A Floating Life

by Tad Crawford

  “There would have to be thousands of caves,” I protested.

  “Yes, thousands, hidden from sight.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “It’s a secret project.”

  “Whose project?”

  “When the mayor was elected to his first term, he promised to end the housing shortage. He made a firm commitment to affordable housing. One of the easiest steps for him to take was to build these caves.”

  “You’re kidding me. I would have read about it in the newspapers.”

  “I said it was secret.”

  “But … ”

  “Think about it. How many homeless bears will the public tolerate? That’s one reason the mayor took it on first, before subsidized housing for the poor and the disadvantaged middle class. And there are certain practical advantages—”

  “Such as?” I broke in.

  “A cave is basically just the absence of something. All that’s required is a large hole. You don’t have to lay a foundation, put in pilings, find materials and workers to build up story after story. It’s incredibly cheap. No additional services are needed—heat, gas, and electricity are irrelevant. Historic districts and the beauty of the city skyline are left undisturbed. And Central Park could easily host tens of thousands of caves.”

  “But are the bears happy in caves?”

  “Where else would you want to be in the winter?” he asked. After waiting a moment, he went on, “Of course, there are different kinds of caves. Some are shallow, hardly more than an opening in a cleft of rock. Others penetrate a long distance but are straight and flat. Some go down almost vertically. And then there are the chambers that you come on unexpectedly, small nooks that can be perfect for curling up and large caverns with stalactites and stalagmites. Have you noticed how the shape of the cave affects your dreams?”

  “No, I really haven’t,” I replied.

  “Yes, that would be my only criticism of the mayor’s building program. I find my dreams aren’t as interesting now. The caves feel as if they came off an assembly line. Perfectly rounded, all about the same length, all flat or declining very gradually.”

  He piled absurdity on absurdity.

  “I find it hard to accept,” I said deliberately, “that the mayor would build caves before apartment buildings.”

  “You’re still stuck on that?”

  I didn’t answer. We sat there, each lost in his own thoughts. The music and the buzz of the revelers still came through the forest. My companion had lowered his head, closed his eyes, and might well have fallen asleep. I could feel the hard bark pressing into my back. I shifted one way, then another. Suddenly he leapt to his feet.

  “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  He moved deeper into the forest. I followed, not complaining about his speed, the branches whipping at me in his wake, or the darkness. We must have walked for ten minutes before the rise of a rocky cliff blocked us.

  “This way.”

  I followed and found myself in a tunnel. I call it a tunnel, not a cave, because obviously it had been built by machines. A gradual slope led downward. On the ceiling a translucent wire strip gave off a faint glow. After a few minutes, we reached a cave. The lighting ceased with the end of the tunnel, but I could make out the irregular contours where the cave began. He squatted and pointed back the way we had come.

  “Now do you believe me?”

  I couldn’t imagine a better explanation for this tunnel to nowhere. I had to nod my head in agreement.

  “I spent last winter here.”

  Realizing this was his home, I wondered at its emptiness.

  “Will you come back?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “At first I slept near the entrance, but I didn’t enjoy my dreams. So I kept waking and moving deeper. I ended up in the real cave, the part that had always been there. Come, I’ll show you.”

  With his rough pads and claws, he grasped my hand and led me away from the light until I could see nothing. Unlike the gradual descent of the tunnel, the gradient in the cave was steep, and I kept slipping and banging my feet against ledges and loose rocks.

  “Watch your head,” he warned.

  I bent and groped with my free arm.

  At last he guided me to a ledge of smooth stone where I could sit. I smelled a strong odor, like bales of hay but more pungent. Since I couldn’t see anything, the source of the scent remained a mystery. Cool air flowed upward over my bare arms and face.

  “Was this better?” I asked.

  “In a way. There’s a small niche right here, where I curled up to sleep. You don’t hear a sound.”

  It was true. I couldn’t hear the music anymore.

  “Sometimes,” he added, “I would quiet my breathing so I couldn’t hear myself.”

  “But what about your dreams? I thought you said you enjoyed the long sleep, the chance to let your thoughts wander.”

  “You know what the hunger madness is like before we hibernate. At first I kept dreaming about foraging, but I couldn’t find what I wanted. I didn’t like those dreams, but when I moved deeper I started dreaming of strange creatures I had never seen in the forest. After a while I became troubled.”

  “Why?”

  “I hesitate to say.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I said, thinking that might be his concern.

  “Do you feel anything about the darkness?”

  I had never experienced such absolute blackness, but I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “What about it?”

  “How many of us are here?” he asked.

  A shiver shot up my spine. I had no idea.

  “Just you and me,” I answered, hoping he would agree.

  “In a way, that’s true.”

  “Why in a way? It either is or isn’t true.”

  “It’s true when I’m awake, but when I’m sleeping, I’m not sure if it’s true.”

  “You’re talking about your dreams.” I wanted to clarify that in reality only he and I were present.

  “Do you feel the air rising up?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “A few feet in front of you is a deep shaft. It goes straight down. I have no idea how far, but the air rising from it suggests it connects to other caves.”

  Immediately I felt afraid—think how easily I could have fallen into an unseen shaft.

