“Have you invited your parents out here?” Emily asks Kay, as they crunch their way through this burnt orange colored carpet of needles, “like, for one of these upcoming tours, maybe?”
Harry hasn’t explicitly stated who is and isn’t permitted upon the grounds of Otherwise. And Emily appreciates this, that he has left it up to them to sort out their own informal bylaws. For the most part, it seems that the artists have specifically chosen this opportunity so that they might withdraw from society a little bit, get inside their heads again and tune out the world beyond. Therefore, while the occasional significant other, like Clay, has made an appearance, nobody’s turned this into a giant party or anything by inviting a bunch of friends, or family members. Still, homesickness has already begun to creep in, and it’s inevitable that some will reach out to their close ones, if they haven’t already.
“No,” Kay admits, followed by a sigh. While the three of them move vaguely uphill, mostly side by side as they weave around these well-spaced trees, she’s not only weighing what Emily said, and her response, but considering how much she wants to reveal to Tony. “I know I need to call them. We’ve texted a few times, me and Pamela. Mostly just me asking about Noah. But…the way we left it was kinda shitty, I know, so I’m kinda dreading…”
“An actual phone call?”
“Yeah, an actual phone call.”
Tony has stomped along in his jeans and hiking boots, not saying a whole lot, for that matter not shooting much footage at all on his digital video camera. Now he begins cackling, however, and Kay recoils, at first believing this is directed at her. Only when glancing his way do they notice he’s stopped moving and is staring back with a broad smile, in the direction from which they’ve arrived.
“I guess we have not quite been moving in as straight a line as we thought,” he observes, laughing still. Facing them, he ponders, “I wonder if any of the posses thought to mark their trail?”
Emily, holding an index finger aloft, says, “well, the other two groups I think had a little more obvious path. But as for us…that’s actually not a bad idea…”
“Too bad I didn’t think to bring any…all natural vegan bread crumbs,” Tony jokes. “Should I, like, start cutting notches in the trees? I wouldn’t exactly claim I’m an expert at that, but…”
“Hang on a second,” Kay wearily grumbles, though more for show than actual irritation. She extracts her phone and says, “I mean, we’ve already got our GPS maps on here. But let me send a connect request to… Kathy. I’ll send a location connection request to Kathy. Good?” And she has no sooner said this, to which they nod in agreement, when an audible ping sounds out on Kay’s phone.
“Okay, sweet. She approved the connection. Now I know where she is and she me. Problem solved.”
They continue along this slight, southeast incline for another five minutes or so, as the girls discuss their personal dramas, which Tony is mostly tuning out. He doesn’t mean to look down on these concerns – and truly doesn’t – but would, if pressed, admit that he feels as though he personally has grown beyond this phase of his life. While keeping this point close to the vest, as far as he knows, he’s the only person here who applied for and received a grant to attend Otherwise. He’s a graduate student who has already begun making a name for himself to some extent with his documentary films.
What this means in practice is endless networking, until one fluke connection turns out to matter. He’d been applying forever at any number of residency programs, with no success whatsoever, until this basically fell in his lap. Even so, he just wants to keep a level outlook and not get ahead of himself, though excited about the potential here. At the very least, he hopes to set up a screening in a classroom one night, beyond his installation in the third floor corner room. Beyond that, there are a couple of already prominent artists on hand, and everyone says this Kidwell is positively loaded, so who knows where this might lead.
“Whoa…”
“This is rather…” the girls exclaim, having crested the lip of this meager hill, which pulls him out of his reverie.
Here’s an undisturbed section of paved road, in surprisingly good shape even though – it’s impossible to know how a person can just tell these things – the route is clearly not in regular usage. In fact, nearly within spitting distance, certainly no farther away than someone could launch a plastic camera lens cap in a good tailwind, the road abruptly ends. At its terminus, more or less south of here, a jumbled up mess of brush awaits, which for some reason reminds him of a bulldozer scraping it into this pile, much as a snowplow would its targeted material. But then, beyond, not much more than a single line of trees, and beyond that, there are a bunch of smooth, irregular stones, sticking out of the ground.
“Is that…?” Emily begins, but doesn’t have to finish.
Kay nods and confirms, “I think it’s a graveyard.”
Tony is staring at the sight, agog, torn between attempting to comprehend it, and wanting to just snap on his camera to film it, and trying to think of the best artistic angle for doing so before he proceeds. Except practicality wins the day, or at least the moment, and he whips off this backpack he’s been carrying, kneels on the road to inspect it.
