Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  I turn back to the forest. To my left: north, again. Or, it may as well be, as much as anything is north. The morbid treeline stretches on endlessly, disappearing into morning fog.

  This was the direction I’d seen you run, and if there was any path you’d take, it would be deeper, toward wherever the sun would be highest. The longer I remain stationary in this mansion, the further I revert to the jumble of speculation I became in the weeks before the gun appeared a year and a half ago, the more my options decrease.

  In the end, it didn’t matter that much: a day had passed, a storm had shifted things. We were two points in an empty area that might as well have been infinite. We would find each other—I would find you, I was fated to—or we would not.

  Ignoring the road we came in on, I move in this direction, into this approximation of north.

  I always keep a wall to one side of me, and so this is where I place the treeline, at my right, to orient my progress and ensure that I’m moving forward, perpendicular to the distant gate where we entered the grounds. I cross the drenched flowerbeds and expansive lawns, and finally, at one crisp, well-maintained edge, I exit the mansion’s box-like vicinity, escape into the thick tangle of wild land that separates this household from the rest of the world. The sunshine is dimmed by an overhanging network of branches, tightly webbed together. My pace is slowed. I move parallel to the treeline. The soles of my shoes are quickly heavy with mud, and a thick crust forms beneath each, lending the impression that I’m walking slightly above the ground, over something that is not the ground.

  It occurs to me at one point that the treeline might not proceed in an absolutely straight line, that it might subtly curve and thereby point me in a different direction, which could eventually turn me around. The thought is so disconcerting that I decide to immediately ignore that I’ve had it—if I don’t choose at least one orientating factor and stick to it, I will be completely lost.

  Wet branches and stickers tear at my legs as I traipse through the brush, pushing weeds and stray limbs of honeysuckle out of the way. I turn frequently to look back, to confirm that I’m still making progress, and I gain some satisfaction in this, in marking time and ground covered. The thicket slowly takes on the character of a smaller forest itself, and my heart rate quickens when I look back and in one decisive moment realize that I can no longer pick out where I came from, that I’m definitely further from the treeline than when I entered. I block it out, and try to orient myself straight, plotting an invisible line—whenever I have to move left or right of this line to negotiate some obstacle, I try to find it again. The ground remains wet and soft, but I feel the sun on my back. My throat goes dry. On an impulse, I pull a handful of leaves off a branch and stuff them into my mouth. I chew four times and spit them out, and for the next twenty minutes—or another indefinite period of time, it doesn’t matter—I’m spitting leaf bits out of my mouth. Ultimately, it’s counterproductive. I lose more than I gain.

  The entire time, despite the stops and starts, the circumnavigations and innate bad sense of direction, the treeline stays to my right, a distant and taller darkness. The thicket feels endless, especially once I’ve lost sense of how long ago I entered it, and I had no idea to begin with how wide this space might actually be, if there was a neighbor to be looking out for; it begins to reconstitute itself in my mind as some sort of antechamber to the forest rather than anything in which I could truly cover any ground. I wait longer and longer between looking back, or at least I imagine I’m waiting longer. I think of “acres,” how many of them you could own if you were rich. Thousands, or millions, I guess, though truth be told I’ve never known how this works.

  An indeterminate distance later, when I’m hopelessly sweaty and tired, my legs streaked in mud, my salmon-colored shirt hanging with sweat and woodland distress (it was a stupid color to choose), I hit a brick wall, taller than I am and covered in ivy, the real perimeter of the mansion’s property. It’s infuriating, because I’d assumed I crossed this line a long time ago, when I left the lawn and entered the thicket, and I feel like my progress has been deleted, nullified in some critical way. Hooking my foot repeatedly into the noose-like tangles of stem, I pull myself stubbornly up onto the wall, and eventually gain enough purchase to topple onto the ledge. The light is instant and bright. I lose my balance and fall over the other side, landing on hard, empty grass with a startled, expulsive sound I’m thankful no one else can hear.

