I Went to the Woods

The forest sat alone in a cradle made of sand. It was a seven day drive across the sun-bleached wasteland, nothing but arid desert as far as the eye could see, deep into the heart of the country where there were no cities and certainly no people. It was on the seventh day that I arrived at the forest: a green soup in the bowl of the desert valley, surrounded on all sides by death and yet she herself was overgrown. I traveled to the forest because I was sick of society, I think. I did not care for mysticism and the stories did not frighten me. They say the woods are magical, defended by the gods. And they are certainly right but that was of no concern to me. On the seventh day, as the afternoon speckled the dirt with patterns of sunlight, I abandoned my car at the edge of the desert and wandered into the forest as far as I could stand it, set up camp in the clearing between trees, and decided to live there.

I knew a guy – Charles or Chad or Chandler – that claimed to have visited the forest. He’d joined my online gaming party twice prior and was usually a talker. Today was no different. The mission was done: we had survived the wild snowstorm and hunted our fill of animals. I was relocating materials, rebuilding walls, the clicking of my controller not nearly as violent, my body slouched down uselessly in my chair. My teammates were filling the chat with conversation that I didn’t bother to read, when Charles/Chad/Chandler turned on his mic to speak. His voice was gravelly like a smoker’s and he whispered cautiously, “I’ve been to that forest before, and it’s true what they say. It’s haunted.”

And if he was referring to the god that lives here, then he was right, and haunted is a good word for it. I’d be wrong to say I hadn’t felt it – that same sort of presence as when someone peers over my shoulder while I game, contemplating my moves. Except the god has no comments on my strategy. When I gather firewood from the forest floor – just twigs and dry branches and some pinecones that I think are supposed to be good firestarters – the god doesn’t have any advice. When I chase down rabbits through the trees, hiding in the bushes to see if I can surprise and kill them before they run away – the god doesn’t say a thing. But I know it’s watching me. I see it in the gaps in the forest, where the breeze is warm like a breath on the back of my neck. I notice it in the mirrored trees that grow in patterns, like copy and paste. I recognize it when the same patch of mushrooms appears on my outings, over and over again, as though I’m walking in circles. How the season never changes, how the weather is precisely predictable, how no matter how far I go I can return to my tent if I walk just one hundred more paces in any direction. It’s like a tiny world made just for me with no one in it, with nothing to do but survive.

But on the thirteenth day, the god has become bored. As the sun rises through the trees and I’ve found myself out hunting rabbits, I am met with a stunning lack of animal life altogether. There are no branches snapping, no squeals from mice scurrying through the brush, no insects or birds humming in the air. It is as though everything has died overnight, leaving nothing but an overwhelming silence. I can hear my breath in my ears. Every swallow seems to echo, every little heartbeat. It’s incredible how little I can ignore when there is nothing to listen to. I try to imagine the crackle of animated bonfires, the buzz of voices through headphones, the hiss and thump of digital boots marching on stone and grass. I left the virtual world so I could escape the artificial noise. But now there is nothing at all in the world of my own. Nothing, but the god that watches me carefully: inspecting my decisions, guessing at my behaviors, memorizing me like an algorithm.

After hours of silence, I can feel the weight of my own heartbeat in my head start to take its toll. I let a scoff escape my mouth, standing to gather twigs for a fire that I have nothing to cook over. It takes more than ten minutes to get a single spark from two rocks – longer than it has taken me across all six days in the forest. There is frustration pooling in my face, making me sweat and grit my teeth. When the flames finally rise, I collapse onto my knees in relief. I know the god is watching me. With a sigh, I finally speak.

“If you’re bored, how about we just chat? No need to punish me.”

The god does not answer. I suppose I did not expect it to. As the night encroaches and the fire dies, leaving nothing but breathing coals, I lay my head in the dirt, and fall asleep.

I think I was watching my friends rot away.

There wasn’t a second of the day that we weren’t online, running the same game again and again until we became too good at it and it wasn’t fun anymore. There was routine soaked into the very air we breathed: controller movements repeated until they were muscle-memory, good jokes that became inside-jokes that became worn and tired, familiar voices that melted together until they couldn’t be told apart. The stimulation was becoming monotonous. We started inviting strangers to join our party. The day that Charles – or Chase, or Chester – accepted that invitation, was when it occurred to me: I was watching my friends, and myself, rot away.

