BY Aaron Calvin
It was a Tuesday morning in Sedona in the middle of June and the great red mountains towered
all around, surrounding me. The morning air was sharp and glittering. The whole town was
empty, quiet. The midday heat always loomed, but on a Tuesday morning I could walk down the
asphalt streets of the neighborhood and take a little comfort in the cool breeze. I had been in
Sedona for weeks and I would be here a little longer, making free use of the house a friend of
mine in Los Angeles owned, which goes to show it can be rewarding to keep friends of moderate
wealth if you can stand it. I had run into this friend at a party where he said I was looking a little
lost. He was the kind of person who took pleasure in acts of material generosity. Being the
recipient of such kindness made you feel like a dog whose master had given him a treat but you
didn’t realize that you were the dog until the treat was in your mouth.
Time was so visible in Sedona. Not just minutes, hours, days. Centuries, eons. Geologic
time. Within each inch of the mountains a million years, unremembered but known, measurable
from the pale limestone cliffs down through each gradation of sandstone. It was also desperately
alive, the landscape choked in the early summer with heat-faded flora. A book left in the
residence told me the names. Catclaw acacia, crucifixion thorn, manzanita. One mesquite tree
screamed with leaves while the dried husk of another hung over a guardrail on the highway.
Willow along the river. No saguaro like I saw driving up from Phoenix, giant and eerie in their
erratic forms, but prickly pear in green and purple cultivated throughout the town and left wild in
some places to await unsuspecting passersby. The long spines are easy enough to remove, but the
glochids, the array of accompanying pinpricks, dig deep into the skin. The red desert overrun by
chaparral, sun faded, vibrant and dried out under a sky that looked like it had never heard of a
cloud, fed by the one few reliable rivers in the region. In the backyard of the house was a water
fixture on a timer. It began flowing in the morning and ran all day, tumbling down an
arrangement of chipped rock. In the afternoon, after walking into town, I would lie in the shade
and read what I found in the house. Books by authors I hadn’t read or hadn’t read since high
school that had been left by previous guests. Faulkner, McCarthy, Hemingway. Hummingbirds
came to drink in the fountain and flitted away. Looking up, I saw a baroque eruption of earth in
the distance. It was Wilson Mountain according to a map in a drawer labeled stuff in my friend’s
kitchen. All the drawers and cabinets in the house had labels identifying their contents. You
could say it was really us, the visitors, who lived in the house, not my friend. I wondered if he
felt like a visitor in the house when he opened the drawer labeled dishtowels.
Every morning during my stay in Sedona I walked past the stucco homes—many of them
built in the seventies now on their second or third renovation and most of them now rentals most
of the time—to the main tourist drag. Like a tourist in a ski town that doesn’t know how to ski, I
never hiked the trails that snaked through the hills. I didn’t want to get too close to the luminous
countryside, afraid it might shatter at my touch.
Sedona’s zoning laws have an iron grip on the town. Every building and sidewalk was
made in the likeness of its surroundings. Everywhere was concrete in shades of sandstone, a
pallid reflection of the landscape, shadows on the wall. A child imitating its parent without actual
understanding. Everywhere Sedona tells a story about itself. Plaques, dull and low to the ground,
whisper about the first settler family to plant an orchard in the valley. A sculpture of oxidized
metal twisted to resemble an apple being peeled with an old-fashioned peeler. The dancing
Kokopelli ripped from sanctity into tacky ubiquity. No plaques, no sculptures detailing the
history of the Pueblo or the Hopi claims to the region. Just turquoise and kitsch. Last weekend I
drove half an hour south to see the ruins of cliff dwellings built by the Senagua in the twelfth
century. The remains—carved out reliefs in the cliffside that were part of a more expansive
structure—can only be viewed from a distance. I was almost overcome by an unreasonable
feeling of frustration at being unable to wander the empty stone rooms myself and was only
brought out of my silent fuming by the sound of a toddler in the throes of a tantrum. I looked up
at the empty rooms and thought of how, hundreds of years ago, the sound must have filled up the
valley below, just as it did now. The placard stated that the cliff dwellings were built with the
intention of later being abandoned and left to collapse back into the landscape in time. Its
continued existence was due to an accident of climate and preservationist tendencies of later
colonizers.
The main drag was made up of gift shops and jewelry stores, windows advertising
healing crystals and artifacts and healing messages, ice cream and gelato, a food hall featuring a
strange array of trendy cuisine. What the settlers have done with this strange green desert. I liked
to stop and chat with Gloria, who runs my preferred minerals and crystals shop. Gloria was
highly sensitive to shifts in Sedona’s vortexes—not vortices—and always provided a daily report
on their subtle shifts, which are as mercurial and consequential as the weather. Technically all of
Sedona is a vortex of spiritual energy, but there are also specific vortexes within its limits.
