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"I only went out for a walk, but finally decided to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." --John Muir

Sunday, October 14, 2012

House of Mercy


A man walks by your bench along the Capitol Crescent Trail in Bethesda, Maryland, population 61,000, seven miles from Washington, D.C.  You can’t tell if he has a limp or a swagger.  He clutches a tissue in his right hand like a small storm he is trying to contain.  A woman in a long purple scarf descends the wooden steps to the path from her back yard; every other article of clothing she wears is white: shirt, skirt, socks, shoes—each one jaundiced by its neighbor, like a Great Pyrenees suddenly golden against winter’s first snow.  On your right, where the trail edges a parking garage, locust trees live up to their Latin name—Robinia Pseudoacacia—or “False Acacias.”  They grow tall and branchless in the shade, their spreading canopies of compound leaves not appearing until twenty or thirty feet, looking savannah-like, as if they have been browsed by giraffes.  Everything here seems a little “off,” including you:  a much younger man on a bicycle says “hi” and slows down until you look up and he sees you are not as pretty as he hoped, your long hair having masked a rather mannish nose.  You are embarrassed for him.  He continues on.
            “Alisa! Alisa!”
            “I can go higher!”
            The sounds of a daycare playground several hundred yards back ring in your memory.  You passed it—a wood-chipped square strewn with heavy-duty plastic outdoor play-sets from Wal-Mart or Kmart—on your way in.  There is little dialogue here. Most people are involved in conversations with entities not present:  chatting on cell phones, listening to iPods.  A mother walks silently next to the flesh that came out of her—her teenage son—a body now inconceivably separate, and taller, as if it were trying to outdo its creator.  Dense mats of Japanese honeysuckle drape the trail-edge in odd shapes, like layers of nacre, concealing what’s beneath: decaying logs, a single rock, some native shrub.
            By now you have a single mosquito bite on the back of each hand, your sacrifice for being here:  your blood—your own cells—in the body of the female mosquito, low on the food chain again.  A girl whose red hair clashes with her yellow-green neon tank top jogs by.  Across her upper arm you see a single band-aid, as if she has recently received a vaccine.  Another biker whizzes past, his light blinking brightly and rapidly enough to cause a seizure.  You look away, down at your hands.  Earlier in the day you had a hangnail.  It is so easy to cut yourself with a knife  (you think about a morning last week, when the blade went right through the bagel you were slicing in half and into your palm) but difficult to bite through your own skin.  So you just kept pulling it back with your teeth—the hang-nail—farther and father, until it broke off on its own and the dermis showed beneath.  It is what you would like to do to this land:  peel back its layers until it reveals what’s essential.  But suddenly mosquito bites populate your hands—the knuckles, the heel.  You must cast yourself out of this place, this sweet-smelling, too-wet urban woods, which you have borrowed temporarily, away for the weekend.  As you leave you pass an eight-and-a-half by eleven inch paper sign that someone has printed and affixed to a wooden privacy fence:  BEWARE, it says.  But rain has smudged the large capital letters so they conceal anything more specific that might have been written beneath.  


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