THE NOSE OF THE BOAT SCRAPED THROUGH THE SAND, BUMPED and stopped moving.
Finally!
Julian jumped out into the shallow water. His hiking boots were soaked and filled with grit. He was confined in a small space, and it was hard to move his arms to get to his multi-tool—though to be fair, it was also hard to see how a multi-tool would help him. In his current predicament, what he needed was an earth-mover.
The ceiling was low; it was not so much a cave as a space between boulders, a space large enough for just him. Light filtered through a break somewhere up above, a glimmer between loose and heavy rocks. He climbed to it, but the rocks crumbled under his feet, and he lost his footing and slid, and the rocks slid with him, packing on top of him. He tried again. Why hadn’t he put crampons on his boots to help him climb?
The rocks were heavy. He couldn’t move them. After many attempts to free himself, Julian panicked. It felt as if he’d been under a long time. He took deep breaths to make sure his lungs were still working, and then searched through his pockets again, one by one. In one of the deep pockets of his cargo pants, he finally found his multi-tool. It was better than nothing. With the end of the needle-nosed pliers, he frantically stabbed around the packed-in dirt, chiseling away at some of the crushed stones. He was always chiseling away at something or other, trying to make openings in stones. He was determined to forge through this damn rock. He couldn’t die down here when he was so close to getting out.
Blinding sunlight streaked through the cracks above him. If only he could get the opening big enough to fit his arm through, he would wiggle out. The cook was wrong, that funny little guy. Julian was okay. His body felt okay. His head really hurt, though.
The crack became a crevice, then a hole, and finally, after some increasingly desperate hacking, a bright opening big enough for his arm, his shoulder, his aching head. He shoved one boulder after another out of the way, and crawled out.
For many minutes, he lay on his back in the dirt, his eyes closed, panting, sucking in the hot air, trying to catch his breath. He was out! That was the most important thing. It had been scary for a while. It was silly to admit it now, but there were intervals when he felt he might never climb out.
The sunlight blinded him, literally blanched his pupils, and it took him a while to adjust to the daylight. Even when he could see, he couldn’t focus well, especially out of his left eye. Things were murky and blurry. Well, sure, didn’t he get blinded in that eye?
No, what was he talking about? When would he get blinded? Julian sat up, hugging his knees. He was so happy to be out of the cave. He was never going into a cave again, he pledged with solemn honor.
He didn’t feel strong enough to stand up yet. He looked around. He didn’t know where he was. Nothing looked familiar, and it was very hot. There were no rolling hills, no hawthorn hedges, no buildings, no pubs, no rookeries, no observatories, no antipodean flatlands, no collapsing streets. He was in the highlands this time, in the dust of pampas grass. It wasn’t recognizable. But it wasn’t unrecognizable either.
He stared at his forearms, looking for damage, for the tell-tale signs of injuries, old or new. The arms were smeared with mud and dust. With his right hand he rubbed the dirt off his left arm to see the marks but couldn’t find any. Was it his imagination, or were there supposed to be marks? Wasn’t one of his arms engraved with lines, dots, symbols, a map of where he had been and where he was going? He stared into his hands. He clenched and unclenched his fists. His hands were sore, his right hand especially from digging so long with a multi-tool not made for digging, but otherwise they weren’t too bad. No broken bones, thank God.
The top of his head hurt. When he touched it, it really hurt. His fingers came back bloody. The back of his neck was sticky with blood, the back of his shirt. Ah, so he had a cut on his head. No wonder he wasn’t feeling great. The hot sun that was nice a minute ago after being in darkness for what felt like forever was now making everything worse. Julian was fruitless and weary.
