by Tony Daniel
“All right,” I said after breakfast. “Where are we in time?”
“We’re not,” Carol replied. “As nearly as I can determine.”
“Then where are we—period?” I asked.
“I think of it as an . . . inversion.”
“An inversion? Of what?”
“A mental inversion. It’s as if we’ve turned our personalities inside out. What is deep down gets exposed.”
“My insides are filled with prehistoric Indians? That is who I assume these people are.”
“Well, yes. You obviously have a bit of Indian blood in you. I do, too. And we’re in America, after all. Don’t you think there’s a New World topography on the inside of us, just as there is outside?”
“I hadn’t thought so.”
“Well, truthfully, anything I say is only a guess. I’m an ethnographer, for heaven’s sake, a museum administrator—not a cognitive psychologist or a theoretical physicist.”
“Have you spoken to any theoretical physicists about this?”
“No. I haven’t found anyone else who . . . I justknew you’d be able to come along with me, Edward. There’s something that happens when we’re together—something not rational.”
“You’ve felt it? You’ve felt it, too?”
“Of course I’ve felt it. You know, you might even be able to do it by yourself, now that you know the way.”
“Through that cave? I don’t think so.”
“There are lots of ways. I only came that way because it was . . . metaphorically correct. I thought it would be easier for you.”
“Easier. That scared the shit out me, going through there.”
“Yes, well, fright sometimes helps in finding the way.”
“I don’t like being frightened.”
“There are other ways.”
“And I presume there’s a way back home?”
Carol was quiet for a moment. “Oh,” she said. “Yes. We’ll be going back home soon.”
But that was when I noticed the pottery. Carol was right, it was fascinating stuff. They didn’t turn it on a wheel, but somehow they were able to hand-work it into magnificent shapes. Some of the vessels were so far from having any useful form that they must have been done solely for art’s sake.
One of the old men took me aside—his name was Bashi—took me down to the creek bank. Not far from the village, there was a little quarry that he’d dug into a clay bank. We gathered clay together and took it back to the village. Then he showed me how to mold it. His fine bronze hands were sure and quick, beautiful tools, gleaming wet with creek water as he continually dipped them to keep them moist. I’d never seen a potter work so fast, turning the clay, working it up and out. He got a thinner, taller pot out of his little dab than many professional potters I know could have gotten using a wheel. Bashi then watched me work a pot, showing me a trick here and there. We set them in a wood-burning kiln that Bashi explained—with hand signals and drawings—he fired twice a month, at new and full moon.
And these Indians—my interior Indians—had discovered rakku. Bashi showed me a way to work patterns into the rakku scatter, too, by applying glazes here and there to keep the crazed lines from forming. It was masterful stuff, like nothing I’d ever seen before. Rakku is produced by dipping the hot pot into some paperlike mass. Bashi showed me how they mixed the glazes. He used green straw from the long leaf pine to get the cracks so fine.
Before I knew it, the afternoon had passed, and the younger men returned. Some of them had been hunting, for they brought back rabbit and squirrel. Some had been on the hills all day—for these were not hills at all, but temple mounds, constructed by the people, one basket of earth at a time. About half the men in the village were priests, Carol told me, and this was a center of worship for a whole river valley. These men had spent the day on the tops of the mounds, burning cedar incense and praying to their gods.
“Seems like a good arrangement,” I commented. “The men get to sit around and pray, while the women and the old folks do all the work.”
“Yes, well, the men don’t do this every day,” Carol said. “They work in the fields and hunt. These people are just learning to cultivate teosinte. Soon it will become maize.”
“Why are they doing praying and such today?” I asked. “Because we’re here?”
“BecauseI’m here,” Carol said. She took my hand and led me down to the water. We lay in the sand of the creek bank and pulled the black canoes about us in a “v” for a bit of privacy. We didn’t make love, though I wanted to. Instead, Carol seemed sad, and I held her again as the sun went down and the water flowed.
