by Robert Kloss
“Have you walked in search of the depth?”
And when the caribou and deer and moose left for warmer climes, your feasts were reduced to canned roast beef and chocolate, and now the sunken faces ever deepened until eyes seem to peer from caverns. The nights lengthened into days and to wander from one building to the next required a lantern, so always now the glow of men gathering supplies from the shed, men who returned with frozen beards and cracked red faces, returned insisting the supplies had been pilfered. And they looked to you, and they looked to the woman, and they looked to the unpaid hunched on their bunks and salivating.
*
And soon the halls cleared of laughter and the playing of games, and now the sounds of shoes scuffing the plank floors and the scraping of forks on plates and coughing and the occasional mournful wail of some unpaid child, and from somewhere beneath the winds, the starving huskies howled from tarpaulin pens. And the woman in your bed said, “I hope those poor animals don’t freeze to death,” and you said, “There’s a reason we brought these particular dogs.”
*
And soon darkness spread through the land, and never again sun or the slightest glimmer, and ice dangled from your cabin ceilings, and winds gusted and thrashed the walls so they seemed to bend and buckle, and the freezing air tore throughout the hall. And soon those cabins bent beneath the drifted snow, and your men and the unpaid huddled together in the same immense hall with its furnaces and kerosene lamps, and the glow of faces always watching you and this woman, and all slept in the same enormous hall save for you and the woman in your cabin, layered in bison furs and clasping each other, for as you explained to her, “It’s important to make the distinction between a commander and commanded in all areas” and when the drifts near obscured your cabin you sent men with shovels and pickaxes to unbury the structure. You watched their labor through the windows and when the men returned indoors they returned with faces red and haunted with ice, even their eye lashes whitened with crystals and they watched you with intent before setting aside their tools.
*
And to your face the men praised your greatness and your leadership and filled you with their share of the rum until your eyes swam, and then they suggested that you send an expedition south where another encampment, a scientific settlement, was rumored to flourish. And while most considered the keepers of that post long dead and you believed they would find iced-shacks and grayed, frozen faces, your men said, “But otherwise we will perish.” And you wondered aloud why they had signed on for such a voyage, although you understood they had been offered little option. And you refused, saying a second ship would arrive soon enough in the spring. And they said, “You are a fool.” And they watched you now and whispered in the shadows and plotted your removal, and in your journal you wrote how they meant to bind your wrists and ankles, how they meant to hold a sham trial in the wind and snow and endless dark, and you burned these pages immediately, and you smeared the ashes with your boot until no sign of language remained.
And the unpaid murmured amongst themselves about how your men ate all of their food and burned their fuel, and your men ordered the unpaid to cook the last canned potatoes, and your men drank from the casks of rum while the unpaid settled for powdered milk, and your men in their lengthening-beards crouched on their cots and jotted in their journals of their suffering and their fury and their loneliness, all while unpaid children wailed and thumped the floor with their wooden soldiers and the parents slouched on bunks and against walls, watching the faces of the other unpaid become gaunt and hollowed in the kerosene light.
*
And then the night you woke alone in your bison skin and found the door unlocked, and her boots and coat were missing. And when she returned you feigned sleep, and you asked nothing of her whereabouts, and when she trembled you held her and warmed her, and when she fell asleep you lay awake, watching the flickering of her lids.
*
You wrote of what you would do when they came upon you with knives or pistols, when they had you shot and discarded to the frost, when they made your corpse a mass of ice, deathless flesh in bottomless cold. And these pages blurred beneath your boot heel before she returned from her errands.
*
And she whispered to you as you slept, “They are starving,” and the unpaid seemed like skeletons buried beneath their furs, and you wrote about how you understood that she blamed you, your rations, your men and their mere existence, and you ordered an expedition in search of supply depots or smoke from other encampments, and those who remained huddled together, bundled in furs and leather, and their breath become a swirling cloud, and their faces soon frosted and cracking as they squinted, and all waved to those men on their sleds while huskies tossed clumps of clotted snow in their wake.
