Cities of the Plain tbt-3

by Cormac McCarthy

  There followed a man bearing a sheathed sword upon a leather cushion and after him the bearers of torches and then the litter and the men who carried it. The traveler could not tell if the person they carried were alive or if this were not perhaps some sort of funeral procession passing through the mountains in the rain and the night. At the rear of the enfilade came the hornsman bearing an instrument made of cane bound with wrappings of copper wire and hung with tassels. He played it by blowing through a length of tubing and it played three notes which hovered in the shrouded night air above them like a ponderable body itself.

  How many of these people were there?

  I believe eight.

  Go ahead.

  They advanced upon the road and the traveler sat up and swung his legs over the side of his altarstone and pulled the blanket about his shoulders and waited. They came on until they were opposite to the place where he sat and here they stopped and here they stood. The traveler watched them. If he was curious he was also afraid.

  What about you?

  I was only curious.

  How did you know he was afraid?

  The man studied the empty roadway beneath them. After a while he said: This man was not me. If he may have been some part of me that I do not recognize then so may you. I fall back upon my argument of common histories.

  Where were you all this time?

  Asleep in my bed.

  You were not in the dream.

  No.

  Billy leaned and spat. Well, he said, I'm seventyeight years old and in that time I've had a lot of dreams. And as near as I can recollect I was in ever one of em. I dont recall a time that I ever dreamt about other people but what I wasnt around somewheres. My notion is that you pretty much dream about yourself. I even dreamt one time that I was dead. But I was standin there looking at the corpse.

  I see, the man said.

  What do you see?

  I see you've thought a bit about dreams.

  I aint thought about em at all. I've just had em.

  Can we come back to this question?

  You can do whatever you want.

  Thank you.

  You sure you aint makin all this up.

  The man smiled. He looked out across the roadway and the fields and shook his head but he didnt answer.

  Or did you want to come back to that?

  The problem is that your question is the very question upon which the story hangs.

  A tractortrailer passed overhead and the swallows nesting in the concrete coves flew forth and circled and returned.

  Bear with me, the man said. This story like all stories has its beginnings in a question. And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente.

  Every story is not about some question.

  Yes it is. Where all is known no narrative is possible.

  Billy leaned and spat again. kndale, he said.

  He was curious and afraid this traveler and he called out to the processional some greeting which echoed among the rocks. He asked them where they were bound but never did they answer back. They stood in the old road through the pass huddled together, these mute and midnight folk with their torches and their instruments and their captive, and they waited. As if he were a mystery to them. Or as if he were expected to say some particular thing which he had yet to say.

  He was really asleep.

  That is my view.

  And if he had of woke?

  Then what he saw he would no longer see. Nor I.

  Why couldnt you just say it would of vanished or disappeared?

  Which?

  Which what?

  Desaparecer o desvanecerse.

  Hay una diferencia?

  S'. Lo que se desvanece es simplemente fuera de la vista. Pero desaparecido? He shrugged. Where do things go? In a case such as that of the traveler and his adventureswhere one is on uncertain ground to even say from whence they came at allthere seems little to be said as to where they might be when gone. In such a case one can come upon no footing where even to begin.

  Can I say somethin?

  Of course.

  I think you got a habit of makin things a bit more complicated than what they need to be. Why not just tell the story?

  Good advice. Let's see what can be done.

  Andale pues.

  Although I should point out to you that you are the one with the questions.

  No you shouldnt.

  Yes. Of course.

  Just get on with it.

  Yes.

  Mum's the word here.

  C-mo?

  Nothin. I'll shut up askin questions, that's all.

  They were good questions.

  You aint goin to tell the story, are you?

  So perhaps he struggled to wake. For all that the night was cold and his bed hard stone he could not. In the meantime all was silence. The rain had ceased. The wind. The processioners consulted among themselves and then the bearers came forward and set the litter on the rocky ground. Upon the litter lay a young girl with eyes closed and hands crossed upon her breast as if in death. The dreamer looked at her and he looked at the troupe standing about her. Cold as the night was and colder as it must have been in the windswept reaches from which they had descended they yet were thinly clothed and even the capes and blankets that they wore over their shoulders were of loosely woven stuff. In the light of their torches their faces and their torsos shone with sweat. And strange as was their appearance and the mission they seemed bent upon yet they were also oddly familiar. As if he'd seen all this somewhere before.