“When morning comes,” she said, “do not do anything to interfere with what’s happening, no matter how much you want to.”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s going to happen?”
“I . . . I don’t want to tell you,” she said. “Just promise me.”
“How can I promise such a thing?”
“Promise.”
“All right. I promise.”
“And Edward . . .”
“Yes.”
“Stay with me. Stay with me until it’s over.”
“I will,” I replied, not knowing what I was saying. “I will stay with you.”
The men came for her in the morning, the priests. They motioned for her to get up, and Carol quickly rose and quietly followed them. She was barefoot. I yanked on my boots and stumbled along behind. No one paid any attention to me. There were more canoes on the creek bank now, many more—all black. Carol got into a large one, with a man at the stern, and a woman at the prow. As they poled away from the bank, the woman began a soft, low wailing.
I dragged my canoe into the water, and joined the throng that was following the boat Carol was in. We did not go far, perhaps a half mile. There was a wide sandbar where the creek meandered, and we beached our canoes there. The two—the man and the wailing woman—led Carol up the bank and toward what I thought was a meadow. But it was not a meadow. It was a field, obviously just tilled and planted. We—at least fifty other people—followed.
At the edge of the field was a line of trees. Carol stepped through the trees. We all stepped through the trees.
And there we stood on an asphalt roadway.
It was crumbled and overgrown, but there was no doubt. This was a paved road. And it was a road that I recognized. The road that went from Gaylesville to Leesburg, and crossed the Little River just north of my friend’s cabin. Alabama Highway 273. The W.M. “Country” Brown Bypass.
The people gathered in a circle about Carol. She stood in the middle of 273, on the dash of a fading white lane marker. Hega stepped forward. Carol quickly unzipped her jeans. She stepped out of them. She unbuttoned her blouse and let it fall to the ground. And there she stood naked, white, stippled with brown freckles. Beautiful in the morning light. But so small and vulnerable there. For the first time, shedid look like a wren to me. A quivering little bird, trapped in our circle.
Both of his hands held small corn seed—teosinte, it must be. These he used to anoint Carol’s head, and to scatter at her feet. She stood quietly, a look of sad determination on her face.
After the scatter of the seed, she lay down upon the road way. She stretched out her arms and put her legs together.
No, I thought. Whatever will happen next cannot, must not. But it did. Hega stepped back.
He motioned to three women, who came forward and held Carol’s arms and feet taut. Then two men came.
In each man’s right hand was a big rock. In his left hand were finely carved stakes. Each was about the size and thickness of a railroad spike.
I gasped. This was too much. I stepped forward. The crowd turned to look at me, murmured. I saw Bashi, my pottery teacher, shaking his finger, in these people’s gesture for “no.”
“Edward,” Carol said clearly. “Remember your promise.”
Hega moved in front of me and gently, but firmly, pushed me back into the circle. He stood beside me.
And t
hen the two men nailed Carol to Highway 273. They put a stake through either wrist, and one through both feet. After the stone points were through her flesh, the men beat them hard and drove them into the asphalt underneath. They crucified Carol Verdance upon the ground.
She whimpered when the first blow was struck, but did not cry out. And after that, no matter how hard they pounded, she made not a sound. When the men were done, they stepped away. The women who had been holding Carol’s arms and legs stood up, too.
Hega again scattered teosinte upon Carol and upon the ground. The seed mixed with her flowing blood. Then he quickly turned, as if he could not longer bear the sight, and strode away. The other villagers—to a man, woman and, child—did likewise. They cast teosinte grain upon Carol’s splayed body, then followed after Hega.
Leaving me. Leaving me with Carol Verdane.
I went to sit beside her on the pavement.
“What has happened?” I said. “What has happened to you?”
“Edward,” she whispered. “Thank you for being here. Thank you, my friend.”
“I . . . how can I . . . is this the future? Is this the future we have in store?”
“No, Edward. It is what I said it was.”
“Inside?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want this inside me.”
“Inside us all,” Carol said. “This is how it happens. This is how we imagined maize into being. Corn doesn’t reseed itself, you know. We have to keep imagining it.”
