This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2022 by Karen Russell

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

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eISBN: 9781542037723

Cover design by Holly Ovenden

Published in coordination with Plympton Literary Studio

For Tony Perez, to whom I am tortoise-committed, and then some.

I had attended many weddings as a plus-one, but this was my first divorce. So far, I was having a blast. I didn’t know any of these people, and I was still very much in the honeymoon phase of things with my date—Cristina, I believe—whom I had met at 10:00 p.m. the evening prior in the eucalyptus spa of the Mojave Gold Rush Hotel Casino. My promotion from a total stranger to “significant other” had caught us both by surprise.

“You’re with her?” asked the stoned and wondering valet, who had delicately maneuvered Cristina’s Prelude between two barrel cactuses. “Good for you, bro.”

Cristina is a radiant young real estate agent with a swimmer’s sculpted triceps and jade eyes that glowed in the low light of the casino. To this bug-eyed valet, I must have seemed ten years too old and a millennium too haggard to be Cristina’s plus-one. She took my arm, kindly rescuing me from his invitation to fist bump. “Good for us!” she insisted, although the valet looked unconvinced.

Have you ever attended a party where you are a true unknown? It’s very liberating. Yesterday did not start out with a lucky tilt; I had a bad run on the slots and a cold blackjack dealer. Burning through money—what more annihilating pastime is there? Gambling can feel like burning yourself in effigy, a penance for having money to lose. My ex still lives in our tiny yellow house in Beaverton, but since we split, I’ve only signed temporary leases, traveling south as the temperature falls. For the past four months I’ve been subletting a studio in a grim pocket of Riverside, and it can get awfully lonely, hating myself in the same room.

But then I bumped into Cristina, freshly dumped by her boyfriend of seven years. I recognized a kindred sinkhole. At 2:00 a.m. we found ourselves kissing angrily on the casino floor. Kissing urgently, let’s say. My ex was never much of a gambler. Fern used to feed her bucket of quarters to the slots with a cautious excitement, like a child at the petting zoo. Although we did ante everything at the altar—all our imaginary time, our sickness and our health. I meant every promise I made to her in the stone nautilus of the Saint Agnes Chapel, all those echoing “I dos.” So Fern might say that I was her losing bet. “Who left whom?” Cristina wanted to know, and I’d marveled at the pristine, linear grammar of her question, spoken by someone who had clearly never witnessed an explosion.

“Come with me to a party tomorrow?” Cristina had begged me last night while I was still inside her, one hand pressed to her tailbone under the warm, jetting water, the other cramping on the hotel shower bar, courting a serious hospital bill. “My best friends are getting divorced, and I can’t stand to go to these things alone . . .”

The divorce tent was black and billowing, a raucous crowd already sheltering near the bar. Cristina informed me that it was “very spendy” to get divorced at this venue: The Great Mojave. A tarmac of reticulated sand, studded with a hundred spiny yucca and wiry sagebrush and perfumed by the musky sweat of creosote. Nothing to meet your eye outside the tent’s orbit but basking lizards and the lavender crumbs of former volcanoes. Far in the distance, a thousand-hour walk from this soiree, loomed the red mountains. “WELCOME TO MATT AND NIA’S DIVORCE!” screamed a banner at the wind. It did seem like a good location for it, I agreed with Cristina, patting her bare arm. The fauna hissed and rattled, and the flora was stiffly tuxedoed in thorns.

I walked into the vacuous goodwill that fills a large tent like this one, no one quite certain of anyone’s relation to the hosts, everyone extending a special line of credit to the smiling stranger. The bcc of bonhomie. Someone’s aunt peered into my face and said hopefully, “Juan Carlos?” Why not Juan? I could be anyone. I nodded and waved as if on a parade float, hooked tightly to Cristina.

It was a “green divorce,” a smug little card informed us. Yet most of the guests had flown to the Palm Springs International Airport, while the ex-bridesmaids had caravanned from Los Angeles in a pink stretch Hummer. “Oh, don’t be such a Captain Planet,” said my date. “Everything’s relative, right? You should have seen how much waste their wedding generated.”

The bridesmaids had been excited to wear their dresses again, she noted. At the stroke of midnight, they would drive the getaway car to a reprise of the bachelorette party at the Palazzo in Vegas, without the looming specter of a monogamous lifetime commitment to kill everyone’s buzz. My date would be joining them. Ours, I sensed, would be an ephemeral connection.

Many stilettos were now autographing a fragile ecosystem. As were my own thin soles. I was wearing Goodwill loafers, scuffed like bowling shoes. The decor of this divorce seemed to be Desert Gothic, or perhaps Sex Funeral. Crystal balls and inky vases, little glittering skulls for sconces. Balloons swam in the air above the Royal Table, black and libidinally pink. “RIP MATT AND NIA!” An enormous three-tiered cake hunched like a gargoyle on the buffet table. Perhaps they intended to saw it in half. In lieu of a Mr.-and-Mrs. wedding cake topper, two wax figurines stood back-to-back on the blue icing, smiling in opposite directions.

I confess that I am unfamiliar with the conventions of these popular new divorce parties. My own divorce occurred half a decade ago, and it was a brutal affair. Very poorly attended. Cristina told me that she’d been to several divorces already, with two more on the horizon this summer—the “starter marriages” of her college set had begun to collapse. Celebrities, apparently, had paved the way for these bespoke ceremonies. I must have missed the trend piece about this phenomenon.

“It’s a way to reclaim the narrative,” Cristina explained, in a tone that reminded me that she’d been a baby in the nineties. “Divorce isn’t a failure. We celebrated the start of their marriage with cake and champagne, and now we’re celebrating its ending. Matt and Nia needed all of their loved ones here to glue them together—now we’re back to get them unstuck.” Other cultures, Cristina assured me, have rituals to spiritually dissolve a marriage. Divorcing couples in Japan smash their wedding rings with a hammer. The Beidane tribes of North Africa paint newly single women in henna and serenade them.

“Nia told me that once again her parents paid for almost everything.”

Cristina’s stage whisper seemed angled slightly toward Matt’s side of the divorcing tent. There was a stark division, impossible to miss. From Cristina I learned that Nia Izaguirre had grown up in Miami, the eldest daughter of a small, close-knit family of wealthy Black and Cuban American doctors and professors, while Matt Woodward came from a sprawling, working-class, mostly white family from San Bernardino, California. Matt and Nia had met at a prestigious, vine-y university, where Cristina had been Nia’s sister in the Alpha and Omega sorority. Or something like that—I was really trying my best not to retain these burdensome expository facts about people I aspired to never know or see again.

