Lana had been getting the texts for a week, from a number she didn’t recognize:
Childbirth is nonconsensual.
Then, a couple days later:
A desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet.
Then this morning:
You’re imprisoned in evil matter.
Lana went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Yes, well, it might have been evil. More likely it was simply in its thirtieth year on earth and feeling a little bit tired, being carbon based and all. Those Montana summers had begun to take their toll. The skin above her chest looked splotchy. The “beauty mark” on her lip had tipped decisively into mole. Some faint lines had begun to appear on her forehead, like a cold front moving north. Lana knew the lines would get deeper, and she’d have a harder time getting parts, and then even if she grew an Oscar out of her fucking head and pranced around like a unicorn, no one would give her a second glance.
Still, she did not really wish to be imprisoned in anything else.
She cleaned up from breakfast and then went out to sweep the balcony, not bothering with her respirator even though the smoke stung her eyes. The San Gabriels were on fire again, as were the Santa Susanas; from her balcony, Lana could see the charred remains of the Griffith Observatory, its domeless rotunda looking weirdly forlorn, like an egg cup without an egg. Of course, the observatory had burned last October, in the Cahuenga Peak fire—but the feeling, at least, was of a single fire, one that never fully went out. The planes flew all year round, dumping pink clouds of slurry. Everyone just accepted it now, like they accepted the respirators and the controlled blackouts and the water tax. Even when the Hollywood sign had burned, the steel letters curling like Shrinky Dinks. How shocking the footage had been at first, then sort of freaky-cool in a Burning Man way, then ironic-iconic enough to put on a T-shirt. A new sign was supposed to go up by Christmas. Everyone just shook the ash from their hair, drove their Tesla down Sunset with their air filter on, as if nothing were wrong.
Lana was no different. She did this too (minus the Tesla). What choice did they have?
She swept the ash from her balcony, then watered her potted geraniums with the leftover water from a wineglass in the sink. The Santa Anas were blowing, the palm trees across the street sculling in the wind. Her phone vibrated again. Was actually ringing. Why hadn’t she blocked the unknown number from her phone? She’d dealt with celebrity stalkers before—well, okay, one stalker, but she’d had to get a restraining order when he started showing up at her apartment building dressed like Houdini.
She wrestled the phone from her jeans: a 323 number, different than before, though one she failed to recognize. She forced herself to answer it.
“Lana, it’s Charlie Margolis.”
“Mr. Margolis!” she said, then felt ridiculous. She was a grown woman. Still, what was she going to do? Call him Charlie? Sometimes she had to remind herself she wasn’t a little girl. When she thought of her childhood, she pictured those rashes she used to get after she’d been hiking all day in Glacier or Jewel Basin, through innocent-looking weeds, the kind you don’t even think about being noxious until it’s too late and your legs are aflame. She was still trying to wash it off.
“It’s Jasper,” Mr. Margolis said, sounding worried. “He’s moved to the desert. Joined some kind of antinatalist thing.”
“Antinatalist?”
“Church of VEX, they call themselves. Short for ‘Voluntary Extinction.’ They think humans should stop having babies and die off—the sooner, you know, the better. It’s a save-the-planet thing, I guess.”
“He’s living there?”
“Yep. Yes, he is. My only son.” Mr. Margolis cleared his throat. “The website? It’s pretty, um, extreme. What scares me is the talk of euthanasia.”
“Like mass suicide?”
He didn’t answer. She realized now that the texts must have been from Jasper. Some part of her had known this already. And yet something—fear? protectiveness?—prevented her from telling Mr. Margolis about them.
“I heard he was in rehab again,” Lana said.
More silence. Had he hung up on her?
“Which ‘again’ do you mean?”
“Fourth?”
“Fifth time was last spring. Actually he’s been great. Working at a climbing gym in Palm Springs. On Subs, exercising every day. His dream was to be a route setter—whatever the hell that is. That’s what he told me over Christmas. I thought, Thirty years old, he’s finally found his calling.” Mr. Margolis cleared his throat. “Then he met some eco types on a climbing trip. Joshua Tree, I think. Extremists. They recruited him. You know those guys who, like, promise to solve all your problems? I’m not sure if they’re kooks or just, I don’t know, your dad on acid.”
“I’m surprised he’d join something like that,” Lana said, though in all honesty she wasn’t. The boy had never liked his own family much. How tragic, at his age, to still be looking for one. “Are you asking for help?”
“I’ve called and called. He won’t pick up.”
“Did my parents ever tell you about visiting Jasper at that place near Whitefish?”
“I barely remember it. They said he was ‘difficult.’ ”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Lana said. Apparently, he’d called Lana’s mom a whore.
“I just thought—you know, you guys were so close. He adores you.”
Lana was not at all sure that Jasper adored her. Quite the opposite, in fact. She hadn’t seen him since that summer they were sixteen, when she’d played the clip of him singing with a pillowcase over his head. Humiliated him in front of his sister and her friend. He’d stopped speaking to her after that. No, that wasn’t completely true: he’d called her once seven or eight years ago, in the middle of the night, after she’d debuted in Houdini, PI. He’d been out of his gourd, talking a mile a minute, as if he were leaking like a balloon and had to get the words out before he deflated. You’re a shit actress and should go back to Montana. Lana had hung up on him. For all she knew, he was still trying to shake her off a ladder.
