Segment 4

         Greeted by the sight of cold fire, I spasm, moving without purchase, without friction. I feel so lost, there’s a wind passing through me that I can’t feel properly and it’s taking me wherever it can. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how to get back. I’m on my feet and I don’t remember standing there. I’m surrounded by colors. No, not colors. Leaves. I’m standing, half buried in autumn. I might be wearing a jacket, I don’t remember if I was, before I fell into the stream. I can’t feel my arms. I know that they’re still there, but I can’t see them. I can’t feel them. Oh God. Help me. I don’t know how to tear myself away.
         I’m standing in a patch of grass, trees arcing around me, lifting spread arms to the sky. Wind rustles the branches quietly and stragglers flitter down to join their companions on the ground. There’s sunlight coming from somewhere and it catches the leaves like prisms, spreading glimpses of bright color over the ground, in my eyes. There’s a smell here, but I don’t recognize it. I turn around, as best I can and see the patch goes on for a while, nearly a field. There’s buildings in the distance, blocky and angular, expressively functional. Pivoting, I see closer ones, rectangles with windows. I don’t know how to describe. I’m not an architect. It’s late afternoon, maybe. Or early morning. I can’t feel the temperature. If only I could tell. The sky’s pure blue, hardly a cloud in sight. A canvas wiped clean. I’m not sure where this is. The year rattles around in my head, but it means nothing to me. I wasn’t here, at this point.
         I see you before I hear you. Your shape is a dart going right into my chest, I can’t help but notice it. You’re some distance away, coming toward me. There’s a sidewalk by my feet, too close to touch. A walkway. I’m trying to find the right words but they’re being torn apart before I can reach them. I’m not like this normally, I don’t know what’s happening. I’m supposed to be trained, calm and decisive, ready to act in the face of danger. Now I’m jittery, vibrating like angry static, a constant heavy sensation in my stomach that I can’t dislodge. Out of sorts. This has never happened to me before and I don’t know how to stop it, I can go only go along with it, until it ends or until I break from the barrage. If that would even happen. If it’s possible.
         You’re much closer now. Time is moving in fits and starts, someone has broken the projector and it’s jumping all around. For a second there’s two of you where one used to be. No, there really are two but one isn’t you. It’s a man, someone I don’t recognize. You’re walking close to him. I crouch down, this relentless weight bearing down on me. You’re laughing, your head thrown back, sun slashing diagonally on your face. I crush my hands to the side of my head, trying to restrict my vision. But I can hear you now, and see the brisk shimmer of your mingled shadows. Part of me strains for action, to throw myself right in your path in the hopes that it might trigger something, that it might snap me free. But I’m anchored to my own course, wherever it will go.
         There’s a sullen warmth to the air now, the sense that it could all go away very soon. The grass before my eyes is a patchwork of bright and dull colors, interspersed with moments of pure green. I see other people, in the distance, moving in and out of buildings, walking along in their own paths. I force myself to look up. The other fellow has a backpack slung over one arm. You’re walking with him still. The slow march is inevitable. What’s going to happen? It’s already decided.
         “. . . and so every class seemed to decide at the same damn time to give me a paper to write . . . I swear it’s like they coordinate this stuff . . .” That’s you. That’s you talking.
         “Well, you know, that’s probably true,” the guy with you says. I still don’t recognize him, he’s of slight build, with dark hair and well dressed style. He’s got one hand in his pocket and it’s creating a sort of pocket with his jacket that the wind keeps infiltrating, causing it to balloon out, rippling with the respirations of the day. “I mean, some of your classes are in the same department, I imagine they have to talk sometime . . .” One hand is in his pocket. The other is holding yours. I’ve never been here before, I don’t know the terrain.
         “Some departments, right, but not all of them . . .” there’s a light and easy style to your walk, it’s more a stroll. You have no direction in mind, you’re walking to be, using the motion as an excuse. I know it too well. You’re walking close to him, bumping into him again and again, lightly of course because there’s no weight to you, but it’s almost deliberate on both your parts, like you’re trying to trip each other up, like it’s part of some elaborate game. Your face scrunches up, finding the twist in the anecdote. “Though, I mean, I saw, the other day when I came out of class, I saw two of my professors from different classes, they were standing there talking and . . . they kept looking at us coming out of the room and just . . . laughing.”
         “Oh, hell, of course they’re enjoying this,” the guy says. This is college, I realize, with a slowness that isn’t me. Shout it to me, why don’t you. Why not paint it in the sky and see if I can miss it any easier. “They went through all that crap back then and now they get to put us through it. How can they not enjoy it?”
