The War Against the Assholes (17 page)

23

A
re you awake, Mr. Wood, or are you dreaming?
So Sister Immacu­lata asked me. No mortal can answer that question. We left the amber penumbral glow of Mountjoy House behind us. I kept checking to see if pursuers had appeared. Flashlights on the lawn. I didn't know what to expect. Maybe they'd let us go to die of exposure. Maybe they would consider it a wash and move on. You can't judge the personality of a whole organization. Especially schools. Schools value only one thing above cruelty and stupidity: caprice. We ran. Alabama taking long, choppy strides, holding her pistol with two hands to keep a grip and be ready to fire, I thought. I wished I had a weapon. Two fists and a hard head don't count.

The grass hit our knees. The soil by the river was spongy but not muddy. The multicolored fireflies blinked on and off as we ran along the water, heading toward the woods. The over-the-shoulder looks stopped. The night was quiet enough that we would have heard any ruckus of pursuit. Nobody came. We still trotted. We hit the edge of the trees. “Okay,” said Alabama. Slowed down. “What now,” I said. “I have no idea,” she said. So we kept going. The air much cooler within the border of the trees. The moonlight and starlight much brighter. We had to march with care. The forest coalesced. From wide-spaced stands of trees to dense bramble. Trees that looked like oak. Like Iron Tom. Trees that looked like sycamore. Almost-birches. I peeled a scrap of bark as I walked by. Papery. Just like at home.

“Did you ever write on them,” said Alabama. “Of course,” I said. “I used to write messages for people on them,” she said. A hollow, plaintive, and melodic cry rose and fell. “That makes sense,” I said. “Not people I knew,” said Alabama. The lambent moon above us. Its shadows and pockmarks different. No gouty face. Instead I saw a dragon. Rearing. Foreclaws raised. Or just a smear of ashen gray. You never can tell with the moon. “There's a birch outside my house,” Alabama said. The wild cry repeated. Closer and clearer. “And you used to tear bark from it,” I said. More to hear myself talk than to answer. Your own voice reassures you. A branch swiped my face. Fruit dangled from it, under heart-shaped leaves. Grape-black in the moonlight. “Do you think we could eat these,” I said. “I mean, we could,” said Alabama. One had burst against my forehead: a cool, sticky juice trickled down. It smelled like smoke and mangoes when I wiped it away. “I used to write on it with black crayon and send the bark down the gutter stream in front of my house,” said Alabama, “Mark and Lena loved it. They have like thirty million pictures.”

Progress: simple. We followed the river. “It has to end,” said Alabama. “In a sea,” I said, “or its source, right?” Primitive truth will not fail you. Copious moonlight. Not a crow to be seen. I wondered if they existed here. Wherever we were. I didn't mention that. Neither did Alabama. As far as terrain went it was no worse than walking through the woodsier parts of the park, in the dead of night. Mild hills and dips. Knuckly roots. I tripped over one and stumbled. I soaked my coat sleeve in the river. “Shit,” I said. The water teemed with darting, golden fish. Faintly alight. Tiny black eyes. Tiny yellow fins. They didn't flee my sleeve when it broke the surface. They scraped the cloth and the skin of my wrist with their delicate jaws. They knew me. Or had been expecting me. At least that's the first thought that flashed through my head, watching them swim and arrow, point to point. Watching them glow. “Wow,” said Alabama. I'd never heard her sound impressed before. She dipped up a double handful of water. The fish circled between her palms. The faint light touched her chin. Lit up her eyelashes and dark eyes. The sweat at her hairline and at her temples.

To my amazement, the flickering points in the water started to rise into the air. Forming a small cloud of golden motes above her cupped hands. The fish leaving their element behind, floating off among the dark branches. Their illumination so delicate I could not see them once they'd drifted beyond Alabama's narrow head. “Wow,” she repeated. She got down on her knees. Held up one finger:
wait a second, let me finish talking.
Loudly, violently, wrenchingly, she vomited on the black soil. Her cropped head bobbed. Her shoulders shook. Bile fountained out of her open mouth. She aimed away from the river. “You okay,” I said when she'd gotten back up. “Now I am,” she said. Her breathing still ragged. I took off my wet-sleeved coat and sweater. So did she. The air warm and sweet. Another brace of that nameless fruit hung over us. She took one down and examined it in the river light. Deep red. She opened her mouth and placed it on her tongue. “There are worse ways to die,” she said around the fruit. I took one. I ate it. As soon as the juice touched my tongue I knew we'd be all right. It tasted the way it smelled. Smoke and mangoes. Fall and summer at the same time. No pit. No seeds. Flesh of a cherry. Also of an apple. Alabama crammed two more into her mouth. The juice blackly stained her lips and shining teeth. Trying to erase the taste of bile. “These are delicious,” I said. “And nutritious,” she said.

