“These Are His Memories” by Joe Koch

Back in your day they picked up hitchhikers, so you pick the man up. You could do with the company, even though he looks rough. Skin the muddy texture and fragrance of the dirt he must have been sleeping in, some nook in the rocks, the dirt smell a fond and clean smell, familiar to you from digging, the smell of the earth.

You don’t need to ask where he’s headed. This deep in the wilderness at dusk without a backpack, with nothing ahead or behind for miles but shrubs and switchbacks, the answer is always out.

Looks like another dry one, you say, handing him your water bottle and asking him to get a protein bar out of the glove box. Help yourself. You eat one even though you’re not hungry so he won’t be ashamed if he’s starving. He must be starving, but he doesn’t eat.

Watching the road is a relief, a kindness. You can feel the way he eyes you from under his hood, that hangdog look. Please, you say, grab a few for later, you’d be doing me a favor, my wife and those goddamn value packs. The knee-jerk mention makes your throat catch. It’s a habit, a hard one to break. You swallow. Anyway, I’m William Teller. Folks call me Bill.

The man doesn’t give you his name in return. You can feel something delicate and shocked about him, in the hunger you’re evading from his stare, in the thinness that inflects his voice. Barely above a whisper, he says, it has been a very strange winter.

Yeah? How so?

Very dry, too long. Too warm.

Aw, hell, nothing to complain about.

It’s too early to be this warm and dry, he says, quiet and insistent. It’s too early to wake up.

All I know is these switchback roads are a real shit show when they ice up. Don’t mind a little of that global warming tonight.

Trees and rocks blink past, an endlessly repeating backdrop. You can’t see what’s ahead as the light changes with the sunset, a little blind at certain angles. You take it slow. The man says again, it’s too early to wake up. He says what happens is once you make the decision, none of the reasons matter anymore. I could mull it over and recount them for you, make it seem like it makes sense, so many different causes and effects, failures, losses, but lots of them good, the things you worked for and wanted, happy occasions. It’s never one thing. There is no straw.

It creeps up on you, he says.

He goes silent. You wait. Tires crunch rock and your shovel rattles in the back when there’s a bump.

You try to get out in front of it, he says, keep moving, think positive, eat right, exercise, meditate or lift, you know the drill. And one day you’re out driving to work or walking the dog or jogging the same route with the same view and you don’t know why. You drop the leash or leave the keys in the ignition and pick a point on the horizon as far away as you can imagine. You point yourself on a trajectory that’s opposite home, and you begin to walk and keep walking, and you don’t stop until the world around you stops, becomes silent and pregnant and empty, where your feet have taken you deep into a place where you have abandoned all sense of direction, and you don’t want to be found or rescued. You don’t want to go back. You keep walking, and who knows how many days it’s been, or the last time you ate or slept or jerked off or pissed. You might have slept on your feet or fallen down now and then, or maybe not, maybe you’ve been awake for days, and it all looks the same, and it’s perfect. Perfect because nothing matters.

You can’t tell one tree from another out of these thousands of others, can’t tell one cliff or clearing from the next. Each ascent is another lost cause with nothing at the apex. You’re a guy who can do calculus and tie a half Windsor, you have skills, but not survival skills, no water, no weapons, no supplies, and once you’re out here lost, really and completely lost, you empty your pockets and drop your wallet down a gulch and embrace this soft suicide. You’re here to die.

The dream you had of walking out into the woods and never coming back has come true. You’ve made it real, made it further than anyone else. There’s some pride in that.

When you lie down in the dirt and leaves and moss to let the life drain out of you, it’s not how it should be, though. It’s slow. Nothing happens for a long time, or what only feels like a long time. Peace shifts quickly to impatience, impatience to boredom. Nothing feels real. Yet every inching second feels impossibly real as you slip in and out of waking and a sleepless anticipatory sleep disturbed by dreams of hunger, of aching knees, of stiff joints exacerbated by prickling extremities. You shift to get your circulation back and start to worry about animals when you notice how bad you smell, cougars or bears, tics latching on, things laying eggs, and you leap up, too aggravated to rest in peace. How long it’s been, you should have starved by now, you feel flat, blank as a sheet of paper when you rise, wavering, and it must have been weeks.