         “Maybe,” you say, biting your lip. The two of you sweep past him and the breeze nearly disperses me. Dammit. Damn. I flounder in your wake, trying to keep my head together. College. That’s right. I wasn’t here for any of this. Stumbling, I catch a glimpse of the sky. That’s where I am. Somewhere past the sky, and perpendicular to it. But nobody knows it. To them, I’m just missing. The crazy man, lost out in the world. Except now I’ve been pulled free of time. And the freedom is taking me apart. “But sometimes I wonder, I just . . .” you clutch his hand tighter, fingers intertwining. There’s a level of comfort here I can’t reach. But then you always got close to people quickly. You didn’t have time for anything else. “When they look at us, I wonder if they see us stressing out so much, you know, almost going crazy over all this crap and just . . . maybe it’s funny because we take it too seriously.” Your brows are furrowed. I’m keeping pace without effort, carried along helplessly. “They look at us, running around like lunatics, trying to do this and that and . . . they know it’s not as hard as it looks. They’ve been through it already and it wasn’t really that bad. And we treat like it’s the most important thing in the world. And it’s funny because that’s not it. Not at all.”
         The guy looks at you, and there’s something that lies between affection and amused tolerance in his eyes. Kicking at some loose leaves that have strayed onto the path, he swings the arm holding your hand and says, “You ever consider that you overthink this stuff?”
         Your eyes narrow, like you’re going to say something different. Then you laugh, and lean into the guy, a motion that nearly diverts him from his course. There’s a sedate, separated quality to the campus, a world ripped away from the usual, enclosed in a bubble and set apart. It’s intoxicating, even detached I can feel it, a sense of slowed time, of things of hold and laid to pause, even for a little while. I would have liked it here, had I gone. Had I stayed.
         “Maybe. Maybe I do,” you tell him, your voice muffled as you bury your face briefly in his jacket. He slips his hand from yours and let it fall around your shoulders, pulling you closer. Somehow you manage to maintain the same stride, even with your differences in heights. “It’s been said before,” you add, with a twinkle in your eye.
         “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the guy says with neutral aplomb. The two of you walk a few more steps before he speaks again. “So what is the most important thing?”
         “Hm?” you ask, sounding distracted.
         “The thing, the important thing,” the guy reminds you. Your shadows point forward, ahead, toward the future. Yours is so much shorter. That can’t be right. It’s a trick of the light. A trick of my mind. “You said, that all of this isn’t the most important thing. So something else must be, right?”
         “I guess,” you answer slowly. A nearly shy smile crosses your face. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I just sort of knew that it wasn’t trying to get an A on some stupid paper. That’s as far as I got.”
         “Now, see,” the guy says, with a sigh and a shake of his head, “right there, I thought you were going to say the love of a good man was the most important thing. I thought that was the right answer.” He lets his arm slip from you. You have the presence of mind to cross your arms over your chest and let out a slip of a grin, as if you’re reenacting some old joke. “But I guess all I’ve done means . . . means nothing at all,” he finishes, in a low, depressed voice, his last words barely registering, his gaze fixed securely on the ground.
         “Oh, whatever,” you retort, punching him lightly through his jacket, barely knocking him out of step. The distance between the two of you only varies for a few seconds before closing again. “Who do you think you’re fooling?”
         “What?” he asks, all innocence, his grin matching yours. There’s something in the air, filtering into me, it aches like an old wound. The air has a stillness to it, frozen into crystal, we’re moving in it and we don’t see the images refracted, the possibilities echoing. It’s just me, seeing shadows, the years bent on themselves. It’s me, the whole time. The day is hushed, as if it knows it will never come this way again. Waiting for something. I tremble, but I don’t know where my body is and I don’t know how I know that. “There’s nothing wrong with a guy wanting to feel appreciated now, is there?”
         Your fingers trace parallel lines down his chest. “You certainly have a strange way of hiding it, then.” It hurts to watch this, but I can’t say why.
         “The appreciation?” he asks, with a raised eyebrow. “Or the wanting?”
         “You tell me,” you respond coyly. It’s so odd to see you here, like this, with my memories of you several years removed. You look so small and young that it’s hard to believe you’ve crossed the threshold, hurdling out of the teenage years, into this place, into some small measure of indepedence. You’ve hardly changed and yet everything about you has been refined. It’s like meeting you again, across the median of a busy highway, trying to see you through rushing cars, straining to hear your voice over the whine and hum of grinding motors and wailing horns, everything drenched in haze. You get the outlines and have to infer the rest. Shapes broken down into primary colors, primal structures.
