Chapter 6 Wake for the Rag Moth #2
Memories of the monstrous wolf couldn’t rob the fresh air of its pleasure, not as long as he stayed within twenty paces of a real building with a real door.
He knew a wooden door couldn’t stop the wolf, but he was beginning to wonder if the fact the door belonged to Valentina might make a difference.
All the while, Green poked and prodded at his new life plan, reimagining it, revisiting that morning’s certainty that it was time to give up. He tried to extrapolate from his evening’s work what he could expect from this new world he had agreed to enter with no real resistance or debate.
Sure, I’ll be your apprentice. You can explain more after my broken face and I spend the night watching your murder-bug.
He had been, for years, someone who worked at a desk. Who, at home or work, lived through his computer. Files were the product he produced. Words on a screen. These were the trappings of adulthood, of maturity. The work of the mind.
Now, he couldn’t help but feel that he had traveled back to his childhood.
He had a task involving his body. He had a chore, a remedial assignment given to someone without any specialized knowledge.
There were no hints of prestige on offer here, no unspoken respectability rolled into the benefits package. He was a kid. A hall monitor.
He scowled at the thought.
That wasn’t right and he knew it. What had his life done to him that he believed physical interaction with the world was juvenile?
When Green set that thought on the table, next to the moth, it was more distasteful than the corpse.
Physicality was lesser? Adult life was what happened in electronic non-spaces?
What would that idea say about human history?
What about the people who built infrastructure, who tended forests, who brought shelter and power and healing and nourishment into the world?
Green shoved the thought away. He knew, like all sneaking prejudices, that it would linger like the smell of the rag moth, like the bloodstains on his shirt collar. A sinking realization hit him, obvious as a toothache, unseen as his pumping heart.
What else am I assuming?
What else have I internalized? What parts of me will need to slough away for me to become native to my new life? Will there be enough of me left to regrow something new in place of everything I prune away?
He didn’t know.
He wouldn’t know.
And that, like the hidden aspects of nature to which he had bound his life, would loom over him like a great unknown watcher following in his shadow.
Could he make friends with it?
“I can try,” he said to the rag moth.
Its dust swirled. Its eyes glinted in the lantern light.
How could something so superficially ugly feel so intrinsically beautiful?
How could his own reactions feel like a mystery on par with the impossible insect?
Green sighed.
He pulled out his phone, ran through an inventory of things it couldn’t do without cell service or wifi, and dropped it back into his pocket. No doomscrolling social media. No articles about losing belly fat or building deeper friendships. He was still a novice at being alone with his thoughts.
His boredom felt like wet socks.
There was a notebook lying on a low shelf next to a basket of octagonal seashells.
He grabbed it and sank down onto the cot Valentina had left in the corner. The cover was blank and unadorned. He thought it might be a violation to look inside and immediately forgave himself for doing it anyway. Drastic times. Drastic measures.
The writing was in Cyrillic? Russian?
Green growled in frustration. There would be no escape from his own mind.
Crossing his legs made the acorn dig into his outer thigh, so he uncrossed them again.
He flipped through the pages.
He stopped when he saw an entry in Roman characters.
French, he thought.
He kept flipping.
There was a diagram of a creature that looked like a bird made of sharp angles and a curved line beneath it suggested it was…what? In orbit above the Earth?
More Cyrillic.
On the last few pages, Green found a single entry in English.
It was a letter.
It read:
Dear Ivan,
A freshwater anemone the size of a cart horse nearly ate a good portion of my memory today.
As far as I can tell, I escaped unscathed.
My colleague was not so lucky. She has spent all evening trying to map out the chronology of her life in order to define the shape of her wound.
The absence seems to lurk in her twenties, but she has become distrustful of her ability to place her recollections in their proper order.
I can’t stop weighing what a similar loss would have cost me.
The territory of my years is much, much larger and not so easy to map.
Much of my life is chronicled in my journals, but not all.
Words cannot (should not) attempt to capture everything.
You, for example, are not a matter for my journals.
So, I fear I almost lost you beneath the lake this morning.
