Chapter Ten:Animals

  [content warning: discussions of police violence, racism, child sexual abuse, murder]

  The days bathe in sunlight. The change of the seasons is somehow unremarkable and yet the most vital element of life. Without the rhythms of school or work to ground her anymore, the natural rhythms have set the pattern of time for Ivy. When Gravity arrived it was the start of summer; now the heat wave has crested. July and August demand their sort of calmness, not the vulnerable calmness of winter. The heat sends sweat and flies she's too tired to swat at. She wants only to lie around rexing, marinating in her thoughts, watching Sophia or Eff move about the pce. Weed is at home here. Mid to te summer is the kingdom of the marijuana clouds, a time for rexing into the simple sensation of being in the world. Nothing is happening.

  Over time, Gravity’s presence at the house becomes normal to Ivy. Fae fits in well and, except for the shock of reliving the past, there’s nothing really disruptive for her. Like it was a decade ago, they are frequently stuck around the house together, although they orbit in their own personal circles of habits. Ivy’s sense of stability is returning, though there is no relief from nightmares about the church and her father, an unpleasant new addition to the pantheon of traumas. Sometimes she dreams about Piper but the shock of it is gone. Sometimes she cries about Piper, and Eff or Gravity or Nylon cry about Midnight, and Sophia cries about the girl she knew who killed herself.

  Talking with Sophia and Eff, she nds on the conclusion that the shock to her mental health was less the fact of Gravity’s presence and more the realization that at least some substantial portion of her ideas about her past self were uncomfortably true. Once she is able to bel that as the significant shock, it gives her something to hold onto. Her life here remains stable, as long as people can bring in enough money to keep the housing together. Her friendships are, for the moment, mercifully consistent, as is her retionship with Sophia. There were years of misery, confusion, and horror but they’re in the past now, separated by a gulf filled with stupid hipster boys and yoga instructors and doing drugs out on the street with Eff and making mostly manageable bad decisions at parties or weird punk houses. Time, for once, is on her side.

  Even still, time has its drawbacks. The stillness brings maise. With every passing week she is increasingly aware of the state of her living situation. She’s nguishing, not doing anything with her life, not even bringing in income to help with the house. Something she’s not at all sure how to do in the state she’s in. There’s eight people, plus the cat Jaime recently adopted when it started spending time in the backyard. Even without thinking about rent or electricity or internet, there’s daily costs of food and phone bills and transportation and clothes and all the little things that come up. How do most people live like this? Based on what she sees of people walking around in public, looks of misery and consternation and barely repressed desperation, she’d guess the answer is that no one is doing very well. The recession that hit a decade before has never really ended for the struggling people she knows. Whatever makes economists say that things are better exists in a dimension of society she rarely interacts with.

  She thinks about these things while smoking, while making coffee, cooking pasta in the big pot so there’s enough for everyone, watching TV, vacuuming the living room, organizing people’s clothes, staring off into space and trying not to think about death. Just living, pointlessly. The mundane is haunting her.

  No one’s bothering her about it, it’s just the day to day pressure of seeing everyone else going to their jobs or their hustles and knowing she doesn’t have anything to contribute. The onus hovers over her. She considers, briefly, camming, but the thought of it opens up old wounds about sex and after a long night talking it over with Ursu she confirms that’s not a good headspace to approach it from. She doesn’t have any monetizable hobbies, most her job experience was either miserable secretarial work or eras that appear as mysterious voids in her resume. She applied at a few grocery stores but after a month on stocking and checkout she woke up just not able to go back, repulsed by the thought of her manager’s voice. She would hear it in the shower, echoing in her head, the droning miserable tone of someone whose only pleasure in life was his mundane kingdom that ended where the shopping cart wheels locked. Mental health is the hard limit on her options, something she’s still trying to get used to. Sophia is spending a lot of time out of the house as a private tutor and it gives Ivy time to sit and rot. She smokes weed, stares at the ceiling, stares at the sky, watches Shinji (the cat) chase the birds and the bugs in the backyard, tries to read books but gets too distracted with anxieties, thinks about trying to become an influencer but barely has a web presence, feels anxious, feels guilty, feels nauseous, and more and more starts to resent the feeling of stability in her life that has only brought home to her how thoroughly fucked up her life has been. She checks her phone for texts, sees that she doesn’t have any, puts it away, then checks again. In the past, she had been drifting from situation to situation, reacting only to what she found around her, and there was almost a comfort into how she could slip into those molds. Now, for the first time stable, she feels like tearing her hair out.

  “Well, what do you actually want to do?” Eff asks her, sitting down on one of the rough boulders piled along the Richmond shoreline. She looks altogether too much like Scatter in her bck denim cutoffs and sleeveless Limp Wrist shirt.

  “What do you mean? I want to do something, I don’t know.”

  “You said you’ve been in so many situations where you were just seeking approval or trying to survive. Now you’re in a situation where that’s not as immediately relevant so you’re falling apart. What I’m asking you is, what do you want to do with yourself, with your life, now that you’re here? You’ve been here long enough to have some idea of direction develop, right?”

  The ocean breeze is whipping her hair all around into her eyes. Irritation boils up inside her. Eff is so supportive but she seems to always have a response, always have an answer, and sometimes that can feel maddening. “Why are people always asking questions like that? What do I want to do? I’m tired of trying to figure it out. I feel like a bowl people pour their expectations into and back out of.”

  “You sound hostile.”

  Yes, maddening: she picked it up immediately. Ivy feels outmaneuvered. “I’m not being hostile it just feels like a useless question. I don’t know why you’d ask me that.”

