by Oisín Curran
I do, eventually, fall asleep and the next thing I see is Quill and Rook moving about in the thin light of what must be dawn. Apparently, before jumping off the Lizzy Madge, they threw some provisions into a pair of backpacks. They hand out a few crackers and sardines, a sip of water.
Quill wants to know how far it is to City. Will the provisions last?
I don’t know.
All I know is the direction we must take and so I take it. Behind me, I hear the crew fall into step.
Soon we come to a long, thin tunnel. It thins and thins until I’m the only one who can walk forward easily. The others bend over and move slowly. The light fades as we walk until we’re in the dark just as the tunnel comes to an end and we can stand. Flashlights come on and, in the beams of light, we see bodies on the ground.
Does somebody scream? Do I? Not sure because there’s a crashing in my ears—must be the blood leaving my head because suddenly I’m dropping inside my skin and need to crouch down to keep from falling over.
Quill has a candle lamp in her pack. She lights it.
It’s a huge cave. Gold shines on the ceiling between green stalactites. Purple stone rivers, pink waterfalls, and crystal fountains all frozen in time as though we stepped inside a photograph. None of that matters. There are bodies everywhere. Severn crouches down and pointlessly feels for a pulse. We all know these are corpses—there’s something subtly, but horribly wrong about their postures.
Dead, he says quietly. Then he gently turns the corpse onto its back to see its face. And then he shouts and leaps backward. I’ve never seen anybody look so scared. No wonder. The corpse’s face is his own.
Somebody turns over another body—it’s Rook. And another is Quill. And Chisolm. We’re surrounded by our own dead bodies. Is mine here? I hunt around but can’t see it, but maybe it’s hidden somewhere. It doesn’t matter—this is a waking nightmare, devised by some unknown force (my Follower?) to stop us in our tracks. And it’s worked. The crew is paralyzed. I look around and see them frozen in place as they gaze down at their own deaths. And when they come to, they’ll want to retreat—understandably. I’d like to leave too. Flight is the natural reaction. But there can be no retreat. And no delays. Something must be done quickly.
Behind me, above the tunnel opening, I see several stones precariously wedged into the ceiling. Slipping out of sight of the others, I find a good rock, slightly larger than my fist, grip it tightly, and aim it where it needs to go. My aim isn’t good. I barely nick one of the stones, but it’s enough. Moments later several rocks come tumbling. And then more.
And then the roof of the cavern crashes down on us and we run.
Red glow on the walls of a tunnel opening. We race in and head down and feel heat. But we can’t turn back—the cave-in crashes stones down the tunnel after us and plugs it.
We come out on a cliff edge. We’re high on a shelf overlooking a giant cavern. The ceiling of the cavern is so high it’s hidden by huge, rolling orange clouds. They’re orange because they’re lit from below by a river of fire. Lava pours across the floor of the cavern a hundred feet below.
To our left a thin stone bridge bends over the lava to a shelf on the other side. And there’s an opening in the cliff face across from us—another tunnel.
Our clothes drip sweat.
The others stand and stare down, scared to stone. I walk to the bridge and step on.
Wait! somebody yells, maybe Severn.
Wait? That’s all they ever want to do. It’s that kind of thinking that gets you into real trouble. Never wait. Why would I? There’s only one way to go on and I have to go on. There’s no return, no retreat, no time to stop and think.
The bridge isn’t man-made. Water made it maybe, and lava. Not constructed, in other words, for human feet, or any feet at all, for that matter, so the crossing is hard. Very hard. Because it’s thin and lumpy, I crawl on my hands and knees. Soon I can hear the others behind me, swearing quietly, breathing loudly. Single file, inch by inch, we shimmy forward. My knees tear open on the rock, hands grow slippery with sweat, heat from the river of lava below bends the air, distorts my sight.
Halfway over, a scream behind me. I try to look back but nearly tip over, so lie down to get a better grip and turn my head back.
