Luke pointed a finger at me. “If only we’d just stayed here and waited for rescue instead of going on your pointless quest to the caves, Rowen would be alive. It’s all your fault! Your fucking fault!”
“Shut it, Luke,” Tommy said. “Just shut up!”
The shouting attracted Lori’s attention. She gave the four of us a long look. “What do you think?” she asked.
None of us responded. Finally, Luke stood up and crossed the distance between our group and Lori. He put a hand on her shoulder. “What do you mean, Lori?”
Lori stared at Luke’s hand on her shoulder, then her gaze slid up to his face. “About what Rowen just said. That in the morning we should walk in the direction the cars came from. What do you all think about his plan?”
“Rowen told you that?” Minh asked from her spot by the spring. She was shrinking into herself, subconsciously moving as far away from Lori as she could.
Lori let out a frustrated exhale and started talking again, slower, as if explaining a complex math problem to a not particularly bright student. “Yes. Rowen just said that. You all must have heard him.”
“Is Rowen here with us now?” Luke asked.
My Shut up glare in his direction was wasted, of course. He simply refused to acknowledge me.
Lori just shook her head as she slumped to the ground, eventually coming to rest on her side. She closed her eyes and stacked both hands underneath her head like a pillow, though not before tucking the tablet closer. I could swear the tablet, this object, whatever it was, glimmered. The four of us watched Lori until her chest was rising and falling in sleep. She looked so peaceful, she was practically glimmering herself.
We exchanged looks. No one was willing to speak first. Finally, Tommy was the one to break the spell. His eyes weren’t focusing on anyone specifically, and his tone was matter-of-fact, mechanical.
“There was something wild in that cave. An animal. Perhaps Rowen encountered it, and when he ran, he fell.”
There was no conviction to his tone, though his words made sense. I had heard some strange sounds too, suggesting an animal presence in the temple.
Uninterrupted, Tommy concluded, “We need to take turns keeping guard. How about I take the first shift and I wake up one of you to take over in a few hours?”
Minh nodded before quickly settling on the ground next to Lori. Luke shrugged, appearing disinterested, but he did spare a long look at the tablet Lori was clutching. Was there longing in his eyes—or was the tablet making him uneasy? I couldn’t tell, but I thought I felt what Luke was feeling—a nervousness deep under my skin, squirming on the molecular level. There was no way I could fall asleep right now. So I stayed close to Tommy.
He looked at me, not unkindly. “You should try to get some sleep, Alif. It’s been a very long day, and tomorrow will be an even longer one.”
“I doubt I can sleep. How about I stay up and keep you company for a bit?”
He considered it before giving me a curt nod. Not like he had much of a choice. Together, we moved away from the sleeping ground and sat down facing the dense grove of trees separating us from the temple. Or was it a cave after all? I wasn’t sure anymore. I leaned in to whisper into Tommy’s ear, “Want to know what I’m thinking? All this is a mirage and we’re slowly dying of exposure in the desert.”
He stayed quiet for a long time before murmuring back, “Hey, if that’s the case, at least we’re not aware we’re dying, right?”
“Maybe we’re being punished for something we’ve done, only we don’t know what it is exactly. Or this is a test or something. Or we’re trapped in a Kafka novel…”
At that Tommy chortled. “I like the Kafka option. As long as we’re not going to turn into bugs.”
“Cockroaches,” I corrected. “And I meant another Kafka novel. The Process.”
He said nothing to that. We watched the moon peek through the neon-gray clouds, only to disappear again, teasing us. I listened to Tommy’s soft breathing. It kept me grounded. Tommy’s breathing meant he was alive. My hearing him breathe meant I was alive too.
“We shouldn’t have taken that tablet thing from the cave,” he said.
“Why, do you think it’s cursed?” I said in an eerie voice, trying for a comedic tone, which immediately seemed inappropriate.
In a voice more flat and tired than before, he asked, “Do you remember when we found Rowen with all that candy? He was mumbling something about it being his reward.”
