A World Elsewhere (5 page)

Landish had known Carson but not well. They had never had a conversation. First mate of the
Gilbert
, and the only man who knew the ice as well as Captain Abram Druken did. Francis Carson, who would not under any circumstances abandon the men and boys of his watch. Captain Druken had sent them out from the
Gilbert
when all hands could tell that a blizzard was imminent. They lost their way in the storm and, despite Carson’s advice to return and his ministrations, lay down to die. Had he left them to their lonely deaths, he would almost certainly have saved himself because he was stronger than them and had twice before survived a night outside on the ice. He’d have seen his wife again and seen their baby born. But he couldn’t bear to leave his men. The best first mates were as loath to leave the men in
their care as a captain was to leave a sinking ship. And so he stayed with them. And a piece of the ice pan on which the watch of men were huddled broke off and Carson drifted away, though the men of the watch—for all of whose deaths Captain Druken would also have been responsible because he had discontinued the search for them too quickly so as not to lose time hunting seals—were saved by the captain of another ship. Not even when drunk and at his most vainglorious did Landish fancy he might someday be as good a man as Carson of the
Gilbert
. A chastening life. A chastening death.

He was the opposite of sole survivor. Carson alone was left behind. He may have written something in case his body or effects were found, last words that were never read. Last words to his wife, first and last words to the child who was not yet born. He wouldn’t have burned the words he wrote, wouldn’t have cared how they’d be judged. He may have spoken aloud to his wife and unborn child, to others, to himself. The sole lost soul. There should be a word for all saved but one.

He alone had not come home. Deacon’s mother must have thought a lot about that. Why hers but no other woman’s husband? Why him but no other men? An inscrutably arbitrary death—or had God spied out some secret sin in Carson of the
Gilbert
that now would be forever secret? A young, pregnant widow pondering the motives of the universe. No doubt she would have blamed herself, however absurdly disproportionate to her “sins” her punishment was.

Captain Druken lives on in a warm house, but also alone, surrounded not by family and friends but by the effects of a life spent at the hunt. Alone though his son is but a mile away, while his neighbours, whose houses he has never been inside of and who have never been inside of his, wonder how much that is said about the man is true. Survived by his son and his ship. Landish wouldn’t be surprised if he scuttled the
Gilbert
so that no one else could be her skipper. Still, he wrote to his father, asking him to help the boy, assured him that he
would not spend on himself one cent of any money that his father gave him. There was no reply.

Landish discovered that, if he spoke to him long enough, Deacon, though he couldn’t understand a word, would fall asleep. Landish called his bedtime soliloquies “tranquiloquies.” The tranquiloquies kept Landish from getting too lonely.

Landish wrote, and read aloud to Deacon:

Like other children who come from the orphanage, Deacon did. It is called an orphanage because children of orphan age live there. Up to twelve. Grown-ups can pick you, but like a snot they won’t. No one in Cluding Deacon got picked. The longest one was Kenneth. Fifteen. A favourite but a burden on the colony.

It was heave ho, out you go. You had your chance, now make the best of it. And if you do nothing else, never forget who was here for you when what you needed most was a good kick in the arse. Don’t come back to us with your bed between your legs and some boy named Lloyd curled up inside of it.

Dead. Survived by his wits and many friends. The boys of Cluding Deacon, in their thirties and their forties now, many of them men, gather in their first and one true home, to meet in the place where those years of his life that were spent indoors prepared Kenneth so well for the other two.

There was a rule at Cluding Deacon that no boy could be picked by a young unmarried man unless a young unmarried man willing to part with fifty dollars asked if he could pick a boy.

At last, a young unmarried man availed himself of this longstanding exception to the rule. He chose a one-year-old boy whose last name was Carson. His real first name was unknown at Cluding Deacon, so the man called him Deacon after half of the orphanage because he was so small. The man, whose name was Landish Druken, liked the sound of Deacon Carson Druken.

