by Michael Helm
“You didn’t come back,” she said. She dropped her light to his chest. He did the same. He said nothing. “Are you all right?”
He turned his light back on the hanging rock. It was smooth, vegetable, sparkling. She came forward and stood with him. He walked her around the perimeter. The rock seemed suspended, floating three or four feet from the floor. She felt something larger than fear, though it had the same intensity. It was awe, strickenness, a shiver of beholding, as on first seeing a vast canyon, maybe, or walking into a great cathedral. But here the measurelessness was directly before them, with dimensions perceived all at once. The rock’s hovering shape and colouring were hard to account for, but more so its proportions in relation to the rest of the chamber. It hung exactly midspace and though its curving surface was uneven, from anywhere on the cave floor, itself irregular, the rock seemed to face her.
She stopped walking. He continued. She tilted her light up to the dome, then down, and clipped her eyes to him as he was about to round out of sight.
“Stop.”
“Quiet, dear.”
She came to him, held him at the elbow, trained the light on the back of his head. His hair was matted in blood that had run behind his left ear and down his neck, under his shirt collar.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I got dizzy. I bumped my head when I fell. It’s all part of it.”
“Part of what? You fell? Are you disoriented?”
A short laugh escaped him. He held his hand up to ask her patience as he reached into his pocket and produced a pack of matches. He struck one. It flared and went out immediately. He did it again and again it was there and gone.
“There’s not enough oxygen,” he said. “This is how they died.”
He turned the light into the recesses. He led her forward. At their feet she saw where he’d chipped away at the sediment. There were bones in the floor. Femur staves. Calcified splinters and broken osseous plates. Beyond, ribs breached the surface.
“Human,” he said. “Or protohuma—” He didn’t quite finish the word or she didn’t hear him.
She took him by the arm and drew him away and as they passed by the hanging rock he turned and directed his light at it and looked a last time. She watched him, gauged his movements, as they stooped into the next chamber and crossed it. He was lurching, unsteady. Should she go first or second? She couldn’t reason it through. She was breathing fast. If he went first and passed out she’d be unable to move him. She had him sit near the narrow opening. She looped the rope around his chest, under his arms, and he followed her hands vaguely with his eyes, as if drunk.
“You come in right after me,” she said. “Keep your head close to my feet.”
She rounded her shoulders and started in on her back, head first, with the rope running along her right side so she could tug it as a signal, if nothing else. As she’d feared, the slightly inclined grade was harder to move along in the confined space. She used the heels of her hands and feet to get what traction she could. When her palm touched a smoothness she thought of water, rushing water, filling the passage. He followed well enough but midway he stopped and she said, “Keep coming,” and her voice died inches from her face. She tugged the rope and he started again. It seemed to be taking longer than it should have, and then was certainly taking too long, and the despair was in realizing that somehow she’d taken them into the wrong opening, but no, the rope had run to this one, so on she went, her hands bleeding now, her knees banged up, and then the blackness stood higher and she knew they’d made it.
At the mouth of the first entrance they stood in pain, crouched over, breathing hard, and now she was weeping for the air, at the daylight visible above. He went first, climbing and pulling on the rope as she boosted him. Then he reached down and helped her up. They walked out of the cave and stood looking at La Vallée du Terrieu, miles of green and sunlight.
She examined his scalp, the short, deep gash, still bleeding. With a paring knife they’d used at lunch she cut away the sleeve of his shirt and wrapped it tightly around his head, under his jaw.
“Can’t open my mouth,” he tried to say.
“Perfect, then. Let’s go.”
They crossed the crevasse and left the ladder and walked down, saying nothing.
The part she would never tell anyone, not even herself, she decided, was that the place they’d been didn’t exist, not in the way the rest of the world did. Or it existed in space but not time. You could see time from the entrance but the place inside the mountain was outside of time, as if it had absorbed tens of thousands of years of human wonderment and held it, imprisoned it, and to enter the chamber was to enter the imaginings of the dead. It was a trap they’d escaped that others had not, lured by promise, filled with disorienting visions, then weakening, suffocating. The self-deceiving mind could so easily imagine a design there to hold them. You couldn’t see the rock’s symmetry and colour and not imagine it as the shaping of an engineer, a force, a god with aspirants among humans. Some inherited groove in the brain caused people to believe that all order is intended, that balanced wholes can’t form by chance and natural circumstance. They couldn’t see that none of the received names, the names cursed or called out in worship, could really attach to an ordering force. Over time, she would likely come to think of the cave visit as a misadventure, a lucky escape that had sparked thoughts of a Maker, thoughts she was already putting in their place. Yet on some future nights—how did she already know this?—the sparks would come back to her.
And then, a last idea, one she couldn’t suppress. It was that she was still inside the cave. She had fallen out of time, even as she descended through the woods as present in the world as she always had been. In thought, memory, body, she was nearly exactly herself. The feeling began to fade, to seem fanciful, at lower altitude, as her blood became better oxygenated, but she understood that it would never entirely leave her. It was somehow familiar, the idea that she was two places at once, or one place in two overlapping times. She must have read it in a junk novel, seen it in movies, things that everyone consumed without really remembering and that she found it harder and harder even to pretend to believe.