Death has rejected your petition. There’s nothing left to do but pick a point as far away as you can imagine on some other horizon and start walking again, keep walking no matter how much your back hurts and your feet slip and your vision cuts in and out, keep walking away from life and never stop.

The work never ends. Trail signs taper off, the bike treads and empty plastic bottles give way to evidence of old machinery, fallen markers for habitat restoration, scorched campsites. Further on, no trails, no maintenance, your exhausted senses are attuned, a dull manic buzz. You keep walking until you leave all the junk of civilization behind, all the spillage of human trespass you used to accept as normal, past the last shreds of derelict tents and doused rings of ash.

Deeper, the woods darken into perpetual dusk. The rocks jut out over your path in black contrast. Trees loom, onlookers along your stumbling marathon to the nowhere that eludes you, fans at a slow race frozen in grotesque gestures, some tall in reticent judgement, others short like gnarled monkeys caught mid-dance. Branches shiver in wind, grabbing and scratching and clapping in weird squeaky glee at your progress. You are the lone thing of your kind crossing a gauntlet of demons, ancient bark twisted past baroque recognition, huddled gargoyles of rock guarding against your trespass. The forest capers and jeers, cracking and shuddering above and below, whispering with the frisson of bare branches. And then you see far ahead, between the shaking calamity of trees, a single immobile shape, a shadow like a black cut-out of a tall hunchbacked man.

Tiny in the distance, your fight-or-flight-honed eyes seek movement as it stands blocking your way. Closer, it faces you without a twitch. You tell yourself it must be a backlit boulder or huge upended stump, why is the sun perpetually setting in that direction, it must have been days, you haven’t kept it straight, but the more you look for proof of trompe l’oeil, the more human it seems.

It’s as still as if someone snipped a man shape out of the forest, like they cut it from a piece of kid’s construction paper and left the empty hole. You begin to suspect or remember in your enervated thinness and wan woody stumblings that you, too, are made of paper. You feel as flat and tender as a flexible plane ready to be crumpled or cut. You are close enough now, close enough to see him. Unmistakable in black hairy silhouette, legs spread, long arms draped wide, he hunches down from the neck to create a shape too terrible to match.

When you fit into the cut-out space, the trees around you go white as boiled bone, suddenly aged, stripped of bark, sun-bleached, and petrified. Fallen trunks and contorted skeletal shapes silence the cavorting woods, transforming it into a frozen graveyard of dinosaur bones that glare in that perpetual dusk.

To your surprise, you neither crumple nor lie down and die, for the hole is upright and your stance must match. It’s not a matter of bravery. You have left behind all other options. Your chest presses against the solid trunk of its chest. Your shoulders and hips tremble in contact. Your bare face brushes the knotted stump of its head leaning down to baptize you with a kiss. The mushrooms at its feet fruit up softly into your shins. Your knees bend.

The hole is solid and hard as bark, furred by moss. It breathes in a rhythm compressing and releasing drum-like against your torso, as if its core were one giant lung. The roots of airways like fine filaments grow into your pores, a little deeper with each searching, connecting, expedient breath, and you can smell what it smells now, the compost of centuries of deaths.

Your head falls back intoxicated. A thick branch of fungal bronchioles invades your throat, feeding you the rich liquor of miasma, filling what was once permeable tissue paper with degraded rot from the air and with the slick liquid discharge of decay. You don’t know how you hold it in. Your hunger and thirst become manifest even as you’re sated, your sandpaper mouth smoothed and your clenched gut gorged as you flesh out into a full and conscious body again, from paper to pulp, and again you are initiated into the downward spiral of want, the inescapable cycle revived. You’re shaking, waking where you entered the forest, with no memory of how long it’s been or how you got there, except when you check the date on the watch you’d forgotten you were wearing it says it’s only been one night. All you remember now is the hunger you wanted to forget, the thing you fed on to survive, and you shudder with some kind of new trepidation as a car slows down at dusk to pick you up.

