The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  We finished our beers, and Carol had to go back to work. I drove on, south down the Mississippi, traveling to some ceramics conference in Memphis, I think.

  And as I drove into the twilight along the winding drainage of the eastern North American continent, somewhere south of Cape Girardeau I glanced through trees to the muddy river, and there in a little riverine estuary I saw a massive shape, humped and shaggy. I slammed on the brakes of my jeep, pulled over.

  A woolly mammoth was standing up to its haunches in the water. It was drinking. It lifted its head, taller than the trees. Brown water dripped from its tusks.

  “What,” I whispered. “What are you?”

  I stared. It lowered its head—it must have been a he, with those tusks—he lowered his head and churned up the silt of the river bottom. He raised his head again with a mass of vegetation hanging from his small mouth. I watched him chew it.

  When I opened the door of my jeep, he heard it click. I stumbled out—onto the road, I could have been killed by a passing car, so oblivious I was—toward the mammoth. He looked around, couldn’t locate me with his weak eyes. But the sound was enough to spook him, and off he crashed into the bushes. I ran over, almost fell into the river, climbing down the embankment to the little cove where he’d been. There was nothing. But the water was swirling with mud and the nearby shrubs were chuffed up. I looked everywhere for a track, but found none.

  So I drove away. There was nothing else to do. There are things in our lives, or I should say, there are things inmy life that happen, and are without explanation. I do not work ceaselessly seeking to explain them, and I do not think myself a deluded fool. I remember them, and cherish them if they are good, and stop questioning them when questioning finds no answer, but becomes merely a worrying at its own wounds.

  Seeing the mammoth was such a thing. And it was directly related to seeing Carol Verdane earlier that day, of that I felt sure.

  Two years later, I had moved back to the South, to Alabama, where I was raised. I was spending the summer on a man-made lake at the foot of the great mountain plateau called Lookout, which stretches a hundred miles from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across northwestern Georgia, and into rural northeastern Alabama. I lived in the cabin of a friend who was traveling overseas. The cabin had everything I needed: a place to sleep and cook—and a pottery studio, kiln, and a wheel.

  The Little River is the only water in North America to flow entirely on thetop of a mountain, and geologists are still puzzling out how that came to be. It has cut a deep gorge into the back of Lookout Mountain, with cliffs sometimes eight hundred feet high. The canyon floor is choked with vegetation, and no one lives down there. In those cliffs, there are caves—many of which have yet to be explored. The caves of Lookout Mountain are also famous for their pottery clays, and this was what had drawn my friend to these parts. I felt strange coming home after decades away. I’d left the South in my early twenties, seeking a wider, less provincial world, but the clays had called me back, as well. It was not long before I heard fishermen tell of a cave nearby, over on the wild side of the lake, where the Little River finally emptied itself down Lookout Mountain and into Weiss Lake.

  Those who ventured it seldom went farther than a couple of hundred feet inside. There was water at the cave back, for one thing, and a great colony of bats who did not like to be disturbed during the day. What was more interesting to me than the stories was the fact, mentioned in passing, that going into the cave required good boots because the mud of that cave clung to the feet in big clumps and was almost impossible to get off.

  To a potter, this sounded like heavenly stuff to work with.

  I planned an expedition to the cave, but it was several weeks before I got the chance. First of all, getting there required a boat, and that was one thing my friend’s place wasn’t equipped with. Then I was away for a week teaching a course at an arts and crafts enclave in the Carolinas. While I was there, another potter friend of mine who lived nearby loaned me one of his two canoes for the summer. When finally I returned, it was midsummer—an awful, drippy time of the year in Alabama for those who were not brought up in the heat. For me, it felt very much like I was a kid again, just let out of school, and I was ready for an adventure.

