INTO THE FOREST

Having vaguely agreed on some acceptable approach to the problem of me, I was politely invited to follow The Lady’s sober little page to my ‘guestroom’ while the others stayed to work out details. As I rose to go, The Lady invited me to wander her woods freely, but gently forbade me to leave her chambers. When I expressed confusion about these seemingly contradictory instructions, Rain told me just not to ‘open any doors’ except that of my guest quarters, where he would come find me when ‘the plan’ was finalized. I nodded politely, feeling very much like the proverbial mushroom, and followed The Lady’s page through a narrow door which took us directly back outside.

The earlier fog had cleared now, dappling the forest in sunlight. I gazed up through a filigree of treetops too dense and tangled to reveal more than confetti of the bright blue sky above them. I still had no idea where this forest was—if it really ‘was’ anywhere at all. Though I had asked pretty directly if all this was real, The Lady’s one-word answer had been perfectly inscrutable. ‘Real…’ I still couldn’t decide whether this had been a statement or a question.

If this forest was yet another illusion, it was a very large one. As we walked, and walked, I looked everywhere for anything wrong enough to suggest that all this might be fabricated. But every smallest detail seemed flawless—and not just visually. The feel, scent and behavior of the very air; the movement and sound of every ruffling leaf, falling evergreen needle, or rill of water seemed entirely right. I grabbed a few things here and there in passing: a twig of fir needles, a tiny yellow mushroom, a sorrel leaf, a few strands of iridescent spider’s web. It all felt and smelled just as it should. I even brought a few things to my tongue. The tastes seemed right as well. I could not imagine minds capable of inventing this volume of detail so perfectly, credibly, and consistently, much less maintaining and keeping track of it all, while allowing the rest of their lives to become as botched up as they clearly were? It just made no sense, and Piper had suggested there was really very little they could do with their ‘illusions.’ Still…despite the lack of evidence, I could not dismiss the feeling that this whole forest was a dazzling fraud. Which left me wondering, again, what exactly this thing was that they did to make us see, or not see, whatever they intended—and how much farther than mere visuals it went.

As we’d walked into these woods from The Lady’s soaring house, I had become slowly aware of a subtle, gong-headed sensation—a dissipating mental muffling—suddenly detectable to me, it seemed, only as it started to fade. Was whatever they had given me earlier that morning just still wearing off? …Or had there been something in those pastries after all?

After days of searching for this woman, intent on begging her to undo this ‘miracle,’ how had I just spent—what? Half an hour? An hour and a half? I had no clear idea, even of that—without so much as thinking, much less asking any of the questions that mattered most to me? How had I ended up apologizing to her for the trouble I’d caused instead of insisting—or at least begging her—to fix the trouble she’d caused me? Had this lovely, welcoming, almost maternally compassionate woman been clouding my mind somehow? Hiding my own thoughts even from me? Were they still doing it now? Was I even really awake yet?

As such questions multiplied in my head, our path turned suddenly downhill toward a tiny cottage nestled under some trees at the edge of an open, gorgeously sunlit glade—above which I could find no actual sun—in any direction. There it was. The ‘flaw’ I had been waiting to discover.

“How do you people do all this?” I demanded, more fiercely than I should have spoken to a child. But my tone didn’t seem to frighten or offend him. He just continued toward the little house without so much as turning to glance back at me. Clearly, no one here had any real intention of answering my questions at all.

Or, I wondered, was it just that they couldn’t? Piper had called me a ‘tribal toddler’ that morning. If I were somehow able to bring a fifteenth century farmer into the city today, how would I answer his questions? Would it even help to try?

Likely not.

Still, I wanted answers. More badly with every passing hour.

The cottage’s mossy, cedar shingle roof curved up asymmetrically to a leaning, curled point, like the back of some fanciful limpet. Its many oddly angled wooden walls were pierced by mullioned windows of varying shapes and sizes, and a door of carved wood and leaded glass. Curls of smoke puffed from its tall, river-rock chimney suggesting someone at home, but the page walked right up and opened the door without knocking, then stood aside to let me enter.

“This is my guestroom?” I asked.

He bowed silently, without any change of expression.

