Carrie Richerson by Artistic License

Author:Artistic License
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-10T23:26:59+00:00

THE COMMERCIAL flights were the usual humiliation; attendants who patronized me with soulless courtesy, passengers who stared, or worse, made a point of not staring. The damned, disgusting pity in their eyes. I pulled a blanket over my head and pretended to sleep between flight changes.

My parents were honeymooning on Cyprus the summer that Israel finally lost all patience with the guerrillas of the Bekaa Valley and started the Six-Hour War. The wind was from the southeast. My parents were doubly lucky: they got out fast and the doctors told them their exposure had been minimal. It should have been okay for them to have children.

If I had been born in my mother’s native Greece, I might have been left on some hillside as an offering to the gods. In America my parents weren’t allowed that option. Neither was I. Some days I am not properly grateful for the miracle of my existence.

But it could have been worse. Nature, that most mischievous of gods, indulged her ironic whimsy in linking the physical malformations to psychokinetic Talent. The more severe the deformities, the stronger the Talent. So those of us who have been born with some variation of this mutation, who owe our origins to Damascus and Chernobyl and Comanche Peak, to ozone depletion and heavy metal contamination— we are compensated. And, in the end, we will have the last laugh: It’s a dominant mutation. We breed true, and there are more of us every year.

In El Paso I picked up my plane from long-term storage and headed east. Only when I had climbed above the mutagenic goo that E1 Paso-Juarez calls air did I begin to relax. I could feel the bone-dry, superheated air shriveling the Georgia mold in my pores.

I hadn’t filed an accurate flight plan, and I turned off my plane’s transponder before I banked south at Balmorhea. Every time I do that the FAA threatens to ground my ass, but I grease enough palms to keep my file relatively clean. The same passion for privacy makes sure that my mountain home appears on no map, my access codes are unlisted, and the old-fashioned mailbox down at the unpaved country road carries my mother’s name, “Eleutheria.” No one has gotten the joke yet.

A last tight turn among the weathered limestone reefs of this ancient sea, and I was home. Home to my desert, patient and forgiving of my absences, like an indulgent lover. Here I have found refuge from the casual wounds of a careless public. And here I have found the source and inspiration for all my art.

This is the ultimate Art: an utter commitment to the senses. Colors of a subtlety and range not to be believed. Silence that sings in the midnight ear. Bitter waters and sweet rocks, brimstone soil and aggressive plants. A scented night as seductive as the secrets between a woman’s thighs, followed by a sun that can pound one into the ground like the hammerstroke of doom. Above it all, the bowl of that vast, engulfing, crushing, weightless sky.

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