On • In • By the Way
He started down the street on foot, an asphalt snake ever winding behind him, head never rearing. A black mass gathered overhead to threaten him with sodden clothing and dismal spirits, but he was not cowed. The music of Apricot filtered through his neural pathways to arrive on the doorstep of his mind as if proudly, like a dead mouse. He kicked it away. The delicately veined piano keys returned to poke at him.
He called her that because of the lotion she wore, the orange-rose scented fruit lacing through the air like a leviathan. Always she wore this monster, even when in a hurry, even when facing sleep, even when unshowered for days, or freshly washed and gleaming. She preferred his nickname for her — or one might say pet name, although a better candidate for pethood would be the worn blue potholder in the drawer of dishtowels, the flickering fluorescent light in the hallway, a photograph of someone’s grandmother cheaply framed and resting on the living mantle.
The first drops fell on his hat. Well that he had brought a hat. An SUV passed by, its windows darkened so that he could not quite see its inhabitants, and splashed his shoes. It was all that way now. A simultaneous showing and hiding. Every face opened wider, wider, like a carnivorous plant; every heart shut tighter, tighter, like a morning glory under moon.
He made a little skip. Why shouldn’t he skip? Could any jollier circumstance occur than the loss of all one’s possessions? A seashell shimmer of gasoline swirled in the little pool formed in the rocks of the roadside, as though having given itself up to the pretension of being the seaside, though it could never be; and he was happy, yes, happy to be; happy to be alone, and liberated, and emptied out. Images of the recent past flashed through his mind: scissors halving a credit card, strangers lugging away a sofa, the smile of a librarian hefting one of the many donated boxes.
His one misfortune — that he knew the highway — was amended the moment that he found another road bending east, now the direction of darkness. As he turned, his mind jumped into the future, picturing his first night under the open sky. It was whimsical to say that he owned nothing when he carried in his pack many supplies, and a simple flashlight or knife glaringly made the difference. Could anything be authentic, even within the self?
A flock of starlings shot across the spattering heights. Off to roost for the night, which seemed to approach more swiftly under the stormclouds. He watched where they spiraled down into treetops nearly out of sight, and determined to sleep within the same trees. The raindrops played him a pleasant white noise, encasing him in a watery cocoon that almost erased the persistent piano keys.
His waterproof coat could not entirely repel the chill. Just as he shivered, a guttural voice said, “Come rest by my fire.”
He jerked in surprise. The greybearded man standing in a stained brown coat amidst the roadside grasses would have been impossible to miss in the open landscape, and yet here he stood. “Where did you come from?” he asked, not quite recovered.
“Come,” the man said, turning. Sure enough, perhaps a quarter-mile out blazed a goodly fire despite the rain. The choice was easy. He saw himself like a plankton now, alive but not in much control of his movements, tossed in any direction by the tide. He would follow.
The inexplicable man wrapped whole vegetables in foil and roasted them in the fire: onion, sweet potatoes, green bell pepper, carrot, yellow squash. It seemed inappropriate to offer the old man his jerky, and in fact, he felt strangely ashamed of it. When the man rolled the food out of the flames he silently offered the pepper and squash along with two fat potatoes.
“Thank you,” he said, taking a fork and knife from his pack to split the first potato, releasing a richly scented steam. The foil packages sizzled under the rain. “What is your name?”
“Whatever suits you,” the man replied, already munching on his carrot, though the heat made him suck air and wince.
He laughed briefly. “I’m Daniel,” he offered. After a pause, he continued, “How did you get way out here?”
“You came looking.” The man shook his head slightly, as one does with a person who is rather slow or terribly ignorant. “It won’t be easy for you.” He stood and began rifling through Daniel’s pack.
“Excuse me…” He drew the pack gently closer to him, hesitant to openly oppose someone who had shared his food and fire.
Undeterred, the man tossed his jerky into the sodden field, piece by piece. “Lucky I found you,” he admonished. The strange feeling of shame again fell over Daniel, slowing his opposition. Next went his gun. “You won’t get far that way.”
“What do you mean? Knock it off!” He stood, retrieved his belongings, and yanked the bag away from the man’s busy hands, pulling the closure tight. “If you need something, let me know. Maybe we can…trade.”
