The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  No one went back to the tree. If it hadn’t been sacred before, it was now. It remained bare, unpeopled. The fast-talking poet and her friends put on their big backpacks and left, stuffing the donation box with money as they went. All the tree-folk costumes went flat, tangled up in a heap in the storeroom: beaks and frog legs and the squirrel tail and my wings, resting folded in the corner.

  Any but the most basic tasks of food preparation and trash disposal were suspended. There was no building, no hauling, no digging, no fucking, no washing, no inventing, no sawing, no arguing. Instead, the ex-convento took on a peculiar, desultory air. For the first time, it looked like the poor place that it was. Julia’s tortoiseshell kitten pounced unnoticed around the courtyard, fattening on mice, its red ribbon slowly shredding to string.

  We drifted through the days. The smell of smoke clung to our clothes, our hair, our skin. Malcolm X sat in the courtyard, drawing charcoal pictures of Julia from memory. Xolotl wandered through the fields with the stray dogs, pulling at his fingers. Jabalí shut himself up in his room on the second floor of the ex-convento. His light stayed on at night; people brought him food, took away the half-empty plates. The mustached priest visited, and stayed for hours. Helena ceaselessly washed dishes and did laundry until every sheet and dish in the place was scoured. The chickens wouldn’t lay. On a Thursday afternoon, a CNN truck pulled up to the church’s iron gate. Helena, a dishtowel over her shoulder, sent it away. We have no tree like that here, she told them. Try Tlacochahuaya.

  After breakfast one morning, I loaded up a knapsack with water and food. Keeping the river on my right, I followed the path past the Burros and up along the ridge until it thinned and tangled, then opened again into the dense terrain of the ferns. I waded in. I closed my eyes. I listened. Far off to my left, the sound of the wind shifted ever so slightly, tuned to an infinitesimally lower pitch. I also heard a faint twitter, a rustle. Keeping my eyes closed, I turned toward those small sounds and walked very slowly, pushing aside the ferns with both hands for what seemed like too long. I must have missed it. Then, suddenly, I stumbled into the clearing.

  I opened my eyes. A few yards in front of me was the cave, dull and dark. There was no bicycle wheel today, but several branches had fallen into the clearing. I picked them up and threw them into the ferns. The striped lizard with the long yellow tail watched me from his rock at the mouth of the cave as I sat down by the dead fire pit and drank some water, ate a sandwich. I tried to feel something as I sat there, but all I felt was more or less sated and that the breeze was pleasant on my neck.

  Since Julia’s death I had become a box with nothing inside. I had one clear thought rattling around like a pebble in that box: it should have been me, and I didn’t understand why it wasn’t. I had some hazy idea that if I went into the cave, the echoes would talk to me, or a face would appear in the mirror, or the pattern of the bones would be legible as a sign, or I’d have a prophetic dream. Wasn’t that what happened to people in caves? And, all right, I was angry. I was furious. Because Julia shouldn’t have spent so much time up here. Something terrible was bound to happen. So I was also daring the gods, in my own way. Go ahead. Do your worst.

  Squaring my shoulders, I went into the cave. It was just as it had been: the gloom; the foxed, scorched mirror; the burnt figures in their diorama; the bones in the corner; the lantern, which, as usual, had fallen over. I righted it. I didn’t like it in there any better than I ever had. But Julia had had duties here, and the least I could do was to carry them out for her.

  What was the song she sang? I remembered part of the tune and hummed it as I proceeded around the cave. I knelt down by the diorama and moved the clay figures around the shoe-box on the ground in what I hoped approximated what Julia had done, then put them back in their original places. I scuffed dirt over a few animal turds. I stared into the mirror until my features didn’t look like my own anymore. The flowers on top of the ashes and bits of bone were dried and brown, so I went outside and gathered an armful of ferns and flowers and scattered them over the traces of the body in the busted box. Since the first time I had been in this place, the bones had receded a bit farther into the dirt; the shape of the figure was blurrier. My anger and bravado drained away. My fury flattened. I put my hands over my face in the way I had seen Julia do it. I lowered my hands. I sang what I could remember of her song, then made up the rest. I stood there, bored, restless, and not a little creeped out. But I stood by the bones of a dead woman I’d never known and didn’t like, and did the things we must do for the dead.

