‘Ego Death in the High Desert’

Beth Kephart, a National Book Award finalist, is the award-winning author of some 40 books in multiple genres. Her art appears or will soon appear in a range of journals and magazines including Women Who Create, Print (online), Black Warrior Review, The Pinch, Calyx, The Core, and Lunch Ticket. She is the creator of the words + image Substack, The Hush and the Howl. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

Ego Death in the High Desert

The last words uttered by Marie Antoinette, when she accidentally stepped on the
executioner’s foot: Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait expres.
Pardon me, sir. I did not do it on purpose.

Angie said not to worry, I had time to change out of my bathing suit before leaving for
the bar. The drugs wouldn’t kick in for thirty minutes or so. Back in my hotel room I still rushed,
feeling unaltered as I threw on jeans, t-shirt, beat-up Converse.

Thirty minutes later we were driving down murder road. A boundless stretch of high
desert in daylight and a night ride that can spin the mind to catastrophic scenarios of breaking
down at the mercy of roadside killers. The road to Angie’s favorite bar was disorienting day or
night, tripping or not. The sun was beginning its descent on this late afternoon ride. In the
passenger seat, I lowered my window, let my head tip partially out, let the wind blur my vision.
This is the drug dogs lose their minds on.

The bar seems to float in no-man’s-land suspension, out of time and context. Inside the
windowless space, dim light transmutes cigarette smoke plumes into languid ghosts rising to a
low ceiling. The drinkers appear at ease in the shadowy contours of the bar. A poker-faced
bartender, unrushed and dignified in his movements, pours from a barebones selection.

The drinkers here also slip time and context. Could be a biker bar. A Bukowski bar. A
vampire bar. Every face I dare to focus on seemed too pale, eyes too hungry. This could mean
anything.

Fuck that,” I might have whispered aloud, pushing another catastrophic scenario out of
my head.

Five of us—the novelist, the chef, the singer/songwriter, his wife, and me—got drinks
and went to a patio behind the bar. The violinist and the photographer had taken another car,
saved a table with a view of the outdoor stage and vastly level terrain beyond. I sat at the end of
the table, still tilting my face to the wind.

Years ago I’d seen a classically beautiful French musician drop to her knees on stage,
playing the violin. This is when I realized the violin is the sexiest instrument.

I had a crush on the violinist. I’d met her the night before, after her performance. Now
she sat across from me. I became fascinated with her hands, their elegant, slow movements
sculpting the air as she spoke. Fuchsia shoulder-length hair glinting spectacularly in rays of late
sun. She turned from person to person, making eye contact with each of us. She was generous in
every way. And she was becoming more vivid by the moment.

I sensed the entire table clocking me, the psychedelic drug initiate. I felt their concern
almost physically, like the warm wind. So when a rush of vertigo came over me, I reported on
my status: “Whoa. Really dizzy.”

All eyes swung in my direction. I gripped the edge of the table with one steadying hand. I
took a beat and updated: “Okay, it’s gone. I’m good. I like this.”

A few moments later, I reported again: “I have to take a walk.”

Throwing up was inevitable. Just a matter of getting outside the radius of cringe, out of
anyone’s sight, if I could. I walked to a back corner of the property, behind one of several
inexplicable outbuildings, into my next conjured catastrophe—a scene of zombie apocalypse in
an eerie array of displaced seating. Sun-bleached wooden church pews. Conjoined molded
plastic chairs you’d find in an airport or bus station. Artifacts of waiting, in the foreground of an
eternally patient horizon expanding like the universe.

I sat on the end of what had likely been a park bench, leaned to my side and quietly,
easily ejected what little was in my stomach onto the sand. It was over in an instant and almost
without a sound. The wind held my hair. I didn’t even need to wipe my mouth. I felt graceful. I
let myself smile like a graceful woman would smile. Then I sat very still as the wind swept my
hair and every spinning thought away. I watched the lowering sun bleeding orange and pink
before a white-hot glow began to melt steely clouds. I watched the pulsing orb of the sun become
less than perfectly round.

This is when Ella, the chef, spoke my name. Her voice came from my left periphery, and
it was the kindest sound I’d ever heard. Ella checked on my physical and mental state.

I didn’t know how to respond. I swear I had the thought, I’m fine. Had an epiphany
inspired by vomiting in this weird collection of abandoned furniture and feeling the metaphysical
transcendence of the desert.

But I didn’t say a word, just looked up into her radiant face and smiled like myself, like
the altered idiot I was. Ella took my hand and led me back to the patio, to a table of kindness
vibrating like a miracle frequency.

There was conversation, but I didn’t understand the words. I looked again to the desert,
the setting sun that was now stretched into a thin oval and entertaining me by sliding playfully
back and forth along the horizon. I remembered language again when I heard someone ask where
Danny, the singer/songwriter, had gone.

“He went for a smoke,” his beautiful wife Edie said, just as Danny approached the table
with an odd expression on his face. We all looked up at him.

He answered our unspoken question. “There’s a guillotine around the corner.”

Edie gave a quick laugh and said, “Can’t be real.”

“I touched the blade. It’s real.”

We’d been unaware of the waitress clearing glasses at the next table, until she spoke.

“They filmed scenes for a horror movie here last week,” she said calmly. “Cleared out
everything but the guillotine. Somebody’s supposed to be back for it.”

Horror movie of course. My clairvoyance glows bright as a neon pink Psychic sign in the
dark window of a strip-mall storefront.

Everyone else at the table seemed to relax away from some kind of dread.

