Hand and Shadow

We’re terrible with facts but decent with details, an inconvenience that courts trouble. Imagine a hunter committed to the long stalk but indecisive before a kill. That's us--but how can we regret our hesitation if a life has been spared? There’s a passage from a book we once read, the book’s title now lost to us, the passage written out in our own hand years ago in a blue notebook. Sir David Attenborough on the Bushmen of the Kalahari, their most time-worn hunting strategy. 
Since we’re unsure here, we can quote in full: 
An even more ancient and arduous method does not require any weapons whatsoever, only an endurance beyond our imagining. 
The first hint of an animal’s passage—nouns, verbs, pronouns, conjunctions. It’s decades old but on the move, searching for water, maybe, or high ground. The handwriting’s familiar but the animal’s habits are unusual. 
Having found possible prey, Sir David writes, an eland perhaps or a giraffe, the hunter frightens it so that it runs. He then follows at a steady pace and catches up with it so that before it is properly rested, it is put to flight once more. The pursuit continues in this way, through the hottest part of the day and beyond. It may take hours. It may even take days. Eventually the animal, deprived of any food or drink, collapses. 
Shades of Aesop, the tortoise and the hare. The rules of the race revised so the hare is chased down by the tortoise, outpaced by a murderous focus. 
But the hunter has also suffered, Sir David is quick to reminds us, and may be close to collapse himself…barely enough strength to complete the kill. 
But the killing, best believe, gets done. The corpse conveys upon its killer hunter-status. Only death can confer such an honor. That’s why copy and paste from one digital document to another won’t do: the passage has to be channelled through our nervous system, scribbled with a .oo5 Pigma Micron with our own hand. It took maybe three, five minutes to transcribe. Freshly killed, there it lay in the blue notebook, its dead live eyes marbling up at us. We closed the notebook. We followed the tracks of our pulse out the door, down the stairs, beyond the house and into the low-key centrifugal swirling of a neighborhood, its many falling leaves and dog walkers. We’re a dead man. We’re a self now, aware. 

*

What makes a huntsman? Spear gripped between thumb, fore, and middle finger, we poke the creature asleep before us—is it prey? We’ve been asking the room for a friend; it’s sent one from the twentieth century: The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, on the cover a black-and-white photo of Tal hunched over a chess match in progress. 
Mikhail was a fine huntsman. Life and Games a record of his finest chases. Details of each game, the moves involved, transcripts from interviews and a huntsman’s commentary on his opponents. For a long while he won more than he lost, until poor health and drinking took his luck away—after which the losses outnumbered the victories. He was worshipped in Latvia in his time and is the favorite grandmaster of our friend Vanya. Vanya born and raised in Mostar, drinker of kerosene while a refugee in Turkey, now a tech drone and retired metalhead in Kentucky. He’s thrashed us cleanly every time we’ve challenged him at chess. Years of tutelage as prey, we’ve learned what it feels like when our skull crackles between thirty-thousand pounds of pressure, caught between Vanya’s slowly closing jaws, white castle to black king, checkmate. Perishment is a requisite part of the learning process. Consoling us after yet another slaying in ten moves, Vanya assures us: across his career an accomplished huntsman will have perished as many times as he's been resuscitated. And here’s the cruel trick: only another killer can resuscitate you. 
Take Mikhail. He practiced these exchanges between hunter and prey daily since he was a youngster. How many kidney operations did he have to get through across the course of his life before he was allowed to die? Three of nine chapter titles in Life and Games acknowledge the problem: 
5 Unwell Again
6 Recovered
8 My ‘Death’ and my New Life
Over beers the other evening, Vanya asks again—asks every time you have a chance to sit across from each other—“How do you like your job?” He hopes a little of the shine has come off, to hear a little complaining. It’s in his nature, he’s Bosnian; happiness—other people’s, his own—no matter how briefly savored, is fundamentally suspect. Our job? To spite him with the truth, we tell him: we still love it. “Fuck, man,” he says. “I liked you better when you were depressed.” Finally we’ve found a way to outmaneuver him. We buy him another round to put him in check, but buy ourself one as well. A pair of stouts dark and thick. 
We toast his defeat by quoting back to him one of his favorites, the late wily huntsman and  Magician of Riga: I fell into a trap, so as then to catch my opponent in it. 
The trap is our good health, we cheer to it, sip together towards the dregs

of our mugs.

