“I never learned that,” Eddie says.
“Then we’ll definitely be back before then,” Tomas says.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” Steven says, squinting. He wouldn’t ask this, probably, except he is in pain, and distracting himself.
“Allergies,” Adam and Eddie say at the same time.
“Something in the forest, apparently,” Tomas says.
“It’s like that,” Eddie says. “Any little thing can set him off.”
“Let’s go,” Adam says, and Eddie can tell suddenly how angry he is. One of his hands is clenched inside his pocket. Why would he leave her here, with this stranger? She’d say something but it doesn’t seem worth it. Steven is harmless, with his leg. It is wilderness but popular wilderness, hours before dark. She knows nothing will happen to her, although things have happened to her before, and anyway she will not argue in front of a stranger, and so they go, Tomas and Adam. They disappear into the forest. Later she will think that somebody should have said something. If someone had said something else, the story would have gone in a different way, clearly. Later on Eddie will prefer this other way, any other way. Even now she does. But away they go.
“You’re Eddie?” Steven asks. She does not remember if her name has been said.
“Yes,” she says.
“Really?” he says.
“Yes,” she says.
“Thanks for doing this, if that’s your real name,” he says. “I’m sorry about it.”
“It’s not your fault,” she says. “You fell. Do you have any water?”
“Lots,” Steven says, and reaches for one of the packs, but Eddie gets to it first, and finds the water bottle inside, along with an extra sweater and a pair of socks and a folding knife. Perhaps the other pack is heavy. Eddie takes a sip and spills a bit. It is one of those bottles you suck on. She wipes her mouth and hands it to Steven, who takes it but does not drink.
“How long do you think it will take?” Eddie asks.
“I don’t know,” Steven says. “I’m not good with how many miles. I hope Tomas is okay. He was acting sort of strange. I upset him, I think. It upsets him to look at the leg.”
“It’s terrible,” Eddie says. “I don’t understand how it happened on that slope.”
“I fell,” Steven says sharply, and closes his eyes in a wince. He takes a long sip from the water bottle, possibly to change the subject, and turns his body to accidentally expose the wound again. It must have caught on something, as he fell, a thorny branch or a treacherous piece of rock they cannot see from here. “Did you say something to Tomas?” Steven asks, and covers his wound again. “He was sort of strange. He was acting strange.”
“Tomas,” Eddie says, “interrupted us. We were kissing, and—”
“And?” Steven says, and gives Eddie a crude smile.
“And he walked in,” Eddie says. All of the people in this story are the same age, more or less. It is an age where they have all had sex already. They have all loved before, and some of them, perhaps, are loving now. They have all had sex, and if you have sex you eventually try it outdoors. Why wouldn’t you? And so Eddie does not like this greed to talk about it, even in the woods with no one around. She does not like this guy. Or—and she looks out at the slope again—maybe he is just in pain and trying to distract himself. This is what happens. You meet people who are in pain, in life and love, and you forgive them for behaving the way they do. “We were going to have sex and then he walked in. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“I guess so,” Steven says. “I’m sorry. I was only—”
There is a nearby noise, in the trees someplace, as happens in the forest, and Eddie and Steven look quickly into the leaves and see nothing. Although Eddie won’t remember this, she moves closer to Steven, close enough so he could touch her very easily, although she has always been in arm’s reach. The noise has made her move, as it nearly always does. It is a rustling noise that may only be some branch of a tree, finally giving up on a handful of leaves, or a squirrel, something harmless. But the noise also might be something larger and more dangerous, stumbling as it comes closer, and so Steven and Eddie gather closer to one another and begin to talk closer, too. This happens all the time. You meet someone and talk with a stranger, if for no other reason than they are a stranger, next to you in a diner maybe, or the passenger in your taxi. It has happened to me in the bars of hotels, and in the quieter rooms of parties, when we sit on the coats and place our plastic cups on the bureaus of the host. It can feel a little bit like love, these conversations where we say things that pop into our heads as if they are things we always feel but never say to anyone, but it’s not love. Love is, I hope, more than two people sitting down for a while and telling secrets before help arrives. This is just people talking, to distract themselves from strange noises around them as this story gets worse.
“I’m scared, I think,” Steven says. “I’ll die here.”
“No, no,” Eddie says, but she thinks of his leg and she does not know. “I don’t think you’ll die. With something like this you’d bleed to death and you’re not even bleeding.”
“Isn’t that worse?” Steven asks. “Isn’t it worse if it’s not bleeding?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie says, and certainly she does not know. If she thinks of the wound, it certainly seems serious. Why else would she be stopped here, with someone she doesn’t know, if it wasn’t serious and he weren’t dying? “If I tell you that you might die, you’ll tell everybody later. Tomas. You’ll say that this woman waited with you but kept saying creepy things until you got more and more scared.”
“Do you know Tomas?” Steven asks, but then he frowns and bites down on his own lip. “It really hurts,” he says.
“Should we elevate it?” Eddie asks. “Or wash it?”
“I washed it with the water bottle,” Steven says, “right after we fell and right before you came. Just distract me.”