Silence. River sound and river light. The loud cries were, I was sure, following us. I wasn't worried. Alabama could take care of animal threats. Especially birds, I figured, which was what these sounded like. We loaded up my sweater with berries: Alabama tied it into a bag and we stripped three branches. I was starving. She must have been, too, having emptied her stomach. Her hairline still glistened with sweat in the moonlight. She walked with her gun out, pointed at the earth. The river followed a straight course. The dragon-shadowed moon above and its twin in the phosphorescent water. “Do you think it's two parts of the life cycle,” I said. “What are you talking about,” she said. “The fish in the water and the fireflies,” I said. My mouth full of berry. “I'm no zoologist,” she said. She sounded anxious. Her shoulders, at least, under their blue shirt, expressed anxiety. Some people have expressive backs.

I shut up. I'd never killed anyone. Even a knockout carries moral consequences. I didn't want to console her. Would have been presumptuous. I didn't want to joke it off. Would have been cruel. So I said nothing. We walked on. The cries followed and followed. Clear and curt. Twigs snapping under our feet. The dragon-marked moon above. The ground dipped further. On either side of us, hills rose. A valley. The noise of the river increased: large stones, which looked pink and orange in the moonlight, complicated its course. It broadened. The banks steeper, serrated. Spike-leafed plants thrust up from the soil, in stands of eight or nine. Waist-high. Chalice-shaped flowers with bulbous green pistils. Alabama stopped to vomit again among these night flowers. I was glad she had short hair. Otherwise I would have been faced with an impossible choice: not holding it back or holding it back.

“I sent the messages to made-up names,” she said, “and then when I got older I used the names in the phone book.” It got darker. The moon got lower. Until it was a silvery slice above the tree-spined horizon. We sat on a shelf of rock by the river. Spray hit us. The golden fish agitated and shining in the eddies. I took a short branch from the nearest tree. Snapped it off. It smelled resinous. A good sign. I tried the cigarette maneuver on it. The broken end glowed orange and a small, dim flame licked up. Alabama broke a branch and lit it from mine. Our pathetic torches reflected on the rushing, inwardly lit river. “Look,” Alabama said, “look at that.” In an upper groin of the tree from which we'd taken the branches, the torchlight glinted on eyes. They flashed green. Didn't flee. Just regarded us with calm contemplation. An outline: a squirrel, a cat. Two massive ears protruding from a small, vulpine head. The animal opened its mouth and cried out. The source of the cries we'd been hearing. “It's like,” said Alabama above the noise of the river. “I feel as though I should be frightened of it but I'm not,” I said. We raised our torches. For an instant we saw: tawny, red-striped fur; white paws and white, lashing, curling tail tip; delicate, quasi-­human hands; the narrow, clever face and vast ears, also tipped in white fur. Its golden gaze on us. The tree fox released its melodious, avian cry. Leaped away. A branch creaked as it took the animal's weight.

Joy. Why? I didn't know. Still don't. With true joy you never do. Bodily joy coursing through me. To have seen that unrecognizable beast. Half-familiar. I grinned at the ground. Didn't want Alabama to ask me why I was smiling. The river widened as we followed it. Our torches lit up more green-glass eyes in the branches. My joy only grew. Hob was dead. I'd witnessed a murder. Vincent would not survive. My joy was not legitimate. It had nothing to do with the moral world at all. That tawny fur. Those golden eyes. Those hands. Nothing more than that. I ate another berry. My fingertips, I saw in the torchlight, dyed now the deep red of its skin. “Why,” I said. Alabama knew at once what I meant. She dodged a branch and answered me. “To find them. To save them. People I'd never know otherwise. Alone out there in the great world. And they took pictures,” she said, “you see what I mean?” Torchlight. Dark berry. Her white hand. Her forehead. River, night, immense air. Our need to remember is repulsive. We'd never survive without it.

