Page 59 of So Far Gone

“You got your backstage pass?”

She held it up for him to see.

“Cool. Hey, we’re playing ‘Don’t Be Misled’ right before our encore.”

“Are you really?”

He did his deep DJ voice: “The boys say it’s a banger, B.”

She laughed. “Go ahead, Doug. I’ll be right there.”

He left the tent. She climbed out of her bag in her yoga pants and a sweatshirt and switched off the little battery-powered space heater, which sat beneath a metal table between their two sleeping bags. The Paititi Festival, as she’d learned, was held from the end of April to the beginning of May to mark the first Incan harvesting festival,Aymoray qu.

But British Columbia in the spring was damp and cold, a fair description of how she’d felt the last few days. Sometimes she couldn’t tell when she was shivering from the wet air and when she was shaking from anxiety and lack of sleep. Of course, it was ridiculous, holding asix-hundred-year-old South American harvest festival in the woods of Canada. But the utter strangeness had caused her to reflect on her own life; was it any more random than her family being in the thralls of a repurposed, overly literal, two-thousand-year-old offshoot of an ancient Middle Eastern religion? Before Shane’s frog-in-hot-water conversion, faith had been personal to her—a voice in her head that seemed to come from somewhere outside her being, offering her a sense of purpose, a chance to experience somethingmore, something communal and quiet, a peaceful path out of the self, out of drugs and alcohol, away from the loneliness and insecurity of her younger years. When she had gone to some Narcotics Anonymous meetings—her mother’s idea—Bethany found she took comfort in Celia’s chill Unitarian beliefs, and even in Shane’s wide-eyed Christian enthusiasm.

But this path that Shane was on now—which had eventually led him to the Church of the Blessed Fire and the Army of the Lord—there was nothing quiet about that. And certainly not peaceful. He had become obsessed with the end-times—Pastor Gallen describing his church as “a quivering bride awaiting the return of our King.” It changed Shane, this mixture of paranoid masculinity and Apocalyptic Christian absolutism: a dark communion of fear and testosterone. But, if she were being honest, it wasn’tjustShane’s involvement with this church that had her wanting to run away with the circus. And it might not even have been her mother’s death (although that was the thing that had unmoored her). It was something older, something deeper.

She put on her coat, hat, and gloves and ventured out of the tent.

Every time she went outside at Paititi, it reminded her of the scene inThe Wizard of Ozwhere Dorothy comes out of the black-and-white house into a bizarre world of color. She wondered what Leah would name some of these new hues:sunburned butt-cheek;beach-ball-in-mud-puddle. There were bright, angular tents and small geodesic domes, rainbow flags and tie-dyed banners and Indian blankets, signs advertising vegan tacos, fresh fruit, and energy drinks, body-painteddancers floating by like ghosts. She weaved through, tripping briefly on a tent rope but catching herself. It was nice to be out in the sun, her panic dispersing. (The kids are okay, the kids are okay.) She joined a line of people walking the path toward the Day Stage,Tonatiuh, named for the Incan god of the sun. (She was glad The Buffs were playing here, although it meant they were a minor band. She couldn’t even pronounce the name of the larger, nighttime main stage.) Along the trail, a dozen people were standing in front of a half-naked woman live-painting something abstract on a huge canvas. Bethany had seen more than a few furries at this festival—people dressed in fuzzy animal onesies—perhaps because of the cold weather. But there were just as many people in shorts and open shirts, in tank tops and halter tops and bikini tops. For the life of her, Bethany couldn’t understand how these kids could dress this way in the cold, wet woods. It made her wonder at the power of the drugs they had now.

Yes, the drugs. She was fifteen years past her festival-going, chemical-ingesting prime, and she had decided she didn’t want to slip back. After her single Beetle-toke the first night, she’d only been tempted once, during an anxiety attack on their second day, when Doug was off meeting with the festival organizers and Mama Killa heard her weeping and gasping for air, came inside her tent, and opened her hand to reveal a round pink pill with a heart in the center.

“What is it?”

“It’s comfort, darlin’.” Mama Killa was all comfort herself, in a soft, fuzzy sweater over a patterned corduroy dress, purple leggings and red boots, feather earrings dangling from her big lobes.

“Yeah, but... what is it?”

“It’s peace, my love. And sleep.”

Oh, that little heart. It looked like the Valentine’s candy she used to give Asher and Leah, before Shane informed her, via a pastor he’d met in Baker City, that Saint Valentine’s Day had evolved from a pagan Roman fertility ritual, and that nowhere in the Bible was the celebrationof such saints condoned—just one of the reasons Catholics were hell-bound.

“What is it?” Bethany asked the big, comforting Mama Killa again.

“Just a little ketamine. It’ll calm you down, child.”

Child. She pictured her own then, Asher and Leah (The kids are okay, the kids are okay), and she thought,As long as I don’t take this pill, as long as I don’t sleep with Doug, as long as I don’t fall into this life again, I can still go back, if I choose to.

“I can’t take that,” she said to Mama, who smiled, threw the pill into her own mouth, and pulled Bethany into her big, comforting chest. She held her tightly, rocking back and forth. “It’s okay, darlin’. It’s okay, love.” (Bethany, relaxing into the woman’s flesh, pictured her own frail mother, and thought,Thatis the drug I want.)

