2032 is the Kept Year

And a Musical Rat Attempts to Soothe a Starved Spirit

The forest was eating him when it absolutely should have been the other way around. He was the human here, the apex, the civilized genius. Everything under the canopy should’ve been lining up for the privilege to get deep fried and devoured. Yet when he stumbled out of the murky river, shins swallowed by mud with every step, it was with a hastily whittled spear that had not a trace of fish guts on it and socks pouched with writhing leeches.

Upon realizing the sensation all across his feet was not dripping water, he collapsed against a rock and attacked his socks, peeling them back only to choke on his own breath at the sight of the mass of slimy parasites rolling out, entirely separate from those that had successfully suctioned onto his skin to drain blood.

Not that there was much to drain. His substance was thin, almost ethereal, just the mist clinging to a placid pond. He wasn’t a meal, was in fact barely worth attaching to. It was as if he had died the moment he had lost his way. The worms couldn’t even imagine why his body was going through the motions of attempted survival.

The leeches were fed up with his taste before he pried a third one off; they abandoned him all at once and crawled away, fanning out as if fleeing from a slow explosion. Logan Dole didn’t think much of it, as long as they were done drinking him. He was so sure they didn’t have thoughts at all, and he might have been right a few months prior.

His own head was relatively empty, having succeeded in his modern man mission of letting other entities fill the vessel of his mind so he would never have to trouble himself with the process of discovery or its various emotional tolls. The ebb and flow of his life was determined by the release schedule of five bundled streaming services, his manager told him every week what his goals were and what he should strive for beyond them, and when it came time to plan his vacation he obeyed the first travel advertisement he saw, which was how he wound up in South America.

But not how he wound up off the bus and in the river, with no sign of anything else human for miles in any direction. How did that happen exactly? He struggled to remember. The event was more than four days ago at this point, but the time wasn’t the reason it had become so foggy; he felt that much. Perhaps it was the hunger. Four days without a bite, not one that he could swallow anyway.

His memories before the event were clear enough to pluck out something the tour guide had said, that this patch of forest, one of the last left in the region, was more biologically dense than the vast majority of Earth’s other ecosystems. A spoonful of soil probably had a hundred different species in it.

Yet none of them tasted like steak, or chocolate, or anything he could keep down. An attempt to suck his own blood back out of a leech was equally unsuccessful. How could he taste bad to himself? The blood was thin, watery; it hadn’t been inside the slimy thing long enough for its digestive process to alter it so.

The hunger had to be the culprit. Nothing had ever been felt so intensely, not in his entire life. Logan was married, but he’d never been in love. He’d been in fights, and he’d lost them all because he was never invested in anything behind the violence. He didn’t so much like the numbness of his hands-free drift through life as recognize its tranquility.

And for the first time it was gone, replaced by a sensation so cavernous that it seemed likely he would fall into himself at any moment, and keep falling until death took him midair. Again his head rolled to aim his listless eyes at the tip of his spear. Still no fish on it. That settled it; he officially did not believe it.

There wasn’t a chance that cave people foraged and hunted enough sustenance to keep themselves alive for generations. People were just naked wobbly aberrations unfit for life in the wild. God was real, and he had been the one taking care of them until they invented the microwave and those locking safety bars on roller coasters.

So why had god abandoned him in particular while all the others were still safe and comfortable? He asked the muggy air with lips dryer than any of his surroundings, and got no answer. Just more bird and bug noise. More tweets and whistles. And one twang. Wait, he thought, brain stirring like a rake dragged through a compost pile. Not a single bird or bug in his admittedly limited bestiary made twanging sounds.

“Hello?” His cracked voice shouldn’t have been audible to anything; he barely heard it himself. An answer, in the form of another twang, came all the same. This time it was more like a sentence, more like music. Logan got to his feet with energy that didn’t exist moments ago. As he started following it he couldn’t help but construct a fantasy. The sounds came from a phone, in the hand of a teenager, sunbathing next to her family’s RV, parked on a perfect camping site.

Such roving was not all that common in the country, or permitted in such an ecologically imperiled area, but he’d forgotten that he wasn’t in America. Houses and vehicles and fast food joints were America, and everything with leaves was godforsaken wilderness. Delicate skin cracked further when he blundered through a screen of giant waxy leaves and forced a smile for his rescuers.

They smiled back, with big yellow buck teeth. Logan blinked harder than he ever had, which took most of his remaining energy. The maneuver failed, as that thing was still sitting there on a large mossy rock, little black feet dangling.

He recognized it from one of the brochures for an activity he had very deliberately decided not to pay fifty bucks for: a capybara petting zoo. His distaste for the idea was informed by the glossy details on the back of it. Capybaras were large indigenous semi-aquatic rodents, the largest rodents in the world in fact, many as large as pigs.

They had brown fur, broad snouts like loaves of bread, and bodies like that of a deer crossed with a kiwi fruit. Nowhere in the pictures or the bulleted list of factoids did the pamphlet indicate that they could sit upright, that they could smile, or that they could play acoustic guitar with aplomb.