*

Zlatan has retired. At the age of forty-two the great and terrible Zlatan has tied the laces of his boots together, hung them around the neck of the nearest reporter. Microphones loved him as much as mere mortals hated him. He hated them back, even the gods among them. “He is not a man,” books have overheard him say of Pep Guardiola, and from a certain angle, a Zlatan angle, this is true—Pep’s proven his immortality as much as Zlatan. When one god clashes with another, they can’t occupy the same Valhalla. Zlatan of Sweden couldn’t cut it in Pep’s Barcelona, so he left and conquered Paris. When he opened his mouth, almost everyone laughed: his outrageous dismissive remarks were brutal wit. Twenty-five years have passed and he ends his career in Milan. When he shuts his mouth, will everyone forget him? 
In his day, he referred to himself as a lion. Straight face as he said it, commenting on a swift recovery from injury—Lions don’t recover as humans do. The straightness of the face broke soon as he said it, as if he’d finally surprised himself; the absurdity of assertions he’d make, to test and see if he could believe them. 
Even in retirement, a myth refuses to lick its wounds. The wounds heal too quickly—their man smiles in supreme arrogance and challenges anyone with an opinion about his legacy. How can talkers diminish it, if the career’s finished and he’s fulfilled the legacy by not caring? Once, having arrived in Los Angeles, Zlatan received a signed jersey from LeBron James. Kings of a pride will rarely tolerate such gestures from another king. What was Zlatan’s response? Did he thank King James? Did he call him up and ask him out for drinks at a club, or dinner? Of course not. Those would be mortal replies. He signed LeBron’s own jersey—Zlatan Ibrahimovich—and sent it back to him. It’s said to this very day LeBron dislikes the man. But maybe respects him a bit more than he would admit. But that’s all the past now. Now the lion has retired, leaving humans to comment on his absence from the pitch. 
Among many bitchy morsels he’s left us, there are his occasional remarks on the art of the hunt, the quiet to be found deep within the woods surrounding a soccer field. 
Do you know what I love about hunting? he once asked, already knowing the answer. 
That I am no one in the woods, no one at all. I thought the animals might recognize me, but they didn’t. They didn’t even ask me for my autograph.
Of course they wouldn’t—wouldn’t dare. His signature would bring danger. They’d much prefer another day of life than to be made famous by his maiming them. 


*

We knew a man once who observed a curious ritual. Our neighbor, he lived alone in a house built for a family. In the fall months he would travel to the mountains to kill deer. During the winter months their carcasses could be seen hanging from his back porch, frozen plastic gallon jugs of water stuffed into their cavities. We were told by an acquaintance in his house the man kept a tanning bed and that often he was driven to fury by squirrels that trespassed through a second-floor window. The one tree in his back yard was hundreds of years old; its branches extended level to roof. Squirrels would scurry the branches and leap to his house, and from there they burgled the man’s hidden dominion, waking him often at night with their scratching and chatter. 
There was an unease to the man’s greetings, a secretive greed in the searching looks he would send passing over the bare legs of joggers and younger women among us. We kept our distance, didn’t trust him beyond a hello. Not that he was a hunter—we had known many in our time and had judged them respectful of life, such that they upheld certain codes of conduct when taking one. No, not that—that he hung his kills where anyone might see them. Dogs would stalk the boundaries of his fence line, eager for meat-scent. Children would gawk at the skinned limbless husks, ask their mothers later during dinnertime what sort of creatures those slabs of boned muscle had once been. He was a hunter without decency or moderation. He watched women from his windows, as they walked to their cars. None of us would doubt he kept certain of those women hanging as well in his head. 
Out of our window one spring afternoon, we spied a dog gnawing the remains of a squirrel. The following morning we found another squirrel frozen stiff on the bricks of the back porch. Carrying bags of perishable refuse to the large compost pile in the yard, we noticed squirrels mangled and half-buried among banana peels and grass clippings. Dogs, we’d thought—the dozen or so who wandered the neighborhood alleys, stealing into unfenced yards at night. Our upstairs neighbor happened to be watering his plants on the second floor deck, called down to us, “Dale’s been killing squirrels. I told him he could toss them there. Protein for the compost pile—hope you don’t mind.” 
Glossy black of their seed-like eyes; delicate miniature satellite dish ears, furred and spidered with the finest capillaries—yes, we told him, we did mind. 
A city ordinance specified that if squirrels were trapped, they should be driven to a wooded area and released. Three steel traps were set around Dale’s yard. A live thing thrashed around the interiors of one nearest to the fence. When the thrashing ceased, a tiny black eye spied us through a hole in the grating. Our neighbor described Dale’s hunting technique; ten dead and one live squirrel listened as he explained. 
First thing each morning Dale walked the yard with his morning coffee, screwdriver in his back pocket. With a hand he swept clean any traps he found empty. He used cornbread as bait; most mornings they were gummy with dew. The trap-refreshing process was simple enough: tear a cornbread muffin in two, push it to rear of the long steel rectangular cage, reset the trip pins and wait. Should he find a trap occupied, he’d wriggle hands into a pair of leather gloves, gather his prey with a strong grip, stab it in the neck and belly, stab it half a dozen times with the screwdriver. From his deck over morning coffee, our neighbor had seen it. Dale staring at the little death kicking in his grip, savoring the end of a life. After the squirrel went limp, he walked to the fence line, tossed it over. He had done this dozens of mornings—by late afternoon during summertime, the compost pile breathed with flies. 
He was a hunter without honor. Never had we learned to despise someone so quickly. We borrowed a shovel from a neighbor and gathered each of his victims for a communal burial. To spare them an unwelcome resurrection by dogs, wrapped them in plastic. After which we knocked on Dale’s front door. 
He answered with anger, accusations, in a terrycloth bathrobe. His long sweaty hair was blasted with bedhead; his jaw jackhammered—chew chew chew—a mint-green wad of gum. 
“I’ve been watching,” he told us. “I’ve got live feed of cameras out back. I ever catch you sneaking onto my property to mess with my traps, I’ll sue for trespassing.” 
We considered threatening him in kind. Violations of city ordinance, illegal dumping of waste on private property. There were symptoms of an illness sour and electric in his eyes and stridency—we thought twice. No more killings, we requested. And if that was not possible, no more remains tossed to our yard. Our landlord had been alerted, we lied, had disapproved much as we had. Police would be called, he said, if he came by on his monthly rounds to find squirrel-parts littering the yard. Dale told us just what we could do with our landlord, then slammed the door to kill off the sight of us. It was understood we should leave soon if we wanted to survive his porch—shovel over shoulder, we walked. 
Weeks afterward, the man could be seen fuming from one window or another. There was a version of him for every window, a kind of inverse haunting: whatever he gathered into his gaze, he spooked with rages of the mind. 
Years later, while squirrel-spirits scramble intertwining branches above us, we'll pause on our walk, ask: who had been more superior in their craft? The hunter who killed to avenge an irrational grievance, or worse, his annoyance; or the hunter who stalked a murdered prey, to revive it?  

