Another woman with a long thin snake wrapped around her hissed at me.
“This meteor was predicted. We’ve been waiting for it. Earthbound spirits have been trying to tell Angelenos it’s time to wake up for years now. Where do you get your information?”
“She probably doesn’t!” a man in spandex pants with flame patterns screamed from inside the circle.
The musicians echoed his words, arranging them into an improvised song.
“She probably doesn’t. She probably doesn’t,” they chanted.
The crew captain spoke into his megaphone, asking everyone to break the circle. They had to crack open the boulder. Bob stared him down.
“You’ll regret it. The meteor has arrived, and we have to respect it,” he said with the translucent gaze of a cult leader.
—
Finally the music and chanting stopped and the commune dwellers scuttled to the side of the road. From their van, the crew unloaded a power generator and a tank-looking structure with long yellow tubes attached to it. They plugged a nozzle in to the yellow tube and directed it from a distance toward the rock. They asked everyone to stay back and once the generator was turned on, a glowing white laser beam shot out toward a central spot on the boulder. It wasn’t like a normal lightbulb, spreading light in all directions. It was a small but continuous shaft of focused, self-contained light emitting a warm fuzzy sound. We perched next to Bob, observing the process in awe. The hum intensified, and after a few minutes the rock began to crack open. The heat from the laser had a strange, almost palpable feeling, like it was buzzing into our own skin, an ongoing vibration that tugged at the edges of our bodies. The laser was so strong, it eliminated the debris while it drilled. Parts of the stone vaporized completely, just disappeared, and soon enough the boulder began to look like a clean-cut precious gem.
“Radical,” the snake woman exclaimed.
The ray was so beautiful and precise that nobody dared speak over it. We stared, hypnotized like ancient farmers in front of fire. It felt like we were witnesses to a secret ritual. Topanga was a beautiful, mysterious place where things like this could happen in the middle of the night. Bob stood by impassively, surveying the scene. Even the demolition crew was bewildered by the power of their tool. The stone looked monumental, like a cathedral getting sawed in half. When the sacred building collapsed, the people from the commune howled. Deva and I joined in. The beam-projecting structure was disassembled and placed back into the truck. Bulldozers cleared out the rest.
“Take home a slice of heaven,” Bob said, handing over broken rock bits. He gave Deva and me a deep hug. “This fell from the sky, sisters. Keep it close to you.”
He was jovial and peaceful. There were no signs of the stressed-out man whose commune was sliding away in the mud. It gave me a sense of how rapidly things in the canyon could heal and move on.
I pocketed my rubble. The boulder had delivered Deva back to me and for that I was thankful. Those two days under the rain with her had been an incursion into her real world. She could hop as many fences as she wanted and duck my questions a million times, but from now on out it would be harder to keep me in the fun-only section of her life. We coexisted, our cells had spoken to each other for many consecutive hours.
I took her hand in mine. I could feel that what had been a conquest for me—being given the chance to dig a little deeper into her life—was a defeat for her. The idea that I had been part of her ordinary days, with moldy faucets and chore wheels and rain trickling through the roof onto wet towels, worried her because it meant we were just a few layers away from getting to what it was that pained her. Maybe Deva heard my thoughts because she retracted her hand from mine. She dug into her purse, took out a flask of vodka.
“Some leftovers,” she said in a cheeky voice, and washed down one of Bob’s pills with a sip. I took one too.
We crossed the canyon road and walked along the other side of the street to the local elementary school, leaving behind the howling hippies and the cracked boulder. The gate was ajar. Deva ran toward the playground and climbed over the jungle gym. She hung herself from the tallest bars in the semicircle. It was always like that. I tended to stay in the energy of things that had just happened—the boulder, the laser, her hand in mine—and she was always working up the impetus for something new. The road would be clear the following morning and I knew Deva didn’t want me to leave the canyon with the feeling of having done it all. So she pushed us onward. We had to end those boulder days with something extraordinary, but we had nothing extraordinary in our hands: just children’s rides and rubble in our pockets.
I lay back on the merry-go-round and pushed against the central wheel with my foot. I tilted my head to the ground below and looked up at the stars, spinning upside down. I felt the warm Vicodin and vodka blur into the distant anxiety that something wasn’t right. Deva appeared upside down in front of me, dangling her limp body over my eyes.
“I’m so hot. It’s so hot,” she moaned and rolled the top of her princess dress down to her belly. She was bare-chested in front of me. I stopped the wheel to look at her. She climbed next to me on the merry-go-round and began to spin the central wheel. It made a soft, oily sound. She spun faster, laughing at nothing as we turned—anything was good as long as it could lift her from reality and plunge her into the reckless, happy confusion she loved. She tilted her head to the fast-moving ground.
“Look at the stars. They are so bright.” She sighed.
But I couldn’t look at the stars. I was looking at her pale body instead. She was marmoreal against the penumbra of the trees. Naked under the dark sky, her thin skin covered in goose bumps, she looked like an abandoned statue.
“Look! Look at the stars, Eugenia! They are like little sugar cubes.”
She pushed her foot against the central wheel, making us turn faster. She acted like she never wanted to be still again, like she was trying to spin us into a permanent vortex, but the wheel could only spin so fast. She let go. We slowed down. She stayed folded backward, her hair brushing against the dirt, and began to cry.
When the ride stopped, I moved closer and rubbed my hand on her naked belly to warm her. When she came back up blood had flowed to her head and her face was red with cracked eyes.
“I’m sorry if this isn’t fun for you,” she said.
I kept my hands on her belly. “What are you talking about? It’s so fun.” I tried to console her.
“I’m sorry you had to be stuck here with me and…I’m sorry about my dad. I know he’s weird.”
“It’s fine. I don’t care what he does as long as he is not hurting you.”