…
Some of us have jobs—tending bar or shelving books or roasting beans—but many of us do not. We live with our parents or we live with our siblings or we live with our adult children. They do not trust us to live alone. We fill our days with video games and YouTube clips and television programs that feature people stripping weight or hunting spouses or remodeling kitchens, fabricating a brighter life that seems unavailable to us. Sometimes we go days without talking to anyone except the pizza delivery guy.
We take Xanax. We take Lorazepam. We take Prozac and Paxil and Zoloft. Dozens of little moons dissolve inside us and make our brains deaden and our hearts fizz. Sometimes we are so sad we do not move. We will stare at the floor or the ceiling or the wall for hours, watch the shadows lean, watch a spider spin a ghostly sac around a carpenter ant. We sit so long that when we stand our muscles cramp and ache as if already succumbing to rigor mortis.
This is why Mr. Engel forces us to exercise. We take long hikes in Suicide Woods and the Columbia River Gorge and near the base of Mount Hood. He leads us blinking into the sun and charges our seizing calves and calcified spines into movement. He says that with regular exercise the heart’s chambers expand, the muscle thickens. And if there is anything we need, it is more heart.
Sometimes Mr. Engel invites over instructors, a yogi or sensei, who tell us how to breathe and bend our bodies. Mr. Engel lives in a bungalow in West Linn; his living room is walled by mirrors, like a dance studio, so that when we attempt a flying crow or take a fist to the temple we can watch ourselves falling a thousand times over.
We are falling when she walks in, when she opens the door without knocking and stands framed in sunlight and says, “Am I in the right place?”
We fall in love easily. All it takes is a smile at the supermarket register, two hands reaching for the sugar at the coffeehouse, a long look in the rearview mirror, and we’re yours. Though you’d never know it. We’re too afraid of rejection, Mr. Engel says, so we never take risks. We never talk to the puddle-eyed girl, the dimple-cheeked guy—never ask for a number, offer to buy a drink. We watch them sidelong and for a few minutes our hearts grow full with possibility—and then they walk away and the what-ifs and maybes are replaced by should-haves and might-have-beens and we punch a mirror and watch our reflection splinter and fall apart.
Her name is Tenley. We have never met anyone named Tenley before, but we feel like we should have. The letters sound so right when set next to one another, hard in the front, buoyant in the back. There should definitely be more Tenleys in the world.
She is an art major. A photography student at Portland State. She carries a long-nosed Canon around her neck. Her skin is offset by hair the same nightmare-black as her clothes. A nose ring and eyebrow stud catch the light and shine. She is tattooed with a Chinese character on her wrist, a strawberry ice cream cone on her biceps, a kraken with tentacles trailing up her neck. A blue teardrop drips down her cheek, and when Denver asks her about it—with her swampy, gurgling voice—when she jokes and says, “Isn’t that supposed to mean you killed someone? Have you killed someone?” Tenley says, “Not yet. But I’m going to,” and when we say, “Who?” she says, “Me. I’m going to kill me.”
Today, when we hike Suicide Woods, Tenley joins us. She says the moss-furred branches and giant sword ferns make this place look like some kind of fairy tale; that we ought to sprinkle breadcrumbs to find our way back. We picnic on a ridge of basalt knuckling out over the drainage. While we munch our chips and snap our apples and gurgle warm water from canteens, Mr. Engel asks us to imagine our best self.
We ask him what he means and he says, “I mean you at your best. Your ideal self. Dream big. What are you doing?”
Nobody wants to go first. Nobody ever wants to go first. We lower our heads and hide behind our bangs. So he calls on us.
Sam licks the peanut butter off his teeth and says he sees himself doing two girls at once. “And they’re loving it.”
Mason sees himself eating a steak at a fancy restaurant, but not too fancy, not like wearing-a-jacket fancy, just fancy enough that the steak is prime and the napkins linen.
Denver says she would be in a library, one with big stained-glass windows with colored light streaming through them, reading leather-bound books in a leather-backed chair, the kind with the gold buttons.
