The Silk Road

by Kathryn Davis

  Like when the flavor of a wine is gone or the aroma of a perfume has been dispersed into the air or the savor has left the body.

  Okay, said the Cook. Maybe she didn’t lead us. But she left the door unlocked and threw away the key.

  Of course we remembered our mother saying this about the prison a long time ago, except there, the door was locked.

  It was a memory we all shared. Probably because it was the opposite of the way she felt about us.

  She wanted us to try our wings, said the Botanist.

  She wanted us to crash land, said the Topologist.

  At last we arrived on the plateau. We couldn’t see where we were because of the rain and the wind. The rain and the hail and the howling wind. And the snow, said the Archivist. Don’t forget the snow. At some point we heard the bell. We all heard it; it kept ringing and ringing, ringing without stop.

  It wasn’t the Angelus; by now we knew how to recognize the Angelus.

  It’s marking a death, said the Archivist. One stroke for every year of the deceased’s life.

  No one could live to be that old, said the Keeper.

  You don’t know what you’re talking about, the Topologist said. The bell is Maria. The Dômerie must be nearby.

  When she told us it was a hospital we all felt the same relief.

  Maria was the Bell of the Lost, forged in the thirteenth century. Evidently bells could have names. A wealthy pilgrim had the Dômerie built in gratitude after he survived a fierce attack by an unknown assailant when he went astray in the Aubrac. According to the words written on it, the bell was made to praise God, cast out demons, call home the lost.

  That’s us all right, said the Cook.

  It would have helped if one of us had thought to bring a compass. It would have helped if one of us had been paying attention to what we were doing. The expedition was Mother’s idea. She was the one we’d been counting on to tell us what to do. We couldn’t go back; our tracks were obliterated as fast as we made them by whatever was falling from the sky. Besides, said the Iceman, where would we go back to? A thing never returns to nothing, but all things after disruption go back into the first bodies of matter.

  It would be great if you spoke English, said the Keeper.

  The Topologist was the one we were counting on now. She was the one who could remember leaving her guidebook on a café table somewhere in the Aubrac. The saint had his shrines everywhere along the route but we hadn’t seen one in a while. We hadn’t seen anything in a while. We were ill equipped to travel, every one of us, our fingers unable to perform the simplest task, wiping our eyeglasses dry, buttoning our cloaks. The bell continued ringing but the closer we got to the sound, the dimmer the sound grew. Meanwhile the sound of howling that we thought was the wind was growing louder.

  This is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you, said the Archivist. The dog-headed beast is on the loose. He lifted his pant leg to show us the bite marks. No one ever listens to me, he said.

  I’m listening, said the Geographer, and she crouched down to get a better look.

  The Topologist held the Archivist’s hands in hers and stared him in the eye. Calm down, she said. Breathe in and breathe out. The way Jee Moon taught us.

  Of course the idea of being nowhere was easier for her, as a Topologist, as well as the idea of being in a neighborhood that didn’t exist. She had been sitting in a nonexistent neighborhood the time she noticed the Swede shaking the stone loose from his shoe and invited him to come join her. The way the Topologist saw it, she and the Swede were distinct points separated by their respective nonexistent neighborhoods. Luckily it had been late enough in the day that they decided to share a bottle of wine. A festival was under way; all the cows of the Aubrac had been set free onto the plateau to graze and multiply. Soon enough the Topologist and the Swede were surrounded by luminous golden cows, their heads decorated with flowers. Spring had been late that year. A cow came close to stare at them and they could see its breath.

  Animals dwell upon the moment, Jee Moon said. They have that in common, even the beast.

  The thing about the dog-headed beast was that it dwelt in so many different moments it had begun to seem like it didn’t exist.

  We kept closer to the Topologist than usual. We were careful, having been warned time and again that she didn’t like to be touched. At some point we realized we were following the contour of a small lively stream feeding into an almost perfectly round lake. Even though we couldn’t see the lake, we knew the Dômerie was right there on the other side of it. The bell continued its muffled tolling, more a feeling than a sound, as if our blood were pulsing outside our bodies or we were back inside our mother, waiting to be born.

