by Jeff Long
Ali estimated they were making 7.2 miles per day on foot. At mile fifty they held a celebration, with Kool-Aid and dancing. Ali did the twist and the two-step. A paleobiologist got her into a complicated tango, and it was like being drunk under a full moon.
Ali was a riddle to them. She was a scholar, and yet this other thing, a nun. Despite her dancing, some of the women told her they feared she was deprived. She never gossiped, never joined in the girl talk when the going got raw. They knew nothing about her past lovers, but presumed at least a few. They declared their intention of finding out. You make me sound like a social disease, Ali said, laughing.
Don’t worry, they said, you can still be repaired.
Inhibitions receded. Clothing opened. Wedding bands started to vanish.
The affairs unfolded in full view of the group, and sometimes the sex, too. There were some initial attempts at privacy. Grown men and women passed notes back and forth, held hands in secret, or pretended to discuss important business. Late at night Ali could hear people grunting like hippies among the stones and heaped packs.
In their second week, they came upon cave art that might have been lifted from Paleolithic sites at Altamira. The walls held beautifully rendered animals and shapes and geometric doodles, some no larger than postage stamps. They were alive with color. Color! In a world of darkness.
“Look at that detail,” breathed Ali.
There were crickets and orchids and reptiles, and nightmare concoctions that looked like something the geographer Ptolemy or Bosch might have drawn, beasts that were part fish or salamander, part bird and man, part goat. Some of the depictions used natural knobs in the rock for eye stems or gonads, or spalled divots for a hollow in the stomach, or mineral veins for horns or antennae.
“Turn off your light,” Ali told her companions. “Here’s how it would have looked by the flame of a torch.” She swam her hand back and forth across her headlamp, and in the flickering light the animals seemed to move.
“Some of these species have been extinct for ten thousand years,” a paleobiologist said. “Some I never knew existed.”
“Who were the artists, do you think?” someone wondered.
“Not hadals,” said Gitner, whose specialty was petrology, the history and classification of rocks. He had lost a brother in the national guard several years ago, and hated the hadals. “They’re vermin who have burrowed into the earth. That’s their nature, like snakes or insects.”
One of the volcano people spoke. With her shaved head and long thighs, Molly was a figure of awe to the porters and mercenaries. “There might be another explanation here,” she said. “Look at this.” They gathered beneath a broad section of ceiling she had been studying.
“Okay,” Gitner said, “a bunch of stick figures and boobie dolls. So what?”
At first glance, that did seem to be the extent of it. Wielding spears and bows, warriors mounted wild attacks on one another. Some had trunks and heads made of twin triangles. Others were just lines. Crowded into one corner stood several dozen Venuses loaded with vast breasts and obese buttocks.
“These look like prisoners.” Molly pointed at a file of stick figures roped together.
Ali pointed at a figure with one hand on the chest of another. “Is that a shaman healing people?”
“Human sacrifice,” muttered Molly. “Look at his other hand.” The figure was holding something red in one outstretched hand. His hand was resting not on top of the figure’s chest, but inside it. He was displaying a heart.
That evening, Ali transferred some of her sketches of the cave art onto her day map. She had conceived the maps as a private journal. But, once discovered, her maps quickly became expedition property, a reference point for them all.
From her work on digs near Haifa and in Iceland, Ali came armed with the trappings of the trade. She had schooled herself in grids and contours and scale, and went nowhere without her leather tube for rolls of paper. She could wield a protractor with command, cobble together a legend from scratch. They were less maps than a timetable with places, a chronography. Down here, far beneath the reach of the GPS satellite, longitude and latitude and direction were impossible to determine. Their compasses were rendered useless by electromagnetic corruption. And so she made the days of the month her true north. They were entering territory without human names, encountering locations that no one knew existed. As they advanced, she began to describe the indescribable and to name the unnamed.
By day she kept notes. In the evening, while the camp settled, Ali would open her leather tube of paper and lay out her pens and watercolors. She made two types of maps, one an overview, or blueprint, of hell, which corresponded to the Helios computer projection of their route. It had dates with the corresponding altitudes and approximate locations beneath various features on the surface or the ocean floor.
But it was her day maps, the second type, that were her pride. These were charts of each day’s particular progress. The expedition’s photographs would be developed on the surface someday, but for now her small watercolors and line drawings and written marginalia were their memory. She drew and painted things that attracted her eye, like the cave art, or the green calcite lily pads veined with cherry-red minerals that floated in pools of still water, or the cave pearls rolled together like nests of hummingbird eggs. She tried to convey how it was like traveling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag.
Even the mercenaries and porters liked to look at her maps. People enjoyed watching their voyage come alive beneath her pen and brush. Her maps comforted them. They saw themselves in the minutiae. Looking at her work, they felt a sense of control over this unexplored world.
On June 22, her day map included a major piece of excitement. “0955, 4,506 fathoms,” it read. “Radio signals.”
They had not yet broken camp that morning when Walker’s communications specialist picked up the signals. The entire expedition had waited while more sensors were laid out and the long-wave transmission was patiently harvested. It took four hours to capture a message that was a mere forty-five seconds long when played at normal speed. Everyone listened. To their disappointment, it was not for them.
