Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Amy shook her head. Artie went back inside to tend to his customers.

  “I’ve said it before,” Old Dudley said dreamily, massaging Amy’s thigh now. “To break them, you just have to wear them down. You have to stay up with them for two or three nights, when you first get them. They’ll fight you with every ounce they’ve got. You have to fight them physically. And even though they’re stronger than you, you can outlast them. After a day or two, they start to get tired. They need to sleep, to rest. And you keep waking them up. It’s just you and them, alone in a padded room—you’ve got on a helmet, a flak jacket, and leather gloves—and every time the bird’s head droops to take a nap, you wake it up and make it fight you again.

  “Finally it gets tired. It gets so tired that something happens in its hot little brain, where this time when it looks at you—they think with their eyes, same as a man thinks with his dick—they understand that you are the Supreme Manipulator, the Supreme Being—and forever after, you own them.

  “It’s really nice,” Dudley said. “You can hold them on your arm, after that.” He lifted his arm at cross-brace to demonstrate. “There is this lightness they have on your arm when it finally happens. You can feel that something has left them: something dense and dark and unmanageable.”

  “You already told me that part,” Amy said.

  “Yeah, well, listen again,” he said. His hand had paused on her thigh, but now it began working farther up under her dress, so that she had to grip his hand with both of hers to stop him.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Come on,” Dudley said, hopping down from the porch; and holding out his arms to catch her, as if she were a girl. “I’ll show you my Bible.”

  She lowered herself carefully into his arms. They set off down the road in starlight, he in wide-gapped overalls, she in her new bulk, feeling special and pretty. They moved slowly, and she held onto his arm for balance, walking barefooted.

  When they got to the cabin, Amy was tired, and she collapsed onto the couch. Dudley went to get her a glass of water, and she was surprised by his thoughtfulness, but then understood that he wanted something in return.

  Wearily, she sat up and brushed her hair back from her dampened brow and tried to postpone it. She saw him but once or twice a year and since he was to be the father, it was important to bond with him—but what she wanted, what she needed, more than anything in the world—even for only a moment or two—was rest, and peace, and space.

  “Can I see that Bible of yours?”

  Dudley had had a hand on each of her bare knees, but now he paused, considering it: knowing that it was the last and only obstacle.

  “All right,” he said. He got up and went over to Mel’s desk—now Wallis’s desk—and began rummaging. He found his charred journal, the one the binoculars had ignited, and cursed profoundly.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “I’ve got to go into the basement.” He lifted the rug, lit a candle, opened the trap door, and descended into the earthen dark, while Amy—feeling guilt at suddenly wanting to be alone for a moment—thanked God.

  Down in the basement, Dudley could feel that the pages of all his journals had been opened, read, and learned; he knew it, could sense it, as surely as if Wallis were down in the basement with him; and he would not have minded it all, but for Artie’s revelation that Wallis had abandoned him.

  Such was the earthen hole, the subterranean maw, his domain, that he could sense from the gravity of things—minor dislocations, tiny adjustments—things that had been one certain way for decades now being slightly altered, repositioned by even an inch or two—a discordant feeling, as if one were to awaken in one’s home one night to the sound of someone downstairs playing the piano.

  Dudley’s eyes narrowed. He moved to the seemingly casual jumble of empty cardboard boxes and let his brute senses take in what information they could. He closed his eyes and smiled, went back to the shelf, pulled down the last journal from his boyhood, snuffed out the candle, and went back upstairs, where Amy, still confused, felt like weeping when she saw him: troubled by how strong she had felt in his absence, and how weakened now by his return.

  He thumbed the last brittle journal open to the last page, sat down on the couch next to her, and read to her out loud:

  One Empire

  The Unity of Nature

  Through my window I watch the paling of the evening twilight, till a mild ray from a little star meets my eye. The pensive hour awakens a train of thought. A tiny ray of starlight—whence comes it? What is it? What does it say to me? My soul listens, and I hear starry responses: “I am a tremor in the universal ether. I am the throb of a world in flames. I swing on the farther verge of the abyss of space, and launched years ago on a wave of ether to be floated down to your dark planet and whisper a sublime truth to your understanding.

