The Remainder
For a very long time a man lived by himself in the forest. Of course, there were animals, but they existed only for each other only as objects of fear, of interest and perhaps as nourishment. Sometimes he felt an affinity for them, but he knew that it was only illusory; they were never friends. So he lived alone, without community of any kind.
When he first encountered the pack of dogs they had scared each other. The dogs barred their teeth and curled their lips. He drove them off with stones and they disappeared in the brush to lick their wounds.
The man lived in a clearing in a great, vast forest, at the base of a large mountain that belonged to an immense and jagged mountain range that went on farther than he had ever traveled. He resided in a small house that he had built himself, both from hand hewn lumber and scraps that he had salvaged from the ruins. In his house he had a large clay oven that connected to a bathtub. Small hollows that ran from the oven, down just below the surface of the tub, allowed him to warm water to a comfortable temperature and when it was unpleasant out he used this to bathe. On the roof, there was a large tank that he used to catch rainwater. He had a number of books on a shelf and he could read them, but they spoke of people and places that made little sense to him. Sometimes he tried to imagine what their lives had been like and how the places were where they had lived, but in his mind, no matter how hard he tried, he could not picture a landscape which did not look like a massive forest with an immense and jagged mountain range that went on, as far as he was concerned, to the end of space. He could envision the world filled with people, but only as a picture and without any sensation of what it would really be like. Perhaps, he thought, people had once lived in the ruins as they were portrayed in the stories, but perhaps not; maybe the stories were just the inventions of lone men who were like him, but with better powers of imagination.
The forest outside his clearing was dense and lush; thick undergrowth grew well beyond his height and many of the trees were much too large for him to put his arms around. They were great old organisms and as far as he could tell, they only rarely died; when they did, it happened very slowly and was difficult to tell. Some of them seemed to exist in a state of being both dead and alive, which was unlike in animals, where the distinction was much more clear-cut.
When he got older, the man would divide his life into three periods: first was the time when he had lived with other people – but they had died or disappeared into the vagaries of his imperfect recollection; second was the time when he had lived alone and lastly there was his life with the dogs.
In the summer, the heat would build to a fierce intensity; it would bake down upon him. Sometimes he would go about naked. The forest would become very dry and he would fear forest fires. Sometimes, far away, lightning would catch the brush ablaze and for weeks the sky would turn the color of roses and it would seem like sunset even at noon. In certain places, the big trees had all died, where at some point in the past everything had burned away or been washed away – once the man had walked to such an area for no reason in particular and had found nothing but loose rocks and small scrub plants. Periodically, he had returned, because he found the immense, barren landscape both frightening and intriguing, although it took him about a week to get there.
When he was little, at a time in the year when the forest was not so dry, the others would sometimes set the undergrowth alight; this helped reduce the risk of more serious fires, as well as making the land more passable and facilitating the growth of healthy young plants, like the thorny bushes that produced the red and yellow berries that they liked to eat. However, he did not carry on that practice; there were no others anymore and he only remembered that the activity had even been done at all when something prompted him to think about it, which was seldom. There were many things which he remembered had once been done, which he no longer did or remembered how to do.
In the beginning, the pack of dogs had not occupied the same territory as the man; they came from some far off place. Over time, taking a meandering path, they had come closer and closer. At first they had smelled the man and felt fear. When they detected his presence they would hide themselves in the forest. However; on the day when they first encountered each other, the wind had blown away from them – towards the man, and they had not known he was coming. They had surprised each other as he came around the bend. The dogs remained in the territory by the man’s house, because it smelled of many things which were good to eat. It also, however, smelled of him, which bred uneasiness throughout them. On several more occasions, the man happened upon these animals – every time the reaction was similar.
Sometimes they ventured into his clearing. They would come in search of the things he prepared – the deer that he had recently caught, or the fish he was smoking – the preserves he made and other things that seemed good to them.
