Searching for Cibola

By Bill Lloyd

At fifty years of age Lawrence is at a crossroads. An expert in probability and statistics, he finds himself confronted by a combination of improbable events: his wife Rachel has left him and his close friend John is dead. He abandons his home in Los Angeles and moves to a small house in the mountains above Albuquerque, New Mexico. There he delves into his past, searching for kernels of insight much as a miner might search for nuggets of gold. Aided by his occasional lover Miranda, his daughter Abigail, and his shrink Angel, he struggles to connect his disparate memories into a coherent narrative that he hopes will help him understand the changes that hazard has brought to his life. Along the way he discovers that the truth can be as elusive as the Seven Cities of Cíbola, the mythical land sought by Coronado when he, too, came to New Mexico more than four hundred years before.

In the words of one reviewer, Searching for Cibola describes: "the natural dialectal evolution of individuals interacting with each other and with happenstance . . . Beautifully written"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Lloyd
• Release date: Nov 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465760920

Bill Lloyd

Bill Lloyd is a novelist who writes about the pursuit of meaning in a world marked by uncertainty and misdirection. A native New Yorker and long-time resident of California, he received his doctorate from U.C.L.A. and served for many years as Professor and Chair of the Geography Department at California State University Fullerton. Several years ago he left academia in order to devote more time to his writing. Now he lives with his wife Janine in a small mountain retreat above Albuquerque, New Mexico, though he also spends a considerable part of each year in an old stone house in Olonzac, a small town surrounded by vineyards in the Languedoc region of southern France. The author of two novels, Searching for Cibola and The Solitude Myth, he is currently working on a new novel tentatively titled: Dramatics.

Book preview

SEARCHING FOR CIBOLA

Bill Lloyd

Copyright 2011 William J. Lloyd

Author's Disclaimer

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The places referred to are real but the characteristics and events ascribed to them are fictitious.

Cover image: detail from a painting by the author.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

About the Author

Other Books by Bill Lloyd

1

I'm captivated by the strangeness of the forest, a motley collection of withered pines and gnarly junipers clumped together outside my window like a gathering of crusty old men. They are tough trees, brave enough to withstand the rigors of life in an unyielding climate where months of drought and mindless winds push away whatever scarce rain dares to fall, leaving behind the unrelenting brilliance of the sun to give shape to the landscape. It's summertime now — the monsoon season in the Land of Enchantment — and rain is at least a possibility. I imagine the trees waiting for proof that the season isn't a lie, holding their collective breaths in anticipation of the first few drops of an imminent downpour. They lean toward the churning clouds hovering boldly above the peaks, clouds swollen with the gift of precious moisture destined to replenish the parched land below. At any moment a flood of biblical proportions might come cascading down from the heavens, cleansing the land of a multitude of sins born of sterility and drought.

Yet clouds can be cruel lovers and despite the overture descending from the darkening sky it may not rain this afternoon. A rogue wind might arrive to tempt away the thunderclouds before they have a chance to release their trove of life-giving water. If so, the trees won't be disappointed, for they've learned to be patient. They've heard the fickle promise of the summer rains too many times before.

These days I spend quite a bit of time gazing out the window, leaning back in my black leather chair and staring at the clouds and the trees. There's little else to do living up here in the rarefied mountain air on the warm days of summer. Time moves slowly in New Mexico, slowly enough to deny every hint of transition, putting to rest the faint rumors of the onset of senility and the whispers of impending death. Was it only six months ago that I was sitting in this same chair staring at the time-bound trees when the sound of the telephone startled me like an unwelcome intrusion on a day of mourning? Despite the change of season the foliage of the evergreen trees is no more or less alive than it was back then, the rocky ground no more or less misshapen by the slow course of eroding time. Everything around me remains locked in place, making a mockery of perfection, of the unattainable promise of an ideal proffered but never delivered. And then there is the silence, the quiet murmur of the breeze as it settles on the mountains like a stage-whisper lost in the immensity of a vast natural amphitheatre. I'm not surprised that there was no email today; there was no television either, no reminders of the death of the imagination, no knocking on the door to disturb the quiet, no visitors and no expectations.

