Shadow

1.
If blame must be lodged (and, in the discipline of art criticism laus et vituperatio remain very much relevant), then, one might say Elise’s faculty advisor, Dr. Alexander Kemenworth was at fault for our heroine’s misfortunes.  Elise had returned from her two-semester internship at the Wallace Collection, exchanging London’s rainy chill for southern California’s cloudless skies and brilliant sunshine, an overly analytical light that seared shadows into the landscape and confounded observation with the sheer brightness of things, particularly on the day that she conferred with her advisor at his mountaintop offices at the Getty Research Fellowship.  In the courtyard below his office, tourists strolled between galleries, pausing on the terrace for tea and coffee, and, for a passing moment, Elise was nostalgic for England and everything that was vague, misty, and indirect about the place.  Dr. Kemenworth seemed busy and it was obvious that he wanted her to get to the point, that is, to make a “pitch” as the term is used in the film industry, a brutally succinct capsule summary of the doctoral dissertation that she intended to write, a verbal outline sufficient to the subject that could be delivered in the space between several floors on an elevator. But her conception was nuanced, a bit pastel with the indefinite, perfumed haze of the paintings by Fragonard, Chardin, and Boucher that she had studied at the Wallace, and Elise doubted, even as she spoke, that the subtleties of her plan would be evident to her advisor.  He was handsome with features cast for the part he played – in Hollywood’s environs, everyone seems to be auditioning for a role – and, as his character required, he listened politely, even asked a few noncommittal questions, and, then, let his eyes stray, wandering a bit from Elise’s slim form and pleasing features to the books on his shelf and his computer’s screensaver, an image of Poussin’s shepherds scrutinizing a tomb in Arcadia, and, then, raising a very slightly monitory finger implied that it was his turn to speak and that speak he would.

The subject was too broad, Dr. Kemenworth opined, too uncertain.  The role of shadows, veils, and shrouds in rococo art was simply too vast, particularly when aligned with concepts involving feminine modesty and gender roles, an element of the dissertation that Dr. Kemenworth thought very fertile, very productive of interesting ideas but, perhaps, overly ambitious.  “You have outlined the narrative or discourse, as it were, of not just a book but a series of books... – and I know you’ll write them some day,” he told Elise.  “But we need something that you can compose in nine-months, the gestation period of human infant,” Dr. Kemenworth said, “A more finite task.  Easier to supervise.”  Elise said that she had written a draft of her first introductory chapter and that she thought the subject was viable.  “ But I don’t want you to bite off more than you can chew,” he replied.   He lifted a mechanical pencil from within a ceramic vessel on the edge of his desk.  The mug was a souvenir from Greece, inscribed with an image of a dancing satyr, red figure against black glaze.  Elise told him that she could email the draft as a pdf.  Dr. Kemenworth was chewed on the whiskers under his lower lip.  He had a full grey beard.  Then, he scribbled a few notes on a small pad of white note-paper.

“Consider this,” he said.  He slid the paper toward her.  Written in pencil were words: Shadows and silhouettes – concealment, disclosure, and Rococo intimacy.  “It’s got the kernel of your idea, the living inspiration,” Dr. Kemenworth said.  “You should look at a writing like LaClos’ Le Liaisons Dangereuses, maybe de Sade – the idea that a silhouette both reveals the profile of a person, but also can be a kind of disguise.  It’s an element of libertinism in the 18th century, intimacy that both conceals and reveals.”  Dr. Kemenworth paused.  His eyes searched her face.  “Do you approve?” he asked.  Elise shrugged.  “It’s a very interesting topic to be sure...” she said hesitantly.  “Very rich,” Dr. Kemenworth replied.  “I have a colleague at Stanford,” he said, “works in the psychology of perception – he’s done some studies: you know it’s amazing what people can read from a silhouette.  You know those things were instruments and, always, connected with love affairs, scandalous liaisons, tokens of affection – the profile shows enough detail so you can guess the identity of the woman (or man for that matter) but the silhouette doesn’t name, it harbors some degree of anonymity.  It turns love-making into a game of blindfolds, peeping, voyeurism.  Reveals and doesn’t reveal.  Everyone has to know about the love affair, but, at the same time, no one can really know.”

