“Erik,” Thom said, wanting nothing more than to lie down next to him on the ground. “Erik, get up.” He nudged Erik with his toe. “Get up.” The weight of the couch carved into his shoulder.
Nothing. No sign of consciousness.
“Come on, Erik.” He tried to flip him over with his foot. Thom stood over him, his eyes losing focus. Brain fashioning an endless loop for him. An eternity of a woozy, half-conscious split second of hovering drunkenly over Erik.
Thom knelt, balancing the weight of the couch on his shoulders. He grabbed Erik’s shoulder and pulled him over. There was gravel and sand in his wound, and his eyes were closed. A belabored breathing. The body wracked with fever.
“Erik,” he said. Erik’s shivering had stopped. It wouldn’t be long out here before he died. Could he leave him? Thom tried to imagine going on, knowing that his own fate was just a short ways off, that bringing Erik along would only speed that fate.
Thom steadied one end of the couch against the ground, rolled Erik onto his stomach. With his left hand anchored to the ground, the couch on the left shoulder, Thom jabbed his right hand under Erik’s middle, paused, exhaled, too exhausted for any kind of frustrated tears. He flexed, lifted Erik at his center, his head and legs drooping to the ground, dragging. He heaved, straining, managed to drape Erik limply over his other shoulder. Now to stand. His knees felt embedded in the ground, bloodied. He tipped his center of gravity back, rolled onto the balls of his feet and thrust upward. The couch on one shoulder, Erik on the other.
He took one slow step. His mouth felt like he’d been sucking on a vacuum. His equilibrium was broken, his inner ear stuck on a carnival ride. He took another step, steadying himself, knowing he’d never get either weight back on his shoulders were he to fall. Brain had gone silent long ago. His only thought: take one more step. A faint nerve signal from the left arm: ache. Another step. The hill was steep. Another step. Hours of night. Another step.
Thom came to consciousness on his knees, the couch and Erik pressing him into the ground. Had he just fallen, or had he been here for a long time? He wanted to fall the rest of the way. He pleaded with himself to give up, to lay down there. With his hand he tried to feel a pulse in Erik, some sign of life, and then stopped before ascertaining for sure, not wanting to know, not wanting the choice. He thrust his legs under him and stood. Took a step.
Woke on his knees again. Had he come one foot or forty? Thrust up. He had to point toward that off balance weight in his forehead. The drunk falling asleep at the wheel, dreaming the road, dreaming he drove. Another step. On his knees again. Up. On.
And then a violent awakening, his middle splayed over the edge of the couch, Erik lying with his head against rock. Thom’s left hand was trapped underneath the couch, crushed. He forced himself to move, with immense effort righted himself and his burdens. Something possibly wrong with his hand. On his feet. Another step. The memory of his face against gravel.
Was he dreaming? Another step. The wind cycling about, the fog gray-black. And then a shape began to emerge in the nothingness, Thom still unsure if his eyes were open or closed.
The shape widened, opened. A black form in the blur of gray that Thom stumbled toward. By the time he was upon it, it dominated the landscape. For a merest moment Thom saw pillars and stone and temples and everything he’d hoped for. A great city lost here in the fog. But it was not a city, it was never a city, it was a hole. Thom let out a dispirited sob. The density of the fog made it impossible to see what it was—the opening of a volcano? A great crevasse? It stretched, blocking his way to the left and right. He eased alongside it, trying to get an idea of how large it was, the weight of his burdens cutting deeply into his shoulders. He felt as if his organs were compressing, his knees fusing, his hips grinding to dust. In a quick instant there was a gap in the fog and he saw the enormity of what was before him. An opening into the earth with no discernible bottom that spanned what seemed miles in either direction. Mist had begun to bead and freeze on Thom’s eyelashes. The temperature was dropping. He stared at the opening, trying to discern any kind of ledge or shelf or bottom. The fog seemed pulled into it, as if the hole drank from the atmosphere. The rim was rock and dirt.
