Behind the Moon. Madison Smartt Bell
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. It wasn’t so completely dark after all because there was the light of the phone screen, behind her now; its bluish-white, unnatural luminescence spreading from the cupped hand of the girl where she lay. Then the light went out. But the battery would not have died yet. The screen had shut down to conserve the battery.
She thought of turning the phone on again, and yes, a thumb must have pressed a button, for the light reappeared, and now she could see how the body lay where it had fallen, half on its back and half on its side, knees drawn up, the pale face turned sideways, eyes closed now. On the rock where the head rested there was a darkness flowing, more beyond the fan of Julie’s dark hair. Yes, surely this was Julie’s body, but she was not inside that body now.
Would the blood smell attract the bear? But the bear was an illusion, it was painted on the wall, and then there was something else painted there, or not, something she saw now or had seen, a swirl of bright specks in spirals, like a cyclone or the image of a broad-bladed, fleshy leaf that bulged and rippled in the rising wind.
The light of the screen shut down again; she turned away from it and continued along the passage, careful not to brush the wall on either side. She seemed to know where the walls were, although she couldn’t see them. The freshness and sense of movement in the air was receding behind her. Ahead of her the black atmosphere felt increasingly heavy and close, but it was important that she continue to move deeper into the cave.
11
Ascending more gradually now, the ledge wrapped around the cliff wall to the north. At a narrow place where Julie hesitated, Jamal reached back to help her along, and then they had come out into the warmth of sunlight. Jamal let go of her wrist and turned toward the lowering sun, raising one hand to shade his eyes, inside the yellow goggles. On this side of the cliff the horizontally striped stone hills were densely grouped together, with shallow, dry canyons snaking between them. The first phase of the sunset picked the landscape out in bands of turquoise and rose.
“Wow,” said Julie, “We could be on the moon.”
“Except—” Jamal pointed to the horizon. A glint of reflection from a car window as the vehicle turned a loop in a band of blacktop. It was too far away to hear the motor, and when the car turned out of sight Julie couldn’t even pick out the thread of highway any more. The whole desert valley resonated with an airy silence.
Then squeaking, like a hamster in distress, and it grew louder, but there couldn’t be a hamster in mid-air. From below the lip of the ledge where they stood the beating wings of a hawk came into view, flogging the air as it flew to perch on a crag a dozen yards away.
Julie pulled out her phone to take a picture, but felt Jamal’s warm palm, this time on her forearm.
“Don’t,” Jamal said. “Just. . . . Watch it.”
The hawk tightened its talons, and the squeaking abruptly