The Silk Road

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by Kathryn Davis


  There was a prison in the neighborhood not far from our house and when we lived there it had prisoners in it. Only later did the prison get turned into a haunted house at Halloween with people paying money to be scared to death; the rest of the time it was empty. When we were children we used to go out where the prisoners could see us. Father made a smile for each of our faces with a melon slice and he made one for himself even though he wasn’t happy. After they locked the prisoners up they threw away the key, Mother said, and she showed us a key in a gold cigarette case. Poor things, she said. They need something pretty. She would put on her pearl necklace and stand in the Morning Room window, smoking.

  Back then we had no idea where we were headed. We were children, some of us good as angels and some of us bad, but none of us really bad, none of us evil devils like the men we’d see lined up in the prison yard in their striped garb, chained together at the ankle. Maybe we got that from the movies. It wasn’t until later that we became things with names, a Geographer, a Cook, an Astronomer, etc., though people were always asking what we wanted to be when we grew up, as if what we already were was meaningless. We would never have said Murderer.

  Mother went out in the evenings; every morning Father went to work. The entire neighborhood consisted mostly of grand houses not unlike our own, houses three stories tall with a back entrance and a set of back stairs for the servants, though the only servant we had was Nanny. The prison had always been there; it was, in its own way, a grand edifice of red brick with turrets and crenellations, designed by the same famous architect who designed the university buildings. Usually the prisoners were kept under strict control, but Father remembered a stone coming through the Morning Room window one day; he had been a little boy then. What’s the big idea? he remembered Nanny saying.

  That was the question, really. The thing is, we were all caught in the flood of time but without a back-pool or sluggish eddy or swamp root or anything to catch on, to get a grip on, to stop long enough to have a look at what we were becoming or had become.

  As for the excursion, it’s unclear whose idea it was, only that it was unusual—without precedent or recurrence—for all of us to go out together at the same time. The town car wasn’t big enough and it belonged to Mother: she didn’t want us spilling food in it or, worse, throwing up. Several of us suffered from carsickness and her cigarette smoke didn’t help.

  No, it was decided. We would take the train. We would take it to the end of the line and then we’d get out and walk.

  Where we were going was to be a surprise.

  Naturally, years later, we didn’t all remember it the same way. The day wasn’t fine, the train practically empty, the station we got off at made of stone. One of us couldn’t find the bathroom and wet their pants. Aside from these details, though, there was little agreement. The woman hanging laundry who waved her rail-thin arms at us frantically as we sped past—it had to have been an emergency for her to wave her arms like that, but most of us didn’t remember her at all. Were we given jelly omelets in the dining car? Going through a tunnel, the train blew its whistle and someone touched someone inappropriately. The hill we climbed after leaving the station—was it so steep Mother decided to stay in the restaurant at the foot of it rather than accompany us to the top? Father was furious; he drove his fist through the powder room door. There was no powder room. Mother got to the top before any of us. The view from the top was of a lake so wide it might have been the ocean. The view from the top was of our city. The view from the top was shrouded in mist. The rain was driving down.

  Something was always driving down though it wasn’t always the same thing. Rain, sleet, snow, hail.

  Think of the prisoners, Mother said. She was agitated—we all remembered that.

  At least they’re not standing in the pouring rain, said Father, removing his hat to wring it out.

  There were piles of stone atop the hill, trail markers, spaced equidistant from one another and leading across the summit and down the other side, which we couldn’t see. We walked in pairs, holding hands, so as not to get lost.

  Two by two, like onto the ark, said the Keeper.

  Like in our favorite book, Madeline. The girls’ favorite book, that is. The boys loved a comic called “Prince Valiant” which was about a Nordic prince from Thule who seemed able to travel with equal ease through space and time.

