by Alden Bell
Hey, brother, Abraham says. I guess this means I ain’t dead yet, huh?
Huh-uh.
It’s harder to die than you think. The world, it conspires to keep you alive.
*
Moses finds a car that starts. He lifts his brother and carries him to the car and puts him in. Abe’s body is shivering, and the wound on his leg stinks.
Am I gonna lose it? Abraham asks. The leg, I mean.
You might could, Moses says. But what’s a leg? We still got three good ones between us.
They drive back towards the citadel. The sun is before them now, beginning its decline over the hills.
They are silent for a long time. Finally, Moses asks Abraham what happened.
You mean how I ended up at that garage? Abraham asks.
I reckon so.
Abraham shakes his head and looks abstractedly at the road unspooling ahead of them.
I don’t know, truth be told. They knocked me out pretty good when they took me. I came to when they drug me out of the car at the gasworks. Didn’t know where I was – or how long I’d been under. I puked on one of em.
Abraham chuckles, which sends visible shivers up and down his body.
Yeah, he goes on, I puked all over one of em. That’s when they commenced to kickin me in the guts. But you know I been gut kicked before – I know how to take it. I got some bruises, but nothing in me ruptured. And I saw they had the girl, too. That Vestal. She come runnin out from somewhere towards me, yelling something or other, I couldn’t hear what. But they grabbed her and drug her back. You find her too?
Moses nods.
I found her, he says.
Abraham looks into the back seat, as if to ask without words where the girl is. But he doesn’t speak it. Maybe he can see that his brother does not want to be queried on the matter.
They hauled me into one of them buildings, he goes on, laid me out on the floor. Then Fletcher came in – told me how he was gonna kill me a hundred different ways. I told him it was a shame for him he could only really kill me once – since he seemed to have a lot of brainstormed ideas on the subject. Then he told me how he was gonna kill you – and he had a hundred different ways to kill you too. That guy, he can get pretty creative on the topic of murder. He’s an enthusiast. We might want to steer clear of him for a bit.
He’s dead, Moses says.
He is?
Uh-huh.
You kill him?
Uh-huh.
How’d you do it?
Pistol, Moses says and points to his own forehead to illustrate where the bullet went.
Hm, says Abraham. That’s on the generic side. I bet he was disappointed. Anyway, he left for a while, and I slept on the concrete – I don’t know how long, could of been a week.
It wasn’t.
I dreamed of the ocean. Ain’t that funny? I dreamed I was ridin dolphins under the water. It felt good. I mean, it really felt okay in that dream. You know?
Moses says nothing.
I woke up and figured I’d see you there too and then he’d kill us both but I was bound determined to tell you bout the dolphins first.
I guess you got it told.
I guess I did.
And he was there when I woke up, but it wasn’t like I thought. He’d changed his mind about killin me somehow. Hauled me to the front gates and tossed me out. Said if he saw me again he’d shoot me dead, no more palaver on the topic. How do you figure that?
Moses shrugs.
Probably it don’t signify much, Moses says.
It must signify somethin.
Maybe he just spit you back out – didn’t like your flavour.
Yeah, maybe.
Abraham looks at his brother with a curious gaze. His body shudders, and he wipes his nose on his sleeve and looks out at the road again.
So I walked far as I could, he says. But my leg, it wasn’t cooperatin. I made it to the garage. Boxed myself in. Figured it to be as good a grave as any. Reckoned you were dead already or would be dead tryin to fetch me back. It seemed like the end comin to bear all around. All I wanted was sleep. Suck my last breath ridin a dolphin to the bottom of the ocean.
Abraham looks at Moses, and Moses nods but continues to stare straight ahead.
Anyway, Abraham says. That’s the soup to nuts of what I’ve been up to. How bout you?
So Moses explains how there was a battle between the soldiers and the brigands, how he came down into the middle of it to find Abraham, how he saw the Vestal Amata but then lost track of her, how he killed Fletcher with a bullet to his brain, how he found someone he took to be Abraham but it turned out not to be and the man died anyway, how the whole valley got urpped into the sky by fire, how Moses got to his feet and walked away, how the world was so empty, and the sky so sooty from smoke, how he happened upon the garage and chanced to look inside.
I got your boots in the back seat, Moses says.
You do?
Uh-huh.
That bastard stole em, he said. He looked like me, huh?
I couldn’t tell him – he was burned pretty bad. I was just goin by the boots.
You let him go?
Wasn’t no chance to. The burns got him first.
Abraham nods. Then the shivers seize him again.
They took my pills, he tells Moses. The ones for my leg.
It don’t matter. We’ll get more. Anything you need.
We goin to the cathedral?
Uh-huh.
Good. I could use a rest from wanderin for a bit.
Moses nods – though he understands now that there are no rests from anything, not really.
*
Back at the citadel, Abraham is rolled away into the back rooms of the medical wing. The old pastor, Whitfield, finds Moses and claps him on the shoulder.
They’ll take care of him, he says. You needn’t worry.
I ain’t worried, Moses says.
You were there, in the assault?
I was.
It was bad, I heard. We had some casualties, but not many.
