Time of the Locust (17 page)

Vine of the Earth

E
dward, also known as the Mummy, thought he heard a voice in the early hours. Overcome with expectancy, he had been wide awake, awaiting the morning prison buzzer. And unlike most nights, he had not rested in the pleasant arms of a deathlike sleep. Dreams were a thing of long-gone decades, when his subconscious had been able to cut through the brush of disbelief with a machete, when he had the strength to clear a space and glimpse alternative realities, to see the infinite variations of what could have been his life, not this devastating reality.

With increasing impatience, Edward waited on the filthy padding of his cell bed, anxious for the buzzer. For that daily scream, always prompt, always clear, announced the beginning of his day and reunited him with his dearest. He was no longer a young man, and it had taken thirty years for the raging fires of his heart to die down to the sleepy hues of sunset. And even as his bones creaked under the hanging folds of his chestnut skin, his body warmed under rays of anticipation as the morning hours clicked on, like the blood of an old scorpion heating on the sands of the desert.

But he thought he heard someone speaking to him in the early hours, as he clutched his pillow and reflected on his dearest in that drifting state between lucidness and slumber. It sounded as if someone was talking to him from the end of a long tunnel. It got closer and closer, until it seemed as if the voice was right next to him, in his cell. He hadn't heard the other voices since before he found his dearest. Those others spoke of things he hadn't concerned himself with in years. He had long since lost interest in the sky, in terrain, in the elements, in other human beings. Consorting with men was now a preposterous thing to him, as foolish as jesting with death. Was this voice just an echo of all the other voices he heard inside his head all these long years? Was it like the voices that spoke of things he no longer wished to think about, those unimportant things like freedom and family and money and plans that faded from the universe he created each dawn? He couldn't concern himself with such things now.
Soon, my dearest
, he thought, curling tighter under his thin blanket, imagining the delicate, lovely limbs leaning toward him, bending under the water spray of his love.

The precious thing was all that mattered now.

He spotted it alone in the cracked floor of concrete along the eastern wall of the prison's Great Room, where men became one with machines. At first, he thought it a mirage, a trick of his cataract-plagued eyes. After twenty years in other prisons and more than ten in the one that now caged him, his eyes had convinced him that black, white, and gray were the only colors left in the world. “They are all gone,” his eyes had said to him, guiding his hand to a trash receptacle in the corner, into which he dropped a tattered Bible. And yet on that glorious day, his dearest appeared before him, a minute emerald forest. He looked upon her greenness and was reminded of things he thought were forever washed away: the chartreuse-backed frogs in his mother's yard, the algae floating gently on the lakes of his youth, the iridescent scales of bass as they swam by his strong legs, and the pine needles sprinkling the snow he walked through in yesteryear winters. Most of all, the paradise rising from the ground reminded Edward of the soft grass on which he had held his first love.

And she had been waiting for him all this time, he reasoned, to bead her petals with adoration and respect. Eagerness filled him as he counted down the hours until he could be with her again, images of her supple clovers caressing his gray beard. Together, in the nurturing soil hidden below their roots, they would proliferate. Their lovemaking would be an act the earth itself had blessed and given permission to take place.
But not yet, my dearest
, Edward thought.
We must be careful, because they are watching us always. We must keep our love hidden. Be vigilant, my sweetness.
He turned on his side to face the wall and clenched his eyes tighter.

Nothing could keep the old man from his dearest. When the buzzer sounded every morning and the white lights flooded his cell and the entire floor of the prison, Edward would struggle earnestly to his feet. Although the silence of the cell block was quickly poisoned with bitterness and sorrow, and he could hear the other men groaning and cursing the assaults on their ears and eyes, he was always ready, brimming with excitement. He would step feebly out of his cell when the steel doors slammed open, the only one smiling.

The herd of men would shuffle miserably to the roll-call line and then the mess hall, each man inwardly preparing for the wars of the day. For the inmate population operated like Balkanized states. The delicate balance between them was maintained by endless scuttles in the gladiator rounds of the prison yard and atop steel cafeteria tables. Like war clans, they battled ruthlessly over territory and influence.

But things were always different in the Great Room, an enormous glass box. There the populace became one. The men assembled under the watchful eyes of cameras that never grew sleepy, awaiting the signal. At length, a siren blasted through the silence, and the men poured into the maze of machines like thick liquid. The hum of the underground factory cocooned the inmates, their bone marrow, teeth, and eyelashes pulsating, keying to the vibrating flecks of granite under their feet. They drank deeply of the five-hour shifts, intoxicating themselves with the sweetness of rote activity and tedium. For the everlasting drone of the prison-corps hive was their only deliverance from the flesh burns of private purgatories.

