Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  Thingy’s father, Mr. Clawson, had a collection of steins in his basement entertainment room. He arranged them seasonally in the niches behind his half-bar with the two mahogany vinyl-padded bar stools which always squeaked when we came down the stairs as if a party of somber drinkers, already elbow-deep in their beers, were turning to observe us, not particularly impressed. The steins were lidded and fanciful. Some were ceramic, some pewter. There was even a wooden one, the belly lined with lead, a motif of berry-laded vines massing up its sides; one stein even glass, soldered into panels, the glass old and wavering toward its bottom, the lid tinted an optimistic pink. Do I need to say how much I loved them? They were forbidden; they were jealously tended. Sometimes Thingy would take them from their niches and we would consider them closely. Thingy insisted on holding them. I constrained myself to reaching out one finger to mark the dust in the pursed mouth of a rosebud or brush a cobweb from the brim of the mountaineer’s cap. Sometimes, I fit my thumb into the groove at the top of a handle and pressed the lid slowly open and shut.

  The mountaineer stein was a particular favorite of Mr. Clawson’s. This was another ceramic mug, the base thick and imprinted with the name of its Swiss manufacturer. The lid was shaped like a mountain top—austere and alpine, its glacial peak bearing no resemblance to our own worn, tree-furred ridges—and the handle was an oversized, rosy-cheeked, loden-capped yodeler, lips puckered, head flung back, pheasant feather unfurling brilliantly down his spine. It was a beautiful, foolish thing. Mr. Clawson was proud of it.

  “Purchased from a store on Mount Blanc,” he told Thingy and I as we sat uneasily on the barstools. He was drinking clear liquor from a tiny glass into which he would sometimes allow us to dip the tips of our tongues. “Little place, untouched by time, the glacier melt turning a water wheel outside.” Mr. Clawson considered the stein ruminatively, turning it to its best advantage. “It made a little scooping noise. That’s the only way to describe it. That water wheel I mean, and the glacier water like milk, I mean milky like what is that liquor? Ouzo? The one the Greeks drink. Right away I knew I had to have it, and what’s the name for a glacial valley, Ingrid? Morass, that’s right.”

  Then us alone, Thingy with the stein cradled in her lap, her corduroy skirt pulled over her knees to form a sling for it, and I with my rough finger pressing the hinge that would make the mountain open and the mountaineer’s head tip back still further, unperturbed, whistling now in idiot surprise to see the wall of rock suspended above his face. But of course it never fell. The mountain opened and shut, hollow, disgorging no treasures. When one day we filled it with water from the bar sink and each took prim, sacrosanct sips, the only prophecy the stein reflected was the sad fate of a spider, washed from her web, drowning peevishly in the water’s dusty ripples. “Yodeleheehoo,” I instructed Thingy, but she was listening to the sound of her mother’s footsteps in the kitchen above our heads and she would only titter. “Hee Hoo, Hee Hoo,” she said while clapping the lid of the stein roughly shut.

  In the other real world that was going on all around us it wasn’t as simple as clapping the top of the mountain back on, but this was the general idea. The new mining concerns understood the pace of the century better than the old loners. Certainly, better than the gaunt, blackened pickmen with their company issued work pants and their 1930’s collectivism who were so saturated with coal dust that when cut they bled first black and only later a reluctant red. What I’m trying to explain is how it was to be a child then. Thingy and I can be imagined in any number of topical scenarios—picture the legwarmers and Thingy’s flaxen perm—and that would be true, but what we were also like was two small, densely furred creatures crouched in a burrow, listening to the sound of a huge, inexplicable purpose going on over our heads. We grew up. Time can’t really be stopped; only paused, vibrating along its edges like a bee trapped in a glass jar.

  The new mining concerns drove through mountain towns in phalanxes of white vans, pick-ups and belching diesel trucks. When they came to a mountain that seemed likely they arranged the ranks of eager machines and sheered the top of the mountain off. Then they went to work rooting out what they found there: copper and lead, zinc, gold, silver, olivine and feldspar, mica, quartz, emerald and kyanite, apatite, tourmaline, saltpeter, marble, slate, quartz and porcelain clay, beryl, amethyst, ruby and sapphire, limestone and even uranium, innocuous and deadly.

