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Suitcase
A woman gets on an airplane. Traveling light, just a carry-on, which she stows in the bin above her head. Night flight. Smooth, no turbulence, half-empty plane. She stretches out across three seats and sleeps.
Gets where she's going, rents a car, a jazzy red Toyota. Mountains to the north and she heads that way, a long drive broken by stops for lunch and supplies. Late April; there's still snow on the peaks. Freeway to highway to high-country high-crowned two-lane, hardwood giving way to pine. Rutted track along the ridge, thickly overgrown, easy to miss and she does. Look for a red mailbox the instructions say, and there it is when she comes back by the second time, easier to see from this direction. The cabin too. There it is, chimney and corner of mossy roof visible through the trees.
Two room rustic charm. Water, elect. but no phone. Privacy. Stream. Get away from it all in this Mountain Hide-Away. Wkend/wk/mo.
She gets out of the car and smells the wind: pine, clean dampness. The stream, a glittering curved band, divides the grassy clearing where the cabin stands from the dark forest. One curious thing: at the point where the stream passes closest to the cabin there's a waterwheel. A working waterwheel, wet blades dipping and rising. Hooked to a machine of some kind. It powers a generator, she sees as she walks closer. Juice for the cabin.
Late afternoon. A tiring day; sleeping on planes doesn't rest her. Door key where the rental people said, under the mat. She lets herself in. The air is close, smelling of dust, mice, kerosene. Light switch on the wall, overhead bulb but nothing doing. Burned out, she thinks, or something to do with the generator. She'll look into it later. Lantern on the table, matches, wood stove, maybe she won't look into it. She has left her laptop at home. Wants to go deeper than she thinks that much technology allows. Thinks there's more truth in pen and yellow paper than in a blinking cursor on a screen. Sketchbook and pastels. Clay tablet and stylus. Maybe she'll scratch on the ground with a stick.
Taking inventory:
Front room: stove, table with one short leg, two chairs. Sink. The water runs, as promised. Cold only, gravity-fed from the stream. A bookshelf. Cupboards and drawers with the expected pots, pans, utensils. Unexpected cans of pork & beans, creamed corn, stewed tomatoes, noodle soup. Three kinds of hot sauce, the biggest can of cayenne pepper she's ever seen in her life. Two big jars of curry powder, red and yellow; someone looking to spice up their life. She stacks her own groceries on the table to put away later, and as she does so, a small brown animal runs across her foot and bee-lines out the door. Bigger than a mouse. Furry tail, thank god, probably a squirrel, no doubt harmless but good riddance anyway.
Back room: bed, dresser with spotty mirror in curly black-gilt frame, old fashioned armoire, large and heavy, the wood dark, with a high finish. Why bother? — imagining some city wife's tearful insistence on this little piece of home. She slings her bag onto the bed, hangs her jacket from a peg on the wall. Also on the wall, two mountainscapes. With the real thing right outside? She lifts them down, tilts them face-in against the side of the armoire.
Outhouse: a two-holer, first one she's seen in years. Crescent moon cut into the door. Not much of a smell this early in the year, and no flies at all.
Her leather carry-on is the genuine article, supple, capacious and strong. Even now, after so many years, its scent makes her think of riding stables. It cost her plenty, but it will never wear out. Already it's lasted longer than her longest relationship, her longest job, her longest stay in any one place. She's from a military family. Got used early on to packing and leaving, to wide but shallow roots. This bag has gone with her around the world. It's always partly packed — toothbrush, aspirin, band-aids, a bird guide and compact binoculars remain from one trip to the next.
She sits down on the bed beside it, unbuckles the top flap. It's empty. Nothing at all in the main compartment, nothing in any of the pockets. Not a sock, not a shirt. Not a comb or safety pin, not a book or a magazine, not a single sheet of the yellow writing paper onto which she had thought to pour her heart. No cell phone, of course. Not trusting her eyes, she reaches inside, probes the empty corners. Nothing.