  I lie on my back, catching my breath, staring up at the sky. It’s a different kind of helplessness. It’s blue now.

  I climb to my feet to find that I’m in a wide, grassy expanse—to my left, mossy rocks that have been strewn there for millennia, scaling gradually up into hills, and further back, more forest, mountainous, too far away to seem real. To my distant right an opposing treeline, the one I tried to follow to get here, rises up full-bodied and ominous; I have no idea how its border could have swerved so goddamn far away.

  I break for the right side of the expanse, my ever-persistent version of north. The clouds have dispersed overhead, and it’s hot enough for me to sweat just moving at a normal pace. I roll up my sleeves, which seems like a decision I could have made years, decades ago, but which never occurred to me. Again, I reach the edge of the treeline, and I walk within the fringe of shade alongside it, the wall to one side of me. The ground hardens, and after an hour (or what I take to be an hour), most signs of the previous night’s rain are gone.

  This time, I stare at my feet as I walk. I think about nothing, really. The shoes are wearing out fast; they’re meant for stationary outings. The leather is not hearty.

  It hits me, some period of time later, that I’m not looking for you very hard, that despite my progress forward, I don’t really know what direction I’m going. There’s no reason to believe that when you disappeared you ran in an absolute straight line (as I’m trying to do), and even if you did, there is no realistic way that I’m following that path. The earliest you could have been here is a full day before me, and between then and now the rain would have obliterated any evidence I could reasonably track. I’m not even looking as I walk, really, but watching the ground, eking out a narrow strip of surveyed land along the treeline, the practical version of walking forward in the present to mask the past. I would’ve had to step on you to see you there. I stop walking, a hollow sensation expanding in my gut, and this time I recognize it as loss, crushing loss, an absence I’m only now beginning to acknowledge. You could have been three feet away, on either side, standing silently, and I never would have seen you. We passed, like two anonymous people on the street, bit our lips, didn’t speak, while in reality we were the only two people left, and the street didn’t exist. Finally, I look up.

  The sight before me is familiar, uncannily so. To my right, the treeline, dense and unrelenting. On the left, the usual expanse of grass, lush but yellowed in places, noted, maybe thirty feet away, by a little triangular crumple of bushes, out of which projects a thick, crooked black branch like a giant waylaid spider leg, stabbing into the ground. I’ve been here before.

  The same feeling crawls up inside me, that I’ve been missing something for an unspecifiably long time. I turn around, but of course the area behind me is as indistinct and unrecognizable as the area in front of me is familiar. I turn back, in the direction that, until a minute ago, felt like forward. I look in both directions for footprints, but the grass is dry enough here that there’s no sign of my presence that couldn’t be misinterpreted or fabricated by an anxious mind. In fact, it doesn’t look as if it’s rained here at all, not recently, despite the wayward branch. Had I somehow become turned around? I start walking in the direction I came from, waiting for the sensation to occur again, for the terrain to suddenly appear familiar, as ground already covered. It doesn’t—which makes sense, I wasn’t looking anyway when I approached, but had been staring at my feet, and anyway am coming from the opposite direction. I turn around again, and a few hundred feet up, there’s the bus
h and the spider branch, oriented just as they were two minutes ago. It’s more familiar now—for what might be the third time—and already the déjà vu that made it familiar when I approached it minutes ago (the elements in those approximate positions) is being replaced with this new memory.

  I resolve to keep moving forward, in the direction I’ve heretofore assumed is forward—walk enough, I figure, and things are bound to recycle. I walk past the spider branch, now hyper-alert of my surroundings. A few steps later I’m suddenly expectant—in the way that one recognizes familiar sights in a neighborhood—of a rightward shift in the treeline, of a dead stump and the gap it leaves on the edge of the forest, like a missing piece on the border of a puzzle. A minute later, the trees wrap right, and, sure enough, there’s a dead stump, a chunk absent from the forest. I stop in my tracks, again. This, too—I am more certain than the scene with the spider leg, which could be any windblown branch—its formation, the way I wrapped around the corner and saw it: I have definitely seen this before. I have taken this exact bend before.

