The Involuntary Sojourner

by S. P. Tenhoff

  It rains and it stops. Faucet on, faucet off.

  Wakefield’s new eyebrow, still curved quizzically, fattens on his forehead.

  I have many soil samples now. I keep them in a sealed case, in labeled vials that fit perfectly into the molded plastic. When the last soil-filled vial is fit into place, I will be finished collecting samples. I don’t know the purpose of these samples. It’s not necessary to know, I’ve been told. Something will be done with them. For professional explorers like Pamela and myself, there are things you concern yourself with and things you don’t let yourself worry about. “Above our pay grade, Daniel,” Pamela says. Or said, in the old days. In a funny, gruff voice. Making fun of our willed ignorance, making fun of our making fun of it . . .

  When I first read The Book of Explorers to Mabel, I tried to explain the joy of exploring for its own sake. I’m not sure I was convincing. I’m not sure I was convinced myself. Mabel wasn’t interested. She didn’t care about these men (in the book, it’s all men) and their achievements . . . Basically, Mabel just isn’t interested in explorers. In exploration. It bores her. Mabel is interested, I guess, in mental exploration.

  She—to the extent I can understand her complex thinking and her still-limited English—is of the opinion that Nature is not a collection or even interconnection of things, nor even a process, in the Darwinian sense, but—if I’m getting her right—a system of messages that reveals itself in the thingness we call Nature. But—and I know this is probably beside the point—messages sent by whom, and to whom? It’s a question I can’t ask her. There would be the pursed lips, the sad and embarrassed sideward glance . . .

  Stepping out of the tunnel and into a clearing, we all observe it: the blackened remains of a campfire, near a brook. We pitch the tent and set out supplies, working around the remains, not looking at them or at each other. Then scatter, each to his or her business. A distant roar of water somewhere above. At the edge of the clearing I come across the entrance to another tunnel, recently carved, not yet completely covered over with new forest. I push my way inside. It’s still possible, if only barely, to make it through without the machete. After a minute or two of pushing I practically run into Pamela, standing in speckled shadow, recording equipment Velcroed to her vest and cradled in her hands. She’s looking up, at Kirby’s sleeping bag. I stop beside her and look up too. The bag turns, very slowly, beneath its cluster of branches. Pamela is perfectly still; she has her recording equipment ready, but I can see she hasn’t turned it on; or she’s already turned it off. We stand there, looking up. It’s the first time during the whole expedition, I realize, that Pamela and I have been alone together without her sending me away. The bag turns. As we watch, there is, from time to time, or there seems to be, movement from within—a shifting, a rounded bulging, a subtle changing of shape . . .

  Now, as our expedition moves through the forest, in our zigzagging lines or arcs or possibly only in circles, I keep imagining myself coming upon Kirby’s sleeping bag again. Only this time nearly tripping on it where it lies below me, a green heap, unzipped, flung open. Discarded . . .

  It is a historical fact that Roald Amundsen never returned from his final expedition. It is also a fact that his body was never found. Another explorer lost searching for lost explorers. The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration: that’s the accepted name for Amundsen’s era. And the present age? Would it merit that kind of fearless capitalization? Would it merit a name at all?

  My hacking—there has been no rotation; there will never be a rotation—ends abruptly in a patch of sand. I step into unreasonable brightness. No vistas, no tier upon tier of rich view, but space at least, open space and, in the distance, broken purple shapes. We’ve reached the “Sandbox,” as it’s called, the name another gift from Norcross. Not completely inaccurate, in this case: a terrain of gold dunes, a microdesert roughly three miles square. It’s not bad, for a desert. Hot, obviously. But freedom from the humidity seems like a blessing for the first quarter mile or so. We stay in line, for some reason. Me at the head. Machete at my belt. Luntz stops once, to kneel before the desert’s single cactus.

  We near the purple shapes. The “Plush Mountains.” (Blame Norcross.)

  We pause at the base. Nobody’s inclined to approach. The Plush Mountains. Not mountains, really: piled and shattered surfaces; ridges and cliffs and canyons. The velvety material lining the rocks, Luntz speculates aloud, is most likely some type of lichen. Although possibly a bryophyte. He stands there beside us, speculating from a distance, as if reluctant to touch the plush.

