The Lives of Rocks (3 page)

Unsettling dreams, to be shaken off, with difficulty, upon awakening. Surely all below is only imagined, she tried to tell herself, only fantasy. Surely there is only one world.

The berries they brought home were sweet and delicious, ripe and plump. The dreams of gas flares and simmering
underworld fires, only images, possessed nothing of the berries' reality. Only one world, she told herself. There is nothing to be frightened of, no need to be cautious about anything.

 

The cracks and fissures of chance, the ruptures at the earth's surface claiming the three of them, then, as surely as all must be claimed—those crevices, crevasses, manifesting or masquerading as random occurrence rather than design or pattern but operating surely, just beneath the surface, in intricate balancings of need-and-desire, cost-and-recompense—an alignment of fates as crafted and organic, almost always, as the movements of the tides themselves. There was a school Halloween dance that autumn, a party, which Kirby was unable to attend due to some family matter that had arisen just that week. The crack or crevice, seemingly without meaning.

It was a low-key evening filled with chaperones, and with the elementary and middle schools combining, that evening, with the high schoolers. The party was filled with Twister and pin the tail on the donkey and Bingo and bobbing for apples. There was a haunted house, and masked children of all ages in all manners of costumes ran laughing and shouting through the school hallways, and the high schoolers hung back for a while but then gave themselves over to the fun.

There was dancing in the basketball gym, with some of the children and adults still wearing their masks and costumes, though many of the teenagers had taken off their masks and were now only half animal—tiger, fairy, princess, gorilla. Their faces were flushed, and the discrepancy between what their hormones were telling them—
destroy, rebel
—and what the rigid bars of their culture were telling
them—
no, no, no—
was for the most lively of them like a pressure cooker.

Annie was dressed as a princess, and Richard a red devil. They sat for a while and watched the other children dance. Annie waited and was aware of no pressure. It's possible that she could afford to step aside of the drumming, mounting pressure her peers were feeling because most days she had Richard and Kirby in her life, and Richard at her side, much as a young girl might have a pet bear or lion in her backyard. She turned and smiled at Richard, serene, while the records played and the little monsters ran shrieking, bumping against their legs. The scent of sugar in the air. Around them the dense aura of all the other itchy, troubled, angst-bound teenagers, wanting sex, wanting power, wanting God, wanting salvation—wanting home and hearth, and yet also wanting the open road.

There was no need yet for Annie to participate in any of that confusion. Everything else around her was swirling and tattering, but she was grounded and centered, and she was loved deeply, without reason. She smiled, watching Richard watch the dancers. She reached over and took his hand in the darkness and held it, while they watched, and as they felt the palpable fretting and shifting of their peers. It was lonely, being sunk down to the bottom of the world, she thought, but comfortable, even wonderful, to have each other during such a journey.

“What do you think Kirby's doing right now?” she asked, twisting his hand in hers.

 

They left the party and went out for an ice cream sundae and enjoyed it leisurely, watching the rest of the city zoom by out on the neon strip of Westheimer Road, a busy Friday
night, hearing dimly even in the restaurant the whooping and shouting from open car windows and the screeching of tires, and gears accelerating.

They enjoyed the meal with no conscious forethought of where they were going next—though if anyone had asked them, they would have been able to answer immediately, and after a little while Kirby drove past, finished with his family engagement. He saw Richard's car, and pulled in and joined them.

With Richard and Annie still wearing their costumes, they journeyed east, riding with the windows down as ever, and with the radio playing, but with a seriousness, a quietness, the three of them knowing with adults' wisdom that they were ascending now into the world ahead, as if to some upper level, a level that would sometimes be exciting but where more frequent work would be the order of the day: less dreaming and more awareness and consciousness. Carve and scribe, hammer and haul. Almost like a war. As if this unasked-for war must be, and was, the price of all their earlier peace, and all their peace to come.

Richard and Annie held hands again in the car on the way east, and the three of them knew by the way the crane's allure was dying within them as they drew nearer to that sulfurous, wavering glow on the horizon that they would soon be moving on to other things, and in other directions. It was almost as if now—for the first time—they were pushing into a heavy headwind.

It was getting late. The city's children had finished their trick-or-treating. As they passed through a small wooded suburb sandwiched between shopping malls, they stopped and went up and gathered several stubbed candle remnants
from the scorched mouths of sagging, sinking, barely glimmering pumpkins.

One pumpkin had already been taken out to the sidewalk for the garbage men to pick up the next morning, and they resurrected that one, placed it on the front seat between Annie and Kirby, and fed it a new candle, coaxing it back to brightness as one might offer a cigarette to an injured or dying soldier.

They rode through the city and then east toward the refineries, with their runty candles wax-welded all over the front and back dashboards, the windows rolled almost all the way up now to keep from extinguishing the little flames—the light on their faces wavering as they passed through the night (to the passengers in the passing cars and trucks, it seemed strangely as if Kirby and Richard and Annie were floating, so disorienting was the sight of the big car filled with all those candles—and they kept heading east, toward the flutterings and spumes of the refineries' chemical fires, toward that strange glow that was like daytime at night.

That night Annie and Richard went down into the bathysphere, and into the river, together, with Kirby above them, working the manual crank on the crane like a puppeteer. They were still wearing their costumes—there was barely room for them to squeeze in together, and Annie's satin dress spread across the whole bench, and Richard's devil's tail got folded beneath them—he rode with his arm around her, and hers around him, for stability as well as courage, as the globe was lifted, swaying, from the earth—that first familiar and sickening feeling of powerlessness as the ground fell away below them—and they rode with an array of candles in front of them.

Their faces were almost touching.
This,
Richard was thinking,
this is how I want it always to be.