  I finished the song for Julia’s mother. The bones in the box remained exactly the same—mute, smooth, and cold. Water dripped in the back of the cave. I put my hands over my face, concentrating. I lowered my hands. I began, uncertainly, “He was born.”

  The cave was silent.

  “He was born and he was a running man.” I found a tune.

  The cave was silent.

  “He was born and he was a running man and he made a house.”

  The cave was silent, and it remained silent as I sang the rest, finishing, quaveringly, on “Amen.”

  The cave was silent. Water dripped in the back. The barely visible figure in the busted box didn’t move. And yet. I was held there. It wasn’t time to go.

  I put my hands over my face and concentrated. I lowered my hands. I didn’t want to do it, not at all, but the thing in my chest was immovable. I would be tethered there forever if I didn’t, a permanent fixture in the cave’s gloom, half shade, half mortal. The nodule inside my left thigh began to ache. That was a sign. So, reluctantly, I began.

  “She was born.”

  Silence.

  “She was born and she was a strange child.” Even under these circumstances, I refused to say “indigo.”

  Silence.

  I continued. “She was born and she was a strange child and she climbed a tree.” I sang, and I went on singing, louder and louder, sweating in the cool of the damp cave, jumping up and down in place a little, inventing a few things here and there that were probably true, even if I didn’t know them for a fact. “And she fell,” I finished. “And she fell. And she fell. I could not catch her.”

  I stopped singing.

  I listened. The cave was quiet in the way that a natural place is quiet: not dead silent, but inflected with the buzzings and whirrings of bugs, bird noises, the rustle of the ferns, the tap of some creature on wood (a woodpecker?), a drip drip far back in the cave, and the faint murmur of the river in the distance. It was cool where I was. It smelled like old water and older dirt, like nutmeg, like ash.

  My left thigh really hurt. I put my hand on it; the silvered lump moved when I touched it, rolling painfully, hard under my skin. Above me, the roof of the cave was dark, and it seemed to extend upward limitlessly and unpredictably. I looked up into the darkness. If the cave was a clock, I was one minute on that clock, but I was every part of that minute, and the shadow of the minute, and the echo of the minute, the anticipation and the memory of the minute. In that minute, I existed. I could feel my blood pounding in my ears, my feet in the dirt. I could feel the breath entering and leaving my lungs. The taste of coffee, of water. The beat of my heart. Arms and legs. Hands and feet. Curve of spine. The powerful ache in my thigh. My empty shoulder blades.

  But I was still tethered by the immovable thing. I squatted in the dirt, thinking lightness lightness lightness. There was a whirling in my head and then suddenly I was so hot—the heat began at the base of my spine and rose to my ears, the tip of my nose, flamed my eyes. I was growing hard and at the same time I thought I might shit; my heels pushed down into the ground; my bowels twisted. The whirling moved down into my chest, spun my heart. I pulled my shirt off, mopped my sweating face with it. The lump on my thigh was searing, and that pain, or something, was making me harder. But the hardness was strange to me, and I didn’t entirely like it. I couldn’t see what was arousing me, and I didn’t know if that was what this was, or if the wind was having a
joke on me, playing with me, pulling at me. I pushed myself down, futilely, then kept my hand there. My ears burned. My left hand burned. I thought of that man, the first one, so many years ago in the bus station in Fort Lauderdale. His exophthalmic eyes, his gold wedding ring flashing, the seam he opened in me that day, letting me out, letting something else in.

  I came and my thigh opened. The pain was terrible, but it was also a relief. I made a sound, touched my thigh. The shell was quite thick, bright white, slick with a light smear of blood; I gave my thigh a gentle push, then a firmer one, to release the egg. I caught it, warm and wet, in my other hand. It was about the size of a robin’s egg. How can I describe what I felt? A nearly unbearable tenderness suffused me as I held the small egg in my hand, a weeping that began far within me before I began to sob, and then a joy: how fragile it was. How extraordinary. How unspeakable. No one would ever know, and no one would believe me anyway. But there, in that place, I held the miraculous thing in my hands, cradled its delicate warmth. My thigh was bleeding where it had split; with one hand, I pulled my shirt around it and managed to tie a bad knot.

