Looks at Nothing's sacred crystals

Looks at Nothing's sacred crystals are a treasured part of Lani Walker’s medicine basket, but their most consequential appearance is not as keepsakes: when Lani turns to them for insight into Fat Crack Ortiz’s illness, they show her a sequence of faces she cannot explain. The vision offers no clear answer. Instead, it unsettles her and sends her from an inherited spiritual practice toward a search for information by other means.

Place in the Medicine Basket

Lani keeps the crystals in a soft chamois bag inside her medicine basket, among objects with different histories. When she opens the basket, she recognizes what was there on the night at Ioligam, along with several additional things. Many of its contents came from or through Nana Dahd. They include an ancient piece of red-clay pottery bearing a faint turtle image, once belonging to Rita Antone’s paternal grandmother, Understanding Woman, and Nana Dahd’s sacred scalp bundle. The basket also holds the smooth bone awl Nana Dahd used to weave baskets.

Other objects are Lani’s own acquisitions from Betraying Woman’s cave: a blackened fragment of a broken pot and a delicate bone from a dead bat’s wing. The crystals sit in this collection without being reduced to another archaeological remnant. Their separate bag marks them as a precious possession, and Lani handles them carefully, keeping them contained in the basket while she looks through them. The arrangement places the crystals amid inherited and personally retrieved objects, joining what has been passed to her with what she has gathered herself.

The Vision

For days, Lani has felt that something is terribly wrong at home. Because Fat Crack is ill, she takes his condition to be the source of her unease, but no one seems willing to tell her what is really happening. She retrieves a framed photograph from her dresser: it was taken on her high-school graduation night and shows her in cap and gown, with Gabe Ortiz and Wanda Ortiz beside her. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she holds the picture in one hand and one crystal in the other, raising them toward the light so she can study the faces through the stone.

The first three crystals produce nothing. With the fourth, Gabe’s features appear to shift and grow thinner. Lani initially understands the change as a reflection of his illness and possible weight loss. That reading does not hold. His face dissolves and reforms into the features of a blond Anglo woman Lani has never seen. Those features then disappear, leaving a bare skull. The progression moves from a familiar face, through an unknown one, to a deathly image; the crystal makes the change visible but does not explain its relation to Fat Crack.

Aftermath and Significance

Shaken and unable to make sense of what the crystals have shown her, Lani returns them carefully to their bag. She replaces the bag and her other treasured objects in the medicine basket, closes it, and puts it back in its hiding place. The care of this return contrasts with the disturbance of the vision: the objects are restored to order, while the meaning of what she saw remains unresolved.

The episode changes Lani’s immediate course without resolving her fear. Looks at Nothing's sacred crystals leave her more distressed, and she concludes that the old ways have not worked; she will have to turn to new ones. She switches her computer back on and sends three emails in succession. About half an hour later, as the sun touches the winter-brown landscape outside her window, she finally lies down to sleep. The crystals’ significance therefore lies in both their vision and its limit: they disclose an image that Lani cannot interpret, and that uncertainty propels her toward another kind of inquiry.