Chapter 11 — The Alignment.56
@solena.rising
“Climbed something this morning that tried to talk me out of it the whole way up, loves. My legs, my lungs, the small voice that says turn back. And then you get above the trees and there it is. The whole shape of where you’ve been, laid out small and gentle underneath you, and you understand it was never as big as it felt while you were standing in it.
You can’t see your life clearly from inside your life.
So climb. I’ll meet you at the top. Tides. ”
Coral came for us before the light did.
She knocked at some hour that wasn’t morning yet, bright as noon through the door, and told us to dress warm and bring nothing, because the mountain provided.
We had not slept. We had spent the back half of the night on our separate sides of a border neither of us believed in anymore, listening to each other not sleep, and now, apparently, we were going to go climb a volcano about it.
The card had come the night before. The Reaching, it said. Summit by sunrise. Come to see the shape of the thing you’re inside of. Tidewell loved nothing better than getting a person somewhere high and breathless and then explaining their own life back to them.
The path went up through the dark in long switchbacks, and for the first hour it was mostly breathing, and the sound of forty wellness influencers discovering they had bodies. Whitecap went up like a man being marched. Pearl counted her own steps out loud until someone asked her not to.
Don climbed near me for a stretch, wheezing.
“This had better be the finest sunrise in the recorded history of the sun,” he said. Then he saved the rest of his breath for it, and pronounced it later, flatly, fine.
Coral floated up the front of the line in the dark like the grade was a rumor, telling us the climb was the prayer.
Then the trees thinned, and the sky started going from black to the color of a bruise three days into healing, and I will admit the island was beautiful in a way that made me angry, because I had not agreed to find it beautiful.
The whole eastern sea had gone the color of struck flint.
Birds I didn’t have names for came up out of the dark below us and caught the light before we did.
It was the kind of morning that would have made a believer out of someone, which was the entire point of bringing us up here to see it.
My mother climbed in front of me where the trail pinched, and somewhere in the dark her hand came back and found mine, and I let it.
We were a couple, and couples held hands on mountains.
But after a week of the things our hands had been doing to each other under cover of dark and mud and somebody’s instructions, this was almost unbearable for how plain it was, her palm flat against my palm and nothing else, in the open, the little path lights catching the side of her face.
Everything we’d done on purpose had had something to hide behind, an exercise or a clay pit or the dark.
This had none of it. This was just a hand.
Her hand was warm and certain and it fit, and I held it going up the side of a volcano and thought about every way I was about to ruin the morning, and said nothing, and climbed.
We came over the lip of it just as the sun did.
The whole island lay underneath us in the new light, green and black and ringed all the way around with sea, and for a few seconds nobody had a single wellness thing to say, which was the closest to spiritual I got on that rock.
The compound was a scatter of small white roofs far down at the water, tidy and harmless, the way a trap looks harmless from the outside.
The wind up there had teeth. The light came across the water flat and gold and hit forty upturned faces, and a few of them were already crying, because they cried here the way other people checked their phones.
Coral lined us along the edge to take it in.
“This is the only place you can see the whole of it,” she said, soft, letting the wind do half the work.
“Down there you’re in your life. You can’t see its shape.
From up here you can. You can see where your tide stopped moving.
You can see the pools you’ve been standing in so long you called them the ocean. ”
Beside me, my mother had gone quiet in the way she’d been going quiet more and more lately, the brand off her face, looking down at the island like it was something she was being offered rather than something she was visiting. Not performing the awe. Having it.
I knew the difference now, and I hated that I knew it, and I hated worse that I understood the pull, standing up there in that light with her hand still in mine.
It would be so easy. That was the part nobody understood about a place like this from outside it.
It wasn’t stupid. It knew exactly where the soft places were.
“I want to get the light off the high rocks before it changes,” I said. It was the kind of thing the photographer said, and nobody ever questioned it.
She gave me a vacant little smile, her eyes never leaving the water, and a small nod, and barely registered me at all.
