In the morning I lie to myself about what has happened—my mother is just up getting something out of the drone. But the decapitated missile hangs above the lake as a stark reminder otherwise. Our abandoned plasma torch hangs from the ice screw next to it, and I would give anything to see my mother up there working. And maybe she is and always will be. Maybe the crazy professor was at least right about that. Perhaps time is just some cosmic trick to prevent everything from happening all at once. But true or not, I guess I’ll never know. And if my mother is still somehow beside me now, I sure can’t feel her presence through all this heartache and sorrow.
I have no idea what to do or where to go.
But I know I can’t stay here.
I pack up the remaining rations along with my reading slate and a few potentially useful tools. I tie them in my mother’s fur, wrap it around my shoulders, and secure it with straps made of rope. Then I fill the canteens in the lake, coil the remaining rope, and climb onto the sunlit summit. I stand there deciding which way I should go. I know from crossing with Jimmy that the lake side is a much gentler slope, but I can’t even bring myself to look in that direction now. Instead I head for the western edge to leave the summit and the sight of my final memories of my mother behind.
I’m vaguely aware of coming down the glacier. Then again, maybe I’ve fallen into a crevasse and this is all just a dying dream. I almost wish it were. I stumble and climb, descending in wide switchbacks from one end of the glacier to the other. The crevasses are less open now in spring than they were when we had come up last summer. The recent snow provides some traction. One wide crevasse proves impassable, and I have to drive my mother’s long screwdriver into the ice, tie the rope to it, lower myself past it, and leave the rope behind.
By late afternoon I’m nearly down. I sit on a wide ledge of glacier ice, chew tasteless jerky, and drink water from my canteen, watching clouds pass in front of the sun. I remember sitting here with Jimmy and marveling together at the moon, neither of us sure we would survive to see the summit. I’d give anything to go back there now—to have Jimmy here with me, to have my mother still alive in China, to have my father still alive underground. It’s hard to imagine that since that night when we sat here, just clueless kids, not even knowing yet who was behind the Park Service, everyone we had met since then was gone. Mr. and Mrs. Radcliffe—Gloria and her brother Tom—my father—Finn, Bree, Junior—all the people on the Isle of Man—Roger and Bill—Seth and Mrs. Hightower and Red—the Motars—the professor—Hannah—and now my own mother—every one of them dead.
I’d cry but there seems little point anymore.
Evening finds me on the lower mountain at the top of the trail where we met that wild man and his mutant boy all those months ago now. I keep on moving down, crossing the river in the dark with my clothes and my makeshift pack held over my head. It occurs to me how silly I must appear to the eyes of watching animals, a pale and steaming refugee climbing from the water shivering and naked, ill-suited to this unforgiving life. I’d give anything to change myself into the lowest squirrel and be able to scamper away without a thought or care beyond my burrow. Instead I torture myself with an endless loop of what-might-have-been and if-only.
In the morning I follow the river north, not wanting to see the trestle again, and not wanting to go near the cove. I do the only thing left for me to do. I walk. I walk sunup to sundown, in fine weather and in rain. Each night I unpack, sort my meager rations, wrap myself in my furs, and try to sleep. Mostly I sit awake and listen to the night sounds. Days pass into weeks, how many I can’t possibly know. My pack lightens, and the soles of my shoes wear themselves through. I tie tree bark to them and keep walking. I’m sleeping more and eating less. When my rations run out I begin to scavenge, eating frogs, salamanders, and worms from overturned stones.
A hailstorm catches me one morning in the middle of an open meadow with nowhere at all to go. I sit down where I am, hold my fur pack over my head, and watch the huge balls of ice pound the ground around me. When it passes, the meadow is so thick with hail I can hardly keep from slipping. I cross it with my arms outstretched for balance like a crazed lunatic on roller skates. I corner a small trout trapped in a riverbank shallow, snatch it up and bite into it raw, the fish still flexing as I eat. When I finally cast the fish aside, I look back and see a lone wolf dodge out from the shadows where it had been following me to finish off what I left behind. Come night I make a fire. The strike-a-light that Jimmy made me for my birthday works perfectly. I sit long after I have the fire going and look at it in the glow of the flames.