The man lapses into silence. He hasn’t had anything to eat or drink yet. You keep your eyes on the road while his withered presence haunts your periphery with sly longing, the hangdog not yet full coyote, not yet wolf, but something more reluctant. Your night vision isn’t what it used to be, and man, he wasn’t kidding about the shrubs and rocks out here, the cavorting figures catching the edge of your headlights on both sides of the winding road, audience to whatever you decide to do next. You think about your choices, as you so often have this last week.

You can smell the dirt on him, the clean and fresh soil, a good smell, like the dry mud still stuck on the shovel in the back of your truck bed. The smell of the earth. You say, so, you have a wife?

The hard helplessness in his stare. He says, not anymore.

No moon tonight, strangely enough. The road not so wild or unkempt that there aren’t yellow arrow signs with bullet holes reflecting your headlights every few miles to warn of sharp curves. Maybe it’s the contrast with the long-fingered branches and huddled gargoyles of stone that lends the arrows an untrustworthy glow. You’re not superstitious. It’s common sense to be careful. One nervous wrong swerve and you’d both plunge off the mountain and over the edge of the map into pitch black.

Way I see it, you say nice and slow, after a certain age, a man only has two choices. Most don’t ever choose, and that’s fine for them. It’s better for the people they love. I bear them no grudge. Maybe they don’t hear the call. After living long enough, a man can either walk out and keep walking, or dig a hole and keep digging.

The passenger waits, his hard silence crowding the cab.

There’s your turn on the left, leaving the main road for dry dirt. You ease the truck up the steep terrain and say, reach under your seat there. Grab that bottle for me, would you? Peel that plastic off the cap. He does, and you drink. When you hand the bottle back you say, here. You say it gravely. Here. I insist.

And it’s like you expect, he starts going and can’t stop, guzzling it down in salacious gulps, throat convulsing, the bottle rising higher by degrees as he drains it. A drop spills out of the corner of his mouth like a teardrop. Comic if it were any other situation, any other guy on any other night.

Before he finishes it off you say to him, it seems to me that you’re a man who made your choice. Seems we have that much in common.

He’s panting, having drained the bottle and slumped forward with his head on his fist, pressed on the dashboard. You realize he wasn’t breathing before and isn’t breathing now, a fact you’ve been reacting to but hadn’t registered consciously until it struck you in the moonless quiet. You’ve pulled into the clearing you made yesterday and cut the engine, cut the lights, and you’re readying your flashlight, opening the heavy door of the cab with a metallic yap. His thin whisper in the dark reaches you. I have never been a violent person. I never wanted to hurt anyone. Why won’t they let me die?

 Eyeshine like a fox when he looks up, no moon, only two greenish stars leering in the cab beside you, the waterfall sound of your blood rushing, the footsteps of your heartbeat running to or from the next threat. With a decisive thrill you flick the flashlight on and say, come on now, son. I’ve got something to show you.

In the beam, his eyes still glow with liquid green. The dirt on his skin seems caked so thick it has cracked like bark, or maybe he is impossibly parched and beginning to flake apart like papier-mache. The empty bottle rolls off his tremulous lap, yet he is as motionless as a creature ready to pounce, eyes unblinking, mouth still wet. Trust me, you say, and if you do, I’m going to trust you to hear me out.

Go on, now. Get out. I’m right behind you.

Before you know it he’s two feet away, suddenly near as you lift the shovel out of the bed of the truck. So fast you didn’t see or hear him move. Bashful, though, when you hold the light up and stare back in equivocal silence, equivocal except for the harsh intake of surprised breath and persistent quick drum of your monotone heart. His downturned lids lilt in time with the imperceptible sound in your chest.

Other way, you say. Turn around, friend.

You direct him ahead of you with the beam, casting a long shadow as the two of you hike a little ways deeper. You’ve made something out here, something good and clean and right, and although it’s enough to have accomplished that, and to have done it alone, it’s opening up another chamber in your beating heart to realize you’ve found someone else to bear witness. You never expected a kindred soul. Or whatever you call the opposite of a soul.

Tell me about your wife, you say, keeping a few paces behind, shovel raised, just in case.

