The Perambulating
Everywhere the quiet hunger. Even here, far from the cindery guts of the city.
Earthbound heat of the late afternoon, dense and stubborn. Heat trapped in his body, too, his lungs, the pores of his cheeks, the back of his neck, flaring behind his eyelids.
Dirt powdering his feet up to his ankles. A sweet ache along his calves and up in his cranky hips. It had been a good hike.
Walking with his shadow, which pivots on his footfall with each switchback in the trail. Spenser’s body a compass unwieldy and unreadable.
Light thinned and softened by the edges of things: cloud, branch, leaf, rock, mist.
Water pounding rock. White froth. Riverbed dropping away, atom by atom.
Standing on the wooden footbridge, Spenser stops, leans out and over, a hand-polished beam digging into his ribs. And there it is. The nervous tingle that dances from his balls to the bottom of his gut. The inevitable fantasy, or maybe it’s more of a thought experiment: What if I fell? What kind of ending would this be? Would it hurt? And why would knowing that matter? If you knew it didn’t hurt, would that change anything? What if I jumped?
Not seriously considering this, of course.
Am I the only one? Doesn’t everyone have this same thought, however briefly? Isn’t this precisely where the rubbery fear comes from? Not the height, but the fall, unbidden, entering one’s mind?
Spenser wonders why so many of his memories are in the first-person, but he can only imagine the future in the third-person. Like now, the body dropping from the bridge is something he can’t see through his own eyes. He can only witness it from a stationary perspective on the bridge itself. Maybe this is a good thing. Some unspeakable impulse still more powerful than self-destruction. He leans back, stands up. Keeps moving.
Overhead, a plane silently rips a seam along the atmosphere. Vapour trails scalpel-sharp, then oozing like a white wound. Don’t get it twisted. Don’t look up there and ruin this. Stay in the moment.
No, I won’t end in a fall. Let me wander away. He can picture himself, old and grey and bony, entering a forest, walking right into it. Aimless wanderings of a ravaged mind, maybe a few muddy curses in his mouth. A quiet ending writhing away under a tree with a secret history that it cannot share. In his vision Spenser sees himself clutched and swallowed by dirt, root, stone, leaf, branch, water, cloud. The sky. The fragile light. The green, the green, the green. The white.
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