24

S
un in my eyes. Sun in my open mouth. That's what woke me. And Alabama prodding me with her shoe. “We should keep going,” she said, “look how high the sun is.” My limbs and torso hurt so much I did not care, for several heartbeats, if I died on the soft dirt of the forest, with my coat thrown over me for a blanket. Alabama could have spent the night in a hotel: her face was scrubbed, her hands clean, eyes bright. Droplets of water glinted on her neck. I struggled up. My lungs burned. My throat burned. “The water's safe to drink,” said Alabama, “I drank like ten handfuls an hour ago and I'm fine. There's like no fish in it during the day, I guess.” I knelt at the bank and plunged my head in. The water chilled. It tasted of minerals and snow. I drank the way a pig or a dog drinks, on my knees. Alabama gave me the last of the red berries. “I ate my share while you were asleep,” she said. “Are you a morning person,” I said. “Only after I've killed people,” she answered. Stared me dead in the eye. Did not smile.

The trees looked even odder in the sunlight. Seven- and nine-pointed leaves on the fake oaks. The fake birches had white, papery bark. All of their leaves and branches grew near their tops in spearheads. Leaves bright orange. As though it were fall. The trees the red berries came from were squat and many-armed, with lime-colored leaves and symmetrical holes in the bark of their trunks. I saw a tree fox clamber around one and dart its paw into the hole, drawing it away grasping a bright blue, frail-looking object: an insect, wing case shining. The ground continued to slope down and the riverbanks to steepen. The air smelled sharp and sweet. There did not seem to be any birds, at all. No crows. No jays. No sparrows. When we got thirsty, we stopped and drank from the river, which was growing colder and clearer as we followed its course. Deeper, too. The bed lined with pink and orange stone, and long blue fluid flute-shaped weeds. Larger fish glittered in shafts of sun: apple colored, mottled red and gold. When we were hungry, we gathered more of the red berries and wolfed them down. Our lips and fingers stained. As though we'd been gorging on raw flesh, or simply been careless with paints. We caught a glimpse of this in the river's surface as we bent to drink and both burst into loud snorts of laughter. Like in the Mountjoy elevator. But more debilitating. We threw ourselves back against the earthy bank and roared till we were breathless. “I can't believe this, I just can't believe this,” I kept gasping. “I know, I know,” Alabama gasped back. May seem callous. Given the events of the previous night. Joy is joy and will not be denied.

We lay next to each other, against the sun-heated earth of the bank. Recovering from the fit. Staring into each other's face with childish intent. Five, six inches apart. Both breathing hard. Her breath on my cheek. It was one of those times when you think you should go in for the kiss. Before you realize that doing so would not make any sense. “Fuck it,” I said. “Fuck what,” said Alabama. “You know what I mean,” I said. We lived. Beside this river. Breathing these unknown scents. Under this strange sun. I got to my feet. Nothing, to my surprise, had changed. My joy remained. To judge from her grin, so did hers.

Tree foxes gathered to listen to our laughter. They clung to the branches of the berry trees, staring down at us with their golden eyes, their ears adjusting jerkily. They chirped and chattered to one another. One of them even gestured at us with a forepaw. “Did you see that,” said Alabama, brushing earth off her nape. Another one opened its palms and shrugged its shoulders. “That's uncanny,” I said, “though of all the things to find uncanny it does seem sort of minor.” “Hey, you little bastards,” Alabama cooed. The tree foxes all stopped talking. All stared at us. Then scattered, hurling themselves through the branches. “You clearly offended them with your silence,” Alabama said. “Clearly,” I said. The river sound masked our words. Our path was harder here: more pink stone, less soil. The spray from the river as it hit the banks made the stone slick. Alabama walked as surely as a mountain goat. I was less lucky. I fell. I stumbled. I knocked my knuckles on stone. I tore the new skin over the gash Gilder's teeth had left. In what seemed now to be a previous century.

