WHEN THE car pulls into the parking lot, Bethany heaves her duffel bag onto one shoulder. “They’re here!” she calls to her mother. The weight of the bag strains the straps although she has packed only the essentials listed on the festival website—sunblock, baby wipes, rain poncho—and there is nothing she can safely take out.
“Have a good time, honey,” her mother says, catching her in a tight embrace. Her voice carries the same note of distraction that’s been there for weeks. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too, Mom,” Bethany says into her mother’s hair, feeling a hard nut wobble in her stomach.
They come out of the condominium, and Rebekah and Amos step from the car to greet them. Rebekah grins and chats easily with Bethany’s mother about her California college, the beauty of the campus, the diversity of the student body.
As Bethany squirms into the backseat, her mother gives her another dreamy kiss, lingering for a moment, then letting go. Bethany feels the nut topple and slide in her stomach as the car pulls away. Once they are on the road, Rebekah cranks the music and opens the window.
As far as her mother knows, Bethany will be accompanying Rebekah’s family to a revolutionary reenactment this weekend. It is, ultimately, a harmless lie. There are, of course, many worse things she could be doing than going to a music festival. Later, when she is older and her maturity proven, she will confess the truth, and her mother will understand that there was nothing wrong in it, that she’d underestimated her daughter all along.
But now is not the time for rebellion. Since renting the condo, her mother has been making an effort: asking about her feelings, sitting with her before bed. Sometimes it seems that this outreach is more for her mother’s benefit than her own—that she needs to prove to herself that she is a responsible, available parent. The first year had been bright and optimistic. It was as if, by taking a break from her father, Bethany’s mother had shed a winter skin. That was what she’d called it: taking a break. But as the second year advanced, the sparkle was replaced by a kind of preoccupied quiet. Now, her mother has stopped going out. Her hands have been jittery, and she has been dropping things.
They drive north in the heat, leaving behind Old Cranbury’s dense greenery. Within an hour they are in a different country. Wider spaces, smaller houses, indications of farming. A tractor supply store, an NRA bumper sticker. Between the howling open windows and the thumping stereo, the noise in the car is engulfing. The music goes around in a throbbing, screeching loop.
“I’m so excited that you’re here,” Rebekah shouts into the rearview mirror. “You just have to be at Aether to understand it. Then you’ll never want to miss it again.”
Amos pulls down the sun visor on his side. A little mirror reflects the top half of his face. Since Bethany last saw him, his hair has grown past his eyes in a flat black flap, and he keeps moving it to the side with his fingers. Bethany notices for the first time how thin and careful these fingers are. Most of his teenage acne is gone, and the forehead in the mirror is smooth and pale.
“I just hope it hasn’t jumped the shark,” Rebekah continues. “Last year there were a lot of posers, you know? Guys just looking to drink beer and hook up. But that’s so not the scene, you know?”
Bethany does not know, but nods her head.
From the back, Rebekah’s hair looks different, thicker and darker. “Did you do something to your hair?” Bethany asks.
“I haven’t been washing it. Look,” she says, and shows Bethany the matted beginnings of a dreadlock.
Rebekah has returned from her sophomore year with a wise, fugitive glint in her eye. As many questions as Bethany has asked and as factually as Rebekah has answered them, her friend’s new universe remains shut to her. Bethany suspects that Rebekah is enjoying this bit of mystery, taking it as license to treat Bethany like a sweet, dim younger sister.
The community college was supposed to be a stopgap before Bethany’s launch as an actress. It was her choice to forgo the prototypical American college experience—that halfway house to autonomy—in exchange for intensive auditions. But the auditions have been as fruitless as they are relentless. It has proven impossible to stand out among the pert, practiced girls who have done this since toddlerhood, and it has already begun to seem that her role as Holly Golightly in the high school play will be the pinnacle of her career. All the talk of her precocious talent—a junior snaring a leading role—now seems miserably unfounded. She was cast as Liesl Von Trapp in The Sound of Music her senior year, and nothing since. Fear of failure has begun to puddle cold in her chest. She is a community college student now, surrounded by hairsprayed girls and dull boys earning vocational degrees.
Rebekah had auditioned for Holly, too, but ended up in the chorus. While some of the seniors resented Bethany for stealing a part they considered theirs, Rebekah hadn’t cared. Instead, she’d been impressed with Bethany’s mettle. They went to the diner after rehearsals and Rebekah elaborated in hushed tones about her new, older boyfriend. She’d found him outside the Coffee Bean, on break in his apron. He’d been sitting cross-legged on the pavement smoking an Indian beedi cigarette and reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Rebekah was breathless when she talked about him, about the high-minded discussions they had, about his global awareness, his zest for experience. He was, she whispered, twenty-five years old.
As it turned out, this zest for experience had included a complete survey of opioid and psychotropic drugs. Rebekah swore him off when she left for college, then took him back when he was hospitalized for an overdose. “He said he’s a better person when he’s with me, even if it’s just summers and vacations,” she said with a sigh on the phone, “which I think is true. And he’s gotten more spiritual. He’s been working with this guy in town. He’s kind of his protégé.”
As they approach the festival grounds, the traffic slows, and they find that they have joined a parade of allied vehicles with overlapping car stereos. Passengers smile and wave at one another. Rebekah thrusts her arm out the open window and gestures universally, triggering a series of whoops and hollers. She bounces in the driver’s seat.
“I can already feel the vibe. Everyone’s so happy to be here, that’s the thing. A lot of these people have been waiting all year for this. It’s like the highlight of their year.”
