DEAD HORSE POINT

by Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory, the author of the 2005 Asimov’s Readers’ Award-winning novelette “Second Person, Present Tense,” returns to our pages with another haunting science fiction tale. Of “Dead Horse Point” he says, “I lived in Utah for a year, and that park was our favorite place to camp. In a shoebox somewhere I have a picture of myself sitting on the exact outcropping of rock that the characters find themselves perched on near the end of the story.” Daryl recently sold his first novel, Pandemonium, to Del Rey Books.

Twenty-three years of silence and all it takes is one call. Not even a conversation, just a thirty-second message on her voicemail. Come now, Julia’s voice says. Come now before it’s too late. From anyone else it would have sounded melodramatic, but Julia never exaggerates; she’s always careful with her words. Venya books a flight to Utah the next morning.

Later she’ll think, wasn’t it just like Julia to say it like a command. As if Venya had no choice but to come.

The park ranger tells her where to find their campsite but the RV is locked, nobody home. She sits in the rental car for an hour with the engine on and air conditioning blasting, reading park maps and informational pamphlets and squinting out at the hard sunlight, until she sees the two figures walking down the campground road toward her. They look like they’ve been on a long hike. Kyle’s shirt is tied around his waist and his chest shines with sweat. Julia, following in his wake, wears hiking shorts and a webbed belt, plastic water bottles at her hips like six-guns. Both of them walk head down, lost in thought.

Venya steps out of the car but it’s another minute before Kyle looks up and sees her. At first the only expression on his face is exhaustion, but then he recognizes her and puts on a smile, becoming the winning boy she met decades ago.

“Oh my God,” he says, loud enough for her to hear, and laughs. He glances behind him at his sister but she doesn’t look up.

Kyle reaches Venya and holds up his hands. “I can’t hug you, I’m too sweaty!” he says, but Venya steps in and hugs him anyway. The last time she saw him he was a pale, hyper kid of twenty. He’s in his mid-forties now, but still tanned and fit, hair grown to messiah-length and sun-streaked. Only his face hints at his age, and that is masked by his wild smile.

“I can’t believe it,” he says. “How on earth did you find us?” He steps out of the way. “Julia, it’s Venya.”

Julia doesn’t raise her head. She frowns in concentration at a point somewhere past Venya’s right hip. Her hair is gray shot with black, a negative of two decades ago. Kyle must have decided to have it cut into something short and easy to maintain; Julia wouldn’t have had an opinion.

“How you doing, Jay?” Venya says to her.

Her eyes remain fixed on empty air.

“The same,” Kyle says.

He pulls a key from his shorts pocket and unlocks the RV. Julia follows him inside automatically. It’s cooler inside, but not by much, and the air smells of ripening fruit. Kyle starts the RV’s engine to boost the air conditioning.

The vehicle looks new—probably a rental—but Kyle and Julia seem to have been living in it for several weeks. The counters are crowded with food wrappers, unopened groceries, and stacks of paper plates. Books and papers cover the little table and most of the seats.

Julia sits at the kitchen table. Kyle fills a plastic cup with ice from the small fridge, pours in some water from a collapsible jug, and sets it down in front of her. She lifts it to her lips without blinking.

“How about you?” Kyle says. “I’ve got beer, bourbon, juice—”

“Some of that water would be good.” Venya restacks some books that have spilled across the bench seat and sits down opposite Julia.

Kyle fills a cup for Venya, then opens a bag of dried apricots and sets it down on the table facing his sister. Without shifting her gaze from the tabletop, Julia reaches into the bag and puts an apricot in her mouth.

“I was driving out here from the airport,” Venya says. Kyle gulps down a cup of water and starts refilling it. “I’d forgotten how empty the highways are. I’d look down at the dash and realize I’d covered forty miles without realizing it. I thought, this must be what it’s like for Julia. Autopilot.”

“Julia’s driving a lot these days,” he says. “And I’m still the road she follows.” He finishes the second cup-full. “I’m going to get a clean shirt on. You okay with her?” Before she can answer he says, “What am I talking about, you did it for seven years.”