He became interested in their presence; if he were to believe the stories on his shelf, it had once been common for people to live with such animals. From his youth, he remembered someone who had had one, but he didn’t remember where it had come from or what happened to it. He decided that he would put some food out for them; he put some meat in an earthenware bowl and placed it on his doorstep.
At first they stood at a distance; he could see that they trembled, that they were nervous, with hackles raised and tails lowered. They paced back and forth along the edge of the wood, licking their chops and letting out miserable little yelps. He could see the conflict that played out in their small, animal brains, between their fear of strange things and their overwhelming desire for food.
Their tension made them irrational and quick to anger – very often something small or foolish would cause them to growl and bite at each other, only because it had been unanticipated and their nerves were overwrought. It seemed that an almost equal force drove them away as called them towards his doorstep, except that the desire to approach was only ever so slightly more powerful, so that little by little, they closed the distance between themselves and the nourishment.
They grabbed the meat and quarreled with each other over its possession – lunging spasmodically towards its direction and upon missing the target, gladly taking a mouthful of fur instead. Quickly, they retreated back into the undergrowth. The man was satisfied.
Over time the dance became expedited – they no longer found his smell quite so terrifying; the uncertainty, while never entirely vanquished, had reduced itself to a manageable level and a sense of comfortable routine enveloped the whole affair. However, were the dogs ever to encounter the man in person, they would again revert to their old sensibilities; through a kind of halting choreography they would try to communicate their potential for danger and the spectacle of their strength.
On a very hot day in summer he made out for his fishing weir which was situated just at the mouth of a small river where it emptied into the large, salty inlet. He wore shoes that he had made from deer-hide that did up around his ankles with leather chords, a pair of shorts onto which he had sewn a number of pockets in order to carry tools – fish-hooks, twine, knives, etc… and on his head he sported a frilly white hat made of lace, which was decorated with little pink embroidered flowers. He had found the hat in the ruins and taken it because it was light and comfortable and because the flowers reminded him of ones that had grown in gardens that he had read about.
He came down through the trees to a grassy spit. All the grass was dry and golden – a slight breeze blew, but provided no respite from the heat. Little waves rippled on the dark blue waters. Bands of shimmering brightness flickered on the ocean surface. The light and heat baked into his skull and dizzied him. The air smelled of grass and sea-water and dusty pine and fir. As the wind blew through the trees, it sounded like the word “hush,” or “shhh.” He took off his clothes and put them in a neat pile with his hat on top; even when naked, he felt no reprieve from the temperature. He walked barefoot upon a rock, stepping gingerly and quickly as the heat from the stone burned his feet; then the grass below his feet had the sensation of being both slippery and dry at the same time. The rough, brittle wood of the dock seemed almost threatening to his soles, as its jagged surface denied them any material comfort or resting place and promised a nasty splinter if he wasn’t careful. At the end of the dock, he dove into the choppy, cool water. The little waves broke over his face; he floated as the wind picked up across the bay. He swam towards the seashore; the rocks were slimy but also covered in little barnacles. They easily tore into his flesh, made tender by the water. Unsure of what to do next, he tried lazily to grab hold of something – a rock or piece of kelp and float, as the wind and current tried to push him. After some time, he began to feel cold; he climbed out of the water and lay himself down upon the grass. The surface below him pricked his back – at length he felt the sand-grain feet of ants stipple across his legs. Bending over, he brushed them away with his hand, only to find that they returned again as soon as he reclined. He arose and squinted; he scratched his head. Feeling very hot, he went over to his clothes and dressed – he put on his shorts, did up his shoes and placed his hat atop his head. Suddenly, he realized that he hadn’t spoken any words in a very long time. Thinking back, he couldn’t remember how long it had been; he feared that he might forget how to speak. He wanted to maintain the ability, should he ever meet another human being.
