Things were looking up, and now that they’d set up the campsite and night was beginning to fall over the Driftless Area, so were they. So far only a few stars were peeking out; no more than you might see in Madison yet, but soon, they were sure, they would see the dusty band of the Milky Way and the shower of meteors they’d been promised to grant their every wish.
Miraculously, by dumb luck, they had secured what had to be the best campsite in the park without even making a reservation. It was a walk-in site at the end of a long path through the woods. They’d come out of the trees at the top of a prairie hillside covered in bee-balm, ragweed, and queen-anne’s lace. The sky yawned vastly above them. Though there were other campsites dotting the hillside, they felt cozy and removed up here at the top, on their little plateau of grass.
It seemed to Ben that this was just the sort of place to which ancient people might have made pilgrimages. Maybe there was a sage or a sibyl here, sitting on her little stool in the grass. He was rather vague on what ancient people these might have been, but the soothsayer, at least, was clear in his mind. Her milky eyes rolling. Lips muttering prophecy and nonsense in equal measure.
For several minutes it was perfect; it was just what the two of them had been hoping for when they’d set out that morning, and they enjoyed it together in silence. But then the unexpected occurred.
Ben was the first to spot the vague, but unmistakable form materializing out of the corridor of trees. A straight man was approaching their campsite, and Ben nodded to Sam so that he would look. The air around them curdled with images of guns and fists, knives, pickup trucks, and blood red baseball caps. At least if they screamed, the sound would echo from the wall of trees so that people at the other campsites would be sure to hear, whether or not they came to help them.
But courteously, as the man stepped out into the bright light of their campfire, he took on the appearance of the other archetype available to him: he was bumbling and pitiable. He had extra weight around his middle, and a jarringly youthful face. He held a canned beverage. If you’re coming to rape and pillage, you leave your beer at your own campsite, right? Still, Ben felt acutely aware of how thin and wispy he and Sam were, compared to him. They stared at him as he approached. It took him an unsettling amount of time to speak.
“Um, hi,” he said.
Ben and Sam said hi in unison, in high-pitched voices as if they were women speaking to a small child, or as if he were an acquaintance whose presence they’d been caught attempting to ignore.
“So, um…we were going to set up this big telescope on this site,” the man said. Then he paused. “I’m Brandon,” he explained, and then continued. “We thought no one was camping here tonight. Did you guys, um…switch sites?”
Ben cut his eyes toward Sam. Please talk to him so that I don’t have to.
Sam told the straight man—Brandon—that no, they just hadn’t made a reservation, and they’d gotten here right before the ranger station closed.
“Oh. Well, we’re camped down there…” Brandon gestured with his beer toward a campsite a ways down the hill, smoke curling up from a bright blotch of flickering firelight. “And from there, the tree line kind of blocks the view.”
“Are you trying to see the meteor shower?” Ben asked as if he were interested, feeling guilty for not wanting to talk to him before.
Brandon laughed, as if that were funny or absurd, and maybe it was. Can you even really see a shooting star in a telescope? “Oh, no,” he said. “We’re trying to look at Jupiter, or Saturn. Maybe Uranus, if we’re lucky.” Politely, he said it like urine-us, not your-anus. “So I was wondering if you guys would mind if we, uh…kind of invaded your site and still set it up?”
Ben imagined a gaggle of frat boys or rednecks milling around their site holding beers and glancing into a telescope now and then. Not quite what they had imagined when they set out that morning. But what could he say?
“Okay,” he said.
Brandon seemed surprised. “You’re sure?”
“Um…yeah.”
“Okay well, great.” He kind of gave a little jerk as if he were about to turn around, but then stood still, pulled out his phone, and pressed the button to make it light up. “Well it’s like eight o’clock right now. We’ll probably come around nine thirty.
“Alright,” Sam spoke up. “Who all is coming?” and Ben felt grateful for him; he had wanted to ask that, but it had seemed impossible.
“Oh, yeah,” Brandon seemed embarrassed. “Just me and my son. He’s down there…possibly burning down the forest.” For some reason, he said that last part in a wistful tone, a faraway look in his eye.
They all turned to look at Brandon’s campsite, where the fire did seem to be several times larger than it had been the last time they looked.