It’s Nolan. He’s slipped and hangs by his fingertips, legs dangling in space. Rook reaches for him, but it’s too late.
Horrible silence as he falls.
Instead of melting, he lands with a sickening crack on a chunk of rock riding the lava like an iceberg. Lucky, or maybe not. He lies still on the gliding rock in a limp pile.
We yell to him as he sails away, but he doesn’t move. There’s nothing we can do but helplessly watch his body slide out of sight around a bend. I don’t know Nolan well enough to be sorry for him, but I’m still sorry for him. Sorrier for myself. Now I’ve seen somebody fall, it seems more likely that I’ll follow suit. I stay down and inch like a worm on a stick. That’s what I am. A burning worm. And the heat makes me dizzy. I begin to slip sideways and don’t mind it. Falling is a relief.
Stop fucking around and go! Rook is right behind me. His voice is sharp and scared. I keep going.
Fear and a need so far away it’s an old dream—the need to go on, the gravity of my pictures, of City.
sinking boat
rainbow on a wall
ghost with a gun
butter on hot bread
axe, bird, stump, blood
firewood
lilacs
waterfalls
What have I lost? Which ones gone? My mind has a hole in it and my treasures are leaking out. I’m going as fast as I can, but I have to go faster. I won’t make it, but I go on, on, on. If the last shift forward worked, there’s a chance the next one will. And it does, and it does, and again. Until finally I’m on the other side, helping others off the bridge. First Rook, who kneels on the ground, breathing hard. Then the others, one by one, Chisolm behind Lutra. Quill is the last. Unlike the others, she’s upright. She steps off the bridge lightly, as if she’s been walking above lava all her life. Maybe she has.
I hear the sound of gulls.
Gulls, Iris said dreamily. That’s a welcome change. There’s so much darkness in your fable. Poor Nolan.
We were standing on the road looking out at the bay. Iris was on crutches. The day before she had been released from the hospital and had insisted Myles drive us home immediately. We had arrived at midnight to cold but familiar air, drying herbs, acrid scent of the incense Myles burned while meditating, ashes of a fire lit in the woodstove by a neighbour earlier in the day.
Myles was still in bed the next morning, but Iris had woken me to accompany her to the bay and she gamely hobbled on her crutches while I, still half-asleep, recalled my dreams to her.
My trance narrations had elided quietly into dreams without comment from my parents. A trance, a dream, what did it matter where the story came from? And it’s true that I sometimes dreamed of underground landscapes and journeys, but more often I woke with jumbled pictures (strewn corpses, blue seagulls, lava) and glued them together into something semi-coherent, and tried to suppress my guilt for masquerading a yarn as truth.
It’s wonderful, Iris said, To dream in sequence and with such clarity. I will write it all down when we return to the house.
Below us stretched the slick grey mud flats. She stared at the slender current that wound its way out to sea in the distance. Low tide, she said. I’m at low tide too.
The gulls squawked above the bay, hunting mussels. We turned away from the slaughter and made our way home before we had to watch the poor shellfish dropped from great heights to smash open on the barnacled rocks below, their exposed, snotty guts fought over by a tribe of dagger-eyed birds.
At home I made breakfast and Myles was roused and he and Iris poured the thin, smoky syrup he had m
ade of swampy maple sap over the heavy patties of fried dough that I called pancakes and Myles noted their consistency and the weakness of the coffee and Iris told him not to be an ingrate.
There was a knock at the door—Charlotte and Jane, two of my parents’ fellow disciples, had walked a half-mile from their adjacent houses carrying baskets laden with pies and quiches to ameliorate Iris’s convalescence. There was no turning them away, even if Iris had wanted to—and she did. Nevertheless, she took pleasure in the fact of company if the company were previously known. I wonder why this is. I am largely the same. In my case it is a matter of working up the reserves necessary to dial down the noise of my interior world sufficiently to hear the sounds coming from outside —not the demandless noises of the world—the rattle of a passing truck, or a calling bird to which I listen with pleasure, but the sound of human language to which I feel obliged to listen closely and to respond in kind, matching not merely the subject of the speech, but, more dauntingly, the feeling with which the words are spoken. This kind of thing requires a switch in modes of attention that is not pleasant to contemplate when I’m happily ensconced in the feelings of my own thoughts. I think this might have been (and might be) similar to my mother’s temper, and thus explains her polite, but reluctant greeting of Charlotte and Jane and the inevitable chorus of You shouldn’t haves and But yes we should haves that followed.