“The sky is bright,” he said, “I am tall. The wind blows little whitecaps on the surface of the water. The golden grass trembles. There are animals in the forest, they feed on different things, some eat nuts and berries, some eat leaves, some eat other animals. I eat berries, I eat other animals. I was wet, now I am dry. I was lost, briefly some days ago, but then I found myself.” Quickly, the exercise became repetitive – it seemed senseless to him somehow, although some part of his mind protested that it was not.
He ambled towards his weir; it was situated beside a patch of dusty earth that was shaded by a number of tall conifers. Looking at all the fish that had become trapped there, he remembered a time when he was young and the people who lived with him – his parents and some others, had gone for a long voyage in a boat. Sitting down on the dusty bank and letting his feet submerge in the cool waters that came off the mountains, he tried to remember the reason for the expedition, but could not. All he could remember was that it had been exiting for him as a child and that they had gone to a place where the winds blew more fiercely and the ocean expanded so that it stretched all the way to the edge of the horizon.
They had built a long boat with a mast. At first, they’d only sailed about the inlet, practicing their skills. Somehow, they managed to paint it with vibrant colors; someone painted an animal’s head of some kind at the front – it was too formless really, to suggest any one in particular, but its creator insisted that it was a bear. After some time the others, while never fully accepting that the image was, in fact, a bear, began to refer to it as such also, only because they couldn’t think of anything better to call it.
For quite some time they only sailed around the inlet, practicing various different maneuvers. He remembered how important to them it had been to master everything; at night, when they could no longer practice in the inlet, they would sit around the fire, trying to imagine everything that could happen or go wrong. Different people would make suggestions and then they would talk amongst themselves; first they would try to figure out if it were in fact a new problem that had been raised, or if it were merely an old problem in a different form. If someone had thought of something new, they would try to discuss it carefully until they felt that they had cracked its enigma. In this fashion, they hoped to surmount any obstacles that the world might present them. They took themselves very seriously.
They left in late spring. The man remembered a steely day when a cool wind blew off the ocean. He had worn a light jacket and squinted because brightness came from every direction. The boat rocked gently back and forth as he hid low down with the provisions so that the land and water were obscured from vision and he could only see the would-be sailors – bodies distorted from his awkward vantage point and the grey clouds as they passed overhead. Bending his head towards the planks of the hull, the little boy listened as the water lapped gently against them. When he got tired of this, he looked up and watched the little waves that the boat and the paddles made as they moved through the ocean.
One man had a compass with him and a pair of dividers that he used on a chart which he had copied from fragments of another chart. It was incomplete however, and some days they spent moving slowly along the coastline, trying to fill in the blank spots.
After they left the inlet, the sea opened up into a larger body of water. The boy saw that it was bounded by mountains all around and that before the mountains, in one direction, there was some land that turned out to be a series of islands.
For the first few days, they spent the night on beaches that bounded land that belonged to the ruins. Everyone felt any uneasiness by their proximity to that area; it made them uncomfortable to be aware of so many vanished lives and to be so close to so much dead time. They desired in all things, for time to continue forward seamlessly; they did not want to remember the past too clearly, in order that their fantasies could have the freedom to grow into the future they wanted to believe in.
In the evenings of those days, they made fires in the sand and sang songs. They liked always to look out to the ocean or into the heart of the fire and away from the foliage that grew along the shoreline and everything that they imagined might lie within it.
Beyond the ruins, they passed into a large straight; the wind had been violent that day and the small ship was thrown around by the waves. One could see fear on the faces of the sailors as waves crashed over the bow and threatened to swamp the boat. It was clear to the boy that when they had envisaged this scenario around the campfire, they had completely failed to understand the weight of its material consequences. He wondered if he was going to die until he became too seasick to care. Fortunately for them, it was not a big squall and the wind subsided before anything too serious could happen.
They entered a channel that ran between two islands; the clouds above began to break apart and the wind became listless and flaccid. The loose sail luffed gently in the breeze, in a slow, arduous motion similar, perhaps, to the movements of a man in bed with a low fever who can’t get comfortable. Removing some of their wet clothes, the sailors tried to take stock of the situation. The air smelled beautifully of salt and moisture. Some of them took off their jackets to warm themselves in the sun. Then they set off again, paddling through the channel.
