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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780063452398

Dedication

For Haley

Epigraphs

“Worse—by far,” he said. “Death, according to one’s belief, means either annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of character. You don’t suddenly alter just because the body’s gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution—far worse than death, and not even annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches ours, where the veil between has worn thin”—horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual words—“So that they are aware of our being in their neighbourhood.”

“THE WILLOWS,” ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

Sept. 27.—It has been about here again—I find evidences of its presence every day. I watched again all last night in the same cover, gun in hand, double-charged with buckshot. In the morning the fresh footprints were there, as before. Yet I would have sworn that I did not sleep—indeed, I hardly sleep at all. It is terrible, insupportable! If these amazing experiences are real I shall go mad; if they are fanciful I am mad already.

“THE DAMNED THING,” AMBROSE BIERCE

I.

BRIEFLY, ON THE FIRST DAY, THE SKY OPENS AS THICK, WHITE clouds drift apart, and out of it, a creature gliding on the breeze. It flies over leagues of barren land that was once an ocean floor, focuses its gaze on a crevice in the distance, drawing closer until the crevice reveals itself, the deep scar of a canyon. Crowds of treetops sway along the canyon floor, scattering up slopes that climb in jagged procession along the body of a high, wakening mountain. There is the sharp scent of pine. The mountain’s crown is wide. The floor below is rocky, shale and layered, thousands of years of subterranean earth movement pressed into thin lines. Sagebrush, dusty and gray, dots the face of the mountain. From an outcropping, on that first day, you watch the creature sail by, the flap of its wings cutting the air like a boomerang, and below, all that a desert can be expected to bring, starkness and rugged life. Later, the moon shines down on you, and those other beings whose eyes glow beneath it run into the night.

On the second day, the flying creature perches on a boulder above the plateau. There are fewer trees on the canyon floor. It is natural to reason that some may have fallen over, weak foundations, dried and dead bases eaten away by insects or time. It is natural to reason that you have not fully paid attention to your surroundings. Still, as the sun travels across the sky, you notice that there are sections of trees pushed to the side, paths making way, created by something invisible. There on the plateau, you stand and hear the wind in your roving ears. You hear the creaking of wood, tall trunks groaning, their branches scraping against one another, needles fresh and green.

On the third day, you wake early to the sound of a beak against rock. Fewer trees still. No one but you in these parts and yet there is the sign of something enacting its will on the landscape. You noticed pathways before, but those are gone. Now, holes, pockets of turned soil between trees, and trails of strewn rocks following something that’s been dragged. The wind grows stronger, shrill in your ears. You can no longer hear the creaking of wood, only the deafening absence of that which was once there, now gone. You look behind you from your perch. You wonder who else is out here with you, living in the shadow of the mountain, tearing down the verdure, making way for the deathly and arid grasp of the desert beyond.

On the fourth day, you find the canyon transformed entirely, and the flying creature is nowhere to be seen. Where before there was dense vegetation, now a nigh empty floor, deep pits of dirt hollowed out. The trees have gone, uprooted, patches like termite rot all over the ground. The sagebrush remains, long slithering depressions in the dirt surrounding them. You look round the valley beyond the mountain, an expanse of even white, a cloudless blue sky, and the striations of other mountain ranges far off on the horizon. There is still the strong scent of pine in the air. For a moment, you hear the creaking of wood return. It is encased in the next gust of wind, but you see nothing, no trees, to make that sound. Clouds gather near its peak, bulbous, gray, and heavy with rain.

You stand on the plateau and think yourself in an abandoned canyon. You do not look down, over the precipice, below the drop-off, at the crowd of spindly, quivering things clinging to the sheer face of the cliff. You do not see their roots tangled together, stretching slowly toward you, branches angling, trunks bending, every movement agonizing, deliberate, fortified by the strength of slow-moving time. You do not see the sagebrush watch you, stubborn and motionless, unwitting, waiting for what you think has disappeared. You see what the trees see, which is nothing, only moved by sunlight, air, and dreams of water. Their tethers dig deep into the earth, beneath you, patient, unforgiving. If you do not leave this place, you will die, and for once, it will not be the desert that claims you.

1.1

A THIRD CONSECUTIVE RECORD HIGH WAS FORECAST THE DAY Renata’s front bumper was smashed then ripped off in a hit-and-run. A cloudless, oven season dictating the movement of anything that breathed. Cicadas out in such frenzied, writhing swarms their sun-dried corpses had to be scraped off casino windows with a wide broom. The 4Runner was over twenty years old, reliable if temperamental, as machines eventually become. The battery perished from the heat. The AC had long been rendered useless. A plug-in fan mounted to the driver’s side vent was mostly vestigial, same as the radio, replaced by Renata’s cousin V last year. Hundreds of hours of noxious anxiety and too many paychecks funneled into that car.

Now, after the collision, the 4Runner looked like it had been curb-stomped. Lacquered blue fiberglass shone in angled afternoon sunshine, one side of the curved, mangled bumper resting on the white parking line like puffy gums, the black and dirtied grill beneath it exposed in jagged plastic bits.

Renata wasn’t present for the crash. It all happened—the initial hit, the offending car screeching to a halt, the driver lowering their window, sighing “fuck” before driving off—while she was indoors. She reversed into her spot that morning, leaving her sun-bleached camera in the passenger’s seat. Finished for the day, she walked from artificial chill to suffocating fever, the front of her car gone, the vehicle slightly askew from the impact. The parking lot was silent save for the buzzing of unseen insects in the olive trees nearby. Renata’s coworkers, all of whom had her number, all of whom had parked beside her, went home an hour ago.

Renata crouched next to the fender, a heavy drop of sweat splashing onto her toe, seeping dark into her sandals. Now, an expensive new problem no amount of willpower could solve. She gathered the larger, intact-looking pieces she thought might be salvageable and dumped them in the trunk. In the car, her camera hadn’t shifted from where she’d left it. Renata was sure Tara, V’s mother, would try to offer scant consolation, the stiff and well-meaning kind that left her uncertain if warmth had been offered. Something like, “At least it was the car, not the camera.”

Renata took the side streets home, wary of the highway and what driving faster might do to the various containers of liquid bolted and vibrating near the engine. The streetlights above her neighborhood craned orange and hazy from wind-blown dust careening through the valley, gusts that did nothing to cool the air. The suburbs were supposed to be quiet. But there was always a new layer of noise to peel back: pigeons, aircraft, dogs, car horns, screaming, shrieking—a distant, sawing transmission of life impossible to ignore. Tara’s compact red Ford was parked on the curb in front of the lawn, the driveway unoccupied. Their single-story house huddled within a cul-de-sac, its lamppost left blind since the summer before. Renata’s broken bumper and the foam impact absorber slid against the back trunk window as she parked.

Inside, the house was warmer than the street. Lately, they had been waiting for the sun to set to turn on the AC.

The lights were switched off, the flash of a muted TV reflecting on the walls. Dinner in progress, perhaps. But Renata couldn’t hear any movement, no music, no radio. In the vacuum of the house, there was only the kitchen fan whirring above the stove, the static whine of the TV’s speakers. Renata set her backpack down by the front door, nestling her camera on top. Some nights, V would work a late shift, making a meal before Tara dropped them off at the garage. It was too early in the evening for that. Renata made her way past the yellow couch and matching cushioned chairs, grabbing the remote and turning the TV off as she went. From the darkness of the laundry room leading to the garage, Tara emerged, proceeding into the kitchen without seeing her. She must have just gotten back from the firm. Graying brown hair wrangled into a ponytail, black slacks, green blouse, a flopped image of Renata’s mother, with deep-set, perpetually reddened eyes, broad nose, and a high forehead, less impetuous, more austere. Her sleeves were rolled up, hands grimed with soot. V sat at the circular wooden dining table before an enormous pile of mail, their peroxide blond undercut giving ground to dark roots, the same nose as their mother but their grandfather’s hands, smooth and strong. Old mahogany chairs had been pulled out from under the table and used as stacking surfaces. There were dozens of filing boxes with what looked like notebooks inside, frayed manila envelopes sealed with duct tape, clear plastic storage containers full of clothes, and, on the floor beside the kitchen counter like a massive beetle, a black safe.

“Must be all of it,” Tara said to V.

Tara leaned against the counter, kicked the safe lightly with her toe. She reached behind her, picking up a glass of wine. Renata remained on the threshold of the living room beneath the arch. She never stopped eavesdropping on people. Before she could be noticed, Renata went back to the front door, grabbed her camera. Tara raised the glass to her forehead, eyes closed. V sat hunched over a sheaf of papers, their bulky, black clothes covered in pockets. The stove light cast her family’s shadows against the wall next to the dining table. Renata took three shots, feather shutters quiet as sticky eyes, then set her camera down.

“Are we moving?” she said, stepping into the kitchen.

V turned in their chair, stood, assessed, then hugged her. Over their shoulder, Tara remained still, eyes closed, her lips pursed. Without glasses, she seemed a perfect, chilling illusion of Renata’s grandmother, the similarity so striking it sometimes confused Renata’s eyes. V squeezed her. They smelled like sweat.

“Everything okay?” Renata asked, looking around the kitchen, picking up the nearest item, a blue folder.

V stepped back, holding her shoulders. Tara spoke at the same time.

“Your mother—”

“My sister died.”

The two looked back at each other briefly before V returned to their seat.

Nothing stirred within Renata at first. She felt overly aware of how her response was being watched. Tara had adopted Renata before Renata could memorize her mother’s face. It would have been a lie, she understood, to say the situation was routine, hadn’t bothered her when she fully learned and comprehended it as an adult. Similarly deceptive to say that she had spent her life hoping things would have turned out differently. Following a brief semester abroad in Switzerland during her senior year in college, her mother, an astrophysicist named Corinne, returned to America and took a job in the desert mountains at the McNairy Observatory two hundred fifty miles outside Vegas. Time passed, her mother got pregnant—that’s how the story went. Whether or not Renata had been an accident was left to familial speculation. For a year, Corinne kept Renata at the observatory before foisting her upon Tara, who was already pregnant with V. Corinne returned to the mountains and was never heard from again. That was all in the late ’90s.

Renata moved to V’s side, gazing at the papers on the table. Her cousin appeared to be leafing through her mother’s bank statements.

“Is this all her shit?” Renata asked, struggling to keep her tone even.

Her aunt pushed off the counter, conjured another bottle of wine from the fridge.

“I called in sick today,” V said. “Some guys came knocking in the afternoon with a delivery, asked me to sign for it. I thought it was going to be a box, but they had a U-Haul on the street full of this stuff.” They gestured to the room’s detritus. “I made them put everything in the garage.”

Renata looked at the improbable spread of her mother’s effects, like Corinne was moving in, had just stepped out to grab more things.

“This doesn’t seem like much,” Renata said.

For one person, even she had more junk than a bunch of papers.

“It’s only the written things,” Tara replied. “Journals, finances, research papers, this.” She nodded to the safe.

Renata squinted.

“You brought it in here?”

“Light’s dead in the garage,” V explained.

Renata turned around, opened the garage door. Even in the dim light falling from the kitchen, she could make out rows and rows of more stacked cardboard boxes, crushing each other under the weight of their contents. Before, there had been almost nothing physical that Corinne left behind. Photos, mostly. But nothing handed down to be worn or hoarded, nothing to fight over. Renata returned to the kitchen, pushing a sheaf of red folders carelessly off her chair, and sat down. V touched her thigh.

“Can I get you anything?” they asked quietly.

The family hadn’t heard from her mother in nearly thirty years, save for a postcard from McNairy that Renata received on her eighteenth birthday. The front showed a stock photo of a luminous night sky, its blackness infested with stars, a crust of mountains at the bottom edge. On the back, her mother had written in neat cursive, “Happy birthday, Renata. May we one day meet as equals.” Paperclipped to the card, a square, wallet-size picture of newborn Renata sleeping in her mother’s arms while Corinne smiles, flash-brightened, at the camera. Corinne wore light-green scrubs. A blurred stub of finger obscured the corner of the image.

Both documents were pinned on Renata’s wall above her desk. Renata had never known what to make of those words and Tara never volunteered to shape meaning from them. It wasn’t a promise. Had her mother written “I can’t wait to meet you” or “See you soon,” perhaps a subtle but telling assumption about Corinne would have changed. Instead, what had been written was ambivalent. Now, this deluge of artifacts. Renata wanted to be angrier at the intrusion, at the fact, so unceremoniously offered, that any possibility of a reunion between them had been dashed. But she couldn’t ignore how insistently V and Tara looked at her, stealing glances when she turned away, the fuzzy shape of their heads slowly moving, watching from the corners of their eyes, then shifting back.

“How do you know she’s dead?”

Renata posed the question to her aunt, staring at her, unflinching for once. Death notifications didn’t involve hired movers delivering inherited belongings. For a moment, Renata’s attention drifted away from the room. What if her mother were to knock on the door just then? Surprise.

“Sweetheart.” Tara’s tone was grave, disappointed.

Renata recoiled.

“Don’t. How do you know?” she demanded.

“Nat, this is everything she had,” Tara said slowly. “I mean, everything. There’s a coloring book from when we were kids in one of these boxes. Jewelry in the garage. Her purse! And yes, against my better judgment, I even tried calling her.”

“What about her wallet?”

Tara leaned back against the counter, looked away, shaking her head.

“Nat.” V pulled their chair close, knees bumping together. “I don’t really think there’s any other explanation.”

The words rang in Renata’s ears.

“For anyone else, this would seem more than alarming,” Tara said, gesturing to the mess, avoiding Renata’s eye. “But this is exactly Corinne’s way of saying goodbye.”

“Look, Mom and I already talked about this,” V said, urgent, productive. “We’ll go to the police station tomorrow and tell them. Maybe they’ll know what to do. At the very least, it’s a place to start.”

“We’ll have to take your car,” Renata mumbled.

“What’s wrong with yours?” Tara asked.

“She got hit while I was at work. Front end is ruined. Hey, I know: Maybe Corinne left me some money!”

Tara fixed Renata with a withering, unusually maternal glare.

“Goodnight,” Tara hissed, cradling her glass out of the kitchen.

“I’ll take a look at it in the morning,” V said confidentially, squeezing Renata’s knee.

Renata moved her mouth, lips pressing together tightly, attempting a smile. She was impressed at the speed of her bitterness.

“Thanks,” Renata said as she stood up.

Without another word, despite the grumbling in her stomach and the look on V’s face, Renata walked into her room and shut the door behind her.

* * *

RENATA WOKE IN the predawn morning starving and sweating. Storming out of the kitchen had been more a performance than a true reaction. To keep up appearances, she hadn’t left her room until she was sure Tara and V had gone to bed. She fell asleep, still in her clothes, mouth dry, throat scratchy, a thwarted sob in her chest. A distant, rhythmic thumping rattled a box of paper clips on her desk. Through the window above, Renata could make out the silhouettes of her neighbors moving back and forth behind closed yellow curtains, bass pumping. Behind them, despite the late hour, a roar of traffic or wind or rotors, it all blended together.

Renata could see the light under V’s door across from her own. She washed her mouth in the shared bathroom between their rooms, gurgling and swishing away the acrid taste of dried saliva and mucus. In the kitchen, she opened the fridge wide to let the light out. Her hunger was aimless, but too insistent to tolerate the idea of cooking. As Renata squinted in the dark, rummaging through the pantry by the stove and the cupboard above, her foot slammed against something hard and dense. She winced, looking down. The safe. Her mother’s safe.

The evening’s revelations before she fell asleep didn’t feel right, not quite a dream or a memory. It was as though Renata had blinked and in the next second, upon opening her eyes, everything she had seen—her superficially ruined car, her mother’s belongings, the unsettling, nigh triumphant look of finality on Tara’s face—momentarily vanished without leaving any imprint on her mind. She crouched in front of the black box, her shadow obscuring its combination knob and a line of writing scrawled in silver ink directly on the metal. Renata leaned to one side, her mother’s script looping in neat, carefully drawn letters: If recovered, please contact Corinne Scarborough. An address and phone number below had been covered by chipped Wite-Out and replaced with Tara’s information. Renata tried the handle on the front of the safe. It barely turned. She looked back at the dining table, at the piles of paper colonizing the floor, the dining chairs, the counter. Renata didn’t know nearly enough about her mother to speculate on how to open the safe. Where would she write down the combination? Would she?

Renata closed the fridge and switched on the low-hanging chandelier above the dining table, a piece of leftover garlic bread crammed in her mouth. The folder V had been looking through sat closed on a place mat. Bank statements, 2018. She riffled through a tower of similar folders, all labeled and stretching back to 1988. Corinne was five years older than Tara and lived in Cerritos, near Los Angeles, until Corinne’s biological mother, Geraldine, a forlorn, haunted woman from the few photos Renata had been shown, died. Corinne and Tara being half sisters was always inferred, never spoken about openly, as if it were a secret. Meanwhile, Tara was born to Natalie, the grandmother Renata had always known, a woman her grandfather quickly remarried, who had died before Renata finished high school. She wondered at the premature death of mothers, how it must run in the family. No, she thought. Despite what Tara and V said so definitively, Renata wasn’t convinced that Corinne was gone, not this suddenly.

The garage was pitch black.

Renata tried the light switch before remembering the bulb was out. If V hadn’t replaced it, there was no use looking for a spare. She tiptoed back to the bathroom, returning to the garage with one of the bulbs stolen from the fixture above the sink, along with a dining chair. Renata stepped blindly on and around more boxes, a collection of suitcases, hard-edged objects that crunched and tore, chair and bulb in one hand, bare feet sticking to the concrete. She edged under the dead light, climbed onto the chair, and gripped the glass, turning slowly. Winter, sophomore year of high school, only months before Natalie died, Renata tried unscrewing the bulb while her fingers were starting to go numb. Cold air and a lineage of poor circulation. She squeezed too hard and the bulb exploded in her hand. There was still a faint, inch-long scar on her palm.

After a final, timid rotation, the room popped into view.

Renata had set a leg of the chair atop a folded square of shiny paper. Unfurled, it revealed a large black-and-white photograph, taken some distance away, of a man in a suit sitting beneath an immense telescope, slightly phallic in its positioning near the man’s torso, the bulky, instrument-clad body butting out into a featureless dark. White creases ran up and across the paper, her mother’s initials written on the bottom right corner in silver ink. The items that hadn’t been carried into the kitchen seemed to belong to a different person entirely. Renata poked through plastic crates filled with vinyl records and mass-market paperbacks, a box of patterned knit blankets, disc portfolios filled with DVDs, though most seemed to be academic lectures.

She opened a larger box, taped over many times, packed tightly with dozens of thin leather-bound notebooks and white pens with emerald-green caps, every volume filled with her mother’s tidy cursive, though there were no equations or scientific diagrams as Renata expected, only half-page entries separated by dates. There was a large photo album, its cover printed with a chaotic mélange of colors reminiscent of old fast-food dining booths. Inside were dozens of pictures from what appeared to be a well-documented youth, Tara and Corinne as girls with uncannily similar faces in the back seats of cars, in theme parks, on anonymous laps, the grinning mouths of elders cut off, hands and feet reaching into and out of frame, every entry labeled with the date and sometimes the names of the people photographed.

A blank page divided the first half of the album from the last, marked with the word “McNairy” in block letters. White lab coats and smiling faces with youthful, excited eyes, her mother’s, too much like Tara’s, among them. There were photos of desert brush lining a rocky trail that led to a distant orb high on a promontory, pine trees bunching together at the periphery. In one picture, the torsos of people crowding around, her mother was arm-wrestling a much larger man with a prominent white scar plunging down his neck, his arms straining through a short-sleeved polo while Corinne demonstrated an exaggerated look of boredom.

More posters, rolled up and rubber-banded in pairs, more photographs of faceless strangers, diagrams of the night sky and phases of the moon, along with several long reams of brown paper covered with scribbled equations written in marker. Shoes, a forest-green puffy jacket, a faded canvas pencil bag that looked even older than Corinne, a ceramic bowl decorated with painted flowers. With each item she touched, Renata’s conviction that her mother might still be alive wavered. Some pieces were easy to dismiss, easily replaced, functional but disposable. The objects that had been protected against the grasp of time, cleaned and recleaned, mended or refashioned, objects with an obvious, even recent-seeming use, these were harder to ignore.

Out of everything, the jewelry box gave Renata pause, a small square of varnished wood that fit in the palm of her hand. Inside were four compartments separated by black plastic slats, each section holding a necklace in place, the cord wrapped around a wooden peg. The first necklace was a simple golden chain, thin and fragile, its clasp broken. The second was made with a soft red string tied to a circular charm inlaid with a cross carved into the metal. Tara said she and Corinne attended Catholic grade school for a few years but maintained that Corinne had always been a staunch atheist. Not that she herself was much of a believer, Tara was quick to add. Renata fingered the grooves of the carving, more like a target sight than a cross. In the third slot, a necklace with a silver chain attached to a plate with the name “Geri,” Corinne’s mother’s pet name, printed in capital letters.

In the final slot, a tiny, rectangular locket resting in the corner, a bundle of black string next to it. Sweat slicked Renata’s palms. It was difficult enough to entertain the reality of her mother as an actual person and not just an unwilling parent. Still harder, the idea that her mother, spoken of so fawningly, so disdainfully, depending on the person, depending on the memory, was at all sentimental. Renata pressed the tiny release on the side of the locket and let it fall open between her fingers. Both halves were empty. Renata closed her eyes.

Really, she hoped to stumble across something more personal, something related to her, secretly treasured baby pictures or unsent letters. In the distance, Renata could feel the thumping of her neighbor’s stereo. Her knees ached after crouching and crawling over the mess of her mother’s things. After a moment, the toilet in Tara’s room flushed, followed by the stream of a faucet. When Renata opened her eyes again, V stood in the doorway, one hand in the band of their pajama pants, a glass of water in the other. Renata glanced over her shoulder, container lids strewn on the ground or stacked on top of each other, clothes unfolded after she measured them against her body, books split open and faced down. A grave raided, an archive in disarray. Her hands were black with dust. Her mouth was dry again. V’s face was in shadow, their body outlined in the kitchen glow. The long hair on top of their head was pressed down, shaved sides dotted with pillow lint, a cowlick behind their ear sticking out. Not even as children had the two of them pretended to be siblings. They assured one another that they could be more than Tara and Corinne, that they would be firm, that they would never hate each other, as if they could stop fate with a vow.

Renata closed the jewelry box and stood up, joints cracking. She grabbed a leather notebook and pen at random from the box of journals. V stepped aside, extending the glass of water, reaching to switch off the light.

“Wait,” Renata said.

She set the little pile down on the dryer and picked up her camera. With the viewfinder to her eye, she leaned forward past V, angled the lens down a bit, pulled back, up a little. The whole of the scene in frame, their shadows indistinct, and with one shot, trapped forever.

1.2

LATER THAT SAME MORNING, RENATA WOKE ONCE MORE, this time at the muffled busyness of Tara moving throughout the house, speaking quietly to someone whose responses Renata couldn’t hear. The garage door opened and closed repeatedly. The sound, Renata wondered, of innocent business or her aunt pawing through Corinne’s belongings unseen? By the time Tara left, Renata was expected at the print shop in two hours. She called out sick as tersely as she had heard others do before, what did it matter anyway. Barry, her manager, sounded meek and overly sympathetic on the phone. Probably, Renata assumed, because of what happened to her car, because her coworkers hadn’t possessed the courage to tell her when the car had been hit or who hit it. V’s door was open when Renata finally stumbled out of bed, their room empty. In the kitchen, Renata confronted Corinne’s mess a third time, sidestepping piles of junk, making herself a sandwich, all the while eyeing new documents, new names. It was claustrophobic in the house, summer’s smokeless arson inescapable.

The murmur of a radio drifted through the living room. The front door was thrown wide, V sitting in red coveralls on the single step down to the path leading through the yard. They basked in the heat no matter how high the temperature climbed or how long the season lasted. When Renata and V were children, and Tara was away at work, their grandfather would pick them up from school and drive back to his small house in a sprawling master-planned retirement community on the outskirts of the city. V disappeared into the garage, tinkering with the one possession their grandfather had shown any concern for when he relocated: a white 1965 Mercedes SL Pagoda. Renata had been forced, through sheer repetition, to memorize the make and model. She would steal snacks from the pantry, join her grandfather in watching V work for a while from an old deck chair. Eventually, she too would disappear, into the guest bathroom, which, with her grandfather’s approval, Renata converted into a makeshift darkroom. She could hear the radio crackle through the red walls.

“Will she live to fight another day?” Renata asked, dropping next to V, plate in her hands.

“Oh, for a little bit longer,” V said. They cradled a bag of chips, fingers coated with salt, both hands black from grease. “No damage to the engine or the carburetor, just cosmetic. Still, you’re going to want to start thinking about the future.”

“How long?”

“Comfortably? I say another year. Beyond that, I wouldn’t drive it to the end of the block.”

Renata took the chips from V, who took Renata’s sandwich. Even in the shadow of the house, she could feel sweat creep down her ribs. New sores were forming under her armpits, along her hairline.

“Mom asked us not to go to the police station without her,” V said, mouth full. “She’s trying to come home early.”

“Very well,” Renata said, absentminded.

Renata showered while V tinkered.

She rattled her skin prescription, barely a week’s worth left, but the pharmacy had stalled out on her again. On her desk sat the leather notebook and jewelry box from the garage. Renata couldn’t decide if she naturally cared about all that had been kept from her about her mother or if she was acting out what was expected. When Tara and V watched her, did they see a concerned daughter? Corinne had always been in the back of Renata’s mind, in the subconscious fear of what traits were passed down to her, genes colliding with circumstance in ways she would never fully understand.

Not long after Corinne vanished, Tara finished law school. She joked that she had plenty of practice with Renata before V, even though V was born only a year later. In that sense, Renata was Tara’s first child. Renata never voiced this thought aloud. The rest of their family helped Tara manage the load. For a while, it seemed as if both children spent every week with a new person visiting from out of town, some distant relative or friend of a friend. Tara would come home from work, bag full of files and empty Tupperware, and Renata and V would rush to her with dinner they ordered or attempted to make. Renata couldn’t remember when exactly she had stopped wishing that, one night, her mother might come back, maybe with Tara, maybe of her own accord. Or when she noticed that Tara never treated her with the same easy affection she did with V.

More than once, Renata opened then closed the jewelry box, its surface now oily from her fingers, debating whether or not to wear one of the necklaces inside. The idea seemed laughable, macabre. It made flipping through the notebook tame by comparison. Written so tightly that the separation between words was difficult to see, the contents of Corinne’s journals took Renata all her concentration to decipher. At first, they looked to be a fancier, more meticulously kept diaries, with dates dividing sections of the books. But Renata flipped to the very beginning of the journal, labeled “1996,” and instead of a date or her mother’s initials, the first page was blank except for the name “Francis Brown” in large, capital letters. Not a person she was familiar with, certainly not one she could remember being mentioned by her aunt or grandparents. Each date inside marked a new chapter, written in the first person, of her mother’s thoughts about this Mr. Brown. V knocked on her door before Renata could glean much more. She tucked away the notebook.

“She’s playing up the sibling rivalry thing, you know, between her and Rinse,” V said. Corinne’s nickname clanged in Renata’s mind with renewed novelty. The two of them were clearing up the kitchen, sorting all her mother’s belongings into precarious stacks against the walls.

“Think so?” Renata asked. “Feels a little cruel.”

“Yeah,” V conceded. “I think she’s just spooked.”

Corinne’s mythology had been built up with so many anecdotal stories, yet all of them failed to adequately convey what kind of person Renata’s mother was. She sounded impulsive and deliberate in equal measure, secretive and sloppy. Tara claimed her sister pretended to be an only child around strangers, the half between siblings enough of a wedge to permit complete erasure. Insolent, to Renata’s mind. But V was right. For every bit of gossip, there were three more positive memories her aunt would offer about Corinne in compensation. Maybe, Renata thought, it was difficult for her aunt to feel one way when faced with the possibility that her sister might actually be gone for good.

By the time Tara returned, Renata and V had sorted out the kitchen and nearly finished organizing the garage so that there might be some space to put away things that hadn’t belonged to Corinne. All the cardboard boxes full of loose paper and books were stacked to one side two rows deep, the more personal items like clothing and pictures left near the door so Renata could easily access them. Tara as well, Renata thought, though her aunt wouldn’t admit it, wouldn’t want them to see her crack by combing through her sister’s things.

“Okay, all,” Tara said wearily, knocking on the doorframe. “Let’s go.”

It seemed a sensible idea to visit the police station, but Renata had never been to one and had no notion where they were headed. Climbing into the back seat, Renata looped her camera strap on her wrist. They exited the neighborhood, a white sun leering behind the western mountains. On their side of town, at an incline, they could see a sizable portion of the valley, an earthen platter, everything flat and brightly lit except for the towering casinos and hotels huddled on the Strip. Tara turned onto the highway that curved around the edge of the suburbs and toward the city.

“Are we reporting her missing?” V asked from the front seat.

Tara shrugged.

“We can,” she said. “I think they’re more likely to ask how we know for sure she’s alive.”

V had attempted to prepare Renata for Tara’s mood, but Renata had never seen her aunt so pessimistic or ambivalent.

“So you think they’ll agree with you,” Renata said.

Tara looked at her in the rearview mirror.

“We report Rinse missing, the police aren’t obligated to do all that much. People are . . . entitled to a certain amount of privacy.”

“Bullshit,” Renata spat.

“Hey,” V cautioned, turning around, raising their hand.

Tara continued, her voice lowering.

“If your mother is gone, and I mean gone as in ‘purposefully went somewhere that we can’t find her,’ that’s entirely up to her. The police might put an APB out if it’s serious, which they won’t do. This isn’t that serious.”

“Mom! What’s your—” It was Tara’s turn to be chided by V, but she didn’t stop.

“They can find her and, if she chooses not to disclose her location, she doesn’t have to. Corinne was like my other half until she went off to the fucking Alps, and even then I probably gave her too much credit. Mom and Dad never questioned her decisions. Not when she moved on a whim, not when she left you with me. Look at me, Renata. I always hoped she’d come back, turn her troubled genius bullshit around, but that didn’t happen. There’s a lot I never told you about the two of us because it’s the kind of thing you keep between sisters. And you were too young. I didn’t want you growing up hating her and I didn’t want you thinking I did either. It’s been years since I’ve heard from her. Years. I don’t hope she’s dead, Renata. I promise you that.”

The highway rolled on like a rear projection.

Tara took a deep breath in. “I just can’t see how she isn’t.”

Memories like flies, like flyaway hairs, like splinters squeezing out. When they were little, Renata and V stayed up one night, eavesdropping on Tara from the darkened stairs of a previous house. Tara had been on the phone with someone, they never found out who, talking about Natalie’s declining health. Tears flowing, Tara pacing around the house, phone in hand, smiling at Renata and V, thin, forced, until she went back into her room or stepped out to walk around the block. There was a hush on the night Renata was thinking of. She heard Tara say, “Why won’t she just give up,” almost impatiently, her grandmother, who was losing her memory, and any interruption to her intricate daily routine sent her spiraling. At the time, Renata interpreted Tara’s tone as rude, unfairly irritated.

Corinne hadn’t shown her face in Vegas in over a decade, though some relatives heard she appeared at distant family gatherings. Tara claimed the two ceased communicating entirely. Thus it would have sounded too desperate, too fanciful for Renata to share her suspicion with V that Tara was speaking to her mother that night, when Corinne was supposed to have been unreachable. She was too young to fully understand the deception, perhaps, if indeed that was what it was, but Renata felt betrayed nonetheless. Numbness from so much time changed Renata’s perception of that night, until this moment. Memory leaked out a viscous stream. Renata could feel her bare feet on the carpeted stairs, her breath held, trying to listen for the rapid, miniature voice on the other end of Tara’s call. In the car, Renata felt V’s eyes on her, as she always did when Tara lost her temper.

“Turn around,” V said, focused on Renata.

“What?” Tara objected. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re nearly there.”

“Please,” Renata said quietly. “Tara. Let’s go home.”

In her aunt’s eyes, remorse, or maybe fatigue. Renata gripped her camera, sweat slicking the handhold, her bottom lip quivering. The dots wouldn’t connect. Renata knew this, she clung to her certainty so desperately that it felt like knowing. The police would not help. They would have nothing to offer. Corinne existed beyond anyone’s capabilities, as she always had. The car remained silent as Tara signaled at the next exit and turned back. All Renata had was what was being kept hidden. It had to have been Corinne on the phone that night, she thought stubbornly. If it was, Tara lied, had continued to lie for a long time.

At the house, V peeled off with Tara into the living room, the two of them arguing while Renata lingered outside. A quiet night, low clouds like popcorn bunching up above the neighborhood, dry and sweltering twilight quick with the inevitability of rain. A dog barked in the distance. It began to drizzle droplets thin enough to blow in the breeze. A car drove slowly past, the driver clearly lost, headlights off or broken, scrapes of paint missing from the hood.

Renata tried to situate herself. The past had been escorted out of their house and ignored for a while now. Yet there was too much she wanted to see, too much she couldn’t turn away from. Where to find it? Renata pivoted from the street, glanced inside the house, front door ajar, V and Tara gesticulating through the living-room window. Raising her camera, Renata framed the two of them through the viewfinder, waiting. She rarely shot without some project in mind. Now, it seemed all she could do was document. V left the camera’s eye and Renata lowered her arms.

The rain began to fall in earnest, slapping the pavement, slinking down her back, the moisture welcome but too warm, like she was being bled on. Renata jogged with her head ducked down the street to the cul-de-sac’s shared freestanding mailbox. Inside Tara’s slot, a few envelopes, spam and bills, an iridescent purple mailer for V, and one manila envelope with Renata’s name on it, no return address. Renata looked up then down the street, conscious that she was doing something people only ever did in movies. The envelope was flat, a couple of sheets at most inside. On the back, in smudged red ink, a stamped circular logo of words in serifed capital letters separated by a border of stars reading “McNairy Observation Research Outpost.”

Renata thumbed the envelope’s flap open, the adhesive worn away. She had to reach her whole hand to get to the single item inside, a green check for $300,000, made out to Renata and her aunt, printed by a credit union she had never heard of. Disappointing that this information was typed out rather than scrawled, as she immediately expected, in her mother’s hand. It was a large sum, there was no denying it. Still, Renata thought, something felt wrong, the proceedings too tidy, the number too small, or too specific, or maybe it was all playing out in the way it usually did, a series of occurrences, mundane, devoid of enchantment.

Later that night, the three of them sat around the dinner table, V trying in vain to clean their hands at the kitchen sink so they weren’t some shade of black. The check was crisp, the ink bold. Renata hoped this might inspire Tara to entertain the idea that her mother was still out there. Then she remembered the small museum of belongings in the garage, the artifacts that no longer seemed charged with life, and her hope didn’t feel warm, merely hollow, a taxidermy of the past. Renata tried to imagine Tara suddenly leaving them with nothing but the clothes she wore and maybe a small bag. She tried to imagine the kind of person who could go and never look back, no concern for people missing her because she had already been missing. Death seemed a kinder alternative.

1.3

NOV. 9, 1995—

I encountered the phrase “Francis Passage” somewhere recently enough for the words to nag at me, but today I remembered why. A travel guide, long time ago. It came to mind today with the geologists. A team of them, from the Colorado River.

If I had known there would be so many rock-obsessed underachievers drawn to McNairy, I might have considered a different post. Perhaps it’s my own fault for not realizing what this area means to other people. It’s always been an extension of home to me. That doesn’t make McNairy good or bad. But I would take familiarity over the simple fact of novelty. T calls these geologists “the men in black,” which I’m sure they’d be thrilled to hear. White, pocket protectors, skinny, balding. They’re on field rotation, so they’re bunking in the dorms while they study dirt. A few crammed into the room adjacent to mine. Loud, excitable, like boys the frat didn’t want around. One of them is named Percy. He was the person who mentioned “Francis Passage,” one of many special little desert curios that preserves a species of tree found nowhere else in the world.

It wasn’t a moment of profound remembrance, but the name did stir something back there, the sound of it familiar. Maybe words read on a page, maybe spoken. It’s hard to remember why I know it, even harder to know if it matters. I wanted to follow up, merely as a matter of curiosity, but this Percy was too tired to keep talking + I was too bored to keep asking.

NOV. 10, 1995—

His name is a mononym, like Madonna. Percy. His chair kept bumping mine in the mess hall. He was leaning back as he talked, a kid in high school holding court at the lunch table, surrounded by his puppy friends. He smells like aftershave, which only strengthens the kid in high school feeling. But he’s also one of the only black scientists here right now, which at least provides some variety.

A lot of other people do the singling out for you in these places. In that regard, I can understand his desire (at least it seems like it) to stay within the phalanx of people he knows. I used to do it when I first arrived here. Then you realize you have better things to worry about.

But I was looking forward to a quiet lunch with M, I owe her as much for all the shit she’s put up with lately. A bunch of faggot board members trying to pit us against each other, making us fight over the same position, duplicating the same research to see which of us is more competent. I don’t mean that as prejudice against homosexuals, I mean that as a pejorative against people acting like faggots. I would have to explain the difference to Tara but I think it’s self-evident. “Asshole” doesn’t have the same ring to it. Regardless, I’m the better mathematician, which wouldn’t matter in any other situation. I’m also the better lecturer; M is too shy. She’s always helping someone on the new rotation + letting them pass off her research as theirs.

Still, the geologists! They’re so loud, loud, loud. Only 5 or 6 of them, but they won’t shut up. I’m astounded that they have this much to talk about. How do they get any work done? By contrast, I made some rudimentary progress in the lab today. The Stalk is booked for another week, I did what I could. In the meantime, I tried reading again. BLEAK HOUSE, what must be the third time. All I could think of was M, how funny she was, trying to be courteous while strangers ruined her meal.

NOV. 11, 1995—

A little field trip today down into town + out in the desert.

There are so many road signs in McNairy that are weathered, riddled with bullet holes, dents from rocks in the wind, that kind of thing. One of NV’s many charms. We went—T, M, Young, plus a couple of the geos. Trails + land features out here have all manner of names + reputations. Settler names, Spanish words, Indian tribes. Young loves that stuff. I think he wishes he was part Navajo, like it would make him more interesting.

One geologist, a guy named Hutter, brought up “The Passage” nonchalantly. He said a formation we had walked around looked just like it. I asked him where the Passage was since its exact location is hush-hush, otherwise the tree inside would be ravaged by amateur enthusiasts. He wouldn’t elaborate, as none of his colleagues would. At least, in Hutter’s case, not because he seemed secretive, but because, unlike the rest of his friends, he seemed to have some shame about constantly referring to something no one who actually works here knows or cares about. Plus it seemed too much of a to-do to separate myself from everyone pretending not to be curious, to make plain my interest. In the end, the rest of the day was a wash. We all ended up at the Spyglass. None for me.

Renata paused, placing her mother’s check inside the latest journal as a bookmark. A customer had just walked through the door and Renata was the only employee in the store. The print shop looked like a storage closet, its decor spartan, with only a few feet between the entrance and the front desk. Fluorescent lights snaked above, unframed posters printed on foamboard tacked on the white walls doubling as advertising: black-and-white photos blown up huge, digitally retouched antique film, wedding pictures, banners. Barry started the business in the early aughts and seemed convinced that each year would be the last. Lately, customers had been arriving to develop their point-and-shoot camera rolls, each transaction pushing the store one step further from the brink of the oblivion Renata and her coworkers knew Barry really hoped for.

The customer who walked in looked about eighty and tall, with square oversize sunglasses, a yellow dress, and, despite the weather, a tan coat that hung past their veined, translucent knees. Renata assumed she would never show. Deb Greatrake, thirty-six photos developed from a roll of Kodak black-and-white 400TX, processed nearly three months ago. The store repeatedly called to tell Deb the pictures were ready to be picked up, but she hadn’t answered. Renata remembered the sunglasses, and the fact that almost every single print in Deb’s roll washed out into a uniform gray when she finished soaking them.

“Hi, Ms. Greatrake,” Renata said.

She stood from the high chair behind the desk, placing her mother’s journal on the cushion, riffling through a black cabinet behind her.

Deb nodded, though Renata couldn’t be sure if this was a response or an involuntary gesture that came with age.

“I have a few pictures to pick up,” Deb said, her voice deep and clear.

Renata already had the envelope in one hand, a sample print in the other. The photo was grainy, a streak of white burnt at the very top, with a small black dot in the middle.

“Here they are, ma’am. So I had a couple coworkers double-check the roll you gave us—”

“Ahh, yes this is them!” Deb’s cheeks bunched up in excitement.

“Yes, ma’am. Well, I’m sorry to say this roll might have been a little old by the time you used it. See this picture, it’s got some of the exposure artifacts you get with expired film. We offer digital touch-ups, and we also sell some newer film stock here that I can show you, if you’d like. It’s just that not very much detail turned out in the development process.”

Deb took the picture from Renata with deeply wrinkled hands and brought the matte paper close to her face. She smelled like sandalwood. For a moment, Deb lifted her huge sunglasses and squinted, eyes the color of beer glass roving all around the image. She motioned for the envelope and, in turn, gave each photograph the same scrutiny, raising an image to the light while putting the previous one down. Renata craned her neck slightly watching Deb, guessing the woman, despite her age, was over six feet tall.

“No, yes, these came out nicely. See this picture,” Deb said with a chuckle. “Pardon me, I don’t mean to be smart, I just thought it was funny how you said it before.”

Renata grimaced. She could feel a wave of cramps coming. The front door chimed and her coworker Kennedy walked in from her break, passing the two of them, widening her eyes briefly at Renata, who did the same in return.

“But here,” Deb continued, oblivious or pointedly ignoring. She held another picture, this one plain and gray apart from a similar black dot, slightly larger, in the right corner. “This fellow was flying around my house the other day. He’s beautiful, quite large, almost blue, his feathers are very dark. He’s in every picture.”

Deb shuffled through the pile and Renata could indeed see “him,” though the dot in each photo was made no clearer. It was possible for Renata to suggest a better camera, one that zoomed in maybe, but it seemed likely that Deb would see no reason for it.

“Got it,” Renata said politely. “Well, that’s my mistake. I’m glad these turned out the way you wanted them to.”

More nodding from Deb, this time obviously in response to Renata’s words though somehow less enthusiastic.

“Had to drive all the way, all the way out here for these,” Deb said as she gathered the photos and slid them back into the envelope. “I got your calls, by the way. Just one will do, you know.”

“Next time then?” Renata said, wondering if she sounded hopeful or annoyed. With customers, she could never tell. With elderly customers, usually the latter.

“Uh-huh, sure,” Deb said, turning toward the door, her coat sliding off one cliffhanging shoulder. “Do you mail here? I’ll just do that next time.”

“Yes,” Renata said.

She scrambled for a piece of scrap paper as Deb recited her address, almost reaching for Corinne’s notebook before remembering the pad of sticky notes in the drawer underneath the desktop.

“I didn’t realize people still lived in Mercury,” Renata said.

Someone from V’s garage used to drive out there to deliver parts. Long, straight roads, endless dust. Deb was already halfway out the door.

“Yes, well, they do,” she called over her shoulder. “Most of them government people and such. Half of them like me bored out of their minds, half from back when they were blowing everything up, half from McNairy. All of us bored out of our minds. Good day!”

Renata wiled away the rest of her shift chatting with Kennedy while looking up McNairy Observatory on her phone. Kennedy’s dog, seen many times by Renata in photos but rendered nameless because Renata never truly paid attention, had thrown up on her dog-sitting neighbor.

“Hilarious,” Renata was sure she had said.

She liked Kennedy, they worked together more than any of the few other employees at the shop, but this seemed to be a quirk of circumstance rather than choice. It was often too easy to tune out Kennedy’s presentations about her personal life, which seemed destined to continue on forever in a state of mild but manageable panic. Just to see how she would respond, during a pause in a mostly one-sided conversation, Renata told Kennedy she thought her mother might be dead. This elicited a few moments of atypical silence before Kennedy asked Renata if she’d heard anything about using ketamine as a sleep aid. The subject furnished good cover. Renata’s mind was elsewhere. But she couldn’t find out much by googling her mother or the place where she worked, which she had already done many times over the years.

When she was little, Renata tried to write a middle school report on McNairy’s telescope and the surrounding town, but there was scant information she could get her hands on. The observatory first opened in 1993, it sat at one of the highest elevations in the state, and the telescope’s mirror was made from liquid mercury instead of glass. All of it shut down in 1997. The intervening years since Renata last poked around the internet hadn’t dredged up much more than that. The town of McNairy, sprouted in part to service the workers at the observatory, was only slightly older than the facility, though all the photos of the area before 1993 that Renata scrolled past depicted a lone gas station and a smattering of mobile homes.

After work, in the print shop’s parking lot, Renata tried not to look at her car in its diminished state, instead flipping through her mother’s journal for any mention of McNairy, more details about its origins, her mother’s abiding interest in either the town or the landscape. Her car still didn’t have a face or working AC. Renata put on a cap to keep the sweat from dripping onto the sturdy pages, to hide the colony of bumps sprouting on her temples. Interminable summer. More dead cicadas brushed off casino windows, birds with broken wings and burnt feathers hopping across the streets.

Her mother had written consistently in her journals almost every day for years, but “Francis Brown” or some variation kept popping up in the years after 1995, a name so blandly common a cursory online search returned over ninety matches in the city alone, all of them either too young or too freshly dead. At home, Renata found V asleep on the couch, drooling. Tara hadn’t returned from work yet. It was too hot to walk around and too late in the day to make plans, not that she wanted to see other people. Renata retreated to the bathroom, but before that, she summoned her camera from her bag and, standing on her toes, face scrunched as she looked through the lens, stole a picture of V.

She started a shower and, with the water running as cold as the ambient heat would allow, inspected herself in the mirror, studying the edges of her hairline, the tips of her fingers, the flesh beneath her armpit hair, the indents left from her bra. Psoriasis, since she was a child, moderate enough now in the last years of her twenties when treated with a variety of medications, but she’d been unusually stressed and it was starting to spread like flecks of tree bark down her elbows and knees. Drying off, Renata opened one of the wooden drawers beneath the sink, feeling for the greasiest object inside, an aluminum tube bent and pressed like a desiccated banana. The ointment left her hands smelling like rubbing alcohol, the skin flaring because the ointment did not actually moisturize it, red fault-line cracks stinging and stinging.

When Renata left the bathroom, V was up and yawning, one side of their hair stiff, a dried white line of spit down their jaw. They said they could have Renata’s car mostly fixed by the following week, but Renata raised her hand no, she was thinking of buying a new one with the money she’d been sent.

“Technically, your money and mom’s,” V reminded in a singsong tone. They talked about this already. Neither assumed Tara would try to claim it.

Renata thought to ask V about their mother, her mouth forming the question, but she stopped herself. As far back as she could remember, Renata never recalled Tara pretending she was anything other than a willing, attentive, ultimately necessary stopgap. “I’m your fake mom,” Tara would say, like she was babysitting rather than parenting. And V. Blood relation, a superfluous binding agent when all Renata and V ever wanted in a companion was found and made that much freer, more agile by the simple fact that they weren’t actually siblings.

There were glaring moments of disconnect, few in the grand scheme, but unavoidably isolating. When little Renata used to scour the closets and darkened corners of the house with a black light searching for scorpions that wandered in through poorly sealed doors and windows, and take pictures of them glowing that adhesive constellation green and sometimes goad them into stinging her because they couldn’t be as venomous as people said. Or when she’d make a morbid observation, a dashed-off comment, “I wonder what grandma looks like now,” years after they buried her, and Tara and V would stare at Renata, bewildered, but also resigned. It was said that Corinne offered the same bizarre remarks, inappropriately timed, resisting anything as simple and excusable as a diagnosis.

“I want to know more,” Renata said finally. “I want to know where she ran off to. If she cared about me. All the same questions I’ve had.”

V tilted their head to one side, then the other.

“I think it’s obvious that she did care. Right?” they asked. “Why else would she have done any of this?”

“Maybe there was no one else for her to give all this shit to. I don’t know. I’m scared my mom was a bad person.”

“Oh, Nat, grow up,” V said. “No offense, I love you, but grow up. Your mom very likely was a bad something. Certainly not a reliable person. She chose herself. I’m not saying you need to get over that, but how Corinne was, or is . . . you’re less than responsible for it. And lest you forget, I missed out on an aunt. I think about her too. As for the other stuff, I can’t really say. Always willing to help. But the rest, that’s for you.”

A gust of wind pushed against the windows of the living room and the house crackled in response. Outside, Renata could see a roiling cloud of dust and smoke forcing its way through the neighborhood. Her hair was still wet, her skin itching, her bank account dwindling, her job boring, her degree depreciating, her mind buzzing, her mother, alive or dead, rotting, as they all were. Corinne’s demise couldn’t be something to do, she thought. It couldn’t be a hobby to take up, a diversion. There had to be something more complex to her sudden fixation on her mother, this roving and insistent curiosity that the possibility of Corinne’s passing opened up in her. Or it could be as simple as what V suggested. Maybe Renata always cared. Maybe she had always been doomed.

The two of them spent the rest of the afternoon undoing the work they put into organizing the garage, taking every item of Corinne’s back out again. All the paper—documents, receipts, magazines, bills, notices, comics, books, data tables—they stashed in one corner. Any photos or correspondences were gathered in a jagged pile in the center of the floor. The lone light bulb beamed and swayed on its cord, shadows sharp against the concrete. Renata was looking for two items, at least for now: an address book and her mother’s phone. It was one thing for her mother to send away her wallet, which didn’t hold any cash inside but did contain her credit cards and an ID that expired the year before. Renata hoped it meant something else for her mother not to include her phone or a laptop, some withheld communication device that could preclude finality. Barring that, she would start cold-calling contacts from the address book, if there was one, and ask them questions.

Tara arrived home before they could find what they were looking for, but Renata found something else.

At first, several notecards with phone numbers written on them in the same looping script as her mother’s notebook, but the names, presented without description, didn’t mean anything to her. Fawn Bell. Kirsty Hoff. Marshall Tate. This last, maybe the “M” referred to in Corinne’s journals? No, M as described was clearly a woman and there were a dozen other names, first and last, that began with the same letter. Another wallet, long and green, disused, with a pocket-size photo of Tara, youthful but adult, casually dressed as she rarely was now, next to Renata’s grandfather in a restaurant booth. She turned back to look through the box of Corinne’s journals for any nonlabeled volumes she might have missed. It sat there at the very bottom, so large Renata thought it was merely the base of the box—a black leatherbound folio more akin to a sketchbook, with a thin brown band wrapped around it.

V discovered more photos and a stack of discs binder-clipped together, these in blank cases with labels written in marker. They read the titles aloud: Tara & Corinne Graduation, 1989 VHS Conversion. Renata Cam, 2000–2001 DV Conversion. M.O. Recon Briefing, Mar. 2005.

“Do we still have your old DVD player?” V asked.

Renata glanced up. Tara had dropped her bag and files on the dryer and stepped quietly into the garage, watching. Fitting, she thought, that Tara’s glasses were on today. Did she know how much she looked like her sister when she wore them?

“It might be somewhere in here,” Tara replied softly.

V handed her the stack of DVDs they’d just found. Renata faced the opposite wall. The leather folio flopped open in her hands. The first date was difficult to make out. 1907? 1908? Renata glanced back, surprised to see her aunt begin to paw through the discs, studying the labels. Renata thought Tara looked scared. As Tara turned her attention behind her, rooting around in the corner, pulling out plastic organizers from the shelving unit bolted to the wall, rolling up her sleeves, cursing, V nudged Renata.

“Go ahead,” they whispered.

Renata understood her mother was a minefield topic, but it was no longer a suspicion—her aunt wasn’t telling her everything.

“Tara?”

“Uh-huh,” her aunt said, crouching over a box.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

There was no need to specify who, not when they were drowning in her belongings.

“Maybe three years ago. Four. Three or four.”

V cautioned their eyes at Renata. A gap of nearly fifteen years of supposed silence had just been reduced to a fraction. But Renata didn’t want to stymie Tara with a confrontation just yet.

“Did you ever go to see her in McNairy?”

“Not since she was pregnant with you,” Tara replied, her voice muffled behind another box. “I stayed with her at the observatory for a little while, but even then, she seemed . . . preoccupied.”

“With work?” Renata ventured, closing the folio, wrapping the string back around.

“More like with the people she worked with. Rinse being pregnant without telling anyone who the father was seemed to make some of her colleagues uncomfortable. It definitely wasn’t someone who worked there, I think we all knew that much. She was thinking of leaving the facility for a different position overseas, and I tried to convince her to stay. Well, Mom and Dad wanted me to convince her to stay.”

Tara said the last few words with a tremble in her voice and stopped moving, her face tilted toward the ceiling, glasses atop her head, a small pool of tears in the corner of her eye. It never mattered how many times Renata saw her aunt cry, she never knew what to do. V seemed paralyzed for a moment, staring at their mother kneeling on the ground.

“I’m such a hypocrite,” Tara said, a giggle bursting, snot in her nose like she had a cold. “You know, your mom was such a bitch. Like grandma. She never thought anything applied to her. When Rinse was pregnant, she was thinking of giving you up for adoption. Which, fine. That’s not news. But the last time I went to McNairy it was because neither grandpa nor grandma would do anything. ‘She’s got important work,’ they said.”

Renata tried to picture it. Her mother, bushy, long black hair, round face, sun-kissed, frozen as a twenty-five-year-old telling her sister to fuck off.

“Brash,” Tara continued, turning her face away. “The idea that people cared about her was incidental, extra. I stayed out there for a month. They had some spare dorms. The entire time, all we did was fight. In the end, I got the closest thing to a concession from her. What I wanted, what I knew our parents wanted, was for her to come back to Vegas. She compromised, which, for her, meant doing exactly nothing. She stayed in McNairy, not any closer, not any further away. She wasn’t going to keep you. She kept saying that over and over and I didn’t believe her. Not even after you had been with me for the first few years. Then . . .”

Tara’s face glistened and she inhaled deep, letting out a long sigh.

“Then, when you were five, she came here to see you.”

Renata held her breath. Her stomach churned, a cramp knotting along with it.

“I didn’t know what she was doing for work,” Tara said. “The observatory got shut down a while before that and she still had some kind of government clearance. You know, federal stuff, something. I thought maybe she’d moved to Nellis. She wouldn’t tell me. She couldn’t stay. She came for one day, when you were with grandma and grandpa in California. She looked different. I think maybe we ordered a pizza, it’s hard to remember. I just kept asking questions and she wouldn’t say very much. She asked about you and V. Mom was well on her way at that point. Corinne had to go. Then, she came the next year.”

