A star blew up above my windshield at 1:51 in the morning, 51 minutes past New Mexico’s northern border.
Sleep had tugged on my eyelids since pulling out of a truck stop in Vaughn two hours prior, the merge onto US-285 effortless at that late hour.
The local radio stations did a piss poor job at keeping me awake with their rancheras, but whatever celestial body that decided to go supernova picked up the slack and lodged itself between my ribs.
My foot slammed on the brakes, hard enough for me to have joined the bug-juiced graveyard on my windshield had it not been for the seatbelt. (It kept me from spreading my wings but not from injuring my shoulder, the mechanism in the old ’97 Saturn refusing to adjust to anything other than its former owner's height and build.)
Shooting star or neurons firing in a state of somnambulic confusion, I couldn't tell, but the responsible thing would have been to pull over and call it for a few hours.
That option felt more like a death sentence than driving half-asleep down a desolate highway.
In front of the car, a void waited at the end of cloudy headlights. High beams sliced at the ghosts of yellow lines that vanished beneath a thick layer of desert dust, eroded by the tires of long-haul eighteen-wheelers.
On either side of the car, asphalt dropped off into brittle shrubbery that clung to life in the arid landscape. The night swallowed everything within and outside of my human sight with the exception of the blanket of stars, and a faint speck of light out in the valley.
I had thought the light to be a maintenance shed, or a lone house out in the middle of nowhere that kept a bulb on to keep away the coyotes.
But the light had kept pace with the 80 miles per hour the engine was pushing.
Flecks of unease aided by swelling terror dispelled any and all traces of exhaustion, so I pressed down on the gas until the speedometer matched the thumping in my chest.
There was nothing out there. A whole, wide expanse of nothing.
Nothing, and the light that wasn't so much following but keeping up with the car.
Last week, the idea of taking a trip had felt like a brilliant one. After fifteen months of forced social exposure in an environment where isolation meant survival, hitting the road with only the changing scenery for company had sounded like the key to self-alignment. (Journaling can only do so much.)
I did not regret packing up the car with a couple bottles of water and a bulk box of beef jerky. I did not regret leaving behind the reality of scorned friends and frazzled roommates and disappointed family members. It was only for three days.
At the horizon line, black began to fade into the darkest blue. Oil paints scraped across the sky until navy blended with purple and pink, streaks of red overtaking layers until yellow and white took their place, the canvas wiped and covered in unpolluted blue.
A ball of boiling white moved overhead, reminding me of the explosive encounter five hours prior, but at least I knew what this one was.
The sun lifted waves off the asphalt, and the smell of burning rubber was not a consequence of tires pelting the road.
The Saturn decelerated without my permission.
Taps became stomps until the gas pedal touched the carpeted floor, the grind of unoiled metal on metal failing their only purpose in life, and it’s an apt metaphor for—well—everything. At least with daytime now simmering across the desert, I felt better about pulling over.
Getting under the hood was simple, as was checking the oil, transmission, wiper fluid, and belts. The engine looked to be in one piece.
Getting under the car was less simple.
Spare shirt spread out on the sizzling blacktop, I got on my back and searched for leaks or any other obvious sign of a problem, but no luck manifested on that sweltering morning.
Ass back in the driver’s seat, half a bottle of water gone in a single swig, I typed on my phone one-handed. Weirdly, the signal was good enough for the web browser to load within seconds. Weirder still, it refused to run any searches until the phone detected my location. I couldn't get it to do so even after granting it the necessary permissions. Restarting the device confused it further, signal dropping and picking up again.
Do you wish for this device to know your location?
Accept.
¿Desea que este dispositivo conozca su ubicación?
The emergency burner phone in the glove compartment was out of charge, and the car was too old to change that.
The stretch of highway sizzled under my sneakers as I paced the strip, desolation stretching long around me.
Every video I have ever watched and every podcast on highway disappearances I have ever listened to while on the clock plays at once in a disconcerting cacophony of Valley Girl accents and close-ups of shocked faces across a sea of never ending thumbnails too similar to matter. And while the possibility of dehydration was far more likely, I couldn’t help but be torn between wanting to spot a truck and not wanting to become a drop in some white woman's algorithm.