  I left the canoe strapped to the top of my jeep, brought my other gear in, then listened to my accumulated phone messages. To my surprise, there was one from Carol Verdane. She hardly ever called me—she was always quite busy in St. Louis, and usually spent what free time she had with her family in Madison, Wisconsin. But she was going to be attending a curators’ conference in Atlanta, had decided to drive down, and wanted to know if she could swing by on her way back to St. Louis. I checked the date on the machine and found that her conference was actually being held at that very moment.

  It took five or six calls to finally locate her, but I found that she was still up for a visit, and had been disappointed that I wasn’t around. I invited her over, gave her directions, and the next day, there in my borrowed cabin was Carol Verdane, changing out of her city duds into jeans and a T-shirt.

  Even then, I felt the key turning, the upsurge of—whatever it was she aroused, produced, called forth, in me. The primitive? That wasn’t quite it, but close. But I was not a complete boor, and I controlled myself well enough. Christ, she’s come out here for a bit of relaxation, I thought. Not to get her bones jumped before she’s got a breath of the air.

  We went down to my dock, drank—whiskey for me, gin for Carol—and talked until the sun set and the moon rose full over the bow of Dirtseller Mountain away east. There was a blanket of insects a quarter mile high in that southern summer atmosphere. Near the lake surface, bass breached, snatched, and descended back to their fishy dank. Just above them, swallows flitted in quick curves and dives—always keeping to the same level, the same height above the water—back and forth to feed the gapes of their chicks in nests on the shore banks. High in the sky, in the gloaming, Carol saw bats and pointed them out to me. They flew in great three-dimensional arcs, in controlled leathery tumble, as if a man were falling about weightless in the dark blue sky, clothed in a flapping raincoat.

  “There,” Carol said, pointing. “There’s another. So quiet. I’ll bet the air is full of their crying, if we could only hear it.”

  I nodded, sipped my cold water whiskey, and told Carol about the cave. We carried the canoe to the lake at dawn the next morning and were on our way to the mouth of the Little River as the sun rose, following almost exactly the path of the last night’s moon, over the green hump of Dirtseller Mountain.

  We paddled in silence through the bright morning. We passed Canadian geese—some of them remained year round on Weiss—and a brace of great blue herons, hunting snakes and frogs along the banks of an island. Carol gasped at the beauty of the birds, and I told her to watch them for a while, and I would paddle. We silently slid past them and into the river course.

  I followed the fishermen’s directions as best I remembered and soon found a birch tree with long hatches, which was the cave’s marker. We landed the canoe, and bringing headlamps and day packs, we walked up the hill. The cave was not far, perhaps two hundred feet. It opened up grandly; there was at least a twenty-foot clearance over our heads, and forty feet on either side of us. The way down was steep, but not unmanageable, and we slipped and slid our way down to the main cavern. I stooped and fingered the ground. Wonderful potter’s clay, just waiting to be ashed and thrown on my wheel.

  Stalactites hung from the ceiling, and a few stalagmites huddled in clumps on the floor. Our lights revealed that they’d been blackened by the oily touch of many human hands. There was a strange white noise that filled the air.

  “Is that water, falling down a hole?” I said.

  Carol listened for a moment. “No,” she said. “Bats.”

  And it was. The farther back in the cave we went, the louder the sound grew until there was no mistaking it, or the smell of the bat guano. When they roosted, bats were audible. And
as we got nearer, they became agitated. Shining my light down the cave’s passageway, I could see them dart in and out of the beam, looking like big, big moths.

  Carol walked on ahead. She shone her light upward. The ceiling was filled with cracks and crevices, all jammed with what looked like a brown goo—but it was bats, clumped together, to keep each other and their babies warm.

  “I don’t think they’ll bother us,” she said.

  “But they sure don’t like us,” I added. “Maybe we should respect that.”

  “They’ll get used to us,” she said. “I want to check for—signs of habitation.” She continued back. I suppressed a shudder, and followed after. I felt something touch my shoulder—a bat, I thought. I reached to swat it, convinced against all reason that it was sucking my blood. My palm came away dark.

  “Oh,” I said, “shit.”