Renata couldn’t draw breath. Sweat dotted her temples, aggravating the sores there, warm as blood.

“She showed up around the same time, but this time you were home. And year after year, until you were twelve, around that season, I made sure you didn’t go anywhere. You wouldn’t have recognized her then, she’d cut her hair, dyed it, she’d lost a lot of weight. A bit butch, honestly. She always wore the same outfit. This big brown worker’s jacket that belonged to our dad, starchy yellow button-up.”

Lanny. The name came to Renata’s otherwise dazed mind without effort, heart thumping loud in her ears. Their seasonal babysitter. A military woman. An old friend of Tara’s, always coming and going.

V was slower.

“Wait, didn’t Lanny dress like that?” they asked.

V sat with their knees pressed against their chest, arms tight around them, head pushed forward, their fighting pose. Tara’s shoulders shook as she cried, sucking in air, moaning it out. Renata thought her aunt sounded wounded. But why would any of this hurt her, these memories she had always known?

Renata looked down at her feet.

A rivulet of water, clear and cold, was running beneath her shoes, soaking her shorts. Wind blew against the garage door and with it, the percussion of rain, a flash storm, and only then did Renata remember those clouds in the rearview mirror driving home, dark, full clouds hanging above the mountains like vultures, clouds she thought had drifted far away, possibly heading in the other direction, the last moisture to be claimed by the never-ending heat. She saw them before her now, the same as she saw her aunt and her cousin, nameless, only in miniature, dark cotton floating above the garage floor, creeping toward her, the room thick with humid, suffocating air, a sudden burst of thunder rattling the house, deafening, relentless, evil.

1.4

NOV. 13, 1995—

I’ll start with the boring stuff. Donner approved my proposal, so there’s some work to do in the coming months. Referenced specs in the workbook (pg. 63).

The real coup is Percy. I’ve come around on him, only a little, for finally spilling about Francis Passage. It was named after another geologist, which figures. Some of Percy’s buddies hadn’t heard of Brown or the thing named after him: a tiny unmarked tunnel leading from the Colorado River inland. It’s supposed to offer a route from an old measuring station—“Abandoned,” one of the guys corrected—to a small, half-submerged cave. You have to swim into it from under the station, where Brown also lived. There were conflicting descriptions about this. Everyone agreed the length of the tunnel was about 50m, with a low rock ceiling + quite narrow. Most people can’t fit because the walls are so close + the floor rises sharply. Percy got down into a ball in the cafeteria to demonstrate. The Passage has to remain secret, they all said, in an endearingly serious way. But the geologists are dorks who seem to prefer hearsay to facts. For all I know, they’re good at what they do, but all I’ve heard during their stay is thinly veiled gossip.

As I think I’ve written before, they love the Passage for a tree, a singular species that grows underwater. “Like pines, upside down.” The roots grow upward toward the surface, all over the walls of the cave. I asked if they had talked to other colleagues about this place; apparently, if you’re in the know, its location is something of an open secret. The tree isn’t supposed to exist, hence all the excitement + few are able to find the Passage without guidance. Brown discovered the cave by accident, they said. Apparently, he built the measuring station, or he had been there so long that people assumed he built it. He dug out the ground to install a water pipe beneath + found the cave. Percy said all this, or most of it, by himself. He told it like a ghost story. So much so I had to ask who exactly Brown was; he was so caught up he didn’t even say his last name or what he did. Francis Brown, an early 20th-century surveyor logging water-level data along the river back in the day. Percy finished with a typically spooky kicker: Brown disappeared on the job. No remains. No note. Ambushed? Killed by mercenaries? Still a mystery, of course.

NOV. 14, 1995—

It might seem silly to recount here, but I’m not too sure what my intentions are. For all this looking around, for writing any of it down, other than perhaps the sneaking suspicion that something isn’t quite right. The other day, a colleague of mine, Samson, broke his camera + I offered to help him fix it. I offered to fix it, period. There are pictures of the Francis Passage that, despite the years, are in many ways far clearer + more robust than those taken by drugstore disposables. I can’t really say why this is because oftentimes they’re using the exact same film stock. A lot of time has passed since I last did anything with photography. From the pictures Samson showed me, he’s just at the beginning of his relationship with it.

I looked it over, an old, sturdy, heavy Japanese camera not unlike dad’s Fujica, started playing around with it. It is silly to write this out, but I miss having a hobby. I miss making time for anything else other than what I do. I know that even this is borne from work, from acute interest. I think Tara would call it obsession. Fine. I just can’t believe that what I’m doing is at all worthwhile, going on + on out here.

JANUARY 4, 1905

Contending as I do that human life is merely one variation of nature’s abundance, I worry that this contention appears, to the spectator, needlessly whimsical. I must seem naive, susceptible to a fanciful triteness indistinguishable from childish inexperience. I’ll furnish my argument to the contrary with a theory.

Tales abound of apparitions whose presence in the most remote corners of the nation are treated as a matter of incontrovertible fact. Such tales are not limited by race or latitude. They are, in their way, universal. A “whimsical” man might argue that such preponderance of evidence ensures the existence of another realm, another world of life beyond that which is merely terrestrial. I have been accused of harboring this conjecture before. But universality, or its perception, is not evidence. I can respect the fireside ramblings of the Indian and the pulpit sermons of the Christian. I can understand and even respect how they suffuse the air of a place, of a country. But respect is not agreement either.

Moreover, testimony, spoken testimony from strangers in distant lands, is not data. I don’t pretend to be a sophisticated man—dearest Lenny, her brothers, my father would each attest to this supposition with no small measure of enthusiasm—but I know that which is, if not true, then likely. What purpose can mere guesswork and superstition serve? I think my detractors know the answer even as they refuse to admit it. There is no purpose.

Renata paused at intervals to focus on what her mother had written. In places, there were whole pages with lines struck through them. Francis Brown’s script was far messier but legible across such broad pages, the personality of his penmanship made apparent shortly after she opened the folio. But she couldn’t go any further. Her voice was already hoarse. V held her clammy hand, legs crossed. Together they sat in Renata’s room on the floor against her bed.

“Do you remember seeing a camera?” V asked. “Like, when she came around, did she have one on her? I don’t think she did.”

Renata’s eyes still felt huge, her throat torn up, skin itching all over. She sipped water from a glass held idly in her other hand.

“She didn’t,” Renata said, almost whispering.

“And the one you have now . . . that wasn’t—”

“No, I thought of that too. Lanny helped me fix it though. That’s why I thought of that page in the notebook.”

“Plus the big slash on the page next to it,” V said. “Because she messed up some report or something?”

“Yeah, exactly. She made a few mistakes on a calculation of some kind. In the middle of writing about it, the sentence just stops and there’s a red line across it.”

“Well,” V said softly.

“I can’t even remember how it came up,” Renata continued. “The camera. I think your mom bought me one at a thrift store?”

“I thought you found it,” V said. “But mom pretended you couldn’t have it, and then she got it for your birthday later.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Renata watched their neighbors across the yard flick on lights in their living room, yellow curtains, talk-show laughter, silhouettes. It was almost midnight.

“That might be true,” Renata said, a hot sensation, almost embarrassment, building behind her ears at V’s casual correction. “Well. I had it. Somehow, Lanny knew I had it because she noticed it was broken . . .”

“Should we be calling her something else?” V asked.

It was a sensible question, but Renata found it annoying at that moment. She had always possessed a temper, belied by her tendency to withdraw. People took it for shyness. As Tara and V knew, it was because Renata could lose control very quickly. V squeezed her hand again, rough palms, warm fingers no matter the season.

“She was like ‘What’s this?,’” Renata continued, trying to keep still. “‘Did your mom tell you this is busted?’ And I corrected her. I said ‘Tara isn’t my mom,’ but I wasn’t mean about it, I was never bothered by it. It just wasn’t true. And Lanny said something like ‘Sorry, yes, your aunt. Well, I could probably fix this, but it’s gonna cost you’ in that fake adult voice she’d use sometimes. I said, ‘How much?’ I was maybe ten. She said, ‘It’ll cost you evidence. A picture of the two of us when I fix it. And I get to keep it.’”

Music began vibrating from their neighbors’ house, a steady, nauseating ambience. V looked over their shoulder, squinting through the glass. Renata could imagine them standing up, the intention of going over and yelling at the neighbors taking shape inside them. Renata pulled on V’s arm.

“Did she take the picture?” V asked, distracted.

Renata nodded, moving Francis Brown’s folio onto her lap and holding her mother’s notebook by its front cover, letting the pages dangle in the air, shaking a little, until the check and two white rectangles fell between her feet. One of the photos she always had. The other was a copy found in the garage pile. In the picture, their faces are underexposed but legible, Lanny’s hair, her mother’s hair, lighter, straightened, coming just below her chin, wire-rimmed glasses, dark circles, a nose that hadn’t been crooked before but now was, and a single braid on the right side. Renata’s face is small, her eyes wide, laughing because her mother had just made a farting noise after telling Renata how much Tara hated crass jokes.

“She’d made two copies, I guess,” Renata said. “For the longest time, I thought she had taken this picture and forgotten to keep it. I found the other copy when I first took the notebook out. I just thought it was mine. Slipped in somehow or something. I was surprised.”

“Bullshit,” V said, dramatically leaning away from Renata, which made her laugh.

“Fine—”

“You know, I’ve never put it together until tonight, that that must be something your mom came up with,” V said, an edge laced to their words. “‘Fine.’ You say it, my mom says it, your mom writes it down. It’s so annoying.”

The bass from next door started to buzz Renata’s camera on her desk. One song ended and the next boomed so loudly, it shook the lamp next to it, the light bouncing in the room.

“She didn’t want to be a mom,” V said. “Old story. Doesn’t mean she didn’t think about you.”

“I know,” Renata replied, two warring inclinations colliding.

Closure, for she now knew her mother did see her beyond the memory of an infant, shaped her in some subtle way, made an effort to return. And even more acute, a sense of betrayal. Her mother stopped coming and left no reason to fret over. She could have handled it, Renata thought to herself, the abdication of parenthood. They still could have had a relationship, without the secrecy. Then she thought of the postcard from her eighteenth birthday. May we one day meet as equals.

Renata couldn’t bring herself to think about why her mother and Tara crafted such an elaborate ruse, though Renata was confident her aunt would explain that her wisdom would make itself apparent eventually. She failed to see how such bizarre, fractured logic could ever make sense.

The two photos sat side by side. The house kept shaking.

* * *

THE THREE OF them sat in the living room in stoic silence, the TV blaring. Renata lay curled on the couch, her laptop overheating on a circular blue footstool in the center of the stale room, the screen gridded with used cars so clean they looked fake, an empty burger wrapper clutched in one hand, wondering how far $20,000 stretched. It was all Renata could justify spending on a car, no matter how much money she suddenly possessed. In the grand scheme, it wasn’t all that much.

Renata decided she would replace the 4Runner then drive out to McNairy. She hadn’t told V or Tara initially, and she didn’t plan to ask them what they thought. For the first time, Renata hoarded her own secret, stealing time ever since opening her mother’s journals and Francis Brown’s diary to read them whenever she could, mired in the worlds they contained, teasing out their details, their relations. What she had gleaned after going through two of Corinne’s volumes disturbed and confused Renata in equal measure, not least of which was the fact that her entries stopped in 2008. Some unofficial catastrophe at the observatory, disappearances, poison, a death, off-the-books research, her new friend Percy and Francis Brown somehow enmeshed in the middle of it all. As for Brown’s own recordings, they were choked with seemingly irrelevant details, contextless, but similarly unsettling of his time along the Colorado River documenting what he believed to be the remains of an undiscovered species of animal. But then something happened to him too. His entries ranged from professional, scientific, to rambling, even paranoid. He had become convinced, it seemed, that he was not alone where he was stationed. His increasing desperation was rendered in language too vivid for Renata to consume for long stretches. It would have been simpler to believe the diary was an elaborate if compelling hoax.

V would have understood had Renata elected to share any of this. There was nothing they had done to warrant any cruelty, or silence. At least, Renata hoped that was true. After the revelations of the last few weeks, after earlier that morning when Renata finally broached the subject of her mother again with Tara, tried to forgive her aunt for so many years of omission, instead coming to a pained, unsatisfactory but shared acknowledgment, a placeholder. There seemed to be a gulf, neither Tara nor Renata believing that one had to explain anything to the other. Renata still came away disappointed and took her efforts at reconciliation no further. That night, when she and V sat together, she wanted to ask if there was anything V knew about Corinne that they had been keeping from her. A yes would have been devastating, but it would only have meant that the decision not to tell Renata had come from Tara.

Her aunt shifted in the armchair, switching her crossed legs, changing the channel. The news, another record high for the summer; sports, two helmeted bodies crashing into one another, a man’s gleeful laughter over it. Renata watched Tara closely, trying to divine any twitch of guilt, any performance of disinterest. She second-guessed herself. Why would Tara act differently? She had been withholding the truth about Lanny since the beginning. For her, nothing had changed. The only person who might have any important reaction, besides Renata, was Corinne.

On her phone, Renata had begun to compile a list of supplies she thought she would need. McNairy was over four hours away. She couldn’t find any reliable sources when it came to lodging. She had never camped before, let alone by herself. Three days? she pondered. Maybe five. In her journals, Corinne wrote about sudden, strong winds, especially at the top of the mountain where the observatory sat. There was virtually no cover from the sun, though clouds could accumulate with little warning. Renata’s main concern was burning quickly. Doctors told her from a young age that UV exposure actually benefited her psoriasis, but only in controlled bursts and never without some layer of protection, especially at the height of summer when the UV index maxed out. The prospect of hiking and possibly climbing through brush and dirt with open wounds didn’t seem appealing. No, Renata thought, there were certain factors she’d just have to deal with, and if things got really bad, she could always drive home.

Renata’s cursor hung over a moss green sedan with off-road tires going for $30,000. The remaining sum from her mother’s check was more than she would make in two years, full time, at the print shop. A rush flowed through her threatening to carry her far from the present. Renata turned her laptop to Tara, who took a moment to glance at it before leaning over, looking up at Renata, her face set, impassive. They were at the dealership to look at the car in person, shiny, so pristine and quiet and working that Renata felt like she was getting away with something, the idea that, if she spent more money, she could buy an even nicer car seeming comical, slightly immoral. She signed the paperwork and they drove straight from the lot to a sporting goods store, the truth coming out now: Renata was going to McNairy, she had decided and no one could do anything to change her mind. Neither V nor Tara protested, V sitting in the front seat as usual, fingers tapping on the passenger door, Tara nodding then taking a call from someone at the court in the back seat, all of them then walking through the aisles of the store picking out items from Renata’s list, a list, she realized as soon as they gathered everything into an overfull basket, that was too long. She really only needed a tent, some new hiking shoes, maybe some sturdier pants, maybe a bigger water bottle, but the rest of her essentials, the extra rolls of film, clothes, food, medicine, first aid kit, could just stay in the car. It purred quietly on the road home and sounded all the more perfect and precisely engineered, illicit when they shuttled her old car to a grocery parking lot to sell it to someone named Danny on Craigslist.

The rush continued to flow. Renata called to take time off from work, finally telling Barry an inflated story regarding her mother’s possible death, how she needed time to process, which Barry took with apoplectic understanding. She packed her mother’s journals from 1997 and 1998, the year she was born, and Francis Brown’s diary, five rolls of film, a telephoto lens and a macro she restored in high school, and a battery pack for her phone in one bag. That night, V slept beside her, while Tara stayed up making sandwiches for Renata to bring in a cooler in the car. Renata could hear a low, steady sound from the kitchen, followed by an errant squeak, her aunt’s phone playing music, probably sitting on the edge of the counter near the sink. She didn’t know what kind of music her mother listened to, if both sisters had the same taste.

For all of Tara’s bitterness about Corinne, coupled with the realization that this animosity might have been exaggerated, Renata figured her aunt, behaviorally, resembled Corinne in more ways than she let on. That made Renata angry. The anger felt whole, solid enough to grasp. As she lay in bed, V’s mouth blowing gently onto the back of her neck, for the first time, Renata felt she was Tara’s daughter, that what she was about to do made less and less sense.

1.5

IN CERTAIN PARTS OF NEVADA, AT CERTAIN TIMES OF THE year, like the barren rural lands north of the city, the air could be cooler, mild even, save for the directness of the sunlight. Two hours into her drive, Renata checked the weather in McNairy again. The high had gone up a degree, from 87 to 88. In Vegas, the temperature had climbed from 104 when she set out to 115. Renata drove down a long, unwinding stretch of highway, flat and narrow, riddled with potholes, mile markers popping up for ten or twenty-mile stretches before disappearing, low barbed-wire gates bent out of shape, the odd green diamond street sign cautioning drivers to watch for wild burros or cattle, orange and white sand sparkling or lying matte on the curb, smashed TVs on the rumble strips like punctuation.

Renata’s camera dangled on the passenger seat, the strap hung around the headrest. It was all too easy to begin talking to herself after the first hour, when she began to find the stereo distracting. Rationalization hadn’t presented itself yet, a good-enough reason beyond naked curiosity to drive all the way out there, which wasn’t really that far, V reminded her, about the same distance to LA. Renata imagined hardened people in McNairy, weathered faces, squinting eyes, black-and-white photos from the Dust Bowl transposed onto a timeless patch of desert. She debated donning a fake name for the trip, a fake photo assignment, but that idea passed quickly. Who was she hiding from? Who would care?

Overhead, ravens and vultures winged, one black dot against the sky until it receded into nothingness, and then another appeared. Renata thought of Deb as she drove past a sign pointing the way to Mercury, a smattering of trucks with ATVs cinched in their beds nearby. It occurred to Renata that sticking around in McNairy might draw some attention if there weren’t that many people still living there. Online, she found one review, from two years back, by a man whose car had broken down in the middle of the highway just outside town. He pushed the car a mile into McNairy and said the area was spooky, but that the mechanic he found at the single small gas station was friendly enough. The reviewer didn’t have any cash, but he had a gun, so he paid the mechanic in cartridges.

At the very edge of Renata’s view down the road, past heat shimmers, she spotted a small protrusion, like the tip of a finger. She drove another ten miles, but the object stayed the same size and Renata began to feel a familiar exhaustion, the waiting kind she remembered from long treks to New Mexico with Tara and V, purgatory in a moving vehicle. The best thing was to distract herself and eventually the distance would close. She began talking to her mother.

Renata figured she had nothing to say to Corinne that wouldn’t seem clichéd, scenes of reunited families and standoffish embraces unspooling in her head. Instead, she role-played—a scientist being transferred to the observatory, an astronomer, or maybe some sort of technician. Renata imagined pulling up to the facility after driving all the way up the mountain, zigzagging on a dirt road back and forth, the valley plastered on every side like it had been thrown down from the sky. Her mother’s photo album opened up before her. The people frozen in it, men and women Renata had never seen before, with voices she’d never heard, sprang into motion, the barest details informing their newly imagined lives. In her mind, the facility was activity itself, people running from building to building, cutting samples from surrounding plant life, measuring the distances between stars, waving at her as she slowly made her way to the front doors of the observatory. In her mind, the mountain was empty, and what staff had once worked there now walked slowly down the road behind her in procession, chambers locked, roofs ablaze, a beam of light shooting into the sky from the telescope.

It was difficult for Renata to understand why McNairy had been shut down. Visiting the facility seemed more the purview of diehard enthusiasts than tourists looking for Area 51. To that effect, the most information Renata could find anywhere was posted on ancient forums, most often by users who identified as amateur astronomers prone to roaming the country’s dark sky parks. Light pollution from a city as bright as Vegas made sense to her at first, but it seemed like a problem that would have been addressed with something like an ordinance well before any money had been spent. And Vegas was very far away. That morning, Renata left the city early enough for dark, and even passing through the heart of the Strip, she could distinctly make out a smattering of stars. It was almost 10:00 a.m. now and a planet twinkled near the moon in the clear sky. She kept coming across the same refrain about McNairy, no matter the context, no matter the year: at night, it was one of the darkest places in Nevada.

Renata clucked her tongue and smirked to herself, the finger-size protrusion in the distance no longer tiny, but the size of her hand, a mound of dirt at first, now a mountain. With every mile, as the temperature began to drop with the higher elevation, Renata doubted her mother was truly dead. The idea made her giddy.

* * *

SHE PULLED INTO the only gas station she had seen for almost a hundred miles, much heralded by hand-painted signs as the last place to fill up until the road went through restricted government territory. McNairy’s mountain loomed just behind her, maybe twenty minutes’ drive away, an assemblage of trees and brush, the intimations of layers of earth in bands on the sides of cliffs that jutted from the sheer face of the bluff, though the landscape seemed weightless in the heat, the distances between objects expanding and contracting. Renata popped open the fuel door, unscrewed the cap; the only sound she could hear was the wind.

The station itself was merely a white room with a window, with a rusted ice freezer off to the side, a cage of propane tanks next to it, and thin plywood board over what looked to have once been the station’s main entrance. The squat, brown structure next door must have been the garage, though there was no signage on the wall and a layer of sand ran along the bottom of the main sliding track. Renata couldn’t see anyone inside the white room despite the sunlight, which came down directly and harshly, bright enough to make her squint behind her sunglasses. The foot of the mountain appeared to hover above the ground, and Renata stared at it, feeling the current of gas against her hand, a quiet tick as the meter spun up and up.

All this vacant real estate. The thought entered her mind sometime into the drive and now it pressed upon her more urgently. Vegas seemed so austere and yet full to the brim with industry, people, smog, noise. Even the lone edges of the valley surrounding the city were teeming with the hum of expansion, each parcel of land, every half-baked idea for a new community of “luxury” and convenience snapped up, pushing, pushing further into the desert. Entire sight lines, miles and miles of emptiness, sat bought and paid for, waiting for the area to accrue value. Such naked avarice felt remote, almost laughable, out here. Where would the water come from? How could anything used by millions of people every day last under the relentless sun? By the time she arrived at the edge of McNairy, all Renata could see was the potential for land speculation. The desert, liberating and sinister, depending on one’s use for it, if use indeed there was.

Behind the station, an engine revved. Tires crunched and popped, the telltale dry scraping of something heavy sliding in the dirt. Renata lifted her head, looking beyond the garage and gas station, clocking a faint but growing plume of dust rising and drawing closer. The truck that careened around the corner seemed so old and so heavy, Renata thought it might crumble into its component parts at any moment. Most of the original paint, blue or red or possibly even green, had chipped off and the hood was gone, exposing an engine matted over with dried oil and coolant. The truck pulled up on the opposite side of Renata’s pump, a muffled beat emanating from within, music maybe, or an AM talk-radio show, but the engine cut before she could decide. The person who stepped out, sunburnt and wrinkled, whose gender Renata found difficult to determine, began filling up as if no one else was around. A tattered green button-down fluttered around their waist, black tech shorts, and brown cowboy boots. Their neck was flecked with white spots and puckered patches of inflamed skin, like one of Renata’s bad flare-ups before she had been diagnosed.

Suddenly, the door to the white room swung open, the darkness within opaque even in the garish daylight. Both Renata and the stranger stared as the door squeaked on its hinges. A gust of wind slammed it shut again.

“Josie!” the stranger called out, the timbre of their voice as androgynous as their appearance.

Renata’s tank had been filled, the handle clicking, the nozzle still inserted, but Renata stood there silently, half hiding behind the pump. The wind gusted again, grains of sand scratching at her face. Some settled in the creases of the stranger’s skin on their neck and, at that moment, Renata regretted not having her camera in her hands.

“Josie?” the stranger called out again, less certain.

The white door swung open again, this time clearly wrenched by the wind, and the stranger marched inside. Renata expected the door to slam shut in tandem, the prelude to some terrible confrontation unfolding. What little of McNairy there was to see danced in her periphery, small clusters of flat wooden buildings, septic and water tanks like giant pills, bleached trees that grew drastically in density closer to the mountain, earth carpeted by bushes, long-dead grass, hardy, spiked foliage, and an unfathomably desiccated asphalt road running through the town to the base of the mountain. Renata replaced the nozzle and stepped back into her car. She watched the clock on her dash turn to the next minute and the next, no discernible movement inside the white building, not from any angle and not from any distance as she drove away, gaining speed toward McNairy, her skin irritated from the heat, her conscience unsettled more by the fact that she didn’t stay to see the stranger leave safely than by the fact that she didn’t pay for the gas.

McNairy was split in half by a bend, sun-cracked, whitened timber structures on either side, the road snaking back out toward the open desert before terminating in a long arc at the entrance to a trail furred with pines. A sharp turn beyond the trail hid a wide canyon where a mess of vegetation and brambles crowded together to form a forest of tall, skinny trees and spindly bushes, with fallen boulders and smaller sandstone rocks strewn about. Soft-leaved plants, orange sand, craggy shale, insect-like weeds, dried yellow moss, and fungus all drew together like merchandise under the vast open sky.

Already, the air felt thinner, the comparatively cool climate dizzying.

In the town, a small elementary school made up of two single-story buildings less than fifty feet wide sat at the furthest end of the road, closest to the mountain. A bar, the only multilevel building, stood directly across the street, a dormant neon sign hanging from an iron arm, the front door cracked open. Nearby, a post office fronted by bent, splintering pillars, faded signage, and what Renata took to be a visitors’ center next door, with a preponderance of maps and ads stapled to the door. An olive tree sprouted beside the post office, a massive flowering cactus in front of the visitors’ center. As Renata rolled slowly through the town, her foot hovering over the accelerator, the smashed windows of one building in particular, a house perhaps, stood out to her, the walls once blue, now barely gray, its white curtains drawn behind jagged pieces of broken glass, and two gleaming cars parked in the driveway.

Renata brought all she thought she needed with her. There was no real reason to stop in town. But she had committed to the idea that she would speak to someone about the observatory, an oblique path to her mother laid out by inference. Renata braked and reversed back to the post office, pulling up to the building’s dirt lot. She removed her mother’s journal from 1997 from her backpack. Littered though it was with personal anecdotes about her work and McNairy, the emphasis Corinne’s entries most consistently placed at the end of the twentieth century was on Francis Brown, and later, the idea that she and Brown were somehow metaphysically connected. But the Colorado River, the site of Brown’s work, flowed over four hundred miles away. Renata had checked. Unless she was missing some obscure kernel of local history, asking residents about Brown seemed foolish. Asking about her mother might prove even less fruitful. Corinne seemed to avoid coming down from the mountain or talking to McNairy’s residents whenever possible.

The post office, like the gas station, was impossible to see inside of, with the sun directly above. Renata’s reflection projected clearly in the large picture window. Stepping under an aluminum awning much newer than the building it was attached to, and onto a raised wooden platform, the glare subsided, and Renata glimpsed fluorescent lights on the ceiling within, a beige carpeted floor, disassembled boxes on wire racks, a small fan oscillating from side to side on a chipped counter, and behind it, an Asian man in his late thirties or forties. She couldn’t see any customers.

Renata wandered over to the bulletin board tacked to the front of the visitors’ center, her steps on the platform booming on hollow wood, her camera gripped in one hand. No flyers for missing dogs or people, but several calls for employment from a mining company, the Bureau of Land Management, and real estate agencies looking to hire local property scouts. Someone had pinned a yellowing picture of a young man to the bottom right corner, with nothing else attached. Beneath an ad for a massage therapist, Renata spotted a familiar scrap of type, the runelike letters that encircled the observatory’s logo, stamped in red ink, and a name. She raised her camera and shot. Half the notice had been ripped away vertically:

30 YEAR ANNIVERSARY RETRE

The regional chapter of the National Astronomical So

McNairy alumni back to the McNairy-Ashwell Observa

unique celebration of the site’s foundational research an

Opening reception begins promptly at the Spyglass at

17, 2023

Attendance by invitation only. Please direct any inquiries

Scarborough or Adrian Better at the Spyglass. We’ll get b

1.6

BACK RENATA STEPPED, LEANING TO ONE SIDE, PEERING MORE intently into the visitors’ center, its awning shared with the post office, with a short gap in between. It was as if one structure scooted away from the other. The lights were off inside, but Renata made out a scale model of the valley on a table and a variety of framed pictures on the walls, along with clear plastic slots for brochures, all empty.

Behind her, the post office door sighed open, the creak of feet on the platform high-pitched as a bug. The postman who had idled behind the counter ducked to the side and leaned directly against the window, a cigarette hanging limp between his lips. He was about her height, sporting thick arms, a thin tan line on his wrist, shaved head, and yet the black bristles of his hair were so numerous, she almost couldn’t see the skin on his scalp. His attire seemed a gesture toward the idea of a postman’s uniform, a light blue polo with navy collar, navy shorts, black sneakers, though Renata could tell these pieces were all cobbled together. The name “Ken” had been crudely stitched with red thread over his left breast.

Renata was sure he’d notice her, a stranger, standing there, but he lit his cigarette with a Zippo and took a long drag, squinting into the distance. She waited another moment, just watching. On the back of his left hand, a red and raised portion of skin, stretching from his pinky to his middle knuckle. She followed the length of his hand down to his knees and then his feet. An even more severe scar ran up his left shin, pocked with white dots. She debated addressing him by the name on his shirt but settled for:

“Excuse me?”

Ken turned his head, smoke trailing past his face. He nodded, vaguely surprised.

“Hi,” Renata ventured. “I’m Renata.”

He didn’t respond, merely watched her.

“I’m visiting from out of town,” she continued, thrown off. “And . . . just looking for some local advice.”

Ken nodded again and took another drag. He closed his mouth then closed his eyes. A cold wash crept into Renata’s gut as she waited, a slight breeze blowing past them, carrying his smoke toward her. He breathed in and seemed to hold it, head thrown back against the window, completely still. She’d been blown off before by lesser people for worse reasons. It didn’t matter. Each instance ignited an immediate, almost out-of-body tide of rage. It felt like an abdication, a handoff to another version of herself. Tara called it an overreaction.

“How’s it going over there?” Renata asked, an edge to her tone.

Ken smiled, eyes still closed.

“I’m thinking,” he said. His voice was far lower than Renata was expecting, and upon hearing it, she wondered what it must sound like when he sang. “I’m also on my break.”

“You didn’t seem busy in there,” Renata remarked.

“Not the point. Well,” he said, smiling wide now. “There’s a hot spring not too far from here, sometimes tourists go there. There’s this weird rock formation about twenty miles north. Sort of in the shape of an ear. Apparently very popular. You seem like one of those girls. The stars are bright at night here too, as you can imagine. Makes for nice wistful gazing. There’s the mountain. We’ve got rattlesnakes on the trails up there. And this is the only post office for a couple hundred miles.”

As Ken spoke, Renata’s anger subsided. He paused between each sentence, as if analyzing what he’d just said and deciding if he had made himself clear enough.

“You’ll have noticed the scorch marks, maybe?” Ken asked, throwing a thumb behind him. “Especially on the western wall inside.”

Now that he’d said it, Renata spotted a wave of soot against the opposite wall, the marks, in places, reaching almost waist high.

“The inside got burned pretty bad,” Ken said. “Not so much on the exterior because they threw the bottle into the office.”

Renata turned to face Ken more fully, one hand gripping the lens of her camera.

“Who?” she asked.

“People. I’m sure it wasn’t a race thing. Actually, I’m not sure.”

Renata departed for McNairy under the assumption that, in the wake of the departure of the observatory’s scientists, there would be very little of interest happening in town.

“Jesus,” Renata said, unsure of her part in this new conversation. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with the observatory, would it?”

“No, this was maybe three months ago.”

The drastic decline in population after the observatory’s closure supported Renata’s theory that McNairy was even sleepier than it used to be, but stepping closer to peer inside the office again, directly next to the window, she noted two large carts filled with piles upon piles of packages, boxes small and overlarge, repurposed and new, with padded yellow mailers and white letter envelopes. She guessed there were at least a hundred discrete pieces of mail for a town of fewer than seventy people, some of whom had to have been small children. More than that, a large number of the packages that were faced up had the same return address.

“Those carts look pretty full. Doesn’t seem like this whole thing affected business for very long.”

Ken’s version of laughter appeared to be snorting.

“Sure,” he said. “I don’t know why I brought that up. No one’s made much of a fuss about it. Obviously.” He gestured to himself then her with his cigarette. “Are you—”

“My mom was half,” Renata answered, anticipating the question. “I can’t imagine there’s many people who aren’t white in town.”

Another snort. Ken dropped then stepped on his half-smoked cigarette.

“Not anymore. It’s fine. About the most excitement we’ve seen around here in a while.”

“You didn’t catch them, I suppose.”

“Oh, I know who did it. But it’s no harm done . . .”

“Wait, w—”

“Their life is much worse than mine, and also they did a shitty job, so.”

“But who did it? Aren’t they, like, dangerous?”

“Not anymore. Don’t worry. Did I answer your questions?”

“I didn’t actually ask them.”

Renata’s pulse quickened. She wanted to know how long Ken had lived in McNairy, how useful he might prove. Better to play dumb, she thought.

“Is the observatory still closed?” she asked. “I saw that retreat flyer over there.”

Ken shook his head, looking directly at her then slowly down at his shoes.

“Shut down. That party never ended up happening. Canceled at the last second. But if you’re industrious and don’t get altitude sick, you’re welcome to go up there yourself. Provided you wear a mask. Some nasty tunnels. And everyone seems to get bad allergies higher up. I imagine the place has been broken into a few times by now anyway.”

“The party. Do you know why they canceled?”

“Can’t say that I do. One of the organizers came by, tacked the paper up. A couple weeks before it was supposed to happen, she came back, ripped it up.”

The pronoun rang out in Renata’s head, but she tried to calm her thoughts. Corinne wasn’t the only woman in McNairy by a large margin. But how many people would have cared to come back thirty years later? And there was the surname Scarborough, unmistakable, taunting in its obviousness.

“Unfortunate,” Renata said evenly. “Sounds like it could have been a big deal.”

Ken snorted.

“It’s fine.” He pointed to the camera. “Take some pictures though, maybe.”

“You don’t go up?”

“Nah, too creepy. All that money spent and all that shit just sitting there, useless. You’d think it’d be a simple enough job to clean everything up.”

The breeze picked up, dust scraping against Renata’s legs, whipping Ken’s polo, rolling the cigarette butt into the road.

“You said to wear a mask?” Renata asked.

She had grown up inhaling dust and smoke, but the air passing through her lungs here felt fresher than any she’d breathed in years.

“If you go through the tunnels, there’s some chemical shit,” Ken said. “I’m not really sure. And like I said, allergies get pretty bad. Sometimes a mask helps. Plus all the spooky stuff.”

“Spooky stuff?” Renata asked.

Ken straightened and pushed off the wall, a subtle, agile motion. He smiled at Renata as one hand came to rest on the handle of the door and the other, index finger extended, pointed to his nose. Renata had been dismissed. Tara made a similar gesture many times before. Finger, nose, an abrupt exit—something that couldn’t be freely talked about in the moment, a subject that had become Renata’s responsibility to revisit later, if she really wanted to know.

Renata kept watching Ken as he made his way into the office and back around the counter. He reached underneath and pulled out another small fan, placing it to the left of him, opposite the window, as if he wanted an excuse not to look in Renata’s direction. She made a note to come back before the post office closed, though why Ken would be any more forthright after business hours, when no one else was around, as opposed to during business hours, when no one else was around, escaped her. In her pocket, Renata’s phone buzzed.

A text from V read, “update, please.”

Renata replied, “Soon.”

On the map, McNairy’s lone campground was situated half a mile from the town’s end, where the thicket of trees became denser. If she hadn’t checked the location beforehand, Renata wouldn’t have ventured much past the visitors’ center; the dirt road’s planed edges disappeared and any discernible tire treads led out into the wide open. No signs pointed to the campsite either.

Renata set her car forward at a low crawl, only strengthening the illusion that what she was looking for was somehow hidden, but after two minutes, the trees to her left, a deceptive mile from the base of the mountain, opened. A circular patch of gravel flanked by two metal signs appeared. Renata looked around from inside the car, but it didn’t seem as if anyone had come this way for a while. That, or the wind swept away their tracks. Stepping out, she immediately smelled fire, perhaps charcoal from a barbecue, but couldn’t see any trails of smoke, nor feel the telltale sting in her eyes.

The two signs were riddled with holes and scrapes that had taken off bits of text. One sign illustrated a list of wildlife and vegetation in the surrounding area. Ravens, burros, white-tailed jackrabbits, bighorn sheep, frogs given enough rain. Beneath, a contraption made up of two oversize brown brushes with a gap in the middle, for scraping floral contaminants off visitors’ shoes. The other sign featured a line map of the campsite, with connecting trails that led around or up the mountain. Instead of dotted lines and X’s, there were icons of bird feet and the silhouette of a hawk. Several trails joined at the mountain’s base where the campsite sat. According to the distance marker at the bottom of the map, the whole area was much larger than it appeared when Renata approached from the highway. On top of the illustration, someone diagonally duct-taped a large handwritten sign that read “CAMP SITE PERMANENTLY OFF LIMITS TO VISITORS AND OTHERS.” Renata laughed at the phrasing. She walked backward from the posts and peered down the path. Two arms of a white gate had been chained together and obscured with bits of cut-up brush that had mostly blown away.

Overhead, the sun was starting to dip toward the mountain. Dusk wouldn’t come for several more hours. Renata wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible, ideally invisible. She fished her phone out of her pocket and dialed V. At first, the call went straight to voicemail. No bars, one bar, none again. Renata walked away from the mountain, far past the car, until she could see two bars and dialed. It rang once, a perfunctory courtesy, before her cousin picked up.

“How’s it going?” V answered cheerily. Through the receiver, it sounded like they were chewing on rocks.

“Hi,” Renata responded flatly. “Do you think I could pick a lock with a bobby pin?”

Renata only had one bobby pin on her, her aunt’s (dropped) from when they picked up the new car, along with an assortment of colored rubber-coated paper clips she found at the bottom of her backpack, two of which V told her to strip. V walked her through a process Renata found simple in theory but frustrating upon execution, a jittery, oddly ungraceful attunement to the smallest sounds and tactile feedback, made even more trying by the fact that the lock was heavy, rusted, and dented.

Several years ago, a fabled, torturously mythologized sculpture by a reclusive artist out in the middle of Nevada had finally opened to the public, and Renata and V drove four hours north to see it. They arrived far later than the exhibit’s closing time, with little daylight left, tall chain-link fencing, and a few guards sitting in the visitors’ center obstructing their entry. Plains and plains of sand and compact dirt undulated around them, the air dry, inert but alive. Renata tried researching the layout of the installation on the artist’s website. V watched vlogs from tourists who documented their trip in the kind of discursive detail normally reserved for long-lost friends, which is how they picked up on a few service entrances in the perimeter fence that were secured with simple hardware-store key locks. One person had gotten so close to one of the gates that V could make out the lock’s brand. Renata tried picking it when the time came, but V was faster. The two snuck in just as the sun was setting, with the manicured hills and concrete monoliths of the exhibit looming before them, and Renata felt that they should have left some money under a rock or come back during business hours for the sheer grandeur of it. V was less impressed, stalking around, laughing to themself at random, pointedly spitting on the ground, and, when it came time to leave, flipping off the receding gates.

There was nothing romantic about the illegality of Renata’s actions now, blindly probing an ancient lock while recounting her day to V. It was a quarter to five by the time Renata finally realized that she had successfully undone the lock, but failed to turn the plug inside hard enough. Though the air had cooled, she could feel patches of tender, sunburnt skin on her neck and arms. V wished her well, said they would be sure to let Tara know Renata was already breaking the law. Renata pushed the two white metal arms back, drove her car through, and replaced the lock without closing it all the way.

Dust kicked up behind the car as she inched toward the campsite, trees with bright-green leaves on either side grazing the windows like a car wash and the mountain rising up at a sheer vertical incline ahead.

Here, the base was even further away from the road, perhaps half a mile, this side of the peak flat and smooth, the incline gradually pushing outward into an overhang. Another large circular receiving area about thirty feet across sat just away from the mountainside, with two bathrooms, a small painted dumpster with its lids missing, and an envelope box for visitors to deposit campsite fees. Renata took one look at the box then remembered the gas station, felt her gate-dusted hands on the wheel, thought about how easy it was to simply not pay for anything in these small places, how embarrassing it was that she had forgotten about the cash folded in her front pocket, how tired she realized she felt then. Two gravel paths barely wide enough to fit her car through split off by the bathrooms, with ten camping spots to each section.

In her backpack on the passenger seat were her mother’s journals, plus Brown’s diary. The volumes up through 1996 remained at the house because Renata already read through them. The nights ran away from her as she pored over each entry, starting in 1993, when Corinne seemed to have fully established herself in McNairy. It was in 1996 where things had gotten interesting, where something like a narrative, though Renata knew it was all one, long narrative, began to form.

MAY 14, 1996—

Percy’s arrived. He just missed Tara, though I’m not sure I’d want that interaction to take place just yet. There’s no longer any rumor about our supposed relationship because the entire facility has seen to that for us. M keeps joking that everyone thinks I’m a lesbian. Honest to god, I haven’t a clue why, especially since there are actual lesbians here. But these are the small, ineffectual rhythms of diversion + life in a place like McNairy where everyone has to be interested in everyone else’s business for fear of boredom.

It’s odd having traded a few letters here + there, but Percy fits right in. He’s making himself available + he projects the qualities of a good listener. He leans in, he furrows the brow, nods, etc. He won’t stop commenting about his allergies, a feature of working up here so common it has a name now—“The McNairy Bug.” Everyone gets used to it eventually + Percy is nothing if not cheerful.

Or maybe I’m being delusional. He’s not with his buddies this time, so perhaps it’s that he doesn’t feel so stifled to be professional, such a know-it-all. We drove around a bit in the wilderness today. He got here in the late afternoon, still hot but he didn’t seem to mind. As we went along, he pointed out rocks, while I pointed out stars though there weren’t any visible in the daylight. All perfectly platonic.

I confess an interest in Percy, though it’s difficult to tell what kind. Sexual, probably. Romantic, less certain. I also confess a reluctance toward these feelings. It’s not fear, more confusion. Tara always did the exploring for both of us. I feel I could be happy faking it with almost anyone, up to a point. That’s easier to imagine than having an encounter with the real thing. A hopelessly maudlin thought. Sometimes I make myself sick.

MAY 15, 1996—

A letter from Mom.

Of the “we never see you anymore” variety. It’s pointless reminding her that I’m only a short distance away. I tried explaining some of this familial tension to Percy after a lecture in the auditorium from one of his colleagues. Something about physics + the southern Nevada drought. Percy didn’t seem interested. He kissed me (yes, a real kiss) in a way that I suppose was meant to be spontaneous + therefore romantic. It annoyed me more than anything. Maybe he’s seen too many movies. Seemed more like Percy was trying to get me to stop talking.

We discussed other subjects as well. Another federal contract means we finally had a new computer installed in the observatory, ran some crude simulations to test things out, nothing as mind blowing as promised, but it’s going to make this international collaborative headache a lot easier. Percy’s work has undergone some “rapid development” in Colorado. The peculiar part isn’t even that he seemed to be talking about here too, but that this work sounds wholly separate from what he does at NTS. All of it predicated on a pointed use of the future tense. When we’re back, eventually we’ll set up a site.

So, he has an ulterior motive after all. I can accept that. If anything, this potential for ambition makes me more attracted to him, the idea that he has other things to worry about, self-directed goals to meet. I could write back to Mom + really hammer the “I’m seeing someone” line. It’d be a good diversion. But also a lie.

I am glad Percy is here. It’s just not all the facts.

MAY 18, 1996—

What a strange few days.

More in the culmination of events than any one thing. I looked back + realized I hadn’t really noted them, they were too minor at the time, plus I seem to be communicating a kind of ga-ga attitude around Percy that makes me sound intensely girlish.

I didn’t see Percy at all today so I tried spending some time with M. But M exchanged a very few short words with me + if I spent more time talking with her, I would have missed the DHL guy, who brought my paper comments from the UK. He seemed totally put out, which was amusing. I imagine it’s not a comfortable journey + given how few people around are using that particular service, it’s possible I was the sole reason this person drove out here.

When I finished looking my comments over (peer reviews, mostly positive), I had just enough time to visit the overlook, where I caught a tail-end glimpse of a large group of people down in the canyon. It’s not unheard of to get sky tourists out here. T’s on vacation so I asked Young about it. What do you know? A group of surveyors. I wondered if Percy might be with them. But all of those things, one after the other, exactly ordered.

First learning about Brown, then having so much time pass, still thinking about him. More like an idea than an actual person. It seemed that when Percy came back, he had told himself he would temper his enthusiasm in talking about Brown. But I could tell he was eager + honestly, the more he divulges, the more intrigued I am. Maybe it’s that I hadn’t really considered the existence of surveyors anymore + then, to find not one but an entire group of them here. It’s almost as if I’ve been deemed by some higher power incapable of keeping two things in my mind at once. I have to be hit over the head with the obviousness of it.

Renata closed her eyes, tried to picture her mother, not much older than she was now, with all the attendant nervy confidence and skepticism, her opinions, her desires. Renata tried imagining her mother on the couch in Tara’s house, under the guise of someone else. The couch was soft and it sunk beneath their combined weight as they flipped through channels on the old, bulbous television V later tore up and then, with Renata one weekend night during the summer, smashed on the outskirts of town.

Renata’s vision gradually became blurrier, as it usually did after a long day. She drew her seat back, reclined, reaching for Francis Brown’s folio, a photo outtake from a landscape project last year acting as an ineffectual bookmark. The pages were simply too large. Renata wondered if she would achieve her mother’s clarity of purpose, if she would see the obviousness of events in time. She worried about all that she might be missing, and wondered if she was afraid to learn.

AUGUST 15, 1906

In one’s solitude lies the key to their unmaking and their rebirth. I can look at those words and laugh; they belong to the musings of an older man. And yet the river affords something to me. A gift almost. I know the river is indifferent. If not indifferent, stoic. Water flows. Wind breaks. Many nights overwhelmed by the miles of desert here, unbroken except for those cracks and shaved, flaking holes that have sat undisturbed as open wounds for millennia. I went back again. I had to see it.

From the main flow of the Grand, one can stand comfortably while traveling through the pocket. The floor beneath is quite rough, igneous rock like stale bread cut open, but no truly sharp protrusions. I tend to lift my arms above my head to keep them dry. In that tunnel, a man of some height can stand to full muster with a few inches still above him. A shaft of light comes down at an angle halfway through. This is enough to illuminate the entire passage though, on a clear day, as there are many here, the light can be temporarily blinding.

At the other end, the tree hovers like some sort of wraith, a hulking shade that stands perfectly still. The water in the passage is perfectly clear. I’ve dipped below numerous times without consequence to my vision, but I only venture this as it’s nearly impossible to fully see the tree’s dimensions. At least nine feet in height, perhaps four to five feet across. The tree has no leaves, instead thick, spidery branches. The branches either curve elegantly like half circles or sharply turn at severe—this is a strange word but I can think of no other—precise angles. There is no trunk. Rather, there are what appear to be three separate foundations. Previous notes compare these to legs but they extend along the entire length of the tree, a trio of parallel columns held together by the branches almost like a ladder. Had I been less alert, I would have mistaken the entire specimen for a person. How often this seems to happen of late. How unreliable I have become to even myself.

1.7

A LIGHT BURNED INTO RENATA’S CLOSED EYES, THE BLOOD vessels beneath her lids glowing deep red, forking and bulging like roots. She thought, for a moment, that she was still dreaming.

Renata cracked one eye open, peered skeptically at the moon through the windshield, almost full, not a cloud in sight. Her hair was plastered to her cheek, sweat like tapped oil beading on her skin, her body curled up uncomfortably tight against the driver’s-side door, head almost touching her knees, keys clutched in her palm digging into her hand. V described the position as Renata’s reenactment of the womb, as if she could shrink herself smaller and smaller into an unconscious state of rebirth.

She unfurled slowly, willing her muscles to relax, picturing a dry sponge soaking up water while she tried to retrieve the last threads of her dream. All she could remember were two holes side by side in a dark background and from those holes spilled liquid silver. There was a sour taste on her tongue, the chemical cool after kissing a smoker.

Renata let her keys drop into her lap, her knees popping as she sat up, extending her feet under the wheel. A gust of wind pushed against the car, rocking it, the branches pressing on the windows quivering. The clock on her phone read well past eight and her stomach growled. The advantage to staying just outside McNairy was the same as its limitation: no one knew where she was. If she drove back into town now, she’d have to risk someone suspiciously watching where she’d returned to.

There was already a chance she hadn’t gone unnoticed earlier, Renata thought as she walked toward town, parallel to the mountain and then past the school, past the darkened post office. Or maybe no one really cared. She’d left everything in the trunk except her phone, wallet, and keys. She had no notion if any of the buildings, perhaps the single bar or a restaurant she missed, would be open, if the empty gas station would have its lights on, some sort of life entering McNairy when the sun went down.

At first, all Renata could hear was the wind blowing in her ear, small clouds of debris rolling past. She could feel the dust clogging her pores, making the fabric against her skin feel barbed. Porch lights from most of the houses had been turned on, scattered RVs out in the distance along the opposite curve of the mountain lit up, silhouettes moving within. A group of men, most of them balding, all of them wearing pointed leather boots, crossed the road in animated conversation in front of her to the now illuminated bar, seemingly materializing from the darkness. A car rolled slowly toward them from the opposite direction, pulling off into an alley.

In the headlights’ glare, Renata could see the man nearest to her, his hand raised and frozen in the air, puckered skin running in streaks up his forearm beneath a rolled-up sleeve. The moon hovered just above the building and the bar sign, an oblong fixture in the shape of a spyglass bordered in yellow and red neon tubes. If there was an official name advertised somewhere, Renata couldn’t see, but she remembered it from Corinne’s journals. The Spyglass. She walked further down the road, past the house with the expensive cars, past the water and gas tanks, past the truck from the gas station, pulled off outside a darkened mobile home.

Everyone hid either inside their shelters, in the bar, or somewhere she didn’t yet know about. Renata turned back and stood hunched against the wind. The mountain rose up like a pitched shovel, two peaks sitting across a wide dip, each scar and crevice upon them made plain under the moonlight. The observatory hid just out of sight on the rightmost peak, and Renata strained to see any hint of its presence. She imagined her mother looking down from the top of the mountain, squinting to see the road her daughter stood in. How incomplete the town must look from that vantage.

A distant whooping pricked Renata’s ears, pulling her gaze toward the open desert, a quiet oscillation like a battered boomerang. It cycled closer and closer, cutting the air, passing into silence then cutting again, until the sound passed right over her, a dark shape gliding away into the tree line, followed by a soft, echoing caw. The wind began to pick up in earnest then, a gale pushing from the east that brought a blanket of dirt and what looked like clumps of airborne pollen across the road. For a moment, Renata couldn’t see anything, tiny pebbles striking her hand as she shielded her face, tufts of wispy powder settling on her skin, the howl shrieking higher and higher until, all at once, the wind passed and a voice, cut off before, reached her.

“—inside! Hey!”

Ken was leaning out of the bar’s front door. He waved one hand in wide arcs like he was stretching, a phone and its flashlight showing through the afterhaze.

“We better go,” another voice said quickly, just behind Renata.

She jerked her head to the side to see them, but an arm was already around her shoulder, ushering her forward.

“Glenna,” the voice said.

Again, Renata turned her head, but the arm around her shifted to the other side. Their grip was light, and even through her shirt, Renata could feel their calloused hands. She turned again and finally saw Glenna, a thick, bald woman, pale skin pulled fast against her cheeks.

“Renata,” she replied.

The two of them drew up to Ken, who immediately shouted, “Glenna, meet Renata.” The two women laughed as they ducked inside.

The bar was teeming.

McNairy was supposed to be a tiny town, but there were at least two hundred people inside. Classic rock crackled from speakers set high up on the walls, the ceiling vaulted like the inside of a cathedral, a rusted chandelier hanging from the center, above the bar, which sat in the middle of the room like a service desk. Smoke filled the space, a room narrower than Renata expected, perhaps twenty feet across, but long, with circular tables against walls covered in sepia-toned photographs, newspaper clippings, and drooping maroon paint separating from the plaster.

Glenna peeled off immediately to a table near the entrance, while Renata followed Ken to the back, past a swinging kitchen door on the right and the bar on the left. No one turned to look at them, just three more bodies getting out of the night. The back section widened considerably on either side, annexed from whatever building once stood behind the bar, and here there were cracked leather booths, a few weathered velvet couches, and, in the middle, mounted on wheels, a freestanding blackboard. Renata eyed a half-eaten basket of wings and a bag of chips on Ken’s table.

Another woman sat there as well, gray haired, with light brown skin and a sour expression. Renata, sidling into the half-circle red-leather booth, nodded, introducing herself quietly, though the woman, who greeted her stiffly, fixed her gaze on Ken. Without preamble, Renata immediately grabbed a wing. Mouth full, she looked at Ken seated across from her, exasperation and apology on her face, but he waved her away as he tapped his phone. The front door to the bar opened again, a change in pressure rather than sound. More people were shuffling in.

“There’s a race in a couple days,” Ken said. “Dirt race, something like that.”

Renata nodded, looking back round the room more closely. There were a few people in ATV gear, long-sleeved dirt-bike brands, helmet backpacks. Most of the patrons looked to be Renata’s age or slightly older, very few with wrinkles or thinning hair. The woman at their table, who finally introduced herself as Bobbie, sat silently, glaring at Ken.

“Is this normal?” Renata ventured.

She had finished the basket of wings, picked clean to the bone.

“It’s not not normal,” Ken said, still looking at his phone. “We get a lot of groups out here. Racers, hikers, caravans.”

“Where do they all stay?”

“There used to be a campground not far away, but it’s been shut down.” Ken used air quotes for the last words. “Mostly, people crash on someone’s couch or sleep in their cars or make the trip up from the city the same day. Do you want something else?”

Renata hadn’t noticed Ken had finished with his phone and was holding up the now-empty plate.

“If they have a sandwich or something . . .” Renata started.

Ken was already heading to the bar, where Glenna stood serving drinks, a leather apron around her waist. Renata couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She felt she was being put at ease by Ken’s nonchalant, slightly aloof demeanor. Instinctively, the feeling, coupled with Bobbie’s silent but obvious judgment, made her suspicious. She could never tell with men who volunteered their helpfulness so readily. Sometimes it was genuine. Sometimes it was a performance hiding something less friendly. Her anger, if deployed, often revealed which of the two it was.