  Like in a dream.

  If you wish.

  It aint up to me.

  You think you know how this dream ends. I got a notion or two.

  We'll see. Carry on. With the troupe was a sort of chemist who carried in a belt at his waist the nostrums of his trade and he and the leader of the group conferred. The leader thumbed back the turtleshell to the top of his head like a welder tipping back his mask but the dreamer could not see his face. The outcome of their conferencing was that three of the halfnaked men from the company detached themselves and approached the altarstone. They carried a flask and a cup and they set the cup upon the stone and poured it full and offered it to the dreamer.

  He better think twice.

  Too late. He took it in both hands with the same gravity with which it had been offered and raised it to his lips and drank.

  What was in it?

  I dont know.

  What kind of cup?

  A cup of horn heated in a fire and shaped so it would stand. What did it do to him? It caused him to forget. What did he forget? Everthing?

  He forgot the pain of his life. Nor did he understand the penalty for doing so.

  Go ahead.

  He drank it down and handed back the cup and almost at once all was taken from him so that he was like a child again and a great peace settled upon him and his fears abated to the point that he would become accomplice in a blood ceremony that was then and is now an affront to God.

  Was that the penalty?

  No. There was a greater cost even than that.

  What was it?

  That this too would be forgot.

  Would that be such a bad idea?

  Wait and see.

  Go on.

  He drank the cup and gave himself up to the dark mercies of these ancient serranos. And they in turn led him from the stone out into the road and they walked up and back with him. They seemed to be urging him to contemplate his surroundings, the rocks and the mountains, the stars which were belied above them against the eternal blackness of the world's nativity.

  What were they sayin?

  I dont know.

  You couldnt hear them?

  The man didnt answer. He sat pondering the forms of the concrete overhead. The nests of the swallows clung in the high corners like coloni
es of small mud hornos inverted there. The traffic had increased. The boxshaped shadows which the trucks shook off on entering beneath the overpass waited for them where they emerged into the sun again on the far side. He lifted one hand in a slow tossing gesture. There is no way to answer your question. It is not the case that there are small men in your head holding a conversation. There is no sound. So what language is that? In any case this was a deep dream for the dreamer and in such dreams there is a language that is older than the spoken word at all. The idiom is another specie and with it there can be no lie or no dissemblance of the truth.

  I thought you said they were talkin.

  In my dream of them perhaps they were talking. Or perhaps I was only putting upon it the best construction that I knew. The traveler's dream is another matter.

  Go ahead.

  The ancient world holds us to account. The world of our fathers.

  It seems to me if they were talkin in your dream they'd have to be talkin in his. It's the same dream.

  It's the same question.

  What's the answer?

  We're coming to that.

  cndale.

  The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future. At the core of our life is the history of which it is composed and in that core are no idioms but only the act of knowing and it is this we share in dreams and out. Before the first man spoke and after the last is silenced forever. Yet in the end he did speak, as we shall see.

  All right.

  So he walked with his captors until his mind was calm and he knew that his life was now in other hands.

  There dont seem to be much fight in him.

  You forget the hostage.

  The girl.

  Yes.

  Go on.

  It is important to understand that he did not give himself up willingly. The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them. Where there is no penalty there can be no prize. You understand.

  Go on.

  They seemed to be waiting for him to come to some decision. To tell them something perhaps. He studied everything about him that could be studied. The stars and the rocks and the face of the sleeping girl upon her pallet. His captors. Their helmets and their costumes. The torches which they carried that were made of hollow pipes filled with oil and wicks of rope and the flames which were sheltered from the wind by panes of isinglass set into taming and roofed and flued with beaten copper sheet. He tried to see into their eyes but those eyes were dark and they had shadowed them with blacking like men called upon to traverse wastes of snow. Or sand. He tried to see their feet how they were shod but their robes fell over the rocks about them and he could not. What he saw was the strangeness of the world and how little was known and how poorly one could prepare for aught that was to come. He saw that a man's life was little more than an instant and that as time was eternal therefore every man was always and eternally in the middle of his journey, whatever be his years or whatever distance he had come. He thought he saw in the world's silence a great conspiracy and he knew that he himself must then be a part of that conspiracy and that he had already moved beyond his captors and their plans. If he had any revelation it was this: that he was repository to this knowing which he came to solely by his abandonment of every former view. And with this he turned to his captors and he said: I will tell you nothing.

