At this moment, she sees Amos. She thrusts herself through the crowd to where he is dancing, throwing his arms down as if ridding them of fire ants. She catches his eye and smiles, seizing his hand. He smiles back, bewildered. There is nothing specific she wants to say to him, really. It is enough just to be with him now, in the middle of this. She begins dancing again, a little less freely, waiting for him to join her. When he doesn’t, she yells, “What’s wrong?”
He shrugs and shouts, “The set’s almost over.”
He puts a hand in his pocket, and, suddenly, a look of terror darkens his face. He digs into the other pocket, then the pockets in the back. He looks at the ground, turns a circle in place. His eyes, when they meet Bethany’s again, are panicked.
“What happened?” she yells.
He shakes his head, slaps his hands against the sides of his jeans. He turns a fast circle again, like a dog, scanning the ground. He pushes the person beside him away and examines the ground there.
“Did you lose something?”
He doesn’t answer, but she sees him mouth the word fuck. He puts his head in his hands for a long moment, then looks at her again, glazed.
“Come on.” She pulls him through the crowd toward the back. “There’s got to be a lost and found somewhere.”
He allows himself to be pulled. Once they are away from the crowd, he says, “It’s my pocket watch.”
“You have a pocket watch?”
“It was from my mom.”
The simple way he says this makes it sound like his mother is dead, that no further explanation is needed.
“It’s gone now,” he says bluntly. He flicks his hair to the side, dismissing it.
“Well, let’s at least check the lost and found.”
“Forget it. It probably fell out in the crowd and it’s trampled now. No one’s going to see it in there.”
The music has stopped—Amos was right that the set was ending, the seemingly infinite galaxy of it—and the stage behind them has gone dark for the intermission.
“We should go back and look for it,” Bethany presses.
“Just never mind,” he says.
They wander away from the stage into a stand of trees, an area that has been sectioned off as a chill-out space. Here, there are things hanging from branches, beaded strings and helixes. Floodlights have been strategically placed to shine upon rubbery objects of art, sea creatures and amoeba-like globs that suction the tree trunks. In a clearing, they come upon an enormous, translucent brain lumped upon the ground, made of clear resin. There is a crevice in the frontal cortex wide enough for people to slide through, and silhouettes are visible inside. The surface of the brain is hard and smooth when Bethany puts her hand to it.
“Let’s go in,” Amos says.
Bethany feels a clamp in her chest. There might not be complete privacy here, but it is comparatively isolated. He wouldn’t suggest going in unless he wanted, at the very least, to talk closely with her. He stands back and lets her duck through first. She is aware of her backside directly in his line of vision and is glad she chose the long T-shirt. Inside, people are sitting on the ground. Amos has to stoop down low to get through the entrance and cannot stand fully straight once inside.
“Hey, Amos,” someone calls to him.
“What the hell? I’ve been looking all over for you guys,” he cries. He turns to Bethany. “These are my bandmates. We were supposed to meet up, but apparently they’ve been hiding in a brain.”
This will just be a quick hello, she hopes. They will find another, more secluded place to go. She waits patiently, smiling at the bandmates, some of whom apparently have traveled from other states. To her dismay, Amos settles down upon the ground with them. They talk about music, using cryptic language. After fifteen minutes or an hour of this, Amos has made no sign of decamping, and Bethany stretches her arms meaningfully.
“Time to go back to the campsite, I think,” she says.
He looks carefully at her. “Yeah, you look tired. Rest up for tomorrow, it’s a great lineup. I’m gonna hang with these guys awhile, maybe crash at their site tonight.”
She sits for a moment as the boys continue their prattle. Then she rises and exits the brain. She stands outside, dazed. After counting slowly to ten, she makes herself walk away.
