The Silk Road

by Kathryn Davis

  Of course he was right: the mosses were the sweetest things on earth and they were dying. So many people on the move, all sorts of things were getting trampled. It would be difficult to isolate any one of them. The Silk Road began in the east and headed west—that was the original orientation. When did it veer north? How did word travel?

  There would be a town or village, a church tower with a bell or bells in it, and then the tongues of the bells would lash out, the sound they made expanding the dark blue air. Did we breathe better when the bells were ringing? It seemed, truly, like there was a greater quantity of air—better, fresher air—when the bells rang, though that may only have been their sound. The Silk Road made allowances for quarantines, the piled bodies of the dead. The outfits we wore were outlandish. There was a garment of silk called a paltok. There was particolored and striped hose that we tied with laces to our paltoks, which were called harlottes. There were shoes with pointed toes as long as our fingers, called crakowes. Some of us went about with our loins uncovered. Some of us wore belts studded with gold and silver. We would approach a village and the only person to come out to meet us would be the village idiot.

  Back then we were way too young and inexperienced to understand what it was we were being asked to contend with.

  Once the weather cleared the Iceman made his way to the dock. The floatplane was red and the pilot a girl, strong and rawboned and with a flat black braid down her back. “Watch the dog,” she said, for there was a large one draped courtesan-like across the rear seat. “You have to sit up here,” she said, pointing at the seat beside her. The next thing the Iceman knew, they were taking off.

  For an instant it seemed like the plane was headed back into the water. Then a fish jumped. We’d all been there. A person might fall into the abyss and see stars. They might climb into heaven and, being too high above everything, see nothing. Since we came from the past we knew how to look forward, but it was possible one of us came from the future, too, and when that happens it’s possible to see what it was like before there was anything, anything at all.

  Not the one with two hearts, though—not that one. It’s possible the one who came from the future didn’t have a heart.

  “Sure you’ll fit,” the pilot said to the Iceman, who stood hunched in the open door. “Right here,” she said, patting the seat beside her. The Iceman wasn’t the only one of us she brought to the settlement, but he was the only one she let sit beside her that way in the cockpit.

  We’d grown used to this with him. The corner grocer slipped him chocolate-covered pretzels when we stopped to buy comic books. The goodwives called off the dogs; the nuns blessed him and gave him bowls of aligot to eat. The teenage girl behind the soda fountain fed him maraschino cherries while we waited to pick up our mother’s asthma medicine. Once, on the road, a trader gave him a bag of salt and a lambskin cloak.

  The Astronomer may have been handsome but the Iceman was lovable. He kept a terrarium in the Morning Room with different kinds of moss in it, a sexual generation of mosses including male and female sex organs alike, living things in some cases so little their sex parts could not be seen at all. Of what size were we to suppose the sex parts of such creatures to be? Or the ball of the heart or the eyes? Not to mention the first beginnings out of which the soul and the nature of the mind were formed?

  It had been the same for all of us. From the air the world looked like a hive of bees. Then the plane landed and everything divided into individual parts, each of which grew big again, the cove, the escarpment, the raised beach. Landing, for all of us, was a dream come true and a disappointment. The floatplane unfolded wings of water cold enough to kill. The girl at the controls turned to the Iceman and smiled. She told him the dock had floated away during the night but he didn’t need to worry. Someone wearing oilskins was approaching in a trap boat. Welcome, the person said.

  That was me, said the Geographer. Remember? She mimed a hat.

  The Iceman didn’t remember, but he didn’t want to say so.

  We were all remembering, then.

  The pilot cut the engines and dropped anchor. She was serious but she could be made to laugh. She had a sense of humor, several of us remembered that. When the Cook told her one of those jokes of his, she laughed.

  Wit is the hallmark of intelligence, said the Archivist, by which he meant to disagree.

  He remembered the bush pilot differently, the look on her face as she guided the plane across treacherous mountain terrain. There was something in her expression that made him think of our mother. But when and under what circumstances? A long time ago, that was for sure, our mother’s face coming closer—maybe the time she showed him how to tie a necktie. The necktie had white stars on a blue background, he remembered. He remembered the tip of our mother’s tongue caught between her teeth like she was going to bite it off, her eyes all but crossed in fierce concentration.

  He won a prize at school, it must have been then. A spelling bee? He was the only one of us who was good at spelling. Or maybe it was for penmanship. On the report card the quality of a person’s cursive was judged to be more important than everything else, including health habits. We were made to practice our cursive until it was perfect; there was no room for improvisation or originality.

  Maybe the prize was for that essay you wrote, said the Geographer. About Hadrian. She didn’t say it, but we were all thinking the same thing: he’d only written the essay to impress P.

  A duel to the death, said the Topologist. Plus wasn’t it her essay that won the prize?

  The day the Iceman arrived at the settlement it was just the Geographer and the Topologist in the boat, leaving him plenty of room. The Geographer was driving the boat; the Topologist gave the Iceman a set of oilskins to wear and told him to hold on tight. She was the one who understood him best, space having been her lifelong companion, the place that she dwelt in and that she loved more than anything. Tightness was a necessary criterion she knew, especially when a measure had infinite dimensions. She told the Iceman they didn’t have far to go, and pointed ahead to the escarpment.