*

We’re lost, so you could say we’re back on the trail. The black notebook is open; phrases written in a familiar hand talk among themselves; sometimes it’s enough to leave a notebook alone, open on a desk, sunlight from a nearby window brightening the pages. Enough exposure will eventually brown the paper, a protracted subtle immolation. In a hundred years the voices will fade and quotes will go blind, the pages brittle, fragile. 
Many friends and acquaintances hide together in the black notebook; each we’ve found along the way, on specific occasions. Most are dead, technically. The rest are unaware they’re lodgers in our notebook. They keep us company. They encourage the belief it’s still possible to sustain “an inner life.” Many of their names are esteemed in their respective fields, not all equally. Important. Once they had been relevant to the ongoing communal enterprise beyond the sovereign meagerness of black notebooks—now they’ve been cut to quotes, modest again, equal in size to the hand that copied them in cramped cursive. 
When we need encouragement, when we need to be found and affirmed one brief moment along this trail that leads into and beyond ourselves, we flip a page back to the past and read. 
Paul Klee, final page of his diaries. It’s been years since he last inhabited us; but here he is, alive again; reciting the epitaph he’d written for a future headstone:

I cannot be grasped in the here and now. 
For I reside just as much with the dead 
as with the unborn. Somewhat closer 
to the heart of creation than usual.

The heart of creation—is it elsewhere? The black notebook’s not sure. But then we remember: before he’d written his last words, we’d been unthinkable, inconceivable. Then he’d died and inhabited them: we were suddenly possible. Forty years later we were born having never heard of him. It would take a lifetime of tracking to discover those first tentative prints that would lead us to him; neither dead nor unborn, in the pages of a diary well past its expiration date; held in hand, opened, warmed by the nearness of our breath. 