Tramping through the woods, she feels newly irritated with the people gallivanting through the trees like elves. Off to one side a great number of neon hammocks dangle like cocoons. Here, she comes across the boys from Old Cranbury, each seated awkwardly in a hammock with an unfamiliar girl. These are girls of the skimpy clothing set, each thoroughly groomed and less-than-beautiful in her own way. They peer suspiciously at her. Kurt already has an arm around the hip of the girl beside him, the hammock swaying. Noah looks as guilty as a puppy caught digging in the yard. He inches away from his companion, but she quickly scoots back against him. Bethany, feeling an odd spike of betrayal, turns away.
When she arrives back at the campsite, she finds Rufus leading the others in a drumming session. Rebekah slinks over and whispers, “We’re about to start.”
“Are you going to do it, too?”
“No, I’m going to stay with Rufus while he does it. I’ll be his sitter, kind of. Well, kind of the sitter for the whole group. Somebody has to stay sober, to keep people calm and make sure they have what they need.”
“Do you think people will throw up? I mean, aren’t the neighbors kind of close?”
“Believe me, we won’t be the only ones vomiting tonight.”
The drumming ceases and the drummers enter one of the tents—a yellow one—in single file. Rufus comes back out with a big insulated jug. He pours the contents into a stock pot and lights the propane stove.
“He’s edgy,” Rebekah confides in Bethany’s ear. “He’s been fasting for a couple days, including sex.”
“Aha.”
“Anyway, you can stay if you want. You can try it yourself, or you can help me sit. We have blankets ready in case people get chills, and a bunch of pails. We’re going to put on a recording of the kind of stuff a curandero would play during the ceremony. There’s an instrument he shakes, like a bunch of dry twigs.”
“A chakapa,” Rufus calls out.
“Right. We’re going to play a recording of a chakapa.”
“Okay. Well, good luck.” Bethany backs away. “I’ll see you when it’s done, I guess.”
The ecstasy of the dance music has completely receded from her veins now. The rejection from Amos has fuzzied her brain, and the bizarre, umbrous doings at the campsite exhaust her. She retreats aimlessly from the yellow tent as Rebekah and Rufus disappear inside.
“Hey,” someone calls, and she turns to see Chris sitting on a log with a beer and a cigarette, the sunglasses still in his hair. She is unaccountably happy to see him.
“Aren’t you going to do it, too?” she asks.
“No fuckin’ way. I’m not going near any of that jungle shit.” He smiles at her and shifts over on the log, patting the place next to him. He reaches into his pocket and offers her a flask of bourbon.
“I thought we weren’t allowed to bring our own liquor in?”
“Shh.” He holds a finger to his lips.
She takes the flask. The first sip burns. It ignites a new indignation at Amos’s behavior, the giant brain and the juvenile hammocks, all the silly toys provided for them as if they were infants. A reckless flame travels through her. She tilts the flask and drinks in quick little gulps. Chris, pleased by this, moves closer and puts a hand on her back.
She finishes the bourbon. “Sorry,” she murmurs, turning to him. His face looms very near. The first kiss is surprisingly gentle, then more insistent but still soft, causing a confused flutter inside her. “C’mon,” he says, lifting her from the log. She steps behind him on rubberized legs toward a dirty white tent.
He has a slow-motion way about him, moving with his eyes closed like someone sleepwalking, acting out a dream. She finds herself lulled into unthinking response, mirroring his movements. Maybe because his eyes are closed, she has the sense that she could be anyone—that she is a temporary body in his arms. She is not even sure that he remembers her name. There could be something liberating about this, but the bourbon flame has died down and been replaced by her usual, maddening caution. She watches Chris’s face as he moves his hands over her body like a blind person.
She thinks of Amos, wills back to mind the sharp immediacy of the look on his face when he noticed his pocket watch was missing. She feels an ache, a pining for the bright and precise black-and-white lines of this face. She understands exactly, painfully, who he is.
A rhythmic rattle comes through the walls of the tent from outside. An instrument being shaken in another continent. A rising moan.