“Hello my friend,” the rodent said. It could speak as well, with an accent fitting the local dialect, not that Logan could catch such a thing. He couldn’t even catch a fish. The song continued, but none of the other creatures joined in. Everything else went silent, retreated from that spot. They wanted no part of what was about to happen.

“Wha-” Logan’s voice croaked several times before fresh saliva managed to pave over it and create smooth words. “What are you?”

“Are you familiar with the concept of a spirit guide?” the capybara asked in turn, strumming away on his little guitar. The wood of it was vibrantly green, the strings moving as ripples did in the muddy water. The music was like little fish swimming about his head, so much so that he almost grabbed at them.

“I just need food. Do you have any food?”

“There is no food for you. The jungle has already decided it will not give you any. It has come to life, and it is grumpy. I think the music helps, but only a little.” It changed the tune as it remembered its own question. “People don’t use spirit guides much anymore, but now seemed like the perfect crack in time to bring them back.

It used to be that when people like you were lost, when the Tame stumbled back into the Wild, an olive branch might be extended.” Logan assumed Olive Branch was a chain of fast-casual Italian eateries. “An animal would come along, and with enough temporary mind to connect to another, guide them back to where they belong.”

“I’ve seen it in movies,” Logan admitted. “Wolves, usually.”

“Yes you do give dogs all the attention,” the capybara almost pouted, “but there are no wolves here my friend.”

“So you’re going to show me how to get out of here?” Logan asked, taking several steps forward before collapsing into the mud and looking up at the little beast.

“It’s not as simple as it sounds.” The song grew more complex, like the tune was finding its way through a labyrinth. The rodent’s stubby fingers danced across the strings without rest. Logan almost reached out to turn the knob like it was a car radio, before remembering his predicament. “You see, for us animals there is no way out of here. Here is everything to us, so there is no out, no right or wrong way to go.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Then why am I here?”

“Because you can find your way out, if you know how to accept my help,” it assured him. “All you need is some perspective. Then you will sense where the Wild is, and where rests the Tame. Once you know you will almost be pushed out, like oil out of water.”

“I don’t even know how I got here,” Logan insisted, starting to cry. There were no tears, as he was severely dehydrated, but his face contorted in that unmistakable way. “One minute I was on this bridge, and there were mosquito nets all around it, and the next…”

“Come now, that’s not what happened.” It tilted its head like a disapproving parent. “The world doesn’t just pick you up and move you from one memory to the next. It’s a journey. You got here. How did you get here?”

Logan listened to the guitar. It tested dead ends, encouraged him to do the same, except not give up when he found them. He thought back, found nothing before four days ago, but this time tried backtracking in a different direction, just in case he’d been down that way instead. On the tenth angle he tripped over something.

“The bridge collapsed,” he said, letting the words hang in the air so he could find something ridiculous or wrong about them. There was nothing. “I think there were too many people on it. We were all tangled up in the nets.”

“Yes,” his spirit guide snickered, “the butterflies had a good laugh at you over that. Now you know how that feels. And tell me, were you alone?”

“No. My wife wanted to take the tour… and yeah… it was a butterfly tour. They were all landing on the nets. So many colors…”

“So where is she?”

“Well she got out. They cut her out of the nets with a pair of shears; she kept asking where I was… but I was right there. Why didn’t I… Why didn’t I speak up?”

“You were dazed from the fall,” the rodent suggested, a question mark ringing in the last note of the verse.

“Yeah but they would’ve seen me too. There were so many people, right there. I even saw them cutting out some animals that got stuck. There were some birds and frogs.”

“Your wife left without you?”

“She had a frog in her hands…” Logan paused. The memory was still fuzzy, but he tried to focus in on her expression. Once she had that little green creature cradled between both hands she seemed content. She made fewer peeps than the frog as she was helped onto a bus. The nets were discarded, not properly, just thrown over an embankment so they wouldn’t be visible when they rebuilt and started the tours up again.

“That has been happening.” The animal’s words brought him out of his stupor. He had been content to remain in the memory, tangled up in a net and tossed into a ditch like garbage. At least an approved person had tossed him.

“What’s been happening?”

“Confusion. People thinking they are animals, vice versa. The forces are bleeding together. You’ve started it, and we’re accepting it. It’s how I can talk to you the way I can right now. Your wife thought that frog was you. One heartbeat for another was good enough. I’m sorry to say, but it means your bond isn’t that deep.”

“But nobody else heard me shouting?” Logan asked, glossing over what he already knew about his relationship, even though that knowledge was normally buried much deeper in the cold sand of consciousness than it was just then. Too much of him had been swept away by the hunger, exposing the raw surface of his soul to the scouring rays of sun breaking through the dense canopy.

“They would have, if you had shouted.” Logan opened his mouth to protest, but wound up as quiet as he realized he had been in the wad of netting.

