The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  After a while he said, “Come out and look at the trees.”

  They went outdoors into the veil of smoke that hung over everything. As they approached the oaks Romer saw wisps of blue seeping from the ground-and coiling around the trunks of the trees. At other places it seemed to rise in a haze like fog forming over a marsh. The stench made his eyes water and his nose contract. As they went farther into the orchard he saw smoke coming from the trunks of trees and even from their branches. In places the bark had fallen from the trees and the wood that it revealed was charred. Chunks of bark lay smoking on the ground; now and then a flame would break out on one and crawl like a worm until it died out. Some of the oaks had fallen over and others had sunk vertically into the ground, transformed into piles of ashes with the elbows of branches protruding. Over a large territory, most of the plantation that led up the slope to the hills, the trees were destroyed and only ashes lay to show where they had been. Their roots were still burning underground; little threads of smoke seeped up from the ground as far as the eye could see. The soil under their feet was warm.

  “It started underground, by spontaneous combustion or something; nobody knows. It spread through the roots for a while from tree to tree, then it showed itself above ground. In the trunks and the branches, it burns under the bark and crawls through the tree until it kills it. Underground, all the roots of the trees are connected. The fire travels through the network from tree to tree. Only after a tree is dead does the flame break out. Then it destroys the tree in a single hour.”

  He looked around for a burning tree to show his son. The only one he could find was a mile or more away, at the base of the hills. Romer saw an incandescent glow through the smoke, like an eye of pain. It wavered, died away a little, flared out more strongly, and then died away again.

  Rusty lengths of irrigation pipe were lying on the ground. At other places, holes like graves had been dug and the earth heaped up on one side. These trenches were full of smoke as a jug is of water. There was no life to be seen. From his childhood, Romer remembered rabbits and foxes, the air buzzing with insects, hawks circling in the air and dropping on field mice.

  “At first I tried to put it out with water. We have our well, but it has only enough water in it for the house. I had men lay pipes from the river at Buen Jesús, seven miles away. It took a lot of money, almost all I had. We flooded the ground around the trees with water. For a while, steam came out along with the smoke, then it was exactly as before. We had no way of turning water onto the burning branches, because the pressure was too low. I hired other men with axes to cut away the burning limbs and bury them. They went on burning in the ground. Then I thought that, because the fire began underground, the thing to do was to dig up the burning roots. The same men who had chopped off the branches dug in the ground for days. They would find a burning root and follow it to its end, dousing the pieces they dug up with water. Then they found that each root was connected to another root and the fire went off underground in another direction. I had no more money to pay the men and they took their tools and went back to their homes. I myself stood in the trenches and fought the burning roots as though they were snakes. But there are two thousand trees and two thousand roots, and one man can do nothing. No hay remedio. Estoy chingado. Do you remember your Spanish? Do you know what that means?”

  Romer nodded.

  “I am fucked. I never used that language with you when you were a boy. But now you’re a man. You’ve lived in America and you’ve seen the world. What do you think?”

  “I think you are chingado.”

  “Some men came from Caracas and looked at the plantation. They were engineers. They said that the trouble came from sulfur in the soil. The soil here is rich in sulfur. It’s because of that that the cork oaks grow so well. The soil is sulfurous too where they grow in Spain. It isn’t the sulfur in the ground that burns. The trees drink in the sulfur in their sap, and it crystallizes into the wood. After a while the whole tree is like a Swedish match. A mole gnaws on a root and it springs into flame.”

  “A mole?”

  “Or something. Perhaps even an insect. The men from Caracas offered to buy the land. They said that if they cut all the trees down, and turned water on the soil, the fire would go out and they could mine for sulfur here. They took samples of the soil to see how much sulfur there is in it. They said that there’s a vein of sulfur up there in the hills and it’s seeped down here into the soil in the valley. They offered quite a bit of money. Enough to pay my debts and a little over. I could go back to America and buy a house in Oregon. What do you think?”

  “Maybe that would be best.”