They park in a vast field and emerge into battering heat. Serpentining on foot through the grid of cars, they are assaulted by the slap of sun on metal. It is predicted to be in the nineties all weekend. Bethany squirts sunblock onto her arms while walking. Her hair is already damp on her neck, but she doesn’t want to tie it up without a mirror. This, she recognizes with a dip of embarrassment, is because of Amos. He walks in front of her, taller than she remembers, slimmer in his jeans. It’s as if, while he was away, some inner crank has lengthened his body and rotated its cells so that the boy she looks at now has no relation to the boy she has known, indifferently, since kindergarten.
“Aren’t you hot?” she calls. “I mean, in those jeans.”
Amos looks back and smiles. “Nah, I’m okay. There’s no other option for guys, anyway. What am I supposed to wear, shorts?”
“I love my pants,” Rebekah comments. “They’re so cool on hot days.” The pants are vastly wide, composed of patchwork cotton squares. She lifts the fabric to her knees. “I made them myself, you know. There’s a girl in my dorm who’s teaching me to sew on her machine.”
At the gate, they wait for their turn to give over their weekend passes, a sacrificial two hundred dollars each. The passes are emblazoned with the Aether logo—an alchemical symbol like a seated stick figure with bent knees—and its slogan, “We breathe immortal air.” They have their bags searched. There are so many people here already, just waiting to get in, that Bethany feels woozy at the notion of what small nation must be waiting inside.
“I can’t wait for you to meet Rufus,” Rebekah says, jiggling Bethany’s shoulder. “I can’t believe you guys haven’t met before.”
This exuberance strikes Bethany as disingenuous, as if insurmountable logistics had constantly intervened in the past. In fact, it seems that Rebekah has been keeping Rufus squirreled away, considering Bethany unfit to meet him. She is gratified, if begrudgingly, that she seems to have passed some unspoken test now.
As they enter the festival grounds, Bethany surveys its citizens: colorful figures scattered to the horizon. They seem to have been here forever, moving to and fro on blissful errands. Rebekah lifts her yellow sunglasses to smile at Bethany and does a kind of skipping dance. Bethany returns the smile through a roll of panic. It is scandalous to think her mother had swallowed her weak fiction about the revolutionary reenactment. Had she really believed so blindly, or was she privately crestfallen by her daughter’s daring deceit?
Bethany allows this tremor to rumble and fade, and returns her attention to the surrounding sensory blitz. There is a mechanical thrum that seems to come from the ground itself. She usually gravitates toward radio-friendly songs with beginnings, middles, and ends, sticky melodies and words she can belt out. She likes rising choruses and drums that palpitate before big anthemic melodies. She does not think these types of songs will be performed here. In fact, the lineup seems to include only a handful of bands playing actual instruments. The rest of the artists are electronic—DJs with names like Slap Elf, Mork, Yggdrasil.
Amos does not skip like his sister, but walks faster as they go over the trodden fields toward the campground. He is the musician in the family, with wide and discerning tastes that easily encompass this and every imaginable festival. In high school he’d played whatever necessary instrument—guitar, bass, keyboard—in at least three different bands.
They pause as they come into the campground, a hobo village of nylon tents. Rebekah stops and shields her eyes with a hand.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Amos asks.
“Rufus said he’s in the northeast quadrant. As if that’s helpful at all. But maybe we’ll be able to see his rage stick.”
“What’s a rage stick?” Bethany asks.
“You don’t want to know,” Amos says.
“It’s like a totem thing, to help people find their friends at festivals,” Rebekah explains. “There’s never any cell service out in the boonies. But I think it’s better that way. It’s pretty rare that we get to unplug like this, just be with each other and the music, you know?”
Most campsites are just tents on the ground, but a few are more elaborate arrangements with tables, chairs, tapestries, Tibetan prayer flags, hammocks. One tent is painted with the word PLUR.
“What does that mean?” Bethany points.
“Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. Sometimes people add another ‘R’ for ‘Responsibility.’ As if.” Rebekah holds a hand over her eyes. “There he is!”
As they come closer to their own campsite, Bethany sees that there are already three tents bunched together, along with a wide canopy on poles. Beneath the canopy a number of canvas chairs are arranged in a circle, with a number of unfamiliar men seated in them. One of the men stands up and smiles, stretching his arms out as if demonstrating ownership, or granting a blessing.
His nose ring is the first thing Bethany notices, the first thing, she presumes, that he wants anyone to notice. It pierces the cartilage beneath the septum, with two arms curving downward in a way that is both hypnotizing and deeply unsettling. He is shirtless, his body decorated with paint: green and gold stripes circling his biceps and crosshatching his pectorals. His hair is buzzed short. Bethany thought she remembered Rebekah describing him as having long hair. But perhaps after hearing about the beedi cigarettes and the Metamorphoses, she’d only pictured someone more romantic-looking.
Rebekah scurries into this man’s outstretched arms and cuddles into his chest. Bethany thinks she sees her kiss a nipple and feels a revulsion, as if she’d watched her lick a reptile.
“Bethany, this is Rufus,” she says breathlessly, pulling away.
Bethany begins to hold out a hand, but Rufus bounds in for a hug, pulling her against his painted chest. “So great to meet you. Agh, sorry about that!” he cries, swatting at the smudges on her shirt.
“Oh my God, is that your stick?” Rebekah squeals, pointing to a pole in the ground with something like a decapitated head on top.
“Yeah, do you like it?” Rufus pounces on the pole, hauls it up, and proffers the head. “I made it out of foam and painted the eyes on. It’s Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed giant. Watching over our campsite.”
“Argus,” Bethany echoes. “That’s the name of my dad’s company. It’s a home inspection business.”
“That’s right!” Rebekah cries, dazzled.
“Argus, watching over everything,” Rufus muses, gazing at the severed head.
He helps them erect their tent and arrange their supplies. He talks fast, moves fast, and seems much younger than Bethany knows him to be. She feels a kind of disappointment at this, as if Rebekah had purposely deceived her, built him up as something greater.