*

Easy to romanticize, the heart of creation. We do it too. The flexing engine that pushes us through ever-narrowing channels, arteries, veins, capillaries. Like fire, it’ll perish without oxygen. We regard it, often wrongly, as a solid good working the protean materials of day and night into alien shapes we can re-enter so we might feel the hidden inner arc of lives and admire them. A solid good—but is it? The man who would rape or maim your spouse or daughter is sustained by heartbeats as well; he follows impulses where they lead; often as mementos to his satisfaction or relief, will take trophies. Trophies are proof that, in certain vulgar hands, the sacredness of a hunt can be profaned. Hunters often render everything they touch into kills, and those kills into trophies. Their children, their parents, their lovers. 
These are generalities, we know—they read lovely as flowers in a garden. Let’s water a few weeds, a few dirty specifics, to keep them company. A story. 
Once there was a man born in Czechoslovakia. First he was a child like any other. Very few people noticed him. In his youth he heard a heartbeat outside of his body, a subtle thump-thumping in everything—the heart of creation. He discovered pencils, paper; these early imaginary friends led him to a playground of canvases and easels. He became a painter, enrolled at the Academy of Fine Art. He learned his craft following the path taken years before by his hero Josef Čapek. When the Communists conquered his country and inhabited it with their demands, he and other students were tasked with working in the mode of social-realism. The young man refused, followed his own heartbeat out the doors of the Academy. He rented a dirty studio and resumed painting. No one asked after his fate, no one cared. It was a lonely life. A new life for him—Pariah. Such were the sacrifices he was willing to make to remain free and pure: people would turn their backs when they saw him. Eventually the Communists couldn’t tolerate even this, the little bit of freedom afforded by his exile, so tossed him from his studio into the street and evicted his paintings along with him. The Pariah had been cast out into the wilderness; out of necessity he had to learn to feed and clothe himself. That spring day, thrown to the streets by strong men brusque with moral certainty, he found himself a hunter. Standing to his feet, he set off to create for himself an even more secret life. To accomplish this task, he adopted the habits of pariah-hood fully, adorned himself in pariah-hood’s classic uniform: a ragged, wrinkled suit, hair and beard scraggly and long. He did not trim time from his head but let it grow where it pleased. Scissors and razors were polite deceivers, he would say to himself, to himself since no one dared stand near enough to hear him. They would have a person remain in a present tense of their own design. He would not stand for it. No—he would not sit down, either. He would keep in motion, he would walk. 
A sad case. A pitiful bemusement. Townspeople, spotting the Pariah on a wander, would spare him their close consideration. He was a local figure but only occasionally a curiosity. None remembered when the camera first appeared in his hands. Homemade, cobbled together from junk. For some time many among them mistook it for a symbol of madness: the Pariah and his plaything, a wad of camera-like garbage he lifted to his eye, a mock-photographer taking a garbage picture. The man had been a painter and look where that had brought him. Workingmen would point to the Pariah crouching behind a bush or trundling across a field and warn their sons—“There’s the fate that awaits you, if you don’t set aside childish play and get a job.” 
Accepted nowhere, he could appear most places and not be bothered. The bus station, the main square, the park across from the public swimming pool. He kept his distance because he’d been born at a distance. The camera he carried everywhere helped—it brought the unreachable nearer, afforded a safe view of people in their normalcy. It was harmless, the townspeople believed. It was not a real camera. Some would pose and smile. Some would wave. 
Never underestimate a Pariah’s inventiveness. The truth was otherwise, and known now—the camera was a true thing, their lighthearted dismissiveness naive. The recipe for a garbage camera called for a far-fetched array of ingredients: plywood, thread spools, dressmaker’s plastic. Road asphalt was applied along its edges to prevent light leaks. Bottoms were cut from empty coke bottles and sanded down with sand paper, polished with a mix of cigarette ash and toothpaste. It was true thing with humble beginnings, the camera. Much like its pariah-father, its vision was born from deprivation. 
This was long ago. Now that the story has been told, the past has changed: the Pariah has become known, has won admirers. His fame describes him as an Outsider, a tragic man of principles. For many lonely years he wandered the small town of Kyjov and its surrounding environs taking up to a hundred pictures a day, which he then brought back to a grubby room afforded him for free by a kindly widow, where each negative was printed once and once only. Sheet metal, a light bulb, a tin can, and two fence slats: these came together to serve as an enlarger. The final products he would glue onto cardboard. Here the heart of creation had beat loudly—and few had heard. Pity the Outsider, the originality of his solitude. What would have become of the photographs littering his floor, if Art hadn’t come calling and taken notice? 
He had been a faithful hunter. He had weathered the elements and daily sought his kills. Obsessively he’d tracked a certain species almost exclusively: young women, girls. Girls lounging poolside in bikinis. Girls picnicking in the park. Buxom mothers pinning wet clothes to dry on clotheslines. What did the town think, once it finally saw itself through his eyes? For their Pariah had not merely been a harmless Peeping Tom, but a coveter of what pariah-hood had long denied him—the loveliness of bodies bereft of the women inside them. He had long been town’s mad saint; now he was revealed a Creeper. On a gallery wall in Paris they hung like trophies. Cultured people stood before them, wine glasses in hand, admiring the townspeople's skinned selves taxidermied in black-and-white. They were young at the time and disturbed now at how little they knew of him. 


*

Ancient methods—no matter how contemporary. We’re in a different morning, at a different window, looking at the same yard. First frost outside. We’re of a generation that celebrates the cold, since it augurs eventual relief from allergies. Ragweed, grass, trees—all the green torturers. Our immune system, hypersensitive to minuscule pseudo-pathogens, also part of our inheritance from the mountains, east of where we’re sitting. Brain fog, post-nasal drip, cyclical coughing; eye-rawness, histamine delirium. 
Twice a week we drive to a clinic for immunotherapy. A needle in each arm every visit. Kind ladies distract us with small talk as they deliver the injections. We watch them pierce the lid of tiny red vials, inch back the plunger, draw the allergen concentrate into the needle. We pay good money for these liquids made in a lab. We pay the kindly nurses to pinch a bit of skin and pierce it, push the plunger with their gloved thumbs. Spores and pollens, roughly twenty species, enter the arm and inspire a localized response. Within an hour we can rub the hardened red lump and feel a heat, a kind of pet fever. Before there were needles to solve the puzzle of an immune system in distress, what options did a poor people have? Certain ladies born from the mountains tell me: they had remedies that damn near resembled witchcraft. 
Mama Whittaker was one such mountain mother. She and her people settled around the turn of the century in a holler a stone’s throw from Hazard, called Viper. Some soul long ago had been threatened by a massive rattlesnake, she’d often been told, had maybe even been bit, and as a warning to all future journeymen had returned to civilization having named the place Viper. Mama Whittaker married a secret moonshiner named G.C., Grover Cleveland, his namesake elected president the year of his birth. They sired fifteen children using the mountain method: no protection from anything. Well before the Depression crossed the land of plenty like a famished band of locusts, they were poor. When the stock market crashed, little changed for them. How could they feel the crash, if a stock market had never been built here, Mama Whittaker would say. They lived in a cabin and slept four to a bed. For months at a time G.C. would vanish to play a while with other women. Sated, he would return and lie without much skill or remorse. He had been about, he would tell his wife. He had been out earning a dollar, but having earned it had to spent it to buy a way back home. 
Out of necessity, they were scavengers. They lived so far on the edge of the larger economy money had to go out of its way to reach them. They found they could help a little, meet it halfway: Mr. Combs at Peabody Station would buy ginseng root at a favorable price then up-charge it a fair amount to a wholesaler. Mama Whittaker learned of this from other matriarchs in other hollers and schooled her children in the art of ginseng scavenging. Each morning during the summer months she would divide the children into groups of two, one older with one younger, send them in varied directions through the forest. With sticks they’d dig the damp ground, wriggle the roots free like teeth, drop them among others of their kind in a burlap sack. When the sun was half a finger-length from the top of the sky, they’d call an end to the day’s hunt and wander home. They survived many a starveling year on such earnings. Root-mongering was humble work but they considered themselves lucky—who knew the hills better than they? Mama Whittaker explained that they were helping not just themselves but humankind with their labors. These pale-golden tendrils and tubers were medicinal and had been used by doctors for centuries to heal all manner of ailment. The children believed her. If their father was a devil, their mother was god: her sing-song descriptions of the ways and laws of the universe comforted them, no matter that they often felt otherwise. Hunting for roots was a chore, boring. If it was such a benefit to others, why were they the ones hunting? 
To this day the children, now ancient themselves, speak of their labors as a necessity but a waste. They live alone in nursing homes that few people care to visit. A sovereign quiet surrounds their bitterness: they will speak only if there’s a story to tell. The stories will exclusively repeat events of a shared past, though the past has outlived them. Each will comment in their way on that curious habit observed by their mother. She adored babies. Much the reason she kept having them. And when she was past age to carry a child, began tearing photographs of babies reproduced in advertisements in Sears catalogs. These she pasted to the walls of the cabin’s kitchen. Washing dishes after dinner, a person would be surrounded from all sides by babies. One by one as the children grew smart enough to leave the holler of their birth, their mother continued to sire babies by proxy. Once the kitchen walls were exhausted, babies were papered across every inch of wall through each room of the cabin. When she was a widow and alone, she was mother to hundreds, if not thousands. She was never lonely. Her chosen kin kept her company while her adult children roamed the earth, fleeing their own childhoods and the mountains.