  “When I moved this far into the cave, I began to have a series of dreams. One night I found myself climbing down the shaft … ”

  “In your dream?”

  “Yes. A glow lit it inside and stone steps had been chiseled in a spiral that I thought would go on forever.”

  “Did you get to the bottom?”

  “Not in that dream, no. But in dream after dream I returned to the shaft and climbed farther down. Finally, after I don’t know how many dreams, I reached the bottom. I saw a deep stream flowing swiftly through boulders. All around was a forest that, as far as I could tell, had never been touched by an ax or a backhoe. This virgin world attracted me, except for one thing.”

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing lived there.”

  “Then you were safe. Nothing threatened you.”

  “But I came into that world like a germ, an infection. Not just my beating heart and the pump of my blood, but my thoughts—especially my thoughts. They radiated from me. I couldn’t stop thinking. I couldn’t hold my thoughts back. They entered there like a vibration that would go on and on. They are vibrating there still, growing fainter and fainter but never vanishing.”

  “It was a dream,” I protested.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “If we had a flashlight, we could look down the shaft and see that there are no steps.”

  “And another thing,” he said in the darkness, “I felt that these dreams came from the shaft. They rose like the air from that other world
.”

  “But that makes no sense. If no one lives in that other world, how could anyone be dreaming?”

  “Anyway, after that idea occurred to me, when I looked in the stream I saw I was wrong. There was life there. Enormous white fish were swimming at the bottom. They had large round mouths for sucking nutrients from the debris on the streambed. I could see down through the water thirty or forty feet. In fact, I walked on the water above them. The fish had to be as long as I am tall. Slowly they began to rise toward me. This frightened me, and when one of them came close enough, I gave it a hard kick to make it keep away.”

  “Did it bite you?”

  “I’m not sure these fish had teeth. No, it didn’t, but it began to change shape. It grew two legs and two arms. So did the other fish. I don’t know what to call them, because soon they stood upright. They had heads but no faces—just white, unshapen skin.”

  “Did they walk on the water too?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think they did. I moved away, but one of them gestured as if to speak. But it had no mouth. I wanted to get away. I must have run.”

  “Did they follow you?”

  “Not in the dream, because I woke up. But I think they did follow me, because I keep thinking about them. How could a fish change shape like that? Why would it want to? What would it have said to me? I regret now that I didn’t overcome my fear and listen.”

  “What could they have told you?” I asked.

  “You have no idea?”

  “No, how could I?”

  “That these are not my dreams,” he said.

  “But you dreamed them.”

  “Nonetheless, that’s what I believe they would have said. I’ve thought about it quite a bit. And if they weren’t my dreams, whose dreams were they?”

  I had no answer.

  “Perhaps the dreams were theirs,” he finally went on. “I considered that. Now, this is all just a lot of flimsy intuition and conjecture—I could certainly be wrong—but I don’t think they were the dreamers. I think they wanted something else.”

  “To inhabit the world you discovered?”

  “They’ll do that, of course, but I felt they wanted to find the spiral steps leading upward. That they wanted to climb up and enter our world. They’re still evolving. Who knows what they will look like when that’s finished? They may already be here.”

  I didn’t like this idea at all. It brought to mind the world I knew—the skyscrapers rising from streets thronged with people. You could tell just by looking that they had come from around the globe, spoke a babel of languages, and prayed to innumerable gods, but not one of them, to my knowledge, had risen from a dream world.

  “If they are,” I said, “nothing has changed.”

  “Nothing that we’re aware of yet,” he answered.

  The cave had grown colder. Or at least it felt colder to me.

  “I’d like to go back,” I said, half expecting him to refuse to take me. I heard the scrape of his claws on the stone; then his paw touched me in the dark. Again he took my hand. I welcomed this contact and overcame my fear of falling into a shaft. Protecting my face with my free arm, I made the slow journey toward the surface. What a relief to see the faint light in the tunnel!

  At last we stood outside his den. The full moon had been rising when we entered, but now it had flown to the far rim of the sky. The stars gleamed like points waiting to be connected on a blueprint for some unimaginable invention. We walked without speaking.

  “I don’t hear the music,” I said at last.

  He stopped by the low wall of a large fountain, its winged statue silhouetted in the moonlight.

  “I thought about who the dreams must belong to,” he said, continuing our conversation from the cave.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” I replied. “Shouldn’t you find your wife and children?”

  “No, they don’t need me.”

  This surprised me and I responded sympathetically. “That’s too bad.”

  He laughed, a growling catching of breath in that large throat.

  “It isn’t too bad. I spend my time alone because I want to. It’s my nature. Anyway, I spent a lot of time imagining who the dreams might belong to. Finally, I thought of you.”

  “Me?” Nothing could be more alien to me than those dreams with their weird, changeable creatures. “No, that’s ridiculous.”

  He shrugged, a great hulk of darkness.

  “In any case,” he said, “that’s why I put the invitation under your door.”

  “You did that?”

  He nodded.

  I wasn’t sure how to respond, but I decided to be gracious.

  “Thanks. It was good to see you again.”