So I let go of her hand and went up and around a shoulder of black volcanic rock until the cohort was a murmur below me, and there was nothing up there but the morning and my phone.
I had been thinking about this since the bath house.
Since Don. The whole way up the mountain.
Up high, away from the compound, away from whatever box down there the app was breathing through, maybe.
I woke the phone and went into the running apps, and there it was, the Tidewell one, pleasant and seafoam and humming away at whatever it hummed at, and I closed it. Killed the process. Watched it vanish.
A bar appeared.
Then a second one, climbing into the corner of the screen, casual, like it had been standing just on the other side of a door the whole time, waiting for someone to think of the handle.
I stood on top of a volcano and felt the bottom drop out of the world.
Because that bar meant the island was not remote.
That bar meant there was no dead zone, no edge of the earth, no act of cruel geography holding us silent out here.
There was signal. There had been signal the entire time, sitting one app-width away, and the only thing between me and the whole rest of the planet for six days had been a piece of software with a calming logo that somebody had put on my phone on purpose.
Every message to Andre that went green and died.
Every silent day I had filed, patiently, under Andre being Andre.
Them. All of it. The whole time, on purpose, them.
I had spent the better part of a week talking myself out of the obvious because the obvious was insane, and the obvious had been true, and I had been so reasonable about it.
I had not been paranoid. I had been polite.
My hands didn’t feel like mine. I found Andre’s name and I pressed the green and put the phone to my ear, and it rang. An actual ring. A real sound out of the real world, the best noise I had ever heard, ringing and ringing into a flat somewhere I could almost smell.
“Everything alright, Squid?”
Coral was just there. Off-white and pressed and not even breathing hard, on the black rock behind me with her whole kind face turned up in a smile, the way she’d stood on the path at three in the morning a lifetime ago. I hadn’t heard her come up. Nobody ever heard Coral come.
The phone was still ringing against my ear.
She looked at it like it was a child holding scissors, not angry, only sorry, and the cold dropped all the way through me, because I understood that she had known.
The instant I’d killed that app, something somewhere had told her, and sent her up the mountain after me before the call could so much as connect.
The leash didn’t only hold the messages. The leash had felt me cut it.
I ended the call. I don’t know why. Reflex. Shame. The schoolboy caught with the thing in his hand. Andre’s phone was still ringing into nothing in another country when I got my face back together.
“Yeah,” I said. “Everything’s fine. It wouldn’t connect anyway, no signal up here. I was just trying for a photo.”
“Of course,” Coral said, warm, and meaning I know exactly what you did. “Come down with me. The air’s thin up here. It makes people do things that aren’t really them.”
She put her hand out for the phone, palm up, patient, and after a moment I gave it to her, and she tucked it away somewhere on herself like she was doing me a favor.
They never made a scene of it. That was the part I kept bracing for, all the way down the mountain in the full gold morning while everyone glowed about their breakthroughs, and it never came.
“Where’d you get to?” my mother asked.
“Getting the light,” I said.
She believed me, because why wouldn’t she.
Coral walked the whole descent at my shoulder with her hand resting light on my back, steering, pleasant as weather. At the bottom she stopped.
“I think you could use a little realignment, Squid,” she said, gently. “After a wobble like that one.”
“That sounds like just the thing,” said my mother, who I don’t think knew what the wobble was. She squeezed my arm and went off to be radiant about the sunrise with the others.
So I went with Coral. Alone.
The room was off the back of the welcome hall, somewhere I hadn’t been, all seafoam and salt lamps and a quiet that had been engineered to a fine tolerance.
A staffer stood by the door who did not speak and did not leave.
There were two low chairs. Coral sat me in one and took the other and reached across the gap to hold both my hands, like the beginning of a prayer, and began, very gently, to fix me.
“Tell me about the fear,” she said.
Not the phone. The fear. It was a good move, because there was fear, there was a great deal of it in the room, and she had decided we were going to call my one clear-eyed minute by its frightened name and never let it be anything else.
