The Wonder Garden

by Lauren Acampora

  Mark is trembling. He can still see the logo at the top of the form, two intertwined hearts with a third, smaller heart nestled between. He can see his own name inked in block print beside the heading “Parent #2.” He cannot bring himself to look at Harris, whose dragon-print robe fills his field of vision.

  Finally, the robe moves away. There is a whisper of silk upon silk as Harris lowers himself onto the trunk at the foot of the bed. After several blank moments, Mark turns his head to see Harris facing away, his back quaking.

  Later, in bed, Mark lies awake. Harris’s sibilant breathing deepens and turns to full-on snoring, as often happens when he drinks. Mark usually interrupts this with a shake of his shoulder, but tonight he lets it continue. How silent the room would be without its tumbling cadence. One day, he knows, that silence will come—they will no longer be together. Sooner or later, through his own doing or through the brute force of time, of death, it will come. There is no truth more absolute than this. Perhaps it is understandable that in days of serenity the heart seeks it own friction—whether in defense against, or in ignorance of, the ultimate blow that awaits it.

  For now, they are here, defiantly close beneath the blankets. Suddenly, all else drops away—the dust and sweat of Africa, that hot squall of abstractions—and this is all that matters. This man who would have a child with him, grow old with him and say good-bye.

  The next afternoon, just before closing time, the door of the shop opens and a man enters with an extravagant crown of feathers on his head. The red and green feathers appear to have been borrowed from a South American macaw. His chest is weighted with a collection of intricately beaded necklaces and a string of long pointed teeth, perhaps shark or wild boar. Beneath, he wears a plain black T-shirt and jeans. Mark glances at Harris, who mouths something to him and winks.

  The man comes to a halt in front of the desk where Madeleine sits. It will be interesting to see how she handles this one, Mark thinks. He watches as she puts a piece of hair behind her ear, then stands and pats down her skirt. He watches as she smiles up at the man and collects her purse.

  He glances at Harris, whose eyebrows arch. For a moment, the old energy returns between them, trembling like a guitar string.

  Madeleine pushes her chair in beneath the desk, and the feathered man takes her hand. She steps toward him, tall and slender, classically pretty with the neck of a ballerina. There is something of a little girl about her, Mark thinks, being picked up by her father.

  “Harris, Mark”—she gestures—“this is David.”

  The feathered man raises a hand to each of them in turn, as if in benediction. Then, without speaking, he touches Madeleine’s shoulder. She allows him to pull her close, pressing her cheek against the ranks of beads. As they walk toward the door together, she turns to give Mark and Harris a little wave. A strange smile flickers at her lips. The bell tinkles as they exit onto the sidewalk, colors aflame in the early spring light.

  AETHER

  WHEN THE car pulls into the parking lot, Bethany heaves her duffel bag onto one shoulder. “They’re here!” she calls to her mother. The weight of the bag strains the straps although she has packed only the essentials listed on the festival website—sunblock, baby wipes, rain poncho—and there is nothing she can safely take out.

  “Have a good time, honey,” her mother says, catching her in a tight embrace. Her voice carries the same note of distraction that’s been there for weeks. “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too, Mom,” Bethany says into her mother’s hair, feeling a hard nut wobble in her stomach.

  They come out of the condominium, and Rebekah and Amos step from the car to greet them. Rebekah grins and chats easily with Bethany’s mother about her California college, the beauty of the campus, the diversity of the student body.

  As Bethany squirms into the backseat, her mother gives her another dreamy kiss, lingering for a moment, then letting go. Bethany feels the nut topple and slide in her stomach as the car pulls away. Once they are on the road, Rebekah cranks the music and opens the window.

  As far as her mother knows, Bethany will be accompanying Rebekah’s family to a revolutionary reenactment this weekend. It is, ultimately, a harmless lie. There are, of course, many worse things she could be doing than going to a music festival. Later, when she is older and her maturity proven, she will confess the truth, and her mother will understand that there was nothing wrong in it, that she’d underestimated her daughter all along.