What he doesn’t say: seven years, not twenty-three.

Watching Julia eat is still an unnerving experience. She chews methodically, swallows, and reaches for another piece of fruit, automatic as eating movie popcorn in the dark. The entire time her eyes are focused on some inner landscape.

“How long has it been since the last time she was awake?” Venya calls back.

“Three weeks?” A note of embarrassment in his voice. “Maybe three and a half.”

“That can’t be,” Venya says.

Kyle comes back into the main cabin wearing a faded blue T-shirt. “It’s gotten a lot worse since you were with her, Venya. At Stanford she was never gone longer than what, a couple of days?”

“Julia called me two nights ago,” Venya says. “A voicemail message. She said she was calling from the Dead Horse parking lot.”

“That’s impossible.” But he’s looking at Julia. “She must have come awake at night. I don’t leave her alone—” He shakes his head. “I don’t. She must have come awake in the middle of the night and snuck out.”

Julia lifts her plastic cup and sets it down without sipping; it’s empty. Kyle takes it from her and refills it.

“What did she say?” he asks. “On the phone.” From the middle of the mess on the counter he picks up a glass—a real glass, not plastic—and blows into it.

“Not much. She said you two were staying here at the park. She’s working on a hard problem. Something important.”

He unscrews the cap from a half-full bottle of Canadian Mist and pours a couple of inches. “That’s true. Then again…” He smiles.

Then again, Julia is always working on a hard problem. Even in undergrad, when she resurfaced from one of her “away” times, she’d start writing furiously, page after page, as if she’d memorized a book she’d written in her head and had to get it down before it evaporated. She’d talk as she wrote—explaining, elaborating, answering Venya’s questions—making Venya feel that she was part of the solution, some necessary element in the equation.

Kyle holds up the bottle but Venya shakes her head. He shrugs and sips from his glass.

Venya says, “She said she needed me to come down, before it was too late.”

Kyle’s grin falters, and for a moment he looks a decade older.

“How bad is it?” Venya asks. “How much is she gone?”

“Ah.” He turns the glass in his fingers. He takes a big sip, then presses his lips together. “The past couple of years she’s been away more than she’s been awake,” he says finally. “The trend line’s pretty clear. We always knew lock-in was the probable end point.” He says it matter of factly, as if he’s practiced saying it out loud.

“This had to be tough on you,” Venya says.

He shrugs, and the smile is back. “She’s my sister. And her work is important. She really does need someone to help her organize it and get it out there.”

“I read your book,” Venya says. “The cover had her name on it, but I knew those sentences were yours.”

He laughs, nods. “Julia’s much too addicted to passive voice for pop science.” He lifts his glass. “Thank you, and congratulations—you’re the only one of our thirteen readers to have seen through the charade.” He tosses back his drink, sets down the glass, and claps his hands. “But enough about us imposters! Let me get you settled in, and we’ll do some barbecue.”

Julia stares at the table top as if it holds an equation about to unravel.

The cement shower stalls of the campground washhouse remind Venya of the first semester in college, the year she met Julia. Venya stands in the cold stall for a long while with her head bowed, letting the hot water drum the crown of her skull and pool around her veined feet. She thinks, this is exactly how she found Julia that day.

They’d only been roommates for a few weeks, two first-year women assigned to each other by the University of Illinois mainframe. Julia came from money, her clothes made that clear. She was pale and beautiful and solemn, like one of those medieval portraits of a saint. She rarely spoke, and only an occasional, fragile smile betrayed her nervousness.

Venya was a little put out by the girl’s reserve. She’d come to school with the idea, picked up from God knows where, that college roommates were automatically best friends. They’d decide on posters together, share clothes and shots of Southern Comfort, hold back each other’s hair when they puked. But after a few days of trying to get the skinny, quiet girl to open up, Venya had almost gotten used to the idea that Julia was going to be little more than a silent reading machine that lived on the other side of the room.