Rebekah grabs her by the elbow. “Come on, I don’t want to miss Barterhouse!”
“What about Rufus?” Bethany asks.
“He likes to stay at the campsite.”
As Rebekah pulls her along, Bethany looks for Amos. “Where’s your brother?”
“Probably already out in front of the stage.”
They hurry out of the dusty campground and across the field of flattened grass leading to the main stage. Bethany is sweating, and the dirt has come through her sandals and made ankle socks. The festivalgoers throng around them. It is staggering to see so many young people in one place. There are girls in bikini tops, smiling at Bethany and Rebekah as if privy to a shared secret. One bikini-topped girl wears an enormous feathered Indian headdress. One walks by with no bikini at all, just yellow and black paint upon her breasts, two big black-eyed Susans. Bethany is demure in contrast, in the studded shorts and shirttail tee she’d agonized over.
“Look at that!” Rebekah points. Young men in Victorian clothing, women in leafy halter tops, all perched high on stilts. They strut in circles, gesticulating like circus performers. It is hard to tell the difference between regular people and entertainers here. It seems to Bethany that everyone is imbued with some stardust indigenous to this festival and inaccessible elsewhere. The beauty around her is not exclusionary but inclusive. Just by being there, she might absorb it through her skin and begin to glimmer.
They reach the main stage where Barterhouse, a bearded jam band, is riding an upward swell of guitar licks to heaven. Rebekah begins to sway. Everyone is dancing, the boys wiggling in place, the girls swinging their hair. And this, Bethany remembers with a thrill, is just the beginning of the festival.
Rebekah taps her on the shoulder and holds out a thin, warped cigarette that has materialized out of nowhere. Bethany shakes her head. “You know I don’t smoke.”
Rebekah rolls her eyes. “Here, just take it.”
“Why?”
“It’s all part of the experience.”
Bethany puts the wet end into her mouth and pulls a few times, coughing, then hands it back to Rebekah, who shoos it away.
“Pass it on.”
Bethany looks around, makes eye contact with a shirtless guy in a bandanna. He smiles and accepts the joint. “Peace, man,” he actually says to her.
She is relieved, as if she’s rid herself of a hot potato. There are no police in the crowd, she is sure, but glances around despite herself.
She lets herself sway now, feeling the splash of the cymbal. The weed has made her throat dry. She has tried it only once before, at a cast party. The colors around her are candy bright. A fuzzy rainbow totem joggles above the crowd like a neon caterpillar, along with an impaled beach ball and some crude puppets. People dance with foil pinwheels, dream catchers, bubble wands. It’s as if they’ve all come together to achieve a giant resurrection of childhood. Bethany laughs. All at once she grasps something so basic: this is what people mean when they sing about getting back to the garden.
Bethany and Rebekah last for the rest of the set, until they are both parched. Back at the campground, they fill their Thermoses with water and drop into chairs under the canopy. Rufus is picking out a tune on a strange little guitar. The other men are still under the canopy, drinking out of Solo cups. Their sunglasses make it hard to tell if they are awake or sleeping. Bethany doesn’t recognize any of them from town. There don’t seem to be any girls besides Rebekah and herself.
Rebekah taps one of the guys on the knee and he turns toward her with a slow smile.
“Hey, Chris, this is my friend Bethany.”
“Hey,” he says.
“Chris is from Old Cranbury, too.”
He shifts his sunglasses to nest in a sheaf of sandy hair. His heavy eyelids reveal half-pools of languid blue. The surrounding skin is pale where the sunglasses were; the rest of his face is the bronze of year-round exposure.
“Nah, my parents just moved there a couple years ago.”
“But you’re there now,” Rebekah prompts.
“Just for the summer, then I’m going back to Vail.” Chris looks at Bethany, openly sliding his gaze down her legs and up again.
“His parents are the ones who had that crazy art project, those insect sculptures all over their house, remember that?” Rebekah says.
“Seriously?” Bethany chirps, leaning forward. “I loved that. I’m so sad they took it down.”
Chris chortles. “You’re the only one.”
“Naw, man, I liked it, too,” the guy next to Chris interjects. “That shit was sick.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“I saw the picture in the paper. Your parents rock.” The guy drinks deeply from his cup and appears to go back to sleep.
Chris gestures to his friend. “He’s from freakin’ Dunfield. He’s never even seen my parents’ house.”
“So, uh, how do you know Rufus—and these other guys?” Bethany ventures.
“They were all roommates at some point,” Rebekah answers for him. “Right?”
“Yeah.” He chuckles. “Crazy times.”
Bethany is quiet. These crazy times, she surmises, must have included Rufus’s overdose. These are very likely the people who were with him when it happened. Through the smoothing plane of her high, Bethany feels a millipede of agitation. She stays quiet with her Thermos while Rebekah tries to talk to Chris about his time in Colorado. He really mellowed out there, seems to be the gist of it. All that sun and snow.
He and the others seem to be well into their twenties—perhaps even thirty—resting like complacent tortoises. She allows herself to feel a sizzle of aversion, then willfully dampens it into something tolerable, something more like anthropological interest, like being embedded with another tribe. She studies the men. The one next to Chris wears mismatched tube socks, pink and orange. His dark hair is shaggy, too long to be fashionable, flattened at the top as by an invisible hat.
Rufus has now put the instrument down, and stands in the middle of the tent until he has the group’s attention.
“You all know that I’m clean now,” he begins. “But this is a special occasion, and so I brought something special, just for tonight. For everyone.”
“Something really special,” Rebekah adds.
Bethany looks sharply at her, and Rebekah grins.