Then Tenley speaks. “I am at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood,” she says, “surrounded by movie stars in tuxedos and gowns. Someone tears open an envelope and calls my name and I climb the stairs to the stage in a strapless gold dress. The applause is thunderous. Dozens of cameras are trained on me, and tens of millions of eyes. I accept the statue. I reach into the scoop of my dress, as if to withdraw my acceptance speech, and while everyone’s still expecting me to pull out a slip of paper I grab my gun. It’s a Derringer. Then I bring it to my mouth and pull the trigger.”
No one says anything, not until later, after we pack up our lunches and zip up our backpacks and hike farther into the woods, after we find a body in the creek with the water foaming over it. When Tenley brings her camera to her eye and begins to snap photos, Mr. Engel says, in a shout so different from his usual whispery voice that it startles us, “Why would you say that? Don’t ever say that again!”
In his living room, Mr. Engel asks us to lie down and close our eyes and imagine we have been diagnosed with cancer. “You have three months to live,” he says. “What will you do in that time? How will you fill what remains of your life?”
He walks among us and against the carpet his socks sizzle with electricity.
“Now you have a month. What do you do? Where do you go?”
He waits a long time between his sentences.
“Now a week. Now a day. Now ten minutes.”
Our eyes are closed, but we see him through the scrim of our eyelashes when he leans over Tenley and says, “Who will you spend your time with?”
He reaches out to touch her cheek and a blue jolt erupts from his finger and makes her gasp.
We begin to watch them more carefully now, Mr. Engel and Tenley. She shows up to meetings early and leaves late. She thumbs a message on her phone and his pocket buzzes and he brings a hand to it and smiles. In his bathroom we discover another toothbrush. The bristles smell like cigarette ash.
She rides shotgun when he drives us to funerals. They sit together in the pews for the man who starved himself down to a bundle of flesh-smeared sticks, for the woman who hanged herself and now wears a turtleneck to conceal her torn windpipe, her lips superglued shut to contain her distended tongue.
One day, Tenley asks if she can take our photos. We say yes, but only if we can cover our faces, and she says okay and makes us line up. Some of us put our hands to our faces and peek through the fingers, and some of us pull our shirts up so that we appear headless. Tenley snaps and snaps and snaps.
We huddle around her and study the digital display. “You’re good,” we say when she clicks through the photos, some of us cast in shadow, others in light.
Then an image of Mr. Engel appears. He is sitting in bed, propped up by pillows. Shirtless. A halo of smoke blurs his face. “Oops,” she says. “Went too far.” She punches a button and the screen goes black.
Mr. Engel has a picture window with a bench beneath it. On the bench stands a life-size doll, a girl of about five or seven. She wears a different outfit every day: overalls, flowered skirts, white shorts with a yellow tank top. Her hair is sometimes in a braid and sometimes in pigtails and sometimes parted cleanly down the middle.
None of us have ever asked about her. But Tenley is different from the rest of us. Unafraid. She asks. She asks about the girl in the window and Mr. Engel goes quiet. His face slackens and his body withers and he stares into the middle distance and for a moment he becomes one of us, one of the group, not our leader but our peer.
“My daughter died,” he says in a voice we don’t recognize, a voice that sounds like something drawn from the bottom of a well. �
��She died three years ago and that was her doll.”
Tenley touches him on the wrist, traces the scars with her fingernail, and as she does, we all feel cut to the bone.
It is then that Mr. Engel asks us to leave. He says this so quietly we are not certain he says anything at all.
Then he says it again. “Please, please, please, leave.”
We haven’t been there more than five minutes, we haven’t even eaten the brownies or drunk the pink lemonade. We haven’t dimmed the lights and passed the talking rock, an agate the size of a plum, and shared our latest nightmare. We haven’t held hands and looked one another in the eye and promised to return next time. We aren’t ready. We don’t want to go. But we do as he tells us. We stand and file toward the door and let in a painful wedge of light. Everyone except Tenley. She remains at his side, stroking his scars, until he rips away from her and sweeps his hand like a scythe and says, “You too.”
