The Silk Road

by Kathryn Davis

  The Botanist floated along the second-floor hallway and up the final flight of stairs to the third floor. Was it true, what they said? Once you went up you never came down? Little bug, little bud, little hug, little judge, little mug, little rug, little BUD. LITTLE BUD! On and on she drifted along the hallway, her obedience ferrying her past many doors, all of them closed tight, all of them with smoke seeping through the cracks. It is true that smoke is often used to create a barrier of aromatic vapor through which the air that carries sickness is unable to penetrate. Get out quickly, go a long way away, and don’t be in a hurry to come back: that was what the doctors were prescribing—the ones who hadn’t run away themselves, that is.

  The family who used to live here had been beset by X. cheopis or rat fleas, pests known to be happiest (if pests can be said to be happy) during unseasonably mild, damp winters, which this one certainly seemed to have been. The family consisted of a mother and father and a boy, but when the boy got sick from sleeping in the bedclothes his father acquired in trade for a rooster, they left him behind. They left him behind for dead—that was the spirit of the age. The Silk Road ran in front of their house; everyone was using it, for commerce or as a means of escape. Some travelers relied on word of mouth, some on cairns or blazes. What everyone had in common was lack of destination.

  The boy wasn’t dead though. When he awakened the place he was in was as dark as the deepest well. There seemed to be a log fire burning in the middle of the floor—though how could that have been? He was still inside his house, wasn’t he? Inside the house where he’d been born and suckled and weaned? The bedclothes, too, seemed to be arranging themselves without assistance. The trader had stuffed them with rat flea–infested feathers and hair; as the boy watched, the stuffing reassembled itself into a large creature that glistened like a pearl.

  “Come to me,” the creature said, but it wasn’t talking to him.

  The sun went down and for just one moment the sky was bathed in golden light. Then the Botanist opened the door and came floating across the threshold.

  Inside she saw the boy sitting by the window, though he wasn’t exactly a boy. The person sitting by the window was older than he’d looked from below, older and bigger, and because he had wrapped himself in his cloak she couldn’t see the swellings on his body, but she could smell the sickness on him. What the Botanist saw, smelling it, was the Fairy beckoning the Prince to join her in the Garden of Paradise, even though she’d told him it was the one thing he was forbidden to do. The Fairy said if he joined her there and kissed her, Paradise would sink deep into the earth, which is where it was located in the first place.

  In assembly, if you so much as thought of talking to your neighbor while the principal was telling the story of the Garden of Paradise, you would be turned to stone. The Prince drew back the branches and saw tears welling in the Botanist’s eyelashes. “I have not sinned yet,” he insisted. Even if everlasting night were to descend on him like the lid of his own casket, a moment like this would be worth it. He kissed the tears away from the Botanist’s eyes and then he kissed her lips, whereupon there came a sound like thunder, louder and more dreadful than any sound any living thing on earth had ever heard before. The chill of death crept over his limbs. The cold rain fell on his face, and the sharp wind blew around his head.

  Down by the river we all heard it.

  The man behind the concession stand doused the fire while the child in the faded green pinafore began closing up shop. Both of them looked around nervously, as if they were being followed.

  What lightning bolt devoured everyone? What earthquake? There had been a crowd of us but now we were almost one.

  In the river the Archivist felt raindrops hit the side of his face each time he turned his head to breathe; at length he stopped turning his head, no longer feeling the need to do so. P used to make fun of how afraid he was of everything but she never understood what a good swimmer he was; at Saint Roch he had been captain of the swim team.

  Now, in the water, he was naked, his flutter kick more muscular than ever.

  The river charged over rocks and around fallen logs; it surged and eddied and funneled; it leapt into the air and then dropped a great distance in a waterfall, spangled and unfettered, foaming and loud, into a moss-lined pool. The Archivist’s eyes were wet and he could see perfectly without his spectacles. Or, more accurately, he could see perfectly except for a spot in the middle that was nothing. Of course that’s where P was, in that spot, monitoring his arrival. That’s where she always was and always had been, in the spot he couldn’t see.

  The thing is, he wasn’t himself or what he thought of as himself, just as the farther we walked along the trail the less we knew of what we thought of as ourselves. It was disconcerting, our titles having been so deeply imprinted in us as to become identities. The Cook hadn’t cooked anything in a long time; the Iceman had abandoned his quest for permafrost. If the Archivist was going to turn into something like a fish, no one was going to find it strange. It was all right, as long as he eluded the lure.

  Meanwhile the beech tree provided us with protection from whatever was falling from the sky; beech trees allow very little light or much of anything else to reach the ground, appropriating it all for themselves. The tree was being imperial but we didn’t know that, its imperial behavior limited to other trees and not people. In this way we could be certain that we were people and not plant life, though as was the case with the Archivist, it wasn’t always possible to register a transformation as it happened. Some of us were putting forth branches we couldn’t see called fear branches, like a tree whose space is being commandeered by a beech.

  If the Botanist were here she could have explained what was going on. But that was how she’d always been, drifting away in pursuit of something better than anything we could offer, a keg party or a rare mushroom, a doomed boyfriend or a clump of lady’s slippers. Besides, we never paid attention to scientific explanation—none of us did, aside from the person providing it.

