In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  1. They find Lugalbanda, who has been roaming the steppes in despair. He

  1a. is overjoyed to see them, or perhaps reproachful, but accepts in the end his retrieval by his peers and his return to the land of the living.

  1b. rages and does not forgive; the story becomes one of irreparable breach.

  2. They do not find Lugalbanda, who

  2a.has wandered deeper into the wilderness.

  2b.has been taken away by the gods.

  Trent imagines more pathways, a thorough exploration of the branching possibilities that, like books opened in dreams, can appear but not actually be read. Some he knows can’t work: it’s the Greek gods who take up petitioners in extremis and turn them into constellations. Nor can Lugalbanda break with Enmerkar; Sumerian myths don’t deal with character conflict in that way. So Enmerkar and Lugalbanda are reunited; the ordeal of Lugalbanda abandoned is a wound that heals up by poem’s end.

  Such wounds make us feel what we can’t understand: that’s what myth is. Niobe, still weeping for her children though turned to stone, or the centaurs’ anguished thrall to wine and lust, retain their power to claw at the reader. The Wake doesn’t claw, though the great man, a lesser writer in every other way, knew enough to.

  Untitled, obscure in meaning, often fragmentary, the two or three dozen narrative poems that exist in Sumerian versions seem too blunt and odd to move us as the Greek myths can. Except for the line about mankind being created from “the clay that is over the abyss,” the only tale that Trent found deeply affecting was Lugalbanda’s abandonment on Hurum and his undescribed reaction.

  Mount Hurum is not on Ziggurat’s map—no one knows where it is—and Trent recognizes that his novels must reside within the game’s geography. He hovers above the plain, watching the words IRAQ and Baghdad fade away and the coastline press inward until it is resting against the city that now labels itself Ur. Trent begins to fall, slowly at first, then faster as the land below growing larger and more detailed until it tilts abruptly away, like the view from a plane pulling out of a dive, and he is skimming above a landscape that has lost its lettering and cartographic flourishes and assumed almost the realistic detail of a desert seen in the opening shot of a nature documentary.

  A ripple breaks the horizon’s flatline, and at once the ground flashing below is not sand but cultivated fields, divided by roads and levées. The structures ahead swell and gain definition, a great wall bristling with towers, its ramparts topped only by the central ragged pyramid. The viewpoint circles the city center, temple and palace readily identifiable (Trent remembers close-ups of them) and the ziggurat’s corrugated slopes rendered in vivid detail, then swoops down to alight in the central square.

  The city is full but empty, for Trent knows (with the logic of dreams) that moving crowds would strain the resources of role-playing games: yet this is the Uruk of his book, anchored to the CD yet ranging freely, ungameably peopled by people. Trent moves through the throng in this confidence, secure in his characters’ imaginative reality even as their bodies pass through him, or perhaps his through them. Cinched tight by the city walls, the crowded buildings radiated heat—unrelieved by winds—and a terrible stench, electronically imperceptible but evoked, made real in the mind’s nostrils, by the twining long molecules of words, complex chains that twist to do anything, like wisps of smoke weaving themselves into firewood.

  Stinks and gritty skin, heaped refuse and open water glimpsed from ramparts: immaterial perceptions electrons are too crude to trace. Why are words finer than particles, which are older than anything? The meaning of Sumerian myths elude us, but not because their tablets are fragmentary or our grip on their language infirm. Every word sprouts wings, turns metaphor, and flits off at an angle we hadn’t seen. These angles are not ours, they disregard our geometry. This unbegetting language, spoken by no one, is hardware that only ran thoughts now incomprehensible, their myths a food our minds cannot digest.

  No single stuff of myth, then, no wellspring feeding every people. To work in the digital realm is to accept this: the sentences you construct do not pretend to be transcriptions of spoken words, nor do your images seek validity as representations of nature, judged by their fealty to something. Music—always disconcertingly itself, especially when not giving tune to words—still plays while you play, but no longer serves only as dramatic accompaniment. Word, image, and tone alike emerge from the difference between 0 and 1, the contrast between fields of force that needs, can have, no touchstone.

