The Color Over Occam

by Jonathan Thomas

  The “Control Center” was a rickety whitewashed cabin with a corrugated tin roof. I parked among the few other cars, including Wil’s Outback, in the lot out front. A silhouette behind the screen door was watching as I locked up the Taurus. In case the silhouette belonged to Ranger Metcalfe and he’d pegged me as the guy on the phone, I waved pleasantly, to defuse any fear that I was tracking down Wil to murder him, and with a camcorder, no less. The silhouette waved back. Nobody came out.

  The cabin and parking lot lay within a widening of the paved road, like a meal in the belly of a python. The road no sooner narrowed than a padlocked cow gate restricted access to all but official business and foot traffic. Beyond the gate, where the tall trees grew denser and canopied the road, the tarmac ended, and my pace gradually relaxed on the hard pebbly dirt, despite inner churnings in advance of Wil’s vividly foreseeable displeasure.

  Off the road branched a trail, flanked on the left by a pin oak with a column of red, blue, and yellow dots at eye level, and on the right by a weather-beaten but newly repainted sign. The sign mapped where each color’s path diverged and meandered. I hit the trail, calmer with each breath, lulled by the scent of evergreen needles and leaf mold, by the cool gleam of afternoon sun on foliage, and by the surf-like ripple of boughs in the breeze. Scanning no farther ahead than the next tree with three dots, I wished for this first solitary nature ramble in years to go on and on. But then I had to pause and choose between main red-and-blue trail or its yellow-dot offshoot, and once I stood still and more heedful, discussion drifted up to me from downhill on the yellow trail. Quality time was over.

  As the yellow dots traced a leisurely, curving descent alongside a shallow slope, the gaps between trees on my right gave onto glimpses of sun glinting off the reservoir. These gaps became rarer as brambles and vines expanded from timid patches to a rising tide that bracketed the path on both sides.

  I came around the bend and strolled up to a couple of rangers. The sight of me seemed to startle them when I cleared my throat. The day was dry and temperate, especially in the woods, but they were sweltering in beige uniforms as they chopped and pried up colonies of Queen Anne’s lace and hedge mustard from the packed earth. Their movements had been cumbersome, as if their joints ached, and how much should I make of that? Were they out of shape, or under pernicious blood-borne siege?

  “Sorry to bust in on you,” I greeted them, “but am I on the right track to find Wil Rice? I need to talk to him a minute.”

  They both blinked daze from red, watery eyes and nodded wearily. As the more lanky and sunburnt of them raised his long-handled spade to point down the trail, a shovel slid out of the slick grip of the freckly, stockier one.

  “He went off by himself,” the sunburnt man volunteered. “Good luck getting anything out of him, though.”

  “Quite the Silent Bob lately?”

  “Yeah.” Then he had a coughing spell and spat into the bushes.

  His colleague said, “Must be allergens or some kind of dust in the air. We’ve been stuffed up since we got here.”

  I tended to blame the dust, but kept that to myself. Both men were panting harder than the skimpy heap of weeds between them justified. I gestured toward their harvest with my camcorder. “Tough row to hoe today?”

  “It’s been like this all summer,” the freckly ranger complained. “Every time we turn our backs the trails are overgrown, and it’s impossible down near the water.”

  I vetoed a whim to video these guys. Nothing outright sinister about their appearance or their assertions. I bid them good luck and, brandishing camcorder at their day’s work, added, “Thank God it’s not poison ivy, huh?”

  They seconded that with eyebrows lifted in unison and frowned at the vegetation they were about to attack. I glanced at their campaign hats hanging on branches as I sidled by. Thorny stems were scratching at the brims.

  From here on in, tufts of grass and weedy uprisings marred more and more of the trail, with blades and leaves that may or may not have been disproportionately wide and too brightly green. I didn’t dare stop to investigate and sacrifice my impetus. After a 90-degree turn, clumps of grass functioned as footholds as the trail cut a straight swath down a steep incline, putting me on increased alert. The breeze carried no birdsong to my sensitized ears. Was this the normal hush when a stranger came galumphing through the territory? Or were the more newsworthy Canada geese only one of many species contributing to an exodus?

