Chapter 32: Day 31

Day 31,

We’re back from the camping trip.  Can’t quite work up the motivation to do actual library work right now, so I’m just going to write for a while unless someone comes in looking for something.

It was still relatively early afternoon when I stopped writing yesterday and Lin returned to the library with two backpacks.  She advised me to pack a change of clothes “just in case”.  Curious but realizing by now I wasn’t going to get an answer to whatever surprise she had planned, I took one of the backpacks and obliged before we set out.

We took the road out of the Village I normally use every day.  I pointed out the turnoff to my house as we passed it.  Lin expressed some surprise at first and then chided herself saying she should have figured Pat would put me up there.  Friends with the old archivist as she was, she’d visited on a handful of occasions, but it’d been a few years since she’d been out to it.

I commented that it’s kind of funny that she probably has more memories associated with the place that I’m living in than I do.  She nearly tripped on a loose cobblestone when I said that (distracted by the statement?) then laughed it off and said that she was sure that’d change before too long.

From there the conversation while we walked turned to Cass’s first day as assistant archivist.  I let her in on my… linguistic complications… that we discovered.  Lin seemed to find this equal parts hilarious, tragic, and exciting.  At any rate, her initial reaction appeared genuinely sympathetic, then a few minutes later she apologized for having to stifle a laugh at the sheer absurdity of “the Archivist can’t read.”  This led to a somewhat indignant clarification on my part that I can read, just only when I don’t think about it or concentrate on individual words or letters.  Lin then told me to think of it less like I can’t read properly and more like I have some sort of magic translating power.  I rebutted that I wasn’t able to read the writing that Cass and I found in the cathedral ruins, but she said that maybe whatever translation ability I have hasn’t fully grown yet or perhaps the writings we found were all incomplete enough that it was still the same issue that I was having with individual words or fragmented sentences.  I confess that while I still doubt that’s what’s happening, that latter possibility is intriguing.  Too bad I know not where to find the sufficient text to test that theory with.  Mayhaps the old castle?

Eventually we turned off from the main road’s circuit onto a dirt path leading further inland.  Smaller and less traveled than the one to my house and Cass’s family farm, but not quite so overgrown as the one to the cathedral ruins.  Lin told me it wasn’t too far now, which was a relief seeing as we’d been walking for a couple of hours at this point.  True to her word, we soon arrived at the shore of a large, round lake.  Once we first spotted the glint of water through the trees Lin abruptly picked up the pace, leaving me to scramble after.

Not too far from our exit from the tree line was a small wooden shack, the remains of a fire pit, and a short jetty onto the water with a tarp-covered rowboat moored to it.  All of this Lin greeted with an arms-in-the-air enthusiasm, happy to see “that it’s all still here.” I myself was pleased (and pleasantly surprised) to find something resembling a formal campsite rather than just sleeping in a random spot in the jungle.

Apparently this is a moderately popular spot that Lin used to visit when she was younger, first as a kid with her parents, and then later with friends, but she hadn’t been back in some time.

According to her the good part isn’t really visible until sundown, and so we spent our time until then cleaning out the boat (no holes, but a little bit of rainwater and several spiders) and shack (some dust, leaves, and one particularly large spider) and attempting to start a fire.  It turns out that neither of us knew very well what we were doing with that last part, but eventually got something going for us to sit by while we ate dinner and watched the sun go down.

And that was a sight.  Not so much the sunset itself as what came after.  Once the sun got close enough to the horizon and the sky was beginning to shift from orange and purple Lin grabbed my hand and dragged me down the dock to the boat.  She was emphatic that for the best view we get out to the middle of the lake before the sun was completely gone.  As it turns out rowing a boat is a little more complicated than I thought (or at least requires some measure of technique to not go in circles) and she ended up taking over that job.  We were more like halfway out rather than all the way to the center when it got full dark and Lin declared it “close enough” and pulled up the oars to watch the show.

As the stars came out above us – and even after a month here I still can’t get over their sheer quantity – I became aware of a similar shine in the lake beneath us.  At first I thought it was “merely” a fantastic reflection of the sky above us on the lake’s placid surface, but as I watched it I realized that it didn’t match.  Stars were in the wrong positions, the band of the galactic arm was oriented in the wrong direction, and some clusters of stars were moving as I watched them.  I soon realized that the depths of the lake itself were alight.  The moving “stars” were the animals of the lake covered in their own glowing pinpoints of light, giving the illusion of moving constellations as the dark silhouettes of the unlit parts of their bodies blocked out the deeper lights below.  Floating there with one starry sky above us and another below one could not help but imagine drifting through space, untethered from the world.  A part of me wished we had thought to douse our fire before getting in the boat, but its ability to spoil the illusion was easily enough ignored if you simply looked the other way.

The two of us sat in silence for a long time, taking it in.  Sitting here now back in the archives, I can’t help but feel a twinge of frustration at not being able to do justice to the beauty of that night with mere words.  Looking up at the crystals hanging from the archive ceiling I find myself thinking back to my first time seeing them and the wonder I felt then.  If these are like stars kept in bird cages, then that was like being in the center of a wild flock in the sky thousands strong.