  Game-players don’t know this; they blithely enter these regions (paying for admission), thinking them flat, directional. Assume our forest is merely your path, cheer yourselves after walking its length. Contention is stranger than you know, gamers, who strain at the lines we draw round you, roar at the points we dole out, and imagine yourselves at play in the fields of the board.

  Trent frequently checked the online news outlets, a practice he justified on the grounds that it kept him at his desk instead of sending him into the living room to turn on the radio. Some days he merely glanced for new headlines; others he read to the bottom of what stories were available, searching for hints of the attack that was surely coming. He knew that Leslie was doing the same from work, and sometimes imagined them sharing a second in the pages of msnbc.com/news or www.bushwatch.net, invisibly present to each other.

  When it came, the websites gave it headlines, although there was nothing more than reports of rocket bombardments. “It has begun,” he said aloud. What someone had told him a dozen years ago, coming out of a late movie to students gathered on the sidewalks and word that Baghdad was under attack.

  They ate dinner before the TV news: few facts, much commentary. “Word from halfway round the world,” Leslie murmured, her thoughts on a different track than Trent’s. “How long have most people waited for news of distant battles?”

  “We’re not getting much,” he replied. Anchormen, bleating helplessly, were being replaced one by one with roundtable discussions. Trent cycled through the channels once more, then left it on public television.

  “True; I was thinking of information reaching the strategic command, not the sorry populace. Do you think reporters will make it in before they flatten everything?”

  “Afghanistan isn’t Kuwait,” Trent replied. “It’s a big country, mountainous; far from the sea. You can’t pulverize it from aircraft carriers.”

  “I don’t know,” said Leslie. She was sick with hatred for the Taliban, whose recent demolition of two immense Buddhas seemed their only assault upon something not living. But George W. Bush had declined to distinguish between them and al Qaeda, as though playing to a constituency that would regard such nicety as treason. His demands had been provocative and insulting, impossible to meet although the Taliban seemed to have tried. Yet had the Western nations invaded Afghanistan in the spring, she would have cheered.

  “Is the President our foe?” Megan asked while Leslie was loading the dishwasher.

  “In what sense?” she said, startled.

  “I just heard Daddy on the telephone, and he was talking about our ‘foe President.’”

  On his desk Leslie noticed a photocopied page, with several sentences highlighted and scribbled dates and numbers in the margin. She squinted at the text, calling upon her grad school French. Il y eut une attaque. Les villages insoumis . . . There was an attack. The unsubdued villages illuminated themselves in turn, marking the progress of conquest, like the little flags in commercial cafes.

  A shadow from the other side darkened the sheet, which she turned over to find a sentence in Trent’s handwriting. The resisting villages burst alight one after another, illuminating the path of victory, like the snapping banners of a streetside cafe. The photocopy had been made with their scanner, his usual practice when he wanted to mark a passage from a library book.

  “I hear you likened our President to Dario Fo,” she said as they were getting ready for bed.

  “I did?” He thought about it, then lau
ghed. “He could be played by Dario Fo.”

  Reaching to turn off the light, she saw a book on the floor and turned it over to see the title. Her lips quirked: there was nothing to smile about, but confirmation of her husband’s nature prompted an odd comfort. The photocopy had pleased her more than the scrap noting his daily progress, as though the assignment he had sought were a ditch to be measured in linear feet dug. He should have been writing books all along—books that encompassed history and literature, like the biography he had begun, rather than novelizations, mixing non-history with non-literature as though he was afraid to pull free of this world well lost. Could that last tug hurt as much as Trent seemed to fear?

  She spoke of Trent when reluctant to speak of herself, her therapist had once noted, but wasn’t she supposed to voice her cares? Trent had moved on, getting tech work and even a small grant, but privately raged, rejected (at least in his own mind) by a profession he should have rejected. It was only after tearing free, Leslie explained, that the wound could begin to heal.