“I’m not afraid,” I said.
She smiled and waited. The staffer breathed by the door.
“What were you hoping to find up there?” she said. “All alone. Away from your partner.”
“The light,” I said.
She waited. The waiting was the whole machine of the place, the patient certainty that the quiet would outlast me and I’d hand over the true thing in the end just to make it stop.
When I wouldn’t, she named it for me.
“It’s just stagnant water, Squid,” she said, so kindly.
“That’s all this is. Old fear. The part of you that never once felt safe, that learned a long time ago to mistake a cage for a dangerous world, and a home for a trap.
Everyone’s tide stalls now and then. Yours has only pooled.
There’s no shame in a pool. The only shame is refusing to let it move. ”
And I sat there and felt the genuinely deranged thing begin to happen, which was that some tired animal under my ribs wanted to agree with her.
Wanted to set it down. Wanted to be told it was safe and believe the telling.
I had to hold on to the memory of the bar on the screen, the two bars climbing, the proof, to keep hold of the fact that she was the kindest liar I had ever sat across from.
At some point the light in the doorway changed.
I looked up and the gray woman was there.
The Keeper. She didn’t come in. She stood in the door and watched, and Coral didn’t stop talking but something in her went a degree more careful, a degree more performed, a junior doing the work with the senior in the room.
Coral leaned and murmured something I didn’t catch.
The Keeper’s eyes came to me, and stayed a moment, and then she nodded.
Once. Slow. The nod of someone signing off on a number read aloud to them.
Then she was gone, and the doorway was only a doorway again, and I sat there with the cold understanding that I had been moved up some ladder I couldn’t see.
That the top of the place had come, personally, to look at me, and had found nothing it couldn’t manage.
“I think you’re nearly back,” Coral said, pleased. She took out her phone. “Would you do one thing for me? For the tide. Just tell us, in your own words, why you came. Why you stay. People need to hear it from someone like you, someone who fought the whole way. It helps them more than you know.”
And here is the part I am least proud of in a life that has some competition for the spot.
I looked into the small black eye of her phone, the same lens I had pointed at this woman’s entire career, and I gave them exactly what they wanted.
“I came here so sure I had it all figured out,” I told the little lens.
I found the light without thinking and turned my face a few degrees into it.
“I came armored. And this place got in underneath the armor, to the part of me that was just tired. Tired of holding the door shut against everyone. So I stopped holding it. That’s all. I just stopped.”
I let my voice do the warm little catch it does when a thing is true. It was the best work I’d done since film school, and it was a lie from the first word to the last, and the worst of it, the thing that sat in my chest like a swallowed stone, was how good it felt to be believed while I did it.
Coral watched her screen with shining eyes and got every second of it. They had me now, on tape, in my own warm voice, saying I had chosen to be here. The way a hundred families had gotten lovely little messages that sounded just exactly like the person who had stopped calling.
“There,” she said when I ran down. She looked at me with so much pride that for one revolting second I was warmed by it. “That’s your tide moving again. Welcome back, Squid.”
And they let me go. That was the whole of it.
They let me go, pleased, certain they had corrected the wobble, certain enough that no one walked me out, no one trailed me across the grounds, because in the arithmetic of the place I was fixed now, mended, returned to the fold in my own grateful words.
I found the strip of dead air behind the bath house and stood in it shaking, and not from the cold.
I had it now. All of it, in the body, where there is no arguing with a thing.
The phone worked. The leash was alive and it could feel my hands on it.
Nobody was coming, nobody at all, because nobody knew, because they had made sure of it and then made me thank them for it on camera.
And down the hill my mother was telling the sunrise how safe she felt, drifting further out every day into water I was running out of time to wade into and pull her back from.
I had to get us off this island. Not someday. Now, while I could still recognize the woman I’d be getting off it for.
We had joined a cult. The two most skeptical people either of us knew had packed sunscreen, flown to a beautiful rock, walked in smiling, and joined a fucking cult.