by Tom Crockett
“Remember, Marina.”
“How can I think of what I can’t remember?” The woman with her hand outstretched had repeated Marina’s words in Marina’s own voice to her sister.
“Remember what?” Marina asked of the second Turtle Woman who stood back a bit in the water.
“The time you can’t remember.”
“But she can’t remember.” The women closest to Marina answered her sister with a laugh. “She can come with me now and never need memories again.”
“Think, Marina. There is a dark place in you, a cold spill of black ink. It sucks all the light into it.”
“Come, come with me. Don’t think.”
Marina’s body was listening to the woman who beckoned. Her heart was listening to the woman asking her to do the impossible. She stepped forward, at the same time casting her mind back.
Remember, she thought. My childhood? That seemed too far back. What dark place do I have? What more recent place? Most of the traumas of her recent past she recalled all too well. She had seen her own life as if through a lens. She knew the very grain of these experiences as if she had labored over them in the darkroom, pulling forth every shadow and detail.
She thought of herself in a darkroom. . . . No, it was a dark room. . . . No, not even that. She saw herself in a dark place. What couldn’t she remember? All those bodies falling on her, pressed against her. There was a time—twenty-four hours. No, longer. She couldn’t recall. No, that wasn’t true. There were moments she could recall between the slam of the first gunshots and the narcotic return to life in the Red Cross hospital.
She began to slide down a slippery bank, but she was not sure into what. . . .
A crush of bodies.
Cries and moans and the surreal popping of automatic weapons sounded around her. Oh God, she thought. Not again. Something hurt. It came in waves. She grew dizzy. Was she asleep?
“Stay alive, damnit!” It was Peter Burdett’s voice. It was tight and pinched and whispered in her ear emphatically. She could move a little. Her legs were trapped, and something pressed her down. It was Peter. He had formed a kind of shell around her. He was wedged on elbows and knees over her, but it protected her from the press of bodies so that she could move a little.
Unconscious again, then awake. Machinery noises vibrated over her. They’re coming to save us, she thought—but they weren’t. They were pushing dirt and the bricks of a fallen wall over the pit she was in. It grew quickly dark. Dirt fell in her face and she coughed. There was more pressure on her legs. She could hear other voices sobbing. She envied those that had died instantly.
“No you don’t.” It was Peter’s voice, soft but strained in her ear. Had he read her mind or had she spoken her thoughts aloud? “Stay alive. Stay alive.” She wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or to himself. “Stay alive and get out. Tell Cath I love her. And tell Angie . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.
Cath was Peter’s wife. He had shown Marina pictures. Angie was his daughter. She looked to be about five or six in the photos. Marina knew she should say something, but couldn’t. There were no comforting words she could muster up. She wanted just to close her eyes and die like the others around her.
But they didn’t die, not all at once. She swam in and out of consciousness. She knew who was breathing, wheezing, coughing around her, and when they stopped. She wondered if there was some way to make herself die more quickly. Just get it over with, she thought. But she could not move enough to aid her own death, so she lay in the dark, buried alive, waiting until she could hear no one else move or whimper or breathe.
So this is what I wanted? she asked herself. This is the place I’ve been searching for. I thought I was cheating death, but all along I was chasing it. Was it like this for Christophe? Did it take this long? Did he have time to hate me? Did he put this seed in me, this little wound, this dark desire?
No, she thought, I infected myself with this disease. Christophe gave me only love—more love than I could give myself. So I have this little wound, and I’ve worried at its edges, picked at the scab of it until it is such a big rend that it could swallow me up. How did I do this? I would not let myself be alive, but I could not die simply. Am I such a coward that I’ve been courting my own executioners? Well, now I’ve found what I was seeking. Is it still what I want?
In her dark tomb, Marina saw the ghost of her mother hovering over her. Wait, she thought, my mother’s not dead. Do the living look like ghosts to the dead? Am I already dead? The ghost hovered for a moment, too far away to reach Marina. “What do you want?” she thought she heard it say. Then it disappeared.
“Stay alive,” Peter whispered again. But Peter was already dead. She knew this. She had seen his spirit leave his body. She had seen other spirits float up, but not her own.
I will not be left alone down here. She was light-headed. Some part of her knew that she must have lost a lot of blood. Is that how I will die? she wondered. Or will I suffocate? Will I spend my last few moments in an agony of choking, gasping for breath, or will I drift away from loss of blood?
She tried to move again. There was something hard and familiar in her hand. A camera, she was still clutching one of her cameras. Even in death, she thought, and it made her laugh. Laughing hurt, and pain woke her up.
She worked her arm free and rolled onto her back. The little shelter that Peter’s crumpled body had formed now offered her more room in which to maneuver. She pulled and kicked, trying to free her legs, and the pain in her side almost made her black out again. She rested.
“What the hell am I doing?” she asked herself. She said it out loud, just to hear a voice, to see if she could still make a sound, to see if she was still alive.
