In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (16 page)

Memory as discovery of this almost son of mine, of the body: To scramble back to standing, and then to return to my knees to dig the foundling’s shape from the cave floor, from what ash had already blanketed his form.

To uncover with my fingers the absence of breath, of speech or movement, and to put my hands to his chest, to push and pump and pry but to be able to add no breath or heartbeat, as he had so recently added mine to me.

To wipe away the silt and wonder again how long I had been gone, and where else the foundling had wandered before reaching the cave.

To taste what came out of his mouth and to find not life but ash and more silt, the gray stuff of his suffocation.

To cradle his body against mine and then to stand with his limp heaviness hung upon my frame.

To have forgotten the weight of a child and to regret the forgetting—but then to never forget what happened next, how it felt when my fingers discovered the wounds upon his back, the teeth marks splitting the skull, and to understand it was not the thicker air that killed the foundling but his mother the bear.

T
HE FIRE WAS MOSTLY EXTINGUISHED
by the time we emerged from the cave, although its effect remained in its additions of ash and char, and also its reductions, its destructions of leaf and needle, of fowl and flora. When I reached the tree line I saw the dirt was no less changed, the air warmer than before, and as I watched, a soft rain continued to fall in some places, although not in all. The weather—which had for so long been only one state—was not yet righted, and various kinds of precipitation fell upon me as I carried the foundling toward the crater’s edge, toward the cracked and broken house that hung above.

Between my steps aftershocks shook the ground, nearly rocked me from my feet, belied any delusions of safety I might have harbored now that the fire was gone, now that the sky’s ashy gradient moved quickly toward a more recognizable hue of gray. I advanced upon the ruins of the house, which despite its rearrangement remained mostly where I had built it: All my past steps were easily remembered, and those were the paths that led me home that day, with the foundling in my arms, the fingerling mad with happiness at his false brother’s new lack
of everything, his body empty of all that life the fingerling had once begrudged.

All that remained was the shape my wife had given him, the body of a boy, the face that was my wife’s face, if she had been a boy herself, and how it wrenched me to look upon those features. My wife had sent the foundling into my care, and I had failed her, and for that I was sorry, and for that I would descend again the deep house so that I might reach the great stairs at its bottom, that deeper house that spiraled and soared below, and I tried to convince myself that this time I would walk those steps down into the black, through that last element and then beyond, into whatever deepest house was built there, the chamber in which my wife or else the body of my wife had so long been waiting.

T
HE WALLS ANGLED INWARD UPON
their foundations, with only the brought brick of the chimney still mostly upright, and the rest of the house swayed, its creaking caught in the inconsistent gales that blew across the dirt. From there the path into the house was not the path I had previously taken but some other raised walkway left solid or nearly solid as the ground around it had crumbled, exposing the first levels of the deep house even as their rubble filled the empty rooms within, burying some number of the scorched stone floors. I did not look down more than I had to, and in any case the carried foundling made it hard to see where I placed my feet, and with each step the fingerling continued to cry,
WHY BOTHER
,
WHY BOTHER
,
WHY BOTHER
. Where before he’d had to swim from muscle to muscle, from gland to organ and back again, now his presence was persistent, his movements known everywhere always, as soft lumps between the thin bones of my hand, as more-fibered protuberances upon my femur and my clavicle. My stomach, his first home, swelled with him, so that when I pissed and shat his sign was there too, in thick dark blood, in veiny clods that dislodged only when I pushed and pushed. One
of my eyes now failed intermittently, alternated cloudy and dark and starry and clear, and in this too I sensed his doing, just as I did in the ringing tinnitus of my ears and the crackle of my arthritis. Always now the fingerling made himself known, as perhaps I made myself known inside him, long ago, when I had inserted a fragment of myself into the egg, the vessel of his first long float, and if half the fingerling was made of some half of me, so now half of me was made of the same proportion of him, a weight balanced inside a weight.

Or else it was only old age that I felt. And here was the proof I would not live forever, as always I’d imagined I would.

The wall near our front door held mostly solid, but others were punched through by the bear, her blows driven by that powerful hump upon her shoulders, or else ripped off their studs by moon rock and quake debris, and also singed by fire, by unstuck lightning. Even the parts of the house that had suffered no direct damage were wind worn, weather sick, and I stepped carefully across the floors as I carried the foundling’s wet and filthy body into the house, lifting him through the wreckage of tables and chairs, of pots scattered and utensils flung against and sometimes through walls.

