The house I had built was at first small, just a few rooms, a small number of windows, a single hallway and a very finite and planned-for number of doors, and all of that was still there, if also dashed apart. After I finished my preparations I walked that first house once more, examined again its remains, peered through its broken walls and windows at the dirt beyond, and everywhere I looked I saw only some element I had been cured of wanting, and as I examined the future of this world I found I no longer craved its ownership. Now I would leave it behind to again journey beneath the earth, to again search out my wife—and whether I found her or not I thought perhaps I would never return to this dirt where we had lived, nor any of the lands beyond it.
Below the limits of the house, I knew my wife’s nested structure was far greater, extending even past what I had seen on my last descent. Surely the bear already roamed somewhere among those rooms, waiting between the surface and the great stairs, mad with what she had done, what I was sure she would claim I’d made her do. Soon I would be on my way to meet her, and when I did it would be with the shrouded death of her cub in my arms, with the skins of his first-meant childhood strapped to my back, and I did not yet know what I would say when next we met.
And how I would have to be ready.
And how when I lifted the foundling into my arms, the fingerling objected, saying, OR JUST THROW IT IN THE LAKE.
And how I never would be ready.
ABANDON IT IN THE WOODS OR IN THE GARDEN OR IN THE ROOMS OF THE HOUSE.
And how I had never known what right thing to say or do, to her or to anyone else.
I DO NOT CARE WHERE YOU LEAVE IT, he said. BUT DO ANYTHING BUT BRING IT ALONG.
And how when that meeting came I would speak and act anyway, as always I had done before.
EVERYWHERE THERE WAS THE CHAR and charcoal of our ruined wedding presents, of the memory of them, and also pools of rainwater and clods of sod and fallen walls and piled rubble. I picked through those first unceilinged rooms, then the darker halls below, curious for what remained, but so little held any useful shape or other dimension that soon we moved on, downward and farther in, through room after room, and though I did not forget their contents I also did not linger long between their walls.
And in this room, a silence that had once been a song.
And in this room, a light that had once been lightning.
And in this room, a heat that had once been a fire.
And in this room, a lump of silver that had once been a ring, two rings.
And in this room, the taste of burned hair. And in this room, its smell.
And in this room, the carapaces of bees, long ago emptied.
And in this room, a wine bottle, full of the leavings of maggots but not maggots.
And in this room, a broken bowl of mirrors, reflecting nothing.
And in this room, a filthy red ribbon, for putting up a woman’s hair, for tying it back.
And in this room, unwashed seeds split by fire, revealing the expectant sprouts inside, now doomed and dried.
And in this room, a sensation like the slight give of a bruised thigh, when pushed in upon by a thumb.
And in this room, a sound that might have been my wife’s voice, just too far off to hear.
And in this room, a chunk of moon rock, still hot, and above it a shaft of light lifting five stories to a jagged hole in the surface, to the other moon’s light pouring down.
And in this room, the spokes of a bassinet, a blanket buried beneath a caved-in ceiling.
And in this room, a trowel stained dark, used once for digging twice.
And in this room, a rag, brown with blood, with layers of old blood.
And in this room, the sound of a star hitting the earth.
And in this room, the louder sound of a moon, of part of a moon.
And in this room, a staleness of spilt milk.
And in this room, the slime and the scales of rotted fish.
And in this room, the broken body of a deer, twisted upon itself, legs over head and around antlers, and some of the rest wrenched free for feed.
And in this room, a heavy line arced in the ash, acrid urine, another marker that the bear had raced ahead, and in the next room a runny shit, fresh from her body, and how I shivered to see it, to smell it stinking still.
And in this room, somehow a baby rabbit, alive, shaking in its fur. It had perhaps come into the deep house during the firestorm above, and now it was near death, with no mother to care for it and no food to find. I was hungry too, and just as lonely, and as I picked up the trembling bunny, I wondered if I had it in me to end early one of this world’s last things, so that I might go on a little longer.
I wondered, and as I wondered I stroked away the rabbit’s shivers, and then I wondered no more.
And in the next deepest room, only ash.
And in the room after that, only more of the same.
And then ash in the next room and in the next room and in the next, all rooms filled with ash and smoke-marred stones still radiating heat or else steaming with water falling through cracked ceilings, through ruptured floors, and throughout that descent the fingerling kept silent his counsel, spent his energies tormenting my body instead of my mind, seizing new stations as I slept in slanted doorways and damp hallways. Then visions of battle all night. Then one morning waking to find my right leg paralyzed straight, the muscles needed to flex it away from its numb position unresponsive even as I felt some ineffective ghost kicking, some shade of the right movement. As I kneaded the muscles and cursed my stubborn son, I felt the silent smirk of his faceless form move, and I stopped my massaging to punch his shapes, not caring that I would only bruise the surface of my stomach and thighs, never harming his holdings beneath.
Let my leg go or do not, I said. I will go on no matter what you do, no matter how it might hurt.
The fingerling did not respond, only let me struggle, believing he could convince me to abandon my last charge, the foundling’s body. But I would not and said as much: If I could not have carried the foundling, then I would have dragged him in his sheets, would have crawled the burned wreckage to search out enough wood to make a sledge on which to haul him down the stairs. I sat on the ground, driving my thumbs through my thick trousers, the spotted skin beneath, rubbing the prickling pain from my muscles, and as I fought nerve by nerve against the fingerling he bragged again about how he would one day take control, and that once he did my mind would be reduced to his former role, a prisoner pushed down, a belly-holed secret, wished forgotten. He would take my body and with it he would live his own life, in the house or on the dirt, among the trees of the woods or under the waters of the lake.
I had been given so many new bodies, he said, and one day he planned to rule them all.
MEMORY AS SADNESS DISCARDED, DENIED: To pretend to be unaffected by the almost-emptied rooms of the deep house. To pretend to have some other reasons to open again every door, scour every chamber, even after I knew what I would find, and so to lie to the fingerling, to claim I was looking for my wife, even though we both knew she was not there.