  On the way home, still hot with the emotions the conversation unexpectedly stirred up, she tells Eff she’s going to stop at the grocery store and wants to go in alone. She drives out of the way and stops at a bourgie suburb pce that specializes in organic food and fresh produce. Eff gives her a look but clearly isn’t in the mood to press the issue; instead, she pulls out her phone and gets into an argument on tumblr about feminism while Ivy lets her hair down so it nearly covers her face and puts on a coral pink lipstick that she normally never wears but leaves in the car for just this purpose. One of the old habits she’s never shaken is the feeling that she needs some kind of disguise, however mediocre, on hand. She adds a little eyeshadow to complete the look, tucks her wallet into the glove compartment, and spends nearly an hour shopping like she was wealthy, loading up the cart with fresh vegetables, big delicious squash that look like something out of an advertisement, and a lot of fancy beer she could normally never afford. She casually slips expensive dressings and sauces into the bags of vegetables, then hovers near the fruit examining them for rot while watching the checkout counter through the corner of her eye. When all the cashiers are occupied and distracted, she calmly wheels the cart out to the parking lot and to the car. After she loads up the trunk and slides into the driver’s seat Eff gives her a smirk.

  “Well at least I’m not completely useless,” Ivy says, too irritable to not just say what she’s thinking.

  “No, that was good,” says Eff. “That was smooth. Were you trying to prove something?”

  “Yes,” says Ivy. “I don’t know if it’s to you or me, though.”

  “That you’re still a criminal?” Eff ughs.

  “Maybe!”

  “Hey, do me a favor. Don’t get weird at me like that when I’m trying to help you.”

  Ivy freezes up, having a hard time meeting her eyes. Her mouth tastes like stale lipstick. Some avoidant part of her mind reminds her they should leave the parking lot as soon as possible. She’s still mad at Eff and she doesn’t even know why. Maybe she feels unworthy of Eff’s attention. There’s something hanging over them, has been for years. Since she’s been sleeping with Sophia, things have been changing in Ivy’s mind, reigniting passions that trauma had buried. She’s been getting irritated at Eff tely and it’s not really for any good reason. The fact is, she’s thinking about how soft and full Eff’s lips look, about the way the sunlight reflects in her brown eyes and off the curves of her cheeks. It’s not the kind of thing she knows how to say. She’s afraid of being seen as aggressive, of crossing some line, of losing her friendship with the person she’s been so close to and so supported by. Maybe even fucking up her retionship with Sophia. They’re poly, but she’s never really put that into practice and she’s terrified she’ll fuck it up. She’s not experienced with retionships that go well, with bancing different desires and impulses in a successful way.

  “There’s been a lot on my mind tely. I’m sorry for putting that on you,” Ivy says, and starts the car.

  “Just be real with me, okay?”

  “Yeah, totally.”

  A feeling inside Ivy tells her, now you grab her hand, now you lean in and kiss her. But she’s probably just feeling the rush from shoplifting several hundred dolrs worth of groceries. She turns on the CD pyer instead and the car echoes with Nirvana. They head home and refill the fridge then work together in the kitchen making a big curry dinner for everyone.

  As wildfire smoke ushers them into August, Jaime insists that she’s going mad from being trapped in civilization and manages to talk most the people at the house into going on a camping trip for a long weekend up in the mountains. Jaime, Eff, and Emiko have some experience with camping. The st time Ivy remembers doing anything like that was when she lived in Santa Cruz, unless you count the times she had to spend a night or two half-asleep in a sketchy pce with Eff. Being up in nature is like returning to a friend she’s neglected, a friend she’s always had an ambiguous retionship with. There were times she tried to care, tried to be present for it. Lacey would go on long expnations about the sea life or fire ecology or predator-prey cycles or invasive species and Ivy would nod along, pretending that she had some way to grasp it. It’s all something too immense for her. When she stares at the ocean or the forest her mind gets lost, like a young child trying to recognize the face of a stranger. She knows she should feel some sense of loss over this. Really she feels more than anything that she belongs to the cities she’s been in complicated retionships with. The world of navigable signs and crumbling sidewalks, of people moving around. The ocean and the forest are vast and empty. Strange to think that, even still, they’re so full of life and so reinvigorating for others.

  Sophia has a hard time with the material process of camping, being used to comfort and stability in housing, but tries not to make it everyone’s problem. Her boots catch on the brim of the tent’s opening and on jutting leftover tentposts from previous campers and she spends a half hour each night and morning picking bits of dirt and pine needle from the floor of the tent and throwing them outside. The first night she’s too cold going to sleep and bundles up in a hoodie and jacket in addition to the all-weather sleeping bag they got from WalMart. Sometime around two or three in the morning she wakes Ivy up shifting around, compining that she’s boiling up but every time she takes anything off it’s freezing. They hear what Ivy is pretty sure is a raccoon sniffing around the tent and Sophia’s convinced it’s a bear, and tells everyone the next morning about their brush with fate.

  Jaime, Nylon, and Gravity go off on hikes every day, disappearing for most the day and leaving Emiko, Sophia, and Ivy back at the campsite, pying poker and talking. They have a much easier time letting loose outside of the familiar environment, away from the everyday stressors. Ivy’s gd for the opportunity to talk with Emiko and Sophia; if she were alone or off on that hike she’d be devoured in the vastness of the forest. The birds that show up at the campsite while they’re pying poker are something to see. Wild scrub jays with shocking blue feathers that are surprisingly comfortable getting close to the rge omnivores lounging at the campsite. All that afternoon, a raven sits in a tree nearby and silently watches them. Every time she turns, Ivy sees it up there.

  “I love corvids,” says Emiko one time when she catches Ivy staring at the raven. “At my old pce, there were some crows that used to come by. Sometimes I would feed them. Pretty soon we got to be friends. There were a few that would come right up to me and let me pet them while I fed them. You can recognize them when you get to know them. They have very distinctive personalities.”

  The bird is staring at Ivy, too. It’s almost so still it could be a fake, or a corpse, except for the incredible vitality in its gaze and the way it readjusts its stance. “There’s something eerie about them. I mean that in a positive way. They’re a little outside of the natural world, and a little outside of the human world.”

  “They’re often associated with death,” says Sophia. “Messengers between the world of the living and the dead.”

