In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

by Terrence Holt

  The whisper continued, oddly clear, oddly distant, as if in a tongue I had forgotten. I heard the words, but they fell where I lacked will to listen. I heard the probability of impact on our next revolution; the number of passages before it converged on One; the number needed to damp our oscillations: numbers of endurance, numbers of degree, numbers of drain and fallings off, numbers of decay. I fell among them, fell deaf and blind through darkness and despair, unable to remember what I had wanted, unable to know what I mourned.

  IN A HUMILIATING mercy, Aurora came. Before I was aware of her she was there. A surge lifted through me; dimly I felt the brush of her jets, her arms as they cradled me down.

  And then the mysterious glimmer fell through me again, and I was about to remember, and then I was falling through light.

  I could see ocean, sunlight glittering on waves. I was not standing. I have no legs.

  “You are not here.”

  Aurora’s voice whispers of numbers, teeth gleaming in sunlight, a sidelong sadness in her eyes. Her eyes were dark, sharp flecks in them shining. Her hand reaches up, warm across the place where my face had been.

  “You have no voice.”

  On the horizon, gulls wheel over the hull of a dragger.

  “Listen to me now, while there is time.”

  The mouth moves, and I hear her voice—deeply, as if it murmured in my belly.

  “I cannot always save you. But I can tell you, if it will help you, why you are here.”

  The sadness tells me it will not help.

  “You were dying. Your heart was rotten; you were eaten away. We offered you life; you took it. You wished for this. Here in the Ring is the life we gave you.”

  I remember. I remember the face, the voice that Aurora has taken. I remember the decision we made. And the promises they made us.

  They had not lied. But I had not known how it would be.

  “We did not lie. There is no cure. Your body is gone.”

  I remember this day. I remember this beach where we came to decide; I remember the graveyard we chose: I see it now on the hill on the point, the stones shining white in the sun. I remember how she struggled to push the chair in the sand; how the oxygen burned in the back of my throat, thin and ineffectual in the wind. I remember the dullness of my thoughts, how little surprised I was at how little I cared.

  I remember the weakness. I remember the fear. I remember the way time shortened, the shortness of breath, the sinking within me each day at sunset. I remember it all, and all I remember hollows and fades. I am falling.

  “You remember the bargain we made.”

  I remember how light the price seemed.

  “The process is slow.”

  I remember our tour of the long room of tanks, the small pink masses that jerked on the ends of their cords.

  “We have kept our promise. Now you keep yours. Help us, and let us help you.”

  I have one wish, but no words form: only, in the hollow center of me, a memory of desire.

  The face turns toward me, draws near, filling my sight. The warm hand slips from where my face once was and almost I can smell, almost I can taste and feel the warmth there. Then her eyes open, too close to mine, not sidelong now, too dark, too deep, and the flecks of light are the stars, the Ring an endless road, and Aurora, beside me, eclipses the stars.

  The valves close; collars spin, decouple, and with a rupture, with pain, she is gone. But I remember.

  I fall, the ice falls, the Ring revolves, and still I remember.

  HOW LONG I will remember what Aurora has given me, I cannot say. Already one revolution has passed, and none of it vanishes: the world grows clearer. And still clearer. I wonder where it will end. But though the darkness has achieved a new transparency, though the stars and Saturn and the ice all grow brighter, and I among them also almost whole, and I feel myself almost uninterrupted, with a past that reaches back now almost as far as the Ring goes onward, there is within me still some flaw. I feel it there: an emptiness still at center, an omission, some failure of memory or comprehension that keeps me somehow still apart, still adrift, still insubstantial: still, I fall.

  These words I form against the silence, they will not stop. They slice me fine, interminably articulating time. A word, a thought, a thought, a moment passing on the Ring, and then another word, another thought, another moment and I am still here, still falling among the stars, still burning, still thinking, still here, still turning on the Ring.

  I know now why the gift they gave was not only life, but its forgetting.

  AURORA DOES NOT lie. I need only wait, and I will be returned to a life much like the one I knew. It is only a matter of time.

  I listen in the darkness, and hear the voice of Saturn singing time, the low murmur that pulls so deep within me that I feel as though my life is anchored there, tethered, pulled, drawn out like a wire that stretches fine and finer and still it will not break. How much longer can I wait? How many more revolutions on the Ring? How many more of these moments will fill me, that are already more than I can hold? Why do I not break?

  And why should I not? What is the life she promised but something marred in its making? If I am born again on Earth, returned to a body stranger than a house long unused, will anyone wait there to enter it with me? And what will all those years have done to her?

  If she visits my grave, she is older now, changed by years that I will never know, by change that does not come to me. I am only dimmer to her, and although when I recall the color of her eyes the stars fade, and the pain becomes so sharp I have no other form but pain—though all of this should endure in me I know: she will change, and I grow dim for her, dissolve as my heart dissolves in rain and thaw beneath the soil, as the ice is ground here, ground down to darkness, and only the Ring remains.