Or maybe not. Not long after the phone call, an envelope had arrived in the mail, one of those Priority mailers with no return address. No note inside: just some Monopoly money, a splinter of wood, a chapati-flat stone, perfect for skipping. Lana had never responded to this sentimental gesture. Oh, she’d wanted to: written two different emails to Jasper, apologizing for betraying him when they were sixteen. Because she thought of him sometimes, parched with guilt. Okay, more than sometimes. A lot. You might even say she dwelled. She knew this guilt was self-aggrandizing; he hadn’t turned out the way he had solely because of something she’d done when they were kids. She was but one point on a plane. Still, he’d wanted to be a singer-songwriter, a famous one, and she’d gone out of her way to crush his dreams.
“Okay,” she said to Jasper’s father.
“Okay?”
“What is it you want me to do?”
A week later, she sat in the passenger seat of Mr. Margolis’s car, heading through the Mojave Desert on their way to Twentynine Palms. The view from Route 62 was flat and atrocious, an endless sandbox speckled with creosote bushes. Lana loved it. In Montana, everything was so beautiful that it made you feel ugly inside. Ugly and deformed. There was a smugness about it, a spiritual superiority. She’d never forget the first time she drove through the High Desert, on her way to LA, the gust of kinship she felt looking at the suffering plants. The land itself seemed to be in distress. And the Joshua trees! Those contorted arms, twisting this way and that like an actual Joshua she knew, a kid in a wheelchair she used to tutor for Volunteer Hours in twelfth grade. You’d only grow that way if you were in pain.
Mr. Margolis stared straight ahead as he drove, focused on getting to the collective where Jasper was living. That’s what he called it, a “collective,” as though calling it a cult would turn it into one. And wasn’t a collective, like, a farm? What could they possibly be growing out here in the desert? Lana might have asked Mr. Margolis these questions, but they hadn’t spoken much since he’d picked her up at her apartment in Los Feliz, sporting a salt-and-pepper beard that might have looked distinguished if not for the yarn-y fiber of banana dangling from it. This was perfectly okay with Lana, who hadn’t slept well last night—stewing, as she was wont to, on the state of her life.
“What did Jasper say when you told him we were coming?” Lana asked now, partly to wake herself up.
Mr. Margolis glanced at her, then returned his eyes to the road.
“Tell me he knows we’re coming,” she said.
“How would he? He doesn’t answer my phone calls.”
“Oh my god. You haven’t spoken to him at all?”
“Actually, he wrote me a letter. When he first moved out here. Maybe six months ago? He said they had a one-legged dog on the farm named Ouroboros. I’m assuming he meant to say a three-legged dog. A slip of the tongue. He signed the thing ‘Better off dead, Jasper.’ Instead of ‘love’ or ‘sincerely’ or whatever.” Mr. Margolis fiddled with the air-conditioning vent. “That was about it. It was a short letter. I wrote him back several times, but he never responded.”
He smiled at her, the thread of banana in his beard trembling like a worm. His hand was trembling as well. Lana had noticed this when he’d fiddled with the air-conditioning vent. Mr. Margolis’s decline, from Lana’s perspective, was a distant tragedy related to her birth. It didn’t really concern her. He’d never liked her very much, at least that was Lana’s sense, as if she were somehow proof of the world’s unfairness.
Lana stared out her window, annoyed she’d been roped into an ambush. She thought about demanding they turn around and drive back to LA, but the truth was she had nothing else to do. She was between jobs, between girlfriends, between meal kit deliveries. She hadn’t had a callback all spring. The last shoot she’d done was for a VR game called SpacePaladins: Omega Rising. She’d played someone named Starbreath, who ends up getting decapitated by a knight riding a dragon. That was last fall. Since then she’d been to twelve auditions, all of which had amounted to squat. Lately, when she called Fehmeeda, her agent, there was a longer and longer gap between when Fehmeeda’s twenty-year-old assistant answered and when Fehmeeda got to the phone. Lana had a bad feeling she was being ghosted, but delicately, as if her agent were backing away from a bomb.
“Your dad’s father used to have a three-legged cat,” Mr. Margolis said. “Can’t remember his name.”
“Barnabas,” Lana said.
“Yes. He could walk on a fence.”
“He died before I was born. Eaten by a coyote, they think.”
“Right, of course,” he said, darkening. He studied the road. “Your parents would have inherited him.”
“You and Mom had an affair, didn’t you?” Lana asked suddenly.
He glanced at her in surprise. Lana was as surprised as he was. It had just come out. Mr. Margolis reddened. Even his beard seemed to glow. What had her mother seen in this man, too fair-skinned to keep his emotions to himself? He was handsome in a textbook sort of way. The eyes and nose and mouth were all pleasantly proportioned, like a poem that rhymed. But there was something missing. A force, maybe—a confidence?—holding them together.
