Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  Donna leaned against the wall. A film of haze tinted the sky grey, intensifying at the focal point to dirty brown, as if a dead spot were burned into the center of her vision. When she looked down, her eyes kept grabbing for ground and finding more sky. There were a few wispy clouds in the distance and nothing more. No serpents coiled in the air. She should have felt disappointed but, really, she hadn’t expected better. This was of a piece with all the natural wonders she had ever seen, the waterfalls, geysers and scenic vistas that inevitably included power lines, railings and parking lots absent from the postcards. Russ was staring intently ahead, hawklike, frowning. His jaw worked slightly, and she wondered what he saw.

  “Hey, look what I found!” Piggy whooped. “It’s a stairway!”

  They joined him at the top of an institutional-looking concrete and iron stairway. It zigzagged down the cliff toward an infinitely distant and nonexistent Below, dwindling into hazy blue. Quietly, as if he’d impressed himself, Piggy said, “What do you suppose is down there?”

  “Only one way to find out, isn’t there?” Russ said.

  * * * *

  Russ went first, then Piggy, then Donna, the steps ringing dully under their feet. Graffiti covered the rocks, worn spraypaint letters in yellow and black and red scrawled one over the other and faded by time and weather into mutual unreadability, and on the iron railings, words and arrows and triangles had been markered onto or dug into the paint with knife or nail: jurgen bin scheisskopf. motley crue. death to satan america imperialist. Seventeen steps down, the first landing was filthy with broken brown glass, bits of crumbled concrete, cigarette butts, soggy, half-melted cardboard. The stairway folded back on itself and they followed it down.

  “You ever had fugu?” Piggy asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “It’s Japanese poisonous blowfish. It has to be prepared very carefully—they license the chefs—and even so, several people die every year. It’s considered a great delicacy.”

  “Nothing tastes that good,” Russ said.

  “It’s not the flavor,” Piggy said enthusiastically. “It’s the poison. Properly prepared, see, there’s a very small amount left in the sashimi and you get a threshhold dose. Your lips and the tips of your fingers turn cold. Numb. That’s how you know you’re having the real thing. That’s how you know you’re living right on the edge.”

  “I’m already living on the edge,” Russ said. He looked startled when Piggy laughed.

  A fat moon floated in the sky, pale as a disk of ice melting in blue water. It bounced after them as they descended, kicking aside loose soda bottles in styrofoam sleeves, crushed Marlboro boxes, a scattering of carbonized sparkplugs. On one landing they found a crumpled shopping cart, and Piggy had to muscle it over the railing and watch it fall. “Sure is a lot of crap here,” he observed. The landing smelled faintly of urine.

  “It’ll get better farther down,” Russ said. “We’re still near the top, where people can come to get drunk after work.” He pushed on down. Far to one side they could see the brown flow from the industrial canal where it spilled into space, widening and then slowly dispersing into rainbowed mist, distance glamoring it beauty.

  “How far are we planning to go?” Donna asked apprehensively.

  “Don’t be a weak sister,” Piggy sneered. Russ said nothing.

  The deeper they went, the shabbier the stairway grew, and the spottier its maintenance. Pipes were missing from the railing. Where patches of paint had fallen away the bolts anchoring the stair to the rock were walnut-sized lumps of rust.

  Needle-clawed marsupials chittered warningly from niches in the rock as they passed. Tufts of grass and moth-white gentians grew in the loess-filled cracks.

  Hours passed. Donna’s feet and calves and the small of her back grew increasingly sore, but she refused to be the one to complain. By degrees she stopped looking over the side and out into the sky, and stared instead at her feet flashing in and out of sight while one hand went slap grab tug on the rail. She felt sweaty and miserable.

  Back home she had a half-finished paper on the Three Days Incident of March, 1810, when the French Occupation, by order of Napoleon himself, had fired cannonade after cannonade over the Edge into nothingness. They had hoped to make rainstorms of devastating force that would lash and destroy their enemies, and created instead only a gunpowder haze, history’s first great failure in weather control. This descent was equally futile, Donna thought, an endless and wearying exercise in nothing. Just the same as the rest of her life. Every time her father was reposted, she had resolved to change, to be somebody different this time around, whatever the price, even if—no, especially if—it meant playacting something she was not. Last year in Germany when she’d gone out with that local boy with the Alfa Romeo and instead of jerking him off had used her mouth, she had thought: Everything’s going to be different now. But no.