She kicked again and drew a leg up in a tucked position. That hurt worse, but she had one leg free. It took time, but she managed to work the other leg free as well. She pushed through the little tunnel that Peter had created for her and felt for some open space on the other side. She inched forward, pulling herself along on legs, bent necks, long hair, clothing. Her camera was in her right hand and she used it to bang away at obstacles—bricks, stone, dirt, bone. If she couldn’t go around it, she hammered at it until something broke.
She imagined that she was swimming in a sea of the dead. Sometimes it felt like hands grabbed at her legs, her arms, her clothes, and pulled her down. She did not know if they were living hands or if she was tangling with the crooked rigor mortis of dead hands. Still, she fought her way up.
There was little more that she seemed to remember. The dirt was packed tighter and fell into her mouth more and more as she climbed. She passed out or slept many times, but always woke to dig a few more feet. She must not, she realized, have gone far on her dark journey, but it took everything she had.
Finally she ran out of strength. It was as if there was no more air for her to breathe and she began to gulp in panic at empty space. She could feel bodies beneath her, holding on, clinging to her, but only dirt and stone above. She scraped at the dirt with her camera and pounded up at it. It was solid and hard and she made no progress through it. Her struggle weakened. She had nothing left.
She pushed the camera up against the dirt one more time. It felt massive and heavy like a lead brick, but this time something broke. Her hand didn’t stop. It went up and up, and she felt cool air rush down the length of her arm.
Air and something else. Was that light? she wondered. And what was that noise? She felt the slap of a shutter in her hand then heard a whirring sound like a camera’s autowinder rewinding a film cassette, then nothing.
I should wake up in a Red Cross hospital now, she told herself. But she was not waking up. She was sliding back down into the sea of the dead. She felt the pool of their blood cool about her ankles. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought. They dug me out. I survived.
“Part of you survived.” She knew the voice but it didn’t belong in this dream.
“Part of you got left behind.” The
same voice, but different. She was still sliding down, but her left hand found something to hold onto. She clutched at a small branch that poked up from the ground. It stopped her slide.
“What is the opposite of shadow?” She recognized the Turtle Woman’s voice. It was just the kind of question she would ask.
Where am I now? she thought. About to be buried alive or about to drown?
“I don’t know.” She cried.
“Only your shadow crawled out of that grave, Marina.”
“You must go back for her.”
Marina couldn’t tell who was speaking anymore. It may have been one. It may have been two.
“Look down, Marina.”
Marina looked down and saw herself looking up. Her hand was extended, reaching up. Was she floating in the pool or buried in dark earth? Marina couldn’t be certain. Her own face, distorted by the black water and her own tangle of dark hair looked passive. She did not look as if she cared whether Marina pulled her from the water or not.
Is that what I’ve become? she wondered. Is this some trick, some ruse to get me to turn back from life forever? It was all she could do to hold herself out of the water.
“What should I do?” Marina cried into the night. Her own voice echoed back from the caldera walls. But there was no answer.
She looked down again. Her twin was drifting away. In a second she would be beyond reach. Without thinking, Marina lunged with her left hand. She felt the branch in her right hand crack, but it did not give way. She caught her twin’s wrist and dragged her up out of the water. Slowly and carefully her twin climbed over her. She worked her way to the level edge of the path and dragged herself up and over.
With her twin’s last push, Marina felt the branch in her right hand snap, and suddenly there was nothing to stop her from sliding into the pool. She reached wildly up and out with her left hand and something caught her. Now it was her twin that was pulling her up the slippery bank onto the level path.
She rested a moment on her back, panting into the night sky. Then she felt the trembling. Her twin was pulling Marina to her feet, but the ground beneath them was dissolving. The level path was collapsing into the pool. Her twin pulled her forward for a few yards then Marina was running on her own.
It was like running on dunes. The earth gave way like black sand beneath them as they circled the pool. They both fell, got up, and fell again. Sometimes her twin pulled her up. Other times she saved her twin. Even when they reached the far side of the caldera the ground continued to shift. Sometimes they were scrambling up on hands and knees. Boulders and big stones that seemed to offer solid purchase for a moment fell away after they had passed them, their foundations melting away. They ran and climbed at a sluggish nightmare pace. The black pool bubbled and steamed below them. Voices still called them, but these voices were angry. These were not the voices of the Turtle Woman or her reflection. Marina ignored them.
And then they were over the edge and sliding down the eastern face, trying to control their descent, trying to stand, falling, rolling, banging into each other—sometimes occupying the same space at the same moment in time—until, at last, they came to a stop. But there was no they. There was only Marina.
Which of me has survived this time? she wondered, as she slid to a stop. She looked down at her right hand. She still clutched the broken branch in it. The branch was short, like a bouquet of dried, dead flowers, and made up of many twisted branches. It looked like the winter trees she had photographed before Chechnya, and, in turn, like the single dead hand reaching up from its grave that she had photographed accidentally when she herself crawled to freedom.
I took that photograph, she thought. She was pleased to remember this. How strange, she continued, that I should be pleased to remember a thing like that.
Like so many things that had happened to her since coming to Turtle Island, Marina did not know how she could know this, but she was certain that both she and her twin had indeed made it out of the dark pool and over the edge of the volcano. Her twin, her light reflection, whatever it was that was the opposite of a shadow, was inside her now.
