What Do You See
David Desjardins
When the mother pulls into the roadside grove, the smell of evergreens that invades the car overpowers even the scented cardboard tree dangling from the rear-view mirror, and it makes the boy in the back seat look up from the device on his lap. Even stronger is the smell of cedar, which to him means swings and slides and metal structures to climb, and a bouncy give to whatever ground you tumble onto. A wall of pines and hemlocks looms over the playground, one the boy visited long ago, before the father and the mother began fighting, one that surfaces often in his dreams, leaving a sheen of longing and loss at the beginning of a day.
Out you go, kid. The mother’s words are wrapped in cotton, but he can follow them. When she flicks off the ignition key and pulls out her phone, the boy tugs the rear-door handle, clunk-clunk-clunk, till she sighs and touches the button on her armrest that sets him free.
Near the picnic tables are pine needles and cones to scuff and kick before he reaches the play structures, which have grown smaller since his last visit. They are duller, too, not quite the gray and white of the photos in the shoebox at his grandmother’s home, but not the colorful plastic forms outside his kindergarten either. But they are definitely the same objects he played on all those many months – years? – ago. Even the rust streaking his hands as he runs his fingers across the cold metal tells him that this place is ancient, older than the oldest child he can imagine.
Looking back toward the car, he sees the mother turn the mirror toward her face and dab her skin; she pushes strands of her hair to the side, frowns, pushes them back. Nothing in this place touches her.
The cedar chips blanketing the ground are even more pungent than the boy remembers. Oddly, that smell has never been a part of those gut-aching dreams, but that only strengthens his sense that here, now, he has broken through to Another Realm. In all the shows he’s seen on his grandmother’s TV, the space explorers wear bubble helmets so they can breathe their own air. Is it nose-crinkling air like this that those adventurers guard against?
The boy runs first to a rusty red contraption that he barely recalls: a metal pole rising eight feet high, with a wide ring in the shape of a circular ladder suspended by four chains from the tip of the pole. It is the bones of a spaceship’s nose, he concludes. He pushes the circle around, rotating it faster and faster till it resembles a ring around Saturn. The thing screeches out a complaint as it spins but he is not cowed. Nonetheless, the machine defeats his attempts to ride it. He cannot quite board the thing; when he tries, the ring collapses against the center pole. There must be some magic to it.
A loud roar – like one continuous explosion but muffled, as is all sound to the boy – enters the pine grove and the boy turns to see the father steer his motorcycle up alongside the mother’s car. He removes his helmet, freeing his long dark strands, and speaks to the mother, then walks onto the splintered cedar carpet.
Derek! What’s happening, little man? Come here, give it up! The father opens his arms wide and the boy walks over, lets himself be touched. He keeps his eyes lowered, and doesn’t answer. He has long been conscious of the reactions of the talking people to his own efforts to speak. Well, maybe not Miss Carol at school, but even the father and the mother still make faces at the sounds he makes when he tries.
You’re bigger, dude. Look at you. The father fingers the dark tuft of hair hanging over the boy’s eyes and strums the stubby clear-cut on the side of his head, touching the flesh-colored instrument behind the boy’s ear.
Hey, Dee Man, I have to talk to your mom. You go on and play. I’ll be back in a bit. He slaps the boy’s shoulder and turns away.
At the boy’s feet is a stick to pick up. Examining it closely, he divines its purpose and runs, dragging it across the cedar chips. The stick was fashioned for him so he could create the outlines of the islands that must be made before this world can be properly explored: Each structure is a castle or fort occupying its own piece of land, and before the strongholds can be commanded, shorelines must be drawn. The boy runs in circles, his stick carving out the layout of his game. When he’s finished, he inspects his map-making, the stick resting on his shoulder. Its work done, it is now his Weapon: a rifle, a laser, a sword.
The largest island – in the very center of the cedar chips – is the Headquarters of this world, housing a sprawling skyscraper stack of cubes, four levels high, that a boy can climb up and into, a geometric maze impenetrable to monsters and dinosaurs and any other life forms that prowl here. He tucks the stick into a belt loop on his trousers and boards the vessel, climbing and squirming inside its grid. The metal freezes his fingers.
No! Not going to happen, Danny! Hands off!