Uh-huh.
We’ll plant new growth over the burn. It’s something.
It don’t matter. It’s just a symbol.
Don’t disdain a symbol, says Whitfield. In this world, a symbol is the closest we come to magic.
This may be true. Moses is too tired to think very hard on it.
Did you find the girl? Whitfield asks.
Found her and lost her again.
She might have made it?
Could of.
We’ll pray for her recovery in the chapel. But I’ve seen very few women as industrious as she. I have great faith that she’s still out there and may find her way home.
Moses wants to ask him What home is that, Pastor? Instead he just nods, because it is true. The Vestal is as industrious as any. And it’s also true that she’s likely still out there on the wide, long roads of the country, having claimed her divorcement from Moses as just one more gorgeous escape.
*
They clean Abraham’s wound and wrap his leg with sterile bandages. Then they hook him up to an IV and give him something to make him sleep. Moses stays by his bedside, watching his brother’s dozing form, unable to sleep himself – exhausted though he is.
Once Abraham’s eyes flutter open, and he seems to pull himself from sleep as a drowning man surfacing for a brief moment.
Mose?
Yeah. Right here, brother.
Mose, have I still got my leg?
It’s still affixed. The doctors say you’re gonna get restored.
Goddamn miracle baby, ain’t I?
You are at that.
For a moment it looks as though Abraham will nod off again, but he revives himself once again and starts digging around with clumsy fingers on his chest.
Mose?
Yeah.
Here. Take this.
His fingers get under the cloth of the hospital gown they put him in and clutch at something. It’s the yewess bee gi
ven him by Albert Wilson Jacks, Moses sees, still attached to its leather shoelace. Moses takes it from him and slips the lanyard over his head.
They got machines here can talk to it. I know they do. Plug it in somewhere and find out what kind of bee it is.
Moses says he will, and then Abraham lies back and shuts his eyes and dives under the surface of wakefulness once more.
Later Moses takes Abraham’s plastic talisman and hands it to Whitfield.
What is it? Whitfield says.
Moses shrugs.
It was give to Abraham. Can you all find out what it does? I’ll be back. I gotta run an errand.
*
He drives back to the valley, where the gasworks have mostly burned themselves out. The ground is charred black, and the structures that still stand are twisted and skeletal. The stink of sulphur is everywhere, and ash blows in the breeze, itself lighter than the snow that is now falling. And so there are two currents of air visible – the one that carries to the ground a speckled white to erase the destruction of man with its own destruction, and the other that blusters upwards the grey, dusty remains of people and things, like the tide that takes souls to heaven.
It is quiet, peaceful, and Moses searches the remains of the valley. He turns over the corpses one by one and looks them in their faces, searching for some sign of the Vestal Amata, dead or alive as she may be.
Some of the dead have risen again, and they struggle to move towards him over the snowy, ashy earth. But their skin is charred black and flaky, and it rustles in the breeze, the flakes of their burned flesh like the leaves on a budding tree in the springtime. A shimmying, fluid quality of death he can’t remember seeing before. One of the dead, man or woman he can’t tell, is a walking skeleton. Its skin has been burned away entirely, a blackened exposed skull with its wide bony grin. And, too, its eyeballs have been boiled out of the sockets, so it finds its way blindly through the wreckage, stumbling pathetically and falling face down into the mud, rising again and smelling its way forwards a few paces.
Moses puts them all down, spending his ammunition indiscriminately to make the valley an entirely quiet, entirely dead place. He puts down the ones who are still walking and examines the others. Rummaging through the wreckage, he finds the bladed cudgel he dropped in order to carry to safety the man he thought was his brother. The cudgel’s handle juts straight upwards like a chiding finger, its head bent and melted into the remains of some fallen tower. He pulls once, twice, at the handle, trying to dislodge the thing, but he is obviously unworthy of this particular Excalibur, as it does not budge – and then he thinks that this is as good a resting place as any for the brutal bladed thing. He continues to look.
Finding nothing, he widens his search, stomping through the base of the tree line where the fire has wilted the evergreens and cooked them all black on one side.
He circles the valley once, and then again higher into the trees. On the third time around he sees something caught in a tree branch, dangling and whipping back and forth in the snowy air. He comes closer and takes it in his hand.
It’s the Vestal’s little wooden cross pendant, the one she wore around her neck, and it’s a sign if it’s anything. He recalls the Pastor Whitfield’s warning not to disdain symbols, and he realizes he does not disdain them at all – though he wishes he knew how to read them. He is illiterate in the language of symbols.
What does the cross mean? That she is alive? That she left it as a breadcrumb for him to follow? That it fell, unknown, from her neck in her escape? Or simply that it was blown off her body in one of the explosions and that she is now part of the dusty ash he breathes into his weary lungs?
Symbols everywhere, and they refuse to be read.
He takes the cross, twining the thin silver chain around his thick, calloused fingers, holding the tiny wooden pendant tight in the meaty palm of his hand. He holds it as though he will never let it go.
Though that, too – the gripping of the cross – that too is a symbol for the speculation of those who know the language.
