We Live Inside You (18 page)

Sage has already got the key in the ignition, and she hits the auto-lock just as my door closes. I start the engine and begin to pull out of the lot in reverse. Going forward would steer me by the shade tree and that’s not a chance I can take.

Mr. FBI is standing behind my car now, box opener in one hand and my cash wadded in the other. Sage sees the gash in my arm and her screams gain volume. I can’t take her freaking out right now. I yell back, “Quiet! I’ve got to get out of here!” Mr. FBI is smiling at me, laughing. I start to back up and he kicks my bumper. I feel the kick through the seat of my car.

I start to back up again and now he’s dancing.

We did the Ghost Dance.

He’s chanting something and inscribing small circles in the dirt with his feet. As quickly as the dance began, he’s done and steps to the side. He’s letting me go.

The exit to the place is on a slight incline and my right tire catches the soft shoulder, almost spinning my car into a drop that would pull us end over end to the river below. Back to where they are.

Sage is crying now.
OhmyGod, ohmyGod, ohmyGod…

My arm is still dripping, and I can see dust in the wound. The dust of that place.

This is the beginning of our vacation.

When you lose your friends here, at the Burning Man festival, you lose them for days. The desert shifts time around you. The dust storms, the wind, the drugs, the sense of having drifted into a separate reality, all of these things break down the way your brain used to function. By the end of your first night you’ve seen an all-male gangbang, watched two dwarves get married at the foot of a giant temple, snorted enough Charlie to make Scarface jealous, fondled a theremin dressed as an alien, and fallen asleep at the foot of a door to nowhere. This all before you see your first sunrise.

No surprise that the place is tough on relationships.

Sage was pretty shaken up in the first place, and no matter how much I tried to get her to relax, the Kah-Tah-Nee rez scenario keeps her freaked out. Paranoid. I’m the one with seventeen stitches. I’m the one who can still feel the spit on my face (
Looks like he’s got Phantom Saliva Syndrome, Doc
). I’m the one who had to ask his parents to wire extra travel cash. But Sage is the one making this into her deal. Her trauma.

And we did not come here for trauma. We came to party. But she could barely party anyway, with her “friend of Bill W.” bullshit and her twelve steps and her insistence that we stop and meditate every hour and absorb the peace of the desert. I’m not here to get centered. I’m here to escape into the chaos.

So that’s what I bought. One big fistful of chaos.

I’ve never seen mushrooms like this. The guy that sold them to me said his name was Scheme. I told him that was a tragically dodgy name for a drug dealer. He told me $30 bucks could buy me a ticket to outer space. Said the ‘shrooms came from the Moapa reservation and were used mainly for religious ceremonies. The idea of my drug money eventually trickling back to the Indian population pissed me off, but I’ve seriously never seen mushrooms like this, so small with such a bright purple tint. Besides, they burn The Man down tonight, and there’s no way I’m going to be within shouting distance of sober for that social call.

It’s about three hours till the big wooden Man gets blazed and I want to be peaking when he topples over into his own funeral pyre. I’ve got no girlfriend obligations, no friends to slow me down, a CamelBak full of filtered water, a dust mask, and warm clothes on.

Sage put clean bandages on my arm tonight, moments before she decided to take off with her new yoga friends, Dale and Kristin. She was getting ready to leave our tent and I leaned in to kiss her. She pulled away.

“What?” She’s been hyper-hesitant towards me since our bad time at the rest stop. I can’t figure her out.

She speaks, carefully, like she’s been thinking about this for our whole vacation. “Well… I’m having a strange feeling about you now, like something changed since you got hurt. You looked so scared. You just didn’t look like the guy I thought I knew. And I feel like luck or God or whatever is all that got us out of that place. I don’t think you could have protected me.” She breathed out heavily like she was about to tell me I had terminal cancer. “I just don’t feel safe with you anymore.”

Sage kissed me on the forehead like I was some lost puppy about to get the gas chamber treatment, and then she stepped out of the tent and zipped it up behind her. If she would have stayed I’d have told her that I don’t feel safe anymore either.

I’ll try and find her at the center of The Burn tonight. We can straighten things out.

But first, I’ve got some mushrooms just dying to be ingested. I dig into the Ziploc bag and pull them all out, all the little bright purple stems and caps. Best to eat them quickly, the whole batch at once. They tend to taste like the shit they’re grown on.