She’d been trotting and was too far ahead now. She stopped and looked back, waiting for him to appear through the trees.
3
He came home from the hospital and made a long phone call to Armin Koss and a shorter one to California in which he arranged to take a permanent leave from the university. He sat speaking on the phone at the outdoor dining table. From where she stood looking at him through the open patio doors at sunset he seemed to be addressing a mountain. Echoing the language he now embraced, he told some administrator that the institution would have to “convert” him. In stages the department and benefits offices could attribute his absence to whatever they wanted, sick leave, research leave, but after twelve months he wanted “the honourable discharge of early retirement.” He’d finish out his projects and go.
The sky darkened and held for three days. He hardly slept. Even when the rain woke her one morning near four she went out along the stone floor to the sitting room and there he was. The urge to speak left them, even through the drink hours. He would start talking about something he’d read or hoped to study but then trail off after a minute. Every subject seemed to connect in him to something unsayable. She could only be embarrassed for him. Never before had he been unequal to his thoughts. In the car, coming back from a day trip to Uzès, locally famous cathedral tower and bright woven cotton, she asked him why so quiet.
“I’m trying to respect what’s happened to us.”
“You mean surviving a stupid mistake through dumb luck.”
“Human nature once tried to accommodate profound experiences. Now some of us try to joke them away. Or drape them in rational language.”
He seized on the idea of this rational drapery. It was everywhere, he said, a full decor of false surfaces, a fabric of numbers and symbols cast over creatio
n. The man was a complete stranger to her.
They flew back to North America, same coast, different countries, and he walked out of his life. Over the ensuing weeks he began attending poetry lectures and readings, drawing live nudes. Twice he gave over his home to self-described musicians he’d met at a festival and flew to Peru to get high in ayahuasca ceremonies. He was talking now, but differently, more present in conversation. He admitted he was no natural artist, and his intuition felt at times imprisoned by his learning, but he really did seem changed. For all his self-exploration he was now attentive to her when she spoke, guessing at her unstated concerns, an empathetic listener. There he was on her screen saying in one breath that genetic technology would unlock the secrets of all pathogens, and in the next that the cave must have opened something in her, too, whether or not she wanted to talk about it, and this opening could lead to inspiration. Had she acknowledged something in herself? he wanted to know. He blamed himself that she’d grown up in denial of what he called her “otherworldly side.” She found herself longing for their old, loaded silences. He’d always been a gundog on point, but he’d never before been pointing at her. The analogy extended in her thoughts to find Koss at the trigger. Koss was there always, at the beginning and now haunting her father’s descriptions, something Armin had suggested, had told him on the phone or by email, someone Armin knew in Lima or L.A.
Armin Käding Koss, minor internet figure. He existed almost exclusively in German. His website was under reconstruction. In the virtual strata Celia found a few small profiles in gaming and art magazines, interviews at three gallery sites, promoting shows, two of which had been reviewed. She ran the pieces through a translation program with the usual mixed, often ludicrous results. “ ‘I like to make Sundays for free,’ says Koss his owner. And he also says his client because he knows nothing.” Against the random incorrectness, the accidental nonsense, she surmised and filtered her way through everything she could find. When the sites seemed to have given way to other Armins and Kosses she turned a few more pages and saw nothing and was about to leave the search when he appeared again on page eleven on an antianarchist site that listed the names of members and sympathizers belonging to a group it deemed to be, in the translation, “violent or postured of threat.” The group called themselves Löschen. Koss’s name appeared midpage. A new search took her to what looked to be a pamphlet or booklet self-published by the group four years ago. The booklet was online, pick your language. She clicked on the Union Jack and up came the manifesto. On the cover she recognized Koss’s gestural figures, his semi-nonhumans. These ones, a man and woman, stood with their hands crossed on their chests, slightly bowing forward.
The text began on the next page.
We all must work immediately by whatever means available to achieve Total Planet. The term Total Planet refers to the environment and to the whole condition of post civilization, post control complex to be brought about by a Sudden Event. To achieve Total Planet, threats must be recognized and disarmed or eliminated. The greatest threats are 1) human technology and its ruthless insistence on conformity and 2) those sciences working against the natural world and its organic, evolutionary means for eradicating threats.
Point two was pointed, more or less, at her and her father and their colleagues in the plague wars. She clicked ahead and read lines and paragraphs at random.
Voluntary sterilization will lead to humans only being born to unenlightened parents. For this reason, enlightenment must be brought about through force.
Total Planet can be anticipated as either enlightened survivor-primitivism or extinction.
The enemy from within includes those employing the rhetoric of long reform. The only acceptable reform is in preparation of mind, body, and soul for the Sudden Event.
Eleven signatories, none of them Koss. She looked again at the cover. The figures were from his hand, or computer, whatever, she was sure of it. She should have been alarmed, she was alarmed, but she felt too the pleasure of pieces fitting together, of suspicions confirmed. That he was or had been a fellow traveller of these particular believers made sense. The senseless cause made sense. Even the strange translation “postured of threat” made sense. And so, of course, did his interest in an extinction scientist and his pharma-virologist daughter.