“Distract?” Eddie says. The wound, she remembers, was not wet when she looked at it.
“Just say something, or tell me something.”
“I’ll tell you about a dream I had,” Eddie says, and this is what I mean. Why would she tell him this? This story does not take place at a time when there are soothsayers. A dream, who cares? And yet we say these things because what would it mean if no one was interested? “I’ll tell you a dream I had last night, I think, and I keep thinking about it.”
“Does it have specific details?” Steven asks. “I read someplace that specific details can distract you from the pain. Like on a battlefield they give you specific details. Think about your sweetheart.”
“Thinking about your sweetheart doesn’t sound specific,” Eddie says, “but I guess it is. No, this is just a dream, but I’ll put specific details in. In the dream I’m dating this guy I knew in high school. I’ve been on a couple of dates with him I guess, in the dream. In real life I didn’t know him at all, not even really in high school. Hank Hayride.”
“That can’t be his real name,” Steven says.
“You’re right,” Eddie says. “It can’t be. I never thought of that. I just woke up and thought that I dreamed I was dating Hank Hayride. But that can’t be right.”
“Maybe it was right in the dream,” Steven says, but Eddie is not paying attention.
“Hayride,” she says. “Where did that come from? Hayride, hayride. Haythorne? Maybe Hank Haythorne? It was Hank something, definitely, but anyway I think someone told me he’s dead. But that might be in the dream too.”
“This isn’t distracting me from the pain at all,” Steven says.
Eddie slaps him on the shoulder very lightly, not meaning it, and then keeps her hand there for a second. Steven definitely notices this. She is looking out at the slope where Steven supposedly fell. You couldn’t fall from there, and receive a wound like the one she saw. She didn’t think so. But what could it be? Why would you lie about that and then do nothing, just sit by a brook and hear made-up stories
? Eddie can’t imagine.
“So I was dating Hank Hayride,” Eddie says, as if changing the subject, “in the dream, and we had gone on a few dates, and then he said we had to talk, or he had something to say to me, or something. I don’t really remember. But it was—I think it was that talk, you know, when you go out with someone for a while and then you finally have the talk where you tell them something.”
“Like you’re gay,” Steven says.
“No, not like you’re gay,” Eddie says, “like you’re married, or you used to be married and you lost a baby and you’re not ready for a commitment, or you need to know what’s going on after six weeks of just sort of dating. You know, like the first serious talk.”
“I just had one of those,” Steven says.
“With who?”
“I don’t think you would know the person,” Steven says. “I hope not. It didn’t go well. Those talks never do go well, don’t you think?”
“I guess not,” Eddie says. “I don’t know.”
“You’re always disappointed, I think,” Steven says. “Have you had that talk with what’s-his-name?”
“Tomas?” Eddie asks.
“No, the other guy,” Eddie says. “Adam, the guy you’re with.”
“No,” Eddie says. “No, no. And I guess you’re right. I know it will be disappointing with him. We’d probably have it tonight, except now.”
“You would go have sex in a forest,” Steven says, “and then have that talk?”
“Yes, and it would be disappointing,” Eddie says. “We would lie, or one of us would, but I’m supposed to be telling you my dream.”
“I don’t think that guy is good for you,” Steven says. “I don’t think you should be with somebody like him.” Steven reaches down and picks up a stone for no reason and throws it into the water of the brook. “I think you would rather be with someone else. I could tell the second you walked up to me. I could tell.”
“Maybe that’s what the dream is about,” Eddie says, and this is the sort of nonsense I mean. Why would they say these things? It is flirtatious, somewhat, this kind of conversation. But why pretend that it is Eddie’s dream that matters, when terrible things are going on? But they do. Steven looks at Eddie and looks at her shirt, which was hurriedly rebuttoned in the clearing, and he thinks to himself, this woman is telling me secrets.
“So we met in this diner, which is a real place in the city. In my dream. And Hank was going to tell me something, which is that he was dead. I guess that is more like being gay. But maybe not, because it was causing all these problems. He was telling me that there are certain things ghosts can do and certain things they can’t, but all the while—”
“You’re very beautiful,” Steven says, like he is drunk. Perhaps the pain causes this too, but how many things can you forgive?
“All the while,” Eddie says firmly.
“You are beautiful,” Steven says. “It’s okay to say that. I can say that to you. We’re never going to see each other again.”