Had the wedding tent been as segregated as this divorce, I wondered? Or had the divorce pushed people back into the football huddles of their own friends and families of origin? I did spot some amphibians—my date, for example, had no trouble hopping between the Woodwards and the Izaguirres, navigating the shaded Venn diagram of two separating families. Cristina had mentioned casually to me that she’d been an Army brat and never lived anywhere for more than two years. She swam comfortably from one side of the tent to another, air-kissing uncles.

“I love them both,” she kept repeating. “I am so proud of them for making this hard decision. They deserve to be happy, don’t they? We all deserve to be happy, don’t we?”

No one disagreed. Several of the uncles, their noses already Rudolphed from the California sun and the free rum punch, tried to kiss her on the lips. Absentmindedly, a few shook my hand. Cristina was retelling a story about the first time she saw Matt’s ass tattoo (were there other times?) when I spotted an intruder.

“Do you think we should tell somebody about . . . that?”

I hated to mention it. So much planning goes into a formal event. But the fact of the matter was, a desert tortoise was motoring around under all of the tables, trailing a black lace table runner. It was hypnotic to witness its scaly knees bending and straightening, its plated shell slipping through the golden light. It felt like watching a migrating baby mountain. The tortoise crashed into the silverware dolly, and for a moment I hated every human present for hindering its progress.

“That’s Greeley,” said Cristina. “Their pet.”

“Their pet,” I repeated, more forlornly than I’d intended. “Pet,” like “wife,” is a word that makes me very uneasy. I hear a hairy hand tugging at a leash. Some fool imagining they hold the deed to a life.

“I thought maybe it was wild. A divorce crasher, like me.”

The tortoise turned a dazed circle, lost in a forest of polyester slacks. Dry desert light spun through the tent, and for an instant—the only span of lucidity I can manage these days—I perceived that I had everything backward. We people were the monsters crashing their party, weren’t we? The creosote bush scrub, the gypsum outcrops and alluvial fans, the bighorn sheep and kangaroo rats, the chuckwallas and the Gilas with their seething orange-and-pink backs, the twisted junipers and the woolly Joshuas, the burrowing owls and the raspy cactus wrens—this was their home, and we were trashing it. Intruding on an open marriage of species that had survived the Ice Age, but might not survive us.

“Greeley was the ring bearer at their wedding ceremony.”

“The ring bearer! I didn’t know you could train a tortoise to do that.”

“Operant conditioning. They rehearsed for months. Very Rocky Balboa, you know—Matt blowing the air horn and Greeley crawling down the hall. Greeley will do anything for watermelon. And for Matt, of course. She’s so bonded to him. He adopted her from the Mojave Tortoise Rescue Society. She got hit by a ten-wheeler, and the vet fixed her shell with zip ties. Do you see the scar?”

Cristina pointed at Greeley’s shell, where I could just make out a four-inch crack, ghostly and equatorial; I would have missed it without her story to draw it into focus. “I do,” I said, swallowing back a hot rinse of vomit. I flexed my toes inside my loafers, a trick for stopping thought.

“Greeley was a present from Matt to Nia. Matt’s a romantic. Maybe a little impulsive. Told us Nia was ‘the One’ after their first date. He wanted to make a grand gesture, to show her he was ‘tortoise-committed, not goldfish-committed.’ In it for the long haul. The Society won’t let just anyone adopt a rescue tortoise, you know. It’s a lot harder than getting married, actually. But Matt signed all their paperwork and escape proofed his yard. Then he showed up for their third date with Greeley instead of flowers. They told the story at their wedding.” She smiled wistfully at me. “Not a dry eye.”

She seemed to feel a little embarrassed for all of us, including the tortoise. What chumps we all were, said the lines around her smile, believing Matt! Love at first sight! A vision of love that would endure until death! Roses would have been the more circumspect and realistic gift.

“Look. Now they’re calling her the ‘Divorce Tortoise.’” She showed me Greeley’s line in the program. “Cute,” she said with a wince. “Poor Greeley.”

Divorce Tortoise. As a divorce tourist, I felt an affinity with the creature. Neither of us belonged here. We were conscripts in these strangers’ drama, and the only escape was trudging toward nightfall. The tortoise could not move an inch without lifting eons of evolution on her small back. Glaciers had melted into swamps, and lakes had dried into salt-blue mirages. Now the Mojave was an ocean’s afterimage: reefs of dry rock and sleeping lizards draped across them, their bellies filling and flattening. Against all odds, we were still here, Greeley and I, fused to our brittle cargo and crawling onward. She was staring right at me now, like an umpire squinting into the sun. Her scowl seemed more accidental than adversarial. I wondered how I appeared to her: as a threatening, star-limbed shadow? A fast blur of temperature? Fellow roadkill, pulled out of the grave and magically stitched together again? What did humans’ doomed march forward look like reflected in the eyes of a tortoise? I was blinking back at her too fast to get a clear picture.

“Who will get custody?” I asked.

“Matt, I think. Nia’s moving back to Miami. Greeley was a little more than they bargained for, you know. She keeps chewing through their drywall.”

Fern and I had lived with a dog, Gretel, who we’d gotten as a ten-week-old puppy in the first year of our marriage, a gentle, flatulent shepherd who had an underworld bark but snored as an alto, perhaps dreaming that she was a teakettle. I loved Gretel. I wonder if she would recognize me now; I imagine even my smell has changed.

For the twelve years we were married, I almost never called Fern my wife. It didn’t feel right to collar her with that noun; if you knew Fern, you’d understand. We met in the break room of Mountain View Middle School, where Fern taught art and I taught science. Her first job out of college; my soft landing (I’d left my doctoral program in biology on my own academic Rumspringa and never returned). I love science and I love kids, but this was not the career I had imagined. When we met, I’d been sober for a year and three months. Fern fooled everyone into thinking she was the steady one. Outwardly stable, inwardly she was a kaleidoscope of gorgeous hallucinations. An artist who paid our taxes. Fern kept her own dark side well hidden, although it was an open secret if you knew how to see it: her murals, commissioned by the City of Beaverton, formerly “place of the beaver,” feature bears and salmon waterfalling across the pastel storefronts and civic buildings that are these creatures’ tombstone markers. Tragically, ironically, outrageously, indefensibly—choose your own modifier, in the end it’s all veneer and our species keeps on killing, don’t we? “Developing” property, to use that especially cursed word. “Reclaiming” wetlands. Bricking up the desert with chlorine-blue infinity pools. (When I mentioned this dissonance to Fern, she pointed out that I dissected frogs with children to teach them about conservation, parking my SUV on stolen land to collect my government paycheck.)