When he thought he could bear the pain, he felt around the top of his scalp again. Under the swelling, he found a groove under his fingers, a compound depression in his head. Oh, no—he had an open head wound! He had to cover it with something quick—before dust and dirt got in. He didn’t want to take off his shirt in the sun, so he searched his pockets for anything else, and that’s when he realized he had dropped his multi-tool. Probably when he was moving rocks with both hands to get himself out. No, no. He must find it. It was a Leatherman tool and expensive; it had been a birthday gift from Ashton, the first thing Ashton ever gave him, or as Ashton put it, “the first thing he’d ever given anybody.” Julian didn’t want to lose it. Look how it helped him just now. On his knees, with his bare hands, he plowed through the excavated sand, searching for it. He glimpsed something faintly red in the dust and rocks. He brushed the dirt away, flung away the pebbles that covered it, pulled it out of the earth, flattened it out.
It was the red beret.
He couldn’t believe he had brought it with him. What luck. He must have stuffed it into his pants’ pocket at the last minute, and it had fallen out. The beret was dusty but otherwise in pretty good shape. The leather was soft. Carefully, Julian fit it over his head.
And there was the multi-tool in the sand close by! Oh, thank God.
It was time to stand up, get going. Wobbling slightly, he got to his feet. He was so hot.
Okay. Now what?
For a long time, Julian wandered through the desert wilderness, the untrammeled rattlesnake weed and poison hemlock, through the low-lying, burned-out coyote bush. He was desperately thirsty. He should’ve drunk from the river when he’d had the chance. He stopped walking.
What river?
He peered into the hazy distance for a few minutes. He must have imagined it when he was trapped under the rocks, a mirage of water for men lost in the desert. He distinctly remembered dipping his feet into a stream, but his socks and boots weren’t wet. They weren’t even damp.
Julian kept circling what looked like the same pair of cacti, the same eucalyptus, kept doubling back, tripling back, over this hill and the next, toward the sun, away from the sun. Nothing made any difference. In every direction, it was the same sparse foliage, the same low shrubland. He found a spray of pink live-forevers, a wildflower weed. It had succulent stems. In seconds he sucked out all the liquid inside them. It wasn’t nearly enough. He searched for more, but there weren’t any.
He found a rotting sheep carcass. He stuck his multi-tool inside and maggots exploded out. He thought blood would drain from his body through the hole in his head. Revulsed, he vomited up the bile in his gut. His head wound bled anew.
His mind wasn’t focusing on the terrain because it was anxiously trying to remember something. Something about ice or mountains or both or death. Was it ice and death? He was supposed to know something, maybe about a coming avalanche? Tell someone something.
He sucked the salt from his dirty hands, and then looked at his right hand and thought, wait, I have all my fingers?
It must be heat stroke. Under the brutal sun, for a moment Julian thought he wasn’t supposed to have all his fingers.
He was dying of thirst. Literally dying.
Julian tried to hold on to the tenuous thread of landslide memory, he really tried. But life took over.
As he wandered in the heat and dust, he forgot the ice and the mountains; he forgot about someone else’s death, because his own was looming so near.
And soon Julian couldn’t even remember that he was supposed to remember.
He was having another problem, one that needed to be addressed immediately, or soon it would become his only problem, and then he wouldn’t have any. His head was hurting so bad, it was making him blind. The blood had dried but the skull felt so tender and swollen that Julian had a flashing worry that maybe it was more than just a cut, that maybe it was a more serious head injury. Like a fractured skull. He dismissed the thought. He couldn’t afford a more serious injury out here by himself in the open country.
Disoriented, he sat out his confusion on a boulder and played with the multi-tool, opening and closing all its instruments, trying to think. A straight-edge knife, a serrated blade, a saw, wire cutters, a bottle opener, a pair of scissors, a flathead, a Phillips, a flashlight, a pen, a titanium toothpick, a sewing needle. Thinking was difficult, the brain like midday concrete. To cool himself down, Julian cut off the legs of his pants and then flensed the cotton twill into long strips, tying the ends together to create one long rope. Did he need a rope? What if the head was throbbing because the brain was swelling? Could he have some intra-cranial bleeding, a hematoma maybe? If the pressure from the hemorrhage got to be too much, he would pass out. Maybe he could use the titanium toothpick to find his dura mater through the opening in his cracked skull, puncture the membrane, release some of the pressure on his brain.
