Chapter 14 - The Man of Wind and Moss

Around midafternoon the four of them arrived at a brook. It fell over rocks and through fallen trees and the water was only about a yard or two in width. On either side of it vegetation grew in dark green chutes. Moss, ferns, and flowers stood firm on the edges of the water as it rushed over flat stones. Pickerelweeds stood like purple lances jousting at the sun. Cattails swayed further downstream where the water slowed. One of the flowers caught Marco’s attention and he fixated on it. It had three white petals that looked wrinkled and worn like linen sheets on a clothesline. In the center was a yellow sun with hooks and fur. A long the stem were tubers that grew in brown loops like a collection of warts. Arrowhead, Marco remembered. The flower was called arrowhead.

“I gotta get these jeans off,” Doll said behind him. Pansy came over and helped Doll sit down on an old, crusted log. Doll unhooked her bag and let it fall behind her. Pansy unbuttoned her sister’s jeans and shimmied them down her legs. Doll glanced at Marco, and he looked away, shyly, and walked to the water’s edge.

He had an idea of what he must’ve looked like, but it had since left his mind. He was never one you’d catch fixing his hair in a mirror or checking his own gait in a shop window. To Marco, how he looked seemed irrelevant, but that was only because for most of his life he had identified himself makeshift and impromptu, scrabbled together from the perspective of others. If someone called him tall, then he went forward thinking he was tall. If someone said he had nice eyes, then that was a gem he held onto until it slipped his mind, and he returned to thinking his eyes were just eyes. If people called him funny, he was funny, lackadaisical then, so be it, an overthinker, sure why not? But that all changed when he looked down at his reflection in the water.

He looked monstrous. His jawline was swollen, his nose cracked to the side and somehow cracked in as well. His eyes were dark black. His glasses were crooked. He bared his teeth, and his face looked like it was missing a puzzle piece. He felt a tear run down his cheek, unsure if it was from the pain of smiling, the pain of breathing through his nose, or the pain of reckoning with his new face. His first thought was that Pansy couldn’t love a face like his. He couldn’t help but think that way.

But here’s the thing: Marco wasn’t stupid. He had a large capacity for introspection. Long nights of him on his bed, staring at the ceiling, had him realize and understand that he lacked proper self-advocacy, self-realization, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-centeredness. He had looked up, vaguely, in the sense that Googling is research, numerous ways to build oneself up. To love oneself. But he couldn’t make progress. The nagging in his head always told him the same thing: the right people need to like you. The right person was always Pansy. There had been other girls. Just recently in fact. But the validation of Pansy’s affection was held in a lockbox and hidden from plain sight. But again, he was not dumb. He knew in his heart and in his squirrely little brain that Pansy had no real part in this dilemma. He had fabricated all of it in his head. She had no real agency when it came to withholding validation. It was a made-up problem, and he made her the conquest. He knew that the real answer was inside somewhere. Not in Pansy’s lockbox. Definitely not in the steam room with Sasha. Probably not even with Monchito. But that was the part that kept him up the longest. Frustrated him the most. After learning this about himself, he expected a switch to flip. Like when you see how a magic trick is done, the mystique disappears, and you laugh at yourself and wonder how you ever fell for that in the first place. But that never happened. He said to himself in a glorious revelation: I don’t need them. I only need me. And then his brain said, Get real.

Marco turned from his reflection and looked back over his shoulder, following Doll as Pansy helped sit her down in the shallow water. Doll was in her underwear now and her knee looked terrible. It was swollen. The bookends of the wound were green and yellow, and dried stripes of blood ran down her leg. At the edge of the brook, the girls washed and dabbed at the leg and Doll steadied her breathing and winced and cringed.

“Do you need any help?” Marco asked.

Pansy looked up and her hair fell in front of her face. She wet her hands and pushed her hair back. Her green eyes were bright like marbles in the sunlight. She shook her head and kept tending to her sister.

Marco left the girls and headed downstream where he saw Sasha kneeling by the water. She was taking up handfuls of mud and slathering them on her forearms, coating the bug bites.

“Pretty smart,” Marco said.

“Saw it on TV,” she said without looking up.

“Doll needs to take a rest. I think we should stay here for the night. Seems as good a place as any other.”

“Whatever you guys say.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means you have no idea what the hell you’re doing.”

“I’m sorry, Naked and Afraid, do you have a better plan?”

“I want to talk about the map.”

“Not this again.” Marco turned on his heels to leave. A wet clod of mud splattered against the back of his head. He turned and saw Sasha poised. Mud-handed. “Did you just—?”

“We need to talk about the map.”

Marco approached her. He found his inner Dean. Kept calm. Wiped the mud out of his hair. “There is no Man of Wind and Moss. It’s a thing you read. It wormed into your head. You had a nightmare just last night about it. Don’t act like this. You’re a smart girl.”

“Don’t condescend to me. I know I’m fucking smart, that’s why you should listen to me.” She took the map out of her back pocket again and firmly pushed it into Marco’s chest. “Find the stream.”

“What do you mean?”

“Find any stream of water on the map. Any one. Go ahead.”

Marco’s hands were trembling, and he tried to still them before Sasha could see that he was nervous, but it was obvious he was. That’s the true reason why he didn’t want to look at the map. The needle prick in his brain scared him. When he looked at the map earlier, he felt untethered, lost, falling through some cosmic hole that didn’t make sense. But Sasha stared him down as she rubbed the mud she was going to throw at him onto her arms and elbows.

Marco unfolded the map, and it was worse than he expected. His stomach plunged. The map was empty. Or, rather, there was nothing on it. It was a sheet of light green. No lines, no formations, no boundaries. Nothing. Just green. The legend was a scramble of letters. The compass rose in the corner was gone entirely.

“Where’s the stream? Where is anything?” Sasha asked.

Marco closed the map. He couldn’t stand to look at it. It felt like one of those optical illusions in kids’ books where you have to look through it instead of at it, whatever the hell that meant.

“Are you going to start taking this seriously now or what?” She grabbed the map from him and studied it.

Marco felt himself get riled up. His hackles raised. “We’re spending the night here. In the morning we’re gonna follow the stream. If you keep going on like this, you’re going to freak out Doll and Pansy.” He dug deep inside and looked around for any power of manipulation he could muster. He tried to take advantage of their chemistry. Tried to appeal to whatever brought Sasha to the steam room the night before. He reached forward and touched her muddy hand. He held it in his. “You have to trust me. I know that you’re scared, and I know you’re confused. And I agree that the map is frightening. But, please, Sasha, look at me. You’re leaping to big conclusions. The Man of Wind and Moss is a myth. It’s just something you read.”

Sasha was about to speak, but he stopped her. He held her hand tighter, massaging it with his thumbs. Behind her glasses her eyes widened and grew sad. Her lips were cracked, and the neck of her shirt was dark with sweat. He could see the small rise of her chest as she calmed her own breathing, and he could see how her bony shoulders flinched, wound tight with tension.

“I promise we’re going to get out of here,” he said. “Can you just stay on my side until then? I can’t do this without you.”

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

“Please.”

“We’ll spend the night,” she said. “And in the morning, we’ll follow the water.”

She pulled her hand from his and walked past him. He stayed where he was and watched the stream flow through the cattails. It disappeared around a small bend. The sun ahead played on the water and flies and mosquitoes flew in whirlwind circles just above the shoreline. Despite his efforts, the image of the map bubbled through the cracks in his brain. There was no stream on the map. So, then what the hell was he looking at? And where the hell did it go?