Three from the Stones Read online

  …until he was no longer the tunnel, nor the figure who had slipped down through the pore of the earth, but was only Rhoneh the human man, in his bed, in that outer world of things. Heavy. Bodied. With teeth and jaws and fingers and spine, when, just moments before, he had seemed fast and bright as a light-shaft, letting smoke and shadows make shapes and pass through him.

  He rose from his bed. Stared at the back of his eyelids, with his head in his elbow on his knee. He breathed deep, stood, and began to dress himself. His fingers on the buttons lulled him like a hypnotist’s charm — three buttons, four, and he was already gone….

  For the length of some moments he was neither in the outer world nor in the world of his dream, but in some dark space, darker than any darkness a human should know. For, in the world of humans, there is both dark and light, and simply through the light’s existence, whether here or there, the dark is tempered. Yet Rhoneh had wandered into the far greater darkness of a lightless world, where even our blackest black is only the midpoint between dark and light.

  Dark, and yet not void, for it was pregnant with the existence of all that could not be seen or felt in it.

  And, slowly, Rhoneh became conscious of himself existing in this space, though not yet wholly as a man, but only as a tongue, crawling in the cavern of some strange beast’s mouth. He crawled, the walls about him damp and soft like the moss behind a waterfall. And he slithered over the smooth marble shafts of the creature’s teeth, sleek and geometrical, projecting from the floor. They might have been obstacles to him, but they afforded no difficulty; rather they gratified him with the knowledge that they remained there unmoving, severe, stolid, as he crept over them.

  Throughout it all he carried the intuition that the walls about him were alive, the flesh of some great creature, though he did not know what.

  Until suddenly he was both the tongue — caged and creeping — and also the man around it — whole and encompassing. Traveling through the tunnels of his own passageways, to him both inner and outer.

  At some point the darkness before him began to glow: a red, red black. And then a gold. And forms began to inhabit the glow: the curves of the tunnel, textures of the surfaces, texture in the air. And, taking one turn, he saw there the boy seated before him, against the walls of the tunnel — his tunnel — him — wet and smooth.

  The boy was a shadow only, for behind him, through the doorway, a fire blazed thick and white like the glint on gold.

  “So,” said Rhoneh, and the sound of his own voice paralyzed him, for he had not heard it in years.

  The boy stood, still only a shadow, and, framed in the oblong doorway with the rich gold-white light beating behind him, he appeared as if he were the cotyledon of some mighty, enchanted seed.

  “Waiting for what?” said Rhoneh. “Waiting for what?”

  But in that moment a thunder shook the walls of the cave, a thunder not of sound but of remembrance, the same remembrance that came each morning upon waking: that he, Rhoneh, lived in a world of things outside himself. That he was not self-contained.

  And as this remembrance penetrated him, the tunnel and the chamber of light began to dissipate.

  The sight returned to Rhoneh’s eyes. Sensation returned to his fingers. He felt the breath heave his belly toward his thighs, to touch them, and recede. And he recognized the feeling of his own self, heavy, shaped like a man, stranded in the world of space and objects.

  As his eyes adjusted he expected to find himself on his workbench with clay on his fingers, the long table at his side, the cabinet against the left wall, the window high on the wall before him. But as he scrutinized the image which his sight had built for him he felt a surging sense of panic, like a hot sludge seeping through him. The terrifying, humiliating feeling of a man who has lost all trust of his faculties.

  For the room that Rhoneh saw around him was one he had never seen before.

  While he had been occupied with his dream of the boy in the tunnel, some instinct or other agent of his body had taken him to this strange place, on account of a reason utterly unknown to him.

  Yet as soon as he recovered from this initial shock, an even greater shock tore through him, as if a taut cord running the length of his spine had been plucked, sounding a note, deep and dissonant, through his core, where before there had been only silence and stillness. For there in the room, seated before him, was the boy with the broken hand, the very boy from the dream.