She sits on the bed, more of a cot, really, a bit swaybacked, mattress too thin for the rent she's paying. She sits there a long time. Every now and then she looks into her bag but it doesn't stop being empty. Her things don't stop being missing. Lost. Not there. She can't explain it, can't even begin. Her mind veers. Something else she can't begin to explain is this: when she lifts the bag it feels heavy — every bit as heavy as it did when she packed it. Her things are still there, she just can't see or touch them.
There are plenty of things in the cabin, but they are someone else's things. Sheets and blankets for the bed, sweaters and jeans in the armoire. Not her sweaters and jeans, of course, even though they look as if they ought to fit. Books on the shelves, a bird guide with a life-list in the back with most of the raptors checked off, but they are someone else's books and someone else's falcons and owls. Even the groceries she bought and left on the table have vanished when she returns to the front room, so the food in the cabin is somebody else's food. There's even a bottle of somebody's single malt on the top shelf of the cupboard, half-hidden behind the pork & beans.
She knows without looking that her purse too will have emptied itself but she opens it anyway. No wallet, no car keys, no favorite pen. She helps herself to a drink and returns to the back room. There sits her bag on the bed. It looks full; its scuffed tan sides and pockets bulge promisingly. She sits down beside it. Lifts it onto her lap, reassured by its weight, and runs the zipper back to its stop. Still empty. Its jaw hangs sadly open. Inside, nothing. Outside, the red Toyota melts into the gathering dark.
Robbed!
You'll see things more clearly in the morning, her mother used to say, and on this cold clear morning when the woman wakes, what she can clearly see is that she has been robbed. Not necessarily by robbers, not robbers in the usual sense of the word, but her things are gone. Even if they are still there, still somewhere (and they must be somewhere!), they are gone. For all intents and purposes. So far as she as concerned. And what other concerns has she?
Breakfast, for one. Breakfast for one. Coffee anyway; there's a jar of instant on the shelf with all the hot sauce. She finds a pan-that-is-not-her-pan and shoves another log into the woodburning stove-that-is-not-her-stove, then crunches across frost-spiky grass to the outhouse. On the way back she detours down by the creek to the waterwheel and the footbridge just beyond. Clever, that wheel, and pretty: mossy blades scooping and lifting, upflung water prisming needles of colored light. The generator squats in its doghouse, silent until she finds the switch and throws it. Ratcharatcha hummmm whirrrrr. She shuts it off again. Good to know about if she needs it, but she doesn't need it now. For now, she has no needs.
She follows the creek upstream. Her mind feels flat. Not empty, exactly: flat. Something heavy is holding it down. From time to time it gives a little twitch, floats up half a thought or plan: hike into town, find a phone... check firewood, kerosene... It's hard to plan when you've been robbed, she finds. Loss and confusion get in the way. And questions. Whose jeans, whose sweater is she wearing? Everything fits, but nothing is exactly what she'd have chosen. Walk slower, these boots say. Don't tire yourself out. Shut up, she says. Talking shoes, my god, and breaks into a jog to spite them.
The thin air slows her down again. Blood pounds in her ears. A woodpecker bangs away somewhere in the woods fairly close by, and jays shout back and forth across the creek. Squirrels and chipmunks chitter. The path climbs steeply to a bluff where she stops to catch her breath, looking out over a valley. A hawk soars overhead, riding updrafts as the sun warms the granite that glints like a scalp through the thin high-country pines. Kee-ree! it cries. Kee-ree! She turns back toward the cabin.
The woman is fifty-five years old. A half-century and counting. Lynn Mays is her name.
Until recently she had a good job, but now she is unemployed. Her company — ex-company — which is large and glossy and cutting-edge, has been bought by another even larger and glossier. There's been a change of management, a change of concept, design, look, you name it. Rolling heads don't gather moss. You, you and you: OUT! Two weeks' notice, generous severance, but: OUT.
She's been given notice by her lover, too. More like two days than two weeks. Hey you, across the breakfast table; you, on the other side of the bed: OUT! Okay okay, she's gone. Someday you'll be sorry; you never miss the water till the well.