A hole to throw yourself into, brain quipped, awakened by a new challenge. Thom stumbled closer. He tried to find resources within himself to walk around this new obstacle. He edged closer to the hole, tried to see if he could walk down, but all he saw inside it was blackness. Could he climb down one side and up the other? He kicked at a stone on the lip. It glided silently and eerily into the blackness. Then the edge collapsed beneath him.
Thom bounced heavily against the rim, the deadweights of the couch and Erik landing on top of him. All three of them slipped over the edge and into freefall. He felt himself spinning, felt the depth of the hole underneath him, an echoing soundlessness of infinite space, a black hole of a hole that would suck him into another dimension.
He took a deep, frightened breath and noted how easy it was to breathe without the weight of his body and burdens. He felt an immediate release from responsibility, a release from life. He was falling fast, and he wasn’t entirely sure he minded.
He braced himself, knowing that any second he would land on something hard, something permanent and immortal that his feeble mortality would be no match for. He looked back and could see the mouth of the hole above, the only visible light, a gray opening that receded and closed above him like a great gray eye winking.
So this is how the story ends, my story. He tried to relax into it and remembered that relaxed car-accident victims fared better than tensed ones. He tentatively tried a holler, but the sound traveled down and ahead without echoing back.
He became aware of his body, his frigid fingers, the bruises on his shoulders, his battered legs, his deflated stomach. He idly pondered each joint, and waited for his life to begin flashing before his eyes. Did one will this to happen, this pre-death flashback, and was there any way to prevent it? He braced himself for the relentless stream of computer screens, his timidness in his colossus self, the emotionally crowded space of growing up fatherless, and the rest of his life screened pitifully through his mind.
How deep could a hole be?
He tried to look in the direction he was falling but couldn’t tell which direction was which. There was no sign of the couch or Erik. Only a vague feeling of vertigo and being unable to touch anything solid reinforced the notion that he was falling.
This last month was different, he thought. Perhaps life wasn’t an endless loop of uncomfortable drudgery after all. Or rather, perhaps heaven was an endless loop of one’s choosing. But the problem was, he hadn’t created the time from which to pluck a perfect endless loop.
At least the couch was forever lost from whoever else had wanted it. Certainly no rescue team could plumb a crevasse this deep.
Two hundred kilometers per hour, brain dug up from some lost corner: the terminal velocity of a human falling through the atmosphere. So how many kilometers underground was he now?
He thought of Erik out there in the dark with him. Unconscious and falling. Lifelessly bound for lifelessness.
His mother would be heartbroken. It struck him that this was exactly the sort of fate that mothers feared for their only sons. His father had abandoned his mother by returning home from Vietnam in a bag, and now her son was mangled at the bottom of a hole south of the equator. She would turn to painkillers and depression drugs, or just turn, like a pear in the sun.
“Mom,” he said in the dark, and tried to send her a psychic message of apology. “I was foolish, I went looking for that which cannot be found.”
I’ve done it then, he thought. Was I returning it or destroying it? Is there a difference?
He felt calm and almost giddy. A hazy warm pleasantness spread through his limbs like hot chocolate.
Hypothermia, brain observed, coming to him as if from the end of a long tunnel. But what did it matter? He was a speeding icy comet, center-of
-the-earth bound.
Even so, he folded himself up, collapsed his limbs into a tight ball. Yes, now a meteor. I want it, he thought. I don’t want a delirious, hypothermic death. I only get one last sensation. This is it. The cannonball. The only dive I ever learned. All the kids at the public pool laughing, shouting, “Thom! Thom! Cannonball!” The big kid makes the big splash.
He would accelerate to a new terminal velocity, pass Erik. I’m conscious, I’m the one who made it, I finished this affair. I deserve to be first.