  But now is not the time for rebellion. Since renting the condo, her mother has been making an effort: asking about her feelings, sitting with her before bed. Sometimes it seems that this outreach is more for her mother’s benefit than her own—that she needs to prove to herself that she is a responsible, available parent. The first year had been bright and optimistic. It was as if, by taking a break from her father, Bethany’s mother had shed a winter skin. That was what she’d called it: taking a break. But as the second year advanced, the sparkle was replaced by a kind of preoccupied quiet. Now, her mother has stopped going out. Her hands have been jittery, and she has been dropping things.

  They drive north in the heat, leaving behind Old Cranbury’s dense greenery. Within an hour they are in a different country. Wider spaces, smaller houses, indications of farming. A tractor supply store, an NRA bumper sticker. Between the howling open windows and the thumping stereo, the noise in the car is engulfing. The music goes around in a throbbing, screeching loop.

  “I’m so excited that you’re here,” Rebekah shouts into the rearview mirror. “You just have to be at Aether to understand it. Then you’ll never want to miss it again.”

  Amos pulls down the sun visor on his side. A little mirror reflects the top half of his face. Since Bethany last saw him, his hair has grown past his eyes in a flat black flap, and he keeps moving it to the side with his fingers. Bethany notices for the first time how thin and careful these fingers are. Most of his teenage acne is gone, and the forehead in the mirror is smooth and pale.

  “I just hope it hasn’t jumped the shark,” Rebekah continues. “Last year there were a lot of posers, you know? Guys just looking to drink beer and hook up. But that’s so not the scene, you know?”

  Bethany does not know, but nods her head.

  From the back, Rebekah’s hair looks different, thicker and darker. “Did you do something to your hair?” Bethany asks.

  “I haven’t been washing it. Look,” she says, and shows Bethany the matted beginnings of a dreadlock.

  Rebekah has returned from her sophomore year with a wise, fugitive glint in her eye. As many questions as Bethany has asked and as factually as Rebekah has answered them, her friend’s new universe remains shut to her. Bethany suspects that Rebekah is enjoying this bit of mystery, taking it as license to treat Bethany like a sweet, dim younger sister.

  The community college was supposed to be a stopgap before Bethany’s launch as an actress. It was her choice to forgo the prototypical American college experience—that halfway house to autonomy—in exchange for intensive auditions. But the auditions have been as fruitless as they are relentless. It has proven impossible to stand out among the pert, practiced girls who have done this since toddlerhood, and it has already begun to seem that her role as Holly Golightly in the high school play will be the pinnacle of her career. All the talk of her precocious talent—a junior snaring a leading role—now seems miserably unfounded. She was cast as Liesl Von Trapp in The Sound of Music her senior year, and nothing since. Fear of failure has begun to puddle cold in her chest. She is a community college student now, surrounded by hairsprayed girls and dull boys earning vocational degrees.

  Rebekah had auditioned for Holly, too, but ended up in the chorus. While some of the seniors resented Bethany for stealing a part they considered theirs, Rebekah hadn’t cared. Instead, she’d been impressed with Bethany’s mettle. They went to the diner after rehearsals and Rebe
kah elaborated in hushed tones about her new, older boyfriend. She’d found him outside the Coffee Bean, on break in his apron. He’d been sitting cross-legged on the pavement smoking an Indian beedi cigarette and reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Rebekah was breathless when she talked about him, about the high-minded discussions they had, about his global awareness, his zest for experience. He was, she whispered, twenty-five years old.

  As it turned out, this zest for experience had included a complete survey of opioid and psychotropic drugs. Rebekah swore him off when she left for college, then took him back when he was hospitalized for an overdose. “He said he’s a better person when he’s with me, even if it’s just summers and vacations,” she said with a sigh on the phone, “which I think is true. And he’s gotten more spiritual. He’s been working with this guy in town. He’s kind of his protégé.”

  As they approach the festival grounds, the traffic slows, and they find that they have joined a parade of allied vehicles with overlapping car stereos. Passengers smile and wave at one another. Rebekah thrusts her arm out the open window and gestures universally, triggering a series of whoops and hollers. She bounces in the driver’s seat.

