As he complained, he crawled up the side of the grave, dirt slipping away under him, dropping him back two feet for every one he gained. Finally, he reached ground level and brushed himself off. He looked around carefully. "You're certain we're alone here?"
"Yessir, yessir," they both said, almost in chorus.
"Let's hope so," he replied, pulling off his clothes.
Standing buck naked in the dim amber glow of the lantern, he said it again. "Let's hope so." Then he reached down between his big toe and second toe on the left foot, grasped the sealing strip between thumb and forefinger, and unzipped his body from bottom to top. Then, shrugging off the clever plastic disguise with all four of his arms, he scratched his blunt yellow beak and drew a deep breath, a prisoner freed from a confining jail cell. He turned to look up at Halley's Comet, and smiled as best a beak could smile.
"Give my regards to Broadway," he said, and began loping off toward the pickup point, Tom and Huck pumping along as hard as they could behind him, unable, in their clever plastic disguises, to keep up with him.
"Sir...sir..." Migmunt named Tom called, wheezing heavily as he tried to shorten the distance between himself and the former owner of the estate called Stormfield. "Sir...could you...would you...if you please, sir...slow down a bit so I can ask you..." He abruptly felt considerable pain in his face as he ran full tilt into the beaked, feathered, webbed-and-spur-footed personage who had perspired inside the shell of Samuel Langhorne Clemens for the entire seventy-five year tour of duty. No-longer-Mark had stopped suddenly.
"Now what the bleeding bejeezus do you want?"
"Sir, it's just...I've been on this tour a lot longer than I'd expected. I was told when I was assigned...that is to say, sir, I was advised...when my orders were cut..."
"That you'd be off this miserable duty in what, ten, twelve, maybe fifteen years?" He tapped his three-toed claw impatiently.
"Well, uh, yes. Sir. That is."
"And you want me to say something to the Archangel of the Guard when I get back, is that it?"
"If you would, sir. If you only would."
"Son," the elder entity said, reaching out with one wing and laying his five-fingered talon on Tom's shoulder, "I was told I'd be mustered out in a maximum of fifty years. Fifty was up twenty-five years ago. It's a job, boy, a job dirtier than most, living among these idiots; but someone's got to do it. Can't have them running amuck all over the place, can we now?"
"But..."
"I'll mention your plight. Won't do any good, but I'll mention it. Now...do you mind if I go home?"
And, without waiting for a proper answer, he whirled on his toes, and loped off again toward the pickup point. Behind him, the two figments of his imagination pumped their knees hard trying to keep from falling too far apace.
When they reached the drop target, the slave unit from Halley's Comet was already waiting. The egg had opened, the jasmine light poured forth in a perfect pool across the ground, and three field-echelon sqwarbs were waiting, the eldest looking pointedly at his thigh clock. "Let's go, let's go, come on and let's go," he called across the clearing as the three running figures broke out of cover of the trees. "Time's on the slide, along along, let's go!"
He who had been Mark slid to a halt, threw a slovenly salute, and said, "Ready to go. Seventy-five years- is long enough. Take me on home, sqwarbs!" He turned to the ersatz Huck and Tom who had come to a breathless halt behind him, there in the lee of the egg, and he saw their pathetic looks. Fluffing his pin-feathers, he said to the eldest of the echelon sqwarbs, "These two want to go home, too. Any chance, any hope?"
"Next time," said the clock-watcher.
"Next time? Next time!" Migmunt shouted. "That'll be almost ninety years I'll have spent here! Twelve, maybe fifteen, that was what I signed on for, not ninety!"
Then ensued an argument, a violence, a wrangling that would have brought the authorities, had it not taken place in the middle of a clearing inside dense woods, well past midnight, in a remote section of south-central New York state near the Pennsylvania border. Podlack actually hit the youngest of the three field-echelon sqwarbs, knocking him on his tail-feathers and crimping his comb. Migmunt and Huck tried to climb inside the egg, but were driven back by force.
