We're Here, page 9
She thought about the shoreline in summer, and about it blanketed in snow and a thin crisp of ice in winter. Dragonflies on the water. The shifting, multi-colored aura of the spirit.
As a wave glugged over her head, she realized the decay had expected this, too. It found her like it had her name. For an instant she thought she was sinking, the water both bright and brackish, and then there was nothing. It wasn’t darkness; it was nothing. She could not see anything, even the veins on the insides of her eyelids; she could not hear her pulse, much less the torrent; she couldn’t tell if she was swallowing water or breathing dry air. Everything was gone.
Was she cold? She thought she should be cold.
The lake, Juniper thought. The valley. Where water meets wood.
Oh shit. Lydia.
No, she had to concentrate—the lake, the valley, where water meets wood. The lake, the valley, where water meets wood.
The lake.
She saw the rainbow radiance of the great spirit, and reached for it.
Juniper gasped for breath. She was on land. On her back. Her head hurt like she’d been punched. She turned and retched up water, and saw her name in green paint on a flat rock. To her left, further down the beach, another written rock, and the great spirit vast and semi-translucent, its myriad forms shifting beneath the moonlight. And further still, the end of all things, intact and vast, imploding on itself a hundred times over, flesh fading and bacteria blooming and vanishing—and between her and it, Lydia, her back partially turned and a matchbook in her hands.
Juniper shoved herself to her feet.
Something flashed like sheet lightning and she heard a popping sound. Then there was nothing on the beach except for the two of them and the radiant vines of the great spirit. Juniper ran anyway, grabbed Lydia by the shoulders and hugged her.
Lydia leaned into the embrace and then said, “We got lucky. I think we have a very big problem.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that.” She swallowed and stepped back to regard the great spirit in its full colors. She reached into her sodden jacket and found the bottle there, still capped. The wind ruffled through her layers and she shivered. “Thank you for getting my idiot self out of the water. I don’t think I could have made it back to shore.”
“I’m going to get the first aid kit,” Lydia said.
As her wife walked up the incline to the parking lot, Juniper knelt by the great spirit’s rock. With the same paint pen she’d used to write Juniper’s name, Lydia had scribbled the valley and the line where the woods met the lake. One summoning and two bindings— the signs were quickly done and yet they had all still worked. She would never stop being astounded by Lydia’s precision. “She had to separate you from the decay,” she said, by way of explanation, “Or you might have both been banished.”
She scratched through the sketch with one of her keys, breaking the link. “I think—”
That is what it wanted. If it could not subsume me, it wanted to leave a void here that could be filled.
“It seems like it.” If the spirit was angry at Lydia, it wasn’t showing it, which Juniper would count in their favor. “Do you know what it was?”
It could have destroyed everything. When a bobcat catches a hare, it feeds on the death. Scavengers consume the remains. Life grows in the hare’s bones. When a fire passes through the woods, new growth springs up among the fallen. Death foreshadows new life, and new life foreshadows death. That...it would have broken the cycle.
Death would have offered more death, and nothing new would be born.
“What do we do?”
There must be a great convention.
Juniper held up the intact bottle. Inside it, nothing swirled, but she felt it, knew it was there, as real as she was. Lydia’s matchbook spells had were directionally focused, and to banish this shard of the end of things, they would have to conduct another ritual. Unless... “What do you want to do with this? I don’t want to take this into my home.”
It will be examined by the convention. The bottle vanished from Juniper’s outstretched hand as Lydia reappeared on the banks, the first aid kit in her arms. She pulled out a blanket and handed Juniper a warmth charm.
You saved us for now, the great spirit said to Lydia. We will speak further.
It collapsed into the land around it.
“I want to go home,” Lydia said.
Wrapped in the blanket like a cloak, Juniper walked up the concrete steps to gather her scattered kit. “When,” she asked, “were you going to tell me you’d made matchstick banishment charms?”