  “I can already feel the vibe. Everyone’s so happy to be here, that’s the thing. A lot of these people have been waiting all year for this. It’s like the highlight of their year.”

  They park in a vast field and emerge into battering heat. Serpentining on foot through the grid of cars, they are assaulted by the slap of sun on metal. It is predicted to be in the nineties all weekend. Bethany squirts sunblock onto her arms while walking. Her hair is already damp on her neck, but she doesn’t want to tie it up without a mirror. This, she recognizes with a dip of embarrassment, is because of Amos. He walks in front of her, taller than she remembers, slimmer in his jeans. It’s as if, while he was away, some inner crank has lengthened his body and rotated its cells so that the boy she looks at now has no relation to the boy she has known, indifferently, since kindergarten.

  “Aren’t you hot?” she calls. “I mean, in those jeans.”

  Amos looks back and smiles. “Nah, I’m okay. There’s no other option for guys, anyway. What am I supposed to wear, shorts?”

  “I love my pants,” Rebekah comments. “They’re so cool on hot days.” The pants are vastly wide, composed of patchwork cotton squares. She lifts the fabric to her knees. “I made them myself, you know. There’s a girl in my dorm who’s teaching me to sew on her machine.”

  At the gate, they wait for their turn to give over their weekend passes, a sacrificial two hundred dollars each. The passes are emblazoned with the Aether logo—an alchemical symbol like a seated stick figure with bent knees—and its slogan, “We breathe immortal air.” They have their bags searched. There are so many people here already, just waiting to get in, that Bethany feels woozy at the notion of what small nation must be waiting inside.

  “I can’t wait for you to meet Rufus,” Rebekah says, jiggling Bethany’s shoulder. “I can’t believe you guys haven’t met before.”

  This exuberance strikes Bethany as disingenuous, as if insurmountable logistics had constantly intervened in the past. In fact, it seems that Rebekah has been keeping Rufus squirreled away, considering Bethany unfit to meet him. She is gratified, if begrudgingly, that she seems to have passed some unspoken test now.

  As they enter the festival grounds, Bethany surveys its citizens: colorful figures scattered to the horizon. They seem to have been here forever, moving to and fro on blissful errands. Rebekah lifts her yellow sunglasses to smile at Bethany and does a kind of skipping dance. Bethany returns the smile through a roll of panic. It is scandalous to think her mother had swallowed her weak fiction about the revolutionary reenactment. Had she really believed so blindly, or was she privately crestfallen by her daughter’s daring deceit?

  Bethany allows this tremor to rumble and fade, and returns her attention to the surrounding sensory blitz. There is a mechanical thrum that seems to come from the ground itself. She usually gravitates toward radio-friendly songs with beginnings, middles, and ends, sticky melodies and words she can belt out. She likes rising choruses and drums that palpitate before big anthemic melodies. She does not think these types of songs will be performed here. In fact, the lineup seems to include only a handful of bands playing actual instruments. The rest of the artists are electronic—DJs with names like Slap Elf, Mork, Yggdrasil.

  Amos does not skip like his sister, but walks faster as they go over the trodden fields toward the campground. He is the musician in the family, with wide and discerning tastes that easily encompass this and every imaginable festival. In high school he’d played whatever necessary instrument—guitar, bass, keyboard—in at least three different bands.

  They pause as they come into the campground, a hobo village of nylon tents. Rebekah stops and shields her eyes with a hand.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Amos asks.

  “Rufus said he’s in the northeast quadrant. As if that’s helpful at all. But maybe we’ll be able to see his rage stick.”

  “What’s a rage stick?” Bethany asks.

  “You don’t want to know,” Amos says.

  “It’s like a totem thing, to help people find their friends at festivals,” Rebekah explains. “There’s never any cell service out in the boonies. But I think it’s better that way. It’s pretty rare that we get to unplug like this, just be with each other and the music, you know?”

