Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  Most of the town of Homer—described by a local bumper sticker as “a quiet drinking village with a fishing problem”—is situated on the long spit of land extending several miles into the Kachemak Bay and is made up of restaurants, bars, stores, and motels catering mainly to the crowds of people who drive up from the Lower 48 to fish for salmon and halibut. The parking lots are crammed with RVs and pickups towing camper trailers and boats, and every few yards is another charter fishing outfit. Halfway along the spit I come to a nearly landlocked bight, clearly man-made, about the size of a football field. A sign tells me it’s called the Fishing Hole. Curious, I pull in and park.

  There is a narrow inlet from the sea and a gently sloped embankment surrounding the shallow saltwater pond, for that’s all it is, a pond. People with fishing rods stand shoulder to shoulder and two and three deep around the Fishing Hole, while below them the water churns with trapped king salmon, and the people along the embankment haul them in, snagging them without bait or lures. It’s a pitiful sight. I ask around and learn that salmon eggs raised in hatcheries are transferred here as smolts, held captive in floating pens in the Fishing Hole until they’re large enough to be released into the ocean. Later, when they’re grown and the ancient impulse to spawn kicks in, the salmon return to the Fishing Hole, their birthplace, in actuality a gigantic, carefully designed weir, and on a midsummer night like this huge crowds of people scoop them up as fast as they can. The people stumble against one another, step in each other’s buckets, swear and shove and cast again. “It’s called combat fishing,” a grizzled fellow in a NYPD cap tells me. “It’s wheelchair accessible,” he adds.

  I climb back into the Hummer and head out to find the friend who’s loaned me her wilderness cabin for a few days. All I know is that it’s a dozen miles from town and has no water or electricity and is located on the bay. Two hours later, directions in hand, I drive off-road. It’s after 10:00 p.m., but the sky is milky white. It feels like midafternoon, and the difference between what my watch says and what the absence of darkness says is disorienting and makes me feel uncomfortably high.

  The Hummer shoves its burly way through chest-high brush and ferns, over washes and gullies, and then up along a tilted ridge to a clearing, where the lane stops in front of a small, slab-sided cabin with a short deck. I shut off the motor, step down as if walking ashore from a large boat, and stand in the middle of the ferny clearing for a few moments, savoring the silence and the view. Below the cabin is the bay, and across the bay is the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, a vast, mountainous wilderness area split by three glistening, white glaciers, a world where no Hummers roam, where most of the salmon fishing is done by bears and the native people, where there is nothing like the Homer Fishing Hole, and the white spruce trees have not yet begun to die.

  After a long while, I go inside and make a fire in the woodstove and uncork the bottle of red wine I picked up earlier in town. Out the window I can see the Hummer sitting in the brush, looking like an alien vehicle sent to earth in advance of a party of explorers scheduled to arrive later. I sip wine and wonder what the space people, when they finally get here, will make of our planet. All those dead trees! All that flooded land and the dead villages that once prospered alongside the bay! And the dead and dying rivers and seas! The space people will shake their large, bald heads and say, If they’d stopped devouring their planet, the humans might have saved themselves. Those Last Days must have made them mad.

  Transformation Day

  Lucy Ives

  I.

  The protagonist is awake. This the protagonist knows.

  The protagonist is awake but not at home.

  Waking is the moment, the time, when she is closest to herself, when she perceives herself with fullest clarity. It is as if she passes herself by, near enough to touch; like a mirror, now. As she wakes, the mirror recedes.

  Today, on this morning, the protagonist is obscure. I don’t mean to say she can’t perceive herself, but rather that there is nothing distinct, nothing specific to recommend what she perceives. Nothing recommends this image to her, as an image of herself.

  This is, at any rate, how the protagonist begins to know.

  It is enough, having woken, to accept the sensation of cement, cold and hard and unnaturally even, damp and pungent, beneath her. She is not in bed but rather on the street, a sidewalk.

  She knows this street. Here is a slight hill and row houses packed together.

  She is about to touch her face, but as she seeks to move her arm, she discovers that there is no arm. There is no arm to move. Some part of her body “lifts.” She shakes her head. It’s heavy. She breathes. Her nose is a remarkable instrument. She smells the excrement of dogs, rotting paper, water flowing just beyond the curb mixed with motor oil, more excrement, a cat crouched some four feet from her, behind the wheel of a compact. Now somewhere overhead pigeons chortle.

  How did the protagonist arrive here? The only answer is that she has been asleep, sleeping. In her sleep she has arrived here, although that was only sleep and not a real place, not a way.

  She wants to move. Her back is so long. Her legs shift beneath her, shift against cold cement. Her arms are also very long. She cannot seem to bring them to her sides. They are pressing against the ground like two stilts attached to her shoulders. There is almost no sensation in her “hands.” Why, the protagonist is thinking, do I think “hands”? At the rear of her body the legs stir. They press up. They lift her long back. She shivers. She is not “on her hands and knees.” Her “hands” contact ground, and yet she stands. And she “stands.” She is not upright.

