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 at 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.
I’m your deepest wish, the answer came.
But I couldn’t tell whether it was my own mind giving the response or something external. Was the oasis real? I asked, deciding there was nothing to lose.
The oasis is me.
And that was that.
In the car with Dad and Tommy, radio tuned to some news station, I drifted off in the back seat. I woke up to Tommy saying my name. He was about to get off in what looked like Hawthorn, though it was hard to say; a lot of older parts of Melbourne sported the same kinds of terraced buildings and old pubs.
Tommy passed me a piece of paper as he got out of the car. “Here’s my number.” I watched him run up the stairs of an old apartment building.
I switched seats, taking the one next to Dad as we continued home. More or less awake now, I listened to the newscaster droning on.… Dubai Six … Originally vanished from an active excavation site in Tell Abrar four days ago. Six Australians have now been recovered, alive and well. The search effort was accomplished in collaboration …
At this reaffirmation of my new reality, all the mismatched moments in my head were compressed into a multidimensional one: the visual of Rowen’s body at the bottom of the pit merging with a more recent one—of Rowen smiling my way, Lori’s head on his shoulder. Rowen dead. Rowen alive. At once. Maybe it was like Schrödinger’s cat, its state of being subject to it being observed. But why was I the observer? And were Rowen’s two states one and the same, interchangeable? What did it mean for my own status as a survivor?
“Your mother would’ve eaten me alive if something bad happened to you,” Dad was saying. He’s been trying to have a conversation with me, I realized with some delay, but all I could manage was a smile and a nod.
By the time we made it home, night was crawling in. After the divorce, my parents sold our family home and Dad downsized into a smaller but comfier apartment, not quite in the suburbs but in that liminal space between the city and its outer edges. We still enjoyed the relative quiet and all the trees and saw an occasional possum at night, its eyes burning white from a tree branch or an open dumpster. I loved living here, even though it was time for me to start looking for a place of my own soon, moving in with friends perhaps. I had been talking with Minh and Lori about getting a rental together, but all of that seemed far away now.
Since we had only canned food in the house and were in desperate need of a grocery run, Dad ordered delivery for dinner. But even with a mushroom risotto and a Greek salad, my favorite food combination in the whole world, it was hard to muster an appetite. Still, I stubbornly ate it, washing it down with water, as Minh’s emaciated body and bluish lips flashed through my mind. What was happening to her? I had to see her, tomorrow if they’d let me.
Dad was going to stay up to wait for Mom’s arrival. I was anxious about seeing her but not exactly excited. Having Mom here meant my time and energy had to be redirected at her—she was going to expect it. But the mere thought of it made me tired. I told Dad I was too exhausted to wait up for her and headed for bed, trying not to cower under the weight of his concerned gaze.
I threw my bag, the tablet piece still in it, under my bed and took off my travel clothes. After changing into my pj’s and brushing my teeth, I braved a long look in the bathroom mirror.
A stranger glared back. Some reversed Wonderland version of me, older, eyes like a ghost’s. But I was alive. The image in the mirror wavered, like I was staring into water. The rustling of the palms filled my head with longing.
When I lay down to sleep, nothing felt right. My bed was too soft, too comfy. Even after my last night in a Dubai hotel, my back still wasn’t used to the many comforts I used to take for granted. Maybe I was even nostalgic about the feel of bumpy ground against my back. My mind kept wandering off, listening for the sounds of Mom’s imminent arrival and then sliding to the tablet’s presence under my bed. I didn’t know if it was the best idea to keep the tablet so close, but putting it farther away felt more wrong. As if in response to my thoughts, a subtle buzzing came from underneath the bed, my back tingling in tune with it.
I sat up. I wanted to grab the tablet but feared it’d overpower me and flood my head with its invasive visions. But I needed it, I realized. In hopes of distracting myself, I grabbed my phone and entered Tommy’s number.
I realized none of my friends had called or messaged me, but I guess I hadn’t contacted anyone either.
Tommy picked up on the first ring. “How are you holding up?” I asked.
“Don’t think I can sleep tonight,” came the response, some kind of white noise enveloping his words. “Not after the nightmares I’ve been having.”
I stiffened. “What kind of nightmares?” I lay down on the bed and waited for the room to start dancing in my vision, for the golden-specked mist to drift in. None of it came. Maybe the tablet, broken in two and torn out of its lair in the desert, was losing its power after all, its grip on me loosening.
