At night we went into the woods. We left our fire and crossed the lawns to a wall of untamed trees.
We were 17. I didn’t know where we were headed because I wasn’t really there. Probably none of us were really friends. But teenagers are good at pretending, so Seth and the others went into the woods through choking heat and I followed them like a Shade.
He took us into the trees with an old army flashlight. I followed from the back tripping over roots and ragged ground I couldn’t see, and pressed through branches the others had pushed out of the way before they came swinging back at me. Out the other side we climbed down a grassy slope and followed a railroad track until we came to a bank of fine sand.
Seth and the girl stepped barefoot into the river to the tip of a sandbar and stood awhile surrounded by quiet water. Karl sat on the bank leaning back as if it were a day at the beach. I’d gotten as far as taking off my shoes and socks when the feel of the wet sand made me think twice, and I guessed he had come to the same conclusion.
Moonlight flattened the land into blue-black watercolor, and all of us were ghosts for once. All the shadows were missing.
I wake and I know by the color of the sun that it’s the afternoon and not the morning.
I remember downy skin stretching to reveal the face, pulling back the corners of the eyes, baring innocent teeth. Another child and I mirrored each other’s convulsive grin and became two of a trillion heads on a trillion-headed hydra. A word had made us laugh, and for an instant we were linked like clasping hands by a perfect fit between the left and the right.
I sit pressed against the cold air, taking up space. Skin on the backs of my hands is thin and dry, and I convince myself it’s only the weather.
On the hydra the world was infinite. Here I know it’s only big, and that already I’ve been taken inside and held by naked walls and tile instead of grass and sky, and that I’m being taken into smaller and smaller rooms.
In a shoebox on the floor I have a rock from the railroad track. I sit looking into the box long enough for the rock and the stray relics to disappear, and I see in their place a scene painted with blots and streaks of blue and black.
Two figures stand on a dry patch in the middle of a shallow river while the slurry runs past their feet. On the bank a third sits back with his feet and palms down on the sand, limbs like a spider’s.
Nearby, a shape hangs in the air—an amoeba, or a black paramecium, its cilia gripping like fingers.
I reach into the box.
I reached down to the track and caught a warm stone as we walked. We made our way back through the trees to a steel tower overlooking the river and climbed eight flights of stairs to the top.
The leaves around us moved like deep seaweed, and the landing under our feet moved with them.
I remember a chase through a field after dark, and blades of new corn stalks cutting skin below the knees. I remember because Seth remembered.
At the fire we listened to songs on tapes he had brought: Arlo Guthrie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pink Floyd. We listened and talked.
Seth and his friends had been out in a field at night. Something spooked them and they ran, and only later discovered the itch and burn of the slits they’d cut into their shins.
I try to imagine my feet on the ground, there at the fire, meeting them each face to face. I’d breathe in and I’d feel my skin flush and press against the warm air, taking up space. Past the fire I would see further into the blue and black. From across the park a white light would shine through the trees. The trunks would fracture the light and cast shadows across the ground. I’d know I’m one of them, the old figures with fused roots, and from there too I would see me.
I try to imagine but it was only a wall, in opaque shadow. And I never spoke with them, and I wasn’t there.
I sit looking into the box, and I remember how much and how many times I wanted to be someone else.
I’d never have gone into those trees. But Seth did, because he knew what was on the other side.