by Oisín Curran
bushes and trees alight in a snowstorm, bursting through darkness
a dark-haired girl betrayed, eyes swollen with hate
a pale woman in pain, reaching for me from her bed
two men battling in snow, yelling at each other
I had more. Where are they? There was something, a smell, warm, buttery, and there was blue air, but where, where? I slam my fist into the side of the boat and Rook looks up, startled. I look away without speaking. He has troubles enough—no need to hear me rage against disappearing memories, such as they are. It’s not fair, I think bitterly, to lose so much when I have so little. But what’s fair? Rook has lost a whole person. And who’s to blame for that? One sorrow makes another.
I woke suddenly, sweat-drenched and terrified. Then relief as the autumn sun outside my window brought me back to the world above ground. The world of Myles and Iris. It was the morning after Halloween. But with that realization my good spirits fled as quickly as they came. Pierce was hurt. And how he had been hurt was stranger than any dream. So strange, no adult would tell us children the details, and we had to piece it together collectively from eavesdropped conversations. This is what we found:
Long after the last trick-or-treaters had passed by, a knock came on Willard’s door. Thinking it might be a late straggler, he threw open the door with the same drunken gusto he had greeted us with earlier. But what stood before him was an apparition from another century, or so he at first thought. It was a tall man (had Pierce worn lifts in his shoes?) made even taller by the spindly stovepipe hat that rose precipitously from the pale head upon which it perched. The face sported a fulsome dark beard beneath which Willard discerned Pierce Jones.
But gone was the sly grin, the mischievous air. It seemed Pierce had been so fully animated by the costume as to be possessed by it. Even his diction had the cadence of the early nineteenth century. The pallor of his face, the consumptive cough, the waist and tailcoat and tarnished pocket watch all contrived to give the impression that he had stepped out of a daguerrotype into Willard’s living room. Surely Willard felt in that moment, beneath the amusement that he later professed, disquiet at the peculiar strangeness of his visitor’s stilted, eccentric behaviour. But he chose to take Pierce’s get-up as an elaborate joke, for it was well-known that Willard’s old farmhouse had been haunted in the past by just such an apparition—a top-hatted man who knocked on the door late at night asking the way to the cemetery. It was a haunting that had reputedly led the previous owner to vacate and sell the house and property to Willard for a preposterously low sum (naturally, there were those who suspected Willard of posing as the ghost in order to scare the owner into selling).
And did Pierce repeat this spectral demand for directions? What, in fact, did he say? This, no one—not even the adults closest to Willard—knew, for on that subject he remained silent. What story did he later give the police? For surely, given what occurred, Pierce must have confronted Willard—but about what? About the Gathering? Or one of the other whispered secrets on the periphery of every conversation in the neighbourhood? Whatever it was he said, the gesture that followed them was of greater consequence. Pierce drew from inside his coat the antique pistol that he had earlier shown me and pointed it at Willard’s head. Was Willard’s response truly, as he related it, one of samadhic calm? Did he really join his hands in meditative contemplation and enter a state of oneness with his own impending death? Or did he, as Pierce would later claim, beg for his life? Maybe both. Maybe neither. Whatever Willard’s response might have been it triggered in Pierce a startling response. He pointed the pistol at his own body and fired.
Old guns are notoriously unreliable, and it was due no doubt to the misfiring mechanism, in tandem with Pierce’s sudden and inept (or was it inept?) aim, that he did not lose his life that night. Nor had he, by the time the ambulance arrived twenty minutes later, lost much blood, for it appeared that the heat from the muzzle had cauterized the wound as swiftly as it made it. Yet it was a serious injury, for the bullet had lodged in a muscle and delicate surgery was required to remove it.
