IT WAS FROM AN OLDER HIKER NAMED GENE THAT Mark had learned the art of keeping a pack always ready, inside the front door. Grab and go: he still remembered how powerfully this notion of preparedness for flight had impressed him. He’d met Gene playing pool in a bar and soon they’d been hiking together at least once a week. Despite Gene’s seniority of at least fifteen years, they’d struck up an easy sympathy rare in Mark’s life. Grab and go: until seeing Gene’s pack, Mark had never desired to emulate any person in any respect. The canteens always full. Dry food portions to last for a week. In the short time Mark knew him, Gene would often be gone, without warning, even longer than that. Mark would drop by with his own pack hike-ready some morning, or with a bottle some evening and find Gene’s door unlocked, as always, his house as always submerged beneath friendly disorder, but the opaque, knotted, soldierly pack would be gone from the hall. Gene’s truck or his motorcycle, a 1969 Triumph Bonneville to which he was devoted, would be gone from the driveway. Mark would labor to quell his hurt feelings by extracting a lesson he hoped to absorb. Later he would reflect that, though he’d scarcely known Gene, he’d admired him. For Mark, admiration had never come easy, perhaps because it had been urged on him from a too-early age. Ruth had urged him to admire his father, and his father had urged him to admire her, and although he had loved them, he had striven with increasing difficulty to guard this flame of childish adoration in the face of their exhortations. Meeting Gene, admiration had been a reflex; he had seen in the other man his idealized self, calmed with age and the self’s acceptance of the things it can’t be.
One night, when he had known Gene a couple of months, and they had been playing cards and drinking Jim Beam in Gene’s living room—an unapologetic bachelor’s nest with sagging couch and gigantic TV and stacks of firewood in the corners, and the beloved Bonneville dominating, with Gene’s tools scattered in a sort of worshipful sunburst design all around it—Mark had gone to take a piss and found that the shower curtain in the bathroom, which he realized he had always until now seen closed, was open, exposing a tub full of bright plastic boats.
Coming out, he’d heard Gene taking a hammer to a sack of ice in the kitchen, and in obedience to an intrusive impulse almost foreign to him, he’d opened Gene’s bedroom door, which, like the shower curtain, he had always seen closed. Within was the familiar disorder of the unmarried man, laundry of unknown condition in heaps, but on the walls near the head of Gene’s bed were framed photographs, in great number, of two boys. A range of ages: three and five, perhaps; five and seven; seven and nine. Flannel shirts and blue jeans, or shirtless in swim trunks; spray of freckles; a familiar, self-confident, open expression that somehow contained a remoteness: the complete self, enthroned in its place, far in the future of—or deep in the soul of, or in both places of—each small boy.
Mark had suffered an inexplicable sense of betrayal. Hearing Gene coming out of the kitchen he’d left the room quickly, shut the cheap hollow-core door noiselessly, rejoined Gene, played a couple more hands, and then told him good night. In the months that followed, he’d never asked Gene about his children, nor had Gene mentioned them, although now, on the occasions that Mark found Gene gone, and the pack gone, and the truck, not the motorcycle, absent from the driveway, Mark sensed that Gene was off with his sons.
Later that year, in the winter, Mark learned that the boys were named Wesley and Drew. They were, at that time, ten and twelve. They lived with their mother, whose name Mark never heard. Walking into the bar where he first had met Gene, Mark was told that Gene, on his motorcycle, had been struck by an eighteen-wheeler, pulled beneath it, and killed. Gene had been on his way home from seeing his sons. Their existence was so generally known in the bar—indeed their likes, dislikes, habits, hobbies, funny sayings, all were discussed—that Mark wondered if Gene had only thought that Mark must know them, as all the town did. He wondered if Gene had not spoken of Wesley and Drew because they went without saying.
Mark had given notice on his rented room and his job that same week, had moved away from that town, and had never gone back there again.
It was also true, Mark reflected now, that he had never told Gene very much of himself. They had spoken of the lean-to on the pond, of the fish that were biting or not, of half-baked DEP regulations, of the woman still weeping alone at the end of the bar, of the blazes that hadn’t been fixed on the trail, of the people those blazes got lost, of the wasp’s gray balloon in the tree, of the cherry’s great age, of the old growth, the clear cut, the jewelweed coming in bloom.
