chapter 7

The rhythm of my footsteps and the crunch of the dirt under my boot built a metronome in my heart as its pitter-patters climbed and fell with the hills. Sweating against the cool night air my pores pushed out the microscopic bits the city air had packed into me.

They said I kept impressive pace for not getting out, but honestly I pushed my self to near black out as not to seem too slow to her. She rode my heels; stopping is surrender to embarrassment. I left my thoughts in the Toyota.

Red on the horizon.

I practically bit the back of his head, grabbing the sides of his backpack. If he had said we were stopping I hadn’t heard.

“Whoa”

Sara must have grabbed some hold on my bag, the shoulder straps tightened and my center of gravity balanced. The trees in this spot grew less dense, or had been removed - I couldn’t tell. My breaths grew longer and sparser, the metronome calmed and I perked my ears like a critter – running water? A river perhaps. Marcus dropped his pack. I heard Sara’s hit the ground behind me.

I took mine off. My sweat soaked through my sweatshirt and immediately the slightest breeze sent me into shivers. Ruffling through my bag for a sweater I started looking around. Marcus clicked a flashlight, he had one in front of me during the hike but I never saw anything directly under it. Seeing my own hands after hours of blueness made me want a sink. Filthy.

“We’re here” he said.

“We’re where?” I asked. He flicked his flashlight up and centered it on flatness. It took a moment to decipher it. A tiny cabin.

“Forest Service, more or less free to use, its like forty bucks in the summer time but its free to us now. There are no beds, but there are hammocks and it’s actually very comfy for what you expect. Especially after a hike like that, way not to be some cliché wind huffer, you kept pace pretty good”

“Thank you” I said. Wind Huffer?

I walked inside the little cabin, seeing only from the weak and even moonlight the almost arachnid shadow of the hammock. Sara had laid out the near vintage sleeping bag, and I tried not to think how fast all the spiders and mites must have rushed it for warmth. It must have been Sara; Marcus had been outside with me moments before. I sat down, sinking to where my tailbone bobbed at the maxim of the hammocks stretch only a few inches above the old dry floorboards. Awkwardly finding the point of stability, hesitant from the un natural sensation of the cradle. I stood up again, after feeling something under my thigh. A cookie. Another cookie. The last one tasted like cardboard but this one felt softer, had an earthier smell to it, it must have been high in some sort of hippie- meal. I nibbled it first, succumbing to uncomfortable hunger, then began stuffing it in my mouth to satisfy more than my stomach. I had it, I had to consume it.

I lay down on the hammock, pulling the sleeping bag tight around me. I could hear them talking, their voices tapping the paper-thin windows like flies bouncing off the plexy. There voices went back and forth, but I heard no passion, no, she wasn’t even trying. blah blah blah blah I don’t really care. Blah blah I know but blah blah irrelevant. I’ll just close my eyes a little, then go see what’s going on outside. I could use a fire, some s’mores would be nice. I’ll just close my eyes for a minute I thought.

Right before I slipped away.

There voices became predictable, rising and falling in a calm matter of factness, a dialogue on beat ticking like a metronome. Slowing my heart, swinging, oh how low. Eyelids heavy now. Lashes getting drunk and close. Retinas growing and shrinking to the moonlight so blue it made the vintage red of the sleeping bag look a little purpling bruise.

Flickers on the window cast their blotchening shadows as the fired kicked up. The yellow and white never diminished from the center of the glass, but cutting left and right and up and down were the reflections between the night and the light and between their hand motions and shifts that cast shadows and spun patterns onto the pane like spattering blood or the frequency of jittering sounds as if the window, tiny and flat, was the cockpit glass from forty thousand leagues under the sea and the seaweed and slithering creatures of the unexplored domain were the markers of forward motion on the concaved imagery of dirty little window.

Where was I. What the fuck was going on. Somewhere I was comfortable. I was dreaming. I knew I was dreaming. I think I am dreaming, I thought. I was not dreaming, unless dreaming was as simple as this incredible mind (mine and yours!) that makes us so different than the critters that wouldn’t think twice to sleep outside transcends that bullshit conception of time and the farce of space and our powerful, glorious minds knew all along not only what was going on in our physical dimensions, but all the others as well! I believed that and forgot everything else I had ever thought on the presumptuously out of reach concepts of my idling thoughts.

Something had changed, elsewhere it hadn’t. Elsewhere my mind and mannerisms were in a micro-economics class text messaging the days events back and forth under the table without even looking at the screen. Who looks at the screen? I had missed something important, as I had earlier that day when text messaging that same person cost me a glance that would have other wise been directed at a half Thai/French culinary student who in some other path of mind would have become my best wife.

But if this is true, at their hands, then, in the balance of that equation I was outside, on the rock, speaking to Sara as if it were my job. Marcus would be here, curled in a cocoon in the middle of the last place its wits would have placed him. Maybe in a hotel room in Bangkok or maybe a shack in the Adirondacks. What was I saying to him, how did my reflection cast with the fire on the tiny window and where did it look as though that vessel traveled. What was his prison and how did it get tighter as he sank in the hammock. Her too. How low did her hammock sink, what did she taste like, and did she know that when she handed me the cheesecake a world away in their lie of a kitchen, I smiled not because her finger tips touched mine, but because feeling hers I immediately knew she had never touched a violin in her life.

I hit the wood. I had not been out the door. I had heard through the wall and stretched my ear to the door until the whole thing came apart like a wet hot dog bun. Tearing, the all of me flopped against the floor. Conversation stopped. I gathered myself up on my elbows, crouching awkwardly in the dark while the remnants of netting fretted against my neck and scared me with sensations of spiders legs and moth’s wings colliding against my neck hairs.

I couldn’t feel my hands.

“Lying on my back and counting the stars, it causes a chill all over the top of my back. A nervous chill, you know? Like when you remember a time you fucked up royally and slipped by. When you realize that you shouldn’t even be where you are enjoying your freedom because, if the system actually worked, if karma came back and god existed, you’d be in jail or six feet under. Live life close to the bone and you can’t count the stars anymore because your not lying in a field counting stars, you’re still lying in your best friends living room counting your pulse, counting the flickers off the skylight that are in fact millions of years old – photons surviving the rigors of space to be accounted for between fearful cold sweats of a fading heart beat.

That’s what Marcus was saying. I could hear it now, through the wall, as if I’d crawled on my hands and knees down in the filthy with the spiders to spy a conversation I was presumably invited to in the first place. “Painkillers are a funny thing friend, they kill indiscriminately” he was talking to me. He saw my head around the corner. How would he call her friend?

“They silence the pangs after knee surgery or they can silence that little drummer boy in your chest. Then you realize, right before you black out and dream in the mat black cosmos of the celestial highway, that you got to, absolutely have to kill the little boy inside you or, one of the times you look back over your shoulder for him…he’ll kill you. You’ll turn and he’ll be there, smiling dumbly tossing breadcrumbs to the ducks as the rest of our world blindsides you – unless you can”

Were these his thoughts or mine? Hers? Or all of ours unaltered as if I looked upon the fire to not see it only through its bending shadows and glares from the window but directly in the vulnerable state of flesh. Goddamn the window frame! Damn the shack and cell phone. My throat ached, I had been sick and tried to make myself get it out. It hurt. It couldn’t do anything else but hurt and no play of light could convince me otherwise.