For a moment, the stereo switched off and the din of conversation took over the bar. Ken returned to the table, a beer in one hand, a glass of water in the other. Bobbie slid further into the booth next to Renata, Ken scooting on the edge.

“Worst seat in the house,” Ken muttered.

Bobbie had the knowing look of a parent, her manner almost forcibly relaxed, like she was waiting for an argument to calm down. Renata asked before she could think better of it.

“You wouldn’t happen to be a teacher, would you?”

Bobbie gave a polite, effortful smile.

“No, ma’am. Why do you ask?”

“Sorry,” Renata said. “It was just a thought.”

“Nosy,” Ken teased.

“Tell me a little something about yourself there then, Renata,” Bobbie said, her eyes sticking on the chalkboard, then, after a few seconds, Ken’s phone. “Or I can give my own best guess. It’ll be less flattering.”

Renata followed her gaze. The board was now parallel with the back wall, two women and one man standing behind it, their shoulders and feet visible. The trio seemed to be talking quietly to one another but Renata couldn’t see what they were looking at. The man gestured suddenly and dropped a piece of chalk on the ground.

“I work in a print shop. Like, for photos,” Renata said.

“So you like pictures,” Bobbie said encouragingly.

It was that there, Renata thought. Whatever tone of voice Bobbie just used, not condescending, but not questioning either, as if Bobbie knew more about Renata than she was supposed to and, as a result, made Renata want to explain herself.

“See?” Ken said, looking up from his phone. “Nosy job, looking through people’s shit.”

“Like you,” Bobbie said.

Ken shrugged.

“I take pictures too,” Renata conceded.

“Anything interesting?” Bobbie asked, her eyes squinting slightly as she smiled. At first, Renata found Bobbie’s expression insincere. Now, she wasn’t sure.

“Landscapes, portraits, anything really,” Renata said.

She looked back at the board. One of the three people was writing something.

“I guess I am nosy,” Renata said. “A couple years ago, I house-sat for a neighbor back home. The guy living next to her turned out to have been missing for a long time. I took a picture of him. Well, a few.”

“An exciting answer!” Bobbie cheered.

She’s definitely someone’s aunt, Renata thought. Ken was back to looking at his phone.

“What’s up with the chalkboard?” Renata asked, ignoring the remark.

“A little game of tradition,” Bobbie explained. “The board stands there all night, one side blank, the other side free to write on. The night goes on, people walk up to the board, write something, erase what was written, don’t write anything. Up to you. Glenna at the bar . . .”

Bobbie pointed. Glenna was wiping down the counter, a shard of light on her head, a pair of other bartenders roving like flies around her, taking orders, leaning together, conspiring, laughing.

“She comes over at the end of the night,” Bobbie continued. “Turns the board to face the room so we can see what’s left on it. Rule is there can only be one word or phrase at a time and you have to write the whole thing. You can’t just add on to someone else’s or write one letter at a time. Then we go around the room and try to guess who wrote the last word.”

“So you just remember who the last person was,” Renata said, skeptical.

“You can fake it,” Ken said. He had put his phone down again. “You could go up, stand there all ‘Hmm, hmm,’ raise your arm like you’re writing, then go back to your seat. It’s actually rare for anyone to change the board more than a few times.”

“And how would you know that?” Bobbie asked condescendingly.

Ken shrugged. Bobbie leaned toward Renata.

“Don’t trust him,” she said. “He doesn’t ever write anything, but he’s a horrible know-it-all. Always checks the board after he thinks someone’s written something, just so he can lord it over everyone at the end of the night.”

Renata could smell Bobbie’s perfume, sickly sweet. She nodded, smiling tightly, wondering when whatever food Ken ordered was going to arrive.

“And you were telling some mysterious story?” Bobbie prompted.

“Oh,” Renata said. “Sure.”

She had forgotten as soon as she offered the anecdote. She wanted to show off.

“My neighbor used to have a little backyard that I’d sit in during the day,” Renata said. “This was in the spring, when it was still nice out. I tend to have my camera with me. Next door, there was this guy who’d always come outside to smoke late in the morning. He and I would talk sometimes. He sort of looked like JFK, a little stuck out of time, tall, big, combed hair, old face without looking old. One morning, I asked if I could take a couple pictures of him. He wasn’t weird about it like most guys are. But he asked me not to.

“I remember my neighbor had told me before she left that she was friendly with one of the houses close to her. I assumed it must be this guy. I lived on the opposite side of the neighborhood so I guess she wasn’t technically my neighbor-neighbor. Anyway, I said that was fine. But I stole a couple. I made a big show of doing some kind of yardwork, so the guy wouldn’t get suspicious. But I managed a few pictures. That was my routine for two weeks. I’d sleep over at the house, go outside in the morning, then this guy would come out, smoke, go back in. I’d hear his garage open and he’d leave for the day.”

Renata shivered as she told the story. At the same time, she kept her eyes on Ken and Bobbie. They listened attentively, save a few instances when Ken would glance at the blackboard.

“We never said much to each other,” Renata continued. “It seemed like normal small talk. The last few days of house-sitting, I noticed this guy didn’t come out for his morning smoke. It wasn’t a huge deal, I noticed it sort of how you get someone’s voicemail after trying to call them. Like, ‘Oh, okay. Maybe later.’ My neighbor came home a couple days later. We download. ‘How’s your trip,’ all that. I tell her about the guy next door and she just stops, stares at me.”

“Don’t say it!” Bobbie squealed.

Renata couldn’t help but smile.

“She said no one lived next door to her,” Renata said.

“I knew it,” Ken muttered.

Bobbie covered her mouth with both hands and closed her eyes. Renata felt like she was telling the first story anyone had ever heard, her hands trembling a little under the table from the excitement.

“For like, six months,” she continued quickly. “I described this guy over and over to her, but she’d never seen him before.”

“Did you show her the pictures you took?” Bobbie asked.

Renata bit her lip, flashed her eyes up at the ceiling. Sometimes, when she told the story, she lied and said yes, she had shown Annie the pictures. It all depended on whether or not she wanted to keep talking to whoever was listening. There, in the bar with two strangers, Renata figured it best she try to gain their trust.

“I didn’t show her,” she said.

Renata paused for a reaction from either Ken or Bobbie, but they sat patiently.

“Obviously I thought of them but for some reason, I just didn’t want to her to see. My neighbor called the cops the next day and they had a look around. They didn’t find anything, not even trash, just the cigarette butts I saw him flick onto the ground after he went back inside. I figured, if he didn’t steal anything, or hurt anybody, then what did it matter?”

“What do you think—” Bobbie started, but a short, stocky man with a white apron came up to the table with a plate.

“Burger?” he asked, emphasizing the plate with a nod.

“Here,” Ken said. “Thanks, Henry.”

Henry waved and turned on his heel back to the swinging kitchen door.

“It’s turkey,” Ken said. “Which might not help if you’re either of the V’s.”

Renata had already taken a bite.

“What do I think he was doing?” she asked, finishing Bobbie’s question, her mouth full.

Bobbie nodded, Ken turning away as if he wasn’t interested.

“Well, I showed the cops the pictures I took. At that point, it felt stupid not to. With Annie, I don’t think it would have done anything except make her more scared. A couple weeks after she came back, the cops said the guy in my photos looked a lot like this person who had gone missing almost fifteen years ago.”

Another patron walked through the door, the bell clanging. Renata chewed between sentences, raising her hand to excuse herself, Ken idly poking at his phone.

“Did they have a name for him?” Bobbie asked.

Renata nodded, swallowing.

“Joel Holdstock? Pronounced ‘Joe-ell.’”

“Fuck off!” Ken said, dropping his phone on the table.

“Swear to god,” Renata said, smirking a little.

“What, like ten separate sightings in as many countries since, I don’t know—”

“The cops said he went missing in the summer of 2009,” Renata said. “But yeah, a ghost. Or something like it.”

“Wait,” Ken said, squinting in the half-light at her. “Now that you mention it, I feel like I’ve maybe heard of you before. This was on the fucking news.”

“The sighting was on the news,” Renata corrected. “I made sure they didn’t interview me or anything.”

“But the picture you took was yours, right? Or one of them. The news might have even given you credit for it? By name?”

Renata shrugged, tonguing a bit of lettuce between her teeth.

“Bullshit!” Ken exclaimed. “You passed up being famous.”

“Overrated,” Renata said simply.

The three of them sat together quietly, the bar crowding them closer together, their thoughts turned toward those pockets of time and place that didn’t make rational sense.

Soon, Bobbie said, “Well, I think I’ve got one.”

They passed the next few hours this way, trading anecdotes that they hoped limned the boundary of the inexplicable and outright supernatural. Bobbie told a classic ghostly hitchhiking story, a driver who materialized from the night air on an infamous haunted desert road that she could never find her way back to again. Ken talked about an old customer during his first week at the post office, a young man with red boots who fit the description of someone who had recently gone missing in the area, possibly murdered. He mailed a stained package with no return address. Bobbie decided on a steak dinner around ten o’clock. Ken chided her, then ordered a sundae and shots at eleven. Both times, Henry the waiter, or maybe the cook, drifted by with a plate silently, his white apron spotless, a faint whiff of fry oil trailing in his wake.

As the night continued, Renata listened to the table and the room, the steady chatter, the clinking of glasses, an occasional shout of laughter. Furtively, she scanned the congregation, searching for a distinct mop of hair, a certain jacket, a flash of round glasses, the tantalizing thought of her mother’s potential, improbable, almost assuredly nonexistent nearness churning her stomach. It had been some time since the front door opened, or maybe she hadn’t been paying attention. The bar was loud enough that Renata couldn’t hear the wind outside anymore. Tomorrow, she would have to be more deliberate about asking questions, but tonight she felt reluctant. Whatever life her mother made in McNairy had long passed. Ken was too circumspect with town lore, even if Renata could tell he liked to gossip. Bobbie, she learned, was relatively new to the area though she seemed to know Ken quite well. Renata surmised that, oddly, this understanding didn’t go both ways.

Most of the people in the bar looked like they had settled in a dislocated town to avoid prying eyes and so would have nothing of value to offer about the observatory, let alone her mother, for the simple fact that they didn’t pay attention. The only person who seemed promising was Glenna, whom Ken described as the town’s “vault.” Maybe Renata would begin with her in the morning, if the bar was open. She thought of her car then, thought of what excuse she could give to separate from her new companions without anyone else seeing where she was going, thought about walking up to the driver’s side of the car later that night, finding the window smashed in, all her belongings stolen. Renata instinctively reached for her neck, then the empty space on either side of her seat. She had forgotten her camera.

“Last call!” Glenna cried, slapping her palm down on the bar twice.

A general grumble arose from the still-packed room as a select few went to collect final drinks for their table or stumbled over to close their tabs. Renata checked her phone. It was almost midnight.

Clear and high, the bell above the door rang.

“Uh-oh,” Ken muttered.

In stepped a tall, very angry-looking man. He ducked into the room, bundled in layers of flannel and seersucker, all lashed beneath a tweed jacket that, with the accumulated fabric beneath, bulged and ripped. His shoes, once leather loafers, had holes in both big toes, which wriggled beneath a pair of too-large jogging pants. In the stranger’s right hand, he carried a slim weathered briefcase, its clasp gone, the body cinched with a leather belt. In his left hand pointed the last inch of a cigarette. The man squinted and bent his head forward as if he couldn’t see well. Renata followed his gaze. At first, it crossed to the bar and to Glenna, who merely nodded in greeting. Then, bullishly, the stranger’s lumpen head swiveled to the back of the room, sliding over Renata’s unsubtle stare. For all his motley attire and physique, when he walked, there was an ease, even a grace, to the stranger’s movements, and within seconds, he passed their table, leaving behind a faint sillage of dry cologne.

“The resident creep,” Ken stage-whispered, leaning over to Bobbie and Renata.

“Shush!” Bobbie slapped his wrist. “He’s nice enough.”

The last word sounded like a question. Bobbie and Ken sat and watched the man carefully, their necks turning as he stalked behind them. The resident creep stood behind the blackboard, his brow and that thicket of dark hair with white streaks clearly visible from the top.

Renata had been so singularly focused on him, it shocked her to realize no one else in the room was watching the stranger, a figure at least unknown to her, but then everyone here was unknown to her. Gradually, she noticed curiously still faces, canted eyes turned in the man’s direction, some with expressions of confusion, others showing open suspicion, as if a scene was awaited. For a while, the stranger’s feet danced from side to side behind the board, his head bouncing a few inches this way and that, until he set his briefcase down. Then he stood perfectly still.

“I swear, he’s writing something!” Ken said.

“Who is he?” Renata asked, annoyed that she had to.

“The resident creep,” Ken reiterated.

Bobbie kicked him under the table. She leaned over to Renata, inches from her ear, her saccharine perfume invading the air.

“He was one of the scientists at the observatory,” Bobbie said. “Terry something or other. He lives out on the mountain.”

“Bottom of the mountain,” Ken corrected.

“What does he do now?” Renata asked.

At the bar, Glenna banged her hand on the wood twice more. She was closed. Another grumble in reply tapered to a hush. Everyone looked toward Glenna now, attending to her deliberate movements, one hand polishing the counter with a rag in widening circles, her focus on a single spot. Renata recognized this theatrical dithering, a final flourish before the exhibition. V did much the same thing before working up to a punchline they had already decided they were going to laugh at. There was a pause, a smirk, and the overeager finish.

Renata looked back to the board. Terry the creep no longer stood behind it. Instead, he was somehow already back at the front door, taking long, slow steps, his briefcase swinging at his side, tweed jacket swelling.

“He wrote something,” Ken said, mostly to himself. “I know he did.”

With a piercing ding, Terry stepped back out into the night.

The bar flap opened and Glenna made her way to the back of the room, her bald scalp catching the light like another varnished piece of wood. Patrons nursing beers or cups of water or fries gone cold stood up and wandered over after her. Renata felt hair stand on her itching skin. She curled her toes in her shoes. Bobbie shooed Ken out of the booth, his performance of anticipation grating, failing to draw anyone else’s attention. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, Ken stood around with the other onlookers, his phone in one hand, thumb poised over the screen. Renata wondered who he had been texting all night and thought how overlarge the town gossip seemed to be in McNairy compared to the number of people in it.

Glenna stood behind the blackboard now in her frayed green snakeskin boots. A group moved in front of Renata’s view, two of them the same balding men she passed outside the bar hours ago. She turned, peeking over the booth to look again for the puckered forearm she glimpsed in the flash of oncoming headlights. The man’s sleeves, rolled up before, hung unbuttoned just above his wrist, but she could still see the red, dried skin peeling off in flakes up to the pad of his palm. Her gaze trailed up his body, a profile—reddish stubble, acne scarring on his cheeks, a baseball cap to cover his receding hairline—carved from the angle she sat at. The man appeared much younger this close by, his stubble hiding a boyish face, his stooped affect like adult drag.

“All right then!” Glenna yelled from behind the board. “Someone must be bored.”

The chatter died down to a low hum, just quiet enough to hear that Glenna was turning the board on its squeaking wheels. Renata scooted her way around the booth opposite Bobbie, who remained in her seat, facing away from everyone, looking like she didn’t care for what was happening. The board must have stopped turning because voices began to rise, at first in pointed shouts then exasperated grumbles, patrons gathering closer to the board then stomping away. Renata couldn’t see Ken in the rabble. A woman directly in front of her fell backward, almost knocking her down, pushed out of the way of a sudden scuffle between two older bearded men, with Glenna shoving her way between them. Renata helped the woman back up unsteadily, the woman yelling at the two men. The confrontation settled as quickly as it started. Glenna, face and head flushed, a mean but resigned look in her eye, drove the brawlers outside. Renata finally glimpsed the board.

Someone scrawled and underlined, in yellow chalk, not a word or phrase, but a short, familiar pair of letters and numbers: 80 Hg. The bar cleared out quickly after. People grumbled away, revealing Ken, who was snapping pictures of the board on his phone, flash on, flash off. Then he bent in half over his screen, presumably, Renata thought, to text whoever he had been talking to the entire night and perhaps the slim remainder of McNairy that wasn’t present.

Before Renata could ask, Ken proclaimed, “I gotta go! Tab’s taken care of. Glenna knows I’m good for it. Come by the post office tomorrow. I mean, if you’re around!”

Renata was too far outside the know in McNairy to understand what had just happened. Ken wasn’t going to explain. Looking back at the booth, Renata saw that Bobbie had gone as well. The pressure in the room changed as it rapidly emptied, and soon, Renata was one of few people left. The muffled thunder of engines started then drifted off. Clinking glasses as Glenna and Henry began to clean up. A quiet whistle of the wind forcing its way through some uneven doorway or crack in the wall.

Renata grabbed her jacket off the edge of the booth, dug into her pants pocket for cash, and pulled out a twenty, all she had on her. She looked back at the board again. The arrangement of number and letters tugged on her mind, an almost Pavlovian recognition, revelation stuck in the folds of her brain. She couldn’t place it without looking it up on her phone, which displayed a 1 and x on the signal bar. Renata dropped the cash on the table like she was putting down a wager and made her way out of the Spyglass.

1.8

FEBRUARY 7, 1905

I received a package today I had long forgotten to await. This is the beauty of commerce at a distance—a man may spend his money, go on with his life, and at some unspecified time; or a specified time the man has, like me, failed to remember—be rewarded with the item, or items, for which his money was tendered. It transforms an expense into a sort of gift.

In the package, a first edition of the second volume of collected works by the writer Ambrose Bierce. Some time ago, at least a decade if not more, I read a story of Bierce’s in the San Francisco Examiner entitled “AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE.” The story details a Confederate sympathizer’s extended hallucination in the infinitesimal moments before his execution. In the midst of his reverie—the man has a name too unusual to reproduce here—our protagonist wanders through a forest rife with the horrors of his own mind. He imagines phantom shapes, smells, and, crucial to my theory, does not question that he hears voices as well. This man believes himself to be alone in a landscape that cannot contain any other life-form of mortal consequence besides humankind itself.

I underlined a passage that I will copy out: “All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman’s road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.”

My recollection of this story at the time I originally read it had not focused on this paragraph, which comes near the very end. I recalled enough to retrieve Bierce’s name and I do believe my pleasure having read this story was to such a degree as to occasion my purchase of his complete collected works, for I have read nothing else of his since. And yet AN OCCURRENCE provides a compelling distillation of what I am trying so clumsily to elucidate, this clash of myth and superstition with the greater life of our world. What this man hears and sees, it is revealed, is merely a product of his death-careening mind. But imaginations are not wholly furnished by their own conjurations just as the innards of a calf are not furnished with the cuts of beef they will later become. In other words, something must be made, shaped, by something else. The mind of man, pliant, idle, easily bewildered, is masterful at synthesizing an entirely illusory reality in which dwell monsters, ghouls, demons of all sorts.

Is it any wonder these otherworldly beings resemble us? Talk like us? Stand and sit like us? Share the same aims and desires, however malformed? We are each of us Pygmalion and Galatea at once. All of this spurred by a “divine” revelation I am still struggling to understand, and I use that word “divine” deliberately, as a missive, a gift of clarity so profoundly austere as to be elementary.

It was on the walk back to her car that Renata began to feel woozy, raw, exposed. The sensation came on suddenly as she was still thinking about the blackboard and Ken’s sudden departure and the tall man named Terry who she decided probably hadn’t written anything at all. Dust and pollen clogged the air. The hulking spade of the mountain remained planted in the distance, the moon bright, its afterimage stamped on the dirt road before her, bits of grit and soot scraping her face and hands with each gust of wind, the dryness acute. Her psoriasis had never taken up too much of her attention because she had been forced to accommodate it early in life, early enough for it to be rendered mundane. That included the pain, the cracking, burning, itching. A sensitivity to the wrong fabric, like wool or cheap cotton, which made the joints of her fingers, the insides of her elbows, the backs of her knees, the crook of her neck, her armpits, the skin underneath her breasts feel like she had brushed up against frayed fiberglass. In Vegas, there was a familiarity with the climate, the attendant pocket of her backpack always stuffed with two or three different ointments and moisturizers, shriveled husks of aluminum slightly sticky around the caps. But she woke up in the car that night and headed to the Spyglass without anything she normally needed, her camera, her backpack, not even a bottle of water.

Now, walking with the wind, a swirl of recollections playing in her mind, Renata’s skin suddenly felt like it was blooming, every pore a nostril flaring wide and starved for scent. Finally, the air was clear, whatever cloud of debris she had bent into flying away into the night. The wind was pure in the wake of this cloud, cold without bite, so clean—it was the only word Renata could think of—it seemed like she was walking through a river coming down from the mountain, a stream of the most exquisite, timeless water.

Renata stopped walking, dragged the hardened toes of her new hiking boots until she couldn’t lift them again. She stood rooted in the middle of the road, the moon blanketing the desert around her in a harsh bluish light, the sharp-edged shadows of rocks and shrubs and the open flatness in front of her rendering the night two-dimensional. It occurred to Renata then that she could go home, could be walking into her house and asleep in her bed before the sun came up. There would be time later, over the years and small, concerted changes in her life, when she could dig. She could put together a portrait of her mother from a distance and maybe, in the end, that would prove better. There was nothing that she could gain by being here. The trail had gone cold before she could even begin. The trail had never been a trail at all.

Or the opposite, equally possible alternative: She could stay in McNairy. She could find a way to be here, immerse herself in whatever might be left of her mother’s life. There was nothing pressing to return to and nothing interesting to miss. V and Tara would get on. This day was always coming, Renata thought, the day when things, the true order of their family, would be set straight, the day her mother would come to claim her, under her wing, or otherwise mark her irrevocably as an errant remainder. Not a burden, but not necessarily desired either, Renata thought, her mouth slackening, drool gathering under her bottom lip.

The breeze lessened. She looked down at her arms.

There was something pushing up against the fabric of her shirt, covered in that dark, wispy powder, like the remains of dead flowers: tiny points, hundreds of them tenting through and moving, stippling the surface. With one hand, she gently peeled back a sleeve, revealing bristles, or stalks, or spines, that sprung up, thin, circular, straight, translucent, and sharp at the ends, each two inches long. But they bent and swayed willingly with the wind and Renata could smell it: She could smell what was in the air, the sweetness of the desert, everything that had burnt in the sun in the last week, everything that had never decayed, smoke from the trailers along the town’s main road, pollen drifting from blooming yucca, a note of coyote shit, and, far, far away, like a memory but so defined in its presence, its winding, broken, scattered trail through the sky, a scent she had never known before but could do nothing but know now: water.

Effortful, foolish to look down, to remember her neck or that she ever had any control over it. But Renata did so, she looked at the ground, the bones of her spine popping loudly. She let her head hang, it was too exhausting to try to move it again so quickly, her mouth dry, parched, even her tongue now covered in spines that pressed into her palate. From the corner of her eye, Renata could see the back end of her car. She did not remember returning to it, or the bushes growing on either side that hid it from view of the gate.

Renata felt trapped. She couldn’t think, only spectate through the machine of her body. Sweat beaded on her brow then cooled away in the breath of the night. The moon still lit obscenely above her, the only way she could glean the passage of time, though nothing moved, the perverse openness of her senses overwhelming her.

There was the smell and now a throbbing clarity of vision and now an intimate aural fidelity. She could hear everything like it was being whispered to her, each sound deadened to the same volume so that there was no distance, no sense of force, no depth or range. A snake curling its way through the sand, ants scurrying with a million feet, the shiver of sagebrush cracking against one another, all of it immediate and presented as if every individual sound were rolling by on a conveyor belt.

Dimly, Renata tried to entertain the idea that she was dreaming, but even the idea of a dream seemed foreign to her now. She had been shoved through an invisible plane, passed on through a threshold, blindsided by an extrasensory world that was the same as the one she had left, but somehow more granular, terrifyingly detailed and alive. A tear welled up in her right eye, snot dripping down her nose. Her body was leaking, she thought. She was crying. She was terrified at a distance.

Then came a familiar sound, the gravel pop of an approaching car. Still Renata couldn’t move her head, her gaze pinned to the ground, the bristles on her arms swaying with the changing direction of the wind. She began to think she was smelling through them, realizing as she stood rigid and locked, her back ramrod straight, her arms dangling, that the location of the scent, where she was taking it in, was all over her body, an alien sensation she struggled to comprehend even as she knew it intuitively.

A car door closed and the air, rife with gasoline, became suffused with the sickly, alcoholic odor of cologne. At once, Renata recognized it as Ken’s, the remembrance of a whiff she took in passing when he got up to go to the bathroom earlier. But it was so much more powerful now and, in this new state, so obviously synthetic, a facsimile of the resin from a solitary desert tree reaching with smooth, thick limbs up to the sky, a tree she had never seen before but could now picture not as an image but a shape traced through touch, as if she had shrunken down and run through each branch and root.

“Where are you?” Ken asked hesitantly, his voice low, dampened by the nearby foliage.

She had been found out, though it wasn’t necessarily the most scandalous offense to be accused of, camping at a site that appeared well maintained and seemed to be closed without reason. Perhaps Ken had followed her, could account for the missing time Renata just experienced. But another smell danced on the air, one she could taste, the putrid brine of human sweat.

“Hold on,” a voice replied, high, male, fatigued.

Footsteps crunched in the sand, scraped against a rock, continued on in suppressed syncopation on the desert carpet, Renata unable to tell if this person was getting closer or walking in place. A beam of light passed just beyond her field of view.

“I’m here,” the voice said.

Feet shifted. A branch snapped and the wind began to pick up, the bristles on Renata’s arms bending with it.

“I don’t have time to stay,” Ken said, trying to sound angry. Renata wasn’t convinced. “Or time to hear your bullshit. Fun stunt you managed tonight—”

“Not talking about that,” the voice interrupted. “It wasn’t me on the board. I don’t know why I’m even saying so. You refuse to believe that I might be normal like you.”

Ken sucked his teeth.

“You haven’t really given folks a reason to think so,” Ken said, the twist of a smile in his voice. “Fucking creep.”

A hard thump then something struck the sand, followed by a smack like skin on skin. For a few seconds, Renata could only hear ragged breathing and then smell the warm, salted whiff of blood. Whose, she couldn’t place.

“Do you want to hear what I have to say, or did you come to taunt me?” Terry asked. He sounded calm, almost remorseful. It must have been Ken who was breathing hard.

A long moment passed. Ken coughed, sneezed, and feet shuffled again.

“Thank you,” Terry said. “Now it will come as no surprise that I was right. The pack has moved again. Even further from the foot of the mountain than before. And you’ve been tampering with this sign.”

Something hard tapped metal, a high-pitched whine oscillating then stopping.

“I haven’t been here in weeks,” Ken huffed. “Maybe Bill’s kids fooling around again, or some tourists. Who cares? No one comes here.”

“It matters if someone gets hurt,” Terry said. “God forbid we find out all this precaution has been for nothing.”

“No one’s going to get hurt, Terry,” Ken said. “If you’re so concerned about people trespassing, make a better fucking sign. And fuck the pack. I’ll tell you what no one else can because no one fucking listens to you: They’re just a bunch of trees.”

Terry grunted and the beam of light arced through the bushes past Renata’s boots. Footsteps padded again on the sand, kicking a rock, someone’s mouth smacking, maybe Ken favoring a busted lip. Renata had heard that sound many times before.

“I need more equipment,” Terry said. “And I need cameras.”

Renata cocked her head in the direction the light had come from, her mind crashing through her paralysis just enough to regret the unexpected wave of pain the movement caused her. She could just make out the bottom half of two bodies, Ken’s dark work pants dusty and worn, Terry’s long legs floating in his striped joggers. The two men stood far from each other in the red glow of Ken’s brake lights.

“There is no more equipment,” Ken said. “She took all of it with her. Buy new shit for once.”

“I know she gave you several large parcels,” Terry said. “I know that she still comes into town.”

“You’re wrong, man.”

“Don’t deny it!”

“I’m not denying anything.” Ken dared to step closer. “You know it. She was the only reason I ever put up with you. I believed her, not you. At least she never made me do what she wouldn’t do herself. I almost lost my fucking legs, man. Wherever Corinne is, I hope she stays there.”

Ken spit on the ground and turned on his heel.

“Mackenzie!” Terry called, stepping forward.

“Fuck you, Terry,” Ken said over his shoulder as his feet disappeared. The red lights jumped up and down. His voice was quieter now, obstructed by the car.

“Don’t come near me again. I know Glenna is this close to banning you from the bar. And if Bobbie’s been watching me, she’s been watching you too.”

“You haven’t told her, have you?” Terry asked.

“No, I haven’t. Ironic, right? You’re trying to protect everyone but you don’t want to tell any of them.”

The car door slammed shut.

Terry’s shadow cast long on the ground, faint before it stretched into nothing as Ken pulled away. Renata could hear Terry sigh, could hear him begin to walk, his flashlight clicking off as he returned to wherever he had come from in the darkness. The wind shook Renata, blew against her body, building steadily, her hair whipping over her eyes, a deafening whoosh in her ear. Then, a single, violent gust broke against her and toppled her backward onto the ground, her head barely missing the back bumper of her car. She hit the ground square and hard, her breath knocked out of her.

Renata gasped and writhed on her back, rolling over onto her stomach, coughing, coughing and sucking in air before she realized she could move again, turning her head experimentally, raising and lowering her arms, her skin not smooth, it had never been smooth, but free from the protrusions she had seen and felt, though never thought to touch with her hands. The absence of that once all-consuming sensory attunement made her feel as if she couldn’t smell or taste or hear anything.

The dust and the wind and her mind, once caught in a thick slurry that obliviated any internal generation of thought except seemingly for the intake of information, began thinking and racing once again, began to panic, began to repeat the same question over and over: What happened to her?

There was danger in the moonlit night, Renata thought as she slowly stood, bracing against the car, the idea that she would no longer see the sun slicing through any coherent thought. She couldn’t begin to parse what was real or what the alternative to real might be. Everything felt unfailingly linked together, one moment leading to the next, except for the gap when she was suddenly out of the road and next to her car. She closed her eyes, the wind still loud in her ear, tiny rocks and leaves and bits of debris pebbling her face.

When she opened her eyes again, a shadow hung in the distance. Renata stood parallel to the mountain. Several yards away, at the top of a rocky slope choked with cacti and two juniper trees, a figure stood. A lone pillar of eroded earth rose a dozen feet high to their left, opposite the mountain, blocking a view of the road, so that all Renata could make out was the outline of the person shrouded in darkness, a boxy shape with two legs. Renata tried not to move, uncertain if the figure was watching her or facing the other way. A howl echoed above them, joined by two others higher up. The figure turned their head toward the sound, but Renata kept her eyes fixed.

Overhead, the howl echoed once more, much louder, and Renata thought she could hear rocks being kicked out of the way. The figure continued standing perfectly still. Something small and solid struck the top of the car behind Renata and she swung around, taking a step back. Near her toes, she could see a withered pine cone lolling side to side. Following its trajectory, Renata was met with a pair of flashing eyes.

A gray coyote, flecked with light fur, peered down from the ledge overlooking the campsite, its head cocked to one side. Renata stared at the animal, smiling. V would have screamed with delight. The coyote pawed the ground lightly, its eyes tracking Renata’s hand as she brushed her windswept hair out of her face. Suddenly, the coyote tensed, pointing its snout to the side.

The figure still stood in the same position, their head frozen in a twinned state of looking forward and backward.

Renata longed to glance back up at the coyote, but before she could, the figure moved. They lifted one leg awkwardly, as if it were stuck in something, before lifting the other, and on and on until Renata could discern that they were moving away from her, down the other side of the slope, the dark shape of their body lowering into the hill until only the very top of their head was left. Was it Terry? Renata squinted, confused, even more convinced that this figure was watching her.

Renata looked up again at the mountain ledge. The coyote was still observing her, curious. The bright moon hung higher and smaller in the sky now, the light on the ground stark yet much dimmer. It looked as if the figure was trying to hide from her, even though Renata was so clearly marking them.

But the wind gusted again and what Renata had assumed to be the figure’s head was nothing more than a stone, the dirt it sat on wafting away.

II.

YOU HAVE STOPPED COUNTING THE DAYS.

Hope is a memory. You do not know to look for the reason you are doomed. It is all very clear to you, you think to yourself. You have become a target. The desert has chosen your bones to adorn itself with, like jewels. But you are mistaken, the desert has not chosen anyone, it so rarely does. Hope is a figment of a memory, but it is not gone. The flying creature turns its head, watches you stumble into the great eye by the light of the moon.

You have stopped counting the days.

In past cycles of sun, when the ocean still buried the sand and the mountain was still sleeping, a whisper issued forth from the water. This whisper carried on, muffled by the waves and the wind, which never left, which has lived here since there was time to lose. The sound was the whimper of a strange, scared, and terrible new life. And even after the waters fell back into the sky and the mountain raised its head and its shoulders from the earth, this whisper never grew. Only after leaps of time, and the awakening of other mountains, other valleys, did the whisper break out into a cry, the snapping of limbs to action, the birth of an ancient, grasping, and hungry life that roamed a loping, utterly blind path through the great expanse. You see ordinary things as they appear when they sleep. You cannot hear the scream, a scream that echoes in the shadow of the mountain and moves, inch by inch, toward you.

You have stopped counting the days.

The great eye glints in the tide of heat. It stares up into the night and you stumble into it and do not hear the screams. The flying creature pushes against the air in one wide swoop and glides over the lip of the peak where the great eye sits, plunges down, screeching as it curves away from the walls of the mountain, away from the screams, away from the mass of the blind murmuring revenants that climb up, slowly, up. You hear nothing and in its fear and desperation, the flying creature screeches again, but the great eye swallows you. The screams are deafening. The flying creature rises into the sky, brings its wings tight against its body, and drops, drops, drops like a broken fragment of the night falling loose to the ground, falling until it spreads its wings again, soars out across the seat of the mountain. In the distance, the great eye sees a speckled black vision of the sky.

You have stopped counting the days.

The screams bounce and call and respond and bounce again off the canyon walls as the blind shadows of old climb, climb, climb. Watch. The horror is near. Watch but do not wait.

2.1

THE MEMORY PLAYED LIKE A DREAM, THOUGH THE MEMORY didn’t belong to her.

Corinne came down from McNairy, back to the city. Once, in their youth, Corinne and Tara wiped the slate clean, no expectation of help going forward, no debt to pay. It was cleaner, they agreed, to let each other go their separate ways, after an unremarkable childhood together, after no great bond had made itself obvious, connected but never cordial. Corinne tried to convince herself they weren’t close, but the problem was exactly opposite: too close, too alike. “I should have known better,” Corinne wrote late in 1996. “A call was always going to be answered.”

She came down from the mountain and back into the valley.

In Renata’s imagination, it was nighttime when Corinne finally pulled into the hospital parking garage. Attendants and paramedics and doctors passing by, schools of fish, corridor after blinding corridor, and then the room, Tara propped up in a bed, bandages on her fingers. Their parents found her in much the same way, except with a blade gripped so tightly in her hands it had begun to whittle the bone, blood drying in her lap. Corinne didn’t notice them on the way in, “which feels like a metaphor maybe,” and merely held vigil with Tara, who didn’t speak.

There had been no previous incidents. Tara said she heard voices in the house, that they had given her the razor and wouldn’t leave until she drew blood. Then they kept asking for her. “I surprised myself by weeping angry tears. Tara tends to cry, but she just sat there not looking at me. I squeezed her hand, she squeezed it back. I said, ‘I’m here.’ It sounded ridiculous, obvious. Days later, it still does. I think the physical gesture could have sufficed. I’m not sure why I needed to say something.”

A scene lingered in Renata’s mind, her mother and her aunt alone at night in the hospital, waiting for each other. Slowly, that image darkened, the lights in the room dimming, flickering, winking out completely, then turning on again, and in the center, the two sisters like statues. Winking, dimming, dark.

* * *

IT HADN’T BEEN A DREAM.

The desert, at least. Or the night before.

Renata awoke in her car, images of what had transpired burning clear and lucid in her memory. There was no doubt that it all happened. To Renata, the moments when she couldn’t move, when she was overloaded with expanded awareness, barbs sticking out of her like some sort of sea creature—all so distressingly real, the moments during and after, there was little she could do except try to understand how.

The sun flushed orange on the horizon, the brush around her car still in shadow, the mountain overhang preserving the night. She slept in the back seat this time, after standing guard at the boot of her car for prying eyes, after watching the coyote’s eyes blink, blink, and never return. Her fatigue carried over into the morning.

As she unfurled once again from her tight ball, Renata was confronted with it: the stiffness of her bones, the stinging return of circulation to her feet, her neck cracking as she slowly stretched one way and then the other. She extended her body as fully as the confines of the vehicle would allow, lying diagonal behind the driver’s seat, letting her feet hit the back passenger door. Remnants of last night’s food swished uncomfortably in her stomach, as if waiting for her to be awake to properly digest.

It had only been one day, Renata thought. To start under the pretext of finding out more about her mother seemed foolish enough here in the dark, a day after arriving, hours after her body had so radically transformed. Why did it matter? The question rang falsely, echoed in her head like someone else was asking it. At the beginning, Renata decided it mattered long before she could verbalize the reason, before she could justify it to someone else. Now it felt like she was continuing an ill-prepared quest to find that reason when so many other questions appeared before her.

Outside, the sun began to peek over that flat horizon line, a bruise of golden light blooming. Smattering spots of dust and pollen all over the car windows. Renata stared at and through them, eyes focusing and unfocusing. Whatever she had expected, none of it, and she had been sure there would not be much “it” to speak of, included the low hum of disaster that greeted her ever since driving up to McNairy’s seemingly abandoned gas station. A quiet, almost boring disaster until Terry had shown up at the Spyglass. Until those things sprouted from her skin, until she could sense the entire world. Then again, she wouldn’t have even seen Terry if she hadn’t run into Ken first. She needed to talk to Ken again, in private, without subterfuge. He had spoken plainly with Terry, though it was clear each was keeping something hidden from the other.

Renata pressed her spine against the back door cupholder, pressed her socked feet against the opposite door, stomach grumbling. She couldn’t help checking her arms and hands for holes larger than pores. She grimaced. Anger always telegraphed its arrival, and Renata always embraced it when it came. Humility, patience, empathy, whatever good thing was expected of bigger people extended its gloved hand and Renata would reach for it, but, without fail, anger met her where she was.

She punched the driver’s headrest, her heart beating faster. A vision surged in her mind: her mother on Tara’s couch, her hair cut short, her disguise so obvious now. Renata punched the headrest again, leaving her fist in the fabric. She had been in fights before, but she never relished them. Striking felt natural, when she was alone. Thus far, the impulse never arose so irresistibly that she couldn’t ignore it in front of others. But something was getting away from her here in McNairy, far away and quickly. Nothing made Renata angrier than feeling stupid.

She dug her phone out of her bag in the front passenger seat, spotted two bars on the screen, dialed quickly before she could talk herself out of it. V, as always, only let it ring once.

“That bad, huh?” they said.

Renata felt calmer.

“If your mother was dead, would you be doing any of this nonsense?” Renata asked.

V paused, a popping sound like gum or a tongue clicking.

“Probably not,” V said. “But that doesn’t mean anything, right? I’d probably milk the dead mom thing for sympathy, maybe some decent pity sex. Could be nice to try out, actually.”

“I feel like I’m being laughed at,” Renata said. “Like I’m skirting around something very obvious and there’s an unseen eye watching me move in the wrong direction.”

“Unseen eye, huh?”

The dream of the two sisters, her mother and her aunt, a dramatization based on a journal entry. Renata could see them behind closed eyes. She wondered if Tara had ever talked about her suicide attempt with V, if Corinne had ever brought it up again.

“Maybe I’m just being too timid,” Renata said. “Like, maybe I should actually knock on people’s doors and ask if they knew my mom.”

V scoffed.

“Better off dancing in the middle of the road,” they said. “You know what I would do. I’d snoop around.”

“Like, break in somewhere?” Renata asked, excited, terrified.

“I’ll leave that up to you. You okay?”

Renata nodded to herself in the blindness of the phone call. If V were there, they would tell her not to lie.

Renata admitted, “No.”

“Obviously,” V said.

“Yeah,” Renata said, turning in her seat, toward the head that was merely a stone in the night, in the direction Terry had wandered away after Ken left. An answer, a lead existed between the two of them. Who to bother first?

“I’m working on it,” Renata said. “But wait, what about you?”

Renata could hear the line crackle.

“V?” she said.

“Mom and I are in what I can only describe as a stalemate,” V said.

Renata sat up straighter.

“V, I’m sorry—” Renata began.

“Don’t,” V said. “I’m not going to lie, I’m pissed at you. I also don’t know what I’d have you do instead. This shit is fucked. And Mom is trying to pin a lot of it on Rinse. She can’t make up her mind. Yesterday, she was whistling in the kitchen washing dishes, then, I shit you not, unprompted she goes, ‘I would never tell Renata this, but her mother is better off, you know . . .’ She just trailed off at the end. I can hear you grinding your teeth, by the way.”

“Sorry,” Renata muttered.

“Look, I don’t actually care about your mom,” V said in their best monotone. Renata noted how carefully they managed it. “I understand that you’re figuring shit out and I want that for you. But I’m disgusted with what all this is bringing out in my mom. It’s like—”

“Living with a different person?”

“What a cliché. No. It’s like living with the person I was afraid my mom actually was and she’s so much worse. She’s petty. She’s just . . . working herself up into hating your mom.”

She could picture Tara’s questioning eyes whenever Renata decided to come back home. In the left, just off the iris, a freckle that always swirled with blood vessels when she cried, Jupiter’s hurricane in miniature, and on the right, her slightly waxen eye, the one that didn’t tear up as much, the combined effect of both coming together to see, to look at her and remember.

“Hating her doesn’t suit you,” V continued. “Though I know how scary you can get.”

They sniffed and the line cut out briefly.

“Oh, hey look, before you go off and do something interesting, someone called the house this morning.”

“One of my suitors,” Renata joked.

“They sounded a little old for you. They wouldn’t give their name, wouldn’t say where they were calling from but they asked for you. Specifically, ‘Corinne Scarborough’s daughter.’ I figured, since they didn’t know your name, I wouldn’t give it. I just told them you were at work. But I figured that would be exciting for you to hear.”

Renata was already pawing through her backpack, notebooks, extra camera batteries, and, stuck like a bookmark in an old novel, a brochure from the McNairy Post Office regarding freight price increases. She was being thorough, but Renata nodded at the three-letter name next to “Office Manager.”

“I love you, V,” she said, closing her backpack, throwing her camera strap around her neck. “I’m sorry about Tara. Like, I don’t even know what to say to justify it. But . . .”

Renata opened the car door, one foot on the ground. Was her skin different?

“Look, I may need you out here,” she said.

“Yeah, I figured that,” V said. “I can head there after work tonight.”

“No, not yet,” Renata said too quickly. “Just . . . give me ’til the afternoon. I’ll call you back. Maybe I’ll feel differently by then?”

V snorted again.

“Good luck with that.”

* * *

THE POST OFFICE was busy when Renata arrived.

The temperature had just cracked ninety and there were no cars in the small strip parking lot where she waited. Yet a ragtag line of children and adults accompanying someone else’s errand extended from the front desk to the back window. A short woman with red streaks and a large tattoo of a sun on her chest leaned toward Ken on her toes, gesticulating with some vehemence. Ken’s eyeline kept swinging to the queue.

From her periphery, Renata noticed a shape coming from the open desert beyond the post office. Instinctively, she reached for her camera and, turning to face the person approaching, dropped it again. A severely sunburnt man with patchy black hair carrying a large trash bag hobbled slowly to the side of the post office building, fraying plastic slides held together with duct tape barely keeping his cracked feet off the soon-to-be-scorching ground. Dried, red skin marred his forearms and ankles. An irritation burrowed into Renata’s mind, the memory of a passage in the 1995 volume of her mother’s journals, skimmed past when Renata spent that first night riffling through the deluge of Corinne’s belongings: “Came to the realization today that there are as many homeless retards here as in Vegas.” Thinking of it made Renata wince. Her grandfather always gushed about his daughters, their humility and generosity, their “uncommon genius,” but perhaps Renata was misremembering how he said these things.

The sunburnt man came back into view, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, stomping on a miscellany of soda cans from his trash bag until they were completely flat. The short woman from the post office now stood under the awning lighting her own cigarette, a disassembled white box under one arm. Looking over, the woman walked toward the man behind the post office, her arm outstretched with her lighter at the end of it. Neither of them spoke. The man drew close enough to light his cigarette then lurched back, waving the woman off. Renata glanced into the post office, at McNairy’s bored residents, imagined her mother at some unspecified time in the past doing the same thing, waiting to send a letter home, some scientific document, waiting and ignoring.

V told Renata someone had called the house. Only then did she think how unusual that was. Renata wasn’t in the phone book and there were too many Scarboroughs in Vegas for this person to have dialed each number, one by one. But if they already had the house number, they must have known the name of the person they were asking for. “Corinne Scarborough’s daughter” sounded too specific, a pantomime of ignorance. Renata itched her wrist against the lens of her camera. Her first instinct was that the mystery caller might be Ken, freaked out after last night, sorting through a mishmash of facts he didn’t yet know what to do with. After all, her mother’s belongings had been shipped from McNairy and there seemed to be one person working at its lone post office. If Ken had known Corinne personally, it might make sense. Or, the stranger had been Corinne herself. But wouldn’t V have recognized Corinne’s voice? Would Renata?

More people exited the building—withered, bearded men who could have been bikers from the bar the night before, a mother with two skinny teenage daughters holding hands, and then Glenna, the bar owner, who stepped out lugging three heavy brown boxes, hiking her knees up to keep everything in her arms.

“Can I give you a hand?” Renata asked, camera strap across her chest, car locked before the driver’s door shut.

Glenna hefted her boxes to one side, peering around, her head dripping with sweat.

“You patronized the Spyglass last night, correct?” Glenna asked, setting the boxes down on the wooden porch. “We braved the wind together.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Renata said, hoping the “ma’am” would help.

“Then, yes, you may give me a hand,” Glenna said.

One box contained a new mixer, that much Renata could tell from the label and the weight, but the others sounded full of loose metal parts, maybe glass. The two made their way up the main road, dust vortexing in ankle-high columns, one man shirtless and seated in a lawn chair outside his caravan sipping a beer, watching them from the side of the road as they trudged toward the building that contained the Spyglass, the second story of which Renata had forgotten about.

They entered through the front door, through a narrow mudroom with black and white checkered tiles, another detail Renata hadn’t remembered from the previous night. Three large ceiling fans spun slowly in the main bar space, a street-facing glazed window shining gauzy light into the room, glistening slivers of reflection on the lacquered wood, a whiff of sweat beneath the general current of cigarette smoke and fry oil. Over the speakers, a voice groveled and churned over a jangly piano. Water was running in the kitchen.

“Drop that box there by the door, that’s fine,” Glenna said.

Renata did as she was told, wiping clammy hands along the dry cardboard, peeking through the porthole in the swinging kitchen door, seeing nothing but metal shelves and fluorescent light. Glenna knocked the counter flap open with one knee, shuffling behind the bar, dropping the other two boxes onto the floor.

“This place seems smaller than last night,” Renata said.

Glenna tossed a clean rag over her shoulder, dark blue linen sleeves rolled up to reveal cracked, red elbows. The music playing softly over the speakers shifted, the singer’s gravelly croon giving way to a guitar solo. Glenna was slicing open the first box with a long thin shard of glass half wrapped in white tennis racket tape.

“It is smaller,” she said. “People make it bigger. Look, just you and me being here, the walls are starting to expand.”

The bright eye of the window at the front couldn’t quite reach the shadowy booths in the back where Renata and Bobbie and Ken had eaten. She noted the walls, mounted twisted sheep horns, no sheep heads; framed sepia portraits of mustachioed and sun-kissed men in drooping hats looking directly into the lens; matronly women in bulky, dark dresses facing just off to the side; a huge laminated survey map of Nevada, which claimed a good portion of the wall opposite the kitchen; charcoal drawings, landscape paintings in muted warm colors. All the tacked and pinned contents of an estate sale, or a defunct museum, or a gallery, or the accumulation of years, prospectors and missionaries and soldiers and tradesmen passing through this small town, thrown up on the walls, hung against wallpaper painted with thousands of magnifying glasses in tiny uniform rows, their rims outlined with rope, an open knot for a handle.

“You looking for a drink?” Glenna asked.

Renata glanced back. Glenna was still bent over, rummaging.

“I’ll buy some food if the kitchen’s open,” Renata said.

“Not for another couple hours, sorry. I might have—here.”

Glenna popped opened a mini fridge beneath the bar, tossed up a small brown paper package onto the counter. A single tomato seed shot out onto Renata’s cheek.

“It’s turkey, I think,” Glenna said.

Renata wiped her face, the seed soft and slimy on her fingers. She opened the wrapper. A sturdy piece of rye bread cut in half, a generous amount of pale sliced meat, lettuce that could plausibly have once been alive, a single thick circle of tomato.

“Thanks,” Renata managed, her mouth already full.

Glenna stood up from the box on the floor and lifted out a broken yellow plate for Renata to see.

“Paid a decent amount for these,” she grumbled.

“Maybe you can put them back together,” Renata offered. “Make a new plate from all the pieces.”

“Yeah, like the Japanese. That’s sunny of you.”

“Thanks for the sandwich,” Renata said again, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Haven’t seen you round here lately.”

“I’m just passing through,” Renata said, watching Glenna bend over again. Her voice came up muffled, almost an echo.

“Sorry, what was that?” Renata asked.

“I said, it’s been a long time since you were last here,” Glenna said. “You probably don’t remember. Not to be all spooky.”

“You might be thinking of someone else,” Renata said, adding a light chuckle. “I do get that a lot. Weirdly.”

“You’re darker than her,” Glenna said.

“Excuse me?” Renata said, squinting.

“You were on the news not that long ago, weren’t you?”

Renata froze. She hadn’t technically been on the news, just a photo she had taken and her name.

Glenna kept searching through the box a moment longer, the tinkle of glass or broken ceramic, a deep metallic scrape against the cardboard. Then she stood, fixing Renata with a curious look, one eyebrow raised, unsmiling. She beckoned Renata with a crooked index finger, stepping from behind the bar to the back room, past the booths, to a tall rectangular collage of photos, Polaroids and pharmacy prints, pieces of written-on paper scattered about, all of it hung with white pushpins, a page from a massive scrapbook.

Glenna scooted into the booth in front of the collage, shuffling along the worn leather to the wall, staring up, scanning. Renata was ready to be mistaken for her mother. It had been one of her recurring reveries in the days and weeks before the journey to McNairy, the melancholic inevitability of recognition, some local engaging her in conversation before realizing that she wasn’t Corinne. And then, the decision: whether to plead ignorance and move on, or drop a nonchalant, meaningful, “No, that’s my mom.” And maybe, Renata fantasized, she would cause a bit of small-town drama. The day the daughter came back. But Glenna hadn’t been wrong, just imprecise. She kneeled against the wall, neck turned at a severe angle, squinting.

“Yep, right here,” Glenna said, pointing.

Renata had begun to demur even before her eyes could follow the length of Glenna’s arm. The woman was a bartender, she must have a thing for faces, Renata could grant her that, but she was getting confused. Renata looked up.

Direct from the tip of Glenna’s finger, the collage of photographs haphazardly taped together had been arranged in a circle. In the center was a large group portrait, smiling faces squinting against a noonday sun with a rocky, tree-scattered trail winding up and out of frame. At the bottom, a black strip from a label maker, with white capital letters, “MCNAIRY SUPERNOVAE—AUGUST 20, 1995.”

She hadn’t known her, but she spent years of her life staring at her face; Renata spotted her mother immediately.

Just off to the side, bending forward in the front row, large square glasses with rounded edges, bushy dark hair pulled back into a ponytail beneath a black baseball cap, a black tank top with some sort of long-sleeved button shirt, maybe denim, maybe plaid, wrapped around her waist, her face caught at that quicksilver moment between smirk and frown. Renata looked for a baby bump before registering the date, more than two years before she was born. The people around Corinne crouched in varying states of composure, some smiling, others guffawing open-mouthed, their eyes squeezed shut.

“If it’s any consolation, hardly any of them made good parents.” Glenna said this quietly, facing the wall. “We talk about it sometimes around here. Maybe radio signals or some such.”

Renata’s gaze wandered, her eyes watery.

Within the constellation of photographs surrounding the group picture, close-ups of each person’s life, weddings and birthdays and speeches. Directly below the group picture, a flash-lit photograph of a newborn baby, two deep wrinkles falling down from the eyes, cradled in arms covered by a blue cloth, a mass of hair crowding the corner of the shot. Just behind the baby, comparatively darkened by the flash, Tara’s face, looking up at the bundle, at Corinne, the image too close to divine the expression on either woman’s face. Renata could still taste the acid of tomato in her mouth. Her palms perspired.

Many nights across her life, most pointedly in Renata’s adolescence, she had been overcome with a sadness she had neither language nor desire for. She would realize with sudden distaste that she missed her mother, all the caveats she accumulated about this feeling cracking. Then she would cry and cry. Opposite her bed, on the corkboard above her desk, buried beneath concert tickets and patches and drawings and anything, anything, a photo of her mother was pinned, and Renata would look toward it, through to it. She would feel a flicker of connection, a whisper.

Renata remembered why she had come to McNairy in the first place. She didn’t know her mother at all.

2.2

GLENNA PAUSED, STRAIGHTENED HERSELF, AND KEPT REMINISCING.

The two of them were sitting in the booth, one on each bench. Renata had one of her mother’s journals out in front of her, a pen in hand. A short, muscular cook named Josef, with thin, lime-green hair, poked his head out of the swinging kitchen door not long after Renata looked at the photograph, and Glenna waved him over to ask if he wouldn’t mind making them something.

“Like food?” Josef asked, nonplussed. “Or something else?”

At first, Renata thought he was joking, but Glenna pondered the question longer than seemed necessary before saying, “Something else. Snackish. Maybe some of my stuff.”

Josef’s eyebrows had gone up, a tight, close-lipped smile on his face. He returned to the booth a few minutes later with a large silver mixing bowl full of popcorn slathered in salt, butter, nutritional yeast, paprika, and garlic. Renata ate half of it while Glenna talked. And this had seemed the best way, to let Glenna talk.

