When Mara was a kid, before she left the suburbs, her mom took her to a puppet show at a public library. The actors set up a whole stage in the children’s room, and the kids sat cross-legged to watch. The puppets danced and talked, and behind them, making them move, were actors dressed in black. They weren’t even hiding. They just stood there with their arms out, and when the puppets got animated they moved their arms faster. Mara knew that she was supposed to ignore them, to pretend the puppets were real and the people weren’t. But she couldn’t do it. She kept staring at the actors. There was a woman with long white hair who widened her eyes each time her puppet spoke, but her mouth didn’t move at all. The whole thing struck Mara as horrible. She couldn’t remember the storyline they were acting out. Even at the time it seemed beside the point.

Eventually she started crying, loud enough that others in the audience turned to look. One of the puppets broke from script to say, “Little girl, what’s wrong?” which only made Mara cry harder. Her mom rushed her out, apologizing, and they went for ice cream instead.

Mara hadn’t thought of that show in years, maybe a decade, and she wasn’t sure why the memory came to her then. She thought maybe it was how the cameras had made her feel. Like she was the puppet master, and Mara on-screen the puppet, rushing around for her little tasks, and everyone had agreed to pretend that that was the real story. Even if the audience could see the real Mara somehow—the woman who needed money, who was lost, who cheated on her boyfriend and couldn’t even bring herself to care, because she cared so little for anything she’d left behind—they’d wish they hadn’t. They’d pretend her away. Because they came for a performance, a story, with all the comfort a story entailed, the promise of beginning and middle and end. They came for entertainment. They came to watch her dance.

That was how Mara felt about McCandless, now that she thought about it. Except it seemed sadder, because he was dead. Everyone talked about the story, the performance, and not the man making the figure move. And that seemed like a second death somehow. Like every time they ignored the figure in black, he died a little more. And his creation, this dancing doll, this subject of campfire debate, this inspiration to Boy Scouts in Indiana, spun faster and faster.

She wondered if, like Kyle, McCandless had wanted to die. Or if, like Kyle, he had wanted to live.

There was some part of Kyle, Mara thought, that wanted to make a puppet desperately. That was why he came here, wasn’t it? To make a performance of who he wanted to be, triumphant and fearless and wise. To come to agreement with the audience about who he really was, a character for them to root for and for him to become.