  What’s that? he asked.

  Over near the shore to the left of them an animal was lifting its head from the water, bracing itself on the rocks as it kept rising, lifting its hindquarters and shaking the water from its surprisingly long and not quite snow-white body in one endless ripple, beginning to turn casually as if it had all the time in the world, its black nose pulsating to take in the smell of them.

  It had a beautiful shape, that nose! A shape like the drawer pulls on the bachelor chest that stood in the entry hall near the front door. Bear noses, the Botanist used to call them. But not everyone found her adorable.

  For example the Botanist used to force the Geographer to be the baby when they played family, even though it was the Botanist who was the youngest. Eventually the Botanist grew to be very tall, whereas the Geographer remained short. The Iceman would be the father, the Botanist the mother. She would put a shower cap on the Geographer’s head and get the Iceman to pull her around the block in a wagon.

  The Geographer remembered the prisoners making fun of her, calling her names. One of them in particular, the one we called the Cute Prisoner because of his shining hair and the scar on his cheek the Archivist told us he’d gotten in a duel.

  Breaking and entering, said the Iceman. That’s how he got it. We saw him, remember? That time we were playing Hangman.

  Except the Cute Prisoner didn’t have to break and enter; it was our mother who let him in. She let him in the front door like he was a regular visitor. He pushed her against the bachelor chest and then he pushed his knee between her legs to open them, raising his knee slowly, pressing the kneecap up until it couldn’t go any further. Each one of us remembered—at night, upstairs, feigning sleep when Nanny came patrolling with her flashlight, or consigned to our beds in the settlement, with the snow falling thick around us.

  We thought we were being taken to the isolation ward; we thought we were bei
ng taken somewhere, maybe to our mother who had been known to volunteer as a Gray Lady despite her horror of human infirmity, especially anything involving blood. The outfit she got to wear as a Gray Lady suited her, narrow at the waist and with a red cross atop her right breast, as did the image she carried in her mind’s eye of her lovely self ministering to those less fortunate.

  This was probably how the Prisoner got his toe in the door, said the Iceman.

  Well, more than his toe, said the Topologist.

  But if she was here in the Dômerie, said the Cook, wouldn’t we be smelling that perfume?

  The thing is, we had no way of knowing where the Botanist was taking us. Her eyes, usually the warmest brown of all our eyes, gold and shining like honey, seemed less like eyes than holes in her skull and her pretty mouth hung open trailing a low sound like spoor. Still, we followed her avidly, down the long hall and around the corner past the bell tower, down another corridor and up a flight of stairs. Alone among us, the Geographer kept looking back over her shoulder.

  We shouldn’t have left her out there like that, she said; we knew she meant the Keeper. It was cold inside but not as cold as it had been outside—we were glad to have our cloaks and heavy boots.

  The staircase seemed endless. Now we could see cool bluish light ahead of us, flickering the way light does from a fluorescent tube when it’s about to go out. We could hear, too, the sounds of a working hospital, the rumbling of the wheels of gurneys along the hallway, liquid spilling from basins. Someone screaming, someone moaning, someone telling someone to lie still.

  You need to be taken to the station for processing, said the Botanist. She looked like she’d gone back to being her regular self, standing there before us at the head of the stairs, her eyes bright, her blond hair bound in a coil at the nape of her neck. Unlike her regular self, though, she didn’t seem to register who we were. Proper names, surnames first, she said, consulting a clipboard. This was puzzling, since the Botanist had always been best at remembering everyone’s name. Under her cloak she was wearing a white doctor’s gown, goatskin boots, and gauntlets.

  For heaven’s sake! the Topologist said, pushing her way past. She was trying to get to the elevator we could see opening and closing its doors on the other side of the nurses’ station. Opening, closing, opening, closing—it was like watching a mind trying to make itself up.

  Don’t waste your time, said the Geographer. I’ve been here, remember? She was looking at the Botanist. If I remember correctly, only a very few people are allowed to use the elevator. Isn’t that so?

  It’s a good thing you came inside when you did, the Botanist said, looking the other way, ignoring her. She made her hands into claws. Don’t worry about her, the Botanist said, and we knew she meant the Keeper. The only dangerous thing out there is a beast.

  Processing involved having our scalps checked for bald spots, being told to spit into a metal pan, and being bled. The Iceman, bald already, had to submit to examination of his pubic hair, but the nurse was young and attractive and so he didn’t mind. Eventually we were allowed to proceed, though it was never clear in what capacity, whether as visitor or patient. We were given theriac; we were told to keep our voices down. Maybe it wasn’t the same for all of us. Some of us were made to wear an identification bracelet. Some of us were made to wear a mask. The Cook was tasked with bringing along a large pot of soup.

  The higher we went in the building, the warmer it got. The isolation ward was on the third floor. At one time it had occupied its own separate building next to the stables, back when coal was plentiful. A little table stood between the white hospital bed where a sick person lay motionless and the straight-backed chair where the Botanist sat reading aloud from an old copy of Life magazine. She appeared deeply engrossed in what she was reading, as if she’d been at it for hours, even though we knew she couldn’t have been sitting there for more than a few minutes before we arrived.

