The Cause

by Roderick Vincent

  Anger welled up in me. Not knowing what to do, I hauled firewood to my empty cache, hoping to spring a trap for the person who looted my supply. If no one came, I promised myself I would cross the river late in the night and steal a coal from Uriah’s fire. My own moral fiber had suddenly split after seeing Conroy. I had to remind myself the only rule that counted was don’t get caught.

  Close to my hideout, I found a dead branch the size of an arm, gnarled at the top. I mashed stones into the ruts, and wrapped vines around the top in an effort to secure them. In a thicket of bush, I crouched down with a mangrove leaf full of grubs, eating them while waiting for the sun to come down. Dusk finally fell, the jungle like a colossal snake swallowing us, eating the mice of civilized men, each of us a bump in the belly of Nature on our tiny plots of land along her twisting serpentine riverbank shores. Darkness digested what was left of my principles. I felt like a sack of withering flesh over a set of tired bones, and an animal spirit rose up in me.

  Under a heavy wind, I perched like a madman, struck by the fangs of revenge. I crouched saucer-eyed and skeleton-faced, gazing into the darkness, mumbling with a cracked voice through parched and bleeding lips, waiting for the night to sink into its deepest depths.

  I gripped my makeshift club with sweating hands. The soft, incandescent glow from a toenail moon glowed over the river while I ruminated. Perhaps an hour later, I heard a faint rustling, too inconsistent to be the wind. I wondered who it would be. A figure emerged, thin and sticklike, a figurine in the dark, a strange hyena neck protruding from his body leaving a canine-looking head sniffing for danger in front of him. He crept methodically to the edge of the riverbank under the moonlight. It was Burns. Did he not know how much he was exposed?

  I saw him staring down, using the river stones to soften his footsteps. Sneaking slowly to the tempo of windblown leaves, he edged closer to my treasured cache of firewood.

  I sprang, but he sniffed the danger and leapt back into the woods. I pursued—heart humming in my chest, legs finding strength, and through the darkness I chased with renewed vigor, ears acute to the rustle of leaves and each cracking branch ahead. Eyes from The Hole tuned in with what little light bent into the forest, guiding my running feet safely past broken stumps, clumps of creepers, half-buried tree roots. Burns stumbled and fell. Jerking himself back up, he fled toward the river. Only a few footsteps away, I heard his frantic breath panting for air, his lungs heavy and hyperventilating with exhaustion. Finally, he dashed out of the woods and into the twilight. I broke from the trees, out into the openness where bats darted into the moon and the rumble of the flowing river filled my ears. Now inches away, my arms pumped in a sprint until I closed the gap. With my fingers, I nipped Burns’s shirt ruffling in the wind. With a swoop of a foot, I kicked him in the shin, the force of it intersecting and tangling his motion. The gawky Burns went down, tripping over himself, clipped of his legs as he tumbled onto the stones of the riverbank. He screamed as I plunged on top of him. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  I dragged him closer to the shore. Gibberish poured out of him incoherently in a noisy stream. One of his pleas might have been Conroy’s name. The tumult of excuses continued as I plunged his head under the water, drowning his protests. Pulling him up after ten seconds made him even more frantic, so down he went again. He clutched at my wrists wrapped around his throat, his body thrashing under me. His arms traveled to my face. Fingernails dug into my skin. I cocked my head away, gazing up at the zinging bats over the moon. The stars twinkled as brightly as shards of broken glass. Once more I brought his head out of the water. This time, he coughed, and then vomited up a mouthful of river. Once finished, he glared up at me, wormy strings of hair slithering into his beady eyes.

  “Steal my fucking wood,” I yelled.