Luckily, one woman was fluent in Mandarin. It was a distress signal sent from a People’s Republic of China submarine. “Get this,” she told them. “The message was sent nine years ago.”
It got stranger.
“June 25,” Ali recorded, “1840, 4,618 fathoms: More radio signals.”
This time, after waiting for the long waves to pulse in through the basalt and mineral zones, what they received was a transmission from themselves. It was encrypted in their unique expedition code. Once they finished translating it, the message spoke of desperate starvation. “Mayday … is Wayne Gitner … dead … am alone … assist …” The eerie part was that the dispatch was digitally dated five months in the future.
Gitner stepped forward and identified the voice on the tape as his own. He was a no-nonsense fellow, and indignantly demanded an explanation. One sci-fi buff suggested that a time warp might have been caused by the shifting geomagnetics, and suggested the message was a prophecy of sorts. Gitner said bullshit. “Even if it was a time distortion, time only travels in one direction.”
“Yeah,” said the buff, “but which direction? And what if time’s circular?” However it had been done, people agreed it made for a good ghost story. Ali’s map legend for that day included a tiny Casper ghost with the description “Phantom Voice.”
Her maps noted their first genuine, live hadal life-form. Two planetologists spied it in a crevice and came racing to camp with their capture. It was a bacterial fuzz barely half an inch in diameter, a subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystem, or SLIME in the parlance. A rock-eater.
“So?” said Sho
at.
The discovery of a bacterium that ate basalt impeached the need for sunlight. It meant the abyss was self-sustaining. Hell was perfectly capable of feeding on itself.
On June 29 they reached a fossilized warrior. He was human and probably dated to the sixteenth century. His flesh had turned to limestone. His armor was intact. They guessed he had come here from Peru, a Cortés or Don Quixote who had penetrated this eternal darkness for Church, glory, or gold. Those with camcorders and still cameras documented the lost knight. One of the geologists tried to sample the sheath of rock encrusting the body, only to chip an entire leg off.
The geologist’s accidental vandalism was soon exceeded by the group’s very presence. In the space of three hours, the biochemicals of their combined respiration spontaneously generated a grape-green moss. It was like watching fire. The vegetation, spawned by the air from inside their bodies, rapidly colonized the walls and coated the conquistador. Even as they stood there, the hall was consumed with it. They fled as if fleeing themselves.
Ali wondered if, in passing this lost knight, Ike had seen himself.
INCIDENT IN GUANGDONG PROVINCE
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
It was getting dark, and this so-called “miracle” city didn’t exist on any maps.
Holly Ann wished Mr. Li would drive a little faster. The adoption agency’s guide wasn’t much of a driver, or, for that matter, much of a guide. Eight cities, fifteen orphanages, twenty-two thousand dollars, and still no baby.
Her husband, Wade, rode with his nose plastered to the opposite window. Over the past ten days they’d crisscrossed the southern provinces, enduring floods, disease, pestilence, and the edges of a famine. His patience was in rags.
It was odd, everywhere the same. Wherever they visited, the orphanages had all been empty of children. Here and there they’d found wizened little deformities—hydrocephalic, mongoloid, or genetically doomed—a few breaths short of dying. Otherwise, China suddenly, inexplicably, had no orphans.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The adoption agency had advertised that China was jammed with foundlings. Female foundlings, hundreds of thousands of them, tiny girls exiled from one-child families that wanted a son. Holly Ann had read that female orphans were still sold as servants or as tongyangxi, child brides. If it was a baby girl you wanted, no one went home empty. Until us, thought Holly Ann. It was as if the Pied Piper had come through and cleaned the place out. And more than just orphans were missing. Children altogether. You saw evidence of them—toys, kites, streetside chalkboards. But the streets were barren of children under the age of ten.
“Where could they have gone?” Holly Ann asked each night.
Wade had come up with a theory. “They think we’ve come to steal their kids. They must be hiding them.”
Out of that observation had grown today’s guerrilla raid. Surprisingly, Mr. Li had agreed to it. They would drop in on an orphanage that was out of the way, and with no prior warning of their visit.
As night descended, Mr. Li drove deeper through the alleyways. Holly Ann hadn’t come exactly expecting pandas in rain forests and kung fu temples beneath the Great Wall, but this was like a madman’s blueprint, with detours and dead ends all held together by electric wires and rusty rebar and bamboo scaffolding. South China had to be the ugliest place on earth. Mountains were being leveled to fill in the paddies and lakes. Rivers were being dammed. Strangely, even as these people leveled the earth, they were crowding the sky. It was like robbing the sun to feed the night.
Acid rain started hitting the windshield in sloppy kisses, yellowish and festering like spit. Deep coal mines honeycombed the hills in this district, and everyone burned the mines’ product. The air reeked.
The asphalt turned to dirt. The sun dropped. This was the witching hour. They’d seen it in other cities. The policemen in green uniforms vanished. From doorways and windows and niches in the towering alley, eyes tracked the gweilo—white devils—and passed them on to more eyes.
