1:30 a.m. in Taos, NM
1:30 a.m. in Taos, NM is when I lie down in the middle of Kit Carson Road. I do this nearly every night of the summer here in the desert valley. Night is the place where I don’t owe anything to anyone; it’s the time to aspire to my own undoing. Because I’ve realized I don’t understand the person I’ve become at thirty-seven. I feel as hollow as a prayer.
I step outside my casita into moonlight. I don’t normally smoke, but I light an American Spirit in the driveway. On my headphones I play Kavinsky’s “Nightcall.”
There's something inside you
It's hard to explain
They're talking about you, boy
But you're still the same
I dance-walk down my shadowy spit of a street until it dead-ends into Kit Carson Road. On the corner, moths bang themselves against the one streetlight. I admire their tenacity, as if they know this is the place to be tonight. Across the road, The Living Spa promises rejuvenation via eco-body wraps and tailstone massages. In three directions there are mountains, but I can’t see any of them.
I look both ways down the usually trafficky Kit Carson Road. I go stand in the intersection. And that’s where I lie down on my back. I pause the music. There’s a far-flung ambulance call, then there’s nightwind through a tree of sleeping vultures, then there’s only the sound of my breath’s settling hitch. I blow smoke at the moon.
I’m not basking here because I have a death wish. I do not hope, in the least, that an oncoming car blacks out my vision of the star-poked sky. Still, there’s something inside me—and outside—drawing me to this reckless ritual of no precedent. I could blame my asphyxiating nightmares just as easily as I could blame a local peak called Skull Mountain. If you find success in Taos, according to legend, then the mountain has accepted you. If you come to town and encounter hardship, walls, pain? That can only mean the mountain has rejected you. Like it has rejected me. All summer long. I have no idea why.
If I present my hollow self in an utterly prone state here in the middle of the road, maybe a deep answer to the mystery of me will be revealed. Does an answer arrive?
It’s hard to explain.
“1:30 a.m. in Taos, NM is when I lie down in the middle of Kit Carson Road.”
Headlights bloom on the groomed hedge outside The Living Spa. I look; the car is far away but heading fast toward me. I don’t know what I want to do. I’m stretched out on the asphalt, my body the nightly offering. If I get up, what could save me from still being the same?
I roll into a crouch and stand. I jog to the corner under the streetlight. The car passes without drama. Alive, I start walking back. I pass a bush smothered in Christmas lights, the threat of a weeping willow’s shadow, a wooded lot home to plum trees and a hurt coyote. I try—and fail—to see the night the way an entirely different boy would see it.
When I reach the front door of my casita, with cigarette dowsed and song muted, I want to walk in undone. New. Accepted. And as I cross the threshold, to my repeated surprise, I do. But it’s not really me. It’s an aspiration, or nothing at all. I am little now but living smoke.
About the Author
Alexander Lumans recently had a short story of his listed as a "Distinguished Story of 2020" in Best American Short Stories 2021, edited by Jesmyn Ward. He was awarded a 2018 NEA Creative Writing Grant in Fiction. He was also awarded a fellowship to the 2015 Arctic Circle Residency and was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Paris Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Guernica, The Walrus, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Story Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, American Short Fiction, among others—including a 2020 Pushcart Special Mention. He has received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, Arteles Creative Center (Finland), The Ragdale Foundation, Jentel, ART OMI, VCCA, Brush Creek, and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, among others; he’s also received scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and at Lighthouse Writers Workshop.
Illustration by Sarah Muren.
