Sleep.
He had fallen asleep but then what? What had caused this sweat that clung to him, that he could not dry on the ripstop nylon? What visions had taken hold while he was under the spell of fire. He couldn't be sure. Somehow he got the impression that the sparks he had watched might have turned into stars after his eyes shut. They did not have to change size to do such a thing; he just had to change perspective. Had he thus dreamt of a thousand different worlds, of a thousand different possibilities? Or perhaps not stars but the electrical lights they had watched in the dark? Had he dreamt of following their string, of leaving his father behind, marching towards them? Had he dreamed of breaking through the metal walls that displayed small leaks of potential, of pulling those strands of light ever tighter around him as he passed inside?
He stopped. He could have dreamt of anything; last night was no different from any other. Why torture himself trying to see that far back when sleep stories had always managed to elude him? Maybe he had floated free, held up by the orange fabric that now engulfed him? Maybe he had soared? Maybe he had sunk? It didn't matter. For all he knew he might not have dreamt at all. There was no guarantee. Perhaps his dream had been a singular vision. A flat colour like the top of the tent, the way the world might have ended, or so his father had said, with the ocean of light above the sky, blue wasn't it? An ocean of blue light gone red.
He opened the front of his tent to let the outside world return. His limbs were stiff. They ached as if far longer than one night had passed. He guessed that without some way to tell the time, or some person to ask there was no way for anyone to know how long they had really been away, and he wondered if it had been such a long time, and if his father was already awake, though he could not see or hear him through the gap. Perhaps the sun had peaked and now began to set.
The boy moved outside. The air was so much more comfortable on his skin than the atmosphere in his tent. He stayed down low, he crawled, as there seemed no pressing reason to stand tall given the green wall of trees that surrounded the clearing. His father's tent was green and shaped like a yurt, tethered at the edges. He checked it for signs of life. There was no sound, no movements, just the flicker at the top as it rippled this way and that in the breeze.
He moved to what remained of the fire, turned into a large dinner try made of charcoal. He nudged one of the larger pieces of burnt wood so that it rocked to one side, scraping his finger along it. He withdrew his hand and stared at the black smudge on his skin. A spot of light followed him around as he moved his wrist. He smiled and rubbed the finger over his cheek following a valley that started at the top of his nose and down to the corner of his mouth. He pushed his finger down into the fire again to get more smut, convincing himself as he rubbed the embers, that it might still be warm. He went over the first line he had drawn on his face, and repeated the pattern on the other side until it felt like he had good markings on him, good markings to explore, to scout. The scent of the ash overpowered the evergreen spit and he breathed it in, pressed his lips together as if about to duck under water and pushed his teeth forward. He stuck the finger in his mouth and sucked it. It had a good taste, a good smell, and it stirred something in his stomach. Maybe some of the oil from the bags had remained, awakened by his touch, ultra-fine droplets from the fire, falling around him like sparks from a smelter, bouncing and collapsing like bugs buzzed by the hot lick of the desert sand.
He walked down from the plateau without waiting for his father, figuring he'd spend some time starting to get a handle on the location of any nearby cairns that he could later follow. He had with him his small backpack, which contained a blunt pocket knife, a plastic bottle half-filled with water, a couple of bandaids, a sanitising tablet, a length of uncuttable rope, a comic with a scary story about a secret submarine base in it, three clips to fasten things to the outside, a plastic bag to keep things dry, a broken LED flashlight, a pocket video game that had never worked, and the lighter he had found the day before.
It didn't take much time until he found another cairn. This one was in the shade a few hundred yards away from the tents, under a solitary tree, and the stones on top wore green moss that appeared to have flecks of seeds and fur on them. He figured this meant the rock piles were indeed old, but he couldn't be sure; what if they had been built out of old rocks? Either way, it intrigued him how the stack had been put together, how the rocks piled one on the next all just seemed to fit, how each individual stone had the opposite curve of the one on top, and he smiled as he imagined some burning meteorite shattering against the mountain many years back, only for someone to come along and reconstruct it by chance. One thing was certain: his father was right to scold him for kicking one. It was bad to destroy something like this, something that had been put together with love and care like how he imagined how families might once have been.
But what route could they have marked out?
He started to scan for the next one, reminding himself that his father had said they were in an old national park. These stones may plot the route of a scenic walk. He wouldn't know for sure without at least trying to follow. Perhaps if he managed to uncover a whole sequence he could judge whether there was anything to the trail beyond good views. Maybe he should just pretend. He thought of all those days trapped in the yard. Now he was free of that. Free to follow the route, or even better, free to make one. For a while at least. Yes, he could envisage following this trail to the end and then continuing it, going off on his own, building his own cairns in the hope that someone would one day follow him...
He turned to face the trees, looking back to the camp, trying as best he could to construct a line that joined the cairn near his feet to the one up by the camp. This was all he could think to do -- create a straight line and follow it until he found another. It might not work, but it was that or stumbling along at random. He couldn't rely on the existence of obvious paths -- he looked down at the grass beneath his feet -- those paths would have long grown over.