“Let’s go see it,” Edie said, like a little girl insisting on proof and adventure.

So we all went to see the guillotine.

It was real. For what seemed a long stretch of minutes, we observed it in silence.

Edie, clearly our leader, was the first to speak. “Fuck. I’ve been seeing these kind of a lot
lately on social media. You know, the memes—eat the rich, behead the rich.”

Angie, the novelist, spoke in a subdued tone. “Yeah, French Revolution vibes. Thousands
of people came to watch Louis and Marie Antoinette beheaded.”

“Wasn’t there a Marie Antoinette movie directed by a woman? With a sick soundtrack?”
Kathleen, the photographer, asked.

“Sofia Coppola. Mostly postpunk music,” I heard myself say, as New Order’s gorgeous
Ceremony bloomed in my head.

A stranger had joined our reverent half circle.

“About time for American Revolution 2.0. Definitely should end with beheadings.”

We turned our attention to him. Tall and lanky, slightly greasy longish dark hair. He wore
black jeans, a leather jacket, and cowboy boots that for no earthly reason seemed legit to me.
Like he had a saddled horse tethered to a post in front of the bar. The eyes in his weathered face
were the bluest I’d ever seen. Or maybe the saturated blue was just a psychedelic byproduct, a
desert mirage. Either way, I wanted to swim in those eyes.

Lidia, the violinist, spoke. She seemed genuinely distressed. “Maybe revolution. But we
can’t think like that, actually contemplate beheading the king, the billionaires. They’re just
fucking memes.”

No one responded. We resumed staring at the killing machine. Contemplating it. Outside
lights from the bar came on and seemed to spotlight the blade.

The blue-eyed stranger walked to the platform supporting the guillotine, jumped easily up
onto it, eyed the top-weighted shining metal, and reached a long arm up to touch the edge.

“Jesus Christ!”

He jumped off the platform, a rise of dust clouding around and settling on his cowboy
boots, color drained from his face.

“Actual metal. And fucking sharp.”

“If you’re gonna slice a head off, last thing you want is a dull blade. You know, like
taking a shovel to a rattlesnake’s head. Shovels aren’t exactly the sharpest, might take a few
tries. It’s gnarly.”

Danny seemed to know what he was talking about. I knew he was right. I’d grown up on
a ranch in Central California, witnessed my brother kill a rattler like that; finally severing the
fanged head as the thick, diamond-backed body writhed away for a few animated seconds before
shuddering to stillness, rattle silenced. It was indeed gnarly. But you have to remove the head.

The poisonous head.

you stupid girl. not a girl. haven’t been a girl in forever. stupid old woman
wearing Converse. what are you even doing here with young artists at some scary
cool bar in the desert? knowing fuckall about drugs. shouldn’t have done
psychedelics for the first time here. so many savvy people. you have nothing smart
to say. you don’t belong.

Edie’s voice broke the spell, the spiral.

“Okay, this is how a good trip turns bad. Let’s get another drink before the band starts.”

We shook off ghosts of revolutions past and future, turned and followed our
charismatic leader.

But I stopped after a few steps, drawn back to the guillotine, feeling a pull stronger than
Edie’s magnetism. The blue-eyed cowboy was the last to turn away. Our eyes met. He looked a
little puzzled, then gave me a gentle half smile and ambled off.

A limiting belief is a false or rigid thought, about yourself or the world, that
restricts your personal growth and prevents you from achieving your potential.
Or even feeling alive.

All these futile months trying to get out of my head. So hostile in here. The self-helpers
and psychotherapists call that hostility limiting thoughts, or some such buzz phrase. I knew it as a
form of torture. There seemed to be no information I could trade my captor for relief. I would
have given up anything and anyone for relief. Fuck limits. I wanted to be as empty and possible
as the desert.

This is when I realized I was the ransom.

Looking more closely at the apparatus, I saw that the heavy blade was secured aloft by a
thin but sinewy strong rope, wrapped round a kind of metal cleat—like you would use to tie a
boat to a dock—mounted on the framework. Once on the makeshift platform, I felt its
unsteadiness. Maybe the cowboy’s jump in hard-heeled boots had compromised it. I just got on
my knees a little sooner than planned.

The unwound end length of rope clutched in my left hand, I lowered my head to the
bottom part of the pillory, a crudely carved demilune, and felt rough wood against my tender
neck. The cover band’s first song charged the air. Tom Petty’s American Girl.

“Fuuuck!”

It was the blue-eyed cowboy’s voice, sounding urgent.

“Wait! Stop!”

I started to lift my head, wanting to see those mirage blue eyes again. My grip loosened
and the rope, pulled by the weight of the blade, ripped through my palm with a sting. After that I
felt nothing.

My eyes were low, the level of the platform, my vision turned sideways . . . to a pair of
dusty cowboy boots spattered with blood.

Oh, man, sorry about your boots, I said. Or thought. Because how could I speak. This
was the last thought of a poisonous head.

Now desert wildflowers bloom from my bone-clean empty skull.

Tanis O’Connor began writing in her teens. In her immortal early 20s she wrote poetry and fearlessly performed spoken word. Many mortal years later, she again performs spoken word—not as fearlessly, maybe more courageously—and writes stories of loss and revelation, conjuring subtle magical realism. She finds new inspiration and challenge in personal essay writing. She recently published a personal essay in The Esthetic Apostle. A work of her short fiction will be featured as a winning entry in upcoming Issue 70 of Beyond Words Literary Magazine. A short story will be included in Ponder Review Vol. 10, Issue 2.