The most exquisite endless loop could have been fashioned from his time with Jean. In a pinch, in the absence of twenty, forty, sixty years together, he could take their one Cuenca night even with its awkwardness and drama, its distrust and pleasure, and try to forge an eternal existence with that. With Jean, for the first time in his life, he’d realized that leaving that caravan of raucous insecurities wouldn’t have been too bad.
The wind was not what he would have expected for such a fall. Or he was getting used to it. Or there was no air to speak of.
And maybe that caravan hadn’t yet caught him up, maybe he was Azulman, diving gloriously to his death, mission accomplished. Maybe he had indeed made that transition from overturned cockroach to human, pupa to butterfly, egg to eagle. He was soaring.
He spread his limbs wing-wide. “I am Thom!” he yelled down the hole. “I am a kamikaze, I am a suicide bomber, I claim victory in my Jihad against the cancer blighting the American soul. A piece of furniture. A couch.”
Dramatic, brain quipped.
“Yes,” said Thom. “Yes! I know! And I know you too, dear brain. Now is your chance, speak all you want.”
Oh, brain said, and was silent.
He expected death at any instant, though a suspicion began to creep in. Perhaps this was his fate, to fall through the earth, to yo-yo through the center from one end to the other. This was hell, then, this was his interpretation of Sisyphus, to get ever closer to the surface only to yo back the other direction. Or perhaps this was only the routine descent to hell. Perhaps he was just another passenger on that somber train.
But I don’t believe in any of that, Thom protested mildly, and then remembered he was open to whatever strange ace the universe had up its sleeve.
But Jean.
Hadn’t he been close there, hadn’t there been something? Hadn’t his Titanic suddenly skirted the iceberg his life might have been? And Erik still hurtling above him. This was no end. This was some joke, this was a perversity, a meaningless fable. Had he or had he not eradicated the dread couch? I deserve my just rewards. Half the kingdom and the princess too.
This was an outrage, and nasty letters would be written, I can tell you. Letters to the editor, for one, to the publisher. “I expect every one of you to write your congressman,” he said into the dark.
Who has voted me off this island? After the work I’ve done for humanity.
I’ve got to climb back up, I’ve got to get out, Thom realized. I’ve finished my quest. Patul is the fucking cloud city, you deluded fuck. Our past is in ruins—it’s time to find Future City, time to make it. There’s still time not to repeat ourselves. He thrashed against the air, seeking a wall. “I’m not through yet,” he shouted in the direction he believed was down. He set every muscle to work fighting gravity, clawed against the air and tried to climb his way molecule by molecule out of the hole. Swinging his big arms with all the force that was left in him, pushing at the air, trying to put anything between him and his descent.
And then, amidst his thrashing, above him, like a gauzy curtain slowly opening, appeared the most delicate thumbnail clipping of moonlight.
He stared at it in disbelief. His brain was immersed in the depths of a sea. As if he’d just discovered the direction he’d been swimming was away from the surface. A heavy, overpowering exhaustion poured over him as his vertigo subsided. He was lying on the ground.
A hooded face eclipsed the moon and said, “It always feels like falling.” The voice had a strong accent and sounded apologetic. Thom’s brain repeated this phrase dully before he understood that he’d heard it. That a voice had spoken that was not Erik’s and not his own. The moon reappeared as the figure retreated.
“What?” Thom said.
“The axis mundi. It feels like falling,” the voice said, and then was gone.
Thom rolled the words around in his mind trying to remember what an axis mundi was. Some kind of connection between sky and land.
With an effort he lifted his head and saw Erik lying facedown across his legs. He spotted the tail end of the couch being dragged away by a group of hooded figures. Then they stopped and surrounded it. There were half a dozen or so of them, but whether it was the cloaks or the moonlight, he couldn’t quite get the number, like trying to count fish in a school of fish. They spoke quietly. The couch was a wreck. What appeared to be its left armrest sat detached not three feet from him, its invincibility apparently worn off. One of the hooded figures reached toward the center cushion and then shied back, as if afraid of getting bitten. Another stepped up, her hood down and long stringy hair showing. She pulled the center cushion off and reached deep into the couch with both hands and withdrew an object the size of a shoebox. It was a box, Thom saw, and the woman—was it a woman?—removed the lid and they peered inside.
