“Why didn’t we get to see the dinosaurs?” Rosalyn asked peevishly.
“Ah, baby, another time,” Michael said, maneuvering around the road that rounded a rock that seemed to be perfectly balanced on another and held by nothing more than belief.
“What if we become extinguished, like the dinosaurs?” Rosalyn said.
“Extinct,” I corrected automatically.
“You know, like all of a sudden, they weren’t there anymore, and there was only the cootie boundary and suddenly no bones at all, not even a few, like they escaped?”
“The KT boundary,” Michael said, seriously. He was always serious in answering the kids’ questions. “And it wasn’t all that sudden. Or rather it was but we know what caused it and–” He stopped as a furry calico body came leaping out of the back seat and in my direction.
“Rosalyn!” I said. She was the one nearest the kitten cage, albeit with a seat back between them and us.
“The kittens got out,” she said, at the same time.
Michael pulled over, probably as shaken as I was by the idea of kittens under the car pedals. Or dropping on his head, when he least expected them.
While I grabbed a chubby screaming calico, Caroline gathered a couple of orange kittens from under the back seats. Moving the suitcase aside from atop the cage, and counting, it was determined that Trixie and the rest of her brood remained confined, and the escapees were thrown back in and the lock – of the sort that you needed to depress at two points before it would open – firmly closed.
As Michael started the car again, down the final slope out of the park, I said, gently, “Rosalyn, you can’t let them out. It’s not safe for them or for us. They could get under daddy’s feet and make it impossible for him to stop the car.”
“I didn’t,” she said. “They did.”
“Honey, they can’t open that lock,” Michael said.
“They did,” Rosalyn protested. “You’re just upset because you’re going to be extinguished. Like the dinosaurs.”
Michael started again, patiently, explaining the shocked quartz at the boundary and the almost certainty that what had brought on extinction had been a meteor impact. I wondered if he was explaining all this for the same reason he had gone to work, as a way of making this seem like a routine, habitual excursion. He’d been explaining things like this to the kids for as long as they’d been alive.
“I don’t know if that is exactly true, daddy,” Caroline said, shifting in her seat. “I’ve been thinking.”
“What, and you also think we’re about to be extinguished?” Michael asked, half teasing. I could hear the relief in his voice, as we left the park and found relatively unobstructed access to the highway into New Mexico. He had to be thinking, as I was, of how long the gas would last us, and of how far we could go.
Carolyn shrugged. Her face, framed by lank dark hair, looked desperately intense, with the intensity of early adolescence. “It’s just daddy, that many times there’s no dinosaur skeletons at all above the impact deposit. You’d think if they died of the impact...”
“I see,” he said. “So what’s your theory?”
“I don’t have one,” she said. But it was the sullen tone of a kid who did have one, but knew she would be teased for it. “There’s tons of extinctions before that, though, some that destroyed all of a type of life, and no big impacts or signs of them, to account for them. Like... like, the trilobites and stuff.”
“They were extinguished!” Rosalyn said, with glee, nodding vigorously up and down. “He didn’t like them and he erased them, and he drew something else.”
“He?” Michael asked, raising an eyebrow.
“You know, God.”
For a moment, my husband was speechless. It wasn’t that we weren’t religious. We were as religious as the next person, which in normal days were our next door neighbors, who were probably devout atheists. In our case, when we came to skipping Sunday services, the church we avoided attending was Episcopalian, though we made courtesy visits for Christmas and Easter and the girls had been baptized.
But there was no mention of any particular power when discussing evolution. Michael had made sure they understood that life, as we knew it, was the result of random selection, nothing more. I was waiting the explosion, and running through my mind the various new friends who might have given my daughter this odd notion, when Michael said, “I see. How does God come into it, baby?”
“Well, I figured that he makes things, you know, and when he doesn’t like it, he erases it, and makes something else.”
“If that were true,” Michael said, slowly. “Then he would have erased all the mammals when he erased the dinos, because you see, mammals were around long before, though they were small and...”
“Not always,” Caroline said, as if glimpsing a way to distract her father, who had set his foot on the gas in the straightaway towards Raton Pass, and who – they knew from experience – might get much much faster if he got annoyed. Not that the police would be out today, I thought, but all the same, I was grateful to my older daughter, as she said, “They’ve compiled all the studies and found that mammal diversification and in fact the size of mammals had increased before the dinosaur extinction. And in fact, their evolution didn’t accelerate till sometime after the dinosaurs had disappeared. Don’t remember how long, but quite a while.”
Normally this might prove a notion that Michael would argue, but in this case, it only caused him to say triumphantly, “See, Rosy, it’s not like that. There is no great designer who erases a creation and draws another one. Mammals, like us, were already here when the dinosaurs became extinct.”
She pouted at him, then shrugged. “Doesn’t mean no one is doing it,” she said, with more determination than grammar. “You know they could have to draw the right thing, first, to make sure it was what they wanted, before they erased the rest. I do that, sometimes, if I’m not sure what I’m drawing. It just means that you have to be careful to erase around what’s there.”
