Sometimes after I dropped the bag, I wondered. What if I just waited until I’d really caught my breath the way I needed to, would the light wait for me? But every time I tried to wait, it didn’t wait, and I couldn’t resist. It started back up without me and the fear that it would not come back and that I’d be left down there in the dark made me go with the light.
My job was to carry the bag and I did my work hard. I was conscientious. I didn’t cheat. I didn’t cut corners. I didn’t go on strike. I didn’t complain. Well, not much. Rather, not out loud. My voice in the silence and the dark sounded too alone. And who would have heard? But I did wonder.
I wondered how the bag got from the bottom of the path where I left it to the spotlit place by the yard where I picked it up. Sometimes when I lay in my resting place I listened, but I never heard the sound of anything except the hum of the light and me. But always when I woke the bag had been transported up the path by some great mystery.
This time when I was summoned, I was eager. I hurried to the spotlit bag and hoisted it and hauled it down. When the light stopped at the bottom of the path, I stopped. I dropped the bag. But when the light bounced up the path again, I didn’t follow it. I stayed where I was. I caught my breath. When the light had gone, I was left in the dark. I held the rope. I felt the roughness of the rope in my palm. I turned on the balls of my feet so the bag was behind me and I gripped the rope and pulled the bag up on my back. I took a couple steps and stumbled. It was hard going up with the bag on my back. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could. But I righted myself and took a few more steps before I stumbled again. I stumbled to my left and knocked against a wall. Chunks crumbled. I righted myself, stumbled a few paces more then swerved to my right. My body knocked against a wall. I tottered up then stumbled another couple of paces and this time I fell against nothing: I was beside an opening. I went into the opening. I hauled the bag with me and went into the alley. When I got as far as I thought was necessary – further than the spillover of the light of the path could reach – I dropped the bag. I sat down. I leaned my back against the wall of the alley and caught my breath. The bag lay at my feet like a loyal dog. I touched the bag, running my hand over it. Its skin felt slippery where it had hit the walls. The walls were wet. I kept my hand on the bag a minute, then patted the bag. I stood up and turned around and walked off. I left the bag.
I wasn’t used to walking without the weight of the bag and bowed beneath it, so I wandered. I bumped into what I hadn’t on the way into the alley – big corrugated metal trash cans, clumps of soggy paper, broken glass and piles of things that clattered. It was a dreadful place where I’d not been allowed to come. I left the alley running.
I knew I’d reached the path when I fell sideways down an incline. I picked myself up and climbed as fast as I was able to the yard.
When I got to my resting place I was very thirsty. I reached out for the cup but knocked it over. I heard the water spill and make a hissing sound as it sank into the ground. I didn’t put the cup down. I held it and held it in my hand as if by some good mystery it would be full again.
I lay down in my resting place and looked forward to a long, uninterrupted and true rest. I wouldn’t have to carry the bag again.
But this time when I rested, how I dreamt of my bag! Now since I had tried to hide it, I thought of it as “mine.” I dreamt that I was walking and I didn’t have the weight on me and I was on a different path. I was walking somewhere open, I’d been walking long and it was light, not just the light, but light like daylight, with nothing between me and the sun but sky. Then there was a hand, and then the hand was pointing and I saw the bag. I kneeled on the moist ground in the open air beneath the blue, blue sky and slowly, slowly put my hand around the bag. The bag was warm. The bag was soft as skin. I could feel through the thinness of the bag to the thing inside, and I knew what it was. Then easily, so easily, the bag opened itself to me, the rope coiled at the top of the bag unwound, the skin slipped apart like oil, it opened like a bud and there was a sweet, clean smell like a blessed thing, like a thing released. I looked down in the bag and saw —
The light. The light was waking me. I closed my eyes and tried to will myself to sleep again because though in the dream I knew what was in the bag before I opened it, I didn’t know awake. But I couldn’t sleep.
Across the yard in the spotlit spot was the bag. It had been found and moved from where I’d hidden it. I pulled myself up from my resting place. My hand still held the cup which I’d hoped would, by some good mystery while I still slept, be filled. I slipped the cup into my shirt. The metal was cool against my skin. I walked to the spotlit place and took the rope and heaved the closed bag up on my back and followed the light down the path.
When the light stopped at the bottom of the path, I stopped too. Though I dropped the bag, I continued to hold the rope. I sank down as always but this time when the light started to bounce back up the path, I stayed. I sat on the ground. I watched the path until it was no longer lit by the departing light. Everything was dark. I blinked as everything got black and I could not see. I pulled my bag more close to me. I felt the bag next to my ribs. I stuck my hand in the air like a trunk or a tentacle and I felt nothing. The ground beneath was crumbly with patches of oiliness or wet. The only sound was my breath. The light was gone, I couldn’t hear its hum.
