Amnesia Walk
He saw sky through tree branches. He heard a gentle crunching noise. He smelled an earthy outdoor smell, and felt his body sway as he walked steadily. Gradually he realized he was walking but he didn’t remember why. He didn’t remember anything.
He ducked under a low-hanging branch and felt a weight on his back—a backpack. His fingers touched it. He had ten of them, and two arms, and two legs. The man felt this was a good thing, then realized he was thinking and decided thoughts were also good things to have. He could see trees, rocks, and bushes composing the forest around him, and a leaf-strewn ground which crunched slightly under his boots. Apparently he had boots. The man almost thought, but avoided the thought, that he did not have something important. He did not have any memory.
He saw no one else in this forest. He did see a squirrel chattering some dozen yards away, its tail flicking with each raspy note. The man thought to ask the squirrel if it knew who he was and what he should do, but he knew that would be ridiculous. He decided since he’d been walking longer than he could remember, the sensible thing was to keep walking until something new happened.
There was no path, only an open wilderness of granite rocks and pine trees. Presently the flat earth turned upward and he was climbing a small hill. At the top he glimpsed between trunks at a great distance what might have been a mountain ridge, and far below, something sparkling. Water was the word that came into his mind, and the word made him thirsty. He was hungry too after the exertion of walking uphill. He slung the backpack to the ground and opened it, supposing it might contain something to satisfy him.
Inside the pack on top there was a water bottle. And a bag of nuts and dried fruit, and these refreshed the man. Underneath these he could see another bottle, a pot, and several bundles. Tempted by curiosity to dump out the pack and examine all its contents, the man stopped when he suddenly shivered. The air felt cool now that he stood still, especially with the breeze blowing across the hill. Nighttime was approaching, and the exposed hilltop did not seem like a safe place to be at night. Danger was a word that occurred to him now as he squinted up at a darkening sky.
Anxious about the chilly breeze, the man found a spot sheltered from it by a small cliff. He pulled an oblong bundle from his backpack and unrolled a tent, pitching it quickly using his walking stick and pegs driven into the ground. Moving rocks, he made a fire ring, and breaking sticks, soon started a fire with some matches. He did all this without planning to, hands reaching for the right things before he could ask himself how he knew where to look.
As darkness fell the man spread his coat on the ground and emptied his pockets onto it one by one. A box of matches, leather gloves, a sizable knife. A compass, a folded piece of paper, a pen.
In the backpack he found two large water bottles, a metal pot, and with it a spoon. Then there was the bag of food: rice, jerky, dried fruit, nuts. It wasn’t full. That seemed important somehow, but he moved on.
He found a pair of thick socks, one sock’s cuff folded over them both so they stayed together. And a shirt that smelled a little foul. Near the bottom was coiled a length of narrow rope.
There was a little box that had medical supplies: bandages, ointment, pills he didn’t quite know the use of, cloth tape. Also there were three needles and a small spool of thread. For a moment he thought he’d broken the box when a flat thing fell out of its lid. It was a small flexible mirror the size of his hand.
Besides the tent which he’d already taken out, the man could see there was a sleeping bag stuffed in the bottom. A roll of dense foam was tied vertically to the back of the backpack, which turned out to be big enough to lie on. He decided to sit on the foam mattress for now, which made him more comfortable but proved troublesome with the thing constantly trying to spring back to its rolled-up position.
During this operation the man bumped his shin and felt pain. Rolling up his pant leg, he examined a bruise halfway between the ankle and knee. It wasn’t a bad injury, just enough to feel while walking, now that he noticed it. But his heart was beating fast as if the hurt were a matter of some distress.
“I hurt myself recently,” the man mumbled to himself. Noticing his pulse and a certain rushing feeling in his head, he added, “And I guess I felt upset about it. I guess in a way my body remembers what happened.” With the help of the mirror he checked over the rest of his body, but the only other injury was a slight scrape on his left palm.
He faced the firelight and held the mirror up. In the reflection he saw brown hair, light skin, and a narrow face covered by patchy whiskers that were starting to suggest a beard. And looking in his own brown eyes gave him a haunting empty feeling. The man in the mirror was a complete stranger.
Unsettled, he stored the mirror and picked up the paper, rewarded by the sight of writing and lines on it. Most of the lines were crooked, a few straight, and one was dotted that led to a prominent X. He read handwritten words like river and double mountain peak without realizing he was doing it, and in a moment said out loud, “It’s a map.”
It was a simple map, a sketch really, with a few landmarks noted and a path approaching the X that was clearly the focus. It was labeled in smudged and sloppy writing with just the word Blue.
