Otherwise

by John Crowley

  “Do you want to eat?” she said. She put a plate of brown chunks before him. Then she sat too, a little way off, as though uncertain how he might respond.

  “It’s meat,” he said.

  “Sure.” She said it encouragingly. “It’s okay.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “We don’t eat meat.” A broken, blanched bone protruded from one brown piece.

  “So eat grass,” she said, and rose to go. He saw he had rejected a kindness, a human kindness, and that she was the only one here capable of offering him that—and of talking to him, too.

  “No, don’t go, wait. Thank you.” He picked up a piece of the meat, thinking of her tearing it bloody from its skin. “It’s just—I never did.” The smell of it—burned, dark, various—was heady, heady as sin. He bit, expecting nausea. His mouth suddenly filled with liquid; he was eating flesh. He wondered how much he needed in order to make a meal. The taste seemed to start some ancient memory: a race memory, he wondered, or just some forgotten childhood before the Mountain?

  “Good,” he said, chewing carefully, feeling flashes of guilty horror. He wouldn’t keep it down, he was certain; he would vomit. But his stomach said not so.

  “Do you think,” he said, pushing away his plate, “that they’ll talk to me?”

  “No. Maybe Painter. Not the others.”

  “Painter?”

  “The one you talked to.”

  “Is he, well, the leader, more or less?”

  She smiled as though at some interior knowledge to which Meric’s remark was so inadequate as to be funny.

  “How do you come to be here?” he asked.

  “His.”

  “Do you mean like a servant?”

  She only sat, plucking at the grass between her boots. She had lost the habit of explanation. She was grateful it was gone, because this was unexplainable. The question meant nothing; like a leo, she ignored it. She rose again to go.

  “Wait,” he said. “They won’t mind if I stay?”

  “If you don’t do anything.”

  “Tell me. That one up on the hill. What’s his function?”

  “His what?”

  “I mean why is he there, and not here? Is he a guard?”

  She took a step toward him, suddenly grave. “He’s Painter’s son,” she said. “His eldest. Painter put him out.”

  “Put him out?”

  “He doesn’t understand yet. He keeps trying to come back.” She looked off into the darkness, as though looking into the blank face of an unresolvable sadness. Meric saw that she couldn’t be yet twenty.

  “But why?” he said.

  She retreated from him. “You stay there,” she said, “if you want. Don’t make sudden moves, or jump around. Help when you can, they won’t mind. Don’t try to understand them.”

  Just before dawn they began to rise. Meric, stiff and alert after light, hallucinatory sleep, watched them appear in the blue, bird-loud morning. They were naked. They gathered silently in the court of the camp, large and indistinct, the children around them. They all looked east, waiting.

  Painter came from his tent then. As though signaled by this, they all began to move out of the camp, in what appeared to be a kind of precedence. The girl, naked too, was last but for Painter. Meric’s heart was full; his eyes devoured what they saw. He felt like a man suddenly let out of a small, dark place to see the wide extent of the world.

  Outside the camp, the ground fell away east down to a rushy, marshy stream. They went down to the stream, children hurrying ahead. Meric rose, cramped, wondering if he could follow. He did, loitering at what he hoped was a respectful distance. As they walked down, he studied the strangeness of their bodies. If they were conscious of his presence, or of their own nakedness, they didn’t show it; in fact they didn’t seem naked as naked humans do, skinned and raw and defenseless, with unbound flesh quivering as they walked. They seemed clothed in flesh as in armor. A kind of hair, a blond down, as thick as loincloths between the females’ legs, made them seem not so much hairy as cloudy. Walking made their muscles move visibly beneath the cloud of hair, their massive thighs and broad backs changing shape subtly as they took deliberate steps down to the water. In the east, a fan of white rays shot up suddenly behind down-slanting bars of scarlet cirrus, and upward into the blue darkness overhead. They raised their faces to it.