One morning during the third week, Venya woke up late, dashed into the big bathroom they shared with the other girls on the floor, and quickly brushed her teeth to get rid of the dead-shoe taste of stale beer in her mouth. As usual, Julia had gotten up before her, and Venya saw the girl’s green robe hanging outside one of the stalls, the shower running. Venya went off to her back-to-back morning classes, then to lunch. It was 12:30 or 1:00 before she went back up to her floor to drop off her books and take a pee.

Julia’s green robe still hung on the hook, and the shower was still running.

Venya must have called Julia’s name—that would have been the natural thing—but she only remembered running to the rubber curtain and yanking it aside. Julia stood under the spray, looking down at her feet. The water was still running hot, thanks to the industrial-sized boilers in the building, but the woman still shivered. When Venya grabbed her arm, Julia immediately stepped out of the stall to stand beside her.

Venya couldn’t get her to speak, make eye contact, or even change expression. But Julia obligingly allowed herself to be dried off, led back to the room, and tucked into bed. She lay there with her eyes open, staring past the ceiling.

Venya’s first thought was that someone had dropped LSD into Julia’s breakfast. But the symptoms were all wrong—no acid trip, good or bad, was this calm—and in fact the symptoms didn’t match any drug she had experience with (and she’d experienced more than her share). She didn’t want to get Julia in trouble, but she finally decided to call the R.A., who called the paramedics, who took Julia to the ER.

Julia snapped out of it sometime during the night. She suddenly sat up in the hospital bed, looked over at Venya, and asked for pen and paper. The doctor on duty shook his head disbelievingly; he made it clear to Venya that he thought Julia had been faking the whole thing. Julia apologized, but kept scribbling.

At four AM her family arrived. A thirteen-year-old boy bounded into the room and jumped onto the bed next to Julia. Her father and mother came next. Professor Dad, as Venya instantly decided to call him, shook her hand, thanked her for staying with his daughter. Professor Mom sat down in the chair next to the window, holding a silver pen in her fingers like a cigarette she was dying to light. Julia said hello to each of them, and immediately returned to her writing. The boy kept up a running comedic monologue: about Julia’s gown, the age of the hospital, the fat nurse by the front desk. Even then Kyle was the entertainer, the performer, the distracter. So it took Venya some time to figure out that the parents were arguing. It took her even longer to realize that the argument had been going on for years.

Professor Dad made oblique references to Julia’s room at home; Professor Mom scowled and shook her head. “She needs help,” she said at one point. “Professional help.” There were no questions, no talk about what had happened in the shower: Julia had “disappeared” before, evidently, and would disappear again.

Later Venya would hear the whole medical history, how when Julia was a child they diagnosed her mental absences as petit mal seizures. After CAT scans turned up nothing, they called it mild autism. As she grew older and the gaps grew longer, they started calling it Disassociative Identity Disorder, which was just a fancy name for multiple personalities. One psychiatrist thought there was a “monitor” personality who could perform daily tasks while the Julia personality went somewhere else. But Julia never bought the Sybil explanation. When she “woke up” she remembered most of what had happened while she was out. It didn’t feel like there was another personality in her. And she knew the difference between the two states—she knew when she’d been out.

The way Julia described it, her condition was the opposite of Attention Deficit Disorder: she couldn’t stoppaying attention. An idea would occur to her, and then she’d hop on that train of thought and follow it right out of Dodge. She was missing some neurochemical switchman who could move her attention from reverie to awareness of the outside world.

But in the hospital, Venya understood only that Dad wanted Julia to come home, and Mom wanted her to stay in a hospital, any hospital.

And Julia?

The girl stopped writing. She put down the pen, folded the papers in half, then in half again. Her expression was tight, and her eyes shone with unshed tears. “I can do this,” she said finally.

They didn’t seem to hear her. Her father and mother continued to argue in their cool, knife-edged voices.

Kyle turned to Venya and silently mouthed: Do Something.

Venya looked away, but the idea had been planted. A terrible, awful, stupid idea.

She raised her hand, and the professors dutifully stopped talking. “How often?” Venya asked. They turned their attention to her, as if regarding her from podiums at the far end of a great lecture hall. “How often does this happen?”