That wiped all future attempts at jokes from my system. I softly confirmed I remembered it.
“What do you think that meant?” Tommy asked, finding my eyes in the dark and not letting go until I felt naked and exposed.
“That he wasn’t thinking rationally?” I said.
Tommy wasn’t satisfied with my answer. He looked away, cutting off our connection.
To say what I said next felt like going up against a powerful current. “I’ve been having such strange dreams since we got trapped in here,” I confessed, seeing again the giant woman seated on her giant throne, head hidden in the clouds. “Each time, it was as if someone—or something—was trying to communicate with me.”
“And then you were shaking those poisonous yellow things into the stream?”
“I really thought I was dreaming … What do you think the tablet’s got to do with all this?”
“It’s obvious it had some importance to whoever lived here before this place became lost and abandoned. Someone planted fruit-bearing trees in here; someone did those drawings on the cave walls. The tablet has angles and a clear geometrical shape, which means…”
“Human design,” I completed his sentence. He was right. And isn’t that what occurred to me too—that the hexagon must’ve been man-made—back when we were in the temple? But there was something else … That organic feel to the tablet; its greenish undertone. Like maybe it was alive once. “Do you think it killed Rowen somehow?” I asked.
Tommy shrank away from me, his entire body tightening. “It was chaos in those caves,” he said, his voice controlled. “Who knows what really happened. But the likeliest thing is that Rowen wandered off, then slipped and fell. It could’ve been any one of us. It could’ve been you, Alif.”
The way he said it made my skin crawl.
After a moment he said, as if he were trying to convince himself, “I guess if there was anything really wrong with that thing—the tablet—it’d be obvious by now, right? I mean, Lori’s been handling it for some time now and she is…”
“She’s in total denial and hallucinating, that’s what she is,” I finished the sentence when he trailed off. “I want to have a better look at that thing tomorrow. That is, if we can wrestle it away from her. She seems pretty attached to it.”
“Why wait?” Tommy stood up and beckoned me to follow him.
THE DREAM MAKER
We moved, quiet as thieves in the night, until we were hovering over Lori. She appeared younger in her sleep—innocent, carefree. As if she could sense our wicked intent, she murmured sleepily and covered the tablet with her right hand.
I crouched by Lori’s side and reached for the tablet. Before my fingers brushed the tablet’s surface, Tommy grabbed my wrist. We had to communicate with gestures and glances. Tommy signaled for me to wait and walked a small distance away to search for something in the grass. He returned carrying a flat rock, its shape roughly similar to the tablet. Tommy handed the rock over to me, and then, two fingers wrapped around Lori’s slender wrist, he lifted her hand off the ground just enough to start tugging the tablet out. At the same time, I started to insert the flat rock underneath Lori’s hand. The whole operation lasted less than a minute, but by the end of it I was sweating from the effort.
The deed done, we should have retreated, especially since Lori started to fret in her sleep, but Tommy lingered, so I stayed too. I tried to meet his eyes, but he was staring blankly at the tablet cradled in his hands. Not wanting to wake up Lori, I patted Tommy’s shoulder. He
was unresponsive.
“Tommy?” I leaned in and whispered into his ear.
He didn’t flinch, didn’t react in any way. It was the tablet, I realized. Its neon glimmer seemed brighter now, illuminating Tommy’s skin. I reached out and, without thinking, snatched the tablet from him.
A wave of rocket-blast euphoria hit me so strongly, I ended up on my butt. The tablet was magnetic in my hands, my fingers glued to its surface, feeding on an electric discharge, not completely unpleasant. It was strong enough to reach deep under my skin.
My body became a shell, and I was trapped inside it. Yet my mind was flying free. I saw my father’s face. Dad was smiling that crooked smile I used to see a lot when I was a kid. Mom was also there with us. Strong gusts of nautical wind were whipping her black hair around. The three of us, we were on a yacht. I remember this trip! I must’ve been about ten when we visited Rügen island, where Dad’s grandparents were from. We toured the island, learning how people used to live their entire lives out there decades ago. The day we went sailing was particularly stunning, water so calm Dad took us around the bay and then out into the sea proper. Mom laughed a lot that day. This was two years before my parents separated, divorce soon to follow.
