The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

librarian, and he shakes his head vigorously no. “Please leave me alone,” he says. The best thing I can do is
not help him. Help is a kind of relationship. Next thing you know I’ll be asking to be his friend, and he
doesn’t want to be my friend. “I’m not going to miss you at all,” he adds.
He is a connoisseur of the arc of the seasons and the scent of the wind, but he can’t really see anyone else.
I’ve told him a little about my family and my pastimes, and he didn’t even bother to feign much interest. He
doesn’t know what to do with the information, what questions to ask. He knows people only peripherally, by
the food in their pantry and the decorations on their walls. His only real relationship was between him and
the forest.
Knight thinks of himself both as a common criminal and as a Nietzschean Übermensch—a superman,
subject to no one else’s rules, a master of self-discipline capable of transcending the vapidity of life. He has
told me his story and asked for nothing in return, but he admits that he wonders which version of him I will
portray. “I’m worried about having my identity applied by someone else,” he says. “I don’t particularly trust
you. I don’t distrust you, either. I’m taking measure of the man. There are certain threadbare spots in your
measure. You have the ability to do harm or good. Do what you think is right.”
He really only had a single curiosity about me: What books were on my shelves? He asks me to take a
video of them and send it to him. He says he’ll find a way to get the technology to work. Make the video, he
says, but mail no more books or letters, and certainly do not pay a visit to his home. “Once I get out of here,
you’re off my dance card. I can’t afford the indulgence that is you; I deny you my magnificent presence. Did
you get my dance-card reference, or do I have to update my references? Did you read Little Women?”
He especially detests my aggressiveness, my coming to speak with him so many times. “You get a bee in
your bonnet, and there’s no stopping you.” He says that he regrets writing back to me. Then he backpedals.
He fears, he adds, that he is being too hostile. He did get something out of the visits: “Some stress release.”
But he has grown weary of talking about himself.
Mostly what he wants me to do is just slow down and let time pass. “Don’t be a pest,” he says. “I’ll speak
to you when the lilacs bloom. And maybe not even then.” I ask him if by lilacs blooming he means next
year, and he says, “Yes, in spring. I don’t use years yet.”
Knight is no longer able to disappear into the wild, not without risking seven years in prison, so he wishes
to melt into the world. A guard comes to escort him away, and I thank him for speaking with me, for
sharing his ideas. For the lyricism of his language. I tell him I like the way his mind works. “Good-bye,
Chris,” I say. “Good luck.”
There is time for Knight to express a last thought. He does not. There’s no wave, no nod. He stands up,
turns his back on me, and walks out of the visiting booth and down a corridor of the jail.