Forty Two
Forgetting the nearness of the edge, Willie had fallen down into the Well and could not get out. He could not see any circle of light above his head, nor could he see any lines that might separate this thing from the other thing. The only reference to distance was provided by a tiny spot of pulsing pain encased in an absurd complexity of soft pulp and warm blood; but it was very far away. Very far away. Between himself and the spot of pain everything else had been crammed, all in a chaotic flux, shifting ceaselessly within a river of infinite length.
Consciousness had been reduced to a mere gesture of self-apprehension. The locus of his sentience was not connected to the room, the bed, or even to the points of vague sensitivity that were his fingers, his toes, his penis and his eyes. Therefore sleep offered itself to him not as an abdication of substance and flesh, but simply as a doorway to something else. He took sleep, as he might have taken a drink from the glass beside his bed. And the dream was there waiting for him.
The tapestry of nocturnal sounds has fallen into silence; all the creatures are expectant and motionless as the plants come alive. Inside the house, their pots begin to shudder and crack. Riot of movement: they send out their shoots and creepers and fronds, feeling for the touch of a neighbor, raveling together, making thick, green ropes. In agitation, ropes wend through rooms of the house, meeting others, braiding into thicker cables, upsetting tables and chairs and shattering glass as they move. As they move. They make an orgy of squirming vegetable ecstasy on the floor. Ancient, enormous potted palm-presence in a dark corner of the living room, seen now to have been presiding over all, waiting, dips his head into the green orgy. Old man/palm rights himself again. Braided green cables have penetrated into his trunk, making a horrid Medusa. Cables writhe and pull at the trunk (but he is willing, engaged), lashing furiously until his monstrous clay urn/foot explodes apart in a shower of dirt and clay shrapnel. Barefoot boy walks gingerly over the dark floor, minding stray vines that are still sweeping across the broken glass and splintered wood. They seek the trunk! Outside, the moon sees him. Bare feet are invincible. Dark lobes of jungle converge from every direction. It seizes the house. Jungle clambers up against one wall and joins the fibrous tentacle within. The tentacle swells and twists and tenses against the confining concrete walls. Walls begin to crack; the entire house shudders and contorts, making an animal scream as it disintegrates into white powder.
Bare feet squish loudly in the mud. The jungle is impossibly thick; broad leaves up against his face. A patch of midnight hovers overhead; but no stars, only Cyclops moon. Running now, the leaves part against the pressure of his face, a silly vine catches on his ear. No effect! There is life under the black, fallen leaves. Movement! Black panther head emerges, shoulders, body, tail; born from the earth. His fur is silver in the moonlight. Together they run. They hunt. The prey is ahead, elusive, worthy. Near. They feel its heart, its fear. Panther, poised, growls into the night. Below, the prey falters, hopeless, offers tender flank meat. Panther’s eye is gold; opens his mouth. Boiling water vomits out! Boiling water burns the dog!
Bare feet leave the mud (clean), legs spring the boy high into the canopy, into boughs soft embrace. The moon is monstrously unobstructed. Large wings draw themselves out of dark leaves. A bird form appears and capers along the tree-tops; a crystal head that does not smile. Wings spread, shudder crimson, red-feathered and bejeweled. It’s a dazzled life! The head’s opaque facets swallow moonlight in dark gulps. Wings spread across the night, jewels become the stars. The boy reaches his hand into blood-red feathers. They are liquid and stain; jewels refuse the touch. The touch of the jewel is ice. The bird’s obsidian head shrieks in birthing-pain, as balls of jelly water drop from the cavity of its ass. Tiny fetuses shiver within each grape, that the mother, striving to the brilliant moon, crushes in her carbon claws as she takes to the sky.
When he woke again, darkest night was in the room, laying like a black solidity right up against his eyes. There was no moon at all in the sky. The insects and frogs were making their mechanical sounds, rising in a clamor of sovereignty over the lightless void. He lifted his feet into the air and placed them together on the granite floor. The sensation of cold seemed to come up from some source of ultimate coldness, deep beneath the house. He remained in that position for some time, trying to find some suggestion of his hand in front of his face. But he could find none; neither did the impulse to get up and walk pass from him. When he could no longer resist it, he stood and walked from memory toward the door.