They had spoken of those aspects of the immediate world they shared. For Mark it had been an intimacy of perfect clarity and perfect simplicity, devoid of anguished barings of the soul. And wasn’t this what he sought? The sense of having found his snug place, without having to pay in disclosures, in endless confessions and self-revelations? That was what repelled Mark from religion: all that supposedly selfless obsession with self, with self’s failings and sins and past lapses and present resolves. Mark never could bear all that speaking of self, all that cleansing of self, all that woebegone self-proffering in the hope of forgiveness. More than anything it had been the necessity that he constantly yield his self that had propelled his resistance to church, not, as his parents had wanted to think, the necessity that he believe in God. Such belief, if it could have been his, was something he would have enjoyed. He knew that he yearned for the truly great thing, the One thing. He’d yearned for it in drugs, and in gypsy crisscrossings from West Coast to East, and most happily down the trails with Gene. Perhaps it wasn’t his particular birthright; every human must have it. But Mark had gained from his parents an outsize preoccupation with that yearning and a tendency to put it ahead of all other concerns.
Perhaps he’d felt injured that Gene had not told him about Wesley and Drew because his contentment with Gene had been almost monastic. He had loved Gene not as a father or friend or sibling but as if they’d been two mendicants, a pair of Franciscans with backpacks, allied in their choice of essential aloneness, and free of all ties to the world. And yet all that time Gene had his sons.
Mark had been steadily climbing for almost two hours, as the tender coolness of early morning was swallowed by heat, and the chirr of the insects rose up into such an unvarying roar Mark soon stopped hearing it. The trees all around were the color of spring, that impossibly fresh, vibrant green that could make Mark’s chest ache, as if the leaves were too young to be out in the weather and should have been packed up in cotton at night. And yet the woods were impenetrable to his eye; the leaves were youthful, but they were full size, and when Mark gazed between the tree trunks, the leaves filled up the spaces between like a depth of chartreuse-colored water. Mark knew from his map that the trail, which was ascending the flank of a mountain, was going to level off soon in a sort of a saddle between two higher peaks, but he couldn’t make out any sign that the saddle was near.
All at once he was there, as if he’d stepped off a staircase. The ground was level beneath his feet, and he’d entered a natural clearing, with long, silken grass underfoot and the trees that marked off a perimeter mingling their boughs overhead, so that in spite of the clearing below, there was no patch of sky overhead, only sun-dappled shade. Mark’s strange sense he was underwater intensified. Somehow an expanse of old growth had survived here, so that he seemed to stand in an arcade, or a mosque, with the columnar trunks rising out of a verdant prayer rug. It took him a moment to realize that his impression of a temple wasn’t entirely fanciful metaphor. At one side of the clearing, thick segments of tree trunk about two feet across had been crudely cut into chairs, one cut crosswise to just over halfway, a second cut lengthwise to meet the first, so that a chunk was removed and the segment became a squat L, its seat not much more than a foot off the ground. There were eight of them, ranged in a circle, around the vestige of a fire pit so overgrown that it probably hadn’t been used since the previous summer.
Mark turned around, slowly, but he didn’t see any cut stump nearby. The maker of the chairs must have lugged the fat logs here from elsewhere, perhaps already cut into chairs, perhaps with a chain saw to do it on site. But as obvious a process as it was that had led to these chairs—the fat logs, the two cuts with the saw—Mark couldn’t envision it. The circle of chairs seemed ancient and ordained, as if they’d grown out of the earth on their own, or been conjured by non-human force.
He stood hesitating so long that all the exertion of the past few hours had the chance to catch up with him, and his legs became meltingly tired. He squatted, freed himself from his pack, and then, as if it might bite or collapse, gingerly sat down on one of the chairs. Once settled, he felt all the clandestine excitement of his boyhood, inventing tales of castles and broadswords and strange amulets. The other seven empty chairs seemed to quiver in expectation. The clearing had a contrary atmosphere that mingled secretiveness with exposure, so that Mark felt he’d tripped through a portal and tumbled away from the world and at the same time was sure he’d be intruded upon any moment. He’d seen no one on the trail this morning; no other car had been parked at the trailhead. But he was in the northeastern United States of America, never far from his fellow humans, no matter how he might try to sequester himself and pretend.
Although splintery, sharp-edged, and unaccommodating, the chair seemed to embrace him; he found himself falling asleep. The chirr of insects swelled and ebbed like a tide, but it might only have been his drowsiness that found a rhythm in the drone. He felt certain that something happened here, that this Stonehenge of logs must mark a site of conjunction, a seam between worlds, where the one, every four thousand years, would reach into the other….
