Delays, pt. 1
Two beats, ba and dum, upward toward the summit.
The first hours before we arrived were spent in the truck. I sat in the back of the pickup’s cab, they in the front. The truck was old, boxy. The previous owner smoked. He kept it clean and in good shape. In the final bright days of summer, the wind was warm. The truck lacked A/C. I half-slept while they spoke to one another. Open windows let the roaring wind ride alongside to cool us. Moments came and went where the cab of the truck felt immaterial, like the cab walls faded away as we glided on the wind through the valley. The wind took their words while I slept, and so they are lost and cannot be recorded here or elsewhere.
Sleeping before being knocked unconscious weaves memory into a knotted little ball. The crunch of steel-on-steel bookended by not-quite-dreams made the moments after awakening in a tangled mass of tree, plastic, and metal all the more confusing.
Unraveling, the first thread was that the warm summer air, bright and lazy, fled with the wind, replaced by blood-scented nightcold.
The ringing in my ears felt incongruent with our plans of backpacking through the mountains, and so I went back to sleep. I woke up and it was still dark, so I went back to sleep. I woke up again and I guess I was so cold that I vomited twice.
Vomiting did not warm me up. I went back to sleep.
I woke early in the morning. I was surprised to find myself covered in bile and blood. The world spun. I did not have a cellphone. My ears were ringing. I fell from about ten feet in the air onto hard-packed dirt after unbuckling myself. My nose started bleeding again after I hit the ground, rolling onto a small patch of green. The tree that held what was once a well-maintained truck stood like a proud chalice, holding all our luggage, food, water, and their bodies.
My vision blurred, became inseparable from a halo of pain. My left arm was limp, splintered. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t swallow. Threadbare, I vomited a third and final time then went back to sleep.
Then three or four of the little (?) things were around me. (Regardless of their distance, they seemed to maintain their size.) They held themselves up by nothing but their will, string-like and impermanent, stronger than steel. I could see them. (Though “seeing” was secondary to feeling their presence.) My chest felt full, despite being out of breath from labored sleep. They were talking in “hushed tones,” but the words (?) they spoke were some kind of (un)holy (I was not sure yet which) synthesis of harpsichord and theremin.
What came rushing in as they deliberated whether I should live or die was the immensity of sight and sound surrounding me, no longer squirming – like a toddler handed a tablet, a distract-o-matic – the diaphanous beings’ conversations fell into the furthest distance of my attention as the greens and blues and browns and whites bloomed in my mind. Magnifying all of it, that ever-perfecting relief, where birds gyrated about, full-throated and bellowing their lovesongs as their roosts were radiating the easing transpiration from their leaves, swaying branch inseparable from trunk inseparable from rooted dirt and deciduous duff inseparable from the fungi perfuming the air with their earthy digestions, and the drip-drip-drip of motor oil and blood was a pacemaker, a metronome, a revery, our timekeeper—all inseparable from above and below.
I closed my eyes and breathed a ragged breath before it closed in, shrank once again, into a tiny knotted ball of black.
I had arrived.
[...]
The torpid, sleepish darkness was shattered by the chattering of birds. The sun crested above far-off, snowpeak crags. I saw it through a window. I was in a bed. My throat was dry. My hands started to sweat the moment awareness came flooding back to me.
A small bedside table supported a cold glass of water. I reached toward it. My left arm was set and wrapped in a bandage. I used my right.
“Good. You aren’t dead.”
I looked around. My bed was the hard-packed dirt of the forest floor. I tucked myself in and fell back to sleep.
[...]
I woke again, covered in blood. The truck had slid but not yet fallen.