I leaned through the door and gazed around at a single room with what appeared to be some kind of curtained alcove. It was the very archetype of cozy: straight out of a fairytale. A small bed framed in curling, polished wood, and covered in thick pastel-colored quilts, sat across the room from three large windows looking out across the sunny meadow. To the bed’s right, a tiny roll-top writing desk stood against one wall, replete with candle, stationery, quill, and ink pot. I wondered who they imagined I might be writing letters to. Across the room sat a small round wooden table with three chairs. Three sets of brown ceramic dishes lay on woven straw mats there, as if a meal were imminent, though I saw no facilities for cooking. On yet another wall of the irregularly shaped room, a cheerful little fire blazed under a mantel of river-rock framed in more curling, polished wood. Madrone, I thought. An expansive dark green rocking chair with curling runners sat by the picture windows atop an oval green- and russet-colored rag rug which covered most of the remaining hardwood floor.

“This is beautiful!” I said, turning back to smile at my young guide.

He bowed again, and turned to leave.

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

He turned back to stare at me as if I were a melancholy work of art, bowed once more, and walked off into the woods from which we’d come as if I’d never existed to begin with. What is he about? I wondered, realizing that I hadn’t seen him speak to anyone. Not even The Lady.

I shrugged and went inside, closing the door behind me.

The curtained alcove turned out to be a charming if primitive bathroom, where someone had been kind enough both to fill its small, round copper tub with clear, hot water, and to leave a stack of fresh clothing on the wicker chair beside it. Other than being clean, the clothes were nothing special: some blue jeans, black socks, cotton boxers, a black T-shirt, and a dark green long-sleeved wool shirt.

I walked around the copper tub to what, underneath its wooden seat, appeared to be a pit latrine, though happily without any smell I could detect, or any bottom near enough to see. Hoping my assumption was correct, I took a badly needed leak. Then I stripped off my fetid clothes, grabbed the yellow chunk of soap provided, and sank blissfully into the bath. How delightful to feel civilized again after… Had it really been just one night on the streets? It felt like weeks now, since I’d fled my condo. But that had been just two days ago. Still, for a teenage boy, two days of fear and flight without a bath is no laughing matter. I reeked pretty badly.  

Chest deep in that delightful water, I began to scrub myself with the fragrant bar of soap, and quickly became conscious of my new body as I hadn’t really done before—in any focused way, at least. The lightness of it. Its easy flexibility. Its smoothness… I had hardly thought of my new condition yet as anything but a terrible mistake in urgent need of correction. In fact, I’d barely had a moment to think of anything but navigating one crisis or another.

I stopped scrubbing, and leaned back, suddenly aware of an exhaustion more mental than physical. Just sitting for a while, alone, with no crisis to manage, no interrogators to appease, half afloat in the now herb-and-petal-scented soapy water…seemed more desirable to me than any other activity I could imagine. When had I last had the pleasure of thinking about nothing? Not for…well, far, far longer than I’d been this teenage boy, certainly. This sudden cessation of hostilities begged to be savored.

Of course, human minds don’t tend to think of ‘nothing’ for very long. Not without a lot of meditative training, or between dreams at night, perhaps. Mine started up again almost immediately.

If my interview with The Lady had left me understanding anything at all, it was that my new form wasn’t going to get corrected. I was this now. For good.

Which didn’t seem so dreadful—at the moment. The man I’d been would never even have fit into this tub, much less drifted here so comfortably. Rain had said it very clearly that morning: I had wanted this. It had been my wish—however stupid.

But…had it been? …Had I really wished for this?

Technically, perhaps. I was a teenage boy now, knowing everything I’d known at fifty. That was what I had said to The Lady that night.

But this was not what I had meant. The boy I’d wished to be had not been living on the street without family, friends, resources, or viable identity. I had never imagined his life as a whipsaw of anxiety and trauma—in a world where the most basic pillars of reality were all turned upside down. No, this was not—in any way—what I’d been wishing for.

What I’d been turned into wasn’t even really a boy! Not inside. I had a nice young body now, but no innocence to go with it, no simplicity, no blissful if misguided assumptions of security or potential. No more laughter or playfulness than I’d ever had. Not even any renewed sense of wonder, oddly, despite having landed, somehow, in the middle of an actual fairytale! What childhood idyll had ever shared anything in common with this bewildering maelstrom of violent threats and frightening, shaming, crazy-making intrigue? Politics, for god’s sake! What kind of fairytale had politics in it? ...Okay, most politics was thoroughly imbued with fairytales. I’d concede that. But that was different—and beside the point. Other than my teenage body, there was nothing truly childlike about me at all. That was what everyone had seemed to miss as I’d been shamed all morning for failing to appreciate this so-called ‘gift.’