  I lay a fingertip on the smooth, slick shell of the little egg. The whirling in my head stopped. The immovable thing, the invisible tether, had released. On the bones of my shoulders were veins and muscles and skin, but nothing else. I knew that there wouldn’t be anything else, ever. My left hand was cool; the heat in the rest of my body was gone as well. My dick was soft. The gods were done with me. I had changed back.

  I limped over and looked in the half-melted spotty mirror again. There was no one in there but me: an ordinary man standing in the dirt, wingless, a bloody rag around his thigh. Gabriel, now. That minute gave way to the next, and the next.

  I walked out of the cave into the sunlight, and gently set the egg amid the ferns.

  6

  The Sunburst and the Moonglow

  When did I first stumble into the wrong grove? Is that even the right question?

  My mother shuffled the cards. Arthritis had crimped the ends of her fingers, but she was still fast. Slap, slap, slap. She dealt us each a hand. We were sitting by the pool at the Moonglow, the motel she owned down the road from the Sunburst. Mostly, she lived in the Moonglow now. I liked it there. In addition to the pool, it had a view of the beach. We could watch the waves. On the concrete deck, the air smelled of salt and chlorine together. The tortoiseshell kitten, leggy and nearly grown, sat on the white aluminum table between us, batting frantically at the cards.

  “Watch, Gabe,” my mother said. “See? That’s what we call an echo.” She smiled, pleased. In her old age, she didn’t waste any movements or play extra cards. She ate one grapefruit for breakfast each morning, smoked one cigarette every day. She was slim and brown. Her gaze was quick.

  “Let me see that again.”

  She slapped down two cards.

  “Ma, listen.”

  She gathered her cards gracefully back to her hand in a small, sharp fan. “What?”

  “Dad—”

  She made a face. Then her face softened. For just an instant, I could see the woman she had been then: the tender, barefoot one with long, flowing red hair, pouring food coloring over ice and listening to her old Bob Dylan records while her husband spent hours making guitars that no one would ever play. She folded her fan. Her face resettled into its present form. “You know, Gabe, I like to think that he went to sea. Men used to be able to do that. They went to sea, and women waited behind and looked out to sea from the widow’s walk. Sometimes the men didn’t come back, and the women never knew. Was it a sea monster? A siren? Pirates? Were they kings in other countries, or slaves? It was terrible not to know, but it was also a blessing, because you were free to imagine all sorts of fates for them. So.” She gestured in the direction of the ocean. “He’s out there somewhere. I think it was a siren, but . . .” She shrugged.

  I took my mother’s hand and smiled at her. She picked up my hand and kissed it. “My turn, Gabe. You aren’t the same. Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”

  I set my cards down. I nodded. I told her the story of all my transformations, beginning with my time in the city and everything that had happened to me there, and the lazy lion that was following me, and the strangers I had met, and the peculiar and magical people of Ixtlan.

  She lit up a second, excess cigarette as I talked.

  But wait, I said, because I was still her son, after all, remember the house in Bishop, and all of it, and the magnificent City—

  My mother sat back. She looked at the sea, then at her small, spotted, slender hands on the aluminum table. Then she told me her story, and she built the City again in the air between us, and it was both the same as and different from the City I thought I knew. She leaned two cards together, balanced a third on top of it. It was like this, she said, protecting the structure from the wind with her hands.

  7

  The City

  You return, changed—yourself, and something else as well.

  If you take the F train from the leafy parts of Brooklyn to Manhattan, there are perhaps fifteen or so thrilling minutes when the train runs on elevated tracks, and the city is ranged before you on the other side of the river: gleaming, silver, the buildings tall and close-set. Then you dip down into the tunnel, into black, and when you emerge from the train onto the street, the buildings aren’t silver but brown and red and white and many other colors, and they are lower and less compressed and dirtier than they looked from the windows of the train. You can see people going in and out of them. You can see what sorts of businesses are there. You can see the way the light changes as it touches the various surfaces: stone, wood, brick, glass.

