Blood Fable

by Oisín Curran

  We walk down alleys. I can hear sirens, but we don’t run. Some people look out their windows at us. They wave. We wave back. We turn corners. We fade down streets. The streets are made of stone. So are the buildings on either side.

  Carved from stone, says Rook. He sounds impressed. I’m not. The stone is falling apart. The buildings have cracks in them. White-green bushes in the cracks. White-green vines hang from the roofs. Chickens on the roofs. I think Rook sounds impressed because he’s happy. His crooked face is wide open again. He looks like he’s dancing a little when he walks. Quill doesn’t notice Rook, but Rook doesn’t care. He’s happy she’s alive. I want to be like him but I can’t. Everything around me looks like it’s falling down. Everything is broken. I’m broken. Breaking. I can barely speak anymore, barely have any words. I try to pull my pictures together but they slip out. Only a few left now. I’m almost all gone.

  book

  girl

  snow

  fight

  We come to a canal. It smells like fart and rot. Piles of garbage float, some swans grease by. We cross a footbridge to the other side. Then there are steps going up a steep hill, small, stone, slippery. They go back and forth and up and up, up, up. Clumps of white grass on either side. The buildings are worse and worse. Then they’re just caves with doors. Then the doors start to look a little better. Some are open. Some look nice inside. Warm, messy. Quill stops, we stop. We look around. We’re on a different hill than the one with the waterfall and Chisolm’s palace. We’re around the corner from the bay.

  Beautiful, says Rook.

  In a monochromatic way, says Quill.

  The city is below us. We can’t hear it. Or we can, but it’s quiet. The place we came from, the jail, the dirty stone streets and buildings, are all tiny under us. I feel a little better. Why does it feel good to be so high above things?

  Quill takes a pair of binoculars from one of our rescuers. She looks out to sea. I see nothing. Some specks maybe, on the horizon. Boats? There are boats in the harbour. Big, small, in between. Farther out is the huge stone post we passed. The column. It goes from the water to the rock ceiling. Clouds drift around it.

  The Gun, says Quill when she sees what we’re looking at. That’s what people here call it.

  Why? asks Rook. It looks nothing like a gun.

  Quill’s busy with her binoculars again. She doesn’t answer. One of her beautiful friends does. He takes off his sunglasses. His eyes are big and dark.

  They say in ancient days there was trade between planets, he says. Merchants travelled inside comets. They say the Gun pokes out of the ocean above like a volcano. They say it is a volcano. Comet spaceships landed in the mouth of the volcano above and came down the tube like a ball sliding down a chute. Then, when they were ready to leave, a vent released volcanic energy, forcing the comet up through the chute like a bullet going up the barrel of a gun and shooting it into space.

  Garbage, snorts Quill.

  Well, says her friend, There’s the man who’s been claiming he’s a comet rider. Says he came here from a distant galaxy. Wants to re-establish trade.

  Snake oil, says Quill.

  Your mom doesn’t seem to think so, says the friend. She’s been photographed with him.

  Tabloid trash, says Quill. Let’s go.

  I don’t remember the phone ringing, nor Iris picking up. What I remember is a fresh loaf of bread sitting on the kitchen counter with one end sawn off. The end lay on its back, a pat of butter melting into its exposed crumb, steam rising. And I remember my mouth closing on that heat, salt, fat, crunch. But then the phone must have rung. A heavy black plastic phone with a rotary dial and a thick curlicued cable twisted into unresolvable knots. We shared a party line with strangers and so, if not careful, might hear the gossip of an unknown family, salacious, meaningless.

  This phone call, however, was for us—for Iris, I should say. What I remember is her pacing, her fingers further twisting the cable while she stuttered some form of explanation—an explanation she clearly did not feel it her duty to provide, yet which she nevertheless provided because it was in her nature to do so. Like many people, she disliked, above all things, the sensation of failure, and it was this dislike that the person on the other end was exploiting. Person on the other end—why beat around the bush? It was Willard, I could hear him, and he was calling about bread.

  Caught off guard at first, she soon found her feet in the conversation.

  But it’s not your recipe, she said, her voice rising. I got it from The Tassajara Bread Book.