“Yes, something really special. You can’t even get it in this country. It’s from the Amazon, a very ancient, medicinal brew. I made it at home from the caapi vine and some other imported ingredients. The tribespeople call it ‘vine of the soul.’” He pauses. “It’s not really a drug, more like a potion. It’s supposed to be taken communally as part of a ceremony. My mentor went down there and drank it with a real curandero. He said it was like a soul purge, like ten years of therapy in one night. It cracks the whole world open.”
“You done this before?” one of the Solo guys asks.
“No.” Rufus smiles. “I’ve been waiting for the perfect time to try it, and I decided that instead of saving it for myself, I’d share it with you guys, do a real ceremony. There’s no place I feel more comfortable and safe than this.”
Rebekah looks admiringly at him. Bethany feels dread like a trapdoor opening beneath her.
“All right, bro, bring it on,” says the guy in tube socks.
“Not yet, Stooge.” Rufus holds up a hand. “Not till after the music’s done tonight. Maybe midnight or so.”
“Cool.”
“Just to warn you, it’s so powerful it can actually cure drug addiction.”
The guy called Stooge laughs, exposing a set of stained teeth.
Rufus finishes his announcement and takes a seat. Bethany stares at the war paint on his chest while Rebekah reaches for his hand.
“Hey, babe,” she says, as if they are alone. “Can I see that?” She points to the little guitar where it rests on a folding chair.
“Did I ever show this to you? Apocatequil brought it back for me.”
“You told me about it, but I never saw it,” Rebekah says, blinking her lashes. She turns the instrument over in her hands, then passes it to Bethany. It is made from some sort of animal shell.
“What—” Bethany begins.
“Armadillo,” Rufus answers.
Bethany touches the scaly hull, the stiff hairs still attached, and feels a small shudder. The instrument is hollow, eerily light. She thinks of the armadillo that was sacrificed, its flesh scooped out.
“It’s called a charango,” Rufus says. “It’s for courtship rituals.” He points to a mermaid carved into the head of the instrument. “This is a totem to the sirens who can help the musician win love.”
He takes it from Bethany and plucks a few wobbly notes. “Maybe we can use it in the ceremony tonight.”
Bethany’s pleasant haze has turned heavy. Her body sags in the camping chair and it seems possible that she won’t get up again today. She hears her name being called and listens vaguely to this, thinks what a funny thing a name is.
“Bethany,” she hears again, more distinctly. “Bethany Duffy.” She looks up to find three boys standing beneath the canopy. She knows that she knows them, but it takes a moment to fish their names out. Noah Warren, of course—what is he doing here? And the Hatfield brothers. Kurt. And the younger one—Jason? Martin? All three of them look too clean, too fresh for this place. She smiles.
“Hey, do your parents know you guys are here?”
Noah laughs, then Bethany. Noah’s mother, too, would keel over dead if she knew. She is one of those exasperatingly buoyant women in town who volunteer for everything, cheer at every sports game, and behave as if no world exists outside Old Cranbury. The persistence of her budgetary dreams is one of the reasons Bethany’s father finally quit the school board.
“I’m at their house,” Noah says, nodding to the Hatfield brothers.
“We’re at his house,” adds the younger Hatfield. Mason, that’s his name.
The older one, Kurt, is staring at Rebekah. “You’re Rebekah Foster, right? You went to OCHS.”
Rebekah gives him a queenly smile. “I graduated three years ago.”
“I thought so. I remember you.”
“Hey, fellows.” Rufus comes over with a bunch of folding chairs and hands them out. “Have yourselves a seat. Chill with us for a while.”
There is no space in the circle’s perimeter for them, so they awkwardly open the chairs where they stand, in the middle of the tent.
“I thought I saw you from across the campground,” Noah is saying, “but Kurt said I was imagining it.”
Kurt is still looking intently at Rebekah, as if trying to decipher something. He is dressed for a sailboat, in khaki shorts and navy polo shirt.
“You’re at college in California now, right?” he asks.
“Very good,” Rebekah says.
“I’m going to Dickinson in a couple of weeks. In Pennsylvania.”
“Well, that will be different.”
Kurt smiles despite this teasing, which Bethany can tell has already bled into scorn.
“He’s just here to pick up girls,” his younger brother pipes in.
“And what’s wrong with that?” Kurt smiles at Rebekah, then at Bethany.
“Plenty of those out there,” Rebekah says, motioning beyond the tent.
Bethany feels the urge to kick her friend. She normally would have little use for these boys, but she likes having them here now.
“Are you guys thinking about college yet?” Bethany asks Noah and Mason in a kind, sisterly tone.
The boys look at each other.
“I don’t know,” Noah says. “I’ll probably go to college eventually, but I want to travel first. For at least a year. Maybe go around the world, like, backpacking. It feels so claustrophobic in Old Cranbury, you know? I feel like I’ve been cooped up my whole life. Even this”—he sits forward and flaps his hands outward—“it’s so homogenous. Have you noticed that it’s all white kids?”
“No, it isn’t,” Rebekah snaps.
“Yes, it is,” Noah says. “Look around. People think this is such a wonderful melting pot or something, such a representation of our generation. That’s why I wanted to come. I mean, it’s fun and everything, but it’s not, like, earth-shattering.”
“Well, no one’s gladder to be here than I am,” Rebekah says, putting her hands to her heart.
Bethany meets her friend’s eyes and smiles back. She knows that, at home with her fanatic parents, Rebekah would be churning butter or helping her mother weave yarn into the household loom.
“So, where do you want to travel?” Bethany presses on.
“India. Bangladesh. Then further east, I guess. Maybe China and Russia.”
“I’m sure your mom loves that plan.”
Noah rolls his eyes cheerfully. “I haven’t exactly mentioned it. But soon it won’t matter. I’ll be eighteen and I’ll just go.” He pats his friend on the knee. “Mason here has ideas, too.”
