Ela smiled at him playfully. “You sure about that, boy?”
Dylan realized he’d finished his cup. “I didn’t know you could make tea out of it,” he said, his voice sounding like somebody else’s, like he was hearing it from outside his body.
“Only for a few thousand years. Especially in these parts, since the buttons harvested from the roots of West Texas cacti are unusually high in mescaline sulfate.”
“So now you’re a chemist, as well as an activist.”
“You can take the girl out of the school, but not the school out of the girl.”
Dylan felt her sliding close to him, nearly tipping the kerosene lantern over as she shifted on the blanket warming them atop the root cellar’s cold, flattened ground.
“The Native American Church believes peyote to be crucial to obtaining spiritual guidance, so long as it’s ingested in the proper environment.”
Dylan looked about dramatically. “A root cellar?”
Ela laughed. Their eyes met and locked, and Dylan could see a light sheen on her flesh, her face seeming to glow in the twinkling lantern light. The world before him was shifting and shaking slightly, though not in the way that left him dizzy. It was more like the effects of the IV anesthesia he’d gotten before a stomach test he’d needed, a few years back.
If anything, Dylan felt more alert, more aware, hyperfocused on his surroundings, with Ela shining as the only light amid the darkness. He couldn’t see the lantern anymore; there was only her. And then they were kissing, without Dylan realizing their faces and mouths had come together.
Even though the tea tasted sour, her breath was sweet, reminding him of sunflowers, for some reason. Then he seemed to be with her in a field of them, green and yellow and bright, their hands sweeping about each other. Dylan’s arms felt disconnected from his body, like snakes pulling free of his shoulders, acting independently of his own thoughts. It felt like a dream he could control, all of this happening according to his own direction as he stood outside himself and watched it all transpire. He heard a baby crying, and then his mother was somewhere else in the field, picking flowers with his younger brother. Then something was crawling into the jeans his dad hated because they were too skinny to suit his tastes and cost too much, and Dylan realized it hadn’t crawled in at all, just morphed into something altogether different, over which he had no more control than he had over his arms or his thoughts.
The lantern tipping over burned his eyes with a splash of light that brought Dylan back to where he was. Except his shirt was off and the wool of the blanket was scratching at him. Or maybe it was Ela scratching at him. Didn’t matter, because there was no way this was really happening, no way. It was just a dream or an illusion he’d lost hold of, and soon he’d wake up with his underwear soaked, the way it had happened when he was, like, twelve.
The raw newness of his feelings then was what he felt now, but it was a newness heightened by an awareness, in the recesses of his mind, that he had gone back to that time with all his knowledge and experience retained. Then Ela was wrestling him, pounding him, it seemed, until he realized it wasn’t her at all but his own heart, thudding up a storm, his naked rib cage seeming to expand more with each beat, threatening to explode.
And then he did explode.
But not there.
Somewhere else.
Everywhere at once.
He thought he heard Ela gasping, screaming, glimpsed grayish shapes like the Dementors from the Harry Potter movies, slithering through the air, enveloping both of them in their dark shroud.
“Ela!” he cried out.
Or thought he did.
“Ela!”
Didn’t she see them closing in? Didn’t she know?
Gotta stop, gotta stop, gotta stop …
Words spoken or merely formed, it didn’t matter anymore, the difference reduced to nothing. Action and thought became indistinguishable from each other, to the point where Dylan could no longer tell which was which. Or what was really happening from what his mind conjured.
The Dementors …
Everywhere. And nowhere.
Just like him, just like them—him and Ela.
Together. Separate. Here. Gone.
And then it was happening again, inside him, only different this time. Because the Dementors were gone, replaced by ghostly specters watching him from afar and from up close at the same time. Dylan saw his mother smiling down at him, and he hugged Ela even closer, for reasons he didn’t understand.
But then his mother was gone, replaced by a series of spectral images drawn from among the monsters who had visited him in the past. Dylan had learned much too young that there were things that really did go bump in the night, that monsters were real. But they didn’t seem real now, making him question the integrity of his own memory and whether these beings were the products of comparable delusions, which attacked him only in his mind.