Carlos is gone. Ben spins around, desperate for any sign of the man’s presence in the forest around him. The only eyes that meet his are those terrible unseeing rings that glow faintly among the trees. Their eerie iridescence flashes with the eagerness of bared teeth, excited by his fresh panic. The lesson imbibed from Carlos chimes in the back of his head. He can’t lose control of himself. It is a task of enormous self-discipline, especially in solitude, but surviving the fall has enabled him to see the dreamness of this place better. Carlos is gone, but so is the mothman. When he gathers himself enough to really look, the surrounding dark is less solid, the trees less thick. Maybe Carlos has escaped and I will follow him soon, he tells himself.
A fawn steps out from the dark. It wobbles into view on frail boney legs. The white spots on its pelt that mimic dappled light stand out in a forest with none. Ben is apprehensive of the thing, and yet it behaves like a normal animal, flicking its ears and stirring the grass with its nose. Ben has never had any fear of deer, let alone a fawn hardly larger than a housecat. The darkness splits, parting around path through the woods, destination unknown. The fawn turns its innocent eyes to him, the path, back to him, and back to the path. With a spritely flick of its tail it begins down it. He cannot trust it, but he cannot forgo the companionship either. Even a baby animal companion is better than being alone, so he follows.
Both he and the fawn step with caution, testing the ground with pointed toes and tiny hooves, flinching at the sound of every twig underfoot. The fawn’s travel is aimless. Ben wonders if he should have stayed put, but when he glances back the darkness has closed on the path behind them. With each few steps it reveals a few more meters of clear forest floor ahead. The fawn continues in perfect pace with the receding darkness and Ben keeps just a few paces behind.
The journey is hypnotic. Ben and the fawn venture ever further down a path that gently sways back and forth but never leads anywhere other than more identical forest path. The constant anxiety of what may lie ahead balances with the irresistible pull of linear progression. Ben soon loses any sense of time or distance. The path ahead is always just barely visible, haunted by the barest outlines that dance and trick the imagination. Always it seems there will be a revelation waiting just around the next bend. An escape. A monster. The fawn leads on and he is now helpless to follow. All that is not the path ahead falls out of view. Going forward becomes like sinking, descending a burrow, falling into a fractal. The surrounding darkness always watching, waiting, preparing.
The trance is broken when Ben hears a voice call his name from the darkness behind. Carlos? He whirls around and sees the empty retention pond around him again, as if he never left. Carlos is nowhere to be seen, but the fawn remains. It stamps a hoof to call attention back to itself.
A little girl appears on the rim of the ditch as if she'd been standing there since he first arrived. Even shrouded in shadow, Ben recognizes her. It’s Kat, his childhood best friend.
Kat approaches and the fawn bounces over to meet her. At first Ben is apprehensive, expecting the false-Kat with the unseeing eyes. However, this Kat is different. She is young, no older than they were when they played here, perhaps not even grown into double digits. Her hair is long and tangled, her clothing comfortable and full of holes. She was wild back then. They both were. She is exactly as he remembers her.
She bounds across the field shouting and flailing with the Fawn prancing in circles around her. They are playing in the unmistakable style of children yet uninhibited by the world. The meaning of the motion and noise is impenetrable to anyone far from youth, but Ben recognizes it in a sudden restoration of faded memory. He recognizes the sword in her hand cutting dramatic arcs through the air, the names of magic spells she shouts. She is playing pretend the way they used to. All their stories begin to come back to him, collaboratively woven out of just voice and body and the occasional prop broomstick. Those stories were once the center of his life. They had not been the simple storybook plays so often attributed to children, but epics of explosive imagination, episodic adventures that stretched across months and years of real time, decades and centuries of narrative time. Tales with vast assemblages of characters, arcs within arcs within arcs, plots always grasping for ever more exciting twists and turns, always expanding, rarely ever resolving completely. Those stories were never written down. At some unknown point in pubescence, they trailed off. Whole universes built out of sound and motion left behind no trace in anything but the memory of two aging children and what traces persist in old trees and weeds and concrete drainage pipes.
Suddenly Ben is the way he used to be when he first told the stories. He is young and unburdened, back when his voice was high and his feet bare and his scrawniness healthy. He bounds off after Kat and the fawn. He forgets all about the parasite and Carlos and everything else. He joins them and falls back into place like a book slid into its slot on the shelf.
Kat is fighting a entire squad of cybernetic poachers who are after the fawn for its pelt. Their stories always teemed with animals, a mutual obsession. She fights with a quarterstaff and throwing knives, and magical abilities too. She can transform into a snow leopard when she wants to. Ben plays the part of the poachers for a time, but when the battle is won he has his own character to inhabit. Kat was always partial to ferocious warriors, magicians, powerful and vicious defenders of the good. Ben preferred the complimentary healers, damsels, mothers, and gentle companions. He cares for the fawn after the harrowing battle. Together they sit on the incline of the ditch’s edge, which was actually their secret base in the Indonesian rainforest, and talk. Now that they have exhausted themselves, the story will proceed through dialogue until they are ready to run again. Ben holds the deer, its twiggy legs dangle from his likewise arms. He can feel its calm heartbeat through the thin fabric of his t-shirt.
Somewhere in the woods he hears a voice calling him. A dim voice from the distant future. But it is far away and he quickly forgets it.
He wanted to stay in the old retention pond forever. However, just as in the time from whence these memories were drawn, the idyll cannot not last.
“That’s my dress.” Kat says.
Ben looks down and finds himself wearing a simple sundress in powder blue. It had been hers, briefly. “You gave it to me.” He says. It had indeed been a gift. Kat had never liked the dresses her mother urged her to wear. Ben could not remember asking her for it, nor even confessing his interest in such a garment to her. She’d given it as a surprise. She had simply known.
Only now she looks at the dress with strange eyes. “Yes, I did.” She says slowly, as if the information is new. “Why are you wearing it?”
Her tone cuts. The profound comfort from only just a moment ago evaporates. “You’re a man, why are you wearing my dress? What’s wrong with you?”
Ben opens his mouth to defend himself but a whole new set of memories infuse into the scene like a wave of nausea. The ditch no longer seems so vast. It is quite small, actually. The grassy expanse is abruptly curtailed by the flat stretch of sun-bleached asphalt, the ceaseless growl of engines and the vile scent of their diesel. On another side the houses box him in, their windows suddenly full of eyes watching him. They watch as his body outgrows the little dress. The jagged edges of his frame stab through the fabric, a pin-cushion of boney joints. Kat stands now and glowers down at him. She is changing too, rapidly shedding familiarity. Her belly swells with life at the same time death spills out of Ben’s. The fawn in his lap lays limp, its neck dangling next to its cold legs: Dead. The shock of it pulls a scream out of him and its sound is just as jagged and wrong as his body. The more he stares at the fawn the deader it becomes, rotting away in his arms, bursting with maggots.
“Pervert! What’s wrong with you? What happened to you?” Kat screeches at him. Her voice is not her own, but his mother’s and his father’s and a million others indistinguishably blended into one. Her eyes distort into the paralyzing gaze of parents and relatives, once friends, priests, teachers, glancing strangers in high school hallways, and then finally into the terrible unseeing gaze of a monster.
Caught between then and now, now and then, Ben loses hold of both and falls into the chasm between. He falls through layers of sheer panic, viscous despair, and finally into the empty space between stars where nothing can survive. At the zenith of his psychic dissolution, the maggots burst from the corpse of the fawn and wriggle up his arms in the thousands. They feast on the raw meat exposed to them. They will devour all that was left of him.
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