  Espe Brown?! Willard’s voice shouted down the line now. That hack? Most of the recipes in that book he stole from me, did you know that? That asshole robbed me and now he’s getting rich off my work. So yes, you’re using my recipes and you’re doing it wrong!

  Iris began to deny culpability, indeed to deny Willard’s right to accuse her, and in so denying, she began to weep tears of outrage. The tears got in the way of her words momentarily and, choking slightly, she paused, and in the pause she listened, because Willard had seized the opportunity to speak. Listening, her mouth tightened, her face turned white and upon the receiver she slammed down the phone.

  Then she stopped crying altogether and in a silent rage went about preparing dinner. When Myles came home, she took him outside, and through the kitchen window I saw her explaining with violent gestures what had happened. Then he turned abruptly and walked quickly to the car. Iris rushed inside and ordered me to go with him.

  I suppose she reasoned my presence might have a civilizing effect, and this was probably a wise decision, for it seems unlikely that Myles would have assaulted someone in front of his own child. He didn’t acknowledge my presence in the passenger seat but seemed preoccupied with arriving at his destination as quickly as possible. This was the sawmill where Willard and the others were ripping tree trunks into boards. It was a picturesque spot overlooking a forested valley, and now in early winter the stone sky sank into snow and everything was anchored heavily to the earth, especially the mill itself, its giant blades rotating in a blur under a long peaked roof, and within the open walls the men in torn, stained, heavy working garb fed logs into the shrieking machine and manipulated its levers, the cold muting the ordinarily powerful odours of sawdust and sweat.

  Willard turned when he saw Myles stomping toward him and smiled disdainfully, as though he were expecting the visit yet was disappointed to find his expectations fulfilled. Myles was either insensible to, or disinterested in, this disdain. He stalked up to the sawmill motor, reached in, and switched it off mid-cut. The blade quickly, unhappily, ground to a halt in the middle of a log.

  Ignoring the protests of the other men, Myles stood inches away from Willard and informed him that he was never again to speak to Iris as he just had. Willard raised his eyebrows dismissively and said that Myles’s ego had been wounded, he understood, but this was an ongoing problem, he must practise, practise, to subdue his pride.

  Go to hell.

  Myles said this loudly, abruptly, then turned and stalked back to the car. Behind him I saw Willard’s stunned face and his followers standing in various states of awkward shock.

  There is no hell, called Willard, recovering enough to inject a mocking tone into his voice. Only the one you make.

  You’ve made one! shouted Myles as he got in the car. And you’re in it. Up to your neck in burning shit.

  Somewhere in the mute tangle that constitutes a son’s feelings for his father, bound up with the resentment, the love, the awe, and the disappointment, lurks always a desire to see your old man bring down another old man.

  All the better that it be a principled stand in defence of one’s mother. Whether this is due to some atavistic need to see one’s leader lead, or to see loyalty and honour displayed, I can’t stop my heart from swelling when I remember this moment. And any love I had left for Willard was snuffed o
ut or maybe transferred to my father. I envy Myles’s whiplash reaction, so unlike my own passive, prevaricating, hairsplitting penchant for appeasement, for rational discussion, for compromise. Mine is a useful attribute in nine-tenths of interactions, but useless, even cowardly, at rare but important moments. This was one of them. Willard had spoken of Myles’s pride as an impediment, but if my father’s pride drove him to defend my mother and if my pride in him is a sin, it is one that I embrace. Like my namesake, far rather would I be in hell with my loved ones than lonely in heaven.

  My pride overwhelms memories even of Myles’s regrets and recriminations when, a week later, a note arrived formally accepting his resignation from the New Pond. He had been cast out with a letter of juvenile punctiliousness registering outrage against the collective in coldly affronted, quasi-legal terms (whose pride had been wounded now?).

  Myles laughed at the note, but it was a bitter laugh and later he would blame Iris for having provoked him to confrontation, thus causing his banishment from a world he had worked so hard to help build. And Iris would say acidly that if it were her fault he had been forced to free himself from the clutches of that tinpot tyrant then Myles ought to thank her, and it was a fault she regarded as a virtue.

  Myles would shake his head regretfully and mutter how strange that it had all come down to a few loaves of bread.