“Why didn’t I?” The capybara tilted his head again, pouring the answer into him. “Because… I thought I was an animal too. Just some dumb animal stuck in a net. That’s what I couldn’t remember. It’s like that day is… it’s like it’s saved in a different format. Text document versus PDF. Saved in animal format.”

“Confusion,” the capybara summarized. “Everything is up in the air right now. It’s a difficult time for all of us.” His song reflected the somber sentiment. Suddenly Logan was reminded of a young man, a rival at one point, sitting outside a lecture hall at their university, playing the same instrument. He’d almost won over Logan’s wife with it. He should’ve let him have her, he realized.

“So do I know the way out now?” he asked the animal and himself, looking all about. Leaves. Mud. Rocks. No miraculous path opening up. “I remembered what happened though.”

“But it is not perspective,” his guide pointed out. “Where is your curiosity as to why all of this is happening? That is what you need to fish out of the murk. The confusion comes from the shifting of the Tame, but why is it shifting?”

“I don’t know what the Tame is!” The effort of shouting made him feel feverish. This could just be a hallucination. He needed to touch this guide, feel its fur, see if it was anything more than spirit.

“It’s you,” explained the animal. “It’s what makes people different from animals. We have the Wild, and you have the Tame… but now we have some Tame.” He played his instrument louder to illustrate his point.

“You’re stealing it,” Logan accused, unsure if he should care.

“It can’t be stolen.”

“You think we’re just giving it away!” Still unsure, he was nonetheless furious. The last thing he would ever do was give up what had allowed him to coast along so freely. He needed every last drop of the stuff, if it came in drops. Without it he was exactly what he was then, filthy and unfit for leeches.

Logan was about to mention all the things made possible by his humanity, all his achievements, but he couldn’t make music the way the capybara could. He couldn’t even squeak. No, he hadn’t done anything with his life, but he hadn’t wanted to. That was peace. Others had strapped him in, read the instructions to him slowly, and then he had kept his hands and feet inside the car at all times just like he was supposed to.

That was peace. Other people were giving up the Tame, he decided. It was the one decision they made for him that he could not accept, and this was the violent rejection. He’d been vomited into the wilderness and left to dry out.

“None of you can have my piece of it,” he told his guide, who stopped playing in response. “You hear me? It’s mine and I’m taking it back.” He grabbed at nothing and slammed it against his chest, hoping to put it back where it belonged. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“What do you want?”

“I want a bed! I want some street noise! I want food!”

“You wouldn’t be stuck here if that’s what you wanted. You would be seeking those things.”

“I am seeking them!”

“Logan, what are you after?”

“You don’t say my name! You don’t say anything! You’re meat!” Vicious denial gave him energy that he didn’t have, forcing him to lunge. Crazed, he grabbed his guide by the feet and pulled him down off the boulder, into the mud with him. Finally the thing made an animal noise: a frightened squeal.

The song was over, and that was something he had done. Maybe the first thing he’d ever done. Logan felt powerful as a result, but he wasn’t responsible for that power. Dutifully he had avoided it, and so now when it came to him in desperation he refused to absorb its accompanying accountability. That belonged to someone somewhere else, whichever idiot in a suit and tie was handing over his Tame in a tan envelope.

The only thing he had in common with such a person was that a full meal was nearby; in Logan’s case it would just take a little more work. He took up the neck of his spirit guide’s guitar and swung, smashing the instrument against the animal’s flank, making it more dazed and confused than he had been at any point since the bridge.

Its little sounds of pain and protest were nothing to him. Just an animal. Just a nut to crack. And Logan cracked it by whipping it around, both hands around its pattering raccoon feet, and smashing its head against the rock it had sat on. Finally it went silent, but that lingered only for a second before all the other sounds of the jungle rushed back in.

Birds and bugs. Back to normal. Everything was eating everything else, as it did when the two forces were in balance. Logan couldn’t obey the Tame, off gallivanting as it was in the nearest city, so instead he bowed down to the Wild, supplicated himself to its mastery. His confusion did not require him to act in such a way, but it provided an excuse for later, when he assured the world that no raindrop in the storm had its path determined by Logan Dole.

The capybara was just a hallucination, surely, so it didn’t have to be raw. He imagined its meat cooked, and when he ripped its flank open steam poured out like he’d just torn the film from a microwaved dinner. Smelled like pork. Logan dove into it, taking massive bites and chewing less than he was thinking.

If he could hear a hallucination he could taste one. If he could see it he could swallow it, and it would satisfy his stomach just as much as it had his eyes. As he gorged he thought he was alone, with no one to see his shameful murder of the only being willing to help him, but there were countless eyes upon him.

Every leech that had tasted him knew exactly how little he was capable of, and how evil that little was. It provided insight as to why the Tame might shift, why they might hate themselves so much that they would get themselves lost and look for ways to be animals again. They weren’t getting it right. Bumbling. Ignorant. Flailing and drowning every rescue diver come to save them.

Someone would have to end this embarrassment, finish things up for them. Logan flossed with a guitar string once he was finished, sucking the last gobs of flesh back off it. That poor frog, he thought, stuck with his wife’s cooking.