On their left, the land was relatively flat. Trees grew along the low shoreline. In the distance, there was a small hill. The other side, while covered in the same sorts of things, seemed quite different. Large, rounded cliffs rose out of the sea and seemed to glow in the sunlight. The shoreline undulated, as though it was itself a very large sail, luffing in a breeze that blew too powerfully and slowly for them to perceive. Where the shore dipped in, little beaches formed and all along the tops of the cliffs various trees hung on to the rocks as though looking down to see what passed below. For some reason the boy felt elation in his chest as he looked into the trees and envisioned all the things that might go on within them. He imagined a vast number of worlds, but all of them small and on a child’s scale, contained by the island’s pleasant boundaries. With wonder, he foresaw all the coves, hilltops, fields and clearings as of yet untapped by his youthful imagination.
The small vessel carried on through the channel; the boy could hear the sound of water lapping against the hull and the sound of oars and of men and women making noises as they exerted themselves. In the eyes of some, he saw – heightened by exhaustion – an anxious uncertainty. The boy looked into the dark waters and imagined stories about the fish that lived at the bottom. The day carried on for him like this, and for the others as a grueling ordeal, in which they didn’t imagine anything except being able to stop.
They carried on for a very long time. The sun began to sink on the horizon and all shadows became long, obscuring from them everything that couldn’t be bathed in the warm, gentle brightness of evening sunshine. At last they followed the coast into a small bay. There, they were confronted by an array of beautiful sandstone formations – large, lapidary bubbles followed the shoreline for quite a stretch. On a denuded island to their left, hundreds of black birds stood silently with their wings fully extended. The boy had seen these birds before and knew that they stood like this, because they, unlike ducks, got wet when they dove into the water and needed to face the sun afterward in order to dry off.
Finally the exhausted crew set aground upon a small beach made entirely of shells. Everywhere one looked, there were broken bits of shells instead of sand or pebbles. He expected that they would be sharp, but they felt almost soft to the touch, so round and worn had they become by so many years exposure to the sea. He looked at the black birds diving in the evening light. As far as he knew, they had no particular name – when people wanted to make reference to them, which in his experience was rarely, they merely described some aspect of their appearance or behavior. He wondered why they bothered to name certain animals, like ducks or raccoons, while others, like these black birds, no one seemed to have any interest in naming. The preparation of dinner soon distracted the boy from this line of thought. Shortly they all ate and told stories around the campfire.
When it was dark, the boy went to the waters edge to throw stones. He picked up a handful of pebbles and tossed them in the air. Where they hit the surface glowed with phosphorescence. He went down to the water’s edge and hit at it with a stick so that it produced light. His feet got wet and when he became too cold he sat by the fire and stared into its core – watching the coals shimmer and pulsate in the gentle wind. He felt that if he could stare deeply enough into the embers, perhaps he could see back through time, but he began to feel sleepy and everything felt heavy and soon he fell asleep.
They carried on and as they carried on, the body of water widened around them. They came to another piece of land which seemed much bigger – more like the place that they had left from (however large that was, nobody knew) than the little islands that they had just visited. However, the boy thought that it didn’t seem quite as large as his home – everything seemed somehow contained and the mountains were smaller. The trees were also smaller and everything seemed dryer and not quite as dark.
One evening they slept on a small sandy beach that was inside a little bay. The next morning one of the adults took him for a walk in the forest behind the beach. The adult showed the boy some rock formations that drew square outlines on the forest floor. Most of them had small, protruding pieces of rusted metal coming out of them. The adult explained that those had once been the bases of people’s houses and that he imagined that the area had once looked much different.