  The Topologist didn’t like to talk about what happened to her after she left the shrine. Most of us assumed that whatever it was the Swede had been involved, though there was a lot of disagreement about whether he’d been in the shrine with us that day or she had met up with him after. Some of us thought we remembered seeing someone who might have been him, a good-looking man in a dark green rain poncho, lighting a candle for Saint Roch. But did this mean that by then the Swede was already sick?

  Really, it could have been any one of us. We had all experienced the agonizing sensation of the skull shrinking around the soft mass of the brain, driving out thoughts the way seawater boils with the mastering might of the winds.

  I thought I could help him, the Topologist said, if only I could get him to the hospital.

  Right, said the Geographer. The hospital.

  We all had the same idea, for whatever good it did.

  While we’re on the subject, the Archivist said, again lifting his pant leg.

  The Botanist bent down to see what he was talking about. I don’t like the looks of that, she said.

  Me neither, said the Cook, but it was obvious he was making a joke.

  Under the circumstances it was difficult to see anything, the night saturated with water and without a moon, the wind causing the heavy fabric of our cloaks to spread and fold like wings.

  We had to be careful, traversing the lip of the lake. From the start the ground had been slippery underfoot, but now, given this most recent precipitation, the way was fraught with danger. The Keeper was the least agile among us and needed to hang onto the Geographer’s arm. If she hadn’t, the Geographer might have raced ahead, being the swiftest and eager to run. If it weren’t for the Keeper who knows where the Geographer would be by now?

  Meanwhile the Dômerie began assembling itself in large wavering blocks, some of the blocks advancing toward us more aggressively than others, piling side by side and one atop the other over and over and over again into an impossibly tall tower with a pointed turret, alongside of which a low building extended itself alluringly, stretching to its full length like an animal. Everything was wet, dark; even without moon or stars the stones glistened. There it was, the hospital, right there in front of us. All we needed to do was enter it.

  The Topologist followed along the hospital wall, trailing her fingers across the stone. There must be a door here somewhere, she said. From the beginning, small things have figured out how to get through impossibly small openings. This was one of the advantages of being small, the Geographer said. Something practically invisible to the naked eye like a flea could change the course of history.

  Remember Nanny and the mice? said the Botanist.

  She thought there was just the one, said the Cook. She gave it a name. Something upper crust. Miles.

  And then Miles had babies in the hamper.

  Nanny always wondered how he got in, said the Topologist.

  My question exactly, said the Cook, pointing at the hospital.

  But the Topologist either couldn’t remember or didn’t want to say. The little dog, though! There had been a little dog that followed them from the shrine, attracted by the meat the Swede had stowed in his pack, and when they got to the hospital the little dog ran up to what turned out to be a door and barked
at it.

  I think the door is hard to see, the Topologist said. It blends in with the stone. You have to push on it to make it open, she said. Like an ashtray in a car. Push down.

  The next thing we all knew, the Botanist had disappeared.

  We were used to people disappearing. Our mother for example: one minute she was right there, so close we could see the fine colorless hair on her upper lip and smell the egg on her breath. The next minute she was gone. She was quick moving; we could hear the click of her heels along the hallway. There was nothing magical about it, the Iceman said. She never wanted children. We cramped her style. I saw her with that man, he said. Her thighs like wings—she wanted to fly, remember? She even took lessons. The Iceman said it was so dark when he went into the Morning Room he couldn’t tell if he was floating or falling. He’d been having the dream about the daemon with the howling mouth we’d all grown tired of hearing; for such a substantial person his psyche was surprisingly delicate. It was easy to hurt his feelings. We tried to watch what we said around him. The Botanist was his favorite and now she was gone.

  How did she do that? The Archivist was pushing on stones, one after another, to no avail.

  Like when we used to play Sardines, said the Keeper. You’d think someone was there with you and all of a sudden they weren’t.

