The building, however, was locked.
Anna’s face briefly registered disappointment. Then, spotting an iron gate by the side of the church, she wobbled past a shabby grotto into a cemetery full of plastic flowers and tombstones old and new. It wasn’t a dauntingly large space, but the sun was brutal, so Brian became concerned when Anna kept moving.
“You wait here in the shade,” he told her. “What are we looking for?”
“Madrigals,” she said.
Wren jumped at the challenge, scouring the inscriptions on the stones with such enthusiasm that she hit pay dirt in less than three minutes. “Here’s someone named Hegazti Madrigal,” she hollered to Anna. “He died in nineteen ninety-three.”
“She,” said Anna.
“What?”
“Hegazti was a she.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Are there any others nearby?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Wait.” Brian had spotted a stone that was flush with the ground. It was no bigger than a shoe box and weatherworn, but its inscription was easily readable.
BELASKO MADRIGAL
1920–1936
Wren gasped at the discovery. Brian wasn’t sure whether his tone should be celebratory or funereal, so he returned to the shade, where Anna was waiting, and escorted her back to the grave marker. She stood there for about a minute, smiling tenderly at the granite reality, before murmuring a word that made no sense to him.
“Abyssinia,” she said.
Chapter 26
WORLDS BEYOND
Ben and Michael were swapping sleepy grins, since the kid in the Pan outfit had conked out on Michael’s chest in the big tent at Comfort and Joy. There was no way to move without waking him, so Michael was accommodating his weight to the point of numbness. “He’s so peaceful,” he murmured. “I hate to disturb him.”
“There’s no rush,” said Ben, realizing how blissful that simple fact made him. He could spend an eternity here in this cushioned puppy pile of lantern-lit men, watching his husband holding this goat-legged kid. The kid’s hand was resting on Michael’s Buddha belly, receiving its benediction even in sleep. The oceanic sounds of sex still ebbed and flowed in various corners of the tent, but the three of them were contentedly beached, for the moment at least, on a warm and golden shore.
The kid stirred and rubbed his eye with his fist.
“Hey,” he said, as if he had just discovered them.
“Hey,” said Michael, kissing his forehead beneath the horns.
The kid rolled over languidly and nestled between the two of them. His once-prancing penis was now a silky pink mouse napping in his faux fur loins. He seemed to be startled, briefly, by the jungle growl of an orgasm in a far corner of the tent, but his lips soon plumped into a smile of understanding.
“I have a feeling,” he said, “I’m not in Snowflake anymore.”
Michael chuckled. “I have a feeling you’ve said that before.”
“Maybe.”
“I used to say it about Orlando.”
“Where’s Snowflake?” asked Ben.
“It rings a bell,” said Michael, “for some reason.”
“Arizona,” said the kid.
“Right.”
“How does that ring a bell?” asked Ben.
“Probably our alien abductions,” said the kid.
“I don’t think that’s it,” said Michael.
Ben laughed.
“They were for real,” said the kid. “They made a movie out of it.”
They were quiet for a while. The kid was holding Ben’s cock—not in a particularly insistent way but idly, halfheartedly, as if it were a toy he might get around to playing with again. Michael noticed this and smiled benignly at Ben.
“Are you guys a couple?” asked the kid.
“You bet,” said Michael. “Husbands.”
Ben looked over at the man he’d been with for eight years, the man he’d married twice just to make it stick. Michael’s generation—its history of fighting disease and bigotry—sometimes made him grumpier than Ben would like him to be, but he knew what he’d found in Michael: a gift for intimacy like none Ben had ever known. Michael, for all his messiness, knew how to connect with him completely.
“Don’t you ever get jealous?” asked the kid.
“Oh, yeah,” said Michael. “Truly, madly, deeply jealous.”
“So?”
“So it’s not as big an emotion as the one that holds us together.”
The kid rolled his head toward Ben. “Do you get jealous?”
Ben hesitated just long enough for Michael to laugh. “Hell, no,” said Michael. “He knows he’s got me for life. I try to make him jealous, but I have no luck at all.”
The kid grabbed Michael’s cock with his other hand. “Bet I could do it.”
Ben laughed. “How can I be jealous of someone who doesn’t have a name?”
“Dustpuppy,” said the kid.
“Cute,” said Michael. “Kinda perfect, in fact.”
Ben agreed that it was. Everything about this man was suited to their molly moment. He seemed closer to a spirit than a human being, the uncomplicated embodiment of youthful lust and sweetness. Ben remembered the kid’s reference to alien abductions in Arizona and amused himself with the thought that Dustpuppy had been sent to them on assignment from another planet, an escort for worlds beyond.
“I have to sit up,” said Michael. “You guys stay put.”
“What’s the matter?” asked Dustpuppy.
“Your foot?” asked Ben. He was well acquainted with this scenario. Michael’s lingering gout had a way of making his limbs go numb. “Here,” he said, grabbing a nearby bolster and propping it against a tent pole. Michael settled against it and issued a groan of relief as he extended his foot and shook it like a dust mop.