They continued on through the forest. The boy stumbled on another artifact. It was a stone obelisk, about four feet high. The top looked as though it had been taller at one time, but had broken off. It had writing inscribed on one face – what looked like somebody’s name, some numbers: four digits connected to four other digits by a dash and a small symbol that looked like two sticks crossed or a lower-case t. He looked for a moment at the object’s strangeness and then showed it to the adult. Immediately the adult became uneasy and as a result, so did the boy. He explained to the boy that it marked the place where a dead person had been put in the ground. The boy asked about the numbers; the adult told him that they signified a passage of time, but that he didn’t know when. He told him that those things could be very old and that they just seemed to remain in certain places for no reason that he understood, whereas there had probably been many more of them around at one time, but they had since disappeared. They boy asked about the symbol. The adult gave him an explanation, but he didn’t seem to know himself and so the boy promptly forgot everything that he said.
Afterward, he found a number of other markers. These stones seemed to make the adult uncomfortable. He tried not to show the boy that he was afraid, but the boy could tell anyway. Why was the adult so afraid he wondered? He wondered why people had chosen that place to put all their dead. He wondered what had been special about that place over any other or why they didn’t just burn the dead as his people did. For no reason that he could explain, he suddenly felt all the hairs on his neck stand on end and it seemed as though the blood in his veins had suddenly grown cold. He saw that the adult shared his sensation. They moved away from that place, which had in the boy’s mind, been cut off from the rest of the forest. Whereas before he had felt nothing but a kind of vague interest, when they passed the old foundations again, they seemed to have acquired a certain similarity to the place filled with human remains. Both seemed somehow imbued with a kind of power that didn’t allow them to carry on with time like the rest of the forest, but remain forever lost in their own worlds. He felt that when he came near them that the power was trying to grab hold of him, to drag itself back into the progression of time, but that it would just end up pulling him in with it. He tried to explain this feeling to the adult and the adult told him that there were two worlds – the world as it seems to you and the world as it is without you. He told the boy that sometimes people experience feelings that are so powerful that they seem to come from the world without and that he had to be careful not to confuse them. But the boy could not make the distinction clear in his mind and the adult for everything he said, still felt uneasy.
In the evenings they would go out to catch fish. The boy liked best of all to drift on the listless current as the steely brightness of the mostly overcast day gave way to the warm glow of dusk. The light shimmered off of the water in some places and in other places the current created swaths of glassy calm. The wind made his cheeks red and he could feel the sticky salt moisture across his skin. The surface of the ocean soothed him because it was so large and slow moving and nothing could be hidden.
They continued around the coast. On one side it was bounded by grassy bluffs and on the other, an expanse of water and more mountains in the distance. They had snow on their peaks and so the boy imagined that they might be connected to the land where he came from, though they seemed somehow different as well. The trees grew more densely than before and it rained often. Also, there was always a cool breeze that seemed to isolate everyone from each other. When they talked, the wind made their voices sound more distant.
The straight narrowed. They took their boat into a deep inlet and when they came out, they landed on a small beach. Above the beach was a large grassy field that was being reclaimed by the forest. It looked as though someone had maintained it recently – perhaps within the last fifty years, maybe less. The field was filled with apple trees, which were blossoming. The boy found a rotted sign in the bush. It read “East S.” Once it had said more. He did not show it to anyone for fear that their knowledge would transform it into something frightening.
On a long rocky beach they found a cabin. It had a pen, which judging by the remains had once contained chickens.
They saw a bear with cubs.
After they passed through the straight, they were in open water. The shore beside them became more inhospitable: now large mountains rose from its mass. The foliage grew dense and dark. It was almost always overcast and everything was damp all the time. Big swells sometimes came off the ocean. Everything would be enshrouded in dark clouds until sometimes in the afternoon the sun would break them apart revealing patches of blue with hazy borders of vapor.
There were days of storms and days of beautiful sunshine; there were days when they were all afraid and days when they slept on warm rocks and listened to the birds. The weather improved with summer.
