There was a place where the woods dropped. There was a path. And a bridge. A small bridge. A small stone bridge.
I ran as if someone was waiting for me. As if I was late.
“Listen to me, Evan. If I ever ask for that, go get help. If I ever ask for that, you’re going to have to save me.”
I tried I tried I tried I
It was about ten minutes farther in. This strange stone bridge, patching the gap between two cliffs. A memento of some earlier settlers, who might have had uses for the forest that were obscure to us now.
It was your mind. What could I do?
Focus, I thought. Focus.
I skidded down the dirt edge of one of the cliffs. I felt like I was bruising myself, but I didn’t mind. I saw the arch but couldn’t see if anything was in it. Anyone. I wanted you to be waiting with your camera. I wanted to be blinded by a flash, hear a laugh behind it.
Nothing stirred as I approached. The bridge had been out of use so long that the trees and the shrubs had begun to grow underneath it. Abandoned. I stepped through the undergrowth and looked through to the other side.
“Hello?” I called.
I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.
I jabbed my shoulder against the wall, made another bruise. The stones curved right over my head. They were cold, colder than the air.
I started to find patterns in the way the stones were stacked, and that’s when I saw it. Shoved into the bridge like a message that had been left for the rocks.
The next envelope.
As I reached up, I flashed into a fit of frequencies—all of them playing at once. Your voice, saying you would never forgive me. The first envelope sitting on the ground, my hand reaching down for it. My mother telling me not to touch things as we walked through a museum. Or maybe it was someone’s house. The curve of the stone next to the crack. And the crack itself—the shape of it, how it grabbed hold of the envelope. Hunger and sounds and my shirt pulling up as I reached, exposing the skin. The bark. I thought about the castle this was supposed to be, and wasn’t. Your prison. Jack’s cigarette. The fire that receded to the tip of his mouth and the smoke that expanded into the air. Two infinities: the one that stretches to the beginning but never touches—when you halve and halve and halve and halve, infinitely—and then the one that spreads out into the endless, endless future, the endless, endless distance. The set of infinities that is itself infinite. How do we go on? When so much happens to us, how do we go on? I took the envelope in my hand. I was already picturing myself opening it. I was already ahead of myself. But I had to stop that image—I had to stop that prediction—because I had no idea what was going to be inside.
Like every fool before me, I reached.