The Desert Sound

When I meet her, I say all the wrong things first.

Wind the beautiful.

Hair is yours.

Meet me nice.

Name I have.

All this to say: I will save the right things for last.

I recognize her from the wanted posters in the city where we are no longer allowed to speak. She is the woman in the pictures in every way and none.

A pleasure, she says.

Pleased, I say.

The desert howls grain into our ears. She finger-taps the top of her wooden staff, shakes a bracelet, hums an off-key tune. It’s hard to make a noise back, especially in front of her: the

sound thief. Alleged thefts: laughter, birdsong, the plush biting of fruit. They tell us to keep our sounds close to our chest, lest she find us in a dark street singing and take our music forever. You’re a bit quiet for an outlaw, she says.

Forgive me, I say. I am still learning to scream.

She smiles, and the glimmer of it looks so much like a fast-moving river that I want to run my fingers through her teeth. I step toward her. It is said if you speak into the sound thief’s mouth so closely that your lips are touching, you may steal it all back.

My canteen is empty, I say. Spare any water?

She obliges. She has to tilt her canteen very far to begin pouring into mine. Her eyes stir the blank horizons around us, and in the high noon sun, it is almost stunning how regular she is. How person. How me. How she curls a fist behind her back so I will not see her ripping at a hangnail.

The reward for her capture: a long and peaceful life of lemons and water.

You are wanted in the city, I say.

I am not sure why I tell her this. I am suddenly thinking very hard about the old blood crusted on my own worried nailbeds.

The sound thief spits froth into the cracked pale earth and says, I am glad. Who calls? The governor, I say.

That choke-worthy toe, she says. He acts as if I could steal whole sounds off the face of the earth. Imagine.

It is said the sound thief is not a woman of company. It is said the sound thief never quiets, fumbles, or breaks. It is said many things. I suspect most of them are not true.

When my father commanded her capture, I told him no. He reminded me of my duty as the cleverest of three sons. I reminded him that I do not care about thieves because I do not believe in property, to which my father smacked me hard on the back and growled into my ear: was I a man who wished to see his own father die of thirst or scurvy? Was I deranged, disobedient, suicidal?

I will give you the truth because lying is boring. I am not in the desert because I am stable in the head, obedient, or wish strongly to live. I am in the desert because I am a widower. I imagine the laughter of billions stacked neatly inside the sound thief’s chest like coins, besides other things that have gone: swallows, pomegranates, comedians. Those horrible comedy shows on the underground strip my wife loved so much. The smug smiles on the performers’ faces as they forced glee from our chests. Her hand hit the table when she laughed, bumping the ice cubes in my glass.

If I am so wanted, the sound thief says, why on earth am I dying in the desert? They are cowards, I say.

And you are not?

I am beyond fear.

Is that so?

The sound thief steps closer, scuffing the sand with her boots. For a second, I think I recognize her expression, how it lifts the skin above her wrinkles and winks at the sun above. The wide pores on her face grinning like little specks of moon.

It is, I say.

You must want, she says.

I do.

Name it.

I don’t remember.

Try.

I make a shuddering with my lungs. It sounds all wrong, like a bunch of bats banging into each other. I remember I have hidden the right words beneath my ribcage, for safekeeping. But they are so far deep, their shape unknown, like the name of my wife or the seed of a melon: small things wielding the threat of something colossally bigger. Seeds I used to swallow at mealtimes just to witness my wife’s deep superstitious concern for the guaranteed continuation of my life. You’ll explode, she’d say. You’ll grow into fruit. You’ll die. You’ll leave me behind. Please, just humor me.

She believed in a lot of things I didn’t understand. But here in the desert, I would gladly die by her slippery wives’ tale watermelon explosion if it meant remembering for one moment the exact way her laugh ricocheted across pools or her name: not what it was, but the way she said it when she said, Hi, my name is.

In the distance, the city is quiet.

The sound thief stands taller, with the posture of a battered lighthouse, and laughs darkly over her shoulder. I watch the direction the sound takes into the sky and feel it wing something open inside of me.