Myles brought him home a week later and installed him on the old trestle bed that normally served as a couch. Now there were two invalids in the house, and with Myles at work and me at school for the bulk of the day, the task of caring for the most recent invalid fell to the other. Iris was able now to hobble to the kitchen with her cane and deliver, with a complex mixture of asperity and solicitude, soup and medications to Pierce’s bedside. Next time, she said as she handed him a cup of tea, Try champagne and sleeping pills—less bothersome for the rest of us. Pierce smiled weakly and drifted back into his morphic haze.
Jokes aside, Iris refrained from asking the questions to which everyone wanted answers—why the absurd getup? The ancient pistol? And most of all, why the confrontation with Willard? Well, maybe not the latter question, for it seemed that there were, in fact, a surfeit of answers available, none of them, however, voiced in the presence of children.
That the adults did not lack for answers we inferred from stifled arguments in tones not of questioning but assertion—yet the difficulty lay in the variety of possible answers. It was, some ventured, the action of a maniac. Or it was the desperate act of a deceived idealist, a romantic who had discovered that his leader was flawed, by extension the petulant act of a child who must destroy his father as we all, purportedly, must do. But others darkly muttered that it was jealousy that drove Pierce. But of what Pierce might have been jealous remained carefully shrouded, for no one would speak it aloud.
And for my part I wondered, and wonder still, if Pierce knew himself what it was that led him to enact such a strange scenario. Had it all made some obscure sense to him at the time, as he carefully outfitted himself in antique costume and loaded his pistol? Was I the only one who knew the supposed origin of the gun? Did I alone note his costumed resemblance to Lincoln? Bound up in all his other motives, was there a performance intended to reverse the past? A latter-day Lincoln shooting a performer (was that not Willard’s true vocation?) with the gun that felled him? Did he know then, and would he ever become aware, of the tangle of impulses that drove him to his action? Could he? If they came as much from outside of him as within? Who can?
Meanwhile, as though spent by his singular explosion, as though having served his purpose, he had extinguished that part of himself that had intrigued me—the self-conscious rogue, the knife-wielding pseudo-drifter.
No, he was not even pseudo anymore—he subsided into blank convalescence. He apologized to Willard, claiming to have temporarily taken leave of his senses. He accepted the drugs given him to prevent another such incident, and as he lay on the trestle bed, contentedly receiving Iris’s convalescent ministrations, while others declared him to be recovering, he grew daily greyer and more distant in my eyes.
Many came to visit despite what he’d done, despite the fact that he had nearly destroyed the Teacher—indeed, perhaps because of the gravity of his offence, he was all the more attractive a candidate for forgiveness. Willard arrived with a full murder of retainers, some stinking of the cow barn, some brushing the mill’s sawdust from their knees while eyeing the house’s posts and beams that they had themselves milled some years earlier. And as Willard, in his benevolence, teased Pierce for his silliness, denim-clad courtiers chortled appreciatively and all was apparently forgiven.
But what of Willard? If Pierce could be forgiven, could not Willard too? The problem lay, it seemed, in the nature of the wrong committed. It was evident that what Pierce had done required either condemnation, approval, or forgiveness. But since no one could agree on what it was that Willard had done and whether or not this contested act was even an offence, it remained in its nebulous, unacknowledged nook in the consciousness of the neighbourhood, growing daily more septic until its putrid stench infected our house to the degree that Iris began to speak of moving. Why, she would demand of Myles’s retreating back, Do you wish to rem
ain in thrall to that foul dictator after what he’s done?
Dictator? said Myles. Let’s not exaggerate.
Fine, said Iris, voice rising, he’s your priest, shaman, guru, personal druid... He’s some kind of sacred monster for all of you lost children!
Oh for christ’s sake, not another one of your bloody fables! Do you really think I’m going to throw everything to the wind? Give up years of practice, all based on nothing more than rumour and innuendo?
To which Iris would cry that he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to believe, that his precious Roshi could be so deeply flawed, such a manipulative asshole, because to do so would be to reveal himself a dupe. Instead he chose to believe that Willard was a transcendent being, when in reality just like a spoiled child he had his gnarled little world of yes-men revolving around him, anxious to do his slightest bidding.