  I am ruined, she thinks and does not know what this means.

  Her body is large now, massive. Her heart thuds below her neck. Again her nostrils open and the world enters. She smells food, some kind of rotten food, but the rottenness does not concern her. It is bread somewhere, along the ground. She moves toward the smell. She continues to look at the ground, the sidewalk, her neck extended. She has a long neck and is covered in a kind of fur. She knows of the existence of this fur because of the new sensitivity of her body. The breeze stirs these soft bristles, these thick hairs. The breeze passes up the backs of her legs, over her genitals, across her anus. There is a sense of complete alertness in her body. She can take nothing for granted.

  The protagonist finds food, which is an old white roll. It is wrapped in a wet paper plate, discarded, and she is eating the plate. She is eating the plate and the roll in rough, trembling, tearing bites. Her ears, meanwhile, take in space. There is so much movement of motors, of bodies. The protagonist is threatened by this movement, and yet it does not come near enough to her. She will not react. She chews. Her eyelids move. She blinks. She becomes aware of her sense of sight. Again she sees the ground. There is a tree in rancid earth. There is cement. The door of a car.

  If she will lift her head now, she will know. If she will lift her head she will know herself, such as she is. It is not like an animal, she finds herself thinking, to be afraid of its own thought. Now, she thinks, that I have become an animal, I must learn not to fear my thoughts. I must think thoughts. I cannot fear them.

  Anyway, she thinks, I am already forgetting. I am an animal and I will forget to fear. I will forget that I had a name or—she cannot remember. She cannot remember what she is forgetting.

  Something happens in her ear. She hears a sound that pricks her and is cold because it is the sound of a man, and the man is moving down the hill on the sidewalk, and the man is moving steadily, and she has raised her head, and because she has raised her head she has seen herself, out of her right eye, in the smooth, dark glass of the car, and she has seen the animal there, and she knows the name of the animal. The animal—the name of the animal is—her head swims because it, her brain, is emptier, fuller, than a stone.

  Donkey. There’s the word.

  All around the protagonist (it is barely p
ossible that she can think this and yet) things have begun to lose their names. The treasure of the wet smell of the hard cement that greets her in its openness and plainness and its existence otherwise than that of life and whatever lives has no name. If she must move it will not be because she knows where she is going. How to evade the movements around her that threaten to evict her or snuff her from this strange, large body? Her eyes blink and yet she barely sees. She smells and hears but does not see.

  And so something begins—which is slow walking. She is moving beside parked cars. The protagonist moves deliberately. Her large body can be seen by a human. And so when she enters the sight of a human she may graze this sight but must not pass through it. She must cause herself to be treated as a matter of course. She must move by any means toward water.

  And I would like to say a few things about what happens next: how this donkey, or rather this female donkey, this jenny, for that is the correct term—the protagonist—moves at the pace of an animal serving a human, how she moves forward and though she is seen no one wishes to capture her. She moves over the ill-considered streets of unimportant quarters and areas of this city you and I know well. You and I would laugh if we stood there and saw her coming toward us. Sometimes someone will turn his head to watch her, this beast. Someone will concern himself for a moment with the thought that animals really can have a kind of impressive, solemn, solitary, and nearly human air about them, even if this air is just the effect of our having looked at them. For they are not human, of course, the animals. Their faces are the faces of animals, not the faces of men. Any animal’s “expression” is only the result of the gaze of a man. And someone looks away, not knowing what he has seen.

  I never knew anything about animals, in some sense, until I wrote these paragraphs. I guess I believed that someone could become so lost that she would be forced to change. I could believe that something like this could occur, but I was never forced to believe it until now. Here a human being has become so lost in life that she can no longer hold her form. Her body could not remain present with her, the way she thought and traveled. She did not even know what she was doing. I pity her for that. Like all men and women to whom such a fate befalls, she only believed that she could change. She did not know that she could become anything, that any human can become anything. Like many men and women, she did not know what being human is.

  II.

  She’s passed into shade. She is under an elevated highway.

  The morning has expanded and increased in brightness. It is summer, after all. The morning is an oval, infinitely broad and deep at its center. The morning is a lozenge. Heat is constant and balances perfectly on every surface.

  The jenny hangs her head. Until this moment the jenny has been persistently in motion. She considers a puddle of standing water in the relative darkness beneath the highway but cannot bring herself to drink. Her fear is an ache or it is a rigid alertness, at a donkey’s nostrils, at a donkey’s ears, along her spine. She is a donkey, so how can she know where to go? What is direction to her? A donkey can flee. A donkey can hunger, thirst.

  Here is a short tunnel with walls of brick. Humans and other animals have urinated and defecated and vomited here. Sometimes they have slept here or been slaughtered. The smells remain, fainter in some places and so, confusing. The scent of one presence attaches to the outlines of another. The imprint of an old dog is entangled in the acrid, well-defined trail left by a colony of rats who make nightly use of three feet of this passage in their transit from one hole to another. There is gasoline; the reek of human distress; rubber and mold.

