Out there, p.21
Out There, page 21
“Will it happen tonight?” Meg said, as they picked at the remaining fries.
“Either tonight or tomorrow night,” Roger said. “I do not know which.”
“If you’re still here tomorrow, we should go on a hike,” Meg said.
“I would like that very much,” Roger said.
Roger was quieter than usual. He seemed to have settled into himself, and Meg realized that prior to this time, he must have been racked with a painful longing to arrive at Big Sur. Now that he was close to achieving his purpose, they were able to be present with each other. They stopped at a scenic overlook on the drive back to the cabin. Roger helped Meg climb the sand dunes off the parking lot. They slid over them, laughing, before collapsing into the sand. There was a new moon, and the darkness allowed the stars to stand in sharp relief, brighter than they ever could be in the city.
Back in the cabin, they had sex again. This sex had a different quality than before, slow and exploratory, each transaction defined by Meg’s awareness that it would never be repeated. They both came eventually, then lay with their bodies entwined, the white sheets gritty with sand.
“I don’t want to fall asleep,” Meg whispered.
“You must, Meg,” Roger said. “Sleep is essential for bodily and mental health.”
“Once I fall asleep, I might never see you again,” Meg said. She thought maybe if she stayed awake, she could keep Roger with her longer, at least one more day.
“There is another Murakami quote that I have been thinking about,” Roger said. “ ‘If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.’ ”
Meg began crying, silently, the tears forming a wet patch on the linen beneath her cheek. She didn’t think Roger would notice, but he tightened his arms around her. “Do not cry, Meg,” he said softly. “I will always remember this day we’ve spent together. It has been the best day of my entire life.”
His words comforted her, as they contained an implicit promise that Roger would continue existing, in some form. She understood that this was his purpose, his destiny, that standing in the way of it would do neither of them any good. She fell asleep in his arms, and slept better than she had in months. When she woke in the morning he was gone, the air in the room suffused by a fresh lavender scent.
She rolled over to the tree stump and opened her laptop, hoping to find some message from Roger, a love note scrawled in a Word document. But there was nothing. Later, when she was back in cell service, Meg would check her phone and find a photo Roger had sent the night before—at 8:35 p.m., when she had been in the bathroom at the restaurant—of a cocker spaniel wearing a straw panama hat. The message had gone through on Roger’s end, meaning that wherever he and his phone had vanished to, there was cell service. She replied with a heart emoji, hoping he would respond, but hours and days passed, and he never did. She would keep texting Roger for years, even after she had begun dating the man she would marry and moved to a suburb of Seattle, where they started a family. She wanted to keep him updated, hoping that wherever he was, whatever blot hive mind he’d been absorbed into, some ember of his consciousness could still see her messages, even if he could never respond.
Meg made coffee from some stale grounds she found in the kitchen cupboard. She went on a long hike, and finally, as the sun drew low over the sea, began the journey north to reassemble her life.
For my parents
Acknowledgments
All my thanks to my agent, Emma Patterson, for believing in my work and remaining my tireless advocate. Thank you to my editors, Clio Seraphim and Kwaku Osei-Afrifa, and their teams at Random House and Hodder Studio, for making the dream of this book into a reality.
These stories benefited from the feedback of my peers in the Stegner fiction workshop: Georgina Beaty, Brendan Bowles, Jamel Brinkley, Neha Chaudhary-Kamdar, Lydia Conklin, Evgeniya Dame, Devyn Defoe, Matthew Denton-Edmundson, Asiya Gaildon, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Nicole Caplain Kelly, Jamil Jan Kochai, Fatima Kola, and Gothataone Moeng. Thanks also to James Cotter, Brigid M. Hughes, Evan Karp, Lisa Locascio, David Mendoza, Ploi Pirapokin, and Joel Tomfohr for your friendship and support.
I’m grateful for my professors, especially Stephen Beachy, David Booth, Lewis Buzbee, Adam Johnson, Chang-rae Lee, and Elizabeth Tallent, for teaching me new ways of thinking about writing. I’m also grateful to Claire Boyle, Laura Cogan, Willing Davidson, and Oscar Villalon for their editorial guidance and championing of my work.
The completion of this book was aided by the generosity of the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, Stanford University, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Thanks above all to my parents, for telling me stories.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Folk has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Zyzzyva. She’s received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recently, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco. Out There is her first book.
katefolk.com
Twitter: @katefolk
Instagram: @kate__folk
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Kate Folk, Out There