  When I was a child, the days of discovery seemed to have ended. Off came the mountaintop, out came the treasure, dumped with the fill dirt for later sorting. It was business, progress. What the mining concerns really wanted were the iron and the coal. Jacob tells me that some mountains still show to the south or east their ancient faces thick with deadfalls, but from the north or west they reveal themselves to be hollowed entirely. A mask. Scooped so only their expressions remain.

  When they were finished, to tidy things up I suppose, the mining concerns gathered all that had been sorted and discarded, all that was left, and tumbled it back into the mountain’s empty core. Imagine that: bears and panthers, long needle pine, the massy trunks of tulip poplar, eagles, moss, river trout, old leather shoes, gold panning plates, brick foundations, lakes, bones and older bones, wood burning stoves, hickory ghosts, balding tires, skins, fish-rib hooks, boulders, flint arrow heads, generational beds of bluebells, church spires, snakes, chicken wire, sulfur-bellied newts all jumbled together, slick with muck. And their voices. . .a torrent of voices, unintelligible, meaningless as the shadow of the mountain top crests over their pit, as the lid claps shut.

  These were not our mountains, Ingrid. This happened further up the chain, and what rimmed the edges of the creek beds was just an echo. When the mining trucks came through Elevation—traveling north, skirting the parklands, heading upstream—Thingy and I would stand on the corner and wave. Sometimes we clasped each other’s hands and held them up over our heads and the men in the trucks and vans waved to us. They were mostly young, hair held back in practical fashion from their eyes with blue bandanas. Thingy and I thought they were handsome, and we looked winsomely after the trucks though we were too old to chase them as some of the boys in the neighborhood did. Later, we lingered in the hollow heart of Mrs. Clawson’s forsythia bush and gloated over our future. Thingy would marry the one sitting high in the cab of the Bobcat and I would marry the man driving the truck. We never saw them again, or if we did we didn’t recognize them. The next week or month there would be a new batch winding through. Thingy would marry the man who blew her a kiss from the jostling cab window; I, she chose for me, the one in the bed of the pick-up truck, eating a banana, blinking the wind out of his eyes.

  Maybe she was right. I’ve never asked Jacob and I doubt he would remember. Did you see two girls? One silver blond, hair like a spent dandelion drifting up from her head; one small, ill-favored, looking behind her to the window in the ranch house that was always left open to the street? Did you see me? I would have to say.

  But back to the story at hand: Alice and Dax and how they met. Really, I have no idea.

  There wasn’t much left of my mother in the house I grew up in. A photo of her holding my brother Luke just after he was born. The color is super saturated. My mother’s hair looks like varnish, a slick cherry, and her T-shirt is almost ultraviolet. She is very young and she holds her baby like she might a book, away from her body. She is not smiling and Luke is already looking nowhere in particular. They are standing together in the driveway of the house I would be born into, pocked brick, the azalea beside the front door blooming so white in the oversaturated corner it has lost all definition.

  It seems like a lethargic photo, perhaps one that confirms a general suspicion about our poverty or emotional sloth. The azalea appears to stalk my mother and her son, a ravenous void descending, and to get this angle my father must have stood in the steep road where often the logging trucks would pop their brakes only at the bend and squeal in barely contained slides down to the sand ramp 100 feet past our drive. That was
Top Road, named because it went on all the way to the top of the mountain, and that was Alice, named because her older sister Thalia had already taken their mother’s name and she was born a little more free.

  Other than this photo, which I keep tucked as a place mark inside various books, there was little in my childhood to remember my mother by. A set of garish plates, turquoise glaze patterned with elephants outlined in rose. Each elephant gripped the tail of the one before so they went around and around the inner face of the plate, around and around the yellow corn, the sliced hot dog, the smear of ketchup. As a young child I understood they were all mother elephants, though there was not a baby among them. As an older child, Rosellen gave them back to Thalia to keep for my adulthood. They were too nice for me now, she said. She said I was the kind of girl who might be inclined to thoughtlessly, willfully, break.

