55th Night
I stumbled away from the explosion, taking refuge in the woods, my movements obscured by the smoke. It struck me that once I was safely out of view, presumably presumed dead, that a rare opportunity was mine for the taking. I could shed my old identity and start over without any of the negative baggage the old self dragged around.
At first, overwhelmed by choices, I couldn’t decide who or what I wanted to be, but then I thought why not a free-floating presence, a different identity for every occasion.
It was possible of course, though perhaps less than likely, that the authorities might not assume that I was the charred remains in the exploded car. So I continued on my way, pushing myself to go faster until it felt as though I had reached my limit.
My leg had been hurting so I snapped a branch from a dying tree to use as a makeshift cane.
I must have traveled about two miles when I heard voices up ahead. From what I could make out, there were two men, perhaps boys, and a woman and they were arguing about whether to go on or turn back.
I overheard the following conversation before revealing myself.
“Look,” one of the boys was saying, “I’m not ashamed of being scared. If there’s something out there that doesn’t want us to go any further, I’m more than willing to take the hint.”
“Oh, please!” the woman said.
“She’s right,” the other boy said. “Just because we find a corpse in the woods, it doesn’t mean our lives are also at risk. Of course it doesn’t. Besides, bad omens, dire warnings, scary moments are to be expected in an undertaking like ours.”
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” a voice behind me said. Someone had sneaked up on me from my blind side and was pressing a hard object that didn’t feel like a gun into my back.
“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m no danger to you.”
“So you say,” said the figure behind me. “Did Miriam, the dark-haired Miriam, send you? Don’t turn around if you know what’s good for you.”
After he poked me again I gave his wrist a side of the hand chop, knocking whatever he was poking in my back (a green banana as it turned out) to the ground. His cry of pain brought the others in short order. They were older than I had imagined, in their early twenties perhaps, though I’ve never been good at determining age.
Although they seemed wary of me, the apparent leader of the group, a tall bald guy named Woodrow Kelp (called Woody), invited me to their campfire site, even offered me a charred marshmallow as a gesture of hospitality.
They were students working on a group project, the one called Larry told me, but that was the extent of my information.
“And who might you be?” I was asked.
I told them my name was Bud and that I was in the woods foraging for unusual mushrooms.
“What do you do when you find such mushrooms?” the woman, who was referred to by the others as Ms. M, asked in her sassy way.
“You don’t seem to have any specimens with you at the moment.”
“Oh I don’t pick them,” I said. “I see no reason to disturb the earth. I just make note of where they’ve been discovered and how they might be described.”
I actually knew very little, virtually nothing about mushrooms, but this was the story that came to mind when Ms. M asked her question. What I was doing, as I saw it, was trying on a new identity.
They seemed to accept my story and I hung out with them for a while glad to have some company, and gradually, by fits and starts, twitches and throat clearings, they revealed the nature of their project.
They were students at a counter-cultural college for gifted misfits in New Hampshire that specialized in the study of unseen realities, or some such thing. This group of four were working together on a term paper for a class called The Dark Side of Human Behavior by investigating certain nasty inexplicable phenomena in the woods we had visited.
So far, all they had accomplished was the amassing of clues and omens, the latest and most disturbing of which was the corpse I had overheard them discussing.
I admired their courage, but I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something foolhardy, even self-destructive in continuing their pursuit. I withheld whatever discouraging remarks came to mind, not wanting to undermine their grim enthusiasm.
Finally, I asked Woody, the self-styled leader of the team, what they hoped to find at the end of their quest.
He took a deep breath before answering. “I don’t exactly know,” he said, carefully enunciating each word, “because as yet it has no name.”
He made a point of walking away from me before I could probe further. “And when you find the thing that has no name, what then?” I called after him.
Ms. M stole up to me and answered my question in a hushed voice.
“Like you with your mushrooms,” she said, “we will not disturb the thing in any way. We are an investigating team. It is our job to locate and describe previously unknowable phenomena, not meddle with its destiny.”
“What if the thing, as you call it, doesn’t make the same distinctions?” I asked.
At first she brushed my question off with the back of her hand as being unworthy, but then she said, blushing in the faded light, “We are not without the ability to defend ourselves.”
I was curious as to what she meant, but not curious enough to go much further with this quixotic group and I announced, thanking them for their company, that the time had come to go my own way.
“I’m sorry,” Woody said as I started to walk away. “I’m afraid we can’t let you go.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” I asked, though I didn’t feel I needed permission to walk away.
“For one, you know too much,” he said.
“Hey, I know nothing,” I said. “I’ve been winging my way through life.” But it wasn’t knowledge of the world, or knowledge in general he was referring to. He meant — why hadn’t I seen this right away? — that I knew too much about their project.
While I was overstating my support of their venture, someone sneaked up behind me and conked me with what may have been a club or an old hiking boot. When I came to, I found myself trussed from neck to toe by silken threads as though I were in a cocoon being carried along on a palette like a wounded soldier. So whether I liked it or not, I became a passive companion on their absurdly dangerous (perhaps dangerously absurd) adventure.
56th Night
I anticipated the two guys lugging me around on a stretcher would get tired of their assignment and it happened even more quickly than I expected.
The one they called Pill had been complaining all along, mostly under his breath about my weighing more than I should and how it was oppressing his back.
“What do you want to do with him then?” Larry said. “You got a better idea?”
“Sometimes — look, don’t say anything to the others — I wish we weren’t hamstrung by being non-violent,” Pill muttered. “Anyhow, I got to answer nature’s call, if you know what I mean.”
So they put me down, virtually dropped me, and Pill went off in the woods somewhere to take a leak.
“The nerd drinks too much water,” Larry said to me.
“How did you get this cocoon around me?” I asked him.
“Hey, that’s one of Ms. M’s little tricks,” he said. “She’s got a little spider in her, that girl. No more questions, okay?”
When Pill didn’t return after what seemed like ten minutes, Larry called out to the others for help. There was no immediate response and it was beginning to get dark. “What do I do now?” he asked no one in particular, though I was his only audience. He raised his voice, took turns broadcasting Woody’s name and Ms. M’s name into the vast unknown, his voice echoing back at us the only response. Nerves got the better of him. He began to do a kind of twitchy dance to pass whatever time needed passing. “What do I do now?” he asked again.