“You all right,” said Alabama. I stiff-armed a rib of stone to steady myself. “Wait,” I said. “I'm not going anywhere,” she said. “No, that's not what I meant,” I said. My palm pressed against a hard surface. I could feel its complexity. I did not want to look. I knew what it would be. I removed my hand anyway. “You need to see this,” I said. Leaf-work and vine-work, carved into the pink stone. Dust and leaf litter had filled the intaglio. That's a technical term. They hammered it into our heads in school, when we were learning about sacred sculpture. I found a twig and dug and cleaned. Alabama used her fingertips. “I bet they're all dead, anyway,” she said when we had cleared a spot on the stone rib, or tusk, or former pillar, or signpost. Letters I could not read. Though when I looked at them it seemed to me that I knew them. They ran in an arc above a simple image: a naked woman, her hair bound up with a vine, carrying a small two-handled phial. Farther down the sloping path another rib jutted up. The decorative capital on this one still intact. “It's like the Acropolis, or something,” said Alabama, “who do you think she is.” “I think she's a goddess,” I said. “The goddess of this river.” “That's surprisingly poetic, Wood,” said Alabama. She marched up to the next pillar and started scraping. “Same thing,” she called. Two on the opposite bank, swathed in vines, bearing nine-pointed bright yellow leaves. If you stared down the bank, you could sight more of these ribs, broken and unbroken, vine wrapped and naked, rising from the smooth stone at regular intervals. “We're walking on a fucking floor,” I said, “a broken floor.”

A colonnade. In the middle of a forest, full of tree foxes and mysterious fireflies. The river tumbled alongside us as we walked. Its banks rising higher and higher. Like man-made walls. Which they were. Stone brick set on stone brick. No mortar that I could detect. Pink and orange squares and hexagons. Corroded by water. Their colors still alive. At sunset they seemed to blaze. One of the berry branches thrust through the stone. We both knew it was the last one we'd see. We loaded my shirt sling. Juice dripped as we walked and I swung it. Growing shadow awaited us, blue and cool. Rising from the columns ahead of us: arches. Intact. Their keystones, pink and alabastrine, half-lit-through by the falling sun. Cut with the same symbol as the columns: a blank-eyed, peaceful young woman, nude and holding a two-handled phial. Vines and leaves above and below. The presence magnified the rushing roar of the river. “Mr. Stone,” said Alabama, “never mentioned anything like this.”

He had not. Either he didn't know about it or he thought we didn't need to. I went with the latter. If your semisuperior is going to withhold information about, say, the existence of what appears to be another world, you have to ask yourself what smaller details they've failed to mention. The sun fell farther. The tree foxes returned in golden masses to the berry trees. Now forty feet above us, their roots breaking the upper edges of the stone walls, growing higher and higher the farther we followed the river's track. Their complex song: louder and more alarmed. “We're kind of big news for them, I guess,” I said to Alabama. “That's one possibility,” she said. The sun had set. Above, in the rectilinear eave of sky we could still see, the last rich rags of its color: crimson, salmon, pollen. The stone we walked along exuded cold. The spray from the river struck higher and higher. The slabbed floor, built of the same pink and orange stonework as the walls, had widened to the point where we could easily walk abreast. Even if we'd been four people. Still signs that the forest was in charge: branches thrusting through the wall, and weeds growing up through the floor. Small, absurdly orange, many-petaled blossoms. They too seemed to glow on their own. Alabama broke off a branch and handed it to me. “I want to keep my hands free,” she said. I didn't blame her. The tree foxes laughed. Slowly, in golden threads, the fish returned from their daytime hiding places to the water, filling it with a wilder light. Here it beat against the sides of its channel, carved and curbed in stonework, between the two halves of this ruined corridor or tunnel or whatever it was. The water's agitation hurled fish skyward. They floated or swam off into the growing darkness ahead of us in great numbers. Trails of stairs. Minor constellations. Whatever you like. “Everything is unbelievable here,” I said. “Get that lit, please,” said Alabama. I obliged. It burned. Emitted sparks and crackles when flame hit a pocket of sap. Sweet smelling. Little smoke.

I don't know when I noticed we could no longer see the stars. The cool coming off the stone, the noise of the river, and the flicker of my torch mingled. Mesmerized me. The way a long walk will. I looked up and saw flame-glow dancing off a stone vault dripping with water, festooned by red-brown weed strings. The streams of fish would cling to these. I tried to keep my torch as far away from the fish as I could. Seemed delicate. “We are officially back indoors,” said Alabama. Her voice echoed. “Yep,” I said. My voice echoed. I hate echoes. When the dead talk to us in dreams they speak in echoes. I didn't know that then. I still hated them. “Echo, echo,” shouted Alabama. “Echo,” the tunnel said. “Please don't,” I said. “Don't,” the tunnel whispered. “Uncanny,” Alabama said. The tunnel didn't reply.