Mason is a good-looking boy, well built. He peers downward and shifts in his seat.
“Hey, do you guys have beer?” Kurt inquires, looking around.
Rebekah scowls. “You have to go to the beer tents and buy whatever cat piss they’re selling.”
Kurt shifts his gaze one last time between Rebekah and Bethany, then pushes himself up from the chair. “All right.” The younger boys don’t move for a moment, then reluctantly go after him.
Left behind on her drooping chair, Bethany feels a tug of disappointment. Rufus has disappeared into one of the tents to prepare his rain forest potion. Someone has rigged a phone to a boom box and watery music leaks out of it, a sad mimicry of the day’s live performances. In a remote part of her brain, Bethany knows she should be out there by the stage, not wasting time here. Instead, she sinks into the chair and finds herself thinking of her father.
Bethany had known all along that there was trouble. For several months her mother had been saying foreboding things like, “I thought he was a different kind of man,” as if talking to herself, trying out the words. “Or maybe I’m the one who changed. People change, you know.” She would look sternly at Bethany. “How did I get to be almost fifty? I have to make things happen if I want them.”
Her mother never explicitly said there was another man, someone who represented these unspecified “things,” but Bethany couldn’t guess what else she could be talking about. She wasn’t making exotic travel arrangements or adopting a risky new career. She wasn’t buying a sports car. Sometimes Bethany overheard her on the phone, using a murmuring, coquettish tone. She had never spoken to Bethany’s father that way. When she went out at night in new clothing, sharply tugging off the price tag before picking up her purse, it was clear she was not going out alone. It had made Bethany feel grown-up to co-harbor this unspoken understanding.
Her father was a difficult person, she knew that. He complained stormily and often, and was not otherwise expressive. As far back as she could remember, whenever she was in any kind of pain it was her mother who rushed to her. Her father did not try to comfort, did not even ask what happened. In her memory, he stands blankly like an etherized animal. And yet, when she thinks of him alone in their house now—where? on the slip-covered couch beneath her framed baby photos?—she feels an intolerable scrabbling in her rib cage.
“Hey,” Rebekah says to her. “Hungry?”
Bethany shakes off her fugue state to accept a salami sandwich. The sunlight is suddenly dim through the trees, giving the campsite an aquatic tint. She hears someone say the word gloaming. The word is unfamiliar—perhaps festival terminology, or something to do with drugs? There is a swirl of activity in the campground, people yelling and laughing. Bethany stands, reenergized by the sandwich. All at once, she is aware of the passing time. Soon it will be night, and she has seen only one band.
“Let’s go back out,” she says to Rebekah.
Rebekah looks crossly at her. She has been rambling to one of the men about the racial oppression of government surveillance, or something to that effect.
“You go,” she says. “I want to stay in case Rufus needs help getting ready.”
Bethany looks down at her friend, rooting for words. If all they were going to do was lounge at the campsite, she wouldn’t have come to the festival. She wouldn’t have lied to her mother. But she knows a confrontation will make matters worse.
“Okay, suit yourself,” Bethany makes herself say, and leaves Rebekah and the comatose men in their chairs.
Alone, she winds through the city of tents, looking for the way out. It is like wading through a dream world, the darkening blue air emblazoned with colored points of light, tinseled with bright voices. At this brief moment before nightfall, she lets herself imagine that she has come upon a ghostly settlement of her own people. This is how it might be, she muses, in the future they’ve been warned about, following the degradation of society, after the plastic infrastructure of school and shopping has melted and marooned her generation back upon the earth. Perhaps this is how they will all live, in wide-open settlements, vast tribal blocs.
At last, Bethany exits the campground and approaches the crowd at the main stage. The music is of another species now, wheeling electronic parabolas. The people around her are not swaying and wiggling anymore, but dancing acrobatically, aerobically, pantomiming elaborate sign language patterns. It is impossible to emulate this cold, from a standstill. As much as Bethany loves music, despite her confidence as an actress and singer, she has never been much for dancing, can’t help fixating on how moronic she must look moving in these artificial ways. Here, though, no one seems to be looking at each other; they all face the same direction, transfixed on a solo DJ: a boy in a hooded sweatshirt hunched over a machine. It seems to take all of his concentration to plug this puzzle of beats into his device, making them skip and twist and weave.
Laser lights from the stage periodically wash the audience in green, blue, red. The lights swing down onto their heads, then lift to the sky to communicate with extraterrestrial entities. Glowing things are everywhere—necklaces, batons, body paint—as if the greatest fear of all, the surest route to death, is to not be seen.
The beat picks up and achieves a manic pace. The swinging lights quicken and the hive-mind dancing accelerates. Just standing in place, Bethany feels her heart jig in a way that is almost frightening. Then the hooded boy hunches lower over his box and the rhythm begins to slow, finally coming to a dead stop. The boy slumps, wound down. There is a breath of anticipation in the crowd, a moment of collective suspension. Then, like a thundercrack, the beat comes roaring back and the full spectrum of laser lights flares out. As if a string has been cut, the people fall back to dancing, possessed.
This time, Bethany cannot resist the current. Her body abandons her and goes into the music, finding caverns and waves and silver needles within. She is distantly aware of not making physical decisions, but following the motions of her limbs at a curious remove. When, at last, the DJ turns a knob that causes the crabby loops to join together in a final, booming tsunami, she feels as if she could lift off the ground. This, she understands, is the reason people flock here like pilgrims.
She thinks dimly of her father at home, her mother in the furnished condominium—all those cushioning, stifling trees around them, separating them from each other and from this. A stream of pity seeps through her euphoria like ink, shading it, giving it depth. Her parents are ruined children, stiffened in their bodies, ossified in their rituals. They are impossibly far from the sparkling truth that she is holding right now.
