Firewatch

Once Peter had given her a cursory tour of the lookout and its immediate environs and brought her bags up the stairs he seemed eager to get himself out of the way.

"Well," he said, "that's it, I think."

His face told a different story - like he was groping after something in the darkness in there. Whatever it was, he didn't seem all that committed to remembering it.

"Oh." Some time later. "Another thing I should mention, I suppose. Couple of folks will be up here around the same time as you taking samples or something, last I heard, out of Fish and Wildlife."

Another pause. "Nothing to worry about."

Then, clarifying. "Just, you being a woman and all out here - wouldn't want you to worry."

He seemed embarrassed, expecting that he'd said something wrong.

"Oh, okay." She said. "And no, thanks, really - would have been a weird surprise, I suppose."

He smiled, suddenly animated, and, rocking back on the heels of his boots, clasped both hands on the frame of the open door before saying his goodbyes (simply, "Well. I'll see you.") and heading out onto the stairs.

Corinne watched him as far as she could - which wasn't all that far once he hit the tree line - before falling back onto the bed. Four months now stretched before her like some vast, glacial plane: barren and vast beyond the mind's reckoning, ripe for the furnishings of an unoccupied imagination.

Freedom, in other words. Wonderful, terrifying freedom.

------------

The next day she made for the banks of the little stream she and Peter had forded in their final ascent, bringing with her only what she could fit in an old Filson day pack her father had foisted on her on the way out of New York.

The way down was steep and narrow, marked some years ago courtesy of red paint the Forest Service had used to draw circles on the odd tree or rock that seemed prominent enough - or sufficiently unchanging.

She touched her palm to the milestones on her way past - as if to commit them to some kind of kinesthetic memory that might serve her in lieu of all others - and stopped otherwise every twenty yards or so for all manner of things: to look at much the same vista she'd had the last time she stopped, to take on water in vanishingly small increments, to follow the movements of a flock of mountain chickadees.

Each distraction had the same kind of silent reverie to it, such that, by the time she'd finally settled on the bank and even sometime after she'd already started painting, she could no longer exactly remember how - or when - she'd gotten there.

Beyond her focus, downstream, a man - visibly younger, thinner, and more animated than Peter even from some distance - strode into view, waving at her uncertainly at various intervals as he tried to find the appropriate range for an audible greeting.

"Hey!" He said, a slight hint of an New Zealan-stralian accent of sorts, seemingly at pains to appear as friendly as humanly possible. "I'm James, by the way, not just some lunatic emerging at you from the forest."

He flashed a lanyard at her in the way a detective might in a movie before requisitioning someone's car. "Fish and Wildlife."

He was quite handsome, she thought, once she finally turned to get a good look at him: the sort of man who actively looked as if he owned a canoe, or went on expeditions of some manner - if only from the look of his forearms and the angle of his shoulders. Tall, too, relatively speaking.

He'd caught Peter going out on his way in, he explained under quiet inspection, and, anyway, he was a biologist, he said, who'd be coming in and out over the next two months or so to study a rare species of salamander found in the headwaters here, and he was pleased to meet her and if she needed anything then he'd be happy to help.

"You're a..." He stood below her on the slope, almost inside the river itself, hands on his hips, clearly hoping to divine something from her blue and white polka-dotted jumpsuit as to why, exactly, she was here and not - say - the West Village, "an artist - I'm guessing?"

"Yeah."

She pursed her lips. People - men, particularly - expected you to be coy with regard to self-assigning such titles, in her experience at least, but increasingly she found herself either not caring altogether or - more keenly still - wanting to project an almost stubborn image of self-assuredness that seemed more consistent with the image of a true creative type.

"A painter," she elaborated. "I'm also a ceramics girlie." She stretched the "e" playfully, grinning a little as she did soon.

"And you? You draw?" She swatted a hand toward what she thought looked like a sketchpad poking from the side pocket of his backpack, leaning back onto an elbow, both so it didn't feel so much like she was looking down on him and to further embellish the cool and nonchalant credentials that she otherwise found abandoning her.