  The trail’s beeline toward the shore continued on level ground, bisecting a boulder-strewn grove of black birch. Prickly, matted undergrowth flanked the path like hands about to clap and made the woods impassable for anyone without foolhardy resolve and industrial-gauge hip boots. The tangle crested inches below trailside yellow dots.

  I heard Wil sawing and hacking a minute before spying him a stone’s throw ahead. Like his coworkers, he was deaf and blind in his world of toil until I coughed loudly, on the outskirts of highest-resolution autofocus. I’d been steeling myself to aim and shoot amidst raving verbal abuse, or turn tail if he charged at me. But unlike his more sociable coworkers, he merely lifted dull eyes toward me and kept sawing at a root protruding like an arthritic knuckle from compressed, stony dirt. He breathed huskily through open mouth. His hat was wedged on low and crooked. He was hunching over, knees acutely bent, as if striving for maximum discomfort and inefficiency. The angle of the saw allowed him the use of only its first several teeth, which repeatedly scraped across the ground. Based on lax expression, he cared as little about that as he did about seeing me. “Hello, Wil.” I aimed for the kind of peaceable tone that wouldn’t scare off wildlife. He nodded listlessly.

  “Okay if I record you at work?” He neither acquiesced nor asked why I would, but prolonged his blank stare as he dragged sawteeth mechanically back and forth and into the dirt. I zoomed in on his face, anticipating eyebrows outstretched, scalp rippling, restless muscles distending his cheeks and temples. Nothing! Was the infestation somehow wise to me? Laying low? I went wider, for lack of a better idea, and sick at heart at my best friend’s infirmity in close-up. A full-body view of his hapless efforts was equally depressing, and I shamelessly spaced out and regrouped with my fickle attention centered on the less discomfiting root at Wil’s feet.

  Wrong again. Through viewfinder I distinctly observed that the root, at the touch of serrated steel, was moving. As best something embedded and insensate could, it was straining to press down, squirm aside, save itself, evade pain. Wil didn’t seem to notice. I was about to berate myself for failing to video this anomaly, and with a disoriented shudder realized I’d been shooting all along.

  At the edge of the frame was a smidgen of the messy sheaf of weeds Wil had uprooted. I zoomed back to encompass it and needed a few seconds to resteady my hands. Stalks and leaves were writhing infinitesimally, just above the threshold of perception, liable to be mistaken for interplay of sun and shade, except that the sky was cloudless and no forest shadows overlapped the path.

  My initial sense, that the loose herbage was snailing toward shelter off the trail, away from the indignity of being ripped up, proved false. The movements between plants and within each plant were totally uncoordinated. As aimless, as purposeless, as Morgan’s had been. The reservoir, I speculated, must have fed into the groundwater here, or maybe something insidious had traveled this far via capillary action from the reservoir through moist soil.

  With that thought, Wil’s more static face seemed a less dreadful prospect than the unquiet weeds. He was still gazing dully at me while he labored, and he was beginning to drool. This had gone on long enough. I had to effect some change in him, by whatever means occurred to me. “Wil, how are Morgan and Lucinda doing?”

  A spark of rancor gave him pause, and brought him upright. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.” The conspiracy theorist in me found ample room for interpretation in his choice of words. He shouldn’t because he was mad at me and we weren’t on speaking terms? Or because persons unknown
had warned him off me?

  “Okay.” I stopped filming. What more did I need here? Anyway, the scent of whatever Wil had been pulling, mostly reminiscent of wintergreen and sassafras, had become cloying. Repellant. Identified in my overheating brain with the drooling stupor on his face. Yes, I had to retreat.

  The urge for one last look at Wil won out only after I thought he might be out of view, and even then I had grave misgivings, as if turning into a pillar of salt were a real danger. Distance had reduced him, but hadn’t quite swallowed him up yet. He was back at grueling work, a bobbing homunculus between shaggy green walls, with no outward sign that our interaction had ever occurred.

  The path ascended toward Wil’s two colleagues, whose conferring and cussing were intelligible already. I’d gladly have blazed a lengthy detour around them, had trailside thickets left any openings. I cringed before the fact at their inevitable questions. How was Wil? What had he said?