  The rest was detritus, much of it anonymous: an egg timer, a red, bell-sleeved wool coat. A clock carved from a slab of wood in which an owl swooped and seemed about to snatch a frozen rabbit, though Thingy and I once plotted its trajectory and concluded that each time it would narrowly miss. And Luke, of course. And me.

  Once, Alice Luttrell left her house by the back door, but not before packing a little red backpack with a hunk of bread wrapped in foil, a sweating piece of white cheese, a yellow thermos filled to the brim with coffee. She also packed a book—any old thing, Reader’s Digest Condensed about a mountaineer and his Sherpa, his yak, his perilous victory—and left the door unlatched. The house, which was spare but grand, sat alone at the head of a bald on the mountainside. From behind her now, growing further away as the forest pressed together in her wake. By this point, Alice Luttrell was a motherless child as are so many of us. It had happened quite recently, a lingering illness, one of those events that seemed to belong to a previous century. She did not know what to make of her recovery.

  “O mother, my mother,” she said at night in her bed, the quilt pulled over her head for a tent, the room dark around her, spreading low under the roof beams. No one answered. No star detached itself from the sky and floated through her window, no green light unfurled from between the floorboards. No response but the old wood popping and once the muted thud of an owl landing on the roof. It seemed many stories she had once believed in were false, or at least exaggerated. Alice recognized within herself a sort of relief that this was so. Every day her father went alone from the house to tend to the store, and every day Alice came alone to the house and went out again, with a pack and a book, to a certain clearing she knew of around the side of the mountain.

  Here is Alice and her red backpack. And here is Alice with her small meal, unfolding the tinfoil, unscrewing the mug.

  Alice with her book at the boulder she uses for her table. The girl is so still two titmice flutter into a nearby puddle and scoop water onto their wings. The foil catches the sunlight and attracts a crow which lands breasty in the near grass and examines her over the top of its heavy beak. The girl is so still the rock under the mountain yearns for her, reaches toward her, caresses the sole of her little white shoe.

  But what is this? A girl alone in the forest? So many place settings at which she could be joined and so little left of her meal. The book’s pages turn steadily, hawk’s feather ruffling in the index. The sun, too, beginning to turn. Time failing her as time will always fail her. Shadows stretching their long legs out from the forest. What is the use of a book? Alice was trying to remember. What is the use of an empty space? She was thinking when she heard an unusual noise.

  You know, let’s not overdo it. Alice was a curious girl and the noise was an attractive one. It sounded like suffering, but of a small sort. An animal suffering which can be comforted or, at the last extremity, humanely exterminated by a brave girl with nature in mind. A wise girl who knows the pressing impetus all nature has toward death—red in tooth, the saying goes, displaying its beautiful ruby red claws. In other words, a very young girl.

  In any event, she followed the noise, her book forgotten, feather blown away, and found at the base of the rock a hole, perfectly round, very deep, such as the one a snake might make. Needless to say, down she went.

  After a long and varied time, much travail, some confusion, some tears, Alice came to large lake in the world that was under her world at the other end of the very deep hole. In the center of that lake was an island, tiered like a pyramid of petit fours and as variously colored. It rose to a jeweled height above the lake’s still, black waters, ascending in steps which sucked at the light that was in that place as if they were made from slabs of sponge and the light itself a thin, blue milk being sopped. From that island, clearly from the pyramid, clearly from the pinnacle—a murky box barely visible atop the fantasy steps of madder rose, curded lemon, stale, ladyfinger green—continued to come such gentle, sorrowful moans that Alice’s heart was mostly wrung from her. She spotted a little boat, folded tight as an oak leaf, bobbing at the edge of a splintered green dock. Without any more thought than that, she was rowing for the further shore.