“Hey!” Thom said. He wanted to get up but his body felt as if it were made of sand bags and clay. “Hey,” he said.
They looked up from where they’d been sifting through the box and then returned their attention to it.
Goddammit, Thom thought. Hello brain? Engine room? “Listen, can I get some kind of explanation here?” he called again.
One separated from the group and approached him. “This is for you,” she said.
He could see a tiny reflection of light in her eyes. She held out what looked like a small stone.
“Well hi,” Thom said. “Can you help get Erik off of me?”
“Erik will be fine. Please take this.”
Thom held his hand out and she dropped the stone into it.
“You understand I’m a little bit confused?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a long way back. Good luck.”
“Who are you guys? I mean. What is this?” He held the stone up toward the moon to try to discern its color.
“A seed. The couch, it was protecting the seeds.”
“What?”
“It was like a shield, a shell, around the library.”
“The library?” Thom said and he felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. “A library. Not books?”
“No. From the first garden, seeds to all of the trees. Seeds to the plants and ideas that have been lost. The Tree of Knowledge is in there, the Tree of Life, the Tree of Forgiveness, the Tree of Clarity, and lots of other trees, trees you wouldn’t have names for.”
“Oh,” Thom said. “Whoa.”
“Plant the seed I gave you, Thom,” she said and turned away.
“Wait,” he said, but the entourage receded into the mist and dark and cold, towing the couch after them.
Understanding rushed in at Thom then, through vessels cleared of their plaque. They’d come bearing seeds from Eden, and from every garden since. They had carried two things, balanced in opposition, a shell and a nut, the couch and its cache, the power to destroy and the remnants of what it had destroyed. All of the gifts that humans, in their industry and genius, had destroyed.
There were figures there and not there, apparitions shimmering in the foglight. One seemed to linger and for a moment Thom almost thought it was the thin, stooped figure of Tree.
“Hello?” Thom called out into the dark but his voice was weak. He struggled to catch another glimpse. “Tree!” he yelled and felt sure he saw the figure wave. And then Tree turned to follow the rest of the cloaked figures into the fog. Trees, brain said. Tree.
Then Thom and Erik were alone. He lay there under the sky until he found it within himself to move.
&nbs
p; After a while Erik stirred and groaned.
“Erik,” Thom said gently, “let’s get up. Let’s go home.”
Two satchels had been left behind for them. In the open neck of the closest one Thom could see the moonlit sheen of an apple.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the following people who were of great help in writing this book. Perhaps if you mouthed their names as you read, their ears would tingle just so.
Paul Chaney (paulchaney.org) was my first reader. I met him in Ecuador and while he worked casting sculpture outside our apartment and breathing in lead fumes, I wrote away. He read the entire first draft in a single sleepless night and I just can’t think of anything more potently encouraging than that. He also introduced me to two other marvelous people, the artists Marco Grieser-Rønnevig and Eva Konstance Rønnevig (artbonbon.com), who talked my wife Laura and I into going on a camping trip with them. They dragged us through some of the most difficult terrain I’ve experienced for five days in El Cajas in the Andes with an extremely stubborn mule. It was the middle of the wet season, when clouds descended from the sky and nestled into the land, and the locals were sure we’d be killed by smugglers or lost. Instead, the smugglers turned out to be some of the best people on Earth. When the toilet paper ran out and food was scarce, Laura and I turned back and Marco and Eva continued deep into the Andean wilderness for nearly a month; a few of their stories were fictionalized in this book. Steve Tighe ran the English Cafe and bookstore in Cuenca, Ecuador and his reading was a huge encouragement and the cafe a place of great respite.
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