Ben felt relieved. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as he had imagined. A man and his son was much less terrible than a group of adult men, or worse, adult men with their beers and girlfriends. He didn’t think he could stomach the emaciated looks that he imagined would come into the eyes of a bunch of straight women while their boyfriends drank beer and played with their telescopes.
“Alright, well thanks,” Brandon said, backing toward the corridor of trees. “Thanks a lot. See you later tonight.”
Ben and Sam waved, and then stood looking at one another in silence after he was gone. Neither of them knew quite what to think.
“Well,” said Sam, “should we learn about contacting spirits?”

***

On their way to the park, they had been driving through a small town where some sort of celebration was going on. The main street they would normally use to get through the town as quickly as possible was blocked off for the revelry, so they were forced to take a longer way around. That was the only reason Sam noticed the sign to begin with. It said SPIRITUALIST CAMP, with a sunflower and an arrow pointing up a bizarrely steep hill.
“Look,” Sam said.
“What?” Ben moaned. He was slouched in the passenger’s seat, and had been disconsolately swiping his thumb toward the bottom of his phone’s screen to refresh his email, again and again. He had received his first rejection that morning. One of the agents to whom he’d sent the the first ten pages of the manuscript of his novel had confirmed what he had always suspected: she did not want to help him publish it. When he’d read the email that morning, he had experienced a rush of excitement near to ecstasy. At least she had responded in some way. Then he had been cast into a deep pit of abjection at having been so excited to receive a form (or possibly even automated?) rejection from a wealthy literary agent who lived in Brooklyn with her husband and children. He had spent the past nine years feeling as if he were ferrying this Momentous, or at least this beautiful (surely at least pretty?) thing out of some dark place and into the world, slaving to provide for its every whim, allowing it to manipulate him into writing sentences that burgeoned with bizarre and impertinent clauses that sometimes neglected to describe things that occupied a straight-forward register of reality, even within the story itself.
And then, when he’d surfaced after all that time spent half-buried in darkness and begun to research how he should carry out its final injunction—to publish it—he had quickly realized that these sentences were nothing like the short, incisive, resonant things he gathered that Millennials were supposed to write. In the entire manuscript, he never mentioned Twitter, and only mentioned Facebook once. He neglected to hook the reader with something shocking, or politically topical, or supernatural within the first ten pages. And looking indulgently at this beautiful, momentous (at least to him, and Sam liked it, too) thing he’d made, it seemed too late to change it to suit someone else’s expectations. Perhaps it had been irresponsible of him to let it be what it wanted to be in the first place; maybe he should have coaxed it into being something more polite, something that could get by more easily in the normal, everyday world.
He feared that he had gone about the whole thing in a very unprofessional manner. That was what the literary agents seemed most intent on avoiding: unprofessional writers. They would read your query letter, and if it was professional enough, they might read the excerpt you sent along with it. Then, if that “hooked” them, they might or might not respond within six to twelve weeks to permit you to send the full manuscript. It was a business, after all. Being professional was what mattered.
So within a matter of weeks, this was what he was reduced to: prowling the internet for hours at a time looking for agents who claimed to be interested in manuscripts which, when vaguely described, had a vague similarity to a vague description of his own. Staring at Twitter; “following” strangers who universally seemed to live in Brooklyn with their straight partners and children. He wondered if they had some sort of commune or settlement there. Gradually, looking at the internet had begun to make him feel like a snake-charmer’s serpent, dreaming vainly of sinking his teeth in. One day, I’ll break free, and then watch out! If I could only figure out how to look away for a second…
So finally, he burst out of the second bedroom (the “study”) of their small condo, and begged Sam to take him camping. He didn’t care where; somewhere where he wouldn’t have any signal on his phone. This was one of the perks of being nurses. Twelve-hour shifts meant extra days off, which made spontaneous mid-week camping trips a possibility.
“Well,” said Sam, calmly, like someone trained to speak to hostage-takers, “There is a meteor shower tonight.” Bless Sam, who always knew about things like meteor showers.