  Meric knew that they considered the sun a god and a personal father. Yet what he observed had none of the qualities of a ritual of worship. They waded knee-deep into the water and washed, not ritual ablutions but careful cleansing. Women washed children and males, and older children washed younger ones, inspecting, scrubbing, bringing up handfuls of water to rinse one anther. One female calmly scrubbed the girl, who shrank away grimacing from the force of it; her body was red with cold. Painter stood bent over, hands on his knees, while the girl and another laved his back and head; he shook his head to remove the water and wiped his face. A male child splashing near him attempted to catch him around the neck and Painter threw him roughly aside, so that the child went under water; Painter caught him up and dunked him again, rubbing his spluttering face fiercely. Impossible to tell if this was play or anger. They shouted out now and again, at each other’s ministrations or at the coldness of the water, or perhaps only for shouting; for a spark of sun flamed on the horizon, and then the sun lifted itself up, and the cries increased.

  It was laughter. The sun smiled on them, turning the water running from their golden bodies to molten silver, and they laughed in his face, a stupendous fierce orison of laughter.

  Meric, estranged on the bank, felt dirty and evanescent, and yet privileged. He had wondered about the girl, how she could choose to be one of them when she so obviously couldn’t be; how she could deny so much of her own nature in order to live as they did. He saw now that she had done no such thing. She had only acceded to their presence, lived as nearly as she could at their direction and convenience, like a dog trying to please a beloved, contrary, willful, godlike man, because whatever self-denial that took, whatever inconvenience, there was nothing else worth doing. Inconvenience and estrangement from her own kind were nothing compared to the privilege of hearing, of sharing, that laughter as elemental as the blackbird’s song or the taste of flesh.

  When they came back into camp they remained naked in the warming sunlight for a time, drying. Only the girl dressed, and then began to make up the fire. If she looked at Meric she didn’t seem to see him; she shared in their indifference.

  When he moved, though, there wasn’t one of them who didn’t notice it. When he went to his pack and got bread and dried fruit, all their eyes caught him. When he assembled his recorder, they followed his movements. He did it all slowly and openly, looking only at the machine, to make them feel it had nothing to do with them.

  Painter had gone into his tent, and when Meric was satisfied that his recorder was in working order, he stood carefully, feeling their eyes on him, and went to the tent door. He squatted there, peering into the obscurity within, unable to see anything. He thought perhaps the leo would sense his presence and come to the door, if only to chase him off. But no notice was taken of him. He felt the leo’s disregard of him, so total as to be palpable. He was not present, not even to himself; he was a prying eye only, a wavering, shuddering needle of being without a north.

  “Painter,” he said at last. “I want to talk to you.” He had considered politer locutions; they seemed insulting, even supposing the leo would understand them as politeness. He waited in the silence. He felt the eyes of the pride on him.

  “Come inside,” Painter’s thin voice said.

  He took the recorder in a damp palm and pushed aside the tent flap. He went in.

  Bree looked at the screen. The sun shone through the fabric of the tent, making the interior a burnt-ocher color; the walls were bright and the objects inside dark, bright-edged, as though the scene were inside a live coal. The leo was a huge obscurity,
back-lit. The recorder was wide open, so values were blurred and exaggerated; dust motes burned and swam like tiny bright insects, the leo’s eyes were molten, soft, alive.

  “You shouldn’t have eaten that meat, Meric,” Bree said. “You didn’t have to. You should have explained.”

  Meric said nothing. The pressure of her ignorance on him, ignorance he could never dispel, was tightening around his heart.

  “What do you want?” the leo said. For a long time there was no answer; the leo didn’t seem to await one. Then Meric, faint, off-mike said: “We think killing animals is wrong.”

  The leo didn’t change expression, didn’t seem to take this as a challenge. Meric said: “We don’t allow it, anywhere within the Preserve.”