  “That’s us too,” says Ivy. “In a lot of cultures, transgender people were messengers between the living and the underworld. Able to go to hell and back without being trapped there.”

  “They’re very intelligent. Maybe that’s what makes them uncanny to humans. They don’t fit neatly in the categories,” says Emiko.

  The cawing echoes around the campsite, sanctifying it. They come to us, Ivy thinks, speaking from out there. Calling us lost navigators home.

  The raven flies away to the sound of something big trampling through the bushes. They turn to see two men and a blond woman in garish bright hiking clothes stumble into their campsite. In broken English one of the men expins that they’re from Switzernd and asks if anyone has weed. Emiko trades them some for a little stone carving of a shark that the man says will give her good luck and then they sit around talking among each other while he rolls the worst joint Ivy’s ever seen. Sure enough it comes apart when he licks it and they all help gathering the little bits of shredded bud from the dust. Halfway through the joint the man turns to them and says, “You are all very sexy! I hear American women like Europeans.” Slowly Emiko tries to expin to him what lesbians are. “Oh!” he says. “Like French!”

  After they leave, Emiko struggles to make a campfire with a flint and steel for twenty minutes until the three of them remember with embarrassment that they can just use a lighter. It’s just picking up when the other three get back, very hungry because they didn’t pack anything other than almonds. They roast potatoes and carrots wrapped in aluminum foil in the fire, and a bag of cocktail weenies for the non-vegetarians. Nylon wants to tell ghost stories but it quickly turns into travel stories with Jaime, about people they knew trainhopping or hitching around. People they lost contact with or who died. Gravity tells them about a haunted punk house in Chicago but it sounds to Ivy like the ghost is bad wiring and unstable ground. She tries to tell a story or two about the pce she stayed in Santa Cruz with the hippie cis feminists and their weird cult, doing period blood magic and seances. Sophia starts talking about how the first western ghost stories come from ancient Greece around the time that houses started to be passed among different private property owners and how it’s a reflection of the fact that social violence becomes anonymized when we move into spaces whose histories we don’t know. Emiko says she had a ghost following her for three days when she was homeless in Texas and doesn’t eborate. When the fire burns low, Sophia and Ivy go to bed, leaving Jaime and Nylon tending the coals, smoke furling up into the sky where the stars sit seemingly fixed in position.

  *****

  “The securization of the world is not true, of course. A true securization would be a terrifying and paranoiac skepticism, would bring one back around to a sort of inverted animism or pantheism. The purpose of the securization is to nullify the potential of alterity within the dominating logos of the hegemonic monotheism, the colonial religious system.”

  Lilly’s having trouble following, but Scatter’s voice is soothing atop the rattle of the rain and the hum of the tires on the wet road. They’re driving a long ways, Lilly behind the wheel of a beat up bck station wagon belonging to one of Scatter’s friends. The back is loaded up with stickers that say things like ‘Unabomber for President’ and ‘Save a Tree, Kill a Human’ plus a lot of punk bands Lilly barely knows like Earth Crisis and Dystopia, giving her a little anxiety about the idea of being pulled over. The anxiety is amplified by the fact that they’re on their way to pick up Houndstooth from a radical convergence in Tacoma because their ride fell through and they haven’t been able to trainhop since getting a fractured rib. The automatic transmission makes angry noises at random, growing more agitated since it started raining, and the brakes squeal enough that she has to give a lot of stopping distance. In the backseat are cardboard boxes full of copies of various zines by people like John Zerzan and Fredy Perlman and a whole box of Situationist writings most of which are just copies of Society of the Spectacle. They’re weighed down with random rocks, a rusty monkey wrench, and a pair of boltcutters that still has a price sticker on it.

  “The strategy of the center is to subsume all it can, with the force of totalizing territorialization. Reliant on its own capacity to devour contradiction into a mere flourish of its might, conflict is marshaled back into the manifestation of the center. Take up the position of nemesis and you become a function of its Manichean dualism, a further eboration of its omnipotent monomyth. To say the father is the mother, the serpent is the savior, is not merely to recast a binaristic conflict, but to subsume that binary to a destructive episode, a fugue state in the process of becoming, which may repse many times, but which is ultimately subject to the cosmology of the infinite. To digest the logos a greater holism is needed, a totalizing openness: the schizopoesis, beyond the rational and irrational, beyond the spiritual and secur, beyond divisions of monotheism, polytheism, pantheism, atheism, and animism. She is already there, tugging at the edges of context: serpent, messiah, nemesis, creator. The repressed sinthome of the structural zeitgeist underlying civilization itself, neither outside nor inside but within and without. She (in the plural sense) is that which is capable of the same kind of retrocausality as the myth of the Father, rendering him into merely that which She has overcome. The shakti of the voidworld.”

  Scatter had found the Lemurian Time War zine in a box of miscelneous materials, full of pins and stickers and street trinkets, that she had started digging through around the three hour mark. She can’t drive and the awkward guilt over having to ask Lilly to do all the work has been making her even more antsy than she already would have been, so she’s taken up sporadic reading, punctuated by her commentary, trying to keep Lilly entertained. She pauses now and holds another Slim Jim out to Lilly.

  “You sure you don’t want one?”

  “I’m still good from the burgers we had earlier.”

  “Hm. I bet Jest would be pissed if she knew we ate meat in her car. So, uh, don’t tell her.”

  The route follows long stretches of highway that occasionally run through towns, sometimes merging with the municipal roads. Dozens of little towns just like the ones she grew up in, with the same kinds of intentionally quaint tourist traps here and there between gas stations and cafes. Selling the same bullshit they get from international suppliers as if it were local fvor. They’re going through one of these towns now. House after house, some with American fgs hanging off the front, some with little wn decorations: wagon wheels, wood carvings of bears, bits of tie-dye. The center strip of the road is filled with endless lines of intermittent hedges, here, not here, here, here, not here, seemingly random, like some kind of binary code inscribed into the civic infrastructure.