“I don’t understand.” I was crying now. Carol’s bleeding had slowed. The hot sun was rising. I was crying and could not stop.
“Edward,” she said. “Oh, Edward.” There she was, nailed to the ground, and she was comforting me.
“It hurts so,” she said.
“Let me take them out, the stakes.”
“You know you must not.”
“Oh, Carol.”
“But it hurts,” she said. “It always hurts so much.”
The sun was hot this day, and there were no clouds. I took off my shirt and used it to shade her eyes.
After some hours, she had trouble breathing. She arched her back and gasped for air. I saw that the sun was blistering her fair skin, her fair breasts.
“I’m so thirsty,” she said at noon. “I’m so thirsty, Edward.”
“I’ll bring you water,” I said. “I can bring you water.” I stumbled from the road, then realized I had nothing to carry the water in, no vessel. I went back and tore a strip from my shirt and doused it in the river.
When I returned, Carol had passed out. I dribbled water on her lips, on her chest and legs. I sat beside her and listened to her labored breathing. I rocked back and forth, thinking of everything, thinking of nothing. Near sunset, she arched her back one last time, could not catch a breath. Her breathing stopped. With a sigh, she lay back down flat against the asphalt.
“No,” I said. “Oh God, no.” And I had not cried all my tears after all. Sometime later, night fell. I crawled to the edge of the highway, and collapsed into the high grass there.
I awoke to the sound of a pickup truck whizzing by.
No! I thought. They’ll hit her!
I sprang to my feet, but it was too late. And not too late. For there was no sign of Carol’s body upon the highway. No trace of blood. I stood there in the empty road and watched the sun rise through the trees, through the kudzu. After a time, I wandered home in a daze.
When I arrived, I smelled pancakes. Pancakes cooking on my stove. I hurried inside, and she was there. Carol was there, holding a spatula over my cast-iron skillet.
“You do want breakfast?” she asked.
“How did you—”
“I decided to come out at the cave,” she said. “So I could bring the canoe back.”
“Was it? Was I dreaming?”
“Oh no,” Carol said, not smiling now. “Oh no. Where’s your day pack, for instance? Where’s your shirt?”
And she was right. I was naked above the waist.
I stumbled in, went to the refrigerator, and got out the orange juice. I drained almost half a gallon. “What’s it like to be dead?” I finally asked.
“I don’t remember,” she said. “I never remember. I’m just back here. Or wherever I left from.”
“Why do you go back?”
“So it can happen.”
“So what can happen?”
“Maize.”
“Why . . . what about before—”
“There were others before me, I think. There have always been others.”
“And me?” But I didn’t really care about that.
“The Morning Star. The Friend to the Sun, I suppose. But you must be something like that, or you wouldn’t have been able to go there in the first place. We would not have had the . . . resonance we do with one another. The primitive resonance.”
“How do you feel?” This was really what I cared about.
Carol laughed and flipped a pancake. “Like a new woman,” she said. “I always feel like a new woman after that.”
Carol left the next day, for she had to be back in St. Louis for work. For a time—weeks—I stuck to making pots and not thinking too much. That was the best thing to do, the only thing. And I returned the canoe to where it came from in the Carolinas. I did not go back to the cave.
But I did try out that new rakku technique, using the glazing methods I discovered over there—wherever there is. I’m doing the best work of my life here in this cabin on the lake. But my friend will return soon, and I must move on.
I wonder if Carol was right.
“You might be able to do it yourself, now that you know the way,” she’d said.
They killed her. They nailed her to a road and she bled and died.
And she returned. Like the planted maize, she returned.
So much that our lives—that human life—is built upon, made from, is that which is maybe better left forgotten. Yet humans have shaped pots for tens of thousands of years. We’ve been molders of clay almost as long as we’ve been hunters of beasts, longer than we have been planters of grain. There must be so much that was lost, but not really, truly lost. So much that is still there, somewhere inside us, waiting to be rediscovered.