Finally, when it was clear to everyone that the egg would not take their full number, Migmunt and Podlack were chivvied aside by weapons awesome to behold, Mark was hustled onboard, and the egg resealed and sped aloft, leaving the forlorn and furious Huck and Tom behind; for another seventy-five years.
As the egg soared toward the shuttle that was Halley's Comet, the one who had been Mark craned his neck and shook his feathers and said, "That wasn't perhaps the smartest thing you could have done, you know."
"What wasn't?" the echelon grenadier said.
"Leaving a pair of extremely disquieted employees in charge of an operation that big. They were angry enough to do almost anything, even let the creatures know about everything."
"Let them," the clock-watching echelon grenadier said, with a haughty curl of his beak. "How badly can they mess up a primitive society like that in just seventy-five years? What are we talking about here...war, famine, pestilence, plague, cheap entertainment, overpopulation, bad art?"
"Seventy-five years is a tweep in a whirl," said the youngest as he rubbed analgesic on his bruise. "How hard did you work to bring some common sense to them? How well did you do; how much influence did you have?"
Mark fell silent. Very true. The creatures of that sleepless orb were highly resistant to sensible behavior. He had done all he could, but the poor dumb things were seemingly determined to stumble about blindly, like sqwarbs with their heads cut off.
He sighed and closed his eyes, hoping for some rest on the journey home. It couldn't really get much worse down there. Not in just seventy-five years. When you wish upon a sqwarb.
PROCESS: Early 1985, and all the foofaraw about Halley's coming back. And no one pairing up Mark Twain's birth in 1835 with the Comet's arrival, and his death in 1910 at its next pass, with the current swing past the Earth. And I was so fascinated with the idea, that I reread all of Twain. One night, I was reading Tom Sawyer to the son of a woman I had been seeing, he was about ten or eleven at the time, and we were both eating Hydrox cookies, and I told him this thing about how I wanted to write about Twain, and the Comet, and maybe the Comet wasn't really a comet but was possibly a spaceship, or a star, or something like that; and he had his face full of Hydrox, and he said, "When you wish upon a sqwarb..." which wasn't, of course, what he said; it was what I heard him say.
And I knew what the story should be. Except I didn't have an ending, so I didn't write it in 1985. Or '86. Or '88. Or '90. But I write it now. And it still doesn't have an ending. But I like the opening a lot. Process.
The Last Will and Testicle of Trees Rabelais
My grandparents came from Poland. They came from a town, Bydgoszcz. That's in the north, right near the middle. I'm probably not pronouncing it properly. Bydgoszcz. They weren't Jewish, they were just Polish. That has almost nothing to do with me or this final statement, but I always tell everybody that my grandparents came from Poland. You never know when it might help. Once I got stopped by a traffic cop as I was speeding to the airport, and I don't know why, but I told him my grandparents came from Poland, and so did his, not from Bydgoszcz. So he let me off with just a warning.
I like to say: let any three people hose me down, and I'll wind up making friends of two of them.
Occasionally someone will ask me what that means, and I tell them, it means I'm a very friendly person.
I leave Montana to the descendants of the last surviving member of the original cast of Gilligan's Island. Go to Montana, if you must. You will hear more intelligent sounds by rubbing a tweed jacket.
Every beach contains the last three chapters of the story of someone's life. If you look out to sea, to see what you can see, you will see the previous pages bobbing at the top of rolling waves.
If I'd realized that creating crabgrass, spurge, chickweed, ragweed, dandelion, plantain, kudzu, purslane, knotweed, sorrel, and burdock was mostly to annoy people, I'd have given God much lower marks on the final exam.
I leave the care and feeding of all Fallacies of Substantive Distraction, including ad hominem, ad misericordiam, ad odium, and post hoc, propter hoc—which is, more precisely, a Fallacy of Causation—to the splendid Sherpa herdsmen of the Nepalese Himalayas; for it is they alone who understand that paper cannot wrap up fire; also that if one plants melons, one will get melons.