  “But she doesn’t want to go.” He motioned with his hand toward the house. “She loves the oaks and she doesn’t want to leave them. Even when they’re only ashes.”

  He was silent for a while. He took out his pocketknife and cut into the bark that was smoking from a half dozen spots. Only a little sap came out, as pale as rose water. “The trees have a fever,” he said. “Their blood is burning.”

  Romer’s mother came from a cork-growing part of Spain. His father met her there during a youthful trip to Europe. He had inherited a little money and it seemed to him a romantic idea to raise cork oaks in the New World where they had never been grown. He traveled to various sites in Texas and in South America and had the soil tested. In the backcountry of Venezuela he found the climate and soil were similar to those in the cork-growing regions of Europe, and he used his inheritance to bring two thousand seedling oaks from Spain and to build the house in the valley near Buen Jesús.

  Consuelo, his bride, was at first happy in this new life which resembled her childhood on the cork hacienda in Spain. She bore him a child and learned the ways of the New World. When the first harvest came she even went out to help the workmen strip the bleeding bark from the trees, laughing at their mistakes and showing them how it was done in Spain. But she had no friends in Venezuela and her neighbors were only illiterate campesinos. On the hacienda in Spain there had been poetry, music, guests, wine. She learned to ride and went on horseback picnics with young men. In Venezuela her husband bought her a horse but she didn’t ride very much; she quickly gained weight, and after a while she was not well. She hardly paid attention to her child. He seemed an American to her, in spite of his raven hair, and she wondered how he had ever formed inside her. When he left to go away to America to college, she was asleep in the middle of the afternoon and didn’t say goodbye to him.

  “Maybe she has what the trees have,” said his father. “Maybe the sulfur got into her blood too. We had a doctor from Caracas once, and he said she had a fever.”

  “I don’t think people can catch fire inside.”

  “It’s all just poetry,” said his father. “Everything is poetry.”

  When they came back to the house, Romer opened his bag and gave his parents their presents, a cheap wristwatch for his father, a jar of potpourri for his mother. His father fixed dinner for the three of them: sausages, mashed potatoes, and some dried fruit which he boiled with sugar. He liked to cook; it was almost his only pleasure. Romer spent the evening reading a philosophy text he had brought along with him. He stayed only three days at the plantation, then he took the ox cart, the train, and the ship back to America and graduate school.

  The burning field is far behind now. Only a trace of its scent lingers in the lounge. Romer and Eliza are still leaning against the window with their ankles crossed and their elbows touching. A crewman appears in the lounge, dressed in blue overalls that are not quite clean. He sticks out like a blackbird in a dovecote; he seems embarrassed and sidles through the armchairs with furtive glances around him. Finally he catches sight of Aunt Madge Foxthorn and goes to her. She listens to what he has to say, then she raises her index finger and points at Eliza.

  The man comes to Eliza. He seems frightened and his face is moist. He mutters the mysterious German word Verengerung and takes her by the elbow. She resists, looking to Romer for
help, but the man in overalls draws her away. Romer feels her arm slipping away from his elbow. Turning, he sees the man in overalls pulling her away through the door at the end of the lounge. The German word, he knows, means stricture, but he doesn’t think Eliza knows it.

  No one in the lounge has paid any attention to this little drama. Romer looks at Aunt Madge Foxthorn and wonders if he only imagined that she spoke to the man in overalls just a few seconds before. Several passengers in the lounge are looking out the windows, others are reading or playing chess. There is no one at the piano. Romer goes to it, sits down at the bench, and pretends to put his fingers into the keys. He hardly knows how to form a simple chord. Glancing up to see if anyone is watching, he feels into the bowl of marbles for the tiny jeweled wristwatch. The marbles click and roll and escape his fingers. He pushes his thighs tightly together, making a little valley of his lap, and pours the marbles into it. The watch is not there. He puts the marbles carefully back into the bowl, one by one. Now he remembers why it was he thought to do this. It was because of the wristwatch he had given his father in Venezuela, years ago.