Professor Dad shrugged. “Hardly ever, anymore. She made it through senior year without—”

“That’s not true,” Julia said quietly. She caught Venya’s eye and held her gaze. “Three or four times a week, a couple of hours at a time. But they’re getting longer.”

Venya nodded, as if this made perfect sense. She stared at the shiny hospital floor so she wouldn’t have to see the entire family looking at her.

Keep your mouth shut, she told herself. This is not your problem.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it.” She offered to watch over Julia for the rest of that semester. Only a semester.

Venya still doesn’t know why she did it.

There was nothing in their relationship to that point that obligated her to help. The offer made sense only in terms of what came after, as if the next seven years—in which she led Julia through undergrad and grad school, and along the way became Julia’s best friend and then, eventually, her lover—caused her to speak at that moment.

Julia accepted Venya’s offer without comment.

They eat their dinner at the picnic table, in the shadow cast by the bulk of the RV. Six PM in September and it’s still in the nineties, but the lack of humidity makes for a 20-degree difference between sun and shade. All around the campground, people fire up grills and pull open bags of chips. At the campsite next to them a van full of twenty-something Germans laugh and argue. The sky hangs over them, huge and blue and cloudless.

“It’s beautiful out here,” Venya says. “I can see why you came.”

“I figured Julia could work anywhere, and if she came awake maybe she’d like seeing this place again.” He dabs mustard from Julia’s cheek and she continues to chew her chicken breast obliviously. “This was the last vacation our family took together before Mom died.”

Professor Mom killed herself when Julia was in grad school; Venya went with Julia to the funeral. Professor Dad checked out in a completely different way. He took a position in Spain, and, soon after, found a new wife. Everyone in the family, Venya thinks, has a talent for absence. Everyone except Kyle.

“What about you?” Kyle says. “Did you ever make a family? Two kids, cocker spaniel, house in the suburbs?”

“I have a son,” she says. “He started college last year. His mom and I broke up a few years ago, but we all get along. He’s a good kid.”

“A son? That’s great!” he says, meaning it. “It sounds like you’ve had a good life.”

“Good enough. And what about you? Ever find someone?”

“Julia’s the only woman in my life.” He laughs, forcing it a little. “Well, I’ve had a few relationships. I’m just not very good at keeping them going, and with Julia … I stay pretty busy. Here, I want to show you something.”

He went into the RV and came out with a fresh bottle of Canadian Mist and two glasses in the fingers of one hand, and a big three-ring binder under his arm. “You remember this?” He sets down the bottle and glasses and shows her the binder cover: “HOW TO DO IT.”

“My God,” Venya says, and takes it from him.

“It’s not the same cover, had to change that a couple of times. But some of the original stuff you put in is still there. Still accurate.”

When Venya decided she had to leave, she gave Kyle a binder like this. Operating instructions for Julia. Names of doctors, prescription dosages, favorite foods, sleeping schedule, shoe and clothing sizes … everything, down to the kind of toothpaste Julia liked. The binder is much thicker now.

“It’s all there,” he says. “The trust fund accounts, computer passwords, insurance papers.”

Venya isn’t sure what to say. “You’re a good brother.”

“Yeah, well. I am my sister’s keeper.” He sets the binder at the end of the table.

They lapse into silence. Venya pushes the last of the baked beans around on her paper plate. Kyle drinks.

“You have something you want to say,” Kyle says.

Venya exhales. “True.” She takes the remaining glass and splashes a bit of the whisky into it. She swirls it around, inhaling the sharp scent, watching the liquid ride the sides of the glass. She’s never particularly liked hard liquor.

“When she comes out of it,” Venya begins. “Do you talk about how she’s feeling?” He waits for her to explain. “You said the absences were growing longer. Eventually … You called it lock-in. She’s got to think about that. Does she feel trapped?”

He smiles, tight-lipped. “I don’t think so.”

“Kyle, you can tell me.”

