Welcome to the Slipstream

by Natalka Burian

  “I’m going to go get some,” she said. “And then we’ll go. Maybe we can make it back here before tomorrow morning.” As she walked away, I noticed that her movements were all tense and jerky.

  “I really hope so,” I said.

  “We’ll be quick,” Alex replied, looking down at my throat, and I looked at his chin. It’s hard to look into someone’s eyes when you’re standing so close. It was all so awkward and terrible. I wanted to remember that morning in the tent with Alex, but I also just couldn’t stand to think about it. I knew how strange that was. Any sane, normal girl wouldn’t have been able to stop obsessing over that morning with him.

  Alex ran his hands up my arms and set one lightly on each side of my neck.

  “Van?”

  “Yeah?” My eyes were still on the squared-off end of Alex’s chin.

  “I just think you’re great. And that you can do anything.” He leaned in and kissed me, but less intensely. It wasn’t a climbing-into-you kiss, but it was still warm and made me feel like what he’d said was true.

  “Thanks,” I said as we hugged. “You too.”

  “Call if you and your mom escape first, okay? If I never have to come back here, that would be great.”

  “No pressure or anything,” I said. Every word hummed with hysteria. I was shocked that I was making sense. Is this how it feels for Mom? I wondered.

  I heard Marine shuffling her feet behind me. At least I hoped it was Marine.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Alex and I said at the same time.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I didn’t move from the spot they left me standing in until they—and the trail—twisted out of my sight. I took a deep breath. You can do this, I thought. You’re smarter than all of these people here. I was surprised and a little embarrassed when the thought came to me, but also immediately soothed by how true it seemed.

  I just hoped the Mom I found with Laurel in a couple of hours was the right Mom, and not the monster I’d met my first night in the camp. I hid Marine’s phone in the waistband of my pants—it was invisible under my sweatshirt. Laurel wouldn’t know I had it unless she had some kind of communal bath planned. I wandered back toward the middle of camp. The central bonfire had already been built back up, and so had Laurel. She looked washed and brushed since our earlier discussion, and her billowing white robes were back on. They were dingier, though, and freckled with red dust.

  Laurel strode around, pointing at people, with Carapace and Ulrike on her heels. Again, Carapace carried his breakfast-in-bed tray, and Laurel grabbed something from it every once in a while to hand off to someone around the fire. There were braided vines, hanging down like beads at a fortuneteller’s, that separated a small area from the rest. Behind the curtain of vines there was some kind of altar. One of the tablecloths had been draped over a boulder, and candles of various heights burned on the magenta and black surface. A few items were laid out, but casually, like they’d been thrown there: a cell phone, the thin chain of a gold necklace in a little lumpy pile, and a ring of braided hair rested in the middle. The necklace looked very familiar—the pendant on it was not actually a pendant but a wedding ring. It was Mom’s wedding ring. It was an altar to Mom.

  I stopped walking; I couldn’t move any farther without feeling dizzy. Jesus, is that her actual hair? I didn’t want to get any closer to find out. Just get through whatever this is. If talking to myself before had been comforting and even motivating, here, beside Mom’s shrine, it was the reverse. I’m going insane, I thought. Maybe they gave me some kind of hallucinogen while I was in the tepee. Maybe I didn’t even notice it. And if so, this isn’t any fun at all. It’s the complete opposite of fun.

  The entire camp had gathered around the altar in a dense, stinking clot. I heard a tambourine somewhere, over the drums and the chanting. I tried to focus on that one sound, to zero in on the least sinister thing in the realm of my senses. It’s just a tambourine. You can do this.

  Laurel climbed up onto the altar; Carapace and Ulrike boosted her up. The chanting stopped but the drumming continued—so did the tambourine, thank God. I tried to breathe along with its benign rattle while Laurel waved her arms.

  “Spirits!” she shouted up into the hot blue sky.

  “Spirits!” repeated the campers all around me.

  “Ancestors!”

  “Ancestors!” Laurel’s followers did not have a lot of call-and-response experience. Their repetition of her invocations was sloppy and ragged, almost like they were blurring the words instead of strengthening them.

  “Masters of the cosmos!”

