The doves don’t return right away. Instead, a single chickadee lights on the mesh tray and picks up one seed in its beak—a seed it will crack against tree bark, to eat only the kernel at its center—and takes off. Some abstract longing or regret flutters up into the air with that bird. I think of the chimney swift in my hand and the dozens of other birds released in the garden that is no longer mine. No matter how hard I tried not to get attached, of course I felt sadness and worry when I let those birds go, as though a part of me would disappear with their flight and eventual demise.
Jackson crouches down on his perch. A thousand miles away, a few descendants of the birds who learned to fly in my spare room might be building their nests. Miles settles back on his post too to resume his scrutiny of his favorite subject: me. Jackson is my sentry, my outward eye; he watches the world for me. Miles is my twin, my familiar, the one whose inward gaze gives me back to myself. Anchored between them, I am exactly where I should be, alone at home.
The Re’em
Adam McOmber
UPON THE DEATH OF GERMAN MONK Ulrich Gottard, a manuscript was delivered to the Roman Curia in a sealed oaken box for consideration by the Holy See. The lord protector of Cromberg Cloister, Father Benedict, wrote in his letter of submittal that he deemed the document a “significant and distressing epistle” due, in part, to the impossible and quasi-heretical nature of its narrative. What was perhaps even more troubling, though, was the reaction the letter produced among younger initiates of the German cloister. These men, like Ulrich Gottard himself, were said to be of a delicate and Romantic nature. “Troublesome searchers,” Benedict called them. The followers of Gottard began to meet secretly in a dimly lit room beneath the cloister’s chapter hall. It was there they attempted an interpretation of the letter—as if its passages were some kind of holy writ. The group began referring to itself as the Re’em and eventually claimed to have discovered that Gottard’s letter contained a message that would soon deliver them all from earthly constraint. When the members of the Re’em began to suggest a pilgrimage to Egypt, Father Benedict was forced to intercede.
Gottard’s narrative—now well known in higher echelons of the Roman Church—unfolds over a series of days during a visit to the Holy Land, soon after his taking of First Orders. An amateur geologist as well as a man of God, Gottard begins his writings with a description of certain curious formations of volcanic alkaline rock in the arid landscape surrounding Mount Sinai in Egypt. Gottard notes that the rocks had, in places, fused together and formed what looked like the arches of a “black and imposing architecture that lay crumbling on the stony hillside, as if left there by some ancient and unknown race.”
It was in one such glittering temple of blackish stone Gottard encountered the animal that would soon overwhelm his thoughts. “The creature stood upon its four legs,” he writes, “and was the size and approximate shape of a Calabrese stallion. Its coat was pale in color, and the hair of its pelt was longish and matted in places. Clearly not a domesticated beast.” Other elements of the animal’s appearance, he continues, were entirely unique. For, unlike a horse, the creature was possessed of cloven hooves and a short, leathery tail. In temperament, it behaved nobly, regarding Gottard as he approached, much as one man might carefully regard a stranger. The creature’s most striking feature was the single braided horn that protruded from the center of its head. “The horn,” Gottard writes, “in certain light, appeared semitranslucent, and at other times looked as though it was nothing more than a piece of twined bone.” The monk soon begins referring to the creature as a “re’em”—an animal mentioned in the Vulgate of St. Jerome (Canst thou bind the horned re’em with his band in the furrow. Or will he harrow the valley after thee?).
Upon returning to the village near the mountain, Gottard ascertained that such creatures, though not common, were at times found in the area. Their home—a valley some miles from Mount Sinai—was accessible if accompanied by a suitable guide. Gottard, unable to banish the encounter with the creature from his mind, produced coins from his purse, and a guide was brought forth—a young man, dressed in white, introduced as Chaths.
Gottard writes that, upon seeing the young man for the first time, he felt a sense of recognition. It was not that Gottard had met the young man before, but in Chaths, he saw something of himself. “As if the villagers had produced not a guide but a mirror,” he writes.