The loss of her job she has chosen to see as an opportunity. She has savings, some investments, plus the severance package of course. And contacts — she knows people, she's not without options. Without her lover she is free, she tries to pretend she believes. She pictures herself holed up here in the high country — wild mountain gal! — hauling fish from the stream, tanning hides, grinding acorns for flour. Drinking in enlightenment with every breath and pouring it back as blue ink squiggles on her yellow pad. She used to be an artist. A painter. Used to be a poet too, of sorts, till life got in the way.
If she hadn't been robbed, she could write about all this. Women Who Run With Varmints, or something. Whip out a best-seller, give bookstore readings, be surrounded by red-hot babes. Yeah, right.
The lover who left her is thirty-eight. She used to be married, but no kids. Now, she tells Lynn, she hears herself growing older; at night she hears the cells of her body breaking down. They make a noise, she says. Little ripping sounds like tearing cloth. She wants a child. Wants a normal family again. A normal family, that's what she said. When Lynn tries to think about this her mind sputters and goes dark. Reboot. And what comes up on the screen is a sputter and more darkness. Reboot, and what comes up? A sputter and more darkness.
Normal?
Lynn wants her own things back. Her own clothes, her binoculars, her credit cards, her lover's breasts under her hands, her lover's full attention. Her life. She wants her own life back. She wants a cup of coffee.
Roots & Berries
Dreaming in animal darkness, dreaming of tongues and fingers and the safety of strong arms you wake to tooth-sharp hunger and climb down from the tree where you have slept in your nest of twigs and leaves. Head first, down you go. Tiny, nearly weightless, you have shed yesterday's skin and clothes. You've grown fur, a sleek brown-mottled pelt; grown a tail; grown sharp and sturdy claws.
The world has changed. Dewdrops swell on the undersides of weedblades. You run through rainbows. Rocks astonish with their texture. The air, woven thick with messages, sends and receives and sends as the breeze shifts. Your nostrils and whiskers quiver. You sense ... not conversation, but communication all around: humm thrumm, not something you hear (though your hearing is acute) so much as connect to through your skin. Yet your mind continues in its human way as well, a background chitter of to-do lists, song lyrics, memories, questions, explanations, sudden inspirations, prayers and profanity. Yesterday's words in yesterday's English remark the changes in the world and in you. Your mind, in yesterday's language, remarks on the oddness of the fact that you don't find the changes odd.
To do on Tuesday: Lay in a supply of roots and berries.
For that is what you eat, and you are hungry. Your mind quiets as you follow an air-strand of musky dampness and rotting vegetation through the dense weave of other scents to a place near the creek where the earth is black and soft. There you dig, exposing fat crisp tubers which you devour one-two-three and leave the rest though English words scold faintly cover them, save them for later but you know there are plenty, and that covering them up is not what you do.
The rules are clear, and not difficult.
Eat. Drink. Evacuate. Be Alert For Danger. Find Shelter. Sleep. A few others. They require brain-stem attention, constant but background. Beyond them... The breeze shifts again, a thin streamer of smoke wafts past. Alarm, then recognition — firewood, cookstove — in a heartbeat.
Yes. Beyond the rules lie chance and possibility. You know these words, you remember their meanings in the language you still speak in your mind. These meanings have no meaning to you now.
You like bright. This statement has meaning. It seems profound. You like the wink of sun on certain small white stones, the warm shine of gold rings but anything will do, any bit of metal catching light. Keys, like the ones that glinted in the grass beside the rental car late yesterday afternoon. You didn't notice them then, but they registered in non-word memory. You could get those keys now, those keys and two white pebbles from the creek. Get them and carry them to a place you know about. You would know they were there. This knowledge would be meaningful.
The berries are green and hard.
You know where they are, you can smell them in their tongue-tightening immaturity, but you wouldn't want to eat them yet. You know where they are but you don't go there, you go to a shady place at the edge of a meadow where dew hangs from the tips of young fern-fronds and you drink with quick flicks of your tongue. A little ways away you squat and defecate; this you cover, kicking up dust with your hind paws.