  “Do you think he is still suffering from that ‘wound’?” her therapist asked.

  “I’m sure he does.” Leslie shifted slightly in the armchair, away from the view of Long Island Sound, and let her gaze rest on the pottery lining the book case. “It gnaws at him, that some people believe it, and that others won’t declare they don’t.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “No.” This time she spoke firmly. “I’ve met her, remember? The whole industry is full of misshapen people who design games because they don’t have the social skills to work in other environments. I mean—” she laughed—“I’ve got computer nerds reporting to me; I know about badly socialized people. But my guys don’t claim creative temperaments. He shouldn’t have been working for someone who lived with her boss, however stable she seemed.”

  “Does the fact that you believe him offer some solace?”

  “You’d think it would.” Leslie thought. “I guess it does, but not enough. He wanted to write a book called Complicity, a study of why people side with their peers’ oppressors. I told him to stop it.”

  “And this was when Tobias was ill?”

  “Right before he was born. It was still going on, afterward. Maybe that’s . . .” She shrugged, her eyes suddenly stinging.

  “That was four years ago,” her therapist observed delicately. “This dispute may have exacerbated matters for Trent, since it struck directly at his role as a family man.” She was reminding Leslie that she is not Trent’s therapist. “That might explain his continued anger over professional problems that, by now, are ancient history.”

  Four years ago Leslie had been in bad shape, and the return of what she now recognized as clinical depression threatened to wash away the ground gained since. She began doing things only when she had to, and didn’t pick up Ancient Mesopotamia at the library until they threatened to send it back. Trent made oblique comments on her listlessness, and even word that a Florida newspaper office had been contaminated by a rare form of anthrax—another grotesque intrusion from the world of techno-thrillers—failed to jar her out of numbed and ringing stillness.

  Was everybody hurting? Leslie supposed so: the avidity with which her co-workers followed the war news smacked of self-medication. Updates rarely came during the workday, but she knew they checked regularly. Trent glared at the TV news, bitter and conflicted, while Megan, unselfconsciously mimicking the familiar Texas accent, asked about “the War Against Terra.” Afghanis, caught in the irruption of renewed warfare as winter began to close the passes to their under-provisioned villages, experienced a brief rain of brightly colored food packets.

  She sat on the couch, the household still after Trent had gone sullenly to bed, and considered her new book, whose full title proved to be Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was. It compared favorably with Sumer: Cities of Eden, the pretty Time-Life volume that the library already had on its shelves. History Begins at Sumer was unaccountably absent, but Kramer had contributed the text for another Time-Life title, Cradle of Civilization. Leslie was annoyed with Kramer for his tendency to make judgmental distinctions between “conquerors in search of booty” and “peaceful immigrants eager to better their lot,” as though migrating populations’ worthiness to move into a land depended on their adherence to some United Nations-like ideal of peaceful coexistence. Did that notion represent the spirit of the mid-sixties, or the spirit of Time-Life Books?

  In the absence of Kramer’s own tome, the earliest volume in Leslie’s modest collection was A. Leo Oppenheim’s Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. Its forthright subtitle intimated Oppenheim’s contention that Sumerian-Akkadian-Assyrian civilization was extinct and should be studied for its own sake rather than for its supposed value as the seedbed of human progress. Leslie found she preferred this austere honesty to the pious melioration that saw Gilgamesh, cuneiform, and the Code of Hammurabi as the first toddling steps of mankind’s march.

  The weeks that followed pulled Leslie in opposite directions: toward the fixity of the past and the lunacy of a fantasy future. She read with disbelief the mornings’ news of anthrax spores mailed to TV studios and the nation’s capital, with senators’ offices contaminated and postal employees dead. The conclusion was inescapable: the United States was under attack by biological agents. The twenty-first century was turning out just as her teenaged sci-fi reading had predicted.

  “They say it’s Saddam.” Trent was following the links from news reports on the spores’ surprising sophistication to declarations by “fellows” at right-wing institutions that Iraqi responsibility was certain.