Flipping the paper over, he saw a few lines of writing on the other side. They read:
“Dec 6. Must evacuate. Lost logbook.”
“What is at the X?”
“I can’t remember”
The man chuckled. “Whoever wrote that, I can’t remember either.” After studying the map awhile longer an idea occurred to him. “Maybe I’m somewhere on here.” A finger surveyed the creased sheet of paper. Maybe this map, made somewhere in the unknown past, could show him his place in a world he knew nothing about. He decided to go to the X, whatever it was, if he could. He felt he’d seen the river and double-peaked mountain from the hilltop today. This decided, the man pulled out his sleeping bag, intending to rest.
There was something left in the very bottom of the backpack—several somethings. He reached in and pulled out four empty food bags. They were all the same large size as the one he’d eaten from tonight. “Apparently whoever I am and wherever I’ve been,” said the man, “I’ve been walking long enough to eat most of my food.” Darkness settled over the campsite as the fire was burning down. A shiver passed through his body, so he wriggled into the sleeping bag and closed his eyes.
Morning came with birdsong in the trees and golden sunlight shining sideways across them. The man shivered and restarted his fire to heat up some water. His camp was in the shadow of the bluff he’d sheltered beside, but a few feet away the shadow ended where the sun reached over the top of the hill. As the sun rose the shadow shrank, its edge surrendering a few millimeters of frosty ground at a time, and the frost twinkled in the light before melting away. Before long the shadow would be gone, eaten up by the day’s progress as the burning orb climbed to its apex.
The man sat up, still in his sleeping bag and with hot water in hand, to study the map. He spent a few minutes shuffling around the map and compass and thinking about the vista he’d seen from the hilltop yesterday. Based on the double-peaked mountain and the direction of the river, he felt sure about his position to the south of the water and guessed he was only ten miles from the X, the Blue, whatever it was. He was surprised to realize he’d been walking away from it when his memory began yesterday.
It didn’t take long to strike camp; in stuffing the sleeping bag and rolling up the tent, hands seemed to remember what to do even though the mind didn’t. “That’s decidedly convenient,” remarked the man as he shouldered the pack and grabbed the walking stick. Feet in boots itched to walk, and stomach happily burned its breakfast, promising a half-day of good energy. The man climbed the hill to face the sun and face his mysterious journey.
As he’d hoped, another bare hilltop soon offered a good view. There was a clifftop that looked northward, and the slope under it was covered in large loose rock instead of trees. This offered a panorama of the northward country. There was the two-peaked mountain near the horizon, and another peak off to the left with a peculiar shape, also marked on the map. It was a wilderness of high hills, pine forests, and imposing cliffs. A few of the higher mountains in the distance were snow-covered. There were no wisps of smoke from other campfires, nothing but the rock and the trees and the water, and a clear sky looming over it all. A curve of the river brought it close by, so the man hiked down to it.
The water was all rushing and splashing loudly between granite boulders and sparkling brightly in the morning sun. Waves and rivulets shimmered as they rushed with enormous force against the solid rock, which must weigh tons upon tons to hold back the onslaught. A floating log came downstream and was bounced between them like a leaf on the wind.
The man filled his pot and set it to boil on a fire he lit for that purpose. He felt annoyed at the bother of starting another fire, but he felt it was very important and gave up trying to guess why. Then he hiked on.
The day passed in steady plodding. Often the slope was steep upward, causing the backpack to feel heavy, or steep downward, causing pebbles to roll downhill away from the heels of boots. The really difficult parts could be walked around, and sometimes the hiker was walking almost in the river. In one muddy place, odd oval shapes were stamped into the mud in pairs. An image of a huge animal came to his mind along with the word elk. Seeing his own feet leave footprints in the mud, the man supposed an animal called elk had made the other tracks. Occasionally an eagle could be seen soaring in the distance or a squirrel jumped in branches nearby, but largely he hiked alone.
The sun was halfway between its peak and the western horizon when at last something interesting came in view. It was just a cliff face, oval shaped with a notch in one side, but there was a drawing of this cliff on the map very near the X. Perhaps this was a final landmark to help find it among all the miles of boulders and trees. Then as he stared up a slope of loose rock toward the cliff, the man saw it: a crack in the cliff's base that widened at the bottom into the mouth of a cave. He felt certain that this was the object of his journey.
Evening was drawing near. The river ran between him and the rocky slope that led up to that dark opening in the mountain, and though he'd passed a few places where the water ran gentle and shallow, here it was a narrow booming torrent. There was no chance of reaching the cave today. So he walked uphill away from the river to find a campsite for another night.