A week passes before we hear from Mr. Engel, and when we do, his email is full of exclamation marks. He writes that he has been planning something for us! Something special! And he can’t wait to show us! An overnight getaway!
In the past he used exclamation marks sparingly. We are worried. We go to him, not wanting help, but wanting to help him.
It rains here as many days as it doesn’t. The sky is as gray as the pavement. Moss furs roofs. Mold breathes out of basements. We step out of Mr. Engel’s van into a spitting mist. We approach the wrought-iron gate that runs along the parking lot. Lone Fir Cemetery, the sign reads.
Mr. Engel’s smile trembles at the corners when he says he has a surprise for us. He says to follow him. We do. We always do. One sleeve of his cardigan is shorter than the other and he keeps pulling at a loose string, unwinding the fabric further, revealing his scars.
A backhoe has carved out thirteen holes. Beside each of them rises a mound of dirt squirming with worms. The headstones are blank. Inside a white tent—the kind you’d see at a catered wedding—sit thirteen coffins with their lids gaping.
“Who died?” we ask.
“You did!” he says and we see then that the coffins are empty.
He says he will outfit us with an oxygen tank, Clif Bars, a water bottle. We will spend the night six feet under. We will be buried alive. His voice wavers with excitement when he says this will be a kind of final test, and though it will be uncomfortable, we will return from the experience with a better appreciation for life. He wants so badly for this to be a good idea, and we want to believe in him. He burrows his hands into the pockets of his sulfur-yellow cardigan. “So who’s first?”
Of course Tenley volunteers. Who else among us would be so willing? She does not smile, but gives us the thumbs-up before we close the lid on her. We shoulder the weight of the coffin and carry it to the grave. With ropes we lower it into the muddy cavity, and with shovels we drop dirt over her until she vanishes. Mr. Engel slips the backhoe driver two twenties and he takes care of the rest.
It is hard to tell, over the noise of the engine, but we think we hear screaming.
Then it is our turn.
One night feels like many. We try to sleep, but in our dreams the walls narrow, the ceilings lower. Every breath is dirt-scented. Our eyes forget color; we do not know whether they are open or closed. There is no clock ticking off the minutes, no streetlamp glowing in the window, no sound except our panicked breathing as we imagine the worms tunneling toward us.
Maybe for the first time, we feel afraid to die.
Oxygen hisses through our masks. Whatever you do, Mr. Engel warned us, do not touch the tank. Even if you feel like you’re choking, you aren’t. Fiddle with the settings, though, and you will run out of air. But with the masks pressed to our mouths and our lungs gulping, we can’t help but feel certain he is wrong. He is wrong and we are going to die and this is what awaits us, this is what death is.
We want the backhoe driver to wake up, finish his coffee and cigarette, key the engine. We want Mr. Engel to pull his hands out of his pockets and get to work shoveling. And then, one by one, we hear a scrape, a thud, voices. The sun blinds us and we blink our eyes at shutter-speed. Our muscles cry out with the wonderful pain of movement. We weep and clumsily applaud and strangle one another into hugs. “I’m so happy,” we say. “I’m so fucking happy!”
The ground is marshy but the rain has stopped. The sun burns through a hole in the clouds. One more grave remains; the backhoe grumbles and carves up four feet of dirt as black and sticky as a chocolate cake. We drop into the pit and shovel off the rest, our blades sending up sparks when they clash. The coffin takes shape beneath us; we kneel and wipe away the dirt and knock at the lid and say, “Tenley! You did it, Tenley!”
It takes another five minutes to arrange the ropes, to haul the coffin from the hole, and by then we all feel giddy, exhilarated. When we undo the clasp, the coffin opens with a sucking sound.
“Oh no,” Mr. Engel says. “No, no, no.”
The satin is shredded. Her fingernails are broken and rimmed with blood. Her skin is as sepia-toned as an old photo, except for her tattoos, the teardrop on her cheek as blue as a speck of sky. On one side of her sits the oxygen tank—knobbed to its highest setting, emptied too early—and on the other, her camera, its final photo one of darkness.
