Warren's dream

Trying to work on improving my writing. Heres a story I'm working through. Any comments are appreciated. Thanks

‐-------

It wasn’t until the fog widened out into a slowly growing circle of visibility, when his dry bags and blue kayak could be seen in the early gray morning, that Warren left the bank of the river and walked up to his gear nestled between stunted trees at the top of a dune. He spent the night struggling to keep his eyelids from collapsing and shoving him into darkness. He was surprised that the adrenaline wore off so quickly. That he had to fight against a straight jacket strangling his mind to remain alert and awake.   His toes were completely numb since both bare feet had remained planted on the chilling sand as he waited all night for the fog to lift. Waiting for the light of the sun to burn away the darkness and that impenetrable mist that was like a wet cotton filling space in clumps of drifting fibres. Waiting for the source of that hideous sound to be revealed as something either in his mind or something that would make him shriek when he saw it. Warren stood like a sentry guarding the river behind his feet.

He was prepared to jump into that river should that thing be unmasked by the fog and he sees it standing there over his gear. He would be exposed. His mind automatically tried putting a face to that voice but all it could conjure up was a mouth - just a big mouth with thick goopy saliva dripping off teeth like they were covered in Elmers glue.

Warren told himself that it was probably just his imagination combining the sound of the wind and maybe a tree falling over with the paranoia that he built up over the night while thinking about man-eating bears. He repeated this thought throughout the night like it was a mantra or a spell that would make what he heard not real. But that voice. It had been there. It was right by him.

And then that scream that jolted his heart hours later. The sound came peeling from far away but it was the direction from which it came that was so startling. The scream was muffled and it came from out of the ground under his feet. He could feel it as a faint vibration on his heels like someone was stuck down there under the sand.    

The mountain peaks around him were no longer dark but a strawberry pink and their granite hunchbacks were a deep translucent purple. Although the sun wasn’t visible yet, it’s light was giving color and hue to everything around and the fog was disappearing.

Even if it was all in his head he wasn’t going to eat breakfast here, no fucking way - the place was ruined for him. He decided he’d just twist around the river and find a new place where he could get some good shots of Devils Thumb and drink coffee with eggs. He was here for a reason after all.

Warren would be on this river for another two days until he reached his pick-up point fifty miles downstream, so he better get used to it. And he better not hear any voices anymore because otherwise he’s going to have to go see a doctor when he gets back and he's not looking forward to the conversation. He embarrassed himself. What the hell is he? A grown man scared of monsters because he's all by himself?

It started to seem a lot more ridiculous as the sun rose up and changed the light pink of those snowy ridges to an electric violet and afterwards white with a blue sky crowning the endless range of hills and crusts of rock surrounding him.

It ended up downright silly as he pushed out from the bank with his kayak’s nose pointing downstream, all of his gear packed up, and he met the freedom of the current strongly push him downstream.

He looks back at the dunes as he's taken in the flow and sees nothing where he expected nothing to be. Although he says aloud “that was just your imagination man”, and nervously laughs at himself in something along the lines of embarrassment mixed with contempt, he sees nothing over there like it's a hole where something should be .

Or was.

The river takes him around a couple of sinuous curves and he never sees those dunes again, as the pines and birch on either side of the narrowing river close him in like a curtain being pulled shut across one curvy bank to another.

12 hours earlier

A twenty eight year old photographer floats down a river. He says aloud that he’s in the middle of nowhere, but actually he’s in the middle of exactly where he wants to be. One hand reaches into the brown water and he watches the whirling eddy currents emerge in the glacier-cooled streams behind his fingers. There’s little particles of sand in there jumbling around. Every once in a while he sees a dragon fly on the surface of the water and he wonders if it’s stuck.

The camera around his neck is what the pros use but he isn’t quite the pro himself. In fact he’s not even a professional photographer. Yet. That’s why he’s here. After majoring in geology in college, and taking way too long to do so, he couldn’t find work. And even though he loved the subject he didn’t want to stay inside all day so he’s trying to make it as a nature photographer.

Warren’s needs to be outside otherwise he starts feeling depressed, like there isn’t much purpose to life. But now that he’s out here he’s wondering if there’s anywhere he can go that can get rid of that feeling. He started taking pictures back in a class on field trips and he learned something about himself doing it; he really enjoyed the technical aspects of photography.