Dr. Kemenworth was excited by this thesis and, now, was improvising.  He licked his lips.  Elise looked over to see that the door to his office remained open – it seemed that his rhetoric was on the verge of causing him to rise, wink at her, and draw shut the door so that they would be together alone in the sun-flooded office among the books and framed postcards and the satyr on the mug showing a slight corkscrew of an erection while the shepherds on the computer peered disconsolately at the inscription on the tomb.  Elise thought to herself that if Dr. Kemenworth was so excited about the idea, then, he should write the book himself.  But she smiled and blushed a little and recalled to him that the very origins of representation were involved in lovemaking.  Pliny the Elder, she said, traced the beginnings of art to Butades, the potter of Sicyon, who made a ceramic relief of the profile of his daughter’s lover after he observed her using a stylus to inscribe the outline of the young man’s shadow on a plaster wall.  “Yes, indeed,” Dr. Kemenworth said.  “The origin of black figure pottery.”   Elise gestured with the back of her hand to the mug with the rampant satyr portrayed on its side.  There was no point arguing with him.  Some things are best accomplished by ostensible agreement and, then, a slight adjustment, a little revision, as it were, triangulating good intentions in one direction with inclinations toward another outcome.  Everything is imprecise in Academia (and Hollywood) until the work is done and published and, even, then, outcomes may be a bit blurry.

“These are excellent ideas,” Elise said.  “I will think about this and adapt my thesis.”

“Very good,” Dr. Kemenworth said, preening a little and clearly pleased with himself.  He was pretty enough to be in movies himself.  Was he, perhaps, gay?

But he rose and moved toward the door opening into the white corridor and, so, Elise also rose and moved even more quickly, cutting him off at the threshold of his office before he could shut the door.  She thanked him and shook his hand – it was more than a little moist and made her hand feel unclean.

2.
Actually, Dr. Kemenworth’s idea was productive and Elise found that it was not difficult to research the subject.  The publication by the perceptual psychologist at Stanford was particularly helpful and, after Dr. Kemenworth had made appropriate internet introductions (something that he had insisted upon), Elise communicated with the researcher by email, now and then, sending him inquiries that the psychologist seemed please to answer.  On a couple occasions, Dr. Kemenworth suggested that they drive up the coast together to meet with Dr. Mrose at Stanford.  Elise rejected these invitations but continued to communicate with Dr. Mrose. 

One of Mrose’s research interests was the use of silhouettes as diagnostic tools.  He emailed Elise that the manufacturers of corsets, for instance, made much use of silhouettes both as advertising and in the design of their products.  A corset, after all, was intended to stylize and beautify the female body, contouring it to match an idealized silhouetted form.  Notions of fitness prevalent in the 19th century frequently invoked the notion of the silhouette and some physicians thought that they could diagnose illness, particularly maladies such as consumption, from the shadow-graph of the afflicted person.  Dr. Mrose emailed Elise that he had pursued the notion of health, fitness, and the shadow-graph to rare printed sources in the 18th century, volumes, perhaps, apposite to her doctoral dissertation.  After some hesitation, she decided to invest in a flight to San Jose, arranging to meet Dr. Mrose at his office near the Stanford Medical Center. 

Dr. Mrose offered to pick her up at the airport but Elise opted for a rental car, an unwieldy SUV encircled by blind spots that made driving on the congested highways problematic.  The psychologist’s office was inside a bleached-white one-story structure that looked a bit like military barracks – in fact, after World War One, the building had been relocated to the edge of the campus from Camp Fremont in Menlo Park.  There was a veranda and a pitched shingled roof and the wooden floors, smooth with a starched aspect, creaked underfoot.  A redwood handicap-access ramp flanked the building and a big eucalyptus tree made the shade fragrant.  Taller, modern structures loomed overhead linked by the lanes of pale white sidewalks. 

“Welcome to my bungalow,” Dr. Mrose said to Elise, shaking her hand.  It was airy inside, scented medicinally by the eucalyptus.  Dr. Mrose explained the building’s history.  “It’s a relic,” he said. “Left over from the days of Ken Kesey.”  Elise smiled.  She didn’t recognize the name.  “The cuckoo’s nest,” Dr. Mrose said helpfully.  She flashed her ingratiating smile at him again.  The reference didn’t mean anything to her – perhaps, he was alluding to an old Jack Nicholson movie.