Fern never belonged to me—not in the beginning, not at the altar, not after childbirth, and not while releasing my damp hand on the precipice of our divorce. Interestingly, I have no problem calling Fern “my ex.” Her absence does belong to me. I authored it, didn’t I? I destroyed us. I carry it with me, folded over a thousand times like origami. My ex-life. My abyss. It’s a tight squeeze, even for a big guy like myself. Try being pregnant some time, I can imagine Fern saying—is this a common side effect of divorce? I haven’t spoken to Fern in years, yet half my mental life is still narrated in her voice. Whenever my thoughts slip across the median into self-pity, or frothing grandiosity, or the darker fantasylands of skipping out on life a little early, Fern’s the bitter echo that returns me to myself. And like an echo, she is everywhere and gone.

Cristina licked vodka dewdrops from a skinny glass, tugging at the straps of her sequined dress. I did hope her name was Cristina. She shuddered in memory or anticipation of something, squeezing my left ass cheek. Butt cheeks can’t really reciprocate a squeeze—not singly, anyways. I didn’t want to leave my date hanging, so I gave a little shimmy. I held two overfull glasses of pink poison, decanted from one of the hummingbird feeders of liquor they’d set up all around the tent. It was going fast, and I have a hoarder’s instinctual fear of winter.

“Damn. This is eerie, baby. Everybody came back for the divorce. Like, I recognize some of these caterers.” My date, I smelled, was already quite intoxicated. “It has only been six years, people!” she brayed into the crowd. “You have all aged terribly!”

I beamed at the many, many faces within earshot of this comment, reassuring each in turn: You look, to me, better than ever. “Watch out, everybody!” shouted a caterer.

For the tortoise was making a beeline for us, grinding wildflowers from an overturned vase in her beak. The black table runner was looped around her stubby hind legs.

“Who is responsible for you?” I murmured, kneeling to free her. Greeley submitted to my ministrations like a child in a bathtub, lifting one clawed foot and then the other.

“Goddamn it, Greeley.” A haggard white man in dark-pink sunglasses came jogging over. His hairstyle was that special paradox, the balding Rapunzel. He gave me a wary smile, tugging on his long gray braid like an emergency rip cord. “Thanks for getting her unhooked.”

“Mr. Woodward! How are you!” screamed Cristina, introducing me to Matt’s father.

I remembered to smile humbly at the impressive credentials I’d invented for myself. Whenever I need to lubricate my passage through an awkward moment or unfamiliar terrain, I tell people I work in Silicon Valley. It’s a universal punch code, disabling everyone’s suspicions. An unemployed public school teacher, living on settlement money, wins no one’s respect or trust. But “Big Tech” makes sense of me: a disheveled, melancholic drunk avoiding eye contact to stare into the portable Narcissus pool of my stupidly expensive watch. Suddenly my least appealing qualities become evidence of my brilliance. Project the suicidal ennui of a wealthy genius, intimate a pot of gold in stock bonuses, and watch yourself magically transform from scuzzy middle-aged loser to shy rainbow. “I’m a Cloud Architect,” I told Cristina last night. “Here for a conference. Incredibly boring stuff, but you can’t beat the money.” Cristina had smiled up at me like a woman excused from jury duty. This is an art I have perfected: releasing strangers from their questions and their need to ask them. Sometimes I do tell the truth, or the least upsetting version of it. I’ll say, “A bridge collapsed. I was driving on it.” I do have money, an unjust sum, courtesy of my lawyers and the State of Oregon. My ex would tell you that it’s wasted on me.

The tortoise butted her head against Mr. Woodward’s shins, hiding behind him and peeking out again, a kind of flirtation with reality that made me think of a toddler playing peekaboo in the checkout aisle. Greeley’s wizened head seemed so small relative to her waffled shell. A rock quilt made of uneven squares, dull brown and undersea green.

Mr. Woodward spoke wearily of Greeley’s dietary and emotional needs, in a Newport-flavored monotone. Nevertheless, I heard the pride in his voice.

“I love tortoises,” Mr. Woodward said, scratching Greeley’s neck. “I call them ‘hard dogs.’ She came out of brumation a month early this year, the warm weather I guess, and she’s been on the go.” He gave us a gloomy smile. “When I was a kid there were still hundreds of desert tortoises out here. They say we’ll be lucky to have any in fifty years. Ninety-five percent mortality rate for the hatchlings. Trucks go bowling for tortoises, as you can see. The damn ravens gobble them up.”

“Terrible odds,” I agreed. I was not surprised that my species had so efficiently destroyed, in two generations, an animal that had lived under the winged shadows of pteranodons. I used to teach a unit on the desert biome to my sixth graders, who loved the video of tortoises clawing out of their eggs, each smaller than a silver dollar, their dark shells already intact. Compared to bald, gluey chicks, the baby tortoises looked ready for a military parade. But of course their armature belies their helplessness. There are always winners and losers in real estate, as Cristina would tell you. Ravens, once unusual in the California desert, now darken the blue skies, thriving in our shadow, feasting on landfills, and nesting on utility poles, eating the day-old tortoises as they emerge from their burrows. “Tortoise translocation,” undertaken by the Marines, has only pushed them closer to extinction. A lot of life, in my experience, is tortoise translocation. Humans kicking the can down the road and changing nothing about the way we live. I could feel my blood stirring, a sound not unlike the roar of traffic.

“We probably shouldn’t be having parties out here,” I said. Baiting Mr. Woodward a little, it’s true. But he only gave me another defeated smile, and my higher ground collapsed; wasn’t I drinking beside him?

“It’s a green divorce,” Cristina reminded me, stepping on my foot.

“It looks bad, I’ll give you that. But who knows? We might still turn the ship around.” Mr. Woodward tugged at his braid and let his eyelids flutter, perhaps parachuting through some imaginary future. “People need to start thinking long term, goddamn it.”

When Matt adopted Greeley, Mr. Woodward told us proudly, he agreed to provide for her care in his last will and testament. “They are the longest lived of all the vertebrates. Have you two seen Mojave Molloy, down at Reptile Gardens? One hundred and twenty-two! Greeley is only ten.” He held up his iPhone to show us the Mojave Tortoise Rescue website.

THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE ADOPTING A TORTOISE

On Mr. Woodward’s tiny screen, we watched a GIF of a two-hundred-pound Sulcata tortoise eating the dandelions on its owners’ graves.

“People forget to factor that in,” I agreed.

“You’re aging great, lady.” Cristina whistled at Greeley.

“Two hundred million years young. One extra rear scute and that nasty scar from the truck, but otherwise perfect.”

I watched with fascination as the tortoise lifted onto all fours and dragged herself forward. It seemed unjust that to seek shelter, to find water, to live a day, she had to carry a cave around. Outside the black tent, the sun slapped at the rocks and the shadows hid. I checked my watch: less than an hour until sunset. Night would come like an exhalation.

“We are Table 8,” said Cristina, handing me a stick of mint gum. “But let’s mingle a little.”

Cristina steered me toward a massively enlarged jigsaw puzzle of Matt and Nia’s wedding day. Remember the memories! commanded the bossy calligraphy. Every guest was invited to take a puzzle piece home with them as a souvenir.

“Don’t take a corner,” Cristina chided me. “You don’t even know them.”

She slid a humble middle piece of sky into her purse. Half the puzzle was already gone—cake, bouquet, smiling faces—and it was disorienting to see the bare table beneath it.

“Beautiful weather for a divorce!” said somebody’s aunt, windmilling a blotto smile in my general direction. She was a kind-eyed older woman in a turquoise bolero who reminded me that I knew her: Nia’s Tia Josefina. “I remember you from the wedding,” she said with warm amnesia, taking my arm. “You know, I told Nia to get married in the church. Of course, none of them listen to me. These children! None of them have religion. They like to have parties, I guess.”

I nodded enthusiastically, warming to the vibe of this lady, a vibe of charitable derision and generational bewilderment.

“You know who invented these divorces?” I said. “The wedding industry. Happily Neverafter. They want to make money on both ends.”

Tia Josefina clapped her hands, delighted. “Exactly.”

We both took a long slug of punch, which made our distress feel mutual, sultry, sophisticated. With my eyebrows I echoed her question—what the fuck was a divorce party? In my day, you were exiled from your family without ceremony.

Yes, I agreed with Tia Josefina, the metaphysical scaffolding has collapsed. Without the anchor of eternity, there are no moorings in this desert, nothing to keep a promise from blowing off. And what was the point of making such audacious vows to one another, when death was lurking just around the corner?

Tia Josefina was staring up at me now, as if she wasn’t so sure she knew me anymore. She spotted my date and waved her over like a lifeguard. “He’s all yours.”

If a wedding encourages decorum, this divorce party felt like a yodeling competition-slash-exorcism. I had arrived at the tent fully committed to my ignorance of its hosts and their problems, but I couldn’t stop myself from blotting up the gossip. The “cheese” on Nia’s side of the tent. Osmotically, I began to piece together a picture. The same people who presumably had celebrated this marriage six years ago were now postdating their predictions of its doom. They did so using the casually racist and sexist and classist language that is common at parties the world over. I’ve certainly been guilty of the same, and I felt grateful to sit this round out.

“Well, Nia is sort of a princess, you know—”

“And Matt comes from a trashy family. They sleep on waterbeds, okay . . .”

“He cheated on her—did you know that?”

“No! Well, maybe a little bit I knew. But Matt said it was just an emotional affair—”

“So they are calling it quits. Do you think anyone will object?”

“We all held our peace the last time. Hold on to your butts, Abi. Esto va a terminar como la fiesta del Guatao . . .”

As a plus-one, I had the necessary detachment that Cristina lacked. A plus-one can take the pulse of a room, or in this case a precariously staked tent, with the coolness of a clinician. And my assessment was: even the grandmas are getting ready to blow.

An older woman, who turned out to be Nia’s mother, saw Cristina and ran over, with a peacock fantail of blue-and-green tulle shaking behind her.

“Mi amor! Qué guapa estás.” Her eyes narrowed at me. “Where’s Juan Carlos?”

“I’ve been seeing someone new. This is him.”

Cristina scanned my face, and I detected a familiar panic. It appeared my date could not remember my name, either, the false one I had given her in the fragrant, artificial mists of the eucalyptus spa.

“Hello,” I said. “I am he.”

“Bienvenidos. Welcome.” Nia’s mother switched to a clipped, wary English. “And how did you two meet?”

I decided not to share the full-color story with Mrs. Izaguirre: how I’d been running bad for hours and taken a break to sweat off my luck in the Mojave Gold Rush Hotel Casino spa. Who could explain the ricochet of contingencies that led us to meet in our loincloth-like towels, the last two people in the cavernous sauna, sitting on a cedar bench as if we were waiting for a bus back to the Pleistocene? I’d complimented Cristina on her makeup. “Very Robert Palmer,” I told her. She said she had no idea who that was, but that she’d been crying for five hours. Her boyfriend had broken up with her on the airport monorail and was presently boarding a red-eye back to Chicago. After a whirlwind midnight courtship that included many pomegranate palomas and an expensive hour together at the craps table, I found myself hunched in the bathroom of room 347, failing the IQ test that was the hotel showerhead. I scalded myself with syncopated bursts of lava water while Cristina waited behind the plastic curtain, patient and bare-assed, until at last I discovered a temperature under which we could make love without suffering burns.

I woke to the smell of blur and ruination. Par for my course—I buy Listerine at Costco.

“You work in tech, right?” Cristina prodded, squinting her eyes at me editorially.

“Sure do,” I lied politely. “I’m a Cloud Architect . . .”

Her face relaxed into a smile.

My sense is that we confided many things to each other last night, naked and tangled together in the wonderfully anonymous sheets of room 347 in the Mojave Gold Rush Hotel Casino. In the feverish intimacy ante of 4:00 a.m., I can remember our voices rising and falling, a tender and private exchange. What might those things have been? Did my brain make a cataloging error, misfiling this information? Or had I missed everything once again?

Nia herself came over now, lipsticked and brave, armored in a shell of irony that included gold running shoes and a black tracksuit. I felt a stab like love for her, the once-and-former bride. Every muscle in her face was working to smile at us. Now I thought I understood a little better the impulse to throw a party like this one—to alchemize a howl of pain into a howl of laughter.

“Oh my God!” Nia screamed beside my eardrum, embracing my date. “You look ah-mazing! I got your text. I was so sad to hear about you and Juan . . .”