They traveled for a long time until at last they came to a place that seemed to the boy like the very end of the world. It was a rugged place where the land jutted out into the ocean. They camped on a crescent shaped beach of white sand that curved on for a very long time. The beach did not look as long as it really was because it was so white and graceful. The eye couldn’t quite contain or describe it and so it seemed small, but one found that if he started walking shortly after waking up that he didn’t return until the sun was almost at its apex.
The land seemed too perfect, especially when the sea was glassy calm so that it seemed almost unreal with the glassy sea and the white sand and the dark wet forest behind. Things seemed smaller there – somewhat like on the first island, where everything was so much more contained than it was where they lived. There were no tall mountains, only small hills. The sun was harsh upon their faces.
One day when they were exploring the area, they came upon another man living on one of the beaches. He had a grizzled face with lines around his eyes. His skin was tanned and leathery. He spoke in a strange dialect that the travelers found difficult to understand. He said that he hadn’t seen anyone since his mother had died. He said that his family had kept a habit of putting a notch in a piece of wood every time they were sure the summer had returned and in this way were able to observe the passing of time. He said that there were thirty-seven notches since he was born and fifteen since his mother died. The others noticed that his habits were strange and that he behaved sometimes as if he were unaware that others were around him. They offered him the opportunity to return with them and he accepted.
When they made their way back, he remembered, there were apples growing on the trees in East S. He remembered warm days when the light had become sharp and autumnal. He played in the long grass and ate the apples and dug in the sand on the beach.
After the man came to live with them, people began to get sick. The disease progressed slowly over a several years, but people began to die. One day several years later the boy found that the man whom they’d met on their voyage had committed suicide. He’d cut his wrists and the boy found him lying across a small stream.
The man stared into the weir but still couldn’t remember why they had gone on the voyage. He also couldn’t remember the exact fates of certain people – had they even died at all? But he imagined that they must have died. For some reason he had been spared the sickness. After a while he noticed that one of the dogs had come out of the bush and was looking at him nervously. He took a piece of dried meat out of his pocket and offered it to the animal. Slowly it approached him and took the food. The man tried to pet the animal and it did not move away or try to bite him. He scratched its ears.
After that the man and the dogs were friends. They lived at his house and to some degree were in awe of his powers. He had the ability to keep them dry when it rained, to keep them warm when it was cold and to make it so that they did not feel hunger gnawing at their bellies for the duration of winter.
When he caught an animal, they would want to eat it right away – while it was still fresh and dripping with blood. But he would drive them off with sticks so that he could prepare it properly, drying most of it so that it could nourish them later.
To the dogs, the man seemed to have infinite knowledge, because there was nothing that they could think or imagine that it seemed he hadn’t already thought.
In the winter when it was raining out, they would all sit in his cabin with the fire going and they were less miserable then they had been before.
One summer the man decided to venture into the ruins: partly because he thought he might find some useful things and partly because they held some power over his imagination. His ignorance about them made them feel like maybe they held the keys to some great and terrible knowledge. All of the lives lived inside their boundaries seemed still contained in some static form by his understanding of the ruination of their ability to go forward. Their lives were like ghosts trapped because they had been denied their natural progression – their ability to fade away through reproduction and replication. They were not like forms of life or living cultures that could render themselves forgettable by producing offspring and maintain through the ebb and flow of day to day existence the appearance of an eternal return of the same. Their only existence was that they were not there and that it was obvious that they were not there because the ruins still were and so they were stuck, unable to disappear and unable to progress; once the ruins had vanished entirely beneath a carpet of forest that grew and died in the same fashion year after year, so as to seem like nothing ever changed, or there was no one left who understood that there was something amiss, that the progression of history had been cut short, then they would be laid to rest.
For the man, the understanding that many lives had vanished – that the city, itself once a thriving environment of sorts was now completely dead – not just its inhabitants, but its entire way of existence, made him feel like the land was full of spirits. Of course, it was really just filled with trees and the odd building that remained standing.