  “Masters of the cosmos!”

  I’d been pushed up close to the fire, and my throat hurt from the smoke.

  “We seek your blessings and guidance as we strike out into the wilderness to greet our prophet! Carapace!” Laurel shouted this practically into Carapace’s face. “Bring the offering!”

  Oh God, I thought, she’s going to slaughter a lamb.

  Mercifully, Carapace did not bring Laurel any living creature. His breakfast-in-bed tray was filled with polished copper bowls, and, by the way he carried it low against his thighs, you could tell it was heavy. Ulrike handed up the first bowl.

  “Honey!” Laurel shouted.

  “Honey!” repeated her campers.

  Laurel turned the bowl over and a thin amber stream fell into the sand below the altar. Ulrike traded her a fresh bowl for the empty one.

  “Wine!” Laurel called.

  “Wine!-ine! Wi!” shouted the others.

  She poured the wine over the honey—it was red wine, and not quite purple enough not to look like blood. Ulrike passed her a third bowl, then a fourth—milk in one and saffron threads in the other. The empty bowls were stacked at Ulrike’s feet in a woozy-looking, sticky copper tower.

  The rank puddle at the altar’s base looked a little less like vomit thanks to the saffron. It looked like a pile of delicate autumn leaves covering a pool of vomit.

  “We invoke the blessing of fire,” Laurel called out to us. “We work under the guidance of the sun and the moon. Sofia has received our message in their light. Now,” she said, bending over to retrieve the ring of hair. “We pay tribute to fire!”

  Carapace procured the crème brûlée blowtorch from his ceremonial tool belt and handed it to Ulrike, who passed it to Laurel. She flicked the cap of the torch open and pressed the button to ignite it, but nothing happened. She banged the base of the torch against the heel of her hand and tried again; still nothing. She turned to Carapace in a huff, speaking to him in a low voice the rest of us couldn’t hear. Already-tan Carapace flushed a dangerous, hypertensive red. He shook the torch, fiddled with something on the side, and then had it burning.

  Laurel touched the ring of hair to the flame, and it blazed up immediately. She dropped it onto the puddle of honey, wine, milk, and saffron. I pinched my nose shut and breathed through my mouth, willing the wind to take the smell of burning hair, to take Laurel, to take all of these people, somewhere else.

  The chanting had devolved into a kind of roaring. A breeze moved around some of the stench from things-that-should-not-be-burning. I closed my eyes and let the clean air wash over me. I hadn’t realized how sweaty I was. I reached under my shirt and felt my skin slick with it. No wonder I was so dizzy.

  Part of me wanted to run after Alex and Marine, to cut my losses with Mom. Maybe I’d live with Ida, maybe I’d try something normal with Alex. Mom could find her way back alone, eventually. But, as I broke free from the massive, sweating group, I knew where my place was—and it wasn’t anywhere normal.

  I’d have to get back to Laurel and walk with her. I’d have to talk to her and not betray my plan to escape. The campers broke into a series of loose knots around the altar. I found Ulrike’s cool blonde head in the crowd and decided to hover near her.

  From where I stood, I watched Laurel and Carapace ladle out oatmeal at the head of a long, cloth-covered table. Hundreds of han
ds passed around bright blue paper bowls of mush. Since I was still on the outermost edge, I had no one to pass to when the man in front of me held out a bowl. So I took it and actually ate it. Despite the lingering acrid smell of burning hair—and despite the psychological ramifications of watching some lunatic cult leader light your mom’s hair on fire—I was incredibly hungry. It had been days since I’d eaten properly. I thought about Carol and Joanna, about how I really missed them. It was embarrassing, how much I missed them. I wondered what Carol would have said to these people.

  After all of the pouring and burning, I was surprised by how unceremoniously Ulrike, Laurel, and I left. Ulrike gathered me up while I was still hanging around the others, trying to figure out where they were throwing away their garbage.

  “Now we go,” she said, her accent chopping each word off at its last letter. She wore a small backpack and carried one of the ubiquitous jugs of water. She smacked me on the back and steered me toward the tepee where Laurel stood, surrounded by hangers-on. Carapace held the tent flap open, worrying the dirt with his foot, dejected.

