by Ben Marcus
I stumbled, fell, sometimes stayed down to rest, breathing in the fine iron smell of the mud, which dried over my face and brought the whole world into silence.
My absence tonight should not matter. Esther preferred me gone from the hut anyway. She’d not even try the soup I’d brew for her, and the bread might only get torn to pieces and scattered to the floor, tossed away angrily as if she were a toddler. Even if I got home before bedtime, when the lamp was snuffed out and the jar of water was replenished on the stone post, I’d be up and down all night anyway, awake on the floor listening to the rough struggle of Esther’s breath behind the cloth.
My absence should not matter. I was certain of that. Esther would be fine. Better to stay out here and sleep.
I did not try again that night to push free of my place in the mud. Nor did I will myself to stop thinking of Esther, alone in the hut all night. The night was warm enough for me to make it where I was. There was no question that she would be all right there by herself. No question at all.
I would wait for daylight, what little of it I had lately been allowed. With daylight I would crawl back to our hut and there I would discover that all was perfectly well with Esther. Of this I was sure.
50
Three years ago I made my escape from Forsythe down the Jewish hole. For months I crept through underground mud on my way home, stopping only to listen for pursuers. The first tunnel I traversed was little wider than the orange cable I followed, and I had to work with whatever digging implements were at hand to gain my passage. At dead ends I did soundings, thumped against the earth until it shaled, and when the wall reported a promising hollowness, I worked with my fingers to bore a cavity.
It was ugly, dark work, and I grew foreign to myself, my skin like a hair-soaked stone, my face too numb to feel.
Others had come and gone before me in some of those passageways. Oh, had they. Their evidence festered along the embankment, muddied, broken, spent. Clothing frozen in dramatic postures, books, papers, shards of once-clear lobes now coated in hair. Luggage stuffed into mud holes. I shed my jumpsuit and clothed myself with the outfits of these pioneers. I found a grooming kit and hacked at the fur on my face, used one of those soft, moldable stones to scrape myself bare.
What a terrible amount of salt was already everywhere, even down below. The first layer of it was burnt. It stuck to your hands.
The books I found remained sealed by glue. Loose pages, scattered like parade scraps, had their text blackened. The broken parts of writing codes were everywhere, handicapped scripts, decipher sheets, etchings in the walls, the local efforts of people to say something to someone, to get a message across.
If people had lived down here in the tunnels, they hadn’t done it well, and they hadn’t done it for long.
As I burrowed south in the next months I took many trips to the top, whenever ladders appeared in the tunnel or some knotted rope hung down or light wriggled in from above, or, most of all, when the orange cabling, my true mapping device, detoured vertically, usually at a bulging splice in the line. I always followed it. I burst out into fields, butted against concrete slabs, emerged at the bottom of shallow ponds, punching through muck into the air.
Sometimes I even pierced into huts covering the apparent Jew holes of strangers.
Once I came up under a trapdoor that wouldn’t fully spring. When I stopped to listen, I heard footsteps, the awful pressure that fills the air when people mute their fear. Someone had rolled a bed over the door I crouched beneath, and when I finally squeezed through, no one was there. It was a damp house that people had left in a hurry. They were outside cowering, probably, petrified by the man who’d broken through their floor. The orange cable I’d followed into this hut divided into a network of the finest little wires, so delicate I could hardly see them. If it weren’t for the miniature cups of liquid the wires landed in—brass thimbles scattered over the floor, tendrils of wire dangling into them—I might not have known they were there. Their strategy of conduction was curious to me, but I dropped away and left that place in peace.
Sometimes the orange cable frayed into nothing in my hands. At its pinched-off stump were teeth marks, a black calligraphy of blood where someone had chewed it through. Around me would be nothing familiar. Even the trees had an animal smoothness to their limbs, or there’d be no trees, not even the barest spasms of grass, just pebbled terrain as far as I could see, stones covered by a fine misting of salt.
More and more often, when I climbed through the earth to take a reading, it was night.
I am no reader of the nighttime sky, as I have said. I find its layout obscene. If it was nighttime aboveground, if I was in some kind of featureless lowland and could not safely find shelter, I dropped into the tunnel again, made camp, and waited in the safety of the tunnel for daylight.
Camp was a woolen wall I raised from blankets. With my knife I slashed a vent, then laced a stitching of twine in the seam, so that my window was a scar in the cloth. In daylight I crept out and disguised my hole, performing the obligatory landmark checks that would allow me to find my way back without a problem.
I did surface walks in towns that may have been Dushore or Laporte, the part of New York that seems to absorb so much sunlight it’s forever shadowless wherever you look. When I walked through the grass, I’d sometimes step on something hard, panes of glass dusted with dirt, windows to shelters below, installed flush to the soil, easily hidden.
I stopped once to sweep away the grass and dirt of one such window, only to see a small, dark room, where an old man’s face looked up at me. This man did not seem afraid. He beckoned. Aren’t you lonely, too, he didn’t need to ask. But I walked on.
In Wilbert, or maybe it was North Sea, smashed radios littered the road. From their severed antennas someone had built a figure of a person, gleaming in chrome, rendered in a posture of contemplation. It sat in a puddle now, starting to rust.
