Dead Time

Ore continued riding north, the motorcycle purring beneath him, his mind simultaneously clear and clouded. He wasn’t very good at riding, and always thought it was an unnecessarily dangerous mode of transport. But in the last year of her life, Yuri really got into motorcycles and went riding constantly. She offered to teach him often, but he kept refusing. Growing up, he had injured himself on every new thing with wheels he tried to master, from skateboards, to roller-blades, to bicycles, and worried that a motorcycle spill could spell the end of his life. After Yuri passed, he was no longer scared of dying, and learned to operate it quickly. Essentially, it was like riding a bike, just a very fat bike, kind of like the fat cat she had given him to take care of before she left New Jersey.

Riding still took up much of his attention though, and pushed out most trivial thoughts, unlike driving a car, which for him, growing up in a state where everything is somehow miraculously at least half an hour away, came as second nature. But while the myriad small thoughts that normally swelled like so many eddies in his stream of consciousness were swept away by the sensation of flying along the road on an engine with wheels, there were a handful that resisted the current, staking their claim on his attention.

He kept thinking of Yuri’s death, which he wasn’t there for. She had gone to Seattle, at first they talked often, then not so much, then often again. This was nothing new, and Ore was used to it, Yuri always had a lot going on, which made Ore feel like his own life was boring by comparison. They hadn’t talked in a while when he learned of her death. Apparently she had stepped on a poisonous snake during one of her hikes, but it wasn’t till a week later that they found her body, judging by the decomposition, so there was an investigation into the cause of death, which came up inconclusive.

The whole thing seemed both suspicious and inevitable. Ore was always amazed at how many risks Yuri took and worried about her constantly, yet up until then she had always gotten through whatever life threw her way. She had hiked more miles than anyone he knew, having completed the triple crown of the three major US trails, each covering thousands of miles. So, it seemed unlikely that she wouldn’t notice or recognize a poisonous snake, or that she wouldn’t know how to deal with the venom once bitten.

Moreover, why did she go off-trail? The reason it took so long for the rangers to find her body was because she was close to a mile away from the nearest path. The examiners conjectured that she was bitten and tried to take a shortcut through the woods to find help, yet the place she was found was in the opposite direction from the highway. Though sometimes she had trouble with spatial awareness, it seemed unlikely that a seasoned hiker like her would completely mistake the direction in which civilization lay.

Then there was the fact that it didn’t seem like she tried to do anything about the snakebite. Even though she was obsessed with minimizing the weight of her backpack, spending much of her money on the lightest equipment, as over the course of many miles, each ounce of weight makes a noticeable difference, she was always extremely well prepared. A search of her possessions revealed she did have a first-aid kit with her, which she didn’t even bother opening. It was as if she was bitten and chose to walk deep into the woods, as the poison spread through her system.

The other strange thing was that she had her phone on her, but didn’t call anyone for help, even though the area definitely had plenty of coverage. It would make sense if she was being chased and so couldn’t make a call or tend to her wounds, but the rangers said it didn’t seem that was the case, the tracks still traceable when they found her just showed a single set of footprints at a regular walking pace, though Ore had no idea how reliable that account was.

In the end, all the evidence, though more accurately hearsay, since he never saw even any photos of her body or the place it was found, pointed to death by misadventure or perhaps suicide. Ore couldn’t help thinking of Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt renowned for her beauty, who, following the defeat of her forces by Octavian, the future first emperor of Rome, was said to have taken her own life by deliberately being bitten by an asp.

He also thought of Socrates, the great philosopher who chose to accept a death sentence and drank poisonous hemlock, rather than taking a plea deal where he could avoid death by admitting wrongdoing and paying a fine, as well as passing up an opportunity to escape. Was Ore mythologizing Yuri now, comparing her to the two classical exemplars of beauty and wisdom? Why couldn’t he accept that it was probably an accident that was bound to happen eventually? Or that she had always been a sad girl in lots of pain?

No. Ore refused to remember her that way. Yuri was the most powerful person he ever met and could not be felled by mere accident. When he was still a depressed teenager, she told him to read Nietzsche, who then became his favorite philosopher and pulled Ore out of his downward spiral. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence is deeply tied to amor fati, love of fate. The most important thing that a person can do for themselves is to “turn every thus it has happened into a thus have I willed it.” That is what Ore was doing now. There is no way Yuri died unless she chose to. Was this the truth or something Ore needed to believe to keep going? It didn’t matter. He and Yuri were one now, like Socrates and Plato, through whom Socrates lived on. There is no way he would die unless he chose to.

Ore had arrived at his destination.