The Ghost's Leavetaking

by Jacob Austin

The earth is wrapped in cognition. A patchwork network of surveillance made up of an untold number of senses blankets the planet from pole to pole. Leviathans patrol the deepest reaches of the ocean with their telepathic soundwaves while the eagle takes in the entire desert at a glance. Roots tunnel deep and wide in search of nutrients, moisture, and stability. Insects vomit chemical hieroglyphics easily deciphered by their brethren. Mycelium convert meadows into satellite dishes. Water itself feels its way forward, finding the channel of least resistance, and this little clearing in the woods has become a hotspot of surveillance.

Or it had been… At the moment, Santo and Johnny are playing from a set of bluetooth speakers.

“This is some funky Spongebob shit,” Barry says as he sways in his sockos, popping open another beer. Everyone laughs as the eccentric Barry knocks off a little improvised boogie. His rather shapely ass bulges against the confines of his cutoffs as he twists down towards the ground, thighs flexing and drawing the shorts taut. Then he twists back up into a standing position, all the while staring down at his feet.

“Shake it, baby!” Laura cheers, letting herself collapse backwards into her camp chair. Eventually the song ends and everyone joins her. It has become nearly too dark to see, anyway, and the air seemed to be shimmering uneasily, or is that only the drink?

The tents flutter noisily nearby in the gasping wind of dusk.

Earlier in the day, Barry and José had constructed the necessary scaffolding for a fire. Now it seems time to light it. Four heavy logs hold each other up in a pyramid shape. In the space below, smaller sticks and newspaper had been placed. José stops me from dousing his creation with lighter fluid. He announces that he can light the fire with a single match.

The wind extinguishes his first, second, and third match. The fourth, protected by cupped hands, drops into the kindling and a small trail of smoke emits from the dry newspaper. A flame spreads from newspaper to twigs before smoldering. Barry works frantically to find more kindling to feed the fire. Slowly it grows and the larger logs begin to catch. Satisfied, he and José sit back and stare intently into the growing flames. Riley offers around fresh beers from the cooler then breaks one off for herself. She sits down and presses her body against mine as across the fire José and Laura move closer. Barry commits himself to drinking more heavily as the couples pair off. He abandons his beer and takes control of José’s whiskey.

José goes to his truck and returns with a small cooler in one hand and a plastic grocery bag in the other. He squats perfectly with his heels on the ground, bouncing a little at the knees while he digs through the cooler. Out comes a pack of hotdogs. He hands around some straightened clothes hangers and buns, then passes the package of hotdogs around. Barry holds his in the center, pinching the weenie between his pointer finger and his thumb, and wiggles it so that both sides wobble up and down, and hotdog juice sizzles as it drips into the fire. Then he pierces one end with the hanger and thrusts it forward. Only Riley and I witness this little private, playful moment.

After dinner and a dessert joint, the playlist comes to an end. We sit in the new silence, each of us mesmerized by the fire. It feeds on our attention as much as the wood. How long we have gone without speaking would be difficult to pinpoint. The hot light burns steadily. Logs shrink, alter their colors, break in half, but do not resist their disintegration. The flame sways and dances and offers warmth. Its little brother had lit the joint from the palm of José’s hand. The woods have taken the smell and hidden it away. We are each of us entranced. The fire holds our gazes at once. It cannot be snuck up on. It has eyes for us all. The bright eyes hold us there, so that even our beer cans go forgotten upon the forest floor.

A wood knock frees us. It was probably not the first one, but it wakes José and he begins to look around and pull each of us out of the fire’s spell. Jaded, the fire seems to withdraw its heat, and the night grows very cold. As we sit just as quietly, but now fully alert, our heads on a swivel, José holds one finger up to shush us, and the other fanned out near his ear, as if to receive sounds more clearly.

Another wood knock. Hard to tell how far away, or even from which direction. The scene is an inversion now. We no longer have the fire surrounded, but are now surrounded by a ring of trees, and we are at the center. Something falls into the clearing, landing outside the light of the fire.

“Stone throw! That was a stone throw!” Barry exclaims.

“It could have been a falling pinecone,” I mediate.