I exaggerate my loneliness. Miranda stops by from time to time, breathing her brooding energy into the hollow rooms of the house. We share a dinner, we talk, perhaps she spends the night. And though the phone rarely rings, I do occasionally read the email messages that show up in my inbox, collections of words from friends almost forgotten, reminders of the life I left behind in California. Sometimes I hear from Abigail, the daughter who embarked on a quest of her own, sharing some precious gems of her distant life in words I never grow tired of reading. She takes pains to avoid any mention of the mother she loves, of the woman I no longer know. That's how it is with email; we forfeit the chance to probe and question in exchange for the comfortable anonymity of reading words etched on a computer screen while sitting alone in the privacy of our thoughts.

I was once a believer in the revolutionary qualities of cyberspace, a participant in the grand human adventure of shrinking distances and infinite information, back before the Web became so boisterous it sucked the life out of anyone careless enough to believe that the old standards of civility and veracity might still apply. Back then I too embraced the hubris that life could be compartmentalized without cost: public and private, work and play, family and friends; a world where everything was possible and trespasses easily forgiven. Living here in the mountains of New Mexico I find that things are different; they are more old fashioned and less amenable to the imperatives of the selfish will. It's a place where I can exalt in an abundance of privacy, a land where stillness and solitude mean exactly what they imply.

Tomorrow I might start on the yard, clearing a bit of brush before the onset of autumn pushes the fire danger into the red zone. Or I may not. I may decide instead to put off the chores for another day, though lately I've found that working outside in the clear mountain air provides a pleasant diversion from the other tasks that occupy my time, the inner explorations and concentrations that grip me as I slowly reconstruct my life, trying to understand why Rachel isn't here, why she no longer exists in my world, and how all that I once had imagined with such certainty became part of a mythic past now confined to the untrustworthy realm of memory.

When I answered the phone that cold winter afternoon I heard the sound of two voices, one the Rachel I knew by heart from twenty-five years of marriage, the other someone I barely recognized after six months of separation. Was it possible for a woman to have two voices, two personas? I wouldn't have thought so. She was speaking in muted tones, her words barely able to bridge the distance that stretched between us like driftwood disappearing over a hazy horizon. I could tell she was crying.

What's wrong? I asked, the words crumbling into dust the moment I spoke them. She didn't answer right away. When she finally found the courage to speak her voice was filled with emotion turned inward. John is dead. That was all she said.

John is dead. Those three words unleashed a rush of emotions in my mind, a flood of long forsaken memories wrapped in a straining toward incomprehension. Rachel had found her voice just as I was losing my ability to grasp what she was saying. Something about a cancer, too-long undetected, virulent, untreatable. He had been sick for a while. He didn't want anyone to know. He went quickly.

I tried to imagine the scene as she described it, the petty details of death on a winter evening somewhere in the south of France. The red glow of twilight would have faded from the sky. The two of them would be sitting quietly after dinner. He wasn't feeling well; he thought he would go upstairs to bed. She stayed behind, reading in the silence of the empty room. Later, when she too went upstairs, he was quietly sleeping. Too quietly, she thought. And that was what death was like, a quiet, gentle sleep. The agony and intensity of a lifetime suddenly wiped away, leaving behind the hollow echo of an empty shell.

Rachel's voice grew quiet as her words wound down into a shallow sea of discontinuity. For her it was over; there was nothing more she could say. I felt for her; I wished I could ease her pain, push back against the torment that embraced her and help her find her way beyond the tragedy. But there was nothing I could say, nothing I could do. We had entered the realm of the survivors as strangers linked only by the knowledge that we both had known him well. Death never ends as long as the rest of us survive. Memories live on, expanding arithmetically to fill the void. John's death wasn't the end of a life; it was the reawakening of a memory.

I watch as the afternoon sky-drama slowly unfolds in languid overtones of gray and white. Over the course of an hour the sky has transformed itself into a patchwork of billowy clouds punctuated here and there by remnant touches of blue. I hear a rumble of thunder as it frees itself from the confines of a cloud, stirring up a gust of wind that bends through the trees like a wild animal suddenly freed from captivity. It looks as if it will finally rain. I glance back at the computer screen, observing the finely ordered array of words unchanged from what I typed an hour ago. I can afford the luxury of time, for the tempo of my writing is unhurried. Once the storm subsides, I'll get back to work, tapping out the strains of my personal libretto into the warm, dull circuits of the patient computer. The words will come slowly as I struggle to wrap my arms around an obstinate reality. It's no easy task separating fact from fiction in a world where human relationships are metaphors for a vain attempt to mate with life itself.

