SUMMER 1977
The room was a bare cinder-block box. There were horizontal openings in three of the walls and a door in the other. It was late afternoon, so the room was mostly dark, shadowy in the corners, the openings glowing weakly in the spillover light. Somehow, this place made sense. Izzy understood its brutal simplicity, like a body pared to essentials, waiting for something more to arrive.
The man with the lizard’s skin was behind them in the doorway. That was a terrible way to think of anyone, she knew how it felt to be judged, but that’s what he looked like, a craggy creature of the desert. Danny was there, sitting on a bench in the middle of the room. A young couple sat in a far corner, a guy with glasses and a thick blond beard and a girl with an open satchel between her legs. From the satchel she lifted a camera lens toward the light and peered through the glass, dissatisfied. Izzy felt like she and Martha were disturbing a private moment, but then Danny smiled and motioned for them to come farther in.
The young man with the glasses offered them water from a plastic jug. Izzy drank greedily, her body wobbly with thirst, her stomach growling with hunger. They hadn’t eaten since that morning. The young man said his name was Ernst. The woman didn’t offer her name. Danny stood by the man at the door and they spoke quietly.
The woman in the corner worked on a small movie camera. She seemed frustrated by the machine or her inability to make it do what she wanted. Finally, something snapped into place and she let out a loud sigh of relief.
Izzy wanted to ask her about the camera, how it worked. She wanted to ask if she could look through its viewfinder, to see if what she saw there was the same as what she saw in the frames she made with her hands. But the woman seemed closed off and annoyed, so instead Izzy moved to an opening in the wall and lifted her hand to feel that outside breath on her skin.
She turned from the window to see the lizard man watching her. She was shaken by the force of his gaze. Everyone else in the room fell away, sliding south off the map.
She stepped toward him and suddenly the air in front of her tore, a rip opened in the space. Izzy flinched from the brightness and heat, the burning white disc that unfolded from the rupture, growing, reddening, filling the center of the room.
Izzy gasped, staggering back, but then the light was gone. The room returned, stuffy and dim. They were all watching her, Ernst and the woman with the camera, Danny on the bench. Martha crossed the room, concerned. The man in the doorway hadn’t moved. He studied Izzy with even more interest, if that was possible. Izzy shook Martha off and leaned back against the wall, her hips and legs weak, her stomach somersaulting.
After a moment, the man in the doorway asked, “What did you see?”
She wanted to say that she had seen the feeling she had chased for so long, that burning light, but nearer now, almost close enough to touch.
Instead she said, “Nothing. I’m just tired from the walk.”
The sun dropped away, leaving the room glowing gray in the weak afterlight. The outside world disappeared. They floated in the abyss. She slid down the wall and sat on the floor. Martha joined her, taking Izzy’s hand. “You’re freezing,” she said, and Izzy realized that she was shaking, her teeth were chattering. She imagined the room wheeling through space, an infinite field of stars surrounding them. She could see those stars through the roof, could even see them through the man’s dark form standing in the open doorway. His voice seemed to come from out there, beyond his body. Izzy remembered sitting in the planetarium at the Griffith Observatory, a sixth-grade field trip, holding Chloe’s hand in the dark, watching the pinpoint stars revolve in the vastness above, stories of old gods and the constellations they placed in the heavens, a narrator’s voice that came from unseen speakers: This is the secret history of the world.
“My name is Tanner,” the man said. His voice sounded close but hidden, as if coming from those same unseen speakers.
“And I believe,” he said, “that we’re all here for a reason that is making itself clear.”
Tanner spoke through the night. He told of his childhood, growing up monstrous and apart. He talked about sadness and sex and violence and prison with an honesty that Izzy found incredible, laying himself open without shame.
Everyone listened in silence. After a while Tanner was silent, too, and Izzy felt afraid, abandoned. Without his voice there was only the night. She reached for Martha in the dark but found nothing. She was floating away, through nothing. She was about to call out when his voice returned, pulling her back.
“What did you see?” Tanner asked again, and this time Izzy spoke the truth, because he had shown her how such honesty was possible.
“A sun,” she said, her voice a bright white slash cutting through the darkness. “Another sun coming.”
He spoke about this world and another, a phase between the two. How he had seen glimpses throughout his life but had never been able to move through. This was the place, though. He knew it the first moment he saw the room. “Did you know it, too?” he asked, and Izzy wasn’t sure if he was speaking to her. Then a voice from the darkness said, “Yes.” Martha’s voice. Then Danny answered, his accent rolling the word like a smooth stone.
“You recognized it, didn’t you?” Tanner asked. He was speaking to Izzy now. She could almost see his pebbled face in the dark, his eyes on hers.
“Yes,” she said.
“What you saw,” Tanner said, “is the sun that will burn this world clean.”
“And then what?” Martha’s voice.
“And then,” Tanner said, “we’ll be free.”
The first milky light of morning. A bird called from far off, a single repeated, questioning cry. Looking up through the openings in the walls, Izzy saw the high branches of a few trees, a small ring of circling gnats. The world had reappeared. Everything that happened—the new sun, Tanner speaking through the night—faded in the light. Izzy wanted to curl up, shutting everything out.
Then Martha unspooled beside her, wrapping her arms around Izzy, pulling her close, the cool tips of their noses touching.
“No, no,” Martha whispered. “You’re here. It really happened.”
Izzy looked into Martha’s eyes, the warmth there, the belief.
Martha kissed her forehead, her cheek.
“You saw it,” Martha said, her lips wet with Izzy’s tears. “You can take us through.”
In a blink, the heat returned. Izzy was covered in sweat, couldn’t drink enough water. She looked around the room at the plastic jugs and wondered what would happen once they were empty.
Ernst and his girlfriend huddled in the corner. He was upset, raising his voice. He wanted to leave. His girlfriend tried to calm him in indecipherable whispers. The woman had an accent; Izzy hadn’t noticed before.
After a long while it seemed like the woman won the argument. She returned to her camera, but with a renewed sense of purpose, attaching a film magazine like a soldier in a movie assembling his rifle. She started shooting from the corner. The whirring film was the only sound in the room. Izzy turned away, self-conscious.
The afternoon burned on. The sun hung at the low end of its arc, staining the room bronze and gold. Danny sat on the bench, eating from a jar of apple sauce. He held the jar out to Izzy, offering. She shook her head, she wouldn’t allow herself to give in to hunger, not here. She stood to get some air at the window and her legs went woozy, weaker than she thought. Then the room dimmed and dropped away and the air in front of her ripped open, flaring brightest white.
Izzy fell to her knees.
It was immense, gorgeous, terrible. Swelling white then yellow then bloodred. The heat was almost unbearable. Her skin felt like it would burn from her skull. She covered her face, reflexively, then lowered her hands. There was fear, but also longing. Let the longing have more power. Bring it through. This was Tanner’s voice, from beside her.
“Can you see it?”
“No,” he said. “You’re the only one.”
She was soaked with sweat. She reached out, an embrace, knowing if she could touch the sun it would pass through, but then the air wavered and the room snapped back into place.
Izzy fell forward on her hands, the sound of her breath hard in her ears. Martha rushed over, her arm around Izzy’s shoulder. “You’re burning up,” she said. Danny brought a jug of water. Ernst watched from the corner, stunned. Even his girlfriend lowered her camera. Martha helped Izzy to her feet, pressed her lips to Izzy’s hands, the bruises forming there from the concrete floor.
Izzy looked up to Tanner, standing where the sun had been, his eyes closed, his face clenched as if he, too, felt its loss.