I didn’t even feel any smaller now. Not really. Everybody else just seemed bigger, somehow. That, right there, was the central problem: I hadn’t really changed in any of the ways I’d actually wished to that night. I was still exactly who I’d been—but in entirely the wrong package now—with a whole world of unimaginable new dangers and difficulties to go with it! What was I supposed to do with that? How was I even supposed to survive it?

‘Still hope to rule the world by twenty-five?...’

She had seen it all so clearly, hadn’t she. Right from the start. And tried to warn me—whatever I’d been telling myself. Until I’d snapped at her for doing so.

‘If this does not turn out as you imagine, please remember that I warned against it.’

I closed my eyes, and slid down into the tub until only my forehead remained above the water. No one’s fault…but my own.

The need to breathe finally forced me to sit up again. I wiped the water from my eyes, and looked down at the teenage body I had more or less insisted on. Against all advice. My body now. To learn to live in. Somehow.

I drew a deep breath, let it out, and drew a deeper one, trying to exhale my bottomless stupidity as I watched the water rise and fall in opposition to my smooth, flat, teenage chest. I gazed down at my impossibly lean, hairless belly underwater, and then at what bobbed almost as hairlessly below it. As if self-conscious of my scrutiny, it stirred, and shrank, then swelled a little, as if to reassert its right to exist. Curiously, I touched my…boyhood, and nearly gasped at the intense flare of pleasure that slight contact elicited, suddenly understanding something I had overlooked entirely. Something long ago surrendered and forgotten.

There was a stack of thick paper sheets by the wooden toilet seat. I splashed up out of the bath, already stiff, and grabbed a wad of them, then returned to the tub and did myself a favor I had not enjoyed with anything like such sensory intensity for many, many decades.

Sometime later, feeling more relaxed and cheerful than I had felt within ready memory, I got out of the tub at last, and went to try on the clothing they had left me. It all seemed to fit perfectly, though that hardly surprised me now. I pulled the T-shirt down, thinking that I might look pretty good in these clothes. Way better than I’d looked in those dreadful thrift store rags I’d arrived in. They hadn’t left me any shoes, though, so I put the same grimy, tattered, plaid ones on, wondering if I dared ask them for something a little less embarrassing. If they were really able to make anything they wanted just by thinking of it, why not some cooler tennis shoes?

I looked up abruptly, and nearly laughed at what adolescent thoughts these were. I’d never given my clothing a single thought before…this bath. Was that all it took? To be ‘young again?’ Probably not. Yet, I wondered how I’d failed even to think before about the world of things a teenage body could experience as no older body was still equipped to. A regime of constant panic had obscured this side of things completely—until now.

I recalled how fabulous the forest outside had smelled, how exquisitely delicious the simple breakfast that morning had been. Had all that been ‘fairy magic,’ or just the sudden return of a fourteen-year-old nervous system? True child or not, there were things about my sadly unadventurous former life that might still be made right. Once I’d learned to ‘hide’ sufficiently, might I not accept Rain’s offer, and go explore the world as I’d never dared to before? Right now, this new life was a nightmare. But with so much energy and time again, what might I not repair once this nightmare was resolved, starting with the chance to be someone that someone like Brian’s friend Jessie might have wanted after all?

I wasn’t bad looking, was I? I turned to stare down at my reflection in the cloudy bathwater. It seemed handsome enough…but so very fourteen. Had I become too young for ‘romance’ now? I would be growing up again, right? Another question no one had answered yet, but I desperately hoped so.

Then again, was I still too old as well? Any girl a boy ‘my age’ should be trying to kiss would, by definition, understand nothing of what I was looking for in love, or life, or anything else. While any woman who understood those things would, by definition, have no business kissing a boy ‘my age.’ No matter how I parsed this, I was as screwed as any real fourteen-year-old boy!

This was all going to require so much more thought than I had ever imagined.

But not now. My warm bath, and all that exercise, had left me in tremendous need of a nap—on that big, soft-looking bed beyond the curtain. Teenagers needed lots of sleep, didn’t they? It had been a very long time, but I was quite certain they did.