Burning (31 page)

The man pushed his hat up on his forehead. It fell backward and dangled against his back, held in place by a string around his neck.

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

“If you will allow me …” Lala reached out with both of her hands, gently taking his and turning it palm up. “Perhaps I can help you find direction toward the answers you seek.”

He wasn’t saying anything now. Behind him I heard guitar music, some sort of folk song, the kind of slow, easy music that’s just right for a hot day.

She looked into his hand and traced its lines with her finger, as if she were reading Braille. “I can see that you are a person who strives for balance,” she said. “You believe in
the value of practical work and do not shy away from it. Still, your mind is your best tool when it comes to earning a living. You are a man of solid values—and solid energy. And it would not surprise me to learn that you are a leader, and usually the man in a room that others turn to.”

“How do you know all that?” His voice was full of wonder.

“It is all there, written for any who knows how to read it,” Lala answered. “Would you like to know what else I see?”

He nodded, totally under her control now that she’d earned his belief. I stood quietly and watched her work.

“This is your Life Line,” she said, tracing a line that began at the edge of his palm and extended up across the middle of his hand, wrapping around the base of his thumb.

“Do I have a long time to live?” He tried to make his voice sound like he was joking around, but I heard something else in it—fear, maybe, definitely a sense of awe.

“Oh, yes,” Lala said, “but longevity is not all we can learn from a Life Line.”

“What else?”

“Look,” said Lala, “the line can be divided into three parts—your youth, your adult years, and old age. See how the line is long and deep? This shows your life will be long and largely full of health.”

“Well, that’s not really true,” he scoffed.

“I did say
largely
full of health,” Lala said. “You have battled illness.”

She did not say it like a question, but he nodded just the same. “How did you know?”

“You see how the line has a chained quality here in the
middle—it begins deeply, but then seems more shallow, and then deepens again?”

By now I was into it as much as the guy. I looked over his shoulder to see the line.

“This represents the struggles you have had with health. But look—see how deep and clear the line is from middle life into old age? Your health problems are behind you.”

The guy smiled, a big, beaming grin full of teeth. “That’s a relief,” he said. “What else can you see?”

“This here is the Head Line. It indicates your basic belief system—your philosophy, the perspective with which you look at life.” Lala indicated a line just above the Life Line that stretched horizontally across his palm. “This too is a long, deep line, in your case. See how straight? You are a logical man, not given to emotional outbursts. You are a realist.”

He laughed. “I used to think so,” he said. “So what in the hell am I doing here?”

“As I said, searching for answers. But perhaps looking in the wrong places? And look here,” she said, indicating a place on the line where it looked a little broken, like part of it was missing, “Do you see this? A broken line tells us that you have come to question your way of thinking. Perhaps something has happened to make you shift in this way?”

“You could say that.”

“I thought so,” Lala said, “and I imagine it has something to do with this line here.…” She pointed to a line above the Head Line. “Your Heart Line.”

“That one must be broken into a million pieces,” the guy
said. His voice had that weird edge to it that people’s voices get when they’re trying to joke about something that they don’t think is really funny at all.

“Look here,” Lala said. “Do you see this little constellation of lines that crosses your Heart Line? These indicate happiness in your romantic relationship.”

“Well, that’s wrong,” said the man.

“Let me finish,” said Lala. “The cluster of lines is
here
, early on the Heart Line. There was happiness once, wasn’t there?”

The man kind of cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “There was.”

“There can be again,” said Lala. “It is all here, written in your own flesh—your suffering, your ability to rebound from it. You were sick once, were you not, and now you are well?”

“Never healthier. But how could you know that?”

Lala ignored the question. “Your marriage is ill, too. But it is not dead. There is still time to heal it, if you wish.”

The man blinked, looking into his palm as if he could see what Lala saw, if only he stared hard enough. Then he looked up into her face. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t know who you are or where you came from. But thank you.” He closed up his umbrella and folded up his chair. “I’ve got to go home,” he said. “You kids have fun out here.”

He took his chair and umbrella and turned to the two browning women, nudging the nearer one with his foot. She grunted and sat up. “These kids are all taken care of,” he said. “Take over the gate, will you? I’ve got to go.”
Then he headed into the city, picking up a jog in spite of the heat.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked Lala after we’d walked through the entrance, smiling at the women who were now in charge of the gate.

“I believe we just had the entrance fee waived,” said Lala. She sounded a little smug.

“How the hell did you
do
that?”

She smiled. “I told you once before—you need to pay attention. Then you will see.”

“
What
did you see, exactly?”

“I saw a man whose ring finger on his left hand still bore a pale stripe where a ring had been for a long time, and until very recently. I saw a man with well-manicured fingers, no calluses, and a fine, expensive watch.”

I hadn’t seen any of this. To me, he was just a guy. “But you said he’d been sick. How could you know that? He looked perfectly healthy.”

“You are not serious,” she said.

“What?”

“Ben Stanley, did you even
look
at that man?”

“Of course I looked at him.” I was getting a little upset. It seemed like Lala was laughing at me.

“Did you see his bracelet?”

“His bracelet?” I thought back. “He had one of those rubber things. The ones people wear for causes.”

“Did you read it?”

“No. What did it say?”

“ 
‘I am stronger than cancer.’
 ”

“No shit.”

“Absolutely none.”

“Huh.” I shook my head. “Okay, then.”

So we were in.

Even in the middle of the afternoon, when the day was at its least tolerable, the place was crazy. After all those years of living just outside the gates, it seemed surreal to be here now, inside them, and ironic that I was here with Lala when I’d rather have been anywhere else, alone with her.