Is it peace you desire, or invigoration?

I am in the forest, but I am not awake. The trees are crowded tight all around me like wooden walls that creep in ever closer, flexing low overhead. The fire roars in the center. I think I see a figure on the opposite side, but then again I don’t. I recognize the overwhelm of the presence, the watchful eye, and I know it is the god even though I can’t see it.

“I don’t desire anything,” I answer compulsively, and when I do an electric shiver runs out through my ribs and into my skin. “I just want to be alone.”

I don’t need the god to tell me that I’ve contradicted myself. I laugh quietly. “Well… nevermind.”

You want to be alone?

“Not from people. Just from everything else.”

What is ‘everything?’

“You ask a lot of questions for a god.” I smirk. In looking around, it occurs to me that the walls are breathing: expanding and contracting like genuine lungs. On instinct, I pull my arms tighter to my chest. “Shouldn’t you be all-knowing?”

You want to be alone?

“I don’t know what I want. Maybe just… to see what you look like.”

There is a long pause, through which the chatter of the fire fills the silence. For a single instant, clear as crystal and yet merely as a figment of my imagination, I see the figure hang its head out to view me. It is just a shadow. Human, and not. But like a blind spot, every time I focus on it, it disappears. There is nothing there. There is also something everywhere, sizzling on the surface of my skin, tickling my nose and cheeks, alerting me to its existence. I feel it tugging on my attention – through the air, through the roots underneath the dirt, in the breathing walls, in the crowding smoke.

“Thank you,” I answer. Again, the energy crackles in the synapses of my nerves, like my very soul is spasming, reacting to the sensation of the god.

You want to be alone?

“No, I don’t.”

Then what do you want?

It is then that I wake, gasping for air. A plume of smoke spills from between my lips, and disappears into the forest.

On day fourteen, there are so many animals in the woods that it feels overpopulated. Rabbits in abundant colonies, pouring from their burrows. A million little gnats and beetles all over the trees and worming through the dirt. Mice and ground squirrels, sparrows in the canopy, crickets in the grass, and thin beige lizards. At lunchtime, I watch as an incredible herd of deer passes by, their hooves nearly silent and black eyes glossy, the sun decorating their backs.

I find that the god’s presence has become stronger at night, as if he is busy during the day like anyone would be, but has time to observe me as I fall asleep. I can only hear him when I’m dreaming, but then again I wouldn’t describe his voice as sound at all. When he does not speak, I find answers to my questions in the forest. Trees that tangle toward and away from me, animals that stare with eyes that are aware, whispers in the breeze that spiral around my arms and legs. I dream, and I don’t. The figure joins me across the fire. Sometimes I think he is curious about me, as if I am a creature in a terrarium of his own design. His presence lives so close that he is practically in my bones, and sometimes I swear I can feel him reshaping me from the inside while I sleep. In the morning I wake up writhing in pain, vomiting, starving. At night I lay alone, but also very much not alone.

I have named him Walden.

On the thirtieth day, or the thirty-fifth, or thirty-seventh? – I start an afternoon fire and place two rabbits that I have skinned on spigots to hang over the flames. The god is here – in fact it feels as though he is right next to me, sharing my oxygen. There is a patient warmth in his observation. He doesn’t answer any of my questions, but seems to bend toward my stories, like he’s listening. It isn’t until later in the night, when I have jolted awake coughing up blood, that I realize just as curious humans study their subjects, predators observe their wounded prey. I have no reason to trust a god. I have no reason to think him benevolent, at all.

In the morning, I find that I have no appetite, so I decide to go for a walk. The number of animals hasn’t lessened at all, even though I swear I’ve hunted them to extinction. It has become overwhelming, the sheer number of them. The hundreds and hundreds of rabbits. The roaming herds of deer.

Since waking, my head has been throbbing ceaselessly, right up top as though something is standing on it with two pin legs, drilling into my skull. I walk to ignore the pain, and the more I walk, the hungrier I seem to become. Absentmindedly, I start picking the moss off of trees as I pass them and eating it. The roots get caught between my teeth and chewing them is like shredding hair. I find sections of long grass in the forest, freshly fallen leaves, the green bark on saplings, new pine needles. I eat them all and none of them taste different from one another, but I can tell them apart by their scent. They smell like they are dying. Some die slower than others. The grass goes first, it being frail. The saplings and needles, still sturdy, take their time in dying, the way people do.