Reaching across her, Mr. Margolis fished around in the glove compartment and took out some wraparound shades, the cyborg-y kind with mirrored lenses.
“Let me tell you something,” he said finally, now that his eyes were hidden. “Your mother blocked me from her phone a long time ago. Cut me off completely.” He looked at Lana—or at least his sunglasses did. “She’s a good person.”
Lana frowned. It had seemed outrageous to her as a girl: her mother’s unhappiness. The woman had everything she needed. Namely, Lana herself. How dare she be unhappy? And how dare she cheat on her marriage, imagining she could solve it?
But now Lana wondered if she’d ever truly cared about this, or if it was just another way of siding with her father, who was gone half the time and therefore easier to adore. To be honest, Lana didn’t give two shits about marriage. It was an ancient relic, like monogamy itself. Why would she care about something invented five thousand years ago, as a kind of burglar alarm to protect a man’s most valuable property? It astonished her, in this day and age, that anyone would agree to something called “wedlock.” Anyway, it made no room for mistakes. Life was hard; people fucked up in all sorts of indefensible ways. Maybe her mother would have been happier with this man with ridiculous sunglasses, who cared more about people than about wolverines. Who believed—even now, after she’d ditched him twice—that she was a good person.
“Do you hate me too? I’m sorry.”
“No,” Lana said truthfully, wondering at the “too.” It saddened her more than anything else he’d said.
On the outskirts of Twentynine Palms, or somewhat before the outskirts, the car’s GPS told them to turn up an unmarked dirt road and follow it for several miles. The road was so washboarded that Lana worried she might chip a tooth. She braced her hands against the dashboard, feeling like an egg shaker full of bones. Eventually they reached the end of the road, where a mangled bicycle, missing both wheels, was chained to a ramshackle gate. The bike had clearly been there a long time. A homemade sign was posted to the gate.
Church of VEX, it said in permanent marker, then below this, in smaller print: We’re All Trespassers Here.
Charlie got out of the car and opened the gate, which meant dragging the mangled bike along with it. They drove farther. Someone had planted quotes or slogans along the side of the road, in the manner of old-fashioned Burma-Shave signs: Happiness Is for Pigs; Man Is the Cancer of the Earth; The Greatest Luck Is Not to Be Born…but Very Few People Succeed in It. Before long they reached a small compound of abandoned buildings: squares of white stucco, austere as a barracks, crumbling at the corners. They looked like sugar cubes. Some of them had cacti or sunflowers out front, potted in old paint buckets or planted ambitiously in the ground. In front of one building, impaled on garden stakes, was a colonnade of doll heads.
Lana, who’d been calm up till now, started to feel a bit scared. The air smelled of manure, or perhaps human shit; she wondered why this pungent smell was a relief to her, then realized there was no trace of smoke. Chickens gabbled somewhere nearby. Mr. Margolis pulled up to the last house on the right, which was larger than the rest and whose corrugated roof jutted over the front door like the brim of a hat. A dog was lying in the shade of the roof. Jasper, in fact, had described the thing correctly. It sat there in a tray, one-legged and obese, like a rump roast stabbed with a meat thermometer. The woebegone creature barked at them, then began advancing toward the car, using its leg to propel the tray, which turned out to have little wheels attached to it.
Someone appeared in the doorway of the house: a dreadlocked white woman, so immaculately sunburned she looked like she’d been pulled out of a scalding bath. “Boros!” the woman yelled at the dog, who stopped barking.
Lana and Mr. Margolis got out of the car. “Good morning,” Mr. Margolis said, though it was well into afternoon. He took off his glasses, as if the woman might recognize him. “We were looking for Jasper Margolis.”
“And who might you be?”
“I’m his father. Charlie. And this is Lana, Lana Meek, an old friend of his.”
“Oh, Mr. Rise and Shine!” the woman said with delight.
“Excuse me?”
“We’ve heard all about you. The noble doctor. You used to wake him up every morning. ‘Rise and shine!’ ” The woman laughed uproariously, as if this were the funniest thing in the world. Her teeth had tooth-sized gaps between them, like the studs of a Lego. “Oh god. I’m going to enjoy this little reunion.”
“What does that mean?” Mr. Margolis asked politely.
“Nothing. We’ve just been starved for some entertainment.” She glanced at the sun, idly, the way you might glance at a watch. “Let’s see how the fiend reacts to Dr. Frankenstein’s pursuit.”
Mr. Margolis stared at her. “Dr. Frankenstein?”
“You brought him into this life, didn’t you? Nonexistence never hurt anyone,” the woman said sententiously, “but existence always did.”
“We read your signs on the way up,” Lana said, frowning.
The woman, ignoring her, turned toward the adjacent building, whose front door was cracked as if someone were peering out of it. “Jasp! You’ve got visitors!”