In the clearing stands the cabin and beneath a pine tree near the cabin door is another cache of roots. These too you dig and eat one-two-three and leave the rest. You can hear the woman whose body you so recently inhabited moving around inside, clattering pans on the woodstove's iron top, clomping big boots on the plank floor. After awhile she appears in the doorway, pulling a sweater over her head. She sits down on the steps with her cup and her writing pad and pen, but she doesn't write, she stares across the creek. Something about her isn't right. She sits without moving while the shadow of the porch roof crawls slowly up her outstretched legs. After awhile you start to move closer but another shadow passes across the clearing, chilling and charging the air, stilling the humm thrumm, all smells replaced by a blue electric sizzle that flattens you against rough bark where pelt-patterns erase you from view. The world stops. Everything stops. Then kee-ree! far above and fading; you and the world can move again.
You wonder that you wonder so little. Yesterday you wore that human envelope. Today you don't know what you are, only that you are, and there are others like you. The woman is alone. She is more than alone. You can smell the animal hair her sweater is made of, and the animal skin of her boots. But she herself has no smell at all. Perhaps this is why she's alone: no one can find her.
No business of yours. Your business is to dig and eat the tubers one-two-three and leave the rest uncovered, and if you come back to where they were they're never there, they have been eaten by others, for those are the rules.
Second Thoughts
Clever, she thinks, to use the creek for power. To have that option. Not to be dependent, to be off the grid. Off the grid: she likes the sound of that but doesn't like its associations. Militiamen. Shootouts, children going up in flames. She regards the power wires leading in from the highway, the long shallow scallops they make in the air, perches for birds, elevated paths for squirrels and other small creatures, the spare graceful reach from one pole to the next. Bringing light, bringing warmth, bringing the Saturday afternoon opera, the baseball game. Bearing glad tidings, bearing the news of the world.
But what of storms? What of trees that fall, what of ice and heavy snow, avalanches, earthquakes, tantrums of the gods? A water wheel. Someone was thinking ahead.
But what if the creek freezes? Cold as it gets up here!
It's not cold now, though, not really, here on the front steps of the cabin with a mug of tea steaming beside her. Not since the sun has cleared the treetops. It glints on the roof of the red Toyota. Automatically she pats her pockets. Her keys have not returned. A hawk wheels overhead. Keeree! Acorns or something rain out of a nearby tree, bouncing and rattling on the cabin roof.
She has been writing, making a list with someone else's ballpoint pen on a damp-buckled yellow legal pad she found on a shelf above the stove. She has drawn a line vertically down the middle of the page. Left side: Reasons to Stay. Right side: Reasons to Get the Hell Out. Take it as a challenge, she tells herself, pen poised above Stay. You wanted to go deeper, here's your chance. Deeper? She doesn't know what that means, but the builder of the waterwheel — the generator of the generator? — obviously did. Go deeper. She can't even find the surface. Moves her pen to the other side of the line. You're a lucky one, she thinks. Options, you've got options. You're not that old, you have money in the bank, good health, marketable skills.
No girlfriend, but even that's a plus, or can be seen that way. Better off without her, without her ticking bioclock and guys-or-girls second thoughts.
But everyone has second thoughts. Third thoughts, 23rd thoughts in her own case, and why stop there? She has always believed in keeping options open, in seeing all sides of every argument, of devil's-advocating on principle to be sure even the crackpot ideas are heard. You're so goddam fair-minded, her ex berated her, all manner of hard truths surfacing as she stuffed Lynn's socks and underwear, unfolded, into a suitcase. You're so fucking reasonable all the time. Don't you have any convictions? Tears rolling down her cheeks as Lynn stood helpless. You act like you think there's no difference between Attilla the Hun and Mother Theresa. How can I love you when I don't know who you are? Goddammit, Lynn, not everything in the world is relative.
Had she ever said it was? She can't remember. Probably so, probably just for the sake of argument. Does she believe it? She doesn't know.
A small brown animal of some kind hops up on the porch railing. It carries a tuber or nut in its mouth, which it proceeds to eat, holding it daintily between its forepaws. It isn't a squirrel and it isn't a chipmunk, and that's the extent of her list of small fluffy-tailed rodents. The Landlord, she thinks; probably the little critter that was in the cabin when she arrived. Keeping an eye on the property. If she had any bread or cereal, if her groceries hadn't disappeared along with everything else, she'd have offered him something. A bribe: find the gremlins who have done this to me, and bite them. Give them rabies or Lyme disease. Hanta virus. Bubonic plague.