  The Astronomer walked up from the riverbank with an armload of fish, their tall dorsal fins shedding water like stars. The fish constellation isn’t very bright, he told us; it’s hard to see with the naked eye. As might be expected, we weren’t interested. The Astronomer said we should use what was left of the concessionaire’s fire to roast the fish if that infernal child would let us, and this was a side of him we hadn’t been aware of—a side of him that, unlike the scientific information he was quick to dispense, actually caught our interest.

  The Cook was sound asleep on his back, grinding his teeth.

  We don’t have that much time, someone said.

  Our sense of urgency was strong, even though we didn’t know where we had to be, or when we had to be there.

  In the third-floor bedroom in the tall, narrow house, the Botanist was lifting the person from the floor and putting him into bed. He weighed almost nothing. He was as light as a feather, almost as if he was already dead and gone and what she was lifting wasn’t his body but his soul. He looked at her beseechingly and she shook her head No. Brushing the hair back from the forehead, drawing the eyelids down over the eyeballs. They don’t know my story, she was thinking, I got taken away too soon so they can’t put their fingers into it and ruin it the way they’ve done to all the other stories. Except for the Cook, whose story was the shortest—as he had reminded us repeatedly—everyone had already told their tale.

  Now she would suck the air from the sac. Extract the lights on their string of silk. The Silk Trail was far shorter than the Silk Road but the distance it covered was far greater, the compass of a human life.

  We were to proceed into the interior, over the snow. We were to proceed across the plain, the plain with no ending. Someone in the labyrinth had been singing about the plain with no ending but we couldn’t remember who or when. How far we were to go and in what direction remained a mystery, too, though the Geographer took a sounding at the foot of the cairn. Our dogs knew little or no fear. O
nce in their traces they were obedient; they were loyal first to each other, only as an afterthought to us. We knew better than to get between a dog and its food or a dog and its mate. The dogs would eat their traces if we let them, also the whips and the boots. They would eat us if there were nothing else. Not me, though, said the Iceman, but he was a romantic.

  Snow was falling, the kind that comes late in the season, big flakes that land on the eyeballs and melt, making everything bright and insanely clear, snow in pieces falling from above and one unbroken bolt of snow beneath the runners of the sleds and the landscape unrolling endlessly as if moving forward meant there was a future, drifts of snow filling the crevices of the black cliffs that began rearing up on either side of us the farther we got from the coast.

  Our lips were cold, making speech difficult. From time to time the Geographer urged us to remember how happy it had made us to find the next cairn that time we were crossing the top of the hill. It was the pleasure of finding something you knew was there, even when you didn’t know where it was or when you would find it.

  Like finding your sweetheart, said the Cook. He was thinking of his wife—we could tell. His story was the shortest because it began and ended with true love, an appetite that ended in a trail of crumbs. Meanwhile we stood watching the approach of Jee Moon, upright on her sled in her bright red parka, maintaining balance while spurring her dogs on through curtains of snow.

  When was the last time we’d seen her? That day in the hospital when she put her hand over the Iceman’s mouth? Without realizing it we had missed her, and now here she was.

  Should she be doing that? we wondered. But the Astronomer seemed unconcerned.

  There was a trail, said the Archivist. We were following a trail across the top of the hill. Of course there would have been trail markers. Some of us remembered that our mother had been messing around with them.

  Listen to me, said the Topologist. It’s a matter of simple geometry. There can’t be a line from point A if there isn’t a point B.

  If she was trying to reassure us, it wasn’t working. What she meant was that if we succeeded in our mission and located the cairn that was the next one after the one on the beach, the cairn that led to the next one after that, everything would be different. What she meant was that to locate the next cairn would mean there was a future.

  It’s like that game we used to play, said the Topologist. What was it called? Sardines?

  When we thought of the game, the smell of the house came back to us. The smell of varnish and acacia blossoms, boiled marrowbones and cloves, of cold air from an open window, damp wool and sweat.

  Someone would be selected to be “it.” We would stand in the front hallway near the bachelor chest, hiding our eyes while the person who was “it” ran off into the house and hid. Meanwhile above our heads our ancestor, the one who got here first, without whom we would be somewhere else no doubt, somewhere warm and sun-dappled possibly, or maybe here but without a sense of why here and not elsewhere, stared meditatively out of his gilt frame at the front door.

  The Botanist used to say he was handsome, like Sir Walter Scott in the Authors card game; the Keeper said he was cross-eyed. The Cook said he’d been put there to scare off salesmen.

  Sardines was the worst game in the world for people striving to get away from one another. It left no room for strangers; it left no room to be alone. The person who was “it” got to dwell briefly in the luxury of an otherwise empty hiding place, but the whole point of the game was to find a place that everyone, ultimately, could jam into. The truth is, the game replicated so perfectly the condition of our lives together it’s a wonder we ever chose to play it.

  There would be the moment you thought you were the only one left. The sound of running feet, of doors opening and closing, of muffled laughter, of bodies bumping against bodies and surprised delight—there would be the moment all these sounds stopped and in their stead silence would open its mouth, the huge black yawning hole you were about to fall into.