I put my hand around the bag. I felt with my fingertips and palm the texture of the outside of the bag. It was like leather or some similarly sturdy, flexible fabric. I found no seams, nor pores nor weave. Though the bag was full, it was not entirely full. There was some give and looseness. I was able to move the surface of the bag over different parts of the thing inside without moving the thing inside itself. I couldn’t tell if the bag was warm, or had been made so from its having been held next to me. Also what was in the bag, though solid, gave slightly to the pressure of my hand. There was the ssshhh sound of my hand moving along the bag. Then there was the sound of the flap of the cloth as my hand went in my shirt and brought the tin cup out. I knocked the cup against the ground. Bits crumbled. My hand got gritty. I kept hitting the cup against the ground until it bent. I broke it where it bent to make a scalpel or knife.
I stuck the point of the knife into the middle of the knot and tried to pull the knot apart; it wouldn’t budge. I tried with my hand and teeth and with the knife to undo the knot but it was fast. I tried to cut the rope. I sawed at the rope but the strands wouldn’t cut. What cut was the insides of my fingers that held the knife. My hand stung with sweat and the wet knife slipped.
I lay the bag on the ground. I pressed the contents of the bag as flat as it would go. I ran my hand over the surface of the bag to find the place that gave most easily. I drew a line in the air above that place where I would enter in. I thought it would only take one tiny scalpel tap to split the surface of the bag. It didn’t. I pressed and gouged and poked and hacked but the skin of the bag was tough. It didn’t sever. Not like me, not like my skin. As I hit and hit and hit the bag my knife cut into my palm and fingers deeply. I felt the bag get wet from me, and I was glad I could see nothing in the dark.
I gave up. I wiped the knife against the ground and then against my shorts to wipe the excess off. I put the knife back in my shirt. I felt around to get my bearings where the path went up. I took the end of the rope in my hand and stood up. I dragged the bag back up the path. I shuffled slowly. It felt so different to drag the bag, to hear it scraping on the ground and not have its weight on my back. In the darkness my feet found the way. They felt the small dip in the middle of the road which had been pressed down by my treading. I could smell the wet smell of the walls I’d never paid attention to before. I could feel how cool and close were the narrow walls and I heard the ground beneath my feet.
Suddenly I was covered with affection for these familiar things. They had been true and stayed with me; they had been part of my job. My job had been but to carry the bag. Not to know why, nor how it kept coming back. My job was no
t to know its terrible contents.
I also knew that having once – no, twice – not done my job I could no more do it again. And I was tired. When I’d dragged the bag back to the edge of the yard where always before I’d found it, I didn’t leave it. I dragged the bag across the yard. I dragged it to my resting place. I dropped the rope. I kneeled down. I took the bit of broken metal from inside my shirt and started digging. The ground was hard and dry but it broke easily. It opened as if to welcome me. Every handful was a gift, it was the good ground giving way to me. I picked the chunks of true ground out. I scooped the small bits and the dust. I made the hole the ground gave up more deep than where I rested. I made the hole about two feet long, and then a bit, and not as wide around. It was more like a shaft than a dip in the ground. When I dug how far the hole should be, the ground was getting moist. It felt less of the crust and more the heart of earth. I picked the bag up by the rope. I stood up. I lifted my arm and lowered the bag. When I felt the bag reach the bottom of the hole I was glad. I kneeled by the hole and coiled the rope on the top of the bag. I kneeled by the hole in the ground and imagined I could see down into it. I imagined the way it might look on a day with sun. I imagined I saw the bag at rest, the rope coiled in a circle on the top and the black and crumbling wall of earth around it. I closed my eyes though it made no difference in the dark, and kept them closed some moments. I wanted to say good words but I didn’t know them.
I knew that it was good and right and meet and just, and in true time, this burying. But part of me was sad to inter the body of the bag.
I opened my eyes and threw a handful of dirt on the bag. The earth made a sound when it fell on the bag, I let there be quiet for a moment, then I threw the other dirt in. When the bag was covered and the hole was filled, I patted the dirt. I made the ground smooth over the bag. I couldn’t see how visible it might be, where I had laid the bag, but I ran my palm across the ground to make it very smooth, to leave no sign of what I did.
Because of the bag, not all the dirt would fit back in that place. I pushed the dirt beside my resting place. I lay down in my resting place and closed my eyes. I reached my arm up from where I lay and swept the dirt from the hole for the bag onto me. I felt the sprinkles of the earth on me, as gentle as kisses but kisses that stayed, then covered me like a blanket and kept me down and held me down, not hard, not how I didn’t want, but how I wanted. I swept it all so the ground by me was smooth. I tucked my arm beside me in the dirt. There wasn’t enough to cover me entirely, but I did what I could.
I lay in my place of rest and listened. I heard my breath and when I breathed I felt the earth above me rise and fall. Besides my breath I heard one thing: the sound of something near me, in the earth. Like the slow small sound of a small thing when it’s closing.
And when I heard, I pictured in my mind the bag beneath the ground. I saw the brown-grass color of the rope get black and wet, and saw its firmness relax, and I pictured the slow and good dissolving of the rope, the turning of the rope to ground. I saw the skin of the bag get thin as it did not resist the slow decay to earth. I saw flakes of the skin dissolve in patches. And then I saw the ground above break open and the light of open air, and then a hand pull back the earth and brush away the last flakes of the bag, and then that hand around the thing, exposed, that had been carried in the bag.
I saw this in my place of rest where I lay covered, waiting.