There were certain questions Renata wanted answered, about her mother, about the facility, about Ken and the post office, about everything to do with McNairy, and so really, Renata felt she shouldn’t ask any of those things, not yet. It had to do with the entirety of a life she had been turned away from. Maybe her questions were the wrong ones.

“I know you want the nitty, but I’ll start with me,” Glenna said. “I came out here, oh, ninety, ninety-one? Yes, I see that look on your face. No, I was not old as the hills. I’m from Maine, lived there most of my life until I got diagnosed in my early twenties. I’ve been bald ever since, keeps things clean. A friend of mine had a bit of land about fifty miles south. She’d been trying to build a house out there for years, but she inherited that plot. No money to do much of anything with it. Thanks, Josef, you can take this away.”

The cook glided away as unobtrusively as he had arrived.

“The observatory was already built by then,” Glenna continued. “McNairy was here first, but barely. I guess it was the highway, then everything followed. Steven, he runs the gas station. He lived here in a trailer for a long, long time, built a shack out of old construction materials the crews building the telescope left behind. Shell installed a pump way back when, never used it. More people started trickling in, more scientists and more caravans because there was protected land around the mountain, and finally some running water. I came after a lot had already been laid down, most of it, really. My friend sold her land, came with me. I didn’t want to go back to the ocean or the city. I’d worked bars around the Northeast. Did that instead of finishing a degree. Josie didn’t want to be alone. We came here. We share a place upstairs. The Spyglass was here by then, owned by a man named Hovel, rich, too rich to be out running around in the middle of nowhere. Everyone thought he had killed someone and fled to the desert. Certainly had the stink of a runaway. He starts being MIA a lot, I start filling in, eventually he stops showing up at all and I take over. That’s the legend anyway.”

Glenna sighed, rubbing her hands together. The music over the speakers had stopped long ago. Renata leaned back in her seat, studying the woman across from her.

“That’s my myth, at least,” Glenna said. “Do you want something else to drink? We open in a bit, I might need to get a buzz going.”

Renata shook her head politely, writing something down. Glenna smirked.

“Some years, then your mom’s crowd comes. Her cohort, I should say. They wouldn’t let me get away without that word. They acted like they were talking to God up on the mountain. I’m no genius, but I’m not a slouch either. I got the gist of their work and it didn’t seem like it would win them any awards. Peeking up at the sky, checking to see if a few bright things were still in the same place they were the night before. No one went home. Even when she had you, your mom didn’t go home. I remember she came in once, right before she was about to pop, and she asked if I knew anyone in McNairy who babysat. Your mom had no idea what she was getting into. She had an attitude. I saw a bit of it with you earlier. Leaning on one foot, waiting for the opportunity.

“I don’t know. You see the same people after so long, it starts to feel like you’re not really paying attention. It’s been so long since anything has been going on around here. A couple stragglers from the old days, a lot less money. It all just up and disappeared.”

Glenna’s face took on affected determination during her reverie.

That’s how it seemed to Renata, like the bartender was pretending to try to remember. And yet she volunteered everything too quickly. There were measured breaths between thoughts, sighs, pauses, then recollections offered without hesitation, like Glenna was repackaging and delivering another version of this conversation, one that she had given to someone else. Renata sat quietly, deciding whether or not she believed what she was being told.

Steps had been taken before arriving in McNairy, a dash to collect facts about her mother that could be verified, not with memory or from biased parties, but with evidence. The most ubiquitous and questionable piece remained that the observatory was shut down due to light pollution. It was repeated and prodded at on online forums rife with conspiracy theories, in crowded threads clogged with nonsense about government cover-ups and secret technologies. Renata didn’t give any of these ideas credence, but she granted that light pollution seemed a weak excuse. Trawling the internet at night, trawling the internet at work, searching “mcnairy observatory,” searching “corinne scarborough nv,” searching “mcnairy observatory closed.”

In an old blog post, a graduate student claimed to have visited McNairy long after the observatory shut down. They expressed cautious bafflement at the closure given, “even today,” McNairy’s superior night sky. There was someone on Facebook, claiming to be one of the original scientists, posting on the anniversary of the observatory’s opening, who said he had barely escaped with his life, but refused to elaborate further.

That was before Renata arrived at later entries in Corinne’s journals, which gestured in a wholly different direction. Her mother, in October 1997, months before Renata was born, after three days without an entry, writing, “They finally let us out. Percy is dead.”

Renata made her way out of the Spyglass, into the desert wind and the bleached sun, the sound of plates and glasses and the murmurs of unseen people falling away behind her, though she knew she would see Glenna again.

In the middle of the road, Renata stood. She looked around, stared in each direction for a moment, at the mountain, at the bar, at the line of trailers and mobile homes and low, low buildings, the open road, and the open road. Her palms itched. She could remember the night before with such clarity, it brought tears to her eyes: the openness, the feeling of a live wire beneath a steady drip of water, the smell of everything, the rigid and unmoving fear, the voices just ahead of her, talking about things she could not grasp.

Renata’s heart beat faster, she could hear it. If nothing else, her mother had given her daughter a task, a void into which she could place her industry. A gust of wind and sand pushed on her skin. Renata walked back to her car, the day heavy, unbearable. Sleep waited in the driver’s seat and invited Renata to surrender.

“Turn your head,” Renata says and her mother does so stiffly, the lens a foot from her nose and then her ear.

The camera clicks.

Renata is barely five years old and runs around the two of them, mother and future, but the future gets annoyed. She can’t think properly with so much going on, and if she can’t think, she can’t see. There is next to no light in the room and each picture Renata takes flashes the scene into existence, her mother’s glasses and her long, bushy hair, a door leading out onto a tungsten street, a brief glimpse of her old dress, V sitting in the corner with their face twisted toward the wall and Tara standing beside them.

“Turn your head,” Renata says again, and this time her mother looks at her instead of the camera. For hours, she’s been looking directly at the camera.

Her mother’s eyes are missing, the insides perfectly smooth, like sanded-down wood, the holes extending all the way through the back of her head like two tubes of flesh and bone have been cleanly punched out.

“Turn your head.”

APRIL 12, 1905

Black hands today, but fair weather. Fine silt, cloth-like until touched, blanketing the ground and my cabin. The previous night, interminable wind and interminable noise. Thin, sheet metal walls that take up every sound, every grain of sand and broken branch and pebble thrown into the air. I awoke from a nightmare of being buried alive and thought for a moment that I was in the final throes of death, my breathing and my dim sight in the darkness of morning merely the flash before the plunge. All day, this feeling of having escaped, of only just getting away from something.

Water temperature, 70 degrees, unseasonably warm. River depth along Sour Ridge remains the same. I visited my small experiment late in the evening before the light fully faded. The pocket remains though the water level is slightly lower. The tree in all of its unlikely glory sits dormant and patient, this is the only word that comes to mind.

Bracing for the summer months. Sent a letter off to Lenny, meek, even pathetic words of love and encouragement. Her sister has miscarried again. “Broken eggs,” Lenny’s words.

APRIL 13, 1905

Many groups today. An Indian band, previously made themselves known during initial struggles to build an adequate shelter. Visited me again. Or, perhaps they were passing by and I happened to open my door and so they were not visiting me at all. A pleasant exchange nonetheless. I remember my wariness before, cannot shake it off as shame. They informed me of several trails that lead to natural springs. Noted them on the map for later drainage research.

Another dispatch of surveyors upriver wholly surprised by my presence. They warned of a vagabond carriage roaming the valley a week prior. Green vests streaked with blood, was the description. I gave my attention in performance only. The carriage they spoke of had been manned errantly and wildly by Admiral Carter’s young son and two or three comrades who succeeded in secreting away the father’s wagon. Carter rode to me in the night in search of the boys as there are few outposts this way. We found them not 10 miles from Hatty’s Junction, intact, the wagon wheel broken on a fingernail of canyon.

The blood that stained their shirts had been their own.

MAY 2, 1905

Nearly a month gone by. I have not forgotten this diary. Indeed, remembering it has presented no small tincture of stress. There must be two records: the work’s and the soul’s. The work has overtaken me. An early summer, stove hot, noticeable dip in the river’s level. Nothing alarming though the rate of evaporation is apparent. Nearly a quarter of an inch and the river stretches some fourteen hundred miles. Days start early and the landscape around me shudders in. It holds its breath in the morning and the heat builds until nightfall when that breath is slowly let out.

Me on my boat. Me on some dirt trail. Me at my desk. Me in bed. A company man. A married man.

The agency made plain their eagerness at the end of April. I was able to easily divine this eagerness as bureaucratic impatience. They want to know the full scope of my findings so they can proceed with the dam. I am not alone in this endeavor. I must imagine the others in this selfsame occupation further up and down the river as fingers and toes of a restless and shrewd body. I believe they have had similar pressure applied. A crisp and handsomely lettered envelope with human-sounding words inside. How stifling the city must be to nurture these closed minds. Here there is heat, yes. Here there is sweat and salt, yes. Here there is what would seem to be a sickness of the air, a fever in the land, and the sun is as the never-fallen first drop of blood from Christ’s brow, yes. But there is no one here who does not know their own peril. The desert clears away those who cannot stand its present condition, at all hours, in all seasons. It does not care if you perish. It may even look after you if you remain.

The desert is unconditional conditionality. All it does is wait.

MAY 7, 1905

Back once more to the tree.

Untenable, wading into the water and returning in my stocking wet feet, even if the summer burns the moisture away within minutes. Somehow the water in the passage is colder, much colder, than the river from which it originates.

The provenance for the tree’s position is moot. I can think of no plausible reason why or how it came to be down there let alone grow to such height. Light does not shine directly or indirectly onto it. The air surrounding its form is unnaturally pristine, free from particles of dust or vapor, as if the tree itself is sucking out all imperfections. I admit to standing entranced in this subterranean tunnel, my fingers braced above me on the ceiling, simply standing, gazing at its alien form. As time passes, I try to see through the wood, through the limbs and fingers of its branches, which can appear burnt, they are so dark, and I am rewarded with nothing.

It is as if the tree materialized forth from the rock itself, millimeter by millimeter, traveling through the earth to a blind freedom.

Renata hit her nose against her knee, breaching through a dream. The sun peered into the car above her through the back-seat window, a hole in the sky, and instead of darkness, there was nothing but white burning her exposed forehead. Inside the car, one long, hot, dry breath.

She’d forgotten to crack the windows. She’d forgotten to park beneath the shade. Renata unfolded herself slowly, though her body ached less than it had the night before. Her armpits were drenched, the skin around her elbows and neck burning stale, familiar, ambient pain summoning the usual illustrative image, a finger covered in dry glue, the other hand descending to pick at the glue until the glue came off in one long sheet. Renata never bothered to venture the possibility, with her doctors or her family, even at the beginning of her memory, when she was too young to fully grasp her condition but old enough to question its origin, that the pain she experienced far exceeded the bounds of psoriasis. Sometimes, it felt like a bloodless skinning.

Laid out before her, under her, over the driver’s seat headrest, the remnants of an aborted inventory check. She had been waiting for something to happen in town, she knew that now. She had been waiting for some sign to start climbing up toward the observatory. But there was no point in waiting.

Her too-large water bottle was filled. Some light, protein-dense provisions fit into a capacious backpack made of lightweight material that did nothing to alleviate the heft of what had been crammed inside: a flashlight, batteries, two flares, a head lamp, a mini first-aid kit Renata picked up at a stationery store, a compact set of binoculars, and a brand-new Swiss Army knife that hurt her fingers to pry open. Extra socks, extra underwear, sunscreen, medicated ointment, gum, earbuds, these seemed extraneous now. She had a hat, she had a fresh tube of ointment with SPF in her pants pocket. And two of Corinne’s notebooks plus Francis Brown’s folio, all wrapped in an old T-shirt.

V urged Renata to bring a sleeping bag, but Renata already felt weighed down by what she carried, and all of it was new. She could sleep anywhere, she’d fashion a superfluous jacket into a pillow. The Leica her mother repaired, that Lanny had fixed, would go the rest of the way, plus two rolls of film for good measure.

Renata smirked. Third act, the killer still loose, everyone’s phones dead, and some analog method comes to save the day. Except all it would take was a good slap on the back panel and the hinge would give and all her film would be exposed.

Every map she consulted, every digital map at least, made the ascent to McNairy’s summit look like a relatively straight shot. The campground hugged the foot of the mountain in a half circle for a mile in the opposite direction Renata needed to take, continuing before the north-facing side opened out into a flat, empty valley that ran on and on into the horizon. She needed to leave her car behind, but had no further way of concealing it.

The plan, as Renata conceived it in her mind, would be to conduct a brief foray through the trail and just barely up the incline that led to the observatory. It was four miles of switchbacks, some light scrambling, what one climber on Reddit termed “good for children.” Still, Renata wasn’t quite ready to spend the night out in the open. She cleaned up the car as best she could, hid everything she wasn’t taking in the trunk.

The rock that seemed like a live entity watching her last night served as her marker. Renata marched toward it, up a slight, sandy incline, the imprints of coyote paws and some elongated, many-limbed insect pressed lightly but perfectly into the grit. Past the rock, the incline flipped, descending gradually, all the while the sheer face of the mountain sucked inward, forming a hollow, before inflating out so that Renata had to step away, craggy layers like unshuffled playing cards rough but pleasing against her hand.

She remembered those yellow eyes staring down at her in the darkness, the blinking shutter before the eyes returned, the unerring patience of the animal looking. Coyotes roamed the outskirts of the city, the same stories told, of tiny suburban dogs snatched during the night. Camping, one could hear them howling together or to each other from a distance, though the call was more vocal, more intelligent than Renata wanted to think about.

She kept walking.

A proper trail was beginning to take shape beneath her feet, the suggestion of a line made up of large, deliberately placed stones curving away from the mountain. Trees with delicate, forking branches, trees with red thorns and peeling outer layers of bark like dead skin, white, skeletal trees half leaved and furred with webworms, trees not much taller than her head—all conspired to block her view of the street just beyond, the town further ahead, bushes, dead roots, child-size boulders, burnt firewood, broken beer bottles, and then the trail turned away from the road.

Renata swung her pack around her waist, removed her camera, focused, and snapped a shot of some graffiti high up on the mountain wall, carved right into the stone: a humanoid figure, rudimentary hands with three fingers and two tall horns protruding from the head. Just past it, the mountain retreated suddenly, no longer rounding but cutting into itself, the wall leading north. Renata stood at the top of a steep set of rock stairs. Before her, a natural amphitheater, a shaded canyon, the desert floor littered with agave and gnarled roots that looked singed and whitebark pine trees crowding together in bunches, some so tall, Renata couldn’t see the sky behind them. Her eyes followed the line of the mountain around this new open area. At its furthest side, an arch formed, sunlight bursting through it, the back of the mountain ascending above, like she was looking over someone’s shoulder. Renata could glimpse the trail continuing beneath the arch.

Each step down into the little canyon hurt her knees.

There was no give on the stairs, and when she set foot onto the cushion of sand, it felt like she was sinking. The trail began to reveal itself more fully, white dirt and gravel to demarcate the rusted color of the native ground. Renata found shells in the dirt, sun-bleached branches pitted with darkened soil, coyote feces dotted with the hardy remains of red berries, the occasional imprint of a shoe headed in both directions. The canyon was larger than it seemed at the top of the stairs. Renata had been walking for almost ten minutes, periodically checking her watch, but hadn’t yet reached the arch.

She heard a dry twig snap behind her. A force pushed her forward suddenly by the back of her head, the air leaving her stomach as she fell to the ground.

2.3

PINK SKIN, BONE DRY AND SCORCHED, BUBBLED ON HIS hands. Pustules or cysts, Renata couldn’t tell, but they didn’t appear fresh. His hands looked like they held a tremendous amount of pain, or, after years of damage, no feeling at all. Yellowing, crooked window shades opened to thin lines spilling sunlight all over the walls and floor. The man limped to one corner of the cramped living room.

He switched on a small hanging white fan, blades browning and curled from the heat. He tossed Renata’s backpack on the floor and all but collapsed into the sofa next to it. This action, to Renata, betrayed the stubborn perseverance of someone who should be put down. The thought came unbidden and cruel, as other such invasions continued to do more and more these last few days. Renata shook the idea away. At the moment, she was more concerned whether her phone had been smashed in the scuffle. The man took a moment to regain his composure, then motioned for Renata to sit in the wooden chair opposite him.

“Now then,” he creaked. “You can tell me you knew you were trespassing or you can tell me that you didn’t. I’m inclined to inform the authorities either way.”

They sat in a sunken mobile home propped up on cinder blocks, tucked just away from the tall bank of pine trees Renata couldn’t see past. She had been dragged face down long enough to disorient her sense of direction, all while the man, tall but slouching, gaunt but handsome, limped onward without looking back. The mobile home, orange and bright inside, smelled like garlic.

Renata squinted at him, adjusting the camera strap around her neck. It flipped when she fell, the lens digging into her stomach. She could feel the stain of a rash forming, her hand resting just above it. The man sat but he kept looking around the room, as if he were the one who’d been taken against his will. His attack had been so swift and physically consuming, all grunts and shoves and the scrape of sand on Renata’s palms, that she hadn’t felt panic begin to set in. There had been his grip on her ankle, and she kicked out with her other foot, striking something rigid but weak; a knee, she guessed from the yelp that followed. By then, they were already outside the mobile home, its rounded door swung open, and the man had grabbed her by the backpack and shoved her through. Panic should have set in, Renata thought remotely.

Except the man looked so familiar. Something about the light in the room made him look different, but Renata couldn’t say why she even intuited that there was a difference. The puzzle of it kept her calm.

“You look like you’re in a lot of pain,” Renata said.

“What if I am?” the man spat, as if accused of something indecent.

She tilted her head to the side, insincerely curious.

“Where are the authorities around here?” Renata asked. “There’s no station in town. I drove through miles of desert without seeing a single patrol car.”

The man settled back further into his seat, his weight rocking slightly. He had discoloration around his eyes, puffy, nearly purple bags that Renata couldn’t help imagine poking open with a needle.

“They’re here, believe me,” the man said, nodding. “Only a phone call away.”

On the wall behind the chair, a framed picture of two men in matching navy blazers hunched over the keyboard of what looked to be a massive, ancient computer. The convex glass screen attached to a wooden box riddled with knobs and switches. Renata couldn’t recognize either figure. Their faces were turned away from the camera.

“So?” the man pressed. “What’s your excuse?”

“The observatory.”

“Closed, since the turn of the century. Surely someone in town must have told you.”

“They didn’t try to stop me from coming.”

The man’s nostrils flared, his eyes darting to the camera resting in her lap. “That doesn’t surprise me. McNairy’s inhabitants are not known for their abundance of caution. I suppose it’s a forgivable mistake for a young woman to make.”

“Is that what happened to your hands?” The man’s eyes hardened at her words. “A lack of caution?”

“Bitch.”

Renata became restless, her knee bobbing up and down. She didn’t want to spend any more time with an old, angry man who lived alone in the middle of the desert. There were enough of them in the city. She was already behind schedule. If she hoped to reach the midpoint to the observatory, a spot marked Elders Summit, and make it back before dark, she needed to keep moving forward. Renata thought she was prepared to rough it overnight on the mountain now. Prepared, not enthusiastic.

“Look, just give me my bag and I’ll be gone,” Renata said. “I didn’t think anyone lived this close to the mountain.”

“Of course,” the man said mockingly. “So claim all the hunters and day-trippers and idiots who crawl around here breaking the law. I came here to retire. It’s a separate, other kind of job keeping you people away.”

Altruism didn’t suit the man Renata was looking at. She saw someone who liked catching strangers on his turf, a tower guard without a uniform.

“No one told me I would be trespassing, there aren’t any signposts—”

The man leaned forward, the sole of his boot pressing against the pocket with her phone inside.

“What do you mean no signposts?”

“Hey, careful!”

“You didn’t see any signs on the trail?”

Renata shook her head.

“Not at the post office or the dirt road?”

“No.”

The man’s eyes glazed over.

“It’s dangerous up here,” the man said quietly. “There’s all kinds of things that make it so. I was more than a little rude just now, I’ll admit that. Believe me when I say I’m not trying to scare you. You should not be coming this way. People die when they’re unprepared.”

That familiar heat behind Renata’s ears.

“You’re out here, aren’t you? All by yourself and in obvious need of some fucking professional help.”

The man scoffed.

“I understand the area,” he said. “I’m not a tourist out for a little getaway. And you don’t need to concern yourself with my condition. Judging by your own hands, we’re similarly disposed.”

A hawk’s sharp caw pierced the sky in the distance and the man turned his head.

Near the nape of his neck, Renata caught the edges of a pale, trailing scar, white and thin. She closed her eyes, trying to recall the photo album buried in her mother’s belongings. A commissary during daytime, a crowd of onlookers gathered around her mother seated at a circular table engaged in an arm-wrestle with a burly man who appeared to be losing. What was the caption written beneath it? In blue ink, in her mother’s distinct capital letters?

“‘Another victory over Terrence Crouch,’” Renata mumbled.

“Did you say something?”

Renata opened her eyes at the man looking back at her. His shirt shifted over the scar, but it was definitely there. He had thinned considerably since the photo had been taken, over twenty years ago. And Ken’s nickname for him, not so different from his full name, had been enough to manipulate Renata’s ignorance.

“Terrence Crouch?” she repeated, louder.

The man’s mouth opened, his hands momentarily gripping the arms of the sofa.

“Why—”

“You’re in a photo in my garage. You used to work with my mother at the observatory.”

“Who was your mother?”

“Corinne Scarborough.”

Renata hoped the name would provoke a shock of recognition, maybe even calm him down. Instead, Terrence struggled against the rocking chair’s swinging and tried to stand. When he finally righted himself, balancing with the greatest effort, a slugline of sweat trickled down his temple. The mobile home was cool, its air musty.

“You need to leave now. Forget what I said about the authorities, just go.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“No,” Terrence said. He bent over rigidly, tossed her bag in her lap, and opened the door, everything outside whitewashed in the sun. “Your mother would not want you to be here.”

Renata shoved her bag back onto the floor.

“How do you know that?” she asked. “It seems like McNairy is the last place anyone saw her.”

Terrence shook his head and wiped his brow.

“That’s very sad, but I’m not negotiating with you. You’re leaving. I’ll walk you back to the main road. I’d take you on my bike but there’s not room enough for both of us.”

“Is light pollution really the reason they shut down the observatory?”

“We’re going.”

“Fuck you.” The words flew from Renata’s mouth. “I’m going up there. I don’t care who you call.”

Looking into her eyes, Terrence stood in the doorway a moment longer. His demeanor shifted, the barest hint of concern in his expression. Though Renata didn’t believe Terrence’s concern was reserved for her. The door pulled shut, the spring-loaded stopper hissing like those much-rumored snakes Renata had yet to see.

* * *

TERRENCE ARRIVED IN McNairy in a personnel exchange in 1995, two years after first light. Terrence claimed he felt ostracized from the rest of the scientists at the observatory, until he met Corinne. They were fast friends, he assured Renata, and remained so after the facility was officially decommissioned in 1997.

Their first encounter mirrored the picture Renata recalled, except Terrence had been arm-wrestling someone he already knew there, a man named Percy Givens. Corinne asked to join; Terrence won. Renata’s mother had been known around the observatory as a firebrand, reckless, quick to anger, qualities that Renata tallied with Tara’s previous accounts. Terrence claimed he was one of few colleagues able to take Corinne’s willfulness in stride. He attributed it to their opposing temperaments. There were parties in Corinne’s room, Glenna’s trivia nights, frequent hikes, the occasional desert excursion in an old dune buggy. But Corinne seemed reluctant to stray too far from McNairy, declining rides to the city, dodging conferences in other states, even other countries. While Terrence surveyed the landscape surrounding the observatory, Corinne looked in the opposite direction.

“There was no competition, more like playful derision,” Terrence said. “I cared most for the rocks, which is admittedly an oversimplification. It was nothing like it is now. Scientists don’t live at observatories anymore. Admittedly, they rarely did in those days either. It was becoming easier and easier to rent time at a telescope anywhere in the world with a computer. I suppose McNairy was a special place in that way, with all those people. I’m loath to admit it but it was.”

As he spoke, the laborious effort and thinly veiled pain that so disgusted Renata before seemed to dissipate. Terrence paced around the compact, oppressively dusty mobile home, his head inches from the ceiling, stepping back and forth between living room and kitchen, the whole time turning his hands over, shaping the air, waving off the past. The observatory conducted its work with an experimental telescope, its mirror made from liquid mercury. McNairy’s coterie of scientists measured the redshifts of galaxies, radio and ultraviolet light waves elongated like taffy from blue to the namesake. That and what Corinne called “little green men,” rotating neutron stars spinning some significant percentage of the rate of the speed of light. Corinne and her colleagues maintained the equipment and developed technology for the telescope, conducted research, wrote papers, tested theories, hoped one day to be remembered as brilliant. Nearly all their work was nocturnal.

Terrence’s grasp of the science was more granular than Renata expected for someone in a different field, but then again, she thought, she wasn’t a scientist. Had she not spent sleepless nights in high school conducting her own amateurish research of her mother’s profession, much of what Terrence said would have been lost on her; Renata was surprised at how much she was able to recall. Few personnel, including Terrence, were ever allowed inside the observatory chamber where data was collected. Even her mother wasn’t authorized to enter the main reflecting room, a precaution against evaporated mercury suspended in the air.

“We carried on for a time,” Terrence said. “Out here, practically an entire town springing up to accommodate us while we played with magnifying glasses and dug around in the dirt. So many people came and went. Even the lifers, as we called them, left McNairy more often than your mother. She never brokered any long-distance friendships, though there were dalliances. Eventually Corinne had you. I got divorced. Percy left, came back, left again. Your mother didn’t know him like I did. She couldn’t fully grasp his warped mind.”

Terrence’s enthusiasm and his recollection were infectious. But the lingering menace of “bitch” still bounced in Renata’s ear and none of Terrence’s paranoid behavior ceased. Furtive looks out the window, a sudden turn of his head when he saw something move out of the corner of his eye. Renata followed those eyes closely. Most of the time, they twitched over to her as he spoke, but every so often, Terrence looked down the little hallway past the kitchen, where she thought a bedroom and toilet must be. Only once did Renata interject. A detail Terrence mentioned had been corroborated in her mother’s journals and she had said so. Immediately, Terrence’s eyes shifted back to the hallway then returned to a spot on the floor. Then came October 1997, the month and year in Corinne’s entries that unsettled Renata most.

“Your mother was a rule breaker by nature,” he said. “Often, she would slip into the main facility in the evenings when it was too overcast to operate. Almost everyone knew about it, though we couldn’t really see the point in saying anything. What are you going to use a telescope for when the only visible thing is less than a hundred feet above you? We thought maybe she just enjoyed the solitude.”

“So she broke in,” Renata said.

“She had access to the building,” Terrence reminded her. “She was personnel, after all. But the place was essentially inoperable on inclement days, and it wasn’t a matter of being quiet. There were cameras on the entrances and the road. She only knew how to avoid them because she had dated one of the technicians who set up the surveillance systems.”

Renata enjoyed the thought: her mother, if not overtly charismatic, then at least an operator. Outside, the sun had moved from overhead, tessellated shadows from the blinds yawning and arcing on the carpet. Renata hadn’t looked at the time since walking from the trailhead. Could she camp out overnight, try to finish the trek at dawn? It hadn’t been too long, but she would also have to reach out to V at some point, check in. Renata feared the possibility of running into more people like Terrence, despite his saying it was unlikely.

“What did she do?” Renata asked. “That night.”

Near the front door, Terrence sat down on a flimsy wooden chair next to a small, shoddy table Renata thought he might have fashioned himself.

“We weren’t there more than thirty minutes—”

“You were with her?”

“Oh, yes,” Terrence said with a humorless smile. “She rarely went on any of these excursions alone. Where would the fun in that be? It was me, her, and a physicist named Blake Ulin. We got inside and immediately things looked wrong. Everything was shut off, absolutely everything. Lights, alarms, temperature control, systems that should have been running twenty-four seven. The temperature control was our biggest concern. Mercury starts evaporating at room temperature. Maybe someone left the door to the main chamber open, maybe some critical failure in the lockdown procedure. The containers with the chemicals were typically triple sealed and the facility was well ventilated. But again, everything was off. No air circulation. Doors unlocked. No one should be there.”

Renata leaned forward in her seat, one hand on her camera. Terrence’s gaze moved to his hands in his lap, fingers rubbing against each other.

“I had a flashlight, we walked around. At one point, Corinne starts covering her mouth and nose with her sleeve. You can’t smell mercury, no way of knowing what you’re breathing in. Then again, the facility was always infested with this wretched pollen that attached itself to everything. It made you gag because you couldn’t stop sneezing. Blake is ahead of us, just charging on. Mind you, we’re in a large room. High ceilings. My flashlight catches a reflection on the ground and that light bounces onto the walls. Silver streaks everywhere. Blake had stepped in some of it, Corinne nearly slipped and fell. The storage room was wide open, the canisters holding the mercury scattered on the floor.

“Then we hear movement in the dark, footsteps. Some groaning. A person stumbles out from behind a control panel ahead of us, they’re wearing a Tyvek suit and gloves, everything on them splashed with mercury, but their ventilator mask is hanging around their neck. One of the technicians who handles the mirror directly? Fine, that’s normal. But he’s completely delirious, must have been breathing in the vapors for at least twenty minutes before we got there. Blood streaming from his nose. I don’t even think he could properly see us. Blake rushes toward him and your mother tries to grab on to him before he’s out of reach because what, you want to touch the man with your bare hands? But Blake rushes past him to a phone, calls the town.”

Renata stared at Terrence. There were intimations in Corinne’s journal, a scattered recollection of the aftermath of that night, the certainty of a dead body left behind, but her mother hadn’t written down any of the details Terrence was sharing.

“At this point, I’m beginning to see flashes in my vision. I’m dizzy. It feels like I’m talking but neither Corinne nor Blake seem to hear me. I’m thinking, let’s open the roof, get some fresh air inside. I turn toward one of the windows, the outline of trees visible. The moon was so big that night. And I think I see even more reflections on the ground. Then I collapse, completely black out. Come to find out the technician we saw had spilled one canister of mercury, began to clean it without his mask, blacked out, and woke up in a state of total delirium. He had started dumping everything outside into a stream that ran behind the building. Total contamination of the area. Your mother hauled me out of there, literally dragged me, from what Blake said. He retrieved the other man. The government suspends the entire project due to environmental damage. Observatory gets decommissioned a month later.”

A shadow passed over the windows of the living room.

Terrence looked up, past Renata, and in the space hesitation presented, she took his picture. His gaunt form framed by a mass of unwashed dishes in his sink, rock samples of varying sizes collected loosely on the counter, and the low cabinets behind him. Renata noted Terrence’s transition into and out of the present tense. Remembering hadn’t made him seem younger, but there was an immediacy to his recounting, an excitement that thrust life into his voice, his eyes.

Or maybe, Renata thought, it was that Terrence never left, had literally never left the place but also never left that time. Her mother was just up the mountain. The observatory was still open. It had all just happened.

“Who exactly was Percy?” Renata asked as casually as she could.

Terrence’s head was still turned in profile, and he kept it there, facing the window, the shadow that swept over them long gone now, everything the same save for his eyes, which he slowly shuttered. His lips were cracked, skin like flakes of ash hanging on, and these quivered as Terrence opened then closed his mouth, over and over.

“Okay,” Terrence said. “Okay.”

Renata toyed with the idea that Percy was her father on the drive to McNairy, after seeing his name scrawled in Corinne’s journals dozens and dozens of times, after estimating the timing, counting backward from her birthday and forward from her mother’s initial encounter with him. After the tantalizing possibility, Renata thought, of their shared darker skin, even though she didn’t know for sure how dark he really was. But Percy’s inclusion in the journals, even in the wake of the kiss Corinne had so ambivalently received, teetered between romantic and adversarial. In one entry, her mother described leaving Percy’s room at night, but she didn’t specify where the room was. There was no reference to what they did or didn’t do. Corinne noted it like she was ticking off a box. For Terrence’s part, Renata didn’t sense jealousy. Everything about him was calcified, cauterized. But it was plain that Terrence was withholding something, and he had carefully failed to specify how he knew Percy before McNairy.

Terrence cleared his throat. A hiccup, a sharp, catching glottal stop with phlegm trapped behind it.

“Before I make a fool of myself, how much do you already know?”

“Percy’s dead,” Renata said. “He died that night.”

Terrence nodded, eyes cast down, admonished by the truth.

“Because he was at the break-in.”

Another nod. Terrence flexed his fingers, both dry, gnarled hands.

“Because there was no Blake Ulin.” This was conjecture, but Renata figured she couldn’t be far off the mark. But Terrence’s face tightened.

“No, unfortunately Blake Ulin was there. Percy was the man we found in the observatory.”

“The technician?”

“A lie,” Terrence admitted. “An official one, in the end. Records conspicuously failed to mention his presence, or his disappearance. Too inconvenient. You must understand, Percy was an interloper of the worst sort. A geologist, sure, maybe even a talented one, if such a thing is possible. Very charming. Irresistible to most. Unfortunately for Corinne, Percy was a true believer. If you’ve asked me about him, then I’m sure you understand what I mean. The ravings of Francis Brown.”

The last two words, the name, delivered with shrill mockery.

“A poor excuse for a scientist!” Terrence said. “Too concerned with existential meaning rather than documenting fact. His accounts are little more than dogma. The natural world and its holy secrets, the cosmic wonder of life in all its unknown forms. Foolishness. Certainly not science.”

Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth, his eyes wandering to the walls of the trailer, down the hall again. Renata lifted her camera again. It no longer required confidence to take his picture. There was no one else in the room with Terrence now. The past had come back and blotted everything out.

“Perhaps I’m being cruel to Brown himself,” Terrence said, breathless. “He did nothing other than write a diary from which Percy built a conspiracy wholesale. Your mother . . . We went into the facility believing we were engaging in harmless fun, but we had come to find that Percy had already gone mad. He had begun to drink the mercury from the pool with his bare hands and there were . . . It was a horrific sight. Absolutely awful. Your mother was devastated, to say the least.”

Renata squinted at Terrence and for the first time felt the absence of the weight of her mother’s journals. V politely read passages Renata had shown to them, while Tara waved the entire thing off. No one but Renata had actually looked at those pages. What they communicated, it seemed to everyone else, must be entirely subjective and personal, rather than factual. Now Renata had run into the truth. Terrence wasn’t lying, but judiciously omitting what very few people actually knew.

“So light pollution—” Renata began.

“A fabrication,” Terrence finished. “Though not entirely untrue in the grand scheme. The city has only continued to brighten . . .”

Terrence and Renata looked in each other’s eyes, the tail of his stray thought caught in Renata’s stare.

“ . . . but of course that’s an observation in retrospect.”

Renata stood from her chair and began to pace a small radius. She was shorter than Terrence but there was something oppressive about the trailer’s ceiling so she ducked down anyway. The light outside was turning orange, a few hours of good sun still left. There was no way she would make it to the observatory before nightfall, and if she did, no way she could make her way back down safely without camping up there.

And then, distinctly, through the jumble of practical thoughts, Renata again felt, for the second time since arriving in McNairy, a kind of untethering from her perception. Upon standing, at first she thought it was vertigo. In a way it was. She was wading into a history she could easily leave behind. Renata looked at Terrence like she was looking at a drawing, the trailer barely sketched in, her shadow a relief. She could see the strokes, the dip in the line where the charcoal carved a wrinkle. In such moments, Renata was reminded of why she had taken to the camera so enthusiastically. And yet, even that origin story needed to be reevaluated.

“My mom’s journals . . .” she began.

They simply stopped, Renata wanted to say. Right around those years when Lanny arrived, the period Renata desired to investigate most. But those journals weren’t anywhere in Tara’s garage, missing in a manner so abrupt it was difficult to ignore. A deliberate cutoff. Renata wondered what else Terrence kept in his hovel. But when she spoke, he seemed, or pretended, not to hear her.

“I need to go,” Renata said, making her way to the door, to her backpack.

Terrence didn’t move, his brow creased. The past had taken him again, and down that forked path, she left him.

Renata hadn’t gotten very far in Francis Brown’s diary initially. That night in the garage, when her mother’s things had been freshly deposited on their doorstep, when Renata had been persuaded to return to bed, she carried the diary with her. The pages she turned were stiff but unyellowed, drier than sand. As she flipped through them, they crackled like cooling embers. She remembered turning those pages backward and forward, letting the sound darken her mind. She imagined herself sitting near a campfire, just out of sight, a figure hunched over itself, scribbling words in the volume she now owned.

Brown wrote about his work often, but he wrote too about other events, other observations. Numerous entries began, “Back to the tree again.” As for her mother’s journals, there were no other ephemera to close the gap between Renata’s birth and the remnants of her time with Lanny, a span in which Corinne seemed to have been erased.

DEC. 20, 1997—

The observatory is closed. Percy is gone. Everyone has scattered. I’m still in McNairy.

October proved that Francis Brown was right, that the extent of his rightness either means he died an obscure but commonplace death, or he was murdered. I caught the bug from Percy, of course.

I know now that the little pieces of information I could glean about Brown, copied down here, were aimed entirely in the wrong direction. We had been looking through the official record. “We.” Percy knew I was interested, but I didn’t realize Percy was obsessed. There’s nothing much to find about Brown, he was a nobody from Arizona whose wife held a brief candle that he would come back, then she remarried barely a year after he disappeared. No friends in high places, no siblings with power.

The tree is what made him worth researching. To Percy, I mean. This wondrous fucking tree + this little tunnel + this little station that Brown worked out of. All ghost stories have some sort of intrigue to them. Near the end, Percy wouldn’t tell me why he kept disappearing. Today, I found out for myself + only because I was too much of a coward to go into Percy’s room sooner: he actually found Brown’s diary. Not an excerpt, not a forgery—why would anyone forge a nobody’s diary? Nonetheless it’s beautiful. I don’t know how Percy did it. Full of sketches + tables + these strange patterns he traced from petroglyphs. It was just sitting on Percy’s desk, open. The lamp was still on.

Renata tried to imagine this part as well.

A tiny room, a dormitory, the thickened air of close quarters, even if those quarters were shared with no one else. The night he died, had Percy felt something approach? Had there been a sign, a disturbance in the world, a ripple to the future from the past? Had Percy felt, as he desired, connected to Francis Brown? Renata’s mother could only speculate.

“There isn’t more,” Corinne had written. “I wish there was more.”

Renata scoffed at that. But when she read on, nothing Corinne ventured made any sense. Half-baked theories, grief-riddled speculation. And still, there, in the place Terrence had been hiding in, or standing watch in, or simply dying in, Corinne’s words made no sense because no one was presenting the whole picture. Renata only had the pieces her mother and her friends were willing to put on the record.

“Mr. Crouch,” Renata called.

Terrence didn’t turn his head, just his eyes, but those eyes, set in a large skull, were huge.

“You say my mom dragged you out of the observatory, that Blake escaped with you. Percy was left inside.”

“Yes?”

“That was all that happened?”

With effort, Terrence stood once again, more joints popping than seemed possible. He was a head taller than Renata at least, but he looked diminished now, the light in him flagging. Renata put one hand against the door, but Terrence didn’t step closer.

“That is all I care to mention,” he huffed.

Renata decided not to press Terrence further.

Dust motes drifted along a shaft of afternoon light that burned through a broken shutter on the door. Corinne had gone on:

Brown recorded what we could only speculate about. The “creations,” as he calls them, are hard to come by, but they only move in groups + they move slowly, which must be why it was so odd when the canyon started changing. It happened gradually. They approached from the valley where there’s no road or building, no one to notice or warn us. Brown seems to have made some sort of connection between the river + their movements.

The river brings animals. Animals bring eyes.

There are fewer eyes in McNairy now. Most of the trees on the mountain remain. Too many for me to make a case for. But I can tell. Like a patchy beard. Pockets missing. Brown’s last entry is about a month before anyone noticed he’d disappeared. He had begun to sleep with a metal collar around his neck + an old leather football helmet tight on his head. I still don’t understand why he didn’t just leave. Maybe the fact that he calls them “creations” says something. Reverence. Awe. Bullshit.

I know one thing connects him to Percy + that’s where I start. They never found Brown’s body. So far, we haven’t found Percy’s.

2.4

IN THE SCHEMA OF MCNAIRY IN HER MIND, RENATA HOPED that her judgment of scale was exaggerated, that the observatory, after some brief moderate trekking, and a dramatic close call, was just around the next crumbling of rock.

But in all her mother’s entries, going up and down the mountain took some twenty minutes or more by car, each way. The scientists first passed through a checkpoint fence then drove carefully back and forth across a series of dirt switchbacks, which added three quarters of a mile of terrain while making very little downward progress. The switchbacks were cut into the mountain, her mother learned from one of the physicists on the oversight committee, because the project ran out of money. They could either graft a new edifice that would gradually lessen the steep incline at the very top of the mountain, or they could stomach the zigzag. Finally, the single-lane path connected to a looping paved road already installed from a failed attempt to mine a gypsum deposit on the east side of the mountain. The town of McNairy was on the opposite face, the observatory completely hidden from sight, the mine entrance collapsed.

There were multiple pedestrian avenues to the observatory, some of them clearly marked with signs, or well-traveled with visible bootprints and graffitied boulders. In several of her mother’s entries, Renata marked the recurrence of sheep and deer peering from the lower reaches below the facility, making their way through sheer brush or heavily wooded patches where the trees grew together. All details Renata hoped to see for herself. But her focus was divided.

Renata’s elbow ripped open as soon as she shut Terrence’s door.

It wasn’t the pain—the pain was pervasive, all over, a mesh of points, relief cuts on tainted skin, each individual rupture vying for her specific attention—but the close warmth of blood dripping down her forearm that pulled her attention. Thick droplets ran down her palm, along her little finger as it swung limply back and forth, her other hand grasping the lens of her camera, her body accumulating the mass of a long day not yet finished. The air felt stagnant, but far cooler than the city. For a while, Renata didn’t register the wound or how it leaked. Her body and her surroundings were the same temperature.

Renata passed out of sight of Terrence’s hovel before she felt a sticking sensation like dried glue down at the crook of her wrist. She turned her arm over, pulling the skin near her elbow closer to glimpse its source, ripping the cut further. All around her, a mess of craggy, towering trees, half needled but shady enough. The ground was furred at a slight incline, a short undulation of rock to her right obscuring the trailer where Renata assumed Terrence still sat, brooding, plotting.

From her backpack, she took a hardshell case with first-aid supplies still shrink-wrapped in plastic, some of her blood smearing on the transparent lid as she fumbled for gauze or an antiseptic wipe. The former was packed into neat squares, which clumped together after she handled them with unclean hands. She wiped in one long line up her arm, stopping just short of a wound she still couldn’t see.

Renata couldn’t help noticing the differences between the personal accounts of her mother and those of Francis Brown. What became apparent most readily was how Corinne seemed to address the subconscious projection of self being written from. For this reason, even though they had nothing in common, even though she had no idea what he looked like or sounded like, even though she was frequently confused by his points of reference, his jokes, his terminology, Renata favored Brown’s diary over her mother’s journals. Brown wrote as if he had been conversing with someone. In his longer entries, those that spanned pages and pages, he laid out examples, supplied context, began his sentences with “See . . .” and “If I haven’t made myself plain,” as if he were giving a lecture, as if he wanted to be understood.

Renata did not necessarily want to understand Francis Brown, but he had attempted to get his point across. Corinne was altogether less consistent, more emotional, which did not make her easier to read. Whatever early twentieth-century formality Brown wrote from, it seemed that he treated his diary as a means for someone else to know his own mind. Renata could easily imagine Brown returning to previous passages, not simply for pieces of information, but entire days or weeks of thought and feeling. Whereas Corinne merely dropped her days down on the page, unburdening herself of their contents as quickly as possible. Was it enough to glean her mother’s true self? This Renata began to ask herself after combing through Corinne’s effects, walking around the neighborhood at night, driving from one place to the next, sitting on the toilet. She thought of it when she helped Glenna move her packages and she thought of it when she sat down with Ken and Bobbie. Corinne spoke out from her journal in a language Renata only partially understood.

At first, Renata endeavored to pick out those most relevant pieces of text from Brown’s diary to match her mother’s own writings. There was overlap with portions of their testimony. Corinne alluded to it often, but Renata had been struggling to find an explicit reference. Brown’s script was too flowing to dissemble quickly. Before leaving for McNairy, Renata started Brown’s diary from the beginning.

AUGUST 29, 1904

This morning as I performed my daily walk along section 102A & B, I heard the voice of a woman echoing off the cliff walls along the river. The sound came to me immediately, distinctly, as one heard from a gramophone, crackled, muffled, broadcast. I have dwelled here long enough to disabuse myself of the notion that I am alone. I don’t simply mean other people but the daily traffic of coyotes, deer, sheep, horses, burros, wolves, cougars, rabbits, groundhogs, and a host of other lives I have been too preoccupied to notice. And yet I can safely say that I have never once heard the lone voice of a woman in this region, not one that wasn’t quickly accompanied by the busy clatter of hooves and carriage or children or the voices of other women.

My thoughts went to you, Lenny, for this account is addressed to you as much as to me. I thought of your voice and your face letting that voice burst through. I thought of you traversing these abundant, dark, and deceptive canyons and hills and mountains alone and these thoughts chilled me instantly. I do not fear the violence of the savage more than the violence of the white man, the black man, the yellow man, but I do fear what the deserts of Colorado and Arizona are able to do, like a man I once read about, to the traveler who feels that his confidence in his mastery of the terrain is absolute.

I have witnessed visitations and I have experienced them myself. They are of a form and degree that continues to escape me. These are not the product of encounters with the devil. They are failures of the rational mind to comprehend its surroundings with any reliability or discernment. We imagine monsters, as I have said. What frightens me is not their existence, but our fatal sensory impotence, a natural impairment in cataloging truth and separating it from mirage. We cloak our perception with our own ignorance and behind this mirrored veil, in which we see only the inside of our own skulls, there lurks the truly alien. Behind this veil might dwell an entire realm we are too dazzled by the trickery of our imperfect machinery to notice.

I heard the woman’s voice all morning, a low, stuttering tone that echoed from far off places no matter which side of the river I walked. I could not make out clearly what she said. She didn’t sound distressed in any way and yet she repeated the same phrase again and again, the cadence of it becoming familiar to me even as I could not decipher its meaning. As the sun climbed to its zenith, revelation swept over me. I walked back to my quarters when a raven flew within inches of my head and from its beak the woman’s voice spoke. “Do this in my memory. Do this in my memory. Do this in my memory.”

There are hundreds of ravens that pass through the canyons here and some of their number make their home among its highest outcroppings. I had heard tell of their capacity for mimickry but never witnessed it myself until today. And I thought, what brilliant sleight-of-hand it must be, what priceless disguise to hide behind one small man’s complete bewilderment. The rest of the day, I pondered the life of this raven, its time with whomever it had copied its nature-made recording, the fate of that woman, the possibility. The farce of imagining some patient, hidden beast taking its time watching me chase my own shadow.

The voice in Renata’s head sounded generically British when she read from Brown’s diary though she knew, sometimes repeated to herself, that he was American. There was a placeholder face and a placeholder stature, an amalgam of tintype Western portraits and photographs of famous white nineteenth-century writers in their youth with brushy mustaches and dark brows. Each feature in her mind was, repeating one of Brown’s most used words, conjecture. Even his penmanship provided a detail that might have proved illuminating had Renata any notion of why Brown’s looked the way it did, some temporal marker of class and education, perhaps even an intimation of which hand he wrote with.

Nonetheless, his image, whether near to the truth or hopelessly divergent, was developing slowly, Renata’s mental picture fixing itself in her mind with every turned page. It was because of this lack—of attachment, of visage, of biography—that Brown didn’t feel to Renata like a ghost, the way her mother did. It was the knowing, Renata assumed, that all along, she had far more of Corinne with her than she once thought. Corinne had been lost and all that Renata had to bear seemed like vapor.

Renata pulled at the flesh near her elbow again, picking at a saltflake of dried skin firmly attached to her arm.

It seemed impossible that Lanny’s voice was also the voice of her mother. And she had been picking at that similarity too: Francis Brown’s wife, Lenny, the ephemeral Lanny. Impossible felt like the right exaggeration. Tugging along the hinge of the dangling piece of skin, Renata felt a wet, spongy divot where the flesh around the elbow cracked and bled. Above and behind her, the sun was descending past the mountain peak. Through the pine needles, all that shone through was a point of brilliant, direct light. Renata’s hands felt chalky, like she’d just come down a sheer wall of rock.

She pried apart a square of gauze, laying it on her bent knee, and applied an alcohol pad blindly but gently against her elbow. The sting penetrated deep to an angry, bright-red nerve root. Renata had endured moments of acute superficial agony, enough to know that her first instinct was always to bite down hard on her lower lip. Instead, as soon as the pad made contact with her skin, she opened her mouth wide, her eyes squeezing shut, a rictus grin momentarily stretching across her face.

Renata dabbed lightly on the same area a few more times. The little moist square came away red and thoroughly soaked. A broken mixture of alcohol solution and blood dripped onto the rocky ground near her backpack. She was leaving a trail, she thought, wiping, rubbing, drying, securing gauze, medicated ointment, tape, the thin film of plastic that wrapped the first-aid kit now doubling as a trash bag.

Renata started back up the incline. The higher she climbed, the denser the trees became. She knew this as a fact before her own eyes and as a point of caution that one commenter reviewing the Fish Tackle Path on Google complained made the journey to Elders Summit unscenic, even confusing. The Fish Tackle Path wasn’t far from where Renata was now, or at least, she hoped not. A tan metal sign pointed toward its entrance near the toilets at the campground where she parked, and Terrence’s trailer was only fifteen minutes’ walk from there, maybe even less. Renata neglected to check the mileage on the sign.

The resistance of the sloping ground past the foot of the mountain felt good on Renata’s bones, her muscles, a sensation of use, of strain. She breathed in long, filling breaths of warm air unpolluted by dust or exhaust, though she could smell the faint sweet aroma of burning wood. She mounted a boulder, jumped over bushes, her ears swallowing a roar of blood as her heart pumped, the sound dissipating, blending in with the inhale and exhale of each step on the rocks, the shuffle of her clothes, her backpack. It was almost too easy to lose her focus in this hypnotic cacophony, but Renata knew too that she had some ways to go before reaching the abandoned gypsum mine that would serve as her primary landmark. From there, the service road was supposed to be less than a mile away. If she spent too much time getting her bearings, she would camp at the mine overnight.

Behind her, to the east, the town of McNairy was cut in half by a jagged incline of earth, parts of the mountain at varying depths collapsing together into the illusion of one solid wall.

Without framing too squarely, Renata shot a picture, hoping the photo was bisected not only by the mountain, but by the light reflecting off the desert floor in the distance. Moving up along the unmarked path she had set herself on, Renata watched as McNairy gradually edged out of view. Renata hiked on and on, counting her steps, dodging side to side over holes in the dirt, coyote shit, the rotted stumps of trees half tumbled over, their roots pulled out from the ground. In her periphery, striated rocks and green leaves and purple flowers blurred together with the orange sand and reddening light of early evening. The world was trapped beneath an eyelid turned toward the sun.

Ahead, the incline rose even further, shaggy, loose dirt culminating in a steely, shiny jutting of stone that pushed out of the ground, creating a wall too high to climb easily. On each side, this gray block extended into a shelf that ran to sheer drop-offs as far as Renata could see. Just above, she could discern a white line of dirt unfurling across the mountainside—the Fish Tackle Path, only a few degrees off from where she was, blocked by the wall.

At the bottom of the shelf, Renata reached up, pushing onto her toes, feeling the edge of the stone lip for purchase, hoping she could hoist herself directly onto what she assumed was the continuation of the path. The ground she could feel above her was pebbled but flat, solid, anchored in the way only something buried at its foundation into the earth could be.

Renata hopped and pulled at the shelf edge.

Her fingers came away immediately, white dust coating her palms. She still carried her backpack and camera. She slid the straps of her bag off her shoulders one by one, the heft of its contents tugging at her wrists, her camera stuffed into the top, its protruding lens wrapped in a shirt against the impact of her throw. Two swings in slow arcs and the bag landed quietly just past the lip, a little spray of dirt rising into view.

Lighter, without dwelling too long before she could overthink her next move, Renata took a half step back, nearly slipping, and kicked her right foot onto the wall, throwing her hands above her, grabbing, scrambling, digging with her toes, pulling hard, until she rolled over the top of the ledge.

Renata sat up. To the right, the trail, clearly marked by a pale yellow dirt footpath devoid of obstructions, rounded a corner on a gradual decline in the direction of the campground. Renata assumed there were steps cut into the trail at some lower point, the sudden rise from the road to her current place on the mountain too steep to hike safely or quickly. She only skipped the path impulsively, not wanting to give Terrence the satisfaction of watching her stumble around looking lost.

Gathering her bag, Renata conjured the glowing pair of eyes that had stared down at her the previous night. She thought again of Ken and Terrence’s conversation and the invasion of tendrils all over her body, the fileted exposure of her senses, the loss of time in those moments when her body seemed to have abdicated any human control. The animal that looked down on all this, tilting its head, steadily watching, would have been at a bend on the same path.

She followed the left-hand extension of the trail. It didn’t end where it seemed to from below, but after a long, inward curving distance—eighty yards? more than one hundred?—the path proceeded up a set of wooden plank stairs with a rope chain set beside it. The stairs ran diagonal from the mountain peak, away from the direction of the mine shaft. Renata recalled a lookout marked at the end of Fish Tackle and a small diagram of water just next to it. Perhaps a pond that filled in after the rain, or the site of some defunct aquifer. She needed to continue up and west from those stairs, upon which a person stood.

A person stood on the stairs.

Renata passed them over while scanning the way forward because they hadn’t been moving. She could make out their shape, a man or a tall woman in baggy pants, a dark long-sleeved shirt, and a baseball cap. A device of some kind was held out in their right hand like they’d been studying it. They were looking right at her.

Resisting the urge to wave, Renata instead unzipped her camera from her backpack. Looking down was its own test. She felt confident that the stranger would have disappeared when she looked back up again, but there they stood, hand slightly out, back straight, stilled. From this vantage, they might as well have had no face at all, no lines of expression on their forehead, a smear for eyes and a mouth.