The man’s eyes glittered beneath his bushy brows, and the light of the flames cut shadows into his face, creating a sense of granite sharpness. “If you don’t accept my help, you’ll soon regret it.”
“I fail to see how stealing my things is any help to me! Are you threatening me?” He buckled the top flap of his pack and slung it over his shoulder. “Thanks for the food, but I’ll stick it out alone.” He rushed away from the madman into the deepening gloom. Every time he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the figure standing by his fire, still as a scarecrow, watching.
Several minutes of walking did not deliver the road. He paused in consternation, then looked back to see the old man waving and shouting. With one hand cupped at his ear, he could barely discern the words: “Cast out all of hurt.”
“Crazy bastard,” he snapped, frustrated and cold. He hurried on.
The last time he looked, both old man and his fire were gone. Staring east, he could no longer see the trees where the starlings had bedded for the night. He turned in a slow circle that cast doubt on his senses, as the surrounding land grew less familiar with every glance. The rain thickened, pounding the earth and working mist up to his ankles. Everything was grey, white, transparently viscous. He lost the sun with his sense of direction. He pulled a compass from his pack, determined to walk east until the rain abated; but with every step, the needle turned, so that following it led him in a circle.
He tore his mind from its wavering between disarray and determination with the reminder that heavy rains are brief. The adrenaline of the unfamiliar experiences and enlivening storm combined to produce a powerful thrill that burst through his body. A moment before he had been bent and disheartened; now, deluged, he spread his arms in welcome. A vast awareness of his absolute freedom swelled within him, and he turned his face skyward, drinking the rain, laughing in joy. The rain poured still harder, and the rumble of thunder shook him.
No, thunder did not watch with flashing eyes, nor approach on ponderous legs that sunk into the ground. But he had been too long in the dead life, as they call it, and even in the throes of present existence he lacked the ability to separate truth from expectation. In this way he lost the second precious thing.
When the storm cleared, the moon cast out its glow to unveil an strange silhouette wandering the horizon a half-mile far. Even before it passed from peripheral to main vision it produced, like a spider clawing at its silks, a tickling sensation that discomfited his wet neck. The shadowy animal would have been like a deer but for the fifth limb that seemed to emerge from between hip and paunch, the skinny tail that extended with its spine onto the ground like that of a crocodile, and the triply long neck that tapered into a perfect sphere of a skull. A full shiver flowed through his body. He turned to run, but instead found himself slowly approaching the thing, drawn in by that tide of life.
The creature had been walking with the bending of too many places but now it ceased and watched him patiently. As he drew nearer he could see that its body was covered in a substance that evoked the rotted forms of dead leaves, fishscales, and the bristly hair of a warthog. The eyes were small — far too small — so that their existence was revealed only by a turn of the creature’s tiny head, when one eye captured the moonlight for a brief instant. Its body seemed taller the closer he drew. It towered over him. He could not arrest his approach, though his whole being bent toward flight.
Some part of him cried out to throw away the gun, the meat; but the same part understood that that time had gone. The sphere-head slowly fell toward him on its sinuous neck with the pinlike ebony eyes shining, and there was no mouth at all, and time stretched out to seeming hours or days; a hoof shuffled with a gentle creaking like that of an old tree as three joints flexed, until descended from its perch high up against the stars, the neck delivered the head to him level with his own gaze, mouthlessly smiling, and he screamed.
“Some soul bled its life out at the entrance to this den, this harbor; and I am ashamed. I confess to you that I ashamed. Slowly rounding, the sky came down like a funnel, all amist, and the red wolves were howling, and the beast roared like a gong, and at that pinnacle of the ancient moments I tied myself, lanced its hide, and lost my bearings for ever…so you see me now, a grudging watcher at the edge, unheard by the hopeless.”
The snail extended its ommatophores from whence it had tucked them and looked vaguely in the old man’s direction, though he couldn’t be sure. He sighed and popped a green grape into his mouth. “It’s a good life, friend,” he informed the snail, “when there is sweetness, tartness, and a balmy breeze.”