Barry flicks his headlamp on, sending out a bright, wide ray of light that illuminates the first layer of trees, but beyond that remains dark. The rest of us turn ours on and wait. The trunks gather together to conceal what lies beyond. Behind us, the fire crackles and shrinks a little too quickly. We stand close together, sending five overlapping rays into the trees, but fail to illuminate the deeper reaches. We wait frozen like that for several minutes longer, and then José slinks back towards the fire, retrieves a sturdy piece of wood from the awaiting pile, and returns, giving us a look and then hitting it hard against the trunk of a nearby fir. The knock resounds loudly, reverberating up his forearm, and leaving him a little shocked. We are quiet while waiting for the reply, but nothing manifests.

We discuss our best course of action. Some would like to take to the woods, but not me. I am content with this encounter, and doubt there is anything out there to find. If I truly believed the big guy was some nine foot primate, I would not be here right now, and I would certainly not vote to go traipsing into the woods after one in the utter darkness of a new moon.

Luckily, enough of us feel similarly, and it is decided we do not go out into the woods. Not while it is so dark that we are more likely to wind up injured or lost than we are of finding anything. Instead, we return to the fire, but it has lost its soothing powers. We are now each of us paranoid, gazing out over our shoulders, into the hooded night. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hoots, and Laura makes the necessary Twin Peaks reference, which draws a laugh, but fails to put us at ease, and before long we are all retiring to our respective tents.

Are the temperature reading on a thermometer or the simple blips and dots of radar any less a representation of reality than what I experience as vision, sound, or touch? We are each of us closed within a windowless submarine, completely dependent on the instruments available to us to decipher the outside world. Should we, then, be so quick to reject the unnamed senses? If a warning light began flashing on board the submarine, would you ignore it simply because you did not know what it meant, or might you find it a worthy endeavor to investigate?

I awake in the tent feeling very alert, the hair on my arms standing on end. Riley is turned away from me, sleeping soundly. I do not wish to disturb her, so I do not turn on a light, or hardly move. Instead, I try to lie very still, and listen, to extend my awareness beyond the confines of the tent in gently lapping waves. In this way, I get a sense of the campsite. A sort of remote viewing perception. It comes weakly, in fits and starts, without color, painted upon a matrix of grey lines, and I am not completely sure if I am not just reconstructing what I know to be.

There are the three tents. They rise from the blank plane as little mathematical humps. The nearby fire ring seems to glow with a greater intensity, the chairs still surrounding it, a few missed beer cans fallen on their sides are scattered at their feet. There is José’s truck and my hatchback, parked side by side, just off the old logging road. I cannot make them out precisely. The license plates, for example, are a blur. There is something else, too. It is harder to see even as I turn my focus from the vehicles and attempt to zero in on it. There is no connection to the earth. It does not set foot on the ground, but instead floats above it. I try to close my attention around it like a fire blanket, but as I do it rushes forward, and I gasp as it seem to pass right through my tent, a sort of plasma ball, glowing pale blue, it whizzes through and then out the other side, into the forest, and my view collapses. Suddenly, I am exhausted, and immediately return to sleep.

In the morning, José wakes in his tent. He finds that he is still naked and searches around for his bag. He pulls on some shorts and a sweater then goes out into the early morning. No one else is awake yet. Poking around in the firepit, he realizes it had not been put out very adequately the night before and is able to bring it back to life with little work. He boils water and uses it to make coffee in his french press. Next, he prepares some bacon in a cast iron skillet and sets it aside as he makes scrambled eggs with cheese. Finally, he warms a few tortillas and makes himself a breakfast taco which he eats while sitting on a log, legs outstretched in front of him.

“Bring enough for the whole class?” I ask, poking my head out of the tent.

José turns around, running his forearm across his wet lips. We look at each other for a minute and then both start laughing. Barry sticks his head out of his own tent, so that we are like prairie dogs surveilling our surroundings before emerging. Instead of unzipping the tent further, Barry looks from me to José and then shimmies his shoulders through the small opening his head is poking out of until his torso flops onto the ground, his arms still pinned against his body inside the tent. He begins to slither forward.

“He’s crowning!” José yells louder than he means to. Barry begins moaning loudly, imitating the sounds of labor as he squirms there in the fallen leaves. “You’re almost there,” I call out encouragingly. “Come on! Push!”

