I rummaged around for useful things, stepping carefully between the pieces of broken glass with my bare feet. I shook out a thin blanket, which I could wrap in a certain way and use to carry things as we had done on the island. I was also lucky enough to find a dull knife with a sheath, a very thin and transparent plastic bottle with a cap - in hopes that I would soon come across water - which was so aged that it was more opaque than transparent, and a pair of sandals that, like the sheath, seemed to be made from a type of animal hide. I wrapped everything into the blanket and slung it around my chest, walking out the door while there was still enough light to spot the broken glass on the floor.
Seeing as there wasn't much time left in the day, and that my feet and legs were tired with the unaccustomed exercise, I decided to sleep under the relative shelter of the building's entrance. I leaned against the wall, cut up one of the melons and ate it, watching the sky until the first stars appeared, and listening to that cacophony of sounds that takes place as the diurnal creatures of the world settle in for the night, and the nocturnal ones wake and stir into movement. The sounds were different from any I'd ever heard, strange chatters, screams, squeaks, and moans, along with a haunting call of three notes being repeated over and over again in the muffled distance, which almost sounded like a wood flute; though a bit harsher, deeper.
There was one fleeting moment after dark, when the forest had quieted down and I picked up the knife to put it back into its sheath before going to sleep, that I was suddenly struck with a flashing image of Onni, covering his stomach, looking down at his hands. I rejected it as fast as I could, thinking of something else, concentrating on a few new sounds that were rising in the trees, bending all of my attention at them as if they were the most imperative thing in the world. But I wouldn't be able to do this for long. The fact remained that already most of my basic needs had been met, that my situation was becoming less urgent by the hour, and that soon, my mind would find itself wandering outside the confined spaces of immediate necessity. Soon, I would have no choice but to acknowledge what I'd done to Onni.
I wrapped myself in the blanket and slept on wooden boards in front of the door, waking only once during the night, after an animal, probably a large rodent of some kind, overturned a few stones as it scurried across the road in front of the house. I remember hearing it stop to look at me, but I think I might have drifted off to sleep again even before it moved on.
* * *
32
I woke to a cloudy day of soft light and flat shadows.
After I packed everything into the blanket and tied it around myself, I walked around the perimeter of the building trying to figure out how it had been supplied with water. I couldn't find anything, and so could only assume that it was an underground system of some kind.
When I left, I followed a black wire that sagged low to the ground and strung from the roof of the house to the road. Once at the road, it turned and continued down the entire stretch of it, as far as the eye could see, never seeming to stop. This was the beginning of the cable, or rather system of cables, that was attached to the top of huge steel poles lining up in an endless procession of rotting shafts, all of them bleeding dry puddles of orange onto the ground. The wires had a plastic sheathing that had decayed and blistered open in places like the flesh of a carcass gnawed away by scavengers, only with a twined mass of metal strings instead of bones. I imagined that this was for the transportation of electricity, and found myself wishing that Harek had told me more about the way past cultures had depended on it. We had talked about it once, but he was dismissive; pointing out that the systems for producing and handling it, apart from being ruined, were also complicated; and, he had added, as there was no way that they could be fixed, they certainly weren't worth wasting our time on. When he had said this, I'd thought about the elaborate scheme around the few electrical lights in the shelter, the coloured wires writhing along the ceilings, through holes, over doors, slinking along the upper corners of rooms, and finally into black sheets of glass that were lying on the roofs, then back out again, continuing on their twisting journey. I could see that he was right; it was complicated. Which, if anything, after seeing how extensive the network of wires on this mainland was, only made me wonder why these people had gone through all the trouble in the first place.
In the middle of the day, after losing sight of the ocean for an hour or so, the road I was walking on ended, intersecting with a wider one. I had to choose between right and left, the stringy poles stretching off into either direction. I chose left, only because it was descending, as water would, hoping that I would come across a stream or river at some point in the near future.
And as a main trail usually has branches that veer off from it, so was there with this road. I began to see a few, and then many smaller tracks that broke away and disappeared, curving out of sight or being overgrown and hidden by the foliage; the strange rusted shafts, hanging with both vines and cables, following them into the trees. Until eventually, the side roads were everywhere, and the number of wires had multiplied until they looked like a loose fishing net that draped over the landscape. Which was when I caught sight of the town.
I had seen a few cities in books, but their scale had always seemed a little abstract to me. Enormous towers poking into the air, concrete streets sprawling beneath them, dots of buildings filling the land to the horizon. It was either that or a picture of a corrupt palace with statues perched in front of it, where the city was in motion around it, eerie streaks of red in the blurry foreground and background. But the town that I came across was neither one of these expanses of infrastructure, nor of palaces and fountains. In fact, the closest thing I had seen to it was in paintings from the art book; the ones with a little cluster of buildings crowning a hill in the distance, fortified walls wrapping around it.