I thought of the survival of fish and mammals and even some relatively large animals, but how, at least in the dinosaur extinction, every dinosaur, including the ones in the ocean and the flying reptiles had perished, and I shivered.
A week ago I wouldn’t even have thought about it. I certainly wouldn’t have considered it. But now, on this lonely road, with the sun starting to set and no idea where we would sleep tonight, it seemed all too likely. Vast swaths of landscape disappearing. The large cities first. I shook. But then, what was supposed to replace us.
Meeee! A tiny feline body hauled itself over the back of the front seats and climbed onto my shoulder.
“Damn it,” Michael said. And didn’t even look guilt for swearing in front of the girls, as he pulled over to the side of the road. “Now, Rosy, stop that. We can’t let the kittens out in the car.” He fished a calico from between himself and the door, and turned around to put it in the cage, as I tossed a little orange one in.
“But dad, she didn’t,” Caroline said. “I was right here, all the time. I saw it. She didn’t do anything.”
“She has to have,” I said, looking at the lock. “Has to. Look at it. There’s no way a cat could open it.”
Rosalyn frowned at the lock. “Maybe they just did. They’re smart kittens, you know. They always got out of the closet where they were born and...”
Michael tested the lock intently. The pinch mechanism required that two levers be pushed together on the outside. It would take either a hand or the best coordinated kitten action we’d ever seen.
“Do we need to tie it shut?” I asked.
He shook his head, still frowning. “No. It seems to be secure enough. We mustn’t have locked it properly before. That has to be what it was.”
“Right,” I said, but in my heart I knew we had. I remembered that lock clicking home.
I started fiddling with the radio buttons, listened to a couple of announcements of places where refugees could stay. There was a Bapt
ist church in Raton offering sleeping space in its basement.
“I’d still prefer not to go to a public place,” Michael said. “Not just because if they think concentrations of people trigger... this effect, whatever it is, it might not be safe, but also because who knows what we could catch? I mean, all these people... the last thing we need is some stomach flu or something.”
“Right,” I said.
He was fiddling with his seat belt, and seemed hesitant to start. I suspected he was afraid of a little feline body appearing beside him suddenly. In fact, he looked back over his shoulder at the cage. And stopped, his eyes widening. “Oh, no.”
I looked back, also, just in time to see the little feline paw protrude and, strangely articulate, press the two levers together, while the little body pushed on the door.
“See,” Rosalyn said. “They’re smart.”
Michael unbuckled and reached back scooping the kitten. “They’re more than smart. They’re mutants,” he said, and raised the little orange kitten’s paw up to the light.
I had never paid any attention, but now I could tell that it looked polydactyl and oddly articulate like –
“It has a hand,” Rosalyn said, delighted.
“With opposable thumbs,” Caroline said, sounding baffled.
Just then the radio piped in, “Cats seem to be left in these deserted, renewed places. Perhaps the domestic cats people left behind. A lot of mother cats with kittens. And oddly a lot of polydactyl cats.”
Michael had reached for another of the litter and was examining its paws. And then another.
“Cats with opposable thumbs,” he said, dismayed.
I felt an odd bubble of laughter run through me. “They were our lords and masters before, and now...” Something ran through my mind, some old science fiction story. Something about intelligent cats being the only thing that could be inherently superior to mankind.
“He draws something he likes better,” Michael said, sounding hollow.
“And then he erases what he’s doodled so far.”
“There might be some cave,” he said. “Some place we could go...”
“They find very few bones of dinosaurs after the boundary,” I said. “In fact, in most places none at all. As if they’d just disappeared, bones and all, with everything that belongs to them. I looked at the sun setting in the horizon, in a glory of red and gold, and waited for the great divine eraser to appear.
A Grain Of Salt
MY NAME IS HUI AND MY SURNAME IS FANG. I was born in the year of the Fire Pig, at the time of the Quin Shi Huangdi Emperor, on the banks of the Yellow river, in a village of no significance.
I was my father’s only surviving son. But since my father was only a secretary of the rank six A to the local court and since by great misfortune on the year of my birth the Emperor fined all his functionaries throughout China twenty silver cash for pestering his majesty with unneeded petitions, there was no money for my schooling.
Still my father taught me at home, the principles of Lao Tze and the Classic of The Mountains And The Sea and many other excellent works which he bought by forsaking a portion of our weekly rice.
Thus I grew up hungry but learned. I could write a perfect hand and improvise on the spot an erudite poem to a lotus leaf and there was every hope that when I stood the examination I might get a post with the provincial ministry.
To great misfortune, just before my twentieth birthday I was waylaid on a deserted road on a night when the moon suddenly vanished and all became pitch black.
At my death I was given the name Heng.
***
We have found this auspicious site, which is suitable for the grave of Fang Hui Heng. We use 99.999 strings of cash as well as five colored silk as offerings of good faith to buy this plot of land.
To the east and the west, it measures five steps; to the south and the north, it measures ten steps. To the east is the green dragon’s land with the element of wood and the season of spring; to the west the white tiger’s land, whose element is metal, whose season is autumn; to the South is the red phoenix, whose element is fire and the season of Summer; to the North is the Great Tortoise, whose element is water, whose season is winter, and in whose power lies immortality.
