He spoke an ancient language out of Siberia. Full of wide low skies and rolling grasslands, shawled men with staffs, and ponies grazing over distances. This is one of those stories where people magically understand each other, or where language is not the reason for misunderstanding. She liked to listen to the sound of his tongue against his teeth, to the distance between his tongue and hers, because hers sounded (he said) like mountains and trees, and (as she said) his sounded like grass and wind. And the manes of horses.
He hadn’t come on horseback. He walked on long thin legs under a corona of yellow hair, blue eyes fierce for one so young, not yet thirty, knowing nothing yet, chest puffed dumbly. Came stalking down the empty dirt lane with his staff and his Gore-Tex pack to Stern’s abandoned commune betweem the far side of Blueline Ridge and the near side of Parkertown.
They said he was a rich man in one world and a beggar in another. The stories made locals hopeful and hateful in equal measure. They said he was a maze master, and that part had to be true. Otherwise how would he have found his way to the farside and the nearside.
She was the first person in that place to speak to him.
He had been living at Stern’s for months before she noticed him. And another three before they spoke.
Parkertown people had grown so used to the commune being empty that no one thought to look for anyone hiding there. It was he who had described his approach to Stern’s, including the part about the dumb chest-puffery. She was the sort who turned words into vivid images, as though she were living inside them. So she felt as if she had seen him coming down the lane into the old compound.
When she first saw him, for sure, she was on a back trail, almost a deer trail, made by prey and the predators following them. Some humans used it, but rarely. She had discovered it when her son was a baby, hiking around the foothills and in the forests. Her son in a pack on her back. Twenty years or so now.
The trail ran above the compound to the north. You could see over the fence from that angle. She’d had a surge through her heart when she caught sight of him. From behind, he resembled her son, who had vanished some months earlier. She’d had a dream in which he was leaving, traveling down the lane, toward the farside. She’d seen the olive green backpack she’d bought for his birthday, and his clumpy hiking boots stirring dust. His slouch, visible even from behind and with the pack. His horsey stride. The back of his sunglasses strap, faded blue, pushing up the brown curls.
She was certain this was the way he had gone. They say there are fetal cells in a woman’s brain decades after the child is born. And mama cells in the child as well. And yes, that was a dream—from her boy, traveling along the umbilical that still linked them, now invisible. Or an update from the forest, which must have experienced his passage. She didn’t have any other signals, so down the lane she went. So many times.
Focused on the trail, and the forest, she hadn’t looked much in the direction of the compound. Even after spotting the interloper, she hadn’t approached him for several more months, figuring he was none of her business. Finally, on the off-chance he might have seen her son, she went through the gate.
Strange place. Something in its nature, or location, or build, gave the air a certain sense of tenuousness. Not quite like a mirage. Subtle heat waves, in pastel. Walking through it was like following a dimming rainbow. Except the buildings were solid, there were fruit trees and vegetables and flowers gone wild, with native flora reasserting itself as well. The compound lay between the nearside and the farside, but perhaps just generally between. The ground solid beneath her hiking boots, but each step felt tremulous. Maybe the Dead Sea had at one time been a similar place and that’s how Jesus walked on it.
The man living there, about 15 years younger than she was, but older than her son, turned out never to have heard of Jesus.
Or many people and things that that were common knowledge, even in this place. That she would have thought almost anyone on the planet, if you weren’t a member of an undiscovered jungle people, or one of those cultures living on small islands in the middle of the sea.
He was decidedly—studiedly?—unfamiliar with her cultural reference points. And speaking a strange language that she only guessed was Siberian of some sort because of the images those sounds evoked in her.
His gray eyes seemed kind. She didn’t often see kind eyes when she looked into the faces of younger people. She introduced herself, extending her hand. He looked perplexed for a moment, then reached out with his own. His grip was loose. Not weak, just loose, as if the contact were enough. No agenda to demonstrate a thing. At least not at that first touch.
She did find her son. Inside a pale blue. He could never see her, and she could never touch him. He didn’t seem lost, or perplexed. The pack gone. She was nearby, inside a greener blue.
No one from Parkertown ever saw her again, nor did they come looking. Disappearances happened, a fact of life between. The villagers considered her a sort of sacrifice. As, she supposed, her son had been. If she hadn’t been gazing upon her boy, she might have noticed Stern himself and then all his followers standing alone, each to a color. And the man from Siberia browsing among them.
