by André Babyn
Without leaves to define the space, to conceal its limits, the forest seemed much smaller than it had when I was younger. Maybe part of that was that I was bigger, too. Or knowing that there wasn’t much living in there that would be likely to hurt me. The forest was nothing like it was in the movies — like Evie’s, in other words: no bears or goblins or snakes or dragons. At most, a few foxes or coyotes resplendent with mange.
There were more footprints than I would have thought at the entrance, splitting off in every direction. Human footprints, I mean. The creek was half-unfrozen and it didn’t seem safe to follow it along the bed, so I took the high route, which was easier going in the winter, anyway, without as much underbrush and with full body cover to protect myself against thorns. Along with several sets of boot prints, one of which I thought might have belonged to Jeff, a deer’s dainty hoofprints followed the creek for a hundred metres or so before branching off deeper into the woods. Or the prints of several deer, as I’ve heard they walk in the steps of their partners to conceal their numbers.
The farther I walked along the creek the more absurd it seemed to me that I would find Jeff there. I knew that what I was chasing wasn’t in Jeff, but in myself, like I could turn back time, go back to his accident and erase it, like it was his accident that had changed him, like what was different about him wasn’t something that had been always waiting inside him and would have come out no matter what. I almost turned back, but I kept going, reasoning that since I had come so far I might as well find out for sure whether he was there.
A set of footprints diverged suddenly from the group following along the ridge and dipped toward the creek. You could see from the way the snow was depressed, from the chunks of exposed brown clay, that whoever it was had fallen as much as climbed down. My heart skipped a beat, but I took a few breaths and closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I was careful to note that the ice hadn’t broken and there was no body lying in the creek. Or anywhere.
“Thank Jesus,” I said.
Even though I wasn’t religious I immediately regretted saying that. It seemed needlessly blasphemous to bring Jesus into the picture when things were so tense.
I followed the new set of footprints from the height of the creek bank, watching it meander across logs and over the places where the ice was heaviest.
As best as I could see, the footprints stopped at the old clearing. The raspberry bushes were thick up on the ridge, and the thorns kept catching on my clothing, so I climbed down, carefully holding on to the base of a sturdy-looking maple. The ice looked solid enough, and the creek was narrower there, anyway. Where the footprints ended was a flattened area where it looked like someone had sat down right in the snow. It was difficult to judge the size of the person who had been sitting down because the impression wasn’t clear — whoever it was had been there for a while and moved around a lot. I put a naked hand over the print and thought for a second that I could feel the departed person’s body heat, but I realized that was impossible, that there was no way the snow was going to keep that kind of information.
The footprints left the impression and went up the other side of the creek, where they headed back in the direction of the path. I studied them for a little while and then I turned around.
When I got home I found Jeff in the kitchen, eating soup directly out of a can. Mom wasn’t home yet.
“You aren’t even going to heat it up?”
Jeff shook his head and kept eating.
“Why weren’t you at school today?” I asked.
“I felt sick,” he said, between sips. “I’ve been home all day.”
I just nodded.
I looked at the counter and discovered my note was gone.
“Are you feeling better now?” I asked.
He shrugged and lifted another spoonful of soup to his mouth.
* * *
Some days I think back to that moment and instead of just accepting what he said without question I wish I had grabbed him by the shoulder, tried to jerk him out of his unreality, brought him back to the present, back to me. Even if that meant conflict. Even if he retaliated. Even if it made things worse.
It couldn’t have made things worse.
Why didn’t I reach out to him? Why didn’t I think he was worth fighting for? Didn’t I love him? Wasn’t I going to miss him?
Why was I so afraid?
11
I came home angry and panicked after the fight with Walid. And hurting, but I cared less about that. I had calmed down a little bit on the walk home, but somehow crossing the threshold caused a lot of the feelings that had dissipated to rise up again, choking me off.
I kneeled on the scuffed linoleum just past the entrance, to my relief just managing to close the door behind me. My breath came in rough, heaving gasps. I wanted to cry, but I wasn’t going to, because I didn’t want to admit what had happened and also because I didn’t want to own up to the fact that Walid had hurt my stupid fucking feelings.
I limped into the bathroom and turned on the light. There was blood caked over the right side of my face, my lip was fat, and my left cheek was swollen. My right eye was starting to bruise, too. I ran my tongue around my mouth and spit into the sink, and my spit was bright crimson against the porcelain. But at least I hadn’t lost a tooth. I was pretty sure.
I looked a little bit better once I washed my face. I thought I was lucky that the cut over my brow wasn’t so deep that it would need stitches, or at least it seemed that way — it had mostly closed up on its own by the time I got home.
I wish I could say that at least I’d gotten my share of hits in, but I’d only landed a few desperate punches before he really started returning fire. Walid is a lot stronger than I am, and he’s been in real fights before. I only really connected solidly once, with his chin. I could see that it had shocked him, but his next few punches were that much harder.
