The boys are warned, so as soon as a nightmare or a bad dream oppresses them, to give up the affair at once, come down from the tree, and return home …
JOHANN GEORG KOHL, 1855
HE WOKE TO FURIOUS CROWS that broke through the morning and carried off any remnant of his sleep. The black shapes above him shifted in the trees where the moss hung from the branches, and roared at him as they twitched from one tree to another. To endure the contempt of crows was necessary now. Paul propped himself with his elbows against the cobbles of the pit, but found it more difficult than before. Touching his jaw, he felt his fingers sink deep into the swelling. It was remarkable he’d slept at all. He took long breaths and fumbled with a notebook that was damp and spongy. Probably the pen didn’t work. This was a good thing. More pens shouldn’t work. Especially his. Slowly the nerves in his legs activated in a peculiar re-awakening until he felt strong enough to lift up and carry himself out of the pit and a short way through the bush.
When he made it there Paul discovered his campsite in ruins, the tent smeared and collapsed as if a balloonist had crashed on this very spot. The nylon food bag lay shredded like tissue on the forest floor thirty yards away, wide open. An animal had ripped his pack from the trees. Grains of rice lay on the ground. A lone red bean, shreds of plastic, wax paper, and the vial of pills, empty since yesterday. Paul located his remaining notebook. Its top margins had been chewed. The raccoons had come. He was unpleasantly hungry now, dizzy-hungry, and he stopped for a moment to recover, leaning against a tree where he clutched his notebook and coughed.
He remained there for some time, several hours maybe, but not a day. It couldn’t have been a day. Yet when he moved it appeared the sun had rolled across the sky like some great stone. At points, the insects swarmed him in intense waves. Several of them screamed in his face. Immense blue dragonflies droned in front of his eyes. A fly landed on his lip. Stupid fly. How could it possibly know where his lips had been? Did it imagine it was immune from the germs that bred on his lips? On the lips of man? Paul forced himself to chuckle.
The sun moved swiftly behind the trees and the clouds came on like dark draperies that were turbulent at the bottom. He drank water from a wineskin and when he opened his eyes it was dark, either with weather or the night, and he knew the Milky Way would not be seen this night. It wouldn’t course across the universe carrying the souls of every single person who had lived and died. Paul shivered. He realized he’d been dreaming. His smallness was suddenly unbearable and he was thrown back with fear onto the strange moving objects of his boyhood dreams, the freight trains and a terrifying snail that appeared to crawl forever up immense curtains when his eyes were shut tight and his father was in a mocking rage in another room. Paul was ready to enter sleep. In the speck of darkness, he heard a train shuddering down the tracks, unsure whether he was awake or not.
When his eyes cracked open, he heard the crows shouting at him, in Latin it seemed. He waited for the wash of dreams to flood him. Linda, in jeans and a sweater stood in front of him. “You have been mad and drunk all summer,” she said sternly. Tears surfaced on his eyes and he heard the rains pattering first on the dense canopy, then rattling harder, dripping through it until the moisture fell on the sponge and the rock of the forest. The dream ebbed from him and he clung to what he could; Linda warming her hair with the portable hair dryer, the one he’d given her.
He realized he couldn’t get up. Something seemed to be lying on top of him like a fallen tree. Tears fell from the sky. He couldn’t get up. He needed to get up and tell her the truth, but there were no words, simple or not, there were only things and memory; the endless bushwhacks through tight woods, ragged ferns scratching them, the Assiniboine River, in a canoe ducking beneath fallen logs to avoid decapitation as an eagle shot over top, its shadow passing across her face. For a strange moment, he’d thought the eagle had flown directly into her face and emerged from the other side.
Paul tried to make his way back toward the pit and the cobbled stones that waited there. Nausea twisted him. Halfway, he stopped and attempted to vomit. Nothing came of it, except a few drops of bile that burned on his lips. He staggered forward and cooled his mouth on the cold white cobbles and when he drew away a line of saliva joined him from lip to stone. He made it to the pit and folded himself into it. Removing the red Swiss Army knife from the pocket of his trousers he pried the blade open with his fingernail. “Here,” Her long neck loomed in front of him. “It’s for you,” she said.
The blade shone as Paul pressed it to the fabric of his right pant leg and opened a seam, probing further now pushing beneath the skin through the fat. He would invoke his skin as the Récollets did, whipping themselves with briar, and torturing their own flesh for the visions that resulted. Paul saw the blood race down his legs and wondered how Enno Littmann would have handled this, that grandiose cataloguer of Ethiopic manuscripts, most of them purchased for the price of a few rifle cartridges. Littmann would do it differently. Littmann would be in a library, sunk into plush upholstery, learning to read and write Coptic Egyptian in less than three weeks while the swish of gaslight illuminated his own personal fifteenth-century copy of the Apocalypse of St. Paul.
