Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  “It always will.”

  “So the Ledge is infinite.”

  “More or less.”

  “An infinite ledge on an infinite plain.”

  “The Ledge was not always there. The entire Park was once a single flat and borderless surface. The Ledge is a tectonic upthrust fault.”

  “Say what?”

  “There was an earthquake.”

  “An earthquake did this?”

  “About two thousand years ago. We do not discuss it much.”

  “But—”

  “We do not discuss it much.”

  “All right.”

  “WHAT’S IT LIKE having wings?”

  “Do you mock me? I remind you that it is still a long way down.”

  “I’m completely serious.”

  “Well. I have never really thought about it. Does a fish think about water or a bird think about air? I have always had them. It is difficult to imagine not having them. That would be worse than naked. Crippled.”

  “Us poor mortals do all right crippled.”

  “You do not miss what you never had.”

  “You hold all mortals in great disdain I think.”

  “What you are would be pitiable if you were not so absurd. So limited.”

  “Tell me what we’re missing then.”

  “It would be playing music to a deaf man.”

  “Beethoven’s Ninth was composed by a deaf man.”

  “A good point. All right then musician. I will make you an offer.”

  “I’ve learned to be suspicious of your people’s offers.”

  “Have we not always been good as our word?”

  “It’s your words that haven’t always been so good.”

  “But it was your choice to listen to them or not. The price of free will is responsibility for your soul, you know.”

  “Thanks for sharing.”

  “Why not hear my offer? You wish to know how it feels to have wings. When we land I will show you a thing. I will give you an experience. It will not be dangerous or harmful, but I cannot describe it to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “It lives in a place where language decays. It occurs before language begins. In exchange for your trust I will tell you that I would be obliterated for showing such a thing to a guest.”

  “Then why take the risk?”

  “Because you are mortal and will forget.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I have shown it to you before and you do not remember.”

  “Maybe I’ll remember this time.”

  “Memory is the re-creation of experience. This experience is one your mortal senses are not equipped to retain. The very act of remembering the experience will falsify it, even destroy it—make it a thing unhappened. Think of it as a beautiful picture mounted on a slide made of something that dissolves when touched by light.”

  “You’ll show me something beautiful here.”

  “You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.”

  “But isn’t the cargo that survives all the more valuable for that very reason?”

  “Yes exactly. Which is why it is a mercy perhaps that so much meaning and emotion are lost. Because you are so limited. Because you could not contain the whole of it.”

  “Our cups runneth over.”

  “Those of you who glimpse that broader apprehension of the world beyond the world of your perception and who endeavor all their sad short lives to convey it directly and completely to their fellow mortals—your Blakes, van Goghs, Stravinskys—were driven mad by the knowledge of the separation of one mind from another and by their own inadequacy to cross the gulf. Anything told is by definition insufficient.”

  “Words may be inadequate but they’re all we’ve got.”

  “All that mortals have, you mean. And even then you are wrong. I have heard your music—oh yes—and you are wrong. you have all these different little boats named speech and writing and painting and sculpture and music and dance. They are none of them seaworthy but you do have something of a fleet. And you have them precisely because your shores are so distant from each other.”

  “Tell me anyway. Tell me what it feels like to have wings.”

  “It feels like singing with your muscles.”

  “Poetic.”

  “Poetry afflicts me. Let me ask you something and perhaps you will better understand my difficulty giving your question a meaningful answer.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Tell me what it feels like to be mortal.”

  “Hell that’s easy. It feels like not having wings.”

  XIV.

  DAZED AND CONFUSED

  LOCOMOTIVE BREATH ROLLS out ahead of Niko as he trudges on across the frozen plain. Biting wind has turned his fingers, toes, and nose to wood. His feet are bound in pitiful remnants of recovered underwear he tore and tied in lieu of shoes when the plain gave way to this vast sheet of ice. Niko constantly alternates hands to carry the battered guitar case, his free fist thrust into the pocket of his skimpy summer jacket as he leans into the knifeblade wind.

  He’s trying to remember something. Something that happened to him. Something he was shown. If he concentrates on what it was perhaps it will help him make his way across this huge expanse of ice on which his internal compass needle has gone awry.

  Available light comes from the ice itself. Pale bluewhite like the phosphorescent trails that bled from around his trailing fingertips certain rare nights on Malibu Beach.

  Niko trudges over bodies frozen screaming in the ice. Their stiff hands claw skyward in the milky ice as if to rob him of whatever ember gutters deep in his core. Niko has long since stopped staring down at them. One soul frozen and aware is an object of pity and compassion. A continent of frozen damned is as numbing as the cold of their estate. The truth is, if he had skates to hurry himself along he would glide without regret across their frozen moments and leave these transfixed wretches gaping upward at the lines that stretch like contrails across their reddish sky.

  It is so cold. Each muscle is a slab of unkneaded clay, each step an effort of will. Niko tries to tell himself the biting cold is good and that as long as he can feel it he’s okay. When he doesn’t feel it anymore is when he’ll be in trouble.