It’s pathetic! she yelled as Myles slammed the door and stalked out of the house to his tool shed. And she followed him, demanding that he not walk away from her, that he turn and answer her, and so he turned, his face glowing with rage, and shouted that he would not argue with someone who wound herself up into hysterics over shreds of gossip and nonsense concocted by fools.
And as Iris began to weep with anger and injury, I, who had followed them out, began to speak. Their reaction I don’t recall. In the midst of their fight, were they relieved by the distraction, or exasperated with my saga? In any case, it was enough to knock them off their rails. They stopped shouting. They found paper, pens, typewriter. They took notes. I have them. And from them I’ve written this:
We sail through the night toward the red light. The magnet in me seems to pull the boat faster. Even though I’ve lost so many of the images that dragged me forward, the few I still have become stronger, harder. And City is still there, its cataracts growing closer in my mind, so close I think I can hear water crashing into water, and the scent of lilacs drifting over the spray. I’m so near my destination I think my body will burst. But it stays calm. Calm and tired. So tired I sleep, and the city lights might blink in a dream. A dream I wake from to see the blinking continue.
We don’t cheer. In the light from the city, I see Rook’s face, red and hollow and tired. We’re quiet. No sound but flapping sails and waves hitting the boat. Then maybe I sleep again, because the next thing I remember is sailing in the middle of lights floating as though strung on bushes in a snowstorm on a dark winter night…
It takes a while to shake this thought. I can almost hear the low voices of people I know—my parents?—talking about the lights, the snow. Then I wake. There’s no snow, no bushes, the voices don’t belong to my family but to strangers in the water all around us.
We wait for shouts, for alarms, none come. Passing close to a light, we see there’s a man in a boat that looks like a basket. It’s so small his legs dangle over the edge. His light is a candle stuck onto the gunnel of his basket-boat. There are dozens more like him.
What are they doing? I whisper. Is it a ritual of some kind?
They’re fishing, says Rook. The fish come to the light. It’s a lure.
Like the city’s light lures us. I look carefully at the floating men and see they’re tugging on fishing lines wrapped around wooden sticks. I think of how strange it is to finally see other people down here. These are the first humans we’ve met since coming underground.
The fishermen are hard to see. Cheekbones and shadows. They’re less interested in us than we in them. As we pass, they raise their faces to watch, then go back to fishing. It’s an odd way to arrive. We seem to be sailing between candlelit ghosts. And I feel like we’re ghosts too, ghosting to a dead city.
But that feeling fades, the closer we come, because this city lives. I thought we were going to find crumbling walls, sad old people in sad old buildings. We come with daybreak, which seems to make the city lights brighter.
The closer we sail, the stranger it looks. In places huge buildings carved from red-rock cliffs. Then there are stacks of metal rainbow cubes and columns that could’ve grown in place. Maybe they did.
Bismuth, says Rook.
No glass in the windows, maybe because it’s always warm and there aren’t any bugs. A bridge made of green stone and dark purple bends over us.
Porphyry, says Rook, his eyes big in the lighter light, And malachite. He’s hanging off the bow of the boat to get a better view. He’s waking a little from his sorrow. Then he sits back suddenly in the boat and his eyes darken, and I think he’s wishing Quill were here to see this. I do too.
I do too, I say, abruptly, too loudly.
He looks at me sideways and after a pause smiles a little, his old snarl-smile.
We sail around yachts and ferry boats, bumping waves in their wake. The wind leaves, so we row on under another stone bridge covered with people on foot, on bicycles. Nobody looks down, nobody notices us. Their clothes are drab, some ragged. Used to quiet, I jump at bike bells. Shouts in the crowd.
We’re on a river or a deep bay that leads into the city. The waterway is lined with buildings and their balconies full of pale flowers and vines hanging down so far we can almost touch them.
