“If synchronous reminds you of synchronicity, then you’re on the right track, my friends!”
Paulie told them that the Photinus carolinus gathered once a year, that thousands of the males pulsed in glowing simultaneity, competing for the attention of the females that clustered below, watching, each hoping to choose the brightest mate.
For Claudia and Edward, Paulie’s babbling crested and receded like the landscape out the windows. During a lull, in which Paulie stopped speaking and Claudia didn’t pick out another tape, Edward retrieved his video camera and began recording, moving first through the space between the front seats, bits of Claudia’s hair that whipped into the frame, then moved towards Paulie.
“Eddy!” he said. “Is this going to be a movie? Will you make me very famous? Here, get me smiling. Make my little teeth big.” In the one-inch viewfinder, close up, the rows of tiny white triangles could have been something else — hills in the distance, calcified shipwrecked things breaking through the sand on the bottom of the ocean — until the tongue broke through, fat and full.
~ ~ ~
THE COUNTRY THOMAS HAD REACHED boasted of its beauty in a way that seemed to erase tract housing and mini-marts and rat-infested public transportation; the overwhelming height and age of the trees, the loud proof of the river beyond them, nullified his memory of anything else. When the map he’d hand-drawn at the library — a childhood habit and a comforting pleasure — indicated his location on the curving two-lane highway as half an hour or so from the possibility of Jenny, he pulled over on an untended shoulder. He would find his way to the water, which he believed he could smell.
On the silted bank, he accepted the probability of Jenny’s being long gone or dead, and he watched as the river, rather than bracing for impact, hurried its pace around the bend ahead. Picking up pebbles with his toes and letting them drop, Thomas waited there twenty minutes, until he felt his breathing had refined. Back behind the wheel, he signaled before he pulled out onto the concrete. He had not seen another car in hours.
At the point in the road where there should have been a turn into the community’s property, he searched for a clear demarcation but found none, let alone the hand-carved wooden sign or softly lit path of loose earth he had imagined in his more sanguine moments. The road neatly divided two biospheres, one that tumbled down in sharp angles of rock and trees that grew almost horizontally into the bleached altitudinous sky, the other a level forest dense with age and nearly lightless.
He left the car door open, the sensor dinging and nagging, as he paced back and forth along the road’s shoulder, pausing at points to will some divine clue and then blushing at his foolishness. On his final lap, ready to get in the car and scan the next few miles of road, he felt the pang of an approaching aura. Unwilling to embrace the uncomfortable swirl of color at the margins of his vision—This doesn’t help me, not now—Thomas settled horizontally on the damp and green side of the road with a hand over his eyes and waited for the ache to strike. As the pain descended, he tried to focus on the view, the trees that triangulated in their height and framed the lowering sun.
Closer to him than the wash of sky, thirty feet above the ground, a length of faded mauve cloth stretched from one branch to another. A foot above glinted a section of pink ribbon, taut and pearled with the near-dusk. A slash of green. Orange. Yellow. He gripped grass in his fists and looked, but saw no clear indication of how whoever tied them there had scrambled up, no marks in the tree but those of weather. The aura rippled and bled his perspective of the colors, and he waited for them to clear, his mind renouncing worries one by one, like muscles giving out.
—
IT FELT DIFFICULT to believe that an hour before, he’d lain curled in the throes of a migraine on the shoulder of the road: now he walked through patches of light where the trees parted their tangled meetings, now he saw — far ahead, but not unreachable — the system of structures.
He momentarily believed, with the kind of unblemished optimism that only accompanies new places, that he had nothing to be afraid of: he would end up with Adeleine or he wouldn’t, he would find Jenny or let the blurred idea of her go, he would accept the lost agency of his body and find another use. Fed by rosy resolve, he approached the cluster of buildings set against the forest in ragged lines, and made for the largest, where a slipshod porch cast blue shadows. The shade of a veranda, composed primarily of a drooping sweep of fishnet, was woven with the spines of hardback books, the lone soles of hiking boots, gnarled pieces of wood that varied in lengths and browns.
In the small of his back and the balls of his feet, Thomas felt the men approach.
He turned to witness their congruent outlines, long hair that fell around stern faces, clothing patched and repatched so thoroughly it obscured any original layer. Their ages seemed indeterminable, as if instead of possessing a certain number of years they shed and gained age, as circumstances required, from one great shared well. In one motion, all of them extended their arms upward in Vs. Either like reaching for something hidden, Thomas thought, or preparing for a fall.
“Raise your arms up to greet us,” said one with gray eyebrows that nearly met and a tattered rope of violet cloth in his long hair, not ungently. He was trying to guide him, Thomas could tell, attempting to lead the foreigner’s first communication.
“But I — can’t,” said Thomas, pointing at his limp arm with his virile one. “But I can’t.”
—
LATER, INSIDE, a hardening clustered among the men. He was a stranger, and he had asked to speak with Jenny, had used her birth name as if he owned it. “I’m here,” he had said, “on behalf of her mother,” as though that would make it better, as though it weren’t offensive enough, his arriving there insisting she belonged more rightfully to some other life.
They were seated in what he assumed was a common area, under polished conch shells that sat on foot-long shelves of birch high up the wall. Bags of rice rested on tapestries of crudely stitched images of forests and rivers. Tortoiseshell cats entered and exited, turning corners purposefully. In a specious reversal of power, all the men sat on square pillows they had removed from a pile in the corner and arranged in a half orbit below Thomas, who balanced in a modest rocking chair. Looking at them, he noted they had mastered the art of listening and threatening simultaneously. The door, which leaned slightly off its hinges, was half open and suggested escape, but he understood they would not permit him to walk out.
“Her son is trying to take her home from her,” he said, his voice hushed with exasperation. “Jenny’s brother.”
“Song,” they said. Every time he said Jenny, all the figures in the room murmured Song in correction, further contributing to the impression that they were forever collectively processing.
“She was one of the first ones here, wasn’t she?” Thomas heard himself continue. “She came with Root.” He hoped that this might indicate a respect for their mythology, that he had not arrived to beg without understanding what they risked by giving, but the mention of the lean man in the forty-year-old photographs made them lower their heads.
“I’ll take you to see Song,” said the one Thomas now understood to be the eldest, “but after, it will be time for you to go.” He rose without checking to see whether Thomas was following, used a careful thumb and forefinger to open the door. Thomas, who hoped to express some thanks, stood to speak, but their heads were pressed into their laps, and their long hair in grays and browns ran over their ears and onto the dusty hardwood. The man he was meant to follow was already outside, and the day was already losing its downy heat.