  Escorted by her captor in overalls, Eliza goes first to her cabin to get her red medical box. The man doesn’t offer to carry it for her; he seems distracted and pulls her away by the elbow. She follows him down the stairway to the crew’s quarters, the box bumping on the corners, then along a metal alleyway which she believes she explored earlier with Romer, although all these aluminum tunnels look much the same. He opens a door and motions for her to enter.

  It is a cabin with four metal bunks in it, two on one side and two on the other, and very little else. A wash basin, a scrap of mirror, and a netting to hold the four men’s duffel bags. Underwear, socks, and other articles of clothing are strewn on the floor. There is a strong man-odor in the cabin. In the lower berth to the left a man is lying on his back wearing nothing but an undershirt. He is a stocky young man with blond body hair, and he is groaning pitifully. Pearls of sweat stand on his forehead. He writhes and tosses. When Eliza enters, he stops groaning for a moment and stares at her wildly. Then he groans again and seizes his genitals with a sweaty hand. His legs writhe like snakes. On the tip of his penis there is a single drop of golden fluid, catching the light from the lamp.

  Eliza opens the medical box and tumbles around in it until she finds the urethral catheter. In the medical school in Geneva, they showed the students how to do this by using a rubber dummy. This is no rubber dummy. It smells of urine and sweat, and it makes a noise. She greases the catheter with petroleum jelly, then seizes the damp sausage in her fingers. When she attempts to insert the catheter into it, the man’s groaning turns to a yell. “Oh, shut up!” she tells him. “It’s not my fault. It’s probably something you caught from some tart.” The catheter slides in, inch by inch. She has forgotten that she needs something to catch the urine in, and motions for the water pitcher. The man in overalls, who has been watching fascinated, doesn’t understand at first and brings her a knife, a bar of soap, a towel. She remembers the word and tells him, “Krug.”

  With the penis in one hand, the catheter in the other, and somehow managing the pitcher with her third hand, she goes on pushing the curved silver tube. The man gives a yell, there is a sound of hissing, and a copious yellow flood rushes out into the pitcher, over her hand, and onto the bedclothes. The patient groans one last time and shuts his eyes. “When the flow stops she hands the pitcher to the man in overalls and jerks out the catheter. Then she goes to the wash basin and throws up.

  *

  Somewhere a clock chimes softly. It is nine o’clock at night by dirigible time, which is set to Greenwich. All land is out of sight and the League of Nations is over the open sea; there is no wind and the airship crawls through a sky that seems dead or asleep. At this high latitude, in summer the sun has not set and lopes along with its feet on the horizon like a watchful dog. It glints sideways across a gray sea discolored with swirls of something oily crawling on its surface, perhaps ambergris.

  In the salon, dinner is over and the stewards have cleared away the tables. Now they are drawing the curtains across the windows to darken the room. As the last curtain is drawn the five green letters appear in the shadowy air. Each of them gives the impression that it has some sacred or occult meaning in itself, but this meaning is mysterious and may never be known by human mind; except for the O, which signifies the perfection and completeness of the Divine, and the I, exactly in the middle of the word, signifying the Axle of the Universe.

  The audience rustles and coughs, preparing for a long silence. Everyone is there: the Vestals and the Frieze, Joan Esterel, Joshua Main, the Lake Sisters as solemn as owls, Cereste Legrand holding his hat on his knees, and the recent recruits picked up in Germany and England. Chief Engineer Lieutenant Günther is sitting in a chair at the rear, although nobody has invited him. Romer and Eliza are holding hands; this gesture, which was carnal only a few feet away in the lounge, has been sublimated into spirit in the darkness and luminescence of the séance. Those with good vision can see that something new has appeared behind the still empty plinth. In place of the tapestry is a facsimile of the silken banner reduced to indoor size, about the height of a man, the height of statuesque Moira. The heart-shaped world seems to glow with its own light: the violet and blue of the sea, the pink and tangerine of the continents, the yellow of the parallels and meridians. The banner shimmers from its own fragility; there are no drafts in the sealed salon.