Oh, God, he was having a sun stroke. To think he could perform brain surgery on himself.
Yet he had to do something.
His ears were ringing, his eye movement impaired. He couldn’t count down from a hundred and didn’t know not only where he was but where he was supposed to be. The rocks bashed his head in good. He couldn’t stand up. He tried to motivate himself with quotes from Muhammad Ali. The boxer hated every minute of training. But he forced himself not to quit. Suffer now, Ali said, and live the rest of your life as a champion.
And: To become a champion, fight one more round.
Julian suspected he didn’t have much time to keep mulling boxing wisdoms. With intense effort he fought the most overpowering urge of all—to lie down in the sand and go to sleep.
But maybe it was like Ali said: Suffer now and live the rest of your life.
He dragged himself to his feet and hunted through the dry chaparral until he spotted the lilac flowers and ashy green leaves of sacred sage. Nearby some common yarrow grew, with its clusters of white buds and pungently sweet scent. Sage was an analgesic, and yarrow stanched blood flow. Sometimes sage was called soldier’s woundwort. Julian pulled off several handfuls of leaves, chopped them up roughly with the knife and used sweat and spit to moisten them. He rubbed the plants between his hands to bring out their strong-smelling natural oils. Carefully he pressed the damp leaves into his head and then fit the beret over it to keep them in place. He took off his T-shirt and wrapped it around the beret. He fixed the contraption in place with the rope he had made. Better a blister burn on his bare back than to pass out alone in the desert.
He found a stick to help him walk and got going again. Walking while leaning on a stick seemed weirdly familiar—and easier. Why didn’t he think of it sooner?
After stumbling through another plain of dying witch grass that like him was being singed into tumbleweed, Julian found a paved road. Valhalla! The place where kings and heroes were received. But this Valhalla was empty and in the middle of nowhere. There were no houses or fences or lights in either direction. But at least it was a road, and it was divided by a yellow line. It ran east–west. He decided to head toward the sun, for in his experience, a path heading west often ended in a large body of water. He would drink salt water now, if he could get to it.
A truck up ahead barreled toward him at rocket speed. Julian couldn’t judge how fast it was traveling and didn’t want to get run over. Tottering he backed off into the sagebrush shoulder, watching the truck slow down, its horn blasting full volume. It whizzed by, knocking him back with a gale of hot air. The driver turned his head to stare at him before stepping on the gas. After the vehicle disappeared from view, Julian got back on the road and resumed his sclerotic pace.
It wasn’t long before he heard a high-pitched siren behind him. Or it could’ve been hours. Julian couldn’t tell. In the distance he saw flashing lights zooming toward him, heard the pitch of another siren, and another. A posse of red and blue lights screamed so loud, he became afraid.
He hated the sound of sirens.
Plus, in their haste to get to wherever they were going, they could run him over and not even know it. He stepped off the road to give them a wide berth and then thought, what if they were coming for him? Hadn’t he killed a man with his bare hands, fought and killed others? Hadn’t he conspired to dispose of a man’s murdered body and stolen a dead man’s gold? Julian had never accounted for his crimes.
In slow motion, he staggered away into the bush.
What was happening? Was the dehydration breaking down his body, his mind? What men did he kill, where?
He was angry he was being forced back into the scrubland after it had taken him so long to find a road. He didn’t want to return to the grasses. But he remembered a dark-haired man telling him to follow his gut, so that’s what Julian did. What was that little man’s name? It was on the tip of his tongue. It would come to him, he was sure of it, come to him when he wasn’t so hot and anxious. He would hide now, Julian decided, but get back on the road as soon as the cops left. Surely there would be regular cars driving by. He would flag one down.