At this moment, she sees Amos. She thrusts herself through the crowd to where he is dancing, throwing his arms down as if ridding them of fire ants. She catches his eye and smiles, seizing his hand. He smiles back, bewildered. There is nothing specific she wants to say to him, really. It is enough just to be with him now, in the middle of this. She begins dancing again, a little less freely, waiting for him to join her. When he doesn’t, she yells, “What’s wrong?”
He shrugs and shouts, “The set’s almost over.”
He puts a hand in his pocket, and, suddenly, a look of terror darkens his face. He digs into the other pocket, then the pockets in the back. He looks at the ground, turns a circle in place. His eyes, when they meet Bethany’s again, are panicked.
“What happened?” she yells.
He shakes his head, slaps his hands against the sides of his jeans. He turns a fast circle again, like a dog, scanning the ground. He pushes the person beside him away and examines the ground there.
“Did you lose something?”
He doesn’t answer, but she sees him mouth the word fuck. He puts his head in his hands for a long moment, then looks at her again, glazed.
“Come on.” She pulls him through the crowd toward the back. “There’s got to be a lost and found somewhere.”
He allows himself to be pulled. Once they are away from the crowd, he says, “It’s my pocket watch.”
“You have a pocket watch?”
“It was from my mom.”
The simple way he says this makes it sound like his mother is dead, that no further explanation is needed.
“It’s gone now,” he says bluntly. He flicks his hair to the side, dismissing it.
“Well, let’s at least check the lost and found.”
“Forget it. It probably fell out in the crowd and it’s trampled now. No one’s going to see it in there.”
The music has stopped—Amos was right that the set was ending, the seemingly infinite galaxy of it—and the stage behind them has gone dark for the intermission.
“We should go back and look for it,” Bethany presses.
“Just never mind,” he says.
They wander away from the stage into a stand of trees, an area that has been sectioned off as a chill-out space. Here, there are things hanging from branches, beaded strings and helixes. Floodlights have been strategically placed to shine upon rubbery objects of art, sea creatures and amoeba-like globs that suction the tree trunks. In a clearing, they come upon an enormous, translucent brain lumped upon the ground, made of clear resin. There is a crevice in the frontal cortex wide enough for people to slide through, and silhouettes are visible inside. The surface of the brain is hard and smooth when Bethany puts her hand to it.
“Let’s go in,” Amos says.
Bethany feels a clamp in her chest. There might not be complete privacy here, but it is comparatively isolated. He wouldn’t suggest going in unless he wanted, at the very least, to talk closely with her. He stands back and lets her duck through first. She is aware of her backside directly in his line of vision and is glad she chose the long T-shirt. Inside, people are sitting on the ground. Amos has to stoop down low to get through the entrance and cannot stand fully straight once inside.
“Hey, Amos,” someone calls to him.
“What the hell? I’ve been looking all over for you guys,” he cries. He turns to Bethany. “These are my bandmates. We were supposed to meet up, but apparently they’ve been hiding in a brain.”
This will just be a quick hello, she hopes. They will find another, more secluded place to go. She waits patiently, smiling at the bandmates, some of whom apparently have traveled from other states. To her dismay, Amos settles down upon the ground with them. They talk about music, using cryptic language. After fifteen minutes or an hour of this, Amos has made no sign of decamping, and Bethany stretches her arms meaningfully.
“Time to go back to the campsite, I think,” she says.
He looks carefully at her. “Yeah, you look tired. Rest up for tomorrow, it’s a great lineup. I’m gonna hang with these guys awhile, maybe crash at their site tonight.”
She sits for a moment as the boys continue their prattle. Then she rises and exits the brain. She stands outside, dazed. After counting slowly to ten, she makes herself walk away.
Tramping through the woods, she feels newly irritated with the people gallivanting through the trees like elves. Off to one side a great number of neon hammocks dangle like cocoons. Here, she comes across the boys from Old Cranbury, each seated awkwardly in a hammock with an unfamiliar girl. These are girls of the skimpy clothing set, each thoroughly groomed and less-than-beautiful in her own way. They peer suspiciously at her. Kurt already has an arm around the hip of the girl beside him, the hammock swaying. Noah looks as guilty as a puppy caught digging in the yard. He inches away from his companion, but she quickly scoots back against him. Bethany, feeling an odd spike of betrayal, turns away.
When she arrives back at the campsite, she finds Rufus leading the others in a drumming session. Rebekah slinks over and whispers, “We’re about to start.”
“Are you going to do it, too?”
“No, I’m going to stay with Rufus while he does it. I’ll be his sitter, kind of. Well, kind of the sitter for the whole group. Somebody has to stay sober, to keep people calm and make sure they have what they need.”
“Do you think people will throw up? I mean, aren’t the neighbors kind of close?”
“Believe me, we won’t be the only ones vomiting tonight.”
The drumming ceases and the drummers enter one of the tents—a yellow one—in single file. Rufus comes back out with a big insulated jug. He pours the contents into a stock pot and lights the propane stove.
“He’s edgy,” Rebekah confides in Bethany’s ear. “He’s been fasting for a couple days, including sex.”
“Aha.”
“Anyway, you can stay if you want. You can try it yourself, or you can help me sit. We have blankets ready in case people get chills, and a bunch of pails. We’re going to put on a recording of the kind of stuff a curandero would play during the ceremony. There’s an instrument he shakes, like a bunch of dry twigs.”
“A chakapa,” Rufus calls out.
“Right. We’re going to play a recording of a chakapa.”
“Okay. Well, good luck.” Bethany backs away. “I’ll see you when it’s done, I guess.”