“Alif!”
A slight pressure against my right cheek. Was it that wind again?
“Shit…”
A stronger sensation—a touch?—on my face. Or more like a gentle slap. Dad’s face started to melt away, merging with the blue horizon, out there where it met the sea.
“Alif, wake up!”
Mom’s laughter dissipated into the wind that was now howling something scary. Daddy, turn the boat back to shore, I wanted to say, but my lips couldn’t move. The sensation of flying and then falling overcame my body and I was whooshing through the air—in free fall. With visions of my parents cutting off abruptly, I was left reeling from the hurt of withdrawal. My skin was clammy, hot. I was lying on my back. Tommy’s blurry face was over mine, and I stared at him, focusing on the movement of his lips until I regained my equilibrium. I sat up.
“What the hell happened?” I looked around. We were closer to the trees now and farther from the sleeping trio. I didn’t remember walking here. Minh and Luke were quiet in their slumber, while Lori was fussing around, whimpering in her sleep.
“I’m not sure…” Tommy scratched the back of his head. “I must’ve blacked out for a second or two, and when I came to, you were on the ground, clutching the artifact like your life depended on it.”
I was about to ask Tommy where the artifact was now, but then I saw it lying on the ground between us, shining its alien light. I said, “The last thing I remember is you staring at … this thing. You were totally out of it, so I grabbed it out of your hands and then, I think, it gave me a mini electroshock and I had a hallucination … or more like a vision.”
“What did you see?”
“My parents. It was a memory actually, but one I thought was long forgotten.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to share the whole thing with him. Or with anyone. The vision I had of my family before its implosion was a personal, deeply intimate experience. I wanted to keep it to myself.
But Tommy was waiting for more of an explanation, and after another moment of hesitation, I added, “It was a memory of Mom and Dad, the way they were before they split up. Back when they were happy.”
“I had a vision too,” he said after a long pause. “Visions, multiple.”
“Yeah? What did you see?”
“I’d rather not say … It’s just that my things, what I saw, weren’t memories as much as … something I want. But I didn’t know I wanted it until I had the vision, if that makes any sense. Sorry I’m being so vague. It’s just so weird. All of it.” He gave me a strange look that set my skin running with cold fire. “We’ve all done strange … things since we’ve been trapped here.”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.” But I really wanted to know why he was looking so uncomfortable. “Was it something embarrassing?”
“Alif…,” he spoke softly.
“Okay, I won’t push … So should we try it again?” I indicated the tablet—or artifact, whatever it was—looking innocent now. “I mean, I think it’s safe to say we’ve already established that this thing generates visions and that it’s activated by touch. We both have now tested it once. We need to set up an experiment and try it out again. I’ll go first?” My hands were starting to shake, eager to touch the tablet again.
“Alif, we don’t know anything about this thing. It could be radioactive, for all we know. It could be making us sick, making us do things…”
I was beginning to feel the burn of impatience. I really wanted to hold the tablet again. My fingertips were practically twitching. “Come on, where’s your spirit of scientific discovery?” Before Tommy could stop me, I reached out and picked up the tablet from the grass. This time I had a bit of a warning and held on to myself a little longer. As Tommy moved toward me, I waved him off, assuring him I was okay. He stayed tense, close to me, ready to slap my hands free of the tablet.
As a familiar daze pulled a curtain over my eyes, I was expecting to see another happy memory of my pre-divorce parents, but instead the tablet showed me something else. I didn’t like this. Not one bit. It was a more recent memory, which was also my embarrassing little secret that no one knew about. This memory was one of rejection. It stung so much, I’d had to shove it to the very back of my mind and ignore it the best I could. I’d done a good job of it so far—until now.