His eyes were shut. He felt the sweat break on his forehead. The gaslight flowed down his legs. The blade found its way beneath his skin and slid down and he did not scream. For the first time in two days, the pain from his teeth left him. Then he screamed. The sound was not unpleasant to him and did not even appear to be his, or to be from him in any way. A wafer of his flesh came free. It looked like a piece of Arctic char. A pulp of his skin the size of a nickel rested in his hand, and he convulsed, as if jabbed with a cattle prod. Paul cried out and began to shake. After the spasms passed, he put the wafer of flesh to his lips, tasting salt, and lard, pork fat, and the grease of man. His saliva was bloody when he spat it out. “Linda,” he spoke her name deliberately. He needed to get up. It was imperative that he get up and go to her.
Paul tore a patch of moss from the rock and pressed it to his thigh. What had he done? What good was it to be mutilated and have no visions? He removed a kerchief from his pocket and wrapped the moss to his wound. Exhaling, he tried to get up but his shins wobbled and he went down again, knees clashing on the stones. They have taken my marrow, he thought, they have taken it and eaten it. The endless hiss of Superior cleansed itself against a rock. It was not daylight any longer, he saw. It was starlight, or moonlight bright enough to read by, but the shining of the white meridian hurt his eyes and a steady pain pulsed from his legs. How had that happened? It occurred to him that all the quartz veins of the planet were burning blood.
Paul yanked another handful of moss from above the pit and pressed it to the kerchief. This is an odd way for a man to die, he thought and yet, it was precisely the way he does, foolish, frightened, without understanding. He was astonished by that, as if it was something he should have known a long time ago. It was dark now, finally, either from night or the swift enclosure of extreme weather. He could not remember it being so dark. No animal had appeared to him; the crow only, cowled black and rasping in trees. He needed to get up. He heard the shushing of the spirit ocean. It was whispering to him. He stood in the halls of his high school, a child with bad skin, a reader of too many books, alone, listening to the silver whisper of girls, sounding to him like surf against the shore of a lake.
Paul tried to get up, but his bones would not allow it. He thought he might just roll over and try to find some way to break through and embrace his wife, to make love to her, to crawl to her on her knees, like a proper husband, but he encountered an old discomfort and feared neither of them would reach their passion. They had held that for others and got nowhere for it. He felt the tightness of her belly, clenched and waiting for release. Linda Richardson. He realized with some alarm that he was crying.
He needed to get up. He needed to crawl back down the path out of the forest and onto the cobbles for Joe to meet him. The idea pleased him; Joe coming down that trail whistling a tune and smoking American Spirit tobacco. Soon, tomorrow. The next day. Joe Animal. He wondered if the man existed. His leg had become grimed with blood. Paul tried to stand and failed. Sweat rolled on his face. A fox barked. He wanted to tell his wife about the love he had for her, enough for both of them and for the entire bloody world. Even his own. He knew that. It had written them and rolled them in the same bedsheets, nights of shooting stars and sheets of lightning when they rode the Ontario Northland, brilliant on wine, in a train clattering on shadowed rocks under the moon. He had to tell her that. It was the only thing he could tell her. The dereliction of this duty bothered him unbearably.
Dark came and the aching of his mouth merged with his mutilation. He felt his thigh and told himself he was not bleeding very much. He felt foolish and chastened. From somewhere nearby he heard panting, his own he realized, and water, he thought. A hissing from the surf, the metallic sound of Superior grinding on the sand and rock. Life had started out there, not his life perhaps, but life; it began in the foam that washed off Lake Superior. It was raining again, falling water dripped through the canopy of foliage, pattering, the most beautiful sound on the earth, but what he heard was not the rain. It was different.
PAUL BECAME AWARE OF THE source of it standing motionless between the trees quite close to him all this time, a tall thing. Standing there watching him. The flesh on it was without any form of skin that he recognized, red and black, and crisscrossed with veins or tattoos and red lines. Two curved, slender antlers spiralling toward the top, rose from the head. He saw the white foam of Lake Superior clinging to the shoulders and thighs and then it began to move. It advanced smoothly into the trees, luminescent even, loping, with one hand outstretched toward him. The long penis swung like an eel that was hardly attached to its loins. Suddenly the thing stopped and turned its head from east to west before staring directly at Paul, registering only then the sort of creature that he was. Slick-skinned like a salamander, the form came at him through the woods, almost curiously, beckoning to him with long fingers and uttering a low moan that Paul understood at the end was the sound of his own voice sobbing in the trees.