After James

by Michael Helm

  —

  After breakfast they tied an aluminum ladder to the roof of her father’s Suzuki Swift and set off into the mountains to explore the possible Neanderthal cave.

  She followed their route on a map covered with his printed additions and notes. They drove on the edge of La Vallée du Terrieu. He’d marked the names of each peak—Montagne d’Hortus, Pic Saint-Loup—each perched chateau, but as they climbed on ever narrower roads the names fell off until finally the doubtful path disappeared from the map and became only a track through a field that ended in trees. Above them the forest climbed steeply to the base of an immense, white, vertical rockface. He studied the approach routes. From the trunk he took their supplies, shrugged into a small backpack. He gave her a coil of rope. He untied the ladder, put it over his shoulder, and led the way into the trees. There was little underbrush but the climb was steep, improvised, awkward with the ladder, and soon they were too spent to speak, though they had said very little that morning anyway, and before long Celia was sweating in her unbreathing layers. Four times at intervals of thirty or forty minutes they stopped to rest. “I wasn’t sure we’d make it,” he said. “I kept you out too late.” He wouldn’t normally express such a concern. He needed a simple summation with which to cap the events of the previous night, as if they could be put away. She said nothing, he let it go. Maybe he understood that she had taken herself out of play in response to last night’s man-of-god nonsense. Two peregrine falcons floated on thermals at the top of the mountain.

  In time they broke above the treeline, then rested once more and ate their packed lunches while looking out at the valley and the distant Mediterranean, a seam on the horizon. The set of his face was as she’d seen it at the chateau, when she’d caught him in his reverie. She let it run and in time he said he was trying to imagine the view of fifty thousand years ago. A colder climate. The trees would not be oak, as now, but pine and beech, species adapted to the cold. In the valley, deer and sanglier, and European megafauna, mammoths and giant elk. And humans and protohumans. Glaciers had pushed Neanderthals this far south, and Homo sapiens had migrated here from Africa. They overlapped for maybe twenty thousand years.

  “They must have recognized their difference from one another.” His voice was sure. He had caught his breath faster than she had. “The genetic record says they interbred. We still have Neanderthal in us. The fossil record gives no evidence of war, though it does of murder. Bones showing evidence of tool-scarring, as if they’d been de-fleshed.”

  “News of the day.”

  “We still behave this way, yes. But they were much closer to the originating moment. If we wanted to, with the genomes, cloning, we could recover ourselves—I mean ancient man—but we’ll never recover our minds or beliefs. We don’t even know ourselves now, most of us.”

  The ledge ran above a sharp drop. Navigating it required him to balance the ladder on a forearm held away from the rockface, so that from her position behind him the ladder seemed a floating incongruity, a surrealist object juxtaposed against the stone sublime. The face curved away from them for a time and then the ledge widened to a large table of rock. There was the cave mouth, across a wide cut. They walked to the edge. Her father extended the ladder and timbered it across the gap, then squatted to rest, letting his arms hang limp. The crevasse meant business. There was no telling its depth but the noon light disappeared at about thirty feet. It was maybe fifteen feet across, too far for anyone to jump, with too short a run up and no safe place to land. Maybe the cave really was unexplored.

  The exertion had slightly elated her, and now in the pause before they continued she detected a hopefulness in the air that must have been coming from him. For years they’d shared a weight never discussed, not father to daughter, or adult to adult. The grief, coming so early in both of their lives, had inside it a degree of fear. But they hadn’t named it, hadn’t known there was anything to figure out, Celia realized, and now they understood but had no way of crossing back over the silence.

  She held the ladder firm on one side as he walked across it rung to rung. Seeing him take the deliberate steps brought on her first shiver of apprehension. If one of them fell, even if they survived the fall, there’d be no way out. What exactly would the other do?

  “We’re being careless,” she said after he’d crossed. “This is pretty stupid.”

  “Don’t cross if you’re not committed. I’ll go and report back.”

  She threw the rope coil to him and told him to hold the ladder and crossed over on her hands and knees, looking forward. He pulled the ladder clear and laid it by the side of the cave mouth. From his backpack he produced two flashlights and a truffle pick for digging out artifacts. There was no threat in the sky, unless it was behind the mountain. No one knew they were up here.

  They approached the entrance, ducked under a pediment ledge, and stood in quiet light. Only a short distance ahead the rock ceiling above them curved down to form a back wall. The space was certain and empty. It led nowhere. He said nothing, kept still. She walked in, letting him have his moment of disappointment. Near the back wall she crouched lower, turned and sat on the cave floor and looked out at him silhouetted there against the blue sky.

  “It could still be your cave. Grotte du Dad.”

  “I feel something. Do you feel it back there?”

  In fact she did feel it, a draft. She shined her light into the corners and saw that the floor opened about twenty feet to her left. She scuttled over on her ass. The walls of the hole formed the first revolution of a kind of curved well that seemed to open into a space beneath them.

  She had no time to speak before he was with her, shining his light into the hole.

  “Holy christ,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  They were silent. She wanted to stop him from thinking but it was too late.

  “I wonder if they named it, the first humans,” he said.