  “Hey, what is Houndstooth up to anyway?”

  “You know I can’t talk about that,” says Scatter with a shrug.

  “Is it like a secret ritual? Are they pnning to bring down a skyscraper?”

  “It’s just the basic rules of the thing: everything’s on a need to know basis.”

  “That sounds like something spies would say.”

  Scatter ughs. “Well yeah! If you’re trying to change everything in your society, doesn’t that by necessity make you a spy? It’s basically inescapable.”

  “Spies lead lonely lives,” Lilly says. She’s not even sure what she’s getting at, it’s just been too many hours on the road and she’s getting weird. The hedgerows are starting to look sinister and intentional to her. If she doesn’t talk to Scatter she might start specuting about what they’re plotting and she won’t know if it’s a joke or not.

  “Americans all lead lonely lives. This is a very lonely pce to be. I think being a leftist cuts you out of a things, for sure, but overall it’s less lonely than the rest of it. I feel less lonely these days than I ever used to.”

  Now there’s a thread to pull on. “Oh yeah, you never really talk about your past. What did you used to do before you became a super dangerous radical trying to take down the shadow government?”

  “I told you, everything’s need to know,” she says, smirking.

  “Bullshit!” Lilly’s practically cackling now. “I wanna know something about you! I wanna know something other than your favorite zines to read or how good you are at hopping over a barbed wire fence. Tell me about yourself.”

  “I used to be a hippie,” says Scatter. Lilly ughs. “No, for real. My dad was a nudist half the time. Huge hippie. Very about pacifism, nonviolent communication, manifesting your reality, all that stuff. Pyed a lot of Grateful Dead.”

  “Holy shit, what did you do?”

  “I mean, it was alright in a lot of ways. There were a lot of things he seemed kinda foolish about. When I turned seventeen I figured I’d engage in the great hippie tradition of the bohemian traveler lifestyle. I started hitchhiking, footing it all around. I used to go to Rainbow Gatherings. I would just get stoned all the time, talk to people about their ideas. I was very interested in people.” Her tone is taking a sad turn. “Very interested in people.”

  “Something happened?”

  “Yeah, my dad got shot by the cops.” Scatter shrugs.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t worry, it was a long time ago. I’ve worked through it. He was drunk, they’d heard he was dealing. I mean, he was dealing weed but from what I understood they looked at this scraggly old Mexican guy with a crazy beard and liberal politics and they decided he was a real danger to the American way of life before they ever even talked to him about it. So when they saw him holding something they decided it was a weapon. It was his pipe. He had a hand-carved one, big and ornate, like something a wizard would carry. He would always say smoking tobacco would kill him. It’s ironic in some kinda way. There were local cops, they knew him. Not only would he not hurt a fly, he’d step in front of someone else’s bugspray. I think they despised him. In the court case, they brought up all his past. Oh, he’s a marijuana grower and distributor. Involved in radical organizing, cuz he had been with the United Farm Workers back when he was young, in the sixties. They tried to snder him every fucking way they could and they needn’t have bothered because the whole jury was white middle-css upstanding Americans. I think they just wanted to rub it in to me and his friends. It was like an animal marking its territory.”

  “Fuck, that’s so fucked up.”

  “Anyway, after that, I went through some things. I had a lot of guilt, thinking if I’d been there, I would’ve done something. Could’ve made it go down differently. I was always better than him at dealing with authority. He had his pride, I had tactics. After I spent some time bumming around getting as wasted as I could and absolutely hating myself, I vowed revenge. Somewhere in all that, I found out about transgender shit and was like, oh that’s me. So basically that’s my story.”

  The st of the convenience stores turn back into rows of pine trees, preserved to preserve the scenic highway, the attraction of the road. Countryside as a calcuted facade. From what she’s heard, just behind the treeline and out of sight of Interstate 5 are rows and rows of industrial cattle farms. Just far enough away you can’t smell their miserable flesh. The transmission marks the moment with a clunking sound that makes the whole car shudder.

  “Maybe, in a way, I was waiting for something like that, though,” says Scatter.

  “What do you mean?” Despite the sound of the car and the Sepultura in the cassette pyer, she can hear a volley of thunder. It must be close, though she saw no lightning.

  “My whole life was defined by a certain image, and it was stifling. I was ready to live that way. Hell, I probably would’ve even transitioned, become some kind of radical, either way. I was already trending toward that, I was already wearing skirts at gatherings and painting my fingernails. Yeah, but like, I knew something was wrong. That wasn’t my first encounter with police violence. And I was learning the history of colonization, and of what industrial civilization had done to the natural world. I was putting together these pieces of this incredibly violent reality behind the Disney World illusion of Americana. I couldn’t square that with my dad’s pacifism and political inaction. I wanted so badly to impress him, and I felt that I had to respect him, had to take care of him. My mom disappeared when I was very young so most of my life was me taking care of him. There’s a kind of obligation, a responsibility there. Maybe there was a part of me waiting to cut ties with what mattered to me, so I could become militant. My dad is gone, but the people are still there, and that’s who I can fight for. I can honor him by trying to respect life, and justice, even if he would disagree with my tactics. We used to get in very heated arguments about these things.” She throws her feet up on the dashboard. “Fuck, it’s all fucking complicated. That’s enough information for you to track down my birth name if you are a fed, so I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “You already know my birth name,” Lilly reminds her.

  “I do not! I forgot it.”

  “Well, my childhood’s boring and simple. White Anglo-saxon Protestant parents into fundamentalism—real boring shit too, no snakes or anything—and being middle-css. By the time I was a teenager, peace was not an option. We fucking hated each other. Not a lot else, small town America bullshit. The kind of shit you see on TV. I didn’t have too many friends.”

  “I’m sure it was interesting in its own way. You’re too much of an interesting person to have had a truly boring childhood.”