"I'm going to open a can of hash," she tells it. "Full of nitrates, nitrites, salt and saturated fat. Want some?"
The Landlord lifts his nose from the half-eaten pod in his paws and cocks his head, chewing briskly.
"That's if I can find a can-opener."
The Landlord cocks his head the other way, considers the pod for a moment and discards it. Then, with a flip of his tail he jumps down from the railing and disappears. A few minutes later she sees him again, or another just like him, over by the creek. Him and three or four of his buddies. Digging.
Go deeper.
Old Broads
Options? What options? She's not that old? — that's a laugh. She's older than dirt, at least in the 20-something-dominated dotcom world that took over her part of town, grabbing up the warehouses, the studio spaces where in dreams she still remembers artists' collectives, writers' collectives, music and theater and health collectives, Lesbian Nation women on the edge of the grid or off it altogether, banding together to get the word out and take care of their own. Most of the dotcoms gone now, of course, but their damage remains. The dreams are real enough, as such things go; it's the memories she doubts. Nothing to do with her, at any rate. She was never collected or collectable, never political, always something of a loner. Preparing even then, it seems to her now, to find herself stranded, alone, unloved and unemployed in someone else's mountain cabin, wearing someone else's clothes, mocked and deserted by her own belongings.
Even if those warehouses never housed groups of women; certainly they've been home to artists, dancers, actors ... and certainly these people were displaced by new companies staffed by the barely-weaned. In a sense this displacement is also hers. Never mind her (impressive and relevant) skills and experience. Now that she has been let go, she will never find another job in that part of the city.
Lynn is a graphic designer. Long ago, in what feels like someone else's life, she used to be someone who painted, made prints and collages, sculpted figures in wood and clay. In college she wrote passionate sonnets to her roommate, changed the pronouns around, won a prize. She briefly considered the painful pleasures of a poet's life sprung from a rootless youth, from moving every few years, changing schools like underwear; from falling in love (again and yet again, town after town) with her best friend, scout leader, gym teacher. All the loneliness and fear. Too scary. At least in twice-a-week painting class she could gaze without shame at the bodies of naked women.
The gym teacher Lynn loved in her senior year was not much older than the girls she coached. Ms K, with her short dark curly hair. The rhythmic left-right clench and release of her buttocks under thin blue nylon shorts when she jogged with her students. The luscious Ms K — an old broad now, Lynn thinks. Old broads, all of us. Are old-broad gym teachers as unemployable as old-broad graphic designers in the digital age? Even old graphic designers with first rate digital skills? Nevermind contacts. They see you coming, a few grey streaks in your hair: forget it.
She wants to forget it. Options, she's got options, this is not a closing but an opening, a yes and not a no. She wants to paint again, to write, pick up that other life she dropped. That's what this trip to the mountains is all about, supposedly.
An artist makes art, she tells herself. Robbed of sketchbook and pastels, a real artist would make do. Cayenne pepper, curry powder, maybe a packet of saffron. A raked bare surface near the creek, free of weeds and pebbles and pebbly little Landlord turds, that's all an artist needs. Crouching, steadying herself on the fingertips of one hand, tap-tap-tapping the pepper can with two fingers of the other. Tap tap taptap, a square of four disconnected lines; tap tap taptap, another smaller square inside it, and then another, lines that look as if they're drawn with powdered blood. Too dark. Too close to what she really feels, not where she wants to go, and she's afraid of sneezing. Taptap tap: saffron highlights. Tap tap tap tap tap.
Tippy Tappett, believe it or not, had been her new boss's name. After the acquisition. Tippy Tappett, 28 years old, with her horsey laugh and her gang of infant thugs. No one is named Tippy Tappett, not in a sane world; certainly no one by that name should have the power to hire or fire actual adults.