  The timing of Willard’s phone call was suspicious, or so my mother reckoned. Willard had known about the bread recipe since I’d mentioned it at Zenday School, but had waited more than a week to call. Why? Iris parsed the situation with some relish over the liqueur that Pierce had earlier brought. Her drinking companion was Bernadette. Together they deduced that the phone call had been calculated as an intolerable provocation with precisely the purpose of causing Myles to resign (although perhaps not in so explosive a manner). Again, why? Because of the presence of Yoshida Roshi, who had, since his arrival, been interviewing Willard’s disciples one by one and during late-night drinking sessions with Willard had confronted the latter with his findings. In a rage, Willard had thrown his dharma brother bodily from his house, and Yoshida had limped down the road to the little shed on our property that he was sharing with Pierce, and there he had installed himself and carried on his investigation.

  You see, Yoshida explained drunkenly one evening over dinner to drunken Pierce and my drunken parents (for a time after Myles’s expulsion, his potent home brew flowed freely), When Willard left Japan, our master enjoined him not to teach for ten years—he knew that Willard was weak, that, given authority, his ego would swell to a dangerous degree. And he was right—look what has happened.

  We did not know, said Pierce. We thought he was enlightened.

  Enlightened! scoffed Yoshida. Enlightenment is nothing—it’s a bolt of lightning in the night: you see the landscape and then it’s dark again. It is, he went on as he opened another bottle of beer, Merely the opening of a bottle. But you must drink the bottle. He poured himself an amber glass and illustrated his point. Indeed you must drink many bottles before you can see clearly for any length of time.

  It appeared that this came across to Pierce and my parents as the deepest wisdom, for they swayed and nodded with bleary profundity.

  But! announced Yoshida, abruptly raising a long bony index finger and shaking it at them admonishingly. Willard alone is not responsible for all this—it was you, you and all of your needy friends, who begged him to teach, who pleaded, who browbeat him into doing it. It was you, he said, head wobbling, Who destroyed him. He was a man before you made him a monster.

  He was a child, Iris said harshly. And yes, his disciples (and I’ll say again that I was never one of them) bear some measure of the blame, but it did not require much browbeating, if that is what he told you, to induce him to become what he became. You can’t make an omelette from an orange. He was ready and not so secretly willing to fulfill his destiny as the leader of a pathetic cult of personality.

  But by the time she finished her sentence, Yoshida was nodding off and Myles had passed out with his head on the rickety table and Pierce alone was wide awake. His only comment was that he was ready for a cigarette and he duly stepped outside.

  And where was I throughout this interchange? At my usual post on the wooden bench next to the stove, sitting silently, absorptive.

  I wonder now if I was the cipher I thought myself, an anonymous listener, an eavesdropper, pleasant, attentive, but otherwise void of personality. Who knows how others saw me. For the most part they didn’t see me at all, other than my mother, that is, who saw me now and ordered me to bed. Fifteen minutes later I was under the covers when she climbed the stairs and, swaying slightly from inebriation, came in to kiss me goodnight. The kiss landed on my lips and stayed there an instant longer and a fraction softer than the usual peck, and I did not like it, but she seemed not to notice that I wiped my mouth with dramatic disgust as she stood and ruffled my hair, smiling benignly and saying that if my father and she had done nothing else right, at least they had made me.

  But, I thought, was it not I who was supposed to have chosen them?

  Tell me more, she said as she cast her eyes about for the chair and sank into it, still smiling with unfocussed warmth in my general direction. Tell me more of your tale. Have you, she blinked rapidly and yawned, Had any more visions?

  Had I? So she could not, in fact, read my mind as I had always feared, for if she could she would have known I was losing track of that underground adventure. It seemed to be dropping further and further away from me and all the while becoming more significant. And to call up the sequence of events on demand required an effort that seemed, in some obscure way, to undermine the nature of the story, as though to relate it in a series of episodes, with one action following the next in tidy progression, might reduce its power. Yet the need, the need in my mother’s smile, the need for distraction, for respite, for an echo of magnitude, compelled me to set events in motion and so I drummed up City.

