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This used to be a thriving mining town, out in the desert. Now it’s a ghost town, a little series of mid-century buildings clustered together in the middle of white dunes. Lenny and David walk through the town square. The sand is warm and rough under their feet. Some of the houses are crumbling, their foundations slipping and leaving them tilted, higgledy-piggledy, like a set of dollhouses knocked askew by a child’s feet. Above them, a Joshua tree looms, its branches tangling up into the sky like tentacles and casting a shadow over the broken-down, rusty cars still parked in the lot. To Lenny, it feels like a town on the surface of the moon, surrounded by blank, alien landscape.
“What are we going to do for water?” Lenny asks. “I mean, maybe we’ll, uh, eat rattlesnakes, or cacti, or whatever, but I mean . . . I’m just talking about . . . something to drink. I don’t wanna wind up like that guy.” She points at the skeleton of a deer half-buried in the sand.
“It’ll rain,” David says. He perches on the back of a rusty pick-up truck, his arms looped around his knees.
“In the desert?” Lenny says, skeptically. “I’m just saying, it’s - it’s pretty dry. Pretty famous for . . . I mean, that’s what they’re known for. Deserts.”
“It’ll rain,” David repeats, determined.
“All right, you’re the boss-man.” Lenny shrugs.
David seems content to sit on the back of the pick-up truck until the cows come home, so Lenny decides it’s time to investigate the sleeping situation. She tries the doors of the houses until she finds one that’s busted enough to come open in her hand. Inside, the house seems almost untouched by the ravages of the environment. Lenny walks past a TV set and a velvet chair. The TV could be new if it wasn’t for its wooden box and rounded grey screen, and the chair looks undamaged but dusty. The wallpaper is peeling, floral patterns curling up off bare plaster like bark off a tree.
Further in, in the bedroom, there are still checkered blue blankets on the bed and white curtains on the window. Lenny peeks out of the window and sees David still sitting there on the pick-up, looking up at the sky. “Waiting for rain,” she mutters.
She turns her attention back to the bedroom. There’s a big bookshelf, with the books all spilling out of the shelves and into a pile on the ground. Next to it is a cabinet with a record player sitting on it.
Lenny picks up one of the books and pages through it. She’s never been much of a reader, but it’s not like there’s gonna be anything on TV. After about ten minutes, she gives up, and turns her attention instead to the record player. She opens the cabinet and grabs a record at random. Then she unplugs the record player and carries it back out to the town square, where David is still sitting, looking up at the sky.
“Hey, space cadet.” She waves to get his attention, setting the record player down on the ground and holding up the plug. “Getting kind of bored over here. Not really a thriving social scene in this town. So I was wondering if you could . . . uh . . . you know, I thought . . .” She gestures with the fingers of her free hand. “I figured, you’ve got, like, powers or whatever, so maybe you’ve also got power, right? Like electricity?”
David tilts his head and walks over to take the plug. He inspects it for a moment, and then kneels down to plug it directly into the sand. “Try that,” he says.
Lenny eyes it skeptically, but she dutifully takes the record out of the sleeve, puts it on the player, places the needle, and presses play.
The music starts. “Oh, have you ever woke up from a daydream, and realized that the world's gone crazy?” the singer whispers.
Lenny whoops, and David grins. “Now it’s a party!” Lenny exclaims. “Come on - let’s dance.”
David laughs. “I don’t - uh, I don’t know how to dance.”
“You don’t need to,” Lenny informs him. “You just need to, like, do your thing. Come on, don’t be a square.” She grabs his hand in hers, and manhandles him into a ballroom dancing pose. She’s leading, of course.
David is laughing, but they’re spinning around in circles together, the music playing, the white sand thrown up in arcs around their feet, the sky blue above them.
“Oh, I'm a laid-back girl,” the record player whispers. “Float in the sun, looking down at the world, oh, just sippin', it's kinda my thing . . .”
Lenny feels wetness on her face, and she looks up. “What’s that?” she asks.
“It’s raining,” David says, and he laughs, and laughs, and they dance in the rain until the record player sputters to a halt in a puddle of rainwater.