  Bree waited for the leo to make arguments, to say, “But all living things eat other living things”; or, “We have as much right to hunt as the hawks and the dragonflies”; or, “What right do you have to tell us what to do?” She had counterarguments, explanations, for all these answers. She knew Meric did too. She wanted to see it explained to the leo.

  Instead the leo said: “Then why did you come out alone?”

  “What?” Meric’s voice, distant, confused.

  “I said, why did you come out alone?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If you don’t allow something, something I do, there ought to be more than one of you to make me stop.”

  As far as his emotions could be read, the leo wasn’t being belligerent; he said it as though he were pointing out a fact that Meric had overlooked. Meric mumbled something Bree couldn’t hear.

  The leo said: “I have a living to get. It’s got nothing to do with these—notions. I take what I need. I take what I have to.”

  “You have a right to that,” Meric said. “As much as you need to live, I guess, but…”

  The leo seemed almost to smile. “Yes,” he said. “A right to what I need to live. That part’s mine. And another part too for my wives and children.”

  “All right,” Meric said.

  “And another part as, what, payment for what I’ve gone through, for what I am. Compensation. I didn’t ask to be made.”

  “I don’t know,” Meric said. “But still not all; there’s still a part you have no right to.”

  “That part,” the leo said, “you’re free to take away from me. If you can.”

  Another long silence fell. Was Meric afraid? Bree thought, Why doesn’t he say something? “Why didn’t you explain?” she whispered. “You should have explained.”

  Meric pressed a lever on the editing table that froze the leo’s unwavering regard, and the golden dust motes in their paths around him too. All along his long way home he had wondered how he would explain: to Bree, to Emma, to them all. All his life he had been an explainer, an expresser, a describer; a transformer, an instrument through which events passed and became meaningful: became reasons, programs, notions. But there was no way for him to explain what had happened to him in the leos’ camp, because the event wouldn’t pass through him, it would never leave him, he was in its grasp.

  “I had nothing to say,” he said to Bree.

  “Nothing to say!”

  “Because he’s right.” Right, right, how pointless. “Because if we want him not to do it, we have to make him. Because…” There was no way to say it, no way to pass it from him in words. He felt suffocated, as though he were caught in a vacuum.

  When, after her affair with Grady, Bree had begun reading the Bible and talking and thinking about Jesus, she had tried to make Meric feel what she felt. “It’s being good,” she had said. Meric did his best to be good, to be Christlike, to be gentle; but he never felt it, as Bree did, to be a gift, a place to live, an intense happiness. He thought to say now that what he had felt in Painter’s tent was what she had felt when she first knew Jesus, when she had glowed continually with it and been unable to explain it, when it made her weep.

  But what could that mean to Bree? Her gentle Jesus, her lover who asked nothing of her but to stand with her and walk with her and lie down with her, what had he to do with the cruel, ravishing, wordless thing that had seized Meric?

  “It’s like Jesus,” he said, ashamed, the words like dust in his mouth. He heard her breath indrawn, shocked. But it was true. Jesus was two natures, God and man, the godhead in him burning through the flesh toward his worshipers, burning out the flesh in them. Painter was two natures too: through his thin, strained voice pressed all the dark, undifferentiated world, all the voiceless beasts; it was the world Candy had urged us to flee from and Jesus promised to free us from, the old world returned to capture us, speak in a voice to us, reclaim us for its own. It was as though the heavy, earth-odorous Titans had returned to strike down at last the cloudy scheming gods, as though the circle had closed that had seemed an upward spiral, as though a reverse messiah had come to crush all useless hope forever.

  As though, as though, as though. Meric looked up from the face on the screen, and drew a deep, tremulous breath. Tears burned on his dirty cheeks. The chains, as they had in Painter’s tent, fell away from him. Nothing to say, yes, at last nothing to say.

