There’s no good place to set a tent. The only good ground I find is between thorn bushes and a stump. I feel uneasy about being in the forest. It’s an anger that burns my throat, creeping bile. I want to grab the thorns by the root and claw wildly until there’s blood mixed in the muck. Just to feel like I’ve done something, anything, for a dead friend, some sacrifice no matter how pointless. I’ve never seen someone with a broken neck. I imagine splintered bone and the urge to vomit. Dave walked into the machinery of the forest. Where’s the blame? I thought that this pain after the initial spike of anger would dissipate over the months.
♦◊♦
I press open the phone booth doors. Palm on the glass. I walk by the front desk and out the front doors and stand on the deck. It’s raining now. The sun’s gone down and the White Island lighthouse is doing its rounds. I step back into the lobby. Where am I supposed to be right now? A girl at the desk looks up, and I feel her looking at me. Still looking, I haven’t moved. Don’t say anything. How deep are my breaths supposed to be? Please say something.
Nick, everything alright? No. I need to get on a boat. In the morning.
We’re booked up, but I’ll take a look. Plus it could get ugly out there tomorrow.
I say Thanks and climb the stairs to the staff floor and find Casey in the hallway. Don’t hesitate.
My friend. He just died.
I killed him myself saying it out loud to her. She’s living and breathing and standing in front of me, and it’s true now because someone else I can touch and grab hold of knows. The words scatter through the hallway and bore into the walls. And this feels new, this power of resonant speech, able to touch every piece of everything around me without moving. It gets into the cracks and chips of old walls, bounces off glass, angles around corners. It bleeds through the membranes of Casey’s ears, and she rushes toward me. It’s part of her now. Darted through the air wrapped in my familiar voice. Slipped through the membranes only to uncurl and spike into the soft tissue of her mind. This virus.
♦◊♦
I’m looking for the tree, and it must know that I’m looking. I walked right by it, and it knew, but I didn’t. I want to find it and paint a red slash on its trunk. I’m coming back with an axe, I whisper, daydreaming in the darkness alone in my tent. Rain falls on the fly and drips into the moss.
♦◊♦
Casey and I stand in the hallway, arms around one another. I think of our rush of youth on the rocks. Swimming and slipping and her on top of me rising and falling as I inhaled, exhaled. Her fingers on my cheeks, the sweat of her palms, the salt water in our hair. If only I could have paused the world there for a hundred years. I’m holding her now, hands on the same lines of her shoulder blades as if I’m trying to keep us quarantined. But it’s out there now, the words are still moving through the staircases and piping, and it will seep into the bedrock. I won’t have to say it again, not to anyone. It will flare through the island in a few minutes, disguised in other voices. I bring my head down and let my forehead rest on her hairline. It’s okay, she says. A lie hidden in her sweet voice, so quiet and disarming my mind allows safe passage.
♦◊♦
It’s Bend, Oregon. Almost. I just left Manzanita but pulled over because I’m crying with my forehead resting on the steering wheel. It’s raining, and I didn’t want to slam into a tree. A cop pulls up next to me and and tilts his head in question, Are you okay? I quickly smile, eyebrows raised, and give him a thumbs up. We can barely see one another through the rain. He gives a short burst of the siren and drives off. That was all he could give me.
♦◊♦
Casey and I move from the hallway into my room and sit on the window sill. Hard rain. Within minutes people start to knock and tell me I’m so sorry, Nick. I feel the bile creep. Feel like I’m feeding on this pity at the expense of Dave. Was he was lying dead on the ground while I swam last night? While we drank and laughed? I didn’t feel it when his necked snapped. The roof begins to leak. I head downstairs with Casey; we bring up pots and pans. Five or six of them spaced around the room. Minutes later she’s asleep next to me. I’m awake listening to water echo on steel. It would be peaceful, but the wind is battering the window in its frame, and I’m worried the ceiling is going to buckle and collapse above us. Wet, rotting wood cutting us open.