They glimpsed the stars, swinging, as Kirby levered them out over the river, and then there was the thrill of free fall—“Hold on!” Richard shouted, covering her with both arms and shielding her head—and the concussion of iron meeting water, the great splash—candles went everywhere, spilling warm wax on their hands and wrists, their faces—one landed on Annie's dress and burned a small hole into it—and then, once underwater, the globe righted itself and settled in for the brief ride downstream. With the candles that were still burning they relit the scattered ones and leaned forward, and cheek to cheek they studied the interior of the foul river as they tumbled slowly through its center.

“What if the cable snapped loose,” Richard asked, “when we hit the water so hard?”

Not to be outdone, Annie said, “What if some old bum, as a Halloween joke, sawed the cable down to its last fiber, so that when we reach the end it will snap?”

There was a long silence as Richard's imagination seized and worked with that one for a while, until it became too true, and he sought to change the outcome.

“What if we were stranded on a desert island?” Richard asked.

“How about a forested island?”

“Right,” Richard said. “What if? And what if we had only a little while to live?”

“The last man and woman on earth,” Annie said.

“Right.”
Man and woman.
The phrase sounded so foreign and distant: light-years away, still.

“Well,” said Annie, “let's wait and see.” But her arm tightened around his significantly, and Richard found himself urging the cable to
break, break, break.

The cable reached full stretch; there was a bumping, and then the globe was swept up and out, tumbling them onto their backs—as if a carpet had been pulled from beneath their feet—and again the candles fell over on them, as did the hot wax, and this time no candles stayed lit, so that they shuddered in darkness, feeling the waves, the intimate urgings of the injured river, washing over and around their tiny iron shell.

The force of the current made eerie sounds, murmurings and chatterings against their craft, as if it, that sick river, had been waiting to speak to them for all their life and had only now gained that opportunity—and they lay there, reclining in each other's arms, safe from the eyes of the world and its demands, its appetites for paradox and choice; and just as the air was beginning to get stuffy and they were beginning to get a little lightheaded, they felt the surge begin: the magnificent power, the brute imprecision of gears and cogs hauling them back upstream, just when they would have imagined (convinced by those fast murmurings and chatterings) that there could be no force stronger or greater than that of the river.

Gradually they broke the surface—through their portal, still lying on their backs and arm in arm, but relaxed now, they could see the plumes and spray of water as they were birthed back to the surface; they could see the crooked, jarring skyline of the refinery fires, and farther above the dim stars just beyond the reach of the gold-green luminous puffs of steam that marked the factories.

There was not much time now. Soon they would be up and free of the river, swinging, and then Kirby would land them on the beach. They were hot now, sweating, and there was barely any air left. Annie leaned over and found Richard's face with her hands, and kissed him slowly, with both hands still on his face. He kissed her back—took her face in his hands and tried to shift in order to cover her with his body, but there was no room—for a moment, they became tangled, cross-elbowed and leg-locked like some human Rubik's cube. They broke off the kiss quickly, and now there was no air at all—as if they had each sucked the last of it from out of the other—but they could feel the craft settling onto the sand beach now and knew that in scant moments Kirby would be climbing down and coming toward them, that there would be the rap of his knuckles on the iron door, and then the creak of the hatch being opened.

Time for one more kiss, demure and tender now, and then the gritty rasp of the hatch: the counterclockwise twist, and then the lid being lifted, and Kirby's anxious face appearing before them, and beyond him, those dim stars, almost like the echoes or spent husks of stars. Cool October night sliding in over their sweaty faces.

Richard helped Annie out—her dress was a charred mess—and then climbed out behind her, marveling at how delicious even the foul refinery air tasted in their freedom. Kirby looked at them both curiously and started to speak, but then could think of nothing to say, and he felt a strange and great sorrow.

They left the bathysphere as it was, sitting with the hatch opened, still attached to the crane with its steel umbilicus; for any number of reasons, none of them would ever go back; they would never see how the crane would eventually
tip over on its side, half buried in silt, or how the bathysphere would become buried, too.

They rode back into the city, still in costume, silent and strangely serious, reflective on the trip home, and with the pumpkin and candles glimmering once more, and with Annie and Richard holding hands again. The candle wax was still on their faces, and it looked molten upon them in the candlelight.

On the drive home Annie peeled the candle wax from her face and then from Richard's, and she held the pressings carefully in one hand.

When Kirby pulled up in front of her house—the living room lights still on, and one of them, mother or father, waiting up, and glancing at the clock (ten minutes past eleven, but no matter; they trusted her)—Annie leaned over and gave Richard a quick peck, and gave Kirby a look of almost sultry forgiveness, then climbed out of the big old car (they had extinguished their candles upon entering the neighborhood) and hurried up the walkway to her house, holding her long silk skirt bunched up in one hand and the candle wax pressings in another.

“Well,
fuck
” said Kirby, quietly, unsure of whether he was more upset about what seemed to him like Annie's sudden choice or about the fracturing that now existed between him and his friend. The imbalance, after so long a run, an all-but-promised run, of security.

“Shit,” said Richard, “I'm sorry.” He lifted his hands helplessly. “Can we... can it...?”
Stay the same,
he wanted to say, but didn't.

They both sat there, feeling poisoned, even as the other half of Richard's heart—as if hidden behind a mask—was leaping with electric joy.

“I'm sorry,” Richard said again.

“The two of you deserve each other,” Kirby said. “It's just that,I hate it that...”But the words failed him; there were none, only the bad burning feeling within, and after sitting there awhile longer, they pulled away from her house and drove for a while through the night, as they used to do, back before she had begun riding with them. And for a little while they were foolish enough, and hopeful enough, to believe that it would not matter, that they could get back to that old place again, and even that that old place would be finer than any new places lying ahead of them.