Edward drew his frayed blanket under his chin and thought of darker days in the Great Room before the advent of his dearest, when his spirit was just a heap of crushed stone. He toiled in the same manner as the other men, with his mind folded into the titanium pegs of the contraptions. But now, as he assembled sneakers in the Great Room every day, he could behold his dearest with elegant subterfuge. He could watch her as she waved joyfully from across the wasteland room. Now he could raise his head above the choked air and witness her triumph in an open pit of hell.

The miracle that no one else noticed her glory was, Edward felt, an avowal of the holiness of their union. He was certain that one day, a brilliant bird of paradise would erupt from her tender breast, and together they would fly away. Day after day, the old man looked at his secret green piercing the cement. Defiant beauty! He wondered how long it would be before he could truly be with her, his blood chilling at the thought of peering into the crack and finding her gone without him.

But the voices of men were always interrupting his concentration in accomplishing this destiny. Like that squeaky-voiced, cross-eyed inmate who assembled sneakers for the bin next to him. He had wished Edward a “Happy Fucking New Year.” Edward stared at him blankly, no longer sure what a New Year was. Indeed, as his dearest grew more beautiful and strong, especially over these past several months, he found it increasingly difficult to understand the concerns of men. For rot and ruin were the only measures of existence left to any of them. These were obsessions Edward had long since abandoned, fixations he knew led only to madness.
But my dearest has ended my decay
, the old man thought, grateful.

The Mummy felt his bladder empty, and a warm, comforting spot spread on his thin mattress. It would soon turn cold, but he would first enjoy the coziness. He settled into infantile contentment and lay waiting for the buzzer.

“Hey, old man.”

Edward turned his head. So there was another voice, something there. “What do you want?” he barked, his dry and cracked voice piercing the silence. He was angry that his solitude was interrupted; his preparation for his dearest was disturbed. “What do you want?” he croaked, louder.

Horus did not expect the Mummy to respond so quickly. “I came to ask you some things, old man.”

“The name's Edward. And there ain't no answers in here. Only questions.” He could feel that the buzzer was less than three hours away, and he was growing nervous. “State your business. Quick.”

“I been someplace,” said Horus.

Edward turned toward Horus. He could just make out his floating figure in the shadows. He had seen ghosts before, the ones that lived in the corridors, but this one did not look like any of them. “Yeah? Well, I been a lot of places. They're all the same.”

“No. I mean . . . a place,” said Horus.

The Mummy flared a gray, toothless grin. “What about it? Used to go places too. Till I got tired.”

At this, Horus was surprised. He floated nearer. “You mean you . . . traveled too? Is there a way out of here?”

Edward looked from Horus to the blank walls. “Only one way out. The Catacombs.”

Horus was enthralled. So they did exist. The tunnels. The gypsum. He thought that the Catacombs were endless, that there was no way to go into them and come out to someplace else, until he saw that light. Here was someone who knew about them too. “Tell me what you know about the Catacombs.”

The Mummy laughed. “Spent years in them. But I had to come out of there. I couldn't go back.”

“Why?” asked Horus.

The Mummy sighed. “Saw that light. That was all right at first. Followed it and followed it. Took forever to get up on it. And then I heard my mama's voice. I tell you, I stepped through that light, and there she was, sitting out there on the oak stump in the yard just like when I was little. She looked at me like she saw me, knew me. And she looked at me like nothing ever happened. Like she had really raised me, and I had lived a good life. I had to get out of there. I had to turn back.” The old man coughed and mumbled something bitterly.

Horus waited for Edward to go on.

“There's other things besides the Catacombs. Mind traveling. Had a hoot with that before I found my dearest. Used to walk into someone else's mind like I was walking through a front door. Oh, the things I saw!”

Horus floated down and hovered just above the Mummy. “So you read minds.”

The old man nodded. “Traveled minds.”

“You mean you talked to them inside their heads like we're talking now?”

Edward snickered. “What makes you think we really talking?”

Horus looked at the toilet. Pieces of tissue were stuck to the sides of the bowl. “You said there was a light.”

“I did?”

“Yes. You said there was a light.”

“Where?”

“In the Catacombs, you said.”

“There was. But I don't know much about that.”

“Well, it sounds like you do. What about it, Edward?”

The urine spot on the mattress had cooled, and Edward felt a chill in his bones. “I said I don't know much about it.”

“Well, tell me what you do know.”

Edward shrugged. “There was the light, and then there was my mama. That's what I know.”