Thinking back, Charles/Charlie/Chester left out half the details he should have mentioned, if he was actually telling the truth about the forest. How could he have skipped over the stars at night: these million, million stars that spatter the sky in oversaturated blues and purples and whites like vivid technicolor, constellations that are overrun by lightyears of each other? You’d think he would have mentioned the deep thicket of trees, taller than I ever imagined, that manage to frame the entire world. They have a scent and a sound. They have a living presence, they breathe, they whisper. And me: I am but an insignificant nothing to this vast expanse. You’d think he would have mentioned that. All these men obsessed with the gods – how could they leave out the most important part?

He said, “Rumor has it, the god of the forest is the god of giving. It will grant you your greatest desire, at a price.” He was deaf to the sound of the rest of our party as they laughed at him. There are no fairytales in the virtual world. Or maybe there are – maybe there are lots of them, because they keep us alert, alive, sane in a society where you can never die and only respawn. Where you play to hunt, to conquer, to start again and again and again. There is a unique kind of pleasure in the forest, where death is death and hunger is pain and when I sit in the rain I freeze down to my core and my skin crawls with goosebumps. Being alive is so much more difficult in real life. He should have warned me. Who cares about the gods, when my soul is so raw?

When the night overtakes my little world, Walden has come to join me by the fire. I cannot tell if I am awake or not. I lie on my back and look straight up into the sky, watching it move beyond my control, shifting around the globe like the black glassy eye of a deer. Walden studies me without speaking. Not that I expected him to. I sigh, and when I do, feel my lungs creak like a dying tree. There is blood in my mouth – it is warm, but I cannot taste it.

“Can I trust you, Walden?”

Like an intelligent animal, he knows his name. But then again, it’s not really his name, is it?

You will anyway, whether or not I give you permission.

It is the first time I’ve heard him refer to himself. All at once, I feel my understanding of him reshaping, expanding. I sit up suddenly to face him, as if there is a figure somewhere for me to face.

“Are you really a giving god? You’d give me anything I want?”

What is it that you want?

I like to think he’s being cheeky, and yet I know better. I can’t be certain of the god’s emotions – whether he has them, whether he intends to, whether he’s just mirroring mine. The way predators mimic prey to make them feel safe. And why shouldn’t he know just how to mimic me, after studying me all this time?

“What is it that you want?” I decide to challenge. When I speak, I can feel my scalp aching, my eyes burning, my insides twisting all around and tangling. “Do you want to eat me?”

That is a human emotion.

“Hunger?”

Want.

Perhaps I am dreaming, because the trees feel close and gentle, exhaling into my ears. I can hear the pulsing of water and whispers in their roots. I can feel the earth squirming beneath my fingers. Everything around me is alive, and so am I. At what point do they become separate?

“Which is to say,” I rub at the sore spots on my skull, groaning under my breath, “you don’t feel it?”

He does not answer. In his silence, the music of the forest hustles in, filling the space around us. I can smell the way the forest thinks. I can hear her breathing.

What is it that you want?

“I don’t –” I start, before the pain shoots from my skull into my right eye. I wince. “I just…”

He waits for me to compose myself. He has all the time in the world. I fear that I do not.

“I want,” I begin again, and allow his existence to settle in between the gaps in my bones, where he fits like he was designed to, “to understand.”

An exhale escapes him, like a sigh of relief. I feel his presence shift around my flesh, and he settles very carefully into the seat of my skeleton, cradling my soul. In his second silence, the forest begins to speak again. I recognize her clearer than ever, like I know her. And I don’t need a god to explain to me that everything that exists only echoes something else – that snail shells resemble hurricanes, that headlights resemble predator eyes, that lightning resembles tree roots resembles highways resembles veins and rivers and metro tunnels and neurons and fungal networks and cities. That it is all the product of a perfect, repeating design. That even as I wake, and antlers sprout from my skull like ferns, like feathers, like wide-open human hands; the necessity is never-ending. To want, to want.

You will.