She flicked her eyes over me, I believe approvingly. I am handsome by the admittedly handicapped standards for white men over forty.

“Nice to meet you,” she murmured.

“Congratulations,” I said. “Best wishes.” I paused. “I love your shoes.”

“So it’s really over?” she said. “Juan’s moving out?”

“It could be for the best,” Cristina said bravely. They both stared at me. “Then again . . .”

Something brushed my ankle. It was Greeley, bulldozing through caterers. Greeley’s obliviousness was a serene contrast to the tipsy, shrieking party guests. I found myself walking behind her, waving my arms like a crossing guard. Nobody seemed to notice that a small dinosaur was wandering around their dress shoes; everybody was too busy trying to make meaningful eye contact with the bartender. Greeley lumbered into a redheaded teenager holding a tray of Bloody Marys and followed a rolling olive under a table. I watched the tortoise chewing happily, unaware that she had once been a symbol of Matt’s commitment to Nia; then a pet in a vivarium, a scaly, surrogate child; and now a prop in their divorce. She was walled off from all human projections, including my own. Greeley did not share our species’ terrible compulsion to name and know and narrate. To mean something to one another. Unlike me, Greeley did not need a sex alias and a fourth drink to change the lighting in her mind. Humans were her greatest threat, and yet she approached us with a shy gentleness, a forgetfulness that we surely did not deserve. Did she remember getting hit by the truck? I pictured the shell cracking on impact, skidding across three lanes of traffic. Bile rose in my throat so suddenly that I had to sit at an empty table and put my head in my arms, flexing my toes until the dreadful pressure eased off.

I followed the tortoise through the crowded tent, now engulfed in golden light. When I was younger, I used to imagine that overhearing gossip about oneself would be a sort of superpower. The privilege of a ghost. A kind of foretaste of the afterlife, melancholy and entertaining. I was wrong, though. It feels like wading through a dirty puddle.

“Where did she pick that guy up? The morgue?”

“It’s sort of a rebound thing.”

“Oh, I loved Juan Carlos. I hope they patch things up . . .”

I resisted the undertow of my ego. Nobody knows you here, I reminded myself. Nobody needs you. Nobody cares if you care. As a plus-one, I got to abstain.

Passed hors d’oeuvres were carouseling around me as I pushed deeper into the party. Fry Batter Roulette. Fried mozzarella, fried zucchini, fried mystery. I lost sight of Greeley, but then I spotted two laughing dudes lifting her into the air, her stout legs wheeling in terror. An ex-groomsman was trying to stick a cigar into the tortoise’s beak while snapping a selfie, and I wanted to kill him.

“That tortoise was crushed by a semi and left for dead on the side of the road, and you’re going to give it lung cancer?”

“Who the fuck are you, man? We’re just taking a picture. It’s not even lit.”

I pushed the ex-groomsman, it’s true. But it was a Good Samaritan shove. “Tough love,” as they say. Then my brotherly love got a little tougher, a little rougher. He ran at me, but I’m a large man—six five, 210—and I easily absorbed the blow. I planted my feet and held my ground.

“Hey hey hey.” Cristina stepped between us. “What’s going on here?”

She leaned down to check on Greeley first, and I loved her for that. Animals reveal the best and the worst of our natures, don’t they? Our kindness, our rapacity. In my last life, I could barely stand to meet our dog’s gaze after an argument with Fern, my flaws were so limpidly returned to me.

“I was taking a picture with the turtle, and this asshole rolls up like we’re in the Octagon . . .”

“Her name is Greeley,” I said uselessly.

Cristina leaned in and whispered something into his ear, a phrase that must have been even more sorcerous than “Big Tech,” because instantly his shoulders dropped and his snarl relaxed. He nodded reluctantly, and then they both turned to stare at me, pity sewing up their mouths.

“What did you tell him?”

“What you told me last night.”

My temples burned under my skin. How honest did I get? I could not ask this woman who might not be named Cristina.

“So you know that clown?”

“Oh, God.” She laughed like someone shaking out a drawer. “Unfortunately, I do.”

Instead of elaborating, she stroked the crescent of flesh behind my left earlobe, sending waves of pleasure down my sweaty back. I saw that she wasn’t angry, quite the opposite. The drama seemed to have aroused her. She lifted onto her toes and kissed me, biting lightly up my neck, her eyes open and locked on the ex-groomsman. Nothing makes you feel quite so hollow as realizing your body is the cannon a woman is using to return enemy fire. I pushed a fang of ice into her warm mouth, feeling the theater of our desire becoming something more genuinely obliterating. Her dilated pupils looked as thirsty as I felt. Down to party, as the kids say. Open to the elements. Desperate for blackout. Independent of all surface attractions, it is this underworld magnetism that draws me to people like Cristina. The midnight demolition crew. Once you know what to look for, you find miserable company the world over.

Over my date’s bare shoulder, I scanned the ground for Greeley. When at last I spotted the tortoise hiding underneath the catering van, lapping at a water dish, my stomach muscles unclenched.

“Let’s take a picture, baby,” said Cristina. “I want to put it on my stories. I want Juan Carlos to see how much fun I am having without him.”

“With you,” she added after the flash, a polite afterthought.

Between the DJ’s sets, you could hear the silvery tinsel of strangers’ banter, and beyond it for miles, forever, the empty roaring of the desert. I’d resumed following Greeley through the party—after the incident with the asshole ex-groomsman, I wanted to make sure she was safe from us. She deserved a better bodyguard, and I planned to resign from this role as soon as I located Mr. Woodward. Greeley wandered behind the noisy tent and paused near a cluster of succulents. Maybe I was a little stoned. Their metallic petals glowed dusty purple in their centers, like alien faces blushing.

“They got lucky with the weather. Colors are richer everywhere today, thanks to that rare predawn rain. The brush greened right up.”

Although I had tried not to make the identification, I somehow knew that this silhouette beside me was Nia’s father, Mr. Izaguirre. A skinny, dark-skinned man with quixotic facial hair that made his gaunt face look nostalgic for another era.

“Look at that silly tortoise,” he said. “Nature certainly has a wicked sense of humor.”

“I have to strongly disagree, sir. I think that Nature is deeply humorless. Deeply and soaringly unconscious. If our species has a role to play here, it’s to supply the laugh track.”

With her deadpan beak and her sparkling eyes, the tortoise supported both of our arguments. The tortoise could support anything, I thought. She passed on our left, her shadow a moving sieve for rocks, dark-yellow lizards, two dozen rent-a-chairs.