Renata moved quickly to adjust her lens, her aperture, then, after looking back for the fourth time and seeing how the stranger never moved at all, trained on them through the viewfinder, rainbow tinting the edges of the lens where light fanned out through the glass.

Zoom. Focus.

Zoom out. Focus again.

More clearly now, Renata could see that the stranger wore dark glasses and, in their other hand, a long, gnarled branch the color of ash, a tinge of orange running along its length. Renata wondered if the stranger was blind, if they had heard her scrambling for purchase up the wall and paused. Against the shadowed face of the mountain, the stranger disappeared into the landscape. That’s what Renata hoped would turn out in the photograph, and she lamented not switching out her color roll for black-and-white, the contrast between the stranger’s dark attire and the rock behind them nearly indistinguishable. She knew exactly how it would develop if she had done so, the stranger lost in the center left half of the image, staring out, waiting for the viewer to notice them.

Reluctantly, Renata took the picture anyway.

The sun dropped behind McNairy Peak, almost entirely submerged by the mountain carapace when Renata reached the foot of the wooden steps that, up close, appeared less than functional, splintered depressions from years of traffic, soft rot at the corners of some of the planks, hundreds of tiny holes eaten through like sores. The stranger was halfway up the steps, facing toward her. As Renata drew closer, the heat shuddered off the ground against her thighs, passed through invisible waves, cooler pockets of air, a breeze pressing on her face, crunching rocks underfoot, dust rising behind her when she stepped hard on the earth, that barest note of burnt wood again, the atmospheric gurgle of a jet somewhere in the distance, the desert pregnant with sound.

Renata felt her throat closing, mouth drying up, the moisture snorkeled away, surrendered to the air. She sensed them before she looked down at her arms, those spines endeavoring to push through her stippled skin, something crashing off an unseen shelf inside her, her chest excavated of heart and lung and stomach and in their place, a quivering, many-fingered creature tapping at the walls of her torso, her toes, something pushing, knocking.

Renata thought of the previous night, how paralyzed she had been, but this felt different, and still the stranger stood on the stair. She could move, still interpret the world at the same pitch she had just a moment ago, no nerve-shredding openness, not yet. Renata was beginning to panic and the feeling was welcome. It brought her heartbeat back to her ears, her throat. Those million tiny fingers beneath her flesh began to recede though she could feel the pressure of them, poised to crown forth, smaller than maggots, larger than hairs.

The stranger walked down to her now, taking each step slowly, methodically reaching the long branch in their hand forward, first the stick, then one foot, and finally the other. They were indeed blind, but the realization brought Renata no comfort. She was on the cusp of discovering a new, fresh deficiency in her body, a phenomenon that could only embolden what she had feared ever since the first deep laceration, every lingering phantom sensation and absolute error of physical being—that there was something mortally wrong with her, an affliction no doctor could diagnose or cure.

Renata grabbed at the rope handrail, finding it slack.

Her hand, Renata reminded herself that it was her hand, looked nearly reptilian, pores and follicles raised in uneven segments, scalelike and discolored, a light brown, red, and dark yellowish hue. The stranger mounted the second to last step, just above Renata, the walking stick probing the dirt, then gently poking Renata’s knee.

The stranger gasped and said, “Arthur? Darling, you ran off.”

They reached out their other hand, the device they held before put away. Renata stepped back, one hand still gripping the rope. A chill air passed over her body, a shower of crystalline, watery sensation so sudden, so exquisite she stopped breathing. The scalelike layer on her hand undulated in a ripple down from her wrist, keening a uniform ashen color before sinking down, down, down into her skin, the flesh simply flesh as it had been, untouched. Her throat relaxed, her heartbeat receded. The stranger was closer now, their hand brushing against Renata’s. The stranger gasped once more.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry, I thought—”

Her voice was monotone, even as its volume rose in exclamation. Tara sounded much the same over the phone, speaking with colleagues or irritable clients. The stranger spoke and her voice confused Renata. It was a voice that contained nothing.

“Hello?” the stranger asked.

“Sorry,” Renata responded, lightheaded. “I got a bit dizzy just now.”

Up close, the stranger’s face was strikingly emaciated, shadow-capturing hollows below her cheeks, faint, lightened, raised streaks like tears leading down from her eyes. Beneath the baseball cap, Renata could see graying hair, but the woman’s skin—hand, neck, chin, ankles—seemed unnaturally free of wrinkle or blemish. Even with the timbre of her voice, throaty, full, Renata suspected the stranger was much older than she could politely guess. There was a hesitancy to her movements beyond her blindness, as if her limbs were stiffened in pain.

“Pardon me,” the stranger said, standing straight, hands resting one atop the other on the tip of the walking stick. “Arthur’s my dog. I thought you . . . Well.”

“That’s my fault,” Renata said. “I lost my breath, I probably sounded like a dog.”

“I heard you coming up from further on and then I couldn’t hear anything until just now,” the stranger said. “I’m Edith, by the way.”

“Renata. I stopped to take a picture of you, if that explains anything. I couldn’t tell from far off if you were real or not.”

Renata sloughed off her backpack, letting it fall hard on the ground. She dug around for her massive water bottle, which took up the bulk of the interior pocket.

“No, that’s not it,” Edith said, shifting on unshod, powdered feet. “I didn’t hear you at all until I got to the bottom of the stairs. I touched you then it sounded like you started panting.”

Renata drank deeply from the metal tankard, the water turning cooler as she drank, worried as she continued in one long pull that she hadn’t brought enough. Squinting at the trail behind them, among the trees and boulders, the crevices that gained depth as the sun made its gradual descent, the furrowed brush where rabbits and quail hid, Renata couldn’t make out any sign of a dog. She couldn’t dispute Edith’s description of her behavior just then either.

“Well, I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you,” Renata said evenly. “I didn’t see a dog coming up, if you’ve been looking for him. I’m trying to find my way up is all.”

“He’ll find me,” Edith said, her tone perfectly flat. Her nostrils flared as she leaned forward. “I can’t smell you either.”

Renata recoiled, grateful that Edith couldn’t see her reaction.

“It’s a blessing,” Renata said, sniffing dramatically. “I stink. Are you out here alone?”

“Are you?” Edith asked.

“Everyone in McNairy is afraid of straight answers,” Renata said, laughing stiffly.

“It comes with the mercury poisoning,” Edith said, smiling.

Renata perked up at the mention. She had been staring at her own hands, her arms. Her body appeared suspiciously ordinary.

“And we don’t get many tourists who stay where you’ve been staying,” Edith continued.

The stilted humor left Renata.

“What does that mean?”

Edith shrugged. “Bobbie’s a friend. People around here are bored. No one’s parked in the eastern campground for a while now.”

Renata winced, shook her head. She wondered then if Ken and Bobbie hadn’t asked where she had been sleeping because they had known all along. She arrived in McNairy in broad daylight.

“I thought I was being discreet,” Renata admitted.

“It’s fine, no one’s going to bother you. Bobbie seems to like you, which counts for a lot here. She’s something of a Jiminy Cricket figure in town.”

Behind Renata, a jingle of metal gave way to gravel percussing beneath small feet, light and quick. A gray-and-white shepherd with black spots along its coat and two-tone eyes bounded down the path from around the bend, tongue lolling out of its grinning mouth. A red collar with a circular pendant hung loosely around the dog’s neck.

“Hello, darling,” Edith said, the syllables elongated into something like a coo.

Arthur trotted up to Renata, smelling the backs of her knees, her bag, her shoes. She reached down, petting his soft head, his left eye a whitish blue, his right dark brown. More insistently, Arthur sniffed at Renata again, padding around her in circles. He began to growl.

“See?” Edith said. “You’re a puzzle even to him. Come here, darling.”

Arthur walked over to her outstretched palm, licking her fingertips, peering up at her face.

“And you?” Renata asked. “What’s your deal in McNairy?”

“A resident of special attachment.”

“How’s that?”

“McNairy blinded me,” Edith said, pointing to her face, that same smile stretched across it.

“Mercury poisoning,” Renata ventured.

“Sure,” Edith said. “I’m the town mascot. I hear people were offended on my behalf at the Spyglass last night. When Terrence Crouch made an appearance and wrote some letters and numbers on the blackboard.”

Renata thought of the immediate reaction when Glenna turned the board. Ken had been texting someone, taking pictures. She couldn’t remember what Bobbie did or said, nor Glenna after she walked back behind the bar and people started making for the door. Apart from those tourists in town for the desert race, anyone in that room, likely multiple patrons at once, could have told Edith what happened in her absence.

“So you were here when the observatory was still running?” she asked, calmly she hoped.

Edith cocked her head to one side, doglike.

“Hmm,” Edith said. “You know, I spent most of my life pretty disinterested in this landscape. Now I’m known for one thing. Or people only seem to ask me about one thing.”

“You brought it up,” Renata said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m interested in what happened around here and no one seems willing . . .”

“You seem to feel you’re owed straight answers,” Edith ventured. Arthur sat at her feet, quietly panting. Edith had gone completely still again.

Renata peered down once more at her own hands, the backs of them, her palms and fingernails, the fine hairs on her forearm, all that she could see rendered into a film underneath which lived something that sat dormant, atrophied, until she began looking for her mother. Something beyond her perception was lurking so close behind her, she couldn’t see it. Yes, someone must have answers. Her body, her senses, it was possible to surrender all of them, it was possible to be thrown into pure consciousness, floating like a satellite above the organic system of her body, never sure if she would return to it. This was new fear. Yes, she was owed answers.

“Sorry, I’m just a little turned around, I guess,” Renata lied.

“How existential,” Edith said, stepping to one side of the stair, as if to let Renata pass. “You’re not far from the mine, if that’s where you really wanted to go.”

“I—” Renata tried.

“And you’re not far from Elders Summit, if that’s where you really wanted to go. And you’re not that far from the observatory grounds, if that’s where you wanted to go. Let me guess: It’s the last one.”

It was hard to divine the true tone with which Edith spoke, but intuitively, Renata understood it to be condescending, even goading. Her shoulders ached at the thought of taking up the backpack once more, straps digging down. But she lifted it without a word, her water tankard in one hand, her camera stuck uncomfortably against her side. Before she could walk past Edith, Arthur barked a loud, aggressive bark, baring his teeth, standing on all fours.

“You shouldn’t go up there,” Edith cautioned. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

Renata had never fought a dog before. The back of her head, the spot where Terrence struck her, throbbed. Two people from back when the observatory was still operational, two people who never left, but Edith didn’t seem the type to shack up with a soul as embittered or hostile as Terrence. From her bearing alone, Edith appeared infinitely more reasonable.

“What do you want?” Renata asked.

“You not to go where I think you mean to,” Edith said.

“Why?”

“Is it not enough to say it’s dangerous?”

Again, Edith pointed one finger to her face. She turned to Renata so directly it was like she was being looked at.

“No offense,” Renata said, stepping slowly toward the next stair. “It seems like everyone else around here has free rein of the place.”

“Then I’ve been doing a poor job,” Edith said. “I’m sure you’ve noticed other things? Everyone’s got a mean rash. We pump our water from a well ten miles west. We’ve got a minor environmental crisis in McNairy. And beautiful views of the night sky.”

Edith said all this with a smile.

“Don’t sound so sad,” Renata said.

Arthur stood with his snout jutting forward, a low growl rumbling in his throat.

“A side effect of mercury poisoning,” Edith said. “Same as my voice. Messes with your brain chemistry. I’ve heard about people who can’t stop laughing, can’t stop crying. Faces get all twisted up. People feel bugs crawling under their skin. People go blind.”

“What happens if you drink it?” Renata said, studying Edith’s reaction.

Corinne’s journal entry on the night Percy died only named men at the observatory, but there was every possibility others had heard what happened, if only as rumors. Renata also knew the people in McNairy felt less concerned with the truth.

“I wouldn’t recommend that either,” Edith said.

“Were you part of the original cohort?”

“Oh, I didn’t work at the observatory.”

Edith drew her hand out, clucking her tongue. Arthur sat in response, his sharp teeth still visible.

“Did you know someone there?” asked Edith.

Renata bit her lip, tried vainly to gauge how fast she could run and how far before Arthur gave up or Edith called him back. She was wasting time, a talent that the residents of McNairy she’d encountered thus far seemed irritatingly adept at demonstrating.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Sorry about your face.”

“What if I told you a story, and at the end of it, you were free to do whatever you’d like?”

Renata rolled her eyes.

“You and Terrence are perfect for each other,” she said, taking another step up the crumbling stairs. “Both of you doing what exactly? Annoying tourists? Jerking off to old photos? It’s fucked up what happened here. But if the contamination or whatever is in town, then it won’t make any difference at the observatory either.”

Renata was bluffing.

She hadn’t considered a large-scale toxic spill, that this could be the foundation for a cover-up, if that was what was going on. Renata could believe it was simpler for the people in charge to pack up the facility and pretend like nothing ever happened.

“Just one story,” Edith pressed.

Renata knew about mercury. It was how you developed a daguerreotype, by using its fumes. She had only attempted it once at the print shop with mercury from a broken thermometer. Years ago, a customer brought in a few antique silver plates they found stored in the basement of their grandparents’ estate, blank, possibly never used. Even with respirators, its vapors would worm their way inside you. Maybe Edith was telling the truth. It was possible, Renata thought, but Edith also didn’t match her affliction. It was too tidy, too congruent with her outward presentation, a walking PSA, a reminder of what threatened the denizens of McNairy.

“Fine,” Renata said. “One story.”

2.5

THE VIEW FROM THE LOOKOUT AT FISH TACKLE POND, LABELED by hand on a small wooden sign for that thought-bubble memory of water on the map, granted Renata a rare sense of vertigo.

She said this to V, holding her phone, their voice in her ear.

Renata swiveled her gaze. The reach holding McNairy, the bottom of a bowl bordered by a flowing curve created by a prehistoric geologic event known as the Antler orogeny, the town sitting on the flattest, most arid part of the basin. A dry patch of nothing; a rising smoke cloud to the north, where she could make out a smattering of tiny dots, racing vehicles, she assumed, tearing through the weekend and the dirt.

Renata longed to talk to V nearly as soon as Edith finished talking. She did not do well with unexpected confrontation. In V’s contrasting opinion, Renata had a bad habit of relishing conflict when it arose. There, on the small promontory, Renata listened to V’s mastication over the phone, its familiarity soothing, and remembered what it had been like to be sent home the first semester of junior year, after breaking a classmate’s wrist in a lunchroom fight. V had been more upset than Tara.

“So what?” V said. “Edith was. like, a land cop?”

Renata laughed.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “More like a consultant. She says she worked at the BLM as a toxic waste adviser. Disposal, clean-up, that sort of thing. She was here in McNairy to oversee the observatory getting shut down. Have we talked about Percy?”

“Rock nerd your mom was in love with,” V said, chewing on something dry and shattery.

“Maybe. Edith knew Percy from way back apparently. He used to do survey work for the Test Site. I guess at one point the government was considering dumping nuclear waste somewhere not that far from McNairy.”

“And Percy came up naturally?” A scratch interrupted V’s question. Renata pictured them putting their phone in a pocket, setting it on a table. “Sorry, I’m peeing.”

“No, I asked about Percy. I pretended I was his kid.”

V whistled, the tone reverberating off the tiles of their shared bathroom.

“Subterfuge,” said V, impressed. “What else have you been lying about?”

Renata checked her watch again. 4:28. She turned round, passing the splintered wooden steps, the little sign. Up there, the next layer of mountain, soft soil and loose rock arrayed like the wrinkles of a bald man’s head, cut into the mountain’s incline. A more level terrain dense with pinyon and ponderosa pine stretched before Renata.

As she climbed, Renata’s sense of the mountain’s size continually warped, its dimensions restlessly, bafflingly fluid, every turn revealing a longer path to walk. Most maps topped McNairy Peak at an elevation of twelve thousand feet and the town at about seven thousand. The air flowed into her lungs thinly. McNairy, the mountain and the town, was only supposed to extend about twenty square miles. As the ranges lifting through the center of Nevada veined north and south toward Carson City and Vegas, dotting, sinking, resurfacing, and sinking again, lone islands of earth like McNairy popped up like baby teeth, visible above the ground, moored together beneath it. McNairy was a regular blip in the desert. And yet it grew before Renata’s eyes. An optical illusion. An ancient, weathered funhouse. Edith called McNairy the last place she’d ever wanted to be.

“V,” Renata started.

How to phrase it, to admit it into existence, whatever process, whatever spasm her body had been working through these last two days. Even then, spotting a relatively clear route through the trees toward the mine, as indicated on the few maps that bothered to mark it, Renata struggled to feel the body beneath her body, to will the infinitesimal movement of hair and sinew into her perception. There was nothing, only more cracking skin, more blood, bone waiting to be dust.

A mist of the selfsame pollen Renata had seen and heard so much about furred the topmost branches. A wall, rising some twenty feet, plunged into the ground at an angle. Rusted lengths of thick wire hung horizontally across left and right, pegged by metal loops hammered into the rock. What reference Corinne made to the mine in her journals, at least so far as Renata had read, was insignificant, a local curiosity. One former colleague of her mother’s, a theoretical physicist from Perth named Will, supposedly camped in the mines on weekends but no one ever joined him. Will claimed the tunnel system was much smaller than people assumed, but that he still managed to get lost on occasion.

Renata heard the toilet flushing.

V hummed as they washed their hands.

“I miss you,” Renata said after a beat. She stood at the wall, peering right to left. The service road should lie above her, about a mile west. She turned left.

“Isn’t that sweet,” said V. “Ready for me to come to the rescue?”

Renata didn’t know what to say. Yes and no.

There was a string in her gut and it was pulling her forward. At the start, the night all those boxes populated Tara’s garage, Renata had been convinced, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, despite Tara’s cynicism, which meant nothing, despite V’s polite skepticism, which meant everything, that her mother was the force tugging that string from the other side. McNairy was supposed to be on the other side. But Renata couldn’t discern the way ahead. Worse, Renata, more fervently than ever, felt that if she turned back now, she would only doom herself to return later.

“Nat?” said V, their tone uncertain.

Renata kept walking, the ground near the wall damp, the tree line shying away from the rock, a deepening darkness signaling the slow march of the sun to the horizon on the other side of the mountain.

“Nat,” V said, stern.

“I’m thinking, V,” Renata said. “I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t be nice to have you here.”

“Okay, then I’ll leave in an hour.”

“But,” said Renata, louder than she intended. “I think I’m almost done here too. I mean, I hope so. I’m not gonna make it to the top tonight, but I’m not far. So, one more day, maybe another night if I’m being slow. Then I’ll be home.”

She doubted every word.

A man in a lab coat, kneeling on the ground of some black room, his hands and face covered in silver, rivulets streaming down his chin, blood and spit and mercury leaking from his mouth. Her mother, escaped into time, changed, haunted. New contours of thought, new associations, new pages of her mother’s life that opened onto the lives, even glancingly, of the people who worked and lived alongside her, now scattered around the world never to return.

“I’m giving you twelve hours,” V said. “I’m not fucking around either. I don’t like the way you sound.”

“How do I sound?”

“Like you have a gun to your fucking head.”

The dark wall of stone, radiating a faint heatglow, bent like a broken arm ahead. The entrance to the mine was strewn with bits of browned iron, old barrel braces, links of chain, nails, detritus of industry salting the ground.

“I am scared,” Renata admitted. Her eyes strained for any hint of light in the hole. “But I’m not pretending otherwise. Fuck, this backpack is heavy.”

“Where are you staying tonight?” asked V.

“You’re going to hate the answer.”

A fuzz came from Renata’s phone speaker, V’s voice stuttering in and out.

“Say again?” Renata said, turning away from the mine, a finger in her other ear.

“I said, I haven’t . . . any of your answer . . .”

“Just trust me, V,” said Renata.

More static.

V said something that sounded like “I’m coming anyway.” Renata wondered what Tara would think, discovering both of them noodling around McNairy, trawling for her sister’s bones.

“I love you,” said Renata. “You’re cutting out, but I’ll send a flare up soon, okay?”

The static turned shrill when she hung up.

Edith talked about a fissure in the mountain down which snowmelt and rain flowed into two natural aquifers beneath the town. The gypsum mine tunneled through a clutch of veins that channeled water through the mountain, and with it, contaminants from the observatory. Mercury, leached into the groundwater over twenty years ago, had also accumulated in the mines, some of it transformed, by the bacteria growing on the ground and walls, by the animals and insects living inside or passing through, into methylmercury. Edith spoke of all this in her even tone of voice, but Renata could intuit an urgency behind the words. It wasn’t the mercury itself that posed a risk to the inhabitants of McNairy, but what it turned into, microscopic beads of poison stored in the body.

Renata unslung her bag, pawing through each pocket, praying she had had the presence of mind to stow a mask. Ken told her to bring one. The denizens of McNairy seemed unphased by the accoutrements of a plague. A journey around the mine added another hour to her hike, and while she could spare the time, it had been a long day. The tunnel in front of her supposedly led down to the main mining thoroughfare, which had collapsed. Continue up in the opposite direction and it should end near a footpath just off the service road. Only there was the danger of blacking out from inhaling whatever poisonous air hung trapped in unseen pockets of the tunnel. A drop of sweat tickled Renata’s nose. It was cold on her skin. The higher she climbed, the cooler it became, and the sun was still out. Renata sniffed involuntarily, unthinking as a twitch, and turned to face the tunnel.

Two points of light hovered high above the ground in the dark. The points disappeared at the same time then reappeared. Blinking. Renata froze, staring at eyes too far away to discern origin or size. An animal, she rationalized. Human eyes didn’t reflect light like that, unless there was a person inside with glasses. But the eyes blinked once more, and when they closed, the black was absolute. The eyes shut, opened, then vanished for good.

Behind Renata, a twig snapped, distant but clear.

Unmistakably a foot stepping on a branch, even the shuffle of gravel and crusty loam, one foot then the other. Renata was done having conversations with strangers. She stretched the mask over her face, the pull of air through the fabric unpleasant, heavy. Renata framed up a quick tilted photo of the mine entrance in its imposing, mouthlike stillness, and stepped across the threshold.

SEPT. 5, 1998—

I can’t say that what’s been done to Edith deserves to be written about. Really, I can’t say that “done” has anything to do with it. They’ve begun the process of officially breaking down the OBSV. About two years of work, but I don’t know if that timeline remains feasible.

I’m not patient, I can admit that. But this process. Ironic now that there are more people crawling around town than there ever were before. They’ve pegged the thing to mercury. I don’t think even they understand what it is they’re covering up. Percy still gone. If he’s alive, who can say in what shape? I want to find his body. By now, it’s probably unrecognizable. Young once told me years ago that the desert preserves selectively. Bones, finger + toenails, fabric, cartilage if it’s thick enough.

I’m writing as if this matters, but really it’s becoming a kind of cognitive exercise. T + I were locked in the mirror room for at least six hours + we shared a single respirator between us. Cognitive impairment, or at least some form of neurological disruption, is all but guaranteed. To say nothing of the fetus.

T won’t speak about it. We meet every week to discuss the movement of the pack, which reached a peak in density in July. We can’t tell if there are more of them or if each is growing individually larger. They gather in groups of ten or twelve, enough to present a plausible natural illusion of foliage, small enough to escape immediate detection. Since the construction crane got delivered, they’ve mostly stopped moving. We don’t know why.

T maintains the bulk of the interest for both of us. A few others from the department are lingering, but only because they’re waiting for applications to come in telling them they have another place to go. Edith asked if I planned to leave + I said I hadn’t thought much of it. I don’t think I was lying. She’s been very friendly, I’m sure she + Percy got along well. Both excitable like dogs. T + I have made the unspoken decision to say very little to each other. The same is true of everyone else. The bodies that were removed—Blake, Izzy, a surprise to both of us, she had been hiding in a service closet—have been classified as decedents, not casualties. Percy’s absence, as far as I can tell, has gone unnoticed.

Except for Edith.

She remembers him fondly, insistently. She’s staying in Glenna’s spare room above the Spyglass, shows up early to the facility every morning. Environmental scientists, cops, construction crew, reps from the board, Edith. I’ve been here in the south wing dorms. At least another six months before they start dismantling this area. Whoever’s left, probably about 20 or so, try to carry on with some semblance of work. The telescope is quarantined, bright yellow tape so everyone knows something interesting happened. Unfortunately by now most know I was involved though not exactly how. This has spread, spilt-milk-like, to Edith who, until today, would not stop asking polite, offhand questions. Clearly masking a more ambitious curiosity.

I can respect ambition, less so ingratiation (?). Edith wants to be friends so she acts like a girl. At least Tara asks you the damn question straight. She called yesterday very frustrated with me about Renata’s sleep schedule, as if I have any control over it. Genetic culpability. Mom + Dad used to say I was a bad sleeper.

Edith kept asking, insinuating really. What do I do all day now that the main instruments for my research are inactive?

I don’t have the stamina to tell her she’s wrong. I do have access to other tools, other data. I’ve been lying to her about where Percy is as a matter of convenience. Vacation/work trip overseas. Lately, she hasn’t been buying it. Said Percy told her just last year that he’d put in his extension request with NTS for an additional year in McNairy, that he was excited to stay on. I’ve been hiking down past the mine on the north face of the mountain, trying to plot an area where Percy’s body may have fallen or where the pack might have retreated with it. When I go out, I cover myself head to toe. I wear a hat, a jacket, pants, long socks, + I keep my hands in my pockets. It’s been an unseasonably long summer + cool as it may be up here, I still sweat like a pig.

Edith insisted on accompanying me this morning + I was too surprised to decline. I know she’s suspicious of me but I’m not sure why. I’m hiding things that concern far bigger entities than the BLM. Frankly, T is confident that, without our intervention, McNairy is in danger. I’m not convinced. Especially given how long we were here before without incident. The pack seems primarily nocturnal, at least when they scavenge for eyes + most locals/tourists don’t venture either side of Elders Summit, more than half a mile from the OBSV. I think if we left them alone, they’d leave us.

Honestly, I hate them. They disgust me. I’m fascinated by their very existence + I have Percy to thank for F. Brown connection (fall ex. to CO?) but I didn’t study biology for a reason. Neither did T but he seems to have reoriented his entire world around them. I’m curious, but to what end? Fame maybe. The anonymous kind. No interviews, no radio, no photos. Just my name + the discovery of a generation. It’s a little boring to me. Plus Blake, Percy, Izzy didn’t die for my vanity.

Edith + I made our way toward an unmarked path the miners used to reach a storage supply box that they buried in the ground. Young told me he’d found a loaded pistol there once, still functional. Edith was telling me about some delay in the decommission phase they had just begun. Something about a faulty attachment to the crane, expensive, time-consuming to replace.

I wasn’t paying attention. I never do when she talks, but in this case I really wasn’t because I could tell a cluster of those things was nearby. T + I have codified the visual indicators now. Upturned ground, large pockets where roots have been pulled up, long, deep streaks. The most subtle sign is their orientation. They don’t have faces or fronts or back, not that T + I have been able to discern. They stand with their anterior stalks pointed in alternating patterns, one facing one way, the next facing the opposite.

I stopped before Edith stopped, she kept talking + paused between three of them. They were bent in a shape I had never seen before, like they were vomiting, the false leaves + branches stooping low to the ground. This set looked like twisted limber pines but the difference didn’t matter for Edith. It was too late for me to call her back.

I’d never actually seen them move, never saw what it looked like when they attached their pronged, stiff fingers (placeholder term) through the neck. It’s violent, deeply physical, horrible, horrible. The illusion of arboreal construction completely shatters.

I screamed. As did Edith. When I came back with help, she was lying on the ground, face down, the flesh on the back of her skull flayed like deli meat. Cuts + bruises all over her face, body, hands.

The board wants a crisis, they can have one. I told them I saw Edith fall down a slope near the same hillock where Blake blacked out. I said I was too shocked to speculate anymore. By the time I got back, the pack had moved away + Edith, though alive, was never going to see again.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to tell T.

Renata stumbled through the dim, rutted tunnels of the mine, ignorant that this entry existed. It was in the 1998 volume of Corinne’s journals, which she had yet to open. These notebooks huddled between a spare shirt, the water bottle, amid a camera lens, packages of dried food, a flashlight, all of it swaying in the dark, and there sat another decade’s worth of words in Tara’s garage and Renata had yet to think through the implications of these, the detritus of a woman’s life after consequential decisions are made. Renata had yet to think about any of this, though she would in time. Just then, she was stepping, stepping, feeling through the dark, remembering what Edith told her not long before, unaware of what was in front of or behind her, the way none of us are.

III.

STRANGER?

Do you live?

There is only silence and you do not stir.

Strewn about, cast aside, the remains of a primordial cycle from which few caught in its wind return. You are here, there, scattered in pieces that do not fit back together. The stalking things have gone, for the season is cold once more and bodies must rest. The earth opens itself to receive them and there they hide.

There is only silence and you do not stir.

Do you live?

Stranger?

3.1

PERCY GAVE EDITH THE FOLLOWING SCENARIO: IMAGINE everything she could see before her submerged beneath hundreds of feet of water. Maybe seven hundred. They stood on the parched spine of what was once America’s greatest lake, the prehistoric Lahontan, which flooded Nevada’s northwestern body for thousands of years. Try, Percy said, to picture a vast ocean unbroken by continents or shorelines, a never-ending, warm, impenetrable churning, its depths alien in every way.

Edith made Renata sit for a story, but, like Terrence, what Renata witnessed seemed more akin to a possession, the past arresting the body, the mouth merely a conduit.

Percy termed this the cliché of visualization, Edith continued. These were demonstrative, romantic but inaccurate images used to illustrate that which takes years of contemplation and study to fully grasp. The turning of the Earth. The sheer age of the planet.

You wanted to listen to Percy, Edith said, he made you feel that you really wanted to learn. This Pleistocene ocean, its size the very width of the horizon, and none of it alive to the notion of time. Percy was obsessed with time, his fixation a melancholic one, a lament for everything swallowed by it. Dare to venture into the federal wilderness and you’d find evidence of long-dead species, their pawprints stenciled into the ground. Some pond or wash long since evaporated, and at its edge, a Smilodon came to drink. It leant its head above the water, its paws sinking into the fresh mud of a common rain. These footprints, Percy said to Edith and then to Renata, remain to this day.

“It was a wonder that did little for me at the time.

“I lived my whole life in Sparks until college, a dry town. Dry soil and diners and teen boys making suicide pacts. A professor told my constitutional government class about this recruitment program for federal jobs across the state, from supply-truck drivers to ghost town tour guides. I hoped for something in environmental protection. Of course, the BLM put me in toxic waste management. There were no similar professions. Not even garbage men covered the same ground. In nearly every case, when they encountered a lethal substance, the garbage men were required by law to call someone like me. This is how it was for a long time, for most of my life before Percy, before McNairy.

“I relocated to Reno first, this shitty apartment in an isolated business park, trash waiting for development all around it, and then a small, cute little house in Carson City, where, one night in my early thirties, I watched a man collapse on the sidewalk and die. Most of my job was supervision, logistics. I’d hire local businesses to handle and dispose of chemical runoff. Otherwise they would have been sued for contaminating populated areas—asbestos usually, but sometimes hydrochloric acid, ammonia, liquid mercury.”

This and the rest of her testimony Edith recounted in the same unaffected tone, somewhere between cue card and recitation.

“I didn’t have a chance to get used to the many secret places I visited in my time at the BLM. Instead, I saw the desert whored out, pulverized, dumped on in a way that seemed to serve no true or beautiful purpose. Plots divided into parcels, caves and rock formations blown up, mausoleums for military trash, and, when I arrived at the Nevada Test Site in 1991, the concealment of controlled horrors.”

The two of them had climbed the wooden steps of the Fish Tackle Path by then, Edith holding on to Renata’s arm, Arthur’s nose at their calves. As she turned to approach the next step, Edith faced Renata and suddenly, the sense that Edith was somehow flat all the way through, that she was as slim and insubstantial as a coin.

Percy had been at the Test Site for almost five years then, and Edith narrated these portions of her story with specific length and detail owing, Renata assumed, to her lie that Percy was her father. As this woman whom Renata had only just met spoke, Renata peppered her recollections with vocal assurances, hmms and huhs, the part she played for those twenty minutes requiring only her physical presence and a reminder that she was indeed listening.

“By 1992, my work had taken me down some secret paths, my security clearance, the very idea of a security clearance at all, upgraded to a moderate level. The American government was in a state of, shall we say, reluctant compromise. It looked like the nuclear age, with its weapons testing and phony deescalation, was drawing to a close. Civilians got cancer, underground caverns of buried nuclear waste and nowhere to put it. I remember the United States detonating the last bomb that September. Of course, there were always rumors of other tests, other plans for experimental weapons, hokey rumors, but more absurd things had happened before. Besides, Percy seemed happy for the whole thing to be over.

“He and I shared a few lunches when we could, exchanged contacts, traded some polite ramblings about our respective lines of work. I can’t say that I got to know who Percy really was though. Or what became of him after I left the Site. Not until four years later, the summer of 1996, when a letter dropped from a place called McNairy that I’d never heard of, with this invitation to come and join an old friend. You know, if I happened to be in the neighborhood. It never occurred to me to actually go.

“Still, it was nice to be remembered, if a little unusual. Me, married then divorced from a professionally rich loser, still in Carson City, still being batted around Nevada on business. I wrote back to Percy with my regrets, it’s just that these days I was too busy, stretched too thin. When they came, Percy’s letters were short but filled with puzzling references to a divided life, between work and passion. By the fourth or fifth letter I learned, from a Test Site communications officer coordinating with the BLM, that Percy had been on leave for over a year. His posting at McNairy wasn’t sanctioned.”

As they stood near the dead pond at the end of the stairs, both facing the baked desert range, Renata, following an abnormal shape at the corner of her eye, finally glimpsed two things. The first was how old Edith was. Her skin was no less smooth, no less unblemished, but its texture was like rice paper, blue veins showing through, the hint of liver spots on the backs of her hands, those gray hairs on her scalp actually a brilliant white. The second came from Renata’s physical proximity, so close she could hardly focus on what Edith continued to say for the shock of what the blind woman had clearly been hiding.

Beneath her baseball cap, covered by layers of hair that had been pulled over where hair no longer grew, Edith’s neck and the base of her skull had been eaten away, a jagged, concave stem of flesh and bone patched together with waxen skin grafts, a scratching of perforated scars zigzagging over bumps where vertebrae poked at the skin, thinly covered, just barely quarantined from the air. Renata couldn’t fathom how Edith still kept her head upright. She looked down then, her eyes tracing reddened skin from Edith’s shoulders into her clothes, and staring up at her, teeth bared again, Arthur, as if he knew Renata shouldn’t have seen what she did.

Edith continued to unravel the past, oblivious.

“Something was wrong with Percy. He seemed scared to tell me and scared to keep it, whatever it was, to himself. ‘Do you remember,’ he wrote to me, ‘the story I told you about the primordial sea, the alien world that once blanketed our own, the desert we walk on the very bottom of a forgotten ocean? The dearest freshness deep down things we know nothing about? Do you remember how so much of what once was has been washed away? Do you remember how none of these mountains or valleys ever considered us?’ These questions, typical Percy questions, sounded desperate, searching. In one letter, those questions were the only thing he’d written down, no greeting, no farewell, no return address.

“In January 1997, Percy included a torn-out section of a map showing a stretch of the Colorado River, this unmarked bit of land circled in black ink. He was trying to communicate something, I know it, it’s so obvious, it pains me. Percy was born in Colorado just like his brother, but everyone is born somewhere they never really leave. I wrote him a longer-than-usual response with my own questions. The most important was if Percy, I didn’t mean to accuse or pry, was doing all right, if he planned to return to work, what exactly, because he still hadn’t actually said so, was he doing in McNairy?”

The glare of a long summer day didn’t lessen even as the sun retreated, even as the two of them stood in the shadow of the mountain. Renata could feel them, the undead standing with her and Edith, behind them both, just on the limned border, their faces turned away. Renata had the sickening thought that her mother and Percy could be laughing at their ignorance.

“By September 1997, I stopped hearing from Percy and,” Edith confessed to Renata, “I’m glad of it. To have the whole thing stop, if not completely finished. It’s too much to worry over someone most of the time. Anyone really. I can’t burden myself with unnecessary attachments. I just finished paying off my mortgage in Carson City and there was a nice patch of land in Wyoming, secluded but not too remote, where I might build a new home. I was very handy, you know, still am, despite how I look. But so goes the death of dreams.

“Suddenly, it was December and I was being given a choice: join a multidepartment pollution task force on an Air Force base in Las Vegas, or consult on the decommissioning protocols for one of the few remaining mercury telescopes in the country in, where else could it be, McNairy. I arrived in January the following year, too late for any meaningful social inroads to be made, so vital to project collaboration. I lived at a charming little bar called the Spyglass, what seemed like the throbbing heart of McNairy, but there wasn’t much life in the town. Everyone I met, after polite but vacuous questions about my comfort, my work, even, at one point, my allergies, seemed to have been traumatized by some unspeakable event. The origin and exact details remained unclear. I interviewed scientists, a lot of them just like Percy. Their precociousness, their zeal. One of them had his same fiery enthusiasm, Percy’s emotionally damaged brother. He never gave me a reason to like him. I advised municipal utility crews. I looked for Percy himself, but no one had seen him in nearly four months, not since just before the accident.”

A gleaming shard of feldspar just beyond Renata’s foot caught her eye. Her attention drifted toward it, and in the prolonged silence of her mind, Renata realized that Edith had stopped speaking. Instead, Edith turned to face her, the sunglasses resting over her eyes angled too far to one side, sliding down the bridge of her nose. There were hollows beneath thin eyelids. Edith’s eyes, as far as Renata could make out, were gone entirely. A thought, too intrusive to register as grotesque: If she were to take a sturdy branch or a metal chopstick and push it through Edith’s orbital cavity, she wondered if the end would penetrate through to the other side, right where the back of her neck was most destroyed.

“You are like Percy,” Edith said to Renata. “But I doubt you are who you say.”

She asked Renata to step closer. Edith’s hands were coldest at the fingertips, but the sensation as they slowly traced and mapped Renata’s face wasn’t unpleasant. A gust of wind swept between them, unbalancing Edith. Renata put out her hand to steady the blind woman, the arm she grasped hard, skinny. A seed of tenderness skittered toward Edith. She was frail, but undeterred. Renata respected that.

“It’s possible that you’re his daughter,” Edith admitted. “But then, I never touched Percy’s face. You could be anyone.”

Renata stepped away as politely as she could, and Edith withdrew her hands, taking up her walking stick. Arthur sniffed something on the air, his tail wagging. What happened to you? Renata wanted Edith to volunteer the answer without having to ask, would come to understand the horrible, unjust truth one day, too late, though she did not know this. The reverie had been broken somehow. Edith had become suspicious, and Renata was losing patience.

“I won’t keep you any longer,” Edith said. “You’ve been kind to listen, but I’m afraid I’m too tired to go on. You likely have some questions for me. I may not answer them. But I can’t prevent what happened to me from happening to you. I know now from trying and failing many times. They tell me I was gone for quite a long time when I went blind, in a coma. People said that, even before old Parker Grace drove me to the nearest hospital sixty miles away. My eyes were nowhere to be found.

“Sorry. I like the people here, I’m grateful that they care, that they’re discreet. It’s because of them that I stayed. I found comfort in the hope that most of what poisoned this town has left it, has been banished in some sense. The government never finished what they started, something about money, something about resources. I’d seen that kind of evasion before. None of it mattered much when I wasn’t in it. In a way, that’s why I never left. The people here were abandoned and I never stopped wondering where Percy went. If he. What happened to me. Well.”

The final word, uninflected as the rest, managed the air of a question. Edith sniffed, her lower lip trembling. Renata looked away. Arthur leaned against Edith’s leg, his snout reaching for a hand to acknowledge his presence.

“Avoid the mine, if you can spare the time. It’s the most likely to be contaminated.”

Then the two of them, wizened shepherd led by faithful companion, turned back toward the trail.

* * *

THE TUNNEL APPEARED in Renata’s mind as a desiccated mouth, every ribbed layer of rock dried and mummified flesh.

There had been a movie she and V watched when they were little, back before Tara had gotten rid of the old box television she inherited from her father. Late at night, on restless weekends, Renata and V mashed the scroll buttons back and forth. On the twenty-second channel, around 10:00 p.m. every Friday and Saturday, the same movie would play, a kind of modern fairy tale set in the New England woods, starring actors they’d never heard of or seen since. To this day, neither Renata nor V could figure out the name of the movie. They had been too frightened to finish it through to the end credits. The two of them, bleary but wired from lack of sleep, always seemed to catch the movie around the same scene, when the protagonist, a small, blond girl in overalls and a bright-green pendant necklace, stepped into the funhouse of an abandoned amusement park. The entrance was a giant mouth without teeth, just faded pink lips and a dirtied red carpet that stood for a tongue.

Inching forward into the tunnel, one hand on the stippled rock wall, Renata tried to remember the girl’s name. Nothing so obvious as Dorothy or Alice or Wendy, but not an ordinary name either.

The darkened passageway smelled savory, like rosemary and meat.

Once she crossed the threshold, Renata crouched into a nook just off to the side of the entrance and waited. The notion that she was being followed seemed melodramatic to her, but she also couldn’t dispel the feeling that she had stumbled into a mess in McNairy from which she might not easily extract herself. Between her mother, Terrence, Percy, and now Edith, four conflicting but intersecting testimonies had been presented to her, some of them still unfolding, texts and narratives for her alone to parse.

To say nothing of Francis Brown; no, she had not forgotten about him. As Edith reminisced about Percy, Renata thought a line might be beginning to reveal itself. Colorado. Percy. McNairy. Corinne. None of it accessible through the portal of her own recollection, her own experience. These were strange materials and strangers all.

At the tunnel entrance, she sat impatiently, waiting to see if anyone approached. All she could hear was the restless air, the sound of crumbled, dead things ushered along by the wind on the floor in the dark behind her.

No one came. Renata pressed a recessed button on her watch. Just past seven.

The ground she walked on inclined gradually, the intimation of light bouncing up and down the tunnel illuminating animal droppings, pieces of dark brown twisted or broken-off metal, monochromatic stains like pools of dried blood, shattered glass from bottles, a teddy bear strung up by a length of barbed wire. The strange half-light of the passage endured the further she went, even after the entrance disappeared far out of sight and the exit she hoped she was stumbling toward remained hidden.

Renata thought of taking her phone out, or, for that matter, the unused flashlight she stowed on her back. She knew why she hesitated. She had not forgotten those two points of light floating in the distance, too high off the ground to belong to a wolf or coyote, unless it stood on its hind legs. But why would it? Renata did not want to entertain the idea of a person, someone she couldn’t see or hear, in the tunnel with her. If she turned on the light now, what would be there? Likely nothing, she reasoned, her breath catching as her foot nudged a rock on the ground. If something was there, it had been there those many minutes and done nothing. Why would seeing it make anything worse? Renata usually wanted to see what she was dealing with. Or she thought she did.

Thirsty.

Her footsteps echoed down the rock hall, the ceiling a foot above her head. Renata walked slowly, not quite confident, but the half-light helped her make out the shape of the passage ahead, curving to the left, always slightly ascending, like a throat upon a hill. Her thirst began to irritate her, its persistence sudden. She felt along her arms for the protrusions that she could not fully bring herself to acknowledge lived inside her now, those filaments like pale, sentient hairs. But her skin was unmolested, inflamed and cracked as it always had been.

A scent like a blown fuse drifted toward her, acrid, burnt rubber and engine oil. A current of air searched through the tunnel behind her, sighing against her neck and hair, warm then cool, and with it, the unmistakable aroma of human sweat. Renata stopped walking, leaning with her palm against the wall. All she could hear was the familiar non-sound when the ear opens itself wide for stimulus, a silence so absolute it creates its own noise, faint but oppressive.

Burning wood. Sweat. Mildew. A weird, distinctly chemical trace of something sour, more a taste than a smell.

It was as if Renata’s other senses shut off, as if even through the barrier of her mask her nose breathed in the world without obstruction. All she could do was stand and smell, each note discrete and alive. The human scent grew fainter, the sweet trace of burnt pine stronger. She was so thirsty and the tunnel seemed eternal. The richness of everything, the force and depth of it. Another current cleared it away, each smell and the intuitive origin Renata envisioned with it. A towel had been lifted from her head. There was nothing but the half-light, no one but her.

Renata took off her backpack, letting it thud to the ground, a bass note that percussed down the tunnel ahead of her. She had been walking for ten minutes, according to her watch. She tried to calculate a pace based on distance and time, but Renata had no sense how far into the tunnel she’d gone. Her consolation, the knowledge that there were no turns other than the very first she had taken. The only other direction led toward the part of the tunnel that had collapsed.

Feeling around for the matte finish of her water bottle, Renata found only fabric, paper, plastic, metal, superfluous objects that sat in the way of her thirst. A thick wad of saliva crept up her throat, her mouth gummy, a stale flavor, like mucus during a cold, on her tongue. She could feel the heft of the bottle in the bag, could see its bulk through the front pocket, nestled somewhere beneath spare clothes. Renata had never been so parched, she was certain of it. In her desperation, she turned her backpack upside down and shook its contents onto the floor. The bottle tumbled out at last, landing heavily on her toe, the impact deadened by the steel tip of her hiking boots, a ripple of dust rising into the air.

It was cold, almost too cold, the water cascading down her gullet, mask hanging from her neck like a second face, each gulp forceful, relieving, each splash crashing down into her, her awareness shorn of anything that wasn’t mouth, throat, stomach. Renata had drunk half the bottle without breathing, without worrying about what was left, if it would last her the night, the final trek to the observatory, the journey back down the mountain.

V told her, Tara told her to bring a hydration pack, but a part of Renata had savored the image of lugging around an unwieldy metal tankard like she was stronger than she was, like she was traveling to some industrial job. She’d brought the hydration pack. It sat in the car. Now, gasping in the tunnel dark, a flood of gooseflesh spread all over her body. She thought about the next two days, about pissing all that water away, about how her diet would be affected by how much water she had left. Most of her newly bought belongings—filters, electrolyte packets, protein bars, energy goo, juice, a second container of water, chargers—waited in the trunk at the campsite. She blanched at the thought of someone opening the hatch. It looked like she’d stolen a haul from a big-box store and fled. Such overpreparedness, as if she planned on leaving civilization behind, as if she had to survive the absence of mankind entirely, as if she hadn’t hiked dozens and dozens of times with V for hours and days during all seasons and needed next to nothing.

And yet, in this one endeavor, dazed by purpose, the most basic necessities were half depleted and out of reach. This was what V always made up for, Renata thought. Her impulsiveness. They anticipated her blind spots. V wasn’t there and Renata felt foolish that she hadn’t asked them to be. She hadn’t looked in their eyes when she left for that very reason.

Renata began gathering everything she’d so hastily dumped on the ground, patting the dirt at her feet, on her knees, one arm supporting her weight, the other grabbing. Renata thought she recovered most of what had been dropped, everything but Corinne’s journals and Francis Brown’s diary, which must have flapped open and skidded just beyond her reach.

The sturdy, slim plastic of a jerky pouch. A pillbox. Her ointment. An extra N95 in an individual plastic package. A bag of mixed nuts. The leather case of her telephoto lens. Her face mask prodded uncomfortably at her throat as Renata angled her head down, squinting, as if parsing the darkness was a matter of focus. A layer of chalk coated her hands.

There was a corner of something long, rectangular, yielding. Only the state map she’d brought, her mother’s, another item tucked away along with her myriad effects, Renata could tell by the furred creases and soft points at each corner. Sweat ran from her temples, the air suddenly close once more. She refused to bring a tent, but there was her jacket lashed by elastic cinches on the front of her backpack. The week before driving out, she’d packed a backup pair of glasses in a hard shell case, wrapping the jacket around them, in case her eyes became too strained at night, as they often did when she stayed up late in the prolonged, inadequate light of her bedside lamp.

A textured, heavy cylinder. Her flashlight. Crumbs. An external battery with rubberized exterior, one of those vaguely military-looking affairs that only came in bright colors. Sharp-edged stones, gravel, something pliant but tangled, a clump of hair or an old spiderweb.

Renata could make out the line of her arms and hands before her, and with each object she touched, a highlighted mental image of what she held, as if she were making the thing glow. Renata’s fingers brushed the tunnel wall to her left. She must have turned as she searched. Pushing out her right hand, Renata felt the same grainy texture. Both hands were extended now and resting on stone surfaces like she was facing a corner. She felt her backpack against the heel of her right foot. She hadn’t moved more than a couple of feet. Suddenly, Renata focused on the press of her phone in her back pocket, the backlit screen, the facsimile of the flashlight icon, more readily deployed than the actual flashlight she had just tossed back into her bag.

Renata held her breath, pricked her ears.

The wall on her left felt so solid as to be the very body of the mountain, its interior totally black with untouched, perfectly set molten earth. The wall on her right felt sturdy but unrooted, coarse, irregularly scuffed and pitted like the wall to her left but with the slightest give. Old leather. Reptile skin, but unseparated by scales, bone, or sinew. Renata’s first thought was a stalagmite or some section of rock unevenly hewn from the tunnel, a column or some little alcove she had only missed when she first stopped. But just before, when she retrieved her pillbox, she extended forward on her knees, her back lengthened, arms stretched as far out as her shoulders would allow. Now, she brought them back, her arms bent near her chest, fingers running up against a structure that had not existed there before. In the subsurface gloaming of the tunnel, Renata followed the stony protrusion on her right from the ground, where it seemed to sprout, past her arm, up to the ceiling.

Two tiny pinpricks of light hung in the air, farther apart than when she first spotted them from the mine entrance. They couldn’t have hovered more than four or five feet above her head, but Renata could no longer deny that they were eyes.

Slowly, she let her breath blow out from her lungs through her nose.

Renata shook her right hand away from whatever was looking at her and waited for it to move, to blink. Her brain couldn’t wring sense from experience. Gone was any extrasensory awareness, the animal intuition of knowing, without seeing, that something was in the room with her, that eyes were trained on her back. Were it not for those steady, miniscule—now she could see—yellow dots glowing in the dark, Renata would have thought herself alone. Even now, meeting its gaze, Renata felt like she looked into an abyss.

It was silent.

Renata held her breath again, sweat trailing down the back of her neck, her armpits, her chin. The bandage on her elbow was leaking warm blood, droplets falling from the tip of the bone. She waited on her knees, hands up, like she was being told to freeze, like she was frozen in worship. The thing didn’t move and neither did Renata. Her back strained from holding her position so long, and it occurred to Renata, through her fear, that the two of them were locked in a kind of death imitation, playacting the idea of not being there at all.

In the dim twilight, there was no head shape, no shoulders, or arms. Behind its eyes, Renata couldn’t see anything, a complete obstruction, an entire section of wall swung out from the tunnel to block her path. Renata blinked, swallowed, thought she finally must do something. A moment after her eyes opened again, the two lights disappeared. They rematerialized.

Renata blinked. A second later, it blinked too.

Trembling, Renata pushed her upturned right palm where she once rested it, remembered the fine-grained, sandy quality, not skin, not stone. V brought her a segment of sheep vertebra once, a preserved gift from the desert. The dried, ossified, angular knot of bone felt wooden, she could have carved a line into its surface with ease and that line would have stayed forever. The thing reminded her of that tangle of spine. And there it was again, only closer this time. Renata’s arm barely proceeded half the distance it had before.

She pressed her hand from the wrist, letting her fingers slide flat against the surface of it, this whatever, she couldn’t think straight. Her palm, dotted with a dry but cool substance like kinetic sand, was met with a corresponding pressure.

Briefly, imperceptibly, a vibration like the strumming of guitar strings passed under Renata’s hand, the hard contour against her skin seeming to melt then reconstitute as many spiny points trailed along from left to right. A chill ran down Renata’s neck, gooseflesh again, the fuzzy halo before a blackout. She gently drummed her fingers from forefinger to pinky against the thing, what part of it, she couldn’t know. The undulation returned, the surface rippling before returning to an unyielding roughness.

Renata hadn’t broken eye contact, but now, her neck seizing from the angle, the eyes above her seemed to flicker, distant yellow flames drawing further away, and as they brightened then dimmed, she could divine hollows behind the eyes, too large to be sockets, with slivers of the tunnel glimpsed between long, petallike extensions. The section of its body that made contact with her hand pulled back. The eyes dimmed and dimmed, deeper, further, and just before they winked out completely, those slivers near the ceiling seemed to shrink and wilt.

Renata breathed out through her mouth, parched once again.

With a flutter of pages turned by the wind, her mother’s journals and Francis Brown’s diary dropped to the ground.

3.2

AUGUST 5, 1905

A broken arm today, thankfully not my writing arm, though I do fancy myself capable of passing ambidexterity. In truth, this is one of several little disasters that have conspired against me over a course of months. Indeed, though the events that led to my injury were entirely accidental, they do not feel incidental. They fall together like the key to a cipher.

It began with a discovery, the record of which I had made note on unbound pages and had failed to copy in this diary. Reading these entries back now—I could not continue my usual recordings in this volume for some months last year when I was forced by the company to temporarily relocate my base of operations upriver, the resulting disruption depriving me of my original effects, which were stowed safely at measuring station GR-5—I do not recognize the man who wrote them. One feature stands out: the clipped nature of my sentences, so terse, rushed, as I was then, working alongside a colleague named Wilshire who seemed, in a word, touched.

To say nothing of the inconsistency with which I wrote. I have never allowed whatever day’s trials to interrupt the fullness of these entries. If I find myself weary, unfocused, or otherwise spiritually despondent, I reserve my recollection for the following morning when I am restored. There were indeed unspeakable nightmares on many occasions during those spring and summer months. I cannot account for them nor the stalking, depressing gloom I felt so acutely then. More troublingly, I cannot account for the return of those same feelings this very week, which possess the quality of a premonition.

I made note of the tree in the tunnel, a novelty that would have otherwise been omitted for the fact that I would not have known it existed without such abrupt change in scenery. Wilshire had been the first to alert me to its presence. I seem to refrain from writing, in the previous entries, that the passage leading from the Grand River to the tree lies directly beneath the living quarters Wilshire and I shared. I believe I made some note of this to Lenny in one of my letters—of Wilshire’s energy, inoffensive but highly changeable, sometimes rising and falling in direct proportion to his obsession with this tree.

