Behind the Moon. Madison Smartt Bell
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 drew her on, and it didn’t even matter that there were more than two. No worse, no different, than joining a rolling kitten pile. It was the light on the camera that pushed her back, its sharpness piercing like a scalpel, making her not see not understand so much as feel, way down in the base of her brain, that Karyn was being done, not doing.
White teeth. “Come on in—we’re just getting started.”
The light stabbed at her, pushed her back. She took two backward steps from the door of the tent before she turned and ran.
21
When she turned from the blaze of white light in the tent door, Jamal was there behind her, spot-lit, his skinny arms outstretched and his face blanched to a featureless pallor by the blast of illumination. Had he herded her, manipulated her into this place?
“You—” she said, “You—” The blur of his face resolved as she came nearer, but she couldn’t think what to put behind that You—accusation, endearment, curse? The light went out suddenly, and for a second or two Julie couldn’t see anything at all, then forms begin to pick themselves out of the darkness, blue-black sky outlining the cliff, the silvery shapes of the bikes where they were parked. And nearer, Jamal’s spidery silhouette, an arm reaching toward her, and she thrust out her hand, to deflect him, or to grasp—she didn’t really know which. Their fingertips barely brushed as she rushed by, and that contact tingled, shimmered like a déjà vu. Go, Jamal hissed—she was already past him now.
Jamal had turned back toward the tent. “Just let her go, Marko.” And Julie was thinking that he meant her to escape from the situation altogether, but how? She didn’t even know how to start Jamal’s little scooter, the only one of the three bikes she might have been strong enough to manage, and it could never outrun the Harleys anyway, and they were out on the empty desert with nowhere to hide, unless she went up the same way on the ledges around to the other side of the cliff, where the hawk had been that afternoon—
“Too late,” Marko’s voice was reasonably calm, a reasonable tone stretched over strain. “She’s in this far, look it, she’s got to come all the way.”
Julie turned back. Jamal had rooted himself in the sand, knees bent and his feet set apart. Marko crouched in the mouth of the tent, holding a flashlight now, with a softer beam than the spot on the camera, the light stain fading as it spread across the sand behind Jamal’s boots.
“Julie’s not in this.” Jamal said. “She never was.”
“If that’s how you feel,” Marko said, “you dumb-ass sandnigger, all you had to do was keep her away.”
Then Marko’s attention moved to her, though Julie wasn’t sure that he could see her where she hesitated, high on the balls of her feet, a little beyond where the pool of flashlight failed. “Come back, Jule—we’re not gonna hurtcha! It’s all. . . . It feels good, once you get into it, y’know, like Karyn is.”
Something in that scared Julie a lot more than she had been scared before and the run impulse was shooting up her legs, erupting in her spine, and still somehow she was frozen in place, transfixed by Marko’s wolverine eyes, if he could actually even see her, when Jamal was blocking most of the light. Then Marko suddenly charged up out of his crouch, raising the flashlight like a club, and it was one of those six-D-cell maglites like the cops used, too, but Jamal went down on one knee and as Marko rushed him he tossed a palm’s worth of sand into Marko’s face, and that broke the momentum. Marko dropped the light and covered his eye-sockets with both hands, calling out blindly, you stinking camel-fucker, I’ll kill you when I catch you, you—
Julie ran. All she could hear was Karyn screaming, the two-note scream that switched itself on at ball-games or car wrecks or concerts or if Karyn saw a snake—it just kept on going like a siren or a car alarm till something shut it off. She reached the cliff and scrambled up the ledges, tripping and crouching, using her hands. Her eyes had recovered from the spotlight blast, and now she could see well enough in the feathery light of the moon, but she supposed the others could see her too.
22
Once, Julie had been riding up an escalator while Jamal (was it Jamal?) was riding down. She didn’t know him then, not really, but the same impulse struck them both at the same time, so that they reached their hands across the gap between the up stairs and the down. Their fingertips brushed with a feathery tingle, for one light instant before the machinery carried them each away on a separate orbit. As if some other life had swung just close enough to hers for that faint touch, then veered off. She didn’t look back after they had passed. The escalators ran in a well of glass walls, and the afternoon sun came pouring through, bathing everyone in a flood of golden light.
The herd of animal persons swirled into the opening at the end of the great hall, which she was now approaching—she was guided by a force she felt inside her, though that force was not her own. Her bare feet fit securely into heel prints that led her through the portal now. The horned being she’d expected to see was not there. She touched the back of her own head with her fingers, and saw again the image of Julie at the bottom of the shaft, lying in the bluish-white glow of her cell-phone screen. Where had the animal persons gone? She had seen them all streaming through the opening into this small round chamber, but now they were nowhere to be found. Her vision fractured, and the pattern