“It’s about those caves. Mostly,” Tommy said. I waited for more, while that background white noise grew stronger, then subsided, then returned once more, flicking in and out of my range of hearing. The tablet under my bed was pulsing again. Or perhaps it never stopped doing that. Its heartbeat. Only I could hear it.
Tommy went on. “In my dreams, I keep running through those caves. I’m being chased, but I’m also pursuing someone. A predator and prey at once. It always ends the same way, the dream. I halt, freezing right on the edge of that pit. I stare down at the spikes, balancing on my heels. I’m about to fall in. I can see the bones down there, on the bottom. And then it hits me—I’ve done that. I’ve killed someone. I’m a murderer.”
Tommy’s words caused sweat to coat my hands, my back, my forehead. I was parched again too, but I didn’t want to leave my room to get water. I could tell my mother was here, in the house; whispers suggested a conversation going on outside my room. I wasn’t ready to face her, to deal with the shock in her eyes at seeing the new me, ravaged by the desert.
“I have strange dreams too,” I said to Tommy. I didn’t call those dreams “nightmares,” because they weren’t exactly that—more like distorted reality. “Not about the pit though. But, Tommy … those weren’t bones in that pit,” I said, immediately wondering if I was making a mistake. My memories of seeing Rowen at the bottom of the pit were become fuzzier and fuzzier. Still, before I completely forgot, I had to find out what Tommy remembered.
“If they weren’t bones,” Tommy said, confused, “then what were they?”
I lowered my voice, afraid my parents would overhear me. “I might be remembering it wrong, but I could swear it was Rowen in there. Killed by that pit.” I stopped. I should’ve had this conversation with Tommy in person so I could see his face, his reactions. But it was too late now.
“Rowen?” Tommy repeated the name of my friend like it was a word from a foreign language. “No, no … That makes no sense … But…”
The rest of Tommy’s words were swallowed up by that white noise I kept hearing. It spiked in intensity, giving off a pulse that was hurtful to my ears, even to my eyes. The phone in my hand started vibrating. I let it go, pushing it away from me. I had to touch the tablet now. It’d make everything better. It’d make things right.
I slipped off the bed, to the floor. Holding my breath, I reached for my bag. Hands shaking, I almost tore my bag to pieces. When my fingers touched the tablet’s surface, I felt a sense of overwhelming relief. Of rightness. But it didn’t last.
The tablet in my hands showed me images, memories of the oasis and the temple—memories I hadn’t seen before. They weren’t my memories.
There was Noam Delamer, his skin sunburned, eyes red with despair. And there was Alain Pinon, the other victim of the desert, the one who didn’t make it out. Noam and Alain were trapped inside the temple, frantically searching for a way out. They were rushing down the twisting corridor, perhaps chasing someone—or something—and also being chased.
Alain came to a halt at the edge of the killing pit, balancing on the balls of his feet. Relief washed over his face—this was a close call! But something rammed into his back, and then Alain was losing his balance and falling over and into the pit. His death was instantaneous. I felt it, the suddenness. Burning agony in my chest and then nothing.
I was now inhabiting Noam. He was standing on the edge of the pit, looking down at the impaled body within. Noam’s right hand was shaking.
“Why are you showing me this?” I whimpered.
I tried dropping the tablet, but it seemed glued to my hands. It made me live through the same sequence of events over and over, like it was playing charades and couldn’t come up with an alternative way of explaining things when its audience drew a blank.
Instead of resisting the flow of memories, I tried focusing on the images flashing before my eyes, hoping that if I decrypted the tablet’s message, it’d release me. But my time to come up with an answer was running out. A cold sensation was spreading from my fingers upward, numbing my hands, slowing down my heart rate.
I zeroed in on Alain’s face, frozen at the exact moment the man knew he was going to die. What did I see? Surprise, confusion.
I dug deep into Noam’s perception of events. I sensed some remorse from him, but mostly relief that he wasn’t the one to die. Though what ran in the background of this unfolding drama was the overall feeling of dissatisfaction. The Queen of Giants, the lonely spark, wasn’t quite sated after she had pushed Noam to sacrifice Alain. This murder was too cold, too clean-cut. The two men didn’t really know each other before the oasis, so whatever relationship they’d developed while stranded in the desert together wasn’t enough nourishment for the hungry little spark.
The spark wanted more. Much more. Its pulsing desire overwhelmed me, its want becoming my want. But there was also something else, something more immediate. My tablet piece wanted its other half. It wanted to be whole again. Or as whole as its state of existence allowed. The realization was a monstrous shiver shaking my whole body. Once the tablet was sure I got its message, it released me.