I
The rain walks. Sliced, she falls in cascades at the hole in the roof, in curtains at the awning. She falls in cataracts. She drapes the stable, and behind, the gridline forest, the ominous and branchless trunks rise in rows and she falls between them too.It will stop.
Not until everyone's back.
I dreamed of my dad again.
It will end when everyone is back.
He was bigger this time.
A stork rattles in the rafters. The steel beams creak. The hysteria dies down as it becomes clear that the rain will last the night. They look around. They find pliers, and rope, a burned, compacted car body, wheelbarrows, gloves, stumps, cans, a retractable ladder, half-eaten wood, plates of sanded glass, and many loose pieces of string. They find cables running in the beams. They find no food. There are dead seeds spilled from gutted bags in the back, dead birds and dead rats. Stalks sprout from the remains, and a thick layer of adenoidal dust, laden with coal or asbestos, covers the landscape inside. They watch the fire, endlessly entertained. The last return, almost empty handed. One bringing along a dog.
There was a hog.
What’s its name.
It was black and full of maggots.
It’s the same everywhere.
The children read together. There are bright flashes just behind the horizon and they smother the fire and sit silent. They sleep with their eyes open. The rituals half-forgotten, the whispered rollcall, the names given to the things found. He is horizontal and listens to the instructions: he thinks a thought. He observes the shape of his thought, and its weight. The color of the light changes faintly. The moon has been destroyed, and the thought rises through the blown roof and dissolves in the pitch wet black.
Shadows wrap the restless group. How long have they been there? How long has the darkness been creeping up on the vagabonds, searing its way into their eyes? The blackness is their last blanket. The rustlings of uncaught prey drifting as one multitudinous body in the enormous barn, bouncing on the wall and multiplying; an alert, sensitive sleep seizes them together at different times, until at last but one of them remains awake. He is young and doesn’t know that he is now alone. Just a child - his eyes burning against the crackling dark. His hands fumble, they slide up slowly between his hair and ears. The silence refracts in his palms and crowds him on all sides. He remains motionless as long as he can bear it, shutting his eyes with force. He sits up. There are motionless bodies around that he cannot see. He glows too faintly, or too strongly. He thinks that maybe this is all coming from him, these travails, this darkness, that his own eyes and skin are making a darkness around him, preventing him. That perhaps all of the others are seeing everything as if in broad daylight, that they are all looking at him at this very moment, unblinking. Feeling his way with wrapped feet to the door. He finds himself outside in the sharp cold wind, basking in the starless gloom. Here he knows that he is alone. He extends his hands against the giant glimmer of the escaping atmosphere.
My nails glow. My arms are long. My foot is the size of the sun, and my thumb is the size of the moon.
He does not know the words to say it, but he now feels his proper place in the universe more clearly than have ever any of the sleeping marauders inside. He will witness the sunrise.
They wait for the scouts to return. Soon they set in motion, the caravan, chasing the latest massacres. Signs of success; smoldering bones, sizzling rubble. The air likely unbreathable. The counting and dispensing of masks among the families according to their needs. They move in small groups, pairs, here a mother and two children, here an old man and a younger one. They use wheelcarts or baskets. While one progresses slowly, sighting salient features, the other reaches and upturns and digs. Thus they gather the scraps, the fabrics, the electronics, the rations. There are no quotas or rules - some scrape meat where they can. The marauders map the field of combat, and reconstruct the events so as to align their trajectories. There are cameras still rolling that aid in determining the time since the end of the bombings.
Robots above.
Again they set off towards the next field. They set off a mine, causing the death of a child and the irrecuperable maiming of his mother. They find woods. The banality sets in and the routine. There are no sudden movements and nothing is now unexpected. Their skin is paper thin.
The sun is warm, the sky is clear. Beginnings are easy. History is written by those who have never read to the end of a story. Says Corey. The rain has let up, opening the sky much too late for it to be of any use. There are children looking up at the clouds, and there are dogs who aren’t quite sure what to think. The instant is suspended - there is an air of quiet despair, something of an atmosphere. Put on your masks and don’t worry about the atmosphere. Says again Corey when they see patches of green in the clouds. The dogs are screaming at a murder passing by. There is salt, and there are no trees. They walk exposed in the heaths, those who can hurry and the march uncoils like a loosened spring.
Barometers drop, and again, wailing goes the weather. Now much stronger than before, there are objects sent flying out of the carts, and branches and unformed matter detached from the bombed hills at the forest edge upwind, it flies like a blizzard of mud, and smacks them and some fall. Others lie on the ground in wait, and crawl. At the head of the procession, a detachment jumps behind an outcrop of limestone. There is a cliff, ahead, they are near the sea now. They are dispersed. There are screams. Corey is nowhere. Sand is lifted and shrubs uprooted and cast out into the coming tide, and there is dirt falling from the sky, and birds, and now there are cracks splitting the sky, bombs or thunder.