Riley wakes up to see the commotion. We watch the show together, her still cocooned within her warm sleeping bag, leaning heavily on my kneeling form, resting her head on my shoulder.

“It’s okay if you poop,” Riley calls out to him. “That’s completely normal.”

Laura unzips the cover from the window of her tent to watch the scene. Their tent is positioned right next to Barry’s and his face is only feet away as he flops the rest of the way out in only his underwear.

“Fuckin hell,” she says and zips the window back up to hide from the morning light.

Barry, egged on by so much attention, takes his performance into the second act. He begins to crawl towards José, slowly converting his crawl into a toddler wobble, walking bipedally, but stumbling once or twice. Eventually, he stands straight, his stomach protruding childlike in front of him. He walks straighter and straighter still until he is practically marching in military form. Then, he begins to decline into a stoop and walk more slowly until finally he is mimicking using a walker, and then he clutches his heart and collapses. All of this in the span of twenty-odd feet.

José stares down at his friend’s still form and wonders if the theatrics have ended. When it seems they have, he nods his head slowly and claps a few times. Riley and I join in.

“Thank you,” Barry says, opening his eyes and pushing himself up, but before he is able to lift himself from the ground, he pauses.

“Need a hand?” José asks before seeing what Barry is hovering over. “Holy shit. That’s a footprint. Footprint!” He announces again, hardly able to contain himself. “There’s a footprint!” Riley and I scramble out of our tent, barefoot and underdressed, with Laura emerging not far behind. We surround the single footprint, easily twice the size of any of our own. It is pressed deeply into the dirt, but there is just the one. We scour the campground, following the presumed trajectory, which, if it were to have traveled in a straight line, would have passed right through Riley’s and my tent, so we immediately unstake it to look beneath, and sure enough, there is a second, the opposite foot, but it is an impossible length away. The creature would have to have pendulum legs. A stride of nearly thirty feet. There is nothing but soft earth separating the two imprints, and another cannot be found.

“There is absolutely no way that was here yesterday,” Riley says. “How could we have missed it? We set up the tents in the middle of the day. Are you telling me you wouldn’t have noticed a footprint this obvious? I mean, think about it. We checked the ground closely, making sure there were no anthills or sharp rocks.”

“But then how?”

“I don’t know. Fuck, man,” José says. “I knew we should have set up the trail cams last night. That goddamn joint!”

“You’re the one who rolled it.”

“Let’s get these photographed, measured, and covered, at least.”

“Why are you guys getting upset?” I ask. “Look, this is proof we are onto something. The wood knocks, the possible lithoboly, and now fresh footprints! We all knew this was probably not a flesh-and-blood primate we are chasing, but it is clearly something. Think about it. If something big enough to leave those footprints had come through here last night, we would have heard it, and that’s not even to mention the impossible footprint under our tent!”

“He’s right. It’s possible nothing would have even shown up on the cameras,” Riley agrees.

“Look, I think we are right where we need to be. The best thing we can do is let ourselves be open, and to follow the signs.”

“Maybe do a little gifting?” Riley suggests.

“Yes, yes. Good idea. Maybe we construct an altar and leave a gift upon it. Show that we come as friends.”

With intention, we set about building an altar on the edge of the clearing. Laura drives a stake directly behind the first footprint, and another behind the second. We draw a string between the two and then run it in a straight line towards the edge of the clearing. In the place where the clearing begins to transition back into unmaintained forest, we begin our work, building within the liminal zone, using unhewn stone, fallen woodstuff, and a piece of moss agate that Riley had chosen from a rock shop. When it is complete, we stand in a circle around it, and each of us carefully press our feet into the earth, so that there is a circle of five prints surrounding it.

We are all in high spirits, and not only because of the footprint discovery, but because it is our first full day out here, and because we are together, and because the weather seems to be a co-conspirator in our adventure. This all seems to dawn on us as we complete the altar. The air is imbued with a newness, like all impurities had been blown away in the night. A few wisps of cloud give the new morning streaks of color, but for the most part it is blue sky as far as we can see. The temperature is cool, but without a bite. In the sunshine, one can sit without sleeves. We lazily slump around the fire, eating breakfast tacos, and drinking the potent coffee from the french press. It smells of damp bark, earth, and woodsmoke. I hug Riley close, but really I want to hold them all, individually and all together, to hold them to me wordlessly, and bask in our togetherness.

