Penpal, Page 2

  An unnatural shape caught my eyes, and I looked at it for what felt like a very long time until I could finally discern what it was. About ten feet in front of me, resting among a mass of tangled sticks and loose leaves, there was a deflated pool float that was shaped like a shark. Even after I understood what it was, I continued looking at it, trying to figure out why it was there. This only added to the surreal feeling, to the point that I was sure that I must be experiencing a dream rather than the world itself. After a while, though, it seemed like I just wasn’t going to wake up, because I wasn’t asleep.

  I stood up to orient myself, and I caught a flash of some trampled shrubs that looked like a path, but the woods were thick behind it, so I turned to look elsewhere. I didn’t recognize this place. I played in the woods by my house all the time, and so I knew them really well, but I had only been in them when it was dark once before. I had run through my woods straight to my house at the last edge of dusk countless times without even having to think about how to get there. But there’s a big difference between dusk and dark, and as I stood there taking in all that there was to see in the dim light, it started creep into my mind much more forcefully that these might not be my woods after all.

  A shiver that I think was only partially due to the chilled air ran through me as I wondered how someone was supposed to find his way to a place when he didn’t know where he was starting. I took a deep breath and a single step and felt a shooting pain in my foot. I lifted my leg quickly and reeled off balance, falling back to where I had woken up only moments ago.

  I moved my eyes from the terrain to my throbbing foot and saw what had felled me. I had stepped on a thorn. It stuck about an inch out of the middle of my foot, but it only bled when I quickly tore it out of my skin. I wound my arm back to throw it someplace where it wouldn’t pose a danger to me any longer, but as I searched for a safe spot, I realized that there wasn’t one.

  By the light of the moon, I could see that the thorns were everywhere. The whole ground was laced with this natural barbed wire. I had been lucky to only step on a single thorn just then, but as this occurred to me, I became conscious of the rest of my body. I looked at my other foot, but it was fine. As a matter of fact, so was the rest of me. I searched over my legs and feet with my eyes and hands. No cuts. No scrapes. I didn’t have another scratch on me. I wasn’t even that dirty. I cried for a little bit and then stood back up.

  I opened my mouth and filled my six-year-old lungs to capacity, and just as I was about to scream for help, my breath hitched in my throat as a thought lodged itself powerfully in my mind: what if someone heard me? I held the air tightly in my chest and stood puzzled by my own question. I needed help; shouldn’t I hope that someone would hear me? All at once, I began to think of the fiends and monsters that I had imagined stalking and chasing me through and out of what might be these woods. I found myself wishing I had never played those games. I let the air escape slowly to give myself a last chance to use it in case I changed my mind and wanted to yell. I didn’t. I would have to find my own way. I didn’t know which way to go, so I just picked a direction and began walking.

  I walked for what felt like hours.

  I tried to walk in a straight line, but there was no path to follow. I made sure to course-correct when I had to take detours around tree limbs that were too entwined to move through or patches of thorns that were too broad to step over. Every time I would make my way past one of these natural obstacles, I would be confronted with a seemingly identical tapestry of foliage, and the feeling of hopelessness would begin to assert itself a little more. I just wanted to see something familiar, and each time the woods appeared particularly thick, I thought I had found my landmark.

  Marking the outer edge of my usual explorations, there was an enormous pile of discarded and decaying Christmas trees that my best friend Josh had found once during a game of hide-and-seek. Although he had been driven out of its concealing shelter fairly quickly by fire ants, we would return to it many times to trample on the stray and spherical colored ornaments that had been left behind.

  We had many stories about where the trees had all come from, but I assume now that the genesis of the pile was much more ordinary than what we had hypothesized. Whatever the origins, what was left was a tangled mass of still decorated, however sparsely, holiday trees that looked, from a distance, to be a single colossal Christmas tree. This would be the easiest thing to spot in my woods, and if I found it, I would know where I was. But that was only if these were my woods.

  As I stepped delicately through the brush, an idea began to form in my mind. If I could climb a tree, I might be able to see my way to the woods’ exit. I became less despondent and began searching the canopy for a proper scouting position. None of these trees seemed tall enough, but if I could find one that was, I might be able to see a house. I might even be able to see my house, I thought.

  I stood still and balanced carefully on my now-aching feet. The trees that loomed over me when I had woken up in these woods had been tall, I recalled. But I struggled to remember just how tall they were.

  “What about the branches?” I mumbled to myself. I remembered seeing branches above me, and if they grew low enough, I knew that I would be able to climb up the tree. If I could find my way back to that spot, I could work my way up the tree and possibly see a way out … but that would mean going back.

  I shifted on my feet and tried to make the best decision. Turning around, I took a few steps back toward the direction from which I had come, and I froze as a phrase echoed in my head:

  How far can you go into the woods?

  I hadn’t been tortured by this question for well over a year, and I stood there a bit bewildered by the fact that it had suddenly come rushing back into my mind.