Now their system has lowered the volume of the storm and they peer into the darkening spirals above. Blue lights blink. A blue pebble has hit an elderly man perfectly, they throw his body down and hear neither crash nor splash. And behind, they see that the recess plunges deeper. They raise their hands, they describe their new formation. More leave voluntarily, seeing their daughters and fathers missing at the rollcall. They are down to a third of the formation of yesterday. The hardy gear up minimally, and descend into the cave. It is easy to live in a cave.
The sky is warm and laden, the sun is black at the climax of the day. The horizon is closed. Water walls wash the shivering remainder. They are out of breath and time. They are lying prone and squatting and draped onto rocks, espousing the shapes carved by eons of blasting salty tides. Some still are active, aware. They fiddle with devices and soaked maps. They formulate a plan in the glints of the geysers of backwash. As if by the motion of the waves, their excitement swells and crests and breaks in repeating succession.
What don’t you understand, we just follow the shore.
No, we’re not here.
We’re right there.
No, this is where we were before the storm.
This is where we are now.
We ran in a straight line from here to there.
No, we didn’t run straight.
He’s right.
What’s that sound?
We’re actually here.
It doesn’t matter.
We have to return further inland.
Yes, he’s right.
Yes, of course, the weather and the wind all along from here to here is going to slow us down.
Break us apart.
More so than before.
Than now.
But if we get lost again?
We’ll know we were right here.
Do you hear that?
It’s like metal.
It’s something screaming.
It’s too regular.
More like creaking.
It’s a ship.
No, it’s not.
It’s the birds.
The birds who live here in this cave.
They live at the mouth here.
Up to here, there is no more shit from here on in.
The cave goes deeper?
I can’t see the end of it.
Buzzards gyrating around a battered limestone column shaped like a queen. Something is falling from the sky, it will fall from the sky into the sea, they see an incandescent mass, clearly separating into parts along its descending trajectory. It’s inevitable now. They see the splash and count, one, two - the first debris splashes too - three, four, five, six, seven - a first crack shatters their eardrums, a sound of tectonic amplitude - then a syncopated beat of sharp metallic clacks. The birds are frantic. They return, it is their home and they are large and aggressive, and the humans are cast out, split into ever smaller units between those who escape and those who retreat.
In this current condition of light, almost horizontal, seeing is too much. What is seen is worth less that sight itself. What is seen is irreducible, multiple, hailing from the ripped, unhooked, incommensurate dimensions; the heats, the densities, the explosions of the faint sounds of the steps of their neighbors in the chain. The incidents are barely identifiable, they are known, supposedly, but combined uniquely such that the moment of this katabasis falls sharply into view as at once a passage and a totality; this moment of all others is the one chosen, on either side of which stretch the sum of all the fruitless others. It is evident to the group that until they arrive to where they may, nothing else in this vast kingdom is permitted to exist but the fact of their descent.
The complex wrinkles of jasperite increase in density so that they seem now to have been carved by more familiar desires than those of the sea and sand. They have been made, revealed. Here the apophenic discern a face and a contorted body. The darkness burns their retinas, they mistake phosphenes for their peers and walk in a haptically bound procession; they feel forwards. Somehow the sizzling black noise gets sorted somewhere in the occipital lobe, they see their grey hands against the abyss, they see that they might well be dreaming, that their inward journey will not end with light. There is nothing but the echoes of the sloshing of their boots, nothing but the smell of sulphur and the promise of a smokeless and fireless asphyxia. A wall of sharp ice closes in on them, they are few and they are lost in the narrow crevice that leads inexorably, perceptibly downwards.
The halls are wide, and likely shielded from cosmic radiation. Blind together and kingless they map a liminal topography of intestinal quality, and here the large feeds into the small, and here a stomach, there a liver. One of the rooms is a pond, and one of them squatting in ambush manages a wriggling piece of flesh whose scales cut his fingers - he smacks it against the stone and they share the metallic meal, raw and invisible, the taste of frozen iron and the sharp bones, and the liquids of variegated viscosities running into the folds of their skins.
There is no solution.
It’s not here.
It won’t be here.
There is nothing here.
It’s better than there.
Sometimes nothing is better than something.
There is never nothing.
Don’t be like this.
There is less here than there is out there.
There are less things, yes.
Fewer things.
Enough of them.
