It was Tucson in the endless dog days of an endless summer. The heat was inescapable, pooling in the window frames and the air as it coughed from the vents: A fever that would never break.
Two weeks we lay there, knee deep in the throws of a heat that would never subdue, a summer that would never end. You would knock on my door, laying there on the bed, staring holes into the dripped and melting ceiling. You held a paper bag of cheap wine between your ****** and tarnished fingers, clinking against the rings you wore like trophies. I donβt know where I found you, golden brown and beautiful out amongst an vast eternity of ugliness.
We took mescaline we had gotten from your cousin living back out on the reservation. Laying there passing back the wine you told me how the desert was alive, how it had been swallowing you your whole life. You told me that the dryness and the heat had consumed you, burnt you through until you couldnβt bear to be yourself anymore. The scorching heat overcame you and you told me there had been no choice but to become the desert. I had only been in the southwest two months, but I saw it, although I was untouched. You had grown here, you said, wilting to ash together with the desert.
The mescaline had me by the throat and I saw you from dust to dust. I saw you at one with the desert. You were beautiful amongst the red and ochre blood of the sand and at once I wanted to melt to ash and burn into the desert alongside you. I told you and you laughed and I laughed and we made love to the heat and to the sweat driven out from underneath our pores, inflamed by the drugs and the inescapable heat. The room was aflame and the great desert was alive and ripping at us through the open window with claws of heat that slashed at our backs.
I awoke and you were tying your shoes. Just like that, the fever had broken, and already you could feel autumn coming in with its swathes of chilled air sweeping across the plains. I had been in love those two weeks. With the sun and the dust and the ash and the desert and all of it being one with you. As it all collapsed around me I felt saddened at its loss. You were out the door and the summer was over. I moved back east where the winter came faster and colder and the desert was of a different kind.