“What are you doing?” Emily glides over to ask him.
“Okay,” he says, extracting a spool of bright blue masking tape, ordinarily used to mark lines for either camera placement or a subject to stand upon. He tears off the first strand, of what will eventually be a rough asterisk, and explains, “I’m gonna designate the spot where we entered the road. It’s between these two trees, can everyone agree?” he asks, indicating the section he’s chosen, which is among the wider gaps in sight. Kay and Emily both silently nod their assent.
“Alright, now enough about that!” Emily concludes, more cheerful now than they’ve yet seen her during this outing, “are we gonna explore this graveyard, or what?”
Thinking back on this episode, Kay will later conclude that she felt a momentary reluctant shiver rattle through her at this instant, but failed to register such while it was happening. This is mostly because she and Tony share a shrug and some eye contact, behind Emily, in other words a bonding moment, and the jolt of this wordless connection supersedes all else. And her best friend has by now literally sprinted over to the brush pile, playfully giggling as she does, begins prying at it to determine the easiest point of entry. Meanwhile, she and Tony draw up beside one another, as they march in much more subdued fashion toward the end of the asphalt.
“I’m not sure about this. You?” he mutters, playfully smirking, out the side of his mouth.
“Me neither,” she admits, “but I guess we’re doing this?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he says, meeting her gaze, eyebrows raised for comedic effect. And she giggles, too, genuinely forgetting for a moment this imperative to be cool, instinctively covering her mouth as she does so.
Well behind Emily, after Tony holds the parted brush for Kay, they ascend a tiny incline just a few steps into this graveyard. Yet as soon as they’ve set foot onto this vaguely spongelike, mossy cemetery turf, Kay and Emily exchange a quizzical glance. Neither has to say anything, because this furrowed brow expression is yet another easily interpreted one, even in a silent movie, even from a distance. And if not, they can pretty much read one another’s mind at this point, so long have they been friends.
The graveyard is mostly flat, on this ridge above some hilly curve of country road. There’s a single tree in just about the exact center. Aside from that, which Tony is the first to discover, stalking around in fairly reckless fashion, his video camera fully engaged to capture all, the ridge takes exactly one swift if steep dip downward. Somewhat reminiscent, Kay thinks, of those giant slides in a county fair, the ones you ride down in burlap sacks – but just one big dip on such a slide – which is itself dotted by tombstones, leading down to another small, flat pocket of land, hemmed in by a tiny gravel lane. Fencing in the other, eastern side, is another stretch of forest, although this is a much more normal and varied looking one, populated by a wide variety of trees and not just one solid mess of those strange, tall pines.
“Why does this look so familiar?” Emily wonders. “Did we…?” she asks, and breaks off, but she doesn’t need to finish the thought, even without the finger she’s whipping back and forth to indicate the road. Kay’s nodding her head nonstop, with a mildly surly expression played for laughs, to indicate Emily is right on the money. “We drove past here, didn’t we? That one day?”
“Yep,” Kay wryly offers, “we sure did.”
By now, both are standing in the small, lower parcel, which is basically even with that stretch of road. Tony has already ventured back up top, and is shouting down with a disbelieving cackle that he already found a tombstone that just says Grace, that he’s filming it to show her. Amusing as this is, however, as much as Kay wishes right now that the two of them were alone here, and she had one arm draped around him, or something, as they stumbled into each other, laughing and pointing at this sight, she’s even more preoccupied at this moment with the admitted hilarity of Emily’s speedwalking routine.
Arms pumping, Emily barrels across the lawn, stands in the middle of this country road. Peers north, toward that giant expanse of lake she recalls, where even now she can glimpse a couple of ski boats kicking up a white spray. Then turns and looks the other way, dangerous as this vantage point probably is, at the curvy hills from which they’d arrived that day of the gravity hill. Satisfied, she flies like a sped up tape back to rejoin Kay.
“Oh my God!” she chuckles in disbelief, “this is totally it! I remember it distinctly! Because wasn’t this the place? This was the place, wasn’t it, where Noah made his weird little comment about…?”
Again, she glances up at Kay, but needn’t bother. Her best friend is already robotically nodding, for comedic effect, her face a surly tempest, as both blurt out the phrase at once.
“The doom statues.”
And start cracking up. So it is that they are leaning into one another, or rather a combination of pushing, embracing, and leaning while they laugh. For a second, anyway, Kay has forgotten all about Tony.
“Yes, yes,” she wearily intones, “the doom statues. Who could forget?”
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