Where the hell were the cops when I needed them?
All my life I have imagined doorways as the answers, and now with gun in mouth I stand here in the middle of the great Nullarbor Plain, attesting to the truth that there are no doorways large enough for an unprotected species like myself to pass through.
I leave the face of the moon to those who look for the best ways to unsnarl knotted shoelaces and dampen bad tempers. It is always cool and quiet, the face of the moon. And from far away it appears to resemble the general appearance of young women who danced in Warner Bros, musicals in the mid-1930s.
My name was Trees Rabelais.
PROCESS: Susan and I chanced to be in the bathroom at the same time. She asked me to hand her something from the medicine cabinet. She preceded the request with Please…
I have no memory of what it was she was asking for, or how it was that I heard, "Please, grab the somethingorother" as Trees Rabelais. But when I repeated it, she said it sounded like the name of the tragic male lead on a soap opera. I thought so, too. And so, to be as one with Miniver Cheevy, Richard Cory, and Wednesday's child, I dwelt on the heroic, godlike, impervious nature, and suicide, of Trees Rabelais. Process.
Chatting With Anubis
When the core drilling was halted at a depth of exactly 804.5 meters, one half mile down, Amy Guiterman and I conspired to grab Immortality by the throat and shake it till it noticed us.
My name is Wang Zicai. Ordinarily, the family name Wang—which is pronounced with the "a" in father, almost as if it were Wong—means "king." In my case, it means something else; it means "rushing headlong." How appropriate. Don't tell me clairvoyance doesn't run in my family... Zicai means "suicide." Half a mile down, beneath the blank Sahara, in a hidden valley that holds cupped in its eternal serenity the lake of the Oasis of Siwa, I and a young woman equally as young and reckless as myself, Amy Guiterman of New York City, conspired to do a thing that would certainly cause our disgrace, if not our separate deaths.
I am writing this in Yin.
It is the lost ancestral language of the Chinese people. It was a language written between the 18th and 12th centuries before the common era. It is not only ancient, it is impossible to translate. There are only five people alive today, as I write this, who can translate this manuscript, written in the language of the Yin Dynasty that blossomed northeast along the Yellow River in a time long before the son of a carpenter is alleged to have fed multitudes with loaves and fishes, to have walked on water, to have raised the dead. I am no "rice christian." You cannot give me a meal and find me scurrying to your god. I am Buddhist, as my family has been for centuries. That I can write in Yin—which is to modern Chinese as classical Latin is to vineyard Italian—is a conundrum I choose not to answer in this document. Let he or she who one day unearths this text unscramble the oddities of chance and experience that brought me, "rushing headlong toward suicide," to this place half a mile beneath the Oasis of Siwa.
A blind thrust-fault hitherto unrecorded beneath the Mountain of the Moon had produced a cataclysmic 7.5 temblor. It had leveled villages as far away as Bir Bu Kusa and Abu Simbel. The aerial and satellite reconnaissance from the Gulf of Sidra to the Red Sea, from the Libyan Plateau to the Sudan, showed great fissures, herniated valleys, upthrust structures, a new world lost to human sight for thousands of years. An international team of paleoseismologists was assembled, and I was called from the Great Boneyard of the Gobi by my superiors at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences at Ulan Bator to leave my triceratops and fly to the middle of hell on earth, the great sand ocean of the Sahara, to assist in excavating and analyzing what some said would be the discovery of the age.
Some said it was the mythical Shrine of Ammon.
Some said it was the Temple of the Oracle.
