In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (15 page)

It said,
I AM LIKE YOU
,
BUT I AM NOT YOU
, and when its voice thrashed against the sides of my skull I knew it was no real squid, only a ghost in the shape of a squid, and in my drowning I believed I smiled, and even in my stomach the fingerling laughed, as if ghosts were no danger, as if ghosts and their memories had not been the whole of our undoing.

The squid-ghost circled me in the floating blackness, and as it circled it spoke, and with words barely words, it said,
YOU SEEK TO MAKE ONLY A CHILD
,
ONLY A HANDFUL OF CHILDREN
,
BUT I WANT MORE
.

It said,
YOU HAVE SEEN THE EGGS I KEEP
,
THE EGGS I TOOK FROM MY WIFE WHEN LAST SHE SWAM IN HER FIRST SHAPE
.

It said,
THEY ARE LESS NOW
,
BUT THEY ARE STILL MINE
,
AND STILL THEY ARE IN NEED OF A GOOD FATHER
, and then it sprayed wide clouds of useless ghost semen and blackest ink, twin excretions fogging the deep lake.

It said,
WHAT YOUR WIFE CANNOT MAKE
,
MINE ONCE REFUSED ME
.

It said,
AFTERWARD
,
I TRIED TO KILL MY WIFE AS YOU TRIED TO KILL YOURS
,
BUT I COULD NOT SUCCEED AS YOU HAVE
, and as it said this I shook, because despite the fall of her moon I did not believe my wife was dead. And then the squid spoke again, said,
KILL HER FOR ME
, its tentacles drawing me close, the hard shell of its body long against me, and against its grip I shook my head, struggled again to escape.

KILL THE BEAR
, the squid said.
MAKE FRESH THIS WORLD ONCE AGAIN
.

After I refused its offer, the squid opened my skin with its hooks and slammed its snapping beak into my chest, and even though the squid was a ghost, still it was powerful there in the lake-black: With sharp movements, it set to folding back the sheets of my skin, splitting some numbers of ribs and also the tissues between. It pushed forward, and my body bulged to accommodate its entrance, its puke-yellow eyes leading the strange wedge of its alien face, and then I was speared upon its sharp ridges, and then the fingerling was pushing back from all his holdings, and between them or upon them I was caught fast and screaming, thrashing against the squid’s attack, its refusal to accept my declining of its barely bartered truce, and for a while we spiraled deeper into the depths of the lake, a black made of the squid’s ink and also something else, where there was no sound and sight, where even our battle was subsumed into the silence, and where I burst against the cold and the dark until I was reduced to a held breath, a bit of bodily heat, a movement slowed and almost stopped. Still the squid-ghost swam on, not farther down but farther in, into me, trying to squirm its
ghost into the spaces I contained, that space that in me was already filled with my own fractured haunts, my cancer-son, and would admit no other.

The squid’s shape was so heavy, so thick with ropes of ink now pushing into me too, and as I dropped through that black I dreamed a squid’s dream: I had not one child but thousands, all same faced as me, all hatching out of the lake at once, from both the egg clutch along the shelf ridge and also somehow from out of my arms, out of my legs, from out of my mouth and ears and nose, all little stars bright with tentacles and sharp black mouths, all floating upward toward the light.

The weight of the squid weighed upon me, and as I watched my dream-children swim off I sank deeper into their making, and in this dream I saw my life did not end with my death but rather went on, spread wide across the face of the world, my children a country of men and squid, so that everywhere there was lake we were there, and everywhere there was dirt there was a man sent to build his house upon it.

Throughout our fall the fingerling fought the squid from every inner space, pushed back with his many tumors, and soon the squid balked, struggled to withdraw, wriggling its barbs backward. Outside my body again, the squid swam long curves around my sinking weight, its angry shape first invisible in the black, its voice now lower than words, untranslatable even by the fingerling, and then again it was upon us, slashing with beak and claw, and as we fell, the depth’s pressure squeezed my lungs until they broke further, filled with ink, burst again.

How tired I was of almost dying, of suffering the sequenced steps without release: Here was the cold, the dark, the black, all around me and inside, and here was my crooked foot and my
dented head or neck and all the rest of my hook-scraped and beak-burst body, and still I did not give in, still some part of me scratched forward, succored for life, for even what sorry life I had waiting. I reached into my boot for my blade, my knife dulled with decades of skinning and scaling, and as I drowned deeper I fought back, put the single sharp edge of my blade against the squid’s soft shell, and together we sank through another fathom of struggle before it tried again to whip me toward the crook of its stained beak, before I raked my knife across one tentacle and then the other, before I plunged it toward the squid’s eye—that eyeball alone the size of my head—and in the dark I moved the knife into the black at the center of its glimmering iris, into and then through that ring of light, pushing the knife so deep my wrist disappeared into the shell behind, and somewhere within the knife finally caught, then wrenched from my grip in a wet squelch of ichor—and still I knew I had not ended the squid, what ghost remained of this once-father.

Not to have killed it but to have at least made half of it dark.

To have at least made that half
black
, blacker, and then to have that part and others broken, made a scrim swimming all around me, a body floating like a shroud.

M
EMORY AGAIN AS TRANSFORMATION, AS
transfiguration: to swim or else float or fall inside the tearing-apart, to be joined with this squid-thing, this whale-thing, this desperation that could be either a squid or a whale, that in one of its shapes the bear had ended. And still it went on, and amid my dispersal swam the squid’s anger, its own remainder, fury at how it could not enter my cavity, and if it could not claim the inner chambers of my body, at least it could reshape the shell.

