In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

by Matt Bell

  The squid’s shape was so heavy, so thick with ropes of ink now pushing into me too, and as I dropped through that black I dreamed a squid’s dream: I had not one child but thousands, all same faced as me, all hatching out of the lake at once, from both the egg clutch along the shelf ridge and also somehow from out of my arms, out of my legs, from out of my mouth and ears and nose, all little stars bright with tentacles and sharp black mouths, all floating upward toward the light.

  The weight of the squid weighed upon me, and as I watched my dream-children swim off I sank deeper into their making, and in this dream I saw my life did not end with my death but rather went on, spread wide across the face of the world, my children a country of men and squid, so that everywhere there was lake we were there, and everywhere there was dirt there was a man sent to build his house upon it.

  Throughout our fall the fingerling fought the squid from every inner space, pushed back with his many tumors, and soon the squid balked, struggled to withdraw, wriggling its barbs backward. Outside my body again, the squid swam long curves around my sinking weight, its angry shape first invisible in the black, its voice now lower than words, untranslatable even by the fingerling, and then again it was upon us, slashing with beak and claw, and as we fell, the depth’s pressure squeezed my lungs until they broke further, filled with ink, burst again.

  How tired I was of almost dying, of suffering the sequenced steps without release: Here was the cold, the dark, the black, all around me and inside, and here was my crooked foot and my dented head or neck and all the rest of my hook-scraped and beak-burst body, and still I did not give in, still some part of me scratched forward, succored for life, for even what sorry life I had waiting. I reached into my boot for my blade, my knife dulled with decades of skinning and scaling, and as I drowned deeper I fought back, put the single sharp edge of my blade against the squid’s soft shell, and together we sank through another fathom of struggle before it tried again to whip me toward the crook of its stained beak, before I raked my knife across one tentacle and then the other, before I plunged it toward the squid’s eye—that eyeball alone the size of my head—and in the dark I moved the knife into the black at the center of its glimmering iris, into and then through that ring of light, pushing the knife so deep my wrist disappeared into the shell behind, and somewhere within the knife finally caught, then wrenched from my grip in a wet squelch of ichor—and still I knew I had not ended the squid, what ghost remained of this once-father.

  Not to have killed it but to have at least made half of it dark.

  To have at least made that half black, blacker, and then to have that part and others broken, made a scrim swimming all around me, a body floating like a shroud.

  MEMORY AGAIN AS TRANSFORMATION, AS transfiguration: to swim or else float or fall inside the tearing-apart, to be joined with this squid-thing, this whale-thing, this desperation that could be either a squid or a whale, that in one of its shapes the bear had ended. And still it went on, and amid my dispersal swam the squid’s anger, its own remainder, fury at how it could not enter my cavity, and if it could not claim the inner chambers of my body, at least it could reshape the shell.

  The fingerling was already familiar with this squid’s motion, swimming and tentacled and inky black, and I was made that swimmer’s shape too, and soon my breathing stopped being one kind and became another, and by that change I finally came to believe what I had been told: that despite our too-many numbers there were always only two, and that those two begat no true offspring, because it was always the same two that appeared, in this and in every age, and yet everywhere on this dirt there were too many.

  AFTERWARD, WHAT OTHER POWER LED me up through the shallower lake, what glowing guide except the light of the moon? Not my wife’s moon, shattered and fallen, but that other again made lonely above the earth, its long light cutting even the ink-water of the new lake, making floating ribbons shimmering around this new body, shorn and reshaped, this face different now beneath the water than it had been above.

  As I ascended, the fingerling taught me the motions this shape necessitated, the jetting this way and that, choosing a path zigzagged upward through the layers of coldest and then colder and then just cold. For a long time, he urged me to stay away from the surface, but I did not understand his hesitance until after I burst the plane between salted ink and rain-soaked air: Beneath the water I would always be squid, would take on the role hollowed out for me by the long-ago aggression of the bear, but above I would for some time longer be only myself, only failed husband, broken father.

