Tucson spills out over 240 square miles of hostile Sonoran Desert, mangy with creosote and deathly indifferent to interlopers. I drove in from the east, from California. After the office parks and the outlet malls and the casinos and the Creationist museum, the I-10 splits open at the seams, unravels into dust. Arizona doesn’t submit to daylight saving time; crossing the border, I lost an hour in an instant.

I was in long-haul land, with weigh stations and roadkill coyotes and ribbons of smoking tire splayed across the interstate like divas arched over baby grands. Gas stations swelled into truck stops, sprouted showers and slot machines. In one of them, east of Blythe and west of Phoenix, I was pulled through the aisles by an unplaceable otherworldly drone. I felt as much as heard something under the whine of the fan-light combo. A strange vibration. I touched the corn nuts, the wraparound sunglasses, the truckers’ potions with their promises of a menacingly sustained horniness. Who wants to want so much for so long? Those who wander the endless road, I guessed. And then another traveler entered, and I realized the ethereal hum I’d heard was a glitching door chime.

Historically, the desert is a site of both exile and enlightenment. It would be neither accurate nor inaccurate to call Tucson an oasis. The city is subject to the sort of primordial dry heat that draws outlaws and asthmatics. Its vermin are javelinas, boar-like creatures that have lived there since before the Pleistocene era. Its largest private employer is Raytheon. Tucson’s greatest source of green is its public works, which are painted the soothing mint of mental hospitals. Its largest tourist attraction is the National Gem and Mineral Show.

I love any concentration of interest: cat shows, car clubs, Comicon. A concentration of interest is a desperation to which I relate. Tucson doesn’t host the world’s only gem show, but theirs is the oldest and largest, and—per the official expo website—the most esteemed. It’s less an event than an invasion. In January the dealers come with Penske trucks and horse trailers, with calcite and pyrite and onyx and chrysoprase. The city sports center is ritualistically cleansed of sweat and stocked with Herkimer diamonds, real diamonds, tourmaline towers, obsidian orbs. The gems overtake restaurants and office parks and highway hotels, all the doors flung open onto the courtyard, all the rooms filled with treasure. There are prehistoric predators’ woody teeth in gold paper gift boxes, wet buckshots of opal in Tupperware tubs. Innovative and unlicensed vendors set up card tables on the sidewalk. The most recent economic impact data I could find is from 2019, when the show brought in $131.4 million, $70 million of which came directly from the sale of gems.

Whether or not you believe in the palliative properties of enhanced vibes, crystals are exceptional generators and transmitters of electromagnetic energy. Crystals are used in telephone and telegraph circuits, optical instruments, cell phones, microphones, radar, digital watches, turbine blades, and barbecue lighters. Fourteenth-century Franciscan monks prayed over clear quartz altar pieces to channel the lucidity and luminosity of the purified soul. The Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca is often depicted with an obsidian mirror. Milky calcite clusters excavated from an archeological site in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert were collected by humans and used as apotropaic items 105,000 years ago.

The typical Los Angeles crystal collector may aesthetically align themself with Brandy Melville and horse dewormer smoothies, but in Tucson the gem show attracts geologists and art collectors, Russian billionaires and casual spectators with pastel vacation shirts and rolling suitcases. Vendors engage in a pageantry of precision, quick to delineate gem from crystal from fossil from mineral, emphasize geological qualities like hardness and clarity, and refer to their wares as specimens. The Tucson Gem & Mineral Society hosts geological education centers—hushed galleries with unobtrusive display stands and tasteful lighting—but the real spectacle is outside, where specimens wrested from the dark core of the earth are laid out under a dazzling sun. It’s almost crass, the casual profusion of precious stones next to county fair snack stands. At the gem show, you can touch almost everything.

I was first to arrive for a girls’ weekend, a boutade of clinking glasses and shit talk and standing in the kitchen barefoot, swaying slightly, whispering I love you more. Kelly, who already lived in Tucson, had been my best friend at summer camp and was now a professional psychic medium. We aired out the sterile Airbnb and she told me we’d entered an auspicious year; the psychic community was abuzz.

“Everyone’s freaking out,” she said. “We know something’s coming, and it’s big. But it’s shapeless.”

Along with my SPF and heartburn medication I’d packed Love is in the Earth, an out-of-print guide penned by an author known singularly as Melody. On its ragged cover, her name was flanked by musical notes. Between imperatives like BECOME ONE WITH THE EXISTENCE OF ALL, Love is in the Earth was indexed by area of concern. Under T: tear ducts, telekinesis, telepathy, temptation, testicles, thalamus, The Crusades, theta, thighs. This was the great power of gemstones, I believed: they were a way of outsourcing your issues to something heavy in the hand. The first step, then, was diagnosis. Would I rather awaken the powers of the pineal gland, or learn psychokinesis, or prevent rashes? Was I most concerned with stress, or suffering, or the elliptically named but deeply appealing subtle bodies? In the Airbnb I flipped to the page number next to thighs and read about a granular mass called Scheelite, astrological sign of Libra.