He had fallen asleep. When he jerked awake, he felt the same embarrassment he might have if he’d started to snore in a movie, to the unseen but palpable displeasure of persons nearby. He couldn’t quite persuade himself he was alone here; he checked his map, shouldered his pack again, and spent several minutes probing the perimeter of the clearing for his trail, which he finally found winding off very faintly in the direction of the modest peak—thirty-eight hundred feet—where he meant to eat lunch. Perhaps he’d come back here and camp for the night. Perhaps not—he brusquely shook off the enchantment once walking again. He didn’t owe the place any additional tribute. The more distance he gained from it, the stronger his sense it was someone else’s, with no space for him, although the land was public and no one could have claimed it.
After another half hour of steady climbing, he was astonished to find himself in a froth of pristine mountain laurel. All tidy-cornered and white like so many fresh handkerchiefs sized for a wren; when Mark brought his giant’s nose close, he could see needle pricks of deep pink, each so small it seemed strange to be able to make out their color. He could not understand this return to the last weeks of spring, when the summer had already poured the woods full of chartreuse; it was at his back and a few hundred feet below him, the high heat and dense bug drone of June, and yet here he was spirited into the past, before the FBI came to his home, before his mother had hung up the phone…. His camera was locked in his van at the trailhead, three hours behind him. This fresh evidence of his lucklessness choked a groan from him, and the wild, wounded sound startled him, as did the fact that he’d started to cry, tipped forward to counter the weight of his pack, with his face in the flowers.
Mark was aware that a crisis of unprecedented type and degree was fomenting in him. His lifelong habits of near solitude, of having very few friends at any one time and never keeping any for long, of speaking little of himself even when he was given the chance, were due only to a distance between him and others, not between him and himself. Hence his distaste for self-centered religion. Such believers, Mark felt sure, did not know themselves; they viewed themselves with a mix of fascination and dread; they made their business their own redemption as a way of avoiding any real confrontation with the stuff of their souls. Mark’s father had been one of these: his aloofness from others was a function of his aloofness from self. But Mark felt he was more like his mother: tight-lipped toward others because all too aware of the unruliness of himself. Of course, Mark had never confirmed this with her; the members of the Taciturn Tribe don’t jaw on about how they don’t talk. But little as he understood Ruth, the one thing he’d felt sure of was that she understood herself and was just keeping quiet about it, the way that Mark did.
That Mark was aware of the fomenting crisis did not mean he knew when or how it would break. This wasn’t due to insufficient self-knowledge but to insufficient time. The crisis was on the horizon, making steady advance, but at a speed that could not be determined.
Mark stopped crying, broke a pom-pom of blooms from a branch, and stuck it into his chest strap. He started climbing again. Right away the terrain grew so steep he really was climbing stairs, jagged blocks piled up on each other, the slim trunks of the laurel growing almost straight out, so that Mark could use them as handholds to pull himself up, which loosed a snowfall of petals.
Gene would have known what to do about the circle of chairs, by which thought Mark meant that Gene would have known what attitude to take, and what manners to use. Gene would have known whether it was an honorable or a dishonorable thing to have colonized the woods in this way. Gene might have known, just from examining the logs, if they’d been deadwood or a live tree cut down for that purpose. Gene would have known whether to treat the chairs as a public amenity, to which all had rights and for which all were responsible, or as a private vandalism—the circle to be broken, the chairs scattered, the fire pit filled in, covered over, so as not to be used.
But the object Mark really pursued by this indirect train was that Gene would have known what to do about Mark’s brewing crisis. As little as he’d let Gene know him, and as little as he’d known Gene himself, Mark had mourned him as if somehow realizing that a time would arrive in his future when he’d need a priest. And given that Mark had dodged priests all his life, Gene was as close to a priest as Mark had.
Still, it was because of his solitude, and the undisciplined, off-trail wanderings of his mind—and not because he thought such an exercise in hokum would do any good—that Mark found himself narrating for Gene the events of the past several weeks, as if they were sitting across from each other at Gene’s card table, with the bottle of Jim Beam and a bowl of ice, while Gene cut and shuffled the cards and Mark refilled their glasses. They were not on the trail, where no serious hiker enjoyed conversation; the trail was for hiking, not talking. So that as he climbed through the clouds of white laurel, until they slowly thinned out and he had come to a place of stunted chestnut and black gum and oak and longer grass and an opening sky, Mark was two places at once and two times at once: with Gene both before him and lost to him, and his mother both as she had been all his life and as she was now—for which Mark had no words.
We’re all mysteries to our kids. That’s the way it should be. Those two—Gene gestured toward the bathroom, from which came sounds of squealing and splashing—they’ll never know who I was. And they shouldn’t. I knew too much about my old man, and just enough about my mom. I loved her, and I hated his guts.