And when these men returned they returned with canisters of spoiled bread, tea, sugar, salt, and rum kegs emptied for defective bungs that one man rode strapped to, moaning and delirious, his face small beneath the shadows of his eyes, the long icicles of his beard, and the other men whispered unto you of his legs swollen to twice the regular size, and you studied these blackened appendages when inside the hall, while the unpaid tore through the ruined and worthless findings. “Cut them off,” you said of this man’s legs and gestured to an area below the knees, and the man wailed and many of your men turned away and vomited and wept and the unpaid women cried and even yours pulled at your arm and sobbed.
And now in the gloom and hopeless hours of the always night, the unpaid women, even the married ones, coddled those soldiers who returned, especially the crippled one, the man of stumps who now pulled himself upon a wooden cart, and the unpaid men watched and whispered in each other’s ears while the unpaid women said, “You were willing to risk yourselves, for all of us,” and they gave your soldiers portions of their rations, these women skeletal and soon dead, but your men did not turn down their offerings, nor did you suggest they should.
*
And when the huskies thumped and howled and moaned in the night, foaming, mangy and snarling, you decreed the dogs would be destroyed. And a cry went up, and they begged you for some final mercy, and you said, “These dogs have accomplished their purpose.” And soon the report of rifle fire, lost and distant in the wind, and the dogs lay dead and frozen to the floors of their kennels, and you left them so until the children froze against the wire kennels, clutching pen knives and burlap sacks. And now your men doused the kennel entire with kerosene and the almost green flames of tarpaulin. And for the next days, the smell of burned dog and tarpaulin in everything breathed and everything eaten.
And when you told the woman in your bed how the unpaid wished to eat the diseased flesh of dogs, she replied, “Can you blame them? They don’t want to die any more than you do.” And soon after this, the unpaid began dying, the children at first, then the older ones, the near elderly, emaciated and calling their relations the wrong names, and from their death cots they said, “Someday we will be free,” and they called you “Master.” And with gauzed eyes they groped the air and called out, “Oh Lord, you’ve come to free my poor soul.” And after the death rattle and the low-gasping articulation, you wrapped the corpses in burlap and deposited them outside your encampment, and when the bodies became more frequent and as your men began to join them, they were simply carried in a bison coat and dropped to the mound where the eyes quickly frosted and the slung open mouths filled with snow.
And through the days now your men plotted mutiny until the only question was when they would set upon you. And you remained at your desk with your rifle at the ready, while the woman in your bed called to you in a lusty voice, asking why you no longer fornicated, why you no longer held her, and when you explained, “I must always be on my ready” she smiled and said, “My spies have reported no conspiracy.”
And there were nights when she said, in half sleep, “Why do we want to live? Why can’t we simply drink the kerosene or throw ourselves into the snow? Why can’t we let ourselves g
o from this suffering?” and she said, “Would you smother me if I asked you to?” and more quietly, “You’re heartless, so you might. But you’re also a coward.”
The dead became hillsides of snow unto themselves, and soon all were too weak to carry a body, even these half-bodies, and now four men were required to carry them and another two men to help those who stumbled and collapsed into the snow. And soon there were those who snuck across the camp to this mound with knives, and when they returned to the hall there were those who pretended new rations of “beef” had been discovered, and all were ravenous at the smell of “beef” scorching and sizzling on heated skillets, and none dared turn down these new food stuffs.
And you and this woman in your cabin yet consumed your rations of canned roast beef, no longer heated, and then the frozen meat, and the slow chewing.
And you remained in your chair before this woman swaddled in your bison hide, and how she wept for those dead unpaid, and for those living unpaid, and even for those soldiers who had died, and for those who were forced to live.
