THE OUTSIDE LOOP

by
Paul Silverman

After the snowshoeing, Karl sat in the lodge near the fireplace and the guitar-playing cowboy and vaguely watched the lanky massage woman take on a new customer at her sit-down massage station. They had given him a trail map but he was bad at maps. In fact, the map was the only thing he had lost when he’d been out there plodding around in the deep powdery snow. He pictured the map as litter, defiling the pristine whiteness, somewhere out there in the forest. When he came back he asked them for a new map and now he took that one out of his pocket, unfolded it, and concluded he hadn’t been on any of the official snowshoeing trails at all. He somehow had veered off on something called the outside loop, which on the map was only a faint gray dotted line, not the deep blue unbroken line indicating where snowshoeing was allowed. It worried him that he hadn’t been on the official route even once. It felt, somehow, as though he had been deprived of the real snowshoeing experience.

And yet it had been almost wondrous while he had been out there. Mysterious and even sacred, as though mammoth beasts were buried in the drifts. The snow was totally white and the sky was too, not a touch of blue in it, and no bright shining sun whatsoever. Nevertheless, the day had felt perfect. It was just the colours that were different. Or missing – totally out of the picture for that day even though the air tasted fine and even refreshing, with a misting shower of snow that fell the entire time he traipsed through the woods. And the forecast was it would continue to fall. Tonight, tomorrow, perhaps all week.

He was an Easterner new to the Rocky Mountains, so he was struck with the stark verticality of everything. The forested peaks on either side of the trail were taller and steeper than anything he was used to, and the trees themselves, the conifers, towered over their Appalachian cousins. Although technically evergreens, the trees were affected by the same colour omission as everything else. No green whatsoever, not that he could remember. Just the extremely white snow and blackness: black trunks, branches, twigs and needles – an entire world of black pine trees, thick with the whitest, purest snow, so much of it the limbs of the trees drooped, even though their trunks and spines stood straight as the pikes of giant warriors. Karl thought of billions of towering arrows ready to rise up and strike another planet. The surrounding mountains also had none of the hues he normally associated with mountains. Browns and reddish beiges and bluish grays and greens. The mountains bristled with the black trees. They stood like enormous, humped animals in their winter coats, looming darkly, their blackness accentuated by the snow draping the trees and the snow-white ocean of sky.

The massage woman was tall and thin and alluring in a way that managed to seem both ethereal and shrewd: a languid free spirit who seemed more than ready to lend you her hands for a Visa card. Her getup was pipe-stem jeans and a flowing top that, in one swoop, said the farmhouses of the prairie and the ashrams of India. Not much makeup but just enough, long half-wild hair caught in some kind of bandanna, and fingers that were pale and long as religious candles. The fingers waved in a loose, watery motion, like reeds or tendrils, as she and the man negotiated just what the massage would consist of. Once they agreed, the fingers became purposeful, guiding the man’s head into the donut-hole pillow which was the main feature of her sit-down massage station. The man had the back and shoulders of an athletic winter sportsman and the back of his neck seemed especially powerful. But the woman’s fingers were up to the challenge. They dug into the neck and stayed there, kneading and pressuring. The sheer physical power she seemed to put into the operation was impressive. Karl imagined that the man, like any man, saw the intensity of her hands as erotic, a sign that he was in her eyes a special being. Yet the massage lady’s glazed, distant look said the opposite: that, in his case, it wasn’t her pulse that was running, it was merely the meter. And Karl wondered how she managed to summon such energy to her hands, customer after customer, day after day.

He wished he hadn’t asked them for a new map because all it did was make him guilty and jumpy about the old map. He didn’t understand how such a thing could slip out of the pockets of his ski pants, all of which had been zippered. Everything else he had taken with him was still in place. Wallet and Kleenex in the left pocket, car keys, matches and a small box of raisins in the right. He considered himself meticulous about such things. While he was off in the forest he had removed his right glove and reached into his pocket two or three times at most, for the raisins and nothing else. Each time he had put the raisin box back and zipped the pocket. The map, he was certain, had been in the other pocket, the one with the wallet and Kleenex, which meant he had never unzipped it, not once – he had just assumed he was on an official trail, left the map alone and therefore hadn’t removed his left glove.