  Rhoneh gasped and fell. And while he had, just a moment prior, felt as estranged from his own physical body as from a stone, or a spider — now, in his utter confusion, it obeyed him fluently. He picked himself up with his hands, sprang out of the room, out of the building, and, finding his bearings, he ran, stride after stride, foot before foot, until he reached home.

  He walked all about his room, touched this and that, murmured half-utterances. Everything was disjointed. He could follow no thread of thought for more than a few moments. He could only walk back and forth, and touch things, and push things away.

  He could not trust himself. He had thought he could, but he could not. He did not know who was that man whose feet walked under him. He felt as if he had never in fact been a man at all, but only a partial witness to some strange man’s life.

  And yet he knew that despite the great urgency and weight of this all, he needed to postpone the fear he felt. He knew that, for now, he needed to put this unsettling incident behind him.

  For tomorrow he was allotted to serve his Days in Adversity. And for that he would need all of himself.

  Chapter X

  The robe like a shadow over the marble floor. A shadow that no body cast. Turning, see there, suspended in its height, white and sheer like a tooth, the grown one’s mask, draped amid the folds of the robe. Over to the wall, and then one brick pulled: Brick H326. And from its slot a voice for the little ones:

  Garep did not speak, had not spoken since her childhood. In her childhood

  she had called aloud her own name — called until her throat was scarred — and yet

  no one had carried it. She called, and the air swallowed her voice. Since then

  she was silent, and in her silence her throat grew stiff and brittle

  so that even a sigh passing through threatened to shatter her.

  Speechless, she worked everyday, not ceasing.

  She moved stones to lay roads. She fished lettuce from the sea.

  She labored and made a city, a people.

  And when she had made them she spoke aloud, “One thing remains.”

  And the words, barreling up through her, split her apart, so that she fell, in pieces,

  as light falls through a sewer grate.

  Outside, Beyan and Fert played marbles amid the cobblestones. Clacked and bounced until, slowing, they dropped into ruts, rolled, and stopped.

  “Losers beg,” said Fert.

  “Doubles for blindsies,” said Beyan.

  Chapter XI

  Lhiar had noticed the man enter, sit and stare silently for some minutes, jolt, topple over, and rush out of the room. He had noticed, but did not wonder, anymore than one wonders at a dragonfly that flies in through a window, circles the room, bumps against the wall, against the cabinet, and flies out again. A dragonfly’s business is its own.

  And Lhiar, for his part, was engrossed in the song of the tomtoads.

  He listened as one listens who, awaiting the arrival of a friend, sits with his back to the road. He keeps an ear alive to all passing sounds behind him, weighing them all against the sound he wishes eventually to find: the sound of a man, his friend, from down the road approaching. So Lhiar listened.

  And yet, as he listened, he did not know precisely what this sound would sound like when it came.

  He waited, anticipating some arrival, some recognition within the song he was hearing — but also not anticipating it: accepting that this recognition may very well never come. Still, though, he did not cease to listen. For just weighing each successive soun
d was pleasant enough. Like picking up shells on the beach, one after the next, finding each one upon inspection to be broken. Set it back down and forget it. No great loss. Move on and inspect the next.

  Lhiar, immobile, pacified, lay, and did not tire of this.

  Chapter XII

  “Do you know something?” said Fert.

  “What?”

  “The Maddened will meet tonight.”

  “Says who?” said Beyan.

  “Says I know who and wouldn’t you like to.”

  “So where then?”

  “Where what?”

  “Where are they meeting?”

  “Just like I thought, in the cabin by the grate on the falls.”

  “When?”

  “Just be there,” said Fert, “okay?”

  “Fine,” said Beyan. But as Fert walked away Beyan stood still, uncertain. It had seemed simple enough with Fert there, telling him this and that; but now, alone, he could not think what this all meant for him.

  He started walking home, his mind thick with a tangle of possibilities. He turned back around and chased after Fert, but, rounding the first corner, he could not see him anywhere.

  This gave him enough of a moment’s pause to reconsider. As if, because he had not found Fert around the very first corner, it was an omen that he, Beyan, was to continue alone.