♦◊♦
Now it’s Dave on the Pacific, and I’m not with him because I’m swimming in the Atlantic. He is alone in the forest on the Oregon coast, and he’s about to get his head caved in. Move ten minutes back. Now he has ten minutes and a few seconds to live. Move back to when we met. Now we have five years. But no, it’s that moment where the branch is breaking, falling. A two-second span where he’s neither living nor dead. And it’s in that moment that I am stuck. It’s falling objects and statistics. It’s the earth trying so hard to pull itself into one infinitesimal dot, and Dave gets in the way.
♦◊♦
A hospital basement, a cold room twelve by twelve. A morgue. It’s before Star Island, before Dave dies, before I drive west. I’m working nights in the emergency room, EMT training. Overhead florescence. There are two bodies in black bags zippered closed lying on gurneys. I can see where the toes press from inside the bags. I cannot see the string and tags, but I know they’re there. The doctor still has his finger on the switch, maybe there’s a spring that holds it down. Clearly not, I think. I’ve angled my body so I could reach out and unlatch the heavy door without needing to turn or look. Grow up, Nick. He asks if I want to see one of the bodies.
No, I think. Yes, I say. An hour later I’ve convinced my roommates we should turn the thermostat to eighty and now we’re sitting on the floor drinking gin.
♦◊♦
Bend, Oregon. I drive away from the bleak ocean, out of the mist and swelling clouds and into the high desert. Sunshine. Dry wind carries juniper and pine and sage fresh against my lips through the open windows as I speed towards my father’s oldest friends. I spend last night alone with roots pressing against my spine. Tonight I’ll sleep in a bed with dogs keeping me warm. I’ll dream of all the things I forget I remember. Tomorrow I’ll buck bails of hay with John and ride horses with Marilyn through the brushwood trails.
♦◊♦
I wake up at seven with the roof intact. I brush Casey’s hair from her face and lower myself to the floorboards. Jeans. I sit in the window sill and watch the mist swirl. My fingers move in circles on the glass. Half an hour later I have everything in a duffel bag. I set it by the door and walk down to the lobby, outside, across the lawn, stand on the pier. The horizon is gray, a blend of blue and white. A lobsterman out in the fog leans over the water. Resetting a trap. An hour later I post a note in the kitchen. I will come back, I will come back, the Star Island mantra. Stay sharp, I add. I’m on a boat to the mainland before noon.
♦◊♦
My fingerprint. It’s unique and somehow urgent and imprinted on a rock buried in the forest of Manzanita. That was all I could give. I’m on the back deck in Bend watching the sun set over Mount Bachelor. I think of ten thousand kids from the past hundred years. All their fingerprints are still on Star somewhere. I hope they are, at least, hope some places have never been cleaned by rain and sponge and steel wool.
♦◊♦
Boston. Dave must be dead by now because I’m in a bar with Maya, and I met her in the Rockies. The bar has no windows and is lit by lanterns. The ceiling is so high I can’t make it out. The walls fade into darkness. We’re playing cards. I turn to look towards the door as it closes. I turn back, and Dave is sitting next to me. I recognize that neither of us is here because I’m asleep in Bend, and Dave is dead and burned. But I pour him a pint from the pitcher and ask how he is. He doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t speak anymore. He just shows up from time to time.
I haven’t been back to Star in years now, but I know they’re still pitching bottles over the rocks. Tonight, even. Half the kitchen has the morning off and they’ll be drinking as the sun sets. Years from now a little girl will play on the rocks at low tide. She’ll find pieces of glass in the sand, opaque and worn smooth. This one’s the color of bark, and this one a bit deeper, mud. She’ll find another and call it clay, but it’s closer to ash. And another like moss and look! Deep purple, the color of blue reflected in blood, almost black. Where did you come from? she’ll say. It was us! we’ll shout, laughing, lungs contracting, from our graves on Gorham Street.
Photos: Isa Photos, Andyarthur, Enric Martinez
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Searing images, Nick. Subtle, not blatant. Great piece.
A completely gripping piece. Easy to read even given the difficult subject matter.
A wonderfully well written piece
A poignant story, indeed.
Wooden Trees…
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