  I work at the New York Public Library. I am in charge of something: I am turning all the records of the dead in New York City into a vast, illustrated digital archive. Every morning, I walk between the stone lions at the library entrance, ascend the marble staircase, and turn to my chosen labor. I keep my mother’s old Ovid, its blue spine nearly crumbled away on a shelf above my desk. Boxes arrive every day, full of yellowing paper records, mysteriously stained and oddly torn; often, years are missing from the boxes. We search for those years. Young people with fanciful hair and inscrutable tattoos feed the yellowed paper into scanners; slightly older, crankier people set up the digital files; I sculpt and tend the immaterial vaults of information that the files become, sorting and moving and arranging the dead, building a city out of light for them, who have also become light. I am making another New York, a weightless New York, for them. In that New York, they are remembered forever. They walk the streets, laugh, quarrel, fall in love. They are my book of changes, a book that never ends.

  I am happy. I am going a bit gray. Janos is even grayer. Sarah and I stay in touch. The tortoiseshell cat spends her days sleeping in the window, dreaming of the birds she can sometimes still catch in the garden. My lazy lion hasn’t padded away, and from time to time he wakes up and claws me, perhaps to remind me that he’s untamed. Like the tortoiseshell cat, the lion likes to prove that he is still in full possession of his prowess. Indeed, we respect it. We can smell the lion, and the lion can smell us, whether we’re just waking up, or walking on the Promenade, or eating in a restaurant. You might see two men, nicely dressed, one slightly grayer than the other, one heading toward round, both ordering well. We see the lion, for the moment sleeping at our feet under the table, his mighty head on his paws. My ears don’t ring anymore; instead, I constantly hear, though faintly, as if from far away, a tympanic, windy sound.

  On that same train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and on others as well, I often look up to see Miranda, Leah, Natasha, and Anna smiling down at the passengers from their cardboard stars, still aloft, still victorious, fresh from their latest lingerie-tearing ordeal. Sometimes I idly do the math in my head as the train moves under the river, and I know that it’s barely possible that Fleur is still alive, even less possible that she’s writing the books. And yet there she is, reigning over every train
in the city, the constellation of her muses fixed between ads for podiatrists and fragments of great poetry. If those muses were to look back at me, they would see the ordinary, interesting face of a man on the train, not quite old and not quite young, almost handsome, gray at his temples, opening his briefcase to look over the list of names of the dead. We wouldn’t recognize one another, though we were all so close once.

  If it’s a nice day, at lunch I walk over to Grand Central to buy a fancy sandwich from one of the fancy stalls that line the upper concourse, and as I head back across the central hall to Vanderbilt Avenue with my white plastic bag, I look up. High above my head, shining in the deep blue, is the map of the heavens that ornaments the lofty aqua arch of the ceiling, each constellation in its place. And above them somewhere, watching the sky below, are the gods, who had their way with me, and sent me back.

  And, as you may know, when the hero comes back from the underworld, he has to bring something with him. Tortoiseshell cats don’t count. So I bring you my story. I tell you all my secrets. I show you all my gods and goddesses, shining like paste jewelry in shoeboxes. My City. A house on Pineapple Street with windows like sails, a little girl with brownish-blackish hair standing at one of those windows like a grave captain at the prow of a ship. The silver flowers and rhinestone stars on the street. You’ve seen me around, maybe on the train, or walking along by the river, or maybe we’ll meet when I carefully set you in your place in my city made of light. Or maybe we won’t meet at all. Or maybe we’re about to brush past each other in Grand Central, under Orion or Cassiopeia, maybe our sleeves will touch and you’ll catch a glimpse of my profile, my ordinary face, the dark shape of the bird in flight on my hand, as I disappear into the crowd. Maybe, for a long or a short time after, you’ll remember me.