I'm tempted to believe that the onset of a relationship is incontrovertible proof of the irreversibility of time. There is no turning back once that first step is taken, no possibility of retracing our steps in the hope of finding another more amenable path to follow. The doors to the alternative futures are permanently shut. And because there is no way back, we dare not imagine how easily things might have turned out differently, since to do so would be to commit an injustice against time itself. Yet for those among us who have grown disillusioned with the lives they are leading, it's hard not to do precisely that. Unwilling to submit to the tyranny of time, they defy the laws of nature by daring to ask the forbidden question: What if I had chosen a different path?

At times I wonder why it took Rachel so long to become the woman she must have always imagined herself to be, the woman I thought I knew but didn't. Who was she? Where did she come from? When she looked up at the stars, where did she dream of going? What traces of her real self did she leave behind in her sudden rush to establish links to a newly chosen future? Futile questions, every one of them, questions I'm not sure I have the right to ask, or having asked them, can ever expect to find the proper answers. I fear the truth lies in the casual debris of a lifetime, the pile of memories that only the bravest among us should dare to dig through. And I'm not feeling very brave tonight, not when Rachel has moved so irretrievably far away, leaving me to wonder if she ever existed at all.

2

My name is Lawrence. I'm average height, average build, and I still have most of my hair, though these days it tends more toward a darker shade of gray than the dark brown I've long been accustomed to. I live alone in the mountains of New Mexico high above the sprawling desert city of Albuquerque. The mountains have a name; they're called the Manzanos. They occupy a corner of the Cíbola National Forest, part of a vast wilderness that greeted Coronado as he journeyed northward from Mexico more than four hundred years ago. He was seeking the seven cities of Cíbola. He never found them.

Like Coronado, I'm curious by nature and doggedly persistent in the pursuit of a modern-day treasure, those nuggets of insight that lie hidden under mountains of data. For nearly a quarter of a century I worked as an analyst at the Institute, a low-level think-tank in Pasadena, California, specializing in the interplay of social policy and economics. My job was to help the other researchers pin down their best ideas by applying the one skill I excelled at: a grasp of the arcane world of statistics.

It was my work at the Institute that led me to try my hand at writing a blog, a thrice-weekly missive dedicated to the curious world of probability. My goal was a systematic deconstruction of the abuses of statistics that passed for analysis in the popular press and among those who wished to be quoted in it. I especially liked to skewer the all too human tendency to take rare and improbable events out of context, thereby affording an undue significance to the one percent that should have passed as noise while leaving behind to languish in obscurity the other ninety-nine percent that closely resembles the world as it is: explainable and predictable. True, it's a somewhat duller world than many might wish for, but the alternative is much worse: an artificial invention with no grounding in external reality. The blog survived for several years, earning me an award from one of the lesser technology magazines and an NPR interview, but eventually I grew tired of beating my head against the immovable obstacle of ignorance and put an end to it.

I took a leave of absence from the Institute when I moved to New Mexico a year and a half ago, though I still do some work for them from time to time as a consultant. It pays the bills and affords me ample opportunity to work on my journal, a loosely structured, non-linear assessment of how I arrived at this juncture in my life. I'm trying to figure out the lasting impact of the players I've shared a stage with, Rachel and Abigail, Angel and Claire, Jonathan, Sally and of course Miranda, who arrived late on the scene. It isn't an easy story for me to put together; it's proven far more elusive than the sorts of problems I'm used to working on in statistics. It never ceases to amaze me how people succeed in defying convention, performing the most improbable feats with a confidence born of an innate optimism and fearlessness. But despite the difficulties, I believe the journal is a worthwhile enterprise, though I won't know for certain until I'm done with it.

The other day I mentioned to Miranda that I'd been trying to describe in written words what life was like in Los Angeles during the decade of the