  Then she has nothing to say because she’s blushing too hard. It would be very easy to get distracted from the road, thinking about the fact that Scatter said she was an interesting person. She’s always ashamed of her ck of radical activities, her ck of history. She feels like a silhouette of a person with no details in it. She really wants Scatter to like her, and she’s not sure if she wants to think too much about why, especially not while it’s raining and they’re on a long windy stretch of highway following a semi truck that drives a little too loosely.

  “This guy’s driving kinda crazy,” she says, switching focus to the truck half out of the ne in front of them.

  “Oh yeah, this is completely terrifying,” says Scatter. “I’ve hitchhiked with truck drivers before. You think it’s scary now, just be happy you haven’t seen what goes on in the cab. This dude’s probably smoking meth with both hands while steering with his knee.”

  “Okay that is a terrifying thought.”

  “I mean—”

  “POLICE! OPEN UP!” The smell of mold, and concrete, the feeling of the sleeping bag sticking to her naked body, the sound of the door being smashed open and heavy footfalls into the other room as they bust up the squat, Scatter rising, the look on her face as the cops close in—

  Ivy opens her eyes. There’s something outside the tent, moving around. Something big. Her whole body is perfectly still. Sophia is still asleep next to her. Whatever it is, she can hear it treading on the pine needles. Crunch. Crunch. That’s not a raccoon. Her heart is pounding, her eyes focused to points. She can’t see anything through the windows of the tent from where she’s ying. Whatever it is isn’t too close by. The story comes back to her, Emiko saying there was a ghost that followed her when she was out on the streets. A strange tone in her voice, a fear that Ivy didn’t normally hear there.

  She reaches very slowly for the pants she wore the day before, wincing at the little sounds of the pstic tarp base of the tent crinkling beneath her hand movements. She finds the jeans, moves to the belt, and there’s the hunting knife Eff bought her two years ago after she got fshed by a creep outside Eli’s. Silently, she unclips the buckle, unsheaths the knife. Slowly, to make as little noise or movement as possible, she rises, eyes darting between the tent windows.

  Nothing to their right. The forest is dark but it’s nearly a full moon and she can see a ways in, outlined in pale blue traces over the darkness. She turns slightly to check behind her.

  There it is.

  It’s Gravity.

  She lets out a sigh, her fingers rexing around the knife. After a moment, she sheaths the weapon, buckles it in, and fishes a lighter and a cigarette out of her backpack.

  Gravity jumps at the sound of the tent unzipping. She walks over to where fae’s meandering near the edge of the campsite clearing.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” she asks in a quiet whisper. The only other sounds are the subtle rustling of the pine trees and the occasional movements of sleeping people in the tents.

  “Yeah,” fae says. “Sometimes it gets to me. Midnight, all that. I saw a few people OD st year. It’s been a rough time. This is my first time really outside the city in a while and I think it all caught up to me.”

  Ivy walks over to where they extinguished the st of the embers of the campfire and gestures Gravity over. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she says.

  Gravity makes some gesture, hard to see in the darkness, maybe a shrug. “Nightmare?”

  “Something like that. Not at first, then I had a fshback, woke up feeling like the cops were busting in on me again.”

  “Fuck that.”

  Ivy lights up, watches the smoke drifting upward. Her own personal contribution to global warming. Gravity sits on a log and also watches. The twists of smoke leave the orange glow of the lit tip and fade into the night sky. Up above them, the stars, with their patterns unchanging. Eternal, endless things, from the perspective of little humans on Earth. Patterns that had been used to map the Earth, cast on it with astrology and navigation, tools of empire and colonialism and fortunetelling and fishing, accessible to nearly all through their utter remoteness, a point removed from all the ideas and illusions of this world. And therefore, unknowable to all. A canvas whose meaning was far more obscure than bnkness, only knowable through the experiences inscribed on the pnet, through the ways the pnet used its alien surroundings to describe itself: zones, locations, pces. leylines, hotspots, paths, borders, heatmaps. Routes, concentrations, deficiencies, gradients, demographics. Arcane regionalism. Territoriality. Spheres of influence. Areas of effect. Nations, properties, estates, realities, worlds. A map of imposed meaning that tries to consume immanent being itself.

  “The thing that drives me crazy is that none of this is mysterious enough,” says Gravity, unprompted.

  “Oh?” asks Ivy.

  “I understand almost all of it. I understand almost everything I encounter.” Fae sounds devastated. “I don’t meet people—rapists, murderers, or victims—that I can’t understand. But I can’t expin anyone to each other. Can you see the horror of that? Can you see the horror that I deal with, every fucking day? Who wants this? Everyone is defined by their ignorance. What they don’t understand, what they don’t remember, what they don’t feel. Identity is the shape of a cavity. I feel like a cursed sage. I just want out.”

  Based on her experiences, Ivy doesn’t really believe that Gravity is blessed and cursed with understanding every person fae meets, but fae’s a very compassionate, empathetic person, and Ivy can believe that fae’s cursed with feeling that fae understand everyone fae meets.

  Fae continues, “Being hypermarginalized—being a trans lesbian, or homeless, or bck and poor, or undocumented—is the most exhausting thing in the world. Because society is prepared to go on without you, wants to go on without you, wants to crush you, but doesn’t want to admit that you’re its opponent, doesn’t want you to name that you’re being crushed alive. So your entire life is just a slow process of having your life artfully crushed out of you to feed the others or at least to please them with the space you’ve created by your absence. I’m so sick of it. I wanna be fucking hateful, wrathful. I wanna get more pissed off than I ever been, and scream, no! You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about so fuck you this shit’s about to go down. No! I’m fucking done! I’m done! This is the same old shit but I’ll fuck it up, stick a rusty screw in your minds eye and twist it around til you die from interdimensional tetanus. Fuck you!” Fae pantomimes screaming it, but it comes out as barely a whisper.

  “What in particur’s on your mind?” Ivy asks.