  Wakefield makes a surprised sound, a strangled half-word stuck in his throat. The beginning of “yesterday,” it sounds like. He’s looking through his binoculars, eyebrows above them curved now as quizzically as his third eyebrow. It’s Esterling. He’s climbing the plush, a crablike scaling, small, already far above. We call to him, we send up cheers and warnings, knowing we’ll be ignored.

  Norcross’s memoir recounts his discovery of a “naturally formed staircase” at the base of these “mountains.” We walk back and forth—sheer faces everywhere—until we think we’ve found it. Although, if we have, “staircase” is a generous description. Anyway a vaguely steplike upward succession of rocks, highly uneven but probably climbable. I clamber up the first step. The plush is soft, pleasant to touch, as velvety as it looks.

  I think of Norcross climbing . . . These same “stairs”? Climbing and chewing jijasa root. At the top, if his at times hyperbolic memoir is to be believed, there should be a “naturally formed archway,” followed by a large level area. The site of Norcross’s famous root-induced vision: carved into the rock there his own face, enormous, covered in plush . . .

  I look down: the Sandbox’s gold square. Then the forest, no sign of our progress through it, no path visible, the trail I carved hidden beneath the canopy. Steam billows ceaselessly from the treetops like the smoke from a thousand chimneys. Beyond the forest there is, there should be, ocean—our starting point. You can make out a blue line far away, but can’t tell if it’s ocean or a strip of sky between steam and cloud. I want to identify it as ocean so that I can look back at where we started, see how far we’ve come . . .

  Above: what can, in all fairness to Norcross, only be described as a naturally formed archway.

  We pass beneath it, entering a large level area. Exhausted, we collapse onto the plush . . . I half expect to see Norcross’s face in stone, his vision made real. Or our own faces, waiting for us. But there’s nothing like that. No plush-covered Pamela. No Wakefield, no Luntz. My own face, nowhere to be seen . . . Only rocks and more rocks. The terrain is not inviting. It’s not rejecting either. The terrain is not expressing an opinion regarding our presence there one way or the other. What would Kirby think? Maybe the view, the terrain—maybe it’s all more interesting from a higher vantage point. Maybe Esterling has crab-crawled his way above us to something better.

  It occurs to me that Mabel will be delivering her presentation at the symposium soon. Or already has. I’ve lost track of the date. I should probably have been there to hear her speak. Pamela and I both. Over my head, probably, but still. When she speaks before groups she sways. She links first finger with first finger and swings the link in front of her. Her good-luck charm, or a talisman to ward off frivolous and irrelevant questions from the audience. She’s prone to error when using comparative adjectives, a rare lapse. “Because this is a more bigger problem,” she might say. Her audience will be forgiving. She’s five years old. They’re there for her ideas, after all. Although her theory, I suspect, still needs work. It’s still in its early stages. I should be there to hear it. I would try my best to understand. I want to understand. At the same time, it scares me. I don’t know where Pamela and I fit into it. If there’s room for people like us.

  In The Book of Explorers there’s a photograph of Roald Amundsen, taken shortly before his disappearance. The scene is desolate. He stands leani
ng in skis, alone in the center of the frame. The ridiculous, oversized, heroic mustache that accompanied him on earlier expeditions is gone. This is late Amundsen, shorn of twinkling eyes and dashing whiskers, Amundsen the stoical grand old man of exploration. Beside him, a sled loaded with supplies. The only way to tell that he’s reached his goal is the flagpole thrust aslant in the snow. Amundsen’s mitten grips it; his face, within his hood’s ring of fur, is small, pinched, masklike. He grips the pole as if he would otherwise be blown away, leaning in his skis. White all around.