Around us the house sighed and swayed, wood groaning against grain, and above us the sky continued its sucking sound, slower now but still wheezing against the tear the moonfall had made. I carried the foundling across the wrong-angled floors and into our bedroom, where upon the bed were still the sheets where my wife and I had once lain in the hopes of making our own children, and now those lengths and widths of fabric became instead a shroud: I wrapped the foundling in that once-white cloth, given to us on the day of our wedding, and as I locked the fabric with careful folds
I remembered all of those wedding guests—my parents, the parents of my wife, our uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and sisters, our friends when we still had friends—and for the first time I thought how they were surely mostly dead, passed away without our notice, lost twice to us because we were too far away to see or hear enough to grieve, too isolated to have any community to share with us its news. We had come to a place where all we could see was ourselves and also each other, and I had almost forgotten that there were ever others, others besides my wife and me, our fingerling and our foundling, the bear and the squid and the smaller lives over which they ruled.

I had seen in the deep house my wife’s memories of her parents—of what one parent had done to the other—but also of what good people they had seemed before. I had no best memories of my own family, had always stood separate from those who were meant to stay close to me, whom I was meant to stay close to, and now maybe they were all dust, and only I was still alive. Everywhere I went I
remained
, and going with me was only the fingerling nested within, and also the dead foundling, this son to carry downward, inside, and through some fire-wrecked memory, that lost reminder of our lives as they were at the last moment of our shared past.

Only when the foundling was right-shrouded did I leave his side, and then merely to seek some pair of breeches, an old shirt my wife had sewn, plus my spare pair of boots, one-half of which I had to cut to fit my mangled foot. I gathered supplies for making light and fire, then an older knife, not my skinning blade lost in the lake but one meant for cooking, last used for the removal of fish tumors, and I packed my satchel with the two furs, the foundling’s first skin and the twitching memory of it, and also my watch, that
gift which I had not worn since it stopped working long before, during my previous descent. These were all the possessions I thought I needed, all I still cared to have with me, and if other objects in that house had once held meaning then they no longer did, not for me.

The house I had built was at first small, just a few rooms, a small number of windows, a single hallway and a very finite and planned-for number of doors, and all of that was still there, if also dashed apart. After I finished my preparations I walked that first house once more, examined again its remains, peered through its broken walls and windows at the dirt beyond, and everywhere I looked I saw only some element I had been cured of wanting, and as I examined the future of this world I found I no longer craved its ownership. Now I would leave it behind to again journey beneath the earth, to again search out my wife—and whether I found her or not I thought perhaps I would never return to this dirt where we had lived, nor any of the lands beyond it.

Below the limits of the house, I knew my wife’s nested structure was far greater, extending even past what I had seen on my last descent. Surely the bear already roamed somewhere among those rooms, waiting between the surface and the great stairs, mad with what she had done, what I was sure she would claim I’d made her do. Soon I would be on my way to meet her, and when I did it would be with the shrouded death of her cub in my arms, with the skins of his first-meant childhood strapped to my back, and I did not yet know what I would say when next we met.

And how I would have to be ready.

And how when I lifted the foundling into my arms, the fingerling objected, saying,
OR JUST THROW IT IN THE LAKE
.

And how I never would be ready.

ABANDON IT IN THE WOODS OR IN THE GARDEN OR IN THE ROOMS OF THE HOUSE
.

And how I had never known what right thing to say or do, to her or to anyone else.

I DO NOT CARE WHERE YOU LEAVE IT
, he said.
BUT DO ANYTHING BUT BRING IT ALONG
.

And how when that meeting came I would speak and act anyway, as always I had done before.

E
VERYWHERE THERE WAS THE CHAR
and charcoal of our ruined wedding presents, of the memory of them, and also pools of rainwater and clods of sod and fallen walls and piled rubble. I picked through those first unceilinged rooms, then the darker halls below, curious for what remained, but so little held any useful shape or other dimension that soon we moved on, downward and farther in, through room after room, and though I did not forget their contents I also did not linger long between their walls.

And in this room, a silence that had once been a song.

And in this room, a light that had once been lightning.

And in this room, a heat that had once been a fire.

And in this room, a lump of silver that had once been a ring, two rings.

And in this room, the taste of burned hair. And in this room, its smell.

And in this room, the carapaces of bees, long ago emptied.

And in this room, a wine bottle, full of the leavings of maggots but not maggots.

And in this room, a broken bowl of mirrors, reflecting nothing.

And in this room, a filthy red ribbon, for putting up a woman’s hair, for tying it back.

And in this room, unwashed seeds split by fire, revealing the expectant sprouts inside, now doomed and dried.

And in this room, a sensation like the slight give of a bruised thigh, when pushed in upon by a thumb.

And in this room, a sound that might have been my wife’s voice, just too far off to hear.

And in this room, a chunk of moon rock, still hot, and above it a shaft of light lifting five stories to a jagged hole in the surface, to the other moon’s light pouring down.

And in this room, the spokes of a bassinet, a blanket buried beneath a caved-in ceiling.

And in this room, a trowel stained dark, used once for digging twice.

And in this room, a rag, brown with blood, with layers of old blood.

And in this room, the sound of a star hitting the earth.

And in this room, the louder sound of a moon, of part of a moon.

And in this room, a staleness of spilt milk.

And in this room, the slime and the scales of rotted fish.