Then it occurred to him he was not telling himself the truth, which made him even jumpier. Something – he saw it as the blind swirl of his own brain cells - had obliterated a simple, inconsequential memory - just as swirling snow obliterates tracks. Of course he had removed the left glove – it was when he had needed to urinate in the woods. To find privacy he had pivoted, made a right angle, stepped off the trail and plunged into the unbroken snow. This occurred about two hours into his trek, and now that the memory was emerging he pictured more and more pieces of it. He had planted his poles in the snow, removed both gloves and tucked them under his right arm while he unzipped and aimed. He even remembered some of his thoughts at the time, his concerns. Had he gone far enough off the trail? – the vaguely marked outside loop he then believed was the official snowshoeing trail – so as to not be seen and embarrassed by other snowshoers or cross country skiers? Were there sufficient barriers around him? – thickets and standing or fallen trees and hollows walled by drifts? He bashfully rejected a number of possible places and moved on, deeper into the woods, until he found a spot where, finally, he had felt secure and unwatched. All of these priggish worries were absurd, of course. He hadn’t come upon a single human being since the first five hundred feet of his journey, and that person had been a lodge worker repairing a small storage shelter for wood and road salt.

Karl remembered the sound of his urine hitting the snow. It was not the normal splash or splatter but a persistent drilling. It even gave off an echo in the extreme silence, and it pierced the snow cleanly and sharply, as though the urine wasn’t even liquid but a solid wand. Once, a stone worker had told him about the modern technique used for cutting counter tops out of large granite slabs. It didn’t involve metal of any kind. It was a water saw, streams of it driven at massively high pressure, and this made the smoothest, most efficient cuts. Nature, the friend said, had invented the technology, employing rivers to slice and shape mountains.

The guitar-playing cowboy wasn’t making it easy to stitch together all the moments, as Karl wanted to – desperately. More skiers had drifted down from the slopes as the afternoon moved towards evening, and there was a shrill, aggressive bustle around the fireplace. This excited the cowboy and made him sing more – and louder. He had just launched into a howling song about breaking up, making up, then making wild love to celebrate the making up. Instead of giving more attention to the cowboy – or to the masseuse standing over the bent back of her customer, one eye on the customer’s neck and one on her watch - Karl turned to the great wide lodge window and stared at the white and black vastness. This made him more anxious, considerably so, because it reminded him of the serious stain he had left out there. What bothered him wasn’t the urine, which was as natural as the trees, but the map, which more than bothered him. He saw it as contamination incarnate: a thick and heavy square of coated, folded, glossy paper, a hunk of industrial crud no better than a thoughtlessly tossed beer can. Even if he had missed the proper trails, he was now a snowshoer who had a responsibility to snowshoeing – and to the snow. Skiers go for the packed lifts and the loud crowds, but snowshoers are people who seek solitude in the pristine woods. The presence of a brightly coloured, glossy clump of paper in the snow was an insult to the very concept of solitude.