“When I knew they would work,” Lydia said, sounding hoarse. “I’d never used them until tonight.”
“We’re double lucky, I guess.” She zipped up the kit and swung it over her shoulder. “The banishment charms are brilliant, Lydia. Game-changing.”
“They need improvement.”
So did the warmth charm; Juniper was still soaked, but now the wetness was warm, and that was a different unpleasant feeling. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll find out what is coming next soon enough.”
Of course, it wasn’t that easy. First they checked everything they wore for remnants of the end of things. Then they combed through everything they’d brought through them. Juniper convened a precautionary banishment on the motorcycle.
After that came the cold flight back and, still later in the night, a steady search of the shop for anything the contaminated great spirit touched. They cast precautionary binding spells and reset the wards; Juniper roused and checked Maxine for signs of possession. The cat grumbled through the spell-casting and demanded new, fresh food in her bowl.
Sunlight made a red line on the horizon before she tossed her now-stiff clothing into the hamper, checked her phone—dry, but probably an expensive brick—and climbed into the shower. Her hair felt so greasy she shampooed twice before stepping out into the terry cloth bathrobe she almost never had a chance to lounge in.
Lydia had chamomile tea waiting for her before she even finished toweling off her hair. Juniper had heard her at the sink during her shower; she had scrubbed and changed and wrapped her hair in paisley silk.
“I’m not sure I’m awake enough to drink that.”
“I put a new sign on the door of the shop. We’re closed for the week.”
Juniper nearly fumbled the mug. “The week?”
“I’ll drop Marcel’s migraine charms off this afternoon. And I’ve texted your sister.”
“Thank you.” Juniper took a sip of steaming chamomile and then set it on the bedside table so she could worm under the sheets. Maxine climbed up the little stairs they’d built for her and lay down on her feet after kneading the blanket and her skin into a suitable bed. “The week, though? Are you sure you won’t explode?”
“I might explode.” Lydia rolled over behind her to wrap an arm around her shoulders. If Juniper hadn’t been so exhausted, she would have turned over and kissed her. Instead she melted into the sheets, enjoying the weight of Lydia’s arm and the gentle presence of her breath on the back of her head. “But something’s coming, and I realized I don’t have the energy for it. We’re stretched too thin at the shop. What we do is important for people but we still need time for ourselves or we’ll burn out.”
Juniper was warm, and comfortable, and her life was not in danger. She could barely keep her eyes open. “Can you bring me a pen and paper?” she asked. “I want to write that down so you can’t walk it back when we wake up.”
Lydia laughed and leaned in to kiss the back of her neck. “I don’t think you’ll let me. But I’m leaving the grant applications up to you.”
LET ALL THE CHILDREN BOOGIE
Sam J. Miller
Radio was where we met. Our bodies first occupied the same space on a Friday afternoon, but our minds had already connected Thursday night. Coming up on twelve o’clock, awake when we shouldn’t be, both of us in our separate narrow beds, miles and miles apart, tuning in to Ms. Jackson’s Graveyard Shift, spirits linked up in the gruff cigarette-damaged sound of her voice.
She’d played “The Passenger,” by Iggy Pop. I’d never heard it before, and it changed my life.
Understand: there was no internet then. No way to look up the lyrics online. No way to snap my fingers and find the song on YouTube or iTunes. I was crying by the time it was over, knowing it might be months or years before I found it again. Maybe I never would. Strawberries, Hudson’s only record store, almost certainly wouldn’t have it. Those four guitar chords were seared indelibly into my mind, the lonesome sound of Iggy’s voice certain to linger there for as long as I lived, but the song itself was already out of my reach as it faded down to nothing.
And then: a squall of distortion interrupted, stuttering into staticky words, saying what might have been “Are you out there?” before vanishing again.
Eerie, but no more eerie than the tingly feeling I still had from Iggy Pop’s voice. And the sadness of losing the song forever.