If we don’t know the people we came from, Mark said, how do we know who we are?
I can’t agree with you there. You’re not those people. Lighting a fresh cigarette, Gene added, I struck the match, but that flame isn’t part of me. It doesn’t need to ask me, “What is fire?”
That, Mark said, is a stoned thought if ever I heard one. They both laughed.
I’m not stoned, Gene remarked, but I sure wish I was. Just another thing my boys don’t need to know. Gene went to get Wesley and Drew out of the bathtub and into pajamas. Mark listened to their easy rough-housing, the boys’ protests and Gene’s admonitions, small wet feet slapping down the hallway, water sucked down the drain.
Mark was crossing a meadow, all long golden grass lying flat in the wind and huge lichen-stained boulders left there by some thundering glacier; thigh-high blueberry bushes just forming the first sour green fruits. He was on the summit: no dramatic triangular point, but a vast tableland swept by wind and pressed upon by the sun. He knew he was high from the neighboring peaks he could see, dark ever-greened masses like motionless waves, or the spines of humped beasts, bursting up from the edge of the prospect. He’d chosen this peak for its openness, as described in his book; the other summits were higher, but entirely forested. Blind.
Only God can give you knowledge of yourself, said Mark’s father. He made you.
I don’t believe in Him, Mark said again.
You love Creation. Look at this place you’ve sought out! You must love the Creator.
It’s not math, Dad. It’s not “if P, then Q.”
So says my atheist son who flunked math, Mark’s father observed, not without bemusement.
Your mom’s hiding something from you, Gene observed, coming back. That’s a reason to be pissed off, sure. But it’s really her problem, not yours. You don’t need your mom to be honest. You have your own life.
I don’t know who I am.
Sure you do. You’re the kid who always went his own way, always rogue of the herd. Climbed out of your crib at ten months and walked out the front door. Tanzania.
I never told you that shit.
You could have.
They were silent.
Though I have to say, Gene added after a moment, ten months is pretty early for walking. You must have been crazy.
I have a feeling I was older, Mark said. I have a feeling I am older.
Yeah? How do you mean?
Like something’s missing. Some part of my life.
Mark kept moving across the meadow, pushing through the tall grass and the islands of high-bush blueberry, passing groves of little gnarled hardwoods that gripped their scant leaves against the strong wind. It was a summer wind, warm in his face. He was drawn on by his sense that the meadow’s exact center point lay just beyond, and again just beyond where he was. The dark, distant neighboring peaks shifted slightly. He’d lost the trail long ago, upon coming out into the open.
Gene’s house now felt brighter, and smaller, and less comfortable; and those parts of it Mark noticed were entirely different, as if a lens had been placed on his memory that enhanced, for some reason, the woodwork, the plush velvet leaves of small plants with impossibly dark, purple flowers, like pinches of night sky brought cringing and puckering into the day. (Mark closed his eyes now and knew: these were African violets. But where? Not Africa. These flowers he saw were in little round pots, beneath long lightbulb rods that were casting a harsh, bluish glow.) The doorframes, the legs of a piano, the legs of a chair were all shiny and brown, as if coated in syrup. A hooded lamp on the piano he’s told not to touch. He’s no longer with Gene. He is younger, even, than Gene’s sons. The quality of the light at a sliding glass door fascinates him. Somewhere a door slams, and then, after a silence, two voices, of women, grow louder and louder, and he slips down the hallway to find them, trailing one hand on the wall.
His mother and the older woman, the one he’s been told is his grandmother, are standing in a back bedroom, the door not quite closed. “And what about his mother?” his grandmother cries, as he shoves the door open. They turn and look at him.
And what about his mother? As if she’s not there in the room.
And then he is older, he is Wesley or Drew’s age, he is ten, perhaps twelve, he and his parents have stopped off in some Asian country, who can guess which one now, but it’s next to an ocean, with steep cliffs that plunge to the surf. Their local hosts are full of pride for a local temple, it is built in the cliffs, it involves a cliff cave with a mouth facing east, some devotional object, and at dawn once a year, when the sun rises out of the ocean, its rays pierce the cave, strike the object in just such a way that the pilgrims and priests climb cliff steps in the four A.M. darkness, to be there and prostrate themselves, and it’s happening during their visit, a great stroke of luck.