On the following morning, the two set out to locate the valley of the re’em. And as they they walked, Gottard found the guide unresponsive to his questioning. Chaths would do no more than mumble a phrase or two in his own language, of which Gottard knew little. The journey was longer than the monk expected, and soon the guide indicated they should make camp for the night. This would allow them to arrive at the valley by morning light. “It would be unwise to approach after nightfall,” Chaths said in words finally plain enough for Gottard to understand.
The monk found he could not sleep. There was a wind that made a strange sound in the hills. And small animals seemed to scuttle in the darkness beyond the reach of the firelight. He spent much of the night considering the fire itself, imagining he saw within its flames the re’em, walking in circles. Where the re’em trod, black formations of stone appeared to rise. Horns that pierced the earth. Gottard turned from these visions in the fire to regard his guide again. There was something in the young man’s features that was not handsomeness exactly, but a quality more like beauty. The sort of beauty that radiated from an ancient sculpture or a stone made smooth by the sea. Gottard felt drawn to Chaths and troubled in his heart because of it. As the sun began to rise, the monk went to the edge of firelight to kneel and pray. “It was then,” he writes, “that a most distressing event occurred. I felt as though a hand were suddenly pressed against not only my mouth but also the surface of my very soul. My prayers would not leave me. They were trapped. God would not hear.”
This disturbance of spirit caused Gottard to call out, waking Chaths, who brought water and sat with the monk. In order to calm Gottard, Chaths finally relented and told him more about the creature they sought.
“It’s not an animal,” Chaths said. “Not as you believe.”
“What then?” Gottard asked.
The guide shook his head. “It does not exist. Not as other things do. The sight of it is thought to be caused by a fissure that develops in the brain. A fever is said to cause the fissure.”
Gottard remembered feeling ill a few nights before he encountered the re’em. He’d attributed the sickness merely to the sort of malaise that often came on during travel. “So you’re saying the animal is some sort of hallucination?” Gottard asked.
Chaths shook his head. “The fissure—it allows a man to see crossways. The animal walks there in that light.”
“I don’t understand—crossways in the light?”
Chaths offered more water to the monk.
“You’ve been afflicted with the fever too?” Gottard asked.
Chaths nodded. “That’s why I’m your guide.”
The idea that sickness had caused him to see the re’em troubled Gottard. Perhaps there was no point in any of this. He was chasing a mirage. Chaths indicated they should begin walking before the sun rose too high. Soon enough the two men came upon not a valley but a kind of hole in the wall of a rocky outcropping. The hole was surrounded by more of the same black volcanic stones that Gottard had seen upon his original encounter with the re’em. The hole seemed to waver slightly, to fluctuate. And Gottard wondered if this too was a symptom of the supposed fissure in the brain.
Chaths indicated that Gottard must be silent once inside the tunnel. The horned creatures were not easily disturbed, but there were other things that lived in the valley beyond. Things that did not appreciate the presence of men. The young guide seemed troubled as he spoke, as if he could see some future the monk could not. Gottard attempted to provide comfort. But Chaths pulled away, indicating that Gottard was not to touch him.
It is in
Gottard’s description of the “valley” that the sense of his letter begins to falter. What he saw after emerging from the other side of the tunnel does not correlate to any known topography in the vicinity of Mount Sinai. It was a landscape, verdant and lush. “Like a garden allowed to run wild for years,” he writes. Farther along, the landscape began to change and the earth became covered with what Gottard describes as a new variety of rock. The monk posits that the pressure of ancient volcanic activity had caused crystals to form. The large crystals protruded from the earth and were of varying colors: deep vermilion, saffron, and azure. The sunlight, which streamed into the valley at an odd angle (crosswise, thought Gottard), struck the crystals and caused a prismatic effect.
Gottard and Chaths appeared to be walking on the floor of a strange sea. The waters of the sea were composed of wildly contrasting colors, so utterly immersive that Gottard soon began to feel as though he were drowning. He fell to his knees, and Chaths came to support him. Gathered in the guide’s arms, Gottard forgot he’d been warned not to touch Chaths, and he put his hand on the young man’s face and then on his neck. Thinking again how beautiful Chaths was. Not like a mirror or a sculpture, but more like water. Chaths was a still lake in this ocean of shifting color.