Children playing dress-up, she thinks, pouring more hot water over the teabag in her cup, shoving another chunk of pine into the stove, vaguely aware of changing light and shadow, a chilly edge to the wind, the broad sweep of the day. Children playing I'm-the-Boss at some absent Real Boss's desk. Kids young enough to be her own, if she'd had any — nearly young enough to be her ex's, if she'd had any. If ex's marriage had produced kids, Lynn muses, even just one, her clock wouldn't be ticking overtime now like a delayed reaction '80's cliché and the two of them would still be together. She, Lynn, could still think of herself as part of a family, no matter how small.
A normal family. Two people can make a normal family, no matter what their names are. Attilla the Honey and Mama Theresa, why not? It was wrong for ex to throw that normal bullshit at her, no matter what her clock was doing. And it was wrong that Lynn couldn't get a job just because children wanted to hire other children. The old-babies' network, Jesus Christ. They kick out the artists and the dancers and the street clinic and they jack up the rents and fill the spaces with 19 year old geeks that don't know north light from the North Pole. And they look at you, and they look at your sox-knocker resumé and your portfolio proof of breadth/depth/ experience/originality and they twist their facial jewelry and smirk.
If I were a vengeful sort, she thinks, I'd be plotting some serious vengeance.
Reasons to Stay
She has to do something. A day wasted already; the sun rests just above the treetops and she is no farther along than she was when she sat down with her cup of tea, hours and hours and hours ago. She hasn't been sitting here the whole time, she supposes, though she is hard pressed to recall what else she might have done. She must have eaten something: a smeared blue Melmac plate rests on the porch rail, a crumpled paper napkin blown from the porch has caught in some spiky weeds beside the path. She vaguely remembers opening a can, finding a tin of crackers, making tea.
And she vaguely remembers sprinkling pepper on the ground, thinks she recalls some fleeting sense of purpose close to prayer. Down on her knees there by the creek, she thinks, and wonders if those were her hands brushing weed husks and small stones from the packed granitic earth and what the purpose might have been. It's exhausting to think about. All the same, she peers toward the creek. If she walked over there, what would she find?
An image comes to her: patterns of right angles, nested squares, the corners not quite joined, drawn not with blood-dark pepper, but with what looks like lines of glowing orange chrysanthemum petals.
A pad of lined yellow paper rests on her lap, an uncapped red Bic tucked under the top few pages. REASONS TO STAY, she has written in block letters. Then a vertical line down the page, then REASONS TO GO. In however long she has been sitting here, that is what she has written. Reasons to Stay. Reasons to Go. That and nothing more, no orange squares beside the creek just the sun slipping lower, drawing mid-day warmth along with it. "This is ridiculous," she says into the clear, almost-cold late-afternoon light, and takes up the red pen. At once her brain tries to shut down as it did earlier but she stays alert this time, maintains control. "Reasons to Stay," she reads aloud.
Okay, to begin with:
1) Embarrassed to leave. Embarrassed to tell the necessary stories to the necessary people to effect rescue.
2) Paid for two weeks. No refund at this point, so might as well get money's worth.
3) Stick around awhile, stuff may turn up.
Her car keys at the very least. If she had keys to the car, she wouldn't feel so trapped. She'd know she could leave whenever she wanted; could take herself someplace where there was a phone, a police station, a bank. Maybe even a branch of her own bank! Her heart gives a happy little skip, as if it thinks that even without ID she'll be able to transfer funds.
Okay, how about:
4) Stick around forever, stuff does not turn up, and this turns out to be instructive.
Go deeper.
When it comes to life lessons, her head is like a rock. Always has been. She knows it's true, doesn't need to be reminded. This is a lie. She does need to be reminded, daily. Hourly wouldn't hurt.
Go deeper.
She doesn't want to go deeper. She wants to stay where she is, safe on the surface where she can see what's coming. Safe on the familiar warm warty skin of the planet.
Her furry brown Landlord returns. No, not the same one, she sees. Landlord has sent a cousin or friend, with a yellowish spot on his head. Landlord II. He sits on the porch railing with his tail curled over his back, eyeing the remains of her lunch congealed on the blue plate. "Go ahead, be my guest," but with a flip of his tail he vanishes again.
Random thoughts. They get their own list, on their own sheet of paper:
1) If she breaks a window on the Toyota she might be able to hot-wire the engine. She has seen this done. It didn't look hard.