Mark is desperate to go. His father has no interest and even, Mark sees, an aversion, though his father professes to be a Christian with enormous forbearance for those of debased pagan faiths. His mother is afraid it is dangerous, cliff steps in darkness, and Mark never gets up before eight, and they would have to get up at three-thirty, and Mark will be crabby and clumsy and plunge to his death. It is out of the question. The subject is closed. In his fury Mark does not go to sleep until some shocking hour, perhaps midnight, so that he is indeed crabby, cotton-brained and bewildered when his mother, her stern, homely face made bizarre by a flashlight, wakes him with a hand on his cheek. Don’t make noise. We’ll just do it without telling Dad.
They go, bleary-eyed, tripping over their practical foreigners’ shoes tightly laced over thick woolen socks. Through the tumbled little streets in pitch-darkness, until they have merged with a firefly parade, old people and toddlers and genderless parents in culottes, every age wearing cheap rubber flip-flops. How can they walk, let alone climb the cliffs, in such footwear? Mark’s mother is afraid they will trip, and the rock is volcanic, its harsh surface can slice up your shoe soles—but here is the whole village, hauling shopping bags heavy with offerings, laboring upward, four-year-olds, ninety-four-year-olds, everyone in between, their huffed breaths audible, all eyes glued to the twinkling and wavering chain of flashlights of which each is a part, and which makes up the sole trail to follow, a lifeline of stars.
The surf booms invisibly somewhere below. And though it has been years since Mark has willingly held hands with Ruth, he and she are conjoined, fused together by their damp, anxious palms, even as they climb single file, Mark first, Ruth behind stretching up to keep hold and to catch him in case he falls backward.
He loves her. She is a strange, remote, distracted little woman, but she is all he’s ever known. He doesn’t remember the cave, the miracle of first light. They probably didn’t make it inside at the optimal moment—there were too many other pilgrims—but he is not disappointed.
By the time Mark had eaten his sandwich and pottered around the meadow for a few hours, thoroughly lost, until he’d spied a faded blaze of paint across the face of a boulder, and then found his way to another, and so to the trail, it was late afternoon. He could get off the trail by nightfall, and yet everything seemed to incline him to spend the night here. Descending again through the cloudburst of fresh mountain laurel, he was surprised by the excitement he felt at the prospect of seeing the circle of chairs from this new angle, headed down-mountain.
The voices reached him just before he broke out of the trees, into the saddle clearing. A percolation of high notes and low; without seeing the people, he knew that it must be a family. It was clamor without raucousness, perhaps another way of saying it was a large group of campers not narrowly focused on drinking and sex. And then as he entered the clearing, the voices of children rang out from the rest, and he saw them rushing through the trees, skinny legs, bright T-shirts and shorts, whipping hair. Three girls and a boy, in a frantic pursuit where all four were both hunters and prey.
His refuge of a few hours before, where he had seemed to sit alone at the beginning of time, or in a parallel world, was completely transformed. The clearing and the grass and the trees were still lovely but at the same time mundane, scaled down and reined in. At a glance he saw five tents set up near the circle of chairs, a disorderly scatter of backpacks and bedding, a plastic garbage sack already dangling half full from a tree branch. There were men and women from late middle age to Mark’s age, all of them somehow alike, browned and vigorous and in constant movement, some pulling deadwood toward the fire pit, some sorting through food packages, some striding after the children. “Hey, you imps!” yelled a woman. “Get back here, we’re not done setting up!”
One of the older men came toward him. “Were you planning on camping?” he asked. “Don’t let us drive you off. There’s plenty of room, and we’ll try to be good neighbors, though I can’t vouch for everyone.” A younger man had joined them, equally affable, and the older man clapped him on the shoulder to demonstrate that he was an element that could not be vouched for, and both laughed.
Mark was struggling to contain an upwelling of such uncomradely irritation, of such petulant disappointment, he wasn’t sure he could speak. Of course it was all public land—it was theirs; it was everyone’s—and he’d sensed such a coming intrusion when he’d sat here before. But something had happened to him on the summit. It had ruined him for other people, perhaps just for the next several minutes, perhaps for a lifetime.
“That’s okay,” he rasped, not sure whether he meant, That’s okay, I don’t want to camp anyway or That’s okay, I’d be glad to camp with you. He hadn’t spoken aloud, he realized, since his furious curses when his mother hung up on him, almost four days ago.
The two men, and now a pair of women who were also approaching, seemed as accustomed to solitary, unwashed, unshaven, shell-shocked solo hikers as they were to this campsite. “Were you just on High Peak?” called the older of the two women. She had smooth gray hair cut in a pageboy and the antic eyes of a person much younger. When Mark nodded wordlessly, she added, with vehemence, “It must be spectacular up there right now. Don’t try hiking with kids! We meant to get there, but we reached camp so late we won’t make it. We’ll have to drag them up there in the morning.”