  What is it he’s forgotten? He tries to remember. To think back on when the monster left him on the Lower Plain.

  GERYON HAD SET down on a huge rock outcropping. Inset on one rough slope of it were massive iron rings with battleship anchorchains attached, and manacled hand and foot to those was the eviscerated form of a blinded giant. Eyes pecked out and liver torn and eaten from his body. He lay mutilated and unmoving, and though there was no sign of life upon him Niko sensed a weary endurance, a geologic waiting. The patience of stones.

  The shriek of a giant bird echoed across the plain.

  Geryon bent down low and Niko climbed from off the monster’s back.

  “Do you know the word hubris?” Geryon said.

  “Greek.”

  “Yes.” The beast straightened and pointed one of many fingers at the bound form.

  “As is he. That is his crime.”

  “Being Greek?”

  The finger lowered and the travestied face turned to Niko. “It might serve you to reflect on why I thought it appropriate to land here.”

  Niko surveyed the view from on high. The black wall of the Ledge filled one horizon, rising till it blended with the larger blackness, until it could not be seen as a wall at all but instead looked like empty Nothing, the border of the universe itself. Yet slanting down across its face there was the faintest rent, the angled notch of cliffside ram
p sloping down to finally meet the Lower Plain, disgorging those who had survived the Olympian descent.

  Foothills sloped against the base of the Ledge wall, undulating from the shore of a vast red lake at the base of the bloodfall and on into the far distance, lowering until they met the end of the cliff-side path. These were the Meat Pie Mountains, a range composed of those who fell from the ramp and hit and broke and healed and remained trapped beneath an everpiling weight of falling souls who may be said to come to light or to rest but who would never truly come to either.

  When Niko was a boy in St. Petersburg Florida his father found a line of sawdust along the length of the patio of their home, a sign of termite infestation. Niko and his brother Van had swept up enough sawdust to fill two grocery bags. Wondering about its odd red color Niko had looked at a handful under a magnifying glass and seen that cupped in his hand were the bodies of ants. The foundation of the house was literally crawling with them.

  Looking at the mounds of vanquished masses fallen from the Ramp on their inexorable way to become citizens of the undiscovered country Niko had remembered grocery bags filled with the bodies of fire ants, tiny red bodies heaped thick enough to be mistaken for sawdust.

  “I said I would show you a thing.” Geryon’s voice brought Niko back around. The monster had folded his wings tight to his broad back and now stood with the terrible spectacle of the shackled god a gruesome epic backdrop looming like some murdered Gulliver among sadistic Lilliputians. “Something that is to words as a cube is to a square. It will not harm you but you must willingly experience this thing.”

  Niko shrugged. “All right.”

  “You take this lightly.”

  “I’m not indifferent, I’m numb.”

  The monster studied him. “Your detachment is your armor I believe.” He knelt before Niko like a bestial parent before its changeling human child. Those horrible plus sign pupils, the searing aqua of those eyes. “I have seen many here defend themselves like this. As they seek to turn away from all that they endure their thoughts fold inward like a spider in a flame. Their minds grow smooth.” He reached toward Niko but stopped. “But there is no turning away. What is felt is past denying.”

  Unaccountably he felt afraid. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because this place is based on feeling. To deny your heart here is to go insane. Your armor is the very weapon they will use against you.”

  “They.”

  The monster shrugged and Niko had the impression that the marble face would smile if it could. “We then. But you need to understand that this is not a cold unfeeling place. Look at the torments, the tormentors. That is passion.”

  “Look at the tormented.”

  “That is passion too. Passios is a Greek word.”

  “To suffer.”

  The monster seemed pleased. “This will be your language lesson for today. Two Greek words, hubris and passios. And now you must give me your permission to take your hand and show you what I will.”

  Niko held out his hand but Geryon drew back. “Permission must be stated.”

  “You have my permission then. What are you going to do?”

  “Show you how I see the world.” Cold fingerbundles covered Niko’s mortal hand—

  TRUDGING THE FROZEN waste Niko has arrived on the threshold of the moment he’s been trying to remember. Touch of smooth marble on his skin. He remembers a deep shifting. A vastening. A sense of beholding the gulf that separates self from other, mind from mind. Of crossing the frontier to another soul. The deep-toned touch of tolling bells along his skin. Liquid voices of chanting monks. Taste of ozone air after lightning in the candleflame flicker of pilgrim souls constellating the plain. Tidal motion and pulsing air. The darkness smelled of amber. Dry perfume of entropy. Deafening beauty of decay. The lake of blood behind him breathing. The living pressure of the very air. All of Hell a living thing. Himself a cell within it acting out his rightful role. A small voice inside him said Remember this.

  And even remembering as he labors on the frozen ocean Niko knows what memory he can conjure is a lie. Inadequate and pale. As if the mere word boat could somehow cross the ocean. Freezing air fills his wheezing lungs and Niko understands he’ll never salvage a true memory of what the monster showed him. Easier to reconstruct an angel from its footprint in the sand.