“I would know,” he says. “We’ve always understood each other. We don’t have to talk about it.” He sips from his glass. “When Julia comes back, all she wants to talk about is her work. Non-stop Q.M. She just starts scribbling, because she doesn’t have much time before she goes away again. Even before she resigned from New Mexico I was helping her write up her papers—not just the layman stuff, the journal articles.” He gestured toward the RV. “I should show you the stuff she’s turning out now. She’s dismantling Everett-Wheeler and the other interpretations. I can’t follow the math anymore, but that’s not important. The job now is to organize the notes and get it into the hands of people who can understand her. This is her chance to get into the history books, Venya. She wants to follow it.”

“What if she follows it so far she can’t find her way back?” she says. “What if she can’t stop from disappearing for good?”

“I don’t think she’d mind,” he says. “In there, that’s where her real life is. Everything out here is just … distraction.”

“You don’t know that,” Venya says. “When we were together, she was afraid of getting lost. We talked about it. We didn’t call it ‘lock-in’ then, but that’s what she was afraid of.”

“So?”

“So, I made her a promise.”

He stares at her.

“I think that’s why she called me, Kyle. Because she’s getting close.” Because she’s afraid you won’t be able to do what she needs.

He puts up his hands. His laugh is brittle. “Don’t take my word for it, then. Ask her yourself.”

Venya smoothes back a stray hair blowing across Julia’s eyes. “I’ll need some matches,” she says.

Venya clears a length of the RV counter and sets out the baggie of grass and the rolling papers. A bong would be better—cooled smoke is best—but Venya didn’t want to put one through airport security. It was nerve-wracking enough just to pack the marijuana, rolled up and hidden in her tampon box.

She shakes out a little of the grass onto the paper. She hasn’t rolled a joint in years, but motor memory guides her hands. In the end she spills only a little of the pot.

“This is your plan?” Kyle says. “Get my sister high?”

“It worked in college.” Twenty-five, thirty years ago. Marijuana screwed with Julia’s focus, derailed the train—if the concentration of THC was high enough. Venya’s co-worker assured her that the pot was near-medical-grade, but there was no way to know if it would be enough.

Venya sits cross-legged on the floor of the vehicle, almost under the table. Kyle guides Julia until she’s lying face up on the floor with her head on Venya’s lap, staring at the ceiling. Kyle lights the joint for her, and Venya breathes with it to get it going.

“Pinch her nose,” she says, then takes a long drag and holds the smoke in her mouth. She lifts Julia’s head, and holding the glowing joint away from their bodies, bends to place her lips against Julia’s. Venya exhales, a long sigh. Smoke eddies above Julia’s mouth, then slowly drifts across her eyes. Julia blinks, but doesn’t shift her focus from the ceiling.

“It may take awhile,” Venya says. She draws on the joint again, thinking about the first time they kissed. Julia seemed so afraid, as if she didn’t know how to live in her own body.

After a few minutes Venya’s lower back and shoulders begin to ache from the awkward position. Even though she’s trying not to inhale she feels light-headed. The pot is indeed strong, or else Venya is indeed old. She suspects both.

Julia never liked marijuana. Or any of the prescription drugs the doctors tried on her in the early days. None of them worked for very long once she developed a tolerance, most of them had uncomfortable side effects, and all of them, Julia said, made her stupid. She couldn’t bear stupid.

The smoke alarm goes off. Venya jerks, and Kyle, laughing, reaches up to the RV’s low ceiling. He pulls off the alarm’s plastic cover and yanks out the battery.

Julia hasn’t moved.

“I don’t think this is working,” Kyle says. The joint’s already burned down half its length.

“Look, her eyes are closed,” Venya says. She tugs one of Julia’s ear lobes. “Come on now, Sleeping Beauty.”

Julia opens her eyes. She looks up at Kyle, then turns her gaze to Venya. Her hand lifts and touches Venya’s cheek.

Julia smiles. “My Princess Charming.”

Kyle helps the two women to their feet. Julia laughs, coughs, then recovers, smiling. “We’re both old women!”

“Fifty is the new seventy, Jay.” But Julia’s wrong, Venya thinks. Or half wrong. Julia awake seems as beautiful to her as when they first met.

