She said, “Redwood trees are poetic, don’t you think?”
Her voice brought me back into the car, back into my body.
“Yup,” I told her. “Always have.”
We made it to the little town of Willits, known as the gateway to the redwoods, in two hours and stopped at a coffee shop on Main Street for breakfast. There were few patrons inside—couple of burly loggers and some old hippies. We drank strong coffee and ate runny egg sandwiches, and after we finished, October got out her sketchbook and asked if she could do a portrait of me.
The plan, she said, was to do one now and then another later, after the mushrooms kicked in.
“No talking, no moving,” she directed.
I sat still and stayed quiet while she focused on my face. The entire time she was drawing, I had a strong, somatic, dare I say synesthetic response to her attention. What I mean is I felt as if she were touching me with her pencil. Her hand made broad, sweeping strokes and small, intricate marks on the paper, each one like a gentle caress on my face. And as she tilted her head and squinted at my features, I had the sense she was examining my interior as much as my exterior.
“You have a beautiful mouth,” she told me matter-of-factly. “And your eyes are almost symmetrical.”
She used her hand for a bit, shading and smudging until her fingers were gray from the graphite.
“This is fun,” she mumbled, as if she were talking to herself. “There’s so much going on behind your eyes, and that makes for a very nuanced portrait. On the surface you’re all still water. But man, that water runs deep.”
“Swampy,” I mumbled.
“No talking.” She shook her head. “Besides, you’re wrong. I can see people’s spirits when I draw them, and yours isn’t swampy. It’s a little marine flare blinking at the bottom of a deep, dark ocean.”
She put her pencil down, examined her work, made a couple of additional adjustments, and then flipped the pad around for me to see.
“Well?”
She’d drawn me with a cup of coffee in my hands, looking a little off to the right, the cafe’s one big window behind me and to the left.
I studied the portrait for a while before I said anything. It looked exactly like me, and yet it looked like a stranger. She’d drawn a fiery light in my eyes that I didn’t think was really there.
“That’s how I see you,” she said.
Then I understood. She’d drawn the potential Joe Harper, not the actual one. Because that’s what a spirit is, right? Our best, brightest, purest self?
“I like it,” I told her. What I meant was I liked who I was in her eyes.
My coffee had gone cold, I went to get a refill, and when I returned to the table a young man who said his name was Finster had taken the seat beside October. Finster had no food or beverages in front of him and claimed he had been a lobster in a previous life.
“I had a beautiful lobster wife and a lobster daughter,” he explained.
Finster had broad shoulders like a swimmer, a square forehead, a square jaw, and wild, crystal-meth eyes.
“We lived peacefully in the ocean for years,” he said. “Then one day my family got scooped up in a net and ended up in a tank in a seafood restaurant near the wharf.”
I tried not to laugh. October listened politely, her chin in her palm, elbow on the table.
“I watched my family get picked from the tank and cooked alive.”
“I’m sorry . . .” October said.
“I prayed for death,” Finster told her. “I wanted to end up on a plate too. I wanted to get chewed up and turned to shit like them. Instead I got rescued by a militant vegan who drove me back to the ocean and set me free.”
That time I laughed out loud; October shot me a look.
“A few days later I got snagged by a fisherman’s hook.” Finster curved his index finger into the shape of a “J” and hung it from his mouth to demonstrate. “Mort.”
With obvious trepidation, October touched the man’s hand, and I saw her flinch when her fingers made contact, like whatever she felt was not good.
“We should go,” I mumbled.
October said she needed to wash her hands and wandered off to the bathroom. While I waited, Finster stared at me with deranged scrutiny, and I imagined he could see in me what I saw in him—blackness.
“You miss her,” Finster said.
“Who?”
“Your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Don’t worry, she’s coming back.”
“I know she’s coming back. She just went to the bathroom.”
October’s sketchbook was still open on the table. Finster looked at the drawing and said, “It’s you. Without the rage.”
“Excuse me?”
“Where’s your rage come from? Daddy? Mommy?” He sniffed the air like a dog. “I can smell it.”
I shut the sketchbook, stood up, and began to bus our table. Before I took the dishes away, Finster grabbed what was left of October’s egg sandwich and shoved it into his mouth.
As we were leaving, Finster pulled on October’s sleeve and said, “Your sweatshirt is nice.”
She was wearing her oversized gray hoodie. There was nothing especially nice about it, and October took it off and gave it to the guy.
“What are you doing?” I said. “What if it gets cold later?”
“I have a sweater in the car.”
“He’s not a lobster,” Finster said to October, pointing at me as we were walking out the door. “You can’t catch him.”
The redwoods along the highway start to get noticeably bigger after Willits, and October kept leaning her head out the window, trying to see their crowns. “Look at that one,” she would say, and I’d remind her that these were still the small trees.
As we approached Avenue of the Giants, she asked to see the mushrooms. I reached behind my seat, grabbed them from my backpack, and handed them to her.
“Wait,” she said. “I was literally expecting a bag of dirty mushrooms. These