  —and then let go. The disconnection marooned him to the very world and trapped him in a cage of flesh, the prison of his insufficient senses.

  Niko dropped down to his knees before the monster and cried out at his sudden loss. He had told himself not to forget and now he knew only that he could not remember. Could not say what he had lost beyond the sense of loss itself.

  Geryon stood before the shackled giant like a priest before his fallen god and looked down at the mortal sobbing on the naked rock like a pilgrim arriving at his destination only to learn that all he has believed is false and that his journey’s been for nought.

  NIKO CAN NO longer feel his feet. He stalks upon their deadwood as if struggling on cauterized stumps. Every breath a painful draw on clotted bellows. Freezing to death. So this is what it’s like. Bones grow cold then start to burn with a different kind of heat. Kindling. Sleepy warmth. Not like the way you float on heroin. That old nodding off. That was more personal. Rock me in the bosom of opiates. This is different. Cold’s a vampire. Cold doesn’t care. Need a stack of firewood. Big fireplace. Cognac in a snifter. Big cigar.

  Niko stops. Niko you fucking moron.

  He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a package of Swisher Sweets cigarillos and a box of lucifer matches.

  GERYON HAD WAITED till the mortal man stopped crying. He watched the man collect himself and watched him slowly don his armor of control. Stone gargoyles face the world to guard the shrine within.

  The mortal man regained his feet and wiped his eyes and nose on the sleeves of his torn jacket.

  “You can’t remember.”

  The mortal shook his head.

  “You never will. But hold to it anyhow. Keep the idea of it. The sense of it.”

  “Why?” Niko’s voice emerged clotted.

  “It will see you in good stead.”

  Niko blew his nose. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Geryon shrugged. “What it says. I leave you a final gift now and then I take my leave of you again and until next time.”

  “I’m still recovering from the last gift thanks.”

  “Do not recover. Learn. More important than the memory you cannot retrieve is what happened to you after it. Remember that instead. This is my gift to you.”

  “What happened after it?” Niko wiped tears from beneath his eyes. “What, this?”

  “Remember it.” Stone wings spread to their full width and then furled tight. The monster pointed out across the plain. “Keep your back to the Ledge and keep walking that way. You will come to a reach of ice. If you survive the walk across it, well then. You will cross that bridge when you come to it.” He lowered his hand and turned to Niko. “And now you must release me.”

  “A question first.”

  The great chest sighed but the monster waited.

  “Why are you helping me?”

  Geryon regarded him inscrutably a moment and then said, “We are ever willing to help a soul head deeper into Hell. But when you try to leave I will be baying at your back like all the others trying to flay your soul. Now let me go. You are ready to complete your little walk.”

  Niko formally released him with the old phrases and the monster turned away in a great rush and swirl of stone wings and launched into the blighted air.

  NIKO COUGHS OUT heated air. His numb hands cup the cigarillo to protect it from the biting wind. The warm smoke hurts his frigid lungs. He’d swear he feels them thawing as he drags in deep. Maybe it’s purely psychological. Who gives a shit as long as it keeps him going. Go ahead, tell me how bad smoking is for me.

  He thinks about the cabbie ferrying him through the city
streets and below the world, her poise amid calamity. The cigarillos were her gift to him. Could she have known I wonder?

  An enormous shadow moves upon the ice. Niko sees nothing in the sky and not enough light to cast such a shadow. He watches it moving and realizes the shadow is beneath the ice, a cruising whale-sized figure swimming somehow through the frozen medium. The souls embedded here are stopped midthrash, agonized faces almost without exception angled skyward.

  The black shape slides across the pale ice under Niko’s ragclad feet. He feels caught in the dark beam of some kind of antispotlight. He fights an urge to run. Where he’d run to is moot. He can barely keep up this dragging pegleg pace as it is. But the icewhale passes underneath him, and where it passes many of the frozen damned are gone and in their place there floats a bloody silhouette marking where they were, contorted human stencils painted red.

  Niko turns to watch the silent shadow continue along the ice into the distance. Behind the ochre band of the Lower Plain the black line of the Ledge provides a false horizon.

  The icewhale momentarily blots out a dark shape standing upright against the pale fluorescence of the frozen lake. Niko frowns. Something’s following him across the ice.

  NIKO HAS LONG since stopped trembling from the cold. He peers ahead and only sees an endless reach of ice mottled with frozen bodies. Maybe he should try to dig himself a hole. Or just curl up on the ice. Just to give himself some warmth and rest. Just for a little while.

  But he keeps walking. Jemma’s out there somewhere, a glowing feather in a glass jar. So many knights forgot their way and lost their spirit in the lifelong search for their elusive grail.

  Against his throat his locket burns.

  Stone wings flap out in the alien dark.

  Somewhere on a riddled plain a patient hand scrapes free beneath a granite block.

  Somewhere on the Upper Plain a metal hammer rings against a chisel on a marble eye and a mad dog anchored to an ancient gate jerks in its manifold sleep.

  Somewhere drinking light along its black contours a parked car pings beneath its hood as its huge engine cools.