The Peters Museum was now shuttered and empty. Dwayne and the van were nowhere in sight.
“Guess we can just wait for him to get back,” Karen said, sitting down on the grass. “Dammit.”
“There’s no way to contact him?” Max said. He sat beside her.
“Not really. I don’t think he has a car phone. If he does, I don’t know the number. But if he’s going to look for us it’ll be here.”
A short, wind-whispering pause.
Max said, “I think I could use a drink.”
“No shit.”
“Mind if I get a smoke?”
Without hesitation, Karen unloaded two cigarettes and handed one to Max. She lit them both.
“Did that even really happen?” Max said.
Karen blew out smoke. They peered at the section of town around them until Max looked up. The clouds were parting, unveiling a sharp and infinite night, dotted with constellations, those cave-pictures painted by the eye. Art thrust outward at the cosmos. He identified Orion. Watched other stars wink on as the clouds continued their cold, quiet rupture. Then he brought his head down, dragged on his cigarette.
***
Humans, she had said. They’ll come around.
Sitting atop the van, encompassed by the dark, moon-kissed tree line, Dwayne listened once again to her voice. Even before everything that had happened, Jenny’s relaxed assurance, her good faith and unshakable niceness, had sometimes bothered him. Now it enraged him.
Not far away, the waterfalls hummed endlessly on. Crickets and other insects a needling ruckus in the shadows of the underbrush. Even with civilization a mile or two away, there was forever something cleansing about being enveloped in woods. Suddenly, fairy tales were real again, or at least felt real. It was easy to deny the presence of the fantastical—even magical—when fed the world through pages or screens, when insulated by click-on comforts. Where science somehow made the most sense. Where God somehow made the most sense.
Yet out here, soaked in nature’s cool purity, neither science nor God made the most sense. Dwayne knew, rather, a curious conjoining of the two. Intuition said the essence, the life force, was real; who was he to argue?
Eyes closed. Breathing measured. See her. Feel her. Embrace her. She’s there. Living at the corner of your eye, sheltered from the angry swarm of your doubts, fears, opinions.
What do you think is going to happen, exactly? That she’ll come strolling from the woods, radiant, tell of her long amazing detour but that she’s back now and for good? Okay. Okay.
Soft wet clouds drifted in, muddling the moon into ghostlight. Air grew colder. Dwayne shivered. Mind over matter. Warmth warmth I’m warm think of her and only her. Can’t do this. Can’t.
Fucking kid had wanted her. Obsessed. She had laid there under him, struggling and coughing and weakening beneath the press of the kid’s hands on her throat. The evil jackass had not gotten far. Dwayne had made sure of that.
How much of herself did Jenny lose in those seconds of final realization. How much of the person he loved had persisted to the last, lonely synapse in her dying brain?
Dwayne climbed down from the roof of the van, returned to the driver’s seat where he inhaled a shuddering breath. This would be the last time trying any of this shit. The stories of Twilight Falls were just that: stories. He had to stop putting hope in them.
But why couldn’t he just move on, stop having faith in nonsense? Because, he supposed, it was the wordless assurance of this place that it wasn’t nonsense. How the gut so easily trumped the head was baffling, but it did. What was he to do, shed everything he knew? How? Clear the rain leaves from the gutter.
Physically, humankind had long ago learned to walk erect—how much longer before its spirit could, as well?
You’ll come around, she said.
The scattered town lights lay ahead, framed in the silhouettes of walnut trees. The van curved down the road. Dwayne sat pensive. Did he have to get them? The urge to continue driving, to drive off, made a strong case in his bones.
You’re Nemo on wheels, he realized. Retired from it all, explorer of the darker, unseen realms. How utterly grand.
The roads splayed into avenues. Dwayne slowed his speed, the van rolling beneath orange sodium streetlights. Soon he arrived at the Peters Museum, in front of which sat two figures under a cloud of smoke.
He pulled to the curb. Both figures rose, brushed themselves off, and without a word climbed into the van.
“Howdy,” Dwayne said. “How did everything go?”
“Let’s just drive,” said Max. “Get out of here.”
Dwayne frowned. “That bad? You saw Feldman?”
Karen held out a vial. “Look at this,” she said. “You know what it is?”
Delicately Dwayne took the vial from Karen, turned on the van’s interior light, and popped off the lid. Smelled it.
“Looks like some watery solution. Or salt water. What is this supposed to be?”
Karen glanced back at Max.
“Clifford Feldman calls it Yaje.”
“What? The Amazon drug?”
“I guess so. You know it, then?”
He nodded. “Uh-huh. Professor contact of mine at Tulane University tried it on a trip to South America, brought a sample back. For some tribes down there it’s a very sacred thing. Used in shamanic rites of passage.”
“Is it illegal?”
“Probably.”
“Well, can we find out?” Karen said. “Can we take this somewhere and tell someone that people are taking it and destroying their fucking minds?”
Dwayne blinked twice. He dipped a finger into the vial, brought it to his tongue.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because....” Dwayne said. “This is salt water.”
Karen stared blank at him.
“Yeah, apparently Yaje is pretty pungent. They put sweeteners in it down there, actually.”
Dwayne brought the vial to his lips, sipped. Max and Karen studied him.
“Just salt water,” he said. “Good for a canker sore.”
***
Laughing and crying, James thought. What was their evolutionary purpose? Common wisdom said they enriched life, made worthwhile the blood-grind of survival. Yet who had dictated under what circumstance to use which? Society told us to cry at the dead. Why, then, did James consistently feel the