  But if I had—if I had previously taken this curve, been somehow turned around—wouldn’t it have been from the other direction? Wouldn’t the treeline—on my left, from that perspective—have curved outward to the right? Wouldn’t my remembrance of this scene have been reversed? The only possibility I can imagine is that, by continuously following the treeline, I’ve somehow walked the forest in a circle, looped what must actually be a relatively small cluster of trees. That the forest is nowhere near the size I thought it to be—someone else’s property, even, meticulously surveyed and analyzed—and that this tragedy is acting out on an even smaller scale than I thought possible. I turn around, start walking back to the spider branch, and to my right now, ten feet away, basically right in my path, lies a small pyramid of stones, a cairn, stacked largest to smallest, flatly intentional. The sight is completely alien to me.

  I turn, and run straight into the woods.

  *

  Entering the forest is like changing rooms. Everything darkens and lengthens its proportions, and the sky virtually disappears. When I break the treeline, a flock of starlings bursts outward in the opposite direction—I label them starlings completely without evidence, though I couldn’t distinguish this type of bird from most others. Again, I move in as straight a line as possible. The forest is easier to negotiate than the thicket, the trees are further apart, allowing full-body motion rather than half-paced plodding forward. Thick roots and fallen branches criss-cross the forest floor, and hopping over them lends a feeling of control, of bounding, of surmountable obstacles as part of a grander sense of progress—each pace is a little longer and higher, therefore that much more successful. I tap the bark of a tree with my palm every so often, like each of them is a pre-set waypoint in a journey someone else planned, but on which I am a fully knowledgeable and briefed participant. The canopy of branches above me shelters the light from the ground, but it’s less disorienting than following the treeline from outside, because there’s too little light: the trees, tapped and untapped, now move too quickly for anything to look too familiar—if it’s only the fear of recognizable objects that throws me, then this can be neutralized by rendering everything generically recognizable, still repeating, but broadly, in natural-occurring patterns (as forests are composed of such patterns). I have so little idea of where I am in actual, spatial reality relative to anything else that if I’m able to accept this leap in my own logic, I will be able to continue.

  I often thought (or I often think now) that when I found the gun in my hand I’d started something over, had both gained and lost some fundamental knowledge about the world and its physical properties, its parameters: here, my entire sense of direction.

  I accept it, and I run until I’m exhausted, until my side starts aching again—probably short of a mile, but enough for the forest to close completely behind me—and then I walk. The sense of progress dims a little, but lingers, takes definitive form when I set my eyes on a distant tree and then pass it. I still have no sense of what lies behind me—each small goal deletes record of the previous one—but I’m transfixed by the path I carve. Whenever I’m able, I walk atop the roots or moss-covered logs, avoiding the forest floor, the leaving of silly footprints. I notice the birds in the trees. Unaccountably, the word “pleather” appears and settles into my mind. I know, not from one clear source, that this is some kind of artificial leather, but the more I turn the word over in my head, “pleather,” the less certain I am about its origins, whether it’s a combination of “plush” and “leather” (the idea being that it’s very soft; if “plush” is a material of its own or some other synthetic I don’t know either), or, possibly, of “plastic” and “leather.” I wonder, horizontally, about “patent leather,” the material I understand to be, above all, very shiny, and how it relates to this family, if “pleather” could actually be a contraction of “patent” and “leather,” if in reality they mean the same thing. I try to locate the contexts in which I’ve heard both terms used—I’m in a dorm room and someone is zipping up enormous glossy boots on Halloween; someone else is sorting through black pants in a drawer—but I can’t evidentially separate the two. This is something I’d ordinarily look up, uncomfortable with the uncertainty, but here, as I move through the wilderness, none of this technology is available to me, there are no signifiers of its truth. If I could, I would ask you—you’re familiar with these materials, are unquestionably handier—but you aren’t here, aren’t anywhere that I am, and the knowledge seems to exist in some distinct body just out of my reach, a trove only you or someone else has access to, the loss comes at me from a different angle: like the flight of flamingos, it’s something I might never ascertain, that I could die without knowing.