The buzzer was not far off now. The Mummy had been lost in the talk for a while, but now that the spot was cold, he remembered why he resented the interruption in the first place. “Go on now,” he said irritably. “Leave me be. And anyway, it ain't none of my concern no more.” He turned away stiffly, curling up and facing the wall. “Can't no good come out of them Catacombs no way—seeing what you can't stand to see—can't no good come of it. I remember my mama left me on that oak tree stump out in that yard when I was a bitty thing, and that was the last I saw her. That was the last I saw her until I traveled through them Catacombs and walked through that light and looked in. She looked at me like nothing ever happened, my mama. Like it was all just fine.”

The old man sighed. “You going where there ain't no way back, boy. Now, get out of here—if you really here—and leave me be. Don't come back and ask me nothing about going nowhere. The only place we going is in the dirt.”

Awakening

M
ineralized and sleek, the locusts grew larger in the richening soil below, until even the eagles marveled at the greenness mysteriously spreading across the plains . . .

Horus stood at the Catacombs entrance, thinking of the light, but he did not remember how it came to be that he was there. The smell of myrrh and roses and death was heavy in the stillness. He looked into the pitch black, thinking of what the Mummy said, how he, too, saw the Catacombs and the faraway light within. “You going where there ain't no way back, son,” he'd said. What could that mean?

Horus stood at the threshold for a long time, and he felt something slowly melting inside of him that had been frozen over, and he came to the edges of his mind to ponder what he himself had forbidden. Dare he think of the child? Because from the moment the police arrived at his house to arrest him, Horus knew that he could never think of what he and Brenda made together as a person. He knew that he would never know the child in sight or sound, from experience and memory. Rather, for him, the child would be a concept. Like love or hate or beauty, an amorphous thing forever intangible but there, always.

Horus looked into the mouth of darkness and entered the Catacombs. The moldy gypsum was soft on his palms as he felt his way to the deeper chambers. The still air parted like water as he walked. The smell of roses hung over him like a vast canopy. Hours passed, until he reached a slant. Downward, downward he walked, his feet tender against the rough passage. His head was pounding. The lower he descended, the thinner the air became, and he felt as if he might fall a final fall, as he saw his father do, but he had the thought that perhaps there was something he might find somewhere in the black too. And Jack Thompson's words rose once again from the ashes:
That's what I want my boy Horus to know. To remind him that he can be free anytime he wants.
Perhaps that was the promise beneath the promise his heart persuaded his mind to make. Jack Thompson wanted his boy to fly. He wanted him to soar away from the coffin, from the rage, from the fear. Sweat ran down Horus's face. Or was it tears? And he wondered if Jack Thompson knew that once a bird is caged, it no longer lives. That at the end of it all, a man might understand only the smallest things of his life. Or the biggest.

And against the warnings of the Mummy, Horus descended deeper still into the Catacombs. He walked on for what felt like days in the darkness, without even the firelight of shunned memories, until at last he came to another tunnel. And there in the passageway was the distant light. Excited, he moved forward, but the tunnel seemed to lengthen and lengthen, until he was near to fainting. The dust and muck that lined the other passageways was replaced with something slippery running down the walls.

But Horus went further into the mysterious Catacombs, giddy with the delirium of the thousand miles he trekked, until at last the passageway stopped moving. The light was just ahead! He could see it clearly nestled in the black space. He journeyed on. The air grew thinner and thinner, and he felt that he would never catch his breath. He swooned, his eyes rolling, but he walked on.

“Come here.” Horus gasped at the light. He tried to regain his strength and focus. Could light be called like a child? Like a dog? He struggled forward, stumbling, overtaken now by the powerful smell of salt. He would reach it this time, he thought, lunging forward. The pain and throbbing in his head stopped of their own accord. Each time he called out, the light seemed closer. He kept moving. He would not let his legs betray him. He would not concern himself with time or distance. There was only the light and his singular purpose of reaching it.

Horus was at last before it, and the light shimmered through the crack of the crypt stone like a blade. He thought again of the Mummy's warning. He smelled sea water. He moved closer to the crack in the stone (so much larger now that he was near) and stepped through, clamping his eyes shut against a sudden brightness all around him. He stepped forward onto what felt like soft, warm sand under his feet. Blasts of salt air filled his lungs. He breathed deeply, greedily. He opened his eyes and squinted up at a golden sun. Horus looked down, and the blue ocean spread before him. He looked into the great liquid and thought of morning glories and blue jays and coral reef and cerulean glass. In the burst of color and the ocean breeze, his heart pounded in his chest, and he was filled with unknowing and knowing. Horus looked out over the water.

And floating there was someone in a little boat.