“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you right now. We’re going to have the most incredible adventure, and I can’t believe we’re in it together.”
“You should eat. You need to take your meds on a full stomach.”
He waved a hand. His eyes were so light, almost white. They upset me.
“Can you see why we should move here?” he said. “Look at these people.”
I looked at the hippie kids. They did look beautiful. But the use of the pronoun we worried me.
“Nice kids,” I said. “What do you think they do here? Do they have real jobs or are they just hanging out?”
Teo shrugged; he wasn’t interested in that.
“This land is innocent, it’s spiritual. Can’t you feel this vibe? And this is nothing. I’m going to take you to a place nobody has ever seen. Just wait. It’ll blow your mind.”
* * *
In the parking lot of a restaurant called the Guadalajara Grill, we picked up the truck that Teo had bought only days earlier. An older guy was sitting across the parking lot outside a liquor store, smoking a cigarette in a drunken haze. I assumed this was the place where Teo had caused a major scene and the cops had taken him away, because the man, as soon as he saw us, yelled something in Spanish in our direction and gave a hoarse laugh. He must have recognized Teo, but I didn’t ask for the details—I didn’t want to know. Teo laughed back, walked over to him and patted him repeatedly on the shoulder. He kept calling him amigo but the man immediately stopped snickering and changed expression—his eyes had suddenly turned wild—so I grabbed Teo by the arm and pulled him toward the truck.
I dropped my car at the rental location in town, and sat next to Teo in his truck. I tried to persuade him to let me drive—Dr. Gomez had advised me it wasn’t a good idea for him to be at the wheel—but he wouldn’t let me. I insisted we go look for a place to spend the night, and opened Airbnb on my phone.
The landscape was stunning, the air crisp, invigorating. We drove right past a herd of bison with gigantic furry heads grazing in the pastures at the foot of the mountain. I wanted to take a photo with my phone, but Teo wouldn’t stop.
“Don’t act like a stupid tourist,” he warned me.
“Why not? I’ve never seen a bison in real life.”
He ignored me and kept driving.
“Taos Mountain is sacred, you know. That’s all Indian land, Sara,” he said, pointing at the thick woodland that covered the mountain, and as he did, the car swerved on the road.
“What exactly does that mean?”
“It means it belongs to Taos Pueblo and the tribe has lived on it uninterrupted for nearly one thousand years. It means its energy has been preserved. This is the oldest place in the whole of North America.”
“Okay. Keep your eyes on the road, though.”
“I’m perfectly in control of this car.”
“Not sure about that,” I whispered more to myself, and went back to my Airbnb search in an attempt to quell my frustration.
“Stop fiddling with the phone and listen to this—it’s part of the reason why I came here.”
“I’m listening.”
“The Pueblo people were told by the Great Spirits to plant and harvest the land in order to survive, to treat their trees as their gods, to listen and to speak to them.”
“Right.”
All this mystical talk made me nervous, and so did the idea that there was a specific reason why he had chosen to come here.
“Basically, instead of controlling their land they believe they are a component of it. A component. Do you understand what that means?”
I wasn’t exactly sure, but I nodded.
Teo started gesturing excitedly toward the mountain.
“Look! No clear-cutting, no buildings, no electricity. This land is still as God created it at the beginning of time!”
His careless driving was making me so anxious that I didn’t want to look at the road, but I stopped scrolling through photos of comfortable-looking bed-and-breakfast rentals where I could finally get some sleep, and gazed out at the mountain again.
Its perfect shape, rising from the flat of the desert, resembled a giant panna cotta dessert fallen from the sky.
* * *
Downtown Taos was pretty in the way an artificial movie set is. Funky galleries and dusty shops that sold Zuni jewelry or cheap Native American art lined a street named after Kit Carson. Rich Texan tourists with brand-new Stetson hats took selfies in front of a hotel called the Historic Taos Inn. Everywhere I looked it was a feast of Virgins of Guadalupe, Frida Kahlo T-shirts, milagros and sacred tin hearts, discolored Tibetan flags flapping from tree branches and wreaths of bright-red chili peppers hanging on front doors.
Farther away from the center, the town took on a more authentic charm. Red adobe buildings were shaped in curves and smooth corners, carved poles holding the roofs of wooden porches. Scrawny mongrels barked in the back of rusty trucks parked on the side of the road. It was the West in all its glory, a scenery I knew only from a mix of old Westerns, Coen brothers’ films and Breaking Bad. I began to feel elated.
Teo started to recite the names of the streets he had learned like a poem. They did sound quite evocative: Paseo del Norte, Camino de la Placita, Camino de la Finca, Callejon Road, La Morada Road, Penitente Road, Francisco Vigil Lane, Coyote Loop. We drove north, past the town, past horses in corrals, past clusters of aspen trees, then straight across the mesa. Way out, on the edge of the horizon, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains were blue, the color of distance. The sun had melted the snow in patches, revealing a deep-red soil. The sky seemed to press on us so closely, there was more of it than land. Teo was right: this was a landscape that called for joy—there was a clarity that laid everything bare—but I had no time to allow myself to be happy. This wasn’t a recreational trip, or a discovery that could change my life.
“You need to take those meds,” I said once more.
“I’m perfectly fine. I’m just happy you’re here,” Teo said, lighting a cigarette as he turned left into the setting sun.
He switched on the radio and raised the volume so he couldn’t hear what I was going to say next.
* * *
The following morning I looked for Teo at the breakfast table of the guesthouse where we had crashed, but he was nowhere to be seen. The owner—an older woman in her sixties with long gray braids and dressed in violet thermal wear—made some remarks about one of the guests making terrible noise throughout the night, moving furniture, playing loud music, starting the car several times and probably smoking. I pretended not to have heard any of these disturbances and tried to divert the conversation by asking her about the house, a rambling adobe with thick beams on the ceiling and oval-shaped fireplaces that she told me were called kivas. She was a talker, proud of her past as a flowerchild who had come to Taos from Florida in search of a truer way of life. So I listened, patiently, although I was worried about Teo, not knowing where he was and what he might be up to after what had clearly been a turbulent night. The woman was in the midst of a story about the time when she lived in a commune and used to hang out with Dennis Hopper at the bar La Fonda, when I heard the truck come into the driveway and brake on the gravel. Teo walked in, still in the same clothes as the previous day, his eyes the same scary gray. Clearly he hadn’t gone to sleep at all. He completely ignored our hostess.