In the morning the wolf is still on my trail.
And it’s there the next day too.
Every day it gets braver and closer. I can make out its mangy, patchwork fur and its hip bones articulating beneath its thin flesh as it jogs along behind me with its long tongue lolling from its slavering jaws.
Then one morning the smell of smoke from my burned-out fire wakes me just in time to see the wolf flattened to the ground and crawling toward me. I rise, slower than I’d like, and chase it away with stones. It snarls and backs off into the brush, but when I set out walking again, it follows. At first I’m worried. But then a strange sense of acceptance settles on my journey. Perhaps this is how things are meant to end for me. Earth knows I’ve eaten my share of creatures in my short time here. And isn’t providing energy to a starving wolf a worthy way to go? I know Jimmy would have it roasting over coals as he wore its fur, or perhaps he’d train it and have it fetching him small birds that he’d drop from trees with arrows. I wish Jimmy were here with me now, but he might as well be on Mars.
It eventually becomes comforting to look back and see the wolf stalking along behind me, to wonder when it might make another move on me, to guess if I’ll have energy or willpower enough even to resist it. Together we follow the river up to higher country where the trees thin and the water runs clear. I carve a crude spear and hunt quick trout in pools of ice cold glacier melt, making sure to always leave enough behind for my new friend. But not too much. I’ve got to keep him hungry for me when my time comes.
Several days into the mountains, we’re passing a strand of evergreens in the twilight when I look back and see the wolf not five meters behind me, trotting along as if we were partners on this strange journey to nowhere. Then there’s a flash of yellow. A cougar leaps from the trees and seizes the wolf’s neck in its jaws and drags it into the shadows without as much as a single whimper or growl. I stand for a long time and watch the trail where the wolf had been.
“Take me, you coward!” I yell. “Come back and take me!”
That night I sleep again in the dark without a fire.
A week later the people begin to come.
I’m in a gulch descending the high country when Red steps from behind a boulder and falls in beside me. It’s a long time before he says anything, and even then he only says, “Isn’t this some kind of afternoon.” He says it as if he expects no reply. I’m not sure I’d even know what to say to him if he did, so we just walk together quietly. When I notice he’s no longer beside me, I turn and see him standing on the trail with his hand raised to say farewell. I raise mine, then turn and keep walking. When I look back again, he’s gone.
The next day I walk without stopping and continue on into a forest. By nightfall I come upon a fire at the edge of a dark glade. Jimmy is sitting there with Junior on his lap, stroking his fur. I sit down across from them but neither appears to have noticed me. Jimmy’s face is unmarked by fire, and I wonder if they aren’t perhaps ghosts, or conjured visions of my own imagining. But I can feel the warmth of the fire and smell its smoke. The big dipper eventually rises over the glade, and so much time passes that I’m not quite sure what to say. When I do finally speak, all I can think of is to repeat Red’s words.
“Isn’t this some kind of afternoon.”
But Junior and Jimmy are already asleep.
No trace of the fire remains when I wake. I leave the
glade behind and wander into the woods. Without the river to guide me, I choose my course by whim and change it as often as new paths appear to my crazed mind out of the maze of trees. It occurs to me that I haven’t eaten in a long time, but for some reason I’m no longer hungry. I come upon a fallen log covered with butterflies. When they lift away in a blue cloud, I see that it’s no log at all but a skinned bear, all wrinkled, gray, and rotting, its long claws tucked against its chest as if in some strange gesture of shyness over being seen there naked on the forest floor. I step over it, and the butterflies settle again, adorning the carcass in a beautiful death-coat of blue.