  As Alice drew closer to its source, the sound changed its timber. Now it was reedy and granular—like sand gritting against the sides of a tumbler, like sugar soaking up an egg in the slurry of the whisk. “This whole dream has the sound of a dessert coming together,” thought Alice even as she looked for toeholds in the sides of the lowest level, the rose one, its fondant shell crumbling away in her hands to reveal the core which was indeed a cake, though one brittle with age.

  Up, Alice went, up and up. She climbed a coralline layer rubbled with candied violets. She climbed a sulfurous layer of frangipane studded here and there with ancient, dolorous pralines. Up Alice went, punching determined fists through layers of gingerbread, red velvet, lemon curd, devil’s food.

  “In a way,” Alice thought, “it’s lucky I don’t have a sweet tooth.” Her paltry meal in the meadow far above was a long time ago and as she climbed the layers grew fresher—an airy tuft of angel’s food that was almost appealing, a moist wedge of Lady Baltimore delicately scented with orange instead of mold. She was very hungry. Indeed, Alice had seen all along evidence of the appetites come before her scalloping the edges of the fondant. The climbers, children it seemed by the size of their leavings, had burrowed a series of tunnels that turned past her sight as if the mountaineer himself, pushed past extremity, abandoned by both Sherpa and yak, had used his frozen mitts to fashion a last shelter. In fact, she believed it was getting colder. And wasn’t that she saw misted before her the ragged vestments of her breath?

  Again she heard the sound, a sob at the end of human anguish, and up Alice climbed to the top of the last level.

  Before her stood what she took, with a pang of disappointment, to be a hut of some sort, blear and squat. Then, squinting through the strange air—which had grown thicker as she climbed, milky as glacial water—she determined it was a hive, conical and many-layered. Finally, scrubbing a rind of sugar from her wrists and adjusting the little red backpack on her shoulders, she realized she was looking at a bundt cake: perfectly fluted, dusted on top with a drift of powdered sugar as fine as new-fallen snow.

  Alice looked about, but there was nothing else to see. She walked to the edge of the pyramid and looked over. Below her the white air swirled. Here and there, immense firs pierced the cloud layer. The air ebbed around their bristling, dark crowns as if the trees rose from water. As if they and their brethren grew below the waters of the lake that floated still and black in the world underneath the world along the edges of whose own streams Alice had lain to consider the blonde murk of pebble and sand, translucent fry and the nymphs, dark against the dark weeds, lazily extending their jaws.

  “A little much,” said Alice, but behind her came again the sound—faint now, ragged—and, as there was nowhere left to go, Alice turned and entered the bundt cake through its single arched door.

  She found herself in a round room paved with closely laid slabs of slate. The walls were waxy, fashioned of ascending cells th
at rose above her head to a much greater height than seemed possible from the outside. In the middle of the room a sullen fire and beyond the fire—how to describe it?. . .a cane chair upon which coiled the largest snake Alice had ever dreamed, and beside the snake a roiling shape, a ball, so hard to see as its parts lifted and seethed, separated into here a tail tip, tensile ribs, here a wedge head, eyes glittering, another lifting to rap the first below the chin—a battle then? A slow luxury?. . .the dry shift of their scales rubbing, the cream bellies and white throats turned to the firelight, and then again the moan—so low it is now just a whisper—and again the compacting shift, here a tail tip, there the arch of a foot, a wet mouth, a rolling eye, the head of a man.

  “Hello, Alice,” said the Queen of the Tie-Snakes, for it was she, “What a long time we’ve waited to have you here.”

  “You have?” said Alice. She edged around the fire and stood just out of reach of the Queen’s whiptail. “How did you know it was me?”

  “And because you have been brave,” said the Queen of the Tie-Snakes, who was not listening, “and we reward bravery, but also because you have sometimes been cruel, and we reward honesty; because you have said the right incantations and sang the right songs, eaten the right fruits and drank the right waters; because, in short, you have done all the things a girl should do if she wants to survive in an unexpected world, we reward you with your choice of one of our alters.” The Queen bowed her head and gestured with a regal sweep of her tail to the edges of the room.