  In fact, his body language had spoken volumes, and none of it suitable for their ears, or Atwood’s. It told me that Wil’s level of debility must have fluctuated according to pattern or purposes unknown, for this virtual zombie unfit to hold a saw couldn’t have handled the morning commute. Nor did he act possessed, like Morgan and Lucinda, so much as consumed, worn down, resigned. By something that used certain bodies as hosts and battened on others?

  Relief was writ plain on the rangers’ faces at my return. Keen on any excuse for an unscheduled break. They subjected me to the foreseen questions, right down to the precise wording, and had to make do with my off-the-cuff rejoinder, “He’s a man of few words, all right.” I pushed on, sorry to disappoint them. Their stack of weeds hadn’t grown appreciably, and though I didn’t mean to be critical, my eyes fastened on it and my pace slackened. When I grasped that I was biting my lip, waiting for limp foliage to move, I hurried along, bidding them best of luck again. Their hats lay upside-down on the ground, and a few twigs and crushed leaves had landed in the crowns.

  Wait a minute. Why not recruit these guys to come see Wil’s discarded greenery in action? Plus, perhaps, the extra treat by now of a severed root trying to crawl like an inchworm? Show them how lucky they really were. Yes, they were slaving away where the underbrush was rank and stubborn, but not where alien infusion had grown pervasive enough to animate anything. I was halfway turned around, ingratiating smile at the ready, when a piteous bellowing erupted from Wil’s direction. His coworkers dropped their tools, and we all bolted in his direction. At the sharp right, elbows grazed the swaying briars, and we recklessly plunged downhill. Nobody said a word, while up ahead the outcry was repeated at odd intervals and had come to sound like the groaning of a wounded stag. Wil had seemed a good ways off before, but in our haste we covered that same ground in no time, and then we were skidding into the blood around him.

  Where I’d been sick at heart, I was now sick to my stomach as well, and my companions’ expressions doubtless mirrored mine. I stayed back to let ranger emergency training take over, and reflex made me operate the camcorder till a sense of decency stopped me. Thrashing Wil had failed to disconnect the root, which I distinctly glimpsed twitching. But when I rewound and studied a freeze-frame, it showed how Wil had succeeded in misapplying the saw between left pants cuff and shoelaces, through his sock, and into his extensor tendon. I lowered the camera, and he was still rocking from side to side, back arching spasmodically, clutching his foot with both bloodsoaked hands as if to keep it attached, and roaring out to vent each overload of pain.

  His coworkers strove to calm him, to examine him, but were shouting themselves hoarse penetrating his anguish, and were laboring with all their might to hold him down. They had also to beware his free leg’s constant frog kicks. “I think he sliced a tendon!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, without any great faith that I’d be heard.

  “We’re on it!” the lanky ranger barked, while the other was bracing Wil’s slippery red hands with his own and begging, “Let me see it, let me see it!”

  As my announcement echoed from the reservoir, Wil stiffened from head to toe and focused on me, enabling the freckly ranger to roll down sticky sock and roll up the trouser leg. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Wil screeched, further distorting his masklike rictus.

  “Just passing by.” I felt obliged to make good on that. Slipped on past him and toward the water. Winced at briars snagging the back of my flea-market varsity jacket.

  “Did you guys have an argument or something?” shouted the freckly man at me.

  “No. He wasn’t angry when I left,” I maintained with qualified honesty, while moving along. They were too busy to press the issue or, I wagered, to notice anything they’d never expect to see, like a flexing root or weeds. Self-inflicted injury had freed Wil from his trance in the worst way, or had willful flora somehow rallied against him? Were his colleagues going to bind the wound? Or improvise a splint or tourniquet or stretcher? Whatever the plan, he’d be less agitated in my absence. I stepped carefully over Wil’s hat, with sweat darkening an inner circle on its broad brim, and his saw, on which a sheen of sunlight vied with a wet red sunburst pattern.

  I didn’t get far. Performed an about-face. Didn’t want it said I had fled the scene of an accident. “Can I help at all? I don’t think he wants me around right now.”