Julia looks around at the cabin, at the stacks of paper in the slanting light. “I need to write some things down,” she says quietly, then catches herself. “But not now. What time is it—seven? We can watch the sunset.”

“If we leave now,” Kyle says.

“Vee, you better roll another one of those before I go away again.”

Kyle passes out flashlights for the way back, then leads them out of the campground. After a hundred yards or so they step off the park road and onto a well-traveled hiking trail. Julia smokes as they walk, putting the joint down by her side when they pass people coming back from the point to the campground. The trail runs across sandy ground, then over patches of slick rock where the trail is marked by small cairns.

Julia puts her arm in Venya’s. “I’m so glad you came,” she says.

“You called,” Venya says simply. She doesn’t know what she can say in Kyle’s presence. Julia called her without telling her brother, without even telling him that she’d woken up while he slept. “Kyle says you’re working on something important. Something about dismantling the many-worlds interpretation.”

“You remember Everett?”

“A little. I proofread a lot of your papers, Jay.”

“You kept correcting my semi-colons,” Julia says. She takes a hit from the joint and grimaces. “It’s not just Everett, and the Deutschian spin-offs of that. I’m also taking down Zurek’s many-histories, and Albert’s many-minds, and Bohm’s pilot waves. The Copenhagen Interpretation already died with the failure of complementarity.”

“You don’t say,” Venya says. In two seconds Julia’s zoomed years beyond her reading. “And your idea is…?”

“Wheeler-Feynman’s absorber theory, but fully extended into QED.” QED is quantum electrodynamics—Venya remembers that much—but she’s never heard of the absorber theory. “With a few of my own twists,” Julia adds.

She’s animated, waving the lit joint like a sparkler. Venya takes it from her and squeezes it out. There are matches in her pocket if they need to relight it.

“There’s no need for an observer to collapse the wave,” Julia says. “No need for parallel universes sprouting out of control. The universe is not a growing thing, it’s already complete. From the moment of the big bang, all the work has already been done. It’s whole and seamless, going backward and forward in time. There’s no ‘now’ and ‘then.’ Everything’s now. Everything’s happening at once. Look—”

Julia stoops to pick up a small rock, and scrapes an upside-down V on the sandy ground. “A particle going forward in time meets an anti-particle going forward in time.” She scratches a minus sign on the left-hand segment and a plus sign on the other segment.

“Oh God, more Feynman diagrams,” Kyle says.

Julia digs into the intersection of the two lines. “That’s an electron colliding with a positron. They’re destroyed, and emit two photons that fly off in opposite directions.” She draws two lines extending from the intersection, making an X. “It doesn’t matter which way time’s arrow is pointing. We can read the diagram from any perspective and it’s equally true. Read it from left to right and you can say that electron meets a photon and emits a photon and a positron. Or from the top, two photons collide and emit an electron and a positron. All are correct. All happen.”

“Okay…” Venya says. She looks at Kyle, her expression saying, How do you put up with this stuff? She has no idea where Julia is going with this, but after hours with the absent version of the woman, it’s a pleasure to be with a Julia so present.

“But it’s equally true,” Julia says, “to say that an electron strikes two photons and emits a positron that travels backward in time.” Julia looks Venya in the eye to see if she’s following. “Time’s arrow doesn’t matter. If the map is true, it’s true for any point in time. It’s a map of the world, for all space-time. The future is as set as the past, for everyone. The territory doesn’t change.”

“For particles, not people.”

“What do you mean, not people? Schrödinger’s Cat, Venya. The EPR paradox. People, and their choices, are already factored into the equation.”

“But people have free will.”

“That reminds me of a joke,” Kyle says.

Julia tosses the rock away. “Free will just means that you don’t know what’s on the map. You don’t create the future, it’s already there, waiting for you like a Christmas present. All you have to do on Christmas morning is see what’s inside.”

“A Jehovah’s Witness dies and goes to heaven,” Kyle says.

“What?” Venya says.

“Ignore him,” Julia says. “I do.”