Dr. Mrose kept fit with a stand-up desk, tilted like a workplace for a mechanical draftsman.  He stood, seeming to hover anxiously over her, while she sat on a kind of wooden pew, hard but not uncomfortable, cradling her bottle of water in her lap.  They talked about her project and Dr. Mrose offered her some advice, annotating, as it were, a bibliography that he dictated.  Elise took notes.  It was quiet in the outer office where several work-study students were reading in their text-books while manning phones that didn’t ring.  Dr. Mrose voice was high-pitched with a faint drawl that she couldn’t place.  His skin had an olive tint, although, perhaps, this was just the diffuse light in his office -- a jalousie window was half-closed so that it’s slats made a lattice shadow on his carpet, an old, threadbare Persian rug.  Everything about the psychologist was a little blurry, soft focus: Elise couldn’t fix his age (he was probably younger than he looked).  He was wearing a polo shirt stretched tight across his broad chest and his hands had long, tapering fingers with nails obviously manicured.  He was probably a short man although this didn’t register exactly with Elise – Dr. Mrose just seemed compact to her.  His hair was short-cropped but very curly, fashioned into a tight bonnet of ringlets and spiral locks, that Elise found both striking and attractive – it gave him something of the aspect of a faun, an archaic figure sculpted from old, polished marble.

After a while, they walked to a nearby building a sort of hospital commissary, but with an elegant café overlooking a cantilevered metal balcony overlooking the tables below where nurses and doctors and a few pajama-clad patients were eating.  Wine was available and Dr. Mrose tempted her to a glass of locally made Chardonnay. Then, they walked back to the bungalow-cottage under the big eucalyptus tree.

“I have something I want to show you,” Dr. Mrose said.  He led her down a hallway to a porch that had been enclosed and boarded to make a storage room.  It was a little dusty and the psychologist sneezed once or twice.  He pointed to an old easel, an upright frame mounted atop a wooden tripod. 

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

Elise shook her head.

“It’s an apparatus for making silhouettes, quite old, in fact – it was once owned by the Winchester family,” Dr. Mrose said.  “But I think it was made in Nice... Nice, France.”

He moved the easel into the middle of the floor and, then, spread the tripod legs hinged below the open wooden frame.  Wood pieces were jointed together to make a rectangular opening, that was, in turn, edged inside with thin, enameled pieces of fine, laminated mahogany around an open oval aperture.  The oval opening set within the square frame was about two feet long and eighteen-inches wide.  Some  brass brackets on hinges outlined the aperture.

“You put a light source, a candle let’s say, over in this direction,” Dr. Mrose said, pointing to a place about five feet from where he had opened the tripod.  “The subject sits between the light and this frame and casts her shadow onto translucent paper stretched between these brackets.  The operator stands behind and traces the shadow...the profile cast on the paper.  I’ve tried it myself.  It’s works wonderfully.  That’s how silhouette profiles were made in the late 18th century and, apparently, thereafter around here.”

“Is it rare?”

“Not really.  A lot of older art institutes have these things.  No one uses them anymore, of course, and most people don’t know what they are.  Can’t identify them.  I happened on this one at an auction.  I don’t think the auctioneer knew what it was.”

“It’s wonderful,” Elise said.

Dr. Mrose folded the tripod again and slid the apparatus back into it’s place between a mannequin and a portable basketball hoop mounted on wheels.

In his office, Dr. Mrose showed her sheets photocopied from rare books – silhouette images of corseted women and bustle-dresses.  The bustles looked like bells and the corsets constricted waists into tight hourglass profiles. 

“That looks punitive,” Elise observed.

“Not healthy,” Dr. Mrose agreed.

“You should look at the materials in the pathology library,” Dr. Mrose told her.  He shuffled papers on his credenza.  “I thought I had copies here,” he said.  “But apparently no longer.”

“What do they show?”