The line of people slowed as they approached the Tonatiuh Stage, where apologetic security guards did a cursory check of badges, tickets, fanny packs, and backpacks and the crowd passed through a gate beneath a massive blackChakana, an Incan cross. Bethany showed her backstage pass and was directed down a different path, between crowd-control panels ribbed with steel posts, like lines of bike racks, all the way to a small, fenced-off grassy area at the side of the stage, where other musicians, girlfriends, roadies, and hangers-on sat on blankets and in folding chairs.

Onstage, a bearded man, bare-chested, in leather leggings, with a red Batman mask painted on his face, hands in his back pockets, was imploring the crowd to adhere to posted quiet times, to follow recycling rules, and to report overdoses to the medical tent. “And with that,” he said, “my friends, lovers, soon-to-be lovers, fellow worshippers at the altar of joy and togetherness... please help me welcome... The Boofs.”

Doug had explained to her that while the band wasspelledThe Buffs—three of the four members had met at the University of Colorado, home of the Buffaloes—they had gained fans by jokinglypronouncing it “boofs” at one of these outdoor electronica festivals, a winking nod to the stoned-off-their-asses fans who had begun downloading their songs. “Or, stonedintheir asses,” Doug said. And since then, it had stuck. “The name, that is.”

At forty, Doug was almost fifteen years older than his bandmates. He’d given bass lessons to one of the Colorado kids soon after The Buffs moved to Portland, and he was invited to join the band after he introduced them to a hobby of his, tweaking an old Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer, queering its accent to make a bassline that was both pleasingly poppy and edgy at the same time, a sound that he said was a throwback to 1980s techno, as well as old acid house, German Trance, and Belgian rave music. Then, in a real stroke of brilliance, he slowed that beat down, achieving what he called “a funky-folky, minimal, Flemish EDM-on-Prozac vibe.”

“Ooo-kay,” Bethany said, not understanding a word beyond 1980s.

But here was the thing. ShelikedThe Buffs! Their music was the only thing that had calmed her these last few days. The other bands all sounded the same to her—one song bleeding into the next, and she grew edgy listening to their monotonous, robotic beats. But The Buffs’ rhythms were slower, chiller, funkier, folkier, more hypnotic, and when the singer chimed in, he brought an ethereal quality that slowed her pulse. Maybe, in that hesitant, faux-futuristic bassline that Doug was setting, she could hear the shadow of his old music, too, the sweet, hopeful, acoustic songs he’d played her during their five years together. The rest of the band was equally tight, and the airy, wispy singer brought it all together, though Bethany feared he might just get blown off the stage by a gust of wind, like a tumbleweed. Still, she was proud of Doug, who had somehow gone frometernal childtoband grown-up, donating his van to schlep their instruments, managing their “finances,” and continuously warning the youngsters away from harder drugs. (Doug had suffered a respiratory illness that a doctor flagged as a precursor to more serious health problems, andwas mostly just a weed guy now, with an occasional cup of ayahuasca tea.)

The band sauntered out, picked up their instruments, made eye contact, nodded heads, and started playing, the three young kids front and center, Doug off by himself on his little rhythm island, with his bass and his synth equipment. The music immediately washed over Bethany, and she started to feel better. One thing she liked about The Buffs was that they broke between songs; so many of the other bands turned their whole set into a kind of time-dilated techno-medley. Bethany sat on a folding chair in this side-stage area, closing her eyes, bouncing her head, tapping her foot. Just over the fence line that separated her from the crowd, people danced in every imaginable way, so long as one’s imagination tended toward the Grateful Dead: whirling dervishes and people reaching for invisible ropes, women spinning sundresses over leggings and men bopping their bearded heads like chickens eating scratch. A row of people spun Hula-Hoops around bare waists. Few of them seemed to have found the actual beat, but their awkwardness was charming. As strange as it was to find herself here, Bethany appreciated how the festival felt mostly judgment-free. You come as the rhythm-challenged reincarnation of a Mesoamerican shaman; I will dress as a dancing racoon. You paint your body head to toe; I will leave my children for a few days to go hide out in a tent and cry myself to sleep.

And still, Bethany felt separated from it all. Older, soberer, she felt like exactly what she was: a runaway housewife who’d left her kids with her severely religious husband, or—if Shane tried to find her, as she doubted he would do—had sent her kids to stay with her cranky, old, reclusive father in the woods. She smiled imagining that unlikely scenario, her distracted dad, who hadn’t even known the ages of his grandkids the last time he saw them, stuck with the nonstop-interrogating Asher and the ever-moody Leah.

But this thought stopped her cold.Wait, what day is it?If Annadidbring the kids to her dad’s place, would Leah have remembered tobring pads with her? If there was one thing her dad would not have on his crappy little ranch, it would be menstrual products. So far, Leah’s early periods had been as irregular as Bethany’s had been when she was thirteen. Suddenly, Bethany was filled with guilt again (The kids are okay, the kids are—)just as another Buffs’ song rose into misty crescendo, and the refrain playing inside her head became:What in the world have I done?

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