"That's ten." She called. "Now concentrate. Try to decide if I am looking, or not... Ready...? And... Now."
He closed his eyes and visualised her with the forest behind, imagining looking over rather than shielding his eyes. He had no idea if that was the best way to do it, but it kind of made sense. He focussed hard, tried to scrunch his brain with the thoughts, thoughts of trees, a flash of red intruding into the scene... a bright colour, somewhere at his rear, the same shade as an old sweatshirt he had back home, only brighter, less covered in grease, the colour of the girl's car beneath the dirt? And he felt that the figure wearing this red was watching him. He was sure of it. Perhaps it wasn't the red from some clothing, but the bits in her hair all gathered together.
"Well?" she called, voice rising up and down like a bird on currents of mountain air. "Which is it?"
"You're looking," he replied.
She didn't say anything.
"Am I right?"
He opened his eyes expecting the world in front of him to have disappeared. The light was somehow brighter than before and he struggled to blink it out.
She laughed.
"No. Turn around."
She had her back to him, stood under the tree over the way. Then she span on the spot and flashed her teeth, making his insides shift. "This," she said, "is looking... You feel it?"
"Aha."
"So you were wrong. That's no good."
"But... Are you sure you weren't?"
"I am surely sure."
"Sure you weren't thinking of me instead?"
"Nice try, but nope. I was thinking of a running river, a raft."
"Oh," he stared at the ground.
"Why? What is it? It only works sometimes."
"It's just... I really felt like you were looking. Like a lot. So much."
"Wishful thinking?"
"No. Something else."
"That's weird," she said coming over to him.
"Yeah."
"How'd it feel?"
"Well I tried to picture the scene and could see this like red thing and I thought it was your hair... It sounds stupid."
"No, it's not. When I was trying to decide if I should go this way or that, I felt like I should look, you know? But then I thought it was more interesting if I didn't. Maybe you were picking up on that?"
"Maybe."
"Or... What if someone is watching us and that's what you saw? What do you think of that? It would make sense if you felt no change between me looking at you and then not."
"Don't joke," he said.
"I'm being serious." She scanned around the area, turning away from him so he could get lost in her hair again like a small fish within a reef. "You know there are some sites around here, don't you?"
"Sites?"
"Yeah. Disposal sites."
"Huh?"
"For the disease... To control the spread?"
"".
"You know what I'm talking about, right?"
"No."
"Seriously?"
"What? What is it?"
She turned back to face him. He could barely stand to see past her let alone at her.
"I thought everyone knew..."
"Knew what?"
"You really don't?"
"No. Tell me."
"Shit," she said.
"What is it?"
"Come on. It's not far and on the way back anyway."
"Where?" he said.
"Over there."
He stared across the valley. Trees washed across the furthest reach of his vision, cradled by belly hills and stomps of dead dirt that twinkled in the lazy last light as the sun dipped down to the east, casting shadows like lost children that stuck on the slopes.
"Where?"
"North."
She pointed to where he could see a divide opening up in the middle of the view, two groups of trees split by a thin cord of black rock that widened as it snaked along towards a point beneath his feet. And he could see a sudden drip into the future, as if each of them stood on one side of this chasm that split the earth imperceptibly but surely over millions of years, millions of moments like these, stuck in space, staring out to the screech of storming sand and the whip of the rocks just breaking before them like waves, an ocean bubbling up, hot and full of long lazy fish that would slide together into glass platforms in hot moments and then part.
And he watched in his mind's eye as they drifted well away from each other. And he wondered what it would be to be such a man there. Was it better or not to have wondered for her touch, her kiss, her words. Would it break him. Would he suffer as the sunlight split and no light could ever carry from one to the other. Would he yearn for her then.
She held out a hand.
It was getting late. Would taking it, learning this whatever it was, would it make him bitter in age. Unable to experience the touch of another again without comparing, without wondering, assuredly, did she build these rocks, this thing, whatever it was, that the best phases of his life might pass like a moon popped behind its rock and gone dark without her. Or, what if it already had?
"Well," she said, "What are you waiting for?"
CHAPTER TEN
The question reverted around his head. He was waiting for some sort of revelation, even as they pushed through the next rows of trees, as they dipped down into the valley. Waiting for a moment where he would see... something... would understand what it was he was meant to discover. But that moment did not come fast. Instead the backs of branches soothed his arms as he fought through them, each taking turns to lead the other along, to dodge the scattering salt when the branches popped back into place, as the forest continued to sway on an invisible wind as if they had never been there at all.
"Where are we going?" he asked again, feet getting wrapped in the long strands of the forest floor, suddenly struggling to keep up to her pace.
"Just a little further," she said. "It'll be worth it, it'll all make sense."
"But..."
"What?"
He paused and a tree branch shot past him and then returned like the motion of a flicked metal blade. "It's getting late... I should be going back."
"Oh come on."
"I was only meant to go a few hundred yards..."
"I know, but... Look. I think this is it. You need to see this.