  He shook his head. No, it wasn’t me, his eyes said. “Briana,” he croaked. But then a hand slid behind his back—the sudden shift of weight from beneath my hips—and out of the water came a fist clenched with a large stone. I blocked his wrist, but the stone hurled toward me as his wrist’s momentum stopped. The blow stung my ear and cheek, but I remained conscious, still mounted, and still able to grab him by the neck and push him under. I held my breath, and in so doing, split myself in two—one man feeling him drown, the other alive and free, breathing the cool midnight air. As he squirmed, flopping in the eddies, swiping at my chest, leaving long claw marks and tracks of blood, his hand rolled over my heart, punching at the missing picture of the Earth drowning in space. And then my fingers clamped, thumbs pushing furiously into his throat, my knuckles white with the toil of squeezing. The water roiled with sediment. His hands grasped for another rock, and his feet squirmed to kick free from the unbearable weight on top of him. So there, under the moonlight shining on the muddy berms of an unnamed river, it was I who gasped for breath with him, saw the cold, marble-blue Earth reemerge from darkness, an eye of God in the midst of the vast universe.

  Finally, the fighting body of Burns relaxed. The water grew calm. The rippling water receded back to the flat mirror it once was. I told myself that perhaps Burns continued in some other universe that wasn’t this one. Only then, so close between life and death, the lucidity of Seee’s name became clear. Finally, I was truly seeing.

  Chapter 12

  “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”

  -Sigmund Freud

  I clung to Burns’s stiffening limb against the pull of the river. I had broken the rules and crossed into another man’s zone. The owner now a corpse floating supine, wide-open fish eyes gazing up at the stars. Exhausted after the struggle, I let go of the dead man’s leg and watched the body slowly drift downstream. My head throbbed. Blood ran down the side of my cheek from a gash on the side of my forehead. I washed out the wound, and crawled up to the riverbank.

  The moment, once again calm. The events of the last few minutes a wisp in the wind. The bats returned, fluttering in the moonlight, undisturbed by what had unfolded below.

  How long had I held him there against the pull of the current? How long had I wept for him? I swept my cheeks with my palm and found they were dry. I had killed men before, but always from a distance, never in hand-to-hand combat. I gazed down at my hands and felt the rough calluses on my inside palm, knuckles scratched and bloodied. I felt weak. The hunger welling up inside me consumed any flickering sign of remorse. Where was the guilt? Ready to admit I was an immoral man, I couldn’t conjure up shame no matter how much I willed it.

  I crawled wearily back to the edge of the jungle and passed out. At dawn I woke, startled by the yelping of monkeys. I took a moment to recollect what had transpired. In danger of being caught out in the open, I quickly jogged upstream, where I found the ash and ruins of Burns’s nesting place. I searched his camp hoping to find tools or matches but found nothing. His shabby bivouac had the roof torn off. There was ash and evidence of a fire, but the place was in disarray. Overturned rocks and dug-in footprints indicated a raid on his premises. I found a bloodstained stone, and I tried to recall any marks on Burns while we scuffled. I searched for other evidence that might have suggested a group struggle, wondering if it was the work of a pack, but saw nothing conclusive. Nature had ripped a seam into the fabric of brotherhood, sinking a spear into the heart of civility after only twenty-one days. I recalled Hassani’s words under the persona of Bloom at the Timothy Skies dinner: After about three days without eating, you get a bit antsy. You find yourself weakening, and suddenly those dormant animalistic tendencies encoded in your genes wake up and want to do something about it.

  Once back in my camp, I vomited in a bush. A fever bore down on me. I lumbered to the river to drink. Bending down into a glistening eddy in the stream, my reflection appeared. A haggard, emaciated man with cuts covering body and face looked back at me. Someone I scarcely re
cognized. In the water, the body of a ghost had taken over Isse Corvus. I scooped him up with my hands and put him to my lips, swallowed him. Then I was looking into a different dimension. The left-over drops falling out of my hands and onto the smoothed riverbank stones contained only parts of him.

  The world went poof, and I flew up over the trees and into a cloud. Within the white haze, I came to a house. I fumbled for a doorknob and upon opening it, found I was in bed, sniffing the soft skin of an ex-girlfriend, the beatitude of Rose Rossetti draped over my arm and breathing into the nape of my neck. The soft fragrance coming from her long curly hair reached my nose. I ran my fingers over her curvy hips, tracing a line up to her breasts. I whiffed the pungent scents of passion coming from them. In the dream, I missed this beauty in the world, this softness.