  The darker ranger waved me away. Wil was hardly tranquil yet. I forged on. Two last snatches of conversation carried on the breeze.

  “There’s so much blood!”

  “Nothing’s completely detached. His foot’s not quite dangling.”

  Wil’s hysterical shrieking overtook me for several more minutes. In that same span, expansive splotches of grass and plants joined up to carpet the path, which gradually narrowed as the thorny walls closed in. My earlier wish to prolong this nature ramble was coming true, though nature had lost its allure, and the reservoir was my least desirable destination. But where to go except forward?

  I began to smell the water as the carpet rose knee-deep, with loftier spikes of goldenrod and Joe Pye weed and milkweed. Bridges of vines at shin level forced me to push resolutely till they snapped. Trailside yellow dots were a memory, hidden in the towering brush that guided my course by looming that much higher than the grass and trash greenery clogging the trail. I wanted less than ever to confirm whether that vegetation was misshapen or stirring with idiot volition.

  And just like that, August succumbed to November. The foliage on path and off retained its imposing height, but was brown and dry and brittle. It rattled. Under my shoes, against my jean legs, it disintegrated as if it had burnt out. Carbonized. As if too much alien invigoration were like an overdose of fertilizer. Then I was crossing sand that fringed a snug cove. To gain some perspective on the damaged ecology, I scaled a flinty outcrop, roughly the shape and size of a beached whale, jutting from out of the woods to the water’s edge. The band of dead brown girded the semicircular cove at a uniform, sharply defined width. The overarching trees still flaunted healthy leaves and needles. This must have been such a rapid, recent die-off that the “Control Center” had yet to learn of it, since one of the rangers had described the underbrush as “impossible down near the water” rather than blighted and crumbling. Here was a timberland counterpart to last Saturday’s stricken pumpkin patch or last century’s Heroux farm.

  The slant of late afternoon sun cast a gloss on the reservoir, and pinpoint sparkles drew my gaze to the foreground. At water’s edge and along the shallows floated a fine powder that had coalesced into a design like a series of festoons, and that hugged the curve of the cove as far as I could see. It foremost resembled the yellow pollen that formed sheets on puddles in springtime. But it beckoned me with a mineral glint as of quartz or mica, and its nebulous color shifted between gray and pink and cobalt with every rippling breeze. This modern resurgence of the dust that had killed the Heroux crops and livestock must have been spewing all summer from the lake-floor portal, propelled toward shore, insoluble in earthly H2O. I whipped hand
kerchief from back pocket and over nose and mouth, petrified that inhaling fresh country air might lead to lungs polluted or possessed. Shuffled guardedly backward down the spine of the rock, as if the dust could home in on heedless movements. Deliberately or not, congestion had found its airborne way to the rangers, hadn’t it?

  I twisted aside to ensure I’d descend upon the sand, and not into the dead swath of tall thicket. Something in the woods balked at my abrupt maneuver, or coincidentally tripped and staggered behind its screen of crunching foliage when I turned to face it. Twigs and branches snapped amidst the thuds and tumble of some unseen bulky body. And then nothing. I didn’t dare puncture the restored silence to ask who was there. Yes, rangers might be searching for me. A deer might be foraging. Or a black bear. Or what else? Nothing that wanted me to get a fix on its whereabouts. On the bright side, for what it was worth, I couldn’t imagine Wil had fought off his coworkers and was limping from tree to tree, ax in hand. But it wasn’t necessarily anything friendlier.

  Absurdly, I’d walked into one of the most shopworn scenes from the horror-movie playbook. Trapped and alone in haunted wilderness, at the mercy of a hidden menace. It would have been laughable had it not been happening to me. On top of that, malignant dust had been massing by the waterside, maybe poised for my next careless inhalation. And because I wore no wristwatch on my days off as a matter of principle, I could only measure time by the lengthening shadows and the increasing ache in my back and upheld arm, for I hadn’t budged since beginning to bend over and climb off the rock. Camcorder in my other hand was putting on more and more weight, causing my hand to cramp and my shoulder to throb. Nothing broke the deceptive forest peace, and the absence of bird and insect song only wound my nerves tighter.