Chapter 10 Root Causes #2
He sank down to sit on a cinder block next to a cluster of rain barrels.
Looking around at the strange assortment of buildings and padlocked doors, and imagining the unknown contents within, he felt suddenly and intensely homeless, a visitor in someone else’s story.
A cold breeze chilled the sweat at his temples.
He put his head in his hands.
A distant crow cawed. He shivered.
He heard Valentina approach and looked up.
She frowned at him. Green wondered if she was reconsidering her offer of apprenticeship.
“You need to go for a walk,” she said.
“Am I being put in time-out?”
“No,” she said gently. “I have just…been forgetting some fundamentals. In more ways than one. You need to go look at the mountains. Get your bearings. Find a view that speaks to you and sit with it, have a conversation.”
She smiled, but it seemed mechanical, like she had recently learned the expression from a book. He supposed she meant it kindly.
“When you get back from your walk, we will talk about the basics of life here. Camp basics. Wilderness skills. I suspect you will find learning a new profession easier when you don’t feel threatened by unknowns on all sides.”
“Really? Is there time for that?”
“There is. There must be. Now, I have research to conclude and journals to revisit.”
She squeezed his shoulder and went back into the lab.
He didn’t know how she could stand the heat in there.
After fetching a canteen of water, Green did as he was told.
I am absolutely being put in time-out.
He walked.
He paused by a rotting log to look at tiny mushrooms, delicate as pushpins, with white tops like droplets of milk.
He passed a hollow tree, then doubled back to look inside.
It was a dark, homey-looking space full of wood chips and seed hulls.
It smelled like sawdust. He knelt by a tiny stream flowing down the mountain.
A maple leaf, yellow as sweet corn, spun down the current and out of view.
He wondered how far it had traveled from its tree. How far would it go?
He arrived at his campsite and found a place to sit and study the view.
Dancer really had given him a gift.
He looked out over the mountains and tried to empty himself of fear and anger.
The Appalachian Mountains. Green knew a few things about them. He knew they were old, perhaps the oldest in the world. Over a billion years old.
Older than land plants.
Older than vertebrate life.
They were old when the dinosaurs awoke and grew to shake the ground. If the mountains thought with a human mind, they would think of warm blood as a very new technology.
But, of course, they didn’t. They didn’t think with human thoughts or mechanisms. They weren’t so limited. What they knew and what they were was not separated by anything so crude as brain cells, as consciousness flashing across nerves like heat lightning.
The acorn was in his hand again.
Green tried to hate the acorn, the way it drew his attention like a solitary headstone on a bare hill. He couldn’t. His hate slid off the smooth brown thing. It was a commonplace object. It was the churning storm that ground away all the comfortable landmarks of his old life.
He set the acorn on a nearby stone, forcing himself to swallow the fear that it would roll away. He withdrew his hand. It sat. Seemingly inert. Looking very much in its proper place.
Hot panic hit him, but he held it up in the cool mountain air and watched it fade like an ember plucked from the fire.
One evening, weeks earlier, he had set that same acorn on his white stone kitchen counter and watched it pick apart the threads of all his choices. On his counter, that little nut looked very out of place.
He pictured the acorn surrounded by his old condo, the way it clashed with everything in ways that eclipsed simple aesthetics.
And this acorn, this acorn was not just a token of some distant forest, some impersonal metaphor for a more primal world. No, this acorn was very personal. This acorn arrived packaged in a memory that felt like a fresh injury anytime he acknowledged its existence.
Everything about that acorn felt like an intruder. Yet, it was an intruder that knew his name and spoke a message that wouldn’t be ignored or dismissed. It was an intruder that said, I’m not in the wrong place. You are.
In the days after his not-death and encounter with the giant crow, Green wanted to drink too much.
He wanted to toss the acorn out his fifth-floor window, to embrace some comforting excuse about an overworked mind, pop some sleeping pills, and surrender fully to twelve hours of dreamless rest. He wanted to pester the new young couple across the hall, demand to be let into Mr. Reynard’s old home so he could sit in the place his friend had taught him that sorrows are best met in the light of camaraderie.
Except he knew it wouldn’t work. Not the drinking.
Not the sleep. Not living for the past. It wouldn’t work because, however painful the memory, he hadn’t imagined it.
He hadn’t imagined the crow. He wasn’t imagining the acorn sitting on his countertop, sucking the oxygen from his rooms with its simple existence.
The intruder was already inside. And it was, without any doubt, too late.
Everything had changed. It had all changed.
Green felt like a man dressed for deep winter, stepping out the door of a snowbound cabin and finding himself on an equatorial island.
He wasn’t dressed for this weather and the colossal dissonance of it all was smothering.
There are times, Green knew even then, when you just have to sit in your discomfort. Times when there is nothing to do but experience the rushing river of your own feelings and see what time and the flowing waters carve from the stone of your present self.
So, Green sat and looked at the acorn in his efficient, modern kitchen and knew that everything was changing, with or without his consent. The acorn wasn’t going anywhere, but something had to give.
Over the next few weeks, he became a very poor employee.
He engaged in a deliberate study of his own thoughts, coaxing old desires from dark corners, brushing the dust off past fascinations and childhood joys.
He unearthed an ill-defined, but enthusiastic, preoccupation with moss and ferns and campfire sparks floating up through the twilight.
As the days passed, he could feel the weight of a theoretical new life taking its first breaths, just out of sight.
