The ground rose but the trees blocked out all perspective. He had no way to tell how far away he was from anything. The undergrowth crowded out his immediate vision and the swaying poplar and spruce clouded the middle distance. The ground was pocked and uneven from the craters left by windblown trees and the remnants of countless burrows partially filled with leaves and rot. With all the pain he felt Simon wanted to be buckled up in the crown of a tree. High up as when he had worked on the IDS, swaying above the city in the community of men who lived above the streets, because there the streets and parks took on a shine in the sun and the ground, no matter how rough, looked smooth and easy.

He tipped and stumbled up the incline and deeper into the woods as his stomach unwound. He kept his eyes on the earth while his body loosened. But with each step he was more lost, with each step on newer and stranger ground. The poplar gave way to jack pine. The only sound was of the naked brush sliding over his clothes, and the whisk of overhead branches slapping his creased and troubled forehead. That and the wind, steadily thrumming the branches.

Deadfalls blocked his way. The wide reach of jack pine branches were impossible to climb over. Sometimes he couldn’t force his way through the hazel brush and he had to turn and walk back, punted from one trail to another. Soon he was no longer able to tell in which direction he was going. He tried to keep to the rise, always heading to higher ground. His face was a mass of welts and his hands had turned pink from the constant sting of whipping brush. He turned and limped and shouldered his way on until he reached a clearing on top of a hill. The trees shrank back and the dead grass was cut jagged from the weight of winter snow. In the middle of the clearing there was a pile of sunken and rotting tires along with a jumble of battery cases, pierced by the skeletons of milkweed stalks and goldenrod. Simon searched for a road or trail that led from the clearing but there was nothing. No ruts or tracks, and the junk offered no clues or answers to how it got there, reluctant in its rot to show the only thing that it could dare to claim: an origin. And Simon knew this and so without a sound he wept.