The door opened and a shirtless man with a shaved head came out, squinting in their direction, a fanny pack girdling his waist. He had a little homemade broom in his hand, like the kind you might use to brush off a suit. He peered at them for some time, then bent over carefully and swept the ground in front of his bare feet with the little broom before taking a step. He hunched toward them this way, sweeping the dirt before him as he walked. Lana wondered if he was clearing a path for Jasper’s appearance. Was Jasper king of this wretched cult? Some kind of extinction pooh-bah, getting the red-carpet treatment?
The man who’d been clearing the path stopped sweeping and stood up straight and astonished Lana by smiling. She recognized the face, of course, gaunt as it was, but only felt a hundred percent sure when she saw the bulge of the pacemaker below his collarbone. Lana hugged him, instinctively, but Jasper just stood there, the broom handle poking her in the stomach. It was like hugging a tree. A tree that stank to high heaven. Were her eyes watering because of the smell? Mr. Margolis seemed to be in shock, staring at Jasper as if he didn’t recognize his own son.
“What are you doing here?” Jasper said.
“What are you doing here?” Lana said. She looked at his broom. “Are you, like, the janitor?”
Jasper laughed. He was tanner than she would have thought possible: alarmingly tan, in that charbroiled way that made you think about being made of meat. If she hadn’t known his age, Lana would have pegged him for forty. His forehead was mapped with wrinkles, old-person ones, and he had that look that addicts seemed to get, that crooked-face thing, as if it had come slightly off its hinges. Rousing himself, Mr. Margolis tried to hug him too; Jasper stepped back and left his father stranded there for a second with his arms out. If Jasper felt guilty for doing this, it didn’t show on his face.
“It’s a monastic broom,” he said defensively. “An ogha. Jain mendicants use them.”
“You’re, like, a Jainist monk?”
“God no. We don’t pretend to be Jains. For one thing, we don’t believe mankind can be saved. Or in the path of four jewels.” He rolled his eyes at her, as if she had the slightest idea what he was talking about. “But we do find their daily practice inspiring—particularly when it comes to ahimsa.”
“Well, you’ve got the smell down. You’ve definitely practiced that. When’s the last time you had a shower?”
Jasper smiled at her.
“Never mind. Don’t answer that.”
“Like Jains, we believe all forms of life are sacred, no matter how minute. It’s why we don’t step on insects.” He held up his little broom. “Man is a scourge. Just by being born, we’ve done irreparable damage. The least we can do is spare other creatures.” He said this last bit woodenly, even with a kind of boredom, as if he were reading it off a teleprompter.
“Jasp,” Mr. Margolis said hoarsely.
Jasper, ignoring him completely, peered at his father’s car. “Hey, did you bring anything to eat?”
Mr. Margolis glanced at Lana and the woman with dreadlocks and then walked over to the Audi and rummaged through something in the backseat before returning with a bag of Doritos. Jasper looked elated. He snatched the Doritos from Mr. Margolis’s hand without looking at his face. Jasper handed Lana his broom and ripped open the bag right then and there, shoveling chips into his mouth. Boros, the one-legged dog, trundled his way over to Jasper’s side in search of crumbs, punting himself along with the pole of his leg. The woman with dreadlocks watched Jasper stuff his face with a look of disgust, then snatched the bag from his hands before he was finished.
“Maybe you should give your visitors a tour.” She looked at Lana and Mr. Margolis. “I’m sure the celebrity actress is a busy woman. Unless they’re planning on joining the congregation?”
“My back is killing me,” Jasper said, staring at the bag of Doritos in her hand.
“Step mindfully. You can give the broom a rest for an hour.”
Jasper nodded. The woman had some power over him that felt unnatural. Lana didn’t like it. And how did she know Lana was an actress? Lana handed the little broom back to Jasper, who stuck it in one of his belt loops. Stepping gingerly, he led them back along the path he’d swept and along the side of the building where he presumably lived, its windows glinting in the sun so that you couldn’t see inside. A pane in one of the windows was broken; someone had taped a piece of paper over it that doubled as a sign. A Perversely Distressing Interval of Consciousness, it read. Still ignoring Mr. Margolis—pretending, in fact, that he wasn’t there—Jasper led Lana to the rear side of the barracks, where a hidden menagerie was sheltering from the heat. There was a pen for sheep and another one for goats, most of whom were lying in the shade cast by a barn made from recycled pallets; the chickens were a bit more active, or at least vocal, one of them bobbing up the little UFO ramp that led to their coop. There were even some peacocks roaming about, dragging their green trains through the dirt.
Lana nodded at a man in a sleeveless T-shirt who was tinkering with an electric dirt bike flipped upside down—but he just stared at her with a tube of something in his hand. Jasper made no effort to introduce her. He led them past the goat barn to a foul-smelling garden stockaded by hay bales, lush with squash and tomato plants, from which an elderly woman was pruning branches; the woman stared at Lana from under the brim of a cowboy hat, frozen in midprune. Mr. Margolis waved at the gardener and said hello. Like Dirt Bike Guy, she failed to respond, merely gazed at them curiously, as if they’d invaded her ancestral village. Upon seeing Jasper she seemed to rouse from her trance, enough to say, “Hey, Seahorse,” and blow him a kiss.
