Valentina smiled.
“Exactly. Respect it as a living thing. Acknowledge its dignity.”
“And if the wolf comes back to visit? I don’t suppose that cabin door is actually reinforced steel disguised as wood.”
“I have more subtle protections here than just doors and locks. In time, I will educate you about them.”
He didn’t like it, but she wouldn’t say more.
After some minorly patronizing answers to Green’s questions about operating the stove (“wood plus fire equals heat”), Valentina left Green to his vigil, unaccompanied but for that living, pacing smell and the stone-dead moth laid out like the spilled guts of an overturned trash can.
Alone, Green looked around the cabin that felt strangely like ahome despite its disturbing owner and contents. There was something solid and comforting about the place. It was the old coffee cup rings on a wooden chest by the stove. It was the frayed pot holder hanging on a hook. It was the hundred small signs of a life being lived.
Somehow, the warmth, comfort, and stillness of the place magnified the pain of his battered face, as if he had finally found a calm enough moment to really feel it. He couldn’t stop fingering his swollen nose or the gash on his chin. Valentina had said that he didn’t need stitches, but his whole face ached in rhythm with his pulse.
He stood over the moth and was surprised to find that he was not afraid. This encounter was different. He wasn’t in the passive mode. The moth was not happening to him. He was studying it. Not only that, but the moth was not solelyhisphantom with which to contend. It was a part of Valentina’s world too. The situation held danger, but it also handed him both agency and connection. It shattered his worries about slipping sanity and hallucinations. It was evidence that his new path might not be characterized only by isolation and constant flight from unknowable dangers.
At first, Green tried to actively watch the moth. He scrutinized a leg. An antenna. The lightless gem of a polyhedral eye. When that became exhausting, he tried to relax his focus and take in the creature as a whole, a brownish something on a brownish table. It was a confusion of textures and shapes. It was a profound mystery fading to background static with time and attention, like bones bleaching in the sun.
He tried to tease out an interesting observation about the swirling aura of motes just above the moth’s body, hoping for something that would prove himself a quick study and a worthy apprentice. It was no use. The motes clotted into a tan haze that was nearly invisible and constantly in motion. Two minutes of watching invited a dull ache behind his eyes.
He began to shift his perspective on the night’s job. He decidedhis task wasn’t to watch the moth. His purpose was just to be there if the moth did anything worth noticing.
This attitude shift had pros and cons.
Pro: He wouldn’t have to spend the night staring at a disturbing insect corpse the size of a car hood.
Con: If the disturbing insect corpse suddenly came to life, Green might not notice in time to impersonate a very harmless piece of furniture.
He walked circles around the table. He pulled wood from the log cradle and fed the stove. It got too warm in the cabin and he fed the stove again anyway. He opened the door a crack to let in some air. He thought of the wolf and latched it again. The heat wasn’tthatbad. He nodded at the ripe dumpster smell of the moth and wondered how long it would take for it to leave his hair and clothes.
Not long after nightfall, Valentina brought in propane lanterns.
“I’m cutting the power to preserve battery life,” she said. “Keep these on low and they’ll last most of the night. Here’s an LED backup. I am going back to sleep in my trailer. Knock if you need me, but do not wander away from the moth unless it is absolutely essential.”
The lanterns gave off a harsh white light and made a low hissing sound as they drank up fuel.
Green stood.
Green sat.
Green studied Valentina’s brass coffeepot. Her cup. The leaf pattern decorating the iron stove.
He ate a granola bar and poured himself cup after cup of plastic-flavored water from his jug. He relished the sweet fresh-air necessity of stepping out into the woods to pee.
Memories of the monstrous wolf couldn’t rob the fresh air of its pleasure, not as long as he stayed within twenty paces of a real building with a real door. He knew a wooden door couldn’t stop the wolf, but he was beginning to wonder if the fact the door belonged to Valentina might make a difference.
All the while, Green poked and prodded at his new life plan, reimagining it, revisiting that morning’s certainty that it was time to give up. He tried to extrapolate from his evening’s work what he could expect from this new world he had agreed to enter with no real resistance or debate.
Sure, I’ll be your apprentice. You can explain more after my broken face and I spend the night watching your murder-bug.
He had been, for years, someone who worked at a desk. Who, at home or work, lived through his computer. Files were the product he produced. Words on a screen. These were the trappings of adulthood, of maturity. The work of the mind.
Now, he couldn’t help but feel that he had traveled back to his childhood. He had a task involving his body. He had a chore, a remedial assignment given to someone without any specialized knowledge. There were no hints of prestige on offer here, no unspoken respectability rolled into the benefits package. He was a kid. A hall monitor.
He scowled at the thought.
That wasn’t right and he knew it. What had his life done to him that he believed physical interaction with the world was juvenile? When Green set that thought on the table, next to the moth, it was more distasteful than the corpse. Physicality was lesser? Adult life was what happened in electronic non-spaces? What would that idea say about human history? What about the people who built infrastructure, who tended forests, who brought shelter and power and healing and nourishment into the world?
