The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

  The north was my favored direction at the moment, because I’d explored it the least. Oh, Hell goes on forever in every direction, of course. But I don’t always get very far. I explored the territories nearest the witch’s garden most thoroughly, in any direction; as I get farther out it gets less and less familiar. I just don’t always get very far out.

  And the nearby territories to the north somehow seemed less hackneyed to me at the moment.

  The forest to the north quickly gives way to an open field. It’s called the Field of Tubers, because of the knuckled roots that grow there. Sort of like carrots, or potatoes, or knees. Like carrots in that they’re orange, like potatoes in the way the vines link them all together, under the ground. Like knees, or elbows, in the way they twitch, and bleed when you kick them.

  The first few times I came to the Field of Tubers I tried to run across. Now I walk, slowly, carefully. That way I avoid falling into the breeding holes. The holes don’t look like much if you don’t step on them; just little circular holes, like wet anthills in the dirt. They throb a little. But if your foot lands on them they gape open, the entrance stretching like a mouth, and you fall in.

  The breeding holes are about four feet deep, and muddy. Inside, the newborn tubers writhe in heaps. They’re not old enough to take root yet. It’s a mess.

  Sure, you can run across the field, scrambling back out of the breeding holes, scraping the crushed tubers off the bottom of your shoes. You get to the other side of the field either way. It’s not important. Myself, I walk.

  Time, which is frozen at the witch’s breakfast table, starts moving once I enter the forest. But time in Hell takes a very predictable course. The sun, which has been sitting at the top of the trees, refusing to set, goes down as I cross the Field of Tubers. It’s night when I reach the other side, no matter how long it takes me to cross. If I run, looking back over my shoulder, I can watch the sun plummet through the treetops and disappear. Of course, if I run looking back over my shoulder I trip over the tubers and fall into the breeding holes constantly. If I idle in the field, squatting at the edge of a breeding hole, poking it with my finger to watch it spasm open, the sun refuses to set.

  But why would I ever want to do that?

  5

  When I first came back, when they wanned me up and put me back together, they didn’t send me home right away. I had to spend a week in an observation ward, and on the fourth day they sent a doctor in to let me know where I stood.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said. “You won’t have any trouble holding down your job. Most people won’t know the difference. But you will cross over.”

  “I’ve heard,” I said.

  “It shouldn’t affect your public life,” he said. “You’ll be able to carry on most conversations in a perfunctory way. You just won’t seem very interested in personal questions. Your mind will appear to be wandering. And you won’t be very affectionate. Your co-workers won’t notice, but your wife will.”

  “I won’t want to fuck her,” I said.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How often will I go?”

  “That varies from person to person. Some get lucky, and cross over just once or twice for the rest of their lives. It’s rare, but it does happen. At the other extreme, some spend most of their time over there. For most, it’s somewhere in between.”

  “You’re not saying anything.”

  “That’s right; I’m not. But I should say that how often you cross over isn’t always as important as how you handle it. The stress of not knowing is as bad or worse than actually going through it. The anticipation. It can cast a pall over the times when you’re back. A lot of marriages . . . don’t survive the resurrection.”

  “And there’s no way to change it.”

  “Not really. You’ll get a prescription for Valizax. It’s a hormone that stimulates the secretions of a gland associated, in some studies, with the migration. Some people claim it helps, and maybe it does, in their cases. Or maybe it’s just a placebo effect. And then there’s therapy.”

  “Therapy?”

  “They’ll give you the brochure when you leave. There are several support groups for migrators. Some better than others. We recommend one in particular. It’s grounded in solid psychoanalytic theory, and like the drug, some people have said it improves the condition. But that’s not for me to say.”

  I went to the support group. The good one. Once. I don’t know what I was expecting. There were seven or eight people there that night, and the group counselor, who I learned wasn’t resurrected, had never made the trips back and forth from his own Hell. After some coffee and uneasy socializing we went and sat in a circle. They went around, bringing each other up to date on their progress, and the counselor handed out brownie points for every little epiphany. When they got to me, they wanted to hear about my Hell.

