The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

There were three visiting rooms, and when a third name was announced and the woman and children
rose, I was dismayed. But then the officer reopened VISITING 2, ushered the group in, and called, “Knight.”
I was wanded front and back, thankful that the small notebook and pen stashed in my pocket weren’t
confiscated. The officer unlocked VISITING 3—a sign on the door warned that if you left for any reason,
you’d be prohibited from returning—and I stepped inside and the door closed behind me, and I was rattled
with nerves. My eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, and there, in the tiny booth, sealed off behind a thick
pane of shatterproof plastic, sitting on a stool, was Christopher Knight.
Rarely in my life have I witnessed someone less pleased to see me. His thin lips were pulled into a
downturned scowl; his eyes did not rise to meet mine. I sat across from him, also on a stool with a black
wooden top. I placed my notebook on the metal desk bolted to the wall below the plastic window. There was
no acknowledgment of my presence, not the merest nod. He gazed someplace beyond my left shoulder,
nearly motionless. He was wearing a dull green overlaundered jail uniform several sizes too big.
A black phone receiver hung on the wall, and I picked it up. He picked his up—the first movement I saw
him make. There was a bit of recorded legal boilerplate, warning that the conversation might be monitored,
and then the lines opened.
I spoke first. “Nice to meet you, Chris.”
He didn’t respond. He just sat there, stone-faced, his balding head shining like a snowfield beneath the
fluorescent lights, his beard—his jail calendar, one hundred and forty days in—a mess of curls, most
brown, some red, a few gray. He had on metal-framed bifocals, different from the glasses he’d worn forever
in the woods. His broad forehead and pointy beard gave his face a triangular appearance, like a yield sign.
He looked a little bit like the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. He was skinny.
The only picture I’d seen of Knight before coming was his mug shot, in which he was clean-shaven and
slightly frowning, wearing his old clunky glasses, his eyes behind them heavy-lidded and dull after the
exhaustion and stress of his arrest. The man in front of me now appeared no more welcoming, but there
was a clear sense of alertness and energy. He might not be looking at me, but he was surely observing,
though I didn’t know if he’d speak even a single word.
Knight had mentioned repeatedly in his letters that he felt at ease in silence. I looked at him not looking at
me. He had pale, boiled-potato-colored skin and a sharp nose. His shoulders drooped, his posture curled
inward, defensive. Maybe a minute passed.
This was all I could endure. “The constant banging and buzzing in here,” I said, “must be so jarring
compared with the sounds of nature.” He shifted his eyes to me—a minor victory—then glanced away. His
eyes were light brown, and rather small. He scarcely had any eyebrows. My comment hung in the air.
Then he spoke, or at least his mouth moved. His first words were inaudible. He was holding the phone’s
mouthpiece too low, below his chin. It had been decades since he’d regularly used a phone; he was out of
practice. I indicated with my hand that he needed to move it up. He did, then repeated his pronouncement.
“It’s jail,” he said, and nothing else. Silence once more.
There were so many questions to ask him, but they all seemed wrong—too prying, too personal. I tried
an innocuous one: “What season did you like best when you were living in the woods?”
Knight paused, apparently laboring to create a response. “I take each season as it comes,” he said, his
scowl reappearing. His voice was raspy, each word a distinct entity—overenunciated, unnaturally spaced,
absent of elisions. Just a procession of nearly toneless sounds, with a hint of the stretched vowels of a Down