Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer Page B

branches of trees. Paths over which a light rain of spores poured down. Paths in darkness and in light. Paths of granite and of shale. Paths of marble. Paths that were like nothing he’d ever seen on TV or in photographs, that could not be of the Earth he knew, so that he stood
    . . . in a field of wheat, through which the ghost path ran over flattened stalks, while at the horizon huge twinned minotaurs battled in front of a blood-red sun, the stink of their sweat infiltrating the wheat, the musk of bull, tornadoes swirling up in the wake of their passage . . .
    . . . on a gravel path near a brook that panted and burbled and trickled down into a pond full of carp, while a woman who looked like his mother played a violin . . .
    . . . on a dirt trail outside of a vast city beside a river, looking up at two green towers rising from the water, between which the sky looked different and strange birds flew . . .
    . . . in the middle of a desert, the path the faintest indentation of sand, ahead of him ruins overrun by weeds and decay, while beside him little metal-and-flesh scorpions clattered and clacked and leathery lizards pumped up their red throats . . .
    . . . on a cobblestone street, watching an old man sweep a courtyard clean under the glare from a purpling sun, while down the way a woman put clothes on a clothes line and dogs yapped at her feet . . .
    . . . at the center of a labyrinth of mine shafts, staring down at an abyss, hearing the plop of pebble he’d sent tumbling down, but only after several minutes . . .
    . . . and in all ways he familiarized himself with this gift for finding what lay side by side and simultaneous with the reality of his every-day life, until it was no longer a matter of searching for a path, but of seeming to create it.
    For awhile, then, it could be said that Rajan Khanna took his secret talent for granted. He used it frivolously—as a shortcut to arrive early to work, or to make sure he wasn’t late for a date with his wife. It did not occur to him that this was frivolous because he had become so used to finding secret paths through the world. For a time, that mysterious otherworldliness he carried about him like a cloak became merely the jetlag of the weary world traveler, except that the world he traveled was like no other in his experience. Sights he came upon—the very ground erupting into hilly golems; a turtle the size of a large island, dotted with trees; a huge metal sculpture in the shape of an Egyptian pharoah in the middle of an infinite desert—no longer moved him to awe or tears. Instead, it was almost as if these images wore on him, burdened him, lessened him. When he saw the face of a tiger carved into the side of a mountain, eroded and smoothed down by the years, it seemed to him that this was his face.
    Once, he had known a salesman who had described a life of months on end living out of hotel rooms and walking through airports, until the delightful frisson and discovery of travel had become the daily plodding toward an end point that whispered only of room service, nights spent in his underwear, alone, on a bed with a view of a parking lot and luminous skyline, watching television. “It could’ve been Rio,” the salesman whispered to Rajan as he left. “It could’ve been Monte Carlo, and it would have been the same as some small town in Alabama with nothing to do.”
    And so, after awhile, Rajan stopped using the paths that often. If they were so common, why bother? He could, most days, get where he was going without recourse to them. Why, although it was rare that he saw someone on the ghost paths, he had once been passed by a jogger of all things—someone jogging on a secret path. Using what had once seemed mysterious and sacred as an exercise route! Stuck in the backwash of sweat and a mumbled greeting from the man, who had his headphones on, Rajan had stopped walking and left that particular path at once.
    When he finally told his wife