It was then that Gottard heard the sound of hoof on stone and turned to look out into the valley. Standing between two of the great crystalline forms was the horse with the single horn. The re’em, in its own environment, was contemplative, more circumspect than it had been on the mountainside. As it approached, the colors that rose from the surrounding crystals appeared to intensify. They shifted to paint the body of the pale horse. Gottard, in his delirium, writes that the braided bone of the re’em’s horn seemed to pour color from its tip. As if the horn were bleeding. And the bright, colorful material that issued forth ran in streams down the horse’s forehead and into its black eyes.
As Gottard reached out to touch the braided horn (for the re’em was now close enough for him to do just that), he sensed the approach of a vast form. Chaths had said the re’em were not alone in the valley, and Gottard suddenly realized this was true. The monk writes: “The being—for it was a sort of being that approached—was too large to actually be perceived by my eye. It seemed instead that the atmosphere, the very air of the valley, grew denser. And it also seemed that the being sang in a voice that was too loud to be heard by my ear. Yet I could sense the sound of it nonetheless.”
“You aren’t permitted here,” Chaths said. “I’m sorry, Brother Gottard.”
“What do you mean?” the monk asked, turning to look at the guide. The young man was alive with bleeding color. It swam across his body, as he stood with his palm against the neck of the re’em.
“You are not permitted,” Chaths said again.
“It was then,” Gottard writes, “that the approaching form—the great being—enclosed me. I felt as if I were drawn up into the palm of a vast hand—a hand too large for me to see. Chaths watched from the ground. As did the re’em. I was lifted high enough that I could perceive the entirety of the valley. All of it was alive with maddening color. I saw a whole herd of re’em running—making rivers in the shifting light. I was drawn higher still, until I felt that I was being pulled out into the heavenly spheres. I could hear the spheres singing; they joined their voices with the voice of the great being. And still, I was drawn upward, toward the cold empyrean itself. And then finally I awoke on the hillside where I’d first encountered the beast. I lay beneath the crumbling architecture, already forgetting the colors I’d seen. Such was the dullness of our world. I called out for Chaths. But my call went unanswered. The guide had remained in the valley. Likely he’d known all along he would stay. Perhaps that was the fate of all guides. And there beneath the black rock, I dreamed that I too would one day guide someone to the valley. And then I would finally be permitted.”
Cardinal
Nora Khan
I WALKED JEREMIAH OUT OF CLASS, down the hall, out to the yard, and let him scream into a square yellow pillow. i watched the veins in his neck fill with blood then contract as though his blood had drained out with his sound. if he’d forgotten his pillow, i put my hand over his mouth. my hand wet with his phlegm as he screamed into my palm.
We would stand shaking, looking out into the woods around the school for a few spaces of breath. I held my right hand away from my side and his face flooded with relief. It was December in Connecticut, and the weatherman said we had remarkable apricity, a warm sun in winter.
I’m a class aide to Mrs. Albrecht, third-grade teacher at Franklin Arts Charter. I take the children to the nurse to get their medication and I step in to manage them when they’re out of line. Jeremiah had been put on another pill, an orange one, and his psychiatrist said he would act out this way for a while. Albrecht and I came up with plans for him. Letting him scream outside was one of our more bizarre routines, but it worked. It was extreme, but not that crazy. Crazy was the amount of medication he was on. Craziest was pure Jeremiah, no medication. Something had to give.
After one particular session, we headed back into Classroom West, where he cut quick past the group tables to the long windows. He knelt at the sill and watched for birds, for their numinous quicksilver presence in the thick of white oak edging the yard.
He turned to me. Dark-brown hair, yolky eyes, a thick eyelash fringe that made him look like an exiled prince. “Where is he? When will he come back? Will he come close to the window?”