It wasn’t just about taking beautiful pictures. And it wasn't even just the art of letting the world see your world, which held a certain fascination for him, but it was something else about photography that was hard to explain. He had never really explained it to himself, though there were times out here in the middle of nowhere - and he thinks suddenly, what does that mean exactly, nowhere? He thinks that nowhere is just where there are not any people although life may be plentiful, and that’s a rather anthropocentric idea isn’t it? But out here in the middle of nowhere he could understand this need in a way that he didn’t need to articulate.

And he’s thinking now as a bend in the river changes his direction from south-west to south, about whether or not there were other things, other truths either about himself or about that world, that he could apprehend without articulating them by speaking or thinking. If there were concepts that words simply could not wrap themselves around and only the silence of a vast wilderness gave them shape for his mind to wrap itself around. It was like tasting or feeling, he thinks, as he maneuvers his kayak around a log floating down the river. He couldn’t truly articulate how something tastes; it was wholly an experience.

He can only point at it and make sounds with his mouth in the hopes that other people can infer what he means. And as his gaze is stolen from the river by those stark mountains jutting out with peaks of snow, he thinks of that feeling of being out here capturing little fragments of reality with his camera. That’s what it is. That feeling he had behind the lens had something to do with reality. And a little bit to do with life.

When he was looking through that camera it was like -

But before he can finish these thoughts he sees it there; his purpose for coming here. It’s unveiled as a change in perspective moves a mountain out of the way. Devils Thumb. It’s a jagged tooth. And it doesn’t have snow - it’s all rock and Warren Hall is ready take his first shot of it while drifting down this wide twisting river.

Warren is careful to keep his camera dry while he pops off a few shots of the peak of Devils Thumb. Those sawtooth peaks make it look as if a rock giant took a bite out of it. One eye closed, that’s all he can see while his kayak drifts on autopilot. The shutter is blinking like he has a third eyelid and then he puts it gently down and panics as the kayak almost rams into a logjam. Plunging his paddles in the water he’s able to avoid that deathtrap but that was a dangerously stupid close call. Maybe he’ll hold off on shootin’ from horseback. Probably not.

Now he’s coming around another bend in the river making his heading South East.

“It’s a curvy motherfucker”, he says. He inhales through his nose. That sweet tangy smell of spruce trees curiously notifies him that he's hasn’t eaten since the morning. So he decides to set up a camp around here because it was already after six and he wants to eat his canned tuna for dinner and granola for dessert.

The bank is sandy on his bare feet as he steps into the water and begins pulling the kayak out so it has absolutely no chance of drifting off. When he sees the dunes, the load of geology classes he’s had are activated and he tries to figure out where they came from. Why are they here?

The thing about geology that was so captivating for him was wrapping his head around how much time there was. The smallest effects over an incomprehensible amount of time lead to changes that were equally incomprehensible. Like how an toxic alien atmosphere slowly changed into the air he’s breathing. Or like how microscopic cellular organisms changed into human beings. Or like how he can’t stop chasing tail and whenever he gets with a girl he likes he slowly loses interest until one day there’s like a phase transition and his feelings for her evaporate. He leaves her without an answer. “Why? I thought we were having a good time?” She might say. But he doesn’t have an answer. It’s nothing personal, it’s just you, he wants to say half-jokingly.

But it’s not her, or all the other hers, it’s him. The elation he feels during the first couple weeks is incredible. And then for inscrutable reasons he’s never been able to understand he’s influenced by a powerful aversion to her. He’s coming to believe now, as he looks at the shape of his body reflecting off the brown water, when he’s trudging up the shallow bank with his kayak, that he’s unable to ever love someone.

What bothers him is that he’s not sure if that does bother him. He’s not exactly lonely but he doesn’t like the feeling of using them. When he drops the nose of his kayak between the trees near the top of one of these dunes, and walks down the shore to find driftwood, he comes full circle realizing that using them is the thrill. It’s a thrill that’s leaking and when there’s none of it left - hey lets just be friends and never see each other again.

Warren builds a fire and he eats the tuna cold. He made the fire only to keep the bears away. There’s brown bears out here and he’s not particularly in the mood to go national geographic on them, especially since he has never seen one in real life. He’s never been alone in the wilderness before. He wonders why he’s really here. How can he trust his own motivations when time after time reveals some hidden intent that was he not conscious of - as if someone else was running the show in there and he was just there to watch, to obey, to believe childishly that it was his idea all along.

    “Mandy…” he says seeing her face in his fire. He was going to marry Mandy. He smiles remembering just six months ago when she brought him that cat. Stix they called him. His smile turns to a grimace when he remembers dropping the cat off at her apartment and what her face looked like when he said Stix could no longer stay with him.