Kelly and I drove to a Ramada Inn. Out the window, the city was expanses within expanses: the flat pink desert, the parking lots, the swoop of undefined land between the wall of a housing complex and the boxy new builds.

We couldn’t park in the official hotel lot because it was occupied by showpieces, boulder-sized creamy agate orbs and sharp pillars of quartz that rose to the second-floor balconies. We wandered with the masses across plains of minivans and moving vans and NRA-stickered pickups. The Ramada Inn was next to an industrial site; burnt rubber tinged the air. At a plastic party table along the hotel’s outer wall, an Insane Clown Posse flag fluttered above a tent of spotty moonstone. I turned a slab of Juggalo moonstone this way and that to catch the light.

Crystals are short and long time all at once: a million years of heat and pressure best experienced in flashy moments. There’s no way the eons-long process of natural crystal production can keep pace with the demands of the market; gems, like so much on earth, are a dwindling resource. You’d never know that in Tucson. Past the moonstone, we walked through a maze of shipping containers filled with dull stone masses, through a white wedding tent of fist-sized garnets and lemony citrine and ancient ammonite fossils carved into ashtrays, the tense chatter of hagglers, then through another parking lot, into a garden of veiny amethyst slabs cut into spinning chairs shaped like cupped hands.

The chairs retailed for $28,000, according to their peddler, a gregarious Deadhead dad-type who’d been a car salesman until Covid layoffs pushed him into the mines. Mystical women had a cutting knack for assessing my spiritual defects, but older men tended to adore me; I delighted them in my red boots and real vintage Sonic Youth t-shirt, a dog who’d learned to ring a dinner bell. I sat in a slick palm and asked the man if he believed in metaphysics.

“When I was younger,” he said.

“What changed?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“I got into dealing.” He told me he’d worked in Oregon, but the amethyst I sat in was from Brazil. When asked who mined it, he was evasive. “When you pull a smokey amazonite from the earth, though”—he ran his hand along the chair’s polished edge, brushed the hem of my shorts—“you’re birthing that crystal.”

I spun around in the vulgar chair and wished I could own it. The bejeweled bible, the sword, the sarcophagus: if one common thread in the human-gem tapestry is spirituality, another is an ancient attachment to prestige and beauty and rarity and catching the light—which suggests that frivolity, and not gravitas, is the domain of the soul, and proves you have one.

Kelly and I trailed a housekeeper listlessly tugging an unplugged vacuum down the twilit center hallway that divided the courtyard and inner rooms, peering into them as we passed. We saw malachite marbled blue-green like earth from space (transformation, evolution), plasticky featherlight amber studded with ancient ants (connection of the conscious self to universal perfection), sinister penile amethyst obelisks (sobriety, intellect), calcified seashells furred with glittery quartz druzy (intuition, heart opening, lungs). Recursive cubes of purple fluorite, the edges like stained glass, the center a color so dense it looked liquid (discernment, aptitude).

People say things like childlike wonder, but as a child, nothing stunned me. I accepted the existence of whatever was put in front of me, firetruck or sunlight or mother. It was only as an adult that I saw how precarious it all was: how I was one slip of an atom away from being something else entirely, or from being nothing at all. How impossibly perfect the world had to be to produce something as singular as a crystalline structure—and then to repeat the equation, to flawlessly replicate itself into something solid and real. Here was the world rearranging itself into strange shapes, the way dreams rearrange the mundane into sublime and illegible matter.

In one room, the beds had been extracted and replaced with glass cabinets. Two women on folding chairs—a pale thirty-something with a draconian ponytail and a pouty teen—looked up from their phones. They smiled like we were the crystals.

“Come in!” the teen waved us in. “Look.”

She held what looked like a sheet of steel up to a sconce, and it suddenly gleamed glassy green. “Chinese carbonaceous Pallasite,” she said. “A crystal from space.”

The girls complimented our outfits as they pulled specimens from the glass cases and pointed out their various intergalactic features.

“There’s iron, stony, and stony-iron meteors. Stony-irons are the most rare, you just don’t find them much. They burn up more.”

“If you spend a hundred dollars you can enter a raffle for a big chunk of adonis lunar.”

“Here’s moon dust—there’s more vials next door.”

“It’s not metal, so you can put it”—here the ponytailed woman stretched the collar of her t-shirt, revealing a smudgy grayscale tattoo of the moon—“in the ink.”

White crests of scar tissue swirled across the moon’s surface. She smelled like cherry car freshener. I thought back to the truck stop, wondered if I’d slipped through some cosmic glory hole and now floated in space, performing the familiar rituals of female friendship. Kelly and I told her the tattoo was beautiful. I fought a compulsion to hold the specimens in my mouth.

The teen wore a nugget of meteorite on a dainty silver chain that seemed to vibrate to the frequency of her enthusiasm. “Want to see something really fun?”

The adjoining room still had the twin beds in it, so you had to edge past them to slide open the cabinets. They looked slept-in. I wondered what it felt like to sleep so close to planets.