Chris is at the zipper of her shorts now. It is a ridiculous zipper, no more than an inch long, but he fumbles at it regardless. Instinctively, she stops him, puts a hand over his hand, and he withdraws it obediently like a redirected animal. Now he is at his own zipper. It is suffocatingly hot, and the ground has begun to rock. More mysterious sounds drift over from the yellow tent—lower moans and strange barking noises. More than anything, Bethany does not want to go outside. She would rather be done with this and go to sleep right here. Whatever caused her to follow this man into this tent she doesn’t remember, but now it is a job she has gotten herself into. It seems absurd, even funny, that she should put her face near this stranger’s open zipper, a ridiculous posture for any person. But once she has consented, once she has begun, she realizes that she can’t exactly, politely, just stop. Slowly, a tickle develops in her throat. It creeps down through her esophagus and grows, until she comes up for air, gasping. Chris puts a hand to the back of her head, pressing gently. She braces her hands on either side of his hips and takes shallow breaths. A drop of sweat falls from the tip of her nose. Unmistakable sounds of violent heaving are now entering the tent from outside. All at once a dirty wave swoons up in her and she retches and vomits in place.
The next few moments are a confusion of mopping and swearing. The tent is tropical, noxious with stink. Chris bundles his soiled camping pad and sleeping bag together with his shorts and underwear. Bethany watches, prone on the damp nylon floor, as he crouches around, naked from the waist down. Finally, he pulls on a pair of cotton pajama pants and looks at her with a kind of flustered reverence. “Are you all right?”
She nods, her head rubbing the ground, the nylon making static in her hair. He nods back and ducks silently out of the tent with his bundle. Relieved depletion overtakes her. She falls asleep to the lullaby of the susurrating chakapa.
In the morning—much too early, only a hint of daylight through the moldy tent walls—there is a stir at the campsite. Bethany lies, stiff and cotton-mouthed, upon a circuitry of roots and stones. Through the hammering of blood in her brain she hears agitated voices. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” someone is saying over and over.
She crawls to the tent door and peers out. There is a bleak indigo cast over everything, and it seems that objects have been rearranged in the night: the propane stove and log and plastic cups on the ground. Rebekah is standing outside the yellow tent, arms hanging at her sides. When she notices Bethany, she stares at her for a long black moment. Even at this distance, Bethany recoils from what she sees in the gaze.
“Only three people ended up drinking the brew,” Rebekah tells her when she comes into the white tent. If she notices the rancid smell, she does not mention it. Her fingers knit and unknit themselves as she speaks, as if deciding whether to pray.
“Rufus was hysterical the whole time, rocking back and forth and trying to run away. That took up most of my energy, just trying to keep him calm. Then Holmes kept puking, like three or four times, and I had to deal with that, too. Stooge just kind of fell asleep, so I thought, Good, I don’t have to worry about him.”
“Rebekah, what happened?”
Rebekah looks at Bethany. “He never woke up. He hasn’t woken up.”
“But you tried . . . ?”
Rebekah’s mouth pulls downward. “I knew the tent was too hot,” she cries, and bangs a fist on the ground. “I fucking knew something was going to happen.”
When they emerge from the tent together, Chris is outside with Rufus and the other one, Holmes.
“He was probably on something else, man. We should’ve asked,” Holmes is saying.
Rufus does not respond. He turns to look at the girls.
“What are we going to do?” Rebekah says calmly.
Rufus stares at her. His face is pale, and he is wearing a shirt now. The shirt is white with a big blue eyeball in the middle of it.
“I think we should go to the medical tent,” Rebekah answers herself.
Rufus stares another moment, then says, “No, they’ll send the cops.”
“What else are we supposed to do, Rufe?”
“All right, I’ll go to the medical tent,” Rufus says quietly. “Let the cops come.”
The ambulance arrives, barreling through the campground. Curious people gather nearby and murmur as the EMTs hunch into the yellow tent and, after a few minutes, slide out a stretcher with a sheet strapped over a body. That’s what it is, Bethany realizes. A body.
“This happens every year,” Bethany hears someone say in a hushed, authoritative tone. “There’s always at least one person . . .”