  “Everything. Every fucking piece of my whole fucked life.” Fae suddenly stands up. “Let’s go on a walk, do you feel up to that? Just a little walk?”

  “Sure,” says Ivy. She can barely see, it’s three or four in the morning. But she’s not going to let a friend down right now.

  Gravity starts down a pathway through the woods leading off toward some fields. It’s more visible than she expected in the brightness of the moonlight, much more so than the deepness of the forest. Ivy makes up her mind that if Gravity wanders off the trail she will stop faer, with force if she has to.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she broaches when they’re a good ways from the campsite. The sound of her voice in the quiet night is shockingly loud and disruptive, makes her very aware of herself and her presence.

  “Shoot.”

  “A long time ago, you said something to me about the Demiurge. Where did that come from?”

  “Oh, fuck, I don’t know. I don’t remember what you’re talking about but you know, back in those days I was obsessed with all kinds of edgy weird stuff. The Demiurge, that’s from gnosticism, right? The other books of the New Testament, the ones that were banned by the church. And I guess from like some Hermes Trismegistus shit, old European magician stuff. I heard about that all on the internet back in the day. For a minute I was in deep shit back then, like fucking around with all kinds of weird stuff. Like yeah old angelcities, geosites stuff, precursors to 4chan, NewGrounds, surface level shit like that, but also Ogrish and shit. You know about Ogrish?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t google it.”

  In the distance, a white shape silently drifts across the sky and swoops down toward the field. An owl. There’s a tinny scream of pain and anguish from a rodent as the owl makes their kill, then they float back up into the sky and off to the shadows of the treetops, peaceful.

  “I used to be on forums when I was a teenager flirting with older men for money,” fae says. “Some of them were kinda regur internet fair but there were a few weird occulty ones. That’s where I first learned a lot of that shit but it also got me interested in other things. I was already a kinda goth emo freak at the time and the thought of like, oh doing actual pagan witchcraft shit, that was really entrancing to me. There are some dark rabbit holes out there. See, the magic shit, a lot of that’s just things the oppressors didn’t like, so they had to shut down. All of the indigenous religions, all of that. Even in Europe, the Europeans had indigenous religions too, and the Christianizers killed them off, they killed the women who knew the old ways and took their children as sex sves, and that’s what turned into white people. Like a bunch of guys who couldn’t get id so they raped everyone and founded their culture on that, calling it Christendom. When they came over here to the Americas, they tried to do the same thing. They would start fake wars, and the indigenous people think, okay, this is a war, but like in the mindset of these peoples they’re thinking, this is a political conflict and there are certain rules. The white people weren’t thinking like that. They brought the idea of total war. They would trigger a conflict, and then when the men would go out to fight they would sneak around and burn the vilges, rape and kill the women, rape and capture the children. This happened all over this nd and Latin America. These things happened in Africa too, and in parts of Asia.”

  They reach the end of the field, and beyond it the path winds further into a forest. Most of the path is still visible, and she’s close to Gravity, but she’s a little worried about something. Bears, maybe, or mountain lions. Not unheard of here; there were warning signs at the entrance to the park.

  “When the colonizers encountered the cultures of the people they were colonizing, they looked at it the same way they had looked at paganism in Europe: a justification for the war crimes they were about to commit. Religion runs on sex trafficking children. If they could prove that the societies they were encountering were in the hands of the devil, they could steal the children. Catholics and Protestants disagree on a lot, but they are hand in hand on sex trafficking bck and indigenous kids. So they had to suppress all the cultures that they were conquering, not just to rule, but so that no one could question their rule. But in the process of that, some things appeared.”

  Somewhere around them was the sound of running water, trickling nearby. Ivy didn’t remember a stream near this path but when she checks they still seem to be on the path, as well as she can tell by the moonlight.

  “When the two worlds collide and neither is destroyed, you get religious syncretism, right? Sometimes this just makes new religions. Houdoun, for example. But sometimes when you add in all the trauma, when you rape and kill people in front of their kids, and then you take those kids off to boarding school with your kids, some things get kinda tangled up like barbed wire wrapped all around you. Feedback loops on the trauma. So colonizers learn things they see from pagans, and they don’t understand. They learn about blood magic, but they don’t learn the context. They learn about violence, fetishes, mind control, but without the context. And the colonized learn too. They see the rituals, the whipping and flogging, the decapitations, collecting scalps, ears, hands, genitals, all of this that the white people do. When your vilge is decorated with human body parts while you are a child, that becomes part of your culture. White people can cim that its not a ritual, that they’re just doing it to show dominance or keep the natives in line. Those things are acts of blood magic. When Pizarro feeds the transgender indigenous people to his war dogs and stands around celebrating the carnage, that is a ritual sacrifice.”

  The stream is running beside them now, louder, churning. Ivy’s afraid of falling into it. This isn’t the trail she thought she knew. It’s grown darker in the woods and all the can do is make sure the ground underfoot is still continuous with the path behind her. Gravity is walking at a steady pace, self-assured, as if fae can see very well in the dark, or simply doesn’t care if something goes wrong.

  “Throughout this whole time there are people who don’t have their eyes covered. Some of them resist it. Some of them fight back, try to take down the colonizers and the rapists.”

  Fae pauses and turns to look at her. “That’s what I wanna be, you know? I never do enough. I idolize people who fight back. People are ashamed of being called social justice warriors. That’s so stupid. We should own it. We should be proud to go to war for justice.” Fae turns forward and continues.