  Kurobe and the Secrets of Puppetry

  Following his final performance before the Emperor, Choemon Kurobe—seventh-generation Master Puppeteer, three-time invitee to the private stage of the Tokugawa shogunate, imperially designated Living Artistic Treasure—was given a fish. His impending retirement had become common knowledge. Since there was, however, as yet no formal announcement, a grand and ostentatious parting gift (a summer home in Kyoto? a gilded statue of a puppet?) in the end hardly seemed appropriate. Gift after gift was considered and rejected before His Imperial Majesty learned of the old master’s devotion to his carp pond.

  The chosen fish was silver-blue in color and nearly three hands in length. The line had been bred over generations by the Imperial Fishkeeper to enrich the patterning and deepen the hue. The very existence of such a fish was unknown beyond the palace gates. Master Kurobe was of course present to witness the introduction of the remarkable gift into his pond. It nosed the surface dubiously, traced a wavering ellipse, and darted under the bridge. The next day Kurobe returned. On the third day, after gazing for a long time at the fish as it traveled through the green water, he decided that there was something wrong with it.

  For years Kurobe had been in the habit of visiting his pond when contemplating a problem. The orderly movement of his carp as they made their slow circuits always calmed his mind. More than once he had found precisely the answer he’d been seeking there at the pond’s edge. But on this day, the longer he remained, the more troubled he became: the Emperor’s fish, he’d discovered, had the oddest tendency to change direction as if it had lost its bearings; it flailed at its pondmates with nervous swipes of its speckled tail; it flipped and twisted, trapped in an imaginary net. Its senseless movements were unnerving. As he watched, the creature scraped the pool’s bottom and vanished in a muddy plume of disturbed water; and it seemed to Kurobe that it was not the pool but his own thoughts that were being clouded over . . .

  The problem he had come here hoping to solve concerned the naming of a successor: for months now he had vacillated, unable to choose between his sons. Each had his strengths. And yet . . . He recalled something he had been fond of telling his wife: “If we could just find a way to squeeze those two into one,” he would say, “they might make a fine man.” His wife would frown and slap at his arm, feigning disapproval. She knew, after all, that it was only a joke—barbed perhaps, but spoken with affection.

  As assistants, his sons were all he could ask for: Master Kurobe operated the puppet’s right hand as well as the stick and levers animating its head; Genzo, the elder, controlled the left hand; Sojiro its feet. Kurobe was the star, of course, resplendent in his gold performing kimono as he displayed the miracle of his technique. Audiences came to see him more even than the figures he led across the stage; or, rather, they came to see them together, master and puppet, the creator present in his own creation. The same could not be said for Kurobe’s sons: like all assistants, they were, by accepted convention, forgotten, the audience politely disregarding their presence as they followed behind their father in black hooded robes like shadows cast in opposite directions. But when Kurobe left the stage for the final time, one of them would have to remove the hood and step forward as lead puppeteer, and Kurobe could not imagine either filling the role.

  Twilight had darkened the pond; the fish were only moving glints of color. Bats veered and tumbled overhead. He started back along the path; but dusk’s inscrutable melancholy had filled the garden, and he found himself lingering. The cypress: it needed pruning. He would have to tell the gardener. He stopped beneath his favorite, an old persimmon whose blossoms had finished falling a week before. He could make out a few, shriveled and brown, in the grass at his feet.

  His fingertips found the juncture of trunk and limb; felt a branch’s rough curve; crossed a nub where a cut had healed. He was, at first, thinking about sons and succession. Then . . .

  Then it was dark. There he was, standing in darkness. Night had whirred softly to life around him. And his fingers, he discovered, were still rasping blindly over the bark of his persimmon tree . . .

  In the common room, Genzo was stretched out beside his usual bottle of sake.

  “Father!” he cried as Kurobe passed, waving him inside.

  “Wait till you hear what I saw in the quarter last night!”

  His son’s enthusiasm made Kurobe feel suddenly weary.