2) If she gets up early, gets an early start, she can hike up to the glacier the rental people mentioned. A good trail, they said. Pack a lunch, a great day hike, but get back before dark.
3) If she gets up early, gets an early start, she can walk out to the highway and hitch a ride to town.
4) If Tippy Tappett just happened to be backpacking in the area (if, say, backpacking just happened to be her favorite activity), and if she were to happen to get lost and separated from her companions and stumble on the cabin late at night, famished and half-frozen and alone, in need of rescue
She leaves this thought unfinished. Tippy Tappett in the great outdoors, not likely, even if she wasn't at the convention this week. Which she is.
Reasons to Go
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
Deeper.
Landlord II (or III, or VII) scampers through lengthening shadows toward a stand of pines. Halfway there he pauses, sniffs, digs. A wind has come up, cold now that the sun is getting low; Lynn can feel the glacier's breath. It ruffles the fur on the Landlord's tail and bends the weedstems above his head. He uproots something and squats on his haunches to eat. Finishing quickly, he remains sitting upright for several minutes, front paws tucked to his chest, head cocked this way, then that. Suddenly he stiffens, sits taller, tail no longer curled but straight. Ratcharatcharatch! he scolds into the wind. Ratcharatch!
Intruder
Dreaming in animal darkness, dreaming of brush on canvas, nib on paper, swirl of blue ink making sense out of chaos, you wake to the scent of Intruder. Your fur bristles. Nose and whiskers read the charged cold air.
It is night. Not late. In the cabin the woman clatters plates and pans. Light from the window throws a yellow patch onto the trunk of the tree where you were sleeping, and the red fender of the car gleams softly. You can see the keys, also gleaming softly, still lying in the grass.
You are aware of sleeping. A muffled twitter in the branches above your head, and all around a soft breathing, breathing, quick heartbeats slowed and resting. This is how it is done. Owlshadow — silent, floating — is also how it's done. Hawk by day. Owl by night. Those are the rules. Owl and cat and coyote by night. Those are the rules and you follow them.
The Intruder is neither owl nor coyote nor cat. Large like a bear but not a bear. Trampling underbrush. Moving stupidly straight ahead down from the ridgeline. Human.
Night belongs to others, not to you, and you are afraid. This new human comes to you on the cold wind, scent and sound feeding your fear long before you pick its shape out of the darkness. These scents and sounds are not new. You were aware of them earlier, but earlier was day, and belonged to you. Earlier, those scents and sounds were faint, distant, like other distant scents and sounds, to be noted, held — a steady hummm, thrummm — at background level. A quiet bluegreen color. Change spikes the color, yellow or red, spikes the hummm to a squeal. A mineral taste of fear on your tongue.
The Intruder is human, but also something else. Something moldy, slightly acrid; the smell curls your lips back from your teeth. In the cabin, the woman is banging things around again. Her clumsy footsteps make you cringe. It is inconceivable that you ever made such noise. How can she expect to hide? How can she hear when the hummm starts to change, when the squeal begins? You have no doubt that her eyes are blind to the color of danger; that even if she were to look out the window — and there she is, suddenly, forehead against the pane so her breath fogs the glass — she wouldn't see the greygreen spike to yellow, as you do, up on your haunches now as the new human approaches, lurching downhill, misshapen, like a big bundle of something on two uneven legs.
The new human is sick. Defective. Wrong. She is to be avoided and shunned, like any wrong, sick thing, for those are the rules.
She has come here to die. You can smell it, a thick cold smell that makes you want to slink away, that makes you want to kick dust and cover it as you would your own dung. You smell it and you hear it now, in the uneven drag and scuffle of her feet on the path beside the creek and stump scratcha stump as she crosses the bridge. Pain. Cold. Fear. She gives them off in waves, spiking yellow, spiking red. Sickness and death; your teeth clack together chopchopchop you can't help it, you draw back against the treetrunk as sickness and death come walking cold and pain.
Stumpscratchastump and then she crumples against the little house with the oily machine inside. Cold pain sickness death. The waves wash out from her, spiking red spiking white sparks, and wash back in again. Death sickness pain cold. To be shunned and avoided, for those are the rules.