*

We pass through the royal gateway adorned with golden stags. We enter where maps have left us, a paradise centuries old. A seasonably warm Sunday in Djurgården. 
People float along gravel paths two by two. Some reel past on bicycles. Walking bridges lead from island to island, a linseed mill stands waiting for tourists to pose before it, a bit of historical color. We have brought the green notebook along with us, a traveler across four continents. Later in the evening it will open on a glass coffee table in the apartment lent to us by an American couple who emigrated back to Utah. It will repeat back to us many mundane visions of Stockholm, particularly the swimmers leaping from docks or sitting on concrete steps, shiny wet in Speedos, along the strand, westernmost edge of Kungsholmen. 
We walk anonymously among languages, we follow the sunlight wherever it falls. We buy a cup of coffee and listen to leaves gossip and dogs bark. In the intimate future we will meet reindeer as they trot past, in Jämtland. We will wander without purpose in Trondheim. In Ålesund we’ll admire the shiver-shine of light along the coast. Geirangerfjord will carry us atop a cliff to an abandoned farm; from there, we’ll view a long fall to glacial waters. Besseggen will be next, and will be miserable. Chilly drizzle, hiking half-lost in fog for hours. In a sod-covered cabin, we will dry our socks on a radiator and read twenty years’ worth of entries in a registry kept on the kitchen table. After which we will complete our traveler’s circuit and return to Kungsholmen. 
The green notebook will mark these, abridge weeks into scribbles of detail, place names, dates. Months will flow by and one morning we’ll wake in a different bedroom on a different continent, in a country that has never sported a royal hunting grounds, a place such as Djurgården. On the inside cover, written by us just moments ago, a summary remark on what follows, a sentence lifted from the behavioral neuroscience textbook we had brought with us across the ocean. We can discover a great deal about learning and memory by examining how they fail. Why else would we spend our precious time re-reading entries made months ago by some imposter skilled at forging our handwriting? None of it reads believably, though we remember it. The felt element of it evades capture, like a deer chasing its instinct to live. It leaps a fallen tree, slips through briars. It breaks into a clearing and survives the rifle. We were there once, as well. 