  Nothing ever changed.

  “Heads up!” Russ said. “There’s some steps missing here!” He leaped, and the landing gonged hollowly under his sneakers. Then again as Piggy jumped after.

  Donna hesitated. There were five steps gone and a drop of twenty feet before the stairway cut back beneath itself. The cliff bulged outward here, and if she slipped she’d probably miss the stairs altogether.

  She felt the rock draw away from her to either side, and was suddenly aware that she was connected to the world by the merest speck of matter, barely enough to anchor her feet. The sky wrapped itself about her, extending to infinity, depthless and absolute. She could extend her arms and fall into it forever. What would happen to her then, she wondered. Would she die of thirst and starvation, or would the speed of her fall grow so great that the oxygen would be sucked from her lungs, leaving her to strangle in a sea of air? “Come on, Donna!” Piggy shouted up at her. “Don’t be a pussy!”

  “Russ—” she said quaveringly.

  But Russ wasn’t looking her way. He was frowning downward, anxious to be going. “Don’t push the lady,” he said. “We can go on by ourselves.”

  Donna choked with anger and hurt and desperation all at once. She took a deep breath and, heart scudding, leaped. Sky and rock wheeled over her head. For an instant she was floating, falling, totally lost and filled with a panicky awareness that she was about to die. Then she crashed onto the landing. It hurt like hell, and at first she feared she’d pulled an ankle. Piggy grabbed her shoulders and rubbed the side of her head with his knuckles. “I knew you could do it, you wimp.”

  Donna knocked away his arm. “Okay, wiseass. How are you expecting to get us back up?”

  The smile disappeared from Piggy’s face. His mouth opened, closed. His head jerked fearfully upward. An acrobat could leap across, grab the step and flip up without any trouble at all. “I—I mean, I—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Russ said impatiently. “We’ll think of something.” He started down again.

  It wasn’t natural, Donna realized, his attitude. There was something obsessive about his desire to descend the stairway. It was like the time he’d brought his father’s revolver to school along with a story about playing Russian roulette that morning before breakfast. “Three times!” he’d said proudly.

  He’d had that same crazy look on him, and she hadn’t the slightest notion then or now how she could help him.

  * * * *

  Russ walked like an automaton, wordlessly, tirelessly, never hurrying up or slowing down. Donna followed in concerned silence, while Piggy scurried between them, chattering like somebody’s pet Pekinese. This struck Donna as so apt as to be almost allegorical: the two of them together yet alone, the distance between filled with noise. She thought of this distance, this silence, as the sun passed behind the cliff and the afternoon heat lost its edge.

  The stairs changed to cement-jacketed brick with small buttresses cut into the rock. There was a pile of stems and cherry pits on one landing, and the railing above them was white with bird droppings. Piggy leaned over the rail and said, “Hey, I can see sea
gulls down there. Flying around.”

  “Where?” Russ leaned over the railing, then said scornfully, “Those are pigeons. The Ghazoddis used to release them for rifle practice.”

  As Piggy turned to follow Russ down again, Donna caught a glimpse into his eyes, liquid and trembling with helplessness and despair. She’d seen that fear in him only once before, months ago when she’d stopped by his house on the way to school, just after the Emir’s assassination.

  The living room windows were draped and the room seemed unnaturally gloomy after being out in the morning sun. Blue television light flickered over shelves of shadowy ceramic figurines: Dresden milkmaids, Chantilly Chinamen, Meissen pug-dogs connected by a gold chain held in their champed jaws, naked Delft nymphs dancing.

  Piggy’s mother sat in a limp dressing gown, hair unbrushed, watching the funeral. She held a cup of oily looking coffee in one hand. Donna was surprised to see her up so early. Everyone said that she had a bad problem with alcohol, that even by service wife standards she was out of control.