I write to you today in a language you didn’t know on a page you will never see.
We spoke so often about travel. I think we always assumed there were limits to how far a body could go.
These limits meant that one could only become so lost, so far away.
This was the unspoken safety net that hung beneath all our grand plans and imagined discoveries.
My love, I don’t assume this any longer.
When I think of the distance in time and miles between the young woman you knew and the person writing this letter, I feel my own life as the ship of Theseus, repaired and remade until I doubt my relationship to any cohesive identity.
And yet, my fear of losing you to those stinging tentacles tells me that there is still living tissue connecting my present with my long ago.
Maybe you would be sad or even angry with me if I told you that it is possible to outlive the beliefs of your youth. Not easily and not often. But it is possible.
There, in my imagination, I see you frowning at the person I’ve become, the unimaginable changes I have weathered, body and mind.
Don’t look at me like that, Ivan. If I could let you hold the number of years on my back, even for an hour, I think you would understand. This is the generosity we give to people who do not share our life experiences but insist on judging how we are shaped by them.
“If you knew, you would know.”
It is how we love those who insist on being wrong. I call this generosity.
My dear, my unreasonably long-ago love, my haunting friend, how would our conversations beneath that spreading pine by the roadside be different if we knew then that there was such a thing as too far away?
Just one more thing I cannot know.
Self-preservation dictates that I must see the walls of ignorance as shelter, lest I begin to view them as a cage.
Tomorrow, I return to study the anemone. I will exercise extreme caution, but if something unforeseen happens, at least your name will be safe within the shelter of this letter.
Love from too far away,
Valentina
Texas 1934
Green closed the book.
He felt ashamed.
It was hard to imagine a less appropriate thing for him to read.
He slapped the notebook back down on the shelf as if it were the object’s fault for tempting him to look.
He returned to the cot.
Sitting, he was eye level with the table’s surface and the moth looked bulkier than from above.
Could that thing actually fly?
The proportion of wings to body didn’t seem right.
Then again, of all the unlikely things about the rag moth, Green supposed aerodynamics were the least improbable aspect to consider.
Perhaps it flew the way a piece of litter flies, a plastic shopping bag billowing down an alley like a jellyfish in an ocean canyon.
He shut his eyes and wished for the time to stop trickling and start cascading.
He cradled his head in his hands and didn’t wake even when his body slumped sideways onto the cot. Sleep is cousin to death and even fear is mortal.
If you put enough caterpillars in a room, they stop being animals and start being weather.
Even so, Green didn’t wake when the clouds rolled in. Not at first.
He was dreaming about rose petals falling from the upper atmosphere.
They bloomed into existence so high he could see the curving haze where air meets vacuum.
Somehow, even on the ground, he could track their progress, whirling down through a cloudless sky, dancing like maple seeds to touch his face with surpassing gentleness before tumbling earthward to crimson the grass.
Touch.
Touch.
Touch.
Soft, scattered kisses of sensation.
The dream, of course, was a trick of the brain to explain away stimuli and cling to sleep. Something was touching Green’s face.
Touch.
Touch.
Touch.
Something pushed against his upper lip, then moved off.
The dream fizzled.
He awoke to a cartoonish sight. A thing from his distant past. A kids’ TV show teaching letters and numbers.
“Today is brought to you by the letter S.”
A living S the color of new April leaves was perched on his chin, swaying in the air like a cattail.
His eyes focused and he saw rows of waving stubby legs and two dark, oversized eyes that brought to mind a starship captain’s helmet in a science fiction show.
His muscles spasmed hard enough to knock the air from his lungs.
He just barely had time to override instinct and stop himself from swatting the creature off his face.
Instead, he froze.
The caterpillar noticed none of this. It finished tasting the air and resumed its crawling, inch-worming its way over Green’s head and onto the cot beneath him.
His dream merged with life. He felt the gentle touches of rose petals moving over his scalp. His chest. His left hand. Both shins.
His view broadened and suddenly he could see that every part of the little cabin was brought to you by the letter S.