Weeks away from Forsythe, where the tunnel widened into a room-size cavern, I found a stash of jam jars, a cloudy red gelatin tiding inside. The lids pried off with a suck, and into the cavern drifted the bitter smell of skin. I used a pencil to spoon free some of the tinted jelly, which I rolled into logs. When these hardened overnight I subjected them to a long, slow heat.
Such little treats kept me nourished for weeks, and when I lodged one in my mouth, it released such a slow sweetness that for days, it seemed, I needed nothing else, not even water. I eat them still. Whatever’s in them is almost all that I need.
There is little else to report of this journey. I surged south, then took exploratory routes away from my path, emerged from underground, calculated coordinates, dipped back into the tunnels, and corrected.
When I saw the Level Falls horse farm stripped of animals, stripped of its barn, just a few troughs remaining that had been turned over and which I did not want to disturb, I knew I was close to home, but judging by the quiet open roads, the unprotected route south into town, I did not want to risk overland passage. I had come this far in the tunnels. Now I would finish my trip underground, where I was unfollowed, unknown, and I could get to my destination in secret.
I lurched east after that. It was trial and error, but mostly it was error, until one morning I shoveled into a crawl space that had no stable bottom, just slimy, flesh-like objects upon which I could not get my footing. These were the pink rubber balls Claire and I had dropped down the hole so long ago, coated now with something cool and slick.
I was below the old hut.
The orange cable elevated. I pictured Claire sitting at the mouth of the hole, waiting for me. She’d have a sandwich ready, a thermos of soup. She’d be laughing, that laugh of anger she delivered whenever someone else’s stupidity had been what she was waiting for, the perfect confirmation of all her suspicions. I’d yell up to her that I found the balls, all of them.
They’re at the bottom and they’re so weird all together, like one of those kid tents with balls in it, except the balls are al
l bloody. I’ll be right there!
I climbed into the corridor. At the top, the mouth of the hole was stuffed with shredded pink insulation.
Perhaps this was what had obstructed LeBov when he made his way out of the hut to Forsythe several Decembers ago.
I picked at the insulation until a sheet of it released past me and slid down the hole. Then I climbed up into the hut.
Everything was mostly as I remembered it. In the corner, undisturbed, was the wooden crate painted with the word Us, a tuft of bluish wool hanging out of it.
It was Claire’s winter hat, kept on hand for a just-in-case. I crawled over to the crate and put it on, smelling, I told myself, the very last remnant of her.
But the whiff I took returned nothing. It smelled only of smoke.
I walked outside, easily found the old path that dropped down to the creek, and beyond that, growing out of the embankment, was the still-recognizable profile of growth that Claire and I called the Seine.
This was it. I’d arrived. I was home.
Now I just needed to rescue my daughter.
51
Most of the rest you already know. The hut’s mechanics were fucked. The orange cable was not just cold but worm-gutted as well. I ignored it for too long, too fearful of town, at first, to trek in and get supplies, letting the wiring blister.
Meanwhile, one of those pink vermin got to it, started eating into the copper, rubbed his bald body against its length until the cable shredded, like bright splinters of candy.
Once, early on, I inserted a copper feeler into the frizzed wiring of the cable, and I wove, from memory, a conductive nest of wire that I slipped under my tongue to complete the facial antenna. When I kissed the wire against the nest, clutching a grounding rod for safety, the old prayer surged on and pushed its way out of my mouth.
You have commanded us not to know you and we have obeyed. When we have known you we have looked away …
Whatever this was, it was no real prayer. It sounded like an apology for something that had never happened. I could not bear the sound, particularly in my own voice, and so I put away my wires and did not eavesdrop on this cable again.
I did not give up on my religion. I found only that I no longer required reminders, assertions, repetitions, harangues. Nothing outside myself. Whatever I believed played on inside me with no help from a radio. I’d heard enough for a lifetime. I found I could do without more things to misunderstand.
I spent my first months home determining the safety levels of my new settlement, circling the hut in wider surveys, moving low and quiet, stopping always to listen for pursuers, building my inner map of the place.
Deer froze when I approached, their muzzles frosted and white. I registered no threats of people. In the end I realized that I was well bounded by the murmur line, protected from others, but also captive as well. Unless you were a child, you could only get to where I was by Jew hole. I set up a few alarm lines anyway, some rudimentary triggers that might give me good minutes to vanish if necessary.
I suppose I was really only concerned about LeBov. A new one, maybe, whom I wouldn’t recognize. That he was coming after me in the tunnel, would soon punch through the floor of the hut.
I should have filled the hole with dirt, with salt, so no one could come through again. Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow until the thing was sealed. But I wanted to keep the hole open for Claire. I could not close it down yet. I had to think she would solve the problem the same way I did. I had to.
I’d only been back for a few days when I crept closer to the old neighborhood, heard the tin-voiced stories bleating from the loudspeakers. The broadcast created an effective repellent of sound, the worst choking in the air. If I got too close, I felt the suffocation—an airless panic triggered by an area ripe with language—so I determined early on where the murmur line was, that point on the periphery where I could hear the voice but not understand it. Beyond this I wouldn’t go.