“Silhouettes of people with some really ghastly ailments.  You need to review Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente – it’s a book published in London, but the edition here is printed in German.  You’ll see how the scientific silhouette was deployed for diagnostic purposes.  It’s sort of ...haunting, I guess.  There’s one book in particular.”  (He turned to his computer and flipped through some tightly printed pages.)  “I can print this for you.”

The printer behind him hissed and, then, a tongue of paper appeared.

“You see,” he said.  “De Boilly – Recueil Silhouette: Physiognomy de la Maladie.  They have a copy at the pathology library.  You should take a look – it’s quite remarkable to see how silhouettes were made to characterize all sorts of illnesses.”

Elise nodded.

“I can take you,” he said.  “It’s about a ten-fifteen blocks away.”

“Oh, no,” Elise said.  “I don’t want to be an imposition.”

“Not at all,” Dr. Mrose said.

“I will walk over there tomorrow morning,” Elise said.  Dr. Mrose rummaged in his desk for a campus map.  He found one, circled the library and slid it to her.

“I’ll call and get you reading privileges,” Dr. Mrose said.  “They can be a little touchy about the collection.  But one condition –“ he paused.

“Yes?” Elise asked.

“You report back to me as to your findings,” Dr. Mrose said.

“It will be my pleasure,” Elise told him. 

3.
The medical center parking was buried underground and the concrete ramps smelled of exhaust and spilled gasoline.  The ceilings were high enough that Elise didn’t sense any danger to the top of the big SUV that she had rented, but there were many cars and the spaces were tight and she had to spiral to follow the ramp down several levels before she found a place to park.  Nearer the surface, there were vacant spaces but they were assigned to physicians or patients requiring particularly sinister kinds of treatment.

Square buildings with windows the color of a big plasma Tv shut down for the night hovered over leafy plazas.  Fountains with stucco basins splashed and all elevated level surfaces had been studded with metal rivets to repel skateboarders.  The pathology library was an old building, built Mission Revival style so that it looked a bit like the Alamo.  A skyway between higher levels of the adjacent hospital buildings spanned the space over the library so that mustard-colored building seemed framed by a big, gleaming lintel, translucent so that Elise could see patients there, some of them pulling intravenous bags slung on stanchions, moving slowly as if sleep-walking.  Some flowers flared around the base of the library like tentative flames.  The facade was a terra-cotta fantasia of columns adorned with carved ivy surmounted by an arched bell-gable.  Elise entered the library through an arch gaping like the mouth of a corpse. 

The place smelled of old books and disinfectant.  At the service kiosk, Elise stated her name and learned that the reliable Dr. Mrose had secured reading privileges for her.  Except for staff, no one was around.  Research of this kind, Elise thought, is now mostly performed on-line and the library, an enfilade of dim rooms, lit mostly by lamps at the oak tables, seemed obsolete, hushed as if to conceal itself from the technology that had made it an anachronism.  Another work-study student, chastened by the gloom in the library, sulked behind a desk.  She seemed to regard Elise’s presence as a personal affront but, nonetheless, brought her the volumes recommended by Dr. Mrose.  The books were rare and delivered with blue surgical gloves, very sheer and tight-fitting, and Elise was instructed to wear them when she turned the pages.

First, she looked at Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente, a large folio in which some of the pages were detached.  She didn’t know German but could use her cell-phone to decipher some of the descriptions of the plates.  Most of the explanatory text eluded her.  The silhouettes were life-sized and printed in velvety-dark ink.  Each image was like a cistern into which you looked, straining your eyes.  Elise typed some notes into her lap top.  Because the library was next to the hospitals, sirens intermittently wailed outside.

Recuil Silhouette: Physiognomie de la Maladie was a smaller book bound in unpleasant-looking yellowish leather.  The binding had a mummified aspect, brittle at the front- and back-board edges, and was surprisingly slippery.  The end-papers were elaborately marbled with gem-colored designs that would have been hypnotic if Elise had lingered over them.  The silhouettes depicted all sorts of hideous conditions, profiles melted by leprosy and syphilis.  The marks impressed into the cream-colored pages glistened like spilt oil and seemed almost iridescent.  Several of the prints tipped-into the book made Elise gasp with horror.  She looked away to see if anyone had heard her, but the table where she sat, turning the book’s pages with her blue surgically gloved fingers was at the center of a room that was empty and, through the cloister-arch into adjacent rooms, Elise saw that those places were unpeopled as well.  She seemed entirely alone.  The gloves interfered with her ability to type on her lap-top.  The words that she tried to record were gibberish, strings of meaningless letters.  Her heart was racing.