The ecstasy of the dance music has completely receded from her veins now. The rejection from Amos has fuzzied her brain, and the bizarre, umbrous doings at the campsite exhaust her. She retreats aimlessly from the yellow tent as Rebekah and Rufus disappear inside.
“Hey,” someone calls, and she turns to see Chris sitting on a log with a beer and a cigarette, the sunglasses still in his hair. She is unaccountably happy to see him.
“Aren’t you going to do it, too?” she asks.
“No fuckin’ way. I’m not going near any of that jungle shit.” He smiles at her and shifts over on the log, patting the place next to him. He reaches into his pocket and offers her a flask of bourbon.
“I thought we weren’t allowed to bring our own liquor in?”
“Shh.” He holds a finger to his lips.
She takes the flask. The first sip burns. It ignites a new indignation at Amos’s behavior, the giant brain and the juvenile hammocks, all the silly toys provided for them as if they were infants. A reckless flame travels through her. She tilts the flask and drinks in quick little gulps. Chris, pleased by this, moves closer and puts a hand on her back.
She finishes the bourbon. “Sorry,” she murmurs, turning to him. His face looms very near. The first kiss is surprisingly gentle, then more insistent but still soft, causing a confused flutter inside her. “C’mon,” he says, lifting her from the log. She steps behind him on rubberized legs toward a dirty white tent.
He has a slow-motion way about him, moving with his eyes closed like someone sleepwalking, acting out a dream. She finds herself lulled into unthinking response, mirroring his movements. Maybe because his eyes are closed, she has the sense that she could be anyone—that she is a temporary body in his arms. She is not even sure that he remembers her name. There could be something liberating about this, but the bourbon flame has died down and been replaced by her usual, maddening caution. She watches Chris’s face as he moves his hands over her body like a blind person.
She thinks of Amos, wills back to mind the sharp immediacy of the look on his face when he noticed his pocket watch was missing. She feels an ache, a pining for the bright and precise black-and-white lines of this face. She understands exactly, painfully, who he is.
A rhythmic rattle comes through the walls of the tent from outside. An instrument being shaken in another continent. A rising moan.
Chris is at the zipper of her shorts now. It is a ridiculous zipper, no more than an inch long, but he fumbles at it regardless. Instinctively, she stops him, puts a hand over his hand, and he withdraws it obediently like a redirected animal. Now he is at his own zipper. It is suffocatingly hot, and the ground has begun to rock. More mysterious sounds drift over from the yellow tent—lower moans and strange barking noises. More than anything, Bethany does not want to go outside. She would rather be done with this and go to sleep right here. Whatever caused her to follow this man into this tent she doesn’t remember, but now it is a job she has gotten herself into. It seems absurd, even funny, that she should put her face near this stranger’s open zipper, a ridiculous posture for any person. But once she has consented, once she has begun, she realizes that she can’t exactly, politely, just stop. Slowly, a tickle develops in her throat. It creeps down through her esophagus and grows, until she comes up for air, gasping. Chris puts a hand to the back of her head, pressing gently. She braces her hands on either side of his hips and takes shallow breaths. A drop of sweat falls from the tip of her nose. Unmistakable sounds of violent heaving are now entering the tent from outside. All at once a dirty wave swoons up in her and she retches and vomits in place.
The next few moments are a confusion of mopping and swearing. The tent is tropical, noxious with stink. Chris bundles his soiled camping pad and sleeping bag together with his shorts and underwear. Bethany watches, prone on the damp nylon floor, as he crouches around, naked from the waist down. Finally, he pulls on a pair of cotton pajama pants and looks at her with a kind of flustered reverence. “Are you all right?”
She nods, her head rubbing the ground, the nylon making static in her hair. He nods back and ducks silently out of the tent with his bundle. Relieved depletion overtakes her. She falls asleep to the lullaby of the susurrating chakapa.
In the morning—much too early, only a hint of daylight through the moldy tent walls—there is a stir at the campsite. Bethany lies, stiff and cotton-mouthed, upon a circuitry of roots and stones. Through the hammering of blood in her brain she hears agitated voices. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” someone is saying over and over.
She crawls to the tent door and peers out. There is a bleak indigo cast over everything, and it seems that objects have been rearranged in the night: the propane stove and log and plastic cups on the ground. Rebekah is standing outside the yellow tent, arms hanging at her sides. When she notices Bethany, she stares at her for a long black moment. Even at this distance, Bethany recoils from what she sees in the gaze.
“Only three people ended up drinking the brew,” Rebekah tells her when she comes into the white tent. If she notices the rancid smell, she does not mention it. Her fingers knit and unknit themselves as she speaks, as if deciding whether to pray.
“Rufus was hysterical the whole time, rocking back and forth and trying to run away. That took up most of my energy, just trying to keep him calm. Then Holmes kept puking, like three or four times, and I had to deal with that, too. Stooge just kind of fell asleep, so I thought, Good, I don’t have to worry about him.”
“Rebekah, what happened?”
Rebekah looks at Bethany. “He never woke up. He hasn’t woken up.”
“But you tried . . . ?”
Rebekah’s mouth pulls downward. “I knew the tent was too hot,” she cries, and bangs a fist on the ground. “I fucking knew something was going to happen.”
When they emerge from the tent together, Chris is outside with Rufus and the other one, Holmes.
“He was probably on something else, man. We should’ve asked,” Holmes is saying.
Rufus does not respond. He turns to look at the girls.
“What are we going to do?” Rebekah says calmly.
Rufus stares at her. His face is pale, and he is wearing a shirt now. The shirt is white with a big blue eyeball in the middle of it.
“I think we should go to the medical tent,” Rebekah answers herself.
Rufus stares another moment, then says, “No, they’ll send the cops.”
“What else are we supposed to do, Rufe?”
“All right, I’ll go to the medical tent,” Rufus says quietly. “Let the cops come.”