  I looked across the room, and a tree stood twenty feet away, its trunk busting though the ceiling. Its leaves were as white as snow. Blue fruit, shaped like pyramids, dangled from its branches. The house shook, and then fell into the earth, and Rose disappeared with it. A moat of darkness surrounded the white-leafed tree, the pit having no bottom. I stood up from the floor and glimpsed at the sky, seeing its height extending beyond my point of vision. The fruit jounced softly in the wind’s embrace, dangling on branches above the void, just out of reach, yet close enough to snatch with a daring leap. With the sense I had already died, I jumped forward and plucked a piece of the blue-skinned fruit from the branch and tumbled into the darkness.

  I woke, still alive, scrabbling among river rocks as the tide bumped me in the face. I caught a mouthful of water and coughed it out. It was late afternoon, and I had lost the day to delirium. Sleep had been the only refuge from the toil of survival.

  I hobbled back to my bivouac where a sparrow was singing high up in the branches of a mangrove. It gazed down at me one-eyed and curious, his head shifting in quick jerks to different vantage points. He saw the same haggard and withering man I had—a frail giant, skinny and sickly, the stench of death covering him like feathers. His little buzzing head was asking why, as if my state were a matter of choice. Then he flew off, bored with me. Deserted by Nature, I sat down and leaned my head back on the bole of the tree and began to weep. After what seemed like hours, I sucked in a lungful of air and stood, the desperation of the situation pulling me to my feet, however inane the action seemed. I flaked away another clump of bark from the hole I bore in the mangrove the day before. No beetles crawled beneath. The clenched fist of hunger gripped my stomach, beating me to feed, so I put the bark in my mouth. The taste was bitter. My glands refused to moisten it.

  A noise of cracking branches caused me to turn. The woods split open, and Seee burst through the trees riding bareback on his black stallion, its hindquarters lathered in sweat. Seee’s face was painted. He wore white swirly paste from the thanaka root on his cheeks. Red streaked under his eyes, and blue paint on his forehead dripped down the sides of his face. Quickly, I wiped away the tears, but he saw them still.

  He cocked his head and glared into my eyes. “I see Isse Corvus is learning to become a man of the earth,” he said. His expression was neither strict nor pitiless. “It is a hard lesson.” He steadied his horse, the animal whinnying through its nose. “You are realizing you are small under the thumb of Nature.” He smiled at me, a paternal glimmer in his eyes. “The earth is burying you, so you must now dig yourself out.” The gelding tried to throw him, kicking his front feet in the air, and Seee yanked down hard on the reins. “Remember this day and it will remember you.” He tossed over a knife. It landed in the ground near where I stood. “Carve today’s date into that tree.” He pointed. “Right next to where you’ve peeled off the bark for your supper.”

  I leaned over and picked up the knife, every muscle deep in protest. Knife in hand, I stared at the tree. The seconds drifted by until I said, “I’ve lost track of time.”

  “November 27, 2022,” he said.

  I carved the numbers into the tree, exerting all of my will to cut deep and strong. When I finished, he said, “Now, give me back the knife.”

  I looked longingly at the shiny knife with the sharp blade. Seee’s horse neighed, and Seee slapped him and told him to steady. He held out his hand for the knife. I reached out and offered it to him handle-first, eyeing it as if it could have been my hand I was giving him. Then he disappeared into the trees and left me with the horror that I would die out here, desperate and starving.

  The next morning, I woke in a leaf bed under the tree branches of my bivouac. Birds chirped in the distance. I got up and pissed in the forest and then limped to the river for a drink. Smoke plumed from the trees on the other side of the bank, and the heavy breeze carried the aroma of cooking fish.

  Laid out on a stone on the riverbank shore, I saw two freshly dead trout. I scurried up to them, picking one up and lifting it into the light. The shiny scales glittered in the sun. Biting directly into a fleshy bit near the belly, I sat down on the rock and devoured the whole fish raw, picking scales and bones out of my teeth as I went. I buried the other fish, hoping to save it for later, then crossed the river to meet Uriah. Through a little break in the woods, he sat on a stone feeding a branch to the fire, his back toward me. “Did you enjoy the fish?” he asked.

  “Did Seee put you up to it?”