I went to the kitchen and took out a container of leftover pasta from the fridge. Then I put it back after staring at it with the lid off for a few minutes. I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, but I wasn’t really hungry, and I wasn’t sure whether I should eat, anyway, because my jaw was so sore. I didn’t want to make things worse, or bite off a piece of my tongue or something. Instead I poured myself a glass of milk and took it up to my room. It was early still, not even five o’clock, but I didn’t want to see Mom before I went to sleep, because I didn’t want to talk about what had happened, although I knew I’d have to see her eventually and that she would figure out pretty quickly that I’d been in a fight. I didn’t think I could lie to her.
Not well enough.
The camera, at least, was okay. I’d had the good sense to put my bag down before I rushed him. Because Walid was such a dumb asshole there was a moment when I was lying in the grass where he threatened to kick my bag or throw it in the street, but the look on my face, I think, told him what was inside. If he had fucked up my camera I would have gone to his parents without hesitation, and he would have got in real shit.
I knew that Walid could be a dick, that he was angry, but I’d always played it down, making excuses for him in my head. I also thought that I was protected, somehow, because we were friends. Because we had been friends for so long. But I guess that protection only went so far. Or maybe there was no such thing as protection. From anything.
I didn’t want to think about what I would do on Monday at school.
After wallowing for a while I got up and tried to call Lauren. Her mom answered and said that she was out. She didn’t say with whom or where she had gone. Lauren had a cellphone but I didn’t want to bother her so I just got back into bed. A little while later I heard my mom come in downstairs, but I buried my head in my pillow when she called up. Not too long after that I heard my door opening.
“Kent?” she said.
I lay absolutely still, with my head facing away from the door. When I didn’t answer her she turned the lights out in my room and shut the door.
I
don’t know when I fell asleep. I didn’t intend to. When I woke up the house was eerily quiet. My clock radio said it was three in the morning. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and thought about getting under the covers, but put on new clothes instead. There was no way I was going to be able to get back to sleep.
The swelling in my lip had gone down, and my jaw didn’t hurt as much as it had before. I was able to eat a couple slices of toast. I put the dishes in the sink and went outside to sit on the front steps. It was cold, and so I put on my full winter gear. Most of the leaves were still up and I liked the way they looked in the street lights: their silence and their stillness. In the distance I could see cars passing on Highway 89, their lights twisting away in the dark.
My dream the night before had been crazy. I was climbing the stairs in an old hotel. I knew it was haunted and I wanted to get out of there, but for some reason I kept pressing upward, trying to escape a dull, thudding sound coming from below, like my heartbeat but louder by an order of magnitude. Coming from above or below. Actually I hadn’t been sure, unclear whether I was moving away from the noise or heading straight for it, like I thought I could pierce it with a javelin and get the noise to stop. The more I thought about it the more unsure I was. The hotel gave me an uncanny feeling: I imagined that behind each door I’d find a different future. Or past. I wasn’t sure. But each one distinct from its neighbours. In any case the hotel was at the centre of time, at its nexus. Jeff was in the dream, too, although he wasn’t a central figure, and I had to work hard to remember he was there. Jeff, I thought. Whenever I needed to remember. In the dream he had been waiting for me somewhere, but I couldn’t remember why or where or even how that knowledge had been communicated.
I sat out on the front steps for a little bit longer, watching the night lift, although sunrise was still a long way away. I started to think about my documentary, wondering what I was going to do, how all of my plans had fallen apart so spectacularly, how I was left with less than nothing even though I had already put more work into it than I thought most people would.
I watched the street and thought about how funny it was that I was up that early. That what I was seeing could only be seen just then, in that particular moment.
It was as I was sitting there watching the quiet when something clicked in my head. I realized I was trying to force myself into creating something obviously larger than I could handle. Why was I starting so big? It was true that I had put more work into the documentary than other people would.
It was stupid. Why not just shoot the Durham that I knew?
Just shoot it and see what happened.
I put on a pot of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with a pad of legal paper and started writing out a script. By the time Mom got up I had already storyboarded some scenes. I was so deep into my work that when Mom asked me what had happened to me I almost told her about my dream until I realized that she was asking about my face.
* * *
I spent the next two weeks in the editing room, after school and over lunch, recording my voiceovers and putting the documentary together piece by piece. I got Lauren to show me how most of the equipment worked. She had experience with the machines because she sometimes made videos for drama class. When other people had the room booked I went in anyway, both because I could count on them sometimes not showing up, and because it was a relief to get away from the guys and the cafeteria. If someone else was in there I helped them out on the equipment or with their own editing, learning a lot in the process. No one seemed to mind.