The fingerling was already familiar with this squid’s motion, swimming and tentacled and inky black, and I was made that swimmer’s shape too, and soon my breathing stopped being one kind and became another, and by that change I finally came to believe what I had been told: that despite our too-many numbers there were always only two, and that those two begat no true offspring, because it was always the same two that appeared, in this and in every age, and yet everywhere on this dirt there were too many.

A
FTERWARD, WHAT OTHER POWER LED
me up through the shallower lake, what glowing guide except the light of the moon? Not my wife’s moon, shattered and fallen, but that other again made lonely above the earth, its long light cutting even the ink-water of the new lake, making floating ribbons shimmering around this new body, shorn and reshaped, this face different now beneath the water than it had been above.

As I ascended, the fingerling taught me the motions this shape necessitated, the jetting this way and that, choosing a path zigzagged upward through the layers of coldest and then colder and then just cold. For a long time, he urged me to stay away from the surface, but I did not understand his hesitance until after I burst the plane between salted ink and rain-soaked air: Beneath the water I would always be squid, would take on the role hollowed out for me by the long-ago aggression of the bear, but above I would for some time longer be only myself, only failed husband, broken father.

At first I waited there, tried to be both, to have both, but the
fingerling denied me, pushed me to pick.
NO
, he said.
YOU CANNOT ALWAYS WANT TO HAVE EVERYTHING
.

Diving back through the lake, I snatched at schools of fish and passing eels, feastings for me and my son, and as my new shape swelled, the fingerling swam within me; his shapes changed too, constrained by my shifting, and for some time we moved together, and after our hungers were satisfied I began our gradual shearing of the surface, and when we broke again the plane of the lake’s surface it was to find the rain softened, the wind reduced, the waves manageable even in the dark, the first true dark in many years. From the surface I searched the shoreline with my human eyes, then as the squid I dove below to swim in toward the shallows, on the way checking the shelf and what lay between the shelf and the shore for any sign of the foundling, finding none except some scent of his blood, some taste of his vomit, and also of salt and fish and bile reduced, traces I imagined discernible only to my new and watery senses.

And then for a moment not to care so much about the foundling, at least not the foundling as a boy, which was not the shape of son my new shape craved.

And then to want to swim back into the depths, the deep and deeper lakes where my body would stay as perfect as any other swimming creature’s, at last ideal for what activities I would put it to, evolved right.

All I had to do was choose the lake over the land forever, and then I could be a new thing, a squid first and a whale after, and for a moment I knew how the one who came before me had arrived at his station, and also what he had traded to claim it.

And how sorely I was tempted, ready then to return to whatever waters, to linger in the naked dark with the black and inky
salt around my ruined ankles, as I did after I first stood into the cold air, watching the squidness slip free of my body—but it was only by choosing the land that I could choose my wife, and so what other choice could I make, what else but to once more become a man.

T
HOSE DAMNED AND CLOCKLESS HOURS
. Those unrecordable days, their tricky times, unable to be measured or even to have their passing discerned, and still some events did happen, still some progressions ran onward, unchecked and uncontrolled: Now the dirt crawled with flames, hot tongues licking that old star-glass, melting some into a form again slippery, still malleable and undetermined as I walked ashore, carrying the shape of a squid inside me, and also the many bodies of the fingerling, who I knew had neither forgiven me nor given up his vengeance. The rain continued to fall upon us as it had before, but no longer was there as much lightning and thunder in the air, and I wondered, How long had I been beneath the water, if that storm had passed, and how would I ever know?

In the distance—up the path from the lake, up the opened hill—there I saw the ruins of our house, barely rooms, barely chimney. The moonfall had cracked its foundations and cratered the rest, and I had to step lightly across our now-treacherous yard and our rubbled sitting room to find a sure path to traverse, some way to
reach the center of the house, where our rooms now fell away into the earth. I crawled out toward the edge on my hands and knees, then looked downward from that precipice into the dirt, into the rooms and hallways exposed below. That first level was damaged too, its chambers cluttered with the house’s fallen furnishings, those dishes and furs and furniture, but from my vantage that sung floor still seemed more whole than the house I had built, and perhaps safe enough to enter, as I still planned.

From there I walked out of the house and then searched all around the cracked crater where the largest portions of the moon had fallen, but along its circumference I saw no good signs: On the lake side of the crater there was ink staining the soil and the water, and opposite that there was only the burned earth and ash-trees where the woods had farthest reached, and none of its animals were left where I could see them, if left at all. Occasionally I found the melted steel of some trap, and between its snapped jaws nothing remained, the fire having immolated what could not run, and no matter how many laps I made there was still no sign of the foundling, whom I had last sensed in the water, and there only faintly. Of all the elements of our world, it was mostly the woods that resisted the cooling of the falling rain, and there the clouds of ash and smoke and falling branches still thickened, so that all I could hear was the crackle of flames, the dropping of deadening limbs. Among the trees the sensed world shrunk, became some few feet of touch and taste, all dark, all ash, reddish-brown and brownish-red. There I called the foundling’s name, and then that confused air entered my lungs, made me hack and cough, put bright flecks across my vision, and still I tried to hold right the path toward my memory of the cave, a path straightened by fire and missing trees, by the removal of all the brush and thorny bramble that had thwarted my last attempt to find its entrance.

And still I was lost, still I could not find what I was looking for, until again the fingerling pointed the way, turned my steps toward what he must have somehow known we would find: the entrance to the cave, and then the foundling found again, just inside that smoke-filled hole; found trying to reach one mother or another by a path less-often taken, as if all caves led to the same chambers; found by stumbling over his stilled form, my feet tangling across his empty shape to send me sprawling.