  We had each experienced this, each of us alone and in different ways. Nanny half inside the linen closet, pressed against the shelves with her head tilted back and her mouth hanging open and her hand up and moving under her dress. Did she see us or was she too involved to notice? It was more exciting to think about being watched than it was to be the watcher. The watchbird! Mother at the kitchen door, standing very close to someone we couldn’t see, laughing and leaning into an embrace, gasping for breath. Father setting aside his newspaper before putting his face in his hands. We saw him do this, but whether he was laughing or weeping was impossible to know for certain.

  A broad body of water appeared alongside us, an arm of the sea, bending at the elbow up ahead. Some of us thought it had been there from the start; we could tell we were going to have to cross it sooner or later in order to continue. Either that or change direction, which the Geographer said would be a mistake. The water looked frozen but the Iceman warned about places where the internal current moved quickly and you could fall through—these places were called rattles, it happened all the time. The snow was falling harder; we saw something white moving across it, something white across something white, a bird maybe, flying above the snow, a bear, loping toward us. It could have been the snow itself, gathering itself into a living being. It could have been a fox.

  The process was called sublimation, the Iceman said. Most solid bodies of matter flew about unvanquished through all time.

  We had no plans for dealing with whatever we might encounter. At some point we stopped to let the dogs rest. It was a pleasure to watch them cock their heads, listening for mice. The lead dogs, the swing dogs, the wheelers—they jumped stiff-legged into the air and then pounced. They never chewed what they caught.

  And, truly, this was the way it always was: we were, as always, together, some of us shivering, some of us holding hands, linked by our chain of tracks in the snow. We could see one another’s breath; we could hear the sound of someone crying. Someone was homesick, though for where, that was a good question. It was like spending the night at the Highgate Apartments, not being able to sleep and hearing the clock strike the hours and a stale corn muffin the only thing to eat. Time had truly slipped through our fingers! See how our great band of friends had dwindled!

  Why don’t you go back? someone said. You’re never going to find anything out here.

  Who was that? asked the Geographer. Did everyone hear that?

  It would be a bad idea to lie down in the snow and go to sleep, the person said.

  By now we’d all recognized the voice. It was the Botanist.

  Those corn muffins were worse than nothing, the Botanist said. I’d rather eat mice.

  It was just like her to show up this way, drifting in and out of our brains the very moment we’d abandoned hope of seeing her again. So ill-equipped to travel o’er the snow at the globe’s tip, she said, if a globe can be said to have a tip. Her voice was singsong; she sounded like she was mocking us.

  The dogs’ hackles were raised, surprisingly—the Botanist had always been their favorite, after the Keeper.

  You saw everything, remember? she said. We all did. When you were playing Sardines, you could sneak around. There would be the dog-headed beast on its hands and knees on the floor beside the bachelor chest. There would be Father. Everyone saw. There would be the enemy laid low with a mortal wound. There would be the country teeming with creatures unfamiliar elsewhere, its many rivers thundering and foaming and swirling along their courses.

  There would be Nanny with her black stones. We should have made new friends—but how, when the human race was almost wiped out? And why? Why pretend? How shallow the foundations on which we reared our towers!

  When the Botanist talked this way we knew what she was doing, hauling the past into the present so we would feel comforted.

  Then you dug the hole, she said. Don’t say you didn’t. The thing is, it didn’t work. You thought you could save yourselves but it didn’t wo
rk.

  And it is true: the bachelor chest survived many dislocations and upheavals. Even after it had undergone its final transformation to pulp and then to nothing, it didn’t serve as a reminder of the past. It was the past. Our mother brought the bachelor chest with her into the marriage; it was quite old, and had come down to her from her father’s side of the family. You could tell the chest was old because it was made of black walnut and had bun feet and two retractable runners called lopers that were used to support the hinged leaf on which the bachelor penned his letters. Most Esteemed Mistress So-and-so. How fiercely I burn. No. How fiercely I miss you. Our mother told one of us about this but we couldn’t remember who. Furniture was important to people who cared about the surfaces of things, she said. Like bachelors? said the Geographer. As if she’s so deep, said the Topologist.

  The sleds had come to a halt at a rattle, the ground falling away in a deep crevasse through which water ran, colorless as midnight. The dogs were lying down now, curled together in a pile with the snow landing on their fur. Soon all we could see of them was a pile of snow that sometimes moved or uttered a cry, threw out a paw here, a paw there.

  We knew we ought to keep going. The snow kept falling from the sky, onto our arms and legs, the firm outline of a nose eroding. It was very cold and still the Botanist wouldn’t stop talking.

  The great green and white ice pans arrived as expected, she told us. The ice wasn’t gone, she said. The ice was everywhere.

  It was jewel time! the Botanist said. I was there! The ice wasn’t gone!

  Someone passed a stone down into the hole, remember? It was so heavy. Death was near. You could tell because the hair on her neck was growing upward, the limbs jerking, scaling the mountain of the elements, the tears flowing uncontrollably and the ears lying flat against the head, blocking the stairway. The energy of water dissolved into fire; the throat and the tongue became dry.