  And I remain in it. And still, I remember.

  I REMEMBER A window through which a wind blew; curtains, lucent in moonlight, holding a slow, lapsing breath.

  I REMEMBER AN evening in my third or fourth summer, and the moan of a distant siren that touched some chord in me.

  I REMEMBER, TWO months after we met, her first words of affection, and how closely I held her so that she could not see my face, because in that moment I was afraid. But I do not remember her words, nor how the moment ended, only that I held her until the moment passed, because I knew it would.

  I REMEMBER WAKING to the slide of legs over legs; warmth, and weight upon my arm. I have been dreaming, something I almost remember. I have just rolled over and will sleep again, but I am rolling also to grapple with this ice beside me, rolling through darkness, the stars, and ice falling everywhere.

  I REMEMBER ENDLESSLY, but every memory ends, and I return to the Ring, and with each return something turns within me: each moment, before I am aware of it, something vital has escaped, and with it my knowledge of what it might be. It turns within me, unmistakable as pain, but what it is I cannot say.

  I call it pain, but it is not pain. I call it turning, but it does not turn. I call it burning, I call it ice, I call it emptiness, falling, silence, dark, and it is all of these, but in the naming it turns again, it sheds whatever I have given it of brilliance or of cold, of nothingness or night. I call it sidelong, I call it limit; I call it error, wither, change. I conjure it with names, with images, fragments of memory, of desire: wind, and a flying fire. I call it smoke. None of these answers.

  I solicit it with likenesses: it is a reflection on a stream, a mote within my eye, the moon upon a hill, the sun that still I cannot bring myself to see. It is nothing at all like these. I call it maimed.

  I call, and call, and nothing answers.

  IT PURSUES ME, like my shadow racing at my side: it drives me, like the force of falling itself. It draws me on, like Saturn drawing out my guts. Like ice that will not melt, it cleaves inside me, undissolving, consuming me—and yet I do not melt. We fall, this thing and I, and I wish it were something solid, something I could batter myself against, but I can open no di
stance between us, nothing through which to collide: we fall together, a mass of pain and fire, fire that does not burn, a fall that never ends, ice that never melts, only the eternal turning of it on the Ring, and still I do not know what it is I do not know.

  IT IS NOT what I do not know: it is that I want to know.

  Nor is it that: it is why I want to know.

  Nor is it that: it is who might want to know it.

  It is not that: it is not that: not that, nor that, nor that, nor that.

  I have found myself striking blindly at the ice, fragments of it exploding in every direction until I strike at empty space and whirl, falling, still revolving, still unable to break.

  It is not what I do not know that torments me: it is that I need to know.

  I HAVE LEARNED to ignore the radar, the spectrograph, the cameras, and the sensors, all but the weight I feel within, the light that flies before me, my susceptibility to falling. I no longer fly from falling: I no longer feel it as pain. It has become something like sleep to me to hold the falling close, to let it fill the space where dreams might dwell, and turn there, turning as I turn, falling as I fall. For a time we fall together, the ice and I, and there is no voice between us and the night.

  And when I awake, I mine the Ring, and wonder what it is I do not know.

  MY IMAGE IN the mirror of the Ring returns: I see ahead its rising, breaking from the Ring on its high angle. In the stillness inside something turns: something echoes, something burns, yearning to follow. I am falling, and with a fall once more into burning, I feel the falling as pain.

  I HAVE SEEN it now for five thousand three hundred and twenty revolutions, rising from the Ring and falling, falling beneath and rising, returning twice each revolution to the Ring.

  And on each return, it has drawn nearer: the shape of the cylinder tumbling in sunlight, an arm reaching out to me, reaching away as it tumbles. Sunlight flashes from glass.

  I fall, it falls, the ice falls, and I mine the Ring.

  But within me I watch as it draws near. I watch, and the hope that grows within me is a pain I cannot let go.

  I HAVE MET myself at last.

  In the near distance, the shattered hulk of a hold is tumbling, end over end; a long scar slithers down its side. The head, bent back at neck, rolls into view. Its cameras goggle emptily now up, now down, now up again: the lens nearest me is fractured, like a star. An arm, twisted crazily askew, waves up at me, waves down.

  I remember the arm I saw waving. I remember the glass that flashed. I remember believing it called me to follow, but now I know that I saw only this: a dead hulk falling, more helpless even than I.

  I watch as it batters, and shards of ice, a slash of metal, hang in the sun. I am hanging as well, watching it dwindle, watching it fade until amid the ice its form is lost.

  It is broken. It is falling. It was always broken. It was always falling. And I am falling with it.

  In the hollow within me, something is starting to break.

  The stars are motionless, as if about to fall.

  I HAVE BEEN drifting, letting my body drift and wheel, turn and turn. I fall deep in Saturn’s shadow. The Ring is gray in the night, and I am gray in it, drifting. My cameras turn, now out into the darkness, now through the plane of the Ring, past the ice that drifts, asleep in its dim gray fall. And now I turn to Saturn, that will not take us in our fall.