  Most campsites are just tents on the ground, but a few are more elaborate arrangements with tables, chairs, tapestries, Tibetan prayer flags, hammocks. One tent is painted with the word PLUR.

  “What does that mean?” Bethany points.

  “Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. Sometimes people add another ‘R’ for ‘Responsibility.’ As if.” Rebekah holds a hand over her eyes. “There he is!”

  As they come closer to their own campsite, Bethany sees that there are already three tents bunched together, along with a wide canopy on poles. Beneath the canopy a number of canvas chairs are arranged in a circle, with a number of unfamiliar men seated in them. One of the men stands up and smiles, stretching his arms out as if demonstrating ownership, or granting a blessing.

  His nose ring is the first thing Bethany notices, the first thing, she presumes, that he wants anyone to notice. It pierces the cartilage beneath the septum, with two arms curving downward in a way that is both hypnotizing and deeply unsettling. He is shirtless, his body decorated with paint: green and gold stripes circling his biceps and crosshatching his pectorals. His hair is buzzed short. Bethany thought she remembered Rebekah describing him as having long hair. But perhaps after hearing about the beedi cigarettes and the Metamorphoses, she’d only pictured someone more romantic-looking.

  Rebekah scurries into this man’s outstretched arms and cuddles into his chest. Bethany thinks she sees her kiss a nipple and feels a revulsion, as if she’d watched her lick a reptile.

  “Bethany, this is Rufus,” she says breathlessly, pulling away.

  Bethany begins to hold out a hand, but Rufus bounds in for a hug, pulling her against his painted chest. “So great to meet you. Agh, sorry about that!” he cries, swatting at the smudges on her shirt.

  “Oh my God, is that your stick?” Rebekah squeals, pointing to a pole in the ground with something like a decapitated head on top.

  “Yeah, do you like it?” Rufus pounces on the pole, hauls it up, and proffers the head. “I made it out of foam and painted the eyes on. It’s Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed giant. Watching over our campsite.”

  “Argus,” Bethany echoes. “That’s the name of my dad’s company. It’s a home inspection business.”

  “That’s right!” Rebekah cries, dazzled.

  “Argus, watching over everything,” Rufus muses, gazing at the severed head.

  He helps them erect their tent and arrange their supplies. He talks fast, moves fa
st, and seems much younger than Bethany knows him to be. She feels a kind of disappointment at this, as if Rebekah had purposely deceived her, built him up as something greater.

  Rebekah grabs her by the elbow. “Come on, I don’t want to miss Barterhouse!”

  “What about Rufus?” Bethany asks.

  “He likes to stay at the campsite.”

  As Rebekah pulls her along, Bethany looks for Amos. “Where’s your brother?”

  “Probably already out in front of the stage.”

  They hurry out of the dusty campground and across the field of flattened grass leading to the main stage. Bethany is sweating, and the dirt has come through her sandals and made ankle socks. The festivalgoers throng around them. It is staggering to see so many young people in one place. There are girls in bikini tops, smiling at Bethany and Rebekah as if privy to a shared secret. One bikini-topped girl wears an enormous feathered Indian headdress. One walks by with no bikini at all, just yellow and black paint upon her breasts, two big black-eyed Susans. Bethany is demure in contrast, in the studded shorts and shirttail tee she’d agonized over.

  “Look at that!” Rebekah points. Young men in Victorian clothing, women in leafy halter tops, all perched high on stilts. They strut in circles, gesticulating like circus performers. It is hard to tell the difference between regular people and entertainers here. It seems to Bethany that everyone is imbued with some stardust indigenous to this festival and inaccessible elsewhere. The beauty around her is not exclusionary but inclusive. Just by being there, she might absorb it through her skin and begin to glimmer.

  They reach the main stage where Barterhouse, a bearded jam band, is riding an upward swell of guitar licks to heaven. Rebekah begins to sway. Everyone is dancing, the boys wiggling in place, the girls swinging their hair. And this, Bethany remembers with a thrill, is just the beginning of the festival.