Sounds from the other world are even fainter up here, but still the boy turns: The father is reaching into the car; his leathered shoulder wrinkled against the edge of the roof. The car seems to tremble and the horn sounds – a short bark – and the father turns quickly toward the playground, pulls his arm from the car’s interior, smiles weakly in the boy’s direction, waves.
There is a dial behind the boy’s ear and as he thumbs it downward, the Outside World hushes. He continues to climb. Each metal-framed cube offers passage to six others – north, south, east, west, skyward, earthward – but for now the boy pulls himself straight to the roof, 12 feet in the air. From this height, a commander can survey not only the sprawl of the known world at his feet but also gaze into the dense jungle beyond the border. That is the Untamed Land, a dark world of wind, water, and creatures that guard their realm as fiercely as the boy guards this one. He makes his hand a visor above his eyes so as to peer deeper into the green canopy, but monsters and aliens are masters of camouflage, he knows. Still, he pulls the stick out from his pants and aims it at gaps in the branches, alert for movement.
After a few minutes, he climbs spiderlike down the structure and wades through the choppy water separating this island from the next. Here are swings, the engines that power this created world, and sadly these here have been neglected: Rainwater dots the pressed-metal seats, and chains are tangled. The commander orders their restoration to working condition, and takes it upon himself to mount the one with the lowest seat, nudging his toes into the cedar below him, leaning back and forward and thrusting his legs out. In minutes he is weightless, flying. The whole playground awakens to his movement; he is kick-starting this world into being, and he can feel its life in the chains thrumming against his palms. Even the green world has taken notice; the branches stir here and there, and the wind spreads the news of the boy’s return deep, deep into the woods.
When his work on this island is complete, he relaxes, commanding the swing to prepare for his exit. Even after he nudges his rear end off the seat, the motion he created still invigorates him. Running to the next island, he clears with one superhuman bound the deep water between the lines he carved earlier.
This place – the land of the slide – is his favorite: the most exhilarating and terrifying of his domain. In his dreams it is always the place where the boy achieves maximum separation from the world below. The ladder leading to its summit is pitched at a slight angle, leading to a dizzying height where he must clumsily transition to a sitting position with only the flimsiest of grips on the metal guardrail. Miles below is a puddle of boiling lava; a fall there would be fatal.
But his courage is great, and taking a deep breath he lifts himself, pulling his knees up under his chin, his fingers tight and white around the guardrails on either side of him. Sitting, the queasiness departs and he looks around. This is the summit of his realm, his seat higher even than the cube stack he ascended earlier. Down there lie the sprawl of cedar chips, the tiny picnic tables, the asphalt parking lot. Down there, the mother, her lips moving with the faintest hum – out of the car now, hands on her hips, straining forward, her face inches from the father’s. She is trembling, and flinches when the father slams his fists on the car roof.
This is where the boy always turns away, eyes down then off to the side, as if life must not be acknowledged, but it intrigues him now that up here the terror has lost much of its power. Atop the slide the strife between the mother and the father cannot touch him. They are like the cars he can see on the highway far, far in the distance whenever he leans out from the observation tower deck at the park near his grandmother’s house. The mother, the father, their words – these cannot harm him, no more than he can help those warring giants.
It is just then that, from the corner of his eye, the boy detects the thing’s movement. Instantaneously he freezes, as he has seen the talking children do in certain playground games. His senses are on high alert now, his eyes trained on the rhododendrons that mark the Untamed Land’s closest approach to his realm. He sends out a thought – Who goes there? – and in a moment gets his answer.
It is a bear. Not the kind from the books his grandmother read to him years ago. Not, for example, that jovial animal depicted on the cover of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See. The creature in front of him would never fit inside of a book; even from high atop the slide, the boy can see that this bear is huge, bigger than the picnic table nearby. It’s dark and slow, and moving with a purpose, which it betrays – can it sense the boy’s gaze?– when it suddenly stands on its hind legs and stares directly up at him.
It is a powerful thing, seeing and being seen.
After a minute, the bear lowers itself, turns, and lumbers back into its Green World. The boy’s mind is racing: What was that look? What message given? It is impossible to tell, but he senses it was meant for him specifically, in his role as commander of this world he has called into being, and he is compelled to release his tense grip on the slide’s metal guardrails and nudge himself forward, letting gravity speed him back down, down to the cedar floor, where his feet catch the splintered softness underneath him and he runs toward the gap in the bushes where the bear revealed itself.