  “I was wandering down this side street, right? Near The Dancing Fox, which used to be a— Anyway, I saw some people gathered around, laughing and, you know, making a general commotion. A bunch of drunks. So I go up to have a look, and it turns out they’re watching this busker. But not your usual clown or juggler. This fellow, he’s doing a sort of . . . burlesque of puppet theater, I guess you’d call it. Jerking around like a puppet, playing every part, male and female, changing wigs and costumes in a flash. And all the while providing his own narration. Pretty soon I was laughing like the rest of them, I couldn’t help it, I mean he was hilarious, Father. Honestly. But very skilled too. Not just some fool. At one point, there was something he did, I . . . I thought I saw a sort of . . . Well, never mind. Anyway, you want to know the best part? He barely came up to here!” His hand sliced a thigh. “Easily the smallest man I’ve ever seen! See, that was the hook: he wasn’t just playing the part of a puppet, he was the size of one himself!”

  Kurobe said nothing. His son was well aware of how he felt about performers attempting parts intended for the puppet theater.

  Actors, of course, had always been whores, showcasing their charms onstage to entice customers into later offstage adventures. Kurobe had no particular quarrel with this; let them do as they liked in their own sordid world. But to attempt the plays of Chikamatsu! It was this belated claim to respectability that Kurobe found intolerable. Their recent artistic pretensions; their posturing and bombast as they blundered through ludicrous impersonations of puppetry’s greatest heroes . . . Kurobe even had it on good authority that a popular Kabuki actor was openly stealing from one of Kurobe’s most celebrated characterizations, imitating his puppet down to the last gesture. Of course, sophisticated audiences understood that, in the hands of a master, a puppet came more vividly to life onstage than any human counterpart. But the rabble couldn’t be expected to appreciate the difference; they were eating up these Kabuki charades. It was shameful, all of it. Far more shameful than whatever the actors got up to in their private rooms after their shows . . . But wait: he’d lost his train of . . . Actors? No; his son had been raving about something. Worse than an actor: a beggar, that was it. A deformed beggar making a deliberate mockery of Kurobe’s art for a laugh and a handful of tossed coins . . .

  Was Genzo trying to provoke him? Kurobe hadn’t spoken to his sons yet of his plan to retire, but it had become an open secret; and Genzo was behaving even worse than usual these days, as if determined to undermine his own chances of succession.

  “. . . So I thought,” his son was saying, “maybe we could go to the quarter together and see him. I’m telling you, Father, you really would be surprised. We could stop along the way, have a drink . . .”

  “You know perfectly well that’s not the sort of place where I choose to spend my time,” Kurobe said in his most dignified tone.

  For an instant Genzo winced as though struck, causing Kurobe to wonder if the invitation he’d taken as a taunt might have been sincere after all; b
ut then a crooked smirk distorted half of his son’s face. It was an expression Kurobe was all too familiar with: ever since childhood, when confronted with his father’s anger, it would appear, a lopsided look of satisfaction, as if he weren’t being scolded at all but rather praised instead.

  “I’m sure it’s a fine sight you make: a Kurobe, wandering the quarter every night like a stray dog sniffing for scraps.”

  “Right. That’s a ‘no’ then, I take it.” Even the smirk had gone; now Genzo merely looked bored.

  “You’ve no self-respect, that’s clear enough; but you might at least try to consider your family name.” He was tired. His words felt tired, a script repeated too many times. A script to a play with no ending. Did he still believe his own words? He had once, perhaps; but even his disappointment in his son seemed like something he’d given up on long before.

  “Finished already?” Genzo poured himself more sake. “You forgot the part about how ashamed Mother would be if she were alive to see me now . . .” And he let his head loll to one side as if to appear drunker than he really was.

  At the sudden mention of his wife, Kurobe found himself unable to speak. Even now. How dare he speak of her. Dazed, he stumbled toward the doorway as if through a darkened corridor.

  “Well, good night to you too!” his son sang out.

  For him nothing.

  It wasn’t just spite: who had earned his title if not Sojiro? Reward filial piety; reward duty. Yes: as he should have done all along. But by the time he reached his room, his resolve had already vanished, and he felt even more uncertain than before, as if each attempt at a decision only drained a bit more of his will to actually decide.

  His daughter-in-law had unrolled his futon for him, lit the lamp, and set on a table the glass of wheat tea he liked before bed. He began to undress. If those two could just squeeze into one. His wife’s frown; her light slap. They might make a fine man. It had seemed a joke, nothing more . . .