"That's what you said ten minutes ago."
"But this time I'm sure of it."
They emerged into an area with less trees, a mere break before the next wall of forest appeared. She began to walk across, turning, deliberately emphasising her hips. She lifted her arm and beckoned him with a finger without turning around. "Come on," she said. "There isn't long..."
He jogged to keep up with her. "What do you mean?"
"Well, when the night comes I disappear. Didn't you know that about pretty girls. Really they are spirits and when the lights go down they tend to lose their spell on you and hide."
"Really?"
"No, you idiot."
"You're insane," he said.
"Yeah. And you like it that way."
"Do not."
"Do too."
She spun around and took hold of his hands and then pulled them out to either side. "This is it," she said. "It's just through there, but I wanted to check you're sure about seeing this?"
"But it was your idea.."
"I know, but... just forget it and let's do it."
"Through the trees?"
"Yes. But one more kiss first."
He didn't have time to think before his eyes had closed, closed tight shut like whenever he tried to stare at the sun, and he was kissing her, letting her tongue slide over his. He still couldn't see, or hear, or feel anything else than that space a few centimetres below his brain, which had all at once taken over the whole of his existence, the whole of his experience, the whole of everything he ever was or ever had been was gone like the night was dark, like the blue curls of the sky when the sun shone, exploded into black, showing the true emptiness
of space.
All he had was between his lips, upon his lips, behind his lips, and across. He poked his tongue. He felt the front of her teeth, the sharp edges of the canines. Canis Major. The dog star. The light in her head, from her jaw, these small ivory tusks that descended, that no one could explain how they formed or where they came, so that the only conclusion was that they had been there all along, like stars behind the sun, behind the clouds, in an elephants graveyard fit to rise up and out, to grow, to seep, to shine in flashes of light, golden dreams exploding in his head, reflecting from her, through her eyes, to her eyes, deep inside her and then back again and around. They were both made of tubes, after all. He knew her lips somehow carried on, all the way to her button nose, her pinned back ears, her eyes, where jelly rounds stopped that beautiful light from bursting out of her, all the way to her heart, her throat, her stomach that twisted him in knots. And he was hit by the flame of doubt now. And he knew then that this sort of passion, this sort of embrace was a fire that burned many ways, just like the campfire his father had built that had grown after they ate: at first it might merely smoulder, but soon, but always, there would be a connection a burst of light, like this. And then ash.
She let go of him and walked quickly to the next edge of trees. He followed as she went inside, ducking expertly around a large branch a few paces in, leading to an even larger clearing. An easy space he stepped into without the need to dodge anything, without the need to half close his eyes, worried they might be skewered. The ground around his feet was grey, dotted with tiny clover leaves, white flowers without their yellow hearts. He walked forward. Beyond the back of the girl, beyond the bones in her shoulders, was something looming tall. What looked to be a large wooden tent, like a shelter made out of the forest, but it wasn't quite that. The sticks were piled haphazardly, twisted into one another, too many to count, like some gigantic wooden mountain tipped from above, an effigy of the peak close to the place where they had first parked the car, the mountain that marked the road into being a man, reduced and readied for him now to climb. Only it wasn't made of wood at all.
She stepped aside.
A crack of thunder pounced into his head. Above the clouds split as if blasted in two. The grey quilt drew back and a fiery light awakened from within, from without, like lightning but more edifying, more complete. A light in his head. His flesh became yellow in this sun, the missing dressage from the flowers suddenly on him, of him, with him. But it was more than that. His hand wasn't just warmed by the sun, it tingled, as if the sun was responding to him and not the other way around. He felt a strange connection hurried onto him by this pile of sticks which wasn't that, but which he did not want to place, or perhaps could not place, for he did not have the experience the way that his father might have, aged in his forties now, wasn't he, lucky to be so, not because he was unfit, or unwell, or unhealthy, but because he was born in a time when people could live that long, or might; apparently, modern men could live the lives of men long past two or three times over by the end, not starting each life fresh, but rolling all them together, a big glob of mud along a hill, a bale of hay filled to the brim with long strands of existence, same shape as the dark, twisted wood in the pile before him. But no more.
Ahead was a pile of bodies. A pile of bones. A bonfire of souls. A pyre, impossible to resist.
"Are they..." he said.
"People?" she replied.
He nodded. Afraid to say more.
"They were."
His feet sank into clay as he approached this pile of corpses. He had to take each step with determination now, no longer proserpine, no longer agile, no sprite of the forest, not the one that had once lived in his shoes, who perhaps, thinking on it, had not yet been weighed down by all of life's experience either, not yet waltzing the way old men did either, that trudge of the dispirited, the way soldiers bounced out to war and then crept, or were carried, back, stretched with their eyes at the sun and their souls hanging from their feet, heavy from the weight of living, of expectation, or if not from the burden of it, from the wearing out of the joints of existence, of the sinews in the legs, of those snaps in the brain, of the emotional connections.