And so here they were on the edge of the Driftless Area, looking at a sign that said SPIRITUALIST CAMP. Ben googled “spiritualist” on his phone. Spiritualism seemed to be a religion based around the practice of contacting spirits of the dead, known as “discarnate humans.” Discarnate humans, according to the internet, seem to spend their time milling around “in Spirit,” just waiting for the chance to contact their loved ones through a spirit medium in order to give solace, or advice.
“Well, should we get a reading?” Sam asked.
Ben looked around suspiciously. “I don’t know. Do you really think we should get out here? I mean do you think this town went to Trump? I’m noticing a lot of pickup trucks. And a very concerning church-to-business ratio.” He wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.
Sam shrugged. “Surely a spirit medium wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. You’d think someone who died in the holocaust would come talk them out of it. Who would you contact in Spirit, though?”
“Probably my uncle Randy. He’s been haunting my family ever since he died.”
“Hm. I guess I would talk to my grandmother. I miss her…”
So they drove up the steep hill. At the top of the hill was an area dotted with small, white cabins that had numbers painted on their facades. Near the parking lot was a slightly larger building with a sign that said WELCOME. They went in.
Inside, a woman with kind eyes welcomed them, but also seemed to indicate wordlessly that there was no rush for them to approach the counter and speak to her. They appreciated this, and spent a few moments looking around the little room. It seemed to be a gift shop as well as a welcome center. There were shelves crowded with vials of essential oils, various decks of tarot cards, and even a few crystal balls. Ben quickly averted his eyes from the crystal balls; they reminded him too much of the screen of his phone, and he had finally managed to look away. In response to a glare from Sam, he had left it in the car.
Once they’d gathered enough courage to approach the woman, she explained that they should pick a medium from a small list of bios, and then she would set them up with a session. They scanned the list, and Sam was first to speak. “I’ll get a reading from LeAnn.”
Ben cursed internally. LeAnn was the one he wanted, too. Her bio made it seem like she struck a good balance between accomplishment and approachability. But it always annoyed Sam when the two of them ordered the same meal at a restaurant which, since they were both vegetarians, happened frequently. But maybe this was different.
“I like LeAnn, too,” he said.
Sam remained impassive.
The woman signed them up for two half hour sessions, and they gave her sixty dollars apiece. It surprised them how much it cost, but they could afford it. After all, they were rich nurses now. That had been their joke the whole time they were lowly nurse’s aids. We’ll be able to grocery shop at Hy-Vee when we’re rich nurses. They still didn’t shop at Hy-Vee, but they could have if they wanted to.
The woman smiled at them as if she thought they were cute or funny, and suggested that they go sit by the healing tree until it was time for their readings. They said alright, and left the building, wondering how they would know which tree was the healing one. Luckily, it was clearly marked with a sign that said HEALING TREE, and it had a bench surrounding it in a ring. They sat on the bench and waited, enjoying the breeze, watching a few people walk slowly and meditatively around the grounds.
When it was time for Sam’s reading, he made a wide-eyed face at Ben, and said, “Here we go,” and Ben spent the next half hour alternately wondering what was going on inside the hut, and trying to meditate.
Exactly half an hour after he had entered the hut, Sam came out again. As he approached the healing tree, something about the shape of his mouth and the angle of his eyes made it clear to Ben that the experience had been more convincing than expected. Making a wide-eyed face like the one Sam had made before he went into the hut, he asked, “So???”
“When I sat down, the first thing she said was, ‘Randy wants to talk to you.’” He stood above Ben, who was still sitting on the bench with his back against the healing tree.
“Oh,” Ben said, looking up at Sam. “So it’s real then.” He started to sweat. “So what else did she say?”
“Well, Randy told me that I was a really good person,” Sam bragged, “He said that he was really glad to see that someone in my family wasn’t totally money-oriented. He was a big hippie, and I guess transitioning into Spirit only confirmed his political beliefs. He also said that people stress me out, and that to calm myself down I should live near water, or among rolling hills.”
This was terrible. It was just what Ben had been worried about. What if he sat down and the medium made a face like she smelled something bad and was just like, Oh. Oh, my. Yeah, the spirits say you’re a really shitty and avaricious person, and you definitely don’t deserve Sam? But in a frantic attempt not to make it all about himself, he just said, “Wow, I guess we really should buy a farm then.”
