by Rowan Maness
He didn’t back down.
“Hey, guess what? Even though I feel like I’m dying because of what’s happening right now, I’m glad the lie is over. The weight’s off my shoulders. It’s a relief. That’s how human beings are supposed to feel.”
“Now I’m inhuman?” I shrieked.
“That’s not what I meant—”
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
James, I thought automatically, and it hurt that it couldn’t be. That it would never be.
“I don’t care what you meant,” I said. “Here’s something real: I never want to talk to you again. So if you need a human being to talk to, you’ll have to find someone else.”
“That’s how it goes?” Shane asked, the bottom half of him, the part I could stand to look at, his shoes in the chalky gravel. “A lifetime of knowing each other means nothing?”
“I can’t even look at you.”
“Yeah, because if you hear, or see, or feel something you don’t like, or can’t deal with, you just shut it out. You—you’re practically autistic! I’m an idiot for thinking it would be any different.”
Inhuman, hypocrite, autistic. He’s right.
Shane was really hurting me somehow. He never had before. I didn’t think he could. He felt it too, and pulled back.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you. You’re wonderful. You stand alone. You’re my dream girl. Why won’t you live with me in the light? You aren’t hearing any of this, are you?”
James was coming toward me.
I mean, Shane was coming toward me.
I kept backing away. The coyote’s voice came from behind the pyramid, chanting an invitation.
You can still disappear.
CHAPTER 20
On the other side of the pyramid, it was almost dawn.
The coyote was standing halfway down a slope that led away from the hiking trails and ponds and into the wilderness of the north part of the park. In the far distance, the double peak of Camelback Mountain pushed softly into the pinkish-grey sky. I focused on that landmark, used it to ground myself, and followed him.
I stayed close and watched him carefully. I didn’t want to lose sight of him and get lost. The coarse coyote fur along his backbone seemed influenced by the nature around us—it made subtle changes in color and sheen, ranging from dusty purple to pale green, sometimes shining like a seashell’s underside, sometimes clouded and dull.
It helped to think about what someone else would see if someone else could see him. I could imagine a person squinting their eyes, discerning easily enough the overall outline of a coyote-shaped thing. It was looking within the outline that took a certain scrutiny. There, he played his trickster games and pushed energy around. His tail appeared shorter or longer from different angles. He grew and lost inches of height with every step. He tried out the paws of bears and hooves of sheep when it suited him.
The dawn made no advances toward daylight, and it was hard to tell how long we’d been walking. Eventually, we came to the top of a butte and stopped. The coyote sat down, panting, very much an animal. I looked out, expecting to see the city, and found it was not there.
Beyond the mountains, on all four sides of the valley, I could see that it was still nighttime, and the night sky met the false dawn at an abrupt edge. I watched a blinking airplane approach the weird seam from the other side, and held my breath as it disappeared.
The coyote was curled up tightly. His belly moved up and down with breathing.
I asked him, Why’d you bring me here?
This is your light.
It was my light. Whatever I called it. The astral plane. A phrase stolen from a song Shane and I obsessed over, a record from my dad’s collection. I’d sent it to James, very early on. Was Shane right? Had I known the truth? Had I suspected?
No. I wish I had. He fooled me.
My rage came back like rising bile, but it was tempered by the atmosphere, kept at bay. Extreme emotion wasn’t possible here. My body was heavy and numb, hard to move.
The Dream Palace was there on the astral plane. I’d never seen it from the outside. Inside, it seemed endless, but now I could see its precise limits. It was neglected, elegant. I thought of Amelia, Anna, Emma, and Rosie dead in the courtyard, my other women gathered around their dissolving bodies.
I couldn’t picture going home and creating someone new, but I couldn’t imagine a life without escape, either.
With effort, I brought my hand up and swiped it through the air. The Dream Palace blinked out of existence, momentarily washed away.
In its place, I put the city back where it belonged, each block even and familiar, the grid I’d been wandering my whole life. When it was done, I apologized to it.
I’m sorry for thinking you’re all nobodies.
My breath synched up with the coyote’s. I sat down and began to pet him. I’d wanted to touch his fur for a long time, and it was as I’d imagined. Coated with dirt, bristly and hot.
You’re not sorry. You don’t feel sorry for anything.
How could he say things and keep so still?
Yes, I do. I feel sorry for everything.
I simply don’t believe that. Do you feel sorry for Shane?
The coyote had the upper hand—he was part of my thoughts, so he could hear them, but I didn’t know what rules, if any, he followed.
I don’t want to argue with a portent.
He responded to this by going to the edge of the butte and standing on his hind legs, rising to his full height.
I pulled out my phone. The buzz from earlier had been a storm of texts and e-mails. Believer, at it again. Not finished with me. If only he knew how beaten I was. A list of names had been posted to the Tumblr—dates, e-mails, and pictures for each.
