finished assembling: a silver-gray hemisphere sealed into the sand. Something in the shape of it appealed to her. Something about the way her image of it trembled around the edges. Sonny cracked a beer and gave it to her—where had he found that? The foam was acrid in her mouth, connecting with a bitter aftertaste from the vitamin water she’d had a few minutes before. She took a larger gulp to wash it out.
Two slightly sweating, soft vinyl coolers had appeared beside the pair of Harleys. Sonny pulled out two more beers and dragged the coolers into the shade.
“Don’t be dumping that ice,” Marko said.
“Huh,” said Sonny, “I ain’t drinking it, not out of there.”
“We can cook with it,” Marko said. “We got a pack of freeze-dried stuff.”
“Are we Boy Scouts or what?” Sonny said, and Karyn laughed, elbowed him, let her blond head roll back against the warm stone of the boulder.
Jamal fired up his little stone pipe and sent it round among the others. Julie took the weakest possible hit, then left the circle before the bowl could come to her again. She didn’t want to get too high too early. Maybe at night, when the stars came out, when sleep would be soon to come. The business of the tents would all be sorted out by then, but she didn’t want to think about it now. There was a voice in her head that said be careful, and she especially didn’t want voices to start splitting off and talking to her from somewhere else.
The shadow cast by the cliff wall had grown to about six feet long, and Julie walked into it, feeling perhaps she might disappear. She sat down cross-legged in a niche of the vertically channeled stone. From here the orb of the tent seemed like an object of contemplation, like some meteorite that had embedded itself in the desert floor, and she imagined the other half of the sphere it described, twinning with it beneath the sand. There was a kind of aura around it. The stone behind her was still radiating warmth, like the walls of an oven, from the sun that had been shining on it for most of the day.
Trippy weed Jamal had—she reminded herself to go slow with that, lifting her arms and setting her palms together in a mudra above her head. As her palms touched she felt a spreading warmth below her navel, much stronger than she’d ever been able to get in her half-hearted attempts to practice yoga. A tingle across the smooth-shaved skin of her bare armpits. The tent rippled as a light breeze shivered over it.
Jamal was studying her from behind his yellow lenses, in that way that made her feel no one else could see her, even though the others were all there. On his cat-shaped, sallow face, the buggy glasses made him look like pictures of a space alien, sometimes.
“The Jule in the lotus,” Jamal said; funny, but it wasn’t a joke.
The wind came up and snatched the tent, which flew away across the plain of sand, sometimes skating on its flat bottom, sometimes rolling end over end. The others were laughing, watching Jamal caper after the tent—every time he almost caught it the wind would pull it just out of his reach. Julie was running like you can run in dreams, with a deep, springing, effortless movement, breathing as evenly as in sleep. That was trippy weed for sure. They captured the tent at last and held it still between them. Rippling in the remains of the breeze, the silvery fabric glimmered like snakeskin, and Julie still felt that warmth in her belly, spreading like the onset of happiness.
8
The pattern of dots billowed toward her, stretching and pocketing over the same roll in the wall that had formed the shoulder and hump of the bear. Or maybe she had moved somehow and was now in a different part of the cave. She didn’t know how she could have moved, because she couldn’t feel her body, although she remembered that not long ago she had felt the cool curve of her cell phone, fitting into the cupped palm of her hand.
She watched the pattern; it seemed important somehow to grasp it. A pattern in four dimensions; in her mind she heard those words, like a voice-over in a movie. But she was seeing it only in three. Umber, ochre, now a near-scarlet red, and there were three spirals swirling around each other—a triple helix, the dots drawing toward each other but never quite touching, as if a magnetic energy held them together, held them a certain distance apart.
For a moment she was inside the swirling particles, as if she was standing under rain.
9
She followed Jamal up the ledge that led to the first rock shelter. He climbed magnetically, as if he had suckers on his fingers and toes, and his head looked outsized on his slim body, maybe because of its big cloud of hair. Where the ledge leveled out to a wider shelf there was a vast overhang, three stories high, with a few trails of vine hanging from its upper lip. Because the overhang blocked the setting sun, it was suddenly almost cold. Julie wrapped her arms around herself. She’d left her jacket with the bikes.
On the inside wall there were tags spray-painted by other kids who’d come out from town, fat cushiony three-D letters smushed together like marshmallows crushed in the bag. Jamal pulled a plastic trash bag from his pocket and methodically began to scour up beer cans. After a moment Julie shook off her chill and helped him. There were chip bags and candy wrappers, too.
“Now what?” Jamal opened a crooked smile, hefting the three-quarters-full bag.
Julie shrugged and walked to the outside edge. Away below and to the left, Sonny and Marko were anchoring poles for an umbrella tent—it would be big as a room in a regular house when they were done. Karyn had scrambled to the top of the boulder and lay on her back on an Indian blanket, her white forearm shielding her eyes from the red rays of the declining sun. Julie pictured the turbulence that would follow if she or Jamal dropped the trash bag.
“Nah,” Jamal said. “The bikes won’t carry it. We’ll be doing well to come out with what we brought in.”
Julie turned toward the inner wall. At one end of the puffy chain of tagging, there was a narrow, dark slit in the rock. “In there?”
Jamal shook his head. “You ever think how you can’t throw anything away? I mean, you can throw it. But it doesn’t go away.”
Now Julie was conscious of herself shrugging. “I guess so,” she said, which seemed equally hapless. Still carrying the bag by its closed throat, Jamal walked toward the rock shelter wall.
“Wiggers,” he said, shaking his head as he read the tags, left to right, stopping where the opening pierced the stone. Julie stood a step behind him.
“You ever go in there?” she said.
“No thanks,” said Jamal. “I don’t like tight places.”
Julie looked into the gap in the stone. It seemed flat black, as if painted on the surface like the tags, as if after all there was no interior. She would have had to stoop just a little and turn sideways to get into it. Jamal was almost a head taller, but so skinny he might have folded himself up so he would also fit.
He set the bag down and touched her shoulder with a fingertip; the touch felt faintly electric through the cotton of her shirt.
“Come on,” Jamal said. “Let’s go find the sun.”
10
Seeming somehow to know her way, despite the utter darkness, she moved a little distance along the passage, then turned back.