We are beyond cell phone service, so the little tyrants have been abandoned, stripped of their allure. We are free. Beyond the reach of bosses, responsibilities, news of death and destruction. In the orbit of only each other. I look across the small morning fire at Laura and José, and think how easily we might have ended up in another configuration: me and Laura, José and Riley, or Barry and Laura, and me and José, or Barry and me and Laura. It seems almost trivial that it had ended up this way. We should, any combination of us, be able to go into a tent together and not come out till morning.

Oh communitas and your swinger energy!

Oh bigfoot, you trickster!

I hug Riley close and forget the rest.

“So what is on the docket today, boss?” Barry asks José.

“Well, we should set up the trail cams. We did bring them, after all. And then I think we should just sort of explore the area. Be on the lookout for any more signs from the big guy.”

We spiral away from camp, the five of us, unfurling, but keeping camp centered. Traveling in ever-widening circles, following the faint impression of a precedent. The day slowly passes. The woods are not overly dense. It is easy to pass through the trees even though it is late spring, verging on early summer, and everything is throbbing with life. Something has left this pathway for us.

Birds and insects compete to fill the soundscape. None of us are any good at identifying them, and we each carry that shame quietly.

We set up our few trail cams as we go, but find no further footprints, nor suspicious scat.

“I used to imagine the woods as a bustling neighborhood,” Laura says. “Deer, racoons, squirrels, bears even, everyone out strolling around, up to their daily errands, and only when a human nears do they disappear. I would always get this feeling, like on hikes and stuff, that I was entering a place just abandoned.”

“Who says that is not the case?” Barry asks.

Upon reaching a large boulder, we stop for lunch. It must have been deposited here long ago, by a glacier, perhaps. It is large enough for each of us to stretch across, and it is warm in the sun. We lay upon it like a tangle of lizards, having grown as unshy with one another's bodies as a theater troupe. My head is on Riley’s stomach, her head is pressed against Barry’s, who is lying side-by-side with José, who is nesting on Laura whose legs lay over my own as we stare through the canopy and into the blue sky overhead. Clouds pass by and we send our own up to join them.

“If not a primate, then what are we looking for?” Barry asks, and not for the first time.

“We are looking for bigfoot,” Riley says flatly, and we laugh.

“But what is bigfoot?” Barry insists.

“A constellation,” I say. We enjoy teasing Barry. He is game for anything. For him, understanding is second to experience.

“A pattern,” José answers at the same time, and we laugh, the two of us enjoying our own secret language.

“A fairy,” I continue, and José takes the challenge.

“A manifestation of Pan.”

“The Green Man’s pet.”

“An interdimensional creature.”

“The greys’ beast of burden.”

“A tulpa, the crystallization of the wildman archetype.”

“A nature spirit.”

“So maybe they are like all of these things?” Laura asks. “Like a sort of QR code that takes the expected shape of whoever scans it, depending on their cultural background?”

“Exactly.”

“Or he could be a big hairy guy,” Riley says.

“We should never rule that out,” I concur.

“Could he be an angel?” Riley asks.

“Sure, could be,” José shrugs.

“A demon?” Laura adds, and her and Riley have now started their own secret game.

“Maybe so, yeah.”

“A daemon?”

“Definitely.

“So what you are saying,” Barry interrupts, perhaps feeling left out by the flirtatious teasing, “is that we have no idea.”

“Not the slightest.”

“So what are we looking for, then, exactly?”

“Bigfoot!” Riley says again, and we all laugh.

The day grows warmer. We have unfurled now quite a ways, and are no longer in the woods. We have reached the river which marks the boundary of the forest. The opposite bank rises high overhead, limestone bluffs, and the beginning of private property. Land that might have once been forest, but is now unknowable. It is quiet out here. As we approach the river, we see a pair of kayakers rounding the distant bend, and then we are alone. The sun is at our backs, so that the naked slabs of limestone catch the light. The grass beyond the woods is yellow and high. It grows up to the banks and then stops as the earth drops off onto a pebbly beach. There is a footpath leading down there, but not a soul around.

