Twofold Twilight Part 6
Every hour, the forest and mountain reminded him of the physical. From one moment to the next, the surrounding land returned him to the cabin and the mountainside. He had books to read and journals to fill, and he had times for meditation, but any of these routes into the mind could be short-circuited by the nature all around: wind’s swirling gusts, birds’ soothing coos, sunlight’s tilting rays, and their shifting shadows. This was all good, he told himself: to feel himself as a body in space, to be derailed from his trains of thought because of a squirrel in the grass, or a woodpecker in a tree. In time, he would notice it all less and less. The terrain and its flora and fauna would recede into the background, and a new and wiser Adam would emerge.
Nature would become his natural habitat, and it would be people that would strike him. The sight of a person would thrill him. Their touch might overwhelm him. He would never fail to notice another face again. Each would be a living sculpture in one-time poses. A deer nibbling grass near his feet would be less remarkable than a stranger waving hello. This was what he planned and welcomed.
What he didn’t expect was that his fellow man would come rushing in on a random evening, but this was what occurred two nights after his failed fishing venture, while he sat on his twin-sized bed, trying to meditate before a nighttime stroll that was now possible thanks to the electric lantern.
When he heard the door jangling and the voices on the other side, he momentarily thought he was experiencing a truly profound level of meditation. Just an instant before, he’d been picturing people in the woods, he’d pictured the woman across the lake, and now here were people sounds. But quickly he understood that his mind wasn’t strong enough to create such believable, textured sounds, and he opened his eyes in the dark and heard the door shake more.
Nerves crossed through him. Then he stood and went to open the door, as much to ease future nerves as to remind himself that this was what you did when people, presumably innocent and harmless, came to your door.
At the door, for a moment, there were a young man and woman, and they soon adjusted to being a teenage boy and girl. A voice from behind them alerted him to the presence of 3 more girls and 2 more boys, and again the de-aging occurred. A couple looked as if they could have been 12 or 14, one looked as old as 17, and yet the ages kept shifting. He understood the ages as definite, as there being much growth and large gaps between one year and the next, but now the ages were oddly blurred when the faces in front of him were by turns one and then the other.
The person closest to him apologized and peered in. “Are you shacked up here?”
Adam confirmed it.
“You been here long?” A guy from the back said, his voice deep and calm. “I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”
“I just started renting it out like a week ago.”
“Renting. You said renting?”
“Shit, I didn’t know this place could be up for rent.”
He wanted to see their faces in better light. He was glad to have people to talk to, even if they were a bunch of stoned teenagers, so he invited them in, and they said yes, curious about who would rent out this cabin in the woods, which must have been the place they used to get blasted. He turned on his lantern, and they turned on theirs and brought in folded seats from their cars and set up around the room, as they must have planned to do before learning he was there. They passed beer cans and a bottle of bourbon, and he said no thank you, and one of them asked if it was all right to light up a joint, and he said sure.
The kid took it out with the assurance of someone much older, someone full of practice and guile, and he struck a match, which gave a pleasant phosphorescence, and lit his joint, which glowed brighter when he breathed in.