“Can you believe this nonsense?” Mr. Izaguirre said affably. “And look at this spread! No expense spared, eh? Costco presents: Your Divorce!”

“What happened?” I asked, in spite of myself.

“Matthew and Nia made a promise they could not keep. Promises are fragile things. You blink, and they turn into lies.”

“Forgive me for asking, sir,” I said. “But what exactly are we celebrating here?”

Mr. Izaguirre turned to face me. If there was a smile hiding in his wrinkling expression, I could not find it. Perhaps my face was equally inscrutable to him.

“My daughter will be free to make new promises now. That’s something to celebrate, isn’t it? Now, you must forgive me for asking,” he added warmly, “but who the hell are you?”

The Ceremony Start Time was 6:30 p.m. Its trajectory set in stone. Or at any rate, laminated at great expense. Mrs. Izaguirre seemed peeved that we were all still milling about, metabolizing hunch punch the red gold of nuclear sunset. “Seats, everybody!” she said, swinging her purse and herding us away from the liquor.

They had cordoned off an aisle in the sand, a lassoed emptiness at the end of which stood Matt and Nia, in her gold Nikes, sheepishly grinning. I spotted Greeley with the empty ring box strapped to her back. The tortoise’s gaze was fixed on the Styrofoam altar, her eyes shining with the blank candor of a mirror. Beside the tortoise was an overgrown child who looked sweaty and pinched, snug in her misery. Children’s formal wear has always confused me. Was she supposed to be a Vegas club impresario? A down-on-her-luck mermaid? A matador?

“That’s the flower girl,” said Cristina. “Nia’s niece.”

“She looks a little old to be a flower girl, doesn’t she?”

“Well, she was a preschooler six years ago.”

Very solemnly, they processioned down the aisle. The girl’s brown cheeks had the tracery of early acne, her thick hair held hostage in Heidi buns. The red velvet ring box bobbed on the tortoise’s carapace like a tiny rickshaw. Every few feet the girl stooped to collect something into a wicker basket—petals, I realized. They had been prestrewn along the narrow path between Matt’s and Nia’s guests. Cristina and I were on the Izaguirre side; all evening she’d been traveling between them, but in the end, I noted, she had chosen.

People’s eyebrows and mouths were trampolining, alternating smiles and frowns. Flashbulbs were going off up and down the aisle, incinerating time. I could not quite get a handle on how ironic or earnest this ceremony was meant to be. I was not, it seemed, alone in my disorientation.

“I’ll always care for you, Nia,” said Matt with a grimacing smile. He coughed into his shirtsleeve. “We sure gave it the old college try.”

People were crying now, and for just a moment the infrastructure of irony broke apart, all the sparking wiring exposed, and along with it a cold loss.

“I still love you, Matt,” Nia said, angling her mouth away from the mic. The crowd heard this and sighed. We believed her. We saw that it was far from enough, at this late hour, to save them.

Matt and Nia took off their rings. Each knelt and returned them to the little box. Matt blew a solemn air horn, and the Divorce Tortoise made a stately revolution, to applause. Then she kept turning. Matt blatted the air horn once more. “Other way, Greeley!” Four doughnuts later, the tortoise got her bearings and dragged herself, to another ovation, after the Flower Girl’s shadow. She clawed majestically back down the aisle, bearing the wedding rings away from the naked fingers of Matt and Nia, keeping tempo with the dirgelike cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” played by the string quartet. The Flower Girl waited, sullenly clutching her basket. Greeley paused to munch on a guest’s shoelaces and was gently directed back to the aisle. Around me, I felt people’s impatience beginning to grow. These processions can feel endless in the best of circumstances, and we were all itching to finalize this divorce and tuck into the buffet. “Let’s get this show on the road, turtle,” growled a Woodward uncle. Cristina and I were squeezing limes into straight gin, a magic to hasten nightfall. “Jesus Christ, Greeley,” Cristina moaned softly. “Pick up the pace.”

Greeley and the Flower Girl were still shuffling toward the last row of chairs when the divorce lawyer and minister, who had jokingly introduced himself as Reverend Cleaver, said: “All rise to greet these newly single individuals!” The string quartet began an exuberant rendition of “Up in the Club.” All eyes were focused on Matt and Nia, freshly liberated from their broken vows.

I may have been the only one who watched the tortoise complete her march down the aisle, under the velvet ropes, and beyond the throbbing gold circumference of the party, out of our story and into a far vaster one—a plotlessly expanding one, if the scientists are to be believed. Soon she was camouflaged among the bleached and crumbling rocks. Not even I could have escaped the party so ingeniously.

After the ceremony, the wheels really started to come off the car. We were sitting at our tables, waiting to be called up to the self-serve buffet. I had my eyes on the Cuban fresh-corn tamales, which were going fast.

“Table Number 33—I can’t believe you’re not bribing me!”

“Table Number 7, don’t eat the husks!”

Matt’s mother stood to make an impromptu toast, dinging her fishbowl-size wineglass with her compostable fork.

“You are two wonderful people, two wonderful people who will go on to have wonderfully separate lives. I’d like to raise a glass to the new divorcees, Matt Woodward and Nia Izquierda.”

“Mom! That’s not her name!”

“It’s our joke, son.”

“It was NEVER FUNNY, Nancy!” screamed Nia from the Izaguirre side, to hoots and stamping.

“To Matt and Nia!” shouted Matt himself, dragging his mom into her chair.

But Pandora’s box had been opened, it seemed. Guests were springing up all over the tent, making rogue toasts, while the frightened caterers hid near the planters.

“Hey! At least there are no kids!” shouted a swaying red-faced woman.

The whole tent stood for an ovation.

“Do we get our presents back?” shouted somebody from Table Number 12, to cheers.

“How about you send us to Bimini this time!”

I began to change my mind about the venue. Perhaps the Arctic would have been a better location for a divorce. In the rippling heat of the Mojave, open secrets began to thaw treacherously; by the time we’d all had seconds of ham croquetas, for example, Matt’s internet infidelity had gone from being a sotto voce rumor to a very public fact.

“I never TOUCHED her.”

“It’s still cheating.”

“Yeah, you horny dot-com splooger! Stay away from my sister!”

“We were already separated!”

“Ding ding ding! All rise to say, ‘I told you so!’”

“Papa. Please. This is my divorce.”