“Better,” said Michael. “Thanks, sweetheart.”
Dustpuppy looked distressed, so Ben tried to put him at ease. “It’s his circulation,” he said, gathering pillows in his arms. “Here . . . we can all sit up.” He made a big pile against which the three of them reclined like drowsy pashas.
Ben found himself slipping in and out of sleep. The last time he awoke, Dustpuppy had gone (headed off, no doubt, for a mission on another planet), so Ben snuggled closer to Michael, who murmured his contentment unintelligibly.
Someone across the tent was playing a small stringed instrument. It had a medieval Anglo-Saxon sound.
“The music of our people,” Ben said with a smile.
Another murmur from Michael.
“What is that?” asked Ben. “A lyre or a lute. I’ve never known the difference.”
“What difference?”
“You know—between a lyre and a lute.”
There was no response from Michael, so Ben looked directly into his eyes. They were open but unblinking. “Are you okay, honey?”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Look at me, Michael . . . Michael?”
“I’m fine.” Michael’s eyes rolled back, exposing the whites.
“Sweetheart . . . damn it!”
Michael’s whole body was shaking now, a series of small convulsions that made him lurch forward off the pile of pillows.
Ben looked up and yelled to no one in particular, “Help us, please! Is there a doctor here? Somebody, please help us!”
The music ended abruptly. Several people sprang to their feet and rushed to offer aid, standing in a circle around them. Some of them were naked and still had semi-erections—a detail that Ben would remember and recount for years to come.
Michael was blue and unmoving. His breathing had stopped completely. His legs were wet with urine.
Ben held him in his arms and began to cry out of sheer helplessness.
> He could not leave this man, so he could not run for help.
“Stretch out!” said someone behind him. “Get him flat!”
So Ben complied, lowering Michael to the dusty carpet, arranging his limbs with such care that he might have been preparing him for ritual anointment.
Do it right, he told himself. Assume he’s alive.
“I’m here, babe,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’re taking this ride together.”
No response. Michael’s hand was cold and stiff as Ben held it in a frantic pantomime of ordinary life.
“Get Hawkeye!” someone shouted.
“I’m on it!” said another. “Where is he?”
“Next door at Celestial Bodies. He’s a ranger. He’s got a walkie-talkie!”
Ben just kept talking quietly to his husband’s inert face. “They’re getting Hawkeye, sweetheart. He’s a ranger.”
Nothing.
“He’s got a walkie-talkie.”
Nothing.
“I love you, Michael. Do you hear me? I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. I promised you that, didn’t I? I’m here, baby, right here, so listen to me, okay?”
But Michael was beyond listening.
Chapter 27
IN HER MIND’S EYE
The road was so rutted that Anna was jostled awake several times in the course of the hundred-mile drive. There was very little to be seen outside the window beyond the powdery emptiness in the headlights of Brian’s motor home. She had asked to be wakened when they passed through Jungo, but that moment never came, since Brian said there had been no evidence of the town’s existence. Not a train track, nor a station, nor a skeleton of planks that might have passed for Mrs. Austin’s general store. Time magazine (and the gold lust of President Hoover) had made Jungo a new El Dorado, but the town had long since vanished, its bones picked clean by the other time, the lowercased time, whose truth was more reliable in the end.
Wren was sitting on the floor the last time Anna awoke.
“Yes, dear?”
“Are you okay? It’s awfully bumpy.”
She agreed that the road was a bit of a washboard. “The bed is comfy, though. It almost absorbs the shock.”
“Frankly,” said Wren, “I’m a little nauseous. Just hoping you aren’t.”
Anna explained that her stomach was ironclad and always had been.
“Lucky you,” said Wren.
“I hope I’m not being a nuisance.”
“No—no . . . I’m curious about Burning Man myself. And Brian promises a nice flat road on the way back.”
It would serve no purpose, Anna realized, to explain her real motivation for requesting this side trip. Her gift for premonition—whether morbid or pleasant—had often fallen short of the mark, so she knew it was best to keep her mouth shut. Even if—heaven forbid—there proved to be a reason for her growing dread, there was nothing they could do about it now. She would only cause them early anguish.
Still, it was hard to forget the times she’d been right.
Lasko, for instance, had been leaving the world just when she had decided to ask for his forgiveness. And forty years later, on a Christmas Eve at Barbary Lane, she would know the very moment that life left Edgar Halcyon, her one great love. She would not be with him at the time, but she would feel it—a warm breeze of bay rum and Harris tweed that swept through every pore of her body.
This time, though, she was seeing a tent. A big tent scattered with bright pillows, like something out of the Arabian Nights. And people she didn’t recognize were scrambling around frantically and shouting the word doctor.
“Where are you right now?” asked Wren.
“Nowhere I should be, apparently.”
“I hear you. The mind wanders when you’re on the moon. This has to be the most desolate place I’ve ever seen. There hasn’t been another vehicle since we left Winnemucca. I just tried calling a friend and—nada. We’re fine, though. We have more than enough Kombucha to survive the trip.”
