In the days before the Middle Desert disappeared, I drove to Irving’s each morning well before six. In the winter, that meant smelling the fine cool emptiness of desert dark. In the summer, it meant catching the gold from the east just as the sun pulled itself over the ridge of Mud Pony Mountain. Each day I spent long hours and untold calories unloading ornamental shrubs and preening fan palms that had arrived by night on large trucks from the distant High Desert. I didn’t yet understand, botanically speaking, why they couldn’t just grow these things in the Middle Desert. Something about our shitty soil. Not enough shit in the soil, I guessed, caused by a general lack of life forms.

Our town, recently small and a little less recently nonexistent, was attracting waves of retirees, deposited in closely packed clusters at our port of dust as if by a desert cruise line. The newcomers did not distinguish the Middle Desert from other, less deserted deserts, and they enjoyed the conventional symbols of desert living more than the less glamorous natural fittings of our local real thing. Our real thing, Irving always told me, was the wonder of wonders. But it did not sell.

“I tried for years,” Irving told me. It was one of my first days on the job. Irving grabbed a fallen frond and flicked a scorpion from his boot. “I wanted to do right by this land, kid.”

“Haven’t you?”

Why the guilt? The man was running a nursery, not a copper mine. God, it was hot. My face was covered with grit and sweat and tiny splinters of unknown provenance. I knew the place was going bust. I knew the newcomers liked palms more than scrub. I knew that Irving had apparently set aside his principles to import the alien fan palms, and that I was here to unload them and prepare them for sale. At the time, it was all in a day’s work to me. But to Irving, we were complicit in a cover-up, a fake, a forgery of reality: the illusion that our desert was the kind of desert envisioned by people who had never before lived in the desert.

One of the new symbols of our community, thanks to us, was the cactus, which did not grow in our Middle Desert, only in the neighboring Low Desert; another was the Joshua tree, which grew only in the neighboring High Desert. Without Irving’s imports, what we would have had, most of all, was a sort of pale-green tangled brush that grew from the shady side of basalt boulders on our three acres. I thought it was sagebrush, but Irving told me it was something else.

“What is it?” I asked Irving.

“It is the tree of life,” he said.

“It’s not much of a tree,” I said.

“It’s not much of a life.”

Irving’s smile was the kind that made a young man want to hug an old man and soak up the bittersweet wisdom of all those wasted years. His skin was browned from half a lifetime of hiking deserts, high and middle and low. When he smiled, the creases spread like sunrays from the corners of his eyes. He vowed never again to develop his three acres beyond the nursery sales hut and the 900-square-foot home he’d built from rough gray cinderblock for himself and his wife, where they had lived and she had, briefly, died.

***

I came to the Middle Desert from a rainy, green town, ready to start over someplace that had, demonstrably, less of everything. I was, for the moment, tired of my young life, and our Middle Desert town promised a surfeit of lifelessness. Irving’s wife, for instance, was already dead when I arrived. I found her in the brick house. That was the day I was supposed to meet Irving. From his home in the great Southwest, Irving had placed the offer in the classified sections of the weekly papers of five faraway northwestern towns: Drain, Boring, Sandy, Echo and Burns. Irving believed that he might find, in such towns, people willing to leave. I was willing to leave.

I remember the sound Irving made as he thanked God for the fruit of the higher, lower and Middle Deserts. It was the sound of a question mark with no words attached, and I understood the question he was asking God: “So tell me, what can I do for you?”

When I came upon Polina’s body, I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d knocked on the door, and nobody had answered, and, forgetting all my manners, I’d simply walked in and there it was, a body. The hair was gray but the cheeks soft and downy. It was a pale, delicate, noble corpse, thin as a river reed but strangely supple amid all the deadly dry. I knelt to double-check that the body was, indeed, dead. I took the cold hand and held it.

When Irving walked in and saw me holding his wife’s dead hand, I looked up and said, “I’m sorry.” He ran to her and pulled her hand out of mine and leaned over her face and kissed it and touched her downy cheek and bowed his ear to her chest and listened. Then he ran to the kitchen and returned with a spoon and a jar.

I will never forget the moment when Polina’s cold hand moved.

I remember the sound Irving made as he thanked God for the fruit of the higher, lower and Middle Deserts. It was the sound of a question mark with no words attached, and I understood the question he was asking God: “So tell me, what can I do for you?”

***

From that day, Irving and I were inseparable.

