By the Beautiful Pond by Harrison Kim

Dan Bonner used his right hand to toss two keys to the moss-covered forest floor of Happy Valley Forest.  The keys lay there glinting among the twigs and dead leaves.  The throw sealed his purpose, to set his mind and body free from chance.  He stood naked, one foot and one wrist handcuffed to a birch trunk.  The forest stood so thick here, he could barely see the sky.  That was the way he liked it, all the empty blue blocked so he could focus on the shade around him.

“A man has to make a decision,” Dan shouted to the forest. “Now I’m bound by it.”

He was glad to be naked now, a Spartan in the woods, alone in the cool quiet.

He thought of his sister Julie, and her words, repeated over and over down the years.

“You’re always thinking about yourself, why don’t you consider anyone else?”

Dan did consider.  He considered God.

Either God would intervene here, in the woods, or he’d starve and die.

He considered the voice of Julie.  She acted like she cared.

“Why don’t you get up off the ground, get out of your head, reach out and make a commitment to something!” 

“She didn’t know me at all,” Dan talked to the tree as he stood solo and unclothed Adam style, locked to the trunk by his own hand, brown moss greening and purple April crocuses blooming beyond his feet, above him, budding leaves hanging over Happy Valley, such a winsome place everyone used to sing as they hiked through, that’s how it got its name.

Dan heard his heart beating.  That was the sound he could understand, moving him through the moments.  It hadn’t faltered yet.  He’d fasted two days in preparation, drank only water, a difficult task for a lifelong alcohol user.

“Order within the self, that’s the first step,” Dan thought, and closed his eyes, just like he did when he threw the keys.

“Do crocuses have a scent?” he pondered as he opened his eyes again, the sun just touching the flowers, birds chirping as he stood.  What kind of bird was that?   Not a turkey vulture.  He peered into the brush, dug his toes into the moss.  This was his stand, to lock into this place, no need for further decisions, now it was up to God to prove they both existed.

“If you rescue me, I will serve you forever,” Dan repeated, over and over, as the sun moved high. 

“I have violated the laws of chance, I have locked myself here on purpose, and I am prepared to pay the price.”  He flexed his right arm. “I am prepared to suffer until the purpose of the Universe unties me.”

He stretched his free leg forward and raised his arm like the Statue of Liberty.  A couple of small brown birds hopped forward, one stepped on his orange daypack, not ten feet away.

“This position is where “What is the meaning of life?” will be answered,” Dan said to the birds.

He tried to roll his shoulders.  It wasn’t easy to stand like this, humped round a tree, limbs restrained with chains and two handcuffs.  He moved his right hand and left leg again, in contrast to their opposites, the locked parts stiffening up; a thirst already crept through his throat.  The brown birds hopped on his daypack, where lay a water bottle, maybe a quarter full.  Dan’s eyes began searching the debris for where the keys might be, then they looked up at the sky, “best to keep my pupils on heaven, and hope.”

All Dan did the previous winter was sit in his low rent hotel room smoking cigarettes, drinking, and staring out at the snow and rain.  “

“A person can stay put in his views, like he can in his room,” Sister Julie used to say when her voice came to visit, talking through the mattress on his bed.

Dan lay unhappy on that mattress, though being there did block out the sky.  The drug addict living above stomped on the ceiling whenever Dan opened his fridge.  Dan turned his T. V. to full volume.  Then the drug addict in the room next door banged on the walls.  Don wasn’t going to turn his T. V. down to please that addict, though.  He sat with his headphones on, listening to music while the T. V. shows flitted and flickered on the screen. When he turned the music off,  Julie’s voice started as a whisper, Julie from the mattress. “get out of your head,” Julie said.  “Go forth and reach for something decisive.”

Yet, if he took a break outside, to the street while the sky gleamed blue, pure chaos flew.  People milled around waving their arms and legs, so unpredictable Dan often banged into them.  It could have been their bodies, could have been their thoughts, but they stopped him dead.  He couldn’t tell intention, everyone so indecisive about direction.  A man should be able to lean any way he wanted, make his own decisions without interference.  In this day world, cacophonic obstacles surrounded him, blocking his path, and when he looked up for a break, he felt the sky sucking him in that direction.