“Did she call you Seahorse?” Mr. Margolis asked.
Jasper continued to ignore his father, treating him like he wasn’t there.
“Are you, um, involved with that woman?” Lana asked.
“No. Ha. I mean, aside from the occasional cuddle puddle.” Jasper said this with a straight face. “Anyway, we’re all celibate here.”
“You are?”
“It’s not worth the risk.”
“Of emotional fallout?”
“Of procreation!”
He led them past the vegetable garden, around the far side of the goat barn, where Lana was startled by the sight of a naked man sitting on the toilet. The man stared at her nonchalantly, as if he were waiting for a movie to start.
“Here’s our composting toilet,” Jasper said, explaining how they used “humanure.”
“There’s no door?”
“The goats don’t mind. I think they appreciate it.”
“It has two toilet seats,” Lana said.
“Yep, you can sit side by side. Shoot the shit, in more ways than one!”
She had nothing to say to this. When had he started talking this way? Like some demented hobo? Lana felt sick inside. It wasn’t a normal sick, but the way you might feel after visiting someone in the hospital, realizing they were worse off than you’d imagined. Jasper pointed out the pit mine in the distance, cut implausibly out of the enormous layer cake of a mesa: an old iron mine, though it hadn’t been in operation since the 1980s. The walls of it were terraced, like one of those Incan farms. It was impressive, even kind of beautiful, in the way Lana imagined an expressway might look to a Martian. She wondered if Jasper’s church had bought the land or was merely squatting. She’d begun to feel like she was squatting herself—not here, on this particular strip of land, but on the earth itself. It was because they were walking so slowly.
“Where are we going?” Lana asked.
“To see Nautilus.”
It sounded like something from SpacePaladins. “Is that a person?”
“We make the pilgrimage once a day. For inspiration. Are you familiar with Anekantavada, the principle of many-sided reality?”
“Of course not,” Lana said.
“What we think of as reality is only a taste,” Jasper said. “A teensy little part. Most of what’s here we don’t experience at all.” Again, he seemed half-bored by his own words, as if he were being forced to listen to himself. “It’s best, given the vastness of our ignorance, not to interfere.”
“Are you planning on living out here forever?” Mr. Margolis asked. His beard glistened with sweat. He looked angry—furious, even—though not at his son. Jasper continued to ignore him. “Jasper. Jasp! I’m talking to you.”
Still nothing.
“Seahorse!”
Jasper spun around, the swiftest he’d moved all afternoon. “Don’t call me that,” he hissed. “What are you even doing here?”
“I’m worried about you.”
“I didn’t ask you to meddle in my life.”
Mr. Margolis removed his sunglasses again. His eyes were like sores. “I’m your father.”
“Exactly,” Jasper said, as if Mr. Margolis had admitted to drowning puppies.
He spun back around and led them toward the ruins of the mine looming at the edge of the pit. He moved faster now that they were away from the barracks, shielded from view by a cluster of crumbling brick buildings. An abandoned transfer tower sat rusting in the sun, its long conveyor encircled by catwalks; it looked like one of those kids’ toys with the racing penguins, doomed to ride the same escalator forever. Jasper ignored the tower, his eyes fixed ahead of him. Lana wanted to tackle him to the ground, wanted to lie in the dandelions together and sneeze happily on his face—anything to shock him back to the kid he used to be. Instead she asked him who this Nautilus person was, if they lived down here in the rubble, and he explained a bit condescendingly that yes, she lived down here, striving for zero impact, though the real question might be what we even mean by “live.” We say so-and-so “lives” in a house, or in Cincinnati, Ohio, but what we really mean is that they consume resources, the very least of which is physical space.
“How does she eat?” Lana asked when he was done lecturing her.
Jasper shrugged. “Alms, I guess you’d call them. We make sure that she’s well fed.” He unzipped his fanny pack, pulling out a handful of radishes. “I should warn you she’s sky-clad.”
“Sky-clad?”
“That’s what Jains call ‘naked.’ ”
They stopped at an abandoned railway cart parked outside of a pair of tunnels reinforced with corrugated steel. You could hear the wind siphoning through the tunnels: a phantom roar, like the sound of a seashell. Painted on the wall between the tunnels were the words:
Digging
Toward
Tomorrow
Jasper directed them toward one of the tunnels, which smelled like urine; peering into it, Lana could see a person sitting in the middle of the tunnel, about halfway toward tomorrow. The person gazed—cross-legged, perfectly still—at the opposite wall. A brown sleeping bag was rolled up beside her.
Jasper handed Lana the radishes in his hand, then urged both her and Mr. Margolis inside. It didn’t occur to her to resist. They were guests in this strange country; you did what the natives asked. The sound once she’d stooped inside the tunnel was considerably louder, a low-pitched organ-y drone that seemed to come from nowhere, or rather everywhere, as if she’d stepped into a didgeridoo. The person sitting in the tunnel was part of the sound, was maybe even creating it herself, the way a whale makes sounds without opening its mouth. Lana trained her eyes on the halo of light at the other end. Her sneakers crunched on the gravel, but the woman in the tunnel failed to move or look up. Even when Mr. Margolis sneezed—it smelled rancid in there, eye-wateringly bad, like a latrine—the naked woman failed to acknowledge it. Her body, unlike Jasper’s, was white as a bone. As thin as one too: you could see the actual cage of her ribs. Her head, shaved nearly bald, was covered in insect bites.