It was not the first time that he had gone to explore the ruins. Every time it took a great deal of deliberation, that is to say that he experienced a certain amount of mental conflict – between two kinds of fear, one which was a sort of awe, this compelled him towards, and the other, a more physical, animal fear and this made him want to stay away. Also there were other factors at play – a kind of detached interest that enjoyed observing new things and a practical desire to discover objects that would be useful to him, that would occupy his time while he figured out what he could do with them and then did whatever that was. Finally, there was the monotony that pushed him to do something different from time to time. It was the fear and the horror that he felt, however, that made them seem larger than life. In this way, he liked to frighten himself because it made things feel more important.
It was a beautiful summer day. Everything was warm and a gentle breeze blew through leaves and evergreen needles to make a gentle rushing sound. He walked with the dogs down what had once been a road, but now was part of the forest floor. Along his way were mounds of earth, of brick and of steel, all coming together and growing trees, ferns, salal bushes, moss and so forth. There were also some buildings – some of brick, some of stone, some of metal. There were some wood buildings, but they seemed almost too decayed to really call them buildings anymore and in everything, there was a kind of seamless quality that made it difficult to perceive where human made structures ended and the forest began. Everything grew moss and ferns, bushes and trees.
The dogs ran far and wide, smelling and exploring. They could stray far off, at distances where people would have become lost and keep track of each other through smell.
There was a building made out of concrete blocks. Its front was gone, as was a good portion of its roof. There was a mound of dirt that had collected from outside and the floor was very cracked. It was difficult to tell the difference between floor and ground. There were some tools: a mallet and some wrenches. There were the remains of some machine – a corroded block of metal with some holes in it, some pipes and some other pieces. He collected the mallet in his bag.
He entered another building which was long and dark. It was the dwelling place of many spiders and their webs clung to his hands and face as he walked towards the back. It smelled of water which had collected and never dried out. He found the darkness somewhat frightening – too separate from the outside world. One of the dogs joined him; he pet its head. In a corner he found some books. One had big pictures and not very many words; another had large print and a few pictures. Another book was very thick, with pages crowded by small little words. Upon opening it, he found that he understood almost none of it. He put the first two in his bag and carried on.
Later, he came upon a large facade made of stone. It had windows made of colored glass. The glass formed pictures of people: of men wearing flat looking golden hats, people with wings and other things. Above the entrance was the same symbol of crossed lines that he had seen on the death markers many years earlier. Like most buildings, its roof was missing. Most of the walls had fallen down, so there was something of a pleasant glade of ferns, moss and bushes inside with a cedar tree growing off in the corner. The man thought it very pretty how the light came through the colored glass and fell on the moss. In the back, what had once been a room, now stood something like a little cabin. He walked into it and found a rotting desk and inside one of the drawers, which had been spared by the elements for some reason, a book in very poor condition. The book was black with the symbol again. Its title was composed of two words that he had never seen before and it seemed not to have an author. He opened it carefully as it seemed on the verge of disintegration, but found it to be full of many queer words which were even more difficult to understand than the ones in the thick book. The dogs sniffed at it disinterestedly, hoping that closer inspection would indicate it to be food, as observation from a farther vantage point had not suggested so at all. They left the book and the building.
Twilight began to fall. Dusty golden light filled the forest and long shadows grew as the sun went lower on the horizon. They walked through the forest to a beach where they made a fire. The world was very silent.
In early autumn the man was sitting beside a fire flipping through a picture book when the dogs began to bark. A stranger came out of the woods carrying a large bag. The man was very surprised; he quieted the dogs and invited him to sit down.
“Hello,” he said and the stranger said something back that he didn’t understand. It turned out that the stranger spoke a different language.
The night came upon them and that sat around the fire eying each other uncomfortably. They tried to communicate with each other, pointing at things and drawing little pictures in the dirt, but the endeavor seemed somewhat futile. After some time the stranger pretended to be very tired and went to sleep. The next morning when the man woke up the other was gone.