  “Look at them,” Piggy’s mother said. On the screen were solemn processions of camels and Cadillacs, sheikhs in jellaba, keffigeh and mirrorshades, European dignitaries with wives in tasteful grey Parisian fashions. “They’ve got their nerve.”

  “Where did you put my lunch?” Piggy said loudly from the kitchen.

  “Making fun of the Kennedys, like that!” The Emir’s youngest son, no more than four years old, salaamed his father’s casket as it passed before him. “That kid’s bad enough, but you should see the mother, crying as if her heart were broken. It’s enough to turn your stomach. If I were Jackie, I’d—”

  Donna and Piggy and Russ had gone bowling the night the Emir was shot. This was out in the ruck of cheap joints that surrounded the base, catering almost exclusively to servicemen. When the Muzak piped through overhead speakers was interrupted for the news bulletin, everyone had stood up and cheered. Up we go someone had begun singing, and the rest had joined in, into the wild blue yonder . . . Donna had felt so sick with fear and disgust she had thrown up in the parking lot. “ I don’t think they’re making fun of anyone,” Donna said. “They’re just—”

  “Don’t talk to her!” The refrigerator door slammed shut. A cupboard door slammed open.

  Piggy’s mother smiled bitterly. “This is exactly what you’d expect from these ragheads. Pretending they’re white people, deliberately mocking their betters. Filthy brown animals.”

  “Mother! Where is my fucking lunch?”

  She looked at him then, jaw tightening. “Don’t you use that kind of language on me, young man.”

  “All right!” Piggy shouted. “All right, I’m going to school without lunch! Shows how much you care!”

  He turned to Donna and in the instant before he grabbed her wrist and dragged her out of the house, Donna could no longer hear the words, could only see that universe of baffled futility haunting Piggy’s eyes. That same look she glimpsed today.

  * * * *

  The railings were wooden now, half the posts rotting at their bases, with an occasional plank missing, wrenched off and thrown over the side by previous visitors. Donna’s knees buckled and she stumbled, almost lurching into the rock. “I have to stop,” she said, hating herself for it. “I cannot go one more step.”

  Piggy immediately collapsed on the landing. Russ hesitated, then climbed up to join them. They three sat staring out into nothing, legs over the Edge, arms clutching the rail.

  Piggy found a Pepsi can, logo in flowing Arabic, among the rubble. He held it in his left hand and began sticking holes in it with his butterfly knife, again and again, cackling like a demented sex criminal. “Exterminate the brutes!” he said happily. Then, with absolutely no transition he asked, “How are we ever going to get back up?” so dolorously Donna had to bite back her laughter.

  “Look, I just want to go on down a little bit more,” Russ said. “Why?” Piggy sounded petulant.

  “So I can get down enough to get away from this garbage.” He gestured at the cigarette butts, the broken brown glass, sparser than above but still there. “Just a little further, okay guys?” There an edge to his voice, and under that the faintest hint of a plea. Donna felt helpless before those eyes. She wished they were alone, so she could ask him what was wrong.

  Donna doubted that Russ himself knew what he expected to find down below. Did he think that if he went down far enough, he’d never have to climb back? She remembered the time in Mr. Herriman’s algebra class when a sudden tension in the air had made her glance across the room at Russ, and he was, with great concentration, tearing the pages out of his math text and dropping them one by one on the floor. He’d taken a five-day suspension for that, and Donna had never found out what it was all about. But there was a kind of glorious arrogance to the act; Russ had been born out of time. He really should have been a medieval prince, a Medici or one of the Sabakan pretenders.

  “Okay,” Donna said, and Piggy of course had to go along.

  Seven flights farther down the modern stairs came to an end. The wooden railing of the last short, septambic flight had been torn off entire, and laid across the steps. They had to step carefully between the uprights and the rails. But when they stood at the absolute bottom, they saw that there were stairs beyond the final landing, steps that had been cut into the stone itself. They were curving swaybacked things that millenia of rain and foot traffic had worn so uneven they were almost unpassable.

  Piggy groaned. “Man, you can’t expect us to go down that thing.”

  “Nobody’s asking you,” Russ said.

