by Rowan Maness
He had to step around my body, and as he did I felt him check me out the way certain kinds of men do, like it’s beyond their control and they don’t even really want to. A lecherous scoop of a glance that leaves you taking stock of your whole existence. What did he see, when he looked? Young. A bikini under shorts and top. Sunburn setting in on my cheekbones and shoulders.
He smiled at me.
“Do you want more water?” the barista asked. I handed her my cup to refill.
Greg waited for his drink, and I watched him become less and less like James. It was like watching the color fade from a painting, leaving an outline, some negative space. I’d colored him in so easily.
Me: No way. You’re there?
Me: If I start driving now, Waze says I could get there by midnight
Me: Tonight, James
James: Oh my god
James: Please?
Me: I can’t wait anymore
• • •
My mom picked me up from the Starbucks on her way home from work. When she asked why I was stranded there, I explained the bare minimum without actually lying. Rhiannon was going to drop me off after school, but she wanted to get mani-pedis. We got in an argument over something stupid.
“I’m sorry, honey” was the cursory response, and then she was off about the dinner Dylan was supposed to be cooking for us that night, “Chilean specialties” he’d learned to make from the girl he was in love with.
“He’s in love with someone?” I asked, squirming in my seat a bit with a nervous stomach, thinking of Rosie driving out of Los Angeles. I was planning how best to prepare myself. Bath, exfoliants, the new outfit I’d bought months ago just in case this day ever came. This night.
I didn’t want to meet James at his hotel, though I knew it well from summers when my grandparents would visit and stay there. Dylan and I lived for it, the attached water park and room service and rotating restaurant.
But it wasn’t right for Rosie and James. They’d been limited by electronic devices for so long, they needed space. A sky full of stars and far-off storm clouds. An epic romantic backdrop. No one else around. The thought of telling someone where I was going, just in case, crossed my mind, but it didn’t stick. There wasn’t anyone to tell. The girls were gone. The boys—Shane and Dylan—would press for details and try to stop me.
Thoughts of James, knowledge of the closeness of him, kept other thoughts from seeping in, muted the coyote’s warnings. The clock on the dashboard skipped minutes, the scene out the car window switched irregularly. The gates of the Dream Palace were open, creaking.
On the highway, we passed a large park. I’d been there many times, on Girl Scout campouts and school field trips to the zoo and botanical gardens.
And there was something else, a weird monument. I saw it as we zoomed by, lit up against a holy Martian-red mountain.
A white pyramid.
Some long-gone governor’s burial site. In a park closed at night, but not gated or patrolled.
I linked James to the park’s website.
Me: I’ve found our place
Me: Look up “Hunt’s Tomb”
James and I would meet there on the rough sandstone path. We would hold hands and look down on the valley at night, the city a grid of stars across the desert floor.
• • •
Nina, almost at the end of her second glass of wine. Dylan on his fourth or fifth, and probably as many THC-laced gummy bears eaten over the course of the day. Joss sober but faint—not dizzy. Fading.
Dylan made salmon empanadas, so many they were heaped in a huge pile in the middle of the table. I picked at one but couldn’t taste anything, all my senses dulled by anxiety.
I was half aware of the conversation between Dylan and my mom turning tense, of the desperate hitch in her voice, the exasperation in his.
I held on to James, texting him as Rosie drove closer. Telling him what she was seeing, making frantic promises.
Me: I’ve passed Palm Springs
James: I want to take you there. Have you ever been?
Me: No
James: We’ll go
Me: I’m driving 100mph and it feels like I’m inching toward you
James: This is crazy
James: I can’t believe we’re doing it
James: Finally
Me: I’ll melt. I’ll dissolve
James: Will you make me wait? To touch you?
“Maybe that’s what you can focus on when you go back to school,” my mom was saying.
“When I what?” Dylan asked.
“I think CGCC has summer classes, and if you get all the basic requirements out of the way before fall, they probably have a program to shunt you into the culinary school—”
“Shunt me?” Dylan was almost yelling.
I left the table, moving upstairs to my room, again losing seconds on the stairs, going up one by one but blacking out between, phone open, nothing changed on it, no new ideas, no new feelings.
James, waiting in a hotel room. Passing the hours by writing to me and readying himself. Three miles from where I stood, where the ending of Joss was happening. I thought about packing a bag—taking my computer, clothes, things I thought I’d miss—but I was incapable of looking too far into the future. I expected that, upon meeting James, time would begin to move sideways, not forward. Maybe a version of me would stay behind, and nobody would even know I’d gone.
I fed the lizard a couple strips of red pepper I’d taken from the dinner salad and sat on my bed.
Me: As soon as I see you I’m going to want you
James: It’s our duty
Believer and Mr. Lauren were texting me, too. Believer saying he knew where I was going. Mr. Lauren asking how I was.
I looked at the broken windowpane above me and tried to draw up a curse or an anti-jinx to keep Believer from following James and me to Hunt’s Tomb at midnight. I said things out loud, for protection against them.
“Believer will be there.”
“James won’t show up.”