He wondered if the present commotion was the truck’s doing. Could the driver have called Julian in? Sometimes the trucks and the cops were connected by special-frequency wideband radios. Julian should’ve hidden from the truck, not the police. He regretted getting caught off guard, cursed his sugar-deprived, swollen, leaking, non-reactive brain.
He stumbled into the dusty plain to let the insistent cars pass. His shins were bleeding. He thought a bone in his foot might be broken, because it hurt to scramble back into the desert. After he’d gone a fair distance and couldn’t hear the sirens anymore, Julian glanced back, to make sure they had passed him, and it was safe again.
But no.
It was the opposite of safe again.
All the lights in the kaleidoscope of his failing vision were pinholed at the place in the road where he had just been, colors spinning like a silent carousel. They were all stopped—as if they had stopped for him. There was even an ambulance. As Julian watched, a civilian car screeched to a stop, the driver door opened, and a man jumped out. A police officer pointed in Julian’s direction. Leaving his car door flung open, the man started running toward Julian.
Was that right, or was it another illusion?
Julian’s one eye had crusted over and the other was filled with dirt and swollen with poison ivy. The one eye that could still see was playing tricks on him. Through his blurred myopic haze, Julian could almost swear the running man was getting closer to him in the dried-out skeleton grass. And his ears were deceiving him. He thought he heard a voice calling his name in the wilderness.
Julian . . . !
The man kept tripping on the rough ground full of ditches and rocks and poverty weed, falling, getting up, running, shouting his name. Julian! Julian . . .
The man was coming toward him clumsily, frantically—or was it frantically and clumsily? Consequences were important. Causes and effects were important. Was the man clumsy because he was frantically trying to get to him?
Julian wavered, fearfully watching the blur come into focus. His head hurt. But his heart hurt more.
Maybe it was being too long without water in the pitiless desert, but for a moment, the mirage in front of Julian glimmered like a ghost of the most familiar shape of all. Ashton.
Except this yelling running ghost was calling out his name.
Instead of taking another step away, like he thought he wanted to, Julian took a step forward, whispering a parched prayer through a throat that couldn’t make a sound. Oh God, please PLEASE let it be Ashton.
Dimly he recalled the lies he had told himself in some flat subarctic city where he searched not for one lost soul but two, peering into the faces of faceless men the way hopeless people do when they’ve lost everything, when every back, every jacket, every hearty laugh looked and sounded like a beloved someone forever gone. But this mirage wore no jacket and wasn’t laughing and yet looked and sounded like his vanished friend.
Julian took another step forward.
A few feet away from him, the panting man stopped running. His hands fell to his sides. Gasping, he crossed his arms over his stomach and doubled over. When he straightened out, he spoke. “Julian,” the mirage said, the eyes welling up, the voice breaking.
Ashton.
Julian dropped his stick, walked toward him, threw his arms around him.
Ashton threw his arms around Julian. The two men stood, gripped in a deadlock.
Julian was dry heaving.
Ashton clasped him around his back. “It’s all right. It’s all right,” he said, holding Julian up. “You’re okay. You’ll be okay. Can you walk? Holy shit, dude. Can you walk? What the fuck happened to you, Jules? We thought you were dead.”
Me, too. Julian tried to speak, but no sound came out. He grabbed Ashton’s shirt. His mouth opened. Ashton waved to the cars in the road. “It’s him! It’s him,” he yelled.
With Ashton’s arm around his neck, a barely upright Julian limped through the grass, was almost dragged through it. It’s all right, dude, it’s all right, Ashton kept repeating. Then Julian couldn’t walk anymore. Ashton yelled for help, but Julian was falling. Before the paramedics could get into the bush with the stretcher, Ashton carried Julian to the stretcher himself.