  “… very little time to do what needed to be done …” The Botanist was turning pages and scowling. “… an epidemic of this proportion had never been seen before and never would be again …”

  To help retain heat, some of which was coming through a register cut in the floor, and some of which was coming from a poorly ventilated woodstove, the whole room and everything in it had been draped in animal skin. The head of the skin on the patient’s bed was looking down over the foot of it at something on the floor. It was a bear, we were pretty sure of that, though the animals to whom the skins on the walls had once belonged were harder to identify, being headless.

  Don’t touch! the Botanist warned when the Topologist approached the patient.

  I wasn’t going to, the Topologist replied. It was obvious she thought it might be the Swede. At some point they’d lost contact with one another.

  The person lying in the bed seemed to be doing something with its fingers. It was impossible to tell what sex the person was, though if it was a man he wasn’t a very big one. The person was small-boned, like Father—it had been such a long time since we’d seen him; people shrank as they got older.

  He’d always been noticeably smaller than Mother. Looking at the wedding picture, you found yourself thinking of something small and dark in contention with something large and white. An alpinist on the Matterhorn. An ant on a wedding cake. Not that Mother was particularly big, just sweeping like a generalization. Father, on the other hand, required a certain degree of vigilance to take in, not unlike that scrap we saw from the train, caught in a tangle of branches, the one that presaged everything.

  No wonder we kept trying to duplicate our first excursion.

  Though of course you can’t go back. We all knew this. You can’t!

  The Geographer hung her cloak in the closet. She saw where the closet was without being told. The Astronomer opened the window and looked out; he was checking for signs of planetary conjunction. There was to be driving rain, the regular kind and the kind composed of dead birds. People were going to get in bed healthy and wake up dead. The Astronomer was humming; everything that happened in the heavens made him happy. The Cook put the soup pot on the little table. He took off the lid and made a face. Did something die in here? he asked.

  The smell was, indeed, repulsive; we found ourselves thinking of Nanny’s room the time the mice ate the poison she put out for them and went behind the lathe to decompose. Mother insisted our house was a celebration of life but we all knew what she meant by that was that our house was a good place to have sex. Even though she never went so far as to make fun of those of us who weren’t interested in sex, we knew the force of her disdain. We were the ones who weren’t invited to sit with her in the first class carriage; it was as if we had a character flaw. Nor did we bond with one another. We hated one another.

  When the Topologist was running up and down the train from car to car, looking for a bathroom, we didn’t help. When the porter gave her a brown paper bag to put her wet underpants in, we laughed. We laughed at the wet spot the underpants made on the bag and we laughed at the thought of the Topologist with nothing on under her skirt. Besides, everyone’s days with Mother in the first class carriage were numbered, we knew that. It was just that not all of us were humiliated in the same way. Mostly our mother favored boys. She didn’t have to worry about who was prettiest.

  It had gotten to be very late, so late it was almost early. The wind was coming from the west, rattling the windowpanes; we could see the Keeper buffeted by it as she made her way along the path to the stables. Soon it would be dawn, the planet tipping away from the universe and toward the bright center of its own system. Soon it would be time to feed the animals.

  The walkway was slippery; the Keeper was trying to watch where she put her feet, the beam of her flashlight guiding her past the stone angel and the dead flower stalks. She had to know we were watching her. To her we were blobs in a window casing, whereas to us she was a clearly defined figure, the beam of her flashlight darting here and there. To us she looked like a child�
�that was how we all looked from above, like children and then, the higher we went, like mice, like fleas, nothing.

  The stables lay north of the Dômerie. They had been built of the same stone as the hospital and were set into the side of the same hill, only they faced away from the lake, toward the river and Portal Road. Though the door stood slightly open there were no tracks leading up to it. Often the Keeper found rats inside, sometimes a raptor eating a rat.

  Which do you think will be gone first, people or animals? she asked. This was before she ran off, leaving us behind with the Botanist.

  Today, instead of a horse in the box stall the Keeper found an old man and woman lying in limp embrace on the straw, their glands swollen and dark as plums. Maybe they weren’t that old; maybe the disease had gotten there first, filling their bodies with its unbearable din like that of a door being smashed down. “Begone!” the old woman exclaimed.

  They seemed unable to get enough of one another, nor did they seem to care that they had an audience. “Cover your eyes!” the old man said as they went at it again, cheerfully pumping like sex-starved youngsters. In point of fact they needed to procreate; everyone did. “Don’t look at us,” the old woman said, and the two of them broke into mocking laughter.

  The Keeper wasn’t worried that they might communicate the sickness to her; everyone who spent time around horses turned out to be immune, the disease rendered impotent by their smell.

  Ordinarily she didn’t set out for town until after breakfast but today was going to be an exception. She was going to have to walk; besides which, something had killed the hens that supplied the breakfast eggs. How could she have neglected to latch the stable door? Our mother would sooner overlook a mortal sin than forgive mere negligence, especially if it involved loss of property. She had never gotten over the time the Botanist borrowed her fur piece without asking, and left it on the bus.