The night falls, and he stays among the ruins. He lies on the ground and lets the snow fall onto his beard and his eyelids and his lips. Finally, in this place of devastation, this graveyard of man and industry, this broken toe of civilization, finally, he sleeps.
*
When he wakes, it is full dark, and he realizes he has slept many hours there on the ground. He stands and sheds a thin layer of snow that has fallen and wed him to the ground on which he lay. He shakes it off, and he is not cold though he can see his breath.
The moon is out and casts mangled shadows over the valley, and in the dark he believes he sees a figure darting through the trees. A naked girl, skin pale and shimmering, almost translucent, red hair chopped short – and there she dashes from tree trunk to tree trunk, disappearing into the shadows and reappearing elsewhere in unexpected places, like a capricious sprite or a trick of the eye. He would call to her if he believed she would be held by his voice. Instead, he finds himself running, bursting into the trees, crashing through them in pursuit of the ghostly shape of the girl. The branches whip and slash at his face, and he can feel the blood trickling on his skin. Or it could be tears, it makes no difference – the salt and aluminium we shed as a result of our stinging contact with the world.
I’m sorry! he calls into the shadows. I’m sorry. I should of believed you. I should of. Faith and love, they ain’t the same thing. Are they? Are they the same thing? I’m sorry. Come back now. You can come back!
He runs until his body collapses beneath him, his breath gone. He falls to his hands and knees, truly ursine now, a beast of the wilderness huffing and panting his way through the night. His lungs are scorching, and he scoops up a handful of snow and swallows it to cool his insides. When his gasping breath slows, he looks around him. There is no sign of the naked girl anywhere.
She is a beguiling ghost.
She has ever been.
Twelve
A Map » Three Conversations about One Thing » A Return » A Confession » Another Vision » How Things Endure
Three days later, Abraham’s fever has broken and he is up and walking around the compound, whistling lewdly at female passers-by.
Stow it, Abe, Moses says. Let’s try to get out of here without rilin the citizenry. I seen em riled – it ain’t pretty.
Wait, Abraham says. We can’t go yet. What about my yewess bee?
Moses has forgotten about it. He finds Whitfield, and the two brothers are led to a room with two banks of computers against opposite walls, facing each other like parallel rows of guardians.
One of the operators is reminded about the yewess bee.
Oh yeah, he says. It’s around here somewhere. It was easy – but there’s nothing on it really. I was going to tell somebody, but – here it is.
The operator is a young man wearing a t-shirt. He is a poor arbiter of grand mysteries such as this, Moses thinks.
The operator plugs Abraham’s talisman into a port in one of the computers and then brings up something on screen that Moses recognizes as the shape of the United States. There are red dots all over it, as though the entire country has succumbed to some kind of pox.
It’s a map, Moses says.
A map! Abraham repeats.
Of what? Moses asks.
A treasure map, I bet, says Abraham.
Actually, says the operator, it’s a corporate map. It shows all the locations all over the country of a particular business. I guess it was a franchise. There are, like, twelve hundred of them.
What business? Moses asks.
National Waffle or something like that? Hold on, here it is – it was something called the International House of Pancakes.
The pastor, who is the only other one present, besides Moses, old enough to remember such predominant American wonders, laughs. It is a sad laugh, full of empty spaces that used to be filled with something. Moses laughs much the same laugh, and together, unspoken, the two men try to make of
the moment something less dire.
What? Abraham asks for the two chuckling men. What is it?
It’s your treasure map, all right, his brother replies.
What some mysteries reveal are truths so mundane they blast wide our own ludicrous vanities.
*
They say farewell to the pastor and leave the citadel behind them. For his service against the raiders, Moses is given a good car with two extra jugs of gasoline packed in the trunk. He is also given some rifles, some ammunition. The citadel’s stores are vast – they can afford such things.
They drive, first north a little ways, then south again. They are directionless as far as Abraham is concerned, though wherever he goes Moses is looking for the girl he turned his back on.
Once, Abraham discovers Moses clutching the wooden cross pendant while he drives – but he does not recognize it as the one the Vestal wore around her neck.
You got religious all the sudden? he asks.
It’s a symbol, Moses replies. What it signifies ain’t simple.
Who said it was simple?
Abraham has his own symbol – the yewess bee. He believes it to be more than just a map of a national chain of restaurants, but instead an elaborate code disguised as a restaurant map. He believes that if they travel to each of the locations, they will piece together some megalithic conspiracy. So every time they pass one of the pancake houses with its blue roof, Moses points it out and Abraham notates it with a pencil in his notebook. It is good for him to have something to follow.
Abraham does not very frequently bring up the topic of the Vestal, having seemed to identify it as out of bounds. The first time is while they are still at the citadel.
So the girl’s lost? he says.
Yep, says Moses.
Not dead?
Could be. Moses shrugs. Dead’s a kind of lost. But last I saw her she was amongst the livin.
I reckon we should look for her.
I reckon so.
I would of thought she’d come back here.
Girl like that, Moses says with a wave of his hand, you can’t figure her. You can’t project what she’ll do.
The next time the topic arises they are on the road. It is night, and the headlights illuminate the tall trees between which they drive.