Before high school ended, even before this trip to Dubai was in the works, I’d applied to a creative writing program at the University of Southern Melbourne. It was a bridging program, designed for students who showed talent but whose specific academic credentials weren’t appropriate for mainstream admission. This was me. I loved to write, but all my high school electives were science- and history-focused. No one knew I’d applied for this program. No one even knew I was interested in creative writing. Everyone just assumed I wanted to study ancient history and become an archaeologist like my parents. Did I want that? I kept asking myself that question, and the truth was I didn’t know. Not for sure. Maybe? I didn’t have it all decided and lined up like Luke did, with his family’s history of graduating from Dunstan Law, or like Lori, who wanted to do a business degree at the “best Australian university” and then “see how that went.”
When I got my rejection email from USM, I stared at my laptop screen in a stupor. This was just a bridging program, with no guarantee of admission. And I wasn’t good enough even for that? How could this be happening to me? Was I irrational to expect to be accepted? Nothing made sense in that moment. A massive blow to my self-esteem, that email turned my world upside down. And I had to pretend like nothing was off with me for days and weeks afterward. I deleted the email and purged it from my “trash” folder. But I couldn’t delete it from my mind. Now, this tablet, this thing glowing in my hands, was shoving that rejection back into my face. But then it was all changing. The letters in the email were rearranging. Instead of unsuccessful on this occasion, there was now we are pleased to inform … The memory stream cut off all of a sudden, and I was back in the oasis with Tommy.
Reeling from the experience, I saw the tablet once more lying on the ground. I knew it was irrational to project human emotions and feelings onto an inanimate object, but I couldn’t help it. The tablet was mocking me. It could see through me. It fished my deepest regrets and wishes out of the depths of my mind and then used it all to torment me.
“What did you do?” I asked Tommy, my voice wavering. My face was wet, and I looked up, wondering if it was raining. It wasn’t.
“You started crying. Just silent tears. I don’t know what the hell this thing was showing you, but I couldn’t take it anymore.” When I offered no response, he asked, “What was it showing you?”
“My parents, again,” I lied.
It was Tommy’s turn with the tablet now. I’d had enough of its
twisted visions, I decided. Or at least that’s what I told myself. Who was I kidding? My whole body was craving to touch the tablet again.
Tommy made a move for the tablet but then paused, fingers hovering over its surface but not touching it.
I said, “You don’t have to do this, if you don’t want to. Whatever this artifact is, it’s playing with our emotions, bending our memories, maybe even our desires.”
Tommy seemed miles away from me. “I do want to try it again. But if I do or say anything weird, can you please promise me you’ll push it out of my hands? Just try not to touch it yourself. And I think, after this, it’s better if we avoid direct contact with this thing.”
“Sounds good.”
First light broke and the sun began to ascend. Tommy picked up the artifact from the ground and, immediately, a euphoric expression spread over his face. I observed him, waiting for any sign of trouble, but then his eyes refocused and found mine. He was still holding the artifact, but at the same time he was also present here with me, not lost in some fantasy. It was eerie to see him like this, so I tried looking away but couldn’t keep it up for long. I felt a pang in my chest, a whisper of a wildflower unfurling its petals. I wanted to kiss Tommy. So bad. My skin was practically electrified and singing.
I reached out for him and wove my hands around his neck, locking my fingers and bringing him close. He didn’t resist. When his lips met mine, that flower in my chest exploded into thousands of pieces. Nothing imaginary about that kiss. It was immediately frantic, raw, as real as it gets. This was finally happening. I was doing it. Half dreaming, half waking, I opened my mouth a little wider and quivered when Tommy’s tongue touched mine. Tommy shifted to embrace me, and, with a thump, the tablet fell out of his hands. The thrall I was under released me, and I broke away from Tommy.
We were still physically close, both breathing heavily. The tablet was lying flat on the ground between us. I released Tommy from my grip, and he let go of me too. We said nothing following the kiss, and as more time passed, nothing we could say seemed adequate anyway. So instead of talking, speculating, apologizing, or backpedaling, we gave in to our sudden fatigue and settled on the ground, curling up next to each other, forgetting all about keeping watch and being vigilant. We fell asleep holding on to each other.
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