The imperial guard shall patrol the four borders. The deputy of the grave mound and the earl of the tomb shall seal it off by pacing its borders; the generals shall make twisting paths through the fields so that for one thousand autumns and ten thousand summers no spirit will find its way back from the dead. If any dare contravene, they shall be imprisoned by the Two Thousand Bushel Captain Of The Underworld.
We have prepared meat and wine and fruits and the sacrificial food. These things are a contract of our sincerity.
Once the land is paid for, the order will be given for the workmen to build the tomb. After the deceased is buried, that will guarantee good fortune and peace for ten thousand thousand years.
Someone finished reading the document, and I came awake with a start. At first I saw nothing. Blinking, brought me a vision of a smoky, dark cavern, where many people clustered and something made a sound like metal rubbing on metal. The sound was barely audible, drowned out as it was in the screaming, shrieking and begging of a thousand tongues.
Closer at hand, I had other problems. For one, I was shackled, my hands and feet held by boards pierced with holes, then tied to each other by strong ropes, so that I could only walk in the smallest of steps and could not move my hands at all.
Worse than that, on either side of me were two men. At least I assumed they were men. They looked like clouds formed entirely of ice and curling snow.
In front of me stood a functionary in silk robes, holding a document and glaring down. “How do you plead?” he said.
I realized, suddenly, in dismay, that he had the head of a tiger and multiple necklaces of jade. His eyes looked like deep-set fires, burning at me.
“How do you plead, you miserable debt-skipper?”
I remembered the contract read at me. A tomb contract. I supposed my father had ruined himself in providing well for me in the underworld. But none of this explained why I was shackled and guarded. Or why I was being called a debt skipper by a creature with the head of a tiger.
The tiger’s tongue lolled out in an expression or distaste or perhaps of madness. “Answer me.”
“I... milord,” my voice emerged creaking and trembling like a metal spring too long held immobile.
“Kowtow to the Lord Ping Deng Wang, ruler of the ninth court of Feng Du,” the dark cloud creature next to me reached out and grabbed me by the neck, pushing me forward, into what could be a kowtow – or just as well a full bodied sprawl, held only by the boards that served as shackles.
Being that close to the ground, I could tell it was neither stone nor dirt nor paving, but a sort of black ice. And being that close to it, I might as well pretend I intended it as a kowtow. I looked up. Feng Du. I was in Feng Du – the hell of eighteen levels where souls suffered punishment for their sins in life. How had it happened? Surely my parents had done everything to ensure I would suffer no such fate. And I had not sinned in my life. Indeed, I had had too little time to live, much less to sin.
And the tiger-headed gentleman facing me was none other than Ping Deng Wang, the Lord of The Iron Web, who held you fast while the lords of the underworld reviewed your sins and decided on the appropriate eternal punishment.
I abased myself, hitting my head on the floor three times. “Oh, Lord Ping Deng Wang, sublime Lord of the Iron Web,” I said. “This miserable one does not know what his crime is. He died before he was twenty summers and is not aware of having committed any of the nine unforgivable sins.”
“Silence!” The guard to the right of me – was he a Two Thousand Bushel Captain? Those were usually the officers of the courts of the underworld – put his foot on my neck. “Do not lie to the Lord.”
“You and your wife, Yen, have not ever paid the bill for your land and therefore you
are liable to punishment as debtors.”
I should have been terrified. I was terrified. Nonpayment of debt was a serious offense. More serious, though, was the mention of a wife, Yen. I’d died at twenty, unmarried. How had I acquired a wife?
I did not dare ask the tiger, who turned to one of the officers near me and said something. He did not address his words to me, and I could not hear him through the shrieking of the damned and the rubbing of metal on metal.
The two guards grabbed me and lifted me, then threw me. I flew through the air, through darkness and cold. The cavern could not be that large, but it felt as though I flew through thousands of years of darkness, till I hit something. The something was a web made of iron strings. I clung to it, unable to move, like an insect in a spider web.
At the same time, with a twang of metallic strings, she landed beside me.
She was small and lithe, with a body like a graceful spring stream, skin the color of the whitest lotus, and eyes and hair as black as a summer night. Around her waist was a girdle of bright green jade beads.
“Who are you?” I said.
“I am Yen,” she said. “I am your wife.”
***
“I have no wife,” I said, pitching my voice so she could hear it over the mayhem around us.
She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen, and at any other time, I’d think myself the most fortunate of men to have acquired her as a wife. But right then my heart was speeding at the thought of the torments ahead. Would they send me to the forest of iron, where every leaf of every tree is a blade? Would I be commanded to climb the trees and cut myself to ribbons over and over again? Or would I fall under the purveyance of the fifth hell, which was ruled over by Yen Lo Wang, where they gouged your heart and boiled you in oil?
It was hard to concentrate on Yen’s lovely features and disconcerting to realize she did not look in the least troubled by our location or our fate. “You had no wife when you died,” she said. “But your parents were approached by people who said their daughter had died without marrying. For a very small price, they allowed your parents to celebrate a wedding between your body and my bones, that you might have company in the underworld.”
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 7