  Unable, despite a repugnance so deep it was like horror, to take her eyes from the screen, Bree heard unbidden in her mind the child’s song she still sometimes sang herself to sleep with: Little ones to him belong; they are weak but he is strong. She shuddered at the blasphemy of it, and stood as though waking from an oppressive dream. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Pretty soon they’ll be gone anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Grady told me,” she said. “There are Federal people here. One of those—animals committed a crime or something. The Feds want to go in and arrest him, or drive them off, or something.”

  He stood. She turned away from his look. “Grady’s going with them. They were only waiting till you got back. What are you doing?”

  He had begun to open cabinets, take out clothes, equipment. “I haven’t come back,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He knotted together the laces of a pair of heavy boots so that they could be carried. “Do they have guns?” he asked. “How many are there? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know. I guess, guns. Grady will be with them. It’s all right.” He seemed mad. She wanted to touch him, put a hand on him, restrain him; but she was afraid. “You have come back,” she said.

  He pulled on a quilted coat. “No,” he said. “I came for this stuff.” He was cramming recording tape, lenses, bits and pieces quickly into his pack. “I meant to stay a night, two nights. Talk to Emma.” He stopped packing, but didn’t look up at her. “Say good-bye to you.”

  A rush of fear contracted her chest. “Good-bye!”

  “Now I’ve got to hurry,” he said. “I’ve got to reach them before Grady and those.” Still he hadn’t looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said, quick, curt, rejecting.

  “No,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m going back to them,” he said. “I’ve got to—get it all down. Record it all. So people can see.” He slung the pack over his shoulder, and filled his pockets with the bread she had set out for him. “And now I’ve got to warn them.”

  “Warn them! They’re thieves, they’re killers!” She gasped it out. “They don’t belong here, they have to go, they have to stop it!” He had turned to go. She grabbed at his sleeve. “What have they done to you?”

  He only shook her off, his face set. He went out of their space and into the broad, low corridors that swept across the level. From the long high lines of clerestory windows, bars of moonlight fell across the ways. There was no other light. His footsteps were loud in the silence, but her naked feet pursuing him made no sound. “Meric,” she whisper-called. “When will you come back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t go to them.”

  “I have to.”

  “Let Grady.”

  He rounded on her. “Tell Grady to
stay away,” he said. “Tell Emma. Don’t let those men into the Preserve. They don’t belong there. They’ve got no right.”

  “No right!” She stopped, still, at a distance from him, as though he were dangerous to approach. He stood too, knowing that everything he had said was wrong, knowing he was doing wrong to her, ashamed but not caring. “Good-bye,” he said again, and turned down a corridor toward the night elevators. She didn’t follow.

  He went the night way down through the Mountain, following the spectral luminescent signs, changing from elevator to elevator—the banks of day elevators were shut down, and there were only one or two downward paths he could go; at every discharge level he had to interpret the way to the next, drifting downward side-to-side like a slow and errant leaf. How often he had dreamed he walked through night spaces like these, coming onto unfamiliar levels, finding with surprise but no wonder places he had never seen, vast and pointless divisions of space, impassable halls, half-built great machines, processions of unknown faces, the right way continually eluding him and continually reappearing in a new guise—oh now I remember—until oppressed with confusion and strangeness he woke.

  He woke: it seemed to him as he went down now that the Mountain had lost all solidity, had become as illusory as a thought, as a notion. The continual, sensible, long-thought-out divisions of its spaces, the plain, honest faces of its machines, its long black-louvered suntraps, its undressed surfaces, all showing the signs of the handiwork and labor that had brought them into being: it was all tenuous, had the false solidity of a dream. It couldn’t contain him any longer, vast as it was.

  He went out across the floor of the great, windy central atrium, past piles of supplies and materials—the place was never empty, always cluttered with things in progress from one condition into another under the hands of craftsmen, wood into walls, metal into machines, dirt into cleanliness, uselessness into use, use into waste, waste into new materials. Before him rose the transparent front, stories high, stone, steel, and pale green slabs of cast glass flawed and honest, through which a green, wrinkled moon shone coldly. He went out.