The darkness congealed. Mr. Li slowed, obviously lost. He rolled down his window and waved a man over from the sidewalk and gave him a cigarette. They talked. After a minute, the man got a bicycle and Mr. Li started off again, with his guide holding on to the door. Here and there the bicyclist issued a command and Mr. Li would turn down another street. Rain sprayed through the window into the back.
Side by side, the car and the bicyclist made turns for another five minutes. Then the man grunted and patted the rooftop. He detached from them and pedaled away.
“Here,” Mr. Li announced.
“You’re joking,” Wade said.
Holly Ann craned her neck to see through the windshield. Surrounded by barbed wire, the gray walls of a factory complex squatted before them in their harsh headlights. Bits of ominous black thread had been tied to the barbed wire, and the walls carried huge, ugly characters in stark red paint. Half-finished skyscrapers blocked her view to the rear. They had reached some sort of dead epicenter. In every direction, the stone-stillness radiated out from here.
“Let’s get this over with,” Wade said, and got out of the car. He pulled at the gate. Concertina wire wobbled like quicksilver. Holly Ann’s first impression gave way to another. This looked less like a factory than a prison. The barbed wire and inscriptions appeared to have one purpose: enclosure. “What kind of orphanage is this?” she asked Mr. Li.
“Good place, no problem,” he said. But he seemed nervous.
Wade banged at the industrial-style door. The brick-and-pig-iron decor dwarfed him. When no one answered, he simply turned the handle and the metal door opened. He didn’t turn around to gesture yes or no. He just went inside. “Great, Wade,” Holly Ann muttered.
Holly Ann got out. Mr. Li’s door stayed closed. She looked through the windshield and rapped on the glass. He looked up at her through his little cloud of tobacco smoke, eyes wishing her from his life, then reached under to turn off the ignition. The windshield wipers quit knocking back and forth. His image blurred with rain. He got out.
On second thought, she reached into the back and grabbed a packet of disposable diapers. Mr. Li left the headlights on, but locked all the doors. “Bandits,” he said.
Holly Ann led. The viciously stroked words loomed on either side of them. Now she saw the scorch marks where flames had lapped at the brick. The foot of the wall was coated with charred glass from Molotov cocktails. Who would assault an orphanage?
The metal door was cold. Mr. Li brushed past her and went into the blackness. “Wait,” she said to him. But his footsteps receded down the hallway.
Reminding herself of her mission, Holly Ann stepped inside. She drew in a deep breath, smelling for evidence. Babies. She looked for cartoon figures or crayon squiggles or smudges of little handprints on the lower walls. Instead, long staccato patterns of holes and chips violated the plaster. Termites, she thought with disgust.
“Wade?” she tried again. “Mr. Li?” She continued down the hallway. Moss flowered in cracks. The doors were all gone. Each room yawned black. If there were windows, they had been bricked up. The place was sealed tight. Then she came to a string of Christmas lights.
It was the strangest sight. Someone had strung hundreds of Christmas lights—red and green and little white flashing lights, and even red chili-pepper lights and green frog lights and turquoise trout lights like those found in margarita restaurants back home. Maybe the orphans liked it.
The air changed. An odor infiltrated. The ammonia of urine. The smell of baby poop. There was no mistaking it. There were babies in here. For the first time in weeks, Holly Ann smiled. She almost hugged herself.
“Hello?” she called.
An infant voice bubbled in the darkness. Holly Ann’s head jerked up. The tiny soul might as well have called her by name.
She followed the sound into a side room reeking of human waste and garbage. The twinkle of Christmas lights did not reach this far. Holly Ann steeled herself, then got down on her hands and
knees, advancing through the pile by touch. The garbage was cold. It took all her self-control not to think about what she was feeling. Vegetable matter. Rice. Discarded flesh. Above all, she tried not to think about someone throwing away a live infant.
The floor canted down toward the rear. Maybe there had been an earthquake. She felt a slight current of air against her face. It seemed to be coming up from some deeper place. She remembered the coal mines around here. It was possible they’d built their city upon ancient tunnels that were now collapsing under the weight.
She found the baby by its warmth.
As if it had always been her own, as if she were collecting it from a cradle, she scooped up the bundle. The little creature was sour-smelling. So tiny. Holly Ann brushed her fingertips across the baby’s belly: the umbilical cord was ragged and soft, as if freshly bitten. It was a girl, no more than a few days old. Holly Ann held the little body to her shoulder and listened. Her heart sank. Instantly she knew. The baby was ill. She was dying.
“Oh, darling,” she whispered.
Her heart was failing. Her lungs were filling. You could hear it. Not long now.
Holly Ann wrapped the infant in her sweater and knelt in the pile of putrid garbage, rocking her baby. Maybe this was how it was meant to be, a motherhood that lasted only a few minutes. Better than never at all, she thought. She stood and started back toward the hallway and Christmas lights.
A small noise stopped her. The sound had several parts, like a metal scorpion lifting its tail, poising to strike. Slowly Holly Ann turned.
At first the rifle and military uniform didn’t register. She was a very tall and sturdy woman who had not smiled for many years. The woman’s nose had been broken sideways long ago. Her hair must have been cut with a knife. She looked like someone who had been fighting—and losing—her entire life.