I was getting away with it. The tablet did as it pleased, and for now it was pleased to remain in my keep.
I picked up my bag, muttered my thanks to no one specifically and proceeded to my gate, not daring to stick around to see if Lori was going to replicate my success.
TO MANY STRANGE RETURNS
Our flight to Melbourne was fully booked, and because Dad and Dr. Palombo had secured our tickets at the last minute, none of us got to sit together. I was in an aisle seat in the middle of the plane, next to a stranger. My bag rested on my knees until a smiling hostess asked me politely but decisively to put it underneath the seat in front of me or in the overhead compartment. Hesitantly, I put it down in front, but I kept the bag’s strap wrapped around my ankle, a half-assed antitheft measure in case I drifted off.
Tommy sat in the row in front of me, and my dad was behind me. The rest of our group was spread out across the front section of the plane. I liked it this way—this accidental isolation. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, and I bet they all felt the same way anyway. Everyone seemed exhausted and uncomfortable in their own skin.
That morning I had eaten my breakfast with Lori and Minh in mournful silence, both of them red-eyed and hollow-cheeked, though Minh more so. I didn’t have to ask—I knew their sleep wasn’t a pleasant affair, same as mine. Minh had barely touched her breakfast, her already fragile frame appearing even thinner now.
Though not looking as brittle as Minh, Luke and Tommy hadn’t fared much better. Haunted didn’t begin to describe their eyes. At least Luke had taken a shower and changed his clothes. He was also back to his passive-aggressive staring mode, but it was more scattered now, as if not focused on anyone specific. He was one man versus the world, and the world was winning.
Tommy was quiet all the way to the airport, but I kept finding him close to me, in the car on the drive over, and later as we walked toward the departure gate. I wanted to reach out and touch him, to make sure he was real. I wondered though if Tommy, apparition or not, was more interested in the contents of my carry-on bag than in me, the girl who carried it.
On board, I mindlessly scanned through the entertainment options on my screen. I half expected to find the film Dad was watching yesterday. I didn’t know its name or anything about it, but that silent moment of a bedraggled man trapped in a strange sand room had burned itself into my mind. In my head, it was Rowen who was trapped in that dark room. It was Rowen who stared wistfully into the abyss that yawned at him from across the sands. And in that abyss there were us five—Lori, Minh, Luke, Tommy, and myself—and we were staring back.
I found my favorite London Grammar album among the entertainment choices on the flight and put my headphones on. I waited for the music to carry me away, but my anxieties were stronger. The lyrics of one of my favorite songs didn’t sit well with me anymore. “I’m gonna show you where it’s dumped” made me think of Rowen and his body deteriorating in the pit.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going to happen upon our return to Melbourne—coming to terms with Rowen’s death (gone too soon, so young, so full of promise), explaining it somehow to his grieving mother (how could any death really be “explained”?), helping organize some kind of memorial service. It. Sucked. All of it.
But what sucked more was that I felt like a garbage human for even being bothered by these things. Excuse me, Alif, did my untimely death inconvenience you? One thousand apologies! And then, of course, I felt like an even bigger garbage human for feeling grateful that I wasn’t the one who’d ended up in that pit of spikes. Being brought up by two atheists meant I was grounded in this life. At least, I tried to be. So, naturally, I was suspicious about the idea of any sort of afterlife. But … all of this, the tablet, my hallucinatory reality shifts post-oasis, and my friends’ physical deterioration, made me wonder what was out there and whether it was just waiting for an opportunity to get us. In the end though, I just wanted to close my eyes and listen to the music.
* * *
I drifted in and out after picking through the food on my tray. I mourned the loss of my appetite, but what could I do—keep forcing myself to eat? Every bite was bland and hurt my throat on the way in. I wondered if Minh was eating. She’d been so shaky on her legs that morning, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses that didn’t come off until the moment of boarding.