This was a dream of theirs, to buy a homestead among the hills of the Driftless Area. Sam had checked out several books about beekeeping and organic, no-till farming techniques from the library, and he was very enthusiastic about it. It seemed like a good idea to Ben, too, mainly because maybe they wouldn’t be able to get high-speed internet out in the country like that. Everyone would forget about them. The apocalypse might happen and, without reliable access to the internet, they might not even notice. They would just continue slurping their honey and not tilling their garden until the end of time.
“Well,” Sam said, sitting down, “you should hurry or you won’t get the full half hour.”

***

After both their readings, they had gone back into the gift shop and purchased a how-to guide about developing your mediumistic abilities. Apparently everyone has them, it’s just a matter of paying attention. That was what Sam was reading out loud to Ben by the campfire now, as the stars gradually extruded themselves out of the darkness.
He was reading about the practice of sitting silently. This seemed to be one of the most common ways to train in preparation for receiving messages from Spirit. It sounded exactly like the relaxation exercises that the teacher of Ben’s high school journalism class used to lead them in when they all got too stressed out about a deadline. It was a very successful high school paper, and Ben had traveled to New York with the rest of the staff to accept national awards on more than one occasion. He understood the utility of the relaxation exercises, but they always bothered him. Who honestly had the time to imagine white light entering your forehead and shooting out of your toes, or to feel your body dissolving into a “vast sea of energy”? It was only later, after he found Sam and started writing his novel, that he’d ever had much success at sitting still for long periods of time.
Even hearing about it now by the campfire was making him antsy, and his mind was wandering. He looked out at the blank wall of trees beyond the night-time hillside, thinking of the coyote. When they arrived in the park, they had immediately gone on a hike. They’d arrived later than they had intended, so they wanted to make sure to get one in before dark. As usual, they were amazed by the landscape of the Driftless Area. Bizarre, vertiginous hills; sculptural sandstone bluffs; snakelike rivers cutting through cliffs of wimpling rock. Sam had explained to him once that the glaciers that slid slowly over the Great Plains, flattening them out so nicely for factory farming, had missed this place. Hence the name “Driftless.” As a result, the topography here had been shaped by water in its liquid, rather than solid, state. That was why it was so beautiful, and also why smaller, organic farming operations were allowed to persist, tucked away in the long, irregular valleys.
With all that splendor, it was easy to forget that you were in the forest, and that you were sometimes afraid of things in the forest. Ben had been coming around a place where the path wound around a sharp sandstone ridge, and there it was. At first he thought it was just a dog that ran ahead of its master like he, in his exuberance at how steep the hills were here, had run ahead of Sam. But then he saw that it was bigger than a dog, and wilder. He stopped, and his body tensed, ready to leap back behind the sandstone wall, but by then the coyote was already bounding away through the forest, running for dear life. That, he thought, was the unsettling thing about animals. You always thought you were supposed to be afraid of them, but when it came right down to it, by the time you got around to feeling scared they had already fled in terror.
That, instead of the content of the book Sam was reading, was what Ben was thinking about when he heard someone say, “Um…hi again,” timidly from behind him.
Ben turned around, hardly believing that Brandon, the straight man, could possibly be back. It certainly wasn’t nine thirty. It had been maybe half an hour—maybe.
“Hey,” he said.
“So I was just wondering…I don’t know what you guys were planning on having to eat, but,” he paused looking at the cooler and dirty plates on the picnic table, and managing to seem like he was blushing despite the fact that it was too dark for Ben to see the color of his cheeks, “but I was just gonna see if you maybe wanted to come…I just got married,” he said.
“Congratulations,” said Sam, and Brandon smiled, his confidence seeming to return to him.
“Yeah, the wedding was last week, so we’ve got just a ridiculous amount of meat,” he explained. “Just a shit-ton of cold cuts, if you guys wanted some.”
Ben was surprised. It was so nice; it seemed even nicer that he hadn’t offered it at first, and then had gone away, thought about them for thirty minutes, and then decided to come back and awkwardly offer up some of his wedding cold cuts. But he had no choice but to refuse.
“Wow, thanks; that’s really nice,” he said. “But we’re both vegetarians.”