Anxiety wrapped its spindly tendrils around my lungs as I took another look at the machinery under the hood to no avail. Heat pressed at my back, sweat gathering along the bottom of my compressed chest. The back of my neck, exposed to the elements, burned when I swiped a hand across it.
Ten road trips in four years, and the one that went tits up was the one I took solo. Figures.
I had hoped that the bad luck ravishing my life throughout that past year would have quit once the clock struck midnight on January 1st, but no dice. The streak of unfortunate events felt never-ending and targeted, as if the universe itself flipped me the birdie.
I supposed that whatever Virgin my parents lit candles for had delivered onto her Son the words of my family’s prayers: ‘save our child from this alternative lifestyle’.
Not that that made sense. I had been queer all my life and telling my Catholic parents should not have changed shit in the eyes of God. Maybe it was self-sabotage. Confirmation bias. Something I’d likely missed in Psych 101.
Bangs swept out of my eyes, I thought myself in circles. Nothing to do but wait it out, hope someone drove by on route. There was an ice pick in the car, and it might make an adequate improvised weapon if the need arose.
The car rocked on its tires with a loud creak and a moan.
I reared back, heart pounding as I watched it ease back to stillness. The metal frame swayed, and while my ears pointed towards 'physical impact', my brain said it must have been a particularly strong gust of wind. A gust I hadn't felt, but saw as brown and red particles of sand settled around me.
Hand to my chest, I took a big enough breath to leave me crunching on microscopic desert terrain. Another sound, a horn, this time from behind me.
I turned and rolling up the road was a pickup truck, its tan and white coat fresh. It was a weird looking thing, as if someone had glued the front of a ’65 Chevy to the back of a ’77 Bronco. A head popped out of the driver’s side window as it slowed to a stop.
“Acho, mano. Bad place to get stuck,” the woman said, her thick black hair spilling over her shoulder as she leaned over. Her skin was as dark as mine, her eyes a brown so deep it ate the sunlight and dared to shine brighter. “Anything I can do to help?” Her English was accented in a way that was intimately familiar.
Glancing from the Saturn to the tan aberration, I took a step away from both.
“You can get in the truck bed if you’d like. There’s a gas station about an hour’s drive from here, and lucky for you it’s on my path.” She tried to tuck the hair behind her ear, but there was too much of it. She offered me a charming smile. “Can’t guarantee when will be the next time you see someone through here. This is truly a road seldom traveled.” Looking me over, she scratched her chin. “Actually, you can hop in the cab. The sun can shave years off the average person. But I reckon you already know that.”
I squinted up at the sun and debated. She looked harmless, but so do most serial killers. Regardless, I figured dying of heatstroke out in the middle of nowhere would be the least preferable way to go.
Locking the Saturn, wallet and phone in my pockets, I got into the passenger’s seat and offered her a tightlipped smile.
“You have a name?” the woman asked, throwing the truck into gear and driving in the opposite direction of my initial destination. At the lack of a reply, she signed what I assumed was the same question. I shook my head. “¿Tienes nombre? Either no name or cat’s got your tongue, which is fine, none of my business. My name’s Ata.”
The way she pronounced it, ah-tah, was harsh on the tongue. A single syllable strong enough to not be English.
“Edda is the last truck depot this side of the interstate for a while, so you may find a mechanic willing to lend you a hand.” She clicked on the radio, and through the waves bled a beat as familiar as the rest of her.
In a part of the States in which the Spanish that reigned was the crisp sharpness of Mexico’s, with mariachi and ranchera a staple of Latine stations, to hear the aggressive percussion that served as background noise to my childhood seized my throat. The graininess of the track, the man’s soulful wails of le lo lai that echoed inside the cab took me back to sitting in Abuelo's sedan as he drove through Utuado’s mountains.
Without the need to keep my eyes on the road, I let them wander.
Redstone cliffs loomed in the distance, bathing a herd of antelopes in its shadows. They were no cows grazing the pastizales.
Tumbleweeds played along the side of the road, some caught in shrubs and others in barbed wire fences. They were no palm fronds in the humid breeze.
