All Fours

There was a documentary made about my childhood. Someone sent it to me on a film reel, and I projected it onto the wall of my basement and watched it in the dark. The documentary seemed to portray me as some sort of feral wonder child who spent all of his waking hours roaming the woods in misunderstood solitude, even though the only wooded area that I ever really played in was a patchy little spot out behind our garage where a worn out old tree presided over some overgrown brush that used to be a garden, and the only sparks of wonder that I ever remembered showing were purely accidental, sporadic and unremarkable.

There was a voiceover of me talking about how the teacher always liked to have me read the current passage from our reading book in front of the class, because she liked the cadence of my voice. She liked that I paused in all the appropriate ways in all the right places for the right commas and punctuation. Most of all, she liked that my reading showed genuine comprehension. This voiceover was played over footage of me roaming through the overgrown garden on a winter morning when it was still dark out, finding my way along the paths of hard frozen mud by spotting the places where the scattered patches of snow had settled into my previous footprints.

Still, I started getting into it, accepting the documentary’s conceits and embellishments, almost believing that this was a reflection of my actual childhood. But then something happened that ruined the illusion for me. The footage rolled on, later into the morning when the sun was up and the patches of snow were receding and a couple of early spring buds on the tangled weeds were starting to open. There were some railroad tracks that passed along the back of our property, and the footage showed me walking along the path by the tracks and then suddenly stopping when I heard something crunching around in the brush. The footage showed me standing still with my ears perked up, and then it showed me leaping forward with this tremendous bound and tearing along the path on all fours, propelling myself along at a ferocious pace with each stride.

This was just too much. I laughed and shook my head in complete disbelief. I look around in the dark for someone to explain it all to, to explain the logistics of the human spine and the inadequacy of a person trying to run that way, to point out the outright lie of the whole thing, to even got down on my hands and knees if necessary to demonstrate my own incapacity to perform such a feat, to confess all the long degradations of my lazy sedentary life. But there was no one there watching this thing with me. I was just alone in the dark with the steady rattle of the projector.