One
Near 4AM, under the blinkless, blue regard of the moon:
All the lost and meandering waters of the earth began to pool together in one place. They came gently at first, as if possessed with the infinite restraint of geological workings. Inoffensive. Slow. Tiny trickles and rivulets emerged from unseen sources, tracing imperceptibly along the gutters, disturbing only the odd gum wrapper and popsicle stick. At first, it all made no more sound than the wind in the trees. A rasp, a gurgle, a low hiss, as dry became wet. But collectively, the noises of “flood�? gathered out of the relative silence, and began their steady climb to a roar.
The gutters swelled as they did after a flash Summer downpour, forming those small, localized lakes. The lakes deepened, molding along the tiny banks of the curbs, rising, joining with other swelling lakes, until a critical mass was reached and all the water flowed powerfully in a single direction, not with randomness but with purpose. Soon the streets became rivers, merging at the intersections, making deeper frothy, brownish rivers, which were finally more than the curbs could contain. Up and over they flowed, gurgling and surging, assailing the sidewalks. And now swept things became visible too, bobbing and tumbling along in the brown water, arrested long enough by some submerged obstacle for the eye to pick them out — there, a sneaker, over there, a woman’s brassiere.
As the curbs had succumbed, so did the porches and stoops in their turn. The flood penetrated into human dwellings. Stairways were surmounted, locked doors were wrested free of their hinges, and the waters began to assail them in their beds. They were all asleep, fat and heavy and sweating against July’s relentless nocturnal assault. Floor by floor the waters rose in the buildings, drowning them where they lay. Silent under the roar of the flood, mouths gasped and bubbled, limbs flailed briefly then were still. The water was darkly busy with them, as tiny hands stinging eyes, choking throats and muffling screams. The bodies quickly climbed in number, making temporary log jams that the mounting pressure forced through windows and doorways, out into the night.
When the flood had risen with its crust of corpses, up through one particular building, it encountered a bed whose occupant was not drowned. Instead, the whole bed was buoyed up along with the countless bodies and the million pieces of human debris. And soon after that, the flood had risen so high that there was no more any sign of human permanence at all, no buildings, no bridges, no distant skyscrapers twinkling. The horizon had become an endless uninterrupted line dividing deep indigo sky from black water. And amid the bodies, all with their faces turned down anonymously into the abyss, among the toilet paper cores, the empty orange juice cartons, and the acres of clothing, floated the boy’s tiny bed.
The boy remained in a profound sleep, even as the evil Will that possessed the water began to show itself at last with unmistakable clarity. At first, the dark presence could be felt only very remotely as a pulse in the fathomless depths of the ocean. Then it began to act on the surface, where the sleeping boy floated. It stirred up eddies and currents with mounting fury. It made a storm. The surface lapped and frothed and turned over on itself as if stirred by a great spoon. But the boy did not awaken. The bodies of the drowned and the miscellaneous solid flotsam on the surface began to break up into frothing fragments, and to be sucked down. It was all being digested by the mad roiling of the water; it was being disappeared. When the storm at last subsided, there was nothing of the world but an immense ocean, featureless on the surface, inscrutably black and deep and vile below. Only the bed remained, now the solitary floating object.
After a time, there was no more a sense of the water rising, since there was no solid thing against which to measure any rising. But the water was still rising. It had made of the earth a sphere of black liquid. Unimaginable depths receded beneath the tiny mattress. Instead of climbing, now the bed seemed to be pressed upon from above, by celestial objects that appeared to descend on it. The pale disk of the moon slowly enlarged over the boy’s bed, casting the sleeping figure in a cold, yellow light. And when it seemed that the moon and stars were themselves in jeopardy of being drowned, there came from that blackest depth of the ocean a pulse of sound. The sound traveled up through lightless fathoms, the node of its meaning undiminished by the great distance, and it burst on the surface in a convulsive tremor of bubbles and spume.
The boy startled awake at the hearing of his name. The sound echoed inside him and thrummed its two syllables against the membrane of his chest. The two beats defined a space of time between them that cupped round a third, nameless, utterly silent thing. He listened to the third thing, listened into the silence between the syllables of his name. There between the two hurtful, percussive halves of his identity, playing like an insubstantial light between the solid hemispheres of pursed lips blowing weak-as-candle-wind and a tongue pressed to the roof of the mouth, there was his response. An anti-scream.