  I will tell you nothing. That is what he said and that is all he said. In the next moment they led him to the stone and laid him down upon it and they raised up the girl from her pallet and led her forward. Her bosom was heaving.

  Her what?

  Her bosom was heaving.

  Go ahead.

  She leaned and kissed him and stepped away and then the archatron came forward with his sword and raised it in his two hands above him and clove the traveler's head from his body.

  I guess that was the end of that.

  Not at all.

  I suppose you're fixin to tell me he survived havin his head lopped off.

  Yes. He woke from his dream and sat shivering with cold and fright. In the selfsame desolate pass. The selfsame barren range of mountains. The selfsame world.

  And you?

  The narrator smiled wistfully, like a man remembering his childhood. These dreams reveal the world also, he said. We wake remembering the events of which they are composed while often the narrative is fugitive and difficult to recall. Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world. For escaping from the world's dream of him this is at once his penalty and his reward. So. I might have woken then myself but as the world neared so did the traveler upon his rock begin to fade and as I was not yet willing to part company with him I called out to him.

  Did he have a name?

  No. No name.

  What did you call?

  I simply called upon him to stay and stay he did and so I slept on and the traveler turned to me and waited.

  I guess he was surprised to see you.

  A good question. He seemed indeed to be surprised and yet in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras appear commonplace. Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. All in our custody seethes with an inner restlessness. But in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet. I got another question. You want to know if the traveler knew that he'd been dreaming. If indeed he had been dreaming. Like you say, you've told the story before. Yes. What's the answer. You might not like it. That ought not to stop you. He asked me the same question. He wanted to know if he'd been dreaming? Yes. What did he say? He asked me if I had seen them. Them people with the robes and the candles and all. Yes. And. Well. I had. Of course. So that's what you told him. I told him the truth. Well it would have served as well for a lie wouldnt it? Because? If it caused him to believe that what he dreamt was real. Yes. You see the difficulty. Billy leaned and spat. He studied the landscape to the north. I better get on, he said. I got a ways to go. You have people waiting for you? I hope so. I sure would like to see them. He wished me to be his witness. But in dreams there can be no witness. You said as much yourself. It was just a dream. You dreamt him. You can make him do whatever you like. Where was he before I dreamt him? You tell me.

  My belief is this, and I say it again: His history is the same as yours or mine. That is the stuff he is made oPS What stuff other? Had I created him as God makes men how then would I not know what he would say before he ever spoke? Or how he'd move before he did so? In a dream we dont know what's coming. We are surprised.

  All right.

  So where is it coming from?

  I dont know.

  Two worlds touch here. You think men have power to call forth what they will? Evoke a world, awake or sleeping? Make it breathe and then set out upon it figures which a glass gives back or which the sun acknowledges? Quicken those figures with one's own joy and one's despair? Can a man be so hid from himself? And if so who is hid? And from whom?

  You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certai
n. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.

  So is that the end of the story?

  No. The traveler stood at the stone and on the stone visible to see were marks of axe and sword and the dark oxidations of the blood of those who'd died there and which the weathers of the world were powerless to erase. Here the traveler had lain down to sleep with no thought of death and yet when he awoke he'd no thought other. The heavens which he had been invited to scrutinize by his executioners now wore a different look. The order of his life seemed altered in midstride. Some haltstitch in the workings of things. Those heavens in whose forms men see commensurate destinies cognate to their own now seemed to pulse with a reckless energy. As if in their turning things had come uncottered, uncalendared. He thought that there might even be some timefault in the record. That henceforth there might be no way to log new sightings. Would that matter?

  You're askin me.

  Yes.

  I think it would matter to you. About him I got no idea. What do you think?

  The narrator paused thoughtfully. I think, he said, that the dreamer imagined himself at some crossroads. Yet there are no crossroads. Our decisions do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The log of the world is composed of its entries, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw. For as the power to speak of the world recedes from us so also must the story of the world lose its thread and therefore its authority. The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand. And yet I think he saw the world unraveling at his feet. The procedures which he had adopted for his journey now seemed like an echo from the death of things. I think he saw a terrible darkness looming.

  I need to be gettin on.

  The man did not answer. He sat contemplating the roadside vegas and the barren lands beyond now shimmering in the newest sun.

  This desert about us was once a vast sea, he said. Can such a thing vanish? Of what are seas made? Or I? Or you?