         “Neither, I hope,” the guy says, stumbling along with you. “I like to think I’m vocal with just about everything.”
         “You certainly are,” you say, with a knowing smirk. Now it’s his turn to jokingly assault you, his hands reaching in and tickling just under your arm, until you have no choice but to dance away under a shield of giggling. You nearly topple into where I’m occupying and the effort of stepping out of the way, useless but all instinct, nearly tears me apart. I’m not used to movement, not in one plane. Maybe if you touched me you’d feel a chill, just a way to let you know, across the barrier.
         He follows you into the grass, finding a new path amidst the scattered canopy. It’s all so cloistered, there should be a bubble covering the sky, sealing it all in. I can admire it but I never could have stayed. I need to be open, in a place where the directions go steadily on, to a zone that’s out of sight.
         “Not to get off topic,” he says, closing the gap between you again, the two of you spiralling into another direction, dictated only by whim. Leaves crunch under your feet, dappled shadows hold nothing but color. I’m running out of breath here, even without lungs. “You want to do anything tonight? Maybe get something to eat, I think they’re showing a movie over in the student center that might actually be decent for once . . .”
         Even before his sentence is over you’re giving him an exasperated look. The way your head tilts just a little bit, the way your eyes don’t really narrow so much as crinkle a little bit, the slight skewing of your posture. I get it, even without being on the receiving end.
         You even add a little head shake to it. It makes the effect resonate somehow. “I think you’ve managed to master listening without actually hearing anything.”
         “What, I said I appreciate-“ the fellow protests.
         You step forward and grab him by the shoulders, rocking him back and forth a little bit, a twist of a smile in your expression. “I. Have. Three papers. Due. At the. Same. Time!” You let him go then and take a half step back, the wind ruffling the fur on the lining of your jacket. You seem out of breath but that’s not unusual.
         He cocks his head to the side and gives you a look that manages to be casual and practiced at the same time. “So? I don’t see what the problem is.”
         You fold your arms over your chest and pivot away slightly, a pensive expression briefly flickering over your features. Even standing still, I feel fragments drifting away. How much do I have? How much is there left? I hear voices, distant, filtering down from a tunnel, maybe calling my name. I can’t make anything out. “Listen, I just can’t, I’ve got to buckle down, I’m missing too many days as it is and if I fall too far behind-“
         All words end in a shouted squeal as the guy moves toward you in a blur of action. Leaves crackle, crumble, as he nearly tackles you, scooping you up with a sure hand and letting gravity take the two of you down, dropping you easily to the ground, making sure that he lands first and that you bounce off of him, rolling clumsily to his side, falling sideways into dead leaves and grass, flailing for a second before flipping back over toward him, your irritated look only being greeted with an angelic smile.
         “What the hell is wrong with you?” you hiss at him, getting up on one elbow, even as he flops backward, one arm snaking behind you, staring up into the endless sky. “I swear, I’m going to sneak into your room while you’re sleeping and knock you out of bed, just to see how you like it . . .”
         “My roommate would protect me,” he says, with a chuckle.
         “Your roommate’s so stoned out of his head that he’d let the police in while he’s holding a lit joint in his hand, if they asked nicely enough,” you answer. “You’re lucky he remembers to lock the door half the time.”
         “Yeah,” he says, still watching the sky. Suddenly I’m ill, my stomach taking a ride down an elevator away from the rest of my body. Dropping to my knees, I try to stay focused, but it’s so difficult. Voices are calling for me. It’s not my name. I don’t know anyone anymore. I’m losing all sense of place.
         You let a moment pass without comment. Then, with a slightly sarcastic drawl to your tone, you say, “So did you drag me down here because you knew I just washed this jacket, or because you want me to spend the next few days finding dead bugs in my pockets-“
         ”Sh,” he says, softly, the sound hardly heard even over the quiet breezes. I think I’m creeping closer but direction and distance aren’t the same for me.
         “What, Jesus, what now-“
         ”Come on, work with me on this for a bit, huh?” he says, and you look at it disbelieving for a second and then fall onto your back the same way as him. The shadow of a tree is falling on the two of you, only partially, covering you like a partial eclipse. Looking up, there are leaves coming down in lazy spirals, nothing halting their slow descents, falling around like so many seconds of the day, passing by whether you’re rotation rapidly or simply standing still. The ambience of the moment shifts, becomes hushed. “You’re stressed,” he adds quietly, once the vibrations of his previous words have faded. “I can feel your heart, it’s going like crazy.”