  Romer’s eyes are still locked on the glowing word in the air. It has a hypnotic effect, especially now that the idea has occurred to him that each of the letters is significant in some way. He understands now, in a revelation that makes his heart bump twice, that the A is the Abracadabra of the ancient mysteries, and the M, with its points turned down, is the sky opened to provide humanity with life-giving rain. In the totemic pictographs of the American Indians, he remembers, the M is the symbol of rain. The R remains mysterious to him. Perhaps it has something to do with the future, a fat Buddha-like body pointing its foot ahead. He feels that on the day he finally understands all the letters he will be transformed into a perfect soul, capable of True Vision, Astral travel, and even levitation.

  In this new knowledge he turns to Eliza and smiles. He is still connected to her by the locked hands. When she meets his glance she is not smiling; her expression is blissful but expresses love and wonder more than happiness. She looks away again, her eyes slightly elevated. She too seems to be staring at the green letters and has perhaps grasped that each of them is significant. It seems possible to him that she understands some of them and he others, so that by collaborating they would be in possession of the last secrets; for example that the R, instead of the future, represents an erect phallus penetrating a fertile womb. This would rearrange cause and effect a little, but such distortions are common in the symbolism of the occult.

  A hush passes over the audience. The figure of Moira has appeared in the green light. No one has seen her approach the plinth; her apparition seems to take form particle by particle in the air. Her gown glows; the embroidered M’s (the rain, thinks Romer) catch the light and sparkle in points. Her hair is rimmed in the pastel glow from the banner behind her. The serpent’s eye flashes in the ring on her finger. For a long moment there is silence.

  Her voice is low and golden, but penetrates to the last corner of the salon. “My friends, my children, beloved ones, this is the last of the séances which you have attended faithfully over the years. There will be no need for more. The letters of jade, the brazen Trump, and the banner have fulfilled their roles and will be set aside. The moment has come which we have all awaited so long, the moment for which we have yearned and striven. Not only with our hands, and not only with our minds, have we done this, but with the power of Atman that pervades us all, the infinite breath of the Astral. Without Atman we would be only specks swirling in the void. This great airship that now bears us swiftly toward Gioconda is only the expression in material subs
tance of our faith and of the will of Atman.”

  She pauses; the audience shifts in their seats. In the silence the engines of the dirigible thrum like distant cellos.

  “You are of the chosen, all of you who know of the ascending steps of our nature, culminating in the Astral Body. Only you see the Real, where the great mass of men see only Maya, the false and deceiving illusion of the world. Yet Maya is the spouse of Atman. The godly and the earthly are mingled in the cosmos, in the human spirit, so that all is a part of all. Even that which is unclean, or which appears to the unenlightened to be unclean, is one with the purest and most divine spark of our nature. All that we are and all that we feel is holy.”

  Here she stops again, as though to allow this to sink in before she goes on. At the mention of the unclean, without realizing it Romer and Eliza have released each other’s hands and now sit primly with them on their laps.

  “You will hear in the marketplace that man has achieved much, that he stands at the top rank of nature. I tell you that man is not something that has been achieved, but something that is to be surpassed. Man does not stand with his foot on the ape; he lies with the foot of Mammon on his neck. Our future and our blissful fate—all of us who are gathered here under this banner tonight-is to surpass man and create the cloud-dwelling Olympians of the future age. We look forward through the eons and we see a world in which the rocks are alive, the plants can feel, the animals reason, and the men are angels.”

  In the darkness of the salon, Günther sits a little slumped in his seat, transfixed. He does not take his eyes off Moira. He knows that what she is saying is true. He knows that all these things will happen, that a race of supermen will grow out of mankind to surpass what man now is, and that he, Günther, is one of the small band of elect that will cause this to happen. He has been converted.

  “Now listen, my friends, my children, beloved ones. I must tell you something that is a secret. There is one image that has been concealed from you before when we traveled in the world of men. The time has come for this image to be presented to your eyes. This image is that of the phallus.”