Big watches him nervously and tries to calm him down by rubbing his back.
‘Hold on.’
A few hours later the situation has worsened. Small’s jaw goes into spasm, he dribbles and he can no longer string full sentences together.
‘Shiver… mind going…’
He doesn’t want to eat, because he’s not hungry. It’s something else. Deep cracks open up in his thoughts and he can feel how the walls that contain them are beginning to collapse. He feels his reason plunging into a hole; waste collects at the smoking base and noxious fumes rise up and lacerate the chimney of his sanity. He is saying goodbye to reality. It is defeating him.
‘I must hurry…’
Big can do no more than comfort him and trust that the exhaustion will overcome him and force him to rest. He is still not ready to take him out of the well. He needs a few more days; less than a week, maybe. He will only get one chance and he can’t risk the effort of these last two months and a half, even if his brother is losing weight quicker than he can bear. It’s torture to see him this way — destroyed, in the last agonies, like a city that’s been flattened by a meteor — and he feels more shame still for feeling so strong in himself, for surviving with such dignity. But he can’t pity him, not now. Not if he wants to keep his promise.
A fine rain numbs the night. Big places maggots in Small’s mouth and pushes them right to the back of his throat to force him to swallow them. The boy takes them without fuss.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he says.
‘Don’t thank me. Eat.’
‘I’m somewhere far away…’
‘I know. But I can still see you.’
‘No… You can’t.’
‘I’m seeing you right now. I’m talking to you.’
‘You aren’t talking to me. I’m an echo.’
‘Sleep, please. Don’t talk anymore,’ says Big with a quake in his vocal cords, despite himself.
‘It’s been weeks since it was me talking.’
To the nocturnal eyes of his brother, it looks like Small is wrapped in a black shroud, the scribbled sketch of a prehistoric child. He lifts him up and rocks him to the rhythm of a drifting boat. An ancient voice carries across a hundred generations and shakes them:
‘Sleep, my child, sleep. They say that life is good. They speak — let them speak! — , they know not what they say. Sleep, my child, sleep. Your day will come and you shall have the longest, sweetest rest. Sleep, my child, sleep. The gentle night is coming — for me, and then for you,’ Big sings, without thinking, without knowing what he says.
79
IN A FIT OF HYSTERIA Small scoops up several fistfuls of earth and eats them. Minute stones grind against his back teeth and the grit scratches the enamel, twisting his attempt at a smile into a grimace. It only takes a few seconds before he is bent double, vomiting a dark paste of soil and bile, but the smile still hangs from his face. He looks like he has risen from the dead.
‘Beeerrrrggggg, beeerrrrrggggg,’ he says.
Big doesn’t know if it was an attack of hunger or an attempted suicide. Seeing how he smiles it seems more likely the upshot of a terminal mental breakdown. He knocks him cold when he goes to scoop up more earth and carry on eating.
Even unconscious he holds on to the crazed smile.
In the hours that follow, Small stirs a few times; momentary spasms of lucidness that alternate with heartrending cries, whimpers and incoherent monologues. He doesn’t have a temperature; it’s more like he has knocked his head and the impact has jogged his brain out of place, flipping it over. He spits continuously. His eyelids open and close like the wings of a fly, beating large pieces of coppery rheum that fall off then stick to his cheeks. An invisible leprosy is consuming him.
‘Water,’ he asks.
Big gives him a drink.
‘I’m cold.’
Big lies down beside him and holds him with all of his body.
‘I’m hot.’
Big undoes his brother’s shirt, mops his collar and the nape of his neck with cool water, and then flaps his own to create a current.
‘I’m dirty.’
Big takes down his brother’s trousers, wipes his buttocks with damp earth and dresses him again.
‘I’m scared.’
Big lifts him up in his arms, the way a groom carries his new wife, and rocks him. He weighs so little he could hold him in one hand.
‘Kill me.’
83
IT IS A COOL DAWN. An invitation to go on sleeping, to sink back into the warm earth and let the forest’s hum slowly stir the senses. The sun just about warms his toes, his ankles, his legs. It strokes his skin and makes his hair stand on end, but doesn’t burn him. Flocks of birds chatter in the trees before flying off. Big is awake, but his eyes are still shut. He wants to draw out the bliss of his slumber, to let himself be towed by the undercurrent all the way to the shore. He knows that all pleasure will disappear when he opens his eyes to the sky and the walls of the well cover him with their heavy shadow.
His mind made up, he concentrates all his strength in one eye, then, at last, opens it, and the morning enters in like a spray of light, blinding him for a few seconds, drawing back the curtains in one stroke. The world spins.
Around him the bed of earth is all stirred up. He is still not completely awake. He yawns. He rubs his eyes to level his horizon. He yawns again. Something seems different. He blinks. He looks. Something is different.
Small is not there.
It feels like a lightning bolt is moving through him from his genitals all the way up to his heart, electrifying his organs, coursing through his cells. Small is not there. Adrenaline bursts into thousands of bubbles that dampen his stupor as if with a shower of metal, and leave him like a cat caught in acid rain. Small is not there. He turns his head this way and that in such a hurry that he looks without seeing and his brain can’t retain the visual details of his surroundings. It’s not possible, he thinks.
He breathes in. He looks again, this time taking his time. There are no footprints on the walls. There are no hand or tread marks. If his brother has escaped from the well, he will have had to do it by flying. He looks again. The soil on the ground has been turned over. He stops. There is a mound over in the corner, like a camel’s hump. He hasn’t seen it before. He moves closer. The bulge is a mountain formed out of layers of fresh soil. Behind it, a half-closed hole. Or half open.
In the time it takes for him to swoop down on the hole and start to haul up layers of soil, he has understood that his brother has spent the night digging a tunnel underneath the well. He screams as his arms sink and rise up again and his skin shreds, leaving his hands like red-hot trowels. And he goes on screaming as his nails break off, flipping like snapped animal traps into the air, and the last speck of earth is shifted. He is still screaming when from a metre away he spots the submerged body, its head buried in the depths of a ridiculous vertical passageway. He goes on screaming as he drags the rag doll that only yesterday was his brother and is now a piece of mud-battered flesh, and he screams as he pulls him out of his lair. And when at last he sets him down and washes him, slapping water on him as if he were a dirty shoe, he