He walked that way, gingerly, the old way, five paces, six, but then could not take another step. He planted his foot hard in the ash and felt it slide away from him creating a mound like pushed snow that spilled onto the top of his shoe and stayed there as a thin dust. He could not but think that the ash was perhaps the result of countless other fires already built up and burned, kicked aside so that the next could be placed, then another, and another.
He almost slipped, leaning back as the thing began to loom over him, to push out towards him, to throb as if it might collapse at the same time as the top seemed to extend away from him; it seemed to grow up into space, to push through the air and surge as it went. At the top, some twisted arms and legs seemed to turn together, to twist like pieces of rope, into a frame, like the roof of a house, that slid down towards the ground. At the base the same arms, for they all looked the same with their lack of flesh, began to curl and reach for him. A metal rod stuck out of one part, skewering two bodies that seemed to have reacted by leaning back their heads and opening their mouths in pain, together, although long gone.
He fell to the ground. Not because the pyre had somehow become alive with red hair and devils' breath, the way his mind suggested it could as he approached, not because he was afraid to reach this strange pile of bones, or had begun sinking into the clay, to be reclaimed, but because he did not know what to do with it when he got close. Was he meant to just look at it, to observe. Because he had never seen anything like it before.
"Do you know what it is? I mean what they are?"
He didn't reply, couldn't.
"It's what's left of a town just over the next hill, I think."
"Some disease?" he managed at last.
"Yes."
"Of what?"
'Of shit, that's what. This is what happens when they go in. The people from the city. When they find a place where it grows. They go in and they kill it all and they drag it out here to burn. To be sure."
"They are really people?"
"Were. They really were. They're not anymore."
He took another step and reached out a hand to the pile, as if he had seen some tiny fingers poking through the mass of ribs and arms and legs, but he had not. He leant forward nonetheless, took a knee in front of the closest edge. At this side of the pile was one corpse unlike the rest. It lay with its head almost touching the base of the pile, but not quite, arms reaching down towards the base, no eyes, mouth, stretching as if raised in celebration, legs disappearing into the mass but somehow twisting back into view like a shoelace, black rags clinging to charred flesh where so many of the other bodies were bone, scraps of skin still dangling from the hands, some strands of hair attached to the back of the head.
"You don't know about any of this?"
"No... They're going to burn them," he said
"They will."
He wondered if his father knew. He must. The girl had made it seems so ordinary to have come upon something like this... looking up at it again, all those rows of what should have been eyes staring back, become paper-blanks, skin sealed across the flaps like dead leather. Her words again, "this is what happens."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was not yet dark when the boy walked back into the camp, conscious of the snap of twigs under his feet that seemed to carry all the way out to the edge of the trees and reflect off the bristles, breaking apart the sound, fracturing it, until it was not a sharp echo of his feet anymore but more the sound of a metal brush sweeping around a sink, the sort of noise his mother made when she was angry, turned to stain eradication to try and lose her thoughts, to try and lose his.
He had the taste of so many branches that had become wind and lifted his hair as he had struggled back, towards where the sky was changing colour and the first stars began to shine. It was not yet dark
but it was becoming, and the shadow of his half-broken body stretched away from him in the low sun, all the way to the edge of the fire, and then past, getting shrouded by trees in the direction which his father's tent sat, glowing as if a bright bulb span light within.
Looking on the dull flush, he thought for a moment about times past when they had shared tents rather than sleeping apart, divided by the zipa, by the rift, the valley down which he ran only to return like elasticated cord; he remembered the first time they had camped together. It could have been a trial run for this moment, in fact, sited not in the forest but part-behind a crumbled wall under the gaze of one of their old houses, not far from the back door, where the ground gave little resistance to the pegs that he now felt hammering into the side of his head, since the residing memory he had of it, could create of it, was not of the night itself, not what they had done, or said, or experienced, but instead the next day, the new light, dawn, reflected in the drops of liquid, on the grass, on the side of the tent, in the morning when they awoke, giant spheres of dew that he rarely saw, since, ever, before, as if the sky had wept for a memory that one time, just that time, a memory of all of that ocean of blue light in the sky, had wept hard, and the tears had not dried.
Why did they stop sharing, sleeping one alongside the other? When? Was it because of a lack of space? Because they had stumbled upon another tent, stuffed at the top of another house, in a storage room, in a shed? Or because his father no longer wanted to, was giving the boy what he seemed to want, given how he had abandoned the camp and gone off on his own first shot?
He stared past the tent to the trees, greedy with long needled leaves. Maybe he shouldn't feel so bad. This trip hadn't been his idea; he hadn't had a choice. And he had sat in the car with his father all the way up, he had slept in it, and walked out to camp. They had spent plenty of time together. And sure, they had some fun, but sometimes the boy liked to be on his own, too, in the yard behind one of their houses or somewhere else, and his father should have known that after all the times, and yet, and yet... He couldn't fulfil the argument. It didn't fit. It didn't settle. For although he had wanted time alone, after he had stumbled upon another child he had not exactly complained.
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