To be honest, from what I could see of this town while I descended into it, it wasn't all that impressive. And though its size was about the same as the ones in some of the paintings, it wasn't even surrounded by a defensive barrier (which, Dana had pointed out, were used to protect the townspeople inside from their neighbouring townspeople, in the likely event that they were as violent and opportunistic as themselves). But regardless of the fact that it wasn't anything close to what I thought it would be, I was glad to have the chance to walk through it. I imagined that if anything could offer insight as to how my ancestors thought, it was the place where they had lived their everyday lives.
I stopped just before entering the grid of streets, spotting a stream at the lowest part of land on the other side of the town. This stream had also been a flooding river in the not so distant past, as the banks were terraced and bare, except for new vegetation that was interspersed throughout silt-coated rocks. Just above the stony terraces that the flood had made were several different kinds of fruit trees, and I could see further upstream that there was a crop-type plant that grew in clumps in the same way that the grain did on the island. I had found plenty of food and water, and would gather whatever I could after I had inspected the town.
However, before even walking into it, I was already getting a feeling as to this culture's odd way of thinking. There were remains of a massive cemented wall lining the banks of the river, which must have channelized the stream toward some designed end. Though, the flooding water had since gouged through and around it, reclaiming what had been its natural path.
Where I entered the town, the wires amassed into a fantastic jumble of poles and lines, stretching along every road and on every side of every building; and as I ducked under the ones that were sagging close to the ground, and looked down one of the streets, I suddenly realized why these people had gone through all the trouble to produce and transport electricity. For some reason, they were afraid of the dark.
There were electric lights everywhere - or at least the inverted bowl that had held lights at one point, their remnants dangling at the end of tall, arcing poles (which were different from the ones on the road, but ju
st as rusted and vine laden). They dotted every imaginable street, side road, corner, intersection, and were in front of every dwelling. At night, they must have flooded the entire town in light, drawing a clear line at its outskirts between the place that was inhabited by people, and whatever lay beyond. And when I thought of it that way - that they had felt a need to distinguish between what was swallowed by the night and what wasn't - I realized that it was probably something much more than the dark that they were afraid of, it was wilderness itself.
The hints were everywhere; in the barricade along the stream, the grid of streets, lines abrupt and even, the careful angles of the roofs edging down, troughs to collect the water lest it spew out wildly from the shingles and onto the soil, the faces of walls squared with the roads, the windows parallel with the ground beneath them. These were a people who felt a need to apply strict rules to their environment. And I could see that, when the earth shifted outside of the parameters they had placed on it, when the cemented walkways lining the streets bulged and skewed, they had repaired them as quickly as they could, pounding down the soil, reshaping it, subjugating it. When the natural world fluxed, they reacted in ways that must have made them feel like they were still in command.
And it seemed like the closer the nature was to them, the stricter the rules became. There were corners of their rectangular lots with trees and bushes that still had scars from being endlessly pruned, truncated, and sculpted. There were containers of soil that hung from windows, which must have had carefully trimmed flowers, plants, or herbs inside them, where there was no room for them to grow out of control. There was a square plot in the centre of the town that probably served as a kind of public garden, a paved lane winding through the centre of it, and a pond lined with transported boulders and filled with redirected water, where domesticated birds most likely paddled around waiting to be fed.
I imagined that these people saw the wilderness as a kind of adversary in a continuous battle, something that was devious and cunning. Because regardless of their calculations and inventions, it would have still found a way to poke its fingers into every facet of their lives. I could picture them, frustrated, watching as it crept across the fields that they'd cleared and squared, growing back in oblong shapes, slithering toward their houses; stubborn leaves bursting out of branches that they'd cut, vines crawling over their newly constructed walls, spiders finding the corners of their rooms as the ideal site for a web, mice vigilantly checking the doors and foundations for imperfections, and finding them. Its fortitude was inexhaustible. And as they seemed to be pitting themselves against it, no wonder they had drawn a line with light at the edges of their towns. It illuminated the one space where they would be able to convince themselves that they had won, a place where they could believe that their constant manipulation was actually necessary, where they were important. And at the same time, it would allow them to put their backs to the wilderness that was stirring in the dark behind them, which could effortlessly point out how insignificant they really were.
Then it struck me that people had probably lived whole lives in these places, 'safe' inside one of the grids of wire-ridden buildings, that they spent their years without ever feeling the wind on their faces, or the rain run over their scalp, without even once being completely enveloped by the dark or by a true silence. And whoever these people were, I'm sure they were secretly haunted with a feeling that something was missing from their lives. Because they would have been living in a lost place, forever drifting between two worlds - one that they wished they hadn't come from, and another where they would never really belong.
I walked out of the town and descended into the flood plains without ever entering any of the houses. What I didn't know was that this town would be the biggest settlement I would ever come across, and I regret now not spending a little more time there, poking my head through windows, snooping around through looted kitchens, because I'm sure I could have learned a lot more about that culture. But the truth was that the few things I'd gathered about it were already enough to push me away, out from their streets and their paved walkways, and into the fields that surrounded the town. I felt uneasy there, for obvious reasons.