The people, I guess, impressed me more than anything else. Name an outfit, someone was rocking it. Bunny ears, capes, body paint every color of the rainbow, ridiculous platform boots, and full-on naked. There was a dude in vampire teeth and black leather being pulled around on a
leash
by a blond chick in a black corset and heels.

And they were riding bikes and unicycles and contraptions of all different kinds, and some of them were playing instruments and others were carrying around drinks.

Lala’s eyes were wide open. She kept swiveling her head back and forth like she was trying to take it all in at once.

Hog Boy hadn’t been lying about the girls. All kinds of them—tall, short, fat, thin, old, young, beautiful, and somehow beautifully ugly—were out there on the playa. I was with Lala, and she was who I
wanted
to be with, but even so I couldn’t help but see all the flesh on display, and a small
voice in my head couldn’t help but wonder what it might be like to touch them, to have them touch me.

The thought gave me a flash of guilt, and I hoped Lala hadn’t seen what I was thinking. Because more than any of them—more than
all
of them—it was Lala I wanted.

No one really even seemed to notice us. I guess it was because we were just wearing regular street clothes. So we were free to look all we wanted.

We wandered through the streets of Black Rock City, holding hands.

So Burning Man is divided into different theme camps, each with its own flavor. The theme camps are created by the campers, and I guess people join whichever camp seems the most fun to them.

Each camp is supposed to give something away to anyone who wanders over to visit it. Lots of them give away cold drinks, but not all of them. Others give out snacks or even experiences. There was a bondage camp where girls dressed up in leather skirts and heels—and one guy who was in the exact same getup—were hard at work spanking any camper who announced he’d been bad and needed punishment.

There were a few body art camps where you could get something airbrushed or hennaed onto your body, anywhere you wanted.

One camp we saw was full of instruments. People came and went, adding their sounds to the music.

There was a place to do yoga, a place to create “vision boards,” whatever those were, a spot for adding to a giant
clay statue display, a place where people would apply
lotion
for you, a confessional where the leaders were dressed like priests from the waist up, naked from the waist down. There was a place to make sock monkeys.

I found it hard to believe there could be enough people interested in a golden shower camp to fill a whole section on the playa, but there they were.

After Lala got over her initial shock, she seemed set on seeing as much as she could. Honestly, I would have preferred to go somewhere we could be alone together.

There was this one theme camp that was set up as a little chapel. It seemed kind of out of place, out there among all the naked sparkly people and booze, but there it was: several rows of benches half-full of people, none of whom looked really dressed for a wedding, watching what was happening on a little raised platform at the front, and a five-foot wall at the back decorated with all kinds of religious symbols. There were a couple of crosses, a Star of David, one of those Muslim crescent moons, a yin and yang, and some other symbols I’d never seen before. A bunch of white sheets were suspended by ropes to form a little enclosure around the whole thing, making it kind of private. The wind was picking up and the sheets fluttered a little. It was kind of nice.

There was a couple—a man and a woman, both pretty young, in their twenties, I’d guess—standing up on the platform. He was wearing a kilt and flip flops and had this crazy beard, long and tangled, and a head full of dreadlocks. She was wearing a wedding gown, sort of; it was white, and she
had a little tiara in her brown hair with a veil, but the dress was way shorter than most churches would be okay with.

And there was another woman, short haired and bare faced, dressed in long, rust-colored robes, who was facing out at the audience and the couple. She was smiling.

Lala joined the crowd, sitting on the bench farthest back from the stage. I sat next to her.

Actually it was a pretty normal wedding ceremony, considering how crazy the venue and the guests were. I couldn’t stop staring at the guy. It was the way he looked at the girl he was marrying. Like he was totally gone on her, like he couldn’t even see anything else.

That was how I felt when I looked at Lala.

At the end, right before they kissed, the guy said this little poem to his new wife:

When they kissed, the whole audience burst into applause, and I was right there with them, slamming my hands together. It’s embarrassing, but I almost could have cried.

Lala smiled and laughed a little when she saw how … I don’t know,
affected
, I guess, I was by the whole thing. It was just so
hopeful
, so
unexpected
, to see love out here, of all places.

“You enjoyed that,” she said to me after the couple was
gone and the crowd had dispersed. We were alone, just us two. The wind had picked up a little more and set the white sheets to dancing.

“It was nice,” I admitted. “I guess I’m more romantic than I thought.”

The word “romantic” reminded me what my mother had said to me that morning back in the kitchen, when Lala was still in my room. About her and my dad. About why they were here, in Gypsum, in the first place. I’m not proud to admit it, but for a quick flash my thoughts went to some of the girls I had seen that day at Burning Man—and to Cheyenne, too. A question came to me, uninvited—could it be true, what Mom had said? I pushed it away.

“Do you think they will be together very long?” Lala asked.

It was like she was reading my thoughts. And even though I had just been thinking along similar lines, I felt compelled to hide that fact.

“Who? The couple who just got married? I guess so—they looked pretty happy.”

Lala seemed unsatisfied with my response, like maybe she knew that I was thinking more than I said. “Most people look happy at a wedding,” she said. “It is later that things can fall apart.”

“I liked what he said to her,” I told Lala, and this was the whole truth. “About being her home, you know, her shelter.”

“Yes. It was pretty.”

“Lala,” I said, “I want to talk to you. About what we’re going to do next—now that your family is gone.”

“What
we
will do?”

“Well, yeah.” Regardless of what my mom thought, regardless of what I might even be thinking, there was more that I needed to say—that I
wanted
to say, in spite of anything else. “I don’t like it, Lala. Your family abandoning you like that … just freaking taking down camp and driving off. It’s not right. And I want you to know that you’re not alone. You never will be, Lala. I love you.” It was the first time I’d ever said those words to a girl. It felt good to say them. Really good.