That wasn’t my first time driving through New Mexico, but the air settled like hot fog along the tar roadways like it never had before. Maybe it was to do with that year and a half of global lockdown, of the fact that I had divorced myself from any real emotion in hopes of making it through alive. Still, it all felt different, like slipping back into skin that had been left at the back of the closet to be eaten by moths.
Edda was not a town.
With a population of zero, it had a staffed gas station with an attached convenience store and diner. Two white Jeeps and three red sedans with missing plates were parked in front of the diner, alongside a royal blue Harley Davidson motorcycle with a single white star painted on its tank. The ancient sign with flickering bulbs that read El Batey swayed in the nonexistent wind.
“I recommend the root beer float,” said Ata, gesturing towards the diner once we exited the truck. “I’ll go see if Don Antony’s got some time to tow your car in.” Needing no response, she turned on her heels and jogged off in the direction of the gas station.
The diner looked to be holding the Guinness World Record for most health violations, not because it was dirty, but because it was dusty from disuse. If it hadn’t been for the thin layer of sand that covered every surface, including the checkered tile, I’d have considered it spotless.
The place reeked of 1950s nostalgia, with vinyl records on the walls and a jukebox propped between two cherry red booths, a chrome fender suspended from the ceiling. A signed picture of Roberto Clemente hung above a trash can.
Despite having seen someone man the counter through the windows, the space behind the cash register was empty. A trucker sat at one of the tables, a hat pulled down over his eyes as if asleep. No one else inhabited the space, and the uncanniness of the scene drew me back towards the door.
A coyote sat on the other side with a spider on its head.
I meant to ask what it was doing there before music sprang up from somewhere other than the jukebox.
It was a muffled beat that repeated over and over, like a record designed to imitate the sound of a broken player. The floor beneath my feet vibrated in tune with the deep, almost tribal droning of drums. A higher clip entered, a shift in rhythm that spread up my legs to settle in the downward curve of my stomach, strumming heartstrings at a steady tempo.
Tucked into the hallway that led to the bathrooms and kitchen was a yellow metal door. It was as old as everything else, the paint where the handle rubbed against the wall wasted away to reveal red clay. The music slipped through the gap between the door and crooked frame, where nothing short of a full replacement would make it align.
The door was shoved open hard enough for it to slam against the wall, but no one stood near it. I watched it wiggle, its hinges slowly bringing it back shut with a click, but not before a strobe of blue shined through the space.
It all happened too quickly to catch sight of whatever was behind the door.
The trucker sniffed, nose occupied by every piece of debris out West, but did not otherwise react to the music. He folded the pamphlet then went by picking at his teeth with a straw.
Outside, a semi rolled in and parked at a pump, kicking up plumes of desert. No one got out. Ata was nowhere to be seen, but her truck was still in the same spot.
The yellow door swung open again and this time I jogged across the space to grab it. Hand on the handle, I marveled at the cool air that billowed against me like balm. It smelled of petrichor, and not at all the damp musk one expects from grungy storage areas.
Lights strobed again as the music grew sensible, an actual song rather than the rhythmic pounding of a caged beast. The concrete walls that surround the wooden stairs were covered in weathered posters of artists and musicians I had never heard of before, all of them foreign.
The idea of a gathering place underneath an unassuming locale triggered trepidation alongside a hefty serving of excitement.
Neither trucker nor neighbor of Edda, hesitation turned to nausea the deeper I went. If small towns were hostile to folks like me, what’s to say of non-towns?
At the bottom of the stairs was a room twice the size of the diner above.
Amidst its sandstone walls were a smattering of circular tables; a dozen or so people chaotically occupied them. They all spoke in hushed tones; a mixture of languages I couldn't understand. The occasional laughter cut through the music whose rhythm slipped into the bloodstream. The dimly lit space was hazy, and a sniff revealed the absence of kush.
It was much like walking through static, if static smelled of rain and felt like a forest breeze.
(Early May in El Yunque. Those pre-dawn hours where the spaces between the trees are a mix of pale blue and gray. Chill humidity. Earthy. Silhouettes move through the haze.)