  Darkness falls in time and the forest takes on a new character, shaped by what moonlight penetrates the canopy. The bird songs quit for a while and then become darker, too. I look back and see that most of the forest has vanished into black except for the trees maybe thirty feet behind me, a neat approximation of my attitude toward their existence until now, and it’s clear that I won’t make anymore real progress until morning, that to proceed with my current approach would be beyond idiotic. I feel my way forward to a fallen trunk, climb over it, and slide into place on the opposite side, facing the direction I’ve been headed in.

  I stare at the blackened and massing forest until it’s too dark to see anything, listening for predators; with every sound my drained body shocks itself back to consciousness, frantically tries to echo-locate the source, holding for the pattern that signals an approach, an imminent attack. My eyelids flutter open and closed. Beneath me, I feel the wad of money I took from the mirror bedroom pressing like a knob against the ground, forming a little bruise, a bedsore. It seems impossible that this item could ever be of use to anyone.

  Gradually, the darkness filters out the information in layers, first the last vestiges of sight and then the sounds, turning them all into one ambient landscape, beckoning sleep. In the end my body takes over, working in coordination, gradually turning off its receptors, and I forget that my ultimate goal is protecting myself. In the last glimmer of consciousness, when I’m powerless to act on it and just dropping fully to sleep, finally, I hear a howl.

  *

  Improbably, I have a sex dream: I am in college again—the way many of my memories seem to lie “back in college,” as if it’s some temporally remote place—and there’s a starved-looking version of you that I notice (though the word that occurs to me in my dream-consciousness is “tap,” as if I’ve singled you out and brought you to my attention like a cult initiate). We’re back in a darkened copy of your dorm room, only with towering, church-like windows. There’s very little pretense there on your bed—in the dream, the implication is that we don’t know each other well, but met at some unspecified point just before, rote stranger fantasy—and I flip up your skirt and press my face between your legs, your face too dark to read. The pleasure in the dr
eam is basically nonexistent; there’s no sense of tenderness or physical response, no joy between us, and I’ve hardly begun when the walls vanish and we’re suddenly lying in an empty field somewhere, on a hill, a distant train on the horizon, laid in the same position, trying to fuck and failing in practice, as if your body has gone away and left a plastic shell in its place. The landscape is desolate tawny grain.

  The black skirt is a tell. I’ve never seen you wear one.

  I awaken on the ground wracked with intensely physical guilt and dread to the call of a bird that sounds like a malfunctioning synthesizer. Warm sunlight pushes in through the trees in front of me, and suddenly it is stupidly, comically obvious: east. I am moving east.

  *

  I continue walking. Late morning, I come to a stream winding through the forest, the waters brown and still. Its appearance is unexpected, but causes me to question the lack of others, because this is supposed to be a coastal region, there ought to be famous rivers everywhere. I climb down to the rocky bank, kneel there peering at the glinting surface as if trawling for familiar objects beneath, and then plunge my face into all of its three inches—it feels like a massive interruption—rubbing my skin raw with cold water, my hands disturbing the mud at the bottom. When I draw back, eyes shut, my hair dripping down into my face, it’s like stepping out of a shower, a liminal sense of normal, balancing on a sensory experience I remember. I feel heavier as I move away from the stream, charged with a new life, a reclaimed power. That afternoon, when the sun beams directly overhead (I’m watching it now, tracking its movements, and therefore time, in a somewhat more accountable way), I see the trees thinning ahead, and the outline of a structure that reads differently than the mansions. I’m overcome with a feeling of purpose, as if I’d been moving toward this location with singular intent since I entered the forest, since we first stepped off the train.