M0R1BUND

viii.

It’s fitting that Heath should surface here. He’s determined to find his footing back in the real world, to find his way home, but it’s hard. The water delivers him to the banks of a ghost river, horizon drawn by an earthen dam.

This time, he almost doesn’t recognize it. He watches the lights dance in the sky, and he realizes that he stands under the confluence of two rivers. The Colorado, stealing East from her banks through 100-odd miles of canals, and the Agua Fria, impounded and aching to flow faithfully to the Salt River’s arms. As he watches them—two foreigners co-mingling in the reservoir where they make their grave—a thought occurs to him.

If he had not gone East, would he have ever met Isaac?

Had it not been for Coyote’s meddling in the Third World, Eve’s long exile, the Big Bang, this awful dam—that first wound—would they be here at all?

The question troubles him. Whose future is buried under the rammed earth? Drowned with the river? They suffer, and for what? So that two men could salvage a few good years from the waste? ‘What a mess,’ Heath thinks. He traces each wound in his mind, long years of exile, drought, floods, and death. If not for them, he and Isaac might not exist at all.

And yet he can hear the man protesting in the back of his mind.

“Do we owe our life to the wound?” he asks. “Or are we alive despite the wound?”