  From ahead came a splashing noise. Carol had found water and stepped down into it.

  “Let’s follow this a ways,” she said. “This really interests me.”

  “Carol, isn’t this dangerous?” I said. “I mean, we have no idea—”

  “—oh, I think it will be all right,” she called back to me. “Follow me.”

  We sloshed forward through utterly still water. My boots sank into the silt on the bottom, and training my light downward, I could not see the tops of my feet. We walked quite a distance back, I reluctantly, Carol plodding determinedly ahead. Finally, she stopped.

  “Aha,” she said.

  “What?” I came up beside her, looked to where her headlamp was shining.

  There, on a small dry ledge, were perched two canoes. We went over to them. Each was wooden and of a piece, made from a single log. They were as black as pitch, as if they’d been smoked and hardened in a fire.

  “These can’t be . . . do you think they’re old, Carol?”

  She ran her hand along the curved stern of one of the canoes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s see if they float.”

  “But doesn’t that violate some, you know, archaeological tenet or something?”

  “Yes, but I’m quite wet,” she said. “And I want to go deeper.”

  “We could go back and get our canoe,” I said, weakly.

  Carol was already tugging one of the canoes from the ledge. It slid into the water with a splash.

  “What about—”

  She reached inside the canoe and extracted a wooden pole, about four feet long.

  “—paddles,” I said.

  Both canoes were only big enough for one person, so I pulled down the other. It too had a push pole inside it. Carol pulled herself out of the water and onto the ledge. From there, she easily stepped into one of the canoes. She sat down and laid her day pack in front of her. I followed her example and, with a bit of teetering, got into the other. We continued back into the cave.

  After a while, the sound of the bats receded behind us, for which I was heartily glad. A while longer, though, and the ceiling began to slope downward. Soon I was ducking to avoid masses of rock that hung down just waiting to bang a head. A couple of times, the rock succeeded. Finally, we came to a narrow place where the sides and ceiling came together. It was just big enough to fit a canoe if the paddler got on his back and pushed himself along with his hands against the ceiling.

  “Uh, Carol, don’t you think this is far enough?” I said. She looked very much like she was preparing to go through the opening. “I mean, we could get stuck.”

  Instead of answering me, Carol reached up and clicked her light off. Mine was still on, so I could see her there, floating in front of me in the black canoe.

  “It isn’t quite far enough yet,” she said. “Really, Edward, I know you are getting a bit spooked, but if you’ll just come along with me a bit farther . . . there’s some clever pottery. I believe you’ll find it very interesting.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “And how do you know?”

  “Well, stay if you must,” she said. And she poled one more time, maneuvering her canoe into the opening, then leaned back and pulled herself in. I watched as the canoe slid forward, its sides clunking against the rock. I watched as the stern disappeared, black glint into utter blackness. After a moment, staying seemed more frightening than following. I pushed forward and entered the hole.

  I pawed myself along for some time. Finally, the closeness began to get to me, and I had to stop and get my breathing under control. “Carol!” I called. “Anything yet?”

  Her voice came back, muffled but comprehensible. “Just a little farther.”

  I gathered what wits I had and continued on. And she was right. In a moment I began to smell better air. Good air, even. And then, with a final push, I was out of the tunnel. I was out of the cave. I was in a still woodland pool, drifting in sunlight, sweet sunlight.

  “There now,” Carol said. I looked around, but all was so bright, so impossibly bright, I couldn’t locate her. “Didn’t I tell you it would be all right?”

  “Where the hell are we?” I asked, and then for good measure: “Where thehell are we?”

  “This is—” she started to say. “I’ve been here before,” she continued.

  Finally, my eyes adjusted. We were in a little pond, surrounded by trees. Something buzzed by my head, checked me out, and then buzzed on, iridescent. A dragonfly. At the end of the pond, a creek flowed out and disappeared in closely crowded trees. Deciduous trees—oak, hickory, maple. I recognized them. I’d learned them as a boy.