Some of the silhouettes depicted whole bodies, bent almost double, hoop-shaped, or with grotesquely elongated limbs or throats like stems on which hideous heads sprouted.  The images were an affliction to Elise and she considered closing the book and sending it back into the depths of the library.  But she was working, had come here for a purpose and not mere prurient curiosity, and so thought it best to soldier forward.  Taking a deep breath, she focused on making notes, objective descriptions or, at least, aids to the memory, and, because her touch was disrupted by the gloves, she typed on her laptop very slowly and deliberately.  The alarming aspect of the engravings was that they had the aspect of photographs – light had haloed a specific person with a particular disfiguring malady and that same light, as real as the beams from the desk-lamp, had participated in taking the picture of the unfortunate patient.  Accordingly, the silhouettes had a presence very different from a sketch or lithograph, indeed, possessed an aura even more powerful than a photograph.  Of course, a photograph warranted the truth but these silhouettes displayed something that more alarming – they were the precise fingerprints of horror pressed into the pages of the book.

Near the end of the volume, she encountered a silhouette that was very hard to interpret. The caption, printed in italic type, said: Dame de visage du Cafard.  Elise didn’t know the word Cafard.  She took out her cell-phone and removed her surgical gloves to access the internet.  The data connections in the library seemed very slow.  She looked back to the profile, a sort of chaos blotted onto the page.  The image seemed to show a microcephalic skull, oddly crowned with some black filament, and an inhuman jaw like a rasp half concealed under a protuberance that might have been an eye half-expelled from its socket.   It didn’t seem to Elise that anyone could live with that sort of disfigurement and she wondered whether the profile didn’t depict some kind of horribly mutilated corpse.  Cafard meant “cockroach.”

Elise used her cell-phone to photograph the page.  The phone flashed, something that she thought must be strictly forbidden among these rare books.  She half-expected someone to rush to her table to reprimand her, and, in fact, would not have felt offended, but rather relieved if a staff member had appeared.  But no one came.  Outside a siren wailed.  Elise flipped through the rest of the book without wearing the gloves.  It didn’t matter and, perhaps, the horrible thing was best destroyed, eaten away by the oils and acids in her fingertips.     

4.
The restaurant was Italian.  But it was neither charming nor romantic.  Elise appreciated Dr. Mrose’s tact in selecting a place with a post-modern design – bare butcher-block tables without white linen, iron girders overhead exposing HVAC ducting, the kitchen’s stainless steel counters and coolers where chefs were working in flashes of fire and puffs of steam also open to the dining room.  Dr. Mrose said that the place was always “eerily empty” and told Elise that he suspected that it was some kind of money-laundering operation for the mob, a declaration made tongue-in-cheek, although the psychologist’s wit was so dry that she wasn’t entirely sure whether he was teasing her or serious.   And, in fact, only a few tables were occupied when they entered – there were more waiters and kitchen staff than customers.

After some wine, they talked about Elise’s work at the Wallace Collection.  She traced connections between Impressionists like Renoir and Degas and the paintings of Boucher and Fragonard.  The conversation became a bit rococo itself – Elise spoke of the art of love in 18th century France, the science of attraction, “elective affinities” as Goethe characterized such impulses, and the great courtesans of the era.  She was well aware of where these words were leading her.  But, Dr. Mrose was very reserved, even reticent, and she didn’t sense anything unpleasantly overt about his responses. 