Indeed, I confess here, months later, that I did not share with Lenny my suspicions that the fellow likely seemed a half-breed afflicted with the mental instability of the conjoined races. I harbor no prejudice against Wilshire if that is indeed his heritage nor against any others of his kind. There is every indication that my own father, proud and stout as he is, might have something tainted in his blood, some quality to the fullness of his lips, the shelflike jutting of his brow that has always struck me as obviously negroid. I did not mention any of this to Lenny who, for all I know, may one day read these diaries and if so, must forgive my impertinent suppositions. I only know that she once loved a mongrel man, that she wished to bear him children, that their union was forbidden by her family, that, to this day, I remain unconvinced that she did not indeed give birth to this man’s child. I have never met him nor glimpsed his likeness, but his existence haunts me. In those courting months, it took all my persuasive powers, of which there are few, to convince Lenny to confess to me the truth of this relationship before we wed. I have never held it against her. Who can hold love, even misguided, aberrant love, against any heart?

Besides, it was her refusal to give in to shame that told me all I need know and allowed me to trust in her as she trusted in me. She did not hide this man or their time together from me out of malice or embarrassment, but out of common decency and propriety. To her, there remains nothing to be ashamed of, a stance she clarified as it applied to him and to me. I cannot say that I have known any woman so forthright or so withering in her lack of fear or politeness. Of course, I would have granted her anything, out of love and out of guilt, for there are lovers in my past that Lenny has never known about. And yet, when I first met Wilshire, I thought immediately of my wife’s first love and a pang of jealousy stung my heart. That irrationality clings to me even now.

The first time we ventured out together with the intention of visiting this curious secret of nature, Wilshire led with his wan, genial manner. I followed with no small measure of confusion and impatience. The man had not stopped talking about the tree during those first weeks. As we waded into the river and passed into the tunnel, which appeared to have been scratched rather than dug, I had been too foolish to notice that the shafts of light burning from above were the very holes that dotted the anterior space near our station, apertures I had taken for mole diggings or the dens of those overlarge spiders I have had no choice but to grow accustomed to here.

I regarded the tree’s existence as unremarkable, though I did not make note of this. I had ceased my diary entries for several months following my relocation, frustrated by a lack of materials. The retrieval of this current diary was impossible. At the time, I had been delivered some twenty miles by wagon to a comparatively bustling watering hole by the river. This nascent village was in the throes of development. Wooden buildings that would later house a saloon, a grocer, a hotel were being crafted as I disembarked. I remember a wave of unbecoming aversion at the sight of so many people. After the tranquility and seclusion of my work in previous months, society seemed crude. And yet, no paper, no ink. I left a note with the grocer, who lived in a canvas tent beside his future business, that I would pay to get my hands on a handsome leather-bound journal, at least seven inches by ten inches, with no fewer than 100 unmarked pages. I believe I waited at least two months before such an item arrived. In that span, Wilshire’s discovery became my preoccupation.

I cannot shake the sensation of being watched as I write through this diary.

I do not actively believe myself to be writing in any way for posterity—I simply hope to know my own mind, I tell myself this as if it is not self-evident, as if I am defending against an assailant who doubts my character, and in even elucidating that thought, the noble pursuit of recording some facet of being for later study, I seem all the more uncertain as to whether this pursuit of self-knowledge is true. I cannot shed this impulse to clarify all that might be misconstrued and in doing so, new revelations peek out from behind the thistle and chaff of my thoughts. I also sense that, barring the normal erasures and losses that accompany most any life, I must be as clear as possible. I must be thorough.

It is no detour to stake this reality as aberrant, for it began on that very day with Wilshire. He showed me his little hidden passage by the river, and while I was unimpressed then, a creeping feeling, quite unexpected but present as any natural force, seemed to have attached itself to me. It has followed me wherever I go. I know now it is because the tree is not of this world. It cannot, in light of recent developments, be reasonably called a tree though its outer presentation would suggest otherwise. It is the vehement oddity of what Wilshire has happened upon that frames this entire affair in an even more bewildering light. Wilshire claimed to have known of this specimen long before he was stationed at GR-11.

Wilshire hailed from Arizona, from another portion of the river that flows along its southwestern borders, and so shared his familiarity of the Grand’s pathways with me as a point of professional concern born from a singularly personal passion. He had been destined to make his living along the river’s flows, he told me. No other profession had ever occurred to him. And what better occupation than to live beside the current, take its measure, report on its fluctuations in water level, temperature, composition, rate of flow? In short, what other line of work not only permitted but required an intimate relation to its foundational area of study? Wilshire was besotted.

I could share in some of his enthusiasm for the work, but I am no naturalist. I do not regard these charred and verdant landscapes with superstition or the condescending exoticism credited to the Indian. It is one of the privileges of this lonely occupation that I have encountered the Indian, broken bread with him, and come to understand that his ways are no better or worse than our own. He has been afforded what the imperial nation of America can never manufacture—time—and with that comes knowledge, hard won but sensible enough. He may believe in gods I do not see and he may keep them. But it is clear that those like Wilshire, who fancy themselves Indians in white dress-up, harbor a delusional aspect that is dangerous. Still, I cannot wholly deny Wilshire’s skill, his ability to divine changes in weather long before they developed, his aptitude for direction. There were many times, on various excursions out into the wilderness in search of natural springs or groundwater wells, when we became lost only because of my ineptitude and were saved because of Wilshire’s superior attunement to the desert.

I do believe now that I was being tested in those first months. Wilshire was taking my measure and I, having unwittingly passed some invisible-to-me examination administered by him, was allowed into some psychic inner sanctum. He took it upon himself to show me the specimen as a matter of urgency, quite literally pulling me by the arm out of the station and marching us to the river’s edge. After some splashing about, more the result of my sour and reluctant conduct, which saw me wrestling with Wilshire like a child, Wilshire seemed to decide it was better to simply continue down into the tunnel without dragging me and I would either follow him or return to the station.

Needless to say, I followed.

We gazed at the specimen for at least an hour that first day, and I confess I could not have been less amused. Wet, perplexed, exhausted with my partner’s disorienting behavior, all I could think was how unfortunate it was to allow such good quality trousers as the ones I wore to soak in muddied waters for so prolonged a time. But, just before we departed, as if those final moments were indeed what we had been made to wait for, the tree-like specimen moved.

Distinctly, its branches twitched, not the twitch of wind passing through the tunnel or the thrash of some small dace swimming out from beneath its roots, but a deliberate, animal spasm, as if muscles had been fired by nerves. The grayish, veined bark running in vertical lines along its main trunk stretched ever so slightly, as if the thing breathed, though there was no attendant sound of an exhale nor the return of the body to an equilibrium state, as when a man breathes in, seems to enlarge himself ever so slightly with that breath, then breathes out again, shrinking back down to his natural form. It was more like the tree was rearranging something within itself, as if it were making room for an object or shifting that object about inside it, as if there were a fetus buried somewhere unseen.

In the depths of the tunnel, against the wall where the tree had rooted itself, a pocket of shadow hid any further scrutiny of its form. I looked over to Wilshire, standing there, one hand braced on the ceiling, his body swaying with the trapped current of the passage, and deemed his toothless smile an omen.

A few days following Wilshire’s revelation, he was removed from his post at GR-11 and I was left alone in that strange place. He informed me of his reassignment further down river as a matter of no great concern. Poised at the station’s entrance, hat in hand, Wilshire’s parting words were, “Not too close, not too far.” I have not seen him since, but in his absence, my focus lay solely with the tree. Many afternoons I spent in thrall to the possibility that the specimen might move again, but such hopes proved to be in vain. I was to spend another four months at GR-11, with a total of 54 visitations that I noted, all at least one hour in duration, and not once did the tree move in a way I could perceive, not like it did that first day. By early fall, I was allowed to return to my former posting at GR-5 and decided this brief obsession was best left alone.

It was only a matter of weeks after returning that I found a corpse. There is no other way to describe it.

3.3

THE FLASHLIGHT’S BEAM WAS HARSH AGAINST THE CENTENARIAN pages, Brown’s script hypnotic in its loops, its tidy consistency.

For miles and miles, the desert enveloped Renata. For the first time since she had walked along the terrestrial rip of the Grand Canyon as a child, she felt some inkling of the desert’s true physical size, its time-deep vastness. This blinking, budding comprehension frightened her.

She exited the mine tunnels in haste, though some part of her, even if it did not feel entirely rational to say she thought this, knew the entity she had encountered was gone. Renata knew she was not out of danger, merely that danger had been delayed. The blood from her elbow wound trailed a path down her wrist. It was five minutes of the inclining tunnel floor and the constant leftward bend of the passage before she glimpsed soft, inviting evening light, and when looking back, a Pollock line of blood dotted into the darkness.

At the exit of the mine, a copse of overgrown trees and brush crowded around, unchecked for years, stiff limbs and serrated leaves scratching at her thighs and shins, the town and the valley behind it plastered to her left like a matte painting. The mountain lifted above her, its body leaning back to the east, and here, finally, past a density of even more trees, even more brush, Renata glimpsed the zigzag of switchbacks that marked the service road to the observatory, a gray line faded with time and disuse, boulders, rusted fencing, and decaying plant matter cluttering the path.

The sun had been firmly out of sight then, not just behind the mountain but below the horizon. In her hands Renata held her mother’s journals, Francis Brown’s diary, their existence and her possession of them made more precious by their momentary seizure in the clutches of the thing in the tunnel. Her mind, her eyes buzzing from the adrenaline and stretched-out time, the incomprehensibility of her encounter melding uneasily with the alien intuition she had trusted to mimic the entity. Renata inspected the notebooks in the waning daylight. She turned them over, hunched slightly with the weight of her backpack, brushing off dust and pollen, searching for telltale scratches, stains, markings of any kind to document the entity’s grip. Renata didn’t know that it had gripped the notebooks, gripping suggested a hand, or something like a hand, and there was nothing she understood about the thing other than the fact that it possessed no type of body she had ever seen before. Indeed, she had not seen it, only sketched out its contours by what she squinted at in the tunnel and what she felt with her palm. Her hands were shaking.

Renata dropped the notebooks on the ground, and the sound was nothing like they made when the thing did the same only moments before. She drank from her tankard. She pulled her phone from her pocket and dialed V. Not even a ringtone, simply a long defiant note. Renata toggled to her messages. V had written, “fuck mcnairy is far???” mere minutes after she entered the tunnel, and then “mom wants to come with. arguing . . .” And then “sorry, this is going to take a while. call me when you can. i’ll figure something out, promize.” But that was all for tomorrow.

Renata was alone. She could see lights on in the few large buildings in McNairy, the post office dark, the Spyglass like a house in a snow globe. Of course, she could turn back. Not through the tunnel again, though she might come out of it faster than the first time. She could pick her way slowly through the night down the unpaved mountainside and face the blind threat of a sheer drop. Turning back to the road, what looked like a cleft of rock at the nearest bend suddenly shifted into the silhouette of a person standing in the offing with their arms at their sides.

Renata ducked down behind a tree, a towering Engelmann spruce, edging her head out from behind it.

The silhouette was an illusion, the cleft merely a cleft.

These optical fake outs abounded since Renata could remember, a fact of the desert, the inability to accurately judge distance and shadow, walking across or through or down for an hour or two, thinking oneself on an individual, rejuvenating hike and there, at the top of a ridge far away, what looked like a stranger facing you, unmoving. It was an experience Renata had never gotten used to. Not least for the fact that sometimes, mostly never, but sometimes, there really was someone standing there.

In her exhaustion, Renata dropped the journals and the diary without looking, and one of them, her mother’s from 1998, lay open, face down against the dirt. Renata picked it up, wiping it off, scanning the left-hand page:

FEB. 4, 1998—

From the BOOK OF MONELLE, Marcel Schwob

“+ Monelle kept on:

I pity, I pity you, my beloved.

But now I return into the night; for it is necessary that you lose me before you find me again. + if you find me again, I will escape you again.

For I am the one who is alone.”

And on the facing page, another rectangle of text without source or quotation mark:

FEB. 10, 1998—

I welcome the grave, so let it come.

I welcome the world in its brackish sum,

+ the flesh turned rotten, drink turned sour,

Every memory forgotten, each rock another hour.

I bartered the future, so let it die.

I have tasted the dream behind your wilted eye.

Gone! Dead! The brush, the vine bows at my feet.

You have not, dare not, can not confess to me

anything.

Her mother must have been eight months pregnant then.

Renata remembered the passage Corinne had written in December the previous year about finding Brown’s diary, about not finding Percy. Her mother’s entries were littered with references to books, mostly novels, poets, one of whom Percy favored because Francis Brown favored him. Corinne loved Dickens, she reread him constantly. It surprised Renata at first, to discover that her mother harbored an affinity for literature, but then Tara had always been bookish too. It was one of the few similarities with Corinne that Tara readily acknowledged.

Renata felt she couldn’t be all that surprised at her mother’s turn to poetry. There had been nothing particularly artful about Corinne’s journal writing, but, Renata continually had to concede, her mother’s reflections ranged from cold and matter-of-fact to unexpectedly, almost distressingly, vulnerable. The poem on the page read like a lament, but Renata couldn’t decide who or what it was for. Percy, possibly. It was written only a few months after the incident. Or maybe for Corinne herself, her life after what happened at the observatory, her life before Renata was born, a disruption, an unwelcome surprise, though this last thought—

Renata slotted the notebooks under her arm and lurched over to a small clearing thirty yards from the mine entrance, a divot in the mountain where a wall of rock curved inward. A short ridge obscured the service road to her left when she sat down, and before her, a run of gray and white rocks sticking out of dried brown soil and sand, fallen branches littering together with large crushed, rusted cans and other bits of dead metal. The higher she ascended, the more evidence of the mine’s working days there were, but none of it was marked or preserved.

Even down in McNairy, no effort was made to memorialize what so many other towns in Nevada, in every state out west, even the ones that had never been near any kind of extractive industry, had maintained. Renata tried to recall the photographs lining the walls of the Spyglass, all those sepia-toned portraits and tintypes, mustachioed men and severe-looking women in dark, tight dresses, shots of the landscape, the desert recognizable though Renata couldn’t have been sure they captured this desert. The images seemed too generic to record anything real or historical about McNairy. To say nothing of the observatory, which everyone she had talked to seemed familiar with but conspicuously blasé toward. No one hesitated to perform their feelings about it, good or bad, but there had also been a strangely uniform set of recollections. Those weirdos up on the mountain playing with fire. A fad that came and went.

Renata thought of starting a fire. She had a ferro rod and plenty of natural fuel around her, but she wasn’t cold and she could only imagine what might become of her if she accidentally sparked a wildfire outside a town with no fire station. The idea was a veil for the comfort it would bring when night fell, the warm, ambient light creating a halo around her campsite, a calming burn to keep whatever lived in the dark at bay. But Renata favored discretion over comfort most days. Better to settle in among the rocks and trees and make her presence as inconspicuous as possible. She looked over her shoulder toward the summit, but the mountain was in its own way. All she could see was its towering bulk, a distended gut fading and fading and fading into a shadow.

Again, Renata cleaned her elbow wound, wiping delicately with an antiseptic pad, the blood a deeper red than it had bled before. The alcohol from the pad dripped all over her hands, licking unseen abrasions and tiny cuts that coalesced into a dull stinging. Alcohol made her skin dry, more so than it usually was. She brought no bag to dispose of her waste, another oversight. Instead, she wrapped everything, the soiled pad, its ripped package, a new bandage wrapper, old and browned gauze, the shiny plastic sheath of a granola bar, into one of her spare socks.

Renata looked at her phone. No calls, no messages, no bars. Standing up, Renata stretched, reaching up then folding in half, her legs straight, her nose against her knee. The skin around her waist felt tight, as if her flesh had been pulled over a skeleton too large for it. Likely her fatigue, likely her dehydration.

Renata walked along the ledge just outside the mine entrance, peered over again at the drop, tried to squint her car into existence. Back toward the road, the ground crunching then swallowing her footsteps, Renata began walking up that first incline toward the hollow. The mountain terrain was beginning to change at this altitude, what she guessed to be at least eight thousand feet. The timberline couldn’t have been all that much further, a difference in a thousand feet that would pass her by. The tallest trees would recede above that point, the landscape too windy, too cold to allow for anything larger than shrubs and shorter foliage to thrive.

Renata expected to find no one at the top, not only for the observatory’s seclusion but the altitude’s physical effects. Mount Charleston felt this way at the peak of some of its easiest hiking trails, not so much a constriction of air as a dearth of it. The feeling of that thinness in Renata’s chest was familiar, but she also felt as if she were breathing just as slowly and confidently as she had at ground level. She walked past the hollow, no longer in that human shape.

With any luck, her journey would be over before V decided whether or not they would actually leave the city. All that was left to do was eat, try to sleep, plan the next, final part of this death walk she found herself on. But it was barely too bright yet and though she was exhausted, Renata could tell it was the kind of fatigue that wouldn’t dissipate gracefully and blessedly into drowsiness. It was a wired, charred physical depletion, the result of a long, sustained sensory assault. Her shoulders felt like they had been molded into a new shape, like they drooped down to her ribs and carried her neck with them.

And her skin. Renata rested her head against the rock, eyes closed, endeavored not to notice the prickling, needlepoint incisions all over her body, a dried-up and abandoned delta cracking under heat and wind. Most days, she could ignore the pain, the flaking, the seaming of flesh, but also the minute shifts in movement and behavior. Renata had become used to accommodating this agony, used to thinking of her skin as a rubber band that couldn’t be stretched too far too quickly too often. At those points of greatest stress, often the mere aftermath of what would have been normal activity for anyone else, the tearing was all but inevitable, the scarring layered and tough.

But there had been those explosive moments since she came to McNairy.

Those pockets of untime, of bodily possession and those snaking, near translucent whorls of she knew not what, how they pushed, how they flowed through her body as if they wavered in a clear stream and that stream was nothing short of a vibrant, electric openness to the world. It was perverse how deeply she missed a sensation that had come and gone in a matter of minutes and had no corollary, no obvious function, no origin. Renata shuddered at the memory, at the possession’s seeming randomness, at its having always been possible before now, and what it might mean, though Renata suspected that something as human as meaning might not factor into it.

She turned back.

The small camp Renata hadn’t yet fashioned. The air that moved around her alternately cool and warm. The trees leaning and creaking above, so high up it seemed as if one strong gust could send them tumbling down. The air smelled wet, a musty, deep scent, a drop of rain falling on a tongue of yellowed ground, darkening the earth, more drops and more bloomings of brown, thirsty desert. It was happening somewhere far off, but getting closer, the rain and the clouds barreling toward McNairy from the north. Innately, Renata knew this without having to summon or look for it and thought nothing of how she knew.

Instead she remembered that snap of a branch underfoot and the telltale odor of human perspiration. Like ants wandering in search of shelter or food. Renata thought of her mother, Terrence, Percy, Edith. Corinne and her friends and fellow insular brilliants looking, all that time, in the wrong direction.

Renata scanned her surroundings once again. Ever since last night, she seemed primed to search for a pair of glowing eyes hiding in the distance. But there were none that she could see. Still, she wouldn’t allow herself to count on her isolation this far up the mountain, not here in a place whose people she still couldn’t trust, whose trails and secrets she still didn’t know, frankly did not ever want to know beyond this journey.

Out of her backpack, Renata drew out a bundle of spare grayish-brown shoelaces that blended in with the muted, earthen color of her hiking boots. It was the kind of lace meant to be cut to size and put to use in multiple, utilitarian ways, either as twine or lashing or clothesline or an emergency tourniquet, made of a tough, thick, wax-coated material that held its shape stiffly.

Renata unspooled the string, bent at severe angles from its extended confinement in her bag, and began walking away from camp. Renata took the end she held and tied it around the base of a budding limber pine on the side of camp closest to the service road. Letting the cord run about two feet off the ground, Renata pulled it taut around an Engelmann growing a few yards parallel and then around the same tree she hid behind and back toward camp. Finally, she took the last section of loose cord and tied it around her right ankle, just above the cuff of her socks, against her skin.

A fast, irregular square of string hung around her, high enough that it was unlikely to be stepped over, low enough not to be seen easily without looking down, made even more inscrutable in the pitch dark that would come. Renata sat back at the arched rock, fishing for a small but heavy stone. She selected a smooth, ovoid rock, hefted it in her hand, tossed it toward the length of cord pulled tight between the two Englemanns.

It sailed high above the line. Another rock, another miss. And again. And again.

The fifth attempt strummed the lace and tumbled out of sight. The vibration was subtle but immediate against her calf, a phone ringing through the earth. As long as Renata stayed in the vicinity of the camp for the night, the integrity of her ramshackle alarm system would hold.

It was then, in the aftermath of her industriousness, or what she hoped might at least be a prudent safeguard, that she had taken up Francis Brown’s diary and read of Wilshire, the Grand River station, and the thing that lived beneath it. The evening glow diffused so evenly it was as if light emanated from the diary’s very pages, and again, that voice in Renata’s head, her conception of Brown as some sort of archetypal British explorer when he had been an American scientist of uncertain status and reputation, certainly well educated from his prose, but she still had no idea what he really looked like, if he might have been bald or tall or charming or lithe or if any of these things had an effect on his personality.

These were superficial questions, Renata knew, that she might have asked about her mother had she not been furnished with so much photographic evidence her entire life, ghostly afterimages of times and places a daughter had never been privy to and never would. Renata’s gaze on Brown’s writing unfocused slightly, her attention shifting to Corinne, to the portrait hung up in the Spyglass of her mother holding her as a baby. And Lanny, terse but affectionate, easily startled, someone who laughed gently, without affectation or condescension, a natural surrender to emotion it was difficult for Renata to imagine her mother allowing. This sturdy person that Lanny was, physically sturdy, Renata remembered this about her well, after crashing into her one afternoon in the house, the way, when she hit Lanny’s stomach while running from V during some game and looking the other way, Lanny didn’t move.

Corinne’s trove of personal journals ended in 2008, when Renata was ten and she had only just begun being babysat by Lanny. That bifurcation, temporally and professionally, seemed too pronounced to be a coincidence. Corinne kept her work quarantined from her thoughts. Renata had almost forgotten those other boxes in Tara’s garage, the ones filled with notebooks full of equations, xeroxed copies of research papers, calculations, math with letters and words Renata had heard of but didn’t understand. In some ways, she knew the Corinne moldering in those boxes was closer to the Corinne she grew up hearing about, the absent mother, a rationalist and a stubborn perfectionist, someone whose thoughts were governed by objective, measurable pursuits, someone who did not care very much or very well for others. By most indications, her mother was not a good person. She was selfish and dismissive, withering in her estimation of people she deemed inferior, and unconcerned with the impact of her words. And still, Renata had not yet read the entry that would solidify and implode these observations, the passage where Corinne did something, or allowed something horrible to occur. Corinne’s journals didn’t necessarily tell a different story, but they provided a more intimate, contradictory arc. There were other people in her mother’s journals, for one, though it was difficult to imagine those people as real. They walked where Renata now sat, had pored over the landscape, over distant planets and galaxies from the top of a desert mountain and thought little of it.

In her hands, Renata still held Francis Brown’s diary, her body following where her mind had not. Beneath her eye passed the word “tendrils” and Renata awoke fully from her disassociative drift: “ . . . the unmistakable white of bone peeked forth with thick tendrils wrapped round it, some of these tendrils hanging lifelessly along the ground.”

Renata scanned back a few paragraphs and then, when she could not recall their contents, back a few pages:

I decided one cold winter morning to trek out to a hot spring whose location I only discovered thanks to the suggestion of the previous station attendant, who left a letter addressed to “whomever fills this unhappy lot.” The spring is some five or six miles upriver, through deep canyons of rounded white rock that give unto stepped sandstone flats. In the final quarter mile, you must walk down an increasingly narrow passage between two canyon faces which extend at least twenty feet above you, at first walking forward then being made to shuffle side to side as the walls squeeze close. You can only see the sky above you and the next bend of stone ahead before, quite suddenly, the pebbled ground grows damp and rivulets of steaming water seem to simply bubble up from the earth, culminating in a pool barely five feet in depth, a natural depression shaped by millennia of erosion and heat. A sort of rock table extends a few feet from the far side of the spring, runoff flowing over it to feed a small stream that lies at the bottom of a drop of perhaps seven feet. I have never attempted to clamber down to see where the stream leads.

Every pathway to the hot springs is unmarked but well traveled. Foot depressions, both shod and bare, are visible in the sand and gravel, sometimes so fresh that the wind has yet to remove a dirtied print from a rock face. I traveled this route many times before and found that the spring’s restorative pleasures were taken at their fullest when the weather was coldest. I have never brought a thermometer with me—I prefer to pack efficiently—but I would hardly be shocked to learn that the spring’s waters exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit or more.

I know I am not the only person who enjoys the spring. Evidence of use abounds from food scraps to bits of leather or cloth littered in the canyon. Most amusing was a crude drawing scrawled into the rock face in the final narrow stretch, likely with a bit of sandstone, of a human figure with great horns protruding from its head.

On that day, not two miles from the river, on the route I found to be least besieged by brush and thorn, a treelike object much like the one Wilshire introduced to me lay flat across my path. The Grand flows through countless variations of forest and desert, at many levels of altitude, for miles and miles. Our understanding of the geologic development of this area is poor, though there is every reason to suggest that the suppositions of a preeminent scholar called Thornton Grey, whom I consider a friend, hold true: a once-great but since-depleted ocean that covered the whole world, not unlike the flood of Genesis but based in firm scientific evidence that is only growing in veracity.

I thought of this as the shape of the corpse made itself apparent, at first as unremarkable detritus one encounters in the wilderness, a fallen tree or even the carcass of a deer or a bear. However, there was a bloodlike substance smeared on the ground several yards behind it, a deep maroon tinged with streaks of white and green like plant matter and dark, stringy lines of what, for an animal, might be remnants of tendon or skin. The thing on the ground steamed in the cold morning air.

It was about ten feet in length and nearly five feet across, with a hardy, ashen bark that appeared riven by some sort of disease. Deep, long fissures extended along its bulk, easily mistaken for the grooves of a pine tree, but the texture was far stranger, like that of the canyons that surrounded us. And from these fissures, which forked and broke like dried skin, that selfsame ichor, which did not flow but dribbled thickly, much more viscous than blood. Branches broken from the impact of the tree’s fall lay strewn about, and these too bore the signs not of desiccated shrubbery but mammalian wounding.

There was no doubt in my mind that what lay before me was another of Wilshire’s beloved specimens, only this one had perished under unknown circumstances. At the bottom, where a rooted trunk should be, the unmistakable white of bone peeked forth with thick tendrils wrapped round it, some of these tendrils hanging lifelessly along the ground. The illusion of a single, unbroken column of wood was shattered from this perspective, for there were clearly three distinct segments perforating the circular shape of the body like poorly chopped firewood. At the opposite end of the specimen, where the crown of a tree might sprout a canopy of leaves and sturdy limbs, there grew spiny, crooked extensions that could be mistaken for tree branches but far less rigid, dark and protracted, in places thicker than my forearm, in others no larger than my finger.

I noted these aspects with nothing like the dispassionate scientific attention I display here. I was beside myself in those moments of discovery and shock. What I cannot describe adequately is the smell, putrid and sour, of rot multiplied by the age of years. I could not fathom what I saw, and I dared not touch the thing for fear of contaminating myself with whatever had afflicted it. In truth, I still could not decide if it was animal or plant, if it was a thing with organs and a heart, or some entity hidden from the knowledge of man, some hybrid beast that had been left to roam the western deserts in peace and seclusion.

I am ashamed to say I turned back.

In that harsh and engorging morning light, the implication of what I had seen frightened me more than I care to elucidate. But I am nothing if not curious, if not stubborn in my own small, feeble way. My mind could not stop churning. I cast my memory back just a few weeks prior and before then, a matter of months. The commonality, of course, was the river. What little I could force out of Wilshire about his relation to these things informed me that, at least according to his experience, these beings subsist on water. But then, what living creature on earth does not? This alone did not make them exceptional, but I entertained the possibility that their need for water was far greater than a human being’s or a plant’s. Perhaps that was why the specimen I came across near the hot springs was so depleted.

Of course, this raised another, even more disturbing possibility: the little movement I witnessed in Wilshire’s presence, that twitch, that intimation of respiration, was a paltry demonstration of their true, potentially ambulatory capabilities. While I thought I might bide my time and search for further evidence of their whereabouts near GR-5, the notion of more intensive, prolonged study finagled its way into my brain. I knew for certain of a location where at least one specimen dwelled. And, for all my sins, I knew now some dim yet revelatory aspect of their physical makeup, their seemingly fused and bipolar construction, though I had yet to witness one move at its full strength or speed. Of course I had to go back to GR-11.

But I will recount those terrible events tomorrow. My hand grows tired and the hour late.

Brown’s entities sounded like no creature Renata could draw parallel to. Except the thing in the tunnel. And, increasingly likely, the catalyst to the incident at the observatory, an event Corinne had vaguely detailed thus far, one that Terrence had skirted round, one that Edith had arrived in the wake of but had been forever altered by. It would have been convenient, Renata thought then, to know Percy’s thoughts on all this, to have his account somewhere. But Renata sought out the word “tendril” again. Looking around her, the darkening mountain, the canted road seesawing up to its summit, Renata felt watched. She was trudging toward something that had survived the past.

Another granola bar, another swig of water, the tankard noticeably, worryingly lighter. Renata took up “1998” again. Her arms weighed down to the earth and she brought up her knees, rested the notebook open onto them.

In the spring, Corinne’s entries were unusually short and matter-of-fact, merely recountings of her daily activities, with the notable appearance of Edith, as if the woman finally entered the stage. Tara had just told Corinne about her own pregnancy, with a family friend’s son named Matthew whom Renata vaguely recalled in her youth, a short, slight man with bleached hair whom her grandfather had been convinced was also Asian. He had gone away eventually too, just like Renata’s father.

At the beginning of summer, the entries grew longer, more focused. Renata caught her name more than once but prevented herself from skipping too far ahead. Settling in, resting the journal on her knees, she clicked her flashlight on, its beam blinding against the white page, a sharp outline of the notebook’s shadow projected onto the tree at the opposite end of the camp. She used her phone instead, just the lock screen, an old black-and-white Jack Dolan photo. The light was softer and then brighter and brighter as the evening wore on.

Renata checked the slack on her makeshift alarm, that hovering lashed rectangle, tugged on the lace tied around her leg. She breathed in. A tremor passed through her hand. She could smell campfire smoke and gasoline, she could taste ink and adhesive on her tongue, sweat, a fuzzy sensation over her eyelids, a blanket thrown over her head, an engine revving, a letter in a PO box, a hand, her mother’s hand, opening the journal, pausing, looking up at her, not at her but where Renata could see but not be seen.

3.4

MAY 1, 1998—

A letter from Tara today. I guess news has breached containment. Now the public knows that McNairy is getting shuttered. Not that anyone besides my family would really care. They do care, that’s why I didn’t tell them, + other, more obvious reasons. I doubt half the people who live in Nevada know the observatory existed or what it was for. That was what was so advantageous about it. It could be like you had died + no one was worried because you were doing something that had no effect on anyone, in a place no one gave a shit about.

Of course, Percy would have disliked my saying so. In fact, I did say this to him, on multiple occasions, that what we do is unimportant. At least, what I do. At least he had actually worked for the government, had found a use, had, if not “helped,” then was part of the apparatus that developed useful tools, technologies, all that. There was a lunch back in ’96, more like an extended argument with food present, where I had brought up this very point.

Astrophysicists are not widely known for their self-awareness or for their social interest in others. I remember being quite put out at every science camp or accelerated afterschool program I got slotted into as a kid, feeling that I was surrounded by helplessly dependent freaks who couldn’t do much more than obsess over a few equations. I understood their fascination, but not their mental impairment. Obviously it wasn’t their fault but it all felt irritatingly beside the point.

I also remember being the only person in so many of these places—repurposed high school gyms or air-conditioned shipping containers or concrete classrooms that looked like prison visitation rooms—who had an actual book to read. For fun, not because of the diagrams of some retarded model of an SR-71A Blackbird. I remember feeling that I actually had a fucking soul + that I was surrounded by these half-formed, embryonic golems.

Percy reminded me of those kids. A lot. That’s why I avoided him at first. Those same kids grew up to be gainfully employed somewhere out of the way, inconspicuous, their brains harvested for making more efficient rockets or particle beams. But they never grew up. I thought that of Percy + then I got to know him + I still thought that of Percy. But he was real. He was a person. When I told him that I was jealous of his job at the NTS, I knew I had offended him because he shut up immediately + just stared. Percy was never prone to anger, but he also wasn’t a pushover. If he thought you were wrong, he’d tell you in this straightforward, very serious way. He illustrated his frustration the only way he knew how, by talking about something else.

“Do you know who monitors the clocks in this country?” he asked me.

Of course I didn’t know what he meant let alone the answer to his question, but the point of these outbursts was never legitimate discourse. You just had to sit + take it.

I shook my head. He looked away. We were in the cafeteria. This was only a day or so after the back window, the floor-to-ceiling one that looked out over the valley opposite McNairy, had shattered. No one knew how, at least not then. Young said he came in early in the morning on Tuesday + found a pair of ravens sitting on one of the tables, napkins everywhere, glass all over the floor, that shitty McNairy not-dust covering everything. Everyone had gotten the bug again, worse than usual. There was a sheet of plastic duct-taped over the hole + a chill breeze would waft into the room every now + again + Percy was looking out that way, as if he could see through the tarp.

“There’s this place called NIST. The National Institute of Standards + Technology. There’s a facility in Colorado, not far from where I grew up. They measure time there. They set time there,” Percy had clasped his hands together + shook them at “set.” He still wouldn’t look at me.

“I remember wanting to work there for a long, long time. I never could have, of course. Wrong kind of scientist. They measure the vibrations of the caesium atom there, in this massive machine called NIST-7. An atomic clock. There’s a bunch of them for redundancy’s sake. Do you know who owns NIST-7?”

Another shake of my head.

“The Department of Commerce. The United States Department of Commerce. Now why would the governmental body responsible for measuring the official weight of, say, a gallon care about time? Because it’s in the government’s best monetary interest to measure, in exacting detail, how long a second really is. They distribute this second all over the world so that as many countries as possible can agree on the same time, so that commerce continues without interruption or error.”

Percy looked back at me now, slowly. His eyes, I remember those eyes better than anything else about him + I guess it’s worth saying here that I’m reconstructing our conversation as best as I can remember it. Maybe he said these exact words, just in the wrong order, or I’ve taken my faulty memory + filled in gaps. But I remember him looking at me then. I think that, early on, I had fallen in love with Percy. It was difficult not to. But it was difficult to stay in love.

When he fixed me with that look in the cafeteria in ’96, telling me some rambling story, I knew that if I had been younger, I would have swooned. But he looked at me then + I remember feeling so angry with him. I remember thinking he cared about the wrong things, that his priorities were screwed up by his idealism. I wished I hadn’t said anything to set him off because, as he kept going on, I felt that trusty old sense of boredom. How predictable it is, this deflation, a kind of muted disappointment at the hope that someone I wanted to be interesting proved to be utterly conventional.

“So you want me to feel sorry for you that you don’t have a nice government job.” It wasn’t a question. “These months away from the Test Site, they’ve been some of the most liberating of my life. If I couldn’t stomach working at a place that corrupted chronometry for the purposes of the state, what makes you think I enjoy a job that asks me to find the right places to dump radioactive garbage? Don’t look at me like that, Corinne. You are transparent to me. Always. There is something ugly inside of you that I’ve overlooked because it’s necessary. Don’t think for a second that I don’t see your disdain. It is plain + glaring + look where it’s gotten you.”

Percy got up + left then. He didn’t even pick up his tray, which was half eaten, an apple, a bag of chips, a sandwich. He just stormed out of the cafeteria. It’s funny now, thinking about that conversation. Percy was one of the few black scientists McNairy ever had + he had never actually worked for the observatory. I think I was drawn to him for that reason, for this childish sense of kinship, self-tokenization, two minorities in the middle of nowhere.

By the time of that lunch, by the time he got up + walked out, Percy had well + truly fallen off the deep end. His obsession with Francis Brown had only intensified. He would shut himself in his quarters for days at a time then go out on these desert excursions for weeks. Much of this activity, though I didn’t know it then, had to do with his adversarial relationship with T, who I’ve always respected more for his inability to countenance bullshit. Funny the way brothers are.

MAY 3, 1998—

It’s the same nightmare again + again: the observatory, Percy, those creatures. Apart from T + I, apart from Young + Heather, who let us out of the chamber, no one understands how much blood there really was. We couldn’t explain it properly because we didn’t know how things had played out. I think Young + Heather must have taken the scene at face value: something terrible, something unspeakable, but ultimately, a human tragedy.

There’s a blending that happens in the nightmare, variations on the same set of circumstances. The dream starts with me + T already on the way into the observatory. But we pause at the entrance to the building. We just stand there as if we’re waiting for something, as if we need permission to enter. I remember that on the actual night, all the usual lights had been switched on outside the facility. Standard evening surveillance sconces around the building + a few that illuminated pathways to the various parts of campus.

But in the dream, everything is dark. Everything is dark + I’m no longer pregnant. In some variations, I’m holding Renata in my arms while T walks ahead of us + I’m so scared because I don’t understand why she’s there, why I’ve brought her. In others, it’s not T but Percy I’m with + T is gone, disappeared, one of those facts you innately know in a dream without having seen it.

Only once have I dreamed that Tara was with me, but it was the most disturbing version. I had her at my power, her hands tied behind her back, her mouth gagged + I was prodding her along with a piece of torn-off rebar. Inside, they’re waiting there. Not like how it really was when we went in, everything in disarray, shattered, grotesque smears, the sound of the wind blowing through broken windows.

No, in the dream with Tara, everything is as it normally would be, had been + there’s a mass of them standing there emitting this low, insistent tone, almost like a rhythmic hum, but below the frequency of intelligible sound. I can feel it in my ears, in my chest. I pushed Tara toward them + before they took her, she looked back at me. The gag fell away + she smiled a triumphant smile, her teeth bloodied + chipped. They took me instead.

But last night was the more standard fare.

T + I wait on the precipice for what feels like hours. I’m pregnant, though I can’t tell how far along I am. There is no weight to the pregnancy, which is usually how I know it’s a dream. At the time, I was only just beginning to show + had finally stopped feeling intensely nauseous. Not many people knew I was pregnant last year + I didn’t plan on announcing it. I had hoped to go on sabbatical during the latter half + return after the baby was born. The reasoning was clear to me + eventually Tara saw the practicality in it. What’s the point in making a fuss over something that won’t last? But it became another facet to the drama of the whole thing, the fact that I was pregnant along with the tragedy, with the closure of the facility. Just about the only thing I enjoyed when carrying Renata was that my allergies seemed to disappear. I could be breathing all the same particles + dust in as everyone else + I wouldn’t sneeze, I wouldn’t cough. One of those annoying pregnancy superpowers I hear about so often, I thought.

But I don’t remember feeling guilty at the time that I made my decision. About giving her up. I knew early on, soon after taking a test. It wasn’t for me. Neither was an abortion frankly, which surprised me. I want to say I still don’t feel guilty, especially since Tara has removed me entirely from the mothering process, for which I admit I am grateful. But in the dream it’s all I can do to keep from crying, from buckling beneath this alien emotion. I don’t generally feel guilty about many things. It’s not because I find myself to be an unimpeachable person, but I’ve tried to live my life without a sense of holding back. I would wish the same for Renata. The baby would have held me back + that is something I’d have felt guilt over, something for which I would have no one to blame but myself.

In the dream, we’re standing at the threshold of the observatory + I know exactly what’s about to happen. That’s what’s so horrible about it. There is no alternative. It has to happen. Percy will be there stumbling half-drunk, hobbling forward on one leg, the other immobile, his face a mockery of a human face, all screwed up like he’s tasting something sour + a saliva-mercury-blood cocktail dribbling down his chin.

Sometimes it’s like I can see the bone of his jaw peeking through the skin, like it’s eroded, eaten by the mercury. He smiles at us. He reaches for us but without any real conviction, a bit of playacting. The telescope is open, the mercury chamber’s door ajar. There’s this loud, thumping sound, like rotors on a helicopter coming up to speed except it never gets faster, only louder.

T runs toward Percy, tries to subdue him, but all that happens is Percy spins around with T, seizing his arms, transferring his momentum into a kind of dance that T struggles to get out of. They spin + spin, Percy staring at me, his head swiveling as they go round, round, round. He has that same rictus grin on his face. I know they’re there, peering through the windows, stooping down like giants, but for some reason I can never notice them sooner.

It’s only after Percy shoves his fingers into T’s eyes that I look away + there, finally, they are, waiting like T + I had been. Waiting to be let in. T dropping to the ground returns my attention to the center of the room. He drops as if he’s dead but he isn’t, just dormant, a kind of background feature that my mind renders inert for the time being. There are holes in T’s face where his eyes used to be, except now they’re on Percy’s index + middle fingers. They face the wrong way, those dark little cords of the optic nerve dangling, flailing, smeared with viscera, surprisingly not bloody.

I have this dream so many times. I turn around, back toward the doors, which should be right behind me, but I turn + find them far away, in reality only another ten feet back but it’s a lifetime, it doesn’t matter. They’re there through the doors anyway. I turn back. Percy stands right in front of me. He smells awful. He holds up his hand, his fingers with T’s eyes on them except they face the right way this time, the pupils + irises somehow dilating as if they still work. I can’t look away from the eyes. I can hear them behind me, behind Percy. They’re quieter than you’d think but it’s unmistakable, the way they heft their weight, deliberate, unerring. I wake up before they touch me.

MAY 4, 1998—

T has introduced a new vocabulary for us to utilize now that we know a little more of what it is we’re dealing with.

Percy’s work was crucial to this + if it hadn’t been for my insistence that we actually use it, I don’t know that T would have made the progress he has in such a short time. What before we had simply called “creatures” we now call “packs,” Percy’s term for their clustering behavior. They travel together, even if a person is more likely to interact with an individual because they spread out, each needs too much room to move + to hunt.

For all his reluctance to credit Percy, T does have a natural eye. I don’t know how he does it. He’s able to spot them easily + quickly. His fluency in their visual presentation is matched only by his hatred of them. Maybe this is why he was so reluctant to allow Percy’s research to influence his own. Bad blood, no doubt.

I believe I’ve set down my ambivalence here. I don’t care one way or the other that these things exist. I fear them, but that fear is almost primal, like it actually has nothing to do with me but with a deep-set, reptilian survival instinct. But they pose a serious problem for the people that live in McNairy.

As far as we’ve been able to glean, there is no history of strange things happening in town. No disappearances, no unusual injuries. This last note is ironic because many of the people who live in town think we’re responsible for the mercury contamination in the water supply. I suppose we are in the sense that we housed the material + it was the observatory’s responsibility to handle it safely. But Percy was responsible, not me or T. This seems like unnecessary waffling, but the distinction is important. What McNairy is facing is bigger than blame. Besides, it’s clear that no one is coming to help. The board refuted any evidence that didn’t mesh with their official lie. They don’t want to know what happened.

Still, it’s difficult speaking to people who are wrong + don’t know it. Those who live in McNairy are loners who value their privacy without having anything interesting to be private about. They have this righteousness to their argument, even though it’s not really an argument, just a strongly held opinion. But maybe we are implicated, if not responsible. Last week, Annie Grewntik had to be driven to Vegas for a kind of specialty poison treatment for mercury exposure. She couldn’t walk straight or talk. In part, that’s what T + I are trying to make up for, by not making things worse for everyone.

Tara was asking me on a phone call the other day if I had been exposed, if I had experienced any latent symptoms. Of course, I had no intention of making her more anxious. I didn’t have the patience to admit that yes, I did experience a moment of panic when Renata was born, when the nurse + the doctor pulled her out, when they handed her to me. I looked her over as best I could though I couldn’t have said what it was I needed to see. I wanted her to be healthy because I wanted her to live a life without the shackle of victimization. She can hate me, but seeing the way everyone in McNairy carries around their resentment without trying to do anything productive about it, I’d rather have my daughter’s hate than her blame.

MAY 5, 1998—

We’ve determined that the packs generally don’t venture below an altitude of 10,000 feet. At least not here. I don’t know how we never noticed it before. Or rather, we noticed it, me + Young + Blake + every visiting fellow who ever stayed longer than a week, but we never thought it was anything other than the peculiar makeup of McNairy itself. Nevada is like this anyway. So many different habitats, climates, distributions of flora, fauna. The desert is change. It seems like it’s always the same until suddenly it isn’t. The entire landscape just beneath the observatory altered from season to season, but we attributed this to typical turnover, to the blooming cycle of various trees + bushes. Something T pointed out to me today awakened a dormant memory.

The first week Percy was here with his cohort of geologists, one of them, a muscular Samoan (?) dude with a funny name like Ringo or Rico, brought up the fact that he hadn’t seen any critters on the way up the mountain. That’s how he phrased it, “critters.” Chambers, who’s still here, said the guy just hadn’t spent enough time in McNairy yet. But I remember feeling like the Samoan had made a good point. I had already been there two years, I had hiked all around the mountain, + not once had I ever seen a rabbit or a coyote higher than the service road. You see both frequently in Vegas in all areas, but not out here in the sticks. Plenty of birds, but nothing running around on the ground. I think Blake ventured the possibility that the elevation played a part, but that didn’t make much sense either.

T brought all this up again today. “Don’t you find it strange,” he asked me, “that the area around us is bereft of animal life?” T + Percy are from Colorado, I still don’t know why they speak like that. But he presented this observation as if it were his own fresh thought. I’m pretty sure he was there the day Percy arrived, the day the Samoan commented on the very same thing, but I hadn’t known to pay attention to T’s behavior around Percy or any other scientist then.

MAY 7, 1998—

Death, or the threat of it, made me philosophical. Not life. Not giving birth. What I do isn’t about zooming out. It’s zooming in, trying to see, trying to clarify. I never thought of my work in this way before last year + it frustrates me.

For instance, this week, the telescope’s time was supposed to be rented by an outfit in Argentina for a particular batch of stars passing more clearly over the North American sky. Now, Argentina isn’t strapped for telescopes + as far as I know, McNairy is was one of the few observatories in the world that used the mercury ones. What no one here wanted to admit was that McNairy was a low-cost affair. We weren’t on the cutting edge of anything. You got to pursue your projects, but they were nested within this labyrinth of other, larger, more consequential projects, feeder homework for better, more interesting things. Mercury is cheap + so is the surrounding apparatus supporting the telescope. You cut the cost of everything in half. Well, more than half. No finicky, brittle materials that cost millions of dollars to replace, all those complex proprietary optical instruments.

The problem is liquid mirrors aren’t very dynamic, you can only point them straight up at the sky + you have to spin them to keep the mercury in a stable shape. Because they only point straight up, you can’t capture a static image of anything, you only get what passes in front of the mirror. So this team in Argentina wanted images of a particular constellation to check its position somewhere a degree or two south of Hyades, which is quite bright.

Mind, they had requested this information in the spring of ’97 like good, considerate scientists + I had been looking forward to this particular request because it would have meant testing out a new camera for the mirror. We were sent some specs in the summer + even if I’m not a technician, I could understand the basic upgrade. Sharper picture, a bigger sensor, fully digital capture.

I think this is what makes what T + I do now so trying, so tedious. I want to go back to my work. I want to be in that amicable, hard-nosed symbiosis with other people as smart as I am, the feeling that something technical + complicated, even if it’s minor, is being accomplished. But T has given it all up, he’s surrendered his curiosity to the same obsession that afflicted Percy. I’ve promised to help him but my interest is in what Percy left behind.

For that reason, it seems that I too am being pulled away from what I began with. At its nearest point, the Colorado River is 400> miles away + that’s not even the stretch that Francis Brown was living on in Colorado. I’ve been reading his diary ever since I found it. I haven’t told T, mostly because I’m sure he’d take it away from me if he knew. Like hiding candy from a child. He may be an ally, at points a friend. Even as he is clearly a racist + a misogynist.

It’s interesting, at around the time Brown finally acknowledges the reality of these creatures, his diary becomes incredibly frenetic. Like he didn’t have time to write everything down. Sometimes it’s like he forgets what he’s talking about as he’s writing. There’s the feeling that his mind has been subtly altered. Not changed, just affected. So it makes the exact area where he carried out his research difficult to determine. His references to station GR-11 are impossible for me to verify here in McNairy. There are plenty of allusions to government-related river surveys. But the Colorado is vast + at the points where states like Nevada + Arizona meet, there are multiple places where he could have been stationed.

Honestly, Brown seems like a ghost. He feels like one. Reading his diaries is like reading someone’s self-written obituary, clearly meant for posterity, clearly trying to forge some kind of record. He was alive at that specific nexus of time when you could still disappear. + then he did.

MAY 8, 1998—

Tara was hit by a car when she was little. She was crossing the street + a car turning the corner struck her on her left side. Not fast, not hard but she was pushed further out into the street + fell, hit her head. Thankfully no oncoming traffic. I was in front of her, we were on our way to the library. Couldn’t have been younger/older than 10, maybe 11. I remember hearing this clipped yelp, like someone had opened a door + inside was a dog + then they shut the door again. I looked back + she was out cold + the man who had been driving was standing by his open door screaming at her, clearly distraught but sublimating his panic with anger.

For several days after the incident (I believe grandpa sued him, I just remember that Tara’s medical bills were taken care of because Mom said Dad didn’t have to change his work schedule) Tara was blind. It was an effect of her concussion from hitting the pavement, her occipital lobe swollen, pushing against her skull. I remember the doctors saying that it was likely she’d never see again, a concussion could lead to temporary loss of vision but “temporary” meant something on the order of 10–20 min, not whole days.

I was thinking about that today when I was thinking over my dreams. Percy with those eyes stuck onto his fingers. The night that they converged on the observatory, the pack was nowhere to be found. They didn’t surround the facility nor did they hide out of sight so that they could ambush us. They can’t move fast enough for that kind of coordinated assault. But you could feel them. Or I could. I could feel them more when I was pregnant + then, after Renata was born, I couldn’t. There’s a lot of woo-woo shit about pregnant women’s higher faculties, but it wasn’t like I could hear the flutter of a hummingbird at 500 yards. I could just tell that something was watching me, that I was being studied.

When we saw Percy, when he finally staggered out of the mercury chamber looking the way he did, he had moved like he couldn’t see + I think I was too overwhelmed to pay attention to what he was doing. But now, if I can even trust my own memory, I think maybe Percy really was blind that night. I hadn’t the presence of mind to look at his eyes. I hadn’t known to look anywhere except the floor, the walls. Not the windows. Not the doors.

All of this to say, the creatures must have brains. Sight is in the brain, not the eyes. Meaning . . . what? Nothing that wasn’t already intuitive but it makes certain things clearer. They have the capacity for vision, they have the necessary biological software as it were, but not the hardware. Well, I guess the brain is hardware. But if they can survive on their own without sight, if their ambulatory function isn’t severely impaired by their blindness, what do they need eyes for? Can they differentiate between species? Some mammals have better eyes than others, suited for different environments, different climates. What more could they want?

Tara got better obviously. She was scared. Why wouldn’t she be. At one point, in her hospital room, Mom was asleep in a chair + Dad had gone out to get some coffee. Probably 11 or so at night, a hospital kind of quiet. There was one of those lofted TVs hanging in the corner across from her bed + Tara was awake, I could tell from the way she shifted in bed or sighed dramatically. I was sitting on her right side + I started waving my hand in front of her face. It’s not that I didn’t believe what the doctors said about her not being able to see or that I thought Tara was faking it, it just didn’t make sense to me. How could you turn off something so essential temporarily + then hope it would magically return?

I kept waving + Tara didn’t move, or at least didn’t move in response to my motion. Mom kept snoring, Dad wasn’t back yet. I got up, leaned over Tara, waved both hands like an idiot. I suppose she could have heard the rustling of my jacket but I wasn’t that loud, just rotating my hands by the wrists like dignitaries wave. Nothing. I had a capped pen in my jacket pocket. I uncapped it, waving still, Mom asleep, Dad on the hunt, + held the tip of the pen right in front of one of Tara’s eyes. She wasn’t numb, I knew that even then. But if you’re blind, what use are your eyes? What’s the point of keeping a dead thing that no longer has a function? I was around when they tried to reassure us that grandma was going to pull through, even as she looked more + more like a corpse with every passing day. I thought it was cowardice before I was told quite sternly by Mom + Tara + Dad + anyone else privately wringing their hands that it was hope. But sometimes it’s hard for me to tell the difference. If you remove hope, then you have to get practical. I’d rather be practical.

At least it would be clear to everyone else forever, the fact that Tara really was blind + not faking it because she could lift up her eyelids + show a couple of gaping holes like inverted walnuts. I must have been too close, maybe my breath on her face or maybe I accidentally brushed against her, because Tara drowsily asked “Rinse?” + I moved as slowly + quietly back as I could into my chair.

MAY 10, 1998—

The most recent large-scale activity of the observers in McNairy occurred less than a year ago. One night, camping in a hammock, a scientist named Renata Scarborough dreamt of a large figure standing over her. The figure was taller than any human being, its skin like the layered rock of the canyons, its neck long, wider than its head. The figure had many limbs, but one couldn’t say with confidence if there were anything like feet or hands. Chittering branches vibrated all over it, branches with leaves that appeared waxen, soft, warm. On its many legs, the figure approached the scientist, rolling, walking, crawling in a movement not seen since an incident on that same mountain more than twenty years before.

Scarborough had set up camp near timberline, leaving herself exposed. The figure’s eyes appeared to show the night sky behind it. In fact, there were no eyes at all, just two holes burrowed through its skull, if that was the correct term. Scarborough had fallen asleep reading a sheaf of papers belonging to another scientist, though her research had given way to a number of conflicting, nonsensical testimonies, none of which proved useful to her. She was just beginning to doubt herself, to doubt the truth of everything she had been told, even as she knew herself to be a keen archivist, a skilled parser of fact, fiction, hearsay, gossip. But many had died before her, pursuing the same knowledge, desperate for the same truth.

The scientist’s head had slumped forward between her bent knees, as if she had been frozen in an eternal stretch. The figure paced around the campsite, each limb rigid then flexible, a tentacle one moment, a stiff branch the next. The figure circled around a small campfire the scientist had lit before settling down for the night with her papers. In the dark, the figure was blind. In the day, the figure was blind. But it sensed Scarborough on the wind, her scent, the quiet rumble of her breath. It couldn’t feel or hear her heartbeat, but a ripple bounced through the air anyway, a thrum traveling in all directions.