The much-cherished but yet-to-be-enacted ritual called “Let Us All Delight in the Good Fortune of a Boy Who Has Been Picked Instead of Us” was at last enacted, after which the boy was hustled from Cluding Deacon by his new guardian, who was himself celebrated by the many older boys he might have picked but didn’t.

Landish looked at the boy.

“I ransomed you, but you were no bargain. I didn’t pay a king’s ransom or even a prince’s. Fifty dollars. The going price, they said. They told me I could ask around but they couldn’t guarantee you wouldn’t be snapped up while I was gone.”

It wasn’t easy for a man who was an only child and had never known a human being younger than himself to raise a boy. Landish wondered if Deacon Carson Druken cried too much. It seemed to him that it was not unreasonable to expect that, over the course of a month, the average child would stop crying at least once, even if only to catch its breath.

Deacon Carson Druken cried when he was hungry. He cried when he was eating. He cried when he was finished eating. He cried when Landish picked him up. He cried when Landish put him down. The urge to pee made him cry. The satisfaction of the urge to pee made him cry. He cried before, during and after a bath. Tears seeped from Deacon Carson Druken’s eyes while he was sleeping.

He cried so much that Landish worried he would die of thirst.

Landish tried to write while Deacon cried. He paid fair ladies who were used to being paid for something else to watch over Deacon while he went out for a walk, for a drink. He thought about spending time in the attic with a fair lady who did exactly what she was used to being paid for doing. He looked at the boy and thought against it.

Seemingly for no reason, Deacon Carson Druken ceased to cry.

The boy looked at him as if there was nothing Landish could tell him that he hadn’t heard before.

Man and boy slept.

“This is your homo supine period,” Landish said to Deacon. “All you do is lie on your back.”

Then came homo suprone when he lay on his belly
and
his back.

Then came homo repine when he sat up, spat up, crawled and bawled and Landish repined for the days when he was cribbed.

Then came “the great uprising” when Deacon stood up.

Then what Landish called his “first pittance of an utterance,” a “word” that seemingly had neither vowels nor consonants.

No others followed for a while. A long while. It seemed that the boy’s first pittance of an utterance would be his first and only one. Landish could see that the boy understood him when he spoke. He didn’t doubt that the boy was able to speak. He had seemed about to many times. Landish wondered what he was waiting for, this boy who was now almost three.

Landish made up many stories for Deacon. There was one about “a boy who lived inside a hollow iceberg, a great palatial shell of ice, through the walls of which the sun sometimes shone so brightly the boy had to cover his eyes to keep from being blinded. The boy was called the ‘bergy boy’ and lived alone in the Palacier. He was ravenice for licorice, the gathering of which was very dangerice in the cavern-ice Palacier …”

The time came when Landish thought Deacon was old enough to hear how he and Landish had come to be together. He told him how his father died, of his mother’s letters, of Cluding Deacon and the fifty dollars that he gave the orphanage in exchange for Deacon.

At last Deacon spoke his first words. A torrent of words by the time he was barely four. He asked Landish to repeat the true story about his parents and about how he and Landish came to be in the attic. He nodded as Landish spoke. He said that, because he’d never
met his parents, he wasn’t all that sad that they were gone. Landish said he might be sad about it one day. He might hate Captain Druken. But Deacon shook his head.

Where was I before I was born?

The same place I was.

What’s it called?

The Womb of Time.

What do you do there?

You wait.

Who picked us?

God did.

Why?

God only knows.

What’s God like?

I don’t know.

Who picked Him?

I don’t know.

What’s
this
place called?

The world. You go from the Womb of Time into the womb of your mother and from there into the world. The world leads to the
Tomb
of Time, the place from which no one knows the way back home. From the Womb of Time to the Tomb of Time. Life.

What happens in the Tomb of Time?

Only Lazarus and Christ went there and came back. They never said what it was like.