Because it had been his first time snowshoeing, Karl had spent considerable mental capital bothering about the straps and snaps and buckles. In addition to the snowshoes themselves, there were special boots that had to be laced correctly, and poles to be dealt with as well. All of this had confused and distracted him, but key details were coming back: rising out of the snow, in a way – that was how it felt. He now understood that the only time he had had both gloves off was when he was relieving himself and zipping back up. With a glove off his left hand as well as the right, the one he used for the raisin box, it was clear he could have reached into the other pocket with the wallet, Kleenex and map. At least that had been the most likely time. He bore down on this line of thinking. Did he in fact reach for the map? If he did, the map could have fallen, just slipped out of the pocket as he put it back, or while he assumed he was putting it back. And if he’d been preoccupied with getting the gloves back on, and getting the foot paraphernalia in motion again, with shaking the snow off the snowshoe webbing and turning himself around to get away from the place where he had urinated, well, all of that could have muddled his actions even further, and fogged his recall as well. It was good, he felt, that he had turned his eyes from the cowboy, the masseuse and the fireplace, and aimed them through the glass at the endless expanse of snow, forest and mountains. Small, important facts were resurfacing, minutia of consequence. The clarity of the view helped. But he wanted an even better view, if possible, to help him remember more. Amid the jumble of ski lodge furniture he spotted an empty chair that was closer to the great square of glass, and dead-centre as well. He sprang to his feet and made a move for it. As he rushed to the chair, however, a flutter of activity caught his eye. It was the massage customer standing up and stretching – the end of the session. Karl couldn’t keep himself from watching the two of them again, the way they parted company. At first, the athletic man did most of the talking, working his head and shoulders in a roguish way. The massage lady processed his credit card with a slightly religious air, as though she were preparing flour for ceremonial bread. Their eyes met and, in a flash, the customer was a different man. His posture sagged. He took the receipt as if she were handing him his walking papers, and seconds later he was out of the room.

Back in the years when Karl was a different man himself – a mental health patient as now, but pursuing much milder therapies – there was a morning he lay flat, stomach side down, on a contraption not unlike the massage lady’s, his chin and brow resting on a cushioned hole. He was at the office of an acupuncturist. The acupuncturist, a small, lean Asian man, opened the session with subtle hand pressure on the skin between Karl’s shoulder blades. Staring down through the hole, Karl watched the acupuncturist’s shoes. They were charcoal gray, small and pointy, the shoes of a delicate man, and they hardly moved. Karl saw them as generic Asian shoes, not exactly leather, not exactly plastic, perhaps a combination of both. For several moments, the acupuncturist worked in silence. Then the shoes became slightly agitated, and the acupuncturist made a single comment, his voice just above a whisper. “You walk around with a war inside you,” he said.

As Karl settled himself into his new window-view seat, his left hand brushed against his left pants pocket. It hit an object that startled him, because it was not a wallet, Kleenex or a folded map. It was a pencil, and he now realized the pencil had been there in the pocket all along. At first he tried to reason with himself, telling himself the pencil was only a short stub of a thing. It had just gotten buried, that was all, behind the other items, and he had forgotten it – in the same way one forgets loose change. But his anxious side could not be convinced or placated. Like a policeman, his anxious side took an accusatory position. It insisted, in a menacing way, that he had brought the pencil along for a specific purpose: To jot down observations, anything from insights that crossed his mind to animals that crossed his path. He had taken it for safety’s sake as well – to write messages in case he became injured or stranded in the snow. But the most troubling and accusing thought of all, the one that raised his heartbeat to a drumbeat, was the suspicion that far more than the pencil had slipped his mind. Perhaps he had, in fact, put the pencil to use. It could not be ruled out. Perhaps he had actually written something on the map. If so, that made losing the map all the worse. Not only was it a blight on the snow; it was a document that carried his handwriting on it.

Now that Karl’s anxious side was raging over the pencil, other wisps of possibility came into sharp, sudden relief. There was a certain shape he had come upon just after zipping up and getting under way again. At the time, he had noted it simply as a cloud in the snow. Those were the words that occurred to him, and at the time he hadn’t thought much of it. But his anxious side would not relent – and what his eyes had actually seen out there, out in the whiteness and blackness of the middle of nowhere, now took on a new and dire significance. To his anxious side it was the most crucial – and possibly incriminating – evidence of all.