The trail runs through a narrow neck, perhaps thirty yards wide, with sky on either side of them. The park pamphlet said that cowboys would fence the narrows and corral wild horses out on the lookout. The legend is that one winter the cowboys left for home and forgot to take down the fence. Naming the point came easy after that.

The land widens again, but then the trail ends in sheer cliff. Julia gestures toward a nose of rock jutting into the air. “My favorite spot,” she says. She walks onto it like a veteran high diver. Venya’s stomach tightens to see her standing on that slender platform, sky above and below.

Suicide runs in the family, Venya thinks. Maybe she isn’t here to help Julia kill herself, but witness it. Or help Kyle cope with it.

But then Julia sits down, and slides forward so that her legs hang over the edge. Venya cautiously follows Kyle onto the shelf. They sit down on either side of Julia with their flashlights between their thighs, letting their feet dangle over a thousand feet of empty air.

They face south, looking out toward hazy mountains fifty or sixty miles away. Between Dead Horse and the mountains are five thousand square miles of canyon country the park maps call Islands in the Sky. A good name. Venya looks down on an ocean of air, a stone basin walled by raked cliffs over two thousand feet high. The bottom of the basin is a vast labyrinth of stone: mile-deep chasms; sharp reefs and table-flat mesas; crenellated buttes like castles surrounded by invisible moats.

At the very bottom flows the only water visible in this stone country, the olive green coil of the Colorado. The river winds out of the south, aiming lazily for Dead Horse Point. Two miles before it reaches the point, the river abruptly goosenecks, bending 180 degrees around a butte shaped like the prow of a ship, and disappears again into the southern maze of canyons.

Venya thinks of those horses, dying of thirst within sight of the river.

“Wow,” she says.

“Mmm hmm,” Julia answers.

They sit in companionable silence. In the fading light the land seems to flex and shift. The cliffs to their right are already in twilight, but the eastern faces glow with deep reds and smoldering oranges. Shadows run down the cracks and seams, pooling two thousand feet below at the darkened feet of the cliffs.

“This Jehovah’s Witness goes to heaven,” Kyle says.

Julia sighs, and then starts chuckling to herself.

“But instead of the pearly gates, there’s a fork in the road, and a sign pointing down each path. One sign says ‘Believers in Predestination’ and the other says ‘Believers in Free Will.’” Julia shakes her head, and Venya wonders how many times she’s heard this joke—and whether she heard it while awake, or as background chatter while she was thinking of something else.

“The guy’s always believed in predestination, so he goes down that road, and eventually he comes to a huge wall and a big door with the word ‘PREDESTINATION’ written over the top. He knocks, and an angel opens the door and says, ‘What brings you to my door, mortal?’ And the guy says, ‘Well, there were these two signs, and I chose the one that said predestination.’ The angel says, ‘You chose it? You can’t come in here, Bub,’ and slams the door. The guy’s heartbroken. Finally he trudges back to the crossroads and goes down the other road. Eventually he comes to another giant wall and a door that says ‘FREE WILL.’ He knocks and another angel opens the door and says, ‘Why did you come this way, mortal?’ And the guy says, ‘I had no choice!’”

“Slam,” Julia says, and laughs.

Venya laughs with them, but she wonders at these two odd, grown children. Orphans, really. Maybe they like the joke because they share the certainty that the universe will screw them over. No—that it already has.

Venya scootches forward and leans out over her knees, staring down. A thousand feet below is a pink shelf perhaps two miles wide and perhaps another thousand feet above the river.

“That’s the White Rim Trail,” Kyle says. He means the pale thin track that runs along the shelf like an old surgical scar. “Jeep road from the uranium-fever days. I always meant to drive that. I’ve never even gotten down to the rim.”

“There’s always the quick way down,” Venya says, and Kyle laughs. “One gust of wind.”

“Stop it,” Julia says.

Kyle says, “When we were here when I was a kid I used to scare myself by thinking of the rock snapping off under my feet, like in a Roadrunner cartoon. I’d hang there in the air for minute, then thwip! A little puff of dust where I hit.”

“Bury you right there in your silhouette-shaped hole,” Venya says.

