Behind the Moon

1

The eye was on her first—the first thing she knew. A brown eye with sickles of a yellow gleam around the edges of the iris, attentive, indifferent—did it even see her? She could not see any part of herself, only the eye that seemed to regard her, with a kind of warmth, she felt, but she was still wondering if it saw her at all and not at all sure that she wanted it to.

She couldn’t feel her body in the dark, and she thought of being frightened by that, but it was just a thought, not fear itself. She remembered that not long before she had been truly frightened, but she didn’t remember anything more than the sensation. Where did the light come from in which she saw the bear? It was so, so dark at the bottom of the . . . Of the shaft. A sort of shaft, maybe; she had fallen into it.

Maybe. She didn’t remember that, either. There was no pain. Now the bear’s head organized itself around the golden-brown eye, there the dark muzzle, damp nostrils, a hint of white teeth and red tongue . . . another eye, but this one hidden under the heavy, hairy bone of the brow, and turned a little into the stone, as if it had not yet come out of the stone.

Maybe it was only a a trick of a few deft lines, streaks of hematite and ochre, that made the bear appear in her mind. Cunningly stroked across a natural contour of the rock. Yet she could feel the warm ebb and flow of the bear’s breath across her face (it was that near), could hear the grumbling of its breath. The big shoulder and the high, humped back of a grizzly coming toward her, as if through a fissure of the rock. Emerging, as if the stone was water. A grizzly!—she should have been afraid.

But this, this creature was older than any grizzly, by hundreds—no, thousands of years. And the eye was like her own, she knew, and she was seeing with the same eye that saw her.

2

A bright white light bore down on her, piercing, like a laser or a diamond.

Julie, Julie . . .

The voice hauled on her, dragged at her. She knew it. Did she, had she loved it once upon a time?

Julie . . . What happened? Julie . . .

The voice wanted her to come out of the cave. She would not come.

3

In the yellowish gleam of her mind’s eye she saw herself among them, five of them on three motorcycles raising red dust as they came across the desert floor toward the rock shelters. She would have liked to ride with Jamal but he had the smallest, lightest bike—hardly more than a scooter really, and Marko had urged her up behind him, while Karyn and Sonny rode together, and Marko roared out in the lead. Julie sat with her legs uneasily forked around the squat muscles of Marko’s back, and now and then he looked over his shoulder at her in a greedy way she didn’t like, but she liked the rush of air in her face and the way her long black hair streamed in the wind, from under the band of the turned-around ball-cap she was wearing—none of them had helmets.

To savor the speed she closed her eyes. A picture appeared: a tousle-headed little girl in a calico dress, riding behind her father on a bicycle, reaching out for something—rambler roses twined through pickets of a fence the bicycle passed; in this daydream it was springtime. The little girl could never quite get her fingers to touch a rose, but whenever she reached, the rear wheel of the bicycle wobbled, and the father, unaware of the cause, bent more sternly into his pedaling.

Don’t do that. Marko’s voice, cutting through the snarl of the engine. You’ll dump us.

Julie started out of her reverie. Had she, herself, reached out her hand? There was nothing nearby. They were crossing a long wide flat of the desert and the nearest hillocks of painted sand looked halfway to the horizon.

Sonny pulled level with them, the drone of his engine beating with Marko’s. Karyn’s face smooshed out against his leather back, her mouth a little open, moist, like a sleeping mouth that breathed against a pillow. Sonny shrugged his near shoulder, rolled the throttle with a faint smile. He pulled ahead, and Marko tilted in to the right of his tailpipe. In the roar of the bigger engines Julie couldn’t catch any hint of Jamal’s smaller one. She tried to look back to see where he was, but she couldn’t turn her head far enough without unbalancing the ride.

Now they were coming into the long shadow of the cliffs where the rock shelters were. Marko swung the heavy bike in a long curve that brought them out into the sunlight again, beside a boulder, where Sonny had stopped. He put his heel down and cut the motor. In the quick shock of silence Julie thought she heard the cry of a hawk overhead and she looked up, blinking into the sun, which was still high. There would be several hours of daylight yet, and she thought it must be three, or three-thirty—buzzers would be ringing to let her out of school, if she hadn’t skipped.