There’s one by the airport, I think. Spiritual healers and gurus of all stripes make money by
guiding visitors to the various vortexes. Gloria was one of these oracles and led yoga sessions at
the Seven Sacred Pools. It was a great racket, and easy to play off. Look around. How could this
not be holy?
Your aura is electric today, my dear, Gloria said by way of greeting. More days than not
my aura was absolutely sizzling.
I think the spirit energy is extra strong today, I said.
There’s an evil energy washing down from the hills, she said, shaking her head. The
pools of energy overflow. Even someone of your insensitivity can feel the flood.
She handed me a small piece of lapis lazuli and told me it was perfect to ward off the
contaminating energy. I dutifully took out my credit card.
I exited out of an alley formed by adjacent octagonal shops. The wind kicked up. There
were literal tumbleweeds. I stepped out onto the sidewalk. In a parking lot, hot pink SUVs and
their tourist trailers slept. The boulevard before me was bifurcated by a median lined with listless
prairie grass. A gray Silverado approached in the right lane at a distance. The manager of the
pizza place raised the metal mesh screen with a clatter and Spanish-language pop music filtered
out onto the street.
There was a gift shop across the street from Gloria’s that specialized in extraterrestrials, a
million iterations of that classic green man. T-shirts, sweatpants, customized pocketknives,
mugs, hats, wallets, stuffed animals, posters, movies, books. The shop owner—a consummate
desert hippie—worked the register. It became another haunt of mine. Lurking by a rack of shot
glasses, I learned that whenever anyone tried to discuss aliens or UFO sightings in earnest with
him, he just smiled and said, Hell yeah, brother.
I was eying a shirt with an alien driving a van beneath a banner that read I’m feeling
alienated on it when I hear someone say my name.
I turned and saw Andrea standing next to the Aliens in Movies display. Andrea, who was
the first friend I had made in college. Andrea with whom I moved into my first New York
apartment. Andrea, who I last saw a decade ago at a loud bar in Brooklyn where, among a
somber crowd, we hardly said a word to each other.
How are you, she said.
What are you doing here? I said.
She gestured behind her to a man in cargo shorts and a polo with a boy, his miniature,
standing next to him.
I’m on vacation. What are you doing here?
I had to think for a moment.
I’m house-sitting.
We both stood before one another, not looking each other in the eye. I knew we were
both probably thinking of Matt, the once beating heart of our world. The second person Andrea
and I had met in our dorm days, our third roommate in that first apartment in the city. We had
last seen each other at the wake that followed his funeral. An artery in his brain had burst while
he was riding his bike as he passed a BQE on-ramp, his body lilting into oncoming traffic.
We had mourned him in the aftermath, but didn’t know how to share it, the sun in the
galaxy of our friendship having blinked out in an instant. With no central mass to keep us bound
in orbit with one another, we simply slipped away. I had never said goodbye to Andrea and
found myself unable to answer the texts she had sent me later, which crested from concern to
anger to self-pity in tone over time. Perhaps it would have been more merciful to block her
number, but I didn’t have the courage even for that.
The husband introduced himself.
This is Ian, Andrea said. He’s an old friend of mine.
The husband tried visibly not to let it show in his expression that he had never heard of
me. I didn’t take offense. After I left New York, I never spoke to anyone about Matt's death. If
the subject of the city came up at all, I wouldn’t even mention I had lived there.
Andrea looked like she wanted to hug me or hit me or just cry. The way her emotional
life had always leaked out of her had always inspired both envy and a shameful repulsion in me.
I turned away from her and her family and walked out of the Store.
Out the window, no cars drove past, no tourists walked past. The Silverado had passed us
by and the street was empty again. Despite this, I could have sworn to have heard the sound of
traffic grinding, of horns shrieking, or some collision of metal. I had to remind myself: It was a
Tuesday morning in Sedona in the middle of June. I turned back to Andrea, who had followed
me out of the store and regained some of the composure in her face.
Isn’t this strange? she said.
I considered the statement for a moment, curiously aware of the weight of the blood in
my body. There was a heavy feeling in my body. There was the sound of a somber and beautiful
voice singing a lament in a language I didn’t understand.
Turning away from Andrea for a second time, I raised my hand to shade my eyes against
the rising sun to look north down the empty boulevard. Coffee Pot Rock, which did in fact
resemble a carafe, stood on the horizon. A stand of yucca trees grew on a plateau extending away
from its peak. I was transfixed by the trees, on how thin and far off they were.
Yes, I said. It is strange.
Aaron Calvin is a journalist and writer living in Vermont.