I drowsed and didn’t dream, or if I did, I had no memory of it. I woke up to someone shaking my seat, the plastic of it creaking in protest. The shaking grew more intense. The cabin was dark when I opened my eyes, the FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT sign on and glowing.
“We’re just passing through some turbulence, folks,” the captain’s soothing voice called from the speakers. “For your own safety, please remain in your seats.”
Automatically, I checked my seat belt and tightened it. I tried to relax. I had no fear of flying. Flying was safe. Turbulence was normal.
A particularly violent tremor made me dig my fingers into the armrests. A baby started wailing somewhere at the front of the plane, another nearby joining in to form a duet. I suddenly yearned to be close to someone I knew. Dad or Tommy or any of my friends—yes, even Lori or Luke, even though both of them had changed into near-strangers to me in the past twenty-four hours.
But then everything became dead quiet, so quiet I wondered if I’d imagined all the ferocious shaking. Scattered murmuring went through the cabin, passengers releasing their breath, laughing off their fears.
I started to drift off again. But before I could fall back into half sleep, two flight attendants rushed along the length of the aisle, headed for someone seated a few rows ahead of me. Minh and Luke were somewhere in that section.
I unbuckled my seat belt and stood up, trying to see what was going on.
“Is there a doctor on the flight?” one of the attendants asked the passengers, while another rushed away, disappearing into the next section of the plane, presumably to search for a doctor there. I looked behind me and met Dad’s concerned eyes. Technically he was a doctor, just not the life-saving kind.
“Minh, ohmygod, Minh!” The hysterical note in Lori’s voice carried all the way to where I was standing. My heart fell deep and deeper and kept on falling.
I left my seat and proceeded down the aisle. “Please return to you seat!” the flight attendant closest to me barked. I obeyed but not before catching a disturbing glimpse of my friend splayed on the floor in the aisle. Minh was having some kind of seizure. Her eyes were rolled back, and her lips were white-blue. I stared at her in confusion, my presence irrelevant, helpless. My eyes were glued to Minh’s face. I couldn’t look away.
Lost to the throes of her convulsions, Minh was coughing up sand. No. It was blood.
In the flickering light of the airplane cabin, everything shimmered in the wrong kind of way.
Not thinking, moving on instinct, I returned to my row, fell into my seat, and grabbed my bag off the floor. The passenger next to me, a middle-aged woman in a comfy tunic dress and a pink head scarf, appeared sound asleep, so there were no questions, no inquiring looks thrown my way.
I reached inside the bag and found the tablet piece, its cold surface pumping calm into my veins. Fingers tingling, lungs filled with apprehension, I placed both hands flat on the tablet, sandwiching it between my palms. I hoped, prayed—Oh, hear my atheist prayer of despair!—that Lori was doing the same, that she was asking her fragment of the tablet for Minh’s recovery, begging that whatever was happening could be fixed, prevented, reversed.
Minh didn’t believe in the tablet’s power, and I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t even describe what this power was or how it worked, but I did know that my parents were talking again and I was now miraculously accepted into a writing program despite my earlier rejection. Did the tablet work miracles? Grant wishes? If yes, then I wished for Minh’s health, for her life. I couldn’t imagine losing another one of my friends.
A query swirled in my mind. But is it your deepest wish? Was the tablet
questioning my desperate request to save Minh?
Yes, yes, please save my friend! I was thinking irrationally, a storm of emotions rather than concrete thoughts.
But what if your friend doesn’t want to be saved?
I rejected that—Nonsense!
What if saving her will have terrible consequences for all of you?
I didn’t care!
The plane started to shake again, turbulence kicking back in. The seat belt sign switched on again. When was this hellish flight going to end? A particularly bad shake caused the oxygen masks to fall from above. Someone screamed, and then passengers clambered all around me, reaching for the masks. The air in the cabin acquired a metallic taste of fear, and I could hear prayers in different languages, directed at different gods, but all begging for the same thing, unified by the act of staring death in the face.