“Is it your camp?” Mark managed as they all began walking back toward the fire pit. He didn’t know how he’d fallen in with them.
“We live as if it were ours, but of course it’s the state’s. We try to camp here at least once a year.”
“Did you make the chairs?”
“Oh, no. We don’t know how those got there. But we like them. We old folks need our lumbar support.”
“Like you’re such an invalid, Mom,” razzed the younger woman affectionately.
Once they had absorbed him, they scarcely noticed him any longer. They were building a fire in the pit, which they’d freshly redug and expanded, and this beacon drew the four children out of the trees and kept them hovering just clear of the flames, eyes gleaming, like oversize moths. The makings of a camp dinner were being assembled, Coleman lanterns were being rewicked and lit, sleeping bags unfurled in tents in preparation for nightfall. The brighter the fire grew, the more quickly the indigo light sifting down through the trees seemed to lose all its color, so that the forest grew murky with shadow and the gaudy encampment stood out like a stage. Mark had put down his pack at a slight distance from them, outside the circle of chairs and the comforting beacon of flame, but not so far away that he couldn’t hear the murmur of their voices, the outbursts of their laughter. He was part of the dim margin now; perhaps he’d pick up his pack, turn on his flashlight, and go, and they’d never remember he’d been there.
He had time to count them, as they drew toward the fire and each other. The four children, all long-legged but not yet teenagers. Maybe the youngest was six and the eldest was twelve. Seven adults: the noticeably older man and woman with whom Mark had spoken, three younger women within a decade of Mark’s age who were probably sisters, and two men who were presumably husbands to two of the women and fathers to the children, in some combination that Mark couldn’t parse. The third young woman had a baby bundled to herself in something like a snug hammock that tied over one shoulder; at first Mark had thought it was a side pack she inexplicably hadn’t removed, until he saw the bundle erupt in a struggle and a small head pop out.
The light was failing and failing, and he still hadn’t crawled off to make his own den in the darkness. Nor had he gone forward to reciprocate their welcome with some friendly act of his own. They were clearly experienced campers, if not in Mark’s style. They knew protocols. They had opened themselves up to him, but they weren’t going to hound him. The next move, if any, was his.
He watched the woman with the baby pacing slowly in the dim space between where the firelight expired and where he was sitting. She had the baby still confined to its bundle and was bouncing it gently, but its displeased exclamations grew louder and louder, or perhaps it was that she drew closer and closer to Mark. On an impulse he stood up and crossed the few yards that still lay between them and, as he did, felt the night dew that had weighted the tips of the long grass, brushing over his calves.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m over there. I didn’t want you to stumble on me and get scared.”
“I knew you were there,” she said. “You’re the poor solo hiker whose peace we’ve destroyed.”
“No, not at all,” Mark managed, suddenly anxious to dispel this impression. “It’s nice not to be here alone. I just don’t want to intrude. It looks like a family thing.”
“That it is, but believe me, you wouldn’t be intruding. My mother must be sitting on her hands to keep herself from dragging you up to the fire and making you toast a marshmallow. She’s the original den mother. She and my dad had three girls, but she didn’t let that stop her.” The baby, which had been sounding more and more like a bobcat and thrashing with abandon, gave a last desperate yowl, and the woman took it under the armpits and began to try to liberate it from the tangle of cloth. “Okay, Esme,” she said. “You’re not being strangled, good grief.”
“Can I help?”
“You can pull down on the sling, yeah, like that, so I can get her out of it.”
A thrill of self-conscious anxiety prickled his skin as he stepped near to do what she asked, which felt strangely like helping her out of her clothes. But it was the baby he’d freed, and once that was accomplished, he stepped away quickly, blushing so much he was sure she must feel the heat from him, even though it was too dark to see. “Feel better, Esme?” he asked, to conceal his embarrassment.
Esme was now sitting very upright and alert in her mother’s arms. Mark saw the fire miniaturized in her eyes, which seemed uncannily keen, tigerlike, gleaming out of the darkness.
“And I’m Laura,” the young woman said. “Do you even want to know the rest of our names? No one should have to confront our whole family at once.”
Mark wanted to. “I’m Mark,” he began, and as he was saying it, and thinking of how strange it sounded, of how uncertain a statement it suddenly was, a blotch of light came bouncing wildly through the night, and a great cry went up.