Brandon guffawed in a weird mixture of relief and amazement. “Hah, wow, okay,” he grinned. “We’re on…opposite ends of the spectrum, then,” he said, and held his arms out to show the vast extent of the unbridgeable divide between them.
They all laughed.
“Alright then,” Brandon said, and started to leave. Then he stopped, and turned back around. “But we’d still like to set up the telescope later, I mean, if that’s okay?
“Yeah, be our guest.”
Brandon grinned again. “Cool. See you guys later.” And then he was gone.

***

The medium didn’t look at all like Ben would have imagined. She looked exactly like someone who might show you a condo that you were thinking about buying, but only if you had already been pre-approved for a loan. She’s here to help, but please don’t waste her time. He found her appearance very reassuring.
“I’m LeAnn,” she said. “Have you ever had a reading before?”
He shook his head, and she explained how it would go. She would say a little prayer, they would try to open themselves up to Spirit, and then she would channel the spirits who approached. She would tell him what they wanted to say to him first, and then, if he wanted to, he could ask questions.
“But don’t expect,” she warned, in a way that made him feel like the spirits were already whispering his secrets into her ear, “to like everything you hear. The spirits always have your best interest at heart, but they always tell you exactly what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.” Ben felt very cold. His t-shirt was soaked through with sweat under his arms. LeAnn smiled. “After all, the spirits see everything.”
He wasn’t sure if she was implying something, and he asked, trying to sound simply interested, “What do you mean by that?”
“Well…” LeAnn looked like she was choosing her words carefully. “They aren’t affected by time in the same way we are. Do you know what I mean?”
Ben thought that he did, and he nodded. He thought it must be exactly the opposite of the way he had been feeling for the past three weeks, since he sent out his first query letter. He felt like something immensely heavy and excruciatingly slow-moving was crushing him and he had no choice but to wait until it passed, no matter how it changed him in the meantime. When he’d called his best friend Erika two nights ago in tears, she had sounded sort of annoyed with him. “You’ve only been doing this for two weeks, Ben, and you haven’t even heard back from any of them yet,” she said. “People look for agents for years.”
He had gasped, alone in the study. “Oh, no. God, no. I can’t do this for years. I would literally rather die.”
Maybe he should take another approach. He could try writing some short stories with terse, resonant sentences, and getting them published in literary magazines. Then maybe an agent with the mysterious Wylie Agency, which didn’t accept queries and yet somehow seemed to represent all his favorite writers, would come along and ask him if he had a manuscript ready. He’d read about things like that happening. He imagined himself on a desert island, sending up signal flares or writing a sign that said HELP ME with driftwood in the sand. That situation seemed a lot less terrible than the one he was in.
Distracted, he’d hardly noticed that LeAnn had begun her prayer. She asked God if He wouldn’t mind showering them with His love and kindness, and sending spirits to help him, Ben, understand what actions he could take to live his life in a righteous and joyful way.
Then she opened her eyes, and they roved around, seeming to focus on him and then slide right off. Had her eyes been misaligned like that before? These were the types of things that, as a nurse, he should have noticed immediately.
“There’s a maternal figure approaching. She’s not your mother, but she mothers you. It could be an aunt. No. It’s your grandmother. Your grandmother’s gone over?”
He nodded, hardly even amazed.
LeAnn smiled. “She’s a cool lady, isn’t she?”
He smiled, and nodded. There were tears in his eyes, and he felt embarrassed, and then tried not to. She was probably used to people tearing up.
“Well the first thing she’s doing is, she’s kind of kicking back, and hopping around,” LeAnn said, unexpectedly, and then explained. “She’s demonstrating that she can do that in Spirit. She must have had a hard time getting around when you knew her?”
He nodded again. He was remembering sitting with her, she on her wheelchair, he on the carpet in the threshhold of her house, a few days before she died. Looking out at the yard, he had been thinking about how she would never go outside again. He could tell by the weight and the fatigue radiating from her body that she was thinking about it too.
