Laser lights from the stage periodically wash the audience in green, blue, red. The lights swing down onto their heads, then lift to the sky to communicate with extraterrestrial entities. Glowing things are everywhere—necklaces, batons, body paint—as if the greatest fear of all, the surest route to death, is to not be seen.
The beat picks up and achieves a manic pace. The swinging lights quicken and the hive-mind dancing accelerates. Just standing in place, Bethany feels her heart jig in a way that is almost frightening. Then the hooded boy hunches lower over his box and the rhythm begins to slow, finally coming to a dead stop. The boy slumps, wound down. There is a breath of anticipation in the crowd, a moment of collective suspension. Then, like a thundercrack, the beat comes roaring back and the full spectrum of laser lights flares out. As if a string has been cut, the people fall back to dancing, possessed.
This time, Bethany cannot resist the current. Her body abandons her and goes into the music, finding caverns and waves and silver needles within. She is distantly aware of not making physical decisions, but following the motions of her limbs at a curious remove. When, at last, the DJ turns a knob that causes the crabby loops to join together in a final, booming tsunami, she feels as if she could lift off the ground. This, she understands, is the reason people flock here like pilgrims.
She thinks dimly of her father at home, her mother in the furnished condominium—all those cushioning, stifling trees around them, separating them from each other and from this. A stream of pity seeps through her euphoria like ink, shading it, giving it depth. Her parents are ruined children, stiffened in their bodies, ossified in their rituals. They are impossibly far from the sparkling truth that she is holding right now.
At this moment, she sees Amos. She thrusts herself through the crowd to where he is dancing, throwing his arms down as if ridding them of fire ants. She catches his eye and smiles, seizing his hand. He smiles back, bewildered. There is nothing specific she wants to say to him, really. It is enough just to be with him now, in the middle of this. She begins dancing again, a little less freely, waiting for him to join her. When he doesn’t, she yells, “What’s wrong?”
He shrugs and shouts, “The set’s almost over.”
He puts a hand in his pocket, and, suddenly, a look of terror darkens his face. He digs into the other pocket, then the pockets in the back. He looks at the ground, turns a circle in place. His eyes, when they meet Bethany’s again, are panicked.
“What happened?” she yells.
He shakes his head, slaps his hands against the sides of his jeans. He turns a fast circle again, like a dog, scanning the ground. He pushes the person beside him away and examines the ground there.
“Did you lose something?”
He doesn’t answer, but she sees him mouth the word fuck. He puts his head in his hands for a long moment, then looks at her again, glazed.
“Come on.” She pulls him through the crowd toward the back. “There’s got to be a lost and found somewhere.”
He allows himself to be pulled. Once they are away from the crowd, he says, “It’s my pocket watch.”
“You have a pocket watch?”
“It was from my mom.”
The simple way he says this makes it sound like his mother is dead, that no further explanation is needed.
“It’s gone now,” he says bluntly. He flicks his hair to the side, dismissing it.
“Well, let’s at least check the lost and found.”
“Forget it. It probably fell out in the crowd and it’s trampled now. No one’s going to see it in there.”
The music has stopped—Amos was right that the set was ending, the seemingly infinite galaxy of it—and the stage behind them has gone dark for the intermission.
“We should go back and look for it,” Bethany presses.
“Just never mind,” he says.
They wander away from the stage into a stand of trees, an area that has been sectioned off as a chill-out space. Here, there are things hanging from branches, beaded strings and helixes. Floodlights have been strategically placed to shine upon rubbery objects of art, sea creatures and amoeba-like globs that suction the tree trunks. In a clearing, they come upon an enormous, translucent brain lumped upon the ground, made of clear resin. There is a crevice in the frontal cortex wide enough for people to slide through, and silhouettes are visible inside. The surface of the brain is hard and smooth when Bethany puts her hand to it.
“Let’s go in,” Amos says.
Bethany feels a clamp in her chest. There might not be complete privacy here, but it is comparatively isolated. He wouldn’t suggest going in unless he wanted, at the very least, to talk closely with her. He stands back and lets her duck through first. She is aware of her backside directly in his line of vision and is glad she chose the long T-shirt. Inside, people are sitting on the ground. Amos has to stoop down low to get through the entrance and cannot stand fully straight once inside.
“Hey, Amos,” someone calls to him.