  “Maybe they called it ‘the hole in the floor.’ ”

  “It’s got a real come hither to it. I’m going down.”

  “That’s too stupid even for you. It might just drop you half a mile inside the mountain.”

  “That’s why we have the rope.”

  “Oh, come on. A cave. We thought we’d walk in, we’d walk out. Nobody said holes.”

  “We’re prepared.”

  “We are definitely not prepared. We should have a team. With radio communication, helmets, gloves, water, first aid, harnesses, those mountain-climbing spiky things, and at least one person who knows what they’re doing.”

  “Humans explore. We wonder what’s beyond.”

  She saw how it set up in his mind. He tied the rope to a stone anchor, a kind of newel post at the top of the opening. The rope was just something he’d found along with the ladder in the storage room under the rented house. It was thick, but old and dry, and would fray easily. He tied the other end in a loop under his arms and braced his hands against the smooth wall of the hole mouth.

  “Jesus, Dad. If I got hysterical would you stay?”

  “You’re not the kind. Now, if I get in far enough you won’t be able to hear me through the rock. Give me thirty minutes. If I’m not back, then don’t—do not—come after me. There’s no cell reception so you’ll need to go down to the car and drive it to town.” He leaned to one side, extracted the car keys from his pocket, and tossed them to her. “Go to Armin and he’ll call the police. Take the map so he can tell them how to get here. I’ll be fine, likely just stuck with my head in a prehistoric honey jar. I’ll have a sleep while you lead them up.”

  “Let me go instead. I’m lighter and thinner and my joints work better.”

  “Nonsense. I won’t allow it. Much too dangerous.” He suppressed a smile, clamped the flashlight in his mouth, and started down.

  —

  She’d been waiting twelve minutes. He’d been in voice contact for about eight. He’d barely disappeared when she heard his first exclamation. Right below her the gr
ound levelled out and opened into a chamber. “I can stand up,” he said. After a few seconds he said, “No artifacts or remains but…hold on.” She stared into the hole. “There’s a ledge, sort of recessed in the stone, and it’s full of seashells. I need to know who put these here.” She saw flashes of light come out of the hole and remembered he had a camera in his vest. He said there was a narrow passage ahead. His voice was fainter now. “I’ll investigate.” She asked him to describe the space and he said, “It’s pretty small.” “How small?” There was no answer. Four minutes later the rope went slack.

  She was inside the very quality of strangeness she’d felt the night before at the chateau, with its shards catching the light. She’d seen them passing in the river, rising in the fountain. They ran along the levers of the penitent machine and curved around the bowed head of a boy. Things full of meaning but resistant to words. The presentiments had been pushed forth by a lack of sleep and the pressure of things unsaid. And again now, the unsaid or unheard. A simple human commerce stopped. What else had he said about the cave on the way up? Nothing useful now. He said certain caves were places of deep solitude, that it wasn’t just fear or necessity that would make people gather out of the killing elements, but something inward that needed to be acknowledged to others around a fire. “These were the first stirrings of religion, the deepest parts of ourselves brought into the social. A collective of souls, staving off fear, hunger, loneliness, if not doubt.”

  She reasoned that he’d come to the end of his rope but not the end of his time. He’d untied himself and kept exploring. Near the thirty-minute mark she’d feel the tension back on the line. She’d hear him, he’d emerge. She tried to have faith in this idea and the faith or tending there opened a space inside her where the dim figure she made out was herself.

  The rim of the hole was the only smooth surface, worn by thousands of years of hands and bodies. On the pocked wall above it she tried to detect the smallest movement of the stippled shadows. In its simplest form time was light, nothing more. Our sense of it changed from being with others. Others marked it, were marked by it, set it at variable speeds in the social flux. But isolated, removed from other presences, time was light and nonlight in perpetual bend and stretch.

  She would deny rogue freedom to the one she most loved out of her own childish need. She sampled the idea that he was after balanced understanding, not revelation, that a word like god didn’t need to injure her. Maybe he’d just grown tired of the terms and metaphors of science, the terms they’d always shared. A balanced understanding would close distances but in the hours since she’d arrived, distances had formed.

  The shadows had notched along without detectable movement. The sun leaned on the mountain faces opposite, the distant fields and vineyards far below. From where she sat the superstitious mind would see the god in all things moving each day left to right, up to down, changing its slant with the seasons. The first divine readings would come from such a prospect. At an earned altitude, in your very body you felt great meanings were arrayed before you, you could look and know yourself. The trouble was in trying to say them, the things you came to know. She would say them only this way. Left to right and up to down.

  —

  It had been forty-two minutes. No sound for thirty-four. Something was wrong but she hadn’t yet moved, weighted in place against the whirl of her thoughts. If she left the cave he’d be alone up here inside the mountain for five or six hours, too long if he was injured or in danger. The rope lay slack against the wall. The first chamber was safe, the one he’d called from, with the shells. It would make sense to lower herself into it and call to him through the next opening. If she couldn’t hear him she’d have to keep calm and crawl out and timber the ladder, and cross it without anyone to hold it steady, and start down the mountain. She had to bring help before dark or she wouldn’t know how to find her way back up. Assuming she could do so by day. She hadn’t paid attention on the climb, only following his lead in slight variation, as she’d done much of her life.