  At first I waited there, tried to be both, to have both, but the fingerling denied me, pushed me to pick. NO, he said. YOU CANNOT ALWAYS WANT TO HAVE EVERYTHING.

  Diving back through the lake, I snatched at schools of fish and passing eels, feastings for me and my son, and as my new shape swelled, the fingerling swam within me; his shapes changed too, constrained by my shifting, and for some time we moved together, and after our hungers were satisfied I began our gradual shearing of the surface, and when we broke again the plane of the lake’s surface it was to find the rain softened, the wind reduced, the waves manageable even in the dark, the first true dark in many years. From the surface I searched the shoreline with my human eyes, then as the squid I dove below to swim in toward the shallows, on the way checking the shelf and what lay between the shelf and the shore for any sign of the foundling, finding none except some scent of his blood, some taste of his vomit, and also of salt and fish and bile reduced, traces I imagined discernible only to my new and watery senses.

  And then for a moment not to care so much about the foundling, at least not the foundling as a boy, which was not the shape of son my new shape craved.

  And then to want to swim back into the depths, the deep and deeper lakes where my body would stay as perfect as any other swimming creature’s, at last ideal for what activities I would put it to, evolved right.

  All I had to do was choose the lake over the land forever, and then I could be a new thing, a squid first and a whale after, and for a moment I knew how the one who came before me had arrived at his station, and also what he had traded to claim it.

  And how sorely I was tempted, ready then to return to whatever waters, to linger in the naked dark with the black and inky salt around my ruined ankles, as I did after I first stood into the cold air, watching the squidness slip free of my body—but it was only by choosing the land that I could choose my wife, and so what other choice could I make, what else but to once more become a man.

  4

  THOSE DAMNED AND CLOCKLESS HOURS. Those unrecordable days, their tricky times, unable to be measured or even to have their passing discerned, and still some events did happen, still some progressions ran onward, unchecked and uncontrolled: Now the dirt crawled with flames, hot tongues licking that old star-glass, melting some into a form again slippery, still malleable and undetermined as I walked ashore, carrying the shape of a squid inside me, and also the many bodies of the fingerling, who I knew had neither forgiven me nor given up his vengeance. The rain continued to fall upon us as it had before, but no longer was there as much lightning and thunder in the air, and I wondered, How long had I been beneath the water, if that storm had passed, and how would I ever know?

  In the distance—up the path from the lake, up the opened hill—there I saw the ruins of our house, barely rooms, barely chimney. The moonfall had cracked its foundations and cratered the rest, and I had to step lightly across our now-treacherous yard and our rubbled sitting room to find a sure path to traverse, some way to reach the center of the house, where our rooms now fell away into the earth. I crawled out toward the edge on my hands and knees, then looked downward from that precipice into the dirt, into the rooms and hallways exposed below. That first level was damaged too, its chambers cluttered with the house’s fallen furnishings, those dishes and furs and furniture, but from my vantage that sung floor still seemed more whole than the house I had built, and perhaps safe enough to ente
r, as I still planned.

  From there I walked out of the house and then searched all around the cracked crater where the largest portions of the moon had fallen, but along its circumference I saw no good signs: On the lake side of the crater there was ink staining the soil and the water, and opposite that there was only the burned earth and ash-trees where the woods had farthest reached, and none of its animals were left where I could see them, if left at all. Occasionally I found the melted steel of some trap, and between its snapped jaws nothing remained, the fire having immolated what could not run, and no matter how many laps I made there was still no sign of the foundling, whom I had last sensed in the water, and there only faintly. Of all the elements of our world, it was mostly the woods that resisted the cooling of the falling rain, and there the clouds of ash and smoke and falling branches still thickened, so that all I could hear was the crackle of flames, the dropping of deadening limbs. Among the trees the sensed world shrunk, became some few feet of touch and taste, all dark, all ash, reddish-brown and brownish-red. There I called the foundling’s name, and then that confused air entered my lungs, made me hack and cough, put bright flecks across my vision, and still I tried to hold right the path toward my memory of the cave, a path straightened by fire and missing trees, by the removal of all the brush and thorny bramble that had thwarted my last attempt to find its entrance.