I’ve told you everything. I don’t remember. I’ve told you the whole truth, from beginning to end.

His voice is less than a whisper, as close as a hiss, as if it were your own thoughts leaking back into your head through the quiet crunch of leaves beneath your feet in the dark of night.

My wife was the best thing that ever happened to me, you say, until she wasn’t. She made everything better, apologized all the time, you know how some women are, but there wasn’t anything she put her hand to that didn’t come out improved. Too good for me. Hard worker, paid her dues, studied and became a nurse. Good money for us. We had a beautiful life.

God, she was gorgeous, too, built like a brick shithouse, an ass you could live in, but she didn’t see it. It was charming at first. All this beauty, and she didn’t try to flaunt it. I guess that’s how it goes. What’s enticing becomes a nuisance after too many years. What’s humble and better than you becomes an insult. And the more she says she loves you, the more it grinds you down.

Or maybe it’s not her. Maybe intimacy always breeds a deep hate, and real men are meant to suffer alone. At least that’s what I’d decided earlier tonight.

You’re at the precipice now, and the man ahead of you stops before getting too close, as if he can see the hole far ahead of you in the dark.

Do you remember her now?

He waits for you to approach, stands side by side with you at the hewn earth edge as you shine the beam downward. You say, it grinds you down, and you act alone, sealing and making permanent your loneliness through the act itself like a sacred pact. And then suddenly you’re closer to everything. To her, because her body is new again, and to a whole world you didn’t know existed, a language you didn’t know you could speak until it poured out.

You’re babbling, breathing faster, and the man beside you crouches down, turning smaller and more distorted like a dark gnarled stump in the gaze of the struggling flashlight, his hands like roots clawing the turned dirt edge of the pit. His head tilts upward and his liquid eyes glare like some iridescent lichen. The drooling mouth slacks wide like a rotted out tree hollow, empty of mud and moss. You’re trying to explain as the head twists again, approaching you at an angle that isn’t possible. Before the garbled words cascade in a rush, your flashlight is gone.

What you want to share, you can feed him. If you could see him. If you could explain. If you could make it make sense to yourself. You go down to the ground on your hands and knees. Not that you’d ever crawl, but you’re desperate. Feeling your way, no moon, shovel first. Something grips the forward end of it. You halt.

You say, it’s about trust, isn’t it? That’s what matters. In something bigger than yourself, even if that thing is death, you trust in the act, in the choice. You remember it all and you don’t need a reason beyond the truth of the act itself. You’ve done what’s right beyond reason, we both did. You did what you had to do, and you don’t have to forget. We deserve it.

You ask him for what you want, beg him really, and in another instant tomorrow has begun. It’s growing light out. He’s lifted you up, brought you straight off the ground with his root fingers, strong enough to hold you and your shovel up and out over the edge.

He leans in close to whisper his answer although no one else is around for miles. His lips and tongue move as if telling you a secret. There are wet noises close to your ear as you slip.

The answer comes unbidden inside your head. No voice, no sound, only detached thought and the texture of thought, only choices that are no longer any choice at all, no comprehension, no memory, no explanation of what this answer that isn’t really any kind of answer means, or how to describe the thing it comes from, or whether your shovel hits wife or root or dirt.

You swing again.

You can’t find him in the hole where you buried her. You dig and keep on digging, because there are no reasons, because a man must act alone, because you believe there comes an age when a man must make a choice and are you his or is he yours? Do you remember me now?

You dig and keep on digging, through bone and root and dirt, digging as the sun rears up. The satisfying thump-slide of whatever the sharp end of your shovel cuts. The lift straining the overused muscles in your back, shoulders, and neck. The gasp of respite after you toss the next crumbling load. Dirt collapses, sliding back down.

The free space around your feet shrinks. The sun doesn’t reach down here. You can’t see your boots, and it’s getting harder to move. You dig and keep on digging, because there are no reasons except the smell of dirt. There is no man except what you bury here. Once he has thought of you he will never leave you again, not ever, and you understand too late that no one ever acts alone, because his memories are endless. Because you were made of dirt. Because this is not your story, and you were never here.

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