“Here,” Jamal said. “You thread it this way.”
Marko bent over his heavy black-and-silver Harley, unloading from the leather saddlebags: trail mix and MREs, a much, much bigger tent kit, a small vinyl case that he unzipped to reveal a sleek little video palm-corder.
“Whoa,” said Karyn. “Cool camera! Where’d you get that?”
“Ultimo.” For a moment, Marko caught her in the camera’s steely eye. Julie watched Karyn, playing up, shifting the rounded weights of her body, tossing her honey-streaked hair back and exposing the white line of her throat.
“Okay, lemme see,” Karyn said, reaching for the camera. Marko held it away from her, making her reach across his body, then let her have it.
“Jeez,” Karyn said. “High rez, huh?” Her fingernail jabbed at the tiny buttons. “Look how you can zoom in on that. Look, Julie, I can see all down in my pores.”
Gross Julie thought, but she was helping Jamal with the tent, capturing the poles at the corners so he could slip the floor pins into them. The tent took shape as its own small world, a free-standing hemisphere, and for some reason Julie pictured the other half that would make it whole, existing somehow like a reflection beneath the sand.
Jamal stood back, resting his knuckles on his narrow hips, and in the next moment a gust of wind caught the tent and whirled it end over end across the sand toward the horizon. Jamal stood frozen for a beat before he took off after it, and Julie started after him, but the wind was faster than both of them; they would never have caught the tent if it hadn’t died down.
Jamal seized the poles where they crossed at the top, then doubled over, winded by the two-hundred-yard dash. Julie trotted up, gasping herself, and laid one hand on the curve of a tent pole. Back by the boulder, under the cliff, the others were capering and slapping their knees, their faces twisting with inaudible laughter.
“Shit,” Jamal said, running a finger along a four-inch tear in the netting of one of the side windows.
“No biggie,” Julie said. “There’s no bugs out here anyway. Too dry.”
Jamal looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded, as if they’d made a deal. Then he picked up the tent like a briefcase and started back toward the cliff.
“Need help?” said Julie.
Jamal shrugged. “It doesn’t weigh anything.” But then the wind gusted up again, and Julie had to catch the other side of the tent to steady it.
“Stakes won’t hold in this loose sand,” Sonny said, when they had come back.
“Tell me about it,” said Jamal. “We’ll have to get rocks and weight it down.”
“What, inside?” Julie said.
“Of course, inside,” Jamal said. “Hold this a minute.”
Jamal’s tent would barely hold two people, and that was without any rocks inside it. There were only two tents. Julie had not thought about how that part would work out, and she decided not to think about it now, holding the tent in place while Jamal looked for rocks.
6
She could feel a cool, metallic object in her hand; it must be her phone. If she could turn it on, there would be light.
The screen shed a pale luminescence toward her, a pale glowing rectangle, like light caught in a mirror. It contained no image and no word. At first it seemed that she looked down into it, holding it cupped in the palm of her hand, but in the dark of the cave there seemed to be no gravity, and this cup of light might just as well have been beside her, or above, impossibly distant, like that frayed wafer of daylight moon, faint in the washed colors of the evening sky.
7
“Rice-burner.” Sonny smirked, turned his head sideways to spit Skoal Bandit juice in the sand.
Jamal straightened from the tent he was assembling, rested his light knuckles on the black waistband of his jeans. “You dissing my machine, yo?”
“No, man,” Sonny said. “I wouldn’t do that.” He turned to offer Julie the garnet-colored bottle. “Here you go, girl. Cut the dust.”
Jamal stooped over the parts of his tent. Karyn was mugging for Marko’s camera, striking a series of runway poses—chin up, wrist cocked to the ear, giggling into it, ooh la la. A slight heaviness in her movement made Julie wonder if Karyn might have had a shot or so before they started. Not that she’d mind a buzz herself, but then she wasn’t a complete idiot: dehydration was an issue out here, and Julie had one liter of water for herself. She didn’t quite know what the others had brought.
Marko ducked and weaved like a paparazzo, pursuing Karen with the camera’s metallic eye, as Julie took a small sip from the red glowing bottle. There was no bite of vodka or gin. Just vitamin water, something like that—but a sicklier sweet than usual. She took a larger swallow and handed the bottle back to Sonny. Karyn was play-fighting Marko for the camera, gimme gimme lemme see, and Marko held it high over her head, making her stretch for it. Her T-shirt hem rode high and the gold of her navel-stud winked in the sun.
“Damn, don’t break it,” Marko said. He let her have the camera. Karyn gathered it toward her cleavage, wiping her dirty-blond hair from her face as she peered into the camera’s bright screen. Her chipped black fingernails clicked on the camera’s tiny buttons. “Look it, Julie,” Karyn said. “You can practically zoom right down your own throat.”
“Gross,” Julie said, absently; she was admiring the tent, which Jamal had just finished assembling: a silver-gray hemisphere sealed into the sand. Something in the shape of it appealed to her. Something about the way her image of it trembled around the edges. Sonny cracked a beer and gave it to her—where had he found that? The foam was acrid in her mouth, connecting with a bitter aftertaste from the vitamin water she’d had a few minutes before. She took a larger gulp to wash it out.
Two slightly sweating, soft vinyl coolers had appeared beside the pair of Harleys. Sonny pulled out two more beers and dragged the coolers into the shade.
“Don’t be dumping that ice,” Marko said.
“Huh,” said Sonny, “I ain’t drinking it, not out of there.”
“We can cook with it,” Marko said. “We got a pack of freeze-dried stuff.”
“Are we Boy Scouts or what?” Sonny said, and Karyn laughed, elbowed him, let her blond head roll back against the warm stone of the boulder.
Jamal fired up his little stone pipe and sent it round among the others. Julie took the weakest possible hit, then left the circle before the bowl could come to her again. She didn’t want to get too high too early. Maybe at night, when the stars came out, when sleep would be soon to come. The business of the tents would all be sorted out by then, but she didn’t want to think about it now. There was a voice in her head that said be careful, and she especially didn’t want voices to start splitting off and talking to her from somewhere else.
The shadow cast by the cliff wall had grown to about six feet long, and Julie walked into it, feeling perhaps she might disappear. She sat down cross-legged in a niche of the vertically channeled stone. From here the orb of the tent seemed like an object of contemplation, like some meteorite that had embedded itself in the desert floor, and she imagined the other half of the sphere it described, twinning with it beneath the sand. There was a kind of aura around it. The stone behind her was still radiating warmth, like the walls of an oven, from the sun that had been shining on it for most of the day.
Trippy weed Jamal had—she reminded herself to go slow with that, lifting her arms and setting her palms together in a mudra above her head. As her palms touched she felt a spreading warmth below her navel, much stronger than