Which choice didn’t matter so much as that there was one, something being done. Who’s choosing? Didn’t matter. She was the one doing.
She touched her fingers to Aaron’s forearm. “Thanks for catching me,” she said. “I could have really hurt myself.”
Soon the interminable exodus, the weed-induced sense of ceaseless toil, dissolved against the newly exposed night sky, the moon cool and blue down upon them like a curved blade, the stars cold and far, and they came up the last stretch of canyon and scree to the plateau, where they found a circle of flat rocks around a charred smear littered with cans faded white by the sun, cigarette butts, and footprints. They pulled beers out of their pockets and realized no one had thought to bring an opener, so Aaron and Mel used their lighters. They lit another bowl and talked about how they couldn’t believe how long it seemed but how short it was, how the stars seemed so brilliant, how the sky seemed everything and the night, walking like forever, was just so yeah.
After a while they realized Matt had wandered off. Aaron touched Dahlia’s wrist. “Help me go find him?”
She nodded. Off they went, leaving Mel and Rachel and Wendy. Aaron glanced back at Wendy as they walked away. Wendy barely shrugged, her lip half-curled in a sneer. Aaron smiled and turned to follow Dahlia.
They chatted their way back down the canyon. Dahlia told him about the people who used to live in the region, the Ancestral Puebloans, and how recent evidence suggested they were cannibals. “The Navajo name, Anaasází, means Ancient Enemy,” she said. In fact, a dig just across the state line in Colorado had found seven skeletons whose bones showed evidence of defleshing, chopping, marrow extraction, and burning. There’d been a lot of skepticism until a biologist from the University of Colorado tested fossilized human feces at the site for myoglobin, a protein found in human muscle. “Their shit didn’t lie,” she said, laughing. She talked about how much she missed reading the marks and fractures in old remains. She’d studied biology until her soccer accident, then she got obsessed with bones, and an anthropology class turned her on to fieldwork. She confessed she thought she might have made a mistake coming out to Utah. She should have stayed in school and finished her PhD. “I got an exit strategy, though.”
“You and Matt gonna head back to Seattle?”
“One of us is, anyway,” she said.
Aaron admitted he didn’t have any idea what he was doing with his life, either. When he was a kid, he dreamed of fronting a punk-rock band. Then he was getting a BA in history, not really sure why except he liked stories about things that happened in the past, and now he didn’t know what the fuck. Everything seemed changed. Unfamiliar. Disconnected. The scales on which he weighed possible futures were out of balance, and he didn’t know how to set them right. “It’s hard to see what really matters now,” he said. “But I’ll figure it out. Maybe just ride my motorcycle back and forth across the country till I have a vision.”
“You got a motorcycle?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d always wanted one, and when I got back from Iraq I just bought it. You have to know what you want, right, and when you figure it out, you have to grab it. What else is there?”
She nodded at this, biting her lip, brushing his arm with hers. At a certain point, climbing down a pair of small boulders, he offered her his hand for assistance and when she came down she held on to it and deep in the canyon, stars overhead, they stood as if in another world and looked in each other’s eyes. She felt a little dizzy and he leaned in close, closer, she could feel the warmth of his body and his breath on her lips, closer, she closed her eyes and he pressed his palm on her hip, she could feel him just back teasing her, holding, then, aloft, she rose up and kissed him.
Matt walked along the hardpack. From up here, the moon-colored blue plateau seemed nearly endless until in the distance buttes and spires erupted from the flats like exclamations breaking a sentence. His brain didn’t seem to be working. Nothing worked. Who the fuck did he think. The fuck. Them. The problem was rubbing a spot clean, clear away the crosshatching, the problem was silence and noise. Once things were silent he’d be able to see the solution, as they say, clearly, but there was too much noise. Thinking thoughts like. Impossible.
Something startled in a bush nearby.
I should go back, he thought. I should go back and tell Aaron he’s no longer welcome. I can tell everyone about the pictures. Tell him he has to leave. And if he hits me? Then I’ll hit him back. No I wouldn’t. I’d lie on the ground and they’d laugh and he’d leave with Dahlia and Wendy and the other two, they’d go off and have an orgy. Or what if I told everyone and they ignored me? Do they already know? Maybe they already know. How can you know what other people know?
Everything noise and fuzz. Her you. Remember that time we went to Taos and slept in a teepee? Or the hot springs we went to naked? Maybe I should just go talk to her. Be reasonable. Just sit and talk and work it out. Explain. Decode. I know you’re upset. I know it’s my fault. Just tell me what you want, so I can fix it. I can’t fix it if you don’t tell me. Help me be good to you. Help me.
He stumbled into a gully and sat against the side, his legs splayed before him, lying staring at the sky. Now there’s Virgo. That wasn’t Virgo earlier. That was Lyra? Hydra? It’s not Virgo now, that’s Orion, and before it was Pegasus. Really I was supposed to be an astronaut. I was meant to be the guy who zoomed into the future, the one floating in space, but I never could be an astronaut. Maybe I’ll never be anything. Maybe I’m cursed. Maybe it really is all my fault. If so, what’s the point of fighting it? What’s the point of fighting anything? Nothing. I’ve never done good things. I’ve never done bad things. What’s worth hurting for?
Dahlia sank back onto the gray comforter and pulled him down on top. She bit his lip, dug nails in his back. He licked the salt off her neck. Rough hands up under her dress, tanned hands on white thighs, fierce hands tugging her tank top, pressing her breasts. Yes, she said yes, yes, she slid her hands down the muscles of his torso, his chest and ribs, she grabbed at his pants and fumbled with his zipper. She took him in her hand, the tense heat. He pulled off her tank top then undid her bra and was at her nipples with his teeth. She said yes, yes. She felt herself burning with life, alive like the world, fire and blood. He slid his hands under her skirt and pulled her briefs off and threw them on the floor. He sucked her tongue. Rubbing her crotch with his palm and thumb, he slid one then two knuckles deep and she said yes, oh god, yes. She pulled away and stretched, reaching for the nightstand, opening a drawer and pulling out a condom. She handed it to him. He stood up.
“You ever been tied up?” he asked.
She sat up and looked into his eyes, then smiled and took him in her mouth. She slid on him and sucked and licked, rubbed and pulled. Then she let go and looked up.
“Tie me up,” she whispered. “Tie me up and fuck me.”
He reached over to the phone and pulled out its cord, then yanked the cord from the wall. He walked around the bed and told her to lie down across it.
“Make me,” she said.
He smiled and shoved her back.
She fell, looking up at him. He took her hands and tied them together over her head with the phone cord, looped the cord through the metal base-frame, tied it.
“That’s really tight,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s tight.”
“It’s fine,” he said, then kissed her, their faces upside down to each other, and went back around the other side. He knelt on the floor in front of her and pulled up her skirt and she opened her thighs around his face. He burrowed in, spreading her wetness around, tasting deep. She moaned again, bucked her hips, wanted to reach and grab his hair but with her hands tied and beginning to tingle she couldn’t.