107 C described the wildlife meticulously: the raccoons, the fireflies; the lingering odour of the spring’s wild garlic. But he divulged little of his transactions with other men. It seemed that most of his enjoyment derived from getting lost on the maze of trampled pathways. In one message, he recounted a sense of panicked excitement, after losing his bearings in the fading evening light. The woods, he wrote, allowed him to remove himself from society for a short period of time but he also talked of a feeling of “oneness” with both the trees and the park’s other evening visitors, whose lives he knew otherwise nothing about. He would, however, stay no later than dusk, when the thrill of almost invisibility would be overridden by his fear of the dark. EARLY JULY Later in the academic year, C grew ever more reserved among his cohort. He told me that, except on one occasion, when he showed some photographs of an electricity substation, he sat uncommunicative in class, rarely contributing to group conversations. He reported that he frequently zoned out and easily lost the thread of discussions. At the end of the school day, he told me that he mostly slipped out quietly, not saying goodbye to his classmates, and chose routes of exiting the building where he would be unlikely to cross paths with anyone he knew. With the warmer weather, he often chose to walk home through the large city park next to the academy. He wrote that he diverted his way on a number of occasions through the mature wooded area on the park’s west side, where he would engage in anonymous sexual encounters among the foliage. He told me that this was preferable to looking for this kind of thing with smartphone apps where, he argued, “discretion was an illusion”.
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