“Tell that to Citigold. I don’t see you two Bill-Me-Laters fighting for the check—”

I made my way over to the dance floor. It was a total bacchanal. The future couldn’t threaten these people anymore. They’d be on departing flights in seven hours. Cristina left my side to join a twenty-person freak train wending its way toward the desecrated cake.

“Stag?” said a low voice behind me.

For a dreadful moment, I thought this person knew me. The proprietary way she touched my arm, the sibilant hint of disgust in her voice. I turned to find an ex-bridesmaid smiling at me. She looked a little like Fern: a short woman with fuchsia lips and wine-stained teeth, a hairstyle like a helmet of roses.

“Excuse me?”

“I was just asking if you came here stag. You know. Flying solo.”

My eyes found Cristina in the crowd of seething bodies.

“Not yet,” I said. “But let’s give it ten minutes.”

Stag. I felt a pulsing at my temples. Stag.

I don’t often share my real name. On my gambling trips, whenever I make new acquaintances, I choose some bland pseudonym—Dave, Greg, Jonah—and I try not to repeat these. An alter ego is still an ego. Even an alias can accumulate a shell of ungainly history.

Now I had a new one, “Stag.”

Night had fallen, and I had long ago lost track of Cristina.

Three older couples were swaying around me like buoys while a few sugar-deranged kids fought with sticks. I had been dancing alone, in the center of the glowing tiles, clapping my hands, shaking my cracker-flat ass, kicking a Goodwill shoe loose. At some point, a kindly stranger passed me a joint. A mature and iridescent woman who might have been Tia Josefina offered me two hits off her dab pen. Less and less did I recognize the shadow on the sand. The divorce DJ worked his sorcery. Through every speaker, Springsteen crooned a bankrupt seduction.

To be a plus-one is to be a barnacle clinging to the hull of a stranger’s celebration. So I really should have been better prepared to be swept away. On the light-up tiles, I could feel myself changing valence, plus to minus. Guest to interloper. My date had abandoned me, unless it was the other way around. Significance leaked out of my pores.

By 9:00 p.m., there was friction breaking out inside the two camps, as well as between them. Intergenerational, internecine stuff. Watered with the blinding punch, this dormant familial rage grew to Feed-Me-Seymour dimensions in the hour between the ceremony and the cake division.

And perhaps because I had no alliances or allegiances, what I heard was almost beautiful. The deep underworld wail of pain inside each family, harmonizing with itself. Someone threw a glass. Punches would be next, I thought. Liquid, which I identified as a wasted Sazerac, landed on my chest. On my way into the blue vault of the valley, I nodded to Cristina, who was stargazing with the asshole ex-groomsman on the hood of her Prelude.

When I left the tent, my only plan was to drink in starlight and enjoy my anonymity. I crested a slight rise and unzipped to take a leak, then yelped and backed into the low, spiny guardrails of the cholla cactuses. Something was scrabbling over the rocks right beside me—someone, I realized. It was the Flower Girl, numinous in the desert starlight. At first I assumed she was my hallucination. I blinked patiently, waiting for my vision to clear. When she waved at me, I stifled another scream.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked her, in the steadiest voice I could manufacture at this hour. “We’d better go back to the party, don’t you think?”

She shook her head.

“Go back if you want. I’m following her.”

“Who?” I asked, just as I caught sight of the tortoise. Greeley hadn’t made it very far. She navigated the stones and sagebrush with glacial deliberation. We were still within earshot of the party, though we’d left the boundaryline of shallow light. Was I supposed to pick this child up and carry her back?

“Okay,” I said, as if I had any say. “Five minutes, and then we turn back.” But nobody was listening to me. We tailed the tortoise in silence. Our three shadows swayed against a wall of static rock. Loose sand made a fantastically loud rasp under the tortoise’s elephantine feet. Birds, reptiles, people—you see the whole family tree when you look at a tortoise.

“Where do you think she’s going?”

“To lay eggs,” said the Flower Girl, with more conviction than I’ve ever felt about anything.

“Don’t you think we’d better turn around now? Someone must be worried about you.” I felt miscast as her protector—who would trust me to steer a child anywhere? I was afraid to touch her hand; the force of my longing to do so terrified me. What if my arms went right through her? What if I scared her back into the night?

The rosy ridgeline had turned a hypothermic blue as the light slipped off.

“Nobody cares. They’re all shit-faced in there.”

This I could not dispute.

There was a single flower in her basket, I noticed. A white rose.

“What happened to all those petals you collected?”

“They turned back into this flower. They flew onto the stem. Everything that was torn apart got fixed tonight.”

“That’s impossible.”

She shrugged. “Like you were paying attention.”

I felt suddenly light-headed, immensely groggy. Perhaps my hangover was finally catching up with me.

We moved slowly through a sparse forest, trees that loomed out of the darkness like ecstatic contortionists. More Joshuas lifting their pom-poms, cheering our flight. Wasn’t it unusual for a tortoise to be this active at night? Was she picking up the pace? Heat lightning kept flashing in the distance. I brought up the rear, and I felt happy as my thoughts drained to a raw whisper. What I heard was: Be led. Be led. The moon had risen, and it traveled like a golden fingerprint on the floating shell. I trailed the tortoise and child at a respectful distance, not wanting to crowd them.

We continued walking along the red rock trail, on an incline so subtle it barely registered. It was a well-maintained trail. This comforted me. We could not get lost on such a path. We would return without incident. Perhaps the child could leave a trail of petals.

“What’s your name?” the Flower Girl asked without turning.

“Stan Dobrev,” I said. Did my name ring any bells for her? Was my aging face frightening, familiar? “Yours?”

She didn’t answer.

The child was coming into focus now. I thought something wicked must be playing a terrible joke on me. I thought that something might be my own mind.

“How old are you?” I asked the Flower Girl.

“Chronologically, I am ten. Eleven in February.”

“Chronologically. There’s a big word. As opposed to, what, astrologically?”

She paused to stare up at me. “My birthday is February 2. What about you?”

“January 32,” I said. “I’ll be older than the tortoise. Five billion years old.”

“You’re teasing me!”

When I heard the tremor in her voice, I felt ashamed of myself, my hope. She didn’t know me. She was just a little girl again, who I had frightened for no reason.

The moon grinned down, unaware of what it lit.

Had she levitated, I would have felt more sure that she was magic, or dead, or unreal. But she continued to climb through the crumbling soil with one hand on the wobbling back of the tortoise, where the ring box sat like a tiny red bud. Without warning, the tortoise stopped behind a nondescript dry wash and began to dig with her long, sturdy nails. Wordlessly, we sat in the sand and watched.