A series of cairns stand along the beach, the largest of which rises about three feet from the ground. We are careful not to knock them over. They could have been built by bigfoot, but they just as easily could have not. We inspect them and then forget them, turning our attention to the water.

Who made the first move would be difficult to say. None of us were dressed for swimming. It had been cool when we set out, and we had worn sleeves against the danger of insects and aggressive plants, but now our clothes are shed on the warm rocks. Our five naked bodies line up in the fading light, wandering eyes take in these new parts of old and forbidden friends. I see Riley’s familiar nakedness, and just past her, Laura’s unknown. I see the others seeing it, too. Barry’s muscles ripple under a thin slab of fat. He is solid and well hung, distractedly so, and then we run into the water, running until we can’t, and then diving into the clear stream. The cold water offers a shock and then a freedom. We boys tackle each other, unphased by each other’s nakedness, perhaps, even, strangely energized by it. A wind comes in a great gust out of the trees, sweeping across the surface, and rippling the darkening water before slapping up against the cliff face.

Afterwards, we dry out in growing embarrassment. Eyes shifty and overly polite. We are quiet on the return to camp.

“Have you ever considered that you have hidden what you want out of life behind the idol you have constructed?” We are around the fire again, of course. It is late now and we are talking. Things seem to slosh out more easily. Barry is asking us this, but he is having trouble gathering his words and piling them in a comprehensible pattern. “I mean, imagine someone asks you what you want out of life. What you really want lies behind your answer. Doesn’t it? Can you even see it anymore, behind the idol’s overwhelming stature? Like, I say I want to be a professor, but that is not true. What I want is to explore, and I have chosen that path because it seems to me that it will afford me that option, but then I forget to explore because I am too busy trying to become a professor, you know? The idol has hidden the god.”

“You are exploring right now.”

“Yes, but this is a rare occurrence. When was the last time any of us did something like this? I want to explore mentally, and spiritually, to be afforded time to think, to daydream, to meditate, and also physically. To go new places. To be a stranger in unknown places. Foreign countries, nature. To experience that which I have never experienced. And I want a home to return to. I don’t want to be a wanderer. I don’t want to roam. So I have chosen the path of professor because that will provide me with the stability I also crave. The home. The money. It’s all so mixed up.”

“You want to be afforded a chance to live a fully human life.”

“Yes! Is that so goddamn much to ask?”

Barry is crying. The fire illuminates his tears, so they run like lava down his face, reshaping it into new forms. José and Laura go to him, sit on either side, and put their arms around him. “Hey man,” José says after a while, at the exact appropriate time to diffuse the situation, “at least you have a giant bird.”

A shocked sniffle turns into a laugh and then we are suddenly all discussing his massive cock, which I had not been alone in noticing. This seems to cheer him up and we forget the impossibilities of attainment, the forever- running-through-our-fingers aspect of desire, our society’s utter disinterest in human fulfillment, and fall into lurid jokes and storytelling.

“Bigfoot must be hung,” Laura says dreamily.

“Actually, humans have the largest penis-to-body ratio of any primate.”

“I thought bigfoot wasn’t a primate.”

“Right. If they aren’t biological, then why would they have any genitalia at all?” Barry asks.

“Magical creatures are always fucking, aren’t they?”

“That’s true. Those old stories, they are all very sexual.”

“Because sex disrupts. It is a departure,” Laura says. “And that is what these encounters are, right? Departures from our meat-and-potato thoughts, as Sylvia Plath puts it. Dreams, sex, magical encounters, meditation, synchronicity storms, altered states, they are all departures.”

“To where?” José asks, and then adds, sounding a little frightened: “From where?”

“Conversations like this, too. Aren’t they departures? Doesn’t your mind feel like it’s being massaged right now? People don’t talk like this. We don’t think like this. Except when we’re stoned, or in the shower. It’s like our minds want to, but we block it out,” Barry says.

“That’s because only one state of mind is given any value: the focused, productive, lucid state, but our minds are meant to drift. It is exhausting for them to be held captive, to build walls around different states.”