  “Well, it certainly isn’t the Taliban.” The medieval theocrats who were regrouping in disarray under assaults from their warlord adversaries and miles-high bombers seemed poor candidates for the invisible attack that sent the world’s superpower into panic, though perhaps (pundits mused) al Qaeda’s penchant for low-tech operations staged within the target country had led them to obtain a cache of Soviet-era war germs. Such a theory did not require the hand of Saddam, but Leslie found it hard to push the reasoning further. The idea of pestilence blooming in the nation’s nerve centers like sparks falling on straw left her disoriented. She did not fear for her own safety, but felt the axis of her being tilt vertiginously, a slow tipping into boundless freefall.

  There were no further attacks, although a Manhattan woman with no traceable connection with the contaminated mails died of inhaled anthrax in Manhattan, and then another—a 94-year-old widow named Ottilie—in central Connecticut. Midway geographically, Leslie wondered if she should feel her family was in the crosshairs. She didn’t, taking comfort in statistics. Word that spores might cling to letters that came through New Jersey moved Leslie to discard all junk mail at the curb.

  A week later a letter was delivered sealed in a plastic wrapper containing a notice that the U.S. government had discovered traces of anthrax on the envelope and had subjected it to irradiation: it should be discarded unopened if it was believed to contain food or camera film. Leslie and Trent stared, unwilling to tear through the wrapper (the letter within was indeed junk mail) or to throw it away. It was an undoubted historical document, but to save the thing would make it a relic. Trent carefully photographed both sides with their digital camera and sold it on eBay for $85.

  Cries for retaliation rose, angrier for being balked. Since Afghanistan could not be attacked twice, other targets were deemed plausible, usually Iraq. “Look at this,” said Trent angrily, gesturing at his screen. “They’re all so sure of themselves.”

  “I don’t know why you’re reading that at all,” Leslie replied. “The chat boards of wargame fans isn’t a place for political insight.”

  “These are my potential readers; I should know what they’re thinking.”

  “I don’t even believe that’s true.” Trent was clawing for a toehold, anxious for demographics that the Web couldn’t give him. He showed more self-confidence with work that he respecte
d.

  Later she glanced at her screen and found a window open to the posts that had enraged him. Vaunting and aggressive, they bore the signature of angry, powerless guys desperate to be knowledgeable. Let’s do it right this time and Next time we nuke the K’abah and It’s time we revisited The Land Between the Rivers.

  By this point Trent was convinced that the anthrax attacks had not been the work of Islamic militants at all. He suspected rogue forces within the American “bioweapons community,” which had secretly developed the strain of anthrax. “Even the administration has admitted that the spores belong to the ‘Ames strain,’” he argued, link-clicking deeper toward the documentation he sought. Leslie found his explanations painful to listen to, and she shrank without looking at those windows he left on her screen: laparoscopic images of warblog, like lab reports of current pathology.

  Had Sumer suffered from pestilence? Though Leslie recalled no references to the plague, or even to disease as something contagious, it seemed incredible that cities of thirty thousand people, which created standing bodies of water and relied upon wells for drinking, were not periodically ravaged by pandemics, especially during wars. Perhaps Nanshe loses much of her family to cholera during a siege; it was a more plausible involvement than engaging her somehow in the business of battle.

  No Sumerian myths mention plague; none of the images of piled dead picture it, nor is it mentioned in legal records. Mortality is ubiquitous, but the index entries for DEATH in Kramer’s Cradle show an exclusive interest in the Sumerian afterlife, while those for The Eden that Never Was focus on the archaeology of grave sites. Gilgamesh showed no fear of catching Enkidu’s fever, nor Enmerkar of Lugalbanda’s. Death did not leap from victim to victim like a flea; each mortal possessed his own, patient and implacable. Whatever the hero’s achievements in life, in the Land of No Return he wandered naked, like all the other dead, hot and eternally thirsty.