The butterflies make me think of my father’s pipe. I reach to my neck to feel for it before I remember giving it to Jimmy the day I left with my mother—my mother, my mother, my mother. No sooner does my mind turn to my mother and I’m sure I see her ahead of me on the trail, but she dodges out of sight behind a tree. I run and look, but she isn’t there. Then I spot her again farther on. I spend the day walking in circles and looking behind trees. When it’s too dark to continue, I sit where I am and whistle in the cold night, trying to remember childhood tunes. Soon others are whistling with me. When I stop they stop too. Then I laugh and they laugh with me. I find the whole thing so funny that I roll on the ground in a riot of laughter and clutch at my belly because it hurts so good. Eventually, we all fall quiet and sleep, but I know they’re there just the same.
After days of walking I come across a stream, drop to my knees and drink until I can drink no more. Then I stand with all that cold water swinging in my gut and follow the stream out of the forest. I’m accompanied now by a small army of silent friends. When I come out onto the promontory that overlooks the valley, I know then that this is where my journey ends. Here in the valley of Jimmy’s dreams.
Hemmed in by mountains, the valley is wide, lush, and green. The stream I’ve been following cuts down in a tiny waterfall and crosses to join a silver river that winds through rolling hills of grass, wildflowers, and groves of oak and evergreen trees. It’s about as beautiful a place as ever I’ve seen. I would be happy to post up here and rest for eternity.
By sunset I’m sitting on a hill next to a sprawling oak with my feet stretched out before me. A perfect picture of the river and the sun is framed in the western edge of the valley beyond a distant field of wheat waving in the breeze. I sleep there for a day, maybe two. I wake in the afternoon, surprised to still be alive. I see Hannah down bathing in the river, and it startles me. But when she turns I see that it’s not Hannah at all, but her mother, Mrs. Radcliffe. I remember her warning me about the drawbacks of the serum and a long life of boredom, loneliness, and pain. Here I am at just sixteen, and I already know what she meant.
I get up and walk down to the river, but I seem to move in slow motion. By the time I get there, she’s gone. I kneel at the bank and drink. After only a sip, I’m full. I pry a large, flat-edged stone from the riverbank and take it back to the hill and use it to dig my own grave. It’s shallow but it will do.
When the grave is finished, I gather wood and build up a fire at the base of the hill. Then I sort through my belongings, setting aside my mother’s reading slate and Jimmy’s strike-a-light. Everything else I pile onto the fire and watch burn. Next, I strip naked and pile on my own threadbare and filthy furs. A black and acrid smoke rises from the fire, as if the hell I’ve been through had somehow clung to my clothes and is now finally being released. I look down at my naked and wasted frame—my ribs, my hips, my scar. I remember my former self, ages ago now it seems, living underground in Holocene II and desperate to become a man. I laugh at the boy for his naiveté, but I love him now just the same. I think he’d be glad to know that he made a difference, that he had friends, that he loved and was loved, and that he finally got to rest beneath the stars he so desperately dreamed to see.
I walk back up the hill, each new step a struggle, each one past a relief, and lie down naked in the shallow grave and claw as much of the dirt over me as I can. The soil is cool, fresh, and rich. Then I clutch my mother’s reading slate and Jimmy’s strike-a-light to my half-buried chest. I close my eyes and dream. I dream, and I dream, and I dream.
CHAPTER 33
The Other Side
“Aubrey, wake up!”
Bill looks down on me, his face framed by blue sky. I know I’ve gone wherever souls go when the body dies.
As he works to unbury me, he talks.
“Why am I always digging you out of something?” he asks. “If it isn’t sand, it’s dirt.”
“But I don’t want rec time to be over,” I say, my voice sounding faraway.
He props my head up in his hand and holds a canteen to my lips. My tongue is swollen, and the cold water runs from the corners of my mouth and chills my neck.
“Did Red bury me again?” I ask, coughing.
He shakes his head. “Red isn’t here.”
“But Red’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” he replies, looking sad, “he is.”
“Then why isn’t he here on the other side?”
