The Wilderness (43 page)

The man smiles, then is serious. “And it's true. He does.”

He picks up the last photograph and holds it to the light.

“And this one—this is you too, Jake. This is the day you took that flight over Quail Woods. That was only four years ago.”

The man in the photograph is wearing a thick coat and head thing with the ear pieces. He looks weathered, nervous, and excited in a calm, slow way. His eyes seem deep and black beneath the hat, stubble shadows the chin, the hand making a thumbs-up is reluctant, but still rather young and strong-looking.

I remember this man, he thinks. I have seen him. It is the first thing he has been sure about for as long as he can recall. An unrefuted fact of life is packed away in that face, behind the expression of a man who looks like he has been winded. He doesn't remember the time itself of meeting the man, not even remotely, but he remembers the man. The eyes. The shifting gaze, looking out to what is far away.

This animal here, at a distance on a dry bank, tears into meat, an activity from which it flicks its eyes now and again while
holding the meat in place. What is this? Is this a dog? His dog? Its colours warn. That space between the ears and the prick of the fur that is oilier and coarser than he had expected. He takes the mother's hand.

A sea of mesh. They walk inside the structure along a wooden path, surrounded by birds, the birds rising rare and frantic. It should be glass, he thinks, not mesh. This should be a sea of glass, a mountain of it, a fake glittering sky of it. It occurs to him: people build things. It comes as something of a revelation.

The man walks beside him and rubs his shoulder.

“You brought me here when I was a baby,” the man says. “I almost remember it, or maybe it's just from the things Helen said. I don't know. I don't know if it really makes a difference. Did you ever bring Alice here?”

He turns slowly to face the man, awash, watered down. Alice? he means to say. Who is that? Vague memory of someone—but—but no, and he cannot ask because there are not the words.

The man turns away and rotates his thumbs around each other, then threads his fingers through the mesh. Something in that gesture of dejection reminds him of somebody. It is always this: something, somebody. Everything unspecific and free-floating.

One day he would like to build a thing like this for birds, but he would like to do it with glass. He wonders how it is done, and searches through an archive of other one-day thoughts and decides whether to guard them or dispose of them: at some point in his life, for example, he would like to marry, he would like to build something, he would like to have children.
There is a clean slate and a run of events to be chosen or not. For the finest shard of time he believes that he has had his life and that it is over, and a panic grips him because he cannot remember it, not a thing, he has had it and lost it, or it has lost him. The fear isolates in a flash of yellow tearing up to the top of the glass mountain. Loss. But he must not consider it.

Nothing is lost, those choices are yet to be made. As they walk on he looks up at the mesh that knits paths above him and searches out the pattern, and the patterns in the patterns, and the patterns inside those, until he has to close his eyes to the logic and settle for the yellow on the inside of his vision, which sparks, then rapidly fades. He grips the hand that has found his, opens his eyes, and walks on.