It was Lin who gently ended the reverie, wanting to show me something.  While we’d been sitting there stargazing and “star”gazing she’d left one arm dangling over the side of the boat and trailing in the water.  Now as she pulled it up to show me her fingers had taken on a similar starry glint.  It faded back to normal within a few seconds of showing me, and as it did so I could tell that it was just a matter of being coated in a dark glitter-filled liquid.  It was as if her skin itself had darkened to a blue-black and begun glowing with a white light from scattered pores, especially clustered along her veins.

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This unsettled me greatly as my mind started racing to think of things that could do that to a person and not coming up with anything good.  I apparently did a poor job at hiding my concern as, seeming upset at having accidentally scared me, Lin began frantically reassuring me that it was perfectly safe and people even went swimming in this lake all the time.  As if to prove this point she started kicking off her shoes and then jumped off the side of the boat fully clothed, splashing me and setting the small craft rocking.  I suppose this was the “just in case” for bringing along a second set of clothes.

After a great deal of internal debate in a surprisingly short amount of time I joined her, albeit much more cautious in my immersion.  First just a finger in the water for a couple of minutes to see the effects and verify that they were temporary and not painful, then a foot dangled over the side before slowly lowering myself in as Lin alternated between teasing and cheering me on.  I kept one hand on the boat at first, keenly aware of the depth of the water beneath me and the awkwardness of trying to swim whilst fully clothed, but eventually I let go and swam the short distance over to where Lin was paddling in place.

The water itself was actually quite clear and it became apparent that the lights (other than those on the fish and other animals) were coming up from the lakebed far below.  Clear enough that I was easily able to look down and see my own skin and clothes change color and begin to glow.  Unnerving yes, but at the same time exhilarating in its own right.  I’d taken long enough to get in that Lin’s face and neck had returned to normal from her initial plunge, giving the illusion of a disembodied face floating above the water.  I imagine I looked much the same.  Up until she splashed me anyway.  I returned the favor and we played like that for a while; laughing and splashing until we both looked like creatures of void and starlight and laid floating on backs watching the true stars above us until we realized we were getting tired enough that we needed to get back in the boat and row back to shore.

Our exposed skin quickly returned to normal as we dried out although our waterlogged clothes and hair maintained traces of starlight our whole way back to shore.  I got another turn to try rowing, and as I did Lin explained to me that you’d pretty much have to live in the lake to really keep any effect afterward like the fish and crabs villagers occasionally catch out of the lake do.  One time she and her friends dared one among them to stay in the lake all night (in the shallows where he could stand or sit) and when he came out a little bit before sunup he was still back to normal in a minute or so.

Back on the shore we took turns changing clothes behind the shack and spent some time drying off by the fire before setting up the sleeping bags Lin had brought for the night on the floor of the shack.

All in all, it was a fun outing and a nice night.  Which made Lin’s uncharacteristic quiet come morning all the more odd.  She was subdued enough and giving only distracted one word answers as we ate breakfast and packed up that I grew concerned enough to ask her outright what was wrong.

To my surprise she began apologizing for dragging me out here and berating herself for being selfish.  I’ll spare her some emotional privacy and leave out the gritty details but the gist of what she told me was that for the past couple of weeks she and her father had been attending to an old man that they were expecting to die any day now and the emotional toll of that had gotten to the point where she felt she couldn’t take it anymore and needed a break, or at least a distraction, but whatever it was, she didn’t want to be alone for it, but all the friends she grew up with these days had spouses or even kids and she’d been gradually growing distant from them, so she grabbed me who was a conveniently located new friend with no other strong attachments and dragged me out away from whatever I was doing with no warning or concern for what I wanted, all while neglecting her duty and leaving her father to care for a dying man alone.

I have to say that I didn’t know what to say to all that.  And still don’t, really.  So I simply did the best I could to comfort her and assuage the guilt she was obviously feeling and along with her concerns that it meant she wasn’t cut out to take over as Village doctor.  It sounded like empty platitudes even to me as the words left my mouth that everyone needs a break at times, trying to take care of yourself and wanting to see friends when you’re having a hard time isn’t selfishness, etc.  Frustrating how despite my verbosity in writing I am at an utter loss with speaking when it actually matters.  Still, I pressed on, insisting (and truthfully so) that I really enjoyed last night and greatly appreciated that she thought of me enough as a friend to invite me out to a place that obviously meant a lot to her.

Maybe my fumbling words helped, or maybe she just put on a mask to keep me from worrying, but she seemed to cheer up a bit.  By the time we reached the cobblestone main road she was back to humming a tune as was her usual habit.  Hoping to keep her from ruminating on things too much I eventually asked if there were words to whatever song that was.  She taught me the words as we walked and we tried singing together in an off-sync manner for a time.  Although with the end of the song we returned to a near silence for the rest of the walk back to the Village with neither of us sure what else to say to keep the conversation going.  Whether that silence was companionable or awkward or a mix I can’t rightly say.

As we neared the library I offered to walk with her the rest of the way back to her place but she politely declined, saying she didn’t want to keep me away from my responsibilities longer than she already had.  I started to object that I really didn’t have much to do, but then stopped myself and merely said “I understand,” before offering a hug and reiterating that I really did have a good time last night and thanked her again for taking me out to the lake.

And so now I’m here, writing, not feeling like working and with no one having come in in the past few hours I’ve been at this with the journal.  I think I’ll close up early and head home.

 

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