Scalp Ticks
We'll never be that way again. Never. He said this while looking at the picture that we had taken a long time ago. This is a picture of how we were. We were like that. This is true. I will never forget how he said this, so sincerely, with his eyebrows up. He said it was true, but also how things had changed now. We looked particularly alien in that picture. I had a beard then, and she was wearing her orange coat, with the hood up. We looked suspicious, which was not entirely false. I suspect that she was pregnant at the time. We were smiling at some trick of optics, a silhouetted cutout that couldn't be seen from the camera's angle.
It was then, a few days later, or a little earlier than that, that we had met a man sitting in the forest as the night was falling, and had thought that he was a strange and frightening dream, until we became convinced that he was quite real, and that we had made an enormous mistake by scaring him. We had met later a woman and a pack of dogs. I was the only one who would remember this moment so vividly and attribute to it the weight of a momentous occasion, even though at the time it seemed to hold for all of us an extraordinary presence. The night was blinding and the dogs' eyes glowed against the blackness. They moved all around, barking crazily, and this woman was telling us that they were aggressive, and that we needed to help her find her way because it was so dark and she was lost. There would be much more to tell about that night, about the climbing, the tics and the scalps, about the songs and the rituals, the cars, the stories.
But a few days later, maybe months, rather, or the year after that, something extraordinary happened. One of us, and this was when we were back in the city, suddenly got the idea that he wasn't our friend anymore. This was an idea, no matter how preposterous it might sound on first reading - this is to say there had been some interaction with him that they were remembering which did not sit right somehow; we couldn't place the source of our discomfort but something just wasn't sitting well either intellectually or intuitively. It was a kind of a thought without a source, a thought whose source was unclear, was it a new girlfriend of his, a sudden memory compiling the many acts of misconduct that had so far been overlooked or simply forgotten by all three, all four, no one seemed to know. He refused to disclose what this exactly was, couldn't. A disturbance began, and grew in intensity as the days went by, and was felt by all of us. There were links being drawn that could no longer be supported, links that had been threaded long before his arrival that were now fraying as the days grew shorter. This was the beginning of our departures from one another, something that happens to all groups, no matter how strange or extraordinary they may seem at the time. A discord that began as a disturbance of the soul soon became tangible in our interactions, marked by longer silences between thought or utterance.
Quite some time passed, with no new updates : waiting. Finally, we hear that two of the former members are still together, walking in a dreamy forest filled with dappled light and hopping away from each other as if escaping an intruder - was it us or some imagined specter? It doesn't seem to matter, really. They hold hands and continue to walk. We also hear that a third member has left abruptly, without giving any explanation. They have not written for a long time, it's been weeks and years. An immense distance separates us. This sense of immensity is to do not so much with the physical space that seems insurmountable now - whose width or depth we may hardly be able to determine, though clearly it outweighs whatever share you and I hold in its dimensions. It has to do rather with the differences of speed - a kind that runs unimpededly on rails laid along its bed, and ours falls heavily from one brickwall towards another. A crisis of ambition, or so to say a mismatched set of plans, does not resolve immediately into clearer perceptions.
We are strangers to one another, much stranger even than the person we walk by in the street without noticing at all. These are the kinds of strangers who cannot be ignored, they live always with us. We wonder whether we live with them the same way, we like to assume that it is not the case, and that we have been forgotten altogether. We like to assume that we do, that our own independent ghosts wander through time alongside theirs, but this seems hardly likely. There is nothing for it but to wait. Maybe this is a lesson in patience, in the only kind of discipline that we will ever need. Maybe one day, after all the fires and droughts we'll return, again with eyes that can barely see light at day and in the night. Our friend, the one that abandoned us will be there. He will not know us and we won't recognize each other. We have been replaced, perhaps we were never more than replacements to begin with.
Later still, and this was when we thought all links had been properly disconnected, we started to work together again, without having seen or spoken to each other in years. The sun was no longer visible in the sky, not to mention the other stars and constellations. The winters were deader than ever. We visited with drones our friend in her house high in the mountains. We brought packages, a great quantity of them that stacked up against the fence like snowdrifts. She did not come down to meet us and we knew she had many visitors, an ever-changing roster of uninvited guest that her health required. We waited for her, lying on our backs under an incline filled with rubble and debris. We watched the drone moving along slowly. Finally she came out. She was wearing an orange coat, a lot of layers. The drone had a mind of its own : it turned in circles before landing on a small patch of lawn. This had become a patch of lawn demarcated with white stones. Perhaps we had met there before at the foot of a mountain we had once climbed down from in the nighttime. It was February again. The slopes were ropy with frozen coagulations of seepage, and spiky with dead growths, the torn trees having rolled downhill, crashed against the houses, the trucks, the river; like this old game in which sticks are dropped into an interlacing mass and the children must remove them, one at a time, without destabilizing the structure. She bade us enter, as though this was our home too.
She cooked, and she played the piano. Mostly she lay in bed, and looked out of the window into forests where no birds sang now for many years - they were all dead or hunted them down to extinction from fear of being consumed by dogs with insatiable appetites that had devoured a family entirely one winter. He was reading a book of his, a book he was no longer sure whether he had read or written. She smiled, and drank, and looked at us with big eyes. She even cried, and she told us about all the places she had been, the people she had met. Everytime she had been in a new place and met new people she had wrangled out of them some beauty. And there was always some, even if it meant going through a lot of trouble for barely anything in return. She had even been on the radio, once. He continued to read the book, in which there were also images. He no longer really knew whether he had drawn these either. We understood that he was afflicted with an illness that attacks the memory, but leaves everything else fully in place. When asked to recall certain events or names he would make strange face and then somehow his hands, drawing lines in the air before him. We enjoyed this, even though it was very sad. It was very sad that he could no longer remember the days when we had been together before, but it was also thanks to his amnesia that it had become possible again. A disturbing swirl in our stomachs informed us that we knew it could happen again soon, and it would be the same way that this one ended.
The drone took another photo inside the house. My beard was longer than I thought, I was older, and frail. I was sick, I suppose. I sat with them quietly until I was asked to leave.