Just as the echo faded into silence, the ocean began to drop from under the boy’s bed. Suddenly the bed was at the center of a spinning vortex, a whirlpool funneling down into an enormous, unseen drain. The ocean was falling away under him so quickly that the bed would levitate briefly from the surface of the water, spin, make a smaller profile against the air, then fall in again with a splash. Above him, the sky lightened and the stars became faint. Finally, the sun burned out through a dull curtain of haze and devastated him with its brightness. The yellow disk swelled above the boy with a weighty, downward-firing heat, and the heat was an instant oppression.
The madness and terror of free-fall was broken suddenly by a loud crack, as of splitting wood. The bed had caught sharply on the summit of a rocky spire that had suddenly pierced the surface of the declining ocean. As the boy scrambled to the edge of the bed to look out, he set it teetering menacingly, and was forced to center himself on it to restore a delicate balance. Once the rocking had stopped and a fierce wind became perceptible as the only movement, other than the throttling of his own heart, he rolled onto his stomach crosswise on the bed. His feet projected over one edge and his eyes over the other. Down below him, an immense distance down, the last of the ocean was scattering over the land, fleeing like the shadow of a vast cloud. The water was gone, and in its wake everything was instantly cracked and dry with dust. The horror of the flood receded into queasy memory, displaced by a new impotence in the face of the merciless sun and a sudden desperate thirst.
Gone also were the streets, buildings and people of Corona where he had lived. Everything he’d ever seen or touched, save for his rickety, old bed, had been swept clean away. Every person that had ever produced a sound that reached his ears, was drowned and dead, forever silenced. The only presences that now impinged on him were the spire below and the sun above. The spire was a finger that had caught him and saved him from a fatal plummet to the unknown ground below, but that also held him high and close to the sun’s unrelenting attention.
Still, despite the misery of the sun, it was impossible to resist amazement at such a spectacularly high vantage point. The boy looked all about him, out across the great, red plain of arid soil that was fledged only very distantly with faint, stubby trees. Those trees seemed to sprout from the air itself, bourne up above the earth as they were by a wavering sliver of mirage-green. His eyes traced away from those dreamy places of viridiscence at the horizon, and made their way back over the mounding orange boulders that rose upward from the dust almost with a measure of ambition. As his eyes scanned from far to near, the boulders became more jagged and precipitous, culminating in a tumble of massive stones directly below. It was from the bosom of that cracked and dusty tumble that this fantastic stone spire rose a thousand feet toward the heavens, now with a tiny wooden bed impossibly balanced at its peak. In that same vertiginous moment when he understood how the spire had interposed itself between his bed and the ground, the boy recognized the place that stretched all around him in disorienting vastness. He knew that those faint patches of mirage-green at the horizon were the edges of the Serengeti, struggling against the African desert, and he understood that only with wings could he hope to traverse its great and hostile sweep.
August 12th, 2006 at 12:08 am
[…] Corona, a small sub-realm of New York City, of indistinct borders, was defined more by the lots where buildings were missing or by the points at which Bodegas were filled with unfamiliar faces, than by the whim-drawn lines on some zoning map. Roughly along the middle, or at least in the place where the people living there felt they were equally far, in any direction, from some place that was not Corona, lay 99th Street. As perhaps suggested by the number of the street, the people who made their homes along it, were infected on the sub-conscious level with a buzzing presentiment that they lived on the edge of a precipice. Which is not to say that 99th Street was one thing and 100th Street yet another, but rather that on the street where Willie lived, things were never still long enough so that you could watch a whole cloud pass by, or count more than two stars at night. Perhaps only slightly more so than somewhere else, but representing an increment of enormous scope to Willie, more people were violently killed there, more buildings seemed to burn, and the shouting on the street was noticeably louder. So every moment was a tensed, clenched submission to inevitable tragedy. And Willie, like everyone else, knew that tragedy waited around every corner. […]
August 27th, 2006 at 12:18 am
[…] After a time, there was no more a sense of the water rising, since there was no solid thing against which to measure any rising. But the water was still rising. It had made of the earth a sphere of black liquid. Unimaginable depths receded beneath the tiny mattress. Instead of climbing, now the bed seemed to be pressed upon from above, by celestial objects that appeared to descend on it. The pale disk of the moon slowly enlarged over the boy’s bed, casting the sleeping figure in a cold, yellow light. And when it seemed that the moon and stars were themselves in jeopardy of being drowned, there came from that blackest depth of the ocean a pulse of sound. The sound traveled up through lightless fathoms, the node of its meaning undiminished by the great distance, and it burst on the surface in a convulsive tremor of bubbles and spume… @ […]