I reached for the mask dangling in front of me, the skin of my hand rippling in my vision. With a delayed reaction, I realized I was light-headed—there was not enough oxygen. The flight was losing pressure.
I must’ve blacked out, and when I came to, everything was calm again. There were no oxygen masks flying around, no signs of panic among the passengers. The calm atmosphere was … too calm. With a start I realized I was seated in a window seat, with Lori to my left. When did I manage to change seats? I rubbed at my eyes. Through the window glass I could see a sky so clear and bright it hurt my retinas. Puffs of pearlesque clouds dotted the view. Sunshine everywhere. I closed the window’s shutter with unnecessary force.
Lori was asleep, her body leaning into her neighbor on the left. I blinked the rest of my sleep out of my eyes and took a closer look. Lori’s head rested on Rowen’s shoulder.
Rowen himself was awake and, as if feeling the heaviness of my gaze on him, he raised his eyes from the entertainment screen and returned my look. Was I asleep? Still in Dubai, lying flat on the couch and seeing things that weren’t there?
Without taking off his headphones, Rowen leaned forward to rummage through the pocket of the seat in front of him. His hand returned with a fistful of Al Nassma candies, which he offered to me. Automatically, I accepted. His hand was ice-cold to the touch, like the tablet when it was busy at work.
Days and nights that I had lost to the desert flashed through my mind. There was that moment I’d first laid eyes on the oasis, its massive outline claiming the horizon. There was the harshness of sleeping on the ground, and there was my unfortunate sleepwalking incident that led to my poisoning our only water source. None of that made sense, but all of it had happened. And also … the sinister temple cut deep into the rock. The tablet. Rowen’s body at the bottom of a pit, bloodied spikes coming out of his stomach and chest.
I knew what was real (all of the above) and what wasn’t (my dreams about the Queen of Giants). And yet … here was Rowen, cramped in the seat next to Lori. He looked exhausted and banged-up but very much alive.
I looked away from him and focused on the candies in my hand. I waited for them to melt away into the air, leaving only the ghost of a sensation on my skin. Yet they remained. Real. Mocking me.
Rowen was leaning forward once more, this time to readjust Lori’s bag, seated between her feet. I watched him pat the bag carefully, as if checking it was still there, verifying its existence—or rather the existence of its contents.
My body became slack, heavy and weightless at once. The plane was preparing to land. Was Minh okay? Or at least no longer suffering? A voice inside me said, Just give in. Stop fighting it. Take what the oasis gives you and make the best of it.
* * *
After landing in Melbourne, we were told to stay in our seats, even after we’d docked at the gate. When a group of medics entered the cabin, carrying a stretcher, my heart started to hammer in my chest. Lori was awake now but barely paying me any attention, all her energy aimed at Rowen.
The rest of the world drained to near black and white as I watched the medics carry Minh away. Dr. Palombo, his eyes wrinkle-rimmed, followed the solemn procession off the plane. I didn’t let my gaze leave the stretcher until it was carefully maneuvered outside. Minh was motionless on there the entire time, but her chest was moving. She was alive, but the tablet didn’t make her better. Instead, it brought Rowen back.
Lori picked up her bag off the floor and placed the bag’s strap across her chest, ready to disembark. When our eyes met, she looked away guiltily. Or maybe it was just my imagination.
“All right,” my dad said when the FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT sign switched off. “Let’s all keep together. Don’t talk to anyone. And don’t let anyone slow you down. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner we can find out what happened to Minh and which hospital they’ve taken her to.”
In silent determination, our diminished group gathered in the arrivals area. “Did you actually see what happened to Minh?” I asked Tommy, but he just shook his head. “Something went down on that plane,” I continued. “I mean, aside from Minh’s … seizures. In all the chaos, I could swear I changed seats somehow, but I don’t remember doing that. And also, you know…” I didn’t want to say it, as if articulating our new reality was going to solidify it.