  Only they didn’t call it Hell. They called it a “psychic landscape.” And I quickly learned that they wanted me to consider it symbolic. The counselor wanted me to explain what my Hell meant.

  I managed to contain my anger, but I left at the first break. Hell doesn’t mean anything. Excuse me —my Hell doesn’t mean anything. Maybe yours does.

  But mine doesn’t. That’s what makes it Hell.

  And it’s not symbolic. It’s very, very real.

  6

  On the other side of the Field of Tubers, if I go straight over the crest, is the Grove of the Robot Maker. A dense patch of trees nestled at the base of a hill.

  The moon is up by this time.

  The robot maker is an old man. A tired old man. He putters around in the grove in a welder’s helmet, but he never welds. His robots are put together with wire and tinsnips. They’re mostly pathetic. Half of them barely make it up to the Battle Pavilion before collapsing. He made better ones, once, if you believe him. He’s badly in need of a young apprentice.

  That’s where I come in.

  “Boy, you’re here,” he says when I arrive. He hands me a pliers or a ball-peen hammer. “Let me show you what Pm working on,” he says. “I’ll let you help.” He tries to involve me in his current project, whatever it is. Whatever heap of refuse he’s currently animating.

  His problem, which he describes to me at length, is that his proudest creation, Colonel Eagery, went renegade on his way up to the Battle Pavilion. Back when the robot maker was young and strong and built robots with fantastic capabilities. Colonel Eagery, he says, was his triumph, but the triumph went sour. The robot rebelled, and set up shop on the far side of the mountains, building evil counterparts to the robot maker’s creations. The strong, evil robots that so routinely demolish the robot maker’s own robots out on the Battle Pavilion.

  I have two problems with this story.

  First of all, I know Colonel Eagery, and he isn’t a robot. Oh no. I know all too well that Eagery, who I also call The Happy Man, is flesh and blood.

  The second is that the robot maker is too old and feeble for me to imagine that he’s ever been able to build anything capable and effective at all, let alone something as capable and effective as I know Eagery to be.

  Besides, Hell doesn’t have a before. Hell is stuck in time, repeating endlessly. Hell doesn’t have a past. It just is. The robot maker is always old and ineffectual, and he always has been.

  But I never say this. My role is just as predetermined as the robot maker’s. I humor him. When I’m passing through this part of Hell, I’m the robot maker’s apprentice. I make a show of interest in his latest project. I help him steer it up to the Battle Pavilion. I can’t say why. That’s just the way things are in this corner of Hell.

  This time, when I entered the grove, I found the robot maker already heading up toward the pavilion. He’d built a little robot terrier this time. It was surprisingly mobile and lively, yipping and snapping at the robot maker’s heels. I fell in with them, and the robot maker put his heavy, dry hand on my shoulder. The mechanical terrier sniffed at my shoes and barked o
nce, then ran ahead, rooting frantically in the moss.

  “He’s a good one, boy,” said the robot maker. “I think he’s got a bit of your spark in him. This one’s got a fighting chance against whatever the Colonel’s got cooked up.”

  It didn’t, of course. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the poor little mechanical terrier. It was about to be killed. But I didn’t say anything.

  At this point in our hike through the grove the witch and the witch’s horse ride by. It’s another dependable part of my clockwork Hell. They turn up at about this point in my journey—the moon just up, a breeze stirring—whichever direction I choose. It’s a horrible sight, but it’s one I’ve gotten used to. Like just about everything else.

  The horse is a lot more imposing freed from his stakes at the table. He’s huge and sweaty and hairy, his nostrils dilated wide, his lips curled back. He’s not wearing those funny glasses anymore. The witch rides him cowboy style, bareback. She bends her head down and grunts exhortations into the horse’s ear. She’s still beautiful, I guess. And I still love her—sort of. I feel mixed up about the witch when she rides, actually. A combination of fear and pity and shame. An odd sense that she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t somehow have to. That the horse is somehow doing it to her.

