The Gideonse Bible   With the beard? Yeah, you!

“Monday / Sundance / Excalibur”

Walking along the path to the brunch, we stopped to stare at the mountain.

The Briton and I were in the awe: golden leaves, white barked trees, snow, sky. Take a picture.

Opposite that monolith was Timpanogos, the sleeping woman, which our husbands

did not see spooning the vows, as they were home, a quick flight

for me, something like a day for her. It was a gamble

for me to go alone, not really knowing anyone, to Utah for this wedding.

But the bride and groom have refined taste – in weddings

and college roommates, in seating charts and centerpieces, in Malbec and mountains.

I was hung-over from wine and dancing, along with everyone and the Briton, and I gambled

by only eating a bagel before we drove to the airport. The Briton took pictures

out of the window of my rental as we flew

down through Sundance, Provo, Salt Lake talking of Facebook, our families, husbands.

Then, I was alone in the sallow Southwest terminal, and I called my husband

my voice speedy with coffee and fatigue and the details of the wedding.

I studied the other passengers waiting to fly

trying to decide whether someone can just look Mormon, and I wondered if the mountains

surrounding the lake were made of salt, and if so, sacred. I flipped through the pictures

on my phone, then stopped myself from snapping one of the track-suited Vegas-bound gamblers.

He was in a rusted wheelchair, and she was deaf, unaware of how piercingly shrill her gambling

predictions were. Also, unlikely. I sat as far away from them as I could, and the husband

noticed others do the same. A little girl across the aisle had a toy camera and she took pictures

capturing the barren, yellowed farms below. I felt faint, queasy, and I blamed the wedding

the bagel, all of that wine – always my drinking – even the thin air in the mountains

on making me want to find one of those bags I stole as a kid whenever we’d fly.

Laying over in Vegas, cradling a commode in a men’s room bagel trail mix coffee flew

from me and I cried I whined and none of the travelers or lurkers or gamblers

said a word. One stared at me at the sink as I washed my sweater. It was darn-right mountainous

the humiliation of bile the tingling of the blinking slots the smell of Cinnebon my husband

waiting for me and wondering in San Diego my restless refusal to ask for help. I was wedded

to dying flying over Barstow. No! I interrupted a texting TSA, she the inevitable picture

of laziness. Not the help that erupted. EMTs. Firemen. Watching me panic. Just take a picture.

Hyperventilation prickles, then freezes into nothing. I thought I was dying as I was flying

through the terminal on the gurney, the EMT yelling at a deaf man in the way, wedding

urgency and irony even as I vomited all over his ambulance and my chest. Tourists and gamblers

filled the ER with their chest pains migraines blood stains and I said I have to call my husband.

This wasn’t my imagined Utah; no one flinched but me, and I was under a numb mountain.

Six hours sticky cold, three with blood in my IV, and I had, doc said, vertigo. Cheap gamblers

stayed at the simulacra I chose over my in-laws’ for the night. Excalibur, I told my husband,

is the tackiest place on earth. But the staff? For me, ragged and teary, they moved mountains.