  You’d feel more alone than ever, said the Geographer.

  Remember running up the stairs to Nanny’s room? the Keeper asked.

  The back staircase was dimly lit and smelled like damp varnish and baby powder; its wallpaper was coming loose and there were lion faces in the roses. We weren’t supposed to play on that staircase—the staircase was for Nanny’s use, just as we weren’t supposed to go into her room even though she could come into our rooms whenever she felt like it. Nanny’s room didn’t smell like the rest of the house and the things she kept there weren’t like our things. When the Cook put her brassiere on over his shirt it was frightening.

  Nanny’s room was small. It didn’t seem possible that all of us could fit into it at once, let alone find a place to hide in it.

  Her things weren’t as good as ours, the Archivist said. She bought her things in a box store.

  She kept hard candies in a dish shaped like a woman’s shoe, said the Cook. Also she believed in God.

  When we’d been least expecting it the sky cleared, like a curtain sweeping open on a new act. The moon, too, was in a new phase, one we’d never seen before. It was our moon though, not some other heavenly body. It shone its light down onto the hospital and the lake and we were amazed to see the beauty of the landscape, whereas before all had seemed hideous, treacherous, even the stones’ shimmering designed to trick us.

  The Keeper reached out to steady herself on the Geographer’s arm but the Geographer was no longer there. Hey! she said. What’s going on?

  With the Botanist we’d grown used to this, due to the opals. The opal wasn’t the Botanist’s birthstone, though, and we also knew that to wear an opal if you hadn’t been born in October was bad luck.

  Hello? Hello? The Keeper looked down the length of the hospital wall and around the foot of the tower. It took her a while to realize that everyone except for her had found the door and gone inside. Hello? she said again, but she knew there was nobody out there with her. She had the moon and the stars and the planets, the stones and the lake. She tuned her ears to the low frequencies, the muffled voices of bottom dwellers, the sharp whispers of gnats. Nothing.

  Eventually from off in the distance came a faint thrumming noise as the hydroelectric plant awakened, while close at hand she could hear us talking and laughing on the other side of the wall—the same way she heard us when we were hiding under Nanny’s bed in a game of Sardines. Usually we were busy making fun of Nanny, having located the copy of Bonjour Tristesse she kept hidden between her mattress and a bed slat.

  The Keeper used to be thin, tall, and purposeful like an arrow, but that was before, back when she was a tomboy. Now she was overweight, her ankles tending to swell if she stayed on her feet too long.

  We worried about her. She was in worse shape than the Iceman and, if that wasn’t bad enough, she was a smoker. At some point we’d all been smokers—even the Archivist when he was trying to impress P—but we’d managed to quit, each of us enduring the loss in his or her own fashion. For some of us it proved trifling, a mere annoyance, while for others it proved unbearable, a feeling akin to grief.

  The Keeper never even tried to quit; she loved to smoke. She was the kind of person whose destiny seemed as inevitable to her as it was opaque. Now, in the moonlight outside the hospital, she was surprised to discover a practically full pack of cigarettes in her pants pocket. The Cook must have put them there, she figured, along with the little Zippo that used to be kept in the cloisonné stamp box atop the bachelor chest. It had to have been him, since the rest of us were continually trying everything we could think of to make her stop.

  The Keeper flicked the lighter’s wheel and a flame burst out. The cigarette was damp but she managed to get it going, its round orange eye looking this way and that.

  What’s she up to out there do you think? asked the Topologist.

  Who the hell knows, said the Iceman.

  Shhh, said Jee Moon, putting her hand over his mouth. This is a hospital.

  The Iceman’s eyes opened wide in surprise—it was the first and only time she had touched him.

  We often heard conversations go on, even through closed doors. This was because a voice can pass uninjured through the winding openings of things, whereas eidola refuse to pass: they’re torn to shreds, especially if the openings through which they try gliding aren’t straight.