Alexander the Great, at the very pinnacle of his fame, was told of the Temple, and of the all-knowing Oracle who sat there. And so he came, from the shore of Egypt down into the deep Sahara, seeking the Oracle. It is recorded: his expedition was lost, wandering hopelessly, without water and without hope. Then crows came to lead them down through the Mountain of the Moon, down to a hidden valley without name, to the lake of the Oasis of Siwa, and at its center...the temple, the Shrine of Ammon. It was so recorded. And one thing more. In a small and dark chamber roofed with palm logs, the Egyptian priests told Alexander a thing that affected him for the rest of his life. It is not recorded what he was told. And never again, we have always been led to believe, has the Shrine of Ammon been seen by civilized man or civilized woman.
Now, Amy Guiterman and I, she from the Brooklyn Museum and I an honored graduate of Beijing University, together we had followed Alexander's route from Paraetonium to Siwah to here, hundreds of kilometers beyond human thought or action, half a mile down, where the gigantic claw diggers had ceased their abrading, the two of us with simple pick and shovel, standing on the last thin layer of compacted dirt and rock that roofed whatever great shadowy structure lay beneath us, a shadow picked up by the most advanced deep-resonance-response readings, verified on-site by proton free-precession magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar brought in from the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States.
Something large lay just beneath our feet.
And tomorrow, at sunrise, the team would assemble to break through and share the discovery, whatever it might be.
But I had had knowledge of Amy Guiterman's body, and she was as reckless as I, rushing headlong toward suicide, and in a moment of foolishness, a moment that should have passed but did not, we sneaked out of camp and went to the site and lowered ourselves, taking with us nylon rope and crampons, powerful electric torches and small recording devices, trowel and whisk broom, cameras and carabiners. A pick and a shovel. I offer no excuse. We were young, we were reckless, we were smitten with each other, and we behaved like naughty children. What happened should not have happened.
We broke through the final alluvial layer and swept out the broken pieces. We stood atop a ceiling of fitted stones, basalt or even marble, I could not tell immediately. I knew they were not granite, that much I did know. There were seams. Using the pick, I prised loose the ancient and concretized mortar. It went much more quickly and easily than I would have thought, but then, I'm used to digging for bones, not for buildings. I managed to chock the large set-stone in place with wooden wedges, until I had guttered the perimeter fully. Then, inching the toe of the pick into the fissure, I began levering the stone up, sliding the wedges deeper to keep the huge block from slipping back. And finally, though the block was at least sixty or seventy centimeters thick, we were able to tilt it up and, bracing our backs against the opposite side of the hole we had dug at the bottom of the core pit, we were able to use our strong young legs to force it back and away, beyond the balance point; and it fell away with a crash.
A great wind escaped the aperture that had housed the stone. A great wind that twisted up from below in a
dark swirl that we could actually see. Amy Guiterman gave a little sound of fear and startlement. So did I. Then she said, "They would have used great amounts of charcoal to set these limestone blocks in place," and I learned from her that they were not marble, neither were they basalt.
We showed each other our bravery by dangling our feet through the opening, sitting at the edge and leaning over to catch the wind. It smelled sweet. Not a smell I had ever known before. But certainly not stagnant. Not corrupt. Sweet as a washed face, sweet as chilled fruit. Then we lit our torches and swept the beams below.
We sat just above the ceiling of a great chamber. Neither pyramid nor mausoleum, it seemed to be an immense hall filled with enormous statues of pharaohs and beast-headed gods and creatures with neither animal nor human shape...and all of these statues gigantic. Perhaps one hundred times life-size.
Directly beneath us was the noble head of a time-lost ruler, wearing the nemes headdress and the royal ritual beard. Where our digging had dropped shards of rock, the shining yellow surface of the statue had been chipped, and a darker material showed through. "Diorite," Amy Guiterman said. "Covered with gold. Pure gold. Lapis lazuli, turquoise, garnets, rubies—the headdress is made of thousands of gems, all precisely cut...do you see?"
But I was lowering myself. Having cinched my climbing rope around the excised block, I was already shinnying down the cord to stand on the first ledge I could manage, the empty place between the placid hands of the pharaoh that lay on the golden knees. I heard Amy Guiterman scrambling down behind and above me.
Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories Page 21