  What it means to thirst in the way she now thirsts is to have perception shrink, simplify. Even the simplicity of a donkey can be further reduced.

  Strange, too, to see the creations of humanity in this way—as if from a great distance. The minds of humans are vast and essentially identical to one another. It takes very little effort even for such a being as a donkey to reflect in this way. The minds of humans are extremely big and very similar and yet they are full of blockages. The lumbering device that is the human mind acquaints itself with other human minds with terrible difficulty; its ability to recognize itself is even more limited, faltering. Thus the construction of mirrors and barriers throughout the landscape human beings inhabit. Barriers exist nowhere else in the natural world; no other organic or living thing knows a barrier. The human body does not know barriers; it dies and is transformed. Similarly, there are no images in the world. Only in the minds of men are there images. There are lenses, there is focus, there is projection and interference, but only in the mind of man do static images exist. A donkey will know this. A donkey stands in the narrow space it has been permitted. A donkey may suffer death at any moment. A van swings roughly into the road within the tunnel and idles.

  The sound of a door: the latch and then precise, light closure. A rubber heel in glass and gravel.

  The jenny stiffens. A donkey can imagine flight and yet feel sick with longing, with an anticipatory dependence on the human hand. The jenny foresees her capture. She is half in love, pleading for this to occur. She will be restrained. The barriers of human habitation will be explained to her by the confines of some cell, cage, or paddock—or perhaps by a butcher, a stunning blow and then knife. She, as donkey, will give meaning to such structures, such behaviors. She will rejoin the world of men, will be reincorporated, and will no longer be an exile.

  She can hear the human behind her, at her left. It is clear that the human makes an effort not to frighten her. If a donkey could laugh in such a moment, this donkey would laugh. The fear that paralyzes her is a feeling of already being bound to the human, a feeling of uncertainty about the temporality within which—along which—this ownership will unfold, if the ownership has not already happened, whether or not it is still possible to flee, even if for now it seems possible. There is a sensation of dazzling, of being dazzled, though this has nothing to do with the sense of sight or any kind of brightness.

  The human crunches over small debris in his path. “Yeah,” he is saying, clearly into a cell phone, “I couldn’t believe it either. Hold on,” he says. He is retiring his device.

  That the human does not speak further indicates his resolve. He will reach her, desires to reach her.

  Therefore the jenny is not thinking when she moves, when she springs forward onto the hard fronts of her hooves. Her knees come up—if these can be called “knees”—and she is stamping, streaking into the sun and the vast industrial stretch beyond the underpass.

  Behind her, very briefly, early as it were, she hears the astonished squawk of the human, who seems compacted, deflated somehow, by her sudden exit. She runs.

  To her right and left are warehouse buildings, senseless places. There is hasty fencing in corrugated metal. Gasoline soaks all things under the sun. She runs. She runs.

  Breath inside her body is ropes, some kind of a net, tensing and slackening. She gathers herself around this, though it is a sensation like pain. She forces the donkey’s body forward, even if against a kind of bond, a knot or a resistance. The physical world possesses her, and yet she strains forward into it, as if she must, as if she must be the one to do it, as if she must choose, as if she is free, as if there were a desire or a body she could hold back, could keep. She has a feeling now as if the body of the donkey has been impaled by an infinitely thin yet infinitely strong metal wire, as if she propels the carcass that she is along this line that cuts her flesh and yet constitutes the sole remaining narrative concerning her being. It is her own story. It runs her through.

  And she is impassioned by this, because the flesh is not willing. She is in a rage because she is not human any longer and no longer has human relations, friends. The hours in the day are nothing more than a kind of empty space to her and can’t be filled by language. The hard bottoms of her “feet,” her hooves, strike the ground and she wants to strike the ground harder. She wants to sha
tter this hardness, and she wants the heat in the muscles of the animal to melt the tissue and the sinew and the bone, and she wants the animal’s jagged breath to become like acid and wants it to eat away the inside of the body of the animal until there is nothing left there but vacant air.

  But this does not happen. What happens instead is far stranger than this. I do not know if you can believe me. What happens instead is that now, no matter how wildly, how intently she pushes, seeking greater speed and suffering in the body of the animal, she experiences only a sinking, a coldness. It is in broad daylight, and it is on the ground, but it is as if she falls—as if she is in darkness. She falls to the earth in coolness. She comes closer to the earth. She is small now and she is soft. She moves into a piece of shade, an awning over a garage. She has the sense that she “darts.” Her eyes are puzzled by the light, and yet she seems to see behind things. She seems to see, now, in time, as well as in space. All objects contain a temporal dimension her eyes move, lick along. It is with a light fascination that her eyes whip across the surface of the world. The line of the street hovers before her and recedes slightly; she follows the intricate surface of an adjacent sign with raised lettering, lingering in the lowest interior angle of an E. Her ears tingle with information. Her nose acquires eternity. She is very small. She sinks further back against the building, pressing herself against its solidity.