Cindy is in the entrance booth, the one marked Tickets. ‘Good morning, Dylan,’ she says with a broad smile as I walk by. Cindy volunteers Tuesdays and Thursdays, and normally checks my driver’s licence each and every time I arrive, even though she’s known me for two years now. She’s a law student up the hill – a career that makes for that kind of attitude, I suppose. But she’s delightful in every other way. I smile back as I pass by, noting her kind eyes behind the massive orange plastic rims of her eyeglasses and the nod as she beckons me onwards. No IDs required today. Not on a Free Day.
It takes two left turns, a brief jaunt down a main pathway (today covered in people), and then a right onto a short, planked path into the trees before I arrive at the dirt walkway that leads to my pond. All in all, no more than five minutes from the entrance. Five minutes, and I’m in another world.
I set the caramel latte on the bench beside me, bid hello and a pleasant afternoon to the memory of Margaret, and pull out my notebook. Its home in my back pocket has left an indelible imprint on my khakis, every pair of them; and the shape of my ass has left the notebooks slightly bent. Every one of them. There are stacks, piled up at home. A lifetime of poetry, thus far read only by me.
I am not alone this afternoon. Free access and not-too-miserable weather have brought others into what is normally a rather secluded area. A group of children plays with stones off to my left, down at the water’s edge, their parents chatting idly behind them, visibly relieved that for the moment their offspring don’t require active observation. Further in the distance, a clutch of tourists with enormous cameras stops and starts along the beds by the water. I’ve never understood the fascination with taking pictures of plants, but these kinds of visitors are the standard, not the exception. The kind that take photos of flowers rather than actually see them – smell them, feel the way they reflect the light into your eyes, standing before their simple, unadorned magnificence. Surely this is a far greater thing than converting them to pixels. But I suppose there’s a whole generation, now, who simply do not know how to encounter anything directly. Human experience is mediated by a small screen held up between face and reality. Only what it captures is truly real. The memories of life have become confined to a span of 2.5 x 5 in (3.5 x 6 if you’ve got the latest model). On the periphery, nothing truly exists.
There has to be something tragic in this, there just has to be. I know we’re more connected than we’ve ever been, that it’s become the norm for the anonymous ‘us’ of the world to tweet and post and link to a degree that wouldn’t have been imaginable a generation ago. And I’m not against occasionally stepping into the public library and accessing the Internet with a swipe of my ID, to visit an online story or revel in the latest news of the day. But I cannot be the only one who feels more detached there than anywhere else. When I’m sitting beneath my trees and the water ripples beneath me, I feel more connected to the world than in any other spot. Even when there’s not another dot of humanity around me. But when I ‘connect’, when wires and satellites link my data stream to that of everyone else in creation, it’s then that I feel the most lost. The most alone.
And they make you pay for the experience.
Still, today is not about being alone. The tourists with their eyes pressed to their cameras may not notice the wide beauty of the periphery they’re avoiding, but for me the periphery is what’s interesting. Because there, at the edge of my vision, the branches wiggle again at the water’s edge.
In the usual spot.
I sit forward, unsurprised but eager. I’ve been looking forward to seeing him, to seeing the scrape that had upset me yesterday bandaged and a boy back to being a boy. Sure, the injury may have been unpleasant, but there are times when unpleasantness brings rewards. Now the boy will have war wounds to prove his courage and offer bragging rights before his peers. Every boy needs to have those: stories connected to little scabs, scars, offering fleshy proof that ‘I was brave, guys, and all grown up.’ Men seem to need them, too, though their scars tend to be deeper, their falls more brutal, and the evidence of maturity even more fleeting.
He dutifully emerges, as if on cue, and promptly takes his customary three steps down to the edge of the pond. Then, as always, he stands like a statue, his stick in hand, its tip just piercing the water. The familiar scene. My own comforting reassurance of normalcy. My heart loosens with gentle satisfaction.
But my breath chokes in my throat. The blood, I immediately realize, is still on his arm, just as fresh as yesterday. It glistens in the grey light seeping down from the overcast sky: moist, liquid, fresh. Even at the distance, I can see a stream of it flow along the path of his dirty skin towards his hand, trailing brown edges where the red blood meets dust and grime.
There is no bandage. His wound hasn’t been cleaned. Hasn’t been tended to at all.
But it’s not just the blood that stops my breath and keeps it halted. The blood’s not even the worst of it. There’s more, today. I’m glued at first on the injury I remember – poor child, still all scraped up – but finally my glance wanders a few inches to my left. Initially, I think it’s the shadows, a trick of the light; but then a sunbeam pierces the clouds and I see directly. The boy’s other arm is overwhelmed by something oval, black. I think at first it’s a patch of some kind, maybe a dark bandage over a different scrape. But it’s not fabric. Almost mirroring the wound on his left arm, I can see now that the large mark on his right is a bruise, deep and discoloured. The kind so dense it looks like it digs down to the bone. It extends over the whole of his forearm, from his elbow to the hand that clutches his favourite stick. Blues and purples and almost-greens that should never be the colours defining the skin of a boy.
I can’t fully focus. This isn’t right. A child so small should not be walking around with such wounds. I try to look into his face, into his eyes, to see if they’re watering, filled with pain. They ought to be filled with pain. But I can’t make out his features through the shadows and distance. Only the basic outline of his face, a few details – the bumps of his ears beneath his hair, the shadow that barely defines his nose. If only I could see him a little better; but the sunbeam is interrupted by tree branches high above, restricting its light to his shoulders and below.
I really have to approach him. Someone must take him to get cleaned up somewhere, at the very least. Get that scraped arm washed off.
But the boy senses my thoughts – his motions are almost that synchronized – and turns. Three steps and he is gone, the bristly green leaves of the Cryptomeria japonica brushing closed behind him.
EVENING
I cannot sleep. Not tonight. It’s not my usual insomnia, either. My normal night-time torture is more gentle: a sustained, unwavering, yet calm refusal to let sleep come, with no specific cause and no specific cure. I’ve grown accustomed to the ruthless consistency of its long-game attack. I know what it’s like to have no thoughts fill my head but still find sleep a foreigner, and to start counting sheep at number one, knowing I’ll easily make it to a thousand without my eyelids growing the slightest bit heavier. One sheep after another, waiting their turn without drama or protest, each mocking the sleep I crave.
But tonight’s insomnia is different, a punctuated sort of thing. Pokes and prods that bolt me to alertness every time I start to fade. And my body is actually fading, that’s the strangest part. I’m genuinely tired tonight. Exhausted. But each time my body starts to give way, to give in, my mind pounces and shoves sleep off.
I am thinking of the boy. He’s all I’m thinking about. Those arms, bloodied and bruised. The fact that I did nothing. I don’t understand his silence and I can’t fathom his threshold for what must be tremendous pain, but mostly I feel guilty that I saw a child with wounds he shouldn’t have had, whom no one had tended to since the day before, and now I’m here comfortably in bed – awake or otherwise – and I didn’t so much as say a word to console him.