Lana crouched down and dropped the radishes in her empty bowl, but the woman didn’t glance at her or move so much as an inch. Lana’s heart seemed to have stopped moving too. It occurred to her that the woman might be dead. But she wasn’t dead; she was sitting there with her eyes open. A living statue.
Lana backed away from the woman. Something radiated from her, the kind of heart-whistling emptiness Lana used to feel as a girl grabbing laundry from the basement or questing to the bathroom in the middle of the night. A similar fear snaked through her now: ancient and terrible, realer than she was somehow, as if everything true and good in the world—everything she’d thought would protect her, love and kindness and sanity—had turned out to be a hoax. Lana hastened back to the entrance and then stumbled free of the tunnel, feeling like she’d narrowly escaped with her life. Mr. Margolis, who’d emerged alongside her, seemed spooked as well, trembling as he put his sunglasses back on.
“Where’s Jasper?” she asked.
Mr. Margolis glanced around helplessly. He patted the front pockets of his jeans, frisking himself.
Lana’s throat went dry. “Tell me you have the key for your car. The fob.”
“I left it in the cupholder, I think.”
“Shit,” Lana said, fearing the worst. She lived in Hollywood and knew plenty of recovering addicts. They retraced their steps through the abandoned mine—moving much faster this time, practically jogging—and returned to the barracks, startling some peahens pecking at the dirt. Sure enough, the Audi was gone. In its place sat the woebegone dog on its little dolly. The dreadlocked woman was there too, looking much less friendly. In fact, she looked like she wanted to cure the earth’s cancer, starting with Lana and Mr. Margolis. In her hand was the half-eaten bag of Doritos, which she threw at their feet.
“The fiend has escaped.”
They called a ride-share, a woman named Josefina, who took them into Twentynine Palms and then agreed to drive them around for a bit, Mr. Margolis paying her directly from his wallet. A rosary dangled from her rearview mirror, tilting to one side when she turned. It was a tiny town, the kind of place where the main street is as wide as a football field and no one seems to get out of their car even to eat. Rows of palm trees flamed in the wind. They passed a visitors’ center, a food pantry, a casino that looked like a Walmart. The driver, who was very talkative—in fact, seemed to believe she was taking them on a tour of some kind—explained that the casino was owned by the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, who were really Chemehuevi Indians; if they were interested, there was a Chemehuevi burial ground on Adobe Road.
“Where do people go to buy drugs?” Mr. Margolis asked.
The driver didn’t answer him. In fact, she stopped talking to them at all. Nonetheless, she took them past some motels and divey-looking bars and then out beyond the center of town to where the road became highway again, unbroken by traffic lights; a guy was walking his bike along the shoulder, a jumble of plastic bags swinging from his handlebars. The driver pulled over abruptly. Mr. Margolis offered her fifty dollars to wait for them, and Josefina nodded unhappily, glaring at Lana, who debated staying in the car and letting Jasper’s dad go on without her. She’d already endured far more on this trip than she’d bargained for. But she had that parched feeling in her throat, a kind of hangover-y thirst, as if everything they’d witnessed that day—Nautilus, the one-legged dog, Jasper’s making off with his dad’s car—were somehow her fault.
Lana grabbed one of the water bottles from the door pocket and followed Mr. Margolis outside, peering into the crater between the highway and some railroad tracks. Spreading across a scrubby strip of sand, under a canopy of stars, was an encampment of tents and tarps and dugouts rigged up with poles and cords and scraps of scavenged plywood, describing an inventive miscellany of shapes. A few of them had solar panels propped in front of them. The panels shone in the moonlight, like TV sets.
Mr. Margolis glanced at Lana, then took off his watch and stuffed it in his pocket. The man with the bike headed down a trail to the encampment, bags jostling as he walked; Lana and Mr. Margolis followed him, picking their way through broken glass. You could see the seam of mountains in the distance, lit pinkly by the Milky Way, which hovered over the tallest peak like a genie escaped from a bottle. When they reached the bottom of the berm, the guy with the bike turned to greet them, inquiring in a friendly Southern twang if they needed help. His hair was wet, slicked back behind his ears.
“We’re looking for a boy,” Mr. Margolis said. “A man, I mean.” He described Jasper as best he could.
“Can’t help you, I’m afraid. I’ve been at the Circle K, performing my ablutions.” The man posed as if for a photograph, grinning. He was wearing a T-shirt that said Mississippi State. How far away from home he was—they all were.
“Is there a particular…spot for addicts?”
The man laughed. “Take your pick.”