The faintest of paths can be seen leading into the woods, just enough to indicate the bear’s recent passage. The boy’s hesitation here, at the very edge of his world, is brief, so momentary that he feels his own courage. Entering the dense undergrowth, he slows to a tentative walk, eyes darting so as to stay on the animal’s trail. The smell of cedar chips dissipates, replaced by something he cannot name, an odor of sweat and shit and yet not quite those things exactly, but something else, something no human touch has ever tainted. In this green world, the boy is learning the primacy of scent. If he is to follow the bear, he must let himself be guided like an animal is guided, by the air’s invisible language.
The boy is not unacquainted with nature. His grandmother often takes him on walks in the park near their house. In those woods is a rocky tuft unlike any other spot, unique in that if you stop there and wait patiently, and oh so quietly, with your earpiece dial fingered forward, you can hear simultaneously a train’s moan, an airplane’s roar, and the distant hiss of automobiles. Until now, this triple pleasure has been his deepest encounter with nature.
Despite such moments, however, that citified forest more closely resembles a zoo; cinder-covered paths with constructed steps lead to trees that wear name tags, explanatory plaques that direct a visitor’s attention to Wet Places or Green Ground Sponges or Butterfly Plants. This place is much different. Here in the Untamed Land, boulders and blowdowns are unlabeled and haphazardly placed. Dry dusty leaves are everywhere. Branches bare and green reach out at him, as if they sense his alien nature. At his feet he finds a gray-and-white furry package with the tiniest of claws embedded in its finely woven surface; such is this world that it is impossible to tell if this discovery betrays birth or death.
After walking for two minutes he looks back. No trace of the playground can be seen: no slide, no swing set, no climbing structure. Nor is there a sign of the mother and father. He thumbs the dial behind his ear up again, but no sound of their struggle, even muffled, can be detected. He pauses, considers retracing his steps, maybe even using his voice, but suddenly notices the way the land here is tilting on each side, slanting itself ahead of him into a slight but clear funnel downward. It is like an invitation, a suggestion. He thinks again of the bear’s cryptic gaze. Surely that too was an invitation; surely the bear must also have gone this way, leading him into the Green World’s essence.
It feels good to walk downhill, even on such a slight incline, but as he continues following the bear, the leaves underfoot begin to shine with moisture. His sneakers slip a bit and he slows his pace to keep from falling. Even as he advances, his thighs brace with each step as his body resists the forest’s downward pull.
In a couple of minutes he sees on the right a similar slanting of the land approaching this one, and then yet another joining from the left. Soon the boy is walking along a small stream, and having thumbed the dial behind his ear forward to its limit, the water begins whispering, its voice dampened yet louder with each step he takes.
At last the boy reaches a wide brim of stone where the water hurries to the edge before plunging, like a silvery string, down to a pool many feet below, farther even than the slide could ever reach were it to be suspended from this place. Down there can be seen the far reach of the bear’s world, as vast as a night sky: a gray-green feathery expanse that rolls away and away and away. The boy steps to the edge, looks down into the pool, then to the right and to the left. The bear is down there, but hidden. He scans the spindly trees that reach up toward him from both banks, his hand again roofed over his eyebrows, but there is no creature to be seen.
Derek!!
He closes his eyes to concentrate on that call but immediately his sense of falling forward is overpowering, terrifying. He opens them again, and holds out his arms for balance, like a circus performer. The spasm eases and he breathes deep, and hears again, from the world he has left behind, in a deeper tone this time: Derek!!
Derek. Yes, that is his name. The boy moves his lips and repeats it silently, then again aloud, as the talking people do, whether in play or in anger or in pain, sending the word out into the bear’s realm. To the boy, his voice is more tremor than sound, making his head hum and rumble, but again he cries: Derek! Somewhere out there, the bear is still walking, patrolling its domain. As it moves farther and farther away, the boy’s cry becomes urgent: There may be no other chance for him to impart to the bear this crucial information. Derek! Somewhere out there, the bear is stopping, turning its head back, listening to this cry. Derek! Somewhere out there, the bear is looking in the direction of the boy. Can it see him here, high above the Unknown World?
David Desjardins is a journalist with roots in Rhode Island, having worked at The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal, and other newspapers. His short stories have been published in Ruminate, Roanoke Review, The Worcester Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Arlington, Mass. with his wife.
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