  “About the dreams,” he said, “let me know if anything occurs to you.”

  “Sure, I will.”

  He raised a paw in a gesture of farewell. For a moment, as large as he was, he looked indecisive, hesitant. He started walking away, then turned with an afterthought.

  “Good luck.”

  I raised my hand and called back to him.

  “You too.”

  Ignoring the long flights of steps, he slipped over a metal fence and fell to all fours as he climbed a steep embankment. I could barely see his shape as he vanished among the tree trunks.

  I sat on the low wall and watched the growing light bathe the angel who had alighted atop the fountain. One of her arms carried a cornucopia or a bouquet, I couldn’t quite make out which, and the other pointed ahead of her as if to mark a direction. I knew I should go home, shower, and ready myself for the day. But as I started to leave, an impulse seized me. I reached in my pocket and brought out a handful of change. With an underhand toss, I seeded the shallow waters with my coins. Then I watched, waiting for what might rise to the surface.

  16

  After the exchange of ritual gifts, I asked the king why every woman was pregnant except for the very young and very old. He swore that a unicorn’s pounding gallop awakened the women from their sleep. Some women said the unicorn had the body of a deer and a twisting silver horn. Others saw the hooves of a horse or the tail of an ox. One spoke of fur sparkling with the five sacred colors—red, yellow, blue, black, and white. Another vowed that heavenly fire clothed the unicorn. I praised God for the king’s good fortune. To glimpse the unicorn foretells the birth of a great being. Then, on bended knees, he pledged the fealty of a thousand generations to my glorious emperor, Chu Ti.

  From the log of Cheng Ho, admiral of the western seas, voyage of the fifth armada

  17

  “It’s a shame about the elephants,” Pecheur said, bending over a piece of wood that he carefully worked on a thin vertical blade that blurred with its up-and-down speed. The saw whined and sawdust scented the air despite the powerful ventilation system.

  I had been sitting in my favorite armchair in the basement workshop. I often came here to read while Pecheur drafted plans or built his models.

  “Which elephants?” I asked.

  “The violent ones,” he replied without looking up.

  “That’s strange,” I said. “I don’t think of elephants as violent.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Herds stampede into towns, knocking down buildings, trampling anyone who gets in their way.”

  “Without being provoked?”

  I waited for his reply. I often saw him absorbed like this, calculating, patiently working his refinements on the materials beneath his hands. Lights hooded with green glass floated above the worktable, which showed scars from long usage. On the walls hung tools such as pliers and wooden-handled screwdrivers in a dozen sizes, while the more specialized devices for building models were placed to the rear of the long table. A planking machine bent wooden strips that had been carefully soaked in water. Vises held the planking in the shape of a hull. A small wooden slip made certain the model’s keel was straight and the bulkheads aligned correctly.

  �
��They’ve learned to hate people,” he said, straightening and turning his head to look at me. “They attack without provocation.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever there are wild elephants. In the last year, there have been almost a thousand of these attacks.”

  “There’s no explanation?” I asked.

  “I think they fear extinction. They’re fighting back.”

  “But … ”

  “Futile?” Pecheur gave a grim smile. “What else can they do?”

  I didn’t know and didn’t offer an answer. After a few moments, he picked up two masts and handed me one. “Use extra-fine sandpaper and go with the grain.”

  I watched as he worked the wooden surface, and I did my best to imitate his strokes. This model would be a carrack with two square sails and a triangular one to the stern. Above those sails would be topsails that caught more wind to increase the ship’s speed. Large ships like these had made possible the Spanish and Portuguese voyages of exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

  “That’s enough.” Pecheur reached for my dowel, examined it, and set both pieces on the worktable. “Shall we take a walk?”

  At first I imagined Pecheur spent all his time in the confines of his brownstone, but in good weather, it turned out, he liked to walk in Central Park. We gathered our usual equipage in a leather backpack that I slipped over my shoulders. Soon we passed the grand buildings that overlook the park from Fifth Avenue. We entered near a playground where children run about on a thick carpet of sand. Their shouts and cries filled the air as some slid down the walls of a stone pyramid and others clambered up a tower of rope. Strolling on the paths, I glimpsed the cloudless blue sky through the branches of the wide-girthed trees. The quick breezes of April rushed about us.

  Pecheur kept a steady pace. We came to flights of steps leading to a round building on a small hill. He held the railing and walked more slowly, but soon we reached the top. Stone chess tables and benches dotted the stone patio around the circumference of the building. Arbors covered with leafy vines protected the players from the sun.

  Several men glanced up from their boards to greet Pecheur before returning to punching their clocks. I put the knapsack on an empty table and began to unpack—white pieces, black pieces, a chess clock, a couple of bottles of water, two greenish-gold apples. Pecheur watched the game at the next table while I set up the pieces: the queen on her own color, the castles in the corners, the knights stabled between the castles and bishops, the bishops close by the king and queen to give advice, and of course the humble pawns in front, ready to hurtle forward to doom or glory. Last I set the clock and placed it so the black player would use his right hand to make his opponent’s time run. I took a bottle of water for myself and left the backpack and the fruit beside Pecheur.