Mr. Engel keeps saying, “No.” But he should be saying, Yes. Because we look at her and know he was right. His efforts have paid off. We are better. He has made us better. We have never felt more repulsed by death. We have never felt so terribly alive.
The Uncharted
In her childhood bedroom, Michelle papered one wall entirely with maps. She collected them from her grandmother’s National Geographic magazines. She tore them from her library’s world atlas and the gas station’s rack of Rand McNallys. She bought them for a quarter from garage sales and thrift shops. She loved the old tattered yellow explorers’ maps, because they made her dream of long ago and far away, and she loved the crisp, tidily folded road maps for their detail and clarity. But she especially loved a staggered collage she tacked up—of the globe, and then the United States, and then the state of Illinois, and then the city of Chicago. She made an X on each of them that indicated where she lived. She knew exactly where she belonged when she stood before it.
Now Michelle works in Silicon Valley and lives in San Francisco, a city that makes no sense. The streets—and the landscape—wander and bend in every direction, so that she sometimes feels as if she’s fallen into the upside-down topography of one of those M. C. Escher prints that some child has crayoned all over.
There’s nothing wrong with being particular. That’s what Michelle often tells herself. She wakes up at six and goes to bed at eleven every day. She irons her clothes and delights in the crispness of her jeans when she pulls them on. She buys segmented plates because she prefers her food not mix. She had all the hardware and fixtures in her apartment changed out to brushed steel so that they matched.
She calls it a dream job, her position at Atlas, a mapmaking tech firm popular for its navigation app and satellite-view maps. Their vans roam city streets and country highways across the world, all with camera units stationed on top that record a 360-degree view.
She is the field director of the Titan program. Her division uses the same camera technology as the vans—except on backpacks. Their goal is to map every inch of the planet. Every reef, every alleyway, every canyon. Everything. She has teams stationed in Marrakech, Bogotá, Reykjavík, the Great Barrier Reef, and beyond.
And one of them has gone missing. A team of four assigned to a northwestern sector of Alaska. Every evening they were supposed to uplink their data to the satellite, but sometimes teams in remote areas ran into problems—inclement weather, damaged equipment—so she tried not to worry at first. But after forty-eight hours passed, her panic heightened and made her lungs feel like tiny paper sacks with holes in them. Not only had her team failed to uplink, but their geo-locaters gave off no signal. They had gone dark.
/> Even if she’d had access to the final minutes of footage, the jumble of images probably would have confused her, like a torn-up map that didn’t align with any compass.
The four team members were spread out in a line, twenty yards apart, hiking through a maze of hemlocks and cedars crowned by mossy branches and skirted by sword ferns. There were three men and one woman, all in their twenties, dirt-smeared and tromping along in boots and canvas pants and thermal long-sleeves. They paced one another, marching through the woods like patrolling soldiers.
Their backs were bent from the weight of their Titan packs, each one with a camera unit that spun on a pole like a disco globe. It was studded with lenses that reflected the dazzle of sunlight. When in motion, it made a rusty chirping sound, like many crickets sawing their legs at once.
The wind whispered and the branches swayed and the shadows shifted and a two-toned whistle sounded. Maybe a bird. Or maybe not. The team did not appear to notice. They swatted at mosquitoes. They swigged from canteens. They studied the thick undergrowth before them, trying not to stumble.
Then one of them passed behind a tree, and never showed up on the other side of it. Gone.
A few paces later, the same thing happened to another. He was there. And then he was not.
The two remaining hikers continued forward unknowingly, until a few paces later, one of them jerked out of sight. Dragged down. He gave a strangled cry, and the remaining hiker paused. And looked around. But there was nothing to see. “Paul?” he said. “Sammy?”
The camera on his back whirred in dizzying circles. As if to follow it, he turned quickly. Branches spiked toward him. Shadows pooled beneath trees and bushes. His heel caught on a root and he nearly fell. “Jane? Where are you?” His eyes blinked rapid-fire. His breathing sharpened. “Guys?”
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