Prodigals Read Online Free PDF Page B

and, behind the relief, a faint sadness. It was sadness about a lot of things, but perhaps, most simply stated, it was regret that we had grown self-knowing enough to avoid our mistakes.
    I left Lily’s room and walked right into Eli and Marta’s because I thought I should tell Eli what I had just understood, him being a screenwriter and all—that our lives had become scripts, that love had become a three-act formula worthy of Robert McKee—but then I saw that he and Marta were going at it, Eli fucking her from behind while they watched themselves in the mirrored doors of the wall closet. When they saw me they paused mid-thrust, and I said, “Oh, God, sorry,” and Marta blinked and said, “It’s fine, sweetie,” and Eli kind of surreptitiously finished the suspended thrust and said, “Yeah, no biggie. What’s up?”
    *   *   *
    We all felt amazingly good the next day. This seemed remarkable considering the night’s program, but it’s the truth. The coke had somehow burned off whatever residue encrusts on you throughout the year—free radicals, shame? We felt unashamed. We were done auditioning for one another and could now be friends, or not-friends, but ourselves. I speak for everyone. That’s what you get to do when you’re telling the story.
    And here’s a model for a modern story: A prince met a princess but they both agreed they were too busy to explore a meaningful relationship.
    Everyone lived not unhappily after.
    The end.
    But this story doesn’t end quite yet.
    *   *   *
    We left for Joshua Tree that morning. It was the same day it always was, but that day was beautiful, and the wind farms spun and the mountains gave up their passes and although the park was busy by the time we got there we didn’t care. We climbed a rock pile, ate a sandwich bag of mushrooms, and lay contented in the sun. There were families around, white families and Latino families and Asian families, and everyone said “Happy New Year,” all of us pleased, it seemed, that we had something to say to one another. There were people rock climbing and tightrope walking on a distant butte, and we hiked over to them as distances took on a subtle fun-house deception and the rocks grew more interesting and our bodies less reliable. The sun tore through the tissue of the sky. The stone-littered ocher valley below recalled a time when humans and dinosaurs shared the earth—not a real time, I’m not stupid, but the time in our collective imagination when we were the scrappy dreamers and they were the powerful monsters and we all had a lot more business with volcanoes.
    The tightrope walkers had their lines stretched at the top of a bluff, we saw, thirty or forty yards across an open chasm. They were a group of Gen-Y hippies, most of them shirtless in rolled-up canvas pants, making coffee in AeroPresses and practicing qigong while an Alaskan Klee Kai ran from one cliff edge to the next. I sat because my balance was shot and watched in rapt dread as the bohemian boys and girls scooted out onto the ropes on their butts, stared at the horizon to find their point of balance or stability or Zen, and raised themselves, waving their hands back and forth above them in a sort of willed precession. I kept expecting them to fall, but they never did.
    Half an hour later we were eating lunch on the low wall of a lookout. From where we were sitting you could see down into the Coachella Valley to the south, see the Salton Sea and the San Andreas Fault, which ran like a post-Impressionist margin in the landscape. I was mostly focused on my sandwich, though, the way the Gala apple and country-style mustard interacted with the sharp white cheddar and the arugula, how the tastes all came together and produced nuances in their interaction that I had never encountered before. I thought I had never been happier than eating this cheese-and-arugula