As Karl dimly remembered it, a section of the snow had been disturbed, as though something had landed on it and moved around. The disturbed area had been at least as wide as Karl was tall, probably wider. The shape was rounded but uneven, in the way some clouds appear to be shaped. He had glanced at it but paid it little mind, concentrating all of his energy on stomping away from the place where he had stood under the black trees and urinated. But with his anxious side ranting in his ear, Karl tried hard as he could to retrace every step and re-consider every inch. First he considered whether it was one of those snow angels people make by lying on their backs and waving their arms like wings. But that motion would have created an orderly shape, and this one was unruly – so churned up it could have been caused by an animal flailing about or even two animals locked in combat. It was indeed a violent shape, Karl’s anxious side proclaimed, speaking with the loud certainty of a gavel falling. And animals in combat were one thing, but what if the disturbed snow had been caused by humans in combat - perhaps combat to the death? The question grabbed at Karl like hands around his throat and shook out the most damning question of all. What if the map were to be found, no more than a few feet from the combat scene - possibly the murder scene - and found with his handwriting on it?

Karl gripped the arms of the chair like a prisoner under interrogation. He pounded his brain for facts. He folded, unfolded and re-folded the new map, hoping it would yield clues. Most of all he concentrated on the scene in front of him, the window and the woods beyond it. He scanned it like a GPS system looking for a pinpoint. The entire puzzle lay right in front of him, every foot of snow and every single tree in the huge ocean of back country rolling out from the lodge. Various trails spider-webbed across it, and on the outer perimeter was a vague border trail called the outside loop. At least that’s what the map said. But where had he seen the cloud shape? At which point on the outside loop? Or, more accurately, at which point just off the outside loop? His anxious side didn’t just demand an answer, but an exact answer. The exact patch of snow. The exact stand of trees. The exact drift or hollow where the old map had fallen. The map that had his incriminating handwriting scrawled on it.

Karl stared at the huge square of black and white until the white became tinged with gray, the onset of evening. He kept at it until his temples began to buzz. Blood pressure, stoked by panic, that’s what he thought it was at first – until he was startled by what appeared to be a large, angry insect in the upper right quadrant of the glass. Next came the rotor action, the whirring of blades, and he realized that the panorama was no longer a simple, tranquil composition of snow, forest and mountain. A helicopter had entered the picture, and the buzzing had nothing to do with his temples or his blood pressure. The chopper buzzed restlessly over the entire terrain, swooping here and plunging there – operated by a pilot who was clearly looking for something, and who had a far sharper view of everything than Karl had, parked in his chair.

After several passes, the helicopter changed its pattern of attack, narrowing the field of investigation. It still swooped and plunged, but the overall line it followed, often pausing to hover, dead-still, was roughly the same one that the maps depicted as a faint gray line.

The outside loop.

When Karl rose to his feet he was hardly able to stand on them, the trembling was so intense. He tumbled back in the chair and tried to come up with options. His first thought was to swallow a fistful of powerful pills. But he hadn’t brought pills. No pills, his doctor had said. That was the whole point of the trip. No pills this time, just the snow, just let the cleansing snow do its work. It will do you a world of good, his doctor had said.

He could, of course, go straight to the bar. He could drink until he was blind drunk. Passed out and numb to the panic. Or else he could try a session with the massage lady, who at this moment didn’t have a customer at her station. Anything that might bring him peace. He looked at her standing by her donut-hole contraption, her candle-fingers wiping the cushioned material with a peach-coloured liquid, eyes glowing with piety as she worked the cloth. Then Karl’s anxious side spoke up, in a voice so loud it drowned out every option but one. It demanded that he strap on his snowshoes at once. That he find the lost map before the helicopter did. It demanded that he do this even though night was imminent, even if the night snow should come down in torrents.

Karl unfolded the new map one more time. He glared at it with profound bitterness. Being a map, and a good map, it could show him many things. But not the only thing that mattered – the place where the old map was located.

Karl tore the glossy paper to pieces and crumpled the pieces in a ball. He fought his shaky legs and made himself stand. He stumbled past the massage lady and the guitar-playing cowboy and down the stairs. They led to the rented locker and the snowshoes and the fast-fading light.

© Paul Silverman
Reproduced with permission