When I first arrived, he allowed me to live for several months in the block house, helping with unexpected chores and new opportunities. He cleared half a closet for my jeans and work boots and took out a thick book and taught me about the plant life of the High and Low Deserts. The book did not include any pages about the Middle Desert. He took me on long walks. He knelt to touch miniature spiny leaves that poked up out of our dry claylike soil. He touched them the way he had touched his dead wife’s cheek. This is how I know what love is. I have never touched a cheek in this way. My father did not touch my mother’s cheek in this way, as far as I can remember. Maybe he did, after they sent me away. The school commandant once touched my cheek, but it lacked the same tenderness. It was not the same kind of touch, and I ran away from the school.

Illustration by Sydney Wilton

I’d tried to call my parents that day, but I couldn’t find a telephone besides the one outside the Pete’s Petrol, and that one had chewing gum in the dime slot. They probably weren’t home anyway. A truck was pulling through, dieseling up for a long drive into the hills. The trailer was piled high with the trunks of Sitka spruce. I hitched a ride and for the next few years I was in the lumber business. I learned to clear a hill. I wrapped chains around trunks and loaded trucks. The forest smelled so good on those mornings; the trunks were sending the remnants of life into the air, telling the world that they had lived here beneath the rain. It was a smell that could make a man weep: None of the men wept. The smell stayed with me into the nights, sometimes camped on hillsides, where it made sense that I could still smell the smell, other times in motel rooms, where it made no sense at all, and I wept.

I was good at what I did; I could liberate the scent of life at an ungodly clip. But I could not cope with still smelling that smell at night, in motel rooms with the windows closed. It was the smell of life but it was also the smell of death, the smell of life stolen from its roots—of life I had stolen from its roots. The smell was chasing me. It chased me to Boring, and then to Drain, where I read Irving’s ad.

***

Irving could tell me the name of every never-named thing in the desert. He would crouch and his eyes would wrinkle and he’d deliver that touch and he would pronounce a word or series of words—crumbly twilit pricklebush albinus; mourning flatcrown—that would capture the appearance and essence and earthly purpose of a plant. They were the family he had given to his wife.

She had wanted children and he had not been against the idea, but nothing had grown. Polina had proposed going to some other place, one that had hospitals, but he did not trust other places, he only trusted this place, and this was a place that had pronounced its quiet verdict: mourning flatcrown would grow here, but the genetic descendants of Irving would not. Irving was very old by the time we met. The time for children had passed long ago, but Polina never stopped speaking of them. She not only spoke of them, she spoke to them. She spoke to Ilyusha, Mariushka and Dasha. Those were her favorites—boy, girl, girl—fourteen, eight, four. “What was I to do?” Irving told me. “She summoned them up out of thin air and swore they were real as rain. I had no choice but to believe her.”

The children Polina painted into Irving’s imagination, she assured us, had dark hair like their father and delicate noses like their mother. Ilyusha could run for miles, out there in the desert; he had inherited his father’s endurance and leathery skin. Mariushka took care of white-tailed antelope ground squirrels and would certainly grow up to become an animal doctor. Dasha, like her father, liked planting things and making them grow, even here. Irving loved the children, whether they existed or not. They were always the same age, which made them difficult to deal with; if any of them were “in a phase,” as Irving’s wife liked to say, the phase never ended. It is hard to grow children when the children do not grow.

The children, such as they were, exhausted Polina, especially Ilyusha, who would listen to nothing and no one. He was always right; he came home from his runs at whatever time he pleased, and he sullenly refused to tell his mother what he had been up to out there. “I’ll tell Dad,” he said, and Polina replied, “But Dad can’t hear you,” and Ilyusha said, “He never listens,” and Irving’s wife said, “He would if he could,” and the kid said, “Someday I’m going to run away from this hellhole,” and the mother said, “Go straight to your room,” but he couldn’t, because Irving had only built one large room. Polina told Irving that she would like to have a two-year-old boy, and Irving tried to soothe her by telling her to appreciate the blessings they already had. “But a two-year-old!” she said. “Imagine! The joy, the force of life, the climbing!”

“But,” Irving said, “he would always be two years old.”

“Irving,” she said, “my sweet, sweet Irving. There is nothing we can’t handle.”

It was night. Irving told her they could both close their eyes and try.

***

Irving looked up from a leaf of furry tangletwig argentus and shook his head. “She never could summon up that two-year-old,” he said. This was in our eighth month toiling side-by-side. I’d heard the story before. Irving would ask, “Have you heard this one?” and I’d say, “No.” Irving did not have a lack of stories, but we spent a lot of time together, and it would have been impossible for him not to repeat himself. I would have repeated myself as well, if I had any stories to tell besides the ones that Irving had told me. Irving and Polina had met when they were both in high school, not in this country but in another one, teeming with life until it was not.