I’m chewing, and they’ve definitely got an earthy taste, but it’s one I can’t quite place, or at least I don’t want to, because the flavor most reminds me of the dust I huffed down when Mr. FBI cut me and pushed me to the ground.

Stranger still, the wound in my arm begins to throb as I swallow the last bite of fungus. But the throb isn’t my heartbeat. The rhythm is not my own.

The drums can eat your blood. The drums can eat your blood. They move in circles. Sing words I can’t understand. Try to melt into the dirt. Try to crawl inside. We are swallowing everything. This whole desert runs on gasoline. We are not separate. All plunder. All rape. We are reptiles. We will eat your children. Keep your drums. Keep them away. Have a blanket, let it soak into you, join the stitches and I’ll skin you alive. Unravel. Consume. Swallow.

Try to breathe. This dust storm can’t last. I’m surrounded. Can you hear them? Where’s Sage? She’s shrinking away. Gone. I’m cold. I’m naked. Why am I naked? Thirsty. The Man is burning somewhere; I can see the flash of the blaze through the dust, light gone soft in the storm filter. They’re around me. Every direction. I can’t keep them away. I can’t make them BE QUIET!

This dust is ancient. A wall one thousand feet high, pointing at the moon. He appears like a cloud. The dead are alive again. We were one but you ate us to nothing. Wokova, your dance will bring the flood. Your armor will make us safe. We are all around you. Pull you back through yellow-black. We’ll keep you alive till sunrise and eat your tongue to steal your lies.

Dancing in circles all around me. The sky is opening up and the spears are raining down. They will eat my heart. The drums are finding their way home. I can’t stop throwing up. I bit my way through my stitches to try and set the drums free. My blood is still pulsing on the ground. Tiny eyes in the soil. Watching. Waiting. Shit. Help me. Sage? If I’m still naked when the sun rises I will be burned black. Burnt to dust. Floating. Breathe me out.

The land will return. The water will be made of flesh. Wokova is coming. The Earth will breathe again. Wokova is risen. Balance will return. The drums can eat your blood. The drums can eat your blood. The drums…

You can try to imagine it. You can picture what it must feel like to walk naked back to your camp covered in the dust of the playa, with a bloody arm and your own vomit dried on your chest. You would know how hard it would be to get the well-meaning hippies to leave you alone, to not drag you back to a med tent. Or you could imagine the fear that you see on the faces of people who came here for bliss, the people whose trips you are utterly devastating with your wrecked appearance. You can grasp all that.

You might even be able to understand what it’s like to hear drums that can’t be real coursing through your bloodstream. You might be able to picture the phantom blurs of bodies dancing in circles around you as you shamble home. Could be a trick of the light, right?

But is there any way to truly understand what it’s like to unzip the flap to your tent and find the girl you love lying there dead? To understand that she’s gorgeous and naked there, with her legs spread, so much so that you’re instantly aroused despite the fact that her eyes are wide open and staring at nothing and there’s old vomit pooled in her mouth and caked in her flowing hair? When you smell the booze on her breath, the stink of the alcohol that she’d sworn off by oath and will so many years ago, would you know that she’d found something to make her feel safe again? And would you be surprised to find you can only think one word?

Would you ever understand what it’s like to be there at the foot of the dead, bathed in new sun, whispering the word “Wokova” like a holy prayer?

.45’s come cheap. I’m just glad that Scott’s brother still lived in Aston. His place was an easy stop on the way back towards Kah-Tah-Nee. Even when I was little, Scott’s brother Dean always had crooked guns. No numbers. Said he bought them at truck stops from cranked-out drivers doing a little extra traffic on their long hauls. Didn’t say much more than that.

Even now, when I show up at his place still covered in dust and withering away inside of a gray velour track suit, he isn’t the talkative type. He notices that my sleeve is crusted to my arm with blood and say he knows a doctor who can fix things without reporting them. I shrug it off. What can I tell him?

I’d see your doc, Dean, but this open wound is the only thing keeping me from hearing the drums. In fact, it was healing up and I cracked the scab open this morning, just outside of Modesto on I-5. Didn’t want to see the shapes dancing around my car anymore so I took my house key and raked the wound until the blood started flowing again.

Nope. I just keep quiet and buy the gun and feel its oil soaking into my skin.

I’m confused by Dean’s question as I leave.

“Hey, Darren, don’t you need to buy any bullets for that?”

I keep quiet.