  She imagined sitting with him on a patio somewhere, beginning the story of what they’d done wrong today. It had been a mistake not to tell anyone. Was it from vanity or cool, delicious hope that he wanted this for the two of them alone? Another error, not to have planned for emergency. The previous night they should have given directions to creepy Koss, explaining that if they hadn’t called him by such and such an hour he was to do so and so. Were there earlier mistakes? He should have told her of the cave before she left Canada. She would have researched what to bring, planned for contingencies. How far back could they go? What were their mistakes, through the years, and how had they contributed to this colossal miscalculation?

  It wasn’t yet panic she felt, as if panic were a stable marker. She wasn’t hysterical. Her heartbeat was getting up there but she’d experienced nothing to cause real fear, only a duration of silence. She told herself that her father was simply late. He was often late, he lost track of the hour, though admittedly given the directions she expected him to know it had been forty-four minutes, fourteen overdue, or six if he was counting from the last voice contact. On the imagined patio she told him her calculations. A small delight held on his face. It would all have worked out, of course, so he was enjoying the story. She looked for the slightest sign that the enjoyment went only so far, but unless you knew him, by his face you’d think nothing much had ever happened to him. You’d guess he’d lived a safe and lucky life, that he felt fear only as mock fear, fright, a tingling on the skin, a shiver along the neck. Never as drops of blackness spreading in the blood, thickening the tongue, numbing the light. But he understood as she did that the world divided between those who knew and those who didn’t.

  She would need both her hands, so how to carry the flashlight? If she put it in her mouth like on TV she’d gag. It was too thick to fit into a belt loop but she had a belt, pretty much decorative, so she took it off and cinched it around the base and then tied a knot and looped the flashlight around her neck so that it nodded and swayed, catching random shapes in the illuminations as she took the rope in hand and felt along the smooth rock wall and lowered herself into the hole. She found level ground almost immediately and stepped forward before taking hold of the light and looking around. She’d stopped herself all of six inches before a spur in the rock that would have brained her. Another mistake, a lucky break. She ducked and moved forward and stood again. The light now caught all of the small chamber. The ledge with the shells, about a dozen, was at eye level. At its highest point the ceiling was maybe eight feet. The rope ran straight across the floor and into a low, small opening in the opposite wall, five or six strides ahead. She could not see how anyone could fit through it.

  She kneeled at the opening and listened, nothing. Even the light draft she’d felt above was absent. She shined the beam into the passage and up came a wall forty or more feet ahead, but she couldn’t tell the dimensions of the space. The rock was smooth, water-worn. She called, “Dad. Can you hear me?” and her voice seemed to wreck in the passageway. The rope—how long was it?—ran true along the shadowed ground. Maybe he’d seen a safe way forward beyond the end of his tether. Even if there was no chamber, even if what she was seeing was forty feet of tunnel, there must be a curve or drop or else she’d be able to see him. All she saw now was a frayed rope lying along a rock shaft.

  She checked the time. Forty-six minutes, no contact. He was just ahead somewhere. If he was hurt, in trouble, time was short. She did not want to enter the tunnel. She could not go down the mountain, go to town and get help, come up again in the dark. Already she was sixteen minutes behind in whatever action she would take.

  She said fuck it and sat and started in, feet first. She rested the flashlight on her chest and pulled herself along with her hands. The top side of the passage was inches from her face and she felt her short breaths burst back upon her. Her knees could barely bend but little by little she went forward, telling herself that her father had made it
through so there had to be room for her. After several seconds she opened her feet and looked down along the beam. A penumbra had formed around the light on the wall ahead and so she knew that the shaft widened, though by how much she couldn’t tell. She seemed to be moving on a slight downward grade.

  —

  The thought to be suppressed was that she might not be able to reverse her direction. It made no difference to close her eyes so she closed them and kept moving and only when the air and the sound of her motion changed did she open them to see that she’d come out into a large chamber. She sat up, shined the beam around. The rope ran to its end midfloor. She checked her watch. Inching through the shaft had taken less than two minutes.

  The chamber looked fifteen or twenty feet high. She stood, breathed. There was something very different about the space, the way it held her imagining. Against this deeper silence even her breath sounded different, muted. If she were here alone she’d panic but knowing her father was ahead somewhere allowed her to keep it together. She crossed the chamber and saw the passageway to her left. Up ahead, through another narrow space, she saw the moving beam.

  As he must have seen hers. She could have wept with relief but instead felt a wave of unsteadiness, an inability to speak. She came forward. The opening to the next chamber was narrow but vertical. She crouched and stepped through.

  But he hadn’t seen her light. Only now did he notice the concentration spot next to his own on the omphalos of rock that hung from the ceiling, huge, rose-coloured. The rock was conical, rounded at the bottom, as if shaped by intention, and she saw, felt, immediately why he hadn’t been able to leave it. At some point—time was hard to reckon now—he registered the second beam and turned quickly and they trained their lights on each other. His face looked strange, as if she’d woken him from a sleepwalk.