They all met at the airport and rented a car out to the festival. They all agreed:
‘This is going to be awesome.’
‘Yeah it’s been rough, but this trip is going to put it all in perspective.’
‘Man, it is so great to see you guys again, we haven’t betrayed who we wanted to be at all.’
But it isn’t three days before Owen discovers just how much his friends have changed, and in their mirror he realises sadly: he must have changed too.
Ron is engaged, and though Owen doesn’t really want to hold that against him, it’s just that twenty-five still seems so young, and Ron talks about it exactly the same way that his other buddy, Harrison, talks about grad school. Like it’s an investment, a business decision. If you want to get married, live in a house and have some kids, you’ve got to get started before you’re thirty, and right now it’s a buyer’s market because most people their age are only just pairing off.
‘We’re not that young any more,’ Ron tells him. ‘This is pretty much my last hurrah.’
‘Cool,’ Owen replies non-committally. He feels like he hardly started having hurrahs in school before it was supposedly time to leave them behind. But not everyone takes life seriously, Owen knows. That’s what he’s here to learn about.
These people … what could they possibly do for a living? The guy with tattoos on his face and ironic breast implants? The woman who is sixty years old if she’s a day with crazy neon troll hair, a bejeweled bellybutton to match, and an X over each sagging breast’s nipple made out of black electrical tape? When did they grow up? What’s their retirement portfolio going to be worth in forty years? Who lied to Owen and told him there was a “right” way to live when clearly these people do nothing more illegal than the occasional hallucinogen, and are still out roaming in the world on their own free terms?
Owen admires every flamingo and scarlet ibis and peacock he spots while wandering through the festival. He participates whenever someone needs a partner for volleyball (or chicken volley ball, or a game of Questions played over a net like in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). And yet … well, it turns out beggars really can be choosers.
He looks at every girl twice, once as a stranger in a strange land, trying to categorize them, see who they really are, who they want to be perceived as, etc. Next he measures them like a discerning grocery buyer: too green, too ripe, too bruised, too pricey, too good to be true, and even a few he deems rotten. For days the only girls he even speaks to are the ones he meets through their boyfriends, and although several of them seem open and eager to welcome Owen to a threesome, it just isn’t the sort of thing he’s shopping for.
But after a while he spots someone. You’d think in the riot of colour you might not notice one girl’s hair, but in a sea of artificial dyes, this girl has naturally remarkable hair. It’s ginger-bronze. It’s a copper-berry. It’s amber waves of champagne.
This girl, she isn’t perfect either. She’s at least thirty pounds overweight, but Owen likes a girl with some heft in her breasts anyway. She’s as pale as fear and burnt red or peeling everywhere the sun touches her skin. When she dances she drips like someone who’s trying to sweat out a fever, but no matter what Owen sees, he finds a way to like it. She’s drinking vodka straight from a plastic jug? She knows how to party. She’s making out with two guys at once? She’s friendly. She decides to sing along loud to someone’s radio? Well, she’s got a great voice, and that’s not even wishful thinking on Owen’s part, not some lustful illusion, she really is good. In fact when Owen finally works up the nerve to speak to her, the first thing he learns is that she’s a singer in band.
‘We were staying with some guy in Reno who was planning to come out here, so of course we tagged along. Haven’t you always wanted to go to Burning Man?’
‘Yeah,’ says Owen. ‘So you’re another virgin then? I keep meeting all these old-timers.’
‘Virgin, yeah!’ She laughs in a voice much deeper than the one she sings with. ‘It’s nice to be a virgin again at something. Lord knows it’s been a while otherwise.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-three,’ she tells him. She’s resting on something that might be a mangled desert rock or might be somebody’s art, there’s no way to tell for sure. She was leaning there for a while before Owen came up, her head moving as if to music, though there were no headphones in her ears.
‘Did you just graduate?’ Owen asks, thinking he’s finally found someone he can relate to.
‘Naw, I never even finished high school.’
She smiles blearily at him, looks him up and down slowly, sizes him up. Owen hopes his tan is even, that his clothes seem cleaner than they are, that he comes across as earnest, but aloof.
‘You wanna hang out?’ she asks him, and with that Owen knows: he’s made muster. He’s in.
She shares a tent with a beautiful guy, tall and Nordic this guy, teeth like he’s sucking on a string of pearls. Owen is relieved to discover that this guy is gay, and that he’s got somewhere else to be.
