clip, she’s wrapped in the camping blanket from my bed, holding an empty bottle of tequila in which she’d inserted a mariposa lily.
The clip ends with her setting the bottle in the dirt, dousing it with lighter fluid, then dropping a match and watching the little flower burn.
We’d only been in bed for a minute or so when October said, “Something’s bothering you.”
The day had been golden, and I didn’t want it to end with a conversation about Cal or my shitty self-doubt. I shook my head and said, “It’s nothing.” Then I repeated what she’d said to me earlier: “We’re here now, and that’s all that matters.”
I remember the exact expression on her face then. An openness so wide and filled with so much faith, it seemed more like blinding recklessness.
The woman believed too much in me.
She believed too much in everything.
TWENTY-ONE.
It rained the day before Cal’s show at the Greek Theater. I remember because October and I were out on the Coastal Trail at Lands End, a park set along the craggy coastline in San Francisco with stunning postcard views of the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Golden Gate Bridge to the east.
We were location scouting for a selfie we intended to shoot the following week. It had been sunny when we left Mill Valley, and I hadn’t anticipated so drastic a change in the weather, but thick, spongy clouds quickly moved in; the drizzle and wind cut right through the flannel shirt I had on, and within minutes I was damp and cold.
The plan as October had explained it was for me to film her as she walked naked through the labyrinth out on Eagle’s Point. She was going to have sharp maces hanging from ropes tied around each of her wrists like macabre, medieval bracelets, dangling and slicing up her legs as she moved.
I hated the idea and tried to talk her out of it. When that didn’t work, I asked her what the motivation was.
“I’m about to hurt someone very badly,” she said. “I want to hurt too.”
We figured we would get one take before someone called the cops to report a naked, bloody woman in the labyrinth, so we needed to plan the shot carefully. I was mapping out the camera’s path when my phone rang.
I pulled it from my pocket and raindrops misted the screen as if from a spray bottle, blurring Cal’s name.
I told October I’d be back and stepped off the trail to take the call.
“Yo,” Cal said.
“Hey.”
He was calling to say he would be landing at Oakland Airport the following morning and wanted to know if I would pick him up and take him to the venue.
“This way we can hang out all day,” he reasoned.
I paused, guarded, unsure of how to respond, and Cal said, “Harp, you still there?” as if maybe the phone had cut out.
I turned around and watched October picking things up in the center of the labyrinth—talismans, rocks, crystals, notes people had left there. She was looking at me, holding up a folded piece of paper, pointing to it, but I was too far away to see what it was.
“Harp?” Cal repeated.
“Sorry, yeah. We’re over at Eagle’s Point. I can barely hear you.”
I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to act normal around Cal, and I knew it was a betrayal on top of an already inexcusable betrayal to agree to spend the day with him, given that I’d been having an affair with his girlfriend for the last month. But here’s the rub: I wanted to spend the day with him. I wanted to pretend, for twenty-four more hours, that he and I were still best friends and brothers. I wanted to see what his life was like on tour. And more than anything, I wanted to watch him perform in front of eighty-five hundred people.
“Text me your flight info,” I said.
Before we hung up, I asked Cal if he expected me to bring October. He sighed and said, “Nah, bro. I need to talk through some stuff before I see her. I need to pick your brain. She’s going to come over later with Rae.”
Earlier that year a strong winter storm had toppled half a dozen redwoods in Muir Woods, and a group of rangers had set up audio recording equipment in and around the park to capture the sounds. Imagine a distinct, cacophonous creaking, like a giant door to the sky with a squeaky hinge, and then