“Yes. It is exhausting. We are caged in, so our only form of relief is turning our mind off. We have made it yet another binary thing when it should be a vast spectrum. Either on or off. That’s why alcohol and caffeine are the drugs of choice. One or zero. Bigfoot hangs out somewhere between.”

There were no wood knocks that night, no litholby, no glowing orbs, or new footprints in the morning. The gifts we left were gone from the altar, but that was it. Nothing on the trail cams besides a few curious deer. We prepared breakfast. Laura and José surprised us all with mimosa fixings, but it was all ending rather quickly. The weather seemed intent on ushering us out, forcing us to rush our goodbyes as a high wind picked up and gloomy clouds threatened to break. We collapsed our tents and loaded up our vehicles. I hugged José and then Laura. There seemed to be something in it, something communicated that could never be said. I did not want to let her go.

Barry climbed into our backseat, and we set out towards home. José and Laura did the same.

In the days immediately following our return, I grew rather melancholy. Riley remained, as ever, the love of my life, and yet I hardly seemed able to rouse myself from this depression. This feeling is something I am rather familiar with. It has visited me all my life in the days after Events of a Certain Caliber.

Returning from another summer in Idaho, I’d sit in the plane, a glum, bowl-haired child, gutted by the end of vacation. It is these small bubbles, sometimes with months or years in between, and with all sorts of different friends, family, and even strangers, that have become the beads I have run together into the history of my life, but the capturing of them takes its toll. This is something I tried to describe aloud for the first time around the fire, but I couldn’t quite get it right.

“It’s like, take a tv show,” I said. We were out of booze by then, on the verge of going to sleep, but none of us wanted to give in. We were desperate for something to happen. A sign from the big guy, or I don’t know what. Lights in the sky. A portal to whisk us away so we could stay like this.

“What tv show?”

“Any tv show, I don’t know.” I was struggling to stick with the idea, but I pushed on. “It’s just like, whatever the show is, you know, that’s all there is.”

“Huh?”

“Like, if it’s set at work, then that’s the center of their life.”

“Work is the center of my life, and I fucking hate it,” Riley had said.

“But I mean, the people. You know, if there is a wedding episode or someone has a baby, then who is there? Their co-workers. How many of your co-workers would you invite to the hospital if you were having a baby?”

“Sons-of-bitches, not a single one of them,” José said.

“Exactly. But not in the television universe. There, something exists that hardly does for us anymore.”

“What?”

“This,” I said, waving my hands frantically, trying to take in everything, everyone, and I don’t know-what-all. “I mean, we can’t live in this. We are leaving in the morning. Probably not to see each other for months. Even Barry, you live twenty minutes away, but you will be so busy with school, and me with work, we might not even grab a pint together for weeks on end. And when we do, it won’t be the same as…this. Shit. I don’t know. Is this making any sense? This, this…communitas. The only force that opposes alienation.”

I don’t know if I got at what I was trying to. It did not feel like I did, but we all sat quietly for a while. My depressed spell did not last more than a few days. The frequency of messages in our group chat ballooned, none of us willing to let each other go, but then it flattened out, returned to normal, and I recalled that I did enjoy the company of my co-workers, those with whom I spent the majority of my days, and that I was happy to come home to Riley at the end of each shift, and maybe once a month or so, Barry and I would go out exploring, our conversations soaring outwards into the betwixt and between in direct relation to volume of beverage consumed.

Before driving away, I noticed an ant mill. José had already pulled onto the logging road and was driving away. Barry sat in the backseat, his head leaning against the piled gear. Riley was checking her phone though we still did not have service. I looked down, through the visible gap from the open door, at the ants circling. They had lost their pheromone trail and were now following the ant in front of them, going in circles. It looked like some secret ritual, some occult symbol, but really it was a death sentence. They would continue in this way until they died of exhaustion. I watched the ring of little bodies go around and around, and then I bent down, hanging out the car, and puffed up my cheeks, and blew a gust of breath directly into them, scattering the circle, little ant bodies tumbling everywhere. I sat back up, closed the door, and put the car in gear.

Jacob Austin co-operates an imaginary bookstore, Yeehaw Books. His published work is collected at jacobottoaustin.com