After drinking from the stream and filling the water bottle that I'd taken from the house the day before (which, to my surprise, didn't leak at all), I headed toward the trees and plants I'd sighted above the floodplains. While I picked through them, I began to get a good feeling about how much time I would have to spend searching for food in this land. The soil was fertile, and things seemed to grow easily. I gathered a few different varieties of fruits and vegetables, some that looked plump and ripe, and others that were a bit thin and dry but still seemed like they might have some sustenance to them. (I would later learn - after carrying it for two full days - that one of the largest, heaviest, and most succulent looking of these was completely inedible, and I would throw it to the ground after putting some in my mouth, spitting it out, wiping my lips with my sleeve, and shaking my head at myself for not having tasted it earlier.)
I wrapped everything in the blanket, tied it around my chest and stood on the edge of one of the banks, looking out at the ocean in the distance, the river squiggling through the landscape toward it. It was an interesting moment. Because now that I had food, water, and could see that shelter wasn't going to be much of a problem, I seemed to be at a loss for what to do next. Where exactly should I go, and what was the point of going there? Though, mostly, I wondered what I was going to do about The Goal. Was I going to start collecting the plants that I'd been trained to find, pillage equipment to make the sterilization mixtures, and then search the land for people on my own? And was that something that I wanted to do, or was obliged to do? Or neither? Or both?
I didn't know, which meant there were a few things that I had to figure out. But to do that, I would need to find a place where I could rest and think for a while - preferably somewhere far from the sad lattice of streets and wires that was still in front of me. And knowing that freshwater was going to be harder to come by than food, it was clear that I would have to stay along the river; I just wasn't sure if I should follow it down to the sea or venture deeper into the mainland. Of course, providing for myself would have been easier on the coast; I knew how to fish, swim, catch crabs, dig for shellfish, and gather seaweeds. Though, I knew there would be enough resources inland as well, which seemed to be the decision I was leaning toward. Maybe it was simple curiosity. Or maybe it was in thinking that the river could have come from giant hills of some kind, and maybe even from melted snow and ice - from mountains. Whatever it was, my legs seemed to make the choice for me, and I turned and started walking upstream, hiking until the land steepened, and the water was roaring down a thick chute beside me. When this rise tapered off, I lost sight of the town, and soon after that, the ocean; which, it turns out, I would never see again in my life.
I stopped after a few hours, and spent the night under a tree beside the river, the rushing water seeming to fade in and out of urgent whispers in a language I couldn't understand.
* * *
33
I felt like the land was growing, as if the contours were rolling away from me, the horizon crawling ever further into the distance. Its size was on a greater scale than anything I'd imagined, than any guess at enormity I'd ever made. I travelled for three days up the river, a tiny dot of movement being swallowed into the folds of the terrain, and though it felt like I was making some real distance, I'm sure that in relation to the entire landmass, I'd barely even scratched an edge.
While I walked I would switch between being barefoot and wearing the sandals I'd taken from the house. It was good to have something between the pads of my feet and the ground, and I could certainly move faster with them on. But after only a few hours, I would start to get blisters from the straps, and so would have to revert back to the waddling pace of hiking barefoot.
As it turned out, finding food along the way was a little more difficult than I'd guessed. W
hile there were straggling patches of crop plants and fruit trees in some areas, there were also long stretches of woody vegetation that didn't seem to yield anything. Though, between what I'd already collected and what I was picking from the trees whenever I could, I had at least two days of provisions in the blanket with me at all times, which was enough.
The only time I stopped during those three days - besides to eat, drink, and sleep - was to examine a few interesting things that caught my eye; strange animal tracks that crossed the blotches of dirt along the riverbed, colourful insects scurrying away from my feet and into the cracks between the rocks, curious shorebirds that fed along the banks, which would flutter a safe distance away and perch on rocks to watch me pass. Once I found a deposit of clay-like mud that had countless prints imbedded inside it, one of which looked like the distorted palm of a human hand. I crouched down and compared them with the size and markings of my hand until I was confident they were different - though it was definitely a primate of some kind. I also stopped every time I came across a stray building that was perched on the edge of the river, peering my head through the door for a few seconds, eyeing the tools on the walls and the debris on the floor, speculating that most of them were temporary housing, maybe belonging to farmers and herders that stayed in them according to the harvest or seasons. However, none of these buildings ever struck me as a place that I could picture myself staying in for a longer period of time, or even, for that matter, to sit beside for more than a brief and needed rest. And so I would press on - on and up.
As the land steadily rose, the vegetation changed to better suit the differences in the air, moisture, and temperature of the rising altitude. The flora was becoming more lush and dense with every hour of travel, until finally, near the end of the third day, I came to some woody shrubs that were so thick that they seemed to create an almost impenetrable barrier. I had been watching this line of bushes get nearer all day, along with the clouds, which were sinking ever lower, growing darker, their bellies fat with rain.
Veracity Page 32