Six Twenty One

I stepped into the warm pond. Light from a party in the yard above leaked out into the night and caught on the little ripples I made in the dark water. I crouched down a bit, letting the water rise around me, around my shoulders, then floated and slowly paddled along. I submerged my face, then lifted it and peered across the shimmering surface of the little pond to the farther edge where the dark mass of forest came to meet it.

Soft sounds of moving water were near me, and further out, the songs of the night. As I nudged around closer to rocks that rimmed the pond, I opened my mouth to nibble the plants that floated there. The fruity smell of the moss came to me. The substantial medium of the water surrounded me.

With eyes closed I comprehended. I was out here looking for something, something I would put inside me, something that would waken my body and arouse my animal. How might I perceive once I found it and brought it into me?

I didn't find it that night in the pond, though I tasted wild food.

On a bright day I had to be among some warehouses and flat sprawling offices that were arrayed across a plain of hot, sharp-stinking asphalt. I had already been to the meeting, worked, then fled outdoors for air. There wasn't much in the treeless place.

But it was late in the day and I found a cool shadow to stand in. Nearby a pale metal door stood slightly ajar. I felt invited or curious, either way, I pushed it open and stepped into a cool space lit only by a row of dirty windows eight or ten feet up the wall of a huge room. In front of me were a desk and some filing cabinets. Further away, in dimmer light, lurked piles of boxes, crates, a fork lift, and other stuff that became less distinct over the length of the warehouse.

At this moment, looking across a dusty shaft of light, I began to hunt. Somewhere, hidden somewhere, was that mysterious liberating object. I had not found it in nature. Could it be hidden among tools and the abandoned coffee cups with brown sticky stuff inside?

I entered a door to the left and found a room with lockers along one wall and another row of lockers down the middle. A table with abandoned tool catalogues stood next to the door. There was another door across the little room and I opened it. More storage. Long tables and boxes. Behind me a door slammed and I heard steps shuffling along the concrete floor. And voices -- men, more than two. I returned to the locker room just as three guys entered from the front.

They were just guys, unremarkable, one tall in a white tshirt and jeans, just behind him a blonde guy in a grey zippered jacket, and a young one, dark hair, fidgety, in very baggy black pants and a hooded sweatshirt. The guy in the tshirt just looked casually at me and said, "We thought we would help you look."

I was not sure how to play it. But I said, "There are the lockers in here and lots of boxes in the next room," and turned to walk into the storage room. The guy who had spoken followed me and the two others stayed and began to search the lockers.

"I am Dan," he said to me as he went along the narrow passage between the wall and the tables. Tables were set up in rows with boxes stacked around and under them. A few open boxes were on the tables.

"How will any of you guys know if you have found it?" I asked him, wondering how anyone else could recognize something so personal to me.

"How will YOU know?" he asked me.

We shuffled through stuff in boxes, not speaking again. Small cartons of some kind of wired parts, large metal disks, some geared, tangles of cotton cloth, all unfamiliar pieces of some foreign-seeming activities. I heard the two in the next room rustling through the lockers, opening and closing the metal latched doors.

Rather than becoming bored with our lack of success, each of us began to feel a little excited with anticipation. I became more and more certain we would find it, that it was here among the cardboard, the parts, the dust. A squeak and a scrape alerted us that the front door had opened and Dan stopped and looked up, his head tilted to listen. Someone spoke and the young man in the next room said, "She's in there."

I turned and saw David walk through the shadows and into the dim light of the room. "This is a bit of a mess," he said. I didn't speak, just hung onto the tangle of wire I had just pulled out of a box. The guy in the zippered jacket came in to see how we were reacting. Dan said, "Why don't you help us with that stack of boxes, there's lots of stuff to look through in here." He came on in and lifted a box up onto a table.

David turned and walked back into the locker room. Soon I could hear the two of them opening lockers.

Then I heard David's voice. It was just a flat "Huh" sound.

We all stopped. The young man peeked into the storage room and said, "He found it."

I walked forward past him and behind me I heard Dan say, "It's been found." Someone said "What's she going to do?" Someone else said "Shh!"

David was on the other side of the row of lockers in the middle of the room. I went over to where he was standing in front of an open locker. The other guys came in, two behind me, Dan behind David.

David came close to me, but avoided my eyes. I felt the needle jab my shoulder, then went down in a heap on the floor and darkness subsumed me. I dreamed. Three men looked down at me. They were gathered tightly together and looked more curious than concerned. Behind and above them I saw David. He looked directly into my eyes with a hardness and intent I had rarely seen in him.

The image of the men wavered, then shimmered like water under a golden moon. I stood and stepped through the glimmer and found myself atop a flat rock looking out over a vast desert. Warm breeze stirred the fur on my shoulder and on the breeze I could smell the heat of someone else's blood.

I turned to look behind me, and the four men stood, still close together, watching me. I could feel the shape and volume of their body heat and hear the stutter of wordless questions in their minds. I turned away from them, back to the desert vista.

I never wanted to see them again.