He fled inside, to his room again, stepping out only in the wee hours of the morning when darkness filled all space, to walk the quiet, lamplit city.  He often carried a bottle, drinking under the moon.  There was a place in the park, between two large oaks, where he’d sit until the Julie whispers came again.

“Your whole life has been a waste,” they said.  “You need to do something significant,” and the word “Significant” echoed in his head and across the nearby duckpond.

These voices came from the oaks.  He’d always liked trees, how the leaves rustled, and the sky appeared in bits through the branches.  It wasn’t about the roots; it was about the canopy that blocked out the empty sky.  Trees used their purpose well, to protect him from that emptiness, and now they gave him advice in his sister’s voice.

In his childhood, Julie was the one who cared for him, she made his school lunch, two pieces of bread sealed with peanut butter, every morning.  She pulled the collar out of his shirt, kept his pants out of his socks, one day she said “I can’t tie your shoes any more you’ll have to do it yourself,” and he knew then that all good things come to an end.

When he turned fourteen, there was a pond.  A beautiful pond, beside the main road, seven feet deep, with a line of Oaks behind.  Dan skipped school, rode his bicycle there, behind the row of trees, then he slid down to the edge of the pond.  No-one could see him there, under the Oaks, with all the birds singing.  Dan pulled out his bottle of wine and began to drink.  Pure bliss.  Dew on the grass, the trees above blocking out most of the sky. Cars motored by above, pushing through the day, the sun arched overhead, as Dan sat alone by the peaceful pond and emptied the bottle.  Hours and hours it seemed, away from school and all the students moving and bumping into him with their bodies and voices.   Away from the traffic, the noise, and other people.  He had disappeared from the world, and he was happy.

Twenty years later, he wouldn’t have changed anything.  The world reeled and he lay back and let it tip.  He stood alone again, this time in the forest, but thirsty, that must be why he thought of the wine.  He’d foregone it now for a week, to prove he was ready.

God, you let me down,” Dan shouted.  “You did not deliver me from my suffering, you let me drink and dream my life away.  Now you have a second chance.”

A breeze moved through the trees, the branches began to toss.  Dan felt a chill. 

His clothes lay scattered beyond his daypack, the wool sweater Julie gave him for his twenty first birthday, crumpled on some rocks, the pants and belt from the Thrift Store, beyond his reach now.

“So be it,” Dan thought as the wind picked up and a raindrop or two reached his face from the closing, blackening sky.  “I offer myself naked to the wilderness.”

More raindrops blew down, and the wind whistled above.  Dan’s teeth chattered, he held himself close to the tree trunk.  He put his face to the bark and looked closely, there could be an entire world in the folds of that bark.   His handcuffed leg and arm ached, he had to hold one position.  His back became freezing wet as the rain poured.  When the water stopped, the woods lay dark and cold, and Dan’s teeth chattered against the bark.  His whole body shook.

“Help!” Dan said, at first in a whisper.  “God help me!”

He lifted his head, able to drink in some of the rain.  He tried to rub himself warm with his free hand   His clothes lay soaked under the stars, and they might as well be as far as the stars.

“This is what I wanted,” he told himself, and he heard Julie’s voice affirm this from the tree trunk his left ear pressed against, “Yes, that’s what you chose.”

He wondered if he could merge right into the tree.  He hoped his physical body would sink into the wood and disappear.  He’d be one with the forest.  But the cold and damp and his shaking body screwed all that up, the shaking so bad his body jumped and twisted, as the handcuffs rubbed his left wrist and right ankle red and raw.

He could only lean against the tree trunk.  His breath felt shallow.  He sucked in all the air he could and started coughing.  The second inhale went better, though he smelled his own anxiety, pungent, like mold growing under his skin.  He slumped against the tree.  He could no longer hold himself up.