A tall white man with braided red hair and green eyes manned a wicker bar top, pouring amber liquid into honest-to-God wooden steins. Beside the keg, however, was something any person should have taken notice of first.
Ata sat cross-legged on the bar top, knees high and spread apart, hands posed as if adjusting the clay discs that hung from her stretched ears. She was nude, her penis nestled in hair as dark as the mane on her head, her breasts framing the gold medallion that hung from her neck.
She was still, more statue than living creature, and I knew, finally, who she was.
From the archaic tongue of my grandmother came the story of Atabey, the primordial Mother who birthed herself, the cosmos, and our island, at the beginning of time. The woman who bore more than one name, each carrying with it the power to create and destroy, to love, to lust, and to protect.
“What can I do ya for, stranger?” the red-haired man asked, unfazed by the presence in the room. “We’ve got mead, we’ve got cerveza, ron caña, and aguardiente. On the house for weary souls far from home.”
I approached the bar, careful not to touch Ata. She smelled like briny ocean air, like sweet cascading streams, of freshly bloomed hibiscus. (Amapolas, Abuela would call them. Our national flower. Although, I still don’t know if that’s correct.)
No speaking would cut through the music—the bomba y plena that someone in the room chanted to. Aggressive drums, lurid swaying. It pushed the heart to join in. More powerful than any drug on hand.
“No need to be shy now,” the red-haired man said as he grabbed my wrist and flipped it over, exposing the vulnerable underside where green veins ran beneath brown skin. “You’ve got that stain she’s partial to, right here. When she said plantain stain, I thought she meant it was shaped like a banana. But no, no. She was talking about the milk stains an unripe plantain leaves behind when cut into.” He traced a nail up my forearm and I shivered.
The red-haired man was beautiful. His eyes a vibrant golden-green, his skin paper white. His smile was enchanting and reeked of princely charm, childlike hubris, sadistic pleasure disguised as mischief. He was beautiful in the way lava invites to be touched. But of lava, too, Atabey was mother of.
“Leave them be,” she said, her voice a breeze through the tombstones of San Juan’s hills. “Get them water. They’re thirsty.”
I watched the man split open a coconut with his tongue and pour its water into a glass. He slid it to me, two ice cubes and a tiny umbrella floating on top. “En hora buena,” he said, his Spanish as accented as his English, before vanishing beyond the barrels.
“Why won’t you speak, mi gente? Your frustration reached beyond the desert cliffs long before you became stranded. Clearly, you’re in search of something out here,” said Ata as she uncurled from her held position into a casual lounge. She held out her hand, and I willingly gave her mine. “Not even a name to the one who holds all.”
Her touch felt like the butteriness of wet sand. It gripped tight and promised security, but a lull in wakefulness promised drowning in the riptide. And so I looked in her eyes and saw the sun as it was during my childhood days.
The coconut water was rich on my tastebuds. “I don’t know how to say any of it,” I said.
Ata hopped off the bar top, my hand still clasped in hers. “Then we do as your ancestors did when words could not hold the power you sought. We dance.”
The le lo lai recited by my bisabuelos as they tended the pineapple, the sugar, and the wheat under the Caribbean sun ripped forth from my throat, a guttural chant that realigned better than any drive through the dusty American Southwest possibly could. A chant that penetrated beyond the candles lit for deathless saints and crucified messiahs, that pulsated hotter and brighter than any single star unraveling above my windshield in the dead of night.
It was my name both given and chosen. It was me and all who came before me and after me.
And as Atabey touched my face, her bare feet an aggressive drumming against the thatched dancefloor, a freeform compaction of those who dared bury her deep beneath blood and soil, gold extorted, water-kissed edges traded for scraps, she echoed back my call. The call and response of a bomba; not a battle—but a union. She flowed like torrential rain, her fingers on my throat as if to say, ‘go on, complete me’.
No longer did the le lo lai come from my throat, but the shrill noise of nighttime rainforests and tall grasses. Her rains came and all I could do was rejoice in her splendor, celebrate as my feet pounded in synchrony with the drums. I threw my head back, let her fill me, and to the eviscerating beat of those tribal drums, I came.