“Did you know,” Irving told me, “that we were dead?”

“You made it through,” I said.

“No, that’s the thing. We didn’t. There is no way we could have. Nothing could survive there. I’m certain of it. The police had come, secret ones, not so secret ones, and then the armies, the real soldiers and the fake ones who did not fight but only killed. One night I went to sleep and the next morning I woke up and I was alive and all of the dying seemed suddenly to be at an end. How does dying come to an end? Am I not right, that you can’t unmurder a murdered world? The leaves had wilted, the roots had been cut, am I clear? I’m afraid I’m not clear. I have never seen awakening from that kind of sleep, but awaken we did, Polina and I, as if some sort of botanical were applied at the final moment when all good processes were at the verge of a halt. How do you arrest the plunge to such an emptiness without some agent of regrowth? The liberator had a little bottle and the largest eyes I’d ever seen: a yellow-haired American boy, tall and weedy and overburdened by his head. He looked like a wilting sunflower. ‘How did you do it?’ I asked.  ‘I’m from the Middle Desert,’ the boy said. Of course, that told me nothing, and he could tell I wanted something. A recently dead man can’t help but be curious. The kid winked at me and grinned. ‘Mourning flatcrown,’ he said.”

***

After Polina and Irving tore themselves free from the continent of the dead, they arrived in our hemisphere expecting it to be a land of perpetual birth, each day utterly new and unspoiled. New York did not feel that way, nor did northeastern Ohio. It didn’t help that Irving was forever haunted by three words, the Middle Desert, and then by two more, mourning flatcrown. He worked as a tailor for money, put away some of it for buying seeds, gardened on his balcony in spring, wandered botanical gardens in summer, studied every atlas and botanical guide he could get his hands on in the Cleveland Public Library. He regularly wrote to the auto club for maps and sent away for brochures from every tourist bureau in the American West. Finally, he came home to Polina one day, rainsoaked, and declared that he had purchased a car.

“Where will we drive it?” she asked.

“I’ll know when we get there.”

Irving found his valley, and the valley was empty. The mountains were millions, even billions of years old, the striped granite, the red crumbling sandstone, the pale unforgiving schist, a place ageless beyond imagining. A tiny, shattered shack was next to the northern patch of flatcrown when Irving arrived. Folded between two logs was a sheet of paper with a childlike hand-drawn sunflower and a note: If you’re here and I’m not, you made it and I didn’t. Live! 

The smell of flatcrown was different in the day that it was at night. The color of it changed from pale gold at dawn to dusty green by noon and black by sundown. Irving picked a leaf and bit into it that first night and was overcome by a profound bitterness, as if an herb had been dipped in all the world’s tears at once.

“What will we eat?” Polina asked.

“We’ll grow it ourselves,” Irving said.

But nothing grew except the few things that had always grown there, things that did not want to be eaten by humans. Such was the Middle Desert’s gift for survival. In the 4.5 billion years of the earth, it seemed, nobody but the liberator and raiser of the dead, the Sunflower Boy, had ever before chosen to live on these three acres. Irving, having been given the chance to live, was determined to do so. So, he began to bring things that were foreign to his three acres. He planted them there, and they grew, and soon many of the things that had grown there before began to die. It was some sort of miracle, in which the merely death-defying yields to the life-giving.

He mourned the old plants, though, and still collected them on his hikes. He would bring them back and plant them on his three acres, but they would immediately die. He disliked all of this dying, even amid the new kind of life that had replaced the dead things. His orchard had grown to include apricot trees and pear trees and flowering plums and a tree that gave green apples and another one that gave red. People began to pull to the side of the narrow weather-pocked road for fruit and flowers. A traveler told Irving that he should open an inn. “What do I need with an inn?” Irving asked. So, the traveler moved to the Middle Desert and opened an inn. The inn needed plants, so Irving used the south end of his acreage to open a nursery-greengrocer to sell produce and saplings.

The garden flourished, the nursery business grew, the town grew around Irving’s three acres—tract homes and strip malls, cigarette stores and massage joints and places to get cheap sushi. And Salons. Salons were everywhere. People wanted to look young forever.

A year passed and another, then ten, then twenty. The garden flourished, the nursery business grew, the town grew around Irving’s three acres—tract homes and strip malls, cigarette stores and massage joints and places to get cheap sushi. And Salons. Salons were everywhere. People wanted to look young forever.