  And still I was lost, still I could not find what I was looking for, until again the fingerling pointed the way, turned my steps toward what he must have somehow known we would find: the entrance to the cave, and then the foundling found again, just inside that smoke-filled hole; found trying to reach one mother or another by a path less-often taken, as if all caves led to the same chambers; found by stumbling over his stilled form, my feet tangling across his empty shape to send me sprawling.

  Memory as discovery of this almost son of mine, of the body: To scramble back to standing, and then to return to my knees to dig the foundling’s shape from the cave floor, from what ash had already blanketed his form.

  To uncover with my fingers the absence of breath, of speech or movement, and to put my hands to his chest, to push and pump and pry but to be able to add no breath or heartbeat, as he had so recently added mine to me.

  To wipe away the silt and wonder again how long I had been gone, and where else the foundling had wandered before reaching the cave.

  To taste what came out of his mouth and to find not life but ash and more silt, the gray stuff of his suffocation.

  To cradle his body against mine and then to stand with his limp heaviness hung upon my frame.

  To have forgotten the weight of a child and to regret the forgetting—but then to never forget what happened next, how it felt when my fingers discovered the wounds upon his back, the teeth marks splitting the skull, and to understand it was not the thicker air that killed the foundling but his mother the bear.

  THE FIRE WAS MOSTLY EXTINGUISHED by the time we emerged from the cave, although its effect remained in its additions of ash and char, and also its reductions, its destructions of leaf and needle, of fowl and flora. When I reached the tree line I saw the dirt was no less changed, the air warmer than before, and as I watched, a soft rain continued to fall in some places, although not in all. The weather—which had for so long been only one state—was not yet righted, and various kinds of precipitation fell upon me as I carried the foundling toward the crater’s edge, toward the cracked and broken house that hung above.

  Between my steps aftershocks shook the ground, nearly rocked me from my feet, belied any delusions of safety I might have harbored now that the fire was gone, now that the sky’s ashy gradient moved quickly toward a more recognizable hue of gray. I advanced upon the ruins of the house, which despite its rearrangement remained mostly where I had built it: All my past steps were easily remembered, and those were the paths that led me home that day, with the foundling in my arms, the fingerling mad with happiness at his false brother’s new lack of everything, his body empty of all that life the fingerling had once begrudged.

  All that remained was the shape my wife had given him, the body of a boy, the face that was my wife’s face, if she had been a boy herself, and how it wrenched me to look upon those features. My wife had sent the foundling into my care, and I had failed her, and for that I was sorry, and for that I would descend again the deep house so that I might reach the great stairs at its bottom, that deeper house that spiraled and soared below, and I tried to convince myself that this time I would walk those steps down into the black, through that last element and then beyond, into whatever deepest house was built there, the chamber in which my wife or else the body of my wife had so long been waiting.

  THE WALLS ANGLED INWARD UPON their foundations, with only the brought brick of the chimney still mostly upright, and the rest of the house swayed, its creaking caught in the inconsistent gales that blew across the dirt. From there the path into the house was not the path I had previously taken but some other raised walkway left solid or nearly solid as the ground around it had crumbled, exposing the first levels of the deep house even as their rubble filled the empty rooms within, burying some number of the scorched stone floors. I did not look down more than I had to, and in any case the carried foundling made it hard to see where I placed my feet, and with each step the fingerling continued to cry, WHY BOTHER, WHY BOTHER, WHY BOTHER. Where before he’d had to swim from muscle to muscle, from gland to organ and back again, now his presence was persistent, his movements known everywhere always, as soft lumps between the thin bones of my hand, as more-fibered protuberances upon my femur and my clavicle. My stomach, his first home, swelled with him, so that when I pissed and shat his sign was there too, in thick dark blood, in veiny clods that dislodged only when I pushed and pushed. One of my eyes now failed intermittently, alternated cloudy and dark and starry and clear, and in this too I sensed his doing, just as I did in the ringing tinnitus of my ears and the crackle of my arthritis. Always now the fingerling made himself known, as perhaps I made myself known inside him, long ago, when I had inserted a fragment of myself into the egg, the vessel of his first long float, and if half the fingerling was made of some half of me, so now half of me was made of the same proportion of him, a weight balanced inside a weight.