The ambulance arrives, barreling through the campground. Curious people gather nearby and murmur as the EMTs hunch into the yellow tent and, after a few minutes, slide out a stretcher with a sheet strapped over a body. That’s what it is, Bethany realizes. A body.
“This happens every year,” Bethany hears someone say in a hushed, authoritative tone. “There’s always at least one person . . .”
The police come. When it’s her turn to talk, Bethany feels like she is reading lines in an audition. She listens to herself telling the story of her evening, pointing to the white tent, pointing to Chris. The officers seem serious but unsurprised. Their tone wavers between sympathy and contempt. They unceremoniously take down her name and address in case they have further questions. She gives her home address—her father’s address—without thinking, then feels a blade of fear that her parents might find out about this.
The police move on to Rufus. They speak to him for a long time. After they finish, one officer remains with him as the others poke around the tents. Bethany wonders what has happened to the magic brew, whether they’d drunk all of it last night, or if Rufus—or, more likely, Rebekah—had poured the remainder somewhere. Maybe a dog would sniff it out, attuned to whatever telltale chemicals, but the officers have not brought dogs.
After the police lead Rufus away, people from other campsites begin to infiltrate, rooting for information. Rebekah will not talk to them, but walks around in circles shaking her head. She is still in her patchwork pants and tank top. Her hair is snarled down to the tips.
“Well, it’s bound to happen, with people mixing drugs,” one girl is rattling on in a regular voice. “Not everyone knows what they’re doing. People make dumb mistakes all the time. It happens every year.”
“He was probably one of the Yggdrasil crew. I heard they had some bad Molly.”
“Did you know him?” someone asks Bethany. She shakes her head mutely.
“We need to find Amos,” Rebekah says, suddenly insistent. Her voice is high and strained. “You know, not having phone service fucking sucks. What the fuck are you supposed to do in an emergency? Walk around with a freakin’ totem until someone sees you?”
“I think he’s with his bandmates,” Bethany offers. “He said he was going to stay at their campsite.”
With a growl, Rebekah grabs the Argus totem. She holds it aloft as they wander the campground, until at last they find Amos and his friends playing guitars around a little table of bagels. Amos looks clean and rested. The breakfast setup strikes Bethany as neat and civilized; the mugs appear to be filled with real coffee. Bethany wishes intensely that she could sit down with them and pretend nothing has happened.
Amos looks up with innocent surprise.
“Let’s go,” Rebekah says to her brother. “We’re leaving.”
“What? Why?” His brow knits, and he keeps strumming the guitar.
Rebekah yanks him up by the arm. She takes him aside and talks quietly. Bethany can see her back quaver as she starts to cry, and she sees Amos put an arm around her.
They collect everything they can from the campsite and lug it out with them. Rebekah carries the Argus totem, now an unwelcome beacon. As they walk, it seems that some people are whispering, watching them with a curiosity bordering on envy. Others look on ignorantly, blinking like dumb cows, wondering why they are leaving the festival early. The story will spread through the campground, through the festival, eventually reach the ears of the performers themselves. It will dampen the mood for a while, or—possibly—enliven it, add new fuel to the manic dancers. Perhaps this direct news of death will underscore the present moment for them. They won’t be surprised, that much is certain. This happens, apparently, every year. If that is true, Bethany thinks, then the festival itself is nothing but an enormous glittering gambling table where life is traded roughly in order to inflate its value, remove its guarantee.
Rebekah walks with a look of grim focus. Amos, too, is quiet. Bethany feels no sharp emotion, just a general numbness. Only in an abstract way does she understand that a man is abruptly dead—a man who was alive in front of her just hours ago, only a few years older than herself. The idea beads on the surface of her consciousness like oil on water.
A girl in braids approaches them. “Hey, are you leaving already? Here, take this.” She holds out a fan of glossy postcards. Did you become someone else at Aether? the postcards inquire, showing a picture of a purple-wigged woman with butterfly wings. Send us your photos!
With every step toward the exit, Bethany thinks, she is fashioning a permanent memory that will remain with her. She is, in fact, a different person coming out of the festival. Now, walking beside Amos, she catches herself considering the unexpected advantage of having witnessed something he has not. This is such an unscripted moment that anything could be excused. She could grasp his hand right now, and he would have to hold it.
She does not grasp his hand. They continue walking, apart from each other, toward the parking lot. The sneaking light of dawn is gone, replaced by the white slab of morning. There is no special color in the sky. There are no cloud formations or intimations of a higher firmament. It occurs to Bethany that this story will make the news. There will be something about it on television. There will be a spin about the danger of music festivals, and she will have to sit silently while her mother obliviously warns her about it.
Eventually, she will distance herself from the incident, tamp it into a story she tells at parties. She will put herself apart from the man who died. He was fundamentally different, she will rationalize, not from Old Cranbury, unanchored by good parents and constructive surroundings. As they approach the gate Bethany thinks of the town, small and safe, awaiting their return. It is cloistered, oppressively familiar, but maybe—and her mother’s trembling hands return to her—mired with its own dark disturbances. It is its own kind of restive campground, in a way, its properties penciled upon common land, impinging on one another despite the fences meant to hold them apart. Huddled in that encampment are their families, steely cohorts within the greater clan. Even Rufus must have parents of his own, although this seems improbable. He seems parentless, born from nothing, sprung from the thigh of some god.
Far off to the side, before the parking lot, Bethany notices a gathering of people on an open field. This would be the morning yoga session, offered to those able to rise early enough, still interested in breathing. The rows of people move in sync, adopting the same poses, configuring and reconfiguring their limbs like children experimenting with their bodies. Bethany watches as they all bend at once to plant their hands upon the battered field, then arch up in unison, a hundred arms saluting the sun.