In the dark, everything was closer than he expected. The smooth wood of the door was suddenly in front of him, cold and vast like the floor. He suffered a vertiginous moment where he thought he might really be lying prone with his cheek to the granite. But finding the doorknob at once restored up and down to their correct positions. The door opened, and there was that instantaneous gust of wind from the pressure difference. It smelled of the jungle, cool and green; it blew him into the hallway before he was ready to be there. He had not yet had enough time to recompose the layout of the house in his mind, that he might reach his destination without stumbling for hours in the darkness. So he rested his back against the door he’d just come through, until he knew that he must go to the left. And feeling his way along the rough stucco wall he made his way very slowly to the kitchen.
Through the large bay window above the sink, some starlight was filtering, so that the shape of the basin was faintly outlined, and there were tiny isolated pearls of blue light glinting among the drying dishes on the counter. Everything else was steeped in the same featureless black. He peeped down into the sink, staring for a long time until he could barely see the smooth sides that made the hollow. He whistled very lightly into it and was satisfied by the tiny echo. Coming up higher on his toes, he ran the palm of his hand over the inside, and feeling nothing, dangled his fingers over the abyss of the drain. He could see his hands in front of him now, unreal, like sculpted tar. It was good that there wasn’t enough starlight to show how the wrists flowed into his arms, his elbows, and that those unreal hands were connected to the rest of his body. The hands belonged to the Well; they were infinitely capable.
Encouraged by the growing momentum, he levered his body up onto the counter top with gymnastic precision. There was no delight at being up so high, since he could not see the floor. There were only the insect sounds and the different acoustics nearer to the ceiling. Running his hands over the cabinets, he came to a handle that felt right. He checked his instinct by estimating the distance of an imaginary vertical to the sink’s faint double rectangle below. It must be this one he thought, opening the cabinet. And indeed the two boxes of corn flakes were there, side by side, resonating their presence so powerfully that he did not have to see them with his eyes.
He drew one of the boxes out; it was heavier than he had imagined, so that the weight required the additional support of his chest, and the whole procedure of bringing the box down to the counter top and his feet back to the floor was slow and difficult. He laid the box down on its side and was ready to open its flaps, but there was a sudden flare of fear. It seemed that the dawn was really deceptively near, waiting to spring up from the edge of the world without warning and reveal him there in his infinite culpability. The sounds of rousing were upon him, coming from the three occupied bedrooms: Celestina would begin her day as always, with a surreptitious entry to the bathroom followed by the long noise of her urine as it streamed from her pressurized bladder. The old woman would lay a while in her bed once she was awake, turning over and sighing occasionally. Sometimes she farted explosively, when her massive weight shifted and put a localized pressure on some deep pocket of gas, bringing it to a position from where it could be squeezed out with minimum effort. But the man who had the corner bedroom made virtually no sound, keeping the pattern of his morning ritual a mystery. It seemed to the boy that the man waited to make his own noises underneath the much louder noises of the women, so that the first clear, self-identifying sound that linked itself to him in the morning was often the starting of the jeepeta. Such a man might wake even now, leave his bed and be in the kitchen, not betraying his presence until the hot breath was felt like a great hand on the neck and shoulders. Then as if to tranquilize the boy, the myriad croakings, burpings, snaps, shivers and rattles of the deep night intensified and set him again to his work.
Out of the box he drew one package of several, feeling its soft, cellophane-wrapped bulk in his hand. He set it down inside the sink. He found a knife whose sharpness he tested carefully with the belly of his thumb. As he was about to bring the point to bear against the cellophane skin and the yielding material inside, it occurred to him to leap ahead just a little to make sure that the way ahead was perfectly clear for all that must be done. It came to him, and immediately he saw the miracle of it, to turn the faucet. There were times when he had heard his grandmother making some complaint or other to no one in particular, but the water seemed to be at the heart of her aggravation. He turned the knob slowly, not wanting to make too loud a sound or add a mess of water to the already difficult condition of utter darkness. The knob slipped slowly past the point where at least some trickle of water seemed reasonable, then further, and turning it more quickly, still nothing, until it would turn no more.