I saw it like lining things up. All of these things leading to the sharp apex of a white pyramid.
“James isn’t real and he’s Believer.”
That last one worried me. I talked to James far more often than anyone else, especially in the weeks since Believer had appeared. And Believer had found everyone but him. James was safe. Never even mentioned.
“James is Believer,” I said. The lizard munched on her peppers and watched me.
Saying it was enough. The jinx was at work and everything would be perfect. I started the ritual of getting my body ready. Bath, lotions, makeup, outfit. And in between, I dragged files to the trash bin on my desktop. Years of creative energy, procrastinating at homework, worlds built and imploded. I purged the laptop of everything false, and when it was over I felt clean. I was ready.
A door slammed in the hallway—the final note of the argument between Dylan and my mom. I could not let myself feel guilty or bad for leaving them. They’d both left me before, in different ways. It was my turn.
• • •
The electrical box was buzzing like a cicada when I walked up to it. The thought occurred to me that it might be a sleeper spaceship. An observation pod for aliens. Maybe they were in there, inside the electricity, making the sounds and the warmth, traveling on those currents. They could be going underground from in there, too, burrowing and popping up miles away, out in the middle of the desert.
It was just kind of vibrating, the whole thing. I put my hand on it. The hot, beige metal seemed to recognize me. The aliens inside were scanning.
Oh, Silver Creek Road. We put a Kokopelli in her mind, didn’t we? We talk to her from her computer.
She’s lining things up.
I wish she’d just go away. This is making me uncomfortable.
Do you think she knows? Can that happen? Have we been too obvious?
I wasn’t concerned with how it was possible, but I sensed that if I waited long e
nough by the box, eventually I would get to Papago Park and meet James.
She does know, doesn’t she?
• • •
It’ll be late by the time Rosie arrives at the white pyramid. She might have gotten lost in Phoenix, and the park is closed from sundown to sunrise, so she has to leave her car on the street and hike up to the point. The point where James and Rosie will each climb through a window, each open a door, and make solid a once-formless love.
He’ll be the first to speak, as he was the first to reach out.
“Is it really you?”
“It’s really me. Is it really you?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant to say.”
“Do you want to go somewhere? Do you want to stay here? What should we do?”
“Maybe let’s stay here, for just a minute.”
They will sit next to each other, hands entwined.
“This is the right place,” James will say.
“I knew it would be,” Rosie will answer.
Before they kiss, they will talk about how strange it is to be real. Now that they are real, it feels like they always have been, they’ll agree. They’ll agree on everything. They will make shy jokes, teasing each other. And only when they can’t stand it any longer will they will kiss.
CHAPTER 19
There are five man-made ponds in the park, and the trail up to Hunt’s Tomb starts near the largest one. A water pump in the center of it turned off and on a few times as I shined the light from my phone onto a map posted outside a public restroom. It was hard to read, written over with Sharpied graffiti, with little brown paw prints to mark various hiking paths.
I was carrying a dented, half-empty plastic water bottle and it gave me something to do with my hands, a noise to make in the darkness. Something to focus on other than the gulping, irregular beats of my heart—hollow shudders that echoed around and out of my body, seeming to crest the valley with atomic backward gasps.
The hike to the pyramid took longer than I remembered, but I arrived well before midnight. I wanted to be there before James, so I could make myself as calm as possible and watch him walk toward me for the first time.
The night was absolute. I’d applied a jinx to keep the rain from falling, and the air was thin and clean. The meandering trail twisted and turned. One moment I was walking along above the glowing city, and the next I was completely cut off from it.
I was guided by small blue lights designed to blend in to the rocks on either side of the path. They were meant for emergencies—lost hikers, brush fires—and I followed them, hearing every little scuttle of a lizard.
Human on the path. Human on the path. Run, run, run while I can, while it’s not too hot. Where’s my hole? Where’s my food?
I was sure I hadn’t been followed by Believer, and I’d left the coyote at the trailhead, sitting on his haunches.
You can’t come.
I’m going to.
Not tonight.
Finally, I reached the pyramid. It was all lit up, as I’d hoped. I was disappointed to find it surrounded by a spiked, wrought-iron fence. I second-guessed my choice, worried that it was too ugly, that the cracked concrete benches—segmented so no homeless people could sleep comfortably on them—would bring bad vibrations. But the view made up for it.
I watched the valley and said good-bye. The oppressed valley, laid over with stars, answered with peculiar stillness.
It took a while before I was able to sit down on one of the benches. I tried to read an informational sign but couldn’t get past the first three words before losing concentration, starting them over again and over again. My entire body was shivering with nerves.
To steady myself, I thought of James. I wondered about his gaze. It wouldn’t be like Mr. Lauren’s—eyes like a nervous dog, with a bit of sweat at the thought of being caught—or Kit’s lazy stoner’s grin.
I needed his eyes on me. He would complete the changeover, turn me into the person he thought I was.
