Jamal took his wraparounds off and looked at her a little strangely, like he was inspecting around the edges of her eyes. His own gray eyes looked knowing, and a little hard. He seemed like he was going to say something but he didn’t.
“What,” Julie said. “What?”
“Nothing.” Jamal put his glasses back on, looked down at the stone space inside his crossed ankles. With one hand he fidgeted with the brass ring on his left boot strap, where the stitching had come loose on the inside. “How much did you drink out of Sonny’s bottle?”
“What, that vitamin water?” Julie shrugged. “Just a taste. I was thinking it might be spiked but it wasn’t.”
“Not with—oh. . . .” Jamal ripped the ring completely free of the loosened strap and twirled it around his finger. The brusque destructiveness wasn’t like him, and that upset Julie more at first than whatever it was he wasn’t telling. That peculiar warmth and softness in her belly when they’d chased and captured the tent was still there, or it had always been there and she was now again aware of it. And with it a sort of crenellation around the edges of her vision. When she turned her head to stare at Jamal, the early stars drew lingering pale lines, like jet-trails, across the darkening sky.
“Did they dose us?” Julie heard her voice go all cracked and screechy—maybe this too was the effect of a drug, if it wasn’t suspicion making her feel it. She was on her feet with her white hands balled into fists on her hips. “Jamal—what was in that bottle?”
“I don’t . . . don’t know anything for sure.” Jamal had also gotten to his feet, fidgeting with his sunglasses and the brass ring torn from his boot, but somehow he wouldn’t look at her with his bare eyes.
“What do you think, then? God damn it!” Julie felt some of her mother’s bitchiness coming out of her mouth, didn’t care.
“Molly, maybe.” Jamal looked away toward the horizon, where the last red line of sunset was like a razor cut. “I don’t know anything really, Julie—they might’ve candy-flipped it.”
“Candy—Jamal, talk English.”
“They’ll cut it sometimes, you know, with acid. . . .” Jamal looked at her straight on now; the subject had gone abstract for him and so now he could explain it. For a second she thought she saw a little snail-shaped op-art graphic vibrating on the side of his face that was in shadow. “Or really the idea is to cut the acid with some X—less chance of a bad trip that way, they say.”
“Who the hell is they?” Julie shouted at him. “Some stoner committee advisory board? Or is it just Sonny and Marko? Marko!” Her voice had climbed at the end, as if she was calling Marko, but that was something she definitely did not want to do . . . and Jamal seemed to have the same thought. He took a step toward her, one hand outstretched, as if that would calm her—Jamal’s long-fingered, slender, rather beautiful hand, delicate and assured as the hand of a musician (though she’d never seen Jamal play any instrument), and it seemed almost a golden color against the rock floor below, which was taking on a milky bluish tinge as the light continued to fade.
“I’ll stay with you,” Jamal said, in that soothing voice—she remembered Jamal was good with animals. Once when they were walking a dry creek bed in town a big stray dog had approached them, growling, hackles up, but Jamal had been cool then, calmed the dog, eluded it, sent it on a different way from them.
“You didn’t take much, whatever it is,” Jamal was saying. “I’ll walk you through it, it’ll be okay. There’s no reason to think it’ll go bad on you anyway. And I’ll be here if—”
“Karyn.” Julie snapped, feeling droplets flying wild from her lips with the name—she was getting that far out of control. “We just leave her there to drink the whole dose then, and be with those two Neanderthals—”
Jamal’s hand swirled down to his waistband, like a falling leaf. He’d tucked his wraparounds in the collar of his shirt; the ring from his boot hung from the index of finger his other hand.
“Karyn’s okay with it.” He hesitated. “It’s not her first time.”
There was something hidden behind the words, inside them. For a moment Julie seemed to see his head break open like the hollow moon’s cracked crystal, and there inside was the hidden thing, purling like a feather of dark smoke. Jamal was blocking her way back to the tents and the others, perhaps just by chance, but she dodged past him before he could react and began to run over the ledges. She could hear him skittering along behind her, calling out, but in a hoarse stage-whisper—Julie, come on, don’t run like that! You’re gonna fall and break your neck—
19
She drew the black tab of the zipper down. The tent flap furled outward with a slow liquid motion, the thickness of a banana peel opening, but she didn’t want to think about a banana, she didn’t know why. A sick, excited feeling gripped her by the belly and the throat, but she was hung up on the movement of the tent flap to the point that she couldn’t yet see past it. It reminded her of that curious, fleshy broad-bladed leaf form—but she was seeing that in the cave, not now, not here. The inside of the tent was big as a regular room, high enough that Marko could stand erect inside it, a piercingly bright light cupped in his hand.
Here was the will-of-the-wisp light she had seen from outside the tent, diffused and softened by the fabric of the walls, circling and probing toward the center she realized now, though the light was so bright she couldn’t really see past it, only Marko’s heavy dark silhouette surrounding it.
“Julie.” Marko’s voice was reassuring, or trying to be. “We were hoping you’d come.”
White teeth. His hand cupping the camera dropped, so that the bright point of light that had blinded her softened as it pooled across the tent floor, and she could see Karyn moving out from under Sonny’s shadowy weight, raising herself partway up from the rumpled Indian blanket. Pushed down from her shoulders and pushed up from her waist, her top was a wrinkled band around her ribcage, which somehow made her seem more abjectly naked than if she’d been completely bare. Her glazed eyes, a glistening on her cheek—she wiped at it with the back of her free hand.
“Come on in,” Marko said. “We’re just getting started.”
His hand with the camera rose toward Julie again, maybe an unconscious side effect of his welcoming gesture. The image of Karyn disappeared in the glare, and Julie understood that the light that had been used on Karyn was now intended to be used on her.
20
Sometimes she got eye wiggles when she was rolling, but that was different, a lot different from seeing stuff that wasn’t there at all, like those swirling paisley patterns she’d seen on the side of Jamal’s face before she ran away from him on the ledges. Now it was iridescent snakeskin patterns on the tent flap when she pulled the fat tab of the zipper down and the flap peeled from its toothy track. Flipping something, candy flipping. Jamal said. She wanted to go deeper into the rolling feeling, warmth and openness, cuddlesome closeness. The tent flap furling downward was a triangle that inverted the triangle that wanted to pull her forward by the nubs of her breasts and the bottom of her belly—then too the dizzy fascination of watching that happen, the tent flap unfurling itself slowly, looking at it from some other place, like when you were watching something secret, forbidden. Even what Karyn was doing