That night the man looked again and again at the map and the writing on the back. He even studied the creases in the paper and the etchings in his compass. He couldn't remember how he knew the red needle pointed north or why he should boil water or what he expected to find at the X, in the cave. Whatever it was, he hoped it would be a good thing, though he reflected that it might not be and that he might not even recognize whether it was. He looked again at the back of the map.
“Dec 6. Must evacuate. Lost logbook.”
“What is at the X?”
“I can’t remember”
On an impulse, he took up the pen and wrote underneath the writing: "I don't remember who I am." The handwriting was exactly the same as all the rest.
"I wrote this," the man said to himself, "All of it. But I can't remember doing it." The questions made his mind like a pebble rolling and rolling along a hill, but there was nothing to do but go to sleep and try in the morning to answer them.
Crossing the river took hours. The man had to hike back downstream the way he'd come until the water was shallow enough to ford, and it was so cold it numbed his feet and legs painfully. Then he sat in the sun until his pants and socks were dry; there was no firewood on this side of the river because it was all rocks and boulders hemmed in by cliffs. "At least my boots are dry," he said as he laced them on at last, for he had taken them off for the crossing.
Midmorning sunlight glowed on warm ruddy stone. The pieces of granite were of all sizes and shapes, from round pebbles by the shore to tall angular boulders. They stacked themselves higher and higher up the steep hill on the left, up to the bases of uneven cliffs, whose ridges drew stark crooked lines along the sky.
There passed a time of finding a way along the rocky shore, trying not to hurry too much and hurt himself on the treacherous terrain. He felt the scrape on his hand then and resolved to avoid similar or worse injury. With a destination so eagerly in mind, it was impossible to enjoy the walk. Finally, after much hobbling and hopping over pieces of granite and craning of the neck upward to look for the landmark cliff, it gradually came in view, soaring a thousand feet overhead. The top of the crack was just visible from this vantage at the bottom of the hill of scree, which the man climbed.
He wasn't sure what he'd expected but the opening of the cave didn't look very remarkable as he came level to it. The opening was steeply slanted so he would have to bend his back and be careful of his footing to avoid sliding down into a narrowing fissure to the side. It was a place unlike the campsite or the sunny hillside—uninviting. It was dark inside. Fear was the word rolling in his mind as the man double checked his map and prepared to shuffle his way in.
A cave is an odd place because going forward it always looks black, but looking back it looks bright. The explorer edged forward carefully, taking small steps and sometimes bracing his hand against the ceiling. He looked back often and often told himself, "I can always go back if I need to," feeling less sure about that than he wished. The backpack was a hinderance but he dismissed the idea of leaving it behind.
At last when the light was getting very dim because of a curve in the way, when internal shouts of "Go back" were starting to overcome the answer of "But where will I go?", the floor became flatter. The angled rock fell away into a sandy floor and the ceiling was high enough to stand up. Curious, the man ran the sediment through his fingers and guessed an ancient course of the river had left this deposit of sand here. In any case it was a delight to walk on, and he inched his way forward, hands running along the uneven walls on both sides. The absurdity of his quest had subsided again under an intense curiosity. For a few minutes he went in complete darkness. He knew he could use the matches to see where he was going, but there weren’t enough of them to last long. He felt damp rough rock rubbing his hands. He breathed motionless underground air. He heard the shuffling of boots on the firm sandy floor. Then he saw a light.
It was a blue light. Dimly glowing ahead, at first it seemed a trick of the mind. But as minutes passed with another few yards of the passage traversed, it became clearer. The man could see the outline of a rock, a darker shape set against a lighter shape beyond it. Turning a corner, he saw a slight widening of the cave brightly enough to notice the wrinkles and cracks in the walls. The light was blue, so blue everything looked strangely flat and ethereal in its azure glow. The source was still out of sight beyond another bend. Able to see, the man stepped forward more confidently.
He turned the next corner and looked squinting down a relatively straight stretch. The far wall was brightly lit by the light. There was another sharp turn and the corner cast a clear shadow. He knew this final corner hid the source. Everything else was just a reflection, gradually decreasing along the folds and turns of the cave. Blue. What could be making that light? The man almost walked around the corner to see, but something about the smudged handwriting on the map where the X was labeled, and something about a disturbance in the sandy floor made him pause.
The sand was slightly churned up in places instead of being smooth as in most places. The man realized he'd seen this phenomenon further back on his path. Most of the rough spots seemed to be near the middle of the narrow cave and spread out along its length. It took only a moment to understand, but much longer to believe. These were footprints.