  “Some people don’t want to fight back. They’ve seen the worst things you can see and they think, I want to have power like that. So cults appear. Not your boring cozy Jonestown Heaven’s Gate ‘we’ll all be saved’ crap. Not your LaVeyan satanists, or your anticolonial satanists. Cults of people who only want to accumute power, physical and metaphysical, and will do whatever they can to achieve it. Serial killers are small fry, because they aren’t organized. These people, there are pces online you used to be able to find, before it became easier to track people and so people went further underground. They brag about how many homeless people they’ve killed. They kidnap children and torture them and film it. People will say it’s not real, because they don’t want to believe it, because there are some fakes out there. Of course it’s real. All these things the colonizers did, hundreds of years ago, a hundred years ago, in this past century. Scandals in churches, you hear about the embezzlement but you don’t hear what that money was used for. People will say, oh these are antisemitic conspiracies. It’s not, there’s no religion or ethnic group that dominates these circles. It’s not even all white people. It’s people who want power through any means. These people use religions for power, that’s it. They’ve studied history, and the lesson they’ve taken is not just iron and blood, it’s rape and mind control.”

  The sound of water is all around them now, almost roaring, and Gravity stops and puts out faer hand. “Careful, the path doesn’t go any further.”

  Slowly Ivy’s eyes pick up the barest traces of what’s around her. There’s a pool in front of them, where the stream has been coming from. At the edge of it she can barely make out a waterfall in the moonlight, emptying into it.

  “I’ve been out here before,” says Gravity. “We’re not supposed to go this way. It’s private property. That’s why you can only go at night.”

  Ivy can feel the coolness radiating off the inky pool, a slight damp spray on her face off the waterfall. It’s not very far off. If Gravity hadn’t stopped her, she might have fallen in.

  “Like I said, I used to catfish older men online as an edgy teenager,” says Gravity. “For the most part it was fine, just your standard creepos who wanna fuck a fifteen-year-old. I’d send some slightly edited low res photos of like my shaved legs or something, they’d send me some money. At one point, though, I ended up in some pces I shouldn’t have been. I ended up on some forums where they would talk about that stuff. It’s all in coded nguage. They talked about hunting, deer and rabbits, and fishing. Only the nguage they used, you could tell it was off. The expressions weren’t quite right, the phrasing didn’t sound like animals, and it was a little too sexual. Then they would offer sales and trades, and that didn’t sound right either. They would talk about ‘pet rabbits’ and punishing them. I swear I didn’t post anything, but somehow… I got these emails, talking about rabbits in the wolves’ den. They just sounded like crazy rambling, but it was the same kinda tone as that site. I freaked out a little bit, deleted my email, all my online accounts. Then I get a letter in the mail. It’s just a printout of some feet pics I had sent an anonymous guy months earlier. Someone drew a rabbit on the back. I was fifteen at the time. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go to the cops, I thought it was illegal what I had been doing and that they would take all the money I’d made. I didn’t want to tell my parents or my brothers. I didn’t say anything to anyone. For months I lived in fear, I was afraid to go anywhere alone. I was afraid to go online. Even my mom and little brother noticed and tried to ask what was wrong but I was so afraid I would get in trouble, or they would if I told anyone. I never told anyone anything.”

  Gravity pulls out a joint fae must have rolled before and lights it. It’s thin, twig-like, and the weed smells skunky, but it seems to calm faer.

  “This is the first time I’ve told anyone about this, actually,” fae says. “I guess we must be far enough out in the middle of nowhere. You don’t have your phone on you, do you?”

  Ivy shakes her head. “No.”

  “Well, that’s good at least.” Gravity offers Ivy the joint but she declines it. Fae turns to face the water churning in the shadows. “That’s not the end of the story. The end is much worse. I got really fixated. I used to cut, sometimes, not because I wanted to die, but because I wanted to be prepared to kill myself if those motherfuckers caught me.” Ivy’s surprised by this revetion, suddenly remembering how Gravity responded to Piper’s cutting as if it was no big deal. Ivy had always read that as a sort of casual callousness. “I used to have a razor bde on a neckce I would wear under my shirt to school and everything. So I would always have one on me. Eventually the P.E. teacher caught me and threw it away and tried to have a parent-teacher conference about it. I was so pissed. Everyone just thought I was being a depressed teenager, that maybe my mom or dad were abusing me, or that I was getting bullied. Things weren’t great in my home but that wasn’t the problem. When people asked me about it, I couldn’t say anything. What could I say? A lot of time goes past. Eventually I start to think that it’s been enough time, that I’m safe. I start rexing a little. I think, if they weren’t going to get me in the first six months, they probably don’t have the resources to waste on some kid who just happened to stumble across their forums. It was all coded anyway, they must’ve known people could end up there. That’s what I was thinking.

  “At some point I started going online again, not to any of the old forums or anything, just like regur internet stuff. I started dating a girl, she was a real messy emo juggalo girl but it was my first serious retionship and we had a fun time. One day we’re talking about, like, gender and emo aesthetics, and I don’t remember which of us started it but we’re kinda joking about like, oh what if I put on all your clothes and pretended to be a different gender on the internet, as you do, right? Real egg shit. Funny thing about trauma, how you try to relive it. I end up putting on her skirts and makeup and a wig and a pushup bra, leggings, the whole deal. I’d still been shaving my legs the whole time, I’d been doing that since I was fourteen, just coming up for weird excuses for it. And like on shitty 2005 webcams, I passed. I ended up posting some of the sluttier pictures. We honestly just thought it was funny. We were just being edgy kids, nothing was sacred so we wanted to fuck around with what we could do. There’s a way, as a teenager, you can end up trying to test your power of how you represent yourself, not realizing the consequences of, like, putting that out there for the world to see. I don’t know that that’s a bad thing, it’s just a part of life, like tooth infections.

  “So a few weeks ter, I get this thing in the mail. It’s a big bubble wrap envelope, my mom thinks it’s something I ordered off the internet and is bugging me like, what is it? I didn’t order anything. I take it up to my room and open it. Inside, there’s pictures of me. Not just the pictures I posted. Some other ones, that me and my girlfriend took, of us having sex while I was dressed up in her clothes. Some other ones we took of sex another time. She liked to have pictures for when she felt lonely, she said. Then there was cash. Four crisp hundred dolr bills, looked like they had been newly minted. Way more than I had ever been sent for feet pics. And then there was a little rabbit’s foot keychain. Do you remember those? A little taxidermized animal foot. The fur was very soft. And wrapped around it was a piece of paper with a web address printed out on it.