  “I have traveled ten score thousand miles a second, but since I started your grandparents first saw the day. They have spent their useless, toilsome lives, and the third generation now meets me at the window. I am a flash of divine intelligence. I am a messenger from the Infinite. I bring tidings of the immensity of creation, of the recognition of one supreme authority among all the constellations—the unity of the vast empire which stretches as far as light of star has flown or electric thought has pierced.”

  So I listened to the message of the starlight, and my thoughts were stirred. They wandered through the vast spaces of the silent worlds, and I saw them all balanced on the invisible threads of gravitation—the same gravitation which drags the sands of the Cordilleras down to the Gulf I saw worlds in pairs and triples, waltzing about a common center of gravity.

  The unity of the physical world is as vast and as wonderful viewed in its historical relations as in its spatial extent. Down through all the cycles—through all the burnings and freezings—through disruptions and collisions—through cataclysms of fire and flood, one hand has steadied the grand movement, and held it close to the plan which One Intelligence ordained and One Will perpetuated. I too know and possess this Power.

  We have seen how man’s organization is bound up with the constitution and the history of the world. We know that man, in his own person, is the link which binds together the beginning and the end of geological history. In his material substance, he is a part of the material world. In his plan of structure he is brother of the entire subkingdom of vertebrates. In the basis of his life he asserts kinship with all that lives or has ever lived. He can stand erect in the vast and majestic realm of nature and say, I am the king of it. I am bound up with it—not with the earth and moon alone, but with the stars. Their vicissitudes are my personal concern. I am made of world-stuff.

  We note another aspect of the unity of nature. Not alone the unity of things in themselves, but the unity of things with each other. Plant life dawned as soon as the turmoil of the primitive ocean had subsided. Humble animal forms rose above the horizon of being as soon as a place in the world had been prepared for them. As conditions improved organization slowly climbed the ladder of gradations, on whose topmost a round man such as myself stands erect and regal.

  Throughout the history of life, the relations between organic and inorganic nature have been reciprocal and responsive—insomuch that a careless logic has held the organism to be the result of its environment. The earth was given to us to eat. When it’s gone, another will arise.

  Observe also the correlation between the world and intelligence. The capacity of knowledge exists in the presence of something to know. With the knowable and the knowing faculty confronting each other, the pleasure of knowing also stimulates the knowing faculty to exercise, and thus fulfills the manifest end of its existence, and fulfills a clear mandate incorporated in the being of man to seek for knowledge.

  How true are the instincts of men and animals to something which is real. The tadpole absorbs its gills and pushes out upon the shore—taking advantage of a fall of rain—and ventures trustfully on the land, believing that a suitable home will
be found. Nor is the trust betrayed. The mother fowl calls her newborn chicks, and they already know her voice. The hungry babe cries out in the night, and Nature has responded beforehand to the call by filling a mother’s milk-breast. The intellectual instincts find the realities of nature equally responsive. Whatever intuition of a master tells us may be trusted. It is a voice implanted in my nature; it speaks for the author of my being; it is the voice of God, and Man. There is no difference.

  One kind of intelligence takes hold of knowledge. In the mind which conceived the plan and frame of the universe was an apprehension of the mathematical relations of the magnitudes involved. The plan of the solar system in its co-existent parts and in its progressive creation was a thought in the mind of the Originator. Man, so far as he grasps it, rethinks the thoughts of the Supreme Thinker! So far as man thinks the divine thoughts, he possesses a faculty akin to the divine intelligence; so far he partakes of the divine nature; so far he comes into a sympathetic union with the Being whose existence is before all and beyond all. In the unity of our massive intelligence we find a bond of brotherhood and sympathy between the dwellers in distant worlds and between all and the Supreme Intelligence.