Something was out there. Something fundamental.
Something that chuffed and sniffed with a bear’s heavy lungs and paced in the dim elsewhere beyond the city lights.
Something better. Something that made Green’s white-tile life seem like the thinnest rice paper barrier, daring him to press a hand through and peer at a place alive and real and not engineered for human convenience.
A place that asked you for more than your obedience and less than your soul.
He returned to himself, to the mountains, and looked down at the acorn.
There, tilted and resting on its cap on a mossy stone, it did not look out of place.
The acorn was right where it was supposed to be.
Now, the question was, could Green find a way to belong there too?
Except none of this was what he expected.
This wasn’t just moss and stone and campfire evenings.
He was a cryptonaturalist now, a word, an identity, that was utterly new and came with a host of questions and consequences.
In the city he had felt at sea, but at least nobody had been relying on him to solve a mystery or prevent untimely deaths.
Still, he knew, there was no going back.
Present Green and past Green exchanged a nod over a narrow ravine of chaotic weeks, narrow, but too wide to leap and too deadly deep.
He drank from his canteen and plucked up the acorn, returning it to his pocket. He watched golden light hold a conversation with autumn mountainsides. He invited an uncomplicated silence into his mind and hoped that the landscape would pour in with it.
When he stood again, his legs were asleep and he had to shake away the pins and needles.
He took a moment to press his forehead against the tree that had been his backrest for the last hour.
“Thank you,” he said, feeling self-conscious and choosing not to care.
His attention landed on Alf’s truck.
He checked his phone.
Still no service.
He felt a surge of guilt for keeping the truck a day longer than intended.
“I guess I’ll reach him the old-school way.”
He drove down to the Count and Countess, where he found his battered Prius sitting with a new windshield. He parked beside it. A banana air freshener hung from his car’s rearview.
Alf greeted Green like an old friend, passed over Casper’s invoice, and loaned him the station landline so he could pay for the repairs.
“Hey, before I head out, I wanted to talk to you about those flyers in back,” Green said.
“Yeah?”
“The one about hiking to the Hole in Nothing. I think you should get rid of it.”
“Bro, those flyers don’t exactly get a lot of traffic. You’re the last person to see ’em.”
“I figured. But it isn’t safe.”
“Oh, yeah? You been there?”
“Yes. Just yesterday.”
“Pretty cool, right?”
Green thought about the ball of goo shooting into the sky and the way the hole seemed to watch him.
“Uh, I wasn’t a big fan.”
“Did you see it at night?”
Green shuddered at the thought.
“No. Does that matter?”
“Yeah, bro. It matters. You gotta see it at night.”
Green thought about telling Alf about the dead birds, but he realized he would be inviting questions he didn’t know how to answer.
“Look, maybe just steer clear of that place. At least for now?”
Alf shrugged.
“I hear ya. Good lookin’ out. I’ll keep the tourists away.”
“Thanks, Alf.”
“Don’t forget, Green, you still owe me that six-pack for hooking you up with car help.”
“I didn’t forget. Want me to buy it now?”
“Nah. I’ll tell you when. Anyway, you gotta drink it with me and you don’t look down for day drinking right now.”
“Heh, no, I guess not today. Well, I have zero trust in my phone, but you know where to find me.”
Green looked through the glass door to the dark trees across the road.
“Alf, you guys see anything weird out here…especially at night…just, stay away from it. You know?”
“Hear that, Jerome? The new guy is giving us advice.”
Jerome didn’t answer. He did something fancy with his deck, displaying the cards in a star shape, then continued shuffling.
“Yeah. Sorry. I guess you know how to live with weirdness out here.”
“Yeah, bro. I guess I do.”
“Okay. Stay safe, Alf.”
“Don’t be a stranger, brother.”
Green went out and something made him look back. Jerome was standing at the window, holding up his deck. Green grinned, nodded, and tapped his forehead.
King of clubs. Come on, man. You got this. King of clubs.
Jerome pressed a king of diamonds against the glass.
Close.
Green shook his head. Jerome turned away.
The Prius still smelled like fresh camping gear and old coffee. It was a smell from a week earlier and seemed to be from a bygone decade. There was a brown constellation of dried blood droplets smattered across the Toyota logo in the center of the steering wheel.
On the drive back to Candle-Fly, Green noticed three soft tan shapes lying in a patch of pine straw just off the road. He pulled over before realizing he’d made the decision. There were no other cars.
He climbed out and felt the profound isolation of an empty roadway pressed between great swaths of woods like a fossil folded in layers of shale.
He thought of Kyle Cartwright loading his fishing gear when something found him in a spot very much like this one.
The sun was still high in the sky. The wolf and fawn were creatures of the dusk and dark.
Aren’t they?
Green went to inspect the shapes.
Three deer lay dead beneath a white pine. They were unmarked. The animals might have appeared asleep, except they had fallen at unnatural angles, one doe’s black nose buried in the soil. Pine needles clung to the deer’s dark, sightless eyes.
Green knelt and reached to feel a soft white throat.
It was numbingly cold.
He looked up the hill and saw a dead chipmunk near an emerald tuft of club moss.
His eyes traveled farther up the slope.
How much death is out there, beyond what I can see?
How many corpses are hidden in thickets, unable to rot, to return to the soil?
How many victims are trapped in perpetual winter?
He didn’t know. He wasn’t certain he wanted to know. He just wished he could make it stop.