  But mostly I’m just afraid. As they rode through the grove now, I stood frozen in place with fear, just like the first time.

  The robot maker did what he always does: covered my eyes with his bony hand and muttered, “Terrible, terrible! Not in front of the boy!”

  I peered through his fingertips, compelled to watch.

  And then they were gone, snorting away into the night, and we were alone in the grove again. The terrier yipped after them angrily. The robot maker shook his head, gripped my shoulder, and we walked on.

  The pavilion sits on a plateau at the edge of the woods. The base is covered with trees, invisible until you’re there. The battle area, up on top, is like a ruined Greek temple. The shattered remains of the original roof are piled around the edges. The pavilion itself is littered with the glowing, radioactive shambles of the robot maker’s wrecked creations. The pavilion is so infused with radiation that normal physics don’t apply there; some of the ancient robots still flicker back into flame when the wind picks up, and sometimes one of the wrecks goes into an accelerated decline and withers into ashes, as though years of entropy have finally caught up with it. The carcasses tell the story of the robot maker’s decline; his recent robots are less ambitious and formidable, and their husks are correspondingly more pathetic. Many of the newer ones simply failed on their way to the pavilion; their ruined bodies litter the pathway up the hill.

  But not the terrier. He bounded up the hill ahead of us, reached the crest, and disappeared over the top. The robot maker and I hurried after him, not wanting him to lose his match before we even saw what he was fighting.

  His opponent was a wolfman robot. As from an old horror movie, his face was more human than dog. It was a perfect example of how the robot maker’s creations were so badly overmatched: what chance does a house pet have against a wolfman? It was often like this, a question of several degrees of sophistication.

  Standing on two feet, the wolfman towered over the terrier. He spoke too, taunting the little dog, who could only yip and growl in response.

  “Here, boy,” cackled the wolfman. “Come on, pup. Come to daddy. Here we go.” He gestured beckoningly. The terrier barked and reared back. “Come on, boy. Jeez.” He looked to us for sympathy as we approached. “Lookit this. Here boy, I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m just gonna wring your fucking neck. Come on. COME HERE YOU GODDAMN LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT!”

  The wolfman lunged, scrambling down and seizing the terrier by the neck, and took a bite on the forearm for his trouble. I heard metal grate on metal. “Ow! Goddammit. That does it.” He throttled the little robot, which squealed until its voice was gone. “This is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you,” said the wolfman, even as he tossed the broken scrap-metal carcass aside. The robot maker and I just stood, staring in stupid wonder.

  “Ahem,” said the wolfman, picking himself up. “Boy. Where was I? Oh, well. Some other fucking time.” He turned his back and walked away, clearing his throat, picking imaginary pieces of lint from his body, tightening an imaginary tie like Rodney Dangerfield.

  As soon as the wolfman was over the edge of the pavilion and out of sight, the robot maker ran to his ruined terrier and threw his skeletal body over it in sorrow, as though he could shield it from some further indignity. I turned away. I hated the robot maker’s weeping. I didn’t want to have to comfort him again. The sight of it, frankly, made me sick. It was one of Hell’s worst moments. Besides, hanging around the pavilion weeping over his failures was how the robot maker had soaked up so much radiation, and gotten so old. If I stuck around I might get like him.

  I snuck away.

  7

  A few months after my brush with the support group I met another migrator in a bar.

  I’d come back from Hell that afternoon, at work. I reinhabitated my body while I was sitting behind the mike, reading out a public service announcement. For once I kept my cool; didn’t tell anyone at the station, didn’t call Maureen at home. I stopped at the bar on my way home, just to get a few minutes for myself before I let Maureen and Peter know I was back.