After a time, his chattering teeth stopped, and he began to sweat, great gobs of liquid poured off his skin, for a moment he considered that it might be raining harder.  He couldn’t change position.  Was that blood trickling down his arm?  Inhaling sent a fire through his ribs and back, so he tried to stop it.

The tightness around his leg and foot increased, a pain swelled up through his brain until it disappeared in thirst and weakness.  He stared into the tree, its black rough surface, soaking wet like everything else, then turned his head to notice in the moonlight, by his daypack, the glitter of metal, and a creature, perhaps a squirrel or a rat, hopping around that glitter, “where the key resides,” ran through his head, and whispers surrounded him, rising and falling with the wind in the forest and the sighs in his head. 

All he cared to do was fall, like he tumbled down to the pond edge years ago, to get away from everyone and everything. 

“God is obviously busy somewhere else,” said the whispers, as a voice cried out, “Help,”  again, and Don knew it was his own voice.

“Get outside your own head,” said Julie, from inside the tree.

Don felt himself slipping forward to breathe, and as he slipped there came, from out of the night, a white circle, far off in the trees.  It stayed small, flitting through the undergrowth, “is it searching for me?” Dan wondered.

It shone powerful and focussed, a laser cut through the night.   Maybe the thin beam would shine on his keys.

If he could reach those handcuff keys, he could do the work of God, and set himself free.  His whole body now numb.  Every inhale crushed the muscles in his chest.  Every exhale went out, like needles emerging.  He tried shallower and shallower breaths, and in fact, that became all he could accomplish.

“I tried to be a Spartan,” came to his mind again.

The light in the forest flickered and strengthened, as Dan heard himself calling for help, through his sore, bleeding lips. He sucked rolls of sweaty rain off his arm, but it wasn’t enough.  He let go a yell, it came out a whisper, and a knife edge sliced through his lungs.  He tried again, more quietly, and didn’t hear a sound.   He banged his head against the tree trunk, let go with a gargle.  Then he coughed, without ceasing, each cough a sledgehammer against his chest, trying to bend over but failing, feeling himself choke, there in the darkness, and that light playing back and forth, back and forth, not coming closer nor going farther away.  He heard a booming, louder and louder at first, the play of his own heart.

He reached, with his free right hand, stretching forth, letting gravity take the lead.  He must reach the key because God was playing around in the forest with a flashlight and Dan could not get his attention.  The booming became a crushing jackhammer.  Could God hear that? Dan felt something coming up in his throat and as it reached the surface, he fell and flung out his arm, and it was as if he fell down towards that beautiful pond again, like when he was fourteen years old, disappearing out of sight of the world.

His right arm moved forward across the moss, and above him the beam of light shone straight down on the little brown bird, that sat on his daypack holding the key in its beak.  All he had to do is keep stretching towards that light, and that bird.  It was liberating!  Always in life he carried his body around heavy and confining, banging into everything, limited by its shape and solidity. 

He lengthened his arm and hand across to where the little bird perched, under silver sheets of rain, and the bird dropped the key into his palm.  Dan stared at the tiny object, and raised it high, pulled it across to the lock that bound his left wrist, and as he did the clouds parted and he perceived the entire fearsome sky, light blue though it was night, with the stars shining in that blue and the light beam shining upon him.  He unlocked, free from his bonds.

Then the sky itself pulled him upright, with considerable force, and he gazed straight into the beam of light, and felt the same peace he did at fourteen, in an alcohol haze, at the edge of that beautiful pond.  

He’d moved outside of himself, faced the sky, and found the key.

That sky curved around, fell under him now, and the rest came easy.  The weight of the world held its bulk above him, the tree, the forest, the earth, the God he cried for. He could let it all go easily.   He plunged into the blue-black night like he did as a child when he dove into the deep water of the beautiful pond.  He fell with all his soul, away from the world, towards that significant sea, while behind him, on the earth, the locks bound his sagging body to the tree.

Kim, Harrison

Image: Pixabay.com – black and white image of trees with light in the distance.