“I think we should go to the party. It’s already so late,” I said. Now I was worried and the worry took on a physical presence like one of my father’s black-tar hate paintings.
The desert was cold and dry. Ben took his denim jacket off and put it on my shoulders. Alo spread blankets on the ground a little farther up from the truck and sat down. They didn’t really like trance music, he explained. How about we just partied out there, the three of us? We had everything we needed, plus it seemed like Deva kind of ditched me anyway. Alo took a swig and offered me his flask of whiskey.
“To warm up,” he said, smiling. And his smile was this tender thing like a child trying to convince his parents that eating candy before dinner was a good idea.
“This isn’t what we agreed on,” I replied, ignoring the flask.
Alo passed a loaded pipe. “No peyote this time, unfortunately,” he cackled.
He wrapped his hands around my ankles and pulled me down on the blanket, hoping I’d relax. When he felt how tense I was, he giggled and raised his hands, surrendering. “We’ll go, we’ll go. I promise. I just wanted a chance to hang with you before we enter a sea of strangers, okay?”
“Okay.”
Ben took a switchblade out of his pocket and started whittling on a piece of dry wood he’d found on the ground. It made a rough sound, like a carrot getting peeled backward.
“So why haven’t we seen each other all these months?” Alo whispered in my ear.
“I was busy with school,” I said, staring out into the dark.
Alo squeezed me against his chest, romantically. “I really missed you, you know? That night at the battleground was special for me.”
“Yes.”
He told me about the surgery. It had been bad, he said, but the good thing was he’d found a way to keep smoking. He did it directly from the hole in his throat now. It was almost the same feeling. I pulled away from him when he spoke, afraid he’d show me the new technique. I had not thought about him since he’d dropped me off in the Prairie Wind Casino parking lot in South Dakota. Now that I was close to him again—a thinner man with wrinkles around his lips, a patchy beard, and no voice box—I felt a rush of something. Guilt and pity and annoyance. He was poor, I thought. So poor he couldn’t even get a full beard to grow on his face. A poor, broken man. I thought about him and how poor he was and how the hole in the throat was an entrance to his soul—a dirty, bleeding soul—and again I was thinking about the poor people of America with their missing body parts and how right Henry was about things getting cut rather than fixed. I hugged him back because if his voice box was missing, he must have been one of the worst off. But all the time I was hugging him I felt and knew I could do nothing for his missing body part.
“I’m sorry about your voice being gone,” I said. “I don’t think you should smoke anymore.”
The chunk of sadness and worry hovering over me began to settle on us so we both got sad. It became obvious that our being in that desert together was wrong. Ben kept doing his thing, peeling his stick with the switchblade. Alo downed his whiskey in a gulp. I got up and wiped dust off my knees and leaned over to give him a kiss.
“I have to go pee. I’ll be right back.”
Alo’s eyes lit up. I was going to stop annoying him about going to the rave and finally relax and sit with him there.
When I reached the back of the truck, I quietly picked up my bag and kept walking. I moved out of the darkness toward the sound of cars on the far-off road. I didn’t look back and once I was on the road I began to run. A few cars zoomed past. I kept ironing out my dress with my fingers, hoping it didn’t seem too short. The wind carried the sounds of distant electronic music. A glow-stick cactus installation and a pink laser beam shooting up from nearby plains told me I was approaching my final destination. A car pulled over and a group of kids asked me if I was going to the moon tribe party. I said I was and they let me in. They were my age. They were not dressed in leather or denim. No scarves around their necks.
The car pulled in to a new dirt road. We reached a group of men in bright orange vests who guided us toward a parking lot brimming with hundreds of dusty parked cars. When we stepped out it felt like we’d set foot on the moon or discovered a new planet populated by comets on fire and giant daisy installations.
A huge stuffed teddy bear came running toward us.
“There’s a bouncing house! Let’s go!” he screamed.
He searched his pockets, took out a plastic bag full of translucent pills, and gave us two each. We followed the bear and rolled down the hill until we arrived in front of a great desert sprawl. The central stage was set up with speakers as tall as buildings. Thousands of fluorescent bodies faced a wall of sound, dancing like a tribe in syncopated hopping moves—all clenched teeth and dilated pupils. Next to the stage was an Alice in Wonderland–themed bouncing house. The bear jumped in and reached out for us to follow. Everyone went in, but the MDMA he had given me began to kick in. I felt my jaws lock and a burst of warmth trickled inside my throat. I was afraid of the bouncing house and the girls in pigtails jumping with pacifiers in their mouths. There were too many people.
I began to wander away, but everyone appeared to me like a seamless wave of colors and electronic sounds and I couldn’t tell faces from arms, human voices from electronic drones. I walked like a soul in torment and stopped in front of every swinging reddish ponytail. I chewed my tongue until my legs went out and I could not do anything that wasn’t sitting down. I stumbled to the ground and knew that I looked like one of those girls who just couldn’t take it. I’d gotten that far on my own and now I was stuck inside my own body. A small hill behind me was the only place that wasn’t crowded. I forced myself to get up and brave the short distance. Halfway up the knoll I managed to remain standing. For a moment the music felt great. I lifted my left arm in the air and swayed gently, looking at the crowds below. Then I collapsed again. Only for a minute, I told myself, but I spent the rest of the night on that dirt patch, staring at a sea of colors, grinding my teeth. After a few hours some people running down the knoll toward the party stopped to ask me if I was okay. I tried to smile and sent them away because I could not speak. A girl with light blue hair leaned toward me and handed me a bottle of water. She pushed a pacifier pendant from her necklace into my mouth.
“That will make it better. Keep it.”