"Oh, I'm shit really. It's just for me." He said, searching around for the appropriate kind of self-disqualification. "Birds and things that I see - more of a mindfulness thing than an artistic venture, you know?"

He shook his head and looked around, suddenly appearing awkward. It was as if, from moment to moment, he realized everything all at once: how he might have acted if he'd met her anywhere else, what he was wearing (overalls, waders), what she looked like, how odd it might have seemed to approach her so familiarly.

"Don't say that," she said, more firmly than she might have wanted, so much so that she blurted, without thinking: "Join me for a minute? Unless you've got something cooking with those salamanders right now."

He looked tentative, at first - like he was trying to figure out whether or not she actually wanted him to accept - but he soon relented upon further encouragement.

"Sure, but pardon me if I'm chatty."

She laughed and waved him down dismissively.

"Oh you good - I'm from the South, baby. Besides, you might be the only person I get to talk to for a long while out here."

...

Corinne had never been a capital "S" stoner. She didn't, for instance, have anything like the kind of reliable, daily relationship with cannabis that certain girlfriends of hers seemed to maintain - such that they had the capacity to talk, sometimes at length, about strains, and THC content, and particular routine activity pairings as if they were an eight-year-old boy who'd just been given an opening to discuss dinosaurs.

But she did have a certain weakness for debilitating men in this way. Especially the more self-effacing types.

"Woah."

She hadn't actually looked at him for some time - being both too preoccupied with capitalizing on the precious little light they had left and concerned that closer scrutiny might have quietened him somehow - but now she discovered an alarmed and quite discombobulated figure, blinking at intervals designed, she imagined, to trigger a sort of soft reboot.

Corinne was reminded of her family's first computer, left heaving and sluggish after a multi-hour and -disc spanning installation of the Sims. Over the course of their time on the slope she'd teased more information out of him than Tony Soprano would divulge across a whole season of therapy appointments. And with a great deal less shouting, she imagined, although all she'd ever actually seen from that show was the odd snippets she'd catch with her ex, consisting mostly of James Gandolfini gasping for breath across various post-industrial cities in New Jersey.

James had come to the US three years ago, she'd discovered, for a post-doc position out in North California. She gathered that he was something of a pre-eminent figure in the field of amphibian ecology and conservation - relatively speaking - by way of publications in journals that even she recognized and talks at conferences and the like. He'd grown up in New Zealand (hence the accent), somewhere, she'd divined from various, disconnected threads about home, family, and life, that he had a difficult, mixed relationship with. And he did, in fact, enjoy drawing, and comics, and animation, topics around which, as they traded questions and ideas between each other in intermittent bursts, he seemed to embody an endearing sense of childish enthusiasm for.

"You doing okay there?"

He stopped blinking and planted both hands flat on the ground beside him.

"Yeah. Yeah. I was a little more out of it than I thought, that's all."

He looked around sheepishly for a while, trying his best to avoid direct eye contact.

"Okay. Well, James." She put a teasing emphasis on his name, affecting an almost-Californian degree of vocal fry. The follow-up coming only after she'd managed to pull her curls back into something approaching a managed state, leaving him fidgeting expectantly.

"I'm gonna take this." She held up his sketch pad, which he may or may not have handed to her sometime at the apex of his high. "And bid you an adieu."

"Night."

Too embarrassed suddenly to reply, James gave a quick nod and sat watching as she cut a thru-line back up through the trees, all the while pulling absent mindedly at the grass beneath him such that he created a bald spot in the earth.

A red tailed hawk circled overhead. He sat alone for a while listening to a chorus of small creatures and the running of water.

"Night."

------------

She woke in the grip of a rootless anxiety. In her dreams, her time here had suddenly ended, swallowed by some kind of deft and cruel acceleration. In the darkness she half expected to see Peter, come to summon her back to the world.

She surveyed the room in rapt silence for a time, frozen in her sleeping bag.

Nothing, of course. But by the time the more discerning woman inside her had stirred and was able to dispell the whole thing as a nonsense she was quite strictly awake and the mountain bluebirds that apparently took up residence on the hillside had erupted into a quite marvellous racket.

