Walking. Leaves in light wind, shivering; stronger gusts, on occasion, in the canopy above. The slow back-and-forth creak of the larger branches, some of the thinner trunks leaning in the stronger wind. The fresh, quiet air of late March; the soil is dark and moist from misty rainfall earlier in the day, the sky a less threatening grey overcast than in February. Geese.
The more time he spends walking in the Riverside Wildlife Area, the less alien he is to its rhythms. His presence had been an aberration—it still is, he knows, though less so than when he had arrived in his Ford Escort, its obnoxious size and noises and colors trundling down the dirt road to the empty lot, the deep, steely blue of the car unlike anything seen in the river or the overcast sky. That blue might be on the wings of some exotic butterfly somewhere. Or at the edges of sunsets or sunrises on certain days. But not here, not now. He breaks spiderwebs on the path with an attitude of melancholic inevitability. The jewel-like iridescent green of the spiders would glint more visibly on a day with sunlight; their beauty in today’s diffuse light is of a subtler kind. When their webs are broken, the spiders swing on loose threads to the left or right and find footing on the leaves and stems of tall ferns. Once established, they wait in stillness for the disturbance to pass. He breaks the webs with care. He cannot help but disturb with his presence, but he makes the disturbance as gentle as possible, cutting the silk threads with a now-routine downward hand motion. He does not see the dark, decaying, nearly-collapsed ruins of the barn to his left through the trees—from inside, the structure appears as a temple for some ancient, forgotten religion. His footsteps add a soft metronome to the bird calls and creaking wind.
He is observed with indifference here. He is a living thing among living things. If he were to stay in the Wildlife Area indefinitely, he would maintain his borders as long as he could, but at some point his heartbeat would stop. In some fashion or another, his heart’s small metronome would stop; his footsteps would no longer disturb the dead leaves and small, struggling plants of the forest floor, and his skin would become a more porous membrane—no longer a meaningful border between him and not-him—his body becoming fertile foundation for insects and fungi. Death would integrate his rhythm into the buzzing, verdant rhythm of the whole.
Fear keeps things separate. As he walks, he considers kinds of fear—are the squirrels as afraid as they seem? The spiders are difficult to read—inside each spider, after its web is broken, how does the impulse to wait in stillness in the leaves make itself known? Is the impulse fear, or is it something else? The world is a given—maintain your borders for as long as you can. He decides that only his feeling has the name of fear—the others must have different names. He then realizes that the rest of them do not need names—only he needs the names.
Mason Ulrich knows how to be alone and likes it, most of the time. It’s an open, airy silence in the forest, for now—he knew it might turn fearful as the day wore on. His name is an empty noise here; it has the same meaning as any other name. He could say, out loud, a name like “Hiram Youssef,” or “Esther Granik,” or “Bridget Burberry,” and it would mean about the same as if he said Mason Ulrich. But Bridget Burberry would never make it out here—not with a name like that, he considers abstractly, walking and repeating the name under his breath a few times with varying inflections: “Bridget Burberry? Bridget Burberry, are you there? Bridget Burberry.”
He does not want to apologize. He has the vague awareness that, in time, he will lose whatever feeling compelled him to drive here—inside, he will eventually find the genuine desire to come clean and apologize. The awareness pulses through him with a certain childish fury. He wishes he could commit to his indignation. It would make it easier. Right now, the awareness of his eventual, inevitable submission to his better qualities makes him furious—at both his current state of mind and his future self’s capitulation. He is, at root, a stubborn person.
Another spiderweb on the path. He breaks it gently, carefully—the iridescent green spider falls and swings on the trailing thread and scurries onto the leaf where the other end is still attached. Mason stands and watches it scurry.
It stops dead on the leaf—perhaps believing it’d reached a place of safety, out of sight from the threatening presence that broke its web.
And then it waits. It’s the same almost every time it happens. He breaks the web, the spider scurries to safety—and then it waits. He’d known the name of this spider species once—he’d looked it up—but he’s forgotten it now. He names this one “Eugene.” “I’m sorry, Eugene. I don’t mean you any harm,” he says softly, absentmindedly, staring at the spider waiting on the leaf. It’s beautiful in this dim, gray light. Mason does not mind overcast days; he likes the diffuse pallor of the light on these days. “I’ll be on my way now.” A few unsteady steps through the ferns where the web once hung. “Good luck out there.”
He is reminded again, somehow, of what had happened—what had brought him here. A jagged pulse of fury and self-pity. There is little sign of it on his face. He is at the bottom of the ridge now. The variation in flora remains remarkable to him. A stream trickles nearby—the ground is blanketed with sub-canopy growth, ferns and saplings and thorny bushes and mosses growing on rocks by the stream. It’s possible to know your elevation only by the moisture in the air. The mud is thicker at the bottom; his shoes squelch. It doesn’t matter what had happened, really. It doesn’t matter at all. In fact, nothing matters. What’s it all for anyway. Stupid, bitter thoughts—easier, somehow, to let the more exaggerated ones pass without consideration. The extreme ones are easier to see for what they are, colored so obviously, as they are, by impotent rage, indignation, the requisite fear underneath. He does not want to die; he knows he doesn’t. That one no longer possesses him—at least, not out here, not in the open air, surrounded, as he is, by trees and spiders. The sight of the iridescent green spider falling and scurrying and waiting on a fern leaf—it’s enough to remind him.