The Quiet Parts Pt. 14
TWELFTH STORY
Before traveling to a pocket dimension they purloin from REI enough camping gear to last the opening stages of an apocalypse. Leigh prepares for their journey with a good night’s rest.
The next morning, she slathers on Neutrogena and ties Brenden’s ankle to her iron desk leg. “We won’t be long,” she promises him with a peck on the cheek.
They stuff their backpacks full of gear. Leigh wears a blue ski suit and goggles; her companion wears the leather jerkin, green leggings, and thigh-high black leather boots they use for LARP. Sequoia, bless them, reeks of weed. This registers to Leigh because, in spite of her near-constant drug usage that summer, she feels not a single withdrawal symptom, in fact, the day she killed Andre was the last time she did substances of any kind. Giddily hopeful, she knows this signals newfound strength in her.
“Let’s go,” she says, eager to ride out the natural high of adventure.
Outside the Garfield door, Sequoia says, “We need to talk.”
Irritated, Leigh leans on the wall. “Kind of an awkward time, but what’s up?”
Sequoia cracks each of their knuckles in order, like they do when uncomfortable. “Well, that day we took time to think about our situation, I went to my ashram for a three-hour Agro Yoga retreat. It was way past the deadline and cost a lot of money.”
Leigh shudders. “And?”
“I spoke with Guru Eric about—”
“You told him what happened!”
“Please stop yelling at me! I didn’t say a word about that. I was really worried about our friendship. You know I care about you, and I love you—”
“I love you too, Koi Pond.”
“We have a toxic relationship,” they ramble on. “We only hang out when you need something. And I go along because I really want to protect our friendship. But I feel like I give more than I get and it really makes me feel undervalued.”
Leigh centers herself with a long inhale followed by a longer exhale.
“Sequoia, I am listening to your needs and making space in my heart for them. I know I sometimes give so much to the many people I care about that I neglect the anxieties of certain people. We’ve spoken about this before.”
After a silence, they respond, “No we haven’t.”
“We have. I remember it clearly. I made space for you and practiced platonic consent the whole time. And before you go on, I just want you to know that demanding I name, like, dates and times when this happened is exactly how the police treat rape victims and could potentially trigger me as a victim of attempted sexual assault. I love you and I am so glad we had this talk.”
She throws open her arms, and Sequoia lumbers into her hug. Squeezes her tight.
“Okay,” says Leigh. “Th-that’s good. Let go now.”
She locks the door behind them.
Coats hinder her passage, dust motes crowding her nostrils like plebeians in a pair of upside-down Coliseums, but she persists. Before long, an incipient chill turns her breath to mist. Time crawls. Her housemate starts questioning everything.
“Can we eat their food?” they say from behind Leigh. “What if we can’t drink the water? Can we breathe the air? Did you bring filtered masks? If we don’t have them, we should really go back. We’re going to a parallel dimension,” they needlessly remind her. “That’s like visiting Baja times a million.”
“More like a visit to Narnia!” Leigh blurts with forced cheer, increasingly convinced she should have left the hippie at home. “Don’t you see? We’ve got a golden ticket!”
That appeal to their adventurous side quiets Sequoia for a time. As Leigh sees things, caution bled out of her the moment she swung the poker at Andre’s head. Now she follows the tale to its end.
The coats thin and the hallway transforms into a cave made of wetly glistening walls that shine an opal hue. Before long she glimpses light from a fissure and hastens to it. The cave narrows until they walk single file. Another hundred or so steps and Leigh bursts triumphantly from the human-sized fissure, the crown of her coronation an amber sky.
To breathe the air like taking a sip of cold water; every breath leaves an icy wake in her chest. From the mouth of the cavern, she crosses a blue crystal floor to the terrace railing. The tower she stands upon rises a good twenty stories in a cloudless, sunless sky the color of childhood memories. Beneath her stretches a plain that undulates in jagged purple waves interspersed with forests of pink-canopied trees, as well as varicolored mineral formations that twist in the polyp shape of coral. Directly across the plain from her, pyramidal hills shine turquoise as with internal light. To her right, a golden road twists for miles until it disappears into the mouth of a mountainous formation carved from some ruby-like stone, shaped like a human head. She has a feeling civilization lies that direction.
