hum so loud

Wendell stands there, just outside the wide arc of light, pressed against the flaky bark of a juniper tree, the only cover he can find in the hot desert night.

Eventually, he will try to put this moment into words. Many times, in his own head, then, finally, out loud in a diner outside Cypress Valley, to the first person feels like he can truly open up to in his nearly fifty years of life. He will say things like, “It was, I dunno, cathode-like, in a way” and, trying to follow down the metaphor, “like stepping into a TV screen” and, backtracking, “but on a channel that’s nothin’ but static—a dead channel, y’know?”

Right now, Wendell doesn’t know what to call it. Doesn’t even think to call it anything. Nothing about this experience is conscious to him, all just sound and light, a sense memory already chiseling itself into grooves.

The hum is so loud and so steady that it’s less like noise and more like a new, pristine silence. Like a semi-gelatinous substance smeared over a rough surface, filling in all the minuscule canyons and craters of sound, crystallizing, leaving behind something singularly smooth, free of variation or blemish.

Wendell assumes he’s gone deaf.

In one sharp mechanical movement, the wide circle of light narrows, a dilation in reverse, spotlighting a lone subject, a small figure with head upturned.

“Looked like a fox,” Wendell will say, then pause, as Carolyn cuts a triangle off her waffle and waits for him to continue. “Might’ve been a small coyote.”

Carolyn will nod—partly to this addendum, mostly to the bite of waffle, which will be the best bite of waffle she’ll ever have in her whole life. She won’t say anything about it, aware of the significance of his sharing this story with her.

“Didn’t tremble or nothin’.” Wendell will be looking into her eyes as she chews that transcendent, once-in-a-lifetime bite of waffle.

It will be a moment that means something for them—both together and separately.

Wendell will look down at the empty saucer.

Wendell will remember.

Wendell looks up and back down again.

The fox doesn’t comprehend what’s happening. He can’t. This is different from when that wolf bit off the majority of his tail, or when the flood swept his den down the river, yet, the feeling is somehow similar. But he doesn’t nip, he doesn’t scamper, he doesn’t move at all.

Wendell doesn’t comprehend what he’s seeing either. For such a defining moment in his life, this moment actually has nothing to do with him. He’s a spectator. Something he’s beginning to realize, even now.

“Was the tail really bushy, do you remember?” Carolyn will say, knowing a thing or two about foxes.

“I don’t know,” he’ll say—partly to her question, partly to any other question he or anyone else could have about the experience as a whole. Then, pondering: “Don’t even remember it having a tail at all.”

Wendell watches the fox ascend the glowing beam—in this forest now and, later, in that roadside diner in 1983. (Also, many years earlier, during that unconscious transition from the ages of six to seven, in a dream he woke from but couldn’t remember.) The fox, looking up, always looking up.

Carolyn will take another bite.

It won’t be as good as the last, but it won’t be bad.

She will listen to him as he mumbles, mentally trying to put together the jumbled pieces of his story, while also thinking about that fox on the outskirts of the housing development she lived near when she was just thirteen, the fox who had let her get so close she thought she might be able to reach out and touch the fur, then darted away before she had the chance.

So close she could smell the mud and the fleas.

Foxes don’t let people get that close, she thought so many times afterwards. They just don’t.

In the silence, Wendell will be thinking back to the beginning of their date, about how she laughed when he spilled the creamer all over his plate of pancakes and the sleeve of his jacket. Not at him, but at the humor of the situation, a moment shared, not just witnessed. Remembering the pleasant disorientation of that grace—call it camaraderie?—which he had learned he couldn’t dare expect from others. How she grabbed the napkins and asked for more creamer when the waiter came back around.

Remembering how he, in that moment, wanted to tell her everything.

“Cream on pancakes,” she had said. “Not so bad, really.”

Wendell would end up thinking back on that moment—after it all got tallied up, thirty-six year later, in their home outside Cypress Valley—more than any other moment in his life.