Julian heard anxious rapid-fire conversation over his head, as if he wasn’t there, as if he couldn’t hear. “White male, twenty-two years old, IDd by his friend Ashton Bennett as Julian Osment Cruz. Found in Topanga Canyon, severely injured, bleeding from his nose and ears, presenting with a compound skull fracture, likely cerebral hemorrhage, vocal cord paralysis, risk of infection, loss of blood, one eye shut, the open pupil not responding to light, concussion certain, sun stroke definite, visible spider bites, possibly a snake bite, poison ivy, body swollen from burn blisters, dehydration, and bee stings.”
Bee stings? Julian thought. Aren’t bee stings good?
Someone covered him with a blanket. Someone put a wet cloth over his face so he couldn’t see even out of his one bad eye. He managed to lift his hand, yank the cloth off his face and stuff it in his mouth, trying to suck the water out of it. Did it not occur to a single medical professional that he might need water? Did that really need to be explained? Yes, he couldn’t speak the word, but did he have to speak it? They pried the cloth from his clenched teeth.
“Why can’t we give him some water?” Ashton said loudly. “Look at him.”
“We’re starting an IV on him now. Don’t worry, he’ll get his fluids through a vein. He can rupture his stomach if he drinks too fast. He’s in trouble. It’s a hundred degrees out and he is not sweating. His temperature is 104. Pulse 180. Look how shallow he’s breathing. He’s about to crash. We need to get him to the hospital stat.”
Ashton leaned over Julian. “I’m going to call your family. I hope the nurses will clean you up, so your mother doesn’t have a heart attack when she sees you. Behave yourself when the nurses fuss over you, cleaning you up, oh, nurse, how much do you charge for genitalia, same as I do for Jews, Mr. Gideon . . .”
“Mr. Bennett, excuse us, please . . .”
Ashton ignored them. “Hang in there, brother,” he said.
Don’t leave me, Ashton. Please. Don’t leave me again. How clearly Julian remembered Ashton gone from his life. The man was wrong. Look how much Julian remembered. Too bad he couldn’t recall the man’s name. All in good time.
The EMT was pushing Ashton away, but he kept leaning over the stretcher. “Dude, I wish you knew what you’ve put us through. Do you have any idea how long we’ve been searching for you, how long you’ve been missing?”
No. Tell me. How long.
“There’s been an APB out on you for seven days, Jules. Seven fucking days. Where have you been? You vanished off the earth. And not for nothing, but you popped up nearly fifty miles from where you and I were camping at Mugu Point. All this time we were looking for you in the wrong place. How the hell did you get here?”
Julian blinked with his one open eye.
“Mr. Bennett! You’re preventing us from doing our job. You know he can’t speak to you. He doesn’t even know who you are.”
“He knows who I am,” Ashton said. “Don’t you, Jules?”
Motionlessly, Julian stared at Ashton.
“Exactly! He can’t answer a single basic question. Does traumatic brain injury mean anything to you? Do you want him to die? Move away from the patient. Go visit him at UCLA Medical Center. He’ll be the one in the critical unit.”
Ashton didn’t move. “Don’t worry, bro, I’m not leaving you. I’m never leaving you again. I’m driving to the hospital right behind you.” He patted Julian’s chest.
Julian kept mouthing, kept trying to form a word.
“Look, he is trying to say something,” Ashton said to the paramedic.
“He’s probably trying to say water, Mr. Bennett.”
“Or my name.” Ashton mined Julian’s face. “Jules . . . ?”
Julian looked up at the sky, hazy in the heat. A tear rolled down his temple. What was the name of the girl he had loved so much? Did he dream her, the mystical girl that changed shape and size, changed his life, changed the shade of her auburn hair, the cream color of her eyes? Was she myth? Did she exist?
With great effort Julian lifted his arm from under the blanket and pressed his palm against his friend’s unshaven, relieved, scared, familiar face, as familiar to him as his own. Summoning his breath before he passed out, from a dry desert throat he eked out what was to him a shout but to everyone else barely heard.
“Ashton,” said Julian.