“Are you real, Stan?”

The Flower Girl asked this abruptly, politely, the way a colleague might startle themselves out of a watercooler soliloquy to ask, “But tell me, how are you?”

I laughed. “I was about to ask you the same question.” The child grinned. Neither of us answered, perhaps stalemated by the same terror.

Needlegrass flowed from the tortoise’s beak like a Neptune-green beard, which made her appear even wiser. A hundred yards to the east of our rock pile, the black tent leaked light into the starry sky. I could hear the hammer of the music, although no lyric was intelligible. I thought again: We should turn back. Someone is looking for this child.

A memory concussed me then, as suddenly as a bottle breaking over my skull. I had a flash of our baby gumming her colorful teething rings one by one. I saw her in the cheap pink crib, holding a foot in each hand, folding herself into a fleshy, dimpled hammock. Touching her belly button and screaming “Button!” in jubilation. She had Fred Flintstone feet, our Sylvie, the thickest, sweetest feet you’ve ever seen on a baby.

Enough, I might have said out loud.

“Stan?” said the Flower Girl. She crouched beside me, staring up at my face from the jury box of a broken rock. “Why did you really come out here?”

For the second time in our brief acquaintanceship, she sounded like a true child. By which I mean belated in her understanding of the risks this world posed to her. I did not want to be the boogeyman who scared her.

“Matt sent me to find the tortoise,” I said. “He’s looking for the rings.”

It was the sanest reason I could come up with on short notice; “Big Tech” wouldn’t work on the Flower Girl. And I’d seen Nia’s big diamond, sparkling like tinfoil, and Matt’s ring that looked like a toilet bowl washer.

“Oh. Those. Here you go.”

She leaned over and popped the box open, retrieving two tiny symbols of eternity and dropping them casually into my outstretched hand. I pressed the rings into the meat of my palm, astonished by their reality.

“You’re not my daughter, are you?” I asked her gently. I had scared her once, and I wanted to be careful.

“What! No!”

“Okay. Just checking. Thanks for letting me know.”

I hadn’t thought so. Not really. Sylvie would be eight today, a few years younger than this girl, or apparition of a girl—I wasn’t certain of anything in this lighting; although who knows what shape the dead might take if they return to visit Earth?

We listened to the tortoise’s dolorous, methodical scraping. A hole widened before our eyes.

I do pray. I find that this surprises people. Perhaps it surprised Cristina last night in the hotel room. Perhaps I got down on my knees at 4:00 a.m. and prayed forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. I pray to my daughter. I won’t forgive myself, but in my weaker moments I can still be blinded by the shining of the world. The yolky, indeterminate slide of the world. At my weakest, in the spaces between eye blinks, I do let myself wonder, could this be a prelude? Could this world be the gray life before dawn? Please let it be so. Please let there be a world outside the world, life beyond life. Be led, said the voice I followed here. Unless it was only my own voice, routed through the darkness.

Sylvie wanted ice cream, and I knew the liquor store was open. The snowfall had looked peaceful to me. I’d suggested the ice cream to Sylvie.

I don’t blame God. No god but me chose to drive on the night I killed my daughter. I’d decided that I needed a drink more than Sylvie needed sleep, and I buttoned a coat over her froggy pajamas and carried her past the dog’s questioning eyes and down the icy porch steps. You might have read about this bridge’s collapse—the flawed blueprints and corrupt contracts, the decades of knowing neglect. Like any avalanche, it only seemed spontaneous. Our lawyers were cheered to find reams of indicting voice mails between engineers and politicians and transportation officials. The State of Oregon was found solely responsible for Sylvie’s death, but Fern and I know that I’m the one at fault. It was the last thing we agreed on before I left. I try not to blame God. I’m hedging a little, I will confess, because more than anything I want to believe in a God who loves my daughter and saved her. A love that envelops this world and extends beyond it, an eternity of love inside of which my baby now exists. What happened to make me so embarrassed for wanting this? For dreaming that such love could be real. More real than the blocks of ice falling from the bridge cables and bombing through our windshield, more real than the freezing black water. More real than the last night I spent in a bed with Fern, our spines fretted together like twins, in the blank room staring at opposite walls. Fern is no longer a believer. She does her living and her grieving in an immanent frame, where she came quickly to despise me. She does not think a reunion with Sylvie will be possible.

Now answer me truthfully: Is there a love alive that death cannot part? People talk about heaven as if it’s a sort of haunted mansion suspended in embalming fluid, but this is not the eternity I imagine. I want to believe in a heaven of red and living blood. A heaven where I will know my daughter.

Perhaps you find my wish the most ridiculous part of this story. I wouldn’t disagree. Wedding vows are a preposterous pledge for two animals to make, foolish beyond belief, and even they come with an expiration date.

“You should keep these,” I told the Flower Girl. I slipped both rings into her palm, which was cold and soft and grainy with sand, as if she’d been out here building castles in the dark. “Make your promises carefully.”

We listened to the scuffling of the tortoise in the wash, and the wild roaring beyond it. There is a loneliness that cannot know itself, that needs us to walk alongside it. I should tell my hosts that I was wrong: it’s not only the laugh track we humans supply to the desert. The God I still pray to is something like this: a night that wants us to inhabit it.

This was a real child, as it turned out, with worried parents calling her name.

“Frances! Fran-ces!” cried a woman’s hysterical voice. Someone shined a flashlight in my eyes.

“Hello there. We were just watching the tortoise dig.”

“Are you high? Arturo, he is high.”

A thickset and kinetic density, a shape that I assume was Arturo, stepped between me and Frances. The tortoise’s apathy to the scene in progress was chilling and marvelous to me. By this point, she had eaten all but the stem of the resurrected flower and moved on to the gray weeds between the rocks.

“I am high,” I conceded. “Your daughter is a lovely conversationalist. We were just remarking on the unlikely longevity of the tortoise. Isn’t that right, Frances?”

I tried and failed to meet Frances’s eye.

“Who are you?”

“A guest, like you.” I tried a smile. “A guest taking in the night air.”

Her mother’s voice was shaking.

“Who are you here with?”

All around us the desert whittled at the older silence, chirping and laughing and sighing. I watched the tortoise slowly retract her head into the mouth of the shell.

“No one,” I told them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Dan Hawk

Karen Russell is the New York Times bestselling author of Swamplandia!, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award; the novella Sleep Donation; and the short story collections Orange World, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.