But even then, she hadn’t been too tired to put on makeup in preparation for the visits from her hospice nurse, Thomas. Ben suspected that she had a crush on him, and he could understand that himself. Thomas was strong, and gentle. But he had mentioned a wife and a child in passing. Too bad; but then, Ben reflected magnanimously, gay guys can’t have everything. Straight women deserve some good things too, especially considering all the stuff they normally have to put up with. Anyway, when his grandmother died, Thomas had put a hand on Ben’s shoulder blade, and hadn’t said anything. It seemed so appropriate, not to say anything, and Thomas seemed so impossibly wise for keeping his mouth shut. In that moment, he had decided to become a nurse, like Thomas, instead of going into an impossible amount of debt to get an MFA. An extremely unprofessional decision, he had come to realize.
“Now she’s telling me how proud she is of you, and how excited she is about your future,” LeAnn said, and made a face as if she wasn’t quite understanding what she was hearing. “She’s showing me that you’re on these two paths in the forest, and it’s dark—maybe a little scary—but you’re just about to come out into a clearing. A place that’s bathed in light. Oh. I think she means that you’ll find your place, and that you’ll realize that you can do the things you love to do, and get paid as well.”
His heart soared. His novel would be published after all! But then he grew suspicious. What if she actually just meant that he would realize that what he really loved to do was nursing? God, please let it be the novel. Not that he didn’t love nursing, of course.
When they’d moved to Madison originally, both of them had gotten jobs as nurse’s aids in a facility for adults with severe developmental disabilities, and they had stayed on there once they got their RNs. Unexpectedly, he found that he had a deep adoration of the residents. They were almost universally nonverbal, and their bodies were deformed. Various organs failed to function the ways they were supposed to, and many of the residents had mysterious, nonfunctional, and even shocking behaviors. When he was in training, he’d expected to be afraid of them, or to feel sorry for them, but once he actually started work, it wasn’t like that at all. He could still remember the strange feeling that would come over him for weeks and weeks after he started working with them—he still got that feeling sometimes. The impulse to run out of the building and through the streets, yelling, You’re all wrong; you’ve got it just backwards! These people aren’t disabled at all; they’re amazing; they’re perfect! They know secrets! It seemed to him that their strange, or even bizarre appearances and behaviors were not mistakes at all, but somehow more expressive of…something, than the way people acted in the normal, everyday world. He often thought of Renata, an elderly woman who spent most of her time sitting silently in her wheelchair. She was both blind and, according to the speech therapists, deaf. But when she was in the bath, how she cackled in delight when the warm water sluiced her body, her milky eyes rolling about in glee. Sometimes she even began to sing out, in a lovely, atonal contralto. “La-laa-laaaaaaaaaaa!” Which made him think that she might not be quite deaf after all. No, Renata could hear; she just didn’t care to listen.
Suddenly, returning from his revery, Ben was horrified to realize that the medium had been relating more messages from his grandmother all this time, and he hadn’t been listening at all.
“—the yard work,” she concluded. “So, do you have any questions?”
He felt very nervous. How was he supposed to ask questions when he wasn’t even sure what she’d said? What if he asked a question she had just covered? And what should he ask his grandmother anyway? He could ask her to get more specific about this clearing bathed in light. Was it his novel? But he suddenly felt very reticent to admit to LeAnn that he considered himself to be a writer, in case she might think him unprofessional. So he blurted out the first thing that came to mind:
“Um…so where is Grandma exactly? Is she like…out among the stars or something?”
He was immediately engulfed in shame for asking such a pedestrian question, but LeAnn seemed to seriously consider this, as if it were a good idea that she had simply never really considered. Then she shrugged.
“I don’t think so,” she said, finally. “To me, she’s right here. Just in Spirit.”

***

Sam was now reading about the difference between a spirit guide and an angel. Spirit guides, evidently, are true discarnate humans. They lived out a life “earthside,” and so they’re sympathetic to our human shortcomings. They try, gently, to nudge us toward a higher path. Angels, on the other hand, were never human, and don’t really seem to get it. Based on what Sam was reading, Ben thought of angels as very bitchy and constantly annoyed by everything we do. It wasn’t what he would have expected, and he couldn’t help but think to himself, man, fuck angels. Angels seemed to him like the types of people who lived in Brooklyn, straight-marrying one another and raising perfect, highly-achieving children, all while laughing at the desperation barely hidden behind the brittle professionalism of your queries.
