“I am not. Why should I be?”
“I don’t know. The unknown? An ending?”
Valentina smiled.
“The unknown is my business and even the very young learn that we must make friends with endings. I am far from young.”
“Are you, I don’t know how to put it, religious? Spiritual?”
“Perhaps, but not in the way I think you mean.”
“I guess I’m asking if you believe in an afterlife.”
“I would say that cryptonaturalists rarely rule out possibilities without data, but no, I do not believe we go on as we are. I do not think we retain our personalities or memories. I do not draw distinctions between mind and brain, and brains are natural things shaped by millennia of evolution to look after our bodies. It does not strike me as likely that our thoughts would suddenly split from all physicality and continue beyond the death of the body. Thinking is a function of the body. The one invites the other.”
Green watched a yellow porch light flick on in front of the little white house and he wondered what sort of people lived there.
“That seems bleak. The loss of knowledge, of self.”
“Take a deep breath and look around you.”
Pale stars were fading into view. A soft susurrus of evergreen brought to mind the sea. The new night smelled of pine and cut grass.
“Would you call this forest in which we sit a human place, Mr. Green? A function of human thought and meaning?”
“No. I guess I wouldn’t.”
“And does that make it alien and forbidding? Is it bleak?”
“Well, no. Not at all.”
Valentina squeezed Green’s shoulder.
“Death may be a loss of humanness, of the ways of knowing to which you are accustomed. But I feel certain that human ways of knowing are not the only ways. And nothing, not death nor loss of mind nor memory, can remove us from nature.”
She placed a hand against a nearby pine and looked up at the sky.
“Drink in the stars. Feel the familiar pull of gravity on your bones. Smell the living trees. Nature is a thing of unity and renewal, change and cycles. You were a part of that before you were born and will remain a part of it eons after your death. And if ever these ideas become too distant or abstract, just pause and look around. You know what nature is and you know that it feels like home. When you feel that instinctual love of nature, your senses are trying to tell you something. They are telling you that human existence is not the only worthy kind of existence.”
Green sat silent for a moment.
“Does that mean you welcome death?”
Valentina hmphed.
“Certainly not. I, as I am now, am too in love with this world. Survival instinct is nature too. And, in any case, I am too curious to depart this mind yet. But I do not lose sight of the fact that when my time comes, I will be unfinished. We will always be unfinished because we are not meant to culminate in any fixed state or final achievement. I do not believe life is a thing that gets completed, just concluded. Truly, it would be tragic for it to be otherwise.”
“Speaking of survival instincts, you haven’t really explained what exactly we plan to do if the horned wolf or the glass fawn arrives here.”
“It’s quite simple, Mr. Green. You see, I have an immortal apprentice with a magic acorn.”
Green laughed.
“Really though, what do we do?”
Valentina pulled her backpack in front of her and produced a cartoonish-looking nubby orange pistol and the same rotten log she brought to Kinkaid Cabins.
“I brought a flare gun. The fawn appears to dislike light and attention. And I brought my spore-log again.”