*
You prayed in those days that she would learn to forget those others, and you and this woman and a piercing light, and you and this woman and what seemed the voice of your father, the fragrance of the prairies, the smoke along the grasses, the clover and yellow primroses, and you and this woman and your talk of the coming spring, of the animals you would hunt and smoke and salt, and how the two of you could live the rest of your lives in this land.
And soon you woke alone in your bison hide, although your skin seemed numbed from where she pressed into your figure, and you knew her coat and her boots would be missing. And when she returned you pressed your knife to her throat and said, “No words” and bound her wrists to the cot, and her hoarse screams through the door as you hunched against the winds. And in the low light of the hall, the horrid faces and near skulls of your men, and perhaps five yet living unpaid, and the sleepless faces of many dead unpaid, and you said unto these men, “I have found the woman who is stealing our rations,” and you and your men bound this woman by her feet even as she wept. Her low wretched sound as you carried her panting into the open night, her tongue hanging in the lamplight, and you watched her laid to the ground even as she said she had never loved you. “Please,” you rasped to the soldier nearest you, and you meant to say, “In the back of the skull. Immediately,” but no words came, and you made only the fatal gesture.
“Can you send lightning that they may go?”
And after dim years alone amongst these skulls, you in the shadow of the bones of the unpaid and the bones of your men, bleached in a hillside of their own, you believed these men who emerged from their ship were mere apparitions. And soon they called you in the name you had not heard in years, and indeed, in their mirrors, you seemed an ancient figure, a withered thing in rags, and when you smiled you smiled with blackened teeth and black-red gums, and when you spoke you said words like “plague” and “starvation,” and you said, “There were those who became crazed in their illness. The winter was terrible. I sought to appease their souls. I sought to grant them mercy.”
“Where were you when this morning was born?”
And for the first weeks after you returned, you sat in your apartment,, wrapped in scarves and beneath layered bison hides. And when you again walked the open air of the capital city you saw now what it had become, the limitless buildings of steel and glass, the avenues of shimmering towers. Some monstrous new universe incommensurate with the old. And there were those who called these towers “vertical cities” and those from across the seas who marveled at a population that would never run out of room, that would never overstuff its metropolises. And you wandered in the reflection of these buildings, in the radiant glint, and you gaped at those figures scurrying and scaling the sides, swinging on cables, those anonymous black specks smaller than fragments of dust, and the nights were lit with the florescence of these towers, and all the skies were fogged with their glow.
And other than monuments erected in honor of generals, it seemed this city had never known war. Men and women laid flowers at these monuments, at the tombs of generals, and they passed along Abraham’s enclosed figure, and there a mother explained to the child at her side, “So we don’t forget,” but when the child asked, “Forget what?” this woman could only say, “Liberty” and “Our struggle.” And you searched for the monument devoted to your father and you found none. And when you asked where one may stand, those you questioned only looked away.
No matter. Your name, by now, had surpassed his; there were those reporters who called you “the man who could not be killed” and “the walking miracle” and the “first truly modern man,” for it seemed the age fast approached when man would not fall to plague. And they asked you of your diet and your “regimen,” and they wondered of your biology, your blood. “The fountain of youth,” they speculated, tapping your chest, your veins, “is perhaps within reach.” And in those times death seemed but another obstacle to conquer, now that space had fallen, now that airships of hydrogen floated above the cities and trips that once took weeks now took hours, and journeys along the plains and to the coasts of the land that once invited death or murder were now taken by wealthy families as amusements.
*
And after some months returned you finally met with Robert, who by now wore the top hat of a millionaire over his silver hair, silk suits and polka-dotted scarves, his face ever lost in the pungency of cigars. And he smiled, and he said, “It seems you are no leader of men. But don’t take it to heart, old boy. In fact, its better this way. Turns out we needed the workers after all.”