“With a gravestone that says, ‘Ouch!’”

“Stop it, both of you!” Julia says. She pushes back from the edge and her flashlight topples and starts to roll. Kyle snags it before it reaches the edge.

“Careful,” he says.

Venya says, “Jay, what’s the matter?”

“We should head back now,” she says evenly.

Kyle doesn’t answer.

“It’s getting cold,” Julia says.

“I’m fine,” Kyle says. “I’d like to stay out here a while longer.”

“Let me take her,” Venya says to him, and realizes she’s slipped back into talking about Julia as if she isn’t there. She quickly adds, “Jay and I need to talk some more physics, right Jay?”

Kyle laughs. “Liar.” He squeezes Venya’s arm, a silent thanks. The man’s been on duty for more than twenty years, Venya thinks. Walking Julia home is the least she can do. And she and Julia do need to talk: The light is fading, and the pot probably won’t last much longer.

“Are you sure?” Julia says to Kyle.

“Of course. Here, take my jacket.” He starts to untie the gray fleece from around his waist.

Julia walks behind him and squeezes his neck. “Always the good little brother.” She bends and kisses the crown of his head.

Venya’s forgotten how quickly darkness falls in the desert. The sun drops behind some far ridge and suddenly Venya can barely see Julia beside her.

Venya clicks on her flashlight and plays it over the trail. After a few minutes of walking she says, “You sounded scared when you called me, Jay.”

Julia doesn’t answer. For a moment Venya thinks she’s disappeared again, but then she makes a sound like a sob. “I’m so sorry, Vee. It wasn’t fair to call you.”

Venya wants to see her face, but resists the urge to lift the flashlight. “I promised to come back,” Venya says. “If you ever got lost.” So lost in her head that she’d never be able to tell anyone when she wanted out, when she wanted to end it. “You said you were afraid of not having a choice.”

“That’s not what I’m afraid of anymore,” Julia says.

“What, then?”

Julia walks on in silence. She still hasn’t turned on her flashlight. Venya feels for the lump of the joint in her jeans pocket. “You want me to light up?” she asks.

After a few seconds Julia says, “Sorry, I … When I woke up and saw we were at Dead Horse, I knew what he was thinking about. The last good time we had.”

“He told me about that,” Venya says. “The vacation before your mom died.”

Another long silence. Venya thinks they’re passing through the narrows, but it’s hard to judge in the twilight. She thinks of the mustangs, made stupid by a simple barrier of crossed logs, unable to escape without someone to guide them.

Venya touches her arm, and Julia says, “The path out is the same as the path back. It’s laid out like a map…”

“Stay with me, hon. No math now. Tell me why you called me.”

“He’s so tired,” Julia says. “You can’t see it—he’s being Kyle for you. But you can’t see him like I do. It’s like time travel. Every time I come back, he seems to be aging so much faster.”

“Julia?”

Julia stumbles against something on the trail and rights herself. “He couldn’t tell me, of course. He knows how important the work is to me. But I was so afraid he’d leave me before you got here, and without him … I’m very close, Venya.”

Venya stops but Julia keeps walking automatically, her voice growing softer. “The math is … the math is laid out like…”

Venya seizes her arm, jerks her to a halt. “Julia!”

She says nothing.

“Julia, I need you to snap out of it. Listen to me.” She shines the flashlight in her face, but Julia’s staring into nothing. No, not nothing. The map of the world.

Venya pushes down on her shoulders. “Sit here. Don’t follow me. I’ll be right back.” Julia lowers to the ground, her knees up by her chin. “Good girl. I’ll be right back.”

Soon, Venya will find his flashlight on the shelf of rock, turned on and pointing into empty air. Sometime after that, when the park rangers and police have finished with their questions and she’s signed the papers that Julia cannot, she’ll find the binder that Kyle set out for her. She’ll turn to the pages about meals, and make Julia her breakfast.

Now Venya turns and begins to jog back the way they came, the flashlight beam jumping from rock to bush to gnarled juniper. Behind her, Julia rises and begins to follow.

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