Lana and Mr. Margolis snooped around for a while, using the flashlight on his phone. They called Jasper’s name, poking their heads into tents and tarps and shacks, even descending into a literal hole in the ground, an enormous burrow Lana might have mistaken for an animal’s except for the two-by-fours bolstering the ceiling. She would not have imagined yesterday that she’d walk into a human fox den, let alone in the middle of the night—would not have imagined it, frankly, in a million years—and yet here she was doing it, of her own free will. Most everyone they looked in on was asleep, zipped into a sleeping bag. The smell, the poverty, the sense of general trespassing: it didn’t seem that different from Jasper’s commune. The more Lana looked around, the more natural it all seemed to her, inevitable really, as if the truly unnatural thing was living in an apartment, a house, pumping water through the ground—through an aging labyrinth of pipes—so that someone could spray herself with it and take a shit indoors. That ancient fear snaked through her again, tingling her scalp; she could almost hear the didgeridoo sound in her ears. She had the eerie feeling—roaming these homes built from nothing, from the earth’s surfeit of debris—of having emerged from the other end of the tunnel.
Eventually they came to a glowing plywood shack with a tattered American flag stuck to the top of it. Inside was a woman cooking something on a camp stove, squatting next to a framed replica of The Blue Boy, though in the replica for some reason the boy’s outfit was green. Mr. Margolis asked her if she’d seen Jasper.
“Skinny guy? With a face?”
What did this mean? Lana had no idea. Nevertheless, they followed the woman’s directions, walking around an open pit of trash and finding their way to a small tent not far from the train tracks. A guy sat in a lawn chair outside the tent, illuminated by one of those rechargeable lanterns and surrounded by what looked like the contents of a storage unit: lamps, golf clubs, a vacuum cleaner with a red bow tied around its neck. Death metal roared from a radio in his lap. The guy had his eyes closed, nodding softly to the music as if it were Vivaldi. Mr. Margolis asked him if he’d seen Jasper, and the guy dropped the radio in his lap and took off running, hopping over the train tracks and vanishing into a ditch on the other side.
Lana poked her head inside the tent, where a shirtless man lay facedown beside a pile of boxes, shivering as if he had a fever. In front of him was a cookie of vomit. He tried to lift himself up on all fours, using his elbows for leverage, like a baby doing tummy time.
“Jasper?” Lana said.
“Dad,” he said, paying no attention to her. Mr. Margolis had crawled inside the tent and was kneeling beside him. “Where are you?”
“I’m right here.”
“Dad. Dad Dad Dad Dad.”
Jasper began to cry. Still kneeling, Mr. Margolis shone the flashlight right into his eyes, inspecting his pupils, then grabbed one wrist to check his pulse.
“Heart rate’s okay. Do you need Narcan?”
Jasper shook his head. “I was just dreaming about this animal. The godflow. It’s like a wolf dog, get it? But it experiences time backward. It gets smaller and smaller and then gives birth to its parents. When it’s a pup. Of course, to him, the godflow, they’re actually his children.”
Mr. Margolis helped him out of the tent and then steadied him as he wobbled upright on one foot, holding him around the waist. Jasper put his head on Mr. Margolis’s shoulder. Lana switched off the radio. She offered Jasper the bottle of water, but he ignored it completely, clinging to his father. He had no interest in her whatsoever. One of his feet, black with dirt, seemed to be bleeding.
“You didn’t bring shoes?”
“I lost my fanny pack,” Jasper said, patting his waist.
“Where’s the car?”
He shrugged.
“You have no idea where the fucking car is?” Lana said.
Mr. Margolis shot her a look. “We’ll find it tomorrow.”
“What?”
“We can stay at a hotel or something.”
“I need to go back,” Jasper whimpered.
“I saw a Days Inn. On the way into town.”
“No, Dad! Please. They’ll throw me out!” He started crying again.
“Okay. Shhhh. We’ll figure it out in the morning.”
Lana stared at Mr. Margolis. “I’m not spending the night in that creep-show cult. It’s like Jainstown out there.”
Mr. Margolis pulled the watch from his pocket. “At this point, it’s practically sunrise.” He seemed transformed, lighter somehow, as if Jasper were supporting him and not the other way around. “Let’s get him dried out first. Back at the collective. I don’t want him climbing out a motel window, looking for his fellow seahorses.”
Jasper couldn’t walk—his foot hurt too much—so Mr. Margolis hoisted him onto his back, gripping him under the legs and carrying him like that, as he must have done a thousand times before. It was a long walk back to the highway. Jasper’s foot was dripping blood, or so it looked like in the dark. Lana resisted bringing up the path of four jewels, whether he’d strayed onto it by mistake. She was hungry and exhausted and pissed about the car. Mr. Margolis, on the other hand, seemed happier than she’d seen him all day—or at least more vivid and alive, tearing purposefully up the trail to the road, Jasper bouncing on his back like a little boy.
They couldn’t all fit in the backseat, not with Jasper perching his foot on someone’s lap to keep it elevated, so Mr. Margolis offered to take the front. Jasper seemed okay with this. He leaned back against the door, eyes invisible in the dark. He surprised Lana, on the ride back to the commune, by reaching for her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, staring at Jasper’s foot in her lap. It smelled like roadkill. She felt her eyes tearing up again, though not from the smell.