“Oh, my God!” Laura cried, bounding away with Esme in her arms. “Are you crazy? I thought you were going to wait until morning!”
“Who wants beer?” a new male voice was shouting. “Where’s Esme—there’s my girl! Look at you! Look at you, little camper!”
Mark turned and walked back to his pack, his heart beating wildly, as if the pack might have vanished. But it was there, though it took him a moment to make out its bulk. His hands were trembling, it must be with hunger, though he felt he had no appetite. He hauled the pack a little farther away over the wet grass and began to dismantle it in the darkness. He lighted his candle lantern and rolled out his ground cloth and found a Baggie of trail mix that smelled strongly of socks. He swallowed sun-warmed, brackish water, forcing it over the lump in his throat.
He was almost scared out of his skin when the children approached, their eight eyes and the stripes on their sneakers reflecting his candle. “We brought you some chili and rice,” the oldest girl said, holding out a bowl that was temptingly steaming and had a spoon stuck on top. “Our moms say you’re welcome to join us.”
Mark had the happy feeling that they’d fought over who got to carry the bowl. He reached out to accept it, and the girl gave it to him, with the other three looking on closely.
“Hey, thanks,” Mark said. “That’s really nice. Tell them thank you, okay?”
“Are you coming?” the girl asked after a moment.
“I think so. I might.”
But he didn’t. After he’d watched them reluctantly leave him, he wolfed down the chili and washed the bowl from his canteen. Then he got into his sleeping bag. He lay a long time, sheltered by their voices, before falling asleep.
Laura’s family had made a conquest of the mountain. Not by any aggression but only their forceful reality, their uniformity, their geniality, they’d made the woods into their backdrop, and apart from anomalous Mark, nothing alien to them remained. Gene was gone. Gone were Mark’s father and mother, and his forgotten grandmother, whom he had encountered only that once, and of whom he had not been reminded again until his mountaintop vision. They had all drawn the lid on their chamber of ghosts. Mark did not even dream. When he opened his eyes in the morning, the interval didn’t exist anywhere in his body. Thunderclap—the sun stood overhead. He sat up.
Laura was pacing and bouncing Esme, who was bundled again. Esme sat straight up from her pocket of cloth, like a mirror of Mark sitting out of his sleeping bag.
“You probably think that we’ve been here all night,” Laura said. Behind her, on the far side of the clearing, the rest of the camp lay silent, giving off a luxuriant aura of sleep.
“Have you?” Mark asked. He was aware of foul fuzz in his mouth, the ripeness of his armpits and crotch, the fact that he was speaking to her from the intimacy of his bed.
“Believe it or not, she does sleep. She just doesn’t sleep until way after midnight, and then she gets up at five, and then she’ll doze all day long and come to life around sundown. She’s a total vampire.”
In the daylight Esme was very beautiful and sagacious and not at all vampiric. It was clear to Mark she wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. Perhaps Laura was walking and bouncing her because too exhausted for anything else. “Want to put her down?” he said.
They disentangled Esme again, a replay of the previous evening’s proximity, with Mark keeping his lips clamped this time so she could not smell his breath. At the end of the ordeal, he found that it was he, and not Laura, who held the baby by her sides, with her feet dangling down. He quickly stooped to put her on his sleeping bag, where she sat very steadily plumped on her bottom and took a fistful of fabric. Mark and Laura sat down to either side of her, off the ground cloth, and Mark felt the dew soaking his shorts.
“What time is it?” he asked after a moment.
“Just past six.” Laura lay down, heedless of the wet grass, slinging one arm over her eyes.
Both females seemed settled. Mark pulled his pack near and furtively dug for his toothbrush. Each item he removed, Esme reached for, and a furrow of concentration and annoyance appeared on her forehead. Finding toothbrush and toothpaste Mark scrubbed his teeth and was able to complete the operation without Laura’s seeing him, although he knew she must hear him. But that seemed less humiliating. “I should get going,” he said, just for something to say.
Laura lifted her arm from her eyes to squint at him. “Really? That’s too bad. You should at least stick around for breakfast. My mother bakes bread in a can in the fire. It takes until noon, but it’s pretty darn good.”
Esme tipped suddenly forward, and Mark moved to catch her, but she was only shifting onto all fours. Once there she examined his sleeping bag closely. Laura propped her head on one elbow. “You going to crawl away, Esme?” she asked.
“How old is Esme?” Mark wondered. He’d never felt the least curiosity about a baby. He’d never touched one, he realized, until just a few moments before.
“Almost ten months,” Laura said. “She’ll be a year in September.”