Things were weird between me and Walid. For the first few days I started coming to school later, so that I wouldn’t have to spend any time hanging out before school, avoiding the hallway where we all stood, but after I got tired of rushing to my locker and then to my first class I’d find Lauren or Sash or Kyle or Christian in the caf. I discovered that it felt good to disrupt my habits like that, to realize that I had more friends — a wider circle — than I had thought. At first I was a little shy about changing my routine, but I realized after a while that nobody cared about what had happened, if they even knew, and that if they cared they probably felt sorry for me, because it was obvious that Walid had kicked my ass and not the other way around. And because most people thought he was kind of an asshole. When people asked me what had happened I told them that I’d gotten into a fight with a rhinoceros or that I’d been in a helicopter crash, and they laughed, and I could usually keep it at that.
When Mr. Wright was taking attendance that first Monday after the fight, he stopped what he was doing when he noticed that Walid and I were sitting far away from each other and asked out loud whether anything was wrong. “Trouble in paradise?” he said. He had meant it ironically, but the fact that neither of us responded told him everything he needed to know. He might have even made the connection to the bruises on my face, which I had explained coming into the class that I had picked up in a squash court, trying out a new manoeuvre.
The truth is, though, I felt better not hanging out with Walid. I don’t know if I could say that I felt happy, but I felt free, which made me realize that I hadn’t felt free before. Which was a weird thing to realize. I wondered how much of it was an illusion and how much of it was real.
* * *
I was still nervous the day of the documentary presentation, despite how much time I had put into the video. I was worried that too much of myself had gone into the project. That morning on the way to school I was overcome by the sudden urge to burn it and piece together something light and easy and safe — above all, something that didn’t have any part of me in the frame. Or only the most superficial parts. But it was too late for that.
Somehow Wright got us out of our other classes. Drama wasn’t running that semester, and so he had the drama room booked for the entire day. It was nice, with wall-to-wall carpets and a little stage on the far end. A huge black television had been wheeled into the middle of the room. It was only something like thirty-two inches, but it was the nicest TV I had ever seen on the premises of any school in Durham. It was huge and boxy and had a tremendous weight, sucking in all of the available light in the room.
“I grabbed this out of the staff lounge,” Wright explained.
“Chalmers must be pissed,” someone said.
There were twenty of us in all, and we’d watch eight videos in the morning and eight in the afternoon. The other four we would watch over the next two days, in our regular class. I was in the afternoon. We had a forty-minute mongrel lunch in the cafeteria, catching the tail end of period two and the first half of period three. Walid stopped me in the hallway as we were coming back from lunch.
“What,” I said.
“You aren’t going to believe what my camera picked up, man,” said Walid.
“Okay,” I said, pushing past him. I wanted to say something else, too, like that I didn’t care, like he could go fuck himself, but I didn’t want to go that far. I didn’t want a repeat of before. Maybe it was a good sign that he had wanted to talk to me and maybe that meant that things were going to quiet down between us, even though they could never go back to where they were. I didn’t want them to, either.
I was also too nervous to give Walid any more of my attention than I already had. I’d spent most of lunch sitting with Lauren and her friends, trying to keep up, but too distracted by what I was going to show later that afternoon.
Most of the other videos were about achievements, hobbies, favourite bands, sports teams, actors, after-school jobs, revered elderly family members, topics I’d overlooked or hadn’t been able to think of a way to execute. I was rubbing my head after every presentation, getting more and more nervous, upper lip sweating, hands trembling, fever in my head, tangled fibrous knot forming in the pit of my stomach.
Bobby Booby’s video was a shakily rendered compilation of hockey highlights he had already sent to a selection of NCAA colleges. Except for a living-room interview that he conducted by getting up from his seat and stopping
the camera on its tripod to change angles between his place on the couch and his mother in an easy chair, it was obvious that his father had shot the entire video, the elder Booby grunting “Yeah,” “Look at that,” “Marge, Marge! ” and “Go, Bobby” underneath the soundtrack, Smash Mouth’s “All Star” on repeat (even playing at a low volume throughout the entire interview with his mother, which felt like a step or two too far, but was probably just because he couldn’t figure out a way to turn it off while he was editing).
The class erupted in cheers at the video’s culmination, half-ironic, half-sincere, when Bobby scored a soft third goal to complete a hat trick, and, after pumping his fist, found his dad with the camera in the stands and, pointing his stick right down the lens, did a deep knee-bend flourish, while his teammates skated around him, confused and waiting for the theatrics to end so they could pat him on the back.
Bobby got up from where he was sitting on the carpet and did a couple of bows in front of the class before he ejected his video. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. He was totally sincere. He came by it honestly, probably from staring too hard and too often at the hockey posters above his bed, through too many repeated viewings of Don Cherry’s Rock ’Em Sock ’Em videos.
Wright called my name. I was next. Lauren patted me on the back and I stood up, stiffly making my way to the front of the room. I put the video into the VCR, but didn’t push it in all the way.
“Okay, uh, so I decided to do a documentary about Durham,” I said. “Because I didn’t know what else to do.”
I looked at Mr. Wright. I couldn’t read his expression, which made me even more nervous.