THE RUINED CITY
SHE SAID SHE WOULD go with me to the city.
I said, No.
You have to go.
I can’t.
You left something there.
I shook my head.
She folded her arms and looked at me. She knew how to wait and how not to.
Who knows what’s there, I mumbled. There could be gangs or dust or drought or poison air. I tried to tell her why without confessing.
OK, she said when I’d exhausted my excuses, What’s the worst that could happen if you go back?
The worst? Oh, everything would be awful, but the worst, the worst – (I didn’t want to say the worst) – I could die. I would, I would really die. We could both die if we went there, we would, we’d —
She’d never liked my flair for the dramatic.
One, she said, That’s not the worst. Two, we probably wouldn’t die. Three, you can’t and I refuse to anymore, live without what you left in the city.
What I can’t do is survive that trip. You know what I can’t carry.
She didn’t look away from me, my empty sleeve. She knew what I consisted of.
You can, she said, I’m going.
I wondered how I could stall for time. Should I tell her Someday? Wait?
It’ll have to wait until the weather’s better.
The weather is always the same.
It’ll have to wait until the roads and until —
Not Someday. Now.
She started packing. She only packed essentials – food, water, knife, tarp, light. It all fit in her single bag.
And though I told her she should, she packed neither a passport nor a weapon.
How will you find it?
The maps were gone. The roads that I remembered had been bombed, the bridges burnt.
I will.
You’ve never been there, you don’t know where it is.
I’d never told her where I’d left. But even what I could have told would not have been enough. I had worked hard to not remember.
How will you get there?
I’ll walk.
She put her arms through the straps of the pack and hoisted it up on her back. As she tied the belt of the pack around her waist she said, There’s enough in here for both of us. Come with me.
She stepped outside.
I didn’t want to stay where she had left. I walked through the door behind her.
I’d never told her where I’d left but she had looked and she’d uncovered evidence: burnt-edged letters, yellowed pages, ragged strips of documents that hadn’t quite been shredded. Junk mail that meant more than it seemed. A trail of drops and bandages. A shovel and a cup. She’d learned as much about the city I had left as I – but different things. Though she didn’t know the history, she had the insight of a foreigner. She saw as quaint what I’d thought monumental, of consequence what I’d dismissed, redeemable what I thought lost. She did not fear nor envy what I did.
She made me travel faster than I thought my body could. At first I could barely keep up with her. Sometimes when I thought I was going to fall, no, really, truly about to fall down, she’d stop. And then I’d sink and she would slip the bag off her shoulders and take out the blanket and make a pillow for me. She’d touch my forehead to make sure I was all right and I would close my eyes and rest.
But once I heard her rustling and opened my eyes to watch her kneeling on the ground not far from me, her open palms an inch above the earth. She turned her head to listen and then, as if she’d heard a cue, she lowered her hands flat. I saw the muscles of her back and neck and arms pull tight as she leaned forward to put her ear to the ground. As long as I kept watching her, she stayed there patient, waiting, as if she heard something beneath the ground.
She took us past the low, round hills to the far side of the country we’d grown used to. Outside the border where I’d felt safe, we were exposed to sun and heat and drought.
She rationed carefully and she was fair, but after a while we used up our provisions. When I lagged behind her, I saw the shape of the empty water bottle shifting back and forth in the bag.
We were walking on a high flat road.
This was a logging road, she said. She showed me where the evergreens had been. We walked through a checkerboard pattern of bald brown clear-cut, slash-and-burn and saplings thin as barb wire. Behind us the mountain had been stripmined. A deep black wedge was exposed. The road was dry. I wanted a drink.
I saw a stream in the gully by the road.
Let’s stop.
She kept walking.
Stop!
Startled by her voice, I spilt the water.
She yanked me away from the stream.
Look, she pointed to the dark grey corridor of shade above the stream. Sun shone through the yellow leaves and on the caramel-colored pebbles in the water. Way upstream, trapped behind a knot of twigs, I saw a puddle of rust-colored foam. When I raised my moist hand to my face it smelled sour. I shook it to get the water off. My hand stung. She dug up a handful of dirt and rubbed it against my hand until the dirt was dry then brushed it off. Red splotches were rising on my hand and wrist and forearm.
It’s going to burn for a while, she said. You have to be careful.
I had to learn to live off the ruined land.
We walked a long time in a barren place. It was hot. We’d run out of water days ago. I kept looking, thinking I saw it, but when I blinked, the only thing in front of me was her. The shape of her body was wavy with heat. I squinted into blinding white. When I closed my eyes sand gritted my eyelids and I saw red. But I couldn’t keep them open. Then when I closed them everything was black. I fell.
When I came to it was cool and dim. She was holding something wet against my forehead. When I looked up I saw stars.
Where are we?
Inside.
She squeezed some of the water from the cloth into my mouth. But those are stars. I tried to point.
Minerals, she said slowly. We’re underground.
I tried to leave but she held me back.
There’s water down here.
She handed me a cup.
Not only water —
Right. Not only water. There’s this —
She clicked the flashlight up at what I’d thought were stars.
The Terrible Girls Page 11