“What for?”
She wanted to say, For not realizing how much trouble you were in. “You sent me those things in the mail,” she said instead. “I never even emailed you back.”
“And you can’t forgive yourself.”
She nodded.
“Poor sibling star,” Jasper said, leaning toward her. She could smell the puke on his breath. For a second, his eyes flaring in the approaching headlights of a truck, Lana wondered if he might hurt her. She almost wanted him to. Instead he made a face at her, a gruesome one, the kind they used to make as kids, lolling his head to one side and crossing his eyes. Lana couldn’t bring herself to make one back.
Jasper and Mr. Margolis shared the only mattress. There were no cushions to be had, not even a pillow, so Lana lay on the cold floor of the barracks and balled up the blanket Jasper had given her and slipped it under her head, shivering in the breeze from the broken window. It was like trying to sleep on an ice rink. Not that she planned to sleep anyway. She didn’t trust these freaky insect worshippers. Her shoulder ached. Also her head. Also her heart.
Mr. Margolis was telling a story about some crazy French guy who ate a baby. Jasper had insisted he tell it. Begged him, as if his life depended upon it. Mr. Margolis had sighed, but Lana could tell he was pleased—or at least pleased to be spending the night this way in some creepy desert commune, telling bedtime stories to his strung-out son. He really was depressed, if this was the best thing to happen to him in a while. It made Lana miss her own father, the way he used to tell her about the wolverines he’d been tracking or make up funny stories about the Washburns next door. Her mom, too—though she drove Lana crazy sometimes. She’d been unhappy for so long, her mother. Though Lana was beginning to think it wasn’t unhappiness her mother suffered from so much as happiness, or at least an idea of it that didn’t exist. If she admitted to being happy, what would she aspire to anymore? The last time she’d visited LA, her mother had complained the whole time about “the jerkwaterness” of Montana—the lack of art museums, of ethnic food, of footwear that wasn’t waterproof—then seemed secretly relieved when it was time to fly home.
It was like that Russian movie with the magic room in it, the one that supposedly grants you your deepest desire in life. But what if your deepest desire in life was not to fulfill your deepest desire in life? What if it was, simply, to keep on desiring it?
What would be in Lana’s magic room? Sleep. A bed that dissolved her into a puddle. Lana listened to the sound of Mr. Margolis’s voice, its reedy rise and fall, anything to put her mind off the scorpions she imagined were setting up camp in her sneakers. If only her agent could see her now, how guilty she’d feel. What was this agent’s name? Lana didn’t remember. Her mind wasn’t working. Mr. Margolis’s voice feathered away like smoke, leaving Lana alone in the dark. Except it wasn’t dark. A light hovered in the distance. She must have been dreaming, because she was in that tunnel again with the naked woman, the woman who refused to move. The bowl at her feet was full of popovers, the kind Lana’s mother used to make on Sunday mornings. They smelled like Montana. Lana approached the woman, very slowly, no longer scared but trembling with joy. The light in the distance blinded her, like the beam of a flashlight. That was where the room was. The hidden room, the room with the rain inside of it. She didn’t want to look at the woman, but her legs, thin as a lamb’s, were in the way. They were spread open, exposing the woman’s vagina. It was the biggest vagina Lana had ever seen. There was something being mined in there. That was the sense Lana had: that something was being pulled out of the woman, something old and not of this earth, maybe even older than the solar system itself, like the diamonds found in meteorites. “The celebrity actress doesn’t have all day,” Nautilus said suddenly, in the voice of the awful woman with dreadlocks.
Lana woke up with a jolt. Goats bleated outside. How long had she been asleep? It felt like a minute but had clearly been hours. The window was pale with light. Jasper and Mr. Margolis were asleep, brought face-to-face by the sagging mattress.
Lana sat up slowly, still half-submerged in her dream. The celebrity actress doesn’t have all day. Okay, fair enough. No argument there. Lana stared at Jasper, whose face in the brittle light looked like it had been crushed and smoothed out again, like a piece of paper rescued from the trash. If she died tomorrow, what could she say to justify being born? That she’d been in a couple dumb TV shows? Acted in a video game, for which she’d been painted turquoise? Been in love with a few women, then driven them away with her neediness, her sleeping around? None of these seemed to justify bumping the population by one, the damage she caused simply rolling out of bed every morning.
What on earth had she been doing? Literally: what, on this earth, had she been doing?
Something sounded from outside. Footsteps. Lana sat there on the floor, listening to their approach. Her heart was pounding, though she couldn’t say why. You could live out here, pretending to be dead, or you could make a fucking impact. Make sure the earth remembered you. Anything in between was a waste of space. A peacock screamed from somewhere: a dreadful sound, like a leprechaun being murdered. The light in the window darkened. And then a familiar voice, the one from her dream:
“Rise and shine, Jasper’s maker! Rise and shine, Lana Meek! Rise! Shine!”