  I shall continue.

  One common aspiration stirs every human soul—to accommodate itself to the Supreme Being whose existence it feels, or more explicitly understands, and whose authority it unhesitatingly recognizes. While this common religious nature expresses the unity of mankind, it has also a higher significance. The correlative of the religious consciousness is God. Man and his Creator, therefore, constitute one system—a complete system, the unity of which is expressed in a body of reciprocal relations between God and Man. As the demonstrated unity of nature implies one original Planner and one Supreme Ruler, so this truth, here made known as an inference from facts of observation, is identical with the intuition of the Unity of God revealed in the universal consciousness of Man. Man is God!

  Only a parting word now remains to speak to the kind reader who has followed thus far. These geological talks must not be further extended. I fear that several of the last ones have been rather abstruse; but my thoughts are too grand to level down. I could never forgive myself had I omitted them, for they seem to me to be the ripe fruit, while all the rest is the mere stem and dry branches on which the crop of fruit is developed. I am sure my maturer reader will be glad to get this fruit, and I am equally confident that even the youngest ones will keenly relish it as soon as their appetites are a little more matured.

  Old Dudley’s lust had subsided, through his narrative—he had halfsubmerged into that time, over fifty years distant, when he had first set out to learn about, and consume, the buried worlds—and he felt relaxed and soothed, as if all were right with the world again, though when he looked over to see what Amy thought about his spirituality, his feelings were hurt to see that she had fallen asleep, and he wondered at what point in his narrative.

  He woke her gently, and lifted her dress up over her head and arms. He undressed himself and helped her down to the floor, as if lifting a boulder from some precarious position. He was greatly pleased by the immensity of her.

  Too tired to protest, she accepted him, though without pleasure. When the pain began—she was afraid he would injure the baby—she told him to be easy, that it hurt, but she might as well have been speaking to a boar, or a bull, and she tried to pull away from him, but he stayed with her, the two of them linked: she like a wounded animal trying to escape, and he like an awful, mindless machine—a metronome. He finished his task, finished it in a manner so that it seemed not to be his task, but the urgings of some force below.

  Spent, he collapsed and pulled free of her, still alternately spurting and leaking—his sign on her like a signature—and he lay on his back like some bear in a zoo, breathing hard, while Amy, sore, and with the baby discomforted and alarmed, found a washcloth and cleaned herself up and dressed. She was alarmed to find a bit of blood spotting the washcloth, and she curled up on the couch beneath an elk hide and lay very still, holding her stomach, listening to the internal rumblings. She knew she should get up and cover Dudley—he was snoring—but she didn’t feel like it, anymore than she would have felt like putting a blanket over an old hound sleeping by the fire.

  She didn’t take it personally. She knew that the weak flesh shrouded a great mind. Still, she hoped he hadn’t hurt the baby. She felt terribly responsible, for having let him inside her in the first place.

  She dreamed that it was late autumn, and that the baby was already born, and was two years old, playing in the sunlight. She dreamed that Colter came home—a grown man, in the dream—and did not recognize his brother.

  Dudley did not sleep long. He ascended back into consciousness as if shedding the dead skin of sleep, or as if dressing in a newer, cleaner suit of clothes. He did not pull on a shirt but merely pulled on the saggy overalls as if stepping into a sack. He lit a lantern and, feeling his age—his knees raw from his calisthenics with Amy, his back aching—he descended into the basement again and began unpiling the empty boxes, ferreting out the map. He knocked a can of flour over, and because he was hungry, and too sore to climb back up, he ate cupped handfuls of that as he worked, digging deeper.

  He found the cedar chest and broke the little lock with one of the specimen stones, bloodying his knuckles as he did so. He unrolled the hides; found Wallis’s map at the bottom, and rolled it out and studied it, read it, recognizing its authority immediately.