  Up ahead was the Botanist, floating in the dark. No matter how she’d managed to get inside the hospital, now that she was an eidolon there was no way she could get out. We could see her bare feet hovering above the floor, her blond hair floating around her head as if darkness were water. The closer we drew, the smaller the Botanist became, the outermost surface streaming off her. She was facing us but moving away.

  It’s not her, though, is it? said the Cook.

  He thought he was seeing his wife’s ghost, the light cast by the Botanist leading him on. As so often happened when we came face to face with the unexpected, our thoughts got loose from our brainpans, sending us straightaway to the place we thought we’d left behind forever. The Cook’s wife made him promise not to go seeking her ghost in mirrors or in pools. When I’m dead I’ll be dead, she said. That will be the end of me. Some people became ghosts, she told him; they were the ones with a spare soul. Others, well. Who could say what the others became? The little fox with the goose in its mouth, the Astronomer recalled with a start. It was his favorite constellation. As for the sound of machinery, the Archivist didn’t realize it was coming from a hydroelectric plant. He would be late, he was thinking. An X suture is what that bite calls for. X X X X X.

  Thoughts were the one thing we couldn’t control, the seeds of the mind possessing a power of moving in proportion to the seeds’ smallness and smoothness.

  At the end of the hall, right before the place where a thick length of rope hung down from the bell tower, a low, narrow passageway like the January tunnel extended off to the right. I’m not going in there, said the Iceman. If I go in there I’ll never get out. When the Geographer took her tablet from her pack and tried to check the coordinates it was so dark she couldn’t see a thing. None of us could, aside from the light the Botanist made as she passed.

  Meanwhile the Keeper was on the other side of the wall, all by herself in the Savage Domain with only a cigarette for company.

  Most of us came to the settlement on the floatplane; we had no trouble fitting inside it, just as we’d all managed to fit inside our mother and the doctor had no trouble getting us out. The Iceman, on the other hand, always turned out to be too big for every place in which he found himself. The desks at school were a torment, a challenge posed by having to pour his form into an im
possibly small opening between two immovable parts, the heavy wooden chair attached to the desktop belonging to the child sitting behind him, and the heavy wooden lid with its pencil tray and inkwell attached to the seatback of the child sitting in front of him, a skinny little girl with a birthmark on her neck.

  We knew about this even though he thought he was keeping it a secret. For one thing, he said the girl’s name in his sleep. For another, we’d all had the same experience: a sudden vision of the tender blade of the girl’s neck as it bent in the breeze of our rapt regard, the delicate brown hair and the café au lait birthmark shaped like something familiar, something along the lines of a mop at the entrance to a tunnel, a leaping flea, a little green lizard. A cairn too, of course.

  I was the one sitting behind him, said the Geographer. I couldn’t see the chalkboard. My view of the world always had an obstruction.

  We weren’t seated alphabetically, said the Keeper.

  It was more like he was teacher’s pet, said the Geographer. He wasn’t a very good student, though.

  He thought “Prince Valiant” was beneath him, said the Cook. Even though the prince spent his childhood in a bog.

  Well, yes, the Iceman said, when one of us mentioned the birthmark.

  Pictures of things and the thin shapes of them are emitted off the surfaces of things: these are like films or rinds, the image bearing an appearance and form resembling the thing, whatever it was, from whose body the picture was shed and wandered forth.

  The day of the Iceman’s arrival the weather was bad; the plane couldn’t fly. Even if it could, how could it land? the woman on the phone wanted to know. She threw the question at the Iceman like a challenge. “It needs to land on water,” she said. Meanwhile he was stuck in a motel room barely bigger than he was, with the same framed print of a sailing vessel above the bed we all remembered from when we, too, had been stuck there, waiting. The sky opened and let loose everything it had at its disposal. There was an election going on somewhere and the candidates stood behind podia and held forth, hatefully. Sweetness, the Iceman thought. Where did it go? Even the mosses, sweetest things on earth, were dying. Who knew what would be left of them by the time he found a pilot willing to take him up the coast?