VICTIMS #10–20:
Ben (Daisy)
Patrick (Grace)
Garrett (Lara)
Brian (Caitlin)
Russ (Eugenie)
Allison (Eve)
I stopped reading. The e-mails and texts were from all of them. People I hadn’t spoken to in years. Some I’d talked to for a week, some months. Some I’d mostly forgotten, and maybe they’d forgotten about me. But they’d been reminded. And they were all angry. Ten people in the world, feeling some version of what I was feeling about James.
Okay, Believer, I get it! I fucking get it!
The coyote shifted at the edge of the overlook.
I held the phone up and pointed the camera at him, centering him in the frame, careful to show the patchwork sky as well.
Click. There he was, frozen enough, reduced enough. I posted the photo to Instagram.
idiotblush what is this?
What part of my brain made you?
I knew he wouldn’t like the question, but I didn’t expect it to make his outline tremble the way it did. There was a sound like crackling electricity, and lightning came up from the ground beneath him, shocking his body, making him glow.
The part that made up all those people.
The part that made up Believer.
There was some key element of all this that I was missing.
Think about it.
That’s impossible.
You deserved it.
The coyote laughed, borrowing the mirthless cackle of a hyena. I remembered how scared I was when he first appeared, and knew I should have stayed afraid. I’d accepted that he was part of me, and now he was saying Believer was part of me too.
The electricity was giving him power. He spoke out loud, and as he did he took all my light away and left us in the vortex of his trickery and falseness, a dizzying, groundless plane of flashing color and perverted energies.
“It is you. You’re doing this all to yourself.”
He was using my voice.
“Stop using my voice!”
“Stop not knowing things! You’re going to wind up here. This is real. Everything else isn’t. If you make me go away, I’ll burrow deeper. You’re not special. You’re like George. Y
ou’re like all of them. You’re a murderer, too—blood on your hands. Nobody tells the truth, not ever. I’ll keep going until you realize—”
He was one thought ahead of me. I was drowning in him.
I focused. Synched my breathing with the coyote’s again. I changed him—made him smaller. He resisted, twisting and growling. Slowly, my light started to return. The butte, the vista, the phone in my hand, a new message on its screen.
Dylan: Stay where you are. We’re coming
The coyote kept diminishing.
The mountains reappeared. They were blurry, but they gave me strength.
This is the light of my creation. You don’t exist outside of it.
You’re wrong!
The permanent dusk. Made up of the green light of youth, the purple light of sadness, the yellow light of longing, and the pink light of phantoms.
The coyote used his last bit of power to force me to look down at the ground.
Written there, one word.
BELIEVER
My finger, covered in sand.
• • •
Dylan and Shane pushed me into a sitting position, and one of them unscrewed the cap of the plastic water bottle and put it to my lips. The water was warm, and after the bottle was empty, I was able to open my eyes.
It was night again, the sky full of stars in slightly changed positions. The mountains and the cityscape were back in their places. Shane was standing near the edge of the butte, in the same spot the coyote had been in when I took his picture, and Dylan was crouched down next to me
“What did you take?” Dylan asked. I got the feeling he was repeating himself.
I glared at him. “Nothing. I think I just—fell asleep.”
“In the middle of the desert?”
“This isn’t the middle—”
“If you hadn’t posted that Instagram, we wouldn’t have been able to find you.”
“Did you see him?”
Dylan shot a look over to Shane.
“See who, Joss?”
“Nobody,” I said, grabbing my phone off the ground. I opened Instagram and looked at the photo.
A dark, grainy, unfiltered photo of the view from the butte. It showed the city lights just outside the scope of the automatic flash, which illuminated nothing but the dirt and a row of painted rocks that weren’t visible in the dark.
“Bullshit, ‘nobody,’ ” Shane said.
“Shut up!” I yelled at him.
There was a comment on the photo.
idiotblush what is this?
kittredgebehr hey, I know that spot
Dylan saw me looking at it.
“Shane messaged that guy,” he said. “It was his idea, to ask him how to get here. And he called me. Three hours, Joss! I thought, like, a chupacabra ate you or something.”
When I didn’t smile or react to that, Dylan recognized the tension between me and Shane.
“What were you guys doing out here anyway?”
“Shane didn’t tell you?”
Shane turned around. “Joss—don’t—”
“He—” I started, then realized I didn’t want to out him. Outing him would mean admitting I’d been in love with his avatar.
“He’s a very good liar,” I said instead. “Better than me.”
Dylan left it at that, though I could tell he wanted to know more.
“Let’s go home,” he said, helping me stand, moving back up the slope.
Even though I felt like I’d vanquished the coyote and sent him back into his world as I successfully returned to my own, I waited for signs of falseness. I was afraid to look beyond Dylan in front of me for fear I’d see something that would let me know I was still in the fantasy, stuck there for good.
But the straps of my sandals blistered my ankles and a helicopter flew by high overhead, and Shane was radiating anger and hurt and Dylan babbled on about nothing, the way he usually did.
It was a more difficult walk than the one I’d taken following the coyote, steeper and rockier than I remembered. It took a long time before we hooked up with one of the hiking trails, and even after that it was a good ten minutes or so before we came to the parking lot.