What were they bowing to, his creations? The hand positions made them look like the risen dead or extras from a sci-fi movie, aliens greeting their master. They were bowing to the coming end, of course. Envisioned and aided, enacted. Imagined and welcomed.
She pasted both links into an email to her father. She tried not to cheapen with cliché her characterization of the group with which Koss was associated. After typing the words doomsday cult she deleted them. Then she wrote them again but put them in quotation marks. She said she was surprised to find this site while looking for examples of Koss’s artwork. She understood that he must know of Koss’s anarchism, given all the time they’d spent together, all the long conversations, but did he know it was basically an “activist doomsday cult”? How did Koss describe it?
The draft sat on her screen. She returned to the antianarchist site and ran the names of the Löschen signatories through a search engine. Nothing came up clear and certain. The hits were few and there was no way of knowing if she had the group members or their namesakes. In an email to a W. Shult at the contact link she apologized for writing in English. She identified herself as a concerned Canadian. Could he tell her more about Löschen? Did he have any more information on Armin Käding Koss? She pressed send and received an auto-reply in five languages: “Your message has not been read. There is no Shult. The group Löschen does not exist but groups like it do. The members and manifestos are fiction. You have encountered art. A. Koss.”
—
She urged him to visit old friends, anthropologists and biotechnicians, men and women taking physical delight in the phenomenal world, and to see a psychiatrist.
“Shrinks have nothing on shamans. I have my guide.”
“Suddenly you trust shamans. Armin Koss is no guide.”
“We test each other’s ways of seeing. Apparently I’m an easy read. For the first time in my life I’m close to believing in a metaphysical force.”
What he needed wasn’t metaphysical. As far as Celia knew it had been a few years since he last had a womanfriend.
“You should get out more.”
“I’m floating in far-outness, as they sort of used to say.”
“At least you’re not solemn.”
“You haven’t heard me yet on the souls of the dead.”
“Then I won’t ask about the afterlife.”
“When I get there we’ll discuss it.”
The travel was its own problem, no longer underwritten by new research funds. He had only the money he had, and he was burning through it. It shot out behind him in contrails stretching to Bali, Machu Picchu, Hatshepsut, Borobudur. He sent her photos of temples and reliefs no different from those she saw on the internet as she followed him from her desk in Vancouver. He sometimes travelled alone, sometimes with Koss. She couldn’t decide which troubled her more.
“What exists right in front of us should make us believers, Lia. The endless varieties of wonder, the symmetries and echoes and patterns and modifications. Before the sheer complexity of nature, we should be stunned, fetal.”
“So you see the stone gods and the altars and all of it as…what?”
“We mimic creations. We make because we’re made. And we can deepen ourselves by encountering those things made in response to reality at base. It’s art touching reality I’m after, religious art or otherwise. I’m not so interested in pop songs made of pop songs.”
“I like pop songs, as you call them. And some people see gods there, too.”
A scoffing laugh.
“There’s a big difference between true things and their mockeries. The mockeries will do us in.”
—
She stared at true things every day in the
lab. Contagions and immune susceptibilities, genetic mutations, epidemics and re-emergences, bacterial pathogens, adaptations, manners of transmission, the vulnerabilities of hosts. In some remote village a genius is born. It leaps out of its home, across species, leaps into the world. Against it stand she and her kind and they have to move fast. They have only the gathered data to draw on, a spotty battle history, clouds of fast-figuring computers.
Some distant village in Africa or Asia. What did it matter? There was no safe distance. Would she ever lose the feeling that something unimaginable was incubating darkly? This was reality at base.
Her father declared his last project to be finding a variant genome of the Justinian plague, sixth century, thirty to fifty million dead. New contagions were more accurately targeted if they were known descendants of old ones. In a move of stark nepotism his team offered Celia a grant to join them on a dig in Turkey, ancient Troy, working with other groups uncovering a mass grave. She declined but the award notice had been sent to her superiors in the company’s anticontagion arm. Her team leader, a polite, hairless man named Didier, called her into his office and asked her to picture the towering plume of a feather the grant would add to their funding cap. They’d be gaining access to a genome that could position them ahead of market competitors. She knew there was no use getting angry with her father for not clearing the idea with her first. He would think of it as a surprise, a gift, and anyway she wanted to see the old him, at work testing hypotheses against evidence. It would be their last research adventure together.
The work would take ten days. Her father sent the ticket. She flew Vancouver-Toronto-Frankfurt-Istanbul-Çanakkale on the understanding he would be there on the ground when she arrived, though he wasn’t. Two hours after she checked into the hotel the phone woke her. She picked it up, half-asleep, but there was no one at the other end. A few minutes later she discovered by email that he’d tried to phone but couldn’t get through. He was sorry, he’d be late, maybe two days. He and Koss were stranded in Cozumel, where bad weather had grounded the flights. He’d attached the names of contact people on the other teams, his friends Jenny and Dresen, they’d help her. Until he arrived she’d have to be his designate.