It was an impasse beyond which he could not see. Backwards was an insufferable direction; it meant the perpetuation of unmitigated misery. Already he could see that even in this new place of greenness and sun there would be more suffering; his father’s hand would continue to travel in its well-practiced arc. No, he must go forward. Though he could scarcely guess at the consequences of the present action, at least there was the uncertainty of the outcome. There was no time now to fumble in the dark beneath the sink, in search of a valve that might not give results, might not be there at all. And he was suddenly impatient with the idea of taking the knife to each package, working the contents out into the sink as the water coursed down the black hole of the drain. Too slow! So he took the whole corn flake box, with its six or seven soft bundles inside, under his arm and went out into the night.
The darkness was vast; the invisible creatures made a louder cacophony, as if to embrace him into it. The stars made their achingly slow arcs in the sky, and there was light! His eyes were all dilated pupil, two black funnels, gorging. He saw the path into the jungle ahead of him, as a slightly darker notch in the wall of black leaves and trunks. He ran into it, delighting at the delicate touch of each leaf, each vine, each unseen buzzing body that collided with him as he displaced the air. Each contact against his skin was like a little hand urging him forward, toward the sea. Suddenly he was out of the jungle; he reached the abrupt line where the sharp rocks began. But the rocks were almost invisible. He had thought of only the distance: Yes it would be miserable and there would be cuts and scrapes and blood, but it could still be gotten over. However, in the absence of light the possibility was direly challenged. He stood with his back to the jungle; behind him each leaf was faintly outlined in blue, and so the whole of it was a fuzzy but visible mass. But in front of his eyes, the vacuum of outer space might have gaped, for all he could see. He pushed his toe forward until the soft flesh met with something sharp and immovable. There the coral began. He knew from the memory that it was about fifty feet to the precipice, and then the mad roil of the waves and unfathomably deep water. At some distance that he judged to be about half way, there were tiny glints of light — starlight catching in the minuscule pools of moisture that remained after each really thunderous wave clap. He could not see waves at all, but every fourth or fifth impact was like an explosion. The spume leapt high into the air and rained noisily over the rocks; he could see some of the tiny points of light wink out while others appeared.
The sound; the sound is a constant. He reckoned he might use the sound of the waves as a measure of the distance, get close enough to hurl the box into the sea, then turn back. His mind embraced the idea, and already he saw that the return trip would be easier with the sanctuary of the jungle looming ahead in a fuzzy glow. He pushed the cereal box out in front of him (the sound of the merciless scrape made him shudder), and he dropped to hands and knees.
It was a thing to be done as quickly as possible, as with the breath held — a dash out and a dash back. Time was in two ways the enemy. On the one hand there was the inevitable dawn to think about — under the thunder of the sea and the sounds of the night creatures there was already the faint sizzle of a burning landscape. If the sky should begin to lighten before he was back in his bed, the spell of the Well would be broken, and somehow it would all fail miserably. There was also the tight-rope walker’s fear to keep him moving. He believed that if he should pause too long on one spot, lose the forward momentum, his orientation in space would shift suddenly, as it had done before in his room. He might find himself hanging from the roof of a black cave or clinging to a sheer cliff wall.
By the time he felt the spray of a big wave rain down over him, his hands and knees were pulpy points of shredded agony. His foot slipped into a deep crevasse, and though the leg accelerated for only a tiny distance, it was enough to occasion a dazzling white explosion of pain from the shin. Apart from the additional treachery of the slickness, the wet terrain was full of dark strangeness and movement. From time to time a hand would slip into a little pool where things leapt and fell with plop noises. There were places where the coral rock was smooth and slimy and covered with fleshy masses. The rock had become more porous too; and he came upon abyssal holes through which a wet wind blew and the sounds of the ocean working and gurgling against the rocks below could be heard. He was tempted to let the box slip down into one of these, but there was no way to be certain that it wouldn’t merely fall a few feet to a solid ledge, never reaching the sea’s destructive grasp. Presently even the minor waves were splashing him, and he was beginning to shiver. There was less and less a feeling of painful solidity beneath and more a sense of the cold emptiness ahead. He reached the final edge at last, but it seemed to be in some sort of cove, since the waves were first heard to crash at some point to the left and then arrived somewhat abated where he was. He felt for a pebble with his hand and threw it into the space where he hoped the sea would be. It splashed in deep water. He hefted the box over his head, putting all of the weight on his ravaged knees. The effort of the toss came from the deepest part of the Well, from some source of strength that was not a part of him. It reached in, turned him out like a sock, and then was gone. He listened a long time for the sound of the splash, but he must have lost it within the thunder of the waves.