*

A sad tale—one unknown by many, so worth telling. Once told it might then be forgotten, but on its own terms: the story of Joy Tudo. 
It began five years ago, in the Philippines. There was a day of rain, darkness on the horizon. A day of rain became a night of rain. Soon days and nights became indistinguishable and there was only rain. There was anger in the wind. There were curses for every tree and house. From the east, across the ocean, a typhoon travelled to punish the earth and its people no matter where they lived, city or village. A ragged, spinning eye—from space, satellites tracked and portrayed it. It was given the name Mangkhut. In its passing many an island was swallowed and digested, defecated as mountains of mud bubbling under downpour. 
In the mining town of Itogon there had been a landslide. A steep hillside had weakened and given way, mauling and burying a mining camp’s bunkhouse under twenty feet of earth and stone. People had been buried alive along with it. The survivors were counted so their number might be subtracted against, to estimate the number of people underground. Among them was a thirty-six-year-old member of the Ifugao tribe, a woman who had travelled from her home village looking for work and had hidden from the rain in the wrong shelter. A rescue team arrived then came the local and freelance foreign reporters. A forensics team from the National Bureau of Investigation appeared a day or so later, all while townspeople and miners stood by watching. 
Word had travelled by mouth and by phone through Benguet Province and beyond—a certain family’s sister and daughter and cousin had disappeared underground and was calling out to them. Two dozen of the woman’s kin drove eight hours through muddy switchbacks and half-ruined roads to reach her, to help in any way they were allowed. There had been government orders to keep clear—but how could a government truly expect a people to do so, if the earth had opened and swallowed one of their own? 
In the woman’s home village her cousins attempted to reach her through ritual forms of communication with the vanished and the dead. A pig was slaughtered. They prayed that their cousin’s spirit would aid the rescue workers in their search to find her. On the seventh day of prayer, Joy Tudo’s spirit spoke to her cousins through the mouth of a mumbukai, a medium employed for that very purpose: a human telephone one can use to talk with the dead. Please find me, she begged, I’m hanging on a post. I’m missing a foot. My cousin doesn’t have a head. I screamed for my mother. I died slowly. I started praying the Our Father. Before I finished, I was taken. 
The day after Joy Tudo’s spirit spoke, her cousin Jasmin was found as described. A few days later rescue workers found Joy and exhumed her from the ground. Prophecy fulfilled, her people asked to take her home. No, they were told, there was a body to account for, more work to be done. There was a clerk typing death certificates. There were forensic workers in Hazmat suits and surgical masks. Permission was requested that bone and tissue samples be taken for DNA identification in a lab, as if the body wasn’t verifiable by sight. They could see her. They had been seeing her in their hearts and minds all their lives. No—they would not sign a waiver. They had at least been given a choice. 
As soon as the body was returned, zipped in a bag, they laid her in the back of a truck and drove through the night to the village were she had been born and raised, where she was wanted. She had left to work at a gold mine and a terrible thing had happened; a curious ore herself, she’d been mined for her story. Connoisseurs of other people’s misfortunes the world over, including our own, we’ve told it. Make of it what you will. Dead, living—we’re a serviceable medium for neither.

*

In the Corps psychotherapists are called wizards. A few discharged Marines have told us so. The hallway outside the office is purring with white noise machines and the office walls are white and clean and decorated with black and white photographs of Mother Nature in a variety of alluring poses. The office park is hardly an Emerald City and the waiting room with its pleasant magazines and coffee maker and water cooler hardly suggest visitors have been granted entry into Oz. It’s quiet though and often that’s enough. People can wait without being bothered. 
The room’s protected by confidentiality but the confidentiality only runs one way—whatever a wizard says can be repeated to lovers and family members and friends, often as explanation for some irritation or problem. 
We were amused when the ex-Marines told us how we were described because the comparison wasn’t far off the mark. Draw back the emerald velvet curtains and of course anyone will find a little man pulling levers and thundering orders into a microphone. Had they expected otherwise? There’s magic in the curtain but a wizard will choose pragmatism every time when it’s called for, draw back the curtains when necessary to reveal their own humble dimensions. If there’s disappointment, there were undue expectations at play, there was mystification. A wizard will rejoice in the loss of such powers, since they never possessed them in the first place. Life in a quiet room has not absolved them of their own dirty human issues and to point that out should be obvious but it isn’t: people will fight a god in order to continue believing in him, we have seen it. By our own hand we have attempted deicide and have seen believers leap from the couch to fight for survival of the illusion. In such instances it’s unwise to fight back. Better to rely on effects of slow erosion. After months of talking, they’ll habituate to the human in the chair across from them; their wizard will die quietly and a fragrance of rot will fill the room. Ideally, certain hard-won improvements will mark his funeral. If only it happened so easily. 
There is a desk and chair, a laptop and lamp and coffee mug filled with pens. There is a bookcase filled with clinical literature and pop-psych page-turners. By design the room is generic and welcomes its visitors’ skeptical reservations and undeserved admirations equally, impartially. Some have been ordered by a court to enter; others come willingly. There is a window view of the street outside, obscurable upon request by curtains and Venetian blinds. As quiet and unchaste as any monastery—many secrets, shames, forbidden muses. Alone at lunchtime consulting with our sandwich, we hear wordless voices through the walls. Other wizards, other Dorothys. Fellow castaways in search of a heart and brain and courage. 