  The Astronomer hadn’t been paired with anyone that day; this was because someone always had to walk with Mother. Two by two onto the ark except for poor, lonely Monoceros, he said. He was referring to the constellation on the celestial equator whose name is Greek for unicorn, its three largest stars forming a seemingly fixed triangle barely visible to the naked eye. The most beautiful sight in the heavens, according to the man who discovered it. Like all the constellations, it doesn’t look a bit like the thing it was named for.

  But I was with you, Jee Moon said to him. I’ve always been with you.

  The Topologist drew a shape in the air with her finger. What the coordinates describe is an abstraction, she said. Say you’re in a spaceship and you start going in one direction for a very long period of time. You could hit a wall. You could keep going forever. Or you could end up back where you started but you wouldn’t know it.

  Exactly, said Jee Moon.

  The day of the excursion the Botanist was still a baby and had to be nursed; until we got to the restaurant this constituted a hindrance. The fad for breast-feeding was a fairly recent one. Most of us had been bottle-fed and, as Nanny was quick to point out, none the worse for it. They used to have special nursing rooms for mothers with babies—often these rooms were attached to the lavatory. The boys were roughhousing and the place was fancy, damask tablecloths, real silverware, and waiters dressed in black waistcoats and trousers, wearing sneers on their faces and their aprons low on their hips. Why our mother decided to take us to a place like that is a mystery.

  But it was Mother’s birthday!

  We had escargots. Escargots meant snails, if only we knew what was going on.

  We could die from happiness, if only we knew.

  Father’s vexation of spirit notwithstanding, Mother was humming, the buttons of her blouse unevenly buttoned.

  That’s when Father put his fist through the powder room door, said the Geographer. Not earlier.

  If he ever did such a thing. The Archivist was Father’s champion, both of them Virgos, not that easy to get along with though delicate, a delicate nature stretched and then suspended above the fathomless abyss.

  We dipped them in butter, said the Cook. Snails are delicious dipped in butter.

  Anything is delicious dipped in butter, said the Botanist.

  When she was a little girl, she used to bring garden slugs in from the backyard and feed them saltines. Remember? That was how it worked, the Geographer said, the kindest acts spawning disastrous outcomes.

  Still, how did she get there? Our mother, that is. Did she climb the hill in her designer high heels? The ones that gave her bunions? Did she even know a trail marker when she saw one? It’s almost impossible to imagine. Conversely, how did we get there, back to her? The whole point of the excursion was to celebrate her birthday, after all. Not everyone remembered the hill, though those who did remembered it vividly. The trail was slippery from the rain. The Topologist lost her footing on the way down, breaking her fall with her right hand, abrading the palm and spraining her wrist. She cried through most of the birthday meal. Remember? The Archivist pretended to wipe tears from his eyes, sniffling.

  Only I never fell, replied the Topologist. You were the one who fell.

  Tensions always ran high between those two, the one dedicated to the preservation of materia mundi, the other to proving its immateriality, the Topologist’s painstaking arrangement of game pieces on the hearthstone neatly swept up by the Archivist and stored in the wooden box in the middle drawer of the bachelor chest where they belonged.

  We had rack of lamb, said the Cook. Overdone. With mint
jelly, he added, and smiled at the Botanist, who loved sweets. You weren’t a vegetarian back then, he reminded her. Back then you ate like a horse.

  A baby horse, she said. Remember?

  Mealtimes were always the happiest times we spent together, Mother and Father seated at opposite ends of a table, making contention between them difficult if not impossible. Dear Heart, she called him at such moments. It was a restaurant, though—not everyone ate the same thing. Mother ordered confit de canard, Father prime rib au jus.

  Was it a French restaurant?

  What difference would that make?

  All the difference in the world, said the Cook.

  As long as it wasn’t in France, said the Archivist.

  And why is that, Mr. Smartypants? The Botanist loved to bait him, and we liked watching his reaction.

  We need to know where everyone was, the Archivist said. All those times when we were on our own, in other places with other people.