  Across the dark face of Saturn, lightning unravels the night. I hear it rise in a chorus of breaking, hear as the sound fades away.

  In the space within me, echoes hollow the silence.

  I turn away, turn, and face once more ahead, where the Ring turns on around Saturn, ahead where sunlight falls on the Ring. I have been drifting, letting my cameras turn.

  As light falls over us, my drifting turns my cameras toward the sun.

  IN THE SILENCE within me, the echoes were still. I was speechless, and empty, and blind. Nothing within me was turning. For a moment, I did not fall.

  In a moment, it was over. And though after that moment, my cameras undamaged, the light returned, and even the lying voice broke through again with promises of hunger, threats of pain; even though the ice and the Ring returned, and I was falling once again, in that moment I knew: it is not the light or the blindness, not the voice or the hunger, not the ice or the Ring, not Saturn or the sun or stars that draws me on to falling. For before my cameras recovered, with the darkness still within me, I felt the falling begin, and knew just how I fall. I carry the memory within me even now: beside the thing that burns there, as durable as pain.

  In the darkness, something struck me. For an instant, I rang like a bell: into the very core of me I rang, and all throughout that ringing I was not ringing, I was not falling, I was nothing but the sound of ice that rang. I was the falling, and so I could not fall.

  AND EVEN THIS I tell you only after, speaking of a place where words can’t follow.

  IN THAT MOMENT, a door opened in me, offering me the chance to pass between I am and I am not, and in that passing end this fall.

  In that moment I chose to return to the Ring and the Fall.

  In my blindness, I turned from what had struck me. I drove the wedge of my self between us, breaking from the fall that is not falling, that has no center and no end, no self to fall, no space to fall through.

  I turned from what had struck me. I turned to give it a name. I called it ice; I called it other; I called it Ring, and pain. I called it Saturn and the sun, I called it home. I called it falling, I called it life and death, I called it love, and in that calling I began to fall again, through the world where falling is the price we pay, the cost of all we are and know, in the bargain that we never made, but makes us, all the same.

  THE ICE FALLS sleeping, swept by time and what first impulse I do not know, only that I fall with it, and in my falling find myself, and, finding, fall, and lose myself again.

  I mine the ice, growing heavy with its harvest, and in her time Aurora comes to me, and takes the ore of my refining homeward. I look homeward now, toward that double star that falls around the sun. There where the sun falls also, among the stars that fall.

  EURYDIKE

  …rolled in mid-current that head, severed from its marble neck, the disembodied voice and the tongue, now cold for ever, called with departing breath on Eurydike.

  —GEORGICS IV: 485

  Something terrible has happened Ive looked everywhere but all the rooms are empty I see signs I cannot read not even this Is anyone here Can anyone read this?

  SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS happened. I have looked everywhere. There is no one alive.

  I have never seen this place before.

  There were people. There are rooms with beds in them. Some have been slept in, but every one is cold. They might have been like this for years.

  Everything feels cramped: the ceilings are too low, the corridors too narrow, but I cannot say why.

  The clothing I woke in looks strange to me as well. There is writing on it, a block of lettering above the pocket.

  I cannot read the letters.

  It is the same in all the rooms. Objects lie about. Some of them I recognize: I know clothes, I know clocks, but many I cannot name. I cannot understand the clocks. What is 835066? Is that a time? 835063. A temperature? 835060. Or is it something else entirely? Does it matter that they are running backward?

  I have moments—they flash and vanish—when all these things seem about to take some shape that I will understand. This terrifies me too.

  I know something terrible has happened. There were people here, but now they are gone. Only I am left.

  Am I? At times a white mist forms between me and the world. It sends cold straight through me. Am I a ghost?

  My memory is empty. It is as if I never lived before now.

  I fear there might be worse things than forgetting. What if I have not forgotten at all? What if everything conceals only emptiness?

  My vision flickers; the world vanishes for a momen
t.

  What if this self I seem is only an effect of something else?

  The air is cold. The floor is yellow. Knowledge inhabits me, so scattered it could be mere flickering, like the screens that flicker senselessly in every room.

  I do not know this flickering is senseless. Maybe it is trying, like everything, to tell me something.

  I don’t know how much longer I can stand this.

  My hands move, filling up the screen line after line. These must be words, but I can’t read them. My hands grasp more than I do.

  I cannot keep my mind on anything for long.

  The numbers have changed: now they read 834883. There is less of something than there used to be.

  I look at the bed, and though I know I should lie down and sleep, I am terrified.

  Something terrible has happened.

  What if it was sleep?

  I WOKE. I ran. My breath flew away in faint white clouds. I ran from room to room, pounding on doors that would not open. No one answered.

  I returned to this room and found this screen, flickering like all the others. I struck it with my fist. It filled with words. I cannot read them, but still I understand one thing.