l a p s e

the night

Sometime in the late afternoon, one of us suggested we start walking. I don't know which one of us it was, but we all unanimously agreed.

The botanist brought out a worn bronze compass and spent several minutes unscrewing the lid while the rest of us waited. He was our unspoken leader. After all, he was the one who thought to bring the compass – it only seemed fair that he be at the head of the group. He pointed west, where the sun hung low in the sky, and we started walking.

The trees that rose above us were spindly and fringed with feathery green needles that dropped off at regular intervals. I looked up as we walked, marveling at the waning sunlight forming shafts that lit up the forest floor with fuzzy abstract circles. It was beautiful, and I remember being so enthralled with it that I did not realize we had found a fifth survivor.

In another clearing much like the one I'd woken up in, on the rump of a fallen log, sat the professor. I don't know for sure if he was actually a professor, but he certainly looked the part: salt-and-pepper hair, half-moon glasses, a tired gloss in his eyes. Next to him was a small leather satchel that I assumed he had been lucky enough to be holding when he fell.

The botanist introduced himself and explained our situation: we were all survivors of the crash looking around for more of us, are you okay? The word survivor made me think – I felt we were not so much survivors as victims of some great and terrible higher power.

The professor simply nodded. He didn't talk much. In fact, I don't think he ever really did. He was silent and sullen, like a ghost.

Somewhere between the start of our walk and finding the professor the shafts of light that had so captivated me disappeared. It was probably late evening now, half-past six or maybe seven, but I found I did not care to know about the time. It seemed so constraining, in the forest; like a burden, like a distant piece of another world.

We decided to stay the night in that clearing. It was the botanist's decision, and we all agreed again. The fallen log made for a good shield to the elements, and there was plenty of space for us all to fit on the ground. In the blue suitcase, miraculously, we found a bedsheet.

Somehow it was the lawyer and I who ended up with the sheet. It had probably once been white but now was more of an off-white or an ivory, and it had small yellow flowers embroidered along its length.

You decided that we should pile the fallen needles into a 'bed' – or at least something that could keep us in place and away from the mud. Setting the sheet and the bags aside, we began to sweep up the needles – some were fresh and sharp, but others were starting to rot – into a heap on the leeward side of the log.

As I swept I encountered an assortment of different creatures that had made their home in the dirt. I found massive ants, grimy earthworms, several beetles, and a garter snake, all of which scurried away immediately upon sensing me looming above.

I once would have been terrified of these creatures, if they had entered my home or crawled up my leg. But in the forest, in their territory, I was not afraid – I simply brushed past them as if they were stones or inanimate objects. Perhaps the plane crash had jarred me so much that it would take only some great measure of danger to frighten me. Perhaps the day's exhaustion had desensitized me to feeling anything at all.

We lay down on the bed of needles. Sometime during the day the rat had scampered onto my shoulder, and when I settled myself onto my back she curled round my head and I could feel her claws in my hair.

The lawyer was beside me, her back to mine, and occasionally I would hear a sniffle or a cough from her side. I was at the very end of the line. I could not see who was on the other side of the lawyer but from the sound of breathing I imagined it to be first you, then the botanist, and finally the professor on the other end.

Night fell. I had trouble sleeping – either I was too restless, or the night was too still - and so I was privy to everything that the forest had to offer. Many things happened at night. I heard everything I expected to hear in a forest – the hooting of owls, the rustling of leaves, the steady song of a swarm of mosquitoes above my head.

But I also heard other things, things that one cannot notice when distracted by daylight. At first I couldn't quite make out anything, but then a kind of rhythm began to reveal itself, humming through the earth and into my body. I listened with a sort of lingering awe, like I had been given the privilege to hear to some phenomenal secret. Like the universe was whispering in my ear. The trees seemed to breathe, and there was a kind of pulsing in the ground, as if a heart and lungs were buried below the soil.

I expected the rain to return, to lash upon us in torrents, in a sort of punishment for surviving. But it did not, and I somehow drifted into a melancholy sleep that drilled itself into my bones.