"Someone has been here before," said the man. Something had walked on this sand sometime in the past, and these did not look like the double-oval prints of the elk. These were oblong prints like the ones his own boots had made in the mud.
Seized by a sudden suspicion, the man planted his right foot heavily near a particularly clear footprint. Taking it away he compared the two. The boots had ridges and bumps on their undersides, and these left a clear impression in the sand where he'd stamped on it. The impression was the same as the other, the mark that was already here when the man entered the cave.
"I made that footprint," he breathed, looking around. There were quite a number of them, some overlapping one another, some pointing inward toward the light, some pointing outward. They started behind him, passed around the corner into the bright blue light, and led out of sight down the lighted passage. The more he looked the more he saw that all the prints matched his own boots.
"I made all these footprints." Is this cave where he lived? The man felt there ought to be someplace he lived, a place he didn't always leave behind after a night of sleeping like a campsite. But he felt somehow that it wouldn't make sense to live in a cave. "I've walked here before, more than once. But I can't remember."
He noticed something strange. Not all the prints looked the same; the ones pointing outward away from the light were longer and deeper. And there were fewer of them than footprints leading in. How was that possible? The man looked and looked and tried to imagine making these shapes in the sand. What kind of gait would make a print like that?
"I was running," he said aloud, "I walked in. And when I came out I was always running."
He looked around. One set of outward-leading prints led sideways to the wall and then away from it at an angle. His eyes met a spur of rock that jutted out from the floor by the wall, and his fingers reached unbidden to feel the bruise on his shin. "I hit my shin on the rock that time," he said, "Why, was I running with my eyes shut?"
He remembered the tent and food bags that he carried in the backpack. This cave, then, was definitely a place he had been walking to and not a place where he lived. “I walked here from far away,” the man decided.
"Why was I always running?" His shin and his elevated heart rate seemed to know the answer. “I was afraid. But if I was afraid why did I go back?” He thought of the scribbles on the map. “Because I forgot.”
In that moment the man made a resolution, a vow to hold to amid the vacuum of memory: he must not walk around that corner. He must not show himself to the source of that light. Something terrible had happened when he had done so before. His nerves forbade it, though his curiosity demanded it.
What kind of thing could there be in this cave that could frighten him or make him forget? Of course he didn't know. Perhaps there was a quite normal thing if only he could remember. But if he didn't walk around the corner, what was he going to do?
His nerves and his curiosity compromised by having him sit down to listen. If there were a dangerous animal in there it ought to make grunting and huffing noises now and then, right? But an hour later the only noise he'd heard was his own breathing. He sat on the ground in the shadow staring at the reflected glow and at the edge of the shadow, everything infuriatingly silent and motionless.
He decided to perform a little test. Finding a pebble on the floor, he stood up, braced himself to run, and tossed it into the light. The pebble landed quietly and rolled a little then came to rest on the sandy floor, casting a small shadow where it sat, now motionless. He tried it again.
Finally, careful to keep his own body in shadow, the man found a larger rock and hurled it at the lighted wall. As the loud clatter split the silent air, he felt a surge of dread and turned to flee. Silence fell again and he stopped. The rock had bounced out of sight down the passage, and again there was silence and stillness. There were only the rocks and the sand and the footprints in it, the pebbles he had tossed into the passage, their tiny shadows, and the unchanging deep blue silent light, the edge of it unmoving—unlike sunlight—and not even flickering—unlike firelight. He had another idea.
He rummaged in the backpack until he found the mirror. Then he thought about the map and the writing on it and put the mirror down. On the back under the other words, the man wrote "Beware the blue light at the X! I think it's dangerous." There, now at least if something happened there would be more of a warning. Then he picked up the mirror and held it pinched by the very edge.
Shuffling along the wall to be near the corner, he carefully placed one boot near the edge of the shadow as if it were the edge of the river's shore, or the edge of a cliff. He gripped the mirror and held it out. Maybe if he didn’t actually show himself in the light, whatever was in there couldn’t hurt him.
A rectangle of blue light appeared reflected on the wall near his head as the mirror passed from shadow into the lighted passage, held carefully in his fingers. It was the wrong angle. The man adjusted his grip, causing the reflection to flick up momentarily across the ceiling. At last he got the hang of it and, steeling himself to behold the source, he brought the blue reflection up to his eyes.
...
Gradually a man found himself walking. There were trees above and a ground beneath him.
He felt cold and reached up to wipe his nose. As he did, something in his shirt pocket crinkled. A piece of paper, which he unfolded. How odd that he didn’t remember putting it there, or anything else. The paper was torn and there was some small writing on it, but what he noticed first were huge letters that scrawled on front and back: RUN AWAY.