The police come. When it’s her turn to talk, Bethany feels like she is reading lines in an audition. She listens to herself telling the story of her evening, pointing to the white tent, pointing to Chris. The officers seem serious but unsurprised. Their tone wavers between sympathy and contempt. They unceremoniously take down her name and address in case they have further questions. She gives her home address—her father’s address—without thinking, then feels a blade of fear that her parents might find out about this.
The police move on to Rufus. They speak to him for a long time. After they finish, one officer remains with him as the others poke around the tents. Bethany wonders what has happened to the magic brew, whether they’d drunk all of it last night, or if Rufus—or, more likely, Rebekah—had poured the remainder somewhere. Maybe a dog would sniff it out, attuned to whatever telltale chemicals, but the officers have not brought dogs.
After the police lead Rufus away, people from other campsites begin to infiltrate, rooting for information. Rebekah will not talk to them, but walks around in circles shaking her head. She is still in her patchwork pants and tank top. Her hair is snarled down to the tips.
“Well, it’s bound to happen, with people mixing drugs,” one girl is rattling on in a regular voice. “Not everyone knows what they’re doing. People make dumb mistakes all the time. It happens every year.”
“He was probably one of the Yggdrasil crew. I heard they had some bad Molly.”
“Did you know him?” someone asks Bethany. She shakes her head mutely.
“We need to find Amos,” Rebekah says, suddenly insistent. Her voice is high and strained. “You know, not having phone service fucking sucks. What the fuck are you supposed to do in an emergency? Walk around with a freakin’ totem until someone sees you?”
“I think he’s with his bandmates,” Bethany offers. “He said he was going to stay at their campsite.”
With a growl, Rebekah grabs the Argus totem. She holds it aloft as they wander the campground, until at last they find Amos and his friends playing guitars around a little table of bagels. Amos looks clean and rested. The breakfast setup strikes Bethany as neat and civilized; the mugs appear to be filled with real coffee. Bethany wishes intensely that she could sit down with them and pretend nothing has happened.
Amos looks up with innocent surprise.
“Let�
�s go,” Rebekah says to her brother. “We’re leaving.”
“What? Why?” His brow knits, and he keeps strumming the guitar.
Rebekah yanks him up by the arm. She takes him aside and talks quietly. Bethany can see her back quaver as she starts to cry, and she sees Amos put an arm around her.
They collect everything they can from the campsite and lug it out with them. Rebekah carries the Argus totem, now an unwelcome beacon. As they walk, it seems that some people are whispering, watching them with a curiosity bordering on envy. Others look on ignorantly, blinking like dumb cows, wondering why they are leaving the festival early. The story will spread through the campground, through the festival, eventually reach the ears of the performers themselves. It will dampen the mood for a while, or—possibly—enliven it, add new fuel to the manic dancers. Perhaps this direct news of death will underscore the present moment for them. They won’t be surprised, that much is certain. This happens, apparently, every year. If that is true, Bethany thinks, then the festival itself is nothing but an enormous glittering gambling table where life is traded roughly in order to inflate its value, remove its guarantee.
Rebekah walks with a look of grim focus. Amos, too, is quiet. Bethany feels no sharp emotion, just a general numbness. Only in an abstract way does she understand that a man is abruptly dead—a man who was alive in front of her just hours ago, only a few years older than herself. The idea beads on the surface of her consciousness like oil on water.
A girl in braids approaches them. “Hey, are you leaving already? Here, take this.” She holds out a fan of glossy postcards. Did you become someone else at Aether? the postcards inquire, showing a picture of a purple-wigged woman with butterfly wings. Send us your photos!
With every step toward the exit, Bethany thinks, she is fashioning a permanent memory that will remain with her. She is, in fact, a different person coming out of the festival. Now, walking beside Amos, she catches herself considering the unexpected advantage of having witnessed something he has not. This is such an unscripted moment that anything could be excused. She could grasp his hand right now, and he would have to hold it.
The Wonder Garden Page 25