Headlights(127)

I inhale. Fuck.

I smell campfire, ponderosa pine. Capsaicin. The cold wind blows into the car, and the bird is gone, but …

A whisper of something. I swear I—

I close my eyes. Send my signal to the other-space. I can feel you. I say it out loud, “I can feel you.”

Another plea. A desperate prayer.

There’s movement, in the headlights, at the far end of the lawn. A rabbit. No … a chipmunk. Or …

The radio suddenly flips to a talk station. Someone saying: “You know, it’s crazy. Human animals use wide-angle vision only about five percent of the time. For only about five percent of our lives do we take in all possible information and then narrow it down to what’s needed. Before we even know what it is we should focus on, we’ve already narrowed in on a finite point. We live ninety-five percent of our time on this earth already dialed in, without knowing what we should dial in to. Nonhuman mammals, on the other hand, most of them, live in the opposite visual range from ours. Ninety-five percent wide angle and five percent focal vision.”

Hannah—

“And yet, all of us are endangered. Kit foxes from suburban sprawl and habitat loss, the extermination of wolves—for the comfort of human homes, human agriculture—this big fat mess of our local hot-button issue—sending coyotes right up to the dominant mesopredator spot in their shared territories. Which is basically everywhere here. And us, humans, well…”

Hannah, are you—

“We’re just so dialed in on what we think we should see, what we think matters and what we think life is, that we very often don’t see what is right in front of us. We’re so tuned in on what we think we want to see that we miss the big picture.”

Tillman, talking about UFOs. Keeping your attention open. Eyes to the skies.

And I get it. What Hannah’s trying to show me. A tear falls.

Sometimes you really just can’t see what’s right in front of you, what’s been there the whole time.

A light flips on in the upper window of Whileago Manor. The room with the trunk.

In the light of the room, through the window, two figures dancing together. Two figures I’ve been looking for for years.

Noel and Marianne.

They’re here.

This house. The ghosts of my family.

Static, on the radio. A song comes on.

It’s John Denver. And I don’t fight it. I don’t fight anything.

Whileago Manor. The badge in my pocket. The lights on and my parents inside.

John Denver sings,

Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

The rabbit darts across the lawn, but it’s larger now. Grows, shifts. A wolf. It looks at me and then howls into the night. Dolly lifts her head in the back, whimpers.

The throbbing, vibrating pressure of the Witchwalker, it’s not here. It’s somewhere off, distant in the dark, not crossing the perimeter of this property. Or maybe not quite stepping through the hole into this world. Waiting, just outside, for her. The Witchwalker, there. Here. But somehow beyond.

Maybe she’s found a way to talk to it, to reason with it. I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know.

The wolf in front of me in the snow. I blink, and it’s not a wolf at all.

It’s a fox. The same one from the playing card I’ve carried since the moment I took it from the cabin wall. A fox, trotting toward the garage. A fox stopping at the door and turning back to face me. Expectant, almost.

And I understand what she meant. Hannah is different now. Different, and not at all.

A future stretches before me, one I am beginning to understand. She’ll come and go, when she wants. She’ll hunt or exist with the Witchwalker, in another realm, elsewhere, and she’ll be with me here. She will go and explore in that vast and limitless night.

Hannah, whose light shines across space and time.

Part of me wishes she would stay forever. Of course I fucking do. In my weaker moments, in a lot of moments, I would do anything for that. But a bigger part of me knows, understands.

You can’t tame what’s wild.

And there’s no reason to want to.

The fox lifts its head to the sky and yips into the night. Dolly looks to me.

The fox waits for us, and I feel her. As if fingers graze my neck. As if a hip leans for one second against mine.

I feel Hannah.

The fox turns around and runs straight through the wall, into Whileago Manor.

And when I sigh. It’s resignation. But maybe, it’s really … relief.

It’s not fighting anymore. Not fighting who I am or my place in the world. It’s facing all of it, the pain, the loss, the fear.

And why would I fight? Why would I keep fighting?

When I have absolutely everything.

Looking in at this house from the night, the lights glowing inside.

The music plays, in the car, all around.

“All right, Dolly,” I say.

John Denver sings. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

As I cut the engine, and turn off the headlights.

“Let’s go home.”





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


My project of writing about this country and the places within it that particularly inspire me could not be complete without acknowledging our land and nation’s history. Colorado has been, is, and will be Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Diné, Lakota, Pueblo, Shoshone, and Ute land. I hope we can continue working toward a future in which we treat this beautiful land, its many varied human inhabitants, its history, and its rich and diverse ecosystems, with the respect they deserve.