  Or else it was only old age that I felt. And here was the proof I would not live forever, as always I’d imagined I would.

  The wall near our front door held mostly solid, but others were punched through by the bear, her blows driven by that powerful hump upon her shoulders, or else ripped off their studs by moon rock and quake debris, and also singed by fire, by unstuck lightning. Even the parts of the house that had suffered no direct damage were wind worn, weather sick, and I stepped carefully across the floors as I carried the foundling’s wet and filthy body into the house, lifting him through the wreckage of tables and chairs, of pots scattered and utensils flung against and sometimes through walls.

  Around us the house sighed and swayed, wood groaning against grain, and above us the sky continued its sucking sound, slower now but still wheezing against the tear the moonfall had made. I carried the foundling across the wrong-angled floors and into our bedroom, where upon the bed were still the sheets where my wife and I had once lain in the hopes of making our own children, and now those lengths and widths of fabric became instead a shroud: I wrapped the foundling in that once-white cloth, given to us on the day of our wedding, and as I locked the fabric with careful folds I remembered all of those wedding guests—my parents, the parents of my wife, our uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and sisters, our friends when we still had friends—and for the first time I thought how they were surely mostly dead, passed away without our notice, lost twice to us because we were too far away to see or hear enough to grieve, too isolated to have any community to share with us its news. We had come to a place where all we could see was ourselves and also each other, and I had almost forgotten that there were ever others, others besides my wife and me, our finge
rling and our foundling, the bear and the squid and the smaller lives over which they ruled.

  I had seen in the deep house my wife’s memories of her parents—of what one parent had done to the other—but also of what good people they had seemed before. I had no best memories of my own family, had always stood separate from those who were meant to stay close to me, whom I was meant to stay close to, and now maybe they were all dust, and only I was still alive. Everywhere I went I remained, and going with me was only the fingerling nested within, and also the dead foundling, this son to carry downward, inside, and through some fire-wrecked memory, that lost reminder of our lives as they were at the last moment of our shared past.

  Only when the foundling was right-shrouded did I leave his side, and then merely to seek some pair of breeches, an old shirt my wife had sewn, plus my spare pair of boots, one-half of which I had to cut to fit my mangled foot. I gathered supplies for making light and fire, then an older knife, not my skinning blade lost in the lake but one meant for cooking, last used for the removal of fish tumors, and I packed my satchel with the two furs, the foundling’s first skin and the twitching memory of it, and also my watch, that gift which I had not worn since it stopped working long before, during my previous descent. These were all the possessions I thought I needed, all I still cared to have with me, and if other objects in that house had once held meaning then they no longer did, not for me.

  The house I had built was at first small, just a few rooms, a small number of windows, a single hallway and a very finite and planned-for number of doors, and all of that was still there, if also dashed apart. After I finished my preparations I walked that first house once more, examined again its remains, peered through its broken walls and windows at the dirt beyond, and everywhere I looked I saw only some element I had been cured of wanting, and as I examined the future of this world I found I no longer craved its ownership. Now I would leave it behind to again journey beneath the earth, to again search out my wife—and whether I found her or not I thought perhaps I would never return to this dirt where we had lived, nor any of the lands beyond it.