Three hours ago, or four, in an access of delight I had almost kissed her. Here we stood in an empty, echoing human structure. Trouble with joy: not much separates it from terror. I was afraid. Wandering through a forest, with floating fish and tree foxes, anyone can survive. Evidence of human life, however: bad news. The human world being far more of a menace and threat than the natural world. We are almost animals, anyway. Human cleverness, malicious and cold, I have never been able to stand. A wind blew, for example. Not a breeze or a gust. One of the insane winds that human structures produce. Basically, I'd be happier if we could all live in tents, on the grassland. I hate civilization at times. That aspect of my character has not changed. The tunnel vault rose. The walls rose. We walked in silence. A stray vine scraped the wall in the draft. No more laughter of the tree foxes. No more stars. No more moon with its draconian smudge. The weeds hanging from the tunnel ceiling collected more and more of the floating golden fish. The torchlight gradually became unnecessary. I left the burned branch in a wall niche. At the foot of a statue on a hexagonal pediment. A naked young woman. Her hair bound up. Holding a two-handled phial. It annoyed me that I did not know her name. Alabama did not, either. “She's not the goddess of the river, though, I bet,” she said, “she looks more like an indoor type of goddess.” “Goddess,” the echo said. Cold, light, skewed.

And vast. We were out of the tunnel. A ceiling above us. Maybe a hundred feet. Huge fronds hung from it, almost touching the surface of the river, which had widened. Enough fish clung to the hanging plants to provide light. What you get in a movie theater, before the previews start. “It's a temple,” I said, “I think it's a temple.” Not that I'd ever been in a house of worship other than a Catholic church. “Looks that way,” said Alabama. The room circular. Its walls interrupted by tall, smooth columns. Radii of orange stones inlaid among the pink ran from each plinth toward the room's center. It's only thanks to Sister Immaculata that I know the word
plinth
. Or
capital
. The orange paths terminated at the foot of an enormous version of the hexagonal pedestal I'd seen in the wall niche. On which stood an enormous version of the naked woman whose image had pursued us as we made our way between the steepening banks into this shrine. Or temple. Or whatever it was.

The river churned beneath the lip of the pedestal. Seemed to end. Its noise great enough that we had to shout over it. “Has to keep going underground,” said Alabama. I nodded. The statue's face: I could not quite make it out. At first just a white-eyed statue. Then Alabama. Vaguely. Sister Immaculata. My mother. My father's mother. A cashier at the Green Mart where I did my parents' shopping twice a week. Messaline. “Shit,” I said. “What is it,” said Alabama. “Look at the statue,” I said, “look at its face.” “It's just a face, Mike. Don't get freaked out,” she said. The statue's features had settled into their placid, omniscient expression. White eyes. Parted lips. Phial extended. I could see, at that scale, the same sharp writing that surrounded the pillar images. It made my head hurt, my vision blur, to look at it directly. “Are you losing your eyesight,” I said to Alabama, yelling over the vibrating thunder of the river, “when you look at the letters?”

The worst part was: an inner voice kept telling me, insisting, I'd been here before. When that was utter nonsense. Not even in dreams had I visited this echoing, stony place. Yet the quiet voice would not stop. I did not know what to do. Alabama was walking along the edge of the room, stroking the walls with one hand and holding her pistol with the other. “Come here,” she said. She cupped her free hand around her mouth. The absurdity of the gesture struck me. It doesn't help. Yet all humans do it. I watched her beckon me over. I went. “It's the Treaty of Constantinople,” she said. I didn't know what she meant. She gestured at the wall. I saw.

A fresco. That's another term I'm indebted to Sister Immaculata for. Stretching up into the darkness. Its color still present, over the faint colors of the stone. A man in a crude gray robe, leaning on a crutch. One eye destroyed by a scar curving down from his brow to his chin. A man clad in red robes. A pope: you could tell from the hat. They stood face-to-face, on the foreshortened ground. Knights in gleaming black armor, their visors raised to reveal pale, bearded faces, flanked the pope, as well as a number of men and women in tunics and sashes, holding metal wands tipped in crescent moons, pentagrams, the symbols for man and woman. Other glyphs I did not recognize. Some held astrolabes. From the palms of others, stiff tongues of fire leaped. The man in the gray robe had far fewer followers. A hunchback holding a sickle. A young woman in a green dress, a leash draped over one fist, its other end connected to the collar of an ape. None of the splendid uniformity and power of the pope's followers. Between the pope and the one-eyed man, a table. On the table a document. Its letters rendered in that eye-blurring writing. The river noise rose. The river noise invaded my ears. My sinuses vibrated.