But soon my friend will return soon from his travels. And then I must decide whether or not I will cross the lake in a black canoe.
Death of Reason
1
T he sky was liquid iron at sunset. The clouds were fiery slag. The scramjet carrying me home banked over downtown Birmingham on approach to the airport. Up on Red Mountain, the Vulcan’s torch flamed scarlet for death—the beacon for another traffic accident sponged from the pavement of the city. Twenty-four hours of anonymous remembrance, then maybe the giant iron statue’s torch would burn green until somebody else spilled himself out on the black asphalt. The custom was over a hundred years old now, but people kept obliging. I once knew the woman whose job it was to throw the switch on the light. I knew her well. Abby would always have work.But Vulcan’s torch would never burn for my grandfather. His time-sharing license had expired on Maturicell two days ago. He died in his sleep. Peacefully. As they say.
The scramjet turned thrusters down and slotted into a bay at Municipal. Guide lasers flared in long lines of neon Morse code outside the window as the beams passed into and out of pockets of humidity. It was time to disembark, but I continued to gaze out at the sky full of fire and light. Twilight in the Heart of Dixie, bloody and wringing wet as usual. Welcome home, Andy Harco. Back to the city where you were poured and formed. Back to the grindstone that put the edge to your soul.
“You get too hot, and you’ll lose your temper,” my old friend Thaddeus the poet used to say. I guess that’s what happened; that’s why I left. I lost my temper in both senses of the word. But in Seattle I’d hardened the edge once again. Birmingham no longer had what it took to dull me down. And I cut back now.
I snugged my op-eds onto my nose, then gathered my wits fro
m under the seat and out of the overhead compartment. Along with my briefcase full of peripherals, I had a bag of toiletries, a plastic Glock nine-millimeter seventeen-shot automatic, and my good blue interviewing suit and wing tips. I had not worn the suit for eight years, but I was reasonably certain it still fit. Granddaddy’s funeral was tomorrow evening. I would have time to get it altered if it didn’t. I had flown out of Seattle in gray shorts and a T-shirt with the faded hologo of a science-fiction convention on the chest. People had given me strange looks back there, for Seattle was in the midst of a cold snap—the temperatures were hovering in the mid-fifties in August—due to some frigid air that had descended from the Arctic. I was, however, dressed perfectly for Alabama.
I felt like a returning tourist as I got off the plane. In a way, I was. I’d been on a long vacation from Birmingham. Eight years, for my health. That is, if I’d hung around eight years ago, a bullet would have just ruined the nice gray interior of my skull. At least, that’s what Freddy Pupillina had told me—more or less—when he sent me the fistful of dead roses. Southern gangsters think they’re so damn subtle and genteel. But perfume on a skunk accentuates the stink even more.
But that was eight years ago, back when I was a rookie rental for the Birmingham P.D. and an unlicensed fabulist. I’d had few friends, and an extremely abrasive manner. These days, I have more friends.
I wouldn’t be seeing Abby, but Thaddeus was a friend. I would look him up after the funeral. It had been a long time since we’d gotten together in person.
I should have expected the snoops to pattern me as soon as I stepped off the jet. For the most part, the only people who travel in actual are high-level business jocks, Ideal coordinating nodes, rich eccentrics—and terrorists. Guess which profile I matched up with? I suppose I was preoccupied with thoughts of Granddaddy, maybe of Abby, so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. While I didn’t plan on seeing Abby ever again, after seeing the Vulcan from the air, she was heavily on my mind.
The snoop interceptor was a Securidad 50 crank, maybe three or four years old. Cheap Polish bionics suspended in a Mexican-made shell. The City of Birmingham never had been exactly on the cutting edge of technology. I clicked up the 50’s specs in the upper right-hand corner of my op-eds and gave them a quick glance. The 50’s innards were standard bionic sludge. Its force escalator was knock-out gas, not a very thoughtful option for use in a crowded corridor, such as are found, for example, in airports. Those wacky Poles.
