by Steve Himmer
A low wooden pallet stood at the far end of the chamber, not quite against the wall and layered with straw. Two dark gray blankets—one thick, one thin—lay folded upon it. They weren’t a uniform gray but were speckled, almost the same as the walls of the cave, and beside the blankets lay a dark tunic made from the same rough material. I lifted it from the bed and it unfolded to hang to my knees, and a length of frayed rope—my new belt—fell out of the folds. Shaking the fabric even that much stirred a strong, stomach-churning scent of lanolin, and the cloth—if I can call it that, as scratchy and raw as it was—coated my fingers with oil from whatever sheep had been shorn for my sake.
“If that will be all, sir,” said Smithee. “Your present attire will be collected when a meal is delivered. Mr. Crane reminds you that silence should be undertaken immediately, so now is the time to say what you will.”
He looked so bored with the possibility of my last public words, so disinterested in me altogether, that instead of something profound or considered I said just, “Okay.”
In reply Smithee said only, “Sir,” of course. Then he walked away toward the house on silent, gliding steps that gave him, in his dark suit, the look of a movie vampire. At the bottom of the hill, though, where he would have been hidden from the view of the windows, Smithee stopped. He pulled a flat black notebook from the inner pocket of his jacket and followed that with a pen. He wrote something down, then flipped back a couple of pages before writing something else. Then he tucked away his tools, smoothed the front of his jacket with the palms of his hands, and carried on up the hill to the house. I hadn’t been able to tell while walking behind him, but watching him from a sideways distance I noticed that however steep the slope of the hill his body stayed perfectly straight; his feet must have met the ground at an angle, but the rest of him never leaned. Not that it meant anything, but I’d never seen anyone walk like that before.
I stripped off my clothes and stood nude in the air of the cave, pale and tender and pink, aware of each pore and pimple and each pound of flesh in a way I never had been. A cool breeze blew in and I broke out in goose bumps, every hair standing straight up off my body. The sudden cold on the parts I’d kept covered made my whole body shiver, the way it happens when opening your fly at a urinal in a cold bathroom. It looked warmer outside, so I left the cave for the grass with the tunic and belt in my hands. Sunlight fell on my cock and balls for the first time perhaps ever, and I stood with my hands on my hips, thrusting myself slightly forward into the warmth.
Then I looked up the slope of the lawn toward the house, toward Mr. Crane’s window on the third floor, and saw the round glint of his telescope lens with the silhouette of a person behind it. And, below his window, a blonde woman sat in a patio chair looking in my direction.
I ducked into my cave to pull the tunic over my head and knot the rope belt around my waist. For the first several seconds there was only the smell, that lanolin smell, closing my throat and watering my eyes, but then I moved some part of my body in some tiny way and the itch was explosive. Prickling like millions of dagger-sharp fibers were sticking and stabbing my cotton-and nylon-spoiled skin, and I burst into bright hives all over. My body had been bound and trussed all my life, covered by clothes I had rarely noticed were there. I pulled them on in the morning and took them off again at night to wear other clothes made from the same fabrics, but pulling on that tunic was the first time in my life I could feel every inch, every thread of a garment where it crossed my body, and it burned. I attacked myself with my fingernails, and rubbed my back and ribs against the rough walls of the cave, and the itch began to feel a bit better if only because the bloody welts I raised with my scratching were so painful themselves that they drew attention away from the other discomfort. Until the fibers of the tunic scratched those raw wounds, and everything hurt even more.
And like that my days in the garden began to go by.
The smell of the tunic and blankets faded as the stink of my own unwashed body usurped the last trace of the sheep I blamed for my suffering, whose coat was the source of my own. And while the itch became less pronounced and more irritating than incendiary, my body stayed swollen and red—as it would for a while—and I took every chance I could steal to rub my back and my sides against a rock or a tree, or to reach with a stick and scratch until I was bleeding and raw.
Meals were delivered, and I ate without knowing whose hands had brought them. Trays appeared in the wall niche by my bed while I was outside or before I woke up; I tried a few times to watch their arrival but somehow they always snuck by.