He was getting tired of this book. “Should we put the stuff in the car and brush our teeth?” he asked.
Sam agreed, seeming to be similarly sick of the book. They gathered up their dishes and food and loaded them, along with the cooler, into the little cart provided by the park to carry your stuff back and forth from the walk-in sites. By the light of their headlamps, they followed the corridor of trees back toward the parking lot. Ben was mesmerized by how pretty queen-anne’s lace looks, bobbing away in the breeze under the brutal, white light of a headlamp.
After they loaded their things into the car and locked up the cart, they set off across a cleared, grassy area toward the bathrooms. Ben couldn’t stop thinking about the angels, and his annoyance extended itself to the stars as well. There were a few falling stars every once in a while, though not nearly as many as he had been led to believe he would see. Most of them were just immobile, though; so immobile. In fact, as he strode along over the grass beside Sam, the jostling of his vision caused by the loping rhythm of his steps made the stars seem to shake and jiggle around a little bit, but they were so immobile that they didn’t even seem to be the ones shaking around at all; they were impervious to it—to him. In fact, it seemed like the only true way to look at it was that they were standing perfectly, immaculately still, and he was the one being shaken around here—he and the whole earth. Their stillness was beautiful, sure, but it was also extremely frustrating. It reminded him of the immense hypocrisy of elementary school teachers who tell the children to sit still. It was like, easy for you to say. Your body might be three quarters of the way in the grave, but this little thing I have does not sit still.
When they got back to their site, Brandon was waiting for them. Next to him was a comically large telescope. Ben wondered how he had even gotten it to their site. It seemed like he could have at least put it in one of the little carts, but there was no cart in sight. He wondered if Brandon had hoped that they would still be there by the fire when he hefted the thing up to the site, so they would see how strong he was. Probably not. Ben was always having to remind himself that not all straight men are actually seven years old on the inside.
“Hey,” said Brandon.
“Hey,” Sam said. “Wow.”
Brandon grinned. “I told you it was big.”
Ben reconsidered his most recent thought pertaining to straight men.
“So is it okay if we set it up then?”
“Yeah, of course…no problem,” Sam said.
Ben was getting kind of suspicious of how many times Brandon was asking them if he could set up the telescope.
“Alright, great. I’ll go get Leander.”
Leander? Seriously? Ben and Sam made wide-eyed faces at one another, and waited for Brandon to come back with Leander.
Leander, as it turned out, was refreshingly unable to hold a conversation with strangers. He seemed tall for his age (whatever age that was), and he had long, gangly limbs. Ben said, “hi, I’m Ben,” when Leander first came up to the campsite with his father. Sometimes Ben thought that working with the residents at work made him good at talking to children, even though that wasn’t true.
“Hi,” Leander said, inaudibly, and then got to work fitting things onto the ends of the telescope.
“So,” Brandon said, seeming used to making conversation on his son’s behalf, “Where are you guys from?”
“Oh, Madison,” Ben said. He never liked to admit to people that he lived in Madison when he was in other parts of Wisconsin, because based on the ads that statewide political candidates ran on television, he assumed that everyone outside of Madison despised everyone who lived there, for some reason he didn’t quite understand.
“Hah!” Brandon said. “Us too.”
So they weren’t rednecks after all.
“Where in Madison?” Brandon pressed.
“Right next to Tenney Park.”
Brandon made a wide-eyed face. “You’re in our neighborhood!”
Ben and Sam laughed. “How funny to meet a neighbor two hours away from home,” Ben said. He really was amazed. The coincidence seemed both supernatural and meaningless.
After that, everyone fell silent as Brandon and Leander screwed and unscrewed things onto and off of the telescope. Ben tried to determine if it was an awkward silence, or just a functional one, but he wasn’t sure. He looked at Sam. Sam was looking off toward the wall of trees, and didn’t seem uncomfortable. Still, he thought it better to say something.
“So…can you see Saturn’s rings through that?”
“Oh, yeah,” Leander said, before Brandon could answer. “For sure. We’ve got a two-times lens for it, so you should be able to see those really well. Even the spot on Jupiter.”