  “When I went to that address, I found a lot of stuff. The pictures my girlfriend and I had taken during sex. Pictures of me over at her pce, sleeping. Pictures of her masturbating. I thought someone had hacked onto her computer and gotten all that. I was terrified, took my bike right over to her pce right away. She got mad at me, said that there was nothing wrong with it, that I used to do things like that anyway. She’d been posting the pictures of me the whole time. Not just like legs or feet like I used to do, full on nudes. When I pressed her about it she said it was my fault for being a guy. While she’s selling pictures of me in skirts. Fucking, I was so mad at the time, I was furious. I didn’t think about that, like, she was a teenager too, she was posting nudes too, even if it was nonconsensual with me, someone had been maniputing her into this. I was pissed off, broke up with her, said I never wanted to see her again.

  “About a week ter she didn’t show up to school. The missing posters went up, but she was never found. I wanted to tell people about what I thought, what I was afraid had happened. But some stuff happened. I got followed by a baby blue Chrysler with all bcked out windows, like tinted to the point where you couldn’t see anything. It happened a lot, starting about the time I got the package, before she even disappeared. Whenever I was alone. I started carrying big sticks, bats, knives when I wasn’t going to and from school, and trying to always walk with other kids. There were some gangbangers I had known when we were young and they didn’t really like me but I could kinda walk with them cuz we were from the same block and they looked pretty intimidating, the Chrysler left me alone when I was around them.

  “The thing that really shut me up was a couple days after she went missing, my little brother was te getting home. And when he did, he had some bruises, he said he didn’t wanna talk about it. He was trying to wash it off but I saw someone drew a rabbit on his hand in permanent marker. The same style of drawing that had been on my pictures. So I stayed quiet, didn’t tell anyone about anything. She was never found, I never got any more mail from them, nothing happened to my brother as far as I know. That’s the end of it. I gave the four hundred to her mom, told her it was from selling drugs because that was the kind of story she would accept, they were kinda a weird family. I think the police just thought she got involved in some sketchy shit and never really looked into it very far. As far as I know no one else even knew she was posting nudes.”

  Gravity is silent and is standing very still, and there is nothing but the darkness and the moonlight and the roar of the waterfall, almost invisible, echoing all around them.

  “I don’t know why they never went for me. Maybe because I stayed silent. Maybe she tried to talk to people about what she was posting. She never could really hold herself back from talking about things. My feelings are all tangled up, horror and guilt and fury. I don’t know what happened to my brother, he had a hard time in school after that.” Fae turns back toward Ivy. “So when you got bckout drunk and started talking about, there’s this secret organization and they’re killing kids in abandoned buildings and shipping their bodies around the country in a giant ritual to worship God, I didn’t think, oh, this is a crazy person. I thought, here’s someone who doesn’t keep her mouth shut and that’s a little scary to me but also a little inspiring. Cuz nothing’s ever gonna change if we don’t start talking about what they’re doing, and start fighting back. Even if we all go to prison or die at least it will be worth it, fighting against something like that.”

  Ivy closes her eyes, wants to say, uh, no, bullshit. I’m not brave, I’m not doing something meaningful, I’m just stupid and scared and filing about and I don’t know about any dead kids and I didn’t almost get trafficked as a teenager and all of this is a terrifying revetion to me right now. She takes a few steadying breaths, mercifully hidden by the sound of the waterfall. Tries to calm her panic so she can think about where Gravity’s at right now, can say something responsible and caring in return. She can’t think of anything to say.

  Gravity seems to sense that the awkwardness of the moment has gone on a little too long because fae says, “Ahhhh, fuck it. Let’s just enjoy this fucking waterfall, right? Thanks for listening to that shit. I’ve never fucking told anyone. I’m a little sorry to spread the curse to you but fuck sometimes things just have to get out, right?”

  “No, it’s okay,” says Ivy. “Besides, I’ve done my fair share of spreading curses. You’re right though. Evil fucking people exist in this world. So does the beauty of this pce.” She paws around in the dark for a rock to sit on and finally finds one, a little slick with the spray from the water and cold and damp but comfortably smooth. “I’ve never been really good at enjoying nature. I appreciate it, but from afar. It’s hard for me, I guess, to step far enough outside of myself to connect with it.”

  “Outside of yourself? That’s a joke, right? There’s nothing more inside of us than nature. Humans are animals.”

  It changes her whole view of things. When she had looked back on their time together in the basement room after she had gotten out of Coordination Division, she had thought of Gravity as someone cooler and bolder than her, who had it all figured out and probably looked down on her. Instead, for the past decade Gravity’s had a completely different narrative about her, as a brave person, a version of her she can hardly rete to.

  Although Sophia also sees her as brave. Ivy puts that out of her mind, it’s too much to think about Sophia right now. She’s a comparatively innocent girl, Ivy can’t imagine how she would even handle the idea of all this. She gets triggered at the mention of child sexual assault.

  “Now you seem a million miles away,” says Gravity.

  “Just processing all that,” says Ivy. “Sorry. I didn’t know—didn’t guess at those things.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned there was a lot you forgot about.”

  “Had you told me this before?”

  “No, but I just figured, I don’t know, it’s been a part of my reality so long that I kinda thought other people could pick up on it.”

  “Not really. I’m not very good at guessing what people’s damage is. I guess part of the problem is the difference between the trauma in the abstract and thinking about it in terms of people’s actual lives.”

  “That makes sense. I think that was kinda a lot of my problem, back then. I was thinking about things a little too much in the abstract, even when it was happening to me. I didn’t know how to think about it in terms of my actual life.”

  “Hey, do you want a hug?” Ivy asks, suddenly struck by a moment of intuition.

  “Uh—yeah, actually. That’d be pretty cool. Thank you.”