My first night in the garden I couldn’t sleep, kept awake by the rustling and snuffling of animals and worried by the wide-open mouth of my cave. The noises weren’t unfamiliar; they were the same sounds I’d heard in hundreds of nature programs. It seemed like they should be less scary, these sounds, because they were part of the background, the atmosphere, not isolated and enhanced by microphones. They should have seemed less real to me, I thought, less present than the snarls and sniffs I’d heard loud and clear on TV, without the wind or the rain or any night noises to muffle them. But these noises were scary, and close: I saw the pointed-snout shadow of a fox creep into the mouth of my cave and watch me pretend to be sleeping before strolling off unperturbed by my presence. A skunk wandered right up to my bed, black and white body rolling side to side like a furry round rowboat as he walked all around in my cave. He (maybe she, I don’t know) raised his tail not two feet from my head—and I knew from TV what that meant, so I held as much breath as I could—but the skunk was only stretching. He leaned forward on his front legs like a cat or a dog, wheezed out a yawn, and was off into the garden again. All that in one night, my first in the cave, and with so much going on I didn’t have time to realize until morning that I’d passed a whole sleepless night like all of those I’d passed in my apartment, but I’d done it without fantasies or long, derailed trains of thought and hours of empty TV. I’d passed a whole night by watching the world as it came to my door.
The next morning and every one after I found footprints of all shapes and sizes laced together across the ground outside my cave, and I followed them as far as I could, trying to reconstruct the nocturnal routes of my neighbors. There were hawks (or falcons, maybe, or eagles; I don’t know the difference) in the daylight, swooping and diving to snatch prey off the ground, and at night I listened to the interrogations of owls. I heard once on TV that owls call the name of the person who will be next to die, but Mr. Crane’s owls only ever called, “Who?” the way owls are meant to, and it made me feel welcome instead of afraid, as if they were inquiring about the new guy in the garden.
Wandering the garden by daylight, I discovered flowers and trees I’d once described as inferior for Second Nature: genuine palm trees and rubber plants, and magnolia blossoms that were brilliant and bright for a couple of days before browning and rotting with the most awful stink. The real plants were impressive, but I still thought there was room in the world for hyperefficient magnolias, and for bushes that don’t harbor thousands of bugs in their branches, waiting for some city slicker to lean in toward their blossoms before unleashing stinging and biting and skin-scratching hordes all over his face and his body. There were lots of other plants, too, but if I’d never written about them for the company I didn’t know what they were. My knowledge of flowers and trees was limited to the ones I’d been paid to malign.
I tied long chains of dandelions to wind around tree trunks and rocks for no other reason than I was there and so were they. I smelled flowers and tasted berries and watched rabbits go at each other in fast, fluffy orgies, then scatter when foxes came close. I classified birds by shape, size, and color and gave them all names because I knew what so few of them actually were, and in time I could recognize a few nesting pairs and pick out some individuals from one another, the ones with misshapen wings or strange-colored spots on their bodies.
There were no sirens or crashes or drunken neighbors trying to poun
d their way into the wrong apartment at the end of their night on the town. There weren’t any airplanes or trains far away in the dark. At first I heard only the space left behind by those noises, and the world seemed half-empty. One afternoon while up in a tree and watching the clouds—a grizzly bear eating a sandwich, and a steamship passing over the moon—I almost fell off my branch because the cell phone I’d left behind was ringing above me. But a few seconds later a gray bird hopped out of some leaves into sight, skipping his way onto a limb close to mine, where he delivered a pitch-perfect rendition of my old ringtone, one of the country’s most common.
Most of the time I did nothing. I could say that I contemplated—that’s what I was being paid for—but even that sounds too active, too focused on solving a problem. I wasn’t focused on anything but watching the world as it happened.