Karyn, who might have been thinking a similar thought, gave her a complicit smile as she swung her leg clear of the saddle of Sonny’s bike. Hastily, Julie scrambled down herself. Her legs felt rubbery from the long, shuddering ride. She took a few backward steps away from the others and turned to look in the direction they’d come from. With a distant, crickety sound, Jamal’s smaller bike persisted toward them, leading a plume of the reddish dust. His hair in a cloud around the triangle of his face. Sunlight winked from a yellow lens of his wraparounds.

Rice-burner, Sonny said, and turned to spit Skoal Bandit juice in the sand.

Marko winked at Sonny, then pulled the bandanna from his head and used it to wipe grit from his face. That’s a spaghetti-burner, dude, he said and grinned aslant at Julie, pushing back the inky waves of his hair. He’ll get here some day, won’t he? Marko said. White teeth.

4

Now the light of the eye was extinguished, and she saw instead a pattern of dots, in umber and ochre, splayed over a hump of the stone, dividing into two bands like a tree trunk forking, like branches of a stream. The pattern swirled and scattered, and then for a time there was just darkness.

She could feel an object in her hand, a cool and smoothly contoured rectangle; it must be her phone. If she turned it on, there would be light. If it turned on.

Away on the surface, in the rose-colored dusk, the moon had appeared before the sun quite set, a wafer frayed on the edges like lace and pale to near transparency, against the deepening blue of the sky. Jamal said one of those weird things that charmed her: I wonder what it’s like behind the moon.

5

The bikes ticked slightly as they cooled, there beside the boulder. Jamal had pushed up his yellow sunglasses to investigate his saddle bags. Karyn frowned into the screen of her phone, blinked at the bright images emerging and dissolving. Sonny ran his blunt fingers down her spine into her waistband, and Karyn elbowed him and wriggled away.

Of course no signal, Sonny said. What else did we come here for?

Marko pulled a clear bottle full of a bright violet liquid from his inside jacket pocket and tossed it Sonny, who had to stoop to catch it. Bad throw. Straightening, Sonny uncapped the bottle and passed it to Karyn, who took a gulp without looking, still fidgeting with her phone. Once she had registered the taste she pushed the phone into her tight front pocket and reached for the bottle again. Then Sonny offered the bottle to Julie. Julie shook her head.

It’s okay, she said. I’ve got water.

You need your vitamins, Marko said. She could feel him looking at her—she didn’t look back. Jamal was laying out the components of a small dome tent on the sand beside his silvery-blue Vespa. Julie watched him, his long fingers shaking out the sectioned poles so that the elastic cords snapped them together at full length. She picked up one of the poles and flexed the fiberglass.

Here, Jamal said. You thread it this way.

Marko bent over his heavy black-and-silver Harley, unloading from the leather saddlebags: trail mix and MREs, a much, much bigger tent kit, a small vinyl case that he unzipped to reveal a sleek little video palm-corder.

Whoa, said Karyn. Cool camera! Where’d you get that?

Ultimo. For a moment, Marko caught her in the camera’s steely eye. Julie watched Karyn, playing up, shifting the rounded weights of her body, tossing her honey-streaked hair back and exposing the white line of her throat.

Okay, lemme see, Karyn said, reaching for the camera. Marko held it away from her, making her reach across his body, then let her have it.

Jeez, Karyn said. High rez, huh? Her fingernail jabbed at the tiny buttons. Look how you can zoom in on that. Look, Julie, I can see all down in my pores.

Gross Julie thought, but she was helping Jamal with the tent, capturing the poles at the corners so he could slip the floor pins into them. The tent took shape as its own small world, a free-standing hemisphere, and for some reason Julie pictured the other half that would make it whole, existing somehow like a reflection beneath the sand.

Jamal stood back, resting his knuckles on his narrow hips, and in the next moment a gust of wind caught the tent and whirled it end over end across the sand toward the horizon. Jamal stood frozen for a beat before he took off after it, and Julie started after him, but the wind was faster than both of them; they would never have caught the tent if it hadn’t died down.