She put on a robe and went to the balcony, tightening her silk bonnet such that it wasn't buffeted off into the ether for some confused archaeologist to unearth in later centuries. She was always waking in such delusional panics. The routine was so familiar now that she really ought to have figured the whole thing out by now, but each morning was as much an adhoc triage as the last: a ponderous affair in which she discovered anew the benefits of quiet contemplation, coffee rituals, and a vague sense of presence in nature. The latter somewhat discounted, she presumed, by interminable and unfocused inner monologue.

She wondered, for instance - tending to a mug of liberally-creamered coffee from the depths of a sleeping bag cocoon that she'd migrated to one of the deck chairs on the balcony - how her brother was doing now and whether there would ever come a time in which they could talk - actually talk - absent of the layers of emotional sediment that came with siblinghood, the quasi-caretaker role she'd had involuntarily thrust her way, his almost-certain tendency toward a familial disposition to oscillating bouts of unhinged energy and depression.

And then there was her last relationship, the abuse, the incident.

Why are you doing this right now? She thought. Maybe in the past she would have gotten angry with herself, with the wallowing, but she searched instead now for something to root herself: the lapping of the morning breeze against the nylon, the distant croaking and chirping of insects and frogs and birds, the gentle pulse of warmth against her palms.

Suddenly she remembered James's sketchpad and - somewhat reluctantly, for it meant temporarily exiting the sleeping bag - popped back inside to grab it from where she'd left it on the table the night before.

She raised her feet up on to the squat wooden railing that lined the balcony-cum-landing so as to create a wind break with her knees and rolled up her sleeves beyond her fingers to allow for gingerly turning the pages without full exposure.

A mix of watercolor, pencil, and charcoal drawings populated something like two thirds of the pages, united both in subject (overwhelmingly images of flora and fauna) and their sketchy, unfinished nature - half thoughts and loose vignettes that suggested to Corinne either a habitual indifference to the subject after prolonged exposure (a theory she immediately discounted) or a lack of confidence on James's part.

Thereafter, cohesion gave way to a richer and altogether more variable imagined world: comic strips, curiously absent of text, abstract amalgams of shapes and color, portraits, cats he must have known or seen, loose ideas, floor plans.

A smile crept to her face even at resting as she meandered through the exhibits here, like an image burned to a TV screen. It felt like an intrusion, in a way, to enjoy such unfettered access to the cluttered rooms and disorderly corridors of a stranger's mind, and in some ways now she couldn't help but cast last night's audacity in a less favorable tone, but such thoughts soon gave way to simple and overwhelming gratitude.

She pinched her nose in the hopes of restoring some feeling and turned to the last pages.

Loose, densely-occupied sheets fell into her lap in a pile. She quickly pinned them against the open spread for fear of rogue breezes, flattening them against the page with her free hand where they'd been haphazardly creased and dog-eared.

In sparse, precise pen strokes - evocative of the same, almost economical, style that had rendered the comics in the main volume - a tall, white woman, elevated further still by thick, platform-heeled combat boots, had been cast in full, imposing glory, a leash bound around one hand so as to pull the slack taut against the collar of a naked, faceless figure of a man kneeling before her.

Overleaf, a different woman - maybe a little closer to Corrine this time, if she was to allow herself a charitable interpretation of an admittedly austere form - this time wearing a leather harness that criss-crossed her body and held a looming, almost forbidding cock at its base, made manifest in side profile.

The next page, and the next, each of the loose appendices dealt with much the same theme: fantastically-imagined likenesses of dominatrices, yes, but - perhaps more of interest to Corinne - a wild menagerie of faceless, docile men cast in the role of statuesque attendants, lewdly-positioned objects, eager (often animalistic) companions, carelessly manipulated furniture.

She felt something like a palpitation.

It was hopeless, of course, to suppress the connections and images that came flooding to mind, stoking embers that - until now - she'd scarcely known were even there, but that, now, now that she dared to consider them, threatened to run amok amid fertile ground.

She took a moment to collect herself before revisiting the little treasure trove James had - she thought inadvertently - left her. This was a matter of strategy; loose excitability wouldn't serve her here.