  He set out for the falls, knowing where it was as one knows where lies the moon— yet the best route to get there?

  He went this way and that. Passed by alleys, only, moments later, after much contemplation, to rush back and turn down them. If he saw another living person cross a street up ahead of him, even if he deemed himself to be going in the right direction, he would retreat immediately, would try to find a parallel road.

  He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth: if, after twenty clucks, he had not discovered some omen that this was the proper road to take, he turned back. The sign might be anything. A missing brick in the wall of the tenements. It might be that he looked through a window and saw a baby’s cradle. It might be that he tripped over a cobblestone, or yawned three times in succession. After each twenty clucks he would decide whether the sign he met was intended for him.

  After a long while he arrived, at last, at the grate on the falls.

  On finding it, he felt the long, dreadful experience of his having been lost drop away from him in an instant. Like a breath that one expels from one’s body, the anxiety left him. But, as with breaths, feelings come one after another, and a new anxiety entered Beyan. For at the grate on the falls he found no one: not Fert, not his schoolmates, not the grave, enigmatic magician he had supposed to be at the heart of the Maddened and all of their plots. No one — only the sound of the falls below.

  Beyan sat. He squeezed his fingers. He muttered partial sentences under his breath. “I found the way...” “I thought you’d be...” “Isn’t this...?” “I wasn’t sure...”

  In this way he sat for the afternoon, looking over his shoulder.

  Chapter XIII

  At dawn fourteen men, Rhoneh among them, and two women. In the foyer they undressed. Hung their robes, like shadows, and their masks, each sheer and white like a tooth.

  All present were well-practiced but for one of the men. The others could tell he was still so young, so new, maybe this was only his second time — his skin was soft and seemed to shine; he was lean; some hairs still on his arms; his eyelids, blinking, sprang open. They envied him, but still they knew that they pitied him more, for they could remember themselves, early on; they recalled how hard it was, the second, the third time, when one knew what was coming and yet felt incompetent before it.

  Let him serve three, four more terms, and his abandon may yet plant hope in him again.

  The pack of them passed through the middle chamber, held their breath, shut their eyes, passed through the steam curtain to the outer provisions stall. A knife for each. A flint for each. One of them carried loops of cord. One carried casks. One nets. One sundries. An agar pouch for each.

  And equipped in this way they stepped out of the city, out, and into the Great Wound, which was the world outside the city walls. For some, their welts were thick enough that they did not feel the tingle. But some felt it, and surely the young one did. His nose twitched, and his fingernails returned time and again to scrape at his thighs.

  In squads of five they walked: one in front, one behind, one to each side, and one in the center — the middle one sheltered, thus, by the others, from the swarms of tiny mouths nipping and nagging in the air. They took turns — all but for the sixteenth, who led, directing the course, and did not change places.

  Rhoneh tried to keep his attention focused on the things outside of himself. Tried not to fall back inward. He latched his sight onto the footsteps of the one walking ahead of him. Step after step. Sinking and rising from the muck, kicking up crabs, eggs, arthropods, from below the film. In the wake of yesterday’s crisis he felt now only a pervading dullness, his emotions spent, so that he was no longer torn apart by doubts and questions.

  He trudged, and could trudge endlessly.

  To him all was grey — the road and the task and the world and all he had ever been. And yet the greyness was a weight only that he carried on his shoulders, that slowed his step and stooped his eyebrows low. Today the weight did not enter him.

  Stride after stride he watched, and waited for the next. But fantasies began to invite him from the corners of his sight, like imps beckoning, peeping from behind trees. He tried to persevere. To stay outside. He started counting to himself. One step, two steps, three steps. He reached fifteen before he noticed that the rhythm of his counting and the rhythm of the footsteps did not coincide. He was not counting the footsteps at all, he was only counting numbers. He was weary. He was slipping.