  I got talking to the guy at my right. I don’t remember how, but it came out that he was a migrator, too. Just back, like me. We started out boozily jocular, then got quiet as we compared notes, not wanting to draw attention to ourselves, not wanting to trigger anyone’s prejudices.

  He told me about his Hell, which was pretty crazy. The setting was urban, not rural. He started out on darkened city streets, chased by Chinamen driving garbage trucks and shooting at him with pistols. There was a nuclear war; the animals mutated, grew intelligent and vicious. It went on from there.

  I told him about mine, and then I told him about the support group and what I’d thought of it.

  “Shit, yes,” he said. “I went through that bullshit. Don’t let them try to tell you what you’re going through. They don’t know shit. They can’t know what we go through. They aren’t there, man.”

  I asked him how much of his time he spent in Hell.

  “Sheeeit. I’m not back here one day for every ten I spend there. I work in a bottling plant, man. Quality control. I look at bottles all day, then I go out drinking with a bunch of other guys from the plant. Least that’s what they tell me. When I come back I don’t even know those guys. Buncha strangers. When I come back”—he raised his glass—“I go out drinking alone.”

  I asked him about his wife. He finished his drink and ordered another one before he said anything.

  “She got sick of waiting around, I guess,” he said. “I don’t blame her. Least she got me brought back. I owe her that.”

  We traded phone numbers. He wasn’t exactly the kind of guy I’d hang around with under ordinary circumstances, but as it was we had a lot in common.

  I called a few times. His answering machine message was like this: “Sorry, I don’t seem to be home right now. Leave a message at the tone and I’ll call you as soon as I’m back.”

  Maureen told me he called me a few times, too. Always while I was away.

  8

  When I leave the robot maker at the pavilion, I usually continue north, to the shrunken homes in the Garden of Razor Blades. The garden begins on the far side of the pavilion. A thicket of trees, at the entrance, only the trees are leafed with razor blades. The moonlight is reflected off a thousand tiny mirrors; it’s quite pretty, really. The forest floor is layered with fallen razor blades. They never rust, because it never rains in Hell.

  The trees quickly give way to a delicately organized garden laced with paths, and the bushes and flowers, like the trees before them, are covered with razor blades. The paths wend around to a clearing, and in the middle of the clearing are the shrunken homes. They’re bui
lt into a huge dirt mound, like a desert mesa inhabited by Indians, or a gigantic African anthill. Hundreds of tiny doorways and windows are painstakingly carved out of the mound. Found objects are woven into the structure; shirt buttons, safety pins, eyeglass frames, and nail clippers. But no razor blades.

  The shrunken humans are just visible as I approach. Tiny figures in little cloth costumes, busily weaving or cooking or playing little ball games on the roofs and patios of the homes. I never get any closer than that before the storm hits.

  It’s another part of Hell’s program. The witch storm rises behind the trees just as I enter the clearing. The witch storm is a tiny, self-contained hurricane, on a scale, I suppose, to match the shrunken homes. A black whirlwind about three times my size. It’s a rainless hurricane, an entity of wind and dust that roils into action without warning and sends the shrunken humans scurrying for cover inside the mound.

  With good reason. The storm tears razor blades from the treetops and off the surface of the paths and sends them into a whirling barrage against the sides of the shrunken homes. By the time the storm finishes, what was once a detailed, intricate miniature civilization is reduced to an undifferentiated heap of dust and dirt.

  There’s nothing I can do to stop it. I tried at first. Planted myself between the shrunken homes and the witch storm and tried to fend it off. What I got for my trouble was a rash of tiny razor cuts on my arms and face. By the time the storm retreated I’d barely protected a square foot of the mound from the assault.

  The storm is associated with the witch. Don’t ask me why. There are times, though, when I think I see a hint of her figure in its whirling form.

  If I forget the mound and run for cover I can usually avoid feeling the brunt of it. Running away, I might take a few quick cuts across the shoulders or the backs of my legs, but that’s it.