*

The divine creature is a shapeshifter and cannot be touched without risk of electrocution. Bristling with sparks and wattage it zigzags through buildings and power lines, surfaces to brighten with needle-like severity the intricacies of a filament cased within the frosty confines of a lightbulb. Within a wall socket it lays curled, supine and lethal, awaiting a plug or butter knife to explore the forked crevice of its lair. It assumes many forms depending on the time of day and the weather. Those who seek enlightenment and dare handle it directly, to tame it for their own purposes, no matter how profane they may be, tend to perish gruesomely—fitting punishment for their presumption and arrogance. It will eat the life right off their faces and leave them clean and unbroken like freshly licked plates. Rarely do the peasants in its queendom request an audience with it without protection, for they have witnessed on evening news programs the ruinous fate met by similar aspirants and consider themselves warned. 
Five lightbulbs surround us, our own private harem of suns. For miles in every direction there are buildings and streets and within the buildings rooms upon rooms. There are plasma televisions and laptops and ceiling fans chasing their tails and going nowhere. Around us, far beyond the bandwidth of our capacity to conceive all of it in accurate specific detail, a whole city is possessed by the divine creature and hums. 
If we could play cryptozoologist for an evening we would attempt a taxonomy of its many manifestations and origins. It rumbles through the thudding walls of apartments, bass and treble rippling the air as sound waves. It blows dragon-heat from the grilled mouth of a hairdryer. It charges half a million I-Phones any given minute, replenishes the power-load of a quarter million vape pens. Once condemned men were buckled into a chair, donned with a crown through which, at the flip of a switch, it coursed searingly through a shaved human skull. Exposed to its full wrath they fried in the grand style of eggs cracked open into skillets. These rare few appearances were celebrated as justice and much faith was placed in its persuasive power as a deterrent. The man who would take a life for his pleasure would think twice, reminded every evening as he flipped a light switch off before entering an unsuspecting bedroom. Its authority was mythic and subtle but according to neuroscientists familial in origin—for brains sustain themselves electro-chemically much like AAA batteries. The wattage of meager thought was enough to softly power a lightbulb. 
We were thinking this and enacting proof of that very point. Agnostic to the faith, nonetheless we respected its many fetishes of worship. The streetlight. The power station. The digital billboard preaching to passersby on the freeway 10% OFF ALL ELECTRONICS THIS APRIL AT BEST BUY. Awful and holy were its many incarnations, for they were homely, unassuming enough to trick us into complacency and hubris. To liven our mortal coil, to brighten the dark our ignorance casts about us, it was enough to shuffle socked feet on our carpet and with a finger touch our outstretched tongue. The resulting shock stung us. Duly warned and humbled, after a period of brief speechlessness we could speak of it. Sentient current in search of a host, it was here as much as it was everywhere.


*

Ms. Michelle hunts people for a living. If there are people on the run and they’re hard to find, she’ll find them. If you need a bill collector, she’ll be your bill collector. If you need a bounty hunter, she’ll hunt you for a bounty. She takes on cases other investigators can’t solve. Most of her work is done digitally and remote, tracking location blips, status updates, financial records. 
Once a Peruvian crime family had stolen a fleet of Caterpillar wheel loaders and she was tasked with finding them. She was particularly proud of her ingenuity on this one. Since a direct approach would most likely get her nowhere, she emailed the estranged wife of the family’s patriarch, reeled her in with a sob story: she was pregnant with her husband’s child and he was denying patrimony. The wife was suspicious at first, then furious. Eventually she told Ms. Michelle where the stolen equipment had been shipped—to a construction site somewhere in South America. 
Painstaking patience. A love of the hunt and data-mongering. As a girl she’d sit at the kitchen table while other children played, assembling a thousand piece puzzles. There was the thrill of exacting revenge for crimes that hadn’t even been committed against her—people who behaved as if they were beyond the reach of consequence. Many of them, if intelligent and motivated, could hide themselves well enough to evade the FBI. The FBI was her competition; she prided herself on catching perpetrators the U.S. government couldn’t. 
The catch that distinguished her, that placed her talents above all others, was the Mullen case. One day she received a call from ACS requesting help recovering a Hatteras yacht named Morning Star. A year earlier a man by the name of Ryan Eugene Mullen had stolen it and vanished. One by one private investigators had tried finding him and had come back empty-handed. The target in question had been a fugitive for over a dozen years and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. His specs were generic: six foot three, two hundred pounds, blue eyes, deep voice, light brown hair. He wore a size fifteen shoe and in his youth had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. As a teen he’d been incarcerated for beating his girlfriend. Somewhere along the way he’d graduated to more sophisticated involvements and filched the U.S. government of two million dollars through multiple acts of cybercrime. 
Nowadays with the help of the internet a criminal can divide themselves into several alternate identities. They can employ any number of ghosting tactics from remote locations. Ms. Michelle began her hunt at a pay-per-use public records database, searching key SITS variables—shelter, income, transportation, social contact. There were dozens of off-brand versions of the man floating around the cyber-world: Reuben Ryan Mullen, Ryan Paul Mullen, Ryan Ray Mullen. Names mixed and matched until they lost their distinguishing features. 
Ms. Michelle reached out to friends at federal agencies, had them check her findings against government databases. They were able to glean a few trace details on several of the aliases. Many led back to several individuals living in the New Orleans area for the past decade, each linked in some way to a Ryan Patrick Mullen. Two of these were the man’s parents; a third was the owner of a junk yard who’d once made the sorry mistake of hiring the man as manager. It was this last lead that confirmed many of the physical descriptions of the man circulating among databases were far off the mark. In the lead’s humble estimation, they were bullshit. 
The yacht was recovered docked on an inland channel in Louisiana. Mullen had attempted to purchase a large house with phony credit and stirred up local suspicion among realtors. Ms. Michelle had arranged for his arrest remotely and enjoyed sight of Mullen handcuffed through a live feed on a federal officer’s camera phone. The man denied all wrongdoing and claimed his innocence, despite the fact he’d been arrested attempting to board the very boat he’d stolen. He seemed confused by the sudden bustle of agents around him. Clearly it’d been something he hadn't conceived might happen. Maybe a guilty man could profess his innocence long enough he might be absolved of his crimes. Or perhaps he believed he was wrongly accused: some other version of himself had implicated him. 
Ms. Michelle was philosophical on the matter. Maybe he lost track of which self he was, until I came along to remind him. 