  And that was how Wallis and Mel found him, when they got back, hours later, and went down into the basement to see what was sending up the lantern glow. Dudley was still seated there, reading and studying the map—committing it to memory, every roll and swale, cliff and crevice—reading it as if the stone below were still moving—reading it as a sailor might watch waves at sea. He was coated with white flour, and his knuckles were smeared with a cakey mix of blood and flour, and when he heard them enter his lair he looked up slowly, like a Buddha—his face white and round and as serene as the moon’s—and smiled.

  WALLIS AND MEL HAD TROUBLE BELIEVING THE FORCEFULNESS with which he moved. It was not with spendthrift panic, nor impulsiveness, but rather, a steady accruing of power. Wallis could not help but think that it was as when a hawk folds its wing and falls—no longer a hawk, but rather a falling instrument of geometry, mathematics, and gravity, with only the faintest resistance of friction separating it from purity: falling faster and faster, as impersonal as death.

  Without rushing, he took a warm bath, chatted a while, never mentioning the map, or even geology. Then he walked off into the night, toward town—he’d left the map in the basement, and for a while Mel and Wallis held out hope that he had not believed the map, or had not read it correctly, or had simply flagged in his desire to drill the valley again—but before dusk of the next day, the tractor-trailers came rolling in over the summit, bringing a barge for crossing the river, and construction workers and equipment for building a new road on the other side of the river—a road that would lead them and give them access to the heart of the well.

  Amy had limped home that morning, holding her back, saying only that she had slept wrong, and Mel and Wallis were out in the garden, picking beans, when they heard the rumbles of the machines’ entry, and felt the vibrations: bulldozers, backhoes, hydraulic drills, and wrenches.

  “I didn’t think he’d do it,” Wallis said.

  “You thought he’d stop with nineteen, and change his mind on twenty?” Mel said.

  They went into town to see the spectacle, and when they got there, they found that the hiring was already going on. The foremen were all friendly, smiling.

  They weren’t in a hurry; they moved slowly. They kept an engine or two running on their diesel rigs, as if to begin lulling and acclimating the villagers to the low purr of the engines.

  They almost pretended to be lost—almost, but not quite. They scuffed at the dirt and admired the scenery. They leaned back, crossed their legs, put their
hands in their pockets.

  “Is anybody here good with a saw?” the foreman asked. “Me, I’m frightened of falling trees.”

  “What do you pay?” someone asked, and that was that.

  Helen came outside—Wallis and Mel could tell it had been a rough night for her—and she looked as if she were still partly asleep. She went over to a bulldozer and climbed up on one of its huge tires so she could reach up and feel the blade’s shiny curved steel. The blade itself was as big as the side of a small house. She touched the rock-dulled teeth of the blade. Each tooth was the size of a man’s head. She stroked the teeth—those she could reach—as she would the flank of a wild horse: as if trying to calm it, even change its essence.

  Some of the road crew was watching her—she was so tiny—and Wallis and Mel heard the main foreman asking around, casually, “Does anyone need any backhoe work done, while we’re up here? We’d be happy to help out. Hell, we came all this way, we might as well. Just don’t tell the boss,” he said, and there was a new quickening in the air, a stirring of interests. Each machine was viewed in a new way: in terms of horsepower, in terms of muscle harnessed. A month’s work able to be done in a day. No one stepped forward with requests, but all eyes glanced at the waiting machines, evaluating them. A stock tank dammed, a diversion canal dug. A pit for a foundation. A basement, a new septic tank.

  “We’ll need cooks,” the foreman said, slapping his flat belly. He laughed, then caught Mel’s eye, and finished his laugh, his eyes hooding.

  Charlie stepped up, raised a tentative hand: a cook. The foreman—the noonday sun caught his short trimmed hair, caught the red filaments in it, and that was how Wallis would think of him, as Red—evaluated Charlie’s heft with pleasure. Amy stepped up, also. Red eyed her stomach. Two cooks.