  “This isn’t the Paleozoic,” I said, somehow relieved to have that cleared up. No dinosaurs; it was a good thing that there would be no dinosaurs.

  “Heavens, no,” said Carol. “More like the Paleolithic.”

  “Oh.”

  “But not really.”

  “No?”

  “I’ve been coming here every year,” she said. “Since I was a girl. I’ve wanted to share it with someone for a long time.”

  “Sort of your . . . summer place?”

  “Yes, exactly,” she said, smiling. “Come on, though. They’re waiting.”

  “Who is they?”

  “Some people I want you to meet.”

  It was then that I noticed that she’d taken off her glasses. This was pretty amazing because Carol could not see a half inch in front of her face without them—back in . . . reality. I realized that this was the first time I’d seen her unmagnified eyes since that evening in Montana so long ago.

  She poled her canoe toward the end of the pool, and went out and down the stream. It was narrow, but not too narrow for the canoes. And it flowed fast enough for us to stop pushing and let it carry us along through the woods.

  “Isn’t this fun?” Carol said. “Things are very easy here, sometimes.”

  Soon the little stream widened out, and then it emptied into a bigger creek, this one with shoals that we had to negotiate. Then the creek flowed into flat bottomlands and left the rocks behind. We poled along for an hour at least. The sun grew high, and I took sunblock from my pack and smeared it on my face and arms.

  “Want some?” I asked Carol. For some reason, this greatly amused her. She shook her head, and continued on. After another long stretch of time—I had no watch and I was losing all track of it—I saw smoke up ahead. We came to two small hills, one on either side of the creek.

  And below the hills, dwellings. Houses made from pole, grass thatch, and bark. And people. Indians. Carol pushed her canoe over to the bank, and I followed along beside her. We beached the canoes, and there we stood. The people gathered round us—women, men, children who ran up and touched Carol’s hands, stroked her hips and thighs, then ran away giggling.

  “Closhi wa nathay,” she said, or something that sounded like that. “Mel na brodu Edward.” She pointed to me. Some of the people looked at me and smiled. A man walked up to me with quick strides and slapped me on the shoulder. I stood there looking bewildered, and he broke into a great guffaw.

  “Hega thinks you are very greasy,”
Carol said. “A tall man, but very greasy.”

  Iwas tall, compared to these people, although I stand only five nine or so. Carol spoke with them further, and then we all went to the dwellings, to a fire ring that was in the middle of them. Something that smelled delicious was roasting there on a stone. I looked closer, and saw that it was a tortilla. There was a pile of them on another stone near to the fire, keeping warm. We all sat down on our haunches, and the tortillas were passed around.

  “What do you think?” Carol said. “Good?”

  “Wonderful,” I replied between bites. “But this isn’t quite corn, is it? It’s too . . . wild tasting.”

  “Teosinte,” she said. “The grandmother of maize.”

  “Eh? Eh?” Hega said, looking at me.

  “How do you say ‘tastes good’?” I asked Carol.

  “Nathay meda.”

  “Nathay meda,” I told Hega. “Nathay very meda.”

  We slept outside, by the dying fire, under the stars. They were right. They were the Earth’s stars. That night was the second time Carol and I made love. We did it in plain sight of the people, but they discreetly turned their heads. They were used to granting privacy in this way, I gathered. Carol was a wonder of trembling warmth in my arms. I held her tight and felt her heart beating so fast I was afraid it might burst, but she pulled me down and into her, deeply into her, and I forgot about that and felt her quivering beneath me, and I was filled with animal joy.

  Afterward, she lay with her head on my shoulder. She was unaccountably sobbing, quietly.

  “Hold me,” she said. “Oh, hold me close.”

  So I hugged her against the chill of the night.

  When I awoke in the morning, Carol was already up, helping the women to gather sticks for the fire. The men—except for the old men—were nowhere to be seen. We ate tortillas, standing and moving around the fire, avoiding the shifting smoke.