  On an afternoon, toward the beginning of kindergarten, I had come home from exploring a part of the woods that I had never seen before. I was excited to tell my mother how far I had gone, and she seemed – even if she was only humoring me – to be equally excited to hear it. When I had finished describing my journey, she congratulated me and asked if I thought I had finally seen all the woods there were in our neighborhood. I told her that I didn’t think so, but that I wanted to. She smiled as she asked, “So, how far can you go into the woods?”

  This sounded like a challenge, and so I answered confidently, but none of my answers seemed satisfactory to her. “Really far,” “Super far,” and even “All the way” were all rejected as viable responses; after each attempt to close the issue, she would just return with the same question, becoming more amused by the minute.

  At a loss, and wanting to be able to answer her question so that she would stop asking it, I asked the only other authority figure I knew: my teacher. She gave me a quizzical look and asked me what I meant. I didn’t even really know what I meant, and so I just repeated the question. She thought for a moment and said, “I don’t know, let’s see,” as she walked me over to the map that was tacked to our classroom wall.

  She asked me the name of my street, which I had memorized, and she took a moment to find it before touching my shoulder and holding her finger on a big patch of green. “I think these are your woods,” she said. I repeated my question yet again; I told her that my mom had been asking me this question repeatedly. As I told my teacher this, she seemed to realize something and took her finger off the map. She smiled coyly saying, “I don’t know. How far can you go into the woods?”

  As I stood there in the woods with my arms tucked inside my shirt to avoid the frigid air, I thought about this question and remembered how I came across the answer; this stirred a warm fondness in me that almost made me forget about the reason that question had come back into my mind to begin with.

  I discovered the answer just a few weeks after I asked my teacher. My grandparents called to chat with my mother and me, and when my mom handed me the phone to talk to my grandfather, “Pop,” I thought I could have a little fun and be on the giving end of the antagonizing for on
ce. Before he could even ask me how I’d been, I charged at him.

  “Hi, Pop. How far can you go into the woods?”

  “What?”

  “How far can you go into the woods?” I repeated knowingly, although I knew nothing at all.

  “Oh. Well, I suppose about halfway,” he said, snickering.

  “What? How come you could only go halfway?”

  And then, as if he had been waiting for this moment for his entire life, he bellowed:

  “Because if I went any farther, I’d be coming out!” He began laughing so hard that it transformed into a coughing fit, and he handed the phone off to my grandmother.

  It took me a while to appreciate the nature of the question and its answer. I had never heard a riddle before, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I would ask that question to dozens of people in the months to follow.

  Standing there barefoot in the woods, thinking about this riddle, I found that it wasn’t amusing anymore. However, now it was more than just a silly question. I had walked a long way; for all I knew I couldn’t walk any farther in – the last tree might be just ahead. If I turned back now, I might be walking back into the woods rather than out of them. I pivoted where I stood and resumed the trajectory that I had adopted when I set out.

  Everything was eerily quiet as I pressed on. The only noticeable sounds were of crickets, cicadas, and the light grinding of leaves under my sore feet. Occasionally, however, I would step too hard on a healthy stick, and its cracking would drive the noisy creatures to silence. I would stand there paralyzed by the sudden hush, and I would hold my breath and listen for sounds I hoped not to hear. When the insects resumed, so would I. Desperate to keep their noise, I trod carefully on the undergrowth, but it was thick, and here and there my foot would press down on a stick just enough to snap it; the bugs would arrest, and so would I.

  This relationship persisted until the last interlude that I remember. I broke a stick, the insects hushed themselves, but instead of the expected silence, I heard what sounded like an infant crying in the distance. I could feel the blood draining out of my limbs as I listened to this wailing that didn’t sound as far in the distance as I wished it to be. I felt a churning in my stomach and a weakness in my legs. Standing completely still and being careful not to make any noise, I waited. But the sound didn’t stop. Suddenly, another sound joined the chorus. A large stick snapped just behind me.

  I panicked.

  I think now, as an adult, the sound I heard that night was a cat in either heat or rage, but I had no thoughts in my mind as I ran veering in different directions, taking as much care as I could to avoid big thickets of bushes and collapsed trees. I was paying close attention to where I stepped, because my feet were in such bad shape, and I suppose I instinctively wagered that it would be better to move less quickly than not at all. I paid too much attention to where I was stepping and not enough attention to where those steps were leading, because not long after hearing the cry, I saw something that filled me with such despair that I find it difficult to articulate its potency even now.

  It was the pool float.

  I was right back where I had woken up.

  I stood there dazed, staring at the pool float. It looked oddly familiar to me now that the initial mental haze that had plagued me when I first awoke had dissipated. I wondered if that was because it was the only thing in the woods that I actually recognized, but that didn’t seem quite right. I shook it off and attended to what really mattered.

  I had traveled for what felt like a great distance, but I hadn’t really moved at all. This wasn’t magic or some supernatural folding of space. I was lost, utterly and completely.