“Hair & Nails,” the signs proclaimed, places for the care of dead tissue.

***

The old plants had yielded their ground to the new ones, one square yard at a time, until there were only two tiny islands of True Middle Desert left. Irving was haunted by what had become of his little patch.

Polina resisted when he announced his plan to kill off the orchard and leave only the weeds. “The orchard feeds us, Irving. You said so yourself.”

“The orchard,” he said, “kills.”

It took two months, which started with a shovel and ended with a rented backhoe, but the execution was efficiently executed and the ground no longer blossomed. Then Irving drove far into the Middle Desert in his old, red Ford pickup and he filled the flatbed with caked clay topsoil and basalt boulders. He drove back and forth every night for a month and week and at the end of the month and the week his journeys were complete. The next spring, the old plants began to grow again on Irving’s acres. He tenderly and selectively picked leaves and boiled them in water with salt. It was the soup of the Middle Desert, he said; when perfected, it would taste of land untouched by man. He filled jar after jar with the deep black potage, labeling each one with dates on masking tape in his oddly elegant Old World hand, never telling Polina why he was doing it.

“Am I supposed to drink this?” she asked.

“Now,” he said, “is not the time.”

“Now,” she said, “that you’ve killed off all the fruit, I just may be hungry enough.”

***

With the orchard gone, the nursery had nothing to sell except tiny samples of the indigenous plant life that Irving had gathered from his replanted acreage. He hand-lettered a plywood sign outside the nursery: “Middle-Desert Living the Way It Ought to Be: Sold ONLY Here.” He erected displays for thimbleweed caeruleum and golden jester’s thorn, but shoppers looked at them in a sort of barely masked horror and whispered quietly to one another. Some regulars hugged Irving before they departed. At home, Polina grew slimmer and slimmer. Her eyes became even bluer, as if she was being filled up with sky.

Illustration by Sydney Wilton

“What should I do?” Irving asked her.

“You’ve always been so certain,” she said. She was sitting in a wooden chair next to the cinderblock wall. She and Irving had made it themselves from the remains of an old cart they’d found near a creek at the spot where the High Desert met the Low Desert without having to go through the Middle Desert.

For the first time, Irving did not know what to do. With the houses and businesses all around him, the Middle Desert now looked less like the place he had come to and more like the place he had come from. Such circumstances brought back old thoughts, old scents. There were entirely too many people, having entirely too many thoughts, plans, schemes, dreams, ambitions. Where nothing else will grow—not even a clump of deathboquet siccum—thoughts, plans, schemes, dreams and ambitions will. They will grow and take on lives of their own, disobedient to the intentions of the planner-schemer-dreamer. The winning scheme, the one that triumphs in the struggle, does not require our intentions, good or bad, only our inertial follow-through. Irving had given birth to the nursery and the nursery had given birth to the town, and the town was killing the Middle Desert, and this so dismayed Irving that he’d killed the nursery, and now Irving’s purposeful impoverishment of the nursery was killing his wife.

***

“What should I do with the nursery?” he asked the owner of Hair & Nails, whose business never seemed to stop growing.

“Fan palms,” said the owner, who also owned the new Tropical Dream Retail Center and needed fan palms to complete his all-desert-is-the-same-desert theme.

“Fan palms?” Irving said. “Those are not middle-desert.”

“The Middle Desert is dead,” said the owner of Hair & Nails and the new Tropical Dream Retail Center.

“I can still grow flatcrown on my property.”

“Irving, listen. I want to help you. You’re the guy with the past, and I’m the guy with the money. That means I’m also the guy with the future. But I like you, so I want you to have a future, too.”

“I killed the desert.”

“The desert is death, unless we outsmart it. You know who taught us that? You did, you old fool. I like you as a neighbor, but I know an opportunity when I see one, and your land is beginning to look like one to me. Take my advice or don’t, but property where only flatcrown grows is destined, sooner or later, to become my property.”

The owner of Hair & Nails provided Irving the money to have twenty fan palms trucked in from Palmville, which itself had imported its first fan palms from Palmington long before. Palmington, in turn, had gotten its fan palms from a botanist who ran a small experimental grove in the Sonoran Desert before the Mexican-American War.

The palms arrived on the massive trailer of a diesel truck. The base of each palm was in a wooden crate hardly big enough to contain its root-ball. A scorpion skittered from behind the bark and off into the Middle Desert. Irving had never seen such a scorpion in the Middle Desert.