         “Yeah, being dropped can do that to a girl,” you say, with a crooked smile. You shift your weight, move a little closer. “It’s slowing down now, though.”
         “That’s good,” he says, swallowing. “You can only do this in the fall, you know.” He’s not looking at you, he’s not looking at anything at all. I wonder if he knew, when it happened, how it went. If he wished he could have been there. If he stayed and even remembered your name, when it was all done. “A few months from now, this will all be covered in snow, or it’ll be too damn cold to stay out anyway. A few more months after that and you’ll just bake out here.”
         “This ground better not be wet, or you’re a dead man.”
         He snorts with brief laughter, before it dissolves and he becomes serious again. Above him, the tree seems to be a portal into everything, the branches closing in on places too close to touch, but too far to actually see. A place past the sky. “What I like about this is how when you’re like this, you know, laying here and everything . . . all you can see is the sky. That’s it.” He draws in a large sigh, his ribs expanding with the effort. You shift again, body to body. His arm is behind him and you’re resting against it. Your gaze shifts to him and then back at the sky. If he’s paying attention, he gives no sign. Did you love him, just a little bit, maybe only for that moment? I can’t say, it’s not for me to say. I can’t reach you. In my head that’s all that matters. “All the buildings and the people and all the stuff that goes with that, you don’t see any of it and you . . . you just pretend that none of it exists.”
         “Until someone comes around and stands over you and wants to know why you’re on your back like that,” you say, reaching over and patting him on the stomach.
         He chuckles, sounds resigned. “Yeah, that’s happened to me before.” His arm is stroking your shoulder, fingers looking for your hand. It finds it easily enough. “That’s why it’s better with another person. You don’t look as silly.”
         “Speak for yourself,” you laugh.
         A leaf passes through me and I feel ripples, like stagnant water being disturbed. I’m distorted, pulled in more than one direction. My mouth opens but I can’t say anything. I can’t even scream.
         He shrugs. “Five minutes, really, is all you need. Just so you can forget about everything. That way, when you’re stressed,” he pokes at you, punctuating the point, “you have this to fall back on.”
         “So you say.”
         “Don’t tell me I’m not right,” he says, arching his back a little. “I know I am, you don’t even need to say.”
         “There’s nothing wrong with your ego,” you quip, kicking idly at his sneaker.
         “Or anything else,” he deadpans. Shifting a little, he adds, “But I think we’ve spent enough time communing with nature, so why don’t we-“
         Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s because I screamed. But I couldn’t take it. The wind rattles then and a cascade of leaves comes down right on top of the two of you and for a moment you’re lost behind the shower of contrasting color, all flickering out of time, abstract and broken, none of the images coming together properly.
         “Ah, Christ,” he says, when the storm passes, his voice distorted as he spits a leaf out of his mouth. You’re staring at him with an expression I can’t quite read. “Damn it, sorry about that . . .” he winces, runs one hand quickly through his hair, brushes out some more leaves. Others are falling, more sedate now, content to follow in the wake of the first ones. The ground is littered with travellers having reached a destination. Maybe not the one they intended but one nonetheless. He looks around. Something is stretching me. It’s time. No. That’s. It’s. “I guess I’ve kept you waiting here long enough-“
         ”That’s okay,” you say suddenly, in a tone of voice I don’t ever remember hearing from you. But I don’t know if I’m hearing anything right. My vision is strafed by darkness, a film playing while the projector has fallen over. Your hand rests on his chest, pushes him back down, his face registering surprise, unsure of where this is going. Suddenly you’ve flipped over and around, coming to rest on top of him, knees on either side of his ribs. I can’t see his face anymore, but I guess what it’s saying, with just his eyes, the shape of his gaze.
         “What’s the hurry?” you ask, lightly, both hands on his shoulders. This is tearing me apart. I’m clogged, without any space to breathe. Your face leans closer to his, time curled in anticipation. I’m glad I saw this. I’m glad I saw how happy you were but this. This is. I’m.
         “We have a few more minutes,” I think you say, as the gap closes finally, as something inside me violently rips, as the leaves descend again, slipping in between frozen time, taking me away, catching me on a wind I can’t touch, carrying me away from a place where I never was.