  For his own part, he’d been at the university. It had just started raining and the only place he could find to park was on the wrong side of campus. Rain hadn’t been predicted; the sky was clear when he left his apartment, the spring constellations clustering brightly overhead. They wouldn’t be visible until he emerged from under the trees, though. The Archivist’s street was lined with ash trees but he didn’t know that’s what they were. The living world didn’t interest him.

  Hydra, Canis Minor, Lyra. We could see them if we went outside, said the Astronomer. Not Boötes, though.

  It’s too cold to go out, said Jee Moon. She sighed and left the banquet table to stand at the window. A full moon had recently risen over the sea, hung like a lamp above the cove’s heaving, boreal waves.

  There was an ash tree behind the house, said the Geographer. Remember?

  Gone, said the Botanist. Dead and gone. Eaten by cutworms.

  Do you always have to be so melodramatic? The Keeper was scraping our plates for the dogs. I remember when you got stuck at the top, she said, and Nanny had to call the fire department.

  The Black Death, said the Botanist. That’s what I remember.

  It’s the ash that draws the flash, said the Iceman.

  The university parking spaces were divided into color-coded areas and came with stickers to match. The red stickers were the most expensive, allowing you to park close to the most important buildings; next came the green stickers, followed by the blue, and finally the yellow. The Archivist never paid for a sticker; he usually walked to work. Tonight was a special occasion, though. P had donated her papers to the university and she was to give a reading in the rare books room.

  The Archivist had little admiration for the work. The Lonely Thoroughfares, P’s first book, had appeared at a difficult time in his life, and he felt she showed an astounding lack of sympathy for her subject. “Little thing, little sniveling thing …” Reading his personally inscribed copy, the Archivist thought it was almost as if she wanted to make fun of the lonely, of the sorry spectacle they presented traversing the vast, empty thoroughfares of their loneliness. Often in these poems, tracks of some kind could be discerned leading into the distance; there would be a leafless tree, an indistinct sound, a choked cry.

  Obviously she was stealing from Hadrian. Only it wasn’t called stealing, it was called appropriation, and what you were left with was called a debt.

  Such a shame, our mother used to say of P. As a girl she hadn’t been what you’d call pretty, but at some point that changed. If the recent author photo was to be believed, even now with age making inroads around the eyes and mouth, she remained quite attractive. The photographer had posed her in a straight-backed chair, which seemed appropriate, given her unyielding nature.

  The Archivist had allowed himself more than enough time to get to campus and park, but the places where a sticker wasn’t necessary were already taken. The rain had begun to fall in earnest; every time a car came toward him he couldn’t see a thing. Twice he got honked at, once he almost hit a woman he recognized from the political science department. She darted in front of him in a white, ankle-length raincoat, only to be pulled back at the last minute by her husband, who shook his fist.

  Time was running out. The energetic level of conversation that preceded these events would have begun its decrescendo into silence. The Chancellor would be scanning the room, checking his watch. P would be seated in the front row, her head bent over her manuscript, the white stalk of her neck just begging to be slipped in a noose. XOXOXO. What kind of inscription was that? Meanwhile the first weed whacker of the season would have begun tidying the edges of the flower beds. Like the undead, the university groundskeepers never slept.

  The space the Archivist finally found was at the edge of the blue section, so far from the center of campus as to be practically yellow, near Fraternity Row, a fanciful assortment of structures whose high Gothic style married uneasily with the immense gas grills and piles of athletic equipment filling their courtyards. Though it seemed impossible, the rain was coming down harder than ever, as if it were being hurled at his car in fistfuls. Naturally he hadn’t brought an umbrella—he was going to get drenched. He was going to look pathetic, not unlike Hadrian’s soul.

  As if a soul could be said to have a look, said the Cook. He was studying the table scraps, ready to take offense at anything we hadn’t eaten. P always had it easy, he said.

  You don’t know what you’re talking about, said Jee Moon. Nothing was easy for her.