“Do you think she’ll walk soon?”
“God, I hope not.” Laura laughed. “I need a little more time to prepare.”
“When do they usually start?”
“I don’t really have any idea. My sisters’ kids all walked between fourteen and seventeen months, so I’m hoping I’ll have a few more months of immobile Esme. Not that she’s really immobile,” Laura added as Esme, with resolute thrusts of her arms, began crawling the length of the sleeping bag.
“Do babies ever walk when they’re just ten months old? Or even, climb out of their cribs?”
“If they do, then I pity their parents.” Laura laughed again. “No, I don’t know. I’m sure some do.”
“But it’s uncommon.”
“I’d say so. Why? Are you hoping to see her first steps? In that case you should definitely stay for breakfast.”
The impetus for these questions was so personal he was sure he had not been oblique, but a true exhibitionist, and that he’d confessed that the myth of his own babyhood now seemed flawed, far too mythic for him to believe. At the same time, he knew he had not told her this, and he longed to. He felt he was obeying ever more reckless impulses when he asked, “Was it your husband who got here last night?” But Laura didn’t seem to notice the color he felt coming up once again in his face.
“Yeah, he’s crazy. He had to work late, so he was going to hike up this morning, but instead he comes up in the dark, with all his gear on his back and a twelve-pack of beer on his shoulder. I’m taking pity and letting him sleep. Usually he gets up with Esme, to give me a break.”
Her casual evocation of a domestic routine had much the same effect on him as the photographs of Gene’s sons had once had. “That reminds me that I ought to be hitting the trail myself,” he said, not having come up with a destination but simply wanting to be gone.
“What’s your plan?” Laura asked him as he began reassembling his pack. “Are you doing a long-distance hike?” She’d pulled Esme onto her lap so he could roll up his sleeping bag.
“Not really. Just driving around, checking out a few places I’ve wanted to see.”
“Sounds nice. A vacation?”
“I’m not really working right now.” He’d left Pine Hill without giving notice to his boss on the house-building crew and without seeing Dorothy—because, he now realized, he hadn’t yet understood he was leaving.
“Do you live near here?”
“No.”
“Sorry,” she said after a moment. “I’m not trying to pry.”
“You’re not.” Mark paused in his packing, an unpleasant thought crossing his mind. “I’m not a fugitive or something,” he assured her. “I’m just in between houses and jobs. I’m sort of wandering, I think.”
“I envy you. If you’ve got the freedom to do it, that’s great.”
“It doesn’t feel as free as you’d think.” He paused between yanking his pack’s straps and then yanked them tighter. “Have you heard of the word ‘hegira’?”
“That’s a record by Joni Mitchell.” They both laughed. “No, I’ve never known what that word means.”
Mark closed his eyes, trying to picture again the word’s full definition, as he’d read it in Dorothy’s library. The word had recurred to him recently, for no obvious reason. But he’d noticed that this often happened: a word he’d brushed past long ago, ignorant of its meaning, somehow found its way to him again and then felt uncannily apt when he learned what it meant. As if the word had returned to reveal to Mark not just its meaning but a meaning in his situation, of which until then he had been unaware.
“Hegira,” he told her. “It’s from the life of Muhammad, but it can mean any ‘journey or flight from danger, to a more safe or congenial place.’”
“Is that what you’re doing? Hegira?”
“I guess. Yeah,” Mark said, and then he grinned foolishly, and Laura grinned back, while Esme looked sternly from one to the other.
“And how’s it going? Your hegira?”
“Better. I mean, I don’t think I’m quite there. But it’s going okay.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me, too,” he said, meaning he was glad she had been part of it, and knowing, as he felt he almost never did with women, that she understood his subtext. She was flirting with him, wasn’t she? He had assembled his pack and was hoisting the heavy weight onto his back when he heard children’s voices drift out of the tents. Perfect timing.
“Have a nice life,” Laura said.
“How about ‘See you next year’?”
“That’s much better. See you next year.”
“See you next year, Esme,” he said, crouching down to make eye contact with her. “You’ll be walking.”
“Oh, yeah,” Laura said.
And what was most remarkable, Mark thought, gazing into the baby’s clear eyes, was that they took it all in, lucid and attentive, and yet nothing remained. She was just ten months old. In her future this time of her life would be severed from her, no less than Mark’s sleep of the previous night had been severed from him. All that fierce striving and wakeful intelligence, and what would she keep? Not a thing, not the fire or the tent or the trees or the unshaven stranger. They might tell her that anything happened, and she would have to believe them.