He would construct his line and follow it, then. He stood on tiptoe to get the best view he could of where the trees raised up around the plateau. He imagined a pin stuck in this point and wrapped a thread around it, took it in his teeth and turned to face the second cairn, moving his feet as close to it as he could without touching it, feeling the tension in his invisible cord.
He started to walk.
He had no idea how well he could navigate straight ahead, but trusted himself to do it, kept his bite tight and visualised the line. He didn't get far before a tree approached. He held firm to his direction, looking over his shoulder to see the furrow in the blades of grass. He stooped under the branches of the tree, broke out from under it, and went further, towards an outcrop of rocks. Even here, rather than go around, he decided he should climb up on top. But this group of rocks was more of a challenge than the gentle slope back up to the camp. He brushed off his hands and took a run at it, making easy progress over the first few steps before he hit a line of loose grit that had somehow beached high on the crags.
He slipped back but managed to fall forward so he ended up leaning against the side, digging his fingers into the soil to pull himself up, battling the weight of doubt, making it a few inches before he jumped just enough to see over the top. For a moment, he felt like he could see the next pile of rocks. But the soil at his shoes turned loose and he slipped and slid around, peddling to keep his position but falling back all the time, a little like how he imagined white-watering down a river, only with a stream of particles and not spray; microscopic bundles of soil, decayed matter, clay that formed bigger bundles as he pressed into it, the twisted ends of roots come off, all thrust back beneath his foot.
He paused to rest, turning around and lying against the rocks with his arms spread out. He hadn't expected to get this tired from the effort, as if they were at altitude. The motion of his chest pushed him into the stone and the various undulations jabbed into his back, making it hard to stop but hard to continue. He wanted to
sit down. But there was no space, and he might easily slide all the way back to the ground. So he hung there and gathered his breath. He took his backpack off and slung it up onto the top of the rocks. Now he had to go up there. He spat on his hands and rubbed them together for one big push, turned, and inched himself along the rock just enough, holding out his palms to support himself. He looked up at the sky one more time and then ran at the last side of rock as hard as he could, jumping up, pulling the roots, clawing at it, kicking at it, pounding his hands against it, and just got enough of a hold on the top shelf to drag himself up.
He was right. There was another cairn up there. He smiled, almost laughed, tried to clean off his clothes, and spent some time sitting with his backpack in his lap as if he was petting it, reassuring it. At least, he thought it was meant to be a cairn. In a way it was less qualified, seemed to have broken down like an old ruin. But ruin or not it was not a natural gathering of rocks; someone had put it there. And this meant that his idea of drawing a line was correct. So now, where was the next? He was hooked. The other side of the rocks was less imposing and he let himself run down it in his ill-fitting shoes, heading towards a long line of trees with no sun underneath. He saw the next one at the foot of a large trunk that slanted down, tipping over, pulling up the earth.
The closer he got to the trees the more a wall of brown and black stretched over his eyes. All the way to the top of the sky. All the way to where the grass lost its colour. He began to doubt if he should cross into this darkness. Yet there was something that begged him to keep on. What if his father now decided it wasn't a good idea after all. What if he never got to see where the trail of rocks led?
He paused to take stock of the view behind him, so that he might find it again for the return. He looked back on the outcrop of rocks he had just climbed and past it to where he felt like the raised trees made the plateau. He looked down at the pile of rocks at his feet and dared to bend down and turn the top rock, which had a slight point on one end, so that it aimed back to the camp. And then without worrying about it more he pressed on, ducking down and under the trees to where the sky disappeared except for specks and the going was tough with so many dense twisted branches reaching over him like witches' fingers.
He pushed in the direction of the line in his head as best he could. His steps were accompanied by the snap-snap of twigs breaking at random, twigs he couldn't even see for his eyes were closed a lot of the time to stop them being scratched out. The ground beneath had lost its colour anyway, covered with leaves that held small pools of water in their cups that ate them up and turned them first to mush then to tiny flies that could only leave through the gaps in the trees where the last of the sky was, and the smell of all this began to overpower him, and he could sense his skin turning green. The urge to rub his face free of dust accelerated but he could not; if he did then the green would only rub in deeper, and it would itch harder, and the scratch would never stop until he bled.
His idea of the straight line started to disintegrate, and he viewed it now like some almighty stained glass window he had once worshipped only for the pieces of glass to fall free and shatter until all that was left was the lead skeleton, poisonous and filled with grey, glowing gloom. He thrashed out either side and hurt his hands against trees become a hundred soldiers in a line with bayonets ready to jab. He could do it. He had made it so far already. If he didn't think on it. If he just focused on moving, keeping hold of that line as best he could and not giving up, pushing through each wave that tried to push back, that tired.
All at once he pierced the edge of a large clearing, a clearing whose edge was nothing but air. A break in the trees. Another pile of rocks in the middle, another cairn, before the next wave of forest came, like he was passing through the eye of the storm, as if the whole landscape wrapped itself into a maze and he was trapped inside. He rushed across, picking up speed to crash back into the forest, then out again, then in, until he found something else.