Her car was parked at his office.  He drove her back to the bulky SUV parked curbside near the strange soldier’s bungalow in which he worked.  Dr. Mrose said that he would make a cup of coffee before she attempted to navigate the unfamiliar roads back to her hotel.  He told her that it was stuffy in the building, the season before air-conditioning was necessary, but when the days could be rather warm.  She was relieved that he didn’t ask her to go inside.  But she needed to use the toilet and, so, he unlocked the door, said he would make the coffee, and pointed down the hallway to a bathroom which she had, in fact, used the day before.  When she emerged, Dr. Mrose suggested she sit on the veranda while he brewed the coffee.  She went outside in the overwhelming perfume of the big, scaly eucalyptus tree on the lawn.   A siren wailed and some dogs barked.  Dr. Mrose came onto the porch carrying a candle and the tripod-frame for making silhouette tracings.  He lit the candle and placed it on the redwood rail.  Dr. Mrose, then, set the tripod behind Elise so that her shadow fell on the window-shaped frame with oval opening.  He unrolled some tracing paper and clipped it in place.  The coffee was ready and he went back into the building.  A pedestrian passing by looked curiously at the candle and the tripod with the paper taut over the frame.

After returning to veranda, Dr. Mrose handed Elise a mug of coffee and, then, standing behind her, out of her range of sight, outlined her profile on the tracing paper.  She heard his thick piece of black chalk scraping at the paper.  It was suddenly very still.  The chalk scratched on the paper and she heard her breath as a rhythmic whisper, a breeze in the tree, footsteps somewhere and a cough, traffic murmuring on some distant thoroughfare like waves surging against a rocky shore. 

The coffee was strong.  It sharpened her senses.  She felt a slight trickle of sweat under her ear and the breeze caressing her there.  “See how it works!” Dr. Mrose announced to her, releasing the clips, and, then, tearing the paper.  The ripping sound was disquieting, violent.  He showed her the profile that he had traced from her shadow.  The candle flickered a little. 

The profile was very flattering.  Her features looked classical, the outline of a marble goddess.

Elise turned to Dr. Mrose to thank him.  His eyes were glittering against the olive of his brow.  The candle burning on the porch railing cast a shadow of Dr. Mrose against the white lathe siding next to the cottage door.  For an instant, Dr. Mrose’s tightly curled hair seemed like a cap of snakes writhing atop his skull.  It was just a trick of the light, the candle’s flicker animating the snakes for a instant.  His secret was revealed but, then, the tangled wreath of serpents flattened and she saw that his profile was shapely, handsome, well-proportioned.

It was enough.  She was sure that Dr. Mrose would be unable to hold his tongue, that he would report on their date and its outcome to that loathsome Dr. Kemenworth.  Her doctoral advisor’s pride would be wounded and he would retaliate against her in some way and things between them would become deeply unpleasant and contentious.  She knew that she was more intelligent than Dr. Kemenworth, more ingenious, and imaginative as well, but he was her advisor and had control over her future and she couldn’t risk upsetting him at this juncture in their relationship.  And, in any event, the thing with Dr. Mrose would turn out to be botched, a mere daub, not worthy of framing, a bagatelle that would turn into some kind of serious misfortune that would haunt her, probably, for several years.  Men were apt to take such things far more seriously than they should – it was a matter of amour propre.

The silhouette was quite beautiful and Elise asked if she could keep it.  “Oh, yes,” Dr. Mrose said.  “It is for you and you alone.”  Elise had finished her coffee.  She rolled up the paper into a tight cylinder.  Then, she asked him if she should bring her coffee cup back inside the bungalow.  Dr. Mrose told her he would manage.  She shook his hand – it was warm and firm.  He looked a little surprised and opened his eyes very wide to embrace her with his gaze.  Then, she thanked him for everything, made certain promises about contacting him in the next few weeks, and slipped sideways into the fragrant night.

At the hotel, she stood in front of the mirror in her bathroom.  It was the sort of mirror that magnifies its reflections.  The light in the bathroom was profoundly unflattering, a harsh clinical glare better suited to a surgery than a hotel room.  Elise thought that her eyes bulged too much, that her cheeks were a little sunken, and that there was something uncanny and unpleasant about the shape of her mandible.  The skull beneath her skin recommended itself to her in the mirror.

She had nightmares about the book in the pathology library and felt uneasy and, even, slightly nauseated when she awoke the next morning.  Perhaps, it was a hangover.  There were sulfites in the red wine and these didn’t always agree with her. 