Not quite nothing, actually, because I sneezed. A lot. I was allergic to everything in the garden: the pollen, the leaves, the grass, possibly even the air. My eyes watered, my nose ran, my inner ears and the back of my throat itched so badly that I came close to trying to reach a long, skinny stick inside my head to scratch. If I accidentally killed myself, I thought, at least I’d stop being allergic.
I didn’t miss all the distractions I’d left behind in the valley, the TV and computer and couch. Not until it rained so heavily one of those early nights that the noise kept me up, and kept the local creatures safe and dry in their dens, leaving me with long hours to fill but nothing to watch. I tried to remember the theme songs from as many TV shows as possible, and sing them all in my head. I recalled old commercials and PSAs about not telling lies, about helping your neighbors and the benefits of one chewing gum over another, and I marveled at how completely I could recreate each of those in my mind: the dialogue, the music, shot-by-shot frames of each ad. In my apartment, on a long night like that, I would have watched reruns and movies I’d never consider wasting time on in daylight, but in the cave I lit a candle instead and danced shadow puppets around on the wall.
I still wondered at least a few times each day about the voices I had abandoned, my bloggers and message board ciphers. I imagined them getting on without me, living their lives but having no one to tell about them and no outlet for sharing their moments—not so unlike me, alone in the garden, encountering foxes and owls and skunks and keeping it all to myself. Apart from my meals appearing out of thin air, I hadn’t seen a sign of anyone since moving in: not Mr. Crane, not Smithee, not the woman I’d spotted sunning herself. I imagined the bloggers’ audience waiting, refreshing websites impatiently in hopes of new content, or sending emails and making comments but not getting answers. Some nights, before I learned to sleep in the garden, I lay watching the small screen of sky framed by the mouth of my cave, and pretended it was a computer and I was typing the stars, that they were the text of my abandoned voices, and I drafted blog posts and updates in my head until they spun me to sleep, imagining all the ways they might describe the days I was having, but always falling asleep before finding the words.
It would have been close to idyllic if not for the allergies and the hives. Every time my thighs rubbed together or brushed my balls it was hell, and I walked bowlegged like a bad movie cowboy. But overall it was much easier to accept my new life, to settle into it, than I had guessed it would be. Giving up speech wasn’t so hard, not without someone to talk to, and I could still hear all the voices of TV and movies and the web in my head, so I could have conversations anytime I wanted to. I could scroll through the archives of each of those bloggers, recalling the stories they’d told a year or two years or five years before, and that was like having someone to talk to. Everything in the garden was comfortable quickly—except for my clothes—as if it had all been designed just for me, sized for my body, and an awful lot of it had. So when I imagined how my bloggers might write about all I was doing, how they might tell it, I couldn’t get far because who wants to hear a story of happiness achieved by dumb luck, without struggles in the way of the journey, without obstacles greater than an itchy rash on some joker’s balls?
10
After the incident with the hikers, after I stumbled and tumbled into their campsite, I sat up late by my fire as it burned down to embers and darkness crept into the space left behind. Then a bobbing, blurry bulb of orange flared up and danced in the dark—a flashlight inside their tent, I suppose, and the first electricity I’ve seen in so long. Seeing that bright glow so counter to the way of the world, against the cycle of daylight and night, filled me with a sadness I didn’t expect. I thought of email and movies and television, blenders and car radios and the evil empire of alarm clocks and phones. The light didn’t last, just long enough to rummage in a backpack for something or arrange sleeping bags before bed—a few seconds, a blip of illumination—but the shock to my eyes was almost painful after all these years in which I’ve had only the sun, moon, and stars and my own tiny fire to light up the world. A second sun suddenly risen right here in my garden, and though it burnt out quickly I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t been there. If it had been any more than a glowing bright blur, if I’d seen it clearly, it might have burned my old eyes right out. That’s a thin silver lining for my fading sight.
It burned longer, though, in the back of my mind, where its heat and its light kept me awake long into the morning, listening to the skitter and scuffle of creatures outside and the harsh rustle of nylon and fleece. Murmured words and muffled laughter carried from their campsite into the amplifying cone of my cave, echoing loudly like they were right beside me or camped on the foot of my bed.
