Left behind on her drooping chair, Bethany feels a tug of disappointment. Rufus has disappeared into one of the tents to prepare his rain forest potion. Someone has rigged a phone to a boom box and watery music leaks out of it, a sad mimicry of the day’s live performances. In a remote part of her brain, Bethany knows she should be out there by the stage, not wasting time here. Instead, she sinks into the chair and finds herself thinking of her father.
Bethany had known all along that there was trouble. For several months her mother had been saying foreboding things like, “I thought he was a different kind of man,” as if talking to herself, trying out the words. “Or maybe I’m the one who changed. People change, you know.” She would look sternly at Bethany. “How did I get to be almost fifty? I have to make things happen if I want them.”
Her mother never explicitly said there was another man, someone who represented these unspecified “things,” but Bethany couldn’t guess what else she could be talking about. She wasn’t making exotic travel arrangements or adopting a risky new career. She wasn’t buying a sports car. Sometimes Bethany overheard her on the phone, using a murmuring, coquettish tone. She had never spoken to Bethany’s father that way. When she went out at night in new clothing, sharply tugging off the price tag before picking up her purse, it was clear she was not going out alone. It had made Bethany feel grown-up to co-harbor this unspoken understanding.
Her father was a difficult person, she knew that. He complained stormily and often, and was not otherwise expressive. As far back as she could remember, whenever she was in any kind of pain it was her mother who rushed to her. Her father did not try to comfort, did not even ask what happened. In her memory, he stands blankly like an etherized animal. And yet, when she thinks of him alone in their house now—where? on the slip-covered couch beneath her framed baby photos?—she feels an intolerable scrabbling in her rib cage.
“Hey,” Rebekah says to her. “Hungry?”
Bethany shakes off her fugue state to accept a salami sandwich. The sunlight is suddenly dim through the trees, giving the campsite an aquatic tint. She hears someone say the word gloaming. The word is unfamiliar—perhaps festival terminology, or something to do with drugs? There is a swirl of activity in the campground, people yelling and laughing. Bethany stands, reenergized by the sandwich. All at once, she is aware of the passing time. Soon it will be night, and she has seen only one band.
“Let’s go back out,” she says to Rebekah.
Rebekah looks crossly at her. She has been rambling to one of the men about the racial oppression of government surveillance, or something to that effect.
“You go,” she says. “I want to stay in case Rufus needs help getting ready.”
Bethany looks down at her friend, rooting for words. If all they were going to do was lounge at the campsite, she wouldn’t have come to the festival. She wouldn’t have lied to her mother. But she knows a confrontation will make matters worse.
“Okay, suit yourself,” Bethany makes herself say, and leaves Rebekah and the comatose men in their chairs.
Alone, she winds through the city of tents, looking for the way out. It is like wading through a dream world, the darkening blue air emblazoned with colored points of light, tinseled with bright voices. At this brief moment before nightfall, she lets herself imagine that she has come upon a ghostly settlement of her own people. This is how it might be, she muses, in the future they’ve been warned about, following the degradation of society, after the plastic infrastructure of school and shopping has melted and marooned her generation back upon the earth. Perhaps this is how they will all live, in wide-open settlements, vast tribal blocs.
At last, Bethany exits the campground and approaches the crowd at the main stage. The music is of another species now, wheeling electronic parabolas. The people around her are not swaying and wiggling anymore, but dancing acrobatically, aerobically, pantomiming elaborate sign language patterns. It is impossible to emulate this cold, from a standstill. As much as Bethany loves music, despite her confidence as an actress and singer, she has never been much for dancing, can’t help fixating on how moronic she must look moving in these artificial ways. Here, though, no one seems to be looking at each other; they all face the same direction, transfixed on a solo DJ: a boy in a hooded sweatshirt hunched over a machine. It seems to take all of his concentration to plug this puzzle of beats into his device, making them skip and twist and weave.