I heard him. The crackle of footsteps on the path. I felt him walk up behind me and stop a few feet away. His presence washed over me as a warm wave. I thought I might fold up into nothing. He was here, my James Constant, hero of my deleted worlds, New Thing. The space around us, the peak and Hunt’s Tomb, was the entire universe at that moment.
“Rosie?” he said. I thought he said that.
Moths were flocking one floodlight at the base of the pyramid. Just one light, not the others. I’d been staring at them, and when I turned around to meet James’s face I couldn’t see it at first, because it was covered with the negative image of a hundred frantic moths.
I blinked them away.
It wasn’t him.
“Get away,” I said, shocked that someone else was taking up the space where James should be. I rose from the bench.
“What are you doing here?”
“I—”
Shane stepped toward me, the floodlight throwing his shadow onto the red rocks behind him. Shane’s huge ghost.
“You have to leave.” I came around the bench and took his arm, shoving him back toward the path. “I’m meeting someone.”
“I know—” He moved, letting me push him.
“You have to leave before he gets here.”
“It’s me,” he was saying. He kept saying it.
Then I knew. I could see it in him. Another face. The guy he wished he was.
“Joss. It’s me.”
It made sense.
“No!” I shouted, the last time I could shout because then I was just crying, a soundless cry that tore through my gut and caught in my throat.
“No, no, no.” I was hitting Shane. He grabbed my wrists, held them. When I met his eyes, he looked terrified, pale and powerless.
But he also looked like someone else.
“Soft Robe,” he said, letting my wrists go so he could touch my face.
James wasn’t coming. He was there. He had always been there.
Desperate, I tried to make him real. I leaned in to Shane, shut my eyes against his shirt, tears streaming out helplessly. I tried as hard as I could, but he didn’t change and neither did I.
I banged on the door to Rosie’s room in the Dream Palace and found that it was sealed shut. I’d swallowed her up just as Shane had taken James and disappeared him.
The tears stopped. Rage uncoiled.
“You killed him!” I said. I was liquid, disgusted. There was a hole right through the center of my body and it was a lonesome wound. The lonesomeness went out of me and wound down through the valley of nobodies.
Shane just kept saying, “I thought you knew.”
“James is dead!”
“You quoted me about Yellow Submarine. You gave me that Henry Miller after you sent it to him. There were so many overlaps. The Green Day song. I thought, ‘She’s sending me hints. She knows it’s me—’ ”
“Oh my God.” I blushed down to my bones. “All the things I said to you. The pictures. The videos?”
“I’m sorry,” Shane said quietly.
“You’re pathetic.” He took it like a blow.
“Please, Joss, okay,” he said. “I fucked it up. But you—you should know how this feels more than anyone else.”
He kept trying to meet my eyes again.
“Don’t look at me,” I snapped. “I hate you.”
“Will you even try to understand?”
“Are you Believer, too?”
“What?” Shane shook his head. “No. No. I would never—”
“You are!”
“No, Joss—look. All of this was for—” He tried to come closer, but I backed away.
“I love you,” he said with a shrug. “I didn’t know how else to reach you.”
I didn’t believe him. Shane couldn’t love me. How did he do it? I thought back to when James first messaged Rosie.
Hey, you look familiar
Ha-ha, really?
Shane was starin
g.
“I said don’t look at me!” I snarled, gathering up any calm I could find, trying to keep my hands steady, stop them shaking.
“Joss,” Shane said, pleading. Each time he said my name it physically hurt.
“The Dream Palace?” I questioned.
“What?”
“I was there, with him. How could that have happened if he’s not real?”
“That was fantasy—”
“You’re a liar! You lied to her!”
I knew it was ridiculous to say.
“We were going to disappear!” I yelled.
“Everything I own is in my car,” Shane said. “I’ll do whatever you want to do. We can go to Palm Springs, or anywhere—”
Beyond Shane, in his looming shadow—
The coyote. Twin white pyramids reflected in yellow pupils. I directed my thoughts his way.
You knew this would happen. Why didn’t you warn me?
The coyote wouldn’t answer. Brazen now, emboldened by Shane’s ripping-open, he sauntered past us, around to the other side of the pyramid.
His voice was a low purr.
You can still disappear.
“I meant everything he said,” Shane was saying. “I hid behind him, but my feelings were real.”
“You’re nothing like him,” I spat out. “None of it means anything now.”
“Look, I’m admitting so much shit,” Shane said, finally letting himself get angry too. “Let’s be real with each other. I’m sick of not being real. Aren’t you?”
“I don’t want to be real!” I shouted. “I want James to be real. I want him!”
I closed my eyes and pictured James’s face. It was already fading.
“I’m sorry,” Shane said. “I’m sorry for lying to you. But if you’re going to stand there hating me, then you’re a hypocrite.”
“If you start calling me names, I swear to God—”
“You lie all the time! To everyone! And you excuse every lie you tell because oh, what, you’re somehow doing it differently, or better? You’re telling a story?”
“What did you think was going to happen, Shane? You’d do this big reveal and I’d instantly forgive you? Love you back? You thought I knew? That’s so stupid. You had to make someone up for me to love because you know it wouldn’t happen any other way.”
