“I love my pants,” Rebekah comments. “They’re so cool on hot days.” The pants are vastly wide, composed of patchwork cotton squares. She lifts the fabric to her knees. “I made them myself, you know. There’s a girl in my dorm who’s teaching me to sew on her machine.”
At the gate, they wait for their turn to give over their weekend passes, a sacrificial two hundred dollars each. The passes are emblazoned with the Aether logo—an alchemical symbol like a seated stick figure with bent knees—and its slogan, “We breathe immortal air.” They have their bags searched. There are so many people here already, just waiting to get in, that Bethany feels woozy at the notion of what small nation must be waiting inside.
“I can’t wait for you to meet Rufus,” Rebekah says, jiggling Bethany’s shoulder. “I can’t believe you guys haven’t met before.”
This exuberance strikes Bethany as disingenuous, as if insurmountable logistics had constantly intervened in the past. In fact, it seems that Rebekah has been keeping Rufus squirreled away, considering Bethany unfit to meet him. She is gratified, if begrudgingly, that she seems to have passed some unspoken test now.
As they enter the festival grounds, Bethany surveys its citizens: colorful figures scattered to the horizon. They seem to have been here forever, moving to and fro on blissful errands. Rebekah lifts her yellow sunglasses to smile at Bethany and does a kind of skipping dance. Bethany returns the smile through a roll of panic. It is scandalous to think her mother had swallowed her weak fiction about the revolutionary reenactment. Had she really believed so blindly, or was she privately crestfallen by her daughter’s daring deceit?
Bethany allows this tremor to rumble and fade, and returns her attention to the surrounding sensory blitz. There is a mechanical thrum that seems to come from the ground itself. She usually gravitates toward radio-friendly songs with beginnings, middles, and ends, sticky melodies and words she can belt out. She likes rising choruses and drums that palpitate before big anthemic melodies. She does not think these types of songs will be performed here. In fact, the lineup seems to include only a handful of bands playing actual instruments. The rest of the artists are electronic—DJs with names like Slap Elf, Mork, Yggdrasil.
Amos does not skip like his sister, but walks faster as they go over the trodden fields toward the campground. He is the musician in the family, with wide and discerning tastes that easily encompass this and every imaginable festival. In high school he’d played whatever necessary instrument—guitar, bass, keyboard—in at least three different bands.
They pause as they come into the campground, a hobo village of nylon tents. Rebekah stops and shields her eyes with a hand.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Amos asks.
“Rufus said he’s in the northeast quadrant. As if that’s helpful at all. But maybe we’ll be able to see his rage stick.”
“What’s a rage stick?” Bethany asks.
“You don’t want to know,” Amos says.
“It’s like a totem thing, to help people find their friends at festivals,” Rebekah explains. “There’s never any cell service out in the boonies. But I think it’s better that way. It’s pretty rare that we get to unplug like this, just be with each other and the music, you know?”
Most campsites are just tents on the ground, but a few are more elaborate arrangements with tables, chairs, tapestries, Tibetan prayer flags, hammocks. One tent is painted with the word PLUR.
“What does that mean?” Bethany points.
“Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. Sometimes people add another ‘R’ for ‘Responsibility.’ As if.” Rebekah holds a hand over her eyes. “There he is!”
As they come closer to their own campsite, Bethany sees that there are already three tents bunched together, along with a wide canopy on poles. Beneath the canopy a number of canvas chairs are arranged in a circle, with a number of unfamiliar men seated in them. One of the men stands up and smiles, stretching his arms out as if demonstrating ownership, or granting a blessing.
His nose ring is the first thing Bethany notices, the first thing, she presumes, that he wants anyone to notice. It pierces the cartilage beneath the septum, with two arms curving downward in a way that is both hypnotizing and deeply unsettling. He is shirtless, his body decorated with paint: green and gold stripes circling his biceps and crosshatching his pectorals. His hair is buzzed short. Bethany thought she remembered Rebekah describing him as having long hair. But perhaps after hearing about the beedi cigarettes and the Metamorphoses, she’d only pictured someone more romantic-looking.
Rebekah scurries into this man’s outstretched arms and cuddles into his chest. Bethany thinks she sees her kiss a nipple and feels a revulsion, as if she’d watched her lick a reptile.
“Bethany, this is Rufus,” she says breathlessly, pulling away.