Tommy studied me, his gaze assessing me. “That turbulence was the worst I’ve ever experienced,” he finally said. “When the masks fell down, I was kind of saying goodbye to it all in my head.”
I reached out and squeezed his shoulder to reassure him, though he wasn’t getting what I really meant. Leaning into Tommy’s personal space, I murmured into his ear, “Rowen is here.” I carefully shifted my view to Rowen himself. He was in line to use one of the self-service immigration kiosks. Lori lingered nearby. I watched her reach out and hug him from behind, saying something into his ear. She wasn’t laughing exactly, but she exuded joy and playfulness. Was I the only one who saw Minh carried away on a stretcher? The only one who found Rowen’s presence among us impossible? The only thing that was keeping me together right now was the very real possibility that I was seeing things. Could it be me who was carried away from the plane on a stretcher?
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Tommy asked.
His response made it obvious I was on my own here. Still, I wanted to press him, to push him to recall our experiences in the temple, but we were now being ushered past the self-service kiosks and my questioning had to wait.
As we were about to exit the Tullamarine airport, I noticed movement in the crowd gathered to greet the arrivals. People I didn’t know were running toward us, cameras at the ready, flashes blinding me from afar.
“Quick, don’t slow down,” Dad said. “Let’s go.”
In a flurry, we exited the airport, though not before I caught calls of “Dubai Six” and “desert survivors” coming from the mob of reporters. Dubai Six. Six of us. Rowen was back, and the rest of the world seemed to have no memory he’d ever been gone.
THE RIFT
A rift formed in our group the moment we woke up in the desert after the storm. Whatever glue that held us together started to melt away, evaporating under the blinding sun. It made sense: We were still ourselves but also new versions of ourselves in crisis. We were relearning the basics about who we were—near-perfect strangers drawn together by terrible circumstances.
Now, we were in the airport’s multilevel parking garage, where cars filled with anxious parents were waiting to take us all home. Dad told me my mother’s flight was landing in a few hours, and she was going to make her own way to our apartment. It was getting late, and I struggled to stay upright and functioning.
The moment Rowen disappeared into his mom’s car, I felt like some dark weight was lifted off my back. With him out of the picture, even temporarily, I could pretend like he didn’t just come back from the dead. As if my brain just glitched and made it all up.
Lori didn’t seem to share in my relief. Edgy, her hands were constantly moving, constantly digging in her bag. It was taking a lot of my diminished focus not to do the same. The tablet’s presence was tugging a
t the strings of my very being. It was in constant turmoil, pulsing, chilling my side through the material of my bag.
Lori turned to me to say goodbye, but when she started to approach for a parting hug, she halted, bounced on her heels a little, and pulled back. Responding to her closeness, my tablet piece pulsed violently, making my skin crawl. Lori’s eyes widened with understanding. Did the pieces want to be reunited?
I stepped away from Lori and gave her a nod from a safe distance. She mimicked me, and then her parents were ushering her away from our thinning group. With her gone, I felt an ache, a kind of emptiness in my chest cavity. Like hunger, only not for food, not for human contact.
“Bye, I guess?” Luke’s words jolted me out of my stupor. His dad was waiting for him in a car.
“Bye. Drive safely,” I replied, my tongue struggling to move in my parched mouth. This thirst came and went, leaving me constantly seeking out fluids but never feeling completely satisfied.
As Luke lingered, I caught an impatient look from Tommy. He was waiting for me by my father’s car. Dad was already inside, hands on the wheel. I wondered where Tommy lived and why nobody was here to pick him up. Perhaps my dad indeed was the closest thing Tommy had to a family. Did Tommy want from the tablet the return of his foster mom Celeste? If so, it didn’t work. Perhaps the tablet’s power had limits.
Or maybe it granted only specific wishes, driven by an agenda we could only guess at and probably never get right. The lonely spark. A meteor that wasn’t a meteor. What are you? I asked in my head, not really expecting a response.
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