But then, the next day, at the Salvation Army, thumbing through hundreds of dresses I hated, what did I hear but—
“I am the passenger...and I ride and I ride—”
Not from the shitty in-store speakers, which blasted Fly-92 pop drivel all the time. Someone was singing. Someone magnificent. Like pawn-shop royalty, in an indigo velvet blazer with three handkerchiefs tied around one forearm, and brown corduroy bell-bottoms.
“I see things from under glass—”
The singer must have sensed me staring, because they turned to look in my direction. Shorter than me, hair buzzed to the scalp except for a spiked stripe down the center.
“The Graveyard Shift,” I said, trembling. “You were listening last night?”
“Yeah,” they said, and their smile was summer, was weekends, was Ms. Jackson’s raspy-sweet voice. The whole place smelled like mothballs, and the scent had never been so wonderful. “You too?”
My mind had no need for pronouns. Or words at all for that matter. This person filled me up from the very first moment.
I said: “What a great song, right? I never heard it before. Do you have it?”
“No,” they said, “but I was gonna drive down to Woodstock this weekend to see if I could find it there. Wanna come?”
Just like that. Wanna come? Everything I did was a long and agonizing decision, and every human on the planet terrified me, and this person had invited me on a private day trip on a moment’s impulse. What epic intimacy to offer a total stranger—hours in a car together, a journey to a strange and distant town. What if I was a psychopath, or a die-hard Christian evangelist bent on saving their soul? The only thing more surprising to me than this easy offer was how swiftly and happily my mouth made the words: That sounds amazing.
“Great! I’m Fell.”
“Laurie,” I said. We shook. Fell’s hand was smaller than mine, and a thousand times stronger.
Only then did I realize: I didn’t know what gender they were. And, just like that, with the silent effortless clarity of every life-changing epiphany, I saw that gender was just a set of clothes we put on when we went out into the world.
And even though I hated myself for it, I couldn’t help but look around. To see if anybody else had seen. If word might spread, about me and this magnificently unsettling oddball.
Numbers were exchanged. Addresses. A pick-up time was set. Everything was so easy. Fell’s smile held a whole world inside it, a way of life I never thought I could live. A world where I wasn’t afraid.
I wanted to believe in it. I really did. But I didn’t.
“What did you think that was?” Fell asked, in the parking lot, parting. “That weird voice, at the end of the song?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t thought much about it.
“At first I thought it was part of the song,” Fell said. “But then the DJ was freaked out.”
“Figured it was just...interference, like from another station.”
“It’s a big deal,” Fell said. “To interrupt a commercial radio broadcast like that. You need some crazy hardware.”
“Must be the Russians,” I said solemnly, and Fell laughed, and I felt the world lighten.
And that night, tuning in to Ms. Jackson, “This song goes out to Fell, my number one fan. Wouldn’t be a weeknight if Fell didn’t call asking for some Bowie. So here’s ‘Life on Mars?’ which goes out to Laurie, the girl with the mousy hair.”
More evidence of Fell’s miraculous gift. A thousand times I’d wanted to call Ms. Jackson, and each time I’d been too intimidated to pick up the phone. What if she was mean to me? What if I had to speak to a station producer first, who decided I wasn’t worthy of talking to their resident empress? And who was I to ask for a song?
Also, I loved “Life on Mars?” I wondered if Fell knew it, had read it on my face or smelled it on my clothes with another of their superhuman abilities, or if they had just been hoping.
I shut my eyes. I had never been so conscious of my body before. David Bowie’s voice rippled through it, making me shiver, sounding like Fell’s fingertips must feel.
I wondered how many times I’d been touched by Fell, listening late at night, trembling at the songs they requested.
I remembered Fell’s smile, and stars bloomed in the darkness.
But before the song was over, a sound like something sizzling rose up in my headphones, and the music faded, and a kind of high distortion bubbled up, and then began to stutter—and then become words. Unintelligible at first, like they’d been sped up, and then:
“...mission is so unclear. I could warn about that plane crash, try to stop the spiderwebbing epidemic. But how much difference would those things make? I’m only here for a short—”
Then the mechanical voice was gone. David Bowie came back. And just as swiftly was switched out.