  Laurel smoothed her bleached-white hair down as she nodded and smiled at her campers. They flurried around her, kissing her cheeks and pressing her hands to their hearts. Watching Laurel preen under their attention really drove home the appeal of cult leadership. Sure there had to be a lot of nonsense and drama, but there was also this other part: being widely, fiercely beloved. For a second I imagined it was me under the attention of all of these campers, and then I realized, if Mom and I stayed on here, it could be me—prophet’s daughter and all. Have you lost your mind? Knock it off! I told myself.

  Laurel gathered her robes around her and lifted them out of the sand, delicately, like some merchant’s wife in a renaissance painting. Without saying anything, Ulrike and I flanked her and we set off down the trail. When we were out of sight of the camp, Laurel slung the bulk of her robes over her shoulder, revealing a pair of purple running shorts and painfully skinny legs.

  “How long do you think, Ulrike?” Laurel asked.

  Ulrike squinted up at the sky, tilting back her golden head. “Forty minutes?” she replied. She looked at me doubtfully.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing, nothing. Ulrike just wants to make sure we are on time. It’s a delicate process.”

  I stepped into Laurel’s yielding footprints on the path where the trail narrowed. The path moved up, and there were a few difficult places where jagged rock formations clambered out of the ground into the middle of the track. Ulrike stood at the base of each of these obstacles and gave Laurel, then me, a hand climbing over. We waited for her on the other side, watching as she practically leapt over them and took her spot back at the head of our triad.

  “Van,” Laurel interrupted, “I didn’t see your friend this morning.”

  “Who, Alex?”

  “Yes, that handsome tall boy.”

  I shrugged, trying to convey no-big-deal-he’s-not-that-handsome-whatever.

  “Yeah, he went back for classes.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” she said.

  I just shrugged again. I was beginning to understand the beauty of shrugging—it was a really effective way not to communicate something you were trying to hide.

  The trunks of the juniper trees we passed began to look twisted, a sign, Laurel noted, that we were approaching the vortex.

  “It’s there,” Ulrike said, and pointed through a blur of leaves at the ring of stones that had contained last night’s fire. As we pushed through a bit of brush, I saw the ledge we’d left Mom on. I saw a scrap of her white robes caught in a tree branch. I saw her still-full jug of water. What I didn’t see, was her.

  “Sofia!” Laurel called, at first playfully, but when she noticed the fear on Ulrike’s tanned face, she began to call with more urgency. “Sofia! If you can hear me, call back! Sofia!”

  Ulrike immediately pounced onto the ledge and shook her head. She started to climb up the rock face, hopping on to whichever narrow footholds she could find. She looked out over us, over the trees, and shook her head again.

  “Do you?” Laurel cleared her throat and looked at me. “Do you think it’s the vortex?”

  Ulrike jumped down from the five-foot drop and landed like a superhero, in a crouch but with her head up, looking right at us.

  “Not vortex,” she said. “We look. Or we call rangers.”

  “No, we’re not calling any rangers,” Laurel said, biting her thumb. She looked from Ulrike to me. “Maybe she just needs a little more time. Surely the spirits will guide her back to us.”

  “She no has water,” Ulrike pointed out.

  I was breathing too fast. Calm down, I thought. I sat down in the dirt. I just couldn’t stand up anymore. Ulrike patted me on the shoulder.

  “I go look. You stay.”

  “Wonderful, Ulrike,” Laurel gushed. “Do you want a blessing before you leave?”

  “No, thank you,” Ulrike said, and bounded away, her hands holding on to the straps of her backpack.

  Laurel didn’t sit down. She walked around me in circles, and then started moving back and forth from the edge of the trail to the circle of stones that had contained the fire. She peered into the ring and scanned the ashes there.

  “Nothing!” she called back to me, as if that would make me feel better. As if “nothing” didn’t already sum up Mom’s chances out in the wilderness. Nothing was exactly what she had. Just as I began to wonder if Ulrike had been swallowed up by the vortex, she came crashing into the micro clearing where we waited.

  “No prophet,” she said. “I think get rangers.”