The twilight is long in this part of the world as the evening fades into dusk. The only sound is the scratching of leaves brushing against other leaves as a slow consistent breeze picks up.

 Why is he here? That question won’t stop feeding off his energy. He should know but he’s having trouble unraveling his own desires from what might actually be those of others. He wonders if all the decisions he’s made over the last several years have just been the determined reactions from interacting with other people. He’s not sure and that’s the part that scares him; the idea that he’s just a mechanism high on dopamine. That he’s not really free.

The wind is interrupted like a heart murmur as a bald eagle beats its wings over his head. Warren’s fire consumes his drift wood quickly. It’s only a small pile of garnet embers by the time he goes to sleep on this pleasantly warm summer night with a sky so full of bright stars that when Warren sees them explode into view he is forced to recognize that reality is not just about his little life and his concerns, about the existential angst he’s currently experiencing on a sandy dune on a river in the Middle of Nowhere. He’s actually on a planet - that’s right - and that sky up there is not just pretty scenery but it’s a place! It’s many places.

When he sees it for what it is - not patterns in the sky - when he feels it for the first time in his life alone in a vast expanse of forest and twisting rivers, all of his angst about how he’s treated people in the past and what kind of person he has or will become and what he’s supposed to be doing in life, seems utterly inconsequential while sitting there as an inexplicable occurrence before the illimitable emptiness of the universe, and infinite hunger of time. That hunger will eventually consume him and he’s shocked to fully realize that he might actually be depressed because the fact that it will consume him gives him comfort. It takes the edge off.

His sleeping bag spoils the silence as it makes an alien zipping sound in this place and he crawls in under the star light between two logs. That edge he feels is like a bitter scream trapped in the gooseflesh of his skin. It manifests as a persistent anxiety. It seems to him now that it has always been there. Maybe it’s just been creeping up on him like a bad disease over the last couple of years. Maybe it’s guilt? Maybe it’s regret about having not chosen a career yet or a lover?

Maybe it’s fear that he’ll always financially struggle. Maybe it’s that out here his own consciousness feels like an alien presence. He squeezes his eyes shut and struggles to sleep under the torment of having had too many decisions to make that he can’t even remember.

His tent remains packed in one of his dry-bags as a dreamless sleep blissfully takes him.

Warren opens his light brown eyes, their color resembles the sandy river and although they can see the river, they can’t see the stars anymore. That’s because, although it’s still dark, he’s greeted by a wet fog that sunk into his camp and slowly drenched him as he slept. Shouldn’t he have realized the weather could change so quickly in these parts?

“Ah what a mistake” he says to the river

“What a stupid fucking mistake!” he yells.

It’s unclear if he’s calling the fact that he slept outside of a tent the mistake, or if it’s being out here on his own in the middle of the wilderness. In the middle of nowhere. Maybe it’s both. A light rain taps on the surface of the river.

His damp shirt clings to his skin. His fingers are wrinkles. The heart in his chest thumps like he just had six cups of coffee. It’s almost pitch black apart from a sagging light in the fog. Maybe just waking up in a weird place half blinded by the wet night is the source of his anxiety. But Warren’s unbearably anxious. He looks down at where his fire was and all that’s left of it is a soup of mud.

“What a mess you idiot” he says.

His own voice is there to keep him company even if it isn’t very nice. That’s when he’s hears it. An animal. It’s body is rustling in the brush just over there by the trees. It doesn’t sound like a bird.

“Oh fuck!” He curses under his breath.

He’s convinced a bear has come to pay him a visit. Maybe it wants some of that tuna it smelled wafting over the dunes. He doesn’t have a gun because he’s never used one before so his only protection is some bear spray in his gear but that’s over where he hears the sound not that far away. He can hear it rummaging around in his stuff!

He stored his bags with his kayak by the brush on the end of the dune to ensure the wind didn’t pick up and blow it into the river.

Now that he’s out here it’s obvious he’s entirely unprepared to deal with wild animals. He’s unprepared to be out in the wild. But he has to do something because he knows it’s a bear. Warren’s hands slip on the slimy logs as he uses them like handrails to find his way out of there. He stops and looks over at his gear but he can’t see it.

The fog is so thick it’s like an entire cumulonimbus cloud sitting here on the ground. All he can make out are branches of trees protruding out of the mist like inverted crepuscular rays. He doesn’t want to go over there and stumble into it.