Then I marked the trees, some stones. I walked off distances until I found a natural observation point, one of a few that I’d rotate among as I spied on the quarantine, awaiting Esther’s release.
There’s little else to relate about my early time here. Waste and water were an early focus. Food was never a worry. I collected canned goods from the abandoned town, even if I hardly felt like eating. I must have spent a year without words.
Even in the summer there were cold, clear mornings, and I woke to a silence that only deepened as the day developed, a muteness that felt rich in nutrients, addictive. I was energetic and strong and almost fearfully alive.
On perfect days I braved the wall of trees on the back line of the swale and pushed up the cliff face to Tower Ledge, where we used to picnic. There were no families here now. The old grill cage had tipped over. The dog run was sick with weeds.
I heard nothing and said nothing, read and wrote nothing, and in time my thoughts followed into this hushed hole. I’d never much thought in sentences anyway, but there were always single words, phrases, sometimes lists, and these fell away, until what passed for thoughts were swooshes of sound, hisses whose meanings were clear to me and needed no decoding into language.
It was Claire who benefitted most from this sort of regard. She fit this way of thinking perfectly. When I thought of her while quietly clearing the land, as she’d wanted us to, while running water lines to the back stream, while washing and hanging the woolen skins I used on the walls for insulation, it was in the gentlest sequence of tones. Small, low notes like a lullaby.
I do not mean for this to be a statement of science, or even an experimental theory that the emotional consideration of a person is best undertaken with sounds, and not images or language—how could I prove this?—but I felt closer to Claire that year than ever before. Finally I stopped missing her, because she was with me now. I fell asleep to the sound of Claire, walked out to eat my lunch on the old shrunken rock above Tower Ledge, and all the while listened to sounds that brought my wife fully to my blood, my body. Through sound I felt finally bonded to her, in her company, whether or not she was even alive or, if she was, no matter what she might have felt about me. Her memory had evolved into sound, a perfect refinement. I loved her best that way with all that I had.
I mention this change only because this phase ended when I found the first child and began my project with assets, with person-derived inhibitors. Through medicine I brought myself back to the language and those tones of Claire went, what’s the word for it? They were gone. I do not hear them anymore.
For that I blame the craven desire to speak, to write, to be heard.
52
A word about my serum: it is more bitter than water. It is not as cloudy as milk. In the winter it thickens with crystals. It foams into a butter when I squeeze into it, by dropper, a juice of the dark valley salt.
When I need some, I pull it out of little ones. I used it first at Forsythe. The crude kind, the roughly gained immunity, drawn on the priceless account of the child’s person. It is the ingestion of this Child’s Play, I am sure, that undid LeBov, if he finally did expire.
And it is the ingestion of this that will soon, no doubt, leave me frozen on the forest floor somewhere, blinking in perfect sunlight at a world I can no longer see.
53
I did not assign names to the children I saw in the woods. A remote perspective was best, sheared of sentimentality, which impedes a productive workflow. Name not that which you intend to cultivate, was the saying. Maybe it was just my saying. But cultivate is such a strong word. They were little ones sometimes sitting alone on a log. Medicine comes at us in so many disguises. It hides in the leaves of plants, grows under tree bark, mulch, sand. Sometimes it stows away in more valuable items, items more resistant to intrusion, and this is where our challenge is fullest. The smallworker addresses these shapes, living or not, and beckons forth that medicine that might benefit the person. But when that medicine resides within the bodies of those entities commonly known as childre
n, the process of extraction grows more, what is the word?
I do not know what the word is.
54
My purpose here is not to detail exactly how I got the Child’s Play serum to work, what sorts of failures I suffered along the way. I labored alone with limited tools seized from the half-looted pharmacy in town, made every sort of error, and at first I did not even know what I was looking for.
Blood and skin, perhaps hair, were the likely targets, so I found my way to small samples of these resources, siphoned or scraped them into bottles with little harm. But that got me nowhere close, because what I never saw at Forsythe was how these resources were processed. I knew nothing of the refinements such materials were subjected to, and I had no old man but myself upon which to test my discoveries.
If a little one wept quietly I played music, brought in a soup. Silence was the natural state of my subjects, who rarely probed their surroundings or tested the air with their small words. Perhaps it is because I looked like nothing they could speak to. The years had made me look unfriendly. Or not the years. Blame for my demeanor lies elsewhere. Perhaps the children felt I would be displeased, but if I was displeased it was for reasons that far predated their arrival in my hut. In every way I was a gentle guardian. I provided food and shelter, sometimes sat on the floor with them and played with the little sack of acorns I’d brought in for distraction.
After each round of extractions I tested the results down at the murmur line, walking into the blizzard of Aesop’s fables until the crushing took me.
When skin and hair failed, I moved to blood, pricking the child’s heel for a drop. I employed coagulants rifled from the hospital in town, seizing the fluid with some salts I’d smuggled out of the pharmacy, salts from before. I suspected that blood would be problematic, no easy fix, and in this suspicion I was correct.
