I don’t like things that go fast. I don’t like Jet Skis and I don’t like Vespas. I don’t even like speed intervals at Barry’s Bootcamp, which I took up again joyfully once Brett and I were no longer friends. (SPOKE might make you cool but it will not make you skinny.)
Lauren starts the race, ripping off her new headscarf and throwing back her chin like she’s Cha Cha in Grease. Brett zips ahead of me, too fast too soon. The Big Chill’s got no strategy. She has to keep slamming on the brakes to avoid crashing into the trees. After a few hundred yards, I catch up with her by maintaining a steady pace. The idea of a race is mostly fallacy, as we don’t have any idea where we’re racing to and we have to follow Tala—at least on the way there.
It’s a rocky, uphill climb, the elevation subtle then ungracefully steep, and I can’t help but imagine what it would be like to walk this, day after day, year after year of my life. At least it’s downhill with the jugs of water, though I remember the older women I saw as we wandered the village, their backs curved like boomerangs. How bitter they must be, watching these young girls with the bikes, going to school, making their own money. Why wasn’t there a better way in time for them?
I have barely moved my legs to get here and yet this film of sweat has turned cold, has drowned gnats in the creases of my elbows. Maybe I’m a little bit sick. Maybe I’m a little bit dying. There is something waiting for me on the other side of these mountains, something happening back in New York that will not leave me unscathed. I should never want to leave, and yet I’m dying to know how bad it is. I’m dying to know what I’m going to do about it. It’s past time to locate my spine.
“Careful!” Tala calls ahead of us, and then she drops off the horizon.
The descent is straight out of a stress dream. Something seasoned hikers would consider rappelling. Even Brett idles at the top, removing her feet from the pedals and stemming the earth for a moment.
“She’s doing it,” I say to Brett, unsure, as we watch Tala bump around boulders and sparse, scraggly bushes.
“It’s amazing,” Brett says, watching her, and I realize she hasn’t stopped because she’s scared. She’s stopped to take it all in. “You lose touch, back in New York,” she continues. “You know you’re doing something that matters, but it’s never more real than when you come here and see it with your own two eyes.”
With that, she twists her handlebars and navigates her way downhill fearlessly, her hair flipping sweetly in the wind. I wonder what would happen if I bumped her tire on the way down. If the back would flip over the front, if her top teeth would go through her bottom lip, as easily as a knife parting hot butter.
It’s greener by the river, obnoxiously, Irishly so. Brett expresses her disappointment that the camera crew was unable to follow us down here. “This is Morocco,” she declares, sucking in a torrent of fresh air, and I want to tell Tala that I won’t say anything if she holds Brett’s face in the shallow river until she stops struggling.
“Oh, come on, I’ll do it,” Brett says, when she notices me daydreaming her death at the river’s seam. Tala has already waded up to her waist and has her jerrican submerged, the water at her side bubbling greedily.
“I’ll do it,” I say, but Brett has already snatched the jug out of my hand and joined Tala. She doesn’t bother to take off her five-hundred-dollar sneakers, which, if you want a tell that someone is newly flush, watch how they treat their expensive things.
I’m about to remove my sandals and join them, prove to Brett that I’m not too much of a priss to get wet, when my pants pocket purrs once, shortly, before going off like a pager at some godforsaken Cheesecake Factory.
My cargo pants are thin silk, adhering to my damp skin like Saran Wrap to Saran Wrap. There is a horrible moment when my phone gets trapped in the lining of my pocket, and my hand writhes like a cat trapped under a bedsheet.
“Oh my God,” Brett judges. “Look where we are! Ignore it!”
“There is a mobile tower over that hill,” Tala says.
“Stop it.” Brett clucks, making apparent her disapproval that underprivileged people should be able to make a call that won’t drop.
“It’s true. There is a well closer to home than this, but everyone comes here because they can find a signal.”
“I left my phone in the car,” Brett boasts as I free my own and open my email. It was as if I’d set a Google alert for “weight loss.” Try it sometime. You’ll see what I mean. My screen is a scroll of vitriol, hit after hit, a greatest collection of pun-y insults. Goal Digger “digs” her own grave? The New York Times removes Stephony Simmons’s “memoir” from bestsellers list, citing fraud. Simmons’s life story is fake news, Fox is the most happy to report.
“Who died, Steph?” Brett laughs, tipping her head back and wetting her hair.
Gwen is coming, Vince has texted me. Call me when you can.
Why is Gwen coming? Where is Gwen going? I open the conversation and thumb back, feeling faint.
At 1:16: A reporter from the Daily News just knocked on the door. I said you weren’t home. Just wanted you to know.
1:47: Okay. A few more have knocked on the door. I didn’t answer. But now there is a small crowd gathered outside the apartment. I’m assuming you are somewhere without service.
I call him immediately, but the connection fails, again and again. I text back, What’s going on? Is Gwen there? I won’t have service much longer. I hit send, but the message doesn’t go anywhere. I growl a curse.
“Can we ride the bikes closer to the tower?” I ask Tala.
Brett wrings out her hair, watching me concernedly. “What’s going—”
We both freeze, terror-eyed, when we hear the ominous rustling in the brush. In an instant, I’ve catalogued every gruesome talking point of Brett’s cause célèbre: the fourteen-year-old girl raped and murdered by four men, the twelve-year-old girl who escaped her rapist only to deliver his baby nine months later, the young mother raped and tortured by a gang, leaving four children behind. At least the Internet will remember me kindly. These days, a woman is forgiven everything when a man kills her.
Tala, shouting a bizarre chant, charges out of the river and joins me on the shore, stomping her feet ferociously.
“Hey-hey. Hoo-hoo!” Tala shouts, and motions frantically for me to mimic her odd dance. But I cannot move a muscle for fear that my brain may stop changing shape, that my synapses may stop spinning this gossamer: A woman is forgiven everything when a man kills her.
“Oh my God.” Brett doubles over with a laugh when a ferret-looking thing sticks his whiskered nose out of the shrubs.
“Jesus,” I say, relieved, and maybe a little bit disappointed. “I was thinking about all those women who have been raped and murdered out here.”
Tala is picking out sharp-edged shells from the soles of her feet. She stops. “What women were raped and murdered here?”
Brett sloshes out of the water, her caftan melded between her thick thighs. “Shouldn’t we go? I thought wherever there are little animals there are bigger animals tracking them.”
I look down at my phone. The text still hasn’t been sent to Vince.
“It’s only a weasel,” Tala says, as Brett plops her big dump on the bike. I’m tempted to go over there and rip her dress from shoulder blades to ankles, check to make sure there’s no butt pad under there. Not a thing about her has turned out to be true.