As for Myles, his sensibility allowed of a very different reaction—contrary to Iris, he thrived on new acquaintance, in fact the novelty of new personalities and new backstories was one of the few things capable of breaking through to still his internal flood of cerebration for a short time while he harvested a person’s name, upbringing, and tribal history before some detail would send him off in a torrent of uttered thoughts, an outgoing tide of free association. When it came to Jane and Charlotte, for instance, familiarity had bred, if not contempt, at least indifference. They could offer him nothing new, and as far as he was concerned, small talk lacked flavour. However, they had one important piece of information—he was late for a work session at the zendo garden. This he had entirely forgotten, and the news suddenly transformed him from slothful tea drinker to hurricane.
He vanished upstairs to change into his work clothes, exhorting me to follow, for I was conscripted to join him in the morning’s labour. Our house was tiny and nearly doorless and so from upstairs, as I belted on my jeans, I heard the voices of Charlotte, Jane, and Iris sunken to a murmur, and as I came (very quietly) down the stairs I caught Jane’s voice saying, We cannot expect to understand Willard’s motives and methods. Common morality does not apply.
Iris didn’t agree, but Jane was firm, saying it was not a question of agreeing or disagreeing—in fact there was no question to be asked, as Willard himself would say, only a reality to be experienced. In any case, she went on, It isn’t as though he raped anybody. I was there, I saw the whole thing. It was at the last Gathering. Of course, Robert and I have experienced Willard before. Bill and Bernadette should consider themselves lucky—
But here Iris coughed loudly because she’d spotted me trying to slip unobtrusively closer to better hear the women’s conversation. Myles descended, dug out a hunk of Charlotte’s rhubarb pie, shoved it in his mouth, beckoned me, muttered goodbye, and flew out the door. So I never found out exactly what Jane meant by Experienced, which was probably just as well.
Myles and I ripped out of the driveway, narrowly missing a passing truck, and went jouncing over the washboards of the dirt road at top speed. Climbing the hill, Myles waved at Willard, who stood in the doorway of his ancient farmhouse playing his piccolo.
A few hundred yards later we swung into the little parking lot, which was full of rusting Dodge Darts and other assorted beaters, and nearly sprinted the sumac-lined wooden platform steps that led down the hill next to, and sometimes over, a narrow but very active brook. We heard, before we saw, the hammer blows and rattling machinery. The steps ended, the woods gave way, and in the sunlight we saw the rolling acreage upon which the cascading rooftops of the meditation hall sat in Japanese style, surrounded by a rectangular moat of whitened beach pebbles, overlooking a pond overlooking a wooded valley.
To our left, next to the pond, men laboured to erect a fence while others carted soil. The sound of machinery came from a tractor that towed a tilling device. This tractor was a denuded Volkswagen Beetle welded to the chassis of a truck. It was driven by its maker, a tall thin, blond man who bounced away earnestly on the tractor. On weekend evenings he took to the stage of the concert barn and released his tenor to the rafters —he was a powerful singer who worshipped Puccini and Gershwin in equal measure. I could hear him crooning over the sound of the engine, practicing a solo from Boris
Godunov, I think. Meanwhile a bald, muscular man was pounding a post deep into the ground as another, slight, bespectacled, and bearded, clad in a ragged army jacket and hat, held the post in question. The military garb was the only material trace that remained of his tour in Vietnam. Other evidence could be found, according to Myles, in his sorrowing eyes. Nearby, a small, mustachioed, handsome man, nattily attired in carefully patched overalls, toted a wheelbarrow full of manure. This was Robert, Jane’s husband, who had also, apparently, Experienced Willard. He greeted Myles sardonically, asking if he was late because he’d been hitting the books.