This morning they were up soon after I was, and I watched from the roof of my cave as their featureless shapes emerged from the tent’s orange bubble as the sun rose behind it. First him, unfolding through the low door like a spring suddenly released from under a weight. Then she unwound herself in a way that made me remember some time-lapse images of a sunflower growing too fast I saw once—source material for Second Nature, but by now I can’t recall what I was meant to be learning—and the two of them stretched side by side but leaning in opposite directions so together they formed a tall, skinny chalice with the half-risen sun in its cup.
I say now that they looked like a chalice, but it was really a big letter Y I thought of at the time, their bodies hazy and indistinct, tan with blotches of color I took to be clothes. I’ve filled in the details in the telling, seeing more in my mind than I saw at the time. Everything looks like other things to me now, shapes without details and without distinction, and it’s easy to mistake one thing for another and to see things I don’t really see. I might say it makes me visionary, or that my mind’s secrets are projected through my weak eyes, but mostly I think it’s memory filling in blanks the way it always has done but finding so many more empty spaces these days. Like my mind tells me I watched her T-shirt rise up as she stretched, lifting away from the tiny shorts she’d slept in and flashing a tan, muscled stomach. I didn’t see any of that, I couldn’t have across such a distance even if it was there to be seen in the beige haze of her moving body, but I let imagination run wild on the shapes of her shirt and her stomach.
In yesterday’s fall on top of their tent, when they helped me up, I felt the first touches of human flesh on my own in so many years, and how strange that in all the confusion and chaos I didn’t make much of the feeling—I know it was there, I know I was touched, but I missed paying attention with everything else going on. I might have liked to hold on to that sensation, to spend some time thinking about it. It might be a more pleasant subject than the difficult meditations I’ll need to make about everything else that occurred, my angry reaction and routine disrupted.
I went for a swim with my flute while they boiled some food on a tiny camp stove. Its burner roared like a jet taking off when they lit it, then settled into a sinister hiss; no wonder they’ve had no fire so far, with a futuristic contraption like that close at hand. And I’ll take this as a good sign they can’t stay any longer than their bottl
ed fuel and packed food hold out. Their dependence on those devices, on those supplies, will send them away when their stores are depleted, I hope.
When I returned from the river, after a few hours’ reflection on the strange sights and sounds of last night, after working through long, shapeless tunes on my flute as I floated, they had hung dripping laundry on the blackberries. Their bright fleece jackets and thick hiking pants crawled on the bushes—not real fleece, not sheep, but fleece as if shorn from some synthetic creature with tight, purple wool—and I thought of a plane crash and lost luggage exploded all over. Perhaps because the roaring of their stove had already called to mind planes. When I came close I saw branches bent down and breaking beneath the weight of their washing, and unripened berries had spilled to the ground, before getting a chance to be grown or to darken from green to pink and to purple and to stain my fingers and lips and the droppings of this garden’s birds.
One of their T-shirts—his, I suspect—had large enough print for me to squint close and read it, to see that it said, “END THE WAR,” but it didn’t say which war and it didn’t say where, or else it said so in letters too tiny for me to make out. The last time I saw fine print was the day I signed Mr. Crane’s contract, and my eyes are too weak for it now. Maybe it’s the same war that was going on when I came here, or maybe some other, but I have no interest in knowing—there’s no place for that here. There is violence, of course, between animals, but it’s the violence of eating and being eaten instead, the violence of staying alive. The animals, the birds and the foxes and bees, go about their violent business when they need to, and they leave me alone. I only mind the never-ending battles between hills of ants if I happen to step in their scrum; the ants only attack when I’m clumsy enough to intrude with a careless misstep. They don’t bring the fight to my cave. Even the bees leave me alone for the most part these days, unless I’m harvesting honey. A war in that far-off other world doesn’t so much as nibble at my calloused feet, and that T-shirt—its words so large and so loud they would not be ignored—was an unwelcome intrusion.