In her neck, tangled in a precise arrangement of bones like the teeth of a wheel, a cord of nerves lit up. The figure was blind, but the light emitted a sound, a persistent whine like the uttered silence after an explosion. The scientist slept as the figure moved closer, the holes in its form more numerous than before, freckles sprouting all over its body like cancers. The scientist’s neck held many freedoms. Just one brief, eternal instance of pain, + that freedom would be theirs.

Behind the figure, the fire writhed, the heat pulsating through the night, the crackle of wood as it burns in a way the figure never could. Growths like glass noodles waved through the air, extending from three of the figure’s limbs, undulating, their striking translucency betraying no sign of muscle or tendon. All the while, a viscous, dark fluid dripped along the length of each, some as thin as hairs, others thick as toes, each everting + searching independently. At the end of these tentacles, microscopic vesicles like bleeding, burning mouths tipped with sharp, curved teeth. Scarborough continued to sleep. If the figure struck deftly enough, the scientist would never awaken. The possession would be total + if the scientist did wake, they would return to consciousness in complete lack, a forever screen of black or red.

A mother need not protect her daughter from everything. It is possible to let life happen to a child, to let things play out, even if those things are horrible. That’s what being a scientist requires. One must allow events to develop, then record the data, then repeat the allowance. You cannot interfere. Interfering is a choice + there are no man-made choices that do not result in ruin. True science requires absence of choices, of people. It is possible to do this with a child, TO HEAL THEM WITH FIRE, NOT A MOTHER’S BLOOD, NOT A MOTHER’S BONE, BUT FEW ARE BRAVE ENOUGH. FEW ARE BRAVE ENOUGH. COME TO, RENATA. COME TO. COME TO. COME TO. COME TO. COME. TO COME. TO COME. TO COM.E TO COME TO COMETOCOMETO—

3.5

THE CORD AROUND RENATA’S LEG YANKED.

The memory of Corinne’s voice rang in her ears like a distant train shrinking into the night. Or was it Corinne’s voice really? Renata’s head lay back against the rock, Corinne’s journal resting on her lap, a hanging line of drool stretching to her neck. Beside her, on the ground, her phone had fallen screen-first, a small but bright rectangle of bluish light spiking out the sides. A thin layer of fine pollen had accreted on Renata’s arms. She didn’t remember the sun finally setting nor the point at which she fell asleep. Renata turned the notebook over and scanned the page for the last sentence she recognized. “The most recent large-scale activity of the observers in McNairy occurred less than a year ago.” After that, the entry ended. In the camp, there was no fire. Corinne didn’t hide in the shadows. There was no creature.

At the thought of it, Renata’s hand instinctively rose to the back of her neck, pushing against the nape, her hair, that rigid, yielding bundle of skin and bone that receded and protruded depending on how it was moved. It was impossible for Renata to say what exactly she was feeling for. Holes maybe. Incisions. Inflamed veins. So much of what she read before falling asleep sounded too outlandish to be the work of an overactive imagination. Her mother was not fanciful. And there was everything Renata had seen herself that day, had experienced and sensed. There was no record she was keeping yet she knew these things were real.

But this whittling away at the truth was becoming tedious, more than she felt prepared for. All this sitting and reading, all this psychic detritus, and not much time had passed, not really, but the trudging through the past felt exactly like being made to obey, like someone was counting on her fear of politeness to prevent her from opening a door that had been unlocked the entire time.

The line tugged again on her leg, more vigorously, a bouncing sine wave along the length of shoelace pulled round the nearest tree. It was almost completely dark on the mountain. A half-full moon blasted the desert valley and the assortment of lit buildings in McNairy, a monochromatic patina of blues and blacks forfeit any sense of dimension, a vision like a lithograph. In the small clearing where she sat, Renata could make out very little, the trees above her and the angle of the rocks flowing onto the service road obscuring the moon and the light reflecting off a belly of approaching clouds.

Renata moved very slowly, pulling her head up, wiping the corner of her mouth. She reached for the flashlight on the ground beside her. The flashlight was long and heavy, but its weight was distributed opposite the bulb and the end was rounded, smooth. Even used as a weapon, she’d have to step close. Renata imagined the thing in the mine, but it had shown no fear of her. Why would it be hiding? Then she remembered the broken branch before she entered the tunnel and the smell—strange, she thought, how accustomed she was becoming to the idea of such an intense olfactory memory, to the idea that she could make out the category of something from its scent—the smell of a person, of a man.

Now the cord was shivering but, in the half dark, Renata couldn’t follow the full shape of it. To her left, where the first knot was tied, the line remained still. Only her eyes moved as Renata traced the string back around. There, directly across from her, a well of shadow beneath the canopy, confetti shafts of moon scattered on the ground, on a single large boulder, a clutch of low-growing bushes, and something else.

Renata could see it now, could see them. Two knees pointing out, crouching but struggling to stay balanced. The head was hidden among the shadows, but there were no glowing eyes. That was relief enough. Relaxing, Renata enacted a pantomime of waking up. She stretched her arms above her head, yawned loudly, then, pretending to search her backpack, untied the cord on her leg. She let it twitch on the ground. On her right side, the entrance to the mine lay nestled at the end of a short, sunken incline only a few meters away. If she ducked down into the groove of the path, Renata guessed that, from the vantage of the bushes where the stranger lurked, they would lose sight of her. She flicked on the flashlight, pointing it at the mountain wall above the service road as if she were inspecting the terrain. Then, after a lingering moment, she shone it directly at the bushes in front of her.

Quickly, she crawled over the lip of the small mound and slid down, leaving the flashlight shining on the ground.

The bushes quivered as the stranger moved about. Branches were tripped over and a hushed curse escaped, but Renata was already nearly there, skirting the edge of the clearing, dust breathing down the sheer drop. The approach from behind revealed the stranger more fully, their posture hunched, one knee and a hand on the dirt, shorts sagging, a dark shirt, tennis shoes. In the dark, they looked like an amorphous blob, a tumor with fingers and feet. Renata wondered if their pants were unbuckled, if they had been watching her and jerking off, or if that thought was justification for what she wanted to do next. The light from her torch across the clearing projected the profile of the stranger against her chest. A short nose, high forehead. No one Renata knew, she didn’t know anyone here.

The stranger didn’t hear her move behind them and, in the moment before contact, Renata endeavored to smell them like she had before. Whatever the mechanism was that initiated the process, some subterranean, primal access of a lower or higher physical knowledge, she didn’t know what it felt like or how it manifested. Thus far, she noticed that this instinct, this extrasensory perception, had already begun. It simply was, and she couldn’t force something so essential. Now, to her nose, there was nothing but the sharp aroma of pine from the trees and a faint whiff of sediment. Renata focused instead on how much she would hurt the stranger lurking in the bushes.

The calculation was and always would be swift. The closest she had come to suspension in high school wasn’t the result of a fight, but the speed of it, the languor with which Renata’s brutality played out. On that day, she and her classmates had just gotten out of a chemistry test prep session and one of the boys matter-of-factly claimed he would out V if Renata didn’t give the boy her phone number. But V had already come out and Renata should have walked away. She knew she should have walked away. The hallway was empty apart from a janitor polishing the floor and a dozen or so other students from the chemistry session heading home. Renata broke the boy’s jaw without meaning to; that was the line she told the dean. She hadn’t meant to do such damage though she couldn’t deny that she wanted to hurt the boy badly. Renata grabbed him by the straps of his backpack and pulled him into her first punch, and when he fell back onto the shining concrete floor, kept kicking him until someone pulled her off.

For a long time after the incident, her friends asked if she was a lesbian. When she asked them why they asked, her friends said it was because what she did to Stefan seemed like something only a guy would do. Renata hadn’t known what to make of that. Masculinity and violence, sure, but hadn’t they ever wanted to do something to someone? Did they have some system in their brains that told them which methods of causing pain were more forgivable as feminine than others? Stefan’s face was closest to her hands. She could easily have kicked him in the balls. In her mind, the whole thing lasted a few seconds. The dean claimed Renata had been kicking Stefan for more than a minute. A broken jaw. Two broken ribs. A bruised kidney and a new row of teeth after a few began to rot. And all she could think of was how satisfying it felt, the pressure against her knuckles as Stefan’s teeth clicked together, how his jaw unhinged.

That was then.

Renata kicked the base of the stranger’s spine, more a shove with the sole of her boot. The stranger tipped forward easily, crashing through the bramble, grunting. Renata shielded her eyes against the glare of her flashlight as she followed them. It wasn’t that she was particularly adept at fighting, she simply wasn’t scared. Or maybe it was that her fear often suddenly turned to anger. The stranger was laid out, face down on the ground and crawling away fast. They wore light cargo shorts that dragged down past gray underwear and an oversize polo shirt. Renata took two long steps forward through the hole in the bushes and brought her foot down on their heel, not too hard, she knew the sturdiness of her boots would carry most of the momentum. It was like stepping on a dry pool noodle. His squeal brought a smirk to Renata’s face.

Ken rolled over and sat up, his half-erect penis partially obscured by his underwear and covered in dirt. He patted at his leg desperately though there was nothing to be done, panting, moaning, muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck” over and over to himself.

“What the fuck, Ken!” Renata yelled.

He hadn’t heard her.

“Hey!” she snapped, her voice deadened by the trees.

Ken looked up at her leaning over him, his face wet with tears. The raw anguish of his expression, his downturned mouth, the wrinkles around his eyes as he closed them against the pain stoked Renata’s anger. What was he doing? Why was he acting so pathetic? She hadn’t thought these things when she overheard Ken’s argument with Terrence the night before. Renata saw no healing bruises or cuts. Maybe Terrence had punched him in the stomach. It’s what she would have done. Renata shook her head, stood up straight, and breathed deeply.

This was a mistake. Ken, a man she didn’t know well or very long. Ken wasn’t a threat, not to Renata at least. Maybe he had done worse things to other people in town. And come to think of it now, Bobbie had acted more like a sponsor than a friend.

Renata crouched down. Ken flinched at her proximity. She raised her hand slowly.

“Let me see,” Renata said.

“I wasn’t trying to be w—,” Ken ventured, his voice wobbly. “I’m sorry! I can explain, I can explain—”

“Let me see,” Renata repeated, punching his knee. “Pull your fucking pants up.”

Ken’s face trembled and, briefly, there was the twitch of an emotion Renata couldn’t place. Not fear or panic. Nearly hope. It disgusted Renata more than seeing him exposed. The look passed. Ken nodded and shimmied on the ground, tugging the waist of his shorts up, zipping them. Gently, she felt along the underside of his calf with her fingertips, working her way to the top of his heel, where a white sock was rolled down. When she touched the tendon, she felt rough, grazed skin where the surface layer rubbed against her boot sole and two soft, mottled bumps. Renata squeezed. Ken hissed, reflexively drawing his foot back.

“Honestly, I don’t know what I did, but we should wrap your foot at least,” Renata said, not lessening her grip. “Probably ice would be a good idea, but I don’t have any.”

“It’s fine,” Ken whimpered, streaks of sweat falling down his brow. “Wrapping it is fine.”

Renata kept her hand clamped on his heel a moment longer, wondering if enough pain had been communicated.

“Hold on.”

The first-aid kit’s roll of gauze seemed too short, but Renata did what she could. The moon glowered in the sky, piercing through the clouds and sometimes, by a trick of the light, floating in front of them. Renata hadn’t ever seen the moon this close, this brilliant. Corinne had written about it somewhere, the observatory’s schedule shifting based on the lunar cycle, how its reflection obscured further points of interest. But the stars were clear and prominent in the sky, distinct and numerous, vertigo inducing if Renata stared at them long enough.

With Ken’s foot in her lap, his back to the sky, his face downcast, Renata rolled the gauze tightly, sometimes pulling quickly, hoping the motion would hurt. She was waiting for him to say something. But Ken, who seemed nervous at first, now looked drowsy. Maybe the shock of what just happened.

The last of the gauze, a crinkling of paper wrappers and the plastic packaging, but Ken wouldn’t look up, his eyes sliding side to side.

“Ken,” Renata said. “We need to talk.”

He was nodding, but it was listless, eddying. A drop of saliva hung from his bottom lip. Renata squinted into the shadow obscuring his face. Ken looked like he was sleeping. She took her hand off his leg and reached to smack his face. As soon as her skin pulled away, Ken jerked back, spittle reflecting the moonlight in a line down his mouth.

“What the fuck are you doing!” Ken screamed hoarsely.

He scrambled backward, his bandaged foot dragging on the ground. Ken looked around wildly, hyperventilating, shaking his head.

“Ken!” Renata cautioned. “Hey! Hey! What the fuck?”

“Wait,” Ken gasped.

He drew his knees up to his chest, his shoulders bobbing up and down. Renata could hear a whistle in his breath as he inhaled.

“Ken, are you cold?”

He nodded, his eyes wide.

“Describe what you’re feeling.” It always worked when V asked.

Ken drew down breaths that sounded painful, like he couldn’t breathe in all the way. When he breathed out, that same whistling returned.

“I . . . I can barely hear you,” Ken whispered, shivering. “But when you were touching me, I couldn’t hear anything . . . I think I fell asleep . . . but it didn’t feel like sleeping . . . I thought I was drowning, I couldn’t breathe!”

Renata reached out to Ken when he started crawling away, and her hand still hung in the air. She looked at her palm then and, unbelieving, clenched it shut, pulling it against her chest. Ken didn’t seem to notice. Her palm had split open in multiple places, deep, reddened slits all over, following every natural wrinkle and fold. There was no blood, no bruising or laceration resembling a cut. Most unnaturally, there was no pain. Renata could see into her hand through the open lines, an opaque mesh of muscle and the startling white of bone and tendon. Along the thin T-shaped crease at the center of her palm, hundreds of thick, translucent spines swayed back and forth, the ends of each strand so tiny they disappeared from sight. A yellowish substance leaked from the openings in her hand, jaundicing her wrist.

Renata looked at Ken’s shin above the bandage. Even in the shadow, she could see dots of running blood smeared all over his skin.

“Ken,” Renata whispered, though she could have said anything. Her anger had dissipated entirely. In its place a fear the size and contours of which she couldn’t fathom.

“Look, I can explain, I promise,” Ken said more loudly, stuttering. “I’m panicking, is all. I’m panicking.”

Ken hiccuped once, twice. He began laughing then abruptly stopped. The moon floated high above them, watching.

“Terrence . . . Terrence told me you visited him.”

“Polite euphemism,” Renata scoffed.

“He said you were coming up here and he didn’t trust you,” Ken continued.

“Why the fuck should that matter to him?”

“He hates when people come up to—”

“Again, why the fuck should that matter to him?”

“I know, I know. I think he’s crazy too! I really do.”

“So you took the opportunity to follow me and jerk off in the dark.”

“No, no! I mean . . . look, I . . . I . . . look, Bobbie has helped me a lot with . . .”

Renata wasn’t interested in Ken’s pathology. She raised her hand in frustration, whether to swat at the air or slap Ken she hadn’t decided. Ken shut up. Renata turned her hand over. It was just her palm, no growths, no cuts, but the skin looked dangerously dry. It had been several hours since she’d used her ointment. Thinking about it made Renata itch all over.

“What happened between you and Terrence last night?” Renata asked.

“What do you mean?” The question seemed to focus Ken, though he still slurred his words.

“At the campgrounds. After the bar.”

Ken stared at Renata without seeing, shook his head, repeating her words to himself.

“Oh! Terrence. Yes, yes. Wait. How do you know about that?”

“Not relevant right now.”

“Okay . . . I guess that’s okay . . . I don’t feel good . . .”

“Ken!”

Renata snapped her fingers at him, but Ken looked ill, the vitality sucked out of his face, sweat beading on his cheeks, his eyes baggy and hollow. The bleeding marks on his shin had stopped shining, the blood turning a matte texture.

“I can’t do it anymore,” Ken rasped, his breathing speeding up, then slowing down. “I told him that. He never listens to me. I think it was . . . think it was maybe a bad idea to help him out. Terrence . . . how much do you know about Terrence . . . he’s a piece of shit . . . obviously, that’s true. I didn’t want to know him but he was the only one around after she left. Or . . . no, she didn’t leave. She always came back . . .”

“Ken, I think we need to get you out of here,” Renata said, standing up quickly.

Beneath the moon, her long, narrow silhouette shaded the ground. A scraping sound like stone on metal tore through the omnipresent wash of the wind. Renata turned around. It had come from high up the service road.

“My dad was a doctor in the Philippines,” Ken continued, unhearing, ragged. “And then he came here. It was just us, him and me . . . my mom didn’t want to come . . . He came here with a lot of money . . . never asked him where he got it . . . We always had it . . . the opposite of what you’re supposed to say . . . You play the part . . . sad immigrant stuff . . . but then he lost it . . . he lost it so fast . . . and all of a sudden I thought maybe my mom was right . . . not to come . . . not to come with him . . . My dad liked the desert . . . the real desert . . .”

Renata stepped closer to Ken, bending down. She lifted his chin very carefully, only letting the edge of her index finger touch his skin. His eyes were glazed over, his stare distant. Renata wondered if striking someone out of delirium really worked. Her heartbeat began to elevate, an uncomfortable pulsing in her neck. What if Ken died?

“Ken?” she said loudly. “Ken, come on!”

When she bumped his shoulder lightly with her knuckles, Ken fell backward onto the ground, his knees still bent, every muscle in his body slack. Renata caught his head before it hit a large, angular rock. And on and on, Ken kept rambling.

“I knew a bunch of these kids . . . always trouble . . . but there’s nothing to do here . . . we’d ride around on their parents’ dirt bikes or some . . . some shit . . . drinking or whatever . . . Just weeks and weeks of that . . . No one cared but Glenna . . . sometimes my dad . . . and then I met someone . . . It was like she came out of a mirage . . . one minute there was nothing and then . . . and then Lanny was there . . .”

Renata had been searching around the campsite, strategizing, wondering how far she could drag Ken but it all erased at his mention of that name. She crouched until she knelt on the uneven ground.

“Say that again,” Renata commanded.

“ . . . but I found out pretty quickly . . . wasn’t her name . . . Glenna told me . . . everyone in town knew . . . but she said . . . said she was trying it out . . . She hung around Terrence a lot . . . which meant I had to hang around Terrence if I wanted to hang with her.”

Ken coughed over and over, and in the midst of convulsing he seemed to recover some of himself. He spat out a white, thick glob of mucus, sat up, cleared his throat in that utterly prepossessing way Renata had only ever seen men do. The front of his shirt was soaked with sweat, but his eyes had more life to them. Renata looked him over closely, worried that he might have wet himself.

“Jesus Christ,” Ken moaned, pressing his hands to his temples. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know, Ken,” Renata said.

A needling guilt wavered in the back of her mind, a suspicion not that this was her fault—she knew it was—but that her situation, already so divergent from the goal she had originally intended, so tangled in its new scope, would only ever unravel and never resolve. Her mother kept popping up like a weed. She had insinuated herself, unwittingly it seemed, into the few major facets of life in McNairy that Renata encountered.

“Who was this friend of yours?” Renata asked.

“What . . . Nothing. Just someone who helped me out. It’s hard to figure what you’re worth among all . . . this.” Ken gestured at the final word, shrugging at the desert. “Are you . . . like, are you going to tell Bobbie? About what I was doing?”

“Ken, who was your friend?”

Ken looked confused. He wouldn’t meet Renata’s eye. How uncomfortable it made people when she looked squarely at them. She had put her hands on Ken, but she wasn’t doing so now. He simply shrank beneath the directness of her gaze.

“No one,” he said defensively, whining. “Just some lady who lived here. One of Terrence’s old science buddies, but I didn’t learn that for a while, she acted real cagey about it whenever it was brought up.”

“You said her name was Lanny,” Renata asserted.

“Yeah, Lanny. Just one of those people that never leaves, you know? Who gives a shit?”

“But that wasn’t her real name,” Renata pressed.

“No, no, it was Corinne,” Ken said.

“How did she help you here?” Renata asked.

“Look, if you’re implying that she didn’t help enough with my like, whole shit, I get—”

“Ken, answer the fucking question.”

Ken finally looked at her, plain curiosity framing his mouth, his eyebrows slanted up, that sardonic skepticism Renata had first seen a day ago returning. He seemed on the verge of smiling.

Ken rocked on his bottom and turned. Belatedly, Renata realized he was trying to stand up, but he was too discombobulated. Every time he braced himself with one arm and swung his good leg beneath his weight, he tipped over. Renata thought to offer her arm, but didn’t want to step closer to him. Ken grunted as he stood and finally balanced himself, limping toward the cliff edge then standing, huffing.

“Fuck, it’s pretty up here, huh?” he said.

He sneezed as if the impulse attacked him.

“Sorry,” he said, wiping his nose. “I can’t stand being up here too long. You should see Terrence. It’s like he’s drunk, his allergies get so bad. You been having problems?”

“No,” Renata said, impatient.

“None?”

“No, Ken,” she said.

“Well, aren’t you lucky?” Ken joked.

He looked back at her, a toothless grin. Renata wasn’t smiling, but stood poised, one leg in front of the other, knees bent, like she was going to run at him. She clenched and unclenched her hands, the skin unbearably rough. It worsened the higher she went that day, but the depth of the damage had never been this severe. The pain fueled her eagerness. It must have shown plainly on her face.

Ken started speaking before Renata could prod him.

“Corinne, right,” Ken said. “I mean, there’s not a lot to know. For a while, I used to hang out with her and Terrence at his trailer. I don’t know where Corinne was living then. She wasn’t living with him, it seemed like they kind of hated each other. She never sat very close to him and then we’d leave his place and she’d be like ‘Don’t ever be alone around him.’ Which I took to mean he was a pedophile, but I think maybe something happened . . .”

Ken trailed off, casting his eyes down.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Maybe nothing happened. Corinne’s such a bitch, like in the good way, I’d be scared of her being mad at me. Sorry. Um . . . what else, yeah. She got me the job at the post office. Or, I applied because of her. She was always mailing shit, like every week she’d mail a package off and I’d walk with her to the post office. I don’t know. She taught me a lot about living out here, about the land and stuff. Terrence too, honestly.”

“Were they working on anything?” Renata asked.

The moon vaulted directly over their heads, their shadows casting neat ovals beneath their bodies.

“You said she didn’t tell you she was a scientist,” Renata said.

“I mean, the observatory closed before my dad and I moved out here. It wasn’t really much of anything. But Terrence and Corinne, when they met up, they were always talking about it. Like, they seemed to plan regular trips up here. They’d sit at his kitchen table and go over maps and make notes but none of it meant anything to me. I think maybe I asked Corinne once what they were doing and she said something like ‘Maintenance.’”

“Did you ever figure out where she was staying?”

“I think she was staying with Glenna,” Ken said. “She was always coming from that direction. But then she’d up and disappear for weeks on end. I’d ask around and people would be like ‘Oh, she’s out.’ She didn’t talk about where she went.”

Renata began to pace in a circle, always turning her head to keep Ken in her periphery.

Her mother had written about discovering where Francis Brown worked. Maybe there was some overlap in the journals with Ken and her mother. Maybe Ken would show up, another character in the narrative.

“What were you and Terrence fighting about?” Renata asked.

Ken turned back toward the open desert.

“Just favors,” said Ken. “Terrence’s been paranoid about people coming up here since I can remember. He says it’s contaminated from the mercury spill. Which is bullshit. Clearly something bad happened. You can see it on people’s hands and arms. You ran into Edith, I mean fuck, dude. I didn’t meet Edith until a while after I started hanging around Terrence and Corinne. You just see someone all of a sudden in the distance and then you turn around and then you look back and they’re right next to you. There’s some bad blood between Corinne and Edith. They won’t go near each other. But Terrence, he has me do this big charade about the campgrounds being closed. And he wants me to like, patrol the trails, but there’s too many people who use them and I actually have a fucking job.”

Renata couldn’t help but fixate on how Ken spoke in the present tense when he mentioned Corinne. She tried to let Ken unspool on his own. But he still wasn’t acting like he knew much about the observatory or the creatures that destroyed it. Ken also seemed to ignore the possibility, after all her insistent questioning, that Renata was Corinne’s daughter for the same reason others had in the past: She was darker than her mother. There was a strange bond Renata felt with Corinne and her store of living memories. They all shared secrets so plain no one else seemed capable of recognizing them.

“You said you didn’t believe in Terrence’s fantasies,” Renata said. “That night. That you were done with him.”

Ken nodded, looking over his shoulder, limping to turn around.

“He’s fucking crazy, dude. I’m telling you.”

“Not Corinne?” Renata asked.

“Nah, she’s too cool for any of that shit.”

“But you said she was helping Terrence, that they were working together on something.”

“I mean, yeah sure, but not on that. There’s nothing to work on there, just old-man crazy-people shit.”

“Ken . . .” Renata didn’t know how to phrase the thought that had just come into her head. “How is it that so many people here have mercury poisoning?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve noticed people around town,” Renata said. “Adults who I have to assume didn’t grow up here with severe exposure symptoms. I thought the contamination happened up there.” Renata pointed behind her.

“Fuck if I know!” Ken said. “Ask Terrence. I’m sure he’d love to talk about it.”

Renata pivoted.

“Who’s the newest resident here?”

“Um . . . probably Jenny Ritter and her kid. They moved out here a year or so ago. Why?”

“Does Jenny or her kid have a rash like Terrence does?”

“Yeah . . . so?”

“Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”

Ken stepped forward, wincing as he did so.

“What, you think it’s worse than Terrence says?”

“I don’t know what I think,” Renata lied. “But Terrence might be onto something.”

“About the fucking boogeyman?” Ken spat.

Renata waved his incredulity away.

“Just forget I said anything,” she said. “You need to get back down and have someone look at your leg.”

Ken glanced back at the tunnel and down the mountain, whipping his head in a pantomime of concern.

“Aren’t you going to help me?” he pleaded.

“No,” Renata said. She faced the mountain.

“Look, Renata,” Ken said, limping toward her.

“Don’t get any closer,” Renata warned. She heard his shuffle on the ground stop.

“I don’t . . . Okay, obviously Terrence is crazy, but I think if there’s something bad up there or, like, the contamination is worse like you’re saying, maybe you shouldn’t . . .”

A gust of wind shoved Renata off balance. Briefly, a flash of awareness like an unseen ray of burning sunlight on her skin. She could sense something watching the two of them. Renata remembered the scraping sound moments earlier. Searching the chiaroscuro mass of rock and foliage before her, she saw nothing. She was looking for eyes, but if they were there, they were lidded in secret.

Ken stood leaning to one side behind her, his bandaged leg bent, the tip of his shoe hovering above the ground.

“We’ll find you a sturdy branch,” Renata said, moving to grab her flashlight. “I’m sure you know this place better than me. This isn’t your first time wandering in the dark, is it?”

She meant it as a rhetorical question but Ken nodded all the same.

“You decide how to explain what happened to you. But I’m not helping you back down.”

It took them longer than Renata wanted. Most of the fallen branches were small and skinny or broken in half. Finally, Renata spotted a reasonably straight pine branch about five feet long, with a Y-shaped end that Ken slid under his armpit. The air changed between the two of them, but thankfully, Ken acted like he had before. Renata didn’t have time for his excuses or his groveling.

“I had a feeling you were behind me in the tunnel,” Renata said. “I heard a branch break before I went in and then I could have sworn I smelled something.”

Ken was sitting on a rock, his bad leg stuck straight out.

“I’m not that loud usually,” Ken said, daring to smile. “And it’s hard to see in the dark.”

Renata looked at Ken. He thought it was all a joke.

“It wasn’t very dark,” Renata said. “For a second, I thought you were Edith.”

“What a sight that would have been,” Ken said quietly. “I didn’t leave town until it got dark anyway.”

His statement bothered Renata. She heard someone trampling through the woods behind her before entering the mine.

They said goodbye at a distance, Renata shining the flashlight on Ken’s path. He said he had his own mini torch in his pocket. As Ken hobbled carefully but skillfully on the uneven ground the way Renata expected he would, she asked the question she had been struggling not to.

“Ken!” she called after him.

Ken stopped just before the black portal of the tunnel, tiny flashlight gripped in one hand. He shouted over his shoulder, “Yeah!”

“When was the last time you saw Corinne?”

“About two weeks ago!”

3.6

ALL THE DENIZENS OF MCNAIRY SEEMED TO STEP QUIETLY off from a life in the greater world and into the desert, deep within the yawning valleys of verdant earth and discarded metal. Any outrage or heartache from those who would reclaim these deserters soon wound down into exhaustion, even acceptance. There was little out there to fight over, not anymore. It seemed a meager assurance to know that the vagrants who escaped into towns like McNairy would live and die as unremarkably as anyone else, if a little more leathery and defeated.

After Ken departed, Renata gathered the bloodied trash that had accumulated while tending to his wound and rebandaging her own. On the first order, Renata understood she had a new problem to face: Her supply of skin treatment was rapidly depleting as she applied it to parts of her body that never needed tending before. Around her waist, just above the band of her shorts, a colony of sores sprouted, sensitive and inflamed, patches of coarse skin studded with white-headed pimples. The outbreak, whatever its origin, felt worse than it looked. Her body was reacting to something Renata couldn’t see or categorize, whether high altitude, some unknown allergen, or, loath as she was to consider it, some form of poisoning.

This last idea Renata toyed with, never fully convinced by it but allowing its plausibility to grow. She had been too circumspect with Ken. For the last bit of time before she had fallen asleep reading her mother’s journal, an idea began to form, the possibility that Percy’s disastrous conduct that night in the observatory had triggered some kind of behavioral catastrophe for the things Corinne and Francis Brown encountered. They seemed like opportunistic hunters, but maybe they too had been corrupted.

Punching the extra clothes inside her backpack into shape, Renata curled up on the hard ground and shut her eyes against the night. The next day would be the one, she told herself. There was a little over two miles to the top, two miles and then the disappointment and confusion she knew must be awaiting her. Ken’s answer to her question hadn’t troubled Renata the way she imagined it would. It confirmed an inkling V had asserted so early on, that Renata never really believed her mother was dead.

Then again, anything could happen in two weeks, and there was the fact of her mother’s belongings, the life insurance check. Surely a bizarre and complicated circumstance to manufacture. What could Corinne be doing now? Where had she gone? The more intriguing and unsettling idea was that her mother would be up there at the observatory doing something that Renata couldn’t understand. In some unfathomable communion with those things, or recklessly trying to fight them off, or brazenly continuing her work. Maybe her mother had simply lost her mind.

Renata awoke in the same position she drifted off in. She checked her phone, its battery half depleted, the same as the day. She had slept into the early afternoon.

The wound on her elbow opened again. Through the heads of pine, the sun was shining gleefully at nearly the same latitude as the moon. Renata wondered if Ken made it back to town and what he might have said, if he had said anything to anyone. A yellowish haze floated over McNairy. In the distance, way out, plumes of dust. The racers. Renata could be there now taking photos.

Sweat pooled on her collarbone though she wasn’t warm, her hair mussed and tangled. Renata knew she had an advantage over Francis Brown, that, in truth, there were many, but her camera seemed the most consequential. She could document instead of recounting and speculating. It was a perversely utilitarian thought. Images existed at a nexus Renata had never tried to define. The limits of what photography accomplished were clear to her, but she had never taken pictures to remember things. She took them, in part, so she wouldn’t have to, so she wouldn’t be forced to surrender to the fallibility of memory. But if Renata was going to stoop to the use of her photos as objects of evidence, she could at least show others what she had seen.

Gathering her belongings, Renata changed her shirt, dug around her backpack for more sunscreen, more food, more water, a flannel she remembered packing. Maybe she had left it, along with so many other items. It was cold at this elevation, with a constant blowing wind. She shivered, wrung her hands, cracking her knuckles. Any other day, a two-mile hike would take Renata and V less than an hour, but even from down in the little clearing, she could see the service road was blocked in several places by fallen rubble and rusted fencing. On either side of the road, there was a steep incline of loose soil and smooth rock. The wind wouldn’t help if she lost her balance scrambling over a crag. Coming back down the mountain would be even more treacherous.

Camera holstered on her shoulder, Renata began to pick her way to the first switchback of the service road. Before Ken had shown up, she slipped into a dream of her mother. Renata had almost forgotten it entirely in the aftermath of confronting him. It frightened her to think of how directly her response to Ken—the crystalline absence of doubt, the pleasure she had taken in hurting him—was linked to what she had been dreaming about. She could still recall that voice in her mind, a full-throated scream pitched down, repeating itself over and over, that choking, desperate final plea. How the voice clawed into the air, vocal chords ribboning and vibrating against each other, an instrument that would never be used again. The dream lacked any image at the end, just the voice, and before that, the certainty that her mother was watching her from the shadows.

No. Not her mother.

On the first incline, Renata looked back at the campsite, the natural disorder she found it in disturbed by artifacts of habitation: shoeprints, swaths of the ground scratched clear by her belongings, her body, bunches of leaves and rock pushed to one side, tree limbs broken in tidy segments, the lingering ambient humidity of body heat. And something else.

Renata couldn’t have seen it from so close: a trail of shallow holes grouped together three or four at a time, perfectly round, some with lines etched into the dirt between each circle. The trail looked like spider holes or burrows dug up by small animals. Each grouping had been spaced far enough apart to seem independent but now, at this new vantage, Renata saw a pattern, a progression from past the bushes where Ken had been hiding all the way to the very edge where she had strung the shoelace. Renata couldn’t remember hearing anything before or after Ken’s departure. Her dream. But then, she had awoken to something far more pedestrian, another man spying on her. After, she had fallen asleep again and dreamt of nothing. In that blankness, anything could have happened. It could have stood inches away from her. It could be watching her now.

The first switchbacks were easiest.

The road, never paved but leveled with gravel and pulverized rocks, remained smooth over the years, with sections disrupted by weather or animals, often at the edges of each turn. Shattered pieces of brown glass, cigarette butts, clumps of hair like cotton snagged on brambles, a broken CD. Any tire tracks that once branded the ground were long gone, and Renata thought it unlikely that she would hear a car pulling up behind her. The wind was deafening, pushing and pulling in torrents, forcing Renata to stop and wait for more insistent squalls to pass.

Corinne wrote about walking down this road, sometimes continuing on into McNairy and hitching a ride back with a colleague who was already in town. The arrival of replacement equipment or new personnel at the facility occasioned complaints that the road up the mountain was too dangerous. Trucks weighted down with heavy cargo stalled out on the way up. More than once, a rotation of researchers was forced to continue to the observatory on foot, abandoning their chaperone to troubleshoot mechanical issues. It became a reliable source of amusement for McNairy long-haulers like Corinne who watched so many different types of people come and go. Her mother claimed the wind was calm in the early summer morning and worst at night in the winter. For Renata, this rendered the strenuousness of the path she walked on an artifact of personal history, the same weather acting on her body as it had on her mother’s. She tried to imagine Corinne bracing against torrential gusts, her mother’s hair picked up and held aloft on the current, her face—Renata couldn’t imagine her face.

Half a mile from the clearing, the road disappeared completely.

The switchbacks grew steeper and Renata, exhilarated by her proximity to the observatory, had no trouble leaning farther and farther forward to stay balanced, her calves laboring, the skin that chafed against her waistband and the straps of her backpack too thin to bruise, so it simply broke and bled. The sun, like McNairy every time she glanced back at it, didn’t seem to move no matter how many steps Renata took, the subtle parallax as she trudged back and forth along the path the only hint that she was looking at a three-dimensional image.

Timberline began to impose itself, a steep falloff of plant density, with taller trees hunching lower and lower and bushes hanging off the mountain at more extreme angles, exposing Renata to the full intensity of unshaded sunlight. Patches of vegetation vanished. Corridors of pine gave way to stunted pillars, many of them uprooted, their undersides exposed and fallen, the sturdy, proud trunks resting somewhere further down, claimed by gravity. Layers of white and orange rock ran all around the upper section of the mountain beneath the browned decomposition of plant matter and trash.

“We hadn’t noticed it,” her mother wrote. “The way the mountain changed below us.”

Then, with the next turn, the clearly marked trail was swallowed by an onslaught of rubble. Renata stood there, panting, the air harder to suck down. A mile and a half to go and it was nearly mid-afternoon. She dropped her backpack, sat on the last bit of level dirt, her camera held limply in one hand.

A cleft of the mountain had come undone, as if it had popped and melted onto the path, igneous viscera erasing the way forward. Renata could follow the event like it was being rewound, the sequence, based on what signs of collapse and erosion had been left behind, plain in front of her. At the top of the cavity, a stream of soil slowly, gradually began to shift beneath the caked-over crust of earth above it. Renata could see boulders nestled a level below the cut of the road, leaden weights pressing down on the ground, pushing more dirt beneath, unlocking more earth as they moved. She wondered when the slip had finally given way, if anyone had been around. A high, steep mound blocked Renata’s view of the other side. With her shadow forming a squashed silhouette just in front of her boots, the sandy, rocky hill rounded by the wind, the image Renata could see through the viewfinder looked surprisingly artificial, sculpted.

She pressed the shutter release.

The further up her gaze traveled, the narrower the blockage became. The observatory was nowhere in sight. Renata consoled herself with the knowledge that it wasn’t supposed to be visible yet, that it sat on a promontory the service road snaked around to. But the impediment to her progress worried her. Before the clearing, it wasn’t energy but time she was wasting. Now it would be both.

When Renata stood up again, droplets of blood flecked the ground, stark against the apricot soil. She checked her arms and legs, her hands, her elbow. Soon, it became apparent: The sores on her waist had opened, the blood whipped off her body by the wind and onto the ground. Dark, uneven scabs were beginning to converge around her waist, exposed reddened flesh visible between veining cracks.

The infection was extensive and spreading. Renata had never seen anything like it on her body before, an exaggeration of her psoriasis, her body ossifying into a hardened shell. Renata could feel her pulse in her neck, thought she could hear it over all other sounds despite the whirring air caught in her ears, a thumping crashing rhythm. Renata wanted to cry. She was crying, tears pulled off her face, misting away, but she wanted the act to do something, to dissolve her fear, to clear a path to an understanding of what was happening to her that made sense. Crouching, fumbling in her backpack for her phone, Renata tossed out her dirtied shirt from the night before, her first-aid kit, snack wrappers, so much she was carrying and not using, all this readiness for what purpose, nearly upending the backpack in frustration like she had in the mine. She grabbed at something prickly, rigid, large, something that moved when she touched it.

Out from the zippered rim of her bag, a tarantula scrambled over her hand and onto the ground. Renata stepped back quickly, wincing at the physical contact between her skin and the spider’s body, fighting the instinct to scream.

Before she could think about what she was doing, Renata’s body stepped forward and picked the tarantula up again. Her fingers were caged around it, the spider’s gangly, segmented legs, covered in fine brown hairs, gripping, undulating, each leg moving independently for traction. Its pod of black eyes was shaded beneath Renata’s hand. She couldn’t open her fingers. The joints locked into place, neither squeezing the spider nor allowing it to move. Renata never feared bugs but she had never wanted to be this close to one. And yet her hand felt detached from her arm. Wringing it, swinging the limb quickly back and forth, her hand remained stiffened, her fingers curled.

Renata closed her eyes, huffing out her breath, trying to calm herself.

Her jaw locked like this sometimes. It was a spasm, a cramp she just needed to let pass. But there was no pain in her wrist or her fingers, no twitching of tightened muscles. The shape her hand was making was involuntary but it didn’t feel. Her nerves seemed to stop at her forearm. At the end, a frozen stump of interconnected bones. Raising her clawed hand to her eye, Renata noticed a familiar pattern behind the tarantula’s body: the creases of her hand were opening again, the skin peeling back to the red, wet matrix of tendons and tissue beneath. That same yellowish discharge oozed down her palm. In Renata’s hand, the spider had frozen completely, its legs stuck straight out from its body, and turning her wrist, a clutch of tendrils, taut like icicles and coated in the yellowish substance, penetrated the tarantula’s carapace.

Renata had nearly forgotten what happened to Ken the night before. Not what she had done to him initially but what she had never intended to occur after, the sucking wound on his shin, the dazed, almost narcotized stupor he struggled to shake away. The branch breaking in the trees. The sudden sound of something moving then halting in the dark. Renata’s heart blared in her ears, a single, unceasing rush.

Suddenly, her hand jerked to one side, her wrist cocked inward. Her fingers began to close on the tarantula. She could feel the resistance of those rigid protrusions push against the bones in her hand, feel the creature trapped inside rapidly lose its sense of bodily awareness. How did she know that? Her back curving, her body folding itself in half, an unpleasant, sticking sensation in all her limbs, microscopic pieces of glass trying to pass through her veins and then, like a cigarette burn, a circular hole poured itself into the periphery of her vision, a darkened aperture that was not completely black, nor completely solid, undifferentiated shapes, objects rendered static and nearly white, but blurred.

And then, another blooming at the opposite cusp of her vision, the small length of cleared road overtaken, this newer, larger circle glowing, almost entirely white. The rings kept appearing, at first separate and unique bands of light and dark with a narrow range of hues barely discernible as color, a green-tinged miasma amidst gray and black, before every ring began to blend together and nothing of the world Renata had taken in before was visible to her.

The tarantula no longer felt or thought. Renata knew it like she knew what it meant to breathe, a bodily grammar far removed from intention or choice. But the swirling mass of sludge-like shapes and bands of color in her vision made no sense, reacted to no change in position. Renata tried to blink, tried to look one way or the other, but nothing happened. She stood in a folded position, her body buffeted by the wind, a cramp forming at the base of her neck. The pain didn’t clear her senses, but it anchored her with a recognizable consciousness of her body, an arrangement of parts that had, since she picked up the tarantula, begun to shut down.

Renata extended that pinched, burning feeling behind her head to an awareness of the length of spine between her shoulders, down, one by one, through each segment of vertebrae and rib as if she were remapping the avenues of herself, reminding her brain of the vessel it was attached to. Renata knew she had to pull herself up, but her mastery over her limbs was severed, the darkened theater her sight presented to her without direction, without orientation in space. How had she ever stood up straight? There was never a method, no set of rules to follow. Her body had always obeyed.

Renata’s heartbeat pumped frenetically in her neck. A high-pitched fizzling curdled beneath her pulse. The sound came and went in regular intervals separate from her heartbeat, a sawing, boiling kettle raised to temperature then turned off. Deliberately, gradually as her uncertain sense of time or patience would allow, Renata focused on sketching out the rest of her body through its sensation, the tensed curve of muscles leading from her waist to her thighs, the pointed wriggling of her toes, squeaking knees, hinged jaw, cold sweat gathering then sliding along her skin, the fields of fine hairs on her forearms trembling in the wind, the numerous open wounds populating her upper body, the swollen, parched tongue in her mouth.

Finally, the fizzing, wheezing sound. It was the air escaping between gritted teeth as she breathed in and out. She could feel the full strangeness of the position she contorted into, her knees bent, torso folded with her nose just touching her thigh, her right arm, and the hand that gripped the tarantula, bent at the elbow, pointing up like the whole limb was being yanked to the sky. The night she eavesdropped on Ken and Terrence, her body collapsed into a similar state, but the shocking and expansive openness to the world, the feeling that she could taste and smell every element around her, was missing.

From the severe angle at which they were bent, her fingers were unable to close into a fist. The wind passed through the gaps, the hairs of the tarantula tickling her palm. Renata couldn’t see anything but that darkened, blurred smattering of muted color. Was it slightly brighter in spots now? The colors shifted like reflections at the bottom of a stream. With as much concentration as she could muster, Renata tried to open her hand, each knuckle scraping against another, engorged at the joints and caked with grime. Renata longed to shake the dust off, to budge at every connection, to assert and insert herself back into her fingers.

Slowly, haltingly, the tendons in her wrist relaxed, inch by inch, a hot cloud of dust slamming into her, grains of dirt rasping fine abrading streaks along her skin. The wheezing rhythm sounded less frequently, as did the roaring of her heartbeat, staccato now, each pounding a discrete, relieving pump of blood.

Her hand went limp.

The spider hung from its carapace by the slack tendrils attached to her palm. Renata could feel the yanking of its small, dead body on her hand as it swayed in the air. With the last miniscule bounce on those alien strings emanating from within her, the tarantula detached and fell to the ground.

The sliver of upside-down desert and sky between Renata’s legs beamed before her violently; her eyes had been open the entire time. Now, she blinked them moist against the wind. Renata unfolded eagerly, too quickly, the cramp in her neck seizing, but her hands flew to her head to grasp and massage the muscles there. She was still hyperventilating, her mouth opened wide. Renata’s eyes searched around her in crazed, rolling swathes. She moved and shook every part of her body as vigorously as she could, kicking her legs, wringing her hands, palpating her face. That acquainted, unthinking coordination of her limbs returned as if it never left.

Renata stood on the opposite side of the dirt hill that collapsed across the road. Shallow bootprints traced her path over it, measured, equidistant steps brushed gently by the wind. She had no memory of walking, no reason to trust her memory in that span of floating time. Renata climbed the hill back over to her belongings, still sitting on the ground, an easy lateral journey. The shadows on the ground were worryingly stark, angled by a sun she realized was no longer where she expected it to be.

Renata stooped to her backpack, hungrily unscrewing the top to her water bottle, and drank the last glugs of liquid left inside. Her phone displayed three voicemails, but no missed calls, no bars. One message was from Tara, two from V, all three time-stamped from four hours ago. Only then did Renata notice the time, half past five, the sun descended well past the mountain’s peak. And her hand.

It was becoming simpler now. Renata knew without looking that if she opened her palm, the creases of her palm would be reknit, unscarred. She jabbed at her phone, tapping play on the first message, pressing the speaker to her ear against the whoosh all around her.

Static.

“ . . . nat . . . plea . . . ocation . . . ou . . . okay?”

It was clearly Tara’s voice but chopped up, fuzzy.

“ . . . a call . . . rday . . . worried me . . . ack . . . what’s . . . on?”

The voice message ended.

Renata pressed play on the first message from V.

Silence.

And then the second message.

“ . . . Nat? . . . scared . . . hold on . . . texts . . . sense . . .”

The rest played a uniform fuzz of static. Renata checked her texts with V. Blue bubbles, jumbled clusters of letters, not words, stacked up.

V wrote back “everything okay? you never called this morning.”

Renata’s responses were nonsensical, unpronounceable. Maybe she accidentally activated the speech-to-text function during her episode. But when did she walk over the hill? Quickly, Renata hoisted her backpack, her camera secure on her shoulder, and scurried over the mound again. From this side, the climb looked more approachable, shelves of rock cutting into the mountain, skirting loose soil and flat, shiny panels of stone.

On the tilted ground ahead, the brown and stiff carcass of the tarantula rolled on its back, its leg bundled together into a point. The pod of black eyes turned milky, two of them exploded. Renata stared at the body, scrutinized its legs, the foreshortened segment where its head attached to the large, round backside. There were no holes burrowed into the surface, no raised tufts of hair.

Renata turned to face McNairy, to the sheer drop over the edge of the service road.

There was a taste unlike anything she had ever eaten or sampled, coupled with a smell and a sound, more a vibration, a frequency without pitch that moved Renata’s eardrums so forcefully she could feel her earlobes shake. McNairy was painted with the fading sun, all the windows that faced toward the mountain glaring white. No plumes of dust in the distance, no cars, no bikes. What was it?

Something sick and dying on the air. No, something burnt, bleeding. Fresh sap from a gash in a tree trunk. Piss drying into the earth. Scraping, crunching, like teeth, like molars. No, a knife prying into an open wound. What was it?

Renata shut her eyes, the onslaught of information crowding her brain. There was a phantom breath on the back of her neck. Why had she been smelling burning these last few days? And something metallic, not like blood, more like the near untaste of steel. Verdant, blooming flowers. Rubber. Old rubber. How did she know it was old? Pollen, a cloud of it, swirling, caught on a current of wind. Salt water. A baked, blackened meat smell. Sinking weight onto shale ground.

Someone was coming. Something was moving up the mountain below her.

There wasn’t only one, Renata could sense it, but not what it was or where or how many or how big or how fast. It was masking itself with the noise of sensation, but there were familiar traces. Human sweat, blood, burning wood, shoe soles. Renata thought she could smell V, thought she could hear the deep, subtly voiced breath of Tara, but they were far away, they had to be. And one other, the intimation of a third presence, a being that tasted human. How could she so quickly identify what was and wasn’t human and how? Whatever it was, whatever this third being was made of, was unidentifiable.

Renata glanced behind her, rays of sunlight fanning out into a crown.

The mountain rose until it surrendered to the firmament. From this side, the shape of the service road vanished then reappeared, its zigzag closing, growing shorter and shorter until it terminated at a bend. On either side of the road, the mountain extended and curved, moss-covered limestone clinging to the gnarled roots of trees that grew at an angle over the edge. Renata could imagine clouds descending at this altitude during a storm. But there were no clouds at all. A powder blue, liquid and transient as river water, claimed the sky, lightening at the horizon.

Up at the final bend in the road, the evening light keening at the edges of the mountain, Renata thought she saw a stutter of movement, a head ducking around the corner, a naked leg, streaked and lean, marching out of view.

3.7

SEPTEMBER 29, 1997—

It’s not as easy as stating outright what I think is happening. I can’t venture details concretely or with any urgency because no one believes me. I am isolated in my experience and, for the first time in my life, I regret it. Now, I fear my mind is beginning to unravel. I will have precious few chances to take advantage of my lucidity. I’m already seeing things that aren’t there, hearing long-dead voices, even smelling objects, through doors and windows, that I shouldn’t be able to smell. Sitting down to write this, I hope, will focus my mind. Most of all, I’m afraid there is little time left for others.

For over two years now, beginning in the spring of 1995, I’ve chosen to be a part of the McNairy Observational Research Center located in a mid-region series of mountains in Nevada rich in geological and archaeological artifacts. I never planned to come here nor thought, when I eventually did arrive, that I would stay.

What scientific work is conducted at McNairy is sedate, far from risk, though there is a quaint program, which I initially took advantage of, to foster cross-disciplinary cooperation. Scientists of all stripes convening on a single campus, sharing ideas and educating one another, the epitome of our American entrepreneurial obsession with manufacturing synergy, with exchanging skills. I say “quaint” not because the program isn’t admirable or hasn’t resulted in genuine fellow feeling, but because it has never, in my limited time here, amounted to anything useful.

Yes, friendship. A romantic pairing or two. More often than not, fraternization impedes the actual work and the quality of scientists’ imaginations. I don’t fault anyone for this. Government-sponsored science necessitates drone-like compliance. If civilian research centers are lucky enough to function on public funding, that freedom is usually curbed by a limited scope, a lack of the same gargantuan resources as Uncle Sam. It’s a cliché that scientists lack the capacity to appreciate the arts, that they are simply rationally driven creatures unwilling to countenance fantasy or speculation about the supernatural. This cliché is, like most, half-truth. I’ve found that the workers at McNairy are, by and large, a friendly group who tell stories to pass the time. Some are religious, some are agnostic, but I would venture to say that not a single one of the people here actually believes the inexplicable can remain hidden, at least not for long. There was no single event unique to this place that precipitated my involvement or my extended tenure. It just so happened that my extracurricular point of fascination settled itself here.

Surprising to me, though I’ve written elsewhere about the evolution of my participation in the goings-on at the observatory, I fell in love. Not with a person, but with the landscape and with the silence it allowed.

Perhaps it’s unfair to say I didn’t fall in love with a person as well. I’m not lucky and never have been. It quickly became apparent that, in the midst of those heady first days of emotional intoxication, my affections were not reciprocated, though we remained friends at their own urging and have since struck up what I can only describe as the strangest, most intimate, and maddening relationship of my adult life. It was a catastrophe, this meeting. Looking back on it now, it seems that the arc of history, of personal history I should clarify, for there is no true arrow of time, bends toward cruelty. Better that I had been truly alone.

I’m quickly losing my thread. Perhaps it’s better to start over.

In the spring of 1982, I was 20 years old and abandoned by my parents to the cacophony and breadth of my intellect in the greenery of Colorado. There was little I did not want to learn. I came from humble stock. My father was an accountant, my mother a lawyer. Much was made of this by my parents’ friends and acquaintances, who joked that roles had been reversed, that my father was the wife and my mother the husband. Three years prior to my birth, in 1959, my father had a son from a previous marriage (the mother left), and it was assumed, since my infancy, that my half brother would care for me and support me as if we were full-blooded siblings. This never came to pass for many reasons, blood being the least of them. It’s not that my brother hated me. In fact, he once told me so, as if he needed to underline the point. “I don’t hate you,” he had mumbled. We had just wrestled with each other and he, as usual, managed to draw blood. “I wish we were friends.” I had no reason to doubt his word, but one grows up suspicious of the excuses of white men, even if you don’t necessarily possess the language for your wariness.

The irony, of course, is that I wanted to be a scientist because my brother claimed he had no interest in it. This suited me, especially after a childhood and adolescence of special tutoring and advanced classes instilled in me the idea that I was somehow smarter than him. I wasn’t. My brother remains a brilliant mind and, against his wishes, a scientist as well. In Colorado, we managed to navigate around one another.

Our primary connection was hiking together on weekends and sometimes during school hours when our parents were working. There was never much conversation, our talking supplemented by smaller forms of communication. A low-hanging branch held aloft. Water bottles shared. A hand offered when someone slipped. The area of Colorado we grew up in sat not far from the river, but the place we hiked to, our spot, was deep in the wilderness, unmarked by trails or roads. My brother had already known about it the first time we went, but he never would admit how. Many afternoons were spent sunning on a large, flat rock that jutted out over the white water at a turn in the river, which gathered ice melt from the mountain five miles past the nearest house. I’d like to think we came to admire one another, my brother and I. What we lost in tenderness was made up for in camaraderie.

Along the river, opposite from where we normally ended our hike, there hung an old, dilapidated structure, what we later learned was a water-depth station. There had been a few of these seen up and down the river, and photographs of them in textbooks on local history. My brother claimed not to have noticed it when I pointed the structure out one afternoon. He feigned disinterest at first. Then he said he remembered what it was, that the station was older than it looked, that it was haunted. Fiction was always one of his gifts, the knack for telling a plausible, often wholly invented story.