  The group made a turn down a steep bank. With each one’s step a layer of muck slid slowly down, down the slope to the ravine below, bringing with it clusters of larvae, mollusks, amphibians and their bones. The weather was fresh, and cool enough when clouds passed overhead, but, still, the group was tiring. With two days remaining ahead of them, already they were tiring.

  Struggling, Rhoneh tried to stay alert. He switched tactics and began to sing to himself. A song from school.

  “Was It violet or green?

  Was It grey or bright?

  Was It smelled or seen?

  Pristine, unkempt,

  Or disheveled?

  In day or night?”

  “Those are things I couldn’t say.

  It struck me though

  That much I know

  And I am changed.”

  “Was It before or after?

  Was It weak or robust?

  Was It named or unspoken?

  Did It baffle, fluster,

  or embolden?”

  “Those are things I couldn’t say.

  It struck me though

  That much I know

  And I am changed.”

  “Did It tarry or flee?

  Did It vex you or please?

  Was It cherished or rued?

  Tarnished or new?

  Was It true?”

  “Those are things I couldn’t say.

  It struck me though

  That much I know

  And I am changed.”

  His mind ran over the words like water over stones, to the point that the distinguishing features of each word eroded away. One word became scarcely different from the next: each one merely a unit plugged into the current of his thoughts.

  And, as the song faded, so, too, the sight of his eyes grew dull, and distinguished less and less among the images before him. For his mind had become ravenous, and demanded to be fed more than mere footsteps, rising and falling, in the sludge.

  Kicked up from below the mud’s surface he saw teeming, as thick nearly as the muck itself, ants, swarming over one another, scuttling over the film, clinging to drops of mud that spurted against the humans’ calves. Rho
neh stared at them with what little remained of his attention. And the ants entered into him through the sight of his eyes. And they impregnated his thoughts with the seeds of images, histories, profundities:

  These ants, tight-bodied, fit, leathern, tireless; who could be guzzled down the wet throat of a man or any other passing giant; who could, with the drop of a stone, be flung far up into the air, to land on a toadstool, or in a rut, or on the hide of some beast, whence either to perish or else to embark on some entirely new life-path; who scurried and fed leg-deep in oceans of sugar; who never paused to inquire, or love, or doubt, but only barreled through experiences, spurred, unceasing, from this to that, by the imperatives, the hungers, the affinities of their ancestral blood.

  The ants: they infected Rhoneh, so that his mind slipped from songs and footsteps, and from the very sight of the ants themselves — slipped back, back into a dark recess where it could brood undisturbed and craft the vast mythologies that belonged to these small, awful, righteous creatures.

  He began with an orb:  An orb, clear and turgid, like a dewdrop hanging from the tip of a leaf. Just so did the world hang, a drop on a leaf, waiting to fall. It wanted to fall, and yet also wanted still to hang. So it bred young in order that they should fall in its place. And the orb’s young were spikes, sharp and fine. And when they fell they cut the air with a thousand wounds so that the air bled torrents, torrents that fell and made oceans.

  Yet the ocean drops were lonely in their sameness, in their multitude — tossed, directionless — and they wished to stream again through the veins of the air, as they had before. They grew legs, so as to climb back up, up to the wounds whence they had fallen; up, up, to return to the inside of the sky. But the wounds had healed, and closed, and the legged creatures born of blood were trapped outside, to live in the world, only, and clamber among themselves.

  They made food, in order that their yearning to seek might be gratified by things found. They made enemies, so that wars, like a salve, might placate the wrath that still lingered in them. And all the while the world hung over them, a drop on the tip of a leaf, clinging, and yet waiting to fall.

  Rhoneh’s mind paused, and the pause was space enough for a message to reach him, like a candle lit far off on a boat at the horizon. And the message pulled him forward, returned him from his fantasies, again to the sight of feet stepping rhythmically in front of him. He adjusted to the light and the space, examined the situation in which he and his others found themselves. In his absence, it seemed, they had left the slope and the muck behind, and with them the ants. And the feet before him were different feet, for the fifteen of them had rotated positions.