  A woman blows into a black stick with silver buttons and makes music I like. We’re in a bar on a side street at the top of the hill. Everybody drinks and eats. Rook dances to the music with one of Quill’s beautiful friends.

  The bar is full and very loud. For some reason there are people holding big cameras and looking at everyone with them. The stone ceiling curves over us. I mean, the stone walls go up and turn into the ceiling and then come down and turn into wall again in one big curve. In some places pale vines grow up the walls and across the ceiling. The heads of strange dead birds look down from the curving walls. They’re old. Sometimes feathers fall off them. There aren’t any windows. Long lamps hang from the ceiling. Their light barely touches the floor’s cracked tiles. Actually, they make the place seem dark.

  We sit at a big booth. Quill is in the corner, talking very close and fast to her other friends. I walk to the bar and try to ask for water, but the man behind the bar doesn’t hear me. Rook has stopped dancing and is standing nearby, talking to a tall man with wild white hair, brown skin, and a pointy white beard. Black eyes, black eyebrows. He raises his hand and the barman sees him and he orders water for me and hands it to me when it comes. I recognize him then. He was in Chisolm’s court. The only one not in uniform. The only one who didn’t look shocked when I said this wasn’t City. He smiled at me then. He smiles at me now. Big gaps between his teeth.

  Charmed, he says, holding out a hand. Call me George. Very deep voice. I shake his hand. He turns back to Rook. I was just telling your friend of my travels, he says. His breath bites my nose. He’s drinking something that looks like water, but isn’t.

  Gimlets, he says, holding up his glass. Not bad here. Had worse. More for my friend, he says to the bartender, and points at Rook. Rook says No, but the barman doesn’t hear him. When the drinks come, I have a few sips of Rook’s before he sees me. He hits my hand away and slides his glass out of my reach. The drink is very sweet and it burns my thr
oat, then my stomach. My head starts to float and the room shines. I hear George talking from close up and far away at the same time.

  ...slingshot my comet from star to star and read, he is saying, A vast pile of books as you can fucking well imagine. When your arse is locked up for a hundred years you plow through more than a few pages. That said, it wasn’t a hundred year’s worth—to ride the comet, we snort a dust that slows you down, down, down, down—he slides his hand down through the air—Till you’re practically fucking catatonic; metabolism, movement, perceptions all glacial. If you’d been able to peer in through twenty feet of alien rock, you’d’ve seen me looking like a goddamn statue; probably took me a day to hobble from one room to the other.

  The gimlet in me seemed to be doing the same thing George’s slowdust did. It dusted my mind. My eyelids took minutes to blink. George kept talking:

  ...sent by a consortium of merchants to open up an old trade route. This place is en route. Not sure what the fuck happened in the old days but there was a fight over tariffs or some shite like that, trade stopped, this place obviously went to the dogs for a couple of millennia. But somebody needed a batch of your more exotic metals, and so here I am, trying to make a deal. What a circus, what a piss-shit circus. Mind you, he said, swallowing his drink and calling for another, You have to be as patient as a stone in my line of work. It takes a special type to shoot around, fuck. We’re a strange bunch, to be honest. I won’t go into the shitty details, but suffice to say that if there’s a rock-rider type, there’s usually more than a dollop of personal tragedy mixed in with general fucking misanthropy. There’s a guild, can you imagine? That’s because we need someplace to lurk between missions. It’s a sad spot—the atmosphere, I mean—the furniture’s plush, the windows big, the sherry dry, but what a mood, what a sorry mood. We slump around in armchairs reading and drinking, completely fucked, completely out of place and time, family and childhood friends all dead for centuries. Technically I’m a thousand years old, for instance, did I mention that? I’ve seen things, you couldn’t possibly imagine—twin moons, rainbow nebulae, butterflies the size of eagles—but what do I have to show for it? Who can I tell? Hapless fucks like yourself that I buttonhole in alien bars so I can bend your ears till they’re broken. No, we’re assholes for the most part. Lonely old wretches. That’s why we drink so much. Or maybe not. Some say the alcoholism is linked to the dust, which is chemically addictive shit and so, when off-rock, we need some kind of depressive taken in lower doses. Who knows? Who cares, fuck?