Missy invites Owen into the cocooned heat of the tent, and in response to that heat, she pulls out the simple bow that’s been holding on her entire light halter dress. It falls to her waist, pooling around her like shallow water.
Her breasts are heavy, and her skin has the cold sear of a way-too-hot bath, the kind of hot your brain almost interprets as freezing. Or maybe her skin is clammy-cool compared to the covered air in the tent. Owen doesn’t spare more than a moment trying to figure it out.
She lifts a knee, her dress still covering the crux of her body, the hottest place on any girl. She combs out her hair with her fingers, settling that around her too, just like the puddles of her dress. She watches Owen patiently, and why she tolerates him is unknown to Owen, because he can feel his jaw slacking open, his eyes glazing stupidly, his fingers fumbling as he reaches towards one of her nipples, as if to pluck a strawberry.
Owen has forgotten his feet outside the tent. He’s leaning on one hand and cupping an ample, hangdog breast in the other. He doesn’t envelop totally into this bud of a space until his date hikes her skirt back, and Owen desperately needs his other hand to explore her molten core. Yesterday Owen met a glassblower at the festival who told him every detail of the process, and yes, reaching into her is like dipping a piece of himself into a furnace. If she is a crucible, Owen is a blowpipe. Even her patch of hair is a dark orange flame. Even the condom she hands him has the viscous transparency of liquid glass.
There are patches of sand in the bottom of the tent, in and out of the snake pit of sleeping bags twisted around each other. It starts to sparkle and dot her hair as she writhes beneath him, using her head and neck as leverage to arch further towards Owen. He clutches at her in thick handfuls, he smothers himself in one of her breasts as if into a pillow. In the moment of his climax, Owen knows with certainty that he would happily suffocate himself if she’d allow it.
In the moments after however, he discovers that she wouldn’t.
‘Wow,’ Owen says as he lies back on the ground. ‘And I don’t even know your name.’
‘What good would it do you?’ she asks him with a tired sort of amusement. ‘I bet you never see me again after this week.’
‘Well, yeah,’ Owen says, realising of course how improbable it would be to carry on any sort of relationship with someone who might live anywhere in the country, but almost assuredly nowhere near him. He accepts that disappointing reality with an adult’s practised ease. ‘Still, there’s no reason for us not to be friendly, right?’
‘We’ve been friendly enough already,’ she says with a more genuine smile. She pats him on the shoulder as she gets up and starts to retie her dress. ‘You can count yourself as one of my friends.’
Owen comes to find out by the end of festival that this girl has a lot of friends. She’s got a name too; she’s actually not that stingy with it, since all the other guys call her by it. Missy. He keeps spotting her by th
at magnificent hair, and whenever he sees it he approaches it, a moth to the flame.
But soon enough (too soon enough) it’s time to return home again. His friends want to leave early to beat the traffic and get back to the comforts of a hotel room, and truth be told, Owen gets tired of Missy’s statuesque friend looking at him pityingly, like he’s just another one of many. Owen decides to bow out gracefully, packs up his good time, and gets into the car for the trip back to the real world.
The windows are lowered as they’re pulling away, so they can see the last of the sights. Owen spots Missy one final time by the turn of her head, and he smiles quietly, keeping it with him as they start home, feeling a little bit better even if he doesn’t feel quite like his old college self, the kid he used to be … the one he came out here to find.
Owen is looking at Ron and Harrison, thinking that this vague disappointment isn’t the worst thing in the world; nobody stays young forever, right?
But before they’re totally quit of the festival, there’s one last big cluster of people. They look like they’re in their late twenties, maybe early thirties some of them, but Owen can’t see their faces too clearly while moving past them, and their clothes are wild and ageless. They’re standing in a circle, all hands in, and a huge bearded man in a tie-dyed halter dress and combat boots is yelling at the top of his voice like a coach about to send his team onto the court. He’s saying something Owen thinks he’s heard in an English class or two. The people around this bearded leader stamp their feet and shout with his every line, getting more and more frenzied:
‘You have NOT slumbered here! These visions DID appear! TAKE this weak and idle theme! NO MORE YIELDING, LIFE’S A DREAM!’
And what Owen was about to let go of? The magic he was about to put down to vacation syndrome? The warm hope that comes from idolizing a girl he’ll never really get to know? Well, Owen decides to keep all that with him, to hold onto it as hard as he can … because why can’t real life be like this too?
www.xcitebooks.com
Click here to join our mailing list
or scan the QR code
The Warmth of His Touch Page 5