  We all knew what Jee Moon meant. We had all seen P throw away positive actions like dirt. She seized upon negative actions. Worst of all she wasted the highly meaningful human body that had been so difficult to obtain in the first place.

  Upon parking his car the Archivist had been relieved to see, off to one side, the apse-shaped back end of January Hall, a large Romanesque edifice housing several all-but-obsolete departments. There was a tunnel that connected the building with the basement level of the library—the January Tunnel was legendary in the neighborhood, a favorite haunt of teen lovers and drug dealers. A few of us had spent more than a little time there, whereas the Archivist wasn’t even sure the tunnel existed. The only thing to do was make a run for it—though if there was no tunnel he was going to get soaked and the light wool suit he’d bought for the occasion would end up clinging unbecomingly to his sticklike figure. That man on the gallows looks like you, P had told him merrily, the first time she got him to play a game of Hangman. She hadn’t been a famous poet then—she’d just been an aloof child waiting her turn at the water fountain outside Saint Roch Elementary. When she lowered her lips to drink, he could hear her braces hit the bubbler.

  The Archivist dove into the downpour. He couldn’t tell where he was going; one moment he couldn’t see a thing, the next moment a door marked January Tunnel appeared in front of him. Once inside, he paused to shake the water from his hair and to wipe his glasses on the hem of his dress shirt. The tunnel was well lit; it extended ahead of him a great distance, its brightness devolving into dimness. There was the sound of machinery, a low thrumming coming from either side of him as well as overhead, and while there were no machines in view the Archivist wasn’t troubled by the noise. It took an enormous amount of energy to keep a university running smoothly.

  Against the wall just inside the door someone had arranged several brooms, a bucket with a mop in it, a pile of rags, but otherwise the tunnel was empty. The walls had been painted with the green paint beloved of institutions, applied in what seemed like a spirit of gay abandon. The concrete floor was splashed with it and it depended in hardened drips from a series of pipes running lengthwise along the ceiling.

  The Archivist’s glasses were steaming up—luckily he hadn’t bothered to tuck his shirt back in. Ever since her cataract surgery, P no longer needed corrective lenses and at night her gray eyes were said to refract light like an animal’s. She was known for her beautiful eyes, eyes that had looked small and beady to us throughout her girlhood due to the unusual thickn
ess of her glasses. For a time she wore plaid frames, the plaid of the rims not matching that of the stems. She’d been one of the unpopular girls, a condition that hadn’t bothered her the way being one of the unpopular boys bothered the Archivist. She took pride in the fact that no one wanted to dance with her at Mrs. Chaliffe’s ballroom dance class.

  At some point the Archivist realized he was beginning to hear a second sound insinuating itself under the thrumming of the machinery—a fainter sound, more personal really, in that it seemed meant for his ears alone. Faint and precise, a lightly repeated thwap thwap thwap punctuated with tiny clicks, it suggested the presence of a creature with soft footpads and delicate claws, either running away from him or coaxing him forward. Ahead on the left he could see a break in the otherwise unbroken wall that turned out to be a short dark hallway ending with a door that no doubt led to one of the windowless basement-level offices assigned to adjuncts or teaching assistants. How long had it taken him to make his way up from just such an office to one with two large windows facing a graceful colonnade? Longer than it should have, that was for sure.

  Based on the sound of the footfalls it seemed like whatever it was he’d been following had ducked into that hallway—but when the Archivist looked, the only thing he saw was a wadded-up ball of paper on the floor near the door, a piece of university letterhead on which someone had drawn ten dashes, penciling in an O above the seventh dash, an X above the eighth. XOXOXO, P wrote in her sloppy mannish handwriting across the title page of her first book. This says it all, she said, giving it to him, and he knew she didn’t mean hugs and kisses but the pattern around the base of the dome in the concert hall he’d taken her to for her sixteenth birthday. He smoothed the sheet of paper and folded it in half carefully before tucking it in his breast pocket.

 

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