Part 1
Jane stepped into the desert night, slipping out of the steady, comforting beat of the Pynk Hotel. Away from its familiar bass lines—the sounds of agitated mattresses, the deep snores, bodies pressed against doors and walls, the soft breathy melodies and grunting percussions—there was desert evening air. She missed the music of the hotel the moment she exited, even as the wind hit her face, just cool enough to mimic the feeling of misting water.
But there was still one familiar bass beat out here. Jane smiled, turning toward the sound of a steel-toed boot tapping a salvaged fender. Closer still, Jane heard the beat’s permanent accompaniment, the mid-tenor humming to themselves as they nodded off, a moment’s respite in between stripping the usable parts off a ruined vehicle.
“We heading to the Cave tonight?” They cracked one eye open curiously.
Perhaps they weren’t nodding off, Jane realized as she shrugged. “Maybe I just wanted to say hey, Neer.”
Neer snorted as they stood up. They were only a couple of inches taller than Jane, and at least half of that from the boots. Still, they tilted their head down sometimes as they looked at people, as if it made them just the slightest bit shorter. Jane didn’t comment on it all that often anymore. “If you wanted to say hey, you would have been on my ass to get to bed before you even stepped out the door.” Neer’s imitation of Jane sounded nothing like her, beyond their intonation, yet they persisted. “‘Neer, if you don’t get your Black ass to sleep, I’m going to convene the Chord and force a vote for you to go on vacation.’”
“Okay, you got me, sweetie. I could use a hand if you don’t mind.” Jane crooked her elbow, inviting Neer to link arms. As Neer complied, Jane laughed, and Neer’s smile grew. Jane got a pang in her heart, more maternal perhaps than she felt for almost anyone at the hotel. It was as rare to see Neer smile like that as it was for Jane to be this vulnerable with anyone, except perhaps . . .
“Thought you would have stayed in tonight, with Zen leaving again in the morning.”
There were more questions than that, hidden behind the words: why Zen wasn’t here with Jane, for one. “She needs to rest. And besides . . .” Jane gestured loosely with her free hand. “If she’s worried about me, she might try to delay again. And New Dawn doesn’t stop its work just because I’m having a bad night.”
Neer accepted the answer serenely, leaving Jane to her thoughts on the way to the Cave. She tried to focus on the beat of their footsteps instead, Neer’s boots clomping alongside Jane’s more muffled sneakers. Jane’s steps, despite her height, were always longer than Neer’s, surer, and gave the appearance of Jane guiding Neer into the Cave, although Neer knew the path as well as anyone at the hotel.
The pair stopped in front of the Cave, sliding their arms out of their union. Neer sucked on their teeth, looking at the entrance.
Jane narrowed her eyes. “You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to.”
Neer shrugged off the suggestion. “It’s just us and your memories, right? I’m golden.” Neer forced a smirk, and Jane could imagine that if Neer smirked at any of the other occupants closer to their age like that, Neer would be dangerously, delightfully popular. “Pynk, even.”
Jane rolled her eyes and marched inside. Just on the edge of the land around the hotel, every step deeper into the Cave turned the sand darker, damper, until green patches of moss and grass grew sparingly in the darkest soil. The walls were cold and sometimes slick with moisture; a few times water dripped down from the stone above.
She liked to close her eyes when she stepped into the Cave, although it wasn’t necessary.
When she spoke in the Cave, the echo carried the deepest notes of her voice, the reverb filling the darkness as if she were on a stage. Jane let her head drop back as she hummed a melody from before the Pynk Hotel or even New Dawn’s capturing her. She let herself sway to the dripping water until she heard a shake and a snap, and the blackness behind her eyelids turned red.
She opened her eyes and shifted; Neer had pulled out a flashlight from their belt clip, resting it on a large piece of flatter stone. It lit up the onyx-swirled gray stone, not like a spotlight but like a candle.
An intimate performance.
“Same as usual?” Neer asked. Jane nodded, slowly settling down into the dirt, kneeling. Neer took a breath and then recited the opening:
“Tell me a story you don’t want to forget.”
Jane pressed her hands against the rich soil. When she had first arrived at the hotel, she’d questioned the way that the Cave was used. This rich dirt could have been moved into the sun to grow trees and vegetables. The pushback had been immediate. It was one of the earliest things that the occupants of the Pynk Hotel taught her: this cave was growing things, was being used for growth.
Because instead of tubers or flowers, memory found purchase here.
“When I arrived a second time,” she spoke, as much to herself as to Neer, as much to plant her hands and her heat in the soil and hope to find her roots, “I knew the path by the way the sun traveled across the sand, reflected off the shitty car that we’d rewired on the way from . . .”
She paused. For a second, it wasn’t that she didn’t know the name of New Dawn, but rather that the feel of it was too big, too intense to come out as words.
New Dawn was at the tip of Jane’s tongue like a flame atop a matchhead. The sterile walls, the way numbered names and faces stood over her as if to comfort, as if to assure her that clean was the only thing she could ever want, desire. Cleanse the dirtiness from her mind, her lips, her tongue, the way her thighs moved, so that then—and only then—she would be something holy.
But it was the dirt in between her fingers now that was real, not their lights and dictates. Not the dirt they perceived. She reminded herself of the dirt before her, under her—the real dirt—of the way it shifted in her hands; at her fingertips it was suddenly smooth and cold, the slab they’d placed her on in that New Dawn facility. Around her wrists, dirt tightened, the straps that they’d held her down with, and she remembered that fighting against these would be fighting against the flow of memory, not New Dawn acolytes.
“From where, Jane?” Neer’s voice broke through, like it always did. They had never been at the facility with Jane, which was another reason why Jane had asked Neer to help her. Neer was part of the present.
“From a New Dawn facility.”
“Which one?”
Jane was silent.
“I’m sorry,” Neer said, “I thought . . . maybe you’d know this time.”
Neer wanted to help, Jane told herself. “Ché drove and Zen held me up when I could barely stand. We shredded our New Dawn clothing, tore off sleeves and shortened long skirts, making belts and bracelets from headpieces. We’d hid boots and leather jackets before we’d gone in.”
“Did you wear those when you arrived at the hotel?”
“I . . . couldn’t remember the drop site, which was when I got scared,” Jane recited. She felt the moment of panic in her rooted fingertips, up her arms, into her breathing. “New Dawn’s list of Standards was still too loud, shoving out memories that were mine. But I remembered . . .”
This was what made Jane wake up and need the Cave tonight, she realized. This was the moment in her memory where things had . . . cluttered, filled with the taste and smell of Nevermind, the gas New Dawn had used to try to clean her body of her soul and her memories.
She’d stared at the ceiling, unable to recall what she’d once remembered. And that was what the Cave was for.
Neer’s voice softened; they recognized where Jane needed support. “You remembered something important, Jane. Something you told me before. Do you want me to remind you? Or do you want to let it grow yourself?”
Jane wanted to seed the memory herself, wanted to push it to grow and take root and never ever let anyone pluck it away again. She took a deep breath, though; she welcomed Neer’s guidance, welcomed the way that Neer cataloged every story that Jane thought needed remembering. Healthy plants often had a caring gardener. Even ...