“Sorry about that, children,” Ms. Jackson said, chuckling. An old sound. How long had she been doing this show? She always called her listeners children, like she was older than absolutely everyone in earshot. I heard a cigarette snuffed out in the background. “Getting some interference, sounds like. Maybe from the Air Force base. They’re forever messing with my signals. Some lost pilot, maybe, circling up in the clouds. Looking for the light. Good time to cut to a commercial, I’d say.”
Someone sang Friendly Honda, we’re not on Route Nine, the inane omnipresent jingle that seemed to support every television and radio program in the Hudson Valley. I thought of Fell, somewhere in the dark. Our bodies separate. Our minds united.
“Welcome back to the Graveyard Shift,” she said. “This is Ms. Jackson, playing music for freaks and oddballs, redheaded stepchildren and ugly ducklings—songs by us and for us, suicide queens and flaming fireflies—”
Fell’s car smelled like apples. Like spilled cider, and cinnamon. Twine held one rear headlight in place. When we went past fifty miles an hour, it shook so hard my teeth chattered together. Tractor trailers screamed past like missiles. It was autumn, 1991. We were sixteen. We could die at any moment.
The way to Woodstock was long and complicated. Taking the thruway would have been faster, but that meant paying the toll, and Fell knew there had to be another way.
“No way in hell that was a lost pilot,” Fell said. “That interruption last night. That was someone with some insane machinery.”
“How do you know so much about radio signals?”
“I like machines,” Fell said. “They make so much sense. Does your school have a computer? Mine doesn’t. We’re too poor.” Fell went to Catskill High, across the river. “It sucks, because I really want to be learning how they work. They can do computations a million times faster than people can, and they’re getting faster all the time. Can you imagine? How many problems we’ll be able to solve? How quickly we’ll get the right answer, once we can make a billion mistakes in an instant? All the things that seem impossible now, we’ll figure out how to do eventually.”
I lay there, basking in the warmth of Fell’s excitement. After a while, I said: “I still think it was the Soviets. Planning an invasion.”
“No Russian accent,” Fell said. “And anyway I’m pretty sure the Cold War is over. Didn’t that wall come down?”
I shrugged, and then said, “Thanks for the song, by the way.”
Instead of answering, Fell held out one hand. I took it instantly, fearlessly, like a fraction of Fell’s courage could already have rubbed off on me.
In that car I felt invincible. I could let Fell’s lack of fear take me over.
But later, in Woodstock, a weird crooked little town that smelled like burning leaves and peppermint soap, Fell reached for my hand again, and I was too frightened to take it. What if someone saw? In my mind I could hear the whole town stopping with a sound like a record scratching. Everyone turning, pointing. Shouting. Pitchforks produced from nowhere. Torches. Nooses.
Space grew between us, without my wanting it to. Fell taking a tiny step away from me.
We went to Cutler’s Record Shop. We found a battered old Iggy Pop cassette, which contained “The Passenger.” Fell bought it. We went to Taco Juan’s and then had ice cream. Rocky Road was both of our favorite.
Twilight when we left. Thin blue light filled the streets. I dreamed of grabbing Fell’s hand and never letting go. I dreamed of being someone better than who I was.
As soon as the doors slammed, we switched on the radio.
“Responding to this morning’s tragic crash of Continental Express Flight 2574, transport officials are stating that it’s impossible to rule out an act of terrorism at this—”
“No shit,” Fell said, switching it off.
“What?”
“The voice. They said I could warn about the plane crash.”
I laughed. “What, you think the voice in the night is part of a terrorist cell?”
“No,” Fell said. “I think they’re from the future.”
Just like Fell to make the impossible sound easy, obvious. I laughed some more. And then I stopped laughing.