Shane hurried into his car, and through the windows I saw suitcases waiting in the backseat. How could he have been so hopeful? He saw us together? Entwined? I knew what magical thinking could do to people—Max promising to marry Anna even though he was already married—but the Shane I knew was sensible, concrete.
The Shane I knew did not fall in love with the Joss I knew.
Dylan had driven my dad’s old truck to the park. It was comforting to see it, to sit in the cab and run my finger over the quarter melted into the soft pebbled dashboard like I’d done a thousand times before. When Shane left I deflated, exhausted, and sank into the passenger seat without saying a word. Whatever combination of chemicals kept me going through the evening left my brain abruptly, and I felt sad and heavy and stupid.
CHAPTER 21
Dylan came back from South America because Believer told him to. He explained it all the next morning, when my mom went out for a run. He sat next to me on the couch. I was nursing my second cup of coffee, looking though my laptop for hidden files, log-in info I’d stashed somewhere. I’d already torn through my room trying to find the phone I must have used to send Believer’s texts, but came up empty-handed.
He’d been silent on the drive back from the park, and when we got home he let me fall into bed without providing any more explanation for what had happened that night, but now he was asking questions. I tried to brush him off at first.
“Nothing’s going on,” I said.
“Then who’s Believer?”
He’d gotten an e-mail, in Chile. A link to the Tumblr and a message:
Your sister needs you.
So the prodigal son returned.
Our conversation went around and around, me trying to downplay the significance of the Tumblr victims, Dylan bringing up Peter’s intrusion into our lives, my history of compulsive lying. He was being nice, framing his questions gently. I hated having to admit how out of control things were. Saying everything out loud made my actions seem even crazier.
“You can’t tell Mom any of this,” I told him. “I am not going on medication again.”
After Peter I made the mistake of telling the first therapist all about the Dream Palace. I told her I saw Amelia, that she’d been in the house with me when Peter barged in. That I followed her to the backyard to hide. That I was sure Peter saw her too. I was briefly put on medication that made me feel like a wretched, drooling lump.
“I didn’t agree with that,” Dylan said. “Remember?”
“No,” I said. “But okay.”
Dylan waited for me to go on.
“It’s—I don’t think it’s really a stalker. I think it’s me. I know it’s me, actually. I just don’t know how yet.”
“So you e-mailed me? As Believer?”
I nodded.
“And you’ve created this Tumblr and sent yourself texts and whatever else?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
Then I told him the details about Max and George, about the messages from other long-lost flirts that were still flooding my phone. I told him about Believer saying I needed to be punished, and I admitted that I’d been blacking out and was unable to account for where I was or what I was doing at critical moments.
On the mountain, Shane said exposing himself as James made him feel lighter, free. But confessing to Dylan just made me feel depleted. I sank into the couch.
“I think this is the only way I could get myself to stop.”
“Have you?” Dylan asked. “Stopped?”
“I’m done. As of last night.”
“Good.”
We sat there for a while. Dylan appeared deep in thought. I pictured all this new information filtering through his brain, trying to reconcile it with his experience, with what he knew of me. What kind of person I was.
> “This is a really annoying thing to ask, but I want your honest opinion,” I spoke up. “It would be helpful.”
“Sure.”
“Am I a horrible person?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Did I kill Peter and Dad?”
“What? No,” Dylan said. “You can’t think that.”
“But I feel like I did.”
“I saw him, you know,” Dylan said.
“Saw who?”
“Dad.”
He’d been asleep on the beach of a small island at the bottom of Chile. Dylan said it was the bottom of the world and it felt like it. He said the sky was bent; you could see it was a dome. He was going from island to island, sneaking onto ferries and hitchhiking across bridges. He wasn’t even thinking about Dad much except that the insurance money felt like death, following him around.
But he woke up on the beach and Dad was next to him, looking out at the moonlit waves. Dylan thought it was a dream, but later his friends told him they’d seen him sitting there, talking to the air.
I asked what they talked about.
“I asked him why he had to die.”
“What’d he say?”
“That he didn’t.”
They went back and forth, arguing. Dylan saying, Dad, believe me, you are definitely dead, and Dad just insisting No.
He was telling me this to let me know that I wasn’t the only one who saw things, talked to people who weren’t there, beyond the realm of daydream or overactive imagination. I was a little jealous of him, though. I wanted to see my dad, not a mischievous animal and a motel full of fake people.
“Anyway,” Dylan continued. “I don’t think you’re a horrible person. I know you aren’t. And honestly? I’ve always kind of admired what you do.”
He went on. “Before you did it on the Internet, you did it by dressing up, pretending to be some character, insisting we all call you a different name. I get why it appeals to you. You’re bored. You’re trying to find out who you are. You hate it here. Reacting to a passively oppressive environment.”
I laughed.
“But you are hurting people,” Dylan added. “So I’m glad you’re stopping.”