“Wow,” Ben said. He could tell by the way Leander spoke that he knew a lot about telescopes, and about the planets too. He was impressed. Kind of like when he found out from the occupational therapist that Renata at work knew how to put on her own shoes. He wanted to keep asking questions about the telescope, but the question about Saturn’s rings had pretty much exhausted the things he knew how to ask about. So he said, lamely, “Do you guys come here often?”

“Every year!” Leander said, proudly.
Brandon smiled. “Yep, every year since he was five. So that’s four years now.”
Leander was nine. This fact horrified Ben momentarily, because that was how long it had taken him to write his novel. But then he shrugged it off. He’d rather have a fat manuscript than a skinny son. Though it was nice for Brandon to have a son like Leander, who seemed very knowledgeable.
More silence followed this exchange. Brandon and Leander seemed to be growing more and more annoyed by their telescope. They were complaining that it was hard to see anything through it. Looking up, Ben wondered if this was because it was getting cloudy, but he wasn’t sure if he would sound stupid if he said so.
“It’s really getting cloudy,” said Sam, as if he weren’t explaining why their telescope wasn’t working at all, but just commenting on the weather.
Brandon took his eyes away from the tiny eyepiece and looked up. “Oh, yeah,” he said, sheepishly.
Leander still seemed completely absorbed in the telescope, though. He was taking something off the front of it again. “I think there’s something wrong with the two-times lens,” he said. “It might be smudged, or like…out of focus somehow.”
Brandon scowled at his son. “Well I don’t think it’s going to matter much at this point, Leander.”
Ben always found it funny and relatable the way parents seemed so proud of their children one moment, and so overwhelmingly, harrowingly annoyed by them the next.
They all stood around looking at one another for a moment, and then Brandon said, “Well, that sucks.”
“Yeah, unlucky,” Ben commiserated. “Right when you got out the telescope, too.”
Brandon shrugged. “Next time.” And he and Leander started pulling things off of the telescope.
Watching Brandon awkwardly lug the giant machine toward the trees while Leander patiently walked along slowly by his side, as if he too were wondering why his father hadn’t brought one of the little carts, Ben felt relieved. Not that he disliked Brandon and Leander. He had been surprised by how nice they were, actually, but that wasn’t really the point. He much preferred it when it was just he and Sam, alone together.

***

Ben usually had a hard time falling asleep while they were camping because, despite the fact that he was ostensibly an adult, he was still scared of sleeping in a tent in the middle of nowhere. That night was different, though. He was asleep the second he slipped into his sleeping bag, as if a spell had been cast. He fell into a place where he and Sam were going hand in hand, following a path or two through a dark forest. It seemed like they had been following this path forever, and he was starting to get a little anxious. But then, just when his anxiety was beginning to ripen into fear, out they came again into the light. It wasn’t just a clearing, but a strange, oblong valley where, he could tell, the summer never ended. And there it was, tucked into a protective curve of the hillside: their homestead. It was so beautiful, with birds, and dragonflies, and Sam’s bees wallowing with pleasure deep in blossoms of bee-balm, ragweed, and queen-anne’s lace, buzzing here and there, hard at work pollinating endless vegetables. Their garden was badly in need of not being tilled. He was surprised to see Renata there, in the wheelchair designed by the physical therapists to fit the unusual contours of her body. His grandmother was there too, in Spirit. He glanced down at his phone, and it said NO SIGNAL across the screen. Tears came to his eyes: everything was perfect, finally. But then the sound of something brushing by the nylon wall of the tent woke him up.
At first he wondered if it was Brandon, back again to set up his telescope, now that the sky was clear. But it had been more of a rustling sound, like fur. Maybe it was the coyote. Normally, fear would have gripped his body, and he would have woken Sam up so that he could tell him in his calm voice that it was probably just a raccoon, and then give him a kiss. But for some reason, maybe because of the lovely dream he’d just been having, he didn’t feel like he needed to disturb Sam tonight. He felt perfectly capable of just lying here silently, immaculately still, and allowing the straight man and the coyote to have their fun on the grassy hilltop under the dancing stars. He breathed in and out, and relaxed each muscle and tendon in turn. He felt his body dissolve slowly into a vast sea of energy.