Deeper and deeper we go, until we come to a huge stone wall, broken and patched in spots, with water gushing over it. And above that there’s another wall, another big waterfall, and another above that, and so on up beyond where we could see. Are these the waterfalls from my memory? No, they don’t match—they’re coming from too high up, or they’re not wide enough. But my memories must be off. They’re in pieces after all, and maybe I’ve put the pieces together wrong in my mind. For now, we can’t go any farther so we row to one side, find a tree to tie our boat to, and go ashore.
What a beautiful park, says Rook as we walk along wide paths. Big trees with black bark and pale green leaves shade us from thin light. Where are the lilacs? The place is grassed very short. Couples sitting on benches and cyclists going by. Some of them look at us, but most don’t. Very often we see young men and women eye-scrape us from inside their clean, black uniforms. Small, round hats sit at an angle on their heads.
Police, says Rook.
Suddenly he pulls me over to a large sign near the waterfront, where we see the image of a woman riding on a giant animal, an otter, climbing ashore. There’s writing next to it. Writing we understand.
In this place, it reads, She came ashore.
Chisolm, says Rook. She’s here.
I walk to a nearby policeman and tell him we need to find the woman on the sign.
Kphh! says the policeman. He calls a policewoman over and tells her what I said. They both laugh. It’s a joke to them. I’m not joking. I’m losing my memories, I’m losing my mind, myself. I can’t even control my own body. It moves by itself, faster than me, faster than thought. While the policeman laughs, my hand slips under his arm, pulls the gun from his holster, and points it at his head.
Take me to her, I say.
We’re in a funicular. That’s what Rook calls it. The police don’t call it anything. They say if we want to see Chisolm, this is how we get there. The funicular is a glass-and-metal box. It’s squeaking up a track. The track runs next to the waterfalls, all the way to the top. From up here I can see the underground ocean we sailed across. It’s getting higher and higher the higher we go. Now it looks like a big wall of metal water in front of us. Down below, the city gets smaller, wider, more beautiful. Roofs, towers, bridges, trees. All wrong. All completely wrong.
Rook is as quiet as the police. He looks at me strangely. He’s scared of me. Of the gun, I suppose. I don’t say much. I don’t feel like talking. All I feel is rage. The policewoman lifts her hand to scratch her nose. I aim the gun at her eye.
Don’t move.
Be careful, says Rook quietly. Be very careful.
The funicular squeaks, jubs, and stops. We’re at the top. Rook opens the door and we get out. A very
big, wide place paved with flat stones, and there are some small trees in spots. On the far side is a large set of steps up to another level of paved stone. Behind that is a big building, a palace, a castle full of towers and windows and porches, and stone steps up and down. It’s made of gold, granite, ruby, silver, and it all flashes in the sad light of this mistake of a city. After all we’ve gone through, all we’ve lost to find this place, and find it’s wrong. It’s not City. How could I have made such a mistake? The answer is obvious. I believed in something that doesn’t exist. There is no City. And my pictures, my memories, are just tricks played by my empty mind. My stupid mind. My non-mind. I have no past. I have nothing. I am nothing.
Just below us there’s a giant hole in the rock. A huge river of water pours out of it loud and fast and falls down the waterfalls one by one into the city.
A giant creature slides down the steps. Lutra. She looks at me, then dives into the river and slips like liquid from waterfall to waterfall to the city below.
A group of people stand up above us on the second level in front of the palace. It looks like they’re waiting for us. I march the police in front of us, pointing the gun at their backs.
I hear music. A dozen men and women separate out from the group above. I recognize them—the piano tuner’s wife, the ship’s carpenter, the doctor. They were all on the boat that followed Chisolm. They’re in black uniforms and they have rifles, which are pointed at us. But when we get closer, they move apart. Behind them I see a piano. A single figure sits at it, playing big and complicated notes. She’s wearing the same black uniform, but anybody can see she’s more important than the rest. She stands and walks toward me. It’s Chisolm. I barely recognize her. She’s old.