Jamal seized the poles where they crossed at the top, then doubled over, winded by the two-hundred-yard dash. Julie trotted up, gasping herself, and laid one hand on the curve of a tent pole. Back by the boulder, under the cliff, the others were capering and slapping their knees, their faces twisting with inaudible laughter.

Shit, Jamal said, running a finger along a four-inch tear in the netting of one of the side windows.

No biggie, Julie said. There’s no bugs out here anyway. Too dry.

Jamal looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded, as if they’d made a deal. Then he picked up the tent like a briefcase and started back toward the cliff.

Need help? said Julie.

Jamal shrugged. It doesn’t weigh anything. But then the wind gusted up again, and Julie had to catch the other side of the tent to steady it.

Stakes won’t hold in this loose sand, Sonny said, when they had come back.

Tell me about it, said Jamal. We’ll have to get rocks and weight it down.

What, inside? Julie said.

Of course, inside, Jamal said. Hold this a minute.

Jamal’s tent would barely hold two people, and that was without any rocks inside it. There were only two tents. Julie had not thought about how that part would work out, and she decided not to think about it now, holding the tent in place while Jamal looked for rocks.

6

She could feel a cool, metallic object in her hand; it must be her phone. If she could turn it on, there would be light.

The screen shed a pale luminescence toward her, a pale glowing rectangle, like light caught in a mirror. It contained no image and no word. At first it seemed that she looked down into it, holding it cupped in the palm of her hand, but in the dark of the cave there seemed to be no gravity, and this cup of light might just as well have been beside her, or above, impossibly distant, like that frayed wafer of daylight moon, faint in the washed colors of the evening sky.

7

Rice-burner. Sonny smirked, turned his head sideways to spit Skoal Bandit juice in the sand.

Jamal straightened from the tent he was assembling, rested his light knuckles on the black waistband of his jeans. "You dissing my machine, yo?"

No, man, Sonny said. I wouldn’t do that. He turned to offer Julie the garnet-colored bottle. Here you go, girl. Cut the dust.

Jamal stooped over the parts of his tent. Karyn was mugging for Marko’s camera, striking a series of runway poses—chin up, wrist cocked to the ear, giggling into it, ooh la la. A slight heaviness in her movement made Julie wonder if Karyn might have had a shot or so before they started. Not that she’d mind a buzz herself, but then she wasn’t a complete idiot: dehydration was an issue out here, and Julie had one liter of water for herself. She didn’t quite know what the others had brought.

Marko ducked and weaved like a paparazzo, pursuing Karen with the camera’s metallic eye, as Julie took a small sip from the red glowing bottle. There was no bite of vodka or gin. Just vitamin water, something like that—but a sicklier sweet than usual. She took a larger swallow and handed the bottle back to Sonny. Karyn was play-fighting Marko for the camera, gimme gimme lemme see, and Marko held it high over her head, making her stretch for it. Her T-shirt hem rode high and the gold of her navel-stud winked in the sun.

Damn, don’t break it, Marko said. He let her have the camera. Karyn gathered it toward her cleavage, wiping her dirty-blond hair from her face as she peered into the camera’s bright screen. Her chipped black fingernails clicked on the camera’s tiny buttons. Look it, Julie, Karyn said. You can practically zoom right down your own throat.

Gross, Julie said, absently; she was admiring the tent, which Jamal had just finished assembling: a silver-gray hemisphere sealed into the sand. Something in the shape of it appealed to her. Something about the way her image of it trembled around the edges. Sonny cracked a beer and gave it to her—where had he found that? The foam was acrid in her mouth, connecting with a bitter aftertaste from the vitamin water she’d had a few minutes before. She took a larger gulp to wash it out.

Two slightly sweating, soft vinyl coolers had appeared beside the pair of Harleys. Sonny pulled out two more beers and dragged the coolers into the shade.

Don’t be dumping that ice, Marko said.

Huh, said Sonny, I ain’t drinking it, not out of there.

We can cook with it, Marko said. We got a pack of freeze-dried stuff.