This is a weird guy, in the forest, and Eddie knows it, but what can she do but continue with her story? Weird guys live everywhere, and this is part of love, too. If there were more women than men in this story, the women would talk about all those guys to pass the time as it grew darker. They would talk about the men they have met who would say strange, even terrible things, while hoping that they were not terrible. Or, of course, there are men who are really so dense that they say such things whenever the mood strikes them, or whenever they’ve had too much to drink, stupidly stupidly while walking through the woods, and certainly there are men who do not care if they do things that put women ill at ease when they are alone, or who even, no matter how harmless the day, can conjure panic out of nothing. Steven picks up a stone, this one much larger. He could not throw this one without hurting his leg from the effort, if his leg is indeed wounded. But even this is unremarkable in the forest, which is why this story is forgotten by the people who lived it. How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can’t grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too. You are with people and you walk away long after they scare you for the first time, because you know it is happening all over the world. And so we will leave the side of the brook, or creek, and never get to hear that while the ghost of Hank Hayride was talking to Eddie, all the while there was someone scraping at the windows of the diner. It was past January, in the dream, and it was time to scrape off the paintings of Christmas scenes on the windows of the real diner. The paintings would be scraped off, leaving the windows bare and revealing all the people who were talking and drinking inside. As the man—it was a man—scraped at the paintings, his tools made a terrible shrieking sound, and it was this sound that was the scariest part of the dream. When Eddie woke up she mostly remembered this sound, this shriek of a sound, and she knew that it meant that something would scrape away at her and leave her raw, wounded even. Something would scrape and scare her, far worse than her troubles with Adam, who was sleeping beside her within arm’s reach. She knew that all of it was over with Adam, despite their plans to go to the forest tomorrow, and sure enough Adam is not with her anymore. Adam has arrived at a field with Tomas walking behind him. The field is grassy and to one side is a pile of segments of a fence which someone has taken apart and stacked up together. All boundaries are down. Far, far from the field is an expanse of water and across the way is the city closest to the forest. The city is San Francisco, a beautiful place, made more beautiful from far away. The field is wet and the men stop and Tomas takes a bottle of water out of his pack and drinks.
Adam nods over at the city. “It’s terrible what happened,” he says, referring to a recent catastrophe, “although—”
Tomas stops drinking and hands Adam the bottle to interrupt him. “I don’t remember this field,” he says. “I’d remember this stack of fences or something. Where are we, where did you take me?”
Adam giggles, a high-pitched nastiness, and he giggles while he is drinking so some of the water pours down his chin. He is much worse. His eyes are scarily red now, and he is blinking almost constantly. He is out of breath, very much out of breath, and his hands keep shaking.
“I bet you don’t even have a map,” Tomas says.
“I have a map,” Adam says, and reaches into his pocket with his shaky hands. He produces, surprisingly, a map, and unfolds it and keeps giggling. We have missed all the crazy, crazy things that he has said, while everything in the world chattered and snapped around him. He keeps hearing noises that make him jump.
“Can we just go?” Tomas says. “My friend needs help.”
“Your friend,” Adam says with a scornful growl. “Wow,” he adds. He leans on the top segment of fence and listens for a moment to a shrieking bird that is causing him much grief.
“Why don’t you tell me what drugs you’re on, and how much,” Tomas says.
“Just a little bit,” Adam replies at once. “I didn’t know. It was just for the hike, and we were going to have sex. She loved it.”
“I don’t think so,” Tomas says. “I think you take it all the time, and your girlfriend doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know.”
“Why don’t you just say her name?” Adam says.
“I don’t know her name,” Tomas says. He sighs and takes the water back. He is bored but maybe also a little scared. If they have gone the wrong way it might take quite a while to retrace their steps, and they should proceed, moving quickly, as if Steven is in much danger and pain. “You’re the worst possible person I could have found for help.”
“What about you?” Adam says. “You’re lying, too. You said that your backpacks were heavy but you haven’t put yours down. There are three backpacks. You have one and there are two by the river. Where’s the third person? What happened to them?”
“The backpacks are heavy,” Tomas says, and by now, after
all this time, he is as angry as Adam or anyone else. Aren’t there any good people in the forest? This is like love too, that desperate question when we are alone with the wrong people. Where are they? These four people are ill-suited to one another, but is there anyone well-suited, three men choked with dishonesty and a woman still scared by that terrible, terrible shrieking sound, as the paintings are scraped away from the windows and her dream of love is over and she wakes up? Even now she feels like crying, although she has been given no terrific reason to cry. Even now, as Tomas reaches into his pack and withdraws something heavy for Adam to see, Steven is gasping and getting worse, or maybe it just seems that way, after all the time they have spent together. He gasps at his leg when he tries to move it around, and he gasps at another noise in the forest around him, and he gasps at the water as he drinks it down until it is almost empty.
“I think I’m dying again,” he says. “It really hurts, and I think we’ll have to do something else.”
“They’re coming,” Eddie says immediately, but there’s nobody else by the creek but the two of them, and Steven laughs and spits something onto the ground.
“No,” he says. “We left them way behind. Do you know that. We left them way behind. It’s a song.” This is true, what he’s saying, although Eddie would have no way of knowing, as the song is obscure and hardly anyone thinks of it. “We left them way behind,” the song says, “and when they finally let us out, we tracked down our accusers. And when we finally let them out, they brought up different charges,” and this is something that Steven does, too. “It’s a song,” he says when he’s done reciting the lyrics, “but in real life I don’t think they’re coming. I think we’re alone, Eddie, although at least we have water.” He looks through the bottle, moving the tiny bit of water from side to plastic side. “I wonder if you’re thirsty, like dying of thirst, if you think about all the water you’ve chugged and squandered. If you think of the water you wasted when you had some.”
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