That afternoon, he said the reason the station sat forlorn and abandoned was because something terrible had happened there. I believed him. Some days, if the sky was overcast or the river’s current particularly powerful, I’d stare across at the building, its aluminum walls rusted over, two large windows long since punched out. The place looked like a sagging face. I could never see into the station through those windows, but my mind would play tricks on me, conjuring figures or shapes that weren’t there. I imagine my brother found my fear endlessly amusing.

I must have been 12 or 13 when I first attempted to cross the river to reach the station. I nearly drowned.

The river was too large and too winding to navigate easily. Bridges knit together certain inhabited areas, but there would never be an instance when my brother and I could trek a more direct path over to the other side and make it back home before our parents returned from work. Naturally, my brother rescued me that first time. He was furious at being made to do so and vowed never to put himself at risk again. If I wanted to cross so badly, he said, I’d have to do it on my own. I was foolish enough to doubt him. When it became apparent, after a few more aborted efforts, that he really wouldn’t help me, my alternatives were few: rig some makeshift rope system, which necessitated tying a strong anchor on the other side seemingly by luck; become a stronger swimmer and hope that skill alone could overcome the power of the current; or get creative.

In the end, I had no choice but to entertain the third option, which involved little more than my hiking further up the river’s edge, scouting the water for boulders I might kill myself on, and jumping into the stream. The idea was that I would let the river pull me along and I would gradually swim across until I simply collided with the station. My brother stayed on the rock we always sat on, except, from between splashing waves, I glimpsed him standing, apprehensive.

One afternoon, I made it to the station and the rest of my life began.

But I didn’t anticipate the degree to which the river played such a central role in the friendship between me and my brother, not until we were forced to move far away from it in my junior year of high school. Our father had retired and my mother had been hired by a large law firm in Denver. For a few months, my brother and I attempted to search for a new shared activity, to no avail. It wasn’t that we were cold toward one another, but a lingua franca had been removed. We realized how little we had in common. My brother’s entreaty that we should be friends turned out to be wiser than I could then understand.

Spring 1982, my brother had just turned 24 and was given our father’s old Jeep, a scarred, haphazardly repaired machine once white and by then mostly covered in rust. We had been stranded at home, at the mercy of Denver’s public transportation or the rare days when my mother allowed us to use her car. But it had seemed fated that the first thing my brother and I would do with the Jeep was drive it back to where we had spent so much of our time together. We would go back and I would show him what he had refused to believe for years that I had found. The drive was amiable enough, but I remember feeling a distressing sense of apprehension. If what I’d seen was no longer there, it would be like I had been propping up a corpse, willing it to live.

We hiked, we climbed, we doffed our clothes and jumped into the river.

The station’s foundations rotted long ago. They were no more than wooden stilts that supported one side of the small building. Inside, there was a weather-beaten metal table and an empty wire bed frame. It was clear that people had squatted in the station before. But what caught my eye, what I hoped to show to my brother, was the hole in the floor, where plywood panels had been ripped open to reveal the earth beneath, which had been dug into some four feet down. The hole, only about the width of my arm, had widened in the years since I had been there. You could see the water at the bottom, a kind of natural tunnel whose entrance was blocked by reeds that had grown over it. The hole burrowed down about halfway into the tunnel. I hadn’t been able to see in either direction before nor did I want to.

I told my brother that the first time I had successfully navigated over to the station and inspected its interior, I laid down on the ground, put my eye to the aperture, and glimpsed a dead body floating in the water. It was the body of a man whose skin, bloated and waterlogged, appeared green, his veins darkened underneath. He floated on his back, his arms out at his sides, his body bobbing in the eddy. The man as I remember him was naked, balding, and his eyes were shut. Except, I noticed, it was as if nothing was beneath the eyes. The lids looked sunken in, concave, as if you could push your finger into them and meet no resistance. At the end of the corpse’s fingertips were what looked like tumors, blackened nubs with floating hairs, very long, thick like vines.

When I told my brother about this, he thought I was joking the same way he had joked with me. Coupled with his obvious lack of interest in attempting the crossing for himself, I left it alone. But the memory haunted me ever since. I had nightmares about the body frequently. I endeavored to put it out of my mind, but it seemingly never left my brother’s. He would ask me periodically, nonchalantly, if I was serious, if I had really seen something in the station. And so it became apparent, to me at least, that our communication wasn’t as deadened as I had feared. I knew, as soon as our father gave him the Jeep, that my brother would want to go back and see the corpse for himself.

We took turns crouching at the hole, peering down into the water, both of us, I think, afraid of what we might see. I was trapped between two warring hopes: that the corpse would be gone, that I would never have to look at it again; and, of course, that it still floated exactly where it had been, that I would be vindicated in my brother’s eyes. As it turned out, neither came true.

Leaning over the edge of the hole, my brother, in nothing but his boxers like I was, failed to see how dry and brittle the soil beneath him had become. The cracks fissured quickly. He fell into the tunnel below like the earth had swallowed him. It wasn’t the sudden movement that frightened me nor the primitive fear that my brother couldn’t swim. He was a stronger swimmer than I ever was. No, I can recall it now with perfect clarity. My brother fell into the hole and didn’t scream. He hit the water and there was no sound that followed, no flailing, no sputtering, no self-effacing comment. It was like he had fallen somewhere else, like he had kept sinking down into the water to some unseen dimension and completely vanished.

I slid to my knees as close to the edge as I dared and looked over, but my brother wasn’t there. I couldn’t see him from that vantage. I couldn’t tell how deep the water was in the tunnel but my caution, I worried, would make me seem like a coward.

I was about to jump down when I heard my brother shout, “Wait!”

He sounded much further away than seemed possible, his voice coming from the right side, opposite the entrance. There was something off about the way he commanded me to stop. I say “shout” but it was more like a croak, as if his airway was constricted or filled with water. I yelled his name, asking frantically what I should do.

He only told me, “Wait!” again.

It felt like several minutes passed.

The water in the tunnel lapped at the crusty walls. There was a howling breeze slipping through a gap in the roof above me. I couldn’t hear my brother breathing or treading water. I called his name again. Again. And again. Finally, I heard a violent splashing, the ripples pushing against the weak current from the river. His hand shot into view first and it was nearly purple. Then his face appeared beneath me, his eyes bloodshot, snot running out of his nose, blood dripping in the water from his neck. I helped him out of the tunnel, patting ineffectually at his soaking body. It wasn’t his neck that was bleeding but the back of his skull, just under the hairline. My brother wouldn’t allow me to look at it. Indeed, all that has come to pass stems directly from that moment.

My brother told me nothing at all. He was clearly in shock when we departed the station, clearly traumatized to have to jump back into the river and cross again. We did so after more than an hour of frustrated silence. I asked and asked, but my brother said nothing. We crossed and gathered our clothes and hiked back to the Jeep and still he said nothing. In those few years before, the station had offered me its own secret, an experience only I could corroborate. Now, it had seemed that the station had repeated the gesture in kind for him. Not a word was spoken about what we did.

Now I must bring the threads together. Perhaps, if you know some of what I’ve already laid down, you can surmise what came next.

I moved on with my life, I went to college, I continued to be bright and exceptional, as did Terrence. We went on to do what adults are expected to do, even brilliant ones. We got jobs, we moved away from home and each other. Of course, I never forgot the station. In truth, I never let it go. I came dangerously close to majoring in Southwestern history for all the graduate research I conducted in my spare time on the postindustrial government-sponsored surveying of the Colorado River, trawling through archives, looking for information about that part of the river we had cherished in our youth, that station, a spider’s den for something unseen and unspeakable, whose prohibition on our memories engendered silence. It’s too linear to suggest that I did this research to supplant my brother’s inability, or refusal, to elaborate on his experience. Something had happened to me too. I held no hope for a late-in-life revelation from him. There would be no confession, no final admittance into his interior being. We reconvened at home on holidays, smiled at one another (well, my smile was sincere), and left it at that.

Perhaps Terrence was right to ignore what occurred.

Certainly now, in the midst of what’s been wrought, I can see the better path. The lonelier one but the right one. My research, the underlying focus that hummed parallel to my career, brought me to McNairy. Only after, it turned out, it had already brought my brother. I should have known. I had suspected as much as we grew apart, that he couldn’t have been as unaffected as he pretended, that he followed a wider, more digressive, but nonetheless similar trail. He had found out about Francis Brown. Indeed, he had learned something of Brown’s life, even discovered his diary, having traced it to an antique Western museum out in the middle of Death Valley, buried beneath cobwebbed bric-a-brac and fraudulent Gold Rush artifacts. He quickly became impatient with it. I took it up.

Now I’m the one suffering most. Now the specter of our obsession drifts before us. I hope to be survived by saner heads who might fill in the gaps I’m doomed to leave empty. What are scientists good for if not working within margins of error? But there is rarely anything to quantify in human behavior.

I have found them. Perhaps that is all I needed to say.

I’ve found them and they, ever resourceful, ever alert, despite my best efforts, have found me. I hear them in the night, whispering to each other. I didn’t hear them before. That’s how I know I’m destined for something horrible if I don’t leave. Arrangements are being made as I write. With any luck, my transfer back to NTS will be approved within the week. I haven’t told Corinne. I intend to enclose this date’s passage where I hope it will be found, which is why it must rest in Corinne’s journals. She’s far from sensible, and yet I trust her. Failing that, this missive will remain on my desk, inside Brown’s folio, where only Corinne or my brother will know to look.

Indeed, if it is you, Corinne, who reads this first, know that I am, above all else, foolish, contrite, and always charmed by your inability to admit that I’m right. I dare say all of this is nonsense, an abundance of caution. I’m excited to meet your daughter as I imagine we all are, those of us who have been lucky enough to be near as you’ve carried her. I’m grateful you understand why I can’t perform the duty I otherwise would. It’s for this reason that I must reiterate my entreaty, for your safety and hers: Leave McNairy. If only for a little while. I can’t say for certain there are signs I haven’t missed, more subtle influences that have begun affecting us all, something in the ground, in the air. Despite my misgivings, it’s possible that I have actually dodged the bullet, though, as ever, I must remain cautious.

Throughout this recollection, I admit I’ve blacked out multiple times, only ever for a handful of seconds (I’ve taken to carrying a stopwatch with me as my symptoms have worsened) but still, the episodes are increasing in severity. I am master of this vessel. I endeavor to remain so. Besides, the greater danger remains on the mountain. No one can stay here. What they are, their distribution, their provenance, is a mystery Francis Brown was too eager to solve. The consequences of their continued presence, or ours, however, are not so mysterious. My hope is that, once I’ve sufficiently recovered, I will return to McNairy with a plan to bring the observatory’s operations to a temporary halt. Winter is coming sluggishly, but the mountain has been parched for months without rainfall. This is an encouraging sign. There is still time.

Once I believed we were marked, my brother and I, tagged like cattle, set loose only to be caught later. Terrence, if it is you who reads this first, for I know you to be an inveterate snoop, you’ve never asked for my apology nor have I ever offered you one. I don’t know what apologies can do now. My chief solace is that you’ve remained unharmed, that you were always the more sensible of the two of us, and that it was through my own choice that I never emulated that same prudence. But I’m working to make things right.

If you are to read this before I depart, find me. We might leave together. However, if either of you come upon this account after I’m gone, I hope the urgency of what I have described is clear.

Get away from McNairy as quickly as possible. Bring as many with you as you can. Even into town is distance enough. But do not linger. Look for the turned soil. The devils are near.

3.8

EVEN DURING THEIR PRELIMINARY SCOUTS, THOUGH FEWER than fifty people at a time would ever stay there, despite the fact that there would never be any traffic, no lanes, no shops, sidewalks, or multistory buildings, the oversight committee and, subsequently, the architects decided to call the single artery running into campus a thoroughfare.

The campus would live and die by its simplicity and functionality, its spareness rendered a virtue. The gravel path that led to the observatory was less than two hundred feet long and barely fifty feet across. Set down upon that road without any notion of what it had all once been, what energy had once fired the settling of the facility, a stranger might mistake the grounds as active, if only slightly bereft, its denizens busy inside, the overbearing light of day shielding the application of electricity and intellect.

But it was McNairy that decided the shape of the facility, the mountain known for millennia before speech by the way clouds gathered and broke over its range, sprouting streams, the pooled water teeming with fish, attracting hunters, anointing and destroying empires in miniature. The observatory’s location as advertised was not the highest point in the county, but a mere thousand yards away, a trifling technicality much worried over and ultimately moot. No one cared.

For many months, ground was razed, trees felled and pulped, boulders crushed down to size, concrete foundations poured. McNairy’s sky was pristine. In every direction, nothing but darkness at night, the observatory so remote and so steeply appointed that curious passersby would struggle to get a glimpse of that startling metal orb, if they knew it was there at all. Approach from the service road and one was greeted with the bulbous growth of the observatory dome, its base a pile of concentric circles meant to exaggerate the fluid dimension of the mirror inside, the slitted cap like a lamb’s eye where the sky was allowed in, housed atop a squat rectangular white building that connected on one side, stage right via a thin covered walkway, to the facility’s living quarters. Thirty years later, Renata witnessed an impoverished facsimile of this view, the facade of the dome taken apart along with the roofs and sidings of buildings, the decommissioning half finished. By the moonlight, the facility looked as if it were being constructed anew.

On the road, towering, rod-straight Engelmann spruces, far out of their element, had been replanted, five feet apart, in a procession on either side. In later years, this line began to wobble and distort, toes wiggling beneath the earth itching for space, but the overall effect had been achieved, the ramshackle abundance of nature that pervaded the journey up the mountain arrested, mangled into an artificially ordered shape. How else to communicate the domain of science than with industrial elegance, a constructed harmony?

To the east huddled an unusually ornate building disconnected from the observatory, the pride of the architects, who would come to loathe the work they had been paid to do for its isolation, a lecture hall adorned with a facade that had been designed in art deco fashion, accented with moldings that should have featured demigod statutes complete with Roman noses trapped in the walls but instead were left modestly plain, the impression of craft rather than the true expense of it, girded at the building’s four corners by pillars with long, geometric tessellations topped by yellow-glow sconces. The lecture hall was meant for visitors and presentations. It was the welcoming room where developing projects were announced, new personnel introduced. It was only ever occasionally used for this purpose.

The living quarters were attached to either end of the cafeteria, which split the facility’s largest western building in two, the north-facing picture windows curved in half circles, shutterless, letting in unfiltered natural light. Single rooms outfitted with uncomfortable twin bed sets that could be replaced at the tenant’s expense. Scuffed concrete floors all down the corridor, bright fluorescent lights on the ceilings that flickered a garish blue. Adjustments were improvised. Colored paper or lighting gels taped over the covers like the leftovers of a craft project, tape peeling from the heat, pieces of thin paper hanging down. There was always a smell of burnt salmon from a microwave in one scientist’s room, a man named Geisert, who never cleaned the spinning plate. Locks were changed, though there had never been robberies. Photos were posted to the walls, maps, charts, streamers and big, cut-out letters spelling names and dates. Hardly anyone spent any time in the dormitories during the day, and at night, most decamped to the Spyglass, two of the three vans designated for research expeditions repurposed for beer runs.

McNairy was a sleepless place. It was not unusual to pass pairs of shoulders bunched together in quiet deliberation at a table in the mess hall, to wander past someone muttering to themselves in the dark, to step out into the night along a canopy-drenched trail and see a silhouette ambling in the distance entranced by the stars.

A stranger might walk through these halls and peer into empty rooms, a rotten blanket turned on a stained mattress, a desk lamp left on. Most of the windows survived the opportunity of neglect, but not the walls, graffitied over, closets raided, toilets clogged and overflowing. Few stayed long enough to be in any danger. Rain had not fallen in years. Footprints branded the floors, and the sharp forked etchings of birds. In those final months, few workers knew what was to become of their jobs. Something noteworthy happened in the mirror chamber of the observatory. Others knew things, it was only difficult to determine who or how. Maybe transfers never went where they said they had gone. Maybe it was better not to know what could happen if you were left on the mountain on your own. One salient truth remained: The party was over.

Renata imagined some of this as she crept slowly down the broken corridors, flashlight in hand, camera tucked under her arm, her backpack and water bottle abandoned on a stack of chairs in the cafeteria. She was in more pain than she had ever been, her torso riddled with open sores, the skin all over her body burning, raw but undeniably teeming. She flipped through more of her mother’s journals on short breaks, missing Percy’s note, instead scanning the passage where her mother described what had been allowed to happen to Edith. Renata almost turned back then, repulsed. It wasn’t Corinne’s lack of remorse that so disgusted her, but the simple cruelty of withholding the truth. Renata wondered if Edith suspected all these years what really happened, if the animosity mentioned by Ken papered over something neither woman was willing to bring up.

Periodically, Renata looked behind her. A trail of blood followed. She captured an image of these darkening drops, her flash switched on, visualized the photograph in her mind, disliked the way it would appear, some amateur crime-scene picture, and took the shot again without the light, standing as still as she could.

There had been many photos across two rolls of film on the last leg up the mountain: the wide vista of the facility, the lecture hall blanketed in particles like the finest grains of sand, the view from one of the lecture hall’s windows out onto the eastern desert, the thin, distant line of the highway stretching into infinity, abandoned dormitories, the cafeteria where her mother arm-wrestled Terrence. It was all still there, the same objects and rooms her mother had written about. There would be dust from the same bodies in the exposed vents, DNA and fingerprints if she knew how to look for them. It was hard to take it all in, to take her time, but Renata was spurred on by a profound urgency, an external push that quickened her pulse, prodding her to stay alert. The alien awareness thrummed in her body even as it trapped her in agony, confounding and exhilarating her, whether something dormant that she controlled or an unwieldy order that controlled her, she didn’t know. Renata couldn’t be sure if what she was enduring was a transformation, the ripping away of some weak outer layer, in her body, in the walls, under the floor.

There, at the end of the hall, a splash of moonlight beaming through a tall window lit up the ground. The window looked out onto the valley on the north side of the mountain, a flat, blue desert knit to the southeast, uninhabited for miles, the parched remains of the grand, ancient lake. At the horizon, mountains rose again, a tiny rift between them. Renata shaded her eyes against the moon glare. She had been hoping to find her mother’s room before remembering that there would be nothing there. Anything worth searching for had been given to her, the bulk of it waiting for her to pick through and make use of again.

Her palm spasmed, the same hand that grasped Ken’s leg, the same hand that violated the spider and robbed it of its vision. She smelled it before she heard it, an acrid, deep odor, like singed hair, like ashen meat. Renata heard a shuffle on the soiled ground behind her and gritted her teeth.

In the shadows, a person, or something shaped like a person, stood.

It was a foot taller than Renata but slouched forward as if it were about to fall over. Renata turned around slowly, knowing her delirium, willing the mass at her peripheral vision to dissolve into nothing, afraid to shine her flashlight anywhere but the ground. But there it stood, in profile, its form blocking the corridor, with long, skeletal arms stiff at its sides, a silhouette of uncertain age or gender. The nose looked like it had been eaten away, jagged flesh covering the bone beneath, snot or grime frozen on the philtrum. Its scalp held no hair and yet there was the intimation of some kind of texture at the crown, a furred line along the curve of the skull, with a triangular protuberance at the top. Renata could see through its neck. There was a diagonal slit cut through it where the throat should have been. She could see a sliver of the corridor through the gap. The thing was standing only a few feet away. How could it have gotten so close without her hearing?

Renata thought of the mine, of those glowing eyes hanging near the ceiling, but she knew without any doubt that this wasn’t the same being. This aberration was significantly shorter, distinctly humanoid, but everything about it was wrong. Its limbs hung loose from their sockets, the head, so far as Renata could see it in the dark, rested with its chin against its chest. Hang a body on a hanger, Renata thought to herself, the sentence forming unbidden in her mind like a nursery rhyme. Her eyes shifted to the thing’s shoulders. No breath moved them up or down. Illuminated by the scattered light of her torch, its feet were bare and rotten, grated skin colonized by fungus, plagued with filth, once-white bones poking through the toes, their clarity in contrast to the rest of its body startling.

But the feet were wrong beyond their obvious decay. Around the heels, what Renata had taken for distended, exposed veins proved more confusing when she shined her light directly on them. Dark and knotted, a network of rootlike vessels alternately thick as cables and thin as wire plunged in and out of its skin, all through its feet, up its legs, extending out from its body and down the corridor behind it like telephone lines. Renata couldn’t dispel the feeling that the thing was looking at her from the side of its eyes. She wanted to arrest the thought burrowing through her brain to her tongue.

“Mom?” Renata whispered.

The thing didn’t breathe or turn its head. A tear of freezing sweat ran cold down her back, the sensation pleasant, distracting. Another shuffle echoed off the walls, but Renata didn’t see the thing move. As little as she could manage, Renata tilted her head and peered past the silhouette before her.

Another person-shaped thing stood there, shorter, more complete-looking, sprigs of wiry hair hanging past where ears should have been, a similar triangular contusion at the top of its head.

“Mom?”

This time there was no sound. Renata only mouthed the word, her lips trembling.

Renata wanted to draw out her tour of the grounds. It was her juvenile instinct for a dramatic end to the journey. She planned to save the observatory for last, a macabre farewell stained with the nagging suspicion that she had seen someone up ahead of her on the road, that, if she could not be satisfied by revelation, she would at least find closure. Instead, something found Renata.

The window behind her was whole, the glass thick. There were dormitories to her left and right, one room missing its door, the other, where the body nearest her faced, with its door still intact. None of the dorms led elsewhere though some were connected by a fire door in the adjoining wall. She could hide. Or she could try to fight. What Renata could see of the thing in front of her gave her some hope. It appeared emaciated, fragile, maybe even slow. She had been wrong before. But she refused to wait there all night.

Renata swung her flashlight at the thing’s head, the beam strobing on the ceiling as the butt of the grip struck the skull.

She meant to push it out of the way, but her arm naturally corrected to strike instead. There was no crack. Instead, the bone yielded, soft like a fruit peel. The edge of Renata’s hand grazed the puttylike flesh, a translucent, viscous fluid leaking from the new opening. The smell pervading the corridor intensified, clogging Renata’s nose, bringing tears to her eyes. She yanked the flashlight out from where it sunk into the skull. The thing staggered forward then pivoted quickly at its hips, turning to grab at her faster than its wasted body should have allowed. But Renata already ducked into the leftmost room.

The door was gone, the floor littered with dirt and weeds and shattered beer glass and pollen, so much pollen, but there was a black desk as high as her hip suspended on broken plastic wheels just beneath the window. In the middle of the adjacent wall, there stood a heavy-looking fire door painted black. Renata ran to the desk and pushed with her legs and arms. The wheels screeched against the concrete, the desk inching forward toward the doorless gap.

The thing in the hall lumbered in a circle, turning on feet that splayed too widely on the ground, tendons and tissue disintegrated with age. The desk slid home against the doorframe, but Renata didn’t stop to look into the hall.

The fire door’s handle was missing, the deadbolt and latch bent inward as if someone had tried to force their way through from the other side. Renata shoved into the next room, a dead rabbit laid on its side in one corner, specks like coyote droppings all over the ground. If Renata thought to look at the rabbit, she would have seen what no one else had known, the threat that stalked the peaks of McNairy for centuries: Its eyes were gouged out. The dormitory’s entrance was still standing, but Renata feared the other person-shaped thing in the hallway might be waiting for her outside. Behind, in the other room, the desk barricade began to slide fluidly along the floor, seemingly pushed with ease. A skittering sound, like drumming nails on a desk, bone on concrete, sped up behind her.

A gust of wind slammed against the building, pressing on the walls, howling through broken windows and yawning doors and cracked ceilings. Renata could smell the faintest hint of rain. Threaded into the yarn of flowing air drifted that same dead scent, sickening, putrid, wholly different from the oven-rotten odor attached to the things in the hall. And another note, something sweet, artificial like a perfume, a ghastly, cloying approximation of lavender that made Renata gag. Tara used deodorant with a similar signature though Renata had never been able to smell it so potently, with such specificity. She had heard of olfactory hallucinations before. Perhaps that was all that had been happening to her in McNairy. Perhaps she had indeed been poisoned, she thought to herself. This was what it meant to succumb to one’s own foolishness. This was what it felt like to slowly die.

Renata wrenched open the dormitory door, holding her flashlight aloft.

The thing with hair stood facing her. The hallway was brighter now, a slanted line of shadow cutting across the doors and walls, slashing its head in two. Renata’s flashlight burned down on a face without differentiation between skin and bone. There were only misshapen cavities, gaping craters where eyes and mouth and nose had once been, now melted or flattened or rendered in strips like candle wax. The top row of teeth was covered with blackened gums, the jaw torn away, a scrap of dangling gristle that might have been a tongue lolling against the throat. The hair on its head looked directly attached to the bone of the skull, a brown-gray brush fried and twitching in the breeze. Briar-like thorns studded its rotten chest and arms. Within the rib cage, partially revealed beneath curtain-like flesh, Renata glimpsed something barbed and writhing, a stringy black mass attached to the spine, disappearing into the pelvis and neck.

Languidly, so easy to believe it had been merely caressed open by the breeze, the triangular growth at the top of the thing’s head flowered, the shape breaking itself in tapering sections that curled petallike at the ends.

Inside, that ubiquitous, cloying pollen everyone in McNairy had taken for granted: A dense swirl of fine, dark particles sprayed into the air, a swarm, each individual speck moving of its own volition, searching the air. Instinctively, Renata held her breath and covered her mouth with one hand. There had been no flowering plants that could account for the deluge she had seen all over the mountain, had read about in Corinne’s journals, had ignored as a quirk of McNairy. Its provenance was simply there, irrevocable. She hadn’t lied to Ken before. She had never sneezed or coughed from inhaling it. Renata never considered if this was immunity and thus never thought to question how she achieved it. But here was the fetid source, disease and antidote together.

The density of particles released seemed alive, aggressive. Before she allowed herself to dwell even more, Renata stiff-armed the thing, its body barely pushed back. The vibration from the impact dazzled her arm, pins and needles stabbing her hand. She hoped to cut down the empty hall, her movement disrupting the lazy cloud of mites or dust or spores, she didn’t want to know what they were. But the thing hadn’t moved enough for her to squeeze past.

Renata ducked, still holding her breath, taking a wide step into the hallway, half in, half out. All along the floor, those rootlike veins ran in forking currents, some lying slack on the ground, others suspended just above, taut and twitching. Renata could see some of them undulating, pulling, being pulled. The shadow of the other being by the window at the end of the corridor played on the floor of the hall next to it, jittery, its movements almost mechanical.

Back.

The word sounded inside her head, spoken in her voice, calm but insistent. But Renata didn’t think it, the word transmitted.

Back.

Renata crouched as low as she could, crawling into the hall. The back of her head brushed the creature’s hand. As if activated by the contact, the hand grabbed the scruff of her neck, exposed bone plunging through her skin without hesitation or resistance, hard, nailless fingers rubbing against her spine. Renata screamed, swinging her flashlight blindly behind her. Her hand hit damp, sloughing flesh. At her side, inches from her face, the thing bent in half, offering the crowned flower, which yawned and spread, a seemingly endless stream of swirling pollen emanating forth.

Back. Accept. Back.

The voice projected from every direction, seemed to be physically there in the hall with her, its volume shrill in her ears.

Accept. Accept. Accept.

Renata’s limbs began to slacken, her vision clouding around the edges. Her mouth filled with saliva. The saliva leaked out the side of her lips. Her palm was spasming, the fingers twisted, cramped into the shape of a dead insect. Cool air was stinging open skin. Renata could feel it this time, the lines of her palm peeling apart.

Acceptacceptacceptacceptacceptacceptacceptacceptacceptac—

It was impossible to think anything but that single word. Renata’s body began to convulse, her skin freezing then scorching then cold again, back and forth in maddening waves. She thought she must be emitting light. Her heart punched against her sternum. It wasn’t the spores. She had little doubt about it, just as she had little left to think, to feel. Renata breathed it in during her journey and had never been stricken with allergy or illness. Just as her mother had been spared during her pregnancy. This pollution of thought that died on the air and blanketed the mountain, disregarded as the aftermath of desert bloom. Renata knew this, as she knew the tearing of her palm, the cracking of her flesh. She was, she thought, inhuman. She had been infected, corrupted, and though she knew she would die, she never envisioned death’s arrival to be so anonymous, so humiliating.

But perhaps there, perhaps then, this lineage of mutation was to her advantage. A glimmer of an idea. A desperate way out. Impossible to grasp it fully in the fuzzy, spreading black of her brain. It would hurt. Everything already hurt.

Renata dropped the flashlight. The clatter sounded far away, another room, a different floor.

Her limbs were leaden but she moved them, shook them like thick ropes dragging on the floor by her shoulders and then by her elbows and finally by her wrists. She remembered the spider on the trail, repeating the same tedious psychic push to fuse thought and body. There was a finger and another and another. Her whole arm was numb but the mechanism was responding digit by digit, tendon to tendon. Renata struggled to ignore the hand plunged into her neck, the feeling of bones not her own wrapping around her spine. Squeezing her hand like bending a brick. Lifting her arm hopeless. Something was snaking its way along the hand of the creature behind her, slithering past her broken skin, feeling the contours and crevices of her vertebrae. Momentarily, Renata lost focus and panicked, but the panic brought with it a shard of clarity. Her hand clenched and unclenched, her arm tensed.

Renata threw her benumbed limb over her shoulder, her hand quivering against the dead flesh of the creature’s wrist, its fingers dug deep into her neck, soaking in her skin. Renata gripped its wrist and forearm as hard as she could bear and yanked left then right. Left. Left. She screamed a hoarse, dry scream. The creature’s hold barely loosened.

Something snapped and suddenly the hand Renata grasped hung free, the bone broken from the arm, still attached by slimy flesh. The thing’s hand pulled roughly out of her neck and in its place came excruciating, nerve-obliterating pain. Renata tugged again, leaning her whole weight forward. She could feel the fingers slip out from the sinew of her spine but something was attached to the tips of them, coils that whipped as they slid out.

Accept . . . accept . . .

Renata lay curled on the ground shivering, her chin covered in drool, her hand dripping blood, the writhing vines padding the ground, but the voice was dying, glitching, confined again to her mind. The back of her neck throbbed.

Outside, wind blew on the walls, branches tapped at the glass. A whistling escaped somewhere, intermittent, and that cloying lavender scent infused with perspiration. Is this what happened to everyone? Renata wondered through suffocating pain. The observatory taken over, the center of an intricate, draining web. A distant summons, breathed in, not heard. But there had been signs of life, vagrants and locals making a game of visiting the facility, of staying over. Ken claimed he had never seen anything out of the ordinary and Renata believed him. This was what happened to Percy. Perhaps, she thought distantly, one of these things was Percy. And her mother? She still didn’t know.

The observatory.

If only she could manage to laugh. The mercury chamber in which sat a huge dish of poison. A good chance if she could get there with any speed. Renata wasn’t so foolish to believe that nothing else awaited her if she ran outside. If she could even run. If she could even walk. She followed in Percy’s footsteps, indeed, in her mother’s too. Renata believed herself to be skirting the edge of danger, following in the wake of sterile historical events, piecing together a finished puzzle. History had come and ensnared her instead. All she could see was now.

Renata attempted to stand and blacked out immediately, heard rather than felt her body slam against the floor, a gnarled pulsating tendril cushioning her head. She sat up slowly. She deepened her shuddering breath, fighting to ignore the variegated agony her body was mired in. Turning her head released a warm torrent of blood down her back, but the wound felt, by degrees, slightly more numb. The two creatures in the hall merely stood facing her, unbreathing, blind creatures, facsimiles of people. Maybe once human, no better than puppets now.

“Percy?” Renata croaked.

Neither creature stirred. She hadn’t expected a response, they didn’t seem physically capable of it. But she couldn’t help saying his name anyway, as if invoking it might bring forth a sympathetic vibration from the world. Renata wiped her mouth, propped herself up on weak arms. She stood cautiously, the sturdy heft of her boots supporting her as she found balance. The flashlight on the ground pointed its beam into a dormitory next to her, the door ajar. A beady eye blinked back at her, a sharp beak with a short, deep scar near one nostril, glistening wings, the flash of talons perched on the sill of a shattered window.

The farther down the corridor Renata staggered, the more energy she summoned. The halls were silent. Apart from her ragged breathing. Apart from her dragging footsteps. Apart from the soft whipping of the vines on the ground bouncing, shivering in the air. The wind abated for the moment. Renata passed the cafeteria, her backpack still resting in the chair. The silhouettes of the creatures remained in the hallway, in the wavering distance. On the other side of the cafeteria, another section of dorms, a corridor much like the other, and at its end, two double doors that led to the covered walkway connected directly to the observatory. To her right, a separate entrance to the cafeteria from the grounds beyond. One door was thrown open, the black vines snaking outside. Were they waiting? Did they sense her? Or had it all been scrambled, disordered? Was the sickening odor out there with them, emanating from them? Renata figured she would find out soon enough.

Gradually, Renata’s steps gained heft, her gait grew more confident. She worried this was only a side effect of shock, adrenaline compensating for physical trauma. The double doors were just ahead of her, two slivers of reinforced glass lit by moonlight. Renata collapsed against one of the doors and looked back. The far end of the corridor disappeared around a slight bend, the two humanoid creatures out of view. Renata pushed the bar open with her back, the old metal squeaking loudly.

At the sound, the black appendages on the ground went rigid.

Blood-rushing silence.

Then came a heavy, dead sliding in the distance, prey being dragged, accompanied by an intermittent knocking of something hard against the floor. The two creatures slacked around the corner, both of them entirely limp on the ground, empty, dormant, their bodies merely ragdolls dragged by their feet and backs down the hallway. The tendrils disappeared with them into the night. Renata shook her head against the image, discombobulating her vision momentarily, then turned around.

The short journey to the observatory felt like a dream.

The walkway was protected on all sides by tough interlocking segments of curved plastic. Age had turned the material, once clear, into a winding cataract, scuffed and fogged over. At one section, Renata passed under a crack ringed with dried blood. A smear of vomit caked onto the exterior at another. There was a gradual incline as the walkway turned right, the outline of the observatory visible against a dark blue backdrop. It took more of her limited focus not to glance out to the thoroughfare, to what, in her periphery, seemed to be a dense, swaying forest.

Up ahead, another set of red double doors, the leftmost bare, its twin drilled with a single handle. Renata gripped it, yanked down. The handle turned smoothly. All along the interior of the cavernous spherical building, the metal skeleton of the supports was visible, steel girders and pipes stamped to aluminum sheets. The space was plain, industrial, the poured concrete floor still shining in snatches that hadn’t been layered in what Renata knew now to be the dead remains of spores. Work tables had been shoved against a wall that was no longer there, chairs stacked together, scattered paper stuck to the ground along with leaves and pine needles, tiny dunes of sand. Renata could see the desert she had never left.

The observatory’s dome shutter was open to the night, the moon hanging behind the aperture. There were more stars than Renata had ever seen, not just twinkling points of light but gaseous clusters that stood out clearly from the purpled matte of space. The opening pointed straight up. In the middle of the room stood a black cube much taller than Renata, a thick, square window cut into each wall. Inside, Renata could see metal scaffolding climbing up to the ceiling. The liquid mirror was there, inside, over ten meters across. It was the only place that was safe for her, even if the mercury was gone. Poison in the air. Poison in the ground. She could barricade herself inside as long as she needed. Renata wondered how long she could survive in the room, if this had been Percy’s desperate plan, if the coming of daylight would banish the creatures like it seemed to when the observatory was still operating. But no one worked there anymore, and few seemed willing to brave the climb. It could be days. Renata couldn’t even relinquish herself to a peaceful death. She had seen what use a corpse could offer to the creatures outside.

Behind her, another trail of blood marked her path.

Renata touched the back of her neck. The wound hadn’t closed, but there was something over it, a hardened scab-like mass. The mass was held fast to her skin, and when she prodded at it, a searing, hot pain flared beneath it. Her fingers, when she brought them before her eyes, glistened in the dark, but all was covered in shades of blue. This is where she came from, Renata thought to herself, looking around the single massive chamber, the perforated metallic eye that no longer saw anything. She had hoped she could see the full shape of the past, the line that branched back to her mother, to this mountain. But it had all been seeded with toxic dust. Renata survived, changed even, and so had Corinne, for a time. Renata hoped her mother was far away.

Back.

The word was spoken softly this time, monotone, almost lost in the wind, which had begun to pick up, disturbing the detritus on the floor, playing spores into hypnotizing currents.

Accept.

Renata turned around, her heartbeat sluggish in her ears. She was alone in the room. Walking a slow, limping circuit around the black box, she peered into every dark crevice, fists clenched. Nothing stood waiting for her that she could make out. The source of the voice had to be outside.

Back. Accept.

The same two words sounded in her head, never growing louder, but repeating in a loop, hovering above the rush of her own thoughts. They didn’t coerce her as they had before, they simply returned again and again. Renata stood facing the entrance to the observatory, a single oversize hatch closed against the night. She could go out the back entrance, just beneath the shutter, a portal that led directly to the unfenced promontory and a lethal plunge to the valley below. A thin trail turned away from the mountain edge there, ran in one direction back down to the service road and in another to the true peak where a lush habitat of plant life used to be. The vegetation was mostly gone now. The runoff from the mercury spill contaminated the immediate surroundings of the observatory. Everything had been uprooted and incinerated. There were still pieces of caution tape snagged on stubborn branches, buried in the slow-healing soil.

Back.

Renata gritted her teeth, reaching inside for something useful. Anger, irritation, anything but dread. She thought of V, of Tara. The wind blew intently through the shutter, through the missing wall, pushing her toward the entrance. Again, that scent of lavender and sweat and something new this time, the unmistakable sour note of engine grease. No, Renata thought. Not here. She stumbled to the hatch, threw her full weight against the square yellow handle, which stuck, stuck, turned.

They blocked the trail from view.

They looked like pine, like spruce and mahogany. They looked like crags, boulders, stones fused with plants. Their exteriors were hairless and coarse like sandstone. Each of them stood apart from the other, if indeed they did stand. Renata couldn’t identify the different parts of their bodies. Some exactly like trees. Others matched the grain and texture of the mountain walls beneath the observatory, striations of light and dark tattooed on elongated bodies with more limbs than Renata could count. They possessed stalklike growths on their bodies, each tipped in bulbs and thorns, all of them haphazard and twitching in the moonlight. Renata couldn’t see any faces, fingers, or mouths. If they had remained still, their camouflage might have fooled her. But they were arranged deliberately. They lived and they had come, Birnam Wood blocking the road.

In the very front, a single creature, treelike, a weft of gray bark skin covered in variegated streaks, thick, sturdy faux branches protruding from the crown, which was bare of leaves. Embedded in the trunk, near the base where roots should have grown, there was a human form, flesh standing out against the monochrome pattern. The human torso disappeared into the trunk, blood staining the bark, spiked stems jutting from the neck and head, which hung out, along with shoulders and arms, like the figurehead of a ship. There was a mess of bushy brown hair, but Corinne was missing those glasses, the eyes unlidded, milky white balls without pupils, bulging from her face. She was clothed, but her top, a simple, unadorned T-shirt, had been torn as vines pushed into her body, where lacerations marked the flesh. Her hands flexed sporadically like a death twitch. Renata knew her mother was blind, but she couldn’t be sure of more. If she could hear. If she could smell or taste. If she could think at all.

Back.

Renata could feel the tremor of a sob building in her diaphragm. A hiccup of vocalized sound escaped her mother’s lips. Corinne’s head turned slowly, scanning with unseeing eyes, her mouth working itself open and closed. The sob melted in Renata’s throat, replaced by focused, useless outrage. Haltingly, Renata stepped forward, eyeing the creatures behind the one that held her mother. None of them moved. Some appeared dormant, a low hum vibrating in the air. One creature, a rock imitator, stood like a slab of cleaved limestone on conical extensions bundled tightly together, their points dug deep into the hard-packed earth. Renata could see the sharp demarcation of its camouflage where the true body beneath revealed itself, hundreds of black tentacles squirming, feeling, supporting, adjusting. Corinne turned her head toward her daughter, but Renata knew her mother couldn’t sense that she was there.

“What happened to you?” Renata whispered, her voice breaking.

Ken said Corinne was in McNairy only two weeks ago. V said someone called the house. Had her mother tried to visit her? Had she worried over the trail Renata might pick up, the unfinished secret at the heart of it? And yet a notion had been developing in her mind since she saw Ken the night before. Of Terrence and his grand plan to save McNairy despite all the years that led to this moment, with nothing changed. Of his contempt for those he would save. Corinne endeavored to retrace Francis Brown’s steps. Brown himself had been convinced that these creatures, or some similar species in Colorado, depended helplessly on water for survival. How desperately? It hadn’t rained in McNairy in three years. Once, long ago, in a time Renata could more easily envision such creatures thriving, this had all been submerged. But the rain was coming. She had smelled it the whole time. Canny hunters, slow predators. It was difficult for Renata to imagine Percy trying to snuff these creatures out. With Terrence, it made better sense, his vindictiveness plain.

Back.

Renata stepped closer to her mother, reaching out, touching her face. The skin was cold. Renata pushed at her mother’s neck beneath her jaw. No pulse. And yet she moved. The creature anchored to her shuddered, the trunk around Corinne flexing, a series of wooden lumps trailing the bark. Renata thought of the tunnel again, prostrate but somehow managing to connect. She peered past the creature to the rabble beyond. There weren’t as many gathered as there first appeared. Her eyes searched for those glowing pinpricks, uncertain if she would recognize them in the moonlight. Layers of rock, layers of timber, none of it real.

There.

A mixture of stone and dendrite, dozens of sturdy limbs arranged in a ring around the crown very much like a crown, stone branches, wooden boulders, and at the very top, two petal-mounts of black, glistening skin like leather holding two naked eyes. They were already fixed on her, forever gaping.

It watches.

Renata staggered back, dazed.

Three-eyed walker before the great, dead eye.

Something spoke in her mind, another consciousness, another being, a language of scent, sound, and, in glimpses, vision. It translated into speech in Renata’s mind. It was not the voice that had stolen her own and broadcast it anew in her mind. This voice spoke with the language of seasons, of memory.

The life world poisoned.

A well sunk into Renata’s gut, a feeling that she was falling even as she stood firmly on the earth. She looked down. Black liquid stained her shirt around her belly, and coursing through it, once-nourishing water now soiled by . . . What was it? She reached a quivering hand toward the flow. She could feel the black water drain out of her from deep within, as if it poured from her bones. Her palm was open again, translucent spines erupting from her skin, filtering moonlight, turning them white. Renata’s fingers passed through the black stream but felt nothing. Rivulets of the substance, fluid as a current, splashed against her hand, staining her skin, but the wound and its blood were not hers.

Broken carcass.

The voice crushed her thoughts. Renata looked up.

The horde was gone, as was the observatory, the road, the trails. Not gone. Where buildings had been erected, where earth had been dug, trees uprooted, weeds pulled, pipes buried, wires run, an overlay now hovered. There was no scent on the air like before and no taste in her mouth. The neon world once opened to her was stifled, smothered. Renata struggled to breathe. Her skin tingled. Her heartbeat pushed through her ears. Something was inside her head that hadn’t been there before. Her skull felt too small, too rigid. It needed to be opened up. Her nose was closed. Her throat was closed. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was the loss of so much blood.

Every manmade disturbance on the mountain disappeared, and in their place, ghosts, merely outlines, traced in pulsating dark strings. It was still night, the moon still hung bright against the clouds, against the weave of stars, but she was alone. Alone with the observer in the distance. Renata’s feet felt wet. Her neck stiffened, and only when she attempted to peer at the ground did she feel it, like rods fused to her shoulders and the back of her head. The black liquid continued to run from her, splashing onto the ground.

Dry sun cycles, different world place, different phase.

Her gut closed. It was never open. Not yet. The poison would come later, Renata understood. Her neck was free, but her hand, both hands, remained dilated. The tendrils pushed through pores all over her body now, on the backs of her hands, her arms, in stippled, writhing ropes under her clothes. The mountain was alive and breathing with her. In each breath, Renata drank in the world.

The great eye, unborn. The three-eyed walker, absent. The thirsting walker, the darkened walker.

The glowing outlines of buildings and roads evaporated. More trees and bushes dotted the promontory. Renata could feel them beneath her, their roots, the capillary movement of water passing through them, the pungent scent of the oils their leaves secreted. Where they had been eaten by creatures with small, jittery mouths. Where they hoarded water inside themselves. The mountain smelled of dry soil, pine, dung, urine, burnt feathers, burnt fur, so much less sweat, so much less blood. A pond hid out of view. In it rotted the dead body of a bluejay turning the water sour. The surrounding vegetation was already doomed, but there was nowhere to go. Renata blanched. The protrusions all over her body stood straight for just a moment, shivering with her. The rot would spread slowly unless the water dried.

In the sky, still the moon. Was it the moon? It shone bright and yet everything around Renata was still blanketed in nocturnal half-light. But the shadows around her were too sharp. She watched the sky. The stars vanished. Only clouds moved, the sky behind them a vibrant deep blue. No moon. She endeavored to look for its craters and scars, but the thing that glared down at her had no features other than blinding, exhilarating light.

The walker changed, changing, heard, did not heed.

A hand pressed on the small of Renata’s back, large but soft. She turned but no one was there. Her vision was blurry now, darkening at the edges like a pinhole until she couldn’t see anything at all. There was so much around her, inside of her, to tell her where she stood, what moved in the sky and in the ground. But the body that moved the hand was only half alive. It coughed a deep, shuddering hack. The voice behind it sounded like a man’s. Inside him grew a new, familiar, spiky life. The man’s body had breathed it in for a long time and Renata could trace the cells along the body’s veins, cells choked with spores that only looked like pollen. But there was blood outside the body, its metallic taste puckered her lips. And something else. Wet too, but inert, something that was never alive. Some of it must have smeared from the man’s hand onto her clothes. It burned.

Us, not us. Un-us.

Sun cycles, unending, scorching, the birthing life world poisoned. Tunnel sweat. Dead air.

Renata was blind. She could feel her eyes moving in their sockets. Mildew clogged her nostrils. Dust. Roots above her head slept in dried soil, whispering. That burning wetness lurked here too, wherever here was, a place that echoed and caught the wind in its throat.

Far away, darkness. Far away, wash. Plead. Torrent. Plead. Cascade. Plead. Flood.

A lake. An ocean. Renata could see it in her mind, but only there. The observer didn’t know of these places, had never seen them. Perhaps it was told, after a long, long time, a different eon, when subterranean plates stayed dormant. But there was a vibrating, stuttering clang in Renata’s head. The observer, without a mouth, screamed. Its hulking mass stood near her now, Renata felt it like a magnet. Her body reached in one direction, but the observer did not connect. It had eyes and did not need more. The ground was dead. Around her, the silent cries of other observers in the valley succumbing to a malignant cancer. It leeched their bones. It choked their prey. It melted their veins.

Dreams. Dreams. Un-sickness.

An ocean. A lake. An oasis, it must exist. Renata thought it as the observer thought it, a delicious, verdant field pregnant with the scent of crowded life. Deep, fresh and moist soil, electric, throngs of bodies. Flesh, fur, skeletons, brains, tongues, eyes. So many eyes. Enough eyes. Water, so much they would never die again. In their dreams, for Renata could sense them all now, their paradise was plain under the lifegiving sun, awash in water, seeded with spilled blood.

Three-eyed walker.

Accept.

Lead.

Accept.

Renata looked back to her mother, speaking to her in her mind though the barrier between them was impenetrable. The connection had been temporary. Renata could not communicate through it, only watch. Overhead, the moon disappeared behind a low-passing cloud. The clear sky was being overtaken. A drop fell cool and heavy on her hand.

She could guide them. If that’s what they wanted. She could intuit the feeling, their desperation. Pull them away from town, away from people, down the other side of the mountain, away from the highway. She was only delaying the inevitable, she thought to herself. Renata would be stranded with them if they didn’t happen upon passersby. There were no oases in the desert anymore. Where Renata brought them, death would follow. There was no heart visible through the thicket of harsh shell. When these creatures found their sustenance again, if they did, if she allowed them to, for Renata was beginning to see the choice before her, death would certainly follow. Perhaps they deserved to die instead. Perhaps their time had long since arrived. There existed certain secrets worth keeping from the world.

A shudder passed through the creatures, stalks quivering. A plume of spores released into the air, haze settling over them all, and through Renata, a pulse of gravity, an emanation almost like a shove. The rain began to fall. All over the horde, fissures in limbs and stalks opened, long cracks, a million tiny holes, tentacles whipping in the air.

Accept.

Renata said the word in her mind on her own. For a while, just a few miles, she could walk with Corinne, a reluctant monster from all that Renata learned thus far, and tell her what had been missed.

BRIEFLY, TWO OF THEM STAND AT THE PROMONTORY, STARING down at the blue and living valley where a kite line of dust drifts into the air. The rain came, drenched the mountaintop, and passed swiftly. The mother and child remain on our sleeping peak for a short time, wary of the great, dead eye, but the child knows what the mother is too disbelieving to fathom. One of their own is down in that valley, at the head of that phantom procession, whether hostage or leader or follower, it does not matter. The child, unafraid, departs knowing the mother will trail in its wake.

Now, the promontory is empty apart from a scarred, dying unfather, a survivor who dreams vain dreams of heroism and reward. It is old. It cannot manage the climb to the peak without great consequence and suffering. You smell its fear, it has soiled the body, but you are not afraid for the first time in many moons. The mountain is not restored, but it is quiet, the cries and shrieks of the stalking viper horde, which clung to these bluffs now distant, drifting away with the breeze.

You stare down at this scene as you stared down at the wanderer from the cliff. You turn away. You too have survived, despite fallow years, despite ruinous capture. You know there are other scavengers, wild and hungry, who pad through the desert and roam its turbulent havens, its never-ending shimmers, the arteries along which water dies and escapes into the earth.

I bid you opportunity. I bid you a good death. But let us see where the other trail leads, and ends.

Where the entwined destiny of the mother and child and the wanderer unravel from those slow, blind beings, dull knives eager to be sharpened once more. I step from this good, true branch, the child racing down the mountain, the mother in pursuit, and ahead, that plume of dust on the flat expanse growing, growing, growing against the blowing, verdant wind.

I spy them, stumbling on their millions limbs, their dread march, and the one at their head, unsure of her own survival. I hail down to them in a language they do not know, but the wanderer looks up all the same, tracks me as I fly overhead, the wanderer holding a maternal, undead hand.

The sky opens onto the dizzying, eternal stars, and for a moment, there is no horror.

Acknowledgments

I HAVE MANY PEOPLE TO THANK, FOREMOST AMONG THEM Haley Patail, a wise voice and brilliant artist, my first and last champion—I love you; my agent, Danielle Bukowski, who saw this novel’s potential in a series of unfinished, disparate chapters years ago and, with a gentle but firm hand, led me to the finish line; and my sharp editor, Rachel Sargent, a crucial southwestern ally, who steered the novel into the better, sleeker, scarier version of itself.

I also want to thank: my Wild Wild Writing Group, Yume Kitasei, Lauren Banka, Sameem Siddiqui, and Tessa Yang for modeling the novel-writing process and for the opportunity to speak so candidly about our work and publishing; Drew Cohen and Scott Seeley at the Writer’s Block in Las Vegas, along with my coworkers past and present, including Monica Barrett and Charlie Joy, for many long, fruitful conversations and their friendship over so many years—the experience of bookselling gives invaluable perspective on this industry and what writing ultimately should mean; Mollie Miller, the first person to read early drafts of Observer and one of its most steadfast advocates at every stage; and Granger Wilson and Cheyenne Cohen, dear friends and artists, in whose home I worked on and finally finished the novel.

Everyone whose ear I talked off in the course of writing, people who only ever responded with enthusiasm and good advice: Mom, Dad, Mel, Cody Gambino, Sreshtha Sen, Summer and Jinan Thomad, Cassidy Stucki, Vera Blossom, Lille Allen, Jos Fillman, Justin Rebollo, Amy Sumerton, Isle McElroy, Tajja Isen, Philip Sayers, Meg Bernhard, Erica Vital-Lazare, Alejandro Heredia, Krista Diamond, Namwali Serpell, Daisy Alioto, Erin Somers, Chris Molnar, Fran Hoepfner, Phil Matthews, B. D. McClay, Elijah Frydman, Mina Cooper, Ria Farmer, and Torri Lippacher.

Immense gratitude to Kristen Arnett, Brian Evenson, and Danzy Senna for lending their voices in support of Observer’s publication, whether on the cover or behind the scenes. Also to Mikayla Whitmore, one of the best visual artists in Vegas and a dear friend, for my headshot. Thanks to Tom Ley and the Defector crew for letting me carve my own little niche on the site and for leading the charge in worker-owned journalism.

To the team at Ecco, including Vanessa DeJesus, Daniela Salazar, Meghan Deans, and Miriam Parker in the marketing and publicity departments, and also production editor Suzette Lam and copyeditor Jane Cavolina for catching my mistakes. Thanks to Vivian Rowe for her incredible work on the cover.

And finally, to the Freelance Solidarity Project, the National Writers Union, Writers Against the War on Gaza, and the labor initiatives agitating for ownership, communion, and liberation: I’ve been a freelancer my entire writing career and would not have been able to last without the robust negotiation and advocacy of organized labor. Solidarity and gratitude.

About the Author

NICHOLAS RUSSELL is a writer and critic from Las Vegas. His work has been featured in McSweeney’s, The Baffler, Conjunctions, The Nation, Orion, The Drift, and Dirt, among other publications, with support from Tin House and MacDowell. He is also a longtime bookseller and contributing writer at Defector. Observer is his first novel.

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Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

OBSERVER. Copyright © 2026 by Nicholas Russell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Without limiting the exclusive rights of any author, contributor or the publisher of this publication, any unauthorized use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited. HarperCollins also exercise their rights under Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790 and expressly reserve this publication from the text and data mining exception.

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FIRST EDITION

Cover design and illustration by Vivian Lopez Rowe

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Russell, Nicholas (Author) author

Title: Observer: a novel / Nicholas Russell.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Ecco, 2026. | Identifiers: LCCN 2025049030 (print) | LCCN 2025049031 (ebook) | ISBN 9780063452398 hardcover | ISBN 9780063452404 trade paperback | ISBN 9780063452411 ebook

Subjects: LCGFT: Horror fiction | Novels

Classification: LCC PS3618.U7646 O27 2026 (print) | LCC PS3618.U7646 (ebook)

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025049030

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025049031

Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2026 ISBN: 978-0-06-345241-1

Version 08042026

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-345239-8

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