What was he, one old man, to do with a trailer full of palm trees? He tied a rope around his waist and another around the base of a tree. He bent forward against the wind, pressed his feet into the ground and heaved the first palm off the trailer. Then he pulled the second, the third. In the end, he had nine fan palms lying on their sides. Then he tied one end of the rope around the crown of a tree and the other end around his chest. Soon Irving had nine standing palm trees, and he collapsed. Polina found him the next morning, brought him back to the house, and boiled him some red spindleweed soup from the acreage. He did not stand up for eight days. By the time he left his brick hut, the first shipment of fan palms was dead. When he returned home, Polina was stitching together the dusty bucket hat he’d torn on a sclerified frond. It was excruciating to watch the movement of her once-swift hands. He told her, for the first time in their shared life: “We’re not going to make it, my love.”

Polina did not look up. “Irving,” she said, “of course we will.”

Later that day, she went to see the man from Hair & Nails. She was thin as a squalid mesquite, the blue light of her eyes almost extinguished.

“Can you help us?” she said.

He sucked on his teeth, ran his nails through his hair.

“One,” he said, “more,” he said, “shipment.”

That night, Irving handed her five envelopes, each sealed and addressed: Drain, Boring, Sandy, Echo, Burns.

“What are these?” she asked.

“Advertisements. I need a man.”

“Why are you sending them so far away?”

“I need a man,” he explained, “who knows trees.”

***

It has been forty years since I rolled into the Middle Desert. The day I arrived was the day Irving finally opened one of the jars and Polina and her blue eyes and her visions and the children of her beautiful mind were spared. The elixir needed more fine-tuning while we supported ourselves with fan palms and watched the town devour the Middle Desert. We spent years rescuing and sustaining our supply of miracle scrub.

I recently sold my shares of a company called Bountiful, which produced the well-known pharmaceutical of the same name, distilled primarily from mourning flatcrown and partly from the droppings of a type of scorpion found only in the Sonora/Palmington fan palm. It deoxidizes that which has oxidized, restarts metabolic processes. The creators of the product kept their identities a secret for many years, but now that they are gone, both of them, I can tell you that I once worked the land that made Bountiful possible, that I served my longtime partners, Irving and Polina, and was listed in their will along with their heirs, Ilyusha, Mariushka and Dasha, who had only and always existed in their mother’s mind. This left me as the sole proprietor of Bountiful and the land on which mourning flatcrown grew—the only land in the world on which it could grow.

On a scorched June morning, when our expanding patch of mourning flatcrown shone with such a feverish shade of gold that one could scarcely imagine it would blacken by nightfall, my neighbor came to the door of the brick hut and handed me a sheet of paper densely covered with dense words. Later that summer, District Court Judge Alma Shade ruled that the document did indeed document what it purported to document: that the neighbor’s great-grandfather, the original owner of Hair & Nails, a subsidiary of Dead Cells, LLC., had long ago secured title to the land formerly belonging to Irving as consideration in exchange for funds to purchase 27 Sonoran/Palmington fan palms.

It turned out that for half a century, Irving, Polina, and their heirs—or, rather, their heir—had been living as tenants. Now Dead Cells had come to claim the land.

***

When his moment came, Irving had declined to use Bountiful for himself. Polina prepared the soup for him, the old-fashioned way, just as he had once made it for her, but he told her he’d seen enough of dying and was now prepared to try it himself. “But what about the living that follows,” Polina asked, “the living you made possible?”

“That?” Irving said. “I didn’t do that. That’s the Middle Desert. And there’s not so much left to waste on me.”

A month after Irving died, so did Polina, who had left me instructions to keep it that way.

I miss them still: Irving’s mad faith in the land, Polina’s madder faith in Irving, the impossible children, the house they lived in, the garden they kept, where the Bountiful laboratories now stand and, one presumes, will always stand, bankrupt and hollowed out in a vacated city. The fourth-generation owner of Hair & Nails and Tropical Dream Center and 30,000 additional acres of the valley floor had learned nothing of our history: He decided our land was too valuable for agriculture and moved the harvesting operation to the Low Desert, where the entire seed crop of mourning flatcrown perished in a month. Where the weeds once grew, he’d built a parking lot and a visitor center, and, yes, an inn called Eternity.

Not long ago I went out looking for mourning flatcrown in the Middle Desert, but the Middle Desert was nowhere to be found.

In our ECO LIT series, Red Canary Magazine dedicates space for established writers and emerging voices to imagine better ways of being.