5.
She was up early.  There was a McDonald’s down the street and she ate an Egg and Sausage McMuffin.  Her flight from the airport at Burlingame near San Francisco wasn’t until 4:30 in the afternoon and so she decided to drive up to the Sequoia grove across the Golden Gate at Muir
Wood. 

The great bridge reminded her of Vertigo, a movie that she disliked.  Mist was draped around the bare, cold-looking Marin headlands. Elise had been to the park many years earlier with her father. When they walked among the towering trees, he told her that they were like tiny bugs crawling through the tall grass. She had memories about how to reach the place but those recollections were faulty and, several times, she had to pull off the road to look at the map on her cell-phone.  She missed the park entrance off Highway 1 and found herself overlooking a cold beach where grey waves rolled against grey sand under a slumping canopy of fog – at sea, a foghorn wailed.  Elise retraced her route, found the entrance and passed the Zen Center in the canyon notch in Mount Tamalpais.  The winding park road was blind with mist but she drove forward, distance elongated in the fog, curving around wooded slopes until she reached the park gate.  Normally, the park was painfully crowded and visitors to the sequoias had to ride buses from remote parking lots to reach the trees.  But this morning was mid-week, early, and the fog was inclement so that no on was manning the pay-kiosk at the ranger station.  The road into the ravine with the tall trees was empty and she was able to park close to the trail-head.  Only a few other vehicles were in the lot, several  shabby old vans fitted-out surfer style and a VW bus with a Grateful Dead bumper sticker – “tree-huggers,” Elise thought.   

The path to Cathedral Grove was wet and the fog was so dense that she could only see the curving ramparts of the trees, all grizzled and split with dark alcoves, but nothing above her head was visible where the grey mist hung like a ceiling.  She walked for a few minutes and, then, it occurred to her that this stroll was, perhaps, dangerous – she was all alone in the woods and her footsteps made a dull, hollow thudding sound that seemed to echo.  She was conscious of her breathing as well, a rasping sound, and she wondered how far she had come from the parking lot and whether the inhabitants of battered, vaguely sinister-looking vehicles behind her were stirring now, maybe, trailing her in the foggy woods. Several times, she thought she heard footfalls, either ahead of her or behind, but she couldn’t see anyone nearby and the distance was covered with a pall of fog.  If there were predators, then, she was prey.  It was an odd notion: what preyed on female pre-doctoral interns at the Getty?  She inhaled sharply: everything apparently.

The sun pushed its beams through the ground mist and, for a moment, her shadow preceded her encircled by an iridescent glory, prismatic and glistening around the shape of her head and shoulders cast against the screen of water droplets in the air.  She stopped to admire the phenomenon, but it was transient and, then, the trees with their russet trunks caught the light and were radiant and she could, suddenly, see upward along the great arching bridges of lightning-chiseled trunk to the green canopy poised against the blue sky. 

The ravine was suddenly alive with light and shadow.  Fallen trees with bearish, uprooted stumps menaced the trail.  She turned to examine the texture of a trunk next to her, spread out her fingers to stroke the bark and saw several black ants prospecting in the flaking, splintery grooves.  The shadow of her head like a dark globe was projected against the side of the tree, trembling a little and blurry with the exhalations of mist still troubling the air. 

Then, there was something else, another shadow blurry at first but expanding as something approached from behind her.  She flinched a little and saw the shadow cast by her skull twitch.  The other shadow condensed into a dark blot on the tree.  The form was that of a tiny bulbous protrusion above hunched shoulders, a tumor with strands emerging from its brow and an irregularly shaped jaw with palps, perhaps, like a spider or a beetle.  Elise stood very still, holding her breath.  The cold air tingled on the back of her neck.  The shadow was now next to her, cast onto the rugged screen of the redwood, a little below the height of her own head.

Whatever it was, the thing was very near.  Elise thought that she should turn and confront the apparition but she was too frightened.  For a long moment, she stood motionless, staring into the dark shadow next to her silhouetted profile.  Elise heard the thing stirring a little behind her.  It was very close.  Then, the thing made a high-pitched squeaking sound complicated by a kind of buzz.  This was too much for her to bear and Elise ran, without looking over her shoulder, ran and ran, gasping for breath, until she reached the big SUV glistening with dew in the parking lot.