None of us knew. He meant the cardinal, the one that lit on a tree that lined up with the center of our room. That winter the small red king took an interest in our class. When he lit high up, he turned to look back down at us, at all the children, their small necks straining, full of blood and more blood, looking up at his brighter body’s blood on the leaves.
And so the children caught the fever to see the bird. Whether he flashed diagonal or lingered on a branch for a minute, his presence lit up the room and turned them ecstatic. All the lighter, bilious males had cleared out months before, and he remained. Throughout the day, the children waited for Jeremiah to see the cardinal, because he always saw the bird first, caught him, and then cried out, There, there, there. Look.
The second week into this bird-watching, Albrecht paused at the window. “How fantastic,” she said, leaning over Jeremiah to watch. “A red animal! A bright red animal. And it’s so gray and cold outside. Isn’t it nice to see some color?”
Jeremiah took up most of my days at Franklin. I gave him his pills in the morning and afternoon. He was seven. He needed them all. His whites, his oranges, his yellows, his blues. White and yellow for focus, blue for happiness, orange for calm and impulse control. He rarely ate; he traded parts of his lunch away throughout the day. During gym, he ran and ran. Large heavy head and swollen stomach.
Carolina Tearstone, his mother, explained that the pills brought him down to speed. As she spoke, she flattened the air before her with her hands. Carolina was a spindly lawyer with bloodshot eyes and she lived in a townhouse in the historic district. I had once heard her staccato on the phone as she walked the length of the halls.
“Then we send him away. Send him to a boarding school or a special school and they can deal with him there,” she snipped. “He’s a boy. He can handle it. Let him handle it. Throw him in cold water and make him learn. That’s how I learned! He’s been a nightmare, Jeremy, you aren’t here to know—”
Hang on tightly, I told him, as he swung from my arm, dragging me down with each step down the hall. The halls dwarfed us on that long walk to the nurse’s office. The auditorium was locked. Pipes exposed, roofs leaking, rooms that changed from hot to cold on a dime.
The school nurse cut the big pills with a small knife then slid them across the counter toward me. Five, six, three, and two. Two, one half, three, and three. I turned each pill in the light. In college, my roommate, a Gold Coast princess, had been on the same pills since she was eight years old. Thirty minutes after taking her dose
, when their effect was heaviest, she would talk about how her parents had abandoned her. I thought of all the kids in college taking triple rounds to bang through finals, then going on to become doctors, lawyers, and bankers. Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, Dexedrine.
Hang on tightly, let go lightly. I picked up the phrase from a movie. I also had read, in a poem, Lose something every day. I tried to learn how to lose everything in my life with a little less pain each time. I lost my parents, pop, pop, two soup cans filled with water knocked off a railing into the grass. My mother, that was last winter. I saw her body wheeled briskly out our front door in the middle of the night. The toxicology report noted no foul. Clearly, it had all gone foul. I hadn’t been able to help her. I didn’t even know she was ill, or where all the medication in the bathroom had even come from. What had I been doing but building a brick wall around my selfish life? Rich tapestry we weave.
Over the past year I let the loss sink into my flesh, learned to pass it through me as slow waste. That job was the twine holding my life together. I was twenty-four years old. I sat in the corner of West and watched the children and felt fear, hope, longing for each of them. I was afraid for their delicacy, their heads filling with all the images and stories they’d carry for life.
Emil Jones, Lisa Taliaferro, Leah Thompson, Gwendolyn Rael, Jeremiah Tearstone, Julian Squire, Amy Wadsworth, Tessa Hansen, J. P. Lilly.
We taught them how to call things by their names. School, temple, bird, snow, god. Some days, I could see my own edges blur. I was Jeremiah, I was Emil, I was Leah. I was all of their mothers and I was all and I was in each of them.
I thought about Jeremiah’s brain, the synapses cleared by cold blue fire, cotton balls shoved in the spark plugs. A few glass layers snapped into the gel of the optic nerve, his gaze contracting. I thought about him waking one day and wanting his mind back, wanting his singular disturbances all to himself. Wanting reparation for all the time he could have spent in the woods, ears open to its silent music.
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