The meteor girls gestured toward the little enclave where you keep your toiletries. The plastic cups had been pushed aside for a magnum bottle of champagne in a satin-lined box.

“There’s Martian dust in there,” said the ponytailed woman. “Real champagne with real dust from Mars.”

“There’s a big party tomorrow at five,” said the younger one, “and we’re gonna crack it open, if you guys want to stop by.”

At the Airbnb, our friends had assembled. Kelly and I shared the news of the Martian champagne. If a stone in the hand could heal you, we reasoned, imagine what a planet in the body might do.

At the restaurant we drank natural wine and at the dive bar we drank tequila sodas and whinnied with pleasure when an old man performed slights of hand for us.

“No fucken’ way that’s your card,” he growled, flipping over what was our card, every time.

It was all magic: the sororal delight, the crusty stranger, the space wine, the earth wine, the gems shrouded in plastic tarps, the dust punks curled in their truck beds, the highway velvet with dust.

At the Airbnb I bunked with Kelly, who for abstract spiritual reasons slept with the lights on. Drunk and antsy, I flipped through Love is in the Earth. Was love in the earth? Was it that easy? Snakebite, sodium, sorrow, soul. Ammonite ashtray, amethyst chair. Or is that not the great hot fiction: that we might ravish the earth, and what we force from its depths into our arms might love us back?

I woke to a relentless heat, my eyes crusty and my mouth claggy and sour. We started at the sports center. Above endless rows of vendors in the dirt arena, the air was unctuous with ketchup and kettle corn. The gems glimmered like charging technology. All I had to do was buy the right one.

I thought I’d know as soon as I touched it; I’d pick it up and its charge would ripple through me, a divine moiré. I touched pixelated celestite geodes; sedan-sized blocks of rose quartz, pink and marbled like great cuts of meat; embryotic carnelian carved into little hearts. The hearts evoked to me the compulsory civility of a golf green. I couldn’t remember what problems any of them solved.

I purchased green aventurine (heart-opening) before remembering I actually wanted green tourmaline (mind-opening). I allowed a woman at the lapis lazuli tent to convince me that lapis lazuli would protect me from ionizing radiation. At the next tent, the palest pink apophyllite was wrapped in toilet paper and guarded by a man who admonished me for purchasing the lapis.

“Everyone knows their mines are run by the Taliban.” He had a wiry beard and a German accent; in another life he might have been cast as an acclaimed psychologist or a subway groper. He pointed to the apophyllite. “Many people give to horses.”

“So… you can eat it?”

“No.”

The man turned away to rummage through a pile of newspapers and I attempted an exit, but he called me back. He held out a quartz point the size of a newborn baby.

“The generator,” he gingerly placed it in my arms. “It is all energy. Everything.”

Under the quartz’s smooth surface were webbed planes that bent light into rainbows. Carbon, silicon, oxygen. Something could have changed in the hour I lost at the state line. I could have been a smooth plane of clear stone. I could have been dust. In my arms in the sports arena, the rock felt less like a baby and more like a puppy. I was in some kind of puppy mill. A thin coating of sand clung to everything. I felt like I’d huffed dry shampoo. I felt very thirsty.

Kelly and I rallied our troops, looped around the parking lot searching for our cars. We herded our group through the banal warren of hallways at the Ramada Inn and stopped abruptly as the ponytailed woman stepped from a doorframe. Like she knew we were coming, I thought. Our friends swanned around us.

“We’re ready for the Martian champagne,” Kelly said.

“We brought more girls,” I said.

“To the party,” Kelly said.

“Oh,” The woman said. She widened her eyes in confusion, then narrowed them.

Kelly and I exchanged tiny nods—confirmation this was the right doorway. There could be many blonde ponytailed meteor sellers. But there, under one spaghetti strap as she leaned into the hotel room and shook her head sharply at someone: the inky moon laced with lunar dust.

“We met yesterday?”

“Okay?” She didn’t affirm that we’d met—that she’d ever seen us before—but she didn’t stop us, either. In the bedroom I contemplated alien abductions, body doubles. The beds were made now, and the room was crowded with men in khaki shorts. The Martian champagne was swaddled in its box, unopened. The men didn’t speak to us.

Relief: the pouty teen, beckoning us back out into the hallway.

“We came back,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. She fiddled with the clasp of her necklace. “Well. The party…it’s sort of for big spenders.” She looked truly sorry for us. I realized, with shame, that the meteor girls hadn’t been bonding with us. They’d been selling to us.

“But—here.” The girl pulled the chain from her neck, handed it to Kelly. Our group gathered around it. Around us, the vendors closed their doors. It had gotten late.

The meteor was no bigger than a pebble, but it was dense and glossy and etched with interstellar scrimshaw. It was a thing we didn’t know we wanted. Here the meteors, and down the hallway, the dinosaur bones.

“Thank you,” we said.

“I have tons,” she said. “It means nothing to me.”