Something made her look up behind her.
A dark, handlike shadow seemed to be feeling its way over the edge she had tumbled down. It looked like black fog and blotted out the stars behind it. Marina didn’t like the look of it. She quickly stood up and looked around her. It seemed as though the trail picked up just below her and continued down the eastern face in the same lazy switchback pattern with which it had climbed the western face.
She picked her way carefully down to the trail. It was awkward holding the branch, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to discard it. She thought of the story Téves had told of Oriolis. He had fallen from the sky with a branch in his hand. Perhaps this was her Greening Vine.
At first the going was easy. The trail was not steep, and once the moon rose, there was plenty of light by which to see. But the black fog continued to ooze down the side of the volcano. Because of the switchbacks Marina was forced to follow, it soon caught up with her and threatened to engulf the path she was on. She wanted to yell at it, to tell it to go back. She had made it over the volcano and she was not going back, but the closer it came, the more it frightened her.
She rested for a moment to think about what to do. She took out the little pendulum Téves had given her and let it spin from her hand. It made her think about the auras and patterns she had been able to see in Adytum Wood and after. All at once she could see the auras and patterns in the trees below her, but when she looked back at the inky mist she saw nothing—no life, no energy, no pattern. She put the pendulum back in her pouch and ran down the trail.
It was a hard thing to do in the open, under the full light of the moon. It was even harder when she crossed the tree line. She tripped and fell, kicked roots and stones hard with her bare feet, limped along. But always the fog was just behind her. It seemed she could not outrun it. It was all she could do to stay a few paces ahead of it. It allowed her no rest. No breaks for water or to nurse a cut or bruise. She began to wonder if she would make it. She had known somehow that she was supposed to be over the mountain before dark and she hadn’t done it. Did that mean that all her struggle was in vain?
She would not accept that. The fog herded her forward like the cold, foul breath of a stranger spitting and wheezing on her back.
When she thought she saw a stretch of trail that was relatively flat and straight and unmarked by rocks and roots, she sprinted. She intended merely to gain a few precious yards in her race with the phantom fog, but she was soon running too fast to easily control her motion. Her ankle struck something and she looked down. Suddenly she was not on the trail anymore. She was not even on solid ground. She was rolling, twisting, tumbling down. Her head struck something solid and then the black fog washed over her.
* * *
She dreamed of being lifted up, pulled from the ground, gently but firmly. Someone carried her, placing her body in the bed of a truck that bounced down a rough, pocked road. They were cutting away her clothes. There were gauze pads and bandages, antiseptic smells, needles in her arms. These things she could feel as if from a great distance away, but she could not see. Her eyes seemed to be weighted from above. She had no strength to pry them open.
Marina woke slowly to something familiar. Her head throbbed, her ankle ached, but there was a familiar smell, a comforting motion on her skin. She resisted the temptation to open her eyes and tried to identify the scents first. She smelled vanilla, cinnamon, cloves, an oil base, perhaps coconut oil. What did it remind her of? Something intimate, lust, Rafael. Yes, she thought, Rafael. She was dreaming of Rafael. She felt the gentle lazy circles around her breasts, the long strokes along her sides that pulled and stretched muscle all the way into her thighs. It felt so good, so real.
Too real, she thought. She was not dreaming. She was back there, back with Rafael. Perhaps she had never left. Maybe she had dreamed all of her experiences since Rafael. Or may
be she had them all to live over again, like some twisted time loop. Was she doomed to live the same experiences over and over again? Worse, she thought, what if I’m trapped here? She remembered the phantom black fog. Was this the price she had to pay for failing to cross the mountain before sunset?
She opened her eyes.
He knelt beside her legs, bent low and stretched out so that all she saw was his long black hair. Then he drew his hands back down along her sides, returning to a kneeling posture as he did.
It was not Rafael.
It was not even a man.
A woman knelt beside her. She was beautiful and almond-eyed with skin the color of golden honey. Half her face was hidden by long black hair, but still Marina recognized her from someplace. Something made her suddenly awkward. An erotic dream she could not be held responsible for intruded into her thoughts. She had dreamed of this woman. She had dreamed she was making love to this woman. Wasn’t this Mai-Ling, Rafael’s Mai-Ling?
She felt a blush spread across her chest and up to her face. She wondered if this woman noticed it.
“Mai-Ling?” Marina asked. The woman seemed surprised that Marina knew her name. But she also seemed used to surprises. She accepted the fact gracefully and smiled.
“Yes, my name is Mai-Ling. Have we met before?”
“No,” Marina fumbled, feeling even more awkward. “I stayed for a while with Rafael. He told me about you.”
“Ahh . . . Rafael,” she said almost to herself, as if remembering something intensely pleasant.
“He said you were an artist and that it was you who taught him to weave.”
“We taught each other some things, I’m sure.” She laughed. “I’m sure you taught each other some things, too.”
Marina began to blush again, unsure of what to do with her hands, what to cover. Mai-Ling pulled a wide piece of sunflower yellow silk over Marina’s body. Marina was grateful for the drape.