*

To be startled, to run; to be chased until one’s legs give out; to drop to the hot ground; to lay panting in the dust. Hounded for days and weeks and years—one generation after another following us at a jog or sprint. No break in the chase to slake our thirst at a water hole. No easy moment available to graze. So we starve and we thirst and as we run we weaken ourselves, all the while our pursuers keeps pace. 
They are a hunting party. They work in shifts. Patience and endurance their only weapons. We did them no harm. Our entire life kept a thoughtful distance from their village. But they grew hungry and with hunger’s hard eyes they saw us, head bowed to sniff the ground or tear with teeth a tough sprig of grass. Before we took notice of their approach, we were shocked into flight, we were running. 
Dust cakes our nostrils, peppers our lashes. Our legs lay like tinder beside us. Footfalls thump the ground, louder from every direction. A man appears, and another. They circle us, leap back when we kick. They move slowly, like leaves on water. They too are exhausted, drained of a will to run. One carries a heavy stone, another grasps at our ears. The ears flick, dodge his grasping hands. But they’re caught eventually. The stone lifts. The stone in both hands slams down. A gash splits our forehead. Blood spurts across the dust, gummy dark rivulets. Our spirit dies within our body and we’re carried by many hands, on many shoulders from the place where we'd fallen. 
We are disemboweled, dismembered, roasted over a very popular fire, eaten. We travel in parts down many gullets. We enter many a child and man and old woman. Enzymes in their stomachs dissolve us. Our essence disperses through their bodies as nutrition. We wake the next morning a dozen people. We open our new eyes and behold each other. Some of us gather mid-morning for an expedition, to search the outlying territories for another meal to chase. We are refreshed, strong. We are not alone, we have each other, and are prepared to race death. Out in the hinterlands it waits, a sacrificial offering. It takes the form of an animal. Wired for fear, swift of hoof. But abandoned by the herd when we come running. 

*

The yellow notebook is a dreamer, makes use of us when it needs us, which is often. Pages flutter like the eyelids of a sleeper in REM: something is happening, some twilight psychodrama is being corroborated. Any cue that an animal uses to synchronize its activity with the environment is called a zeitgeber, we’ve read. German for ‘time giver’. Light acts as a powerful zeitgeber. The yellow notebook is a daytime sleeper but recruits us to do its walking. We carry it nearly everywhere, open it in opportune moments to transcribe second-hand testimonies from other dreamers cast across the alternating dark and light of the earth. The notebook rewards our labors by electing to be our private zeitgeber: by feeding it and sustaining it, by powering the engine of this tiny sun, we acclimate to many rhythms around us. 
The yellow notebook is a time giver and we are its faithful receiver and this would be a symbiosis made in heaven, if there were any truth to mortal cosmologies and the yellow notebook was neverending. But there is a limit to the number of pages available to it. Currently it’s three-fourths through its life cycle. 
We have read that the skulls of certain species are thin enough that light can pass through; that in birds, for instance, the pineal gland is studded with photoreceptors that can detect daylight through cerebral bone. Differently so, for mammals. Since their skulls are too thick to permit the passage of solar radiation, such cells breed in eyeballs instead. This is why we open our eyes before reading the yellow notebook, rather than reading with eyes closed, the more customary requirement for dreaming. The yellow notebook, being a lifelong dreamer, obliges us to meet it with eyes open. Together we enjoy one another’s company lucidly. 
Often our hands play above it and its light casts engorged hand-shadows on the wall. There’s a certain dramaturgy involved: the hands think they’re improvising certain configurations to conjure certain shapes for the wall, but really, who’s to say they aren’t receiving obscure instructions from the notebook? There’s no other explanation for the variety of dramatis personae they’re able to cast in shadow. Few bear any obvious points of reference with the personal lives of their hand-actors. The key is to watch the silent action of shadows, their exploits and conflicts, not the hands; to study every nuance laid bare by their interaction. Since they can’t speak for themselves, we’re left to interpret their needs and aspirations. Maybe they’re unaware of such things as well. The interpretations we provide for them change according to our whim and are the closest we can get to assigning them coherence as a story. 
This afternoon we watch them arrive and leave without due explanation. Ms. Michelle, the skip tracer. Electricity in its many forms coursing through a city, lethal or otherwise. Joy Tudo and her unluckiness. Mama Whittaker and her brood of ginseng scavengers. The lonely voyeur of Kyjov, the squirrel-killer, Zlatan Ibrahimovich in retirement. Mikhail Tal’s finest chess matches replayed for posterity. All these latent in the consolidating dream-time of the yellow notebook; opened on the desk before us, they radiate electromagnetically from their common source. The hands are receivers and do the rest. We’re their sole audience. 
When the play’s over and the actors retire and notebook closes, what will we make of what they've shown us? Repetitions of theme, motifs—were these red herrings to distract from some other subtle exchange we hadn’t noticed? There had been a meeting of dreams and they’d come to an agreement, but as of yet we were still clueless what had been the subject or purpose of their argument. Something about hunters. Something about the lives of the harrowed, the hunted. We would have to reopen the notebook and offer it our hands and eyes again, watch its protagonists play again without awareness of prior exploits. A second performance can never exactly resemble the first, though. The second will deviate from the original and lose itself, all the better to find itself, a game of fates on the wall.