Glancing behind and above, she discovers to her amazement they have exited a doorway shaped like a mouth, part of a ruby tower resembling a man either screaming or singing. The strange structure has a nose, eyes, and cheeks, its tongue a balcony. To her left, a shining stair extends from the terrace to curl up the jaw of the edifice. Calling for Sequoia to follow, she takes that stair two steps at a time, crystals singing major and minor chords under her boots until she reaches the doorway, an oval aperture carved within the ear. Inside, she finds a room meagerly furnished with a dozen woven baskets holding heaps of stones. At each eyehole stands a jagged pink rock as tall as herself.
“He told us to light the beacons,” Sequoia recalls, moving dreamily into the room. Leigh searches among the baskets for kindling or a brazier, finds neither. Sequoia, meanwhile, reaches their hands to one of the rocks. They pull back as if jolted.
“‘Tis an energy source,” they say with admiration, as well as an apparent need to break out Olde English. “Methinks we should rouse it.”
Thrusting both palms to the crystal, Sequoia moves them in circles. Moments pass, and orange light emanates from the core of the stone to spread through every facet. Cautiously Leigh touches the second one, moans at the sudden jolt that numbs her hands to the wrist, but continues to massage the stone like Sequoia does. It excites her to create light through this wondrous process. Soon that brightness grows overwhelming and the companions run from the room for fear of going blind.
Safely returned to the terrace, Leigh stares up at orange flame licking from the eye sockets like a restrained explosion. No sooner does this occur, Sequoia calls her attention to the distant pyramidal mountains, where a similar light sparks at the tip of the central crest.
Then, from the colossal ruby head, flames erupt in eyes the size of airplane hangers.
A memory strikes Leigh of being thirteen years old in a packed movie theater. While her friends stuff their faces with popcorn, and point out every reference to some esoteric Tolkien work, Leigh curls up, bored, impatient for Orlando Bloom to return onscreen. That zillion hours of male bonding, CGI battles, and nerdy gibberish must have imprinted on her deeper than she knew, because she stands in another world, holding tight to Sequoia, hollering, “The beacons are lit, nigga!” Together they waltz the shining floor. “The beacons are fucking lit!”
Night does not fall so much as scatter like a deck of cards; shards of ebony, violet, and crimson emerge from the ether to spiral above the dreaming land. Maybe, Leigh thinks, that image inspires them to play Crazy Eights around an electric lantern while awaiting their escort. Like any camping trip, they drink from canteens and chow on protein bars. From the south, from the east, from their tower beacons shine with unflagging intensity.
At length, when the pain of sleeplessness pricks at Leigh like a lion dragging his spiny tongue back and forth across her eyes, Sequoia calls her attention to the titanic head, from which a torch-bearing retinue emerges in tight formation, a flame in the dark.
“Give me your telescope!” Leigh demands. Her companion has difficulty fumbling through their backpack. “Hurry the hell up!”
When Sequoia at last finds binoculars, Leigh snatches them and peers to the east, at the gemstone landscape until the escort party comes into sight. Beautiful, dark people astride roans as noble as their riders, a parliament of ten, men and women alike; all wear leathern material sewn with ring mail forged from topaz-like stone, weaponed with sabers and the strange rods they carry, scepters crowned with luminous orbs. At the head of their party rides a man . . .
No! It cannot be Mica! At least, not the Mica she knew, on the cusp of thirty yet a boy in her eyes. His beard has filled in, and everything about him, from his posture to the staid purse of his lips, marks a man of great responsibility. The jewels in his armor glitter.
No sense in leaving this new and improved Mica waiting. They pack up and descend a nacreous stair that curves down the smooth stem of the tower. On their arduous journey, the colors in the sky lattice like crystals; by the time the companions step down on terra lucidum, amber has resumed its dominion in the cosmos. Breathless and sore, Leigh kneels to rest, surprised to find the earth at her knees made of sapphire-like stone. Around her grow trees whose trunks appear of translucent glass reflecting her wan face, their leaves like pink jewels that chime in a shyly whistling wind, each with eight roots jointed in the center like the legs of a bacteriophage. After a moment, she rises with help from Sequoia, and they continue through the strange grove.
Upon emerging from the trees, they find their escort waiting. Mica, in one fluid motion, dismounts his stallion and opens an arm. Leigh plunges into his embrace.
“My friend,” he says in a voice so deep she can feel it in his chest. Nothing has changed about his smile. “Welcome to Summer.”