Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

the boar had stood up and were staring at him. The woman was smiling; her eyes were white with just a hint of pupil. The boar was huge—bigger than the woman. It had the coarse black bristle-pad hair common in its breed, as well as sharp, yellowing upturned tusks. A faint musky smell wafted up from the boar. In its barrel-chested, broad-backed swagger, it reminded Rajan of the actor Oliver Reed.
    Rajan smiled back, his natural politeness kicking in. He walked toward them. After all, it was just an old woman with her pet pig. On a road that had appeared out of an apartment wall.
    “Hello,” Rajan said as he approached, addressing the woman. “You are the first person I have seen since I started walking this road.”
    The woman smiled and burbled something.
    Pulling on the leash with one foot so the woman had to hunch over, the boar said, “She doesn’t talk. She doesn’t talk. She’s just how I get onto this path.”
    Gooseflesh broke in a wave over Rajan. He tried to control a sudden visible shaking. The voice of the boar was the same pitch and timbre of the thing that had whimpered in the alley when he was sixteen.
    “I’m sorry,” Rajan murmured. “I meant no offense.” It had all started to become distinctly too real.
    The boar grunted, ignored his apology, and asked, “Are you here because of them ? Are you one of the others ?”
    “I don’t think so,” Rajan said. “I’m not sure who you’re talking about.”
    The boar huffed and snorted. “You must be new. New scent. New human.”
    “Where am I? What path is this?” Rajan asked. He did not want to answer the question implied by the boar’s statements.
    “If you don’t know,” the boar said, staring up at Rajan with its black marble eyes, “then my telling you won’t help. It wouldn’t mean anything, would it? Until you’ve experienced it.”
    “I suppose that’s true,” Rajan said. The boar was huge. Just the size of it scared him. Besides, he was still drunk.
    The boar sat back on its haunches. The old woman sat down beside it, smiling inanely. Around them: the swirling wind, the red dust, the slightest echo of a catbird’s call.
    “It’s fine, you know,” the boar said in a kindly, almost grandfatherly fashion, “ not to know. We’re all travelers here. I hope your journey is a good one.”
    Rajan stood there in silence for a moment. The woman stared up at him, and he could have sworn the white of her eyes had changed and now a miniature of the canopy road swirled there.
    Then he realized he had been dismissed. The boar had dismissed him. Their conversation was over. Somehow, through his relief, he felt disappointment.
    “Well, then,” Rajan said, “It was nice to meet you.”
    When he was long past the boar, the boar shouted out, “Be careful! You never know who you might meet on these paths!” And laughed—a deep, rough roar of a laugh.
    Rajan did not look back. He met no one else on the canopy road, and, after a time, catching yet another glimpse of the apartment, off to his left, he plunged toward it, and in no time at all, he was standing at the front door, in the snow, shivering because, of course, his jacket was inside the apartment, where he’d left it.
    Now the paths came fast and furious. Somehow the encounter with the talking boar had emboldened him, as had his ability to get back so easily. He went from path to path, exploring, experimenting, figuring out how to get from here to there , and back again. What, after all, were one’s college years for, if not experimenting? So he traveled over paths covered with pine needles and broken through by roots like veins. Paths of fine sand that smelled of brine. Paths of mud, deep and treacherous. Paths of pebbles, curling down the sides of cliffs. Paths of sawdust and paths of cedar chips. Paths of asphalt and of concrete. Paths of wood. Paths that lay below ground. Paths that lay above ground in the form of bridges and causeways. Paths weaving upwards through the