  “No, I thought you might be hungry. Was I mistaken?”

  A moment passed. “No,” I said. “Thanks for your generosity.”

  He fed the fire with another branch, turning it over as his eyes remained deep in the blaze, transfixed by its heat and licking orange tongues. “Perhaps you forget The Two Methods of Criticism. The one of helping the clan overcome their faults.”

  I laughed at this. “You think it is my fault I am starving?”

  “Isn’t it? You lack certain knowledge. This much you must admit.”

  I paused, marking his words. “The penalty would be severe if you were caught.”

  “As would it be for you if they saw you standing here.”

  For no other reason than I was ridden with guilt, I blurted out, “I killed Burns. Perhaps I will be punished for that.”

  Uriah was silent. He fed the fire another branch but continued doing it in silence.

  “It wasn’t the plan, but he raided my camp and then we got into it.”

  “I am confused,” he said in a tone that was clear and hard. “I killed Bunker, which you hated me for, yet now you stand here speaking with me as if I am a friend, not an enemy.”

  “You aren’t my enemy.”

  “You see how the tail can flip to the head. We change. Our thoughts change, and you are one in metamorphosis, turning slowly into a warrior who will fight for The Cause.”

  A torrent of questions burned in my head while I kept silent.

  “You were misled, but now your eyes are opening.” Something prophetic intonated in his voice as he unwrapped the secrets he knew about me. A manner of speaking that contained the brooding logic of our leader.

  “Enough with conjecture, Uriah. I don’t know what nonsense you are speaking about.”

  “But you do.”

  I let the moment rest. I hated having his back facing me, but I didn’t want to circle around him either. “How about you? What are you doing in this camp? Who let you in?”

  He sighed with a heavy breath. “Your question is not pertaining to the here and now is it? If I were a sensitive man, I’d take it as an insult. You persist in ignoring the lessons of bushido.”

  “You speak of bushido, but you aren’t a soldier. You can’t run. You can’t fight. Perhaps you’re good with a sword, but the morning trainings almost kill you. How did they let you in here?”

  “So you think I don’t belong because I cannot hack it?”

  I moved a bit. His body still angled away from me, but now I could see one of his eyes glaring straight into the blue of the fire. His soft tone almost seemed to drift with it. “It isn’t my intention to be insulting. You give more effort than anybody. I’m just st
ating a truth—the way I see it.”

  “Admirable. Yet, I will live longer than you if the path we wander remains the same.”

  The words struck me hard. I glanced up into the sky. A hawk flew high in the air—a real bird of prey, glassing the river for fish, scanning the ground for a rodent or snake. “What do you see in him anyway?” I asked.

  His head shifted around a bit more toward me, and from a side-angle, his face revealed a little more of itself. He looked like a relic of the ancient past, an extinct Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon with an impish jaw. Eyes were dark, the dull color of a wild boar, and they floated unnaturally in his sockets. He bent further toward the fire and said, “He sees the visible future others don’t.” He picked up a smoothed stone, fondled it in his fingers, held it up. “If I throw this rock at the river, will it skip or will it sink?”

  I glimpsed back toward the river. The hawk was still up in the air, closer to the water, wings wide and gliding against the wind, taut and hovering, wild gusts jerking him in the air, the bird calculating currents below. In the sky was a true hunter. Myself—a man grounded to the earth, a man with no wings.

  “It all depends on how it is thrown,” Uriah continued, kicking a log in the fire. He watched it grow angry, its sparks leaping into the air. “I know how I intend to throw it. You do not. Does it mean the stone will skip if I intend it to skip? No, it does not.”

  The hawk was gone, and our eyes still had not met.

  “It is only intent,” he continued. “Action is a force of this intent, but it does not make it skip.”

  Finally he stood, turning and staring deeply at me with his dark, animal eyes. A look of fortitude shone in them as if he were reading words from a book, voicing to me who the true man was inside. “The future doesn’t happen merely because one wills it,” he said. “Seee merely wants to be the force of intent, but he is well aware that we are the fluid. We are the ones who lower the viscosity. We are the essence that aids the stone to ricochet. You will either be with him or against him, but you should at least make the effort to listen.”