As he’d explained to his class, the officials in the Adirondacks call it “primitive camping” and it is legal. Not that he cares. The park is big enough, the area wild enough, that if he avoids making fires and using a flashlight, he might never be seen. But the problem, as always, is his compulsion to seek out the beauty of the day. It pulls a spirit like his to the very best spots as if by a song. He is not the only one who hears it, though. This is what leads people to gather, unbidden, onto wide streets and boulevards at the close of day—at the end of a war. We saunter like the undead toward the sunset, exultant.
He should have known better. Still, he submitted to the impulse to watch the sunset by the rock and now three young men are emerging from the woods, all drawn, it seems, by the same forces that pulled him here.
They are polite. They too are camping nearby at Pine Pond, they explain. Is he alone? Yes, he is. Sorry to bother you, they say. It’s no bother, he is forced to say. Nice night. Yes. And so on. They make small talk as people do in the woods, being unable to avoid one another or break off for another conversation as they might at a party.
There are lights by the rising moon. They are not stars but planets.
The men are playful and young, taken in by one another’s company and keeping the mood buoyant. They try to pull Marcus into it. “Have you seen this?” one of them—Jacob—asks him. He’s on his mobile phone. In contrast to the simple majesty of the sunset, the phone casts an eerie blue mask across his face, separating him from the natural order. He laughs at the image a second time. The others gather and laugh too. He is the kind of person who is plugged in and becomes nervous when he is not. Marcus has students like him. The more they strive to express their uniqueness in those machines, the more conformist they become.
Jacob and his friends speak of memes and viruses and winning the internet. They seem to exist on the crest of an endless chuckle that is both constantly renewed and immediately forgotten.
The phone is placed in front of Marcus. There is an image of a woman. He focuses—the screen is too close—and that quickly, as if through a wormhole, he is sucked in.
Jacob is on some kind of robot service that finds whatever is trending around his phone’s location so Jacob can surf the wave of proximate interest. The joke of the moment is from a local network affiliate.
What Marcus is looking at is a picture of Sigrid subjected to juvenile humor and Photoshop. The campers find her hilarious. They call her Mrs. Hagrid. Has he seen this yet? No? This is great.
Marcus does not laugh because seeing Sigrid here is not funny, but he smiles enough to endear himself and convince them that he needs to borrow their phone. The photo links to the news station and a story. Attached to the story is a second picture of her on a flyer stapled to a telephone pole on a street corner that looks familiar. That picture has not been doctored. At the bottom of the flyer is a phone number.
“Do you all mind if I make a local call?” he asks.
Ensconced back at her workstation in the jail cell, Melinda is now free and emboldened to pursue her new interest in suicide. Sigrid can hear the clicking and scrolling of the mouse, which is old and yellowed like a smoker’s teeth. Her searches are manic and her findings impressionistic, but she is covering remarkable ground—much like anyone falling down a mountain.
Sigrid plans to let gravity slow her momentum before intervening to direct her course toward something more productive.
Unfortunately, and as always with Melinda, this journey is not going to be a silent one.
“According to the World Health Organization,” Melinda says, “suicide is the third leading cause of death in the world for those aged fifteen through forty-four. Men do it much more often, but many more women attempt it. Meanwhile, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Men, at least in America, shoot themselves. Women poison themselves. But in looking for the relationship between cause and effect, the story gets very confused. Wow, now this is cool. Turns out,” Melinda says, sipping from a cup of instant coffee, “modern sociology was founded by someone named Émile Durkheim and his first subject of study was . . . get this . . . suicide! It was called Le Suicide,” she says in an accent learned from a cartoon. “He reasoned that suicide was the one thing you could do that didn’t give back any social benefits and for this reason it shouldn’t have a social origin. But it turns out, there were patterns. And so sociology was born. I always wondered what people were studying in sociology. Society, I guess.”
Sigrid didn’t know any of this either. Even if Melinda’s information is procedurally useless, Sigrid finds it comforting to learn that her own confusion has roots and a pedigree.
“Maybe you should take a break from the material for a while,” Sigrid suggests. Taking the cue, Melinda leaves Sigrid for the main room and passes Irv, who is walking in at the same time. He plops down in his favorite spot in the cell.
“Still not eating?” he asks her, nodding toward her take-home Styrofoam container.
“Your term ‘doggie bag’ is unappetizing.”
Irv explains that it is common for Americans to bring food home from low-cost restaurants, as the portions are so large now that they cannot reasonably be consumed in one sitting—though many try. Sigrid asks why the restaurants don’t make the portions smaller and simply charge less. Irv explains that more is better than less for anything of value. Sigrid says this is obviously not true.
“‘Dance Me
