Mars. There was always something so eerily beautiful about this body of water that was so toxic it routinely killed even its own inhabitants. Another day meant another dead fish washed up on shore.

It was the five of us back then, living in that 3-bedroom, 1-bathroom house in Salton City. You were a free spirit, and we were your loyal followers. We’d created something of a miniature play-house for ourselves on one of the beaches near the sea, make-shift from the abandoned fridge, three-legged table, and that old nasty armchair. You were always different in the best way, and it wasn’t just your brilliant amber eyes that contrasted with our murky brown ones or your cute, button nose that put our broad ones to shame.

Your physical attributes were different, but your personality and talents were what really made you beautiful. You drew murals with pencil on old wood that could have been placed in a museum. You wrote scripts for plays that our tiny school performed, but you could have captivated audiences much better as a one-woman-show. You were a true artist. You were the kid who stayed up late and the adult who either went without sleep for days or stayed in bed for a week with blackout curtains, making me worry sick when all of my phone calls went straight to voicemail.

But you weren’t actually one of us. Not like we thought.

One night, when our father was tipsy off of two beers he smuggled in from the nearby gas station to avoid our mother’s hawk-eyed-stare, he started talking. And he talked too much. Until it was too late.

“Bitch!” He shouted at our mother as she knocked his third beer out of his hand. “You think a woman like Crystal would do some shit like that?”

He started rambling about a woman named Crystal with large amber eyes who would write poems for him. You were the product of our father’s weekend trip to Pahrump, Vegas at age 19. You were not the biological child of our mother. That was the most we ever found out. And we were forbidden from talking about it. I guess old habits die hard, or whatever they say, because our father died in a drunk driving accident heading home from work when I was 17. And he took the rest of it with him to the grave.

All this time, I’ve been thinking that our mother would be making decisions about your care. I have forgotten that she is not your blood, our family's boniest skeleton in our neatly organized closets.

And it falls on me. I am the next one related by blood. I am the one who decides whether or not to, as the cliche of horrors goes, pull the plug.

The doctor is explaining the way that we can start to tell that someone is “brain dead.” How could your brain be dead before you go? Your brain has always been simultaneously the most vibrant, melancholic, and ridiculously exuberant part of you. Not even physical death can take that away. Life in this realm can only begin to capture the depths of you.

“... her reflexes aren’t responding like we’d expect them to. She is not taking any breaths on her own…”

How am I supposed to decide if you live or die?

Me?

“What would Zelle want?” The doctor asks.

The Salton Sea was an accident, just as you were. Created from the failure of a river and once believed by some in the 1950s to be America’s up-and-coming favorite luxury resort, the Salton Sea turned out to be nothing more than a fever dream, a pipe dream. Salt and pollution soon rolled in like a dark funnel-producing cloud on a Kansas plain.

But even if the Salton Sea was not enough for the tourism industry, it was more than enough for us. And it was your saving grace, the holy ground that you returned to for stability when your adult life became nothing more than a series of short-lived, destructive highs and very low lows.

You and the Salton Sea needed each other. You still do. You need it for its minerals that don’t just settle in its deepest craters but rise to the top and balance you.

I will never forget the first time you called me from a psychiatric ward, your speech full of such force that I physically felt a push backwards. I leaned against my college dorm room wall, sliding down it with damp eyes.

“I’m healing the Earth,” you spoke the phone, speaking so quickly that you almost couldn’t keep up with yourself. “It’s a new plan, and I want you in on it. It’s a new way of living. I'm starting a commune. I've applied for mayor and the race should begin soon. Hey, it's funny. They want to give me lithium here. They say it's a salt and that I need a salt. I tried to tell them that we grew up in a salt town. Tell them, Lenore. Come tell them. Hey, I need you to come here and talk to my doctors... ”

It was heart-breaking, listening to you throw your life away, the mania irritating the very matter of your brain like sandpaper rubbing against smooth, soft skin. You rambled on about your God-given gift to “re-invent” the Earth.

“Zelle–” I remember barely being able to interrupt you. “ZELLE!”

Salt and dust. It’s all I see now as I stand in front of what remains of our childhood sanctuary. I ultimately said no – no, you wouldn’t have wanted to spend the rest of your life on a breathing machine, being taken care of 24-7. That wasn’t you. That’s never been you.

It’s practically all washed up now. The place where you taught me to float on my back on land, where the water used to be. Dried up and crumbling. I lay down in the very spot, the hard ground like a tough mattress at the house of a friend who you are no longer close with. Newly unfamiliar. No longer welcome.

And then I throw you out, out into what's left of the Salton Sea. What's left of our childhood. What's left of you.

Would you have wanted to lie here? Surrounded by what you never wanted to put in your body? Lithium. Highly flammable. Toxic at low doses. Stability when it’s just right. Killer of creativity but savior of sleep.

But I am absolved of my guilt when I remember the smile in your voice during those long-distance hospital phone calls. That was the one thing that always seemed to bring you back down. Our home. Our Sea.

As I stare out at the remnants of this body of water, I wonder if maybe you were right about the whole healing-the-Earth thing. Maybe you were always going to come back to this place after your Earthly existence. As I walk away, I can't help but hope that, when my time comes, I will join you.