This was a reference to Myles’s recent decision to undertake a graduate degree in English literature. As though, Willard had sneered when he learned of this, The academy has anything to teach. There is nothing there but desiccated thoughts chasing themselves in an ever-tightening circle of irrelevance. There is nothing to learn there because learning is a delusion. There is nothing to learn, nothing to unlearn, there is only emptiness, only the eternal flux to be encountered in every moment, every breath as you saw wood, hammer nails, muck stables, sit on a cushion—it is these activities, and not the wasted hours of abstract thought in dusty libraries, bent over the dead words of dead fools, that will bring illumination.
But Myles had persisted, feeling the need to quench a mental thirst and pursue some advancement in the material world, delusory or not. And so, Willard, finding intolerable the notion that he must share his authority over Myles with bespectacled deans and musty professors, began a campaign of belittlement—singling Myles out at work sessions and meetings, asking if he had any new wisdom to share, proposing that Myles teach instead of Willard, seeing as he was becoming a Master of Fuck All, calling him egghead, calling him Professor of Farts, calling him Piles. How are your piles, Myles? And, of course, all the other men laughed uproariously and joined in, chuckling and shaking their heads whenever they saw Myles and asking him questions about Milton and snickering when he launched enthusiastically into descriptions of Paradise Lost.
And still Myles persisted, his stubborn streak hardening rather than weakening in the face of disapproval. Encouraged by Iris, he took out loans and drove the hour to the university twice weekly.
For instance, the Monday following that zendo work session, Myles picked me up after school and I went with him as I often did to roam the hallways of the English department at the University of Maine, while he sat in class or taught composition. Those bleak corridors are strangely vivid in my memory—the beige linoleum tiles beneath an atmosphere of suppressed dread that lingered in the lounge with its crumbling bookshelves and stench of ancient coffee boiling to tar on its slow-drip machine above the stained and mildewed carpet, bug-splattered windows, glare of fluorescent lights, walls of concrete block painted mustard yellow in some vain effort to cheer the ambience.
A basket next to the coffee machine held a collection of candies, small rolls of toffee individually wrapped in shiny, crackling foil. I transferred the bulk of these to my pockets and then wandered to the elevators, which I rode up and down for what seems in my memory to be hours but was, very likely, no more than a few minutes. But in that time I observed the vacant or anxious or keen faces of stud
ents, the fatigued, thousand-yard stare of the graduate candidates, the self-congratulatory decrepitude of the professors, even the younger ones, and I swore to myself that I would never surrender to the academy. No, once I was done with high school, it was the open road for me. There were seas to be sailed, tombs to be explored, perils to be survived.
I abandoned the elevators for the lounge, where I sprawled in a chair idly flicking through Paideuma, the department’s literary journal devoted to the works of Ezra Pound. Barely reading, my eye snagged on a quote from an Italian philosopher named Giambattista Vico. The threefold labour of great poetry is (1) to invent sublime fables suited to the popular understanding, (2) to perturb to excess with a view to the end proposed: (3) to teach the vulgar to act virtuously.
I muddled over this for a while and decided I liked it. But could a poem teach Willard to be more virtuous? I felt certain he was in the habit of vulgarity. Paging further I landed on a poem...
BE in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.
As though the words of the poem worked a spell, they canted me sideways until I slipped down, down through the linoleum tiles, through concrete and rebar, through ducts and fluorescent lights and ceiling tiles into the open air of the mathematics department, and on down, down in a free fall two more storeys and into the basement past the furnace and hot water heaters through the floor and into the soil beneath, tunnelling through layers of gravel and granite schist, down, down far below where gulls coasted the face of those sunless cliffs, which rose over grey waters.