Curve
Dinner behind her Lynn cleans up, carrying wood from the stack in the lean-to behind the cabin and firing up the stove. Her main purpose is to heat water, but as night falls she is glad of the stove's warmth and cheery light. Add to it a kerosene lamp and the life of Wild Mountain Gal becomes momentarily attractive. Who's to say she can't do this? Who's to say she couldn't make a life, if not here in this cabin, somewhere very like it. Her own place. Someplace where she starts over with new things, with only the things she needs. She can do this, she is suddenly certain, and toasts herself with a drink from the bottle of single-malt. Against all odds, she knows she can carry it off.
Just ... no more curves, please. No sliders, no spitters or change-ups. She'd like a not-too-fastball up the middle, please. A fat one, with her name on it. No more disappearing stuff, no more talking boots, no more little furry critters spying on her every move. If everything settles just the way it is now, she thinks she can deal, can make a go of it, blend in with her surroundings and just ...
She pulls up short. Just what? Disappear, like her socks and underwear, like her bird guide? Follow them into some other reality, where, she imagines, her belongings have gathered and even now are waiting.
Yeah right, she thinks, and while we're at it let's have another drink.
Her soul hurts. She doesn't believe in souls, but hers has developed an ache, and a physical weight, heavy, dragging and lumpy like a burlap sack of something as she moves slowly across the room to shove more wood into the square red mouth of the stove.
Why does your soul hurt, Grasshopper?
It has been too long; she can't imagine an appropriate response, can't remember the Master's name. Okay: My soul hurts because my lover has left me and I have no work and my life has no meaning. I came to the mountains to find answers but instead I lost my clothes.
You are wearing clothes, Grasshopper. Your answer is no answer at all.
My soul hurts because the world is filled with pain and injustice. I am helpless before it all and use my helplessness as an excuse not to join in the fight against it.
You are being facile, Grasshopper. Your answer is not an answer.
She still knows bullshit when she sees it, and the whisky bottle is still more than half full. Equilibrium, she thinks. Equal volumes of liquid and air within the glass envelope. Strive for equilibrium in all things, said Ben Franklin, unless it was Thomas Jefferson. Grasshoppers, fried, are considered a delicacy in some cultures, and are a source of protein. Whoever bought the whisky had excellent taste.
My soul, in which I do not believe for a minute, hurts because I am 55 years old, half a century and counting, and my life has blown itself open and there is nothing inside. I believe in nothing. Literally, I believe that there is nothing there; that I — my flesh-and-blood self — and the phenomenal world that surrounds me, or seems to, are mere invention, cosmic curveballs, existential jokes. What could be funnier than a tree? A rock? How about a 40-story building? What prankster dreamed up oceans and set them a-sloshing and filled them with fish and not mermaids? Bad idea! Let there be mermaids! Certainly, if I invented an ocean I'd toss in a mergirl or two at the very least, just to prove I could.
Master, my soul hurts because my mind is full of bullshit. It's embarrassing to live a life as easy, as relatively blessed as mine has been, and not go daily on my knees in gratitude. But when I try for gratitude I get jokes. Cheap, paltry jokes, not worthy to touch the Mediterranean's hem, even without mermaids. Table grace: good food, good meat, good god, let's eat.
Please, she thinks, not knowing to what or whom the plea is addressed. Please, no more curves for a little while. Let me sort out what I've got.
She pours out a little more whisky and carries the glass over to the window where she stands, forehead against the cold pane, her breath fogging the glass. It is a cold night and the wind has risen. She thinks about stepping outside, standing on the porch in the wind, or maybe taking a walk by the creek. There's plenty of light from the three-quarters moon, so long as she stays out of the trees.
A walk in the night air, she thinks. You're drunk, girlfriend, you ought to sober up before you lie down. Otherwise it's seasick time, and what will the mermaids think?
There was no jacket in the armoire when she looked earlier, but she has gotten used to the way things work now, and knows that what she needs will be ready to hand. Sure enough, a thick woolen pea coat awaits her, heavy and not what she would have chosen, but she puts it on. A pass by the outhouse, she thinks, and a little walk; a little stroll beside the creek to clear her head.
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