  “Ulrike,” Laurel began, visibly flustered, “I told you, nobody is getting any rangers. Don’t worry!” She gave a tight, nervous laugh. “It’s not like I didn’t have a plan for this.” She looked around, her head like an owl’s, scanning and searching the panorama of the clearing. Her gaze landed on me, like Aha. Like an exclamation point. “Van!”

  “Yes?”

  “Please stand.”

  I unfolded my legs and pushed myself up, but I didn’t walk over to Laurel, which I could tell was what she wanted. Ulrike took a swig of water from her jug and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “I know exactly what we’ll do. In times like this, spirit speaks to spirit. Sofia’s energy will respond to your energy,” Laurel said, in a like-duh kind of tone.

  “Okay, so you want me to call out to her?”

  “Well, yes, that’s part of it.” Laurel put her palms together like she was praying in a regular church. She pressed her lined-up fingers against her nose and mouth. “I want you to go out to her.” Because she was talking around her hands, I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her correctly.

  “You want me to go out to her, like out, out?” I asked. “You mean, like, into the wilderness here?”

  Laurel nodded contentedly. “That’s exactly what I mean! You, our prophet’s daughter,” and here she put her hands territorially on my arms, “will find the prophet! Why, you’re like a Sofia GPS! A homing device.”

  “I don’t think those are the same things,” I said, but tried to think as I talked to her. My ideas spun out in parallel lines as I struggled to keep the conversation with Laurel going. “Do you really think I’ll be able to do that?”

  But I thought, Maybe this is the best thing that could happen here. I have Marine’s cell phone; I’ll get reception; I’ll call the damn rangers; they’ll send some kind of helicopter, or whatever; everything will be okay.

  “I know you’ll be able to do it!” Laurel said. “And while you look, Ulrike and I will go back to camp and organize a search party.”

  “She has no woodsmanship,” Ulrike interrupted.

  Woodsmanship?

  “She doesn’t need woodsmanship,” Laurel said, waving away Ulrike’s concern. “She has her spirit guides. Leave her that water, though.”

  Ulrike dropped the jug in the sand and heaved off her olive-green backpack. “Her
e,” she said, handing over the bag. “You take.” I nodded and put the backpack on.

  “Always, you back here.” Ulrike stamped her foot on the ground, and I stamped mine in reply.

  “Okay.”

  “You go,” here Ulrike waggled her pointer and middle fingers back and forth like a tiny pair of legs, “you leave something.”

  “Um, okay.” I didn’t know what she meant, but the sooner I got them both out of there, the better.

  Ulrike waved her hands in the air like she was wiping something out. “Nein, nein, nein,” she said. She looked around the clearing and pulled a fistful of twigs from a low-hanging tree branch. She waved me over and I followed, watching. She mimed walking—taking a few mincing steps—and then stuck a twig in the earth. Then she took a few more steps and planted twig after twig until she arrived at the stone circle. She feigned confusion, throwing her hands in the air, in supplication to the spirits or whatever.

  Suddenly, Ulrike smiled and stuck her pointer finger into the air and then tapped at her temple. She shaded her eyes with her hand and pretended to be searching for a contact lens or something. When she discovered the first twig, she shouted “Ah!” and followed the trail back to me. “Yes?” she asked.

  “Yes, Hansel and Gretel, I get it.”

  “Jawohl! Hansel und Gretel!” she said. “Okay,” Ulrike called to Laurel.

  “I think I should do a brief blessing, and then you can be on your way.” Laurel scanned the clearing for something, anything she could use in the blessing. A wide smile broke out over her face. “Ah!” she shouted, jumping in the air a little. “The blood of the tree!” She pulled on my arm and we walked to a small pine tree oozing milky sap down one side of its trunk. “Please, close your eyes.”

  I heard Laurel whisper, and even Ulrike muttered a bit.

  “Now you may open them.” Laurel’s voice was still a whisper. Her hands were smeared with sap. She rubbed the place on my forehead between my eyes and on quarter-sized spots on the back of each hand.

  “Spirit,” she intoned, “I anoint this child, the daughter of our prophet. May her spirit guides keep watch through the day and the night, through all of her days and all of her nights.”