The austere atmosphere does not simplify the interactions, the situations. Despite the need, the lack, local complexity increases continuously, in fact to a new maximum. The stripped layers are not forgotten once removed, they remain. Removals accumulate. The lost souls, for want of comfort and pleasure and light, for want of delights - they begin to look like shades yet continue accumulating texture, material. They are together a bog, under the thick topsoil thrive anaerobic forms of life, behind their grey eyes and skins, unknown even to themselves. They do not fare better alone. Those that prefer solitude do not smoothen any more. They idle, they wait, they distract themselves from the slow realization that looms larger and larger, day after day. They fiddle with their bodies, scratching, gnawing, pulling, pinching, popping, twisting, ripping, pressing. They live in other times, in the dreams of their dead ancestors, of their aggressors; wearing the red masks, the black rags, the ripped bags with dangling fibers and ropes and belts. Over and above, where roaring armies roam the dead plains and batter the black soil, there are ideas to be had, things unthought. New forms of torture. The flames spouting like once water from hoses, in chirally connected uses, making dust of bodies, dust of history, dust of dust.
II
I’m in a lot of pain.Pain is just a feeling.
You are not your feelings.
Feelings are great.
It’s great that you have feelings.
Do you have feelings.
I feel ambivalent.
Don’t be that way.
That’s what I feel.
I’m dying.
I’m also dying.
I’ll die before you.
I’ve lost a lot of blood.
I’d have thought you would lose consciousness.
I think that’s the moon?
It’s moving too fast.
It’s too small.
How big is the moon?
You’ll die before me.
Are you in pain?
Again and again the night climbed out of the ground around them. They talked endlessly. The absence of light stimulated their exchanges, as did their motionlessness. They had both lost their legs. One was in worse shape than the other. One was lying on his stomach with his face buried in the mud. The other sat upright against a stump blown by bomb or thunder. He could see the other in the daytime.
God hates me.
God loves you in a special way.
God is trying to destroy me.
You are trying to destroy yourself.
The world is trying to destroy me.
I am convinced that God hates you in a special way.
Something is trying to destroy me.
God won’t let it happen.
God loves me.
Those that love God above all are loved by him in return.
God is trying to save me?
Those that God loves above all must carry that burden to the end.
They needed nothing else. They were not waiting. They were content. The moon is about the size of a human thumb. Let me tell you a story said the man whose face was buried in the mud.
The sky was sad as I made my way; it was dark, it was cold, I was almost out of petrol. I scried a storm of incredible size on my tail, I stopped at a gas station. Sleeping trucks, dying neon. Dead tractors, vibrating tungsten. The man wrapped and sleeping, already frozen, maybe. The store, the gas. I tapped him until he woke. I woke him gently. He told me the way and sold me a map. He told me lies and gave me a drawing resembling nothing. And he traced on it a line that matched no roads, he said: The snowballs have flown their arcs in the bleak blank sky of December. He whispered in my ear when I leaned above the map: What God wants, that is good. The air was cold and heavy. The air is laden with some negative charge, thick with menace. I ignored the cryptic messages, the air, the atmosphere. I went on my way.
I slept at the wheel on the endless expressway where quarry trucks and excavators slept alongside. For hours I flew beside the open fracture, the giant sloping steps. The storm was behind. It always seemed bigger whenever I checked the rear view mirror. Bigger but not quite closer. The first bridge was narrow and long and below the water was hard as rock, there were glinting and hollow sculptures of men and horses in it caught in heroic stances by the sudden freeze. I drove in the helices and was in a city that reminded me of Osorno.
The citizens had left or barricaded their homes. I felt the gaze of ghosts from behind the shattered windows and their blown curtains, from between the slanted slits of the planks that made venetian blinds around the gaping wounds of the restless shelling. The city was flooded. The city was beset by plagues and the blinded lepers remained wrapped in rags mourning their maculas on the swaying doors that were tied with ropes to the lights and the gutters and made for unsteady sidewalks. The black bones of burned buildings rose like scaffolding where sat crews of crows. The water was slick and thick and black, and flammable. It lapped at the smoldering rubble and sifted the jewelry of the dead from the ashes of their coffers. The children running on the rooftops wore the rings and made piles of dirty snow at the edges to push down on the limping lepers below.
In the burning cold, I saw the lighter elements and the trash and the litter lifted up by a sudden, swirling gust of wind, and flying in spiraling flocks around the spire across town, and the wind gathering the mass of the pictures and the clothes, the leaves, the notes and letters until it formed into an opaque column of twisting grey volume around the church tower and sent its bell spinning and beating a rhythm of tolls that made the oil shudder. This I saw against the backdrop of the encroaching ice, the unfolding mass towering into the low-hanging clouds and sizzling with blue lightning within. I was huddled with a blind bat while the blizzard tore down the remainder of my car like a piece of paper.
The city’s basically been beaten down to bits.
And here you are.
I’m a worm in the night.
I was a worm in the night, cold as a stone I was. There were inscriptions on the bare walls of the basement, obscene drawings. They made a fire on the ground with old books and they filled the air with a black smoke that clung to our clothes and didn’t escape from the windows.
Why are you telling me this.
You’re in a lot of pain.
Pain is just a feeling.
What’s happening.
Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether it’s happening or just happening to you.
I can’t keep living.
Let me reassure you now, it’s happening.