February 2021 (during lockdown)

I sit next to my father who is driving me home. He has picked me up from a sleepover at my best friend Luna’s apartment in the inner district of Vienna.

In order to get home to the suburban outskirts of the city we have to cross the river. It is early in the morning and the streets are almost empty. On both sides of the bridge grey streetlamps rise and give off an eerie yellow light. A concrete railing runs along the edge of the road, but everything further away is obscured by a milky white fog.

We are surrounded by an opaque mass that is pushing itself closer to us. I stare out of the window, trying to make out something: the bare skeleton of a tree, perhaps, or a building on the bank of the river. But I see nothing. And where there is nothing, in the unknown, there could be anything.

When we reach the other side of the river, pedestrians sporadically emerge from the fog that is now faintly colored by the weak sun, and there are cyclists with scarves wrapped around their heads and runners with reddened cheeks. All are alone.

A damp coldness presses against the window and I lean back into my seat. In my memories, I am in a place far away from here and there, it is always summer.

August 2019 (before lockdown)

We were driving through the desert with my city car. It was one of the last really hot days of summer. The road stretched ahead of us on a wide plain and was sandy and rocky. To our right, hills rose made of dark grey stone. Ochre sand paths wound through the valleys. Higher up the rock was red. That was where we were going.

“Does your car have four-wheel-drive?” Marcus had asked where the paved street crossed a sand path. Luna looked at me.

“I don’t know,” I had answered.

“It should be fine,” José had said. I trusted him and turned the steering wheel to the left. The car started bumping over the small stones. In the beginning, I drove very slowly. There was no other car in sight and when I looked out of the windshield, half of the world in front of me was cloudless sky. A clear line separated the pacific blue sky from the deep yellow of the earth and I wondered about this point where one thing ended and another began.

“I was born here, actually,” José said to me. “I was born in the JFK hospital.”

My car hit a hole in the road, otherwise I would have laughed. “No way there is a JFK hospital in Indio, California.”

“There is,” he chuckled. “You don’t believe me.”

“Of course I don’t!” I said. We all lived in the OC, Luna and I were taking a gap year after high school, and the boys were university students.

“How much further is it, Luna?” I asked.

She said that it was four more minutes until we’d arrive at the trailhead. Someone had told her about a ladder trail in the middle of the desert leading up the red mountains. They had shown her the approximate directions. But I doubted that we would make it anywhere in four minutes. I saw no end of the road, it just continually stretched on into the distance.

When we had been driving for another ten minutes without much change of scenery, and without getting closer to the red rocks, I decided that we should park the car and start walking. I stopped in the sand at the side of the road.

“Let’s go that way towards the hills,” I said. Luna nodded and we started off into the desert.

“Did you lock your car?” Marcus asked.

“Yes,” I said and looked back at the brilliantly white Mercedes that was standing all alone on a patch of sand in-between dried out shrubs.

Luna and I walked in front of the boys. Occasionally, I heard Marcus from the back telling José that the trail might be this way or that. But there was no trail, there were only paths in the sand. Eventually, Luna turned around and said, “To get to the ladder trail we would have had to keep driving.”

“Where to though? There’s nothing here,” I said.

“There is. There are rattlesnakes,” Marcus said and looked at us girls expectantly.

Luna gave him the reaction he anticipated. “What?” she screeched.

Marcus, with a big smile on his face, told us that rattlesnakes lived in the little holes in the hills, that they were hiding in the shrubs and, if we got too close, they would bite us. Luna stared at him.

“I don’t see any animals here,” I said. “I don’t think we need to be concerned.”

For a while we kept walking on the plain. The sun was directly overhead and our shadows were short. Luna’s black silhouette was moving on the blinding yellow sand. We climbed up a steep hill and looked around at the top for a way to keep going. In the distance I saw my car, and further back the grey blue Salton Sea.

“It was an accident,” José said. He was standing next to me.

“What was?” I asked.

“The lake. It formed because floodwater breached a canal. The Salton Sea was never meant to be.”

But how different the view would be without this giant mass of water! If not for the lake, there would only be desert, for the villages could not be seen from where we were standing. If not for the lake, any direction would be the same. There would be nothing to look at and nothing to go to.

“I think you are imagining it wrong,” José said. “The sea is toxic; you can’t swim in it. The waves wash dirt and plastic onto the shore.”