  * * * *

  They descended the old stairway backwards and on all fours. The wind breezed up, hitting them with the force of an unexpected shove first to one side and then the other. There were times when Donna was so frightened she thought she was going to freeze up and never move again. But at last the stone broadened and became a wide, even ledge, with caves leading back into the rock.

  The cliff face here was greenwhite with lichen, and had in ancient times been laboriously smoothed and carved. Between each cave (their mouths alone left in a natural state, unaltered) were heavy-thighed women—goddesses, perhaps, or demons or sacred dancers—their breasts and faces chipped away by the image-hating followers of the Prophet at a time when Mohammed yet lived. Their hands held loops of vines in which were entangled moons, cycling from new through waxing quarter and gibbous to full and then back through gibbous and waning quarter to dark. Piggy was gasping, his face bright with sweat, but he kept up his blustery front. “What the fuck is all this shit, man?”

  “It was a monastery,” Russ said. He walked along the ledge dazedly, a wondering half smile on his lips. “I read about this.” He stopped at a turquoise automobile door someone had flung over the Edge to be caught and tossed by fluke winds, the only piece of trash that had made it down this far. “Give me a hand.”

  He and Piggy lifted the door, swung it back and forth three times to build up momentum, then lofted it over the lip of the rock. They all three lay down on their stomachs to watch it fall away, turning end over end and seeming finally to flicker as it dwindled smaller and smaller, still falling. At last it shrank below the threshold of visibility and became one of a number of shifting motes in the downbelow, part of the slow, mazy movement of dead blood cells in the eyes’ vitreous humors. Donna turned over on her back, drew her head back from the rim, stared upward. The cliff seemed to be slowly tumbling forward, all the world inexorably, dizzyingly leaning down to crush her.

  “Let’s go explore the caves,” Piggy suggested.

  They were empty. The interiors of the caves extended no more than thirty feet into the rock, but they had all been elaborately worked, arched ceilings carved with thousands of faux tesserae, walls adorned with bas-relief pillars. Between the pillars the walls were taken up with long shelves carved into the stone. No artifacts remained, not so much as a potsherd or a splinter of bone. Piggy shone his pocket flash into every shad
owy niche. “Somebody’s been here before us and taken everything,” he said.

  “The Historic Registry people, probably.” Russ ran a hand over one shelf. It was the perfect depth and height for a line of three-pound coffee cans. “This is where they stowed the skulls. When a monk grew so spiritually developed he no longer needed the crutch of physical existence, his fellows would render the flesh from his bones and enshrine his skull. They poured wax in the sockets, then pushed in opals while it was still warm. They slept beneath the faintly gleaming eyes of their superiors.”

  When they emerged it was twilight, the first stars appearing from behind a sky fading from blue to purple. Donna looked down on the moon. It was as big as a plate, full and bright. The rilles, dry seas and mountain chains were preternaturally distinct. Somewhere in the middle was Tranquility Base, where Neil Armstrong had planted the American flag.

  “Jeez, it’s late,” Donna said. “If we don’t start home soon, my mom is going to have a cow.”

  “We still haven’t figured a way to get back up,” Piggy reminded her. Then, “We’ll probably have to stay here. Learn to eat owls and grow crops sideways on the cliff face. Start our own civilization. Our only serious problem is the imbalance of sexes, but even that’s not insurmountable.” He put an arm around Donna’s shoulders, grabbed at her breast. “You’d pull the train for us, wouldn’t you, Donna?”

  Angrily she pushed him away and said, “You keep a clean mouth! I’m so tired of your juvenile talk and behavior.”

  “Hey, calm down, it’s cool.” That panicky look was back in his eyes, the forced knowledge that he was not in control, could never be in control, that there was no such thing as control. He smiled weakly, placatingly.

  “No, it is not. It is most emphatically not ‘cool.’“ Suddenly she was white and shaking with fury. Piggy was a spoiler. His simple presence ruined any chance she might have had to talk with Russ, find out just what was bugging him, get him to finally, really notice her. “I am sick of having to deal with your immaturity, your filthy language and your crude behavior.”