  Up until that moment, perhaps in an effort to focus on what I could control, I had thought more about getting out of the woods than how I got in, but being back at the beginning caused my mind to swim. My feet had not hurt at first, but they were agonized now, and I had made not even an inch of progress. I had been hoping that these were my woods from the time that I had awoken in them. I had hoped that I simply didn’t recognize them due to the obscuring and distorting darkness. But my optimism had long since disappeared, swallowed like everything else by the engulfing blackness.

  Had I run in a huge circle around that spot, or did I just get turned around and start making my way back? I realized that even if I set out again on the path I had tried to follow at the outset, there was no way to be sure I would actually chart the same course; and if I took a completely different course, then I wouldn’t have even made progress in terms of scouting the area through my original excursion. And although I had pushed it to the very back of my mind, rhythmically, like a metronome, my mother’s riddle marched back to the frontlines – its footsteps faint at first but gradually building in a crescendo that became so loud I could think of nothing else: into the woods.

  As this echoed through my thoughts, I suddenly pictured the woods as a vast circle of trees. As I turned on the spot on which I stood and looked around me, a fear crept into my mind that I might be standing at the very edge of the circle and that whatever direction I picked would just lead me deeper, farther into the woods.

  As I continued scanning the landscape around me, my eyes fixated on one of the trees that I had seen towering above me when I first woke up. I looked at it dully – the way you gaze at something when you aren’t actually seeing it, despite how unshakably fixed your eyes have become; like staring at a wall when you’re lost in thought. Slowly, both my eyes and mind regained their focus, and I moved my head up.

  It was tall.

  I forced the despair out of myself and made my way to the tree, being careful to avoid the thorns that were blanketing the ground. As I stood on the exposed roots of the tree and looked straight up the height of its trunk, I thought that the tree must surely be tall enough to allow me to see my way out. I reached my hand up and grasped the lowest limb, but as I tightened my grip, my arm began shaking. Trying to steady myself, I moved my other hand up onto the branch, but when I tried to pull myself up, I felt my body protest. I remember thinking that night that it was simply too cold to climb the tree, but I know it wasn’t the cold that stopped me. It was fear.

  I released the branch and looked back to the spot where my night had started. I could still see the place where I had woken up; it was a relatively clear spot in the middle of an otherwise debris-laced ground – as if I had tried to make a snow angel in the dirt and had given up in the middle of the project. It was a strange sight, but not any stranger than the rest of this place.

  Fully conscious of my feet’s condition, I walked back to the small clearing and sat down with my legs crossed.

  “What if there’s no way out?” I questioned, torturously.

  I was too defeated to feel anything but apathy, and I turned my attention back to the tall tree and the stars above, looking upon it all with listlessness. Tracing my eyes over the stars, I had an epiphany. I had heard so much about explorers navigating the world by sea – traveling to undiscovered lands and building new civilizations. I had learned that they could do this by following the stars, and my spirits rose in a flash as I realized that I might be able to do the same. At the time, I thought the North Star was just the brightest star, and so I looked for and found the one with the most brilliant shimmer. I followed it.

  I was careful to keep the star that I picked in my sights at all times. If I reached a point where the trees above obscured it too much or for too long, I redirected myself on a path that avoided them. I ignored every sound that tempted me to whip my body around to confront it, and despite the pain, I surveyed the ground primarily by the feel of my feet rather than the sight of my eyes, knowing that if this star was lost so too would be my way.

  Eventually my surroundings began to look more familiar; a network of fallen trees that I recognized as ones that I had used as balance beams offered my first legitimate sign of hope, though I walked around and not across them this time. Soon after, I came upon the Christmas
tree pile – its scattered ornaments glimmering dimly in the weak moonlight. I gave it a wide berth to avoid the glass shards that might still pepper the ground from the times that my feet, when they were less vulnerable, had pressed down upon the glass balls of holiday flair and crushed them. My nerves were beginning to calm, and when I saw a dirt void called “The Ditch,” I knew that I had made it out; the feeling of relief that washed over me brought with it a smile that was more sincere and joyful than any I had ever worn on my face before.

  Despite the impulse to quicken my pace when I had my bearings restored and no longer had to watch my North Star so vigilantly, my feet were in so much pain that I had to be mindful of each step. A distance I had covered in mere seconds in my nightly exodus from these woods seemed to be never-ending. I walked with a limp in both legs in an attempt to avoid putting too much weight on either foot. But when I saw the edge of the woods’ dirt floor cut off by the paved cul-de-sac of my street, I grew so happy to be so close to home that I broke into a light jog, despite how much it hurt. When I actually saw the roof of my house over a lower-set neighboring house, I let out a light sob and ran faster, wincing with each step. I just wanted to be home.

  I had already decided that I wouldn’t say anything about any of this to my mother because I had no idea what I could possibly say. I would get back inside somehow, clean up, and get in bed; if I were lucky, she would never even have to know about my odyssey. Anything that I might say would sound preposterous, and the thought of this whole experience reaching its end strengthened my resolve to leave it in the past forever once I finally shut that door behind me. However, my heart sank as I rounded the corner and my home came fully into view.