“It looks so pretty from here,” I answered.

José turned to look at me. “From here,” he repeated.

*

We couldn’t hike any further because the mountains got too steep. The red rock seemed out of reach. So, we had to return to the car. Our only option of getting somewhere was to keep driving. I started the engine and stepped on the gas pedal. The wheels started spinning, but they weren’t moving the vehicle. I looked at José, alarmed.

“No,” I whispered and pressed my foot all the way down on the pedal. The wheels spun in one place and swirled up sand. We were stuck.

“Let’s all get out,” José said. I rolled down the windows. “Reverse!” Marcus called. “We’ll push the car!”

Marcus and José stood in front of the hood and pushed while I put the car in reverse. Nothing happened. “Luna!” José shouted over the sound of the engine. “Come here!”

Luna had been standing aside and now hesitantly joined the boys. The three of them were pushing, the motor was roaring. Beyond, the desert lay quiet.

“Keep pushing!” Marcus cried. Luna’s eyes were wet, and her arms were shaking.

When the car finally stirred and inched backwards, I let out a sigh of relief. All of us working together, we managed to get the car rolling out of the sand and onto the road. Luna, Marcus, and José got back into the car, and I didn’t wait for them to put on their seatbelts, I just started driving. I wanted to get away from the place that had rendered us immobile as soon as possible. There was nothing worse, I thought, than being stuck somewhere.

But now we were on the road again and, eventually, the rocky path made a turn to the right and led us into a broad valley. On both sides rose steep rock walls. We could only see until the next bend in the road, but we knew by the red color of the rock that we were getting closer, that we were in fact almost there.

The path ended in a round valley, and I made sure to park the Mercedes on stony rather than sandy ground. Although it was still afternoon, the sun had disappeared behind the tall mountains. While we were walking through the valley in search of the ladders that would lead us to the top, José picked up pebbles and threw them as high as he could against the rock wall. I laughed.

Luna found the ladder. It was hidden behind a pile of big stones. We climbed up the first ladder, and the second and third and kept on moving closer to the sun. Then I stopped. The last metal ladder was propped in a ninety-degree angle against a stone wall that was fifteen feet high. The others went up first. I watched them cautiously and climbed up last. When I was almost at the top, José took my hand and pulled me up onto the red rock.

“Are you afraid of heights?” he asked.

I shook my head and looked straight into his eyes. I was afraid of falling.

A narrow path wound itself past red rock formations that were halfway lit by the sun and finally led us to a plane on top of the mountain. Yellow flowers were blooming, breaking through the cracks in the stone. The breeze made the long grass shiver. Marcus and Luna were standing close to the edge of the cliff, but I could only make out their silhouettes against the gleaming sun in front of them.

“What do you think the first people who made it up here were feeling? The first people ever, hundreds of years ago,” José asked.

“They must have felt very small,” I said. I sat down on a big rock and gazed into the distance. The waves of the Salton Sea shimmered on the horizon. A warm breeze blew sand into my face, and I closed my eyes.

For a moment it was so still that the silence seemed to take its own form. José sat down next to me; I felt the warmth of his body. In the silence between us there could be everything. It was almost tangible then.

*

We drove back home with the windows rolled down because the air conditioning didn’t work properly in the heat. The sand path turned into a paved road, and the desert became parched land. To our right was a green orchard that bore no fruits, to our left a barren field made of stone and crumbly soil. In front of us were the distant mountains and the setting sun.

“We should all drive down to Mexico next spring,” José said. “My family will be holding a big fiesta for my grandmother’s birthday. The whole village will be there.”

I thought about the future that promised more freedom. I thought about the other side of the border and imagined a land that was even vaster than this. There, we could drive on further with no end in sight. All the places we’d go, and all the people we’d meet.

“I would love to,” I said to José.

Luna had fallen asleep in the back, her face sunburnt. It was even warmer now than it had been in the afternoon. At six, temperatures rose one last time before collapsing once the sun disappeared behind the mountains.

One of my eyes had begun tearing up and I grabbed a tissue. The wind was howling and my straight hair danced wildly around my head. I looked at José sitting next to me. His skin glowed in the setting sun, and he smiled.

In the orchard flying by the leaves of the trees rustled in the wind, and my eye was still tearing up, but oh! I thought this could go on forever.