And you wandered his rows of rose gardens and topiary while his mansion loomed along the hillside, and you said, “I’ve never seen such a house” and Robert smiled, and smoked, and said, “My father claimed I would never live up to his example. He considered me cold. He said, ‘I fear you will never be the man I am, Bob.’ I believe I’ve proved him wrong with Hildene.” And there were children who raced along the lawns with butterfly nets, their screams and laughter, while men in suits brought Robert coils of paper, and of these he said, “My father destroyed landscapes. We build them anew” and he gestured to the shimmering structures pricked along the horizon. “Soon all our nation will be towers of glass and steel. Someday it will be the right of every man and woman to live thousands of feet above the ground.”
In the evenings you ate roast goose and drank brandy until you no longer felt your face and the label of the bottle blurred. And when explosions mere miles distant echoed and rattled the silver and swayed the chandeliers, Robert smiled and said, “So long as we are fat and healthy there is little they can do.” And after dinner you drank more brandy and smoked cigars, and Robert said, “No, old boy, I owe you something significant. I’ll never forget the way you botched that job—” and waved you off when you sought to interrupt him.
You and Robert sat on white steel lawn furniture and gazed over his acres of lawns and gardens, the giggling of children chasing goats, their bells clanging, the impeccable posture of his servants, the trays of goose liver and brandy they brought for you. And he said, “All of this flowered from the war my father built. The war your father built. All of this splendor is owed to us.” He said, “We have seen enough horror, you and I. We have lost everything we have known, save for my Mary,” and he gestured to a window overlooking the lawn, and there the shadow of his wife’s figure, pressed to the glass. “Now we must cherish our magnificence. No important man will ever want again.” He said, “Oh God, if only we could forget,” and then “I have done everything I could to avenge him.” And he was silent for some while as he smoked and mused, and finally said, “I heard she died alone and raving.”
*
And now came the advent of the flatbed truck, and these clogged the streets with their shuddering, their wheels, their smoke, and rarely did a day pass when some man or animal was not murdered by these machines skidding and careening and out of contr
ol, and how the fly strewn bodies of mutilated horses banked along the streets.
And the leather factories and fur farms gave way to truck factories, and where once a few men worked the floors of factories, now all men worked these floors save those men who owned the floors, and now all men who once lived in fields and on farms moved into glass towers and worked shoulder to shoulder affixing wheels or tightening bolts, lost in the mindless repetition of movements, dreaming of when they too would clog the streets with their honking and squealing and the sputtering of their engines. And how school children stayed home when the sky seemed especially “poisonous” and infants coughed char while doctors listened to the rustle within their lungs, saying, “I doubt this one will ever be an athlete.”
And in the night you leaned out your window into a city of trucks, piled and roaring and stuck between other trucks, and in the fury of their malaise men left the cabs of their trucks to punch each other, to beat each other with crowbars, and the city hummed with pistol shots and backfiring trucks and trucks bursting into spontaneous flame. And when a man was shot, or a tower swarmed with fire, there came the wailing of still more trucks, their flashing lights and copper vats, and so many towers burned, and many died gulping blood after gunshots while sirens wailed some miles away, unable to penetrate the morass.
*
It was in those days that the man who innovated these trucks desired to bring prosperity for all, and it was this man alone whose factory and mansion windows were not punched out by gasoline bombs, and who did not masquerade for fear of insurrectionists, for it was this man who said, “We believe in making twenty thousand men prosperous and contented rather than follow the plan of making a few slave drivers in our establishment millionaires” and he said, “I believe it is a disgrace for any man to die rich.” And this man was esteemed along the land for his ignorance and his disgust of high-birthing or for anything intellectual and for all things bookish, and he was fond of saying, “I would not give two cents for all the art in the world.” And this man often said he would never run for political office, for politics housed the most ambitious of snakes, but if elected he would surely not decline the office. And along the land there were politicians he knew and donated to, who calculated to have him elected although he could not spell and although he did not know the name of the first president, nor the second, nor the name of the first revolution, nor the name of the empire defeated.