Landish told him that you passed from the Womb of Time into what he called your birth “Murk,” which was the interval between your “commencement screech” and the first moment of your life that you remembered. No two Murks were of the same duration. Some lasted eighteen months, others twice or even three times that. No one really knew what went on in your mind throughout the Murk, what caused it or what its purpose was. While you were in the Murk you
learned things that you remembered when you left, but you did not remember learning them. Your caretakers could tell that you were learning and remembering and years later told you what you did and what you looked like, but you had to take their word for it.

They may have photographed your body while your mind was in the Murk. They may have kept a diary and let you read it. But none of it rang a bell. Your actions and appearances as recorded and recalled by others while you were in the Murk consisted mostly of mis-remembrance, embellishment and outright fiction. You emerged from the Murk knowing the names of things. It was not possible, even in retrospect, to tell where the Murk left off and your memory began. You didn’t burst from the Murk. You left it gradually. Memory didn’t dawn on you. It came and went, came and went, the Murk breaking, then re-forming, memory like the sun behind a threadbare cloud. The Murk lifted until you could nearly see through it, but then closed in again. And so it went, a seesaw flux of memory and Murk, a fast succession of eclipses from which some light as weak as that of soon-to-vanish stars survived.

You emerged from the Murk and then life as you would remember it began: the stages of life that were known as “hoods.” Childhood, boyhood, manhood, fatherhood, many more including some you had no way of naming yet. Oldhood comes next to last …

Deacon imagined a procession of hooded figures approaching him in single file, each one shorter than the one behind it, all faceless except for the first, which bore
his
face.

 … Over time, some hoods, especially the early ones, dropped out of the procession, and some walked side by side with others until the final hood went by. The final hood. The largest of the hooded figures. The nameless one, abandoned by the others, left by them to walk alone into the Tomb of Time.

“What are you in?” Deacon said. Landish thought of saying fatherhood, but said manhood instead. Deacon nodded.

Landish told him that Deacon’s father had fallen short of fatherhood by ninety days. From the procession of his life, fatherhood had been removed, and with it all the others but for the one that had no name.

“You’re in your childhood,” Landish said again, and smiled. Wildhood, he thought, but could not imagine Deacon running wild. Orphanhood. Happyhood, judging by his eyes and the smile that almost never left his face.

Landish also told Deacon about Just Mist—the realm of things that at one time were possible but had never happened. The actual course of events threaded its way through Just Mist by way of sudden turns, double-backs and circles. Just Mist was full of phantom, nearly lived lives, such as the one Deacon would have had if not for his father’s death.

Landish’s father had hoped he would have a family that would grow into the Druken house, but Landish, by the time his mother died when he was eight, was still the only child. He and his mother were often alone in the house. Her name was Genevieve. She always wrote it Gen of Eve.

She said she made up “Landish” so he would never have to share his name with someone else. But she gave him a middle initial, B, and never told him what it stood for. She said it was good to be the one and only Landish but also “good to be a B.” He asked her what she meant but she told him that maybe one day he would understand. She told his father that his last name was a mixed blessing. Other boys were about as likely to play with a Druken as to pick on one. At school, he’d be ignored. If she taught him at home, they could keep each other company. But Captain Druken said that too much time with his mother would make him a sissy.

So she had been alone a lot. She read while Landish was at school. When he got home, they made forts and castles with her books. She told him stories about a baby who slept in Sir Walter’s Cot. She helped him read some pages out loud. He pronounced mutinous “muttonous.”
His mother said, “Good luck to any skipper cursed with a muttonous crew.” She never spoke of God or Heaven. She told him she had no idea where she’d come from and none where she was going. She died of a cold that just kept getting worse. She slipped so suddenly into her final fever that her last words to him were “I’ll see you in the morning, sweetheart.”

Gen of Eve. The rest of her was in Just Mist. He still couldn’t stand how much it hurt to think that she was gone.