“Help?” My throat was already dry and parched. I swallowed nervously, squinting to eye the sun and the horizon. If it was anything like at home, the distance between the two suggested I’d be dead long before night came. I wriggled around in my ropes, earning myself burns on my ankles and wrists, and a slight swing to change the monotony of just hanging there.
SeattleCop Found Dead In Apartment—Suffered From Sun, Rope Burns. I could see the headline. I wondered what Morrison would think. I wondered where the hell I was. I wondered if I could possibly get myself out of it. I wasn’t panicked; the heat had smashed panic right out of me and pushed me well into numb. But there had to be something I could do before the sun cooked my brain for good. It’d be embarrassing to die here in the white desert without even trying to get out of it.
Start with what I knew. I closed my eyes, not that it did any good against the light, to help myself focus.
I knew I was hanging upside-down on the verge of horrible death by dehydration, according to the backs of my eyelids. “Goddamn it,” I croaked, and opened my eyes again to stare at the expanses of white. One baked crystal gleamed at me. I wondered briefly if it was salt, not sand. Because that made it all better somehow.Shut up and concentrate, Joanne.
My vision started doing interesting things, swimming in and out as it tried to make depth out of featureless grains of sand. I listened for my heartbeat; last time I’d been in a desert of the mind, I’d been dying and my heartbeat was a painfully slow drum. But no: it was bumping along steadily, pounding in my ears and now making me notice the headache all over again. That was probably a good sign.
Choice. The word whispered itself to me. I had a worried moment of wondering whether I was hearing voices or if my own tiny mind had come up with that direction all by itself. After another moment I decided it didn’t matter, as long as I got out of here. If I continued to hear voices, I’d thank them nicely for pointing me in the right direction, and then get medication.
One of the fundamental concepts of shamanism was choice: choosing to believe, choosing to heal, choosing to accept. Once, choosing to accept something that someone else had forced on me had allowed me the power to change it and escape. I let my eyes close again and began the task of acceptance.
It turned out hanging upside-down from a bleached tree in the desert wasn’t the best place to start on the whole acceptance thing. Time wore on and the sun kept burning me. I swallowed on a dry throat more times than I could count, trying to work up a little moisture. Whether I managed to accept my position or if the part of me that held on to disbelief simply dried up and blew away, eventually I started to feel as if I belonged there, the Hanged Joanne in the desert. There was a Tarot card like that. The Hanged Man, not the Hanged Joanne. I remembered Billy enthusiastically telling me about Tarot in general a couple years earlier, while I rolled my eyes and generally behaved like a jerk. I reminded myself to apologize to him—again—if I got out of this. Then I spent a while wondering what it was that the Hanged Man signified, anyway.
Once in a while I tried to will the tree to fall over, or the rope to stretch and put me on the ground. I was starting to feel very at home there, like a nineteenth-century outlaw waiting for the coyotes to come nibble his eyeballs out.
Coyotes!
My eyes popped open. “Coyote! Hello? Help? Look, I know I never call, I never write, but I’ve been kind of busy the last few days.” I wasn’t in daily contact with my spirit guide anyway, but since last time I’d ended up in a desert—one completely unlike this one—he’d been the one to get me out, I figured it was probably my best shot. “I got a teacher!” I yelled. “That’s a good sign, right?” The desert swallowed the shouts up without effort. “Hello? Coyote?”
There was no answer whatsoever, and I started to wonder if doing a spirit quest would wake my spirit guide up to my predicament. While I wasn’t exactly in a sweat lodge, the out-of-body surreality surrounded me in spades, which seemed like a good place to start. For a few seconds I got distracted by how many levels removed from my body I actually was, then decided down that path lay madness. Assuming I wasn’t already totally nuts. Either way, I certainly wasn’t going to get back to myself by hanging around in a desert wondering when the hero was going to show up and rescue me.
After another ten seconds, I realized I was holding my breath and waiting for Morrison to interrupt my trance, as if my thoughts could conjure him.
Another ten seconds after that I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or horribly disappointed that they hadn’t. I sighed and closed my eyes, trying out a crooked half smile at myself. I could afford that here, somewhere so deep and private that nobody but me was ever going to see it. My shoulders relaxed and I sighed, drifting past caring whether or not my skin was burned to the bone or my wrists were numb from the ropes around them. My mouth was too dry to make any saliva at all. When I swallowed it felt like double-sided tape closing together and trying to pull apart again. My shoulders relaxed again, falling another centimeter toward my ears. If I could just take a little nap, it’d turn out all right, whether Morrison rode in to save the day or not.
If my inner self had any sense of dignity at all, it would allow my brain to cook to a crisp rather than let me wake up, go to work, and face Morrison with the knowledge that he’d featured heavily as the White Hat in my damsel-in-distress fantasies.
Someone sucked all the air out of the desert. I inhaled and began coughing, the air suddenly so much hotter that it was like sticking my head in a furnace. Tears rolled down my forehead again as I pried my eyes open. The whiteness of the sun and earth was no longer what I had to struggle against. Now the heat itself stuck my eyelids together and pressed my eyeballs farther back into my head. I whimpered, a genuinely pathetic sound, and the heat added thunder.
It was a physical presence, pushing into my body with a rumble I couldn’t even hear, only feel. I couldn’t breathe. Spots swam through my vision, black and red boxes with sharp edges like pain. The air itself had malicious intent, squeezing down on me. Lightning split the empty white sky, a bolt of brightness against the already impossibly bright world. My eyes ached, but the heat had seared away the last of my tears. I tried to think of last words, sure that the thunder and air and lightning would crush me into lasting oblivion.
“Well, fuck this,” I croaked. A final show of defiance would have to do. Go, Joanne.
A coyote trotted out of the desert.
It wasn’t my coyote.
This one took up more space than my coyote, although he wasn’t, at an upside-down glance, any bigger. When he breathed, the air seemed to expand around him, shimmering like a heat mirage. Every piece of fur on his body gleamed and bristled, like they’d each been individually dipped in gold and bronze and copper. The play of muscle under the gold-dipped fur was incredibly precise, as if every bunch and release was calculated and thought-out ahead of time. Coyotes, with their long legs and skinny bodies, weren’t animals I thought of as beautiful.
This one was.
The air he brought with him was cooler, just within the upper ranges of tolerable. He sat down six inches from my head and I gasped in a grateful breath, never once thinking he was there to rescue me. It was probably a little late to judge somebody who’s already been hanged, but the coyote was jury, judge and executioner. His eyes were gold-flecked, stars in blackness. He felt a little like Cernunnos, and more like the thunderbird. I could only see the surface, but if I relied on the knots in my belly instead of my eyes, I could feel that he tapped into something much larger, part of the raw primal force that made up the universe.