Had Warren ever realized how scared he was of meeting one these creatures in real life? Not really. He thought it would be neat to take some pictures of one from his kayak, but meeting one out here in the dark - or inside of a cloud with less than five feet visibility - that was a whole other experience. He’d read stories about bears that had attacked and eaten people.

They weren’t like lions that went for the jugglers and a quick kill. They’d knock you down and take bite out of a leg, walk away, and then come back for more - maybe this time out of your stomach. It might lay next you and pin your arm down with one enormous paw and chomp out a hunk of your armpit while you screamed. Warren thought that this was the worst possible way to die. They apparently didn’t care if you were alive while they ate your body like it was a buffet and they needed to try a little of everything. A hand here, a bit of intestine there, they were not picky.

Of course he had read about their behavior and what he was supposed to do if one ever confronted him. But reading was different than actually being there - being here. The attacks were unlikely but when they happened it was sometimes gruesome. He also knew that he was supposed to be making noise, right now, to let it know he was there and hopefully let it know that it needed to leave. But he can’t make noise. His lungs won’t let him. And if he stumbled upon it he knows that he needs to play dead. Maybe that’s because they like eating you alive, he wonders.

That part down deep in his animal brain that shrieks at the flash of jaws and teeth was turning on, but flight or fight weren’t the only two options to choose from. Freezing, that was the third option. That’s the option that picked him.

Warren is still standing between the logs trying to figure out what he’s supposed to do and considers getting into his kayak to wait for the bear to go away. But he might lose his stuff if he does that because the kayak would drift and he may not recall where his gear was in this vast space of forest and rivers and sloughs. Not to mention how much more difficult it would be to paddle up stream. But the real problem is that the kayak is by his gear.

Warren builds up his courage. “Alright” he says quietly. And then he yells “Hey!”, timidly at first. The second time it’s easier.

“Hey Bear!”

“Get away bear!”

    Even though he’s cloaked in mist Warren raises his arms up and waves them to make himself look bigger.

    “Go away bear!”

He can hear sticks breaking and branches heaving out of the way as the body of the bear moves into the brush. He can actually see the branches poking out of the fog sway and move. It’s working. The bear is going away.

    “Go away be-”

Warren yells again but he’s cut off by something much louder than his own voice. What he hears feels like the jolt of that electrical socket that he stuck his finger into when he was seven years old. It explodes from the fog. Whatever it was had a throat as wide as some of the spruce trees he’s seen around here - the big ones - a throat clogged with the sand from one of these dunes.

A deep choking growl aggressively screams back “NO!”

Warren feels like he was slapped. He falls backwards over the log behind him. And then his feet are in the water and he wonders how the bank got so close. The sound came from someone. It was sharp and...annoyed..like Warren accidentally woke something up that he probably should have left alone.

“What the fuck is that!” he whispers, half-screams, to himself. What the fuck is that.

After a few seconds of standing on his feet by the bank of the river he collects himself and Warren calls back timidly “Hey! Who are you?”. There was no reply.

“Hello?” He calls through the deaf fog. Maybe it was just his imagination that put a word and a voice to the sound of a tree falling over.

“My name’s Warren!” he yells again “Who’s there!”. But this time he heard a second voice. At first it sounded like a woman screaming in pain. The sound of that voice began as a high pitched wail - how it might sound hearing someone step squarely on a nail. Then it became deeper and deeper until it was like a giant cursing in rage.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” came shooting out of the fog. Warren didn’t speak again. Now the only sound is the sprinkling rain on the river. His eyes shift in the dark. For five hours he stands on the bank feeling his body get colder listening for any sound of that thing he heard. He didn’t hear it go away. The brush stopped moving. Everything became quiet once again.

He didn’t mean to fall asleep on his feet but he finds he did because his eyes snap open when he hears a scream for help. At least that’s what he thinks he heard. It’s barely audible.

At first it appears the sound is at least a mile away because he can hardly hear it. He turns his head to try and capture the direction as that muffled scream happens again.

Then he notices that it’s easier to hear when he tilts his ear towards the ground. He can feel the sound under his feet like how it would feel if a heavy rock was dropped close by. Warren’s throat is dry.

    Warren gets on his knees and puts his ear to the ground. The scream is carried up to him. Someone’s down there. He can’t make out what’s said. He doesn’t hear it again. After ten minutes with his ear to the ground he stands up and tries to look through the fog but it’s still too thick.

He stands there all night with his back to the river.

Submitted August 28, 2019 at 09:14AM by manifold_bot https://ift.tt/2ZwTwvk