Anna smiled at her. This woman was such a generous, uncomplicated spirit. How perfectly suited she was for leading Brian out of his vagrant gloom.
“Anyway,” Wren added, “Brian says we’ll be in Gerlach in a half an hour. That’s the town at the entrance.”
This moment of consolation was punctuated by another walloping bounce from the motor home—and the sound of Brian hollering “Whoa, Nellie!”
Wren rolled her eyes. “I have no idea where that came from.”
“I think,” said Anna, “from Michael.”
“Really?”
“An old cowboy show on television. Someone said it to a Jeep.”
Wren grinned. “I’m sure the Nellie part was what amused Michael.”
There had been plenty of talk about butch and nellie in those days. Anna in fact had worried that Michael would embrace one or the other to such a degree that the natural blend could not occur. She need not have fretted. In no time at all an entire orchestra of gender traits were at Michael’s command, and he took joy in the mix. He had once been fond of referring to himself as the Butchinelli Brothers.
Anna managed a smile. “He brought you into the family, really.”
Wren shrugged. “Does meeting me in a bar count?”
“It better . . . or nothing will.”
Wren laughed. “You’re right, though. I would never have met Brian without Michael. He was one of those people you take to instantly. So full of life and mischief you could just eat him with a spoon.”
Anna looked away, afraid that her face would betray her feelings.
“I hope we can find him,” said Wren, “in the midst of that madhouse.”
“Do we know it’s going to be a madhouse?” asked Anna.
“Well—Brian says it’s going to be festive and very busy. But Michael’s staying with Shawna, and we know where she’s staying. Once we park with Jake and Amos, we can put out the word. Word has a way of spreading there, apparently.”
I can feel it, thought Anna. I can feel the word spreading out from that tent like bright red syrup in a cone of shaved ice.
How awful it was to eavesdrop without being there, without being able to act. She asked Wren to help her sit up in the bed.
“We can move you to a chair if you like.”
“No, this is fine. I just need to look out at something.”
Wren plumped a pillow behind her and gazed out at the gray blur beyond the window. “Even if it’s nothing, huh?”
Anna nodded. Even if it’s nothing.
Wren, sensing something wrong, stayed with Anna for a period of silence, broken only by another “Whoa, Nellie!” from Brian as the vehicle hit another rut.
“For God’s sake,” Wren hollered, “don’t break an axle.”
“I’m workin’ on it,” her husband hollered back.
The tent seemed more subdued now. Fewer players in the scene. The cause for the commotion had apparently been removed.
This might have been calming to Anna, but somehow it wasn’t.
Chapter 28
SOMETHING ELSE AFOOT
Mary Ann’s shift at Arctica had left her bone-tired and aching. Who knew ice could be so fricking heavy? She had tried to push through to the end, but one of her coworkers had noticed her exhaustion and insisted that she go home and rest. If he had known that “home” was this air-conditioned Hollywood-style trailer with a comfy king bed and a wafer-thin television, he might not have been so sympathetic, but she accepted his compassion without protest. There was no way she could face the medical tent tonight without a little down time. And possibly a filet mignon.
It was good to be tired this way. She remembered the old tired, the tired that had dogged her before her cancer was diagnosed, and the tired that had drained her after her surgery. But she had been cancer-free for four years no
w, so she had reason to savor her ordinary old-person weariness. There were worse things in life than the usual aches, and she had known them, thank you very much.
She stretched out on the bed with her flute of prosecco and congratulated herself on having accepted DeDe Halcyon-Wilson’s invitation to occupy this pleasure craft. DeDe’s and D’or’s RV was next door, so there was plenty of opportunity for fellowship whenever she wanted it. She just didn’t want it right now. She wanted to sip her prosecco, and meditate for a while, and maybe have a modest shower and a nap. As she lay sorting out the order in which these events would occur, she noticed the ever-deepening drifts of playa dust on the floor. You could not get away from the stuff, however elegant your quarters. It walked right in the door and sat down.
She knew how plenty of Burners felt about plug and play. She had seen the barely concealed contempt on the face of Jake’s new boyfriend, Amos. To this young hipster, she was just one of those decadent trustafarians who let other people shop for their costumes, or make them even, who let other people cook for them and build their art cars. All of which might be true to an extent, but it was still hurtful. In the end, everybody faced the whiteouts. It was a very democratizing thing, the dust.
Besides, it was not like they were sponsored by Halliburton or something. This camp had been organized by dinky little Western Gentry magazine, or more accurately, westerngentrymag.com, the online presence of the society publication. It was hardly the evil empire. The magazine had not been especially intrusive either, beyond photographing the inaugural organic barbecue, when Mary Ann’s Steampunk Duchess costume had been looking (if she did say so herself) pretty darn rad.
No, she had not made it herself. So the fuck what.
The next time she spoke to Amos, she would try to give him a better idea of who she really was. She wanted him to know that. She wanted him to like her.
She had a feeling he’d be around for a while.
She was in the midst of meditation when someone rapped energetically on the side of the RV. She considered ignoring it, then finally rose and opened the door.