Are we Boy Scouts or what? Sonny said, and Karyn laughed, elbowed him, let her blond head roll back against the warm stone of the boulder.

Jamal fired up his little stone pipe and sent it round among the others. Julie took the weakest possible hit, then left the circle before the bowl could come to her again. She didn’t want to get too high too early. Maybe at night, when the stars came out, when sleep would be soon to come. The business of the tents would all be sorted out by then, but she didn’t want to think about it now. There was a voice in her head that said be careful, and she especially didn’t want voices to start splitting off and talking to her from somewhere else.

The shadow cast by the cliff wall had grown to about six feet long, and Julie walked into it, feeling perhaps she might disappear. She sat down cross-legged in a niche of the vertically channeled stone. From here the orb of the tent seemed like an object of contemplation, like some meteorite that had embedded itself in the desert floor, and she imagined the other half of the sphere it described, twinning with it beneath the sand. There was a kind of aura around it. The stone behind her was still radiating warmth, like the walls of an oven, from the sun that had been shining on it for most of the day.

Trippy weed Jamal had—she reminded herself to go slow with that, lifting her arms and setting her palms together in a mudra above her head. As her palms touched she felt a spreading warmth below her navel, much stronger than she’d ever been able to get in her half-hearted attempts to practice yoga. A tingle across the smooth-shaved skin of her bare armpits. The tent rippled as a light breeze shivered over it.

Jamal was studying her from behind his yellow lenses, in that way that made her feel no one else could see her, even though the others were all there. On his cat-shaped, sallow face, the buggy glasses made him look like pictures of a space alien, sometimes.

The Jule in the lotus, Jamal said; funny, but it wasn’t a joke.

The wind came up and snatched the tent, which flew away across the plain of sand, sometimes skating on its flat bottom, sometimes rolling end over end. The others were laughing, watching Jamal caper after the tent—every time he almost caught it the wind would pull it just out of his reach. Julie was running like you can run in dreams, with a deep, springing, effortless movement, breathing as evenly as in sleep. That was trippy weed for sure. They captured the tent at last and held it still between them. Rippling in the remains of the breeze, the silvery fabric glimmered like snakeskin, and Julie still felt that warmth in her belly, spreading like the onset of happiness.

8

The pattern of dots billowed toward her, stretching and pocketing over the same roll in the wall that had formed the shoulder and hump of the bear. Or maybe she had moved somehow and was now in a different part of the cave. She didn’t know how she could have moved, because she couldn’t feel her body, although she remembered that not long ago she had felt the cool curve of her cell phone, fitting into the cupped palm of her hand.

She watched the pattern; it seemed important somehow to grasp it. A pattern in four dimensions; in her mind she heard those words, like a voice-over in a movie. But she was seeing it only in three. Umber, ochre, now a near-scarlet red, and there were three spirals swirling around each other—a triple helix, the dots drawing toward each other but never quite touching, as if a magnetic energy held them together, held them a certain distance apart.

For a moment she was inside the swirling particles, as if she was standing under rain.

9

She followed Jamal up the ledge that led to the first rock shelter. He climbed magnetically, as if he had suckers on his fingers and toes, and his head looked outsized on his slim body, maybe because of its big cloud of hair. Where the ledge leveled out to a wider shelf there was a vast overhang, three stories high, with a few trails of vine hanging from its upper lip. Because the overhang blocked the setting sun, it was suddenly almost cold. Julie wrapped her arms around herself. She’d left her jacket with the bikes.

On the inside wall there were tags spray-painted by other kids who’d come out from town, fat cushiony three-D letters smushed together like marshmallows crushed in the bag. Jamal pulled a plastic trash bag from his pocket and methodically began to scour up beer cans. After a moment Julie shook off her chill and helped him. There were chip bags and candy wrappers, too.

Now what? Jamal opened a crooked smile, hefting the three-quarters-full bag.

Julie shrugged and walked to the outside edge. Away below and to the left, Sonny and Marko were anchoring poles for an umbrella tent—it would be big as a room in a regular house when they were done. Karyn had scrambled to the top of the boulder and lay on