Corinne groped after one of the many loose implements that had gathered at the bottom of her backpack and, working quickly, so as to avoid allowing herself sufficient time to reconsider, set about annotating, embellishing, and drawing in kind before re-siting the loose pages at the very front of the pad for James to discover the next day when he came to check the half-way correspondence drop point they'd conspired on the day before.

Arms length would serve her best for now, she decided. After all, she had nothing but time.

------------

The responsibilities of a fire lookout typically span a twelve-hour shift, the bounds of which are served within the extent of the tower itself, save for the odd break or meal, which Corinne had taken to spending forging off in different directions from the hillside such that, little by little each day, she began to build something like a comprehensive mental model of the world around her.

Mostly, however, if there was nothing that required monitoring, reporting, or maintaining, she painted. She had hauled up with her (or rather, Peter had) enough by way of supplies to last her beyond the four months, and she felt a stubborn determination to exhaust this stockpile, invigorated, as she was, in a way that had mostly eluded her since the early days of college.

In this way Corinne mobilized occupation like one might makeshift barriers to stall the advance of a coming flood: stalling until, by the time she finally descended a week later to root out his response, she couldn't hold herself back any longer.

He'd enclosed his responses - for much of her annotations took the form of pointed questions, clarified as yes/no in post script - in an envelope, scratched down onto a spare scrap of college ruled paper in something reminiscent of an exam submission, e.g.

1) Q: "Is this something you've explored before?"

No.

2) Q: "If this something you'd like to explore?"

Yes.

And so on, so that by the time the questionnaire was finished she'd learned, variously, that he was clean (recently tested), had never been penetrated, identified as bisexual, was physically attracted to her, and - most consequentially - was open to training.

It was difficult to describe what she was feeling. Journaling revealed a complicated slew of emotion: desires and intention that she struggled to exactly define living alongside insecurities anchored not just in the novel, and the now, but in decidedly more familiar specters.

She imagined herself lying on a leather chaise on the third floor of some office in New York, her clone simultaneously occupying the role of therapist from the chair across the room.

"Why do you think you're second guessing yourself?" Therapist Her said.

"Cause this is fucking weird, right?" The other her - patient her, crazy her, the relatable one - leaned up from the chair and exchanged a look with its counterpart. "Like what the fuck am I doing here? I have no idea how to do this, I don't even know what this looks like, right? All that shit with Dom, all that stuff in college, maybe I'm just going off the deep end here."

"I don't know. Maybe that's on you to define, right? Isn't this about what you want? Isn't that the fantasy?"

She - patient, that is - furrowed her brow and held her hands to her forehead, exhaling loudly.

"Fuck, I guess?" She said.

"And sure, this is weird. We are weird, right? Who'd want to be fucking normal?"

"Uh huh. Yeah."

"Why not just have fun with it? Do what we want? When are you ever going to get the chance otherwise?"

Corinne blinked her eyes open and refocused on the room around her. Out of the window to the North the mountain tops were crowned with the pale light of the first visible stars.

Fuck it, she thought. She didn't care anymore. She was going to do her.

------------

Over the weekend she sent James to town with a dizzying variety of letters, errands, and parameters shaped in the light of a new-found and almost zealous rejection of compromise - something she found almost worryingly easy to dispense with given the medium of asynchronous communication.

First, he was to go the library. She'd compiled a reading list that was to give him an exhaustive introduction to black female authors and thinkers, US history and political theory, her favorites from the canon, love and sexuality, and the birds of the Western USA. He would maintain a journal that documented his thoughts on the first batch, following a structure that she had laid out for him - a truly thrilling prospect for someone as type A inclined as Corinne - and would move on to the second and third and so on as he completed each set.

Besides collecting his homework, she had also requested three further entries that she'd managed to pull up online during the odd moments in which 3G signal blessed the tower: a book on female-led relationships that she wasn't entirely sure about, given both the dubious cover and the often less-than-stellar credentials of writers in the space, a widely-lauded (but notoriously intense) regimen for the training of service dogs, and a collection of Carson McCullers' short stories. The last being admittedly unrelated, but in truth she'd found herself struggling to maintain much interest in the Salman Rushdie novel she'd brought with her.