The last cairn he found was on the side of a small hill that peaked with a floppy grass haircut rather than a rocky spike. It was here, at the top of the hill, that he came across not just a pile of rocks but a girl, just standing there as if frozen, staring off towards where the sun would later fall, her hair twitching in the wind as it wound around her neck. Did she know he was there? She didn't seem to have heard him approach, and he dare not move now for fear of scaring her, wondering if she was the same girl from before.
By the back of her sneakers were two dead bees joined together that distracted him, wings useless and beaten back, albeit with that strange silver within them still, twisted veins visible that might be mined, the band of black on them as well, gold that would kill for a king, the stinger, the barb, the button of their souls undone, now consumed by the question in his head of whether the spikes at the end of their bodies, their stings, tore off when used. He was sure they did. So sure that her legs seemed to vanish from view, for a moment as he stood, as did the faint hairs on those legs, down where the tops of her socks turned to unwinding thread and then finished. Didn't the spike have a life of its own once it had torn, a heart? Didn't he? A life from his father, from his mother, filled with green toxins. Had he read that somewhere, or imagined? A heart for it, a heart for him, for them, that pumped poison, a lung that shrugged and puffed, and the pain he'd experienced of his arm burst into flame the one time he got stung?
Was this just another sign that told him all that he needed to know? That there were patterns in everything around him if he cared to look, as bees joined to bees might lead to his dream of cars joined to cars along the road, making chains. Animal chains. People chains. Chains of metal and rubber. Piles of rocks. The road out to the peaks that they had come, lined with death, as the sun in the side-mirror had seemed to catch his eye and dazzle, as it did now, even if it was darker than before.
He couldn't be sure if he made a noise, or if she could hear his thoughts, or feel his gaze lapping around her feet, but without a word she turned to face him stuck in thought. He looked up. She smiled. He looked back. Another pattern, like he felt he must have walked since the day he was born, like they all had. He suddenly felt like he was shaking, forced his gaze to return.
At this range her eyes gained the appearance of two drip pools surrounded by dragonfly wings that would flit and shimmer within her iris, elongated abdomens reflected in sapphire, and turned to face the centre, sparkling and shadowy all the way to the edge of the small ridge up to her skin that looked like a white sand beach and continued with just the odd dot here or there, a freckle, a rock, a break in the plains like a bell in the midst of a parade, which he could only manage to observe for a second before he had to stop again, cursing, before he forced his eyes to hold some of the way, to her neck, to her hair, to where it started to curl across below ears like a tangled nest of copper grass, long enough to reach her lips that were pink like lobster carapaces, ivory teeth capped into sharp dropping rocks, two slabs, like gravestones, a quarry for his thoughts fit to snap, and back to her neck, the same colour, the same construction.
Perhaps he had not woken up earlier, drenched, because of something in his sleep, but something outside of it.
It was weird to think of it at this moment, some sort of tactic his brain had to keep him from fainting, but he got hold of the thought and inspected it. There was something outside the tent. Something walking around. He had heard it, he was sure, like his own heartbeat in sound but outside, a sudden experience that the forest was alive, that the clearing was alive, that the dying campfire jailed an angel that beat wings within. Was this growing up? Was it an understanding that there was life beyond, other people, outside of his father, his mother, and him. But what life? This life? Her. Was this something new, this idea that life had stalked the stage outside where he had slept. That life did not sleep like the rest of the world, that she didn't.
All he could manage was to point down to the small crop of rocks balanced near his feet that seemed to have br
ought him to her in a beautiful line, tying them together.
"Did you build those?" he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They walked down from the top of the rocks where they had met into an area full of bare trees. The change to this wooden mortuary happened fast, as if they had passed into an area that had been blasted by bombs. Only the trees here were still standing, they just lacked leaves, which littered the ground instead, a mix of needles and wide maple-shapes, half-damp, half-baked, as if plucked for roasting under the sun, while the branches stuck in place despite the breeze, as if mourning their loss, unwilling to go on, as the wind rubbed their shoulders and told them it would pass, strong enough to stir circles on the floor that sometimes funnelled up to shoulder height and then fell back, an impossible swirl of twigs and bits of burnt paper.
As they passed through, the boy fought the urge to stop and stare at the limbs, to see if they were alive. These trees were too thin for their trunks to contain any deep knots, any eyes, there was no point in slowing down, no way to check if any of them were awake, alert, dozing, or dead, no eyelids to pluck between the thumb and finger and pull, daring the pupil to shrink in the light, to twitch.
The girl got ahead of him as he battled himself, her feet cracked and spat on the ground as she walked, each step a small shot that echoed around his head and bounced back off the sky and piled one on top of the next, whipping around his ears as she span on the spot to beckon for him to keep up, a grin on her face, her hair spinning out in a circle behind her and down, heavy with metallic strands, and she leaned back as if pulled by it, as if such dazzling colour could not come without weight. And maybe that was right. For even trees had to let go of their prettiest leaves at the end of the season, sometimes.
"Keep up. You're too slow!" she turned and continued on.
"Where are we going?"
The Lanyard Page 6