“Because you’re not dead.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I’m not dead either.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
He smiles. “That’s alright. You don’t have to understand anything right now. Just relax. You’re okay. Do you think you can get up, or do I need to carry you?”
“I’m comfortable right here.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” he says, “because Jimmy would love to see you.”
“Did you say Jimmy?” I ask, rising on my elbows.
Everything suddenly comes into sharp focus—the valley, the river—but I look around and see no trace of Jimmy.
I lie back. “You’re just another trick. Leave me alone.”
“Okay, then,” Bill says. “I guess I get to carry you.”
The next thing I know, his strong arms are lifting me from the ground, and I’m slung like a sack over his shoulder. My teeth clack as my chin bounces against his back. I watch his heels rise and fall as he walks me down the hill. Then he slumps me in a seat, covers me with a thermal blanket, and buckles me in. Now I’m looking out past the landing gear of a drone. I reach and grab his arm to stop him as he climbs in beside me.
“My reading slate and my strike-a-light.”
“I’ve got them right here,” he says, setting them in my lap. “Now hold on to them tight; the ride’s going to be a bit bumpy getting out of here.”
I jostle and bounce in the seat as the drone runs along the lumpy ground, following the river west, and finally picking up speed and lifting off just in time to keep from plunging into the water where the river banks a hard left. The ride goes smooth and easy now, and the drone climbs into the sky. I turn and look back on the shrinking valley—the golden wheat, the green hills, the wildflowers. The sunlight reflects off the river, giving it the appearance of liquid gold pouring out from the clean mountains and winding its way through God’s country toward the sea.
I know I can’t trust my mind right now, but I swear I see Mrs. Radcliffe, Red, my father, and my mother and all the others standing beside the river, waving goodbye to me.
“Where’s Jimmy?” I ask.
“He’s out looking for you,” Bill says. “We’ve all been out looking for you.”
“Are you taking me to him now? I want to see Jimmy.”
“Of course, you do,” he says. “And he wants to see you.” He hands me a meal bar. “Here, you better try to eat a little.”
My fingers won’t seem to work. I struggle with the wrapper until Bill takes it away and opens it for me. I manage to choke down half of it before I start to feel sick and give up. Then Bill passes me a canteen. My senses begin to return. I see that we’re in a drone like the one Radcliffe took Hannah and me in to tour the park. I look out the glass bubble at the coastline passing below, and I realize we’re heading south.
“Where are we going?” I a
sk.
“I’m taking you back,” he says. “We’ve got a camp set up at the temple. You remember the temple, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I say, “we left you there to die.”
“I made you leave,” he replies. “And besides, you sent the Chief back to look for me. I’ll never forget that. I told you that you were a good man, Aubrey.”
“But my mother said she didn’t find you.”
“She didn’t,” he says. “Jimmy told me all about it.”
“Will you please fill me in on what’s going on?” I ask.
“Do you want to hear this now, or would you rather rest?”
“No, tell me. Please.”
As the mountains, the Pacific, and the golden coastline slide by beneath my window, Bill pilots the drone and tells me all about his adventures.
“It nearly killed me, but I eventually found the spot where Gridboy dropped us off. I was too late though, of course. They had already filled it in. I knew my only hope was if Jillian could somehow open it again, so I stayed nearby and made camp. Turns out I had learned a lot from watching you and Jimmy.”
“Did you finally eat meat then?” I ask.
He nods. “And a lot of other things I thought I’d never eat too. But you were right; the meat wasn’t half bad.”
“I ate worms,” I say. “Did you eat worms?”
“Oh, I’ve got you beat there. I chased vultures away from a big dead cat and lived for two days on the maggots I picked out of its rotting flesh. But let me get back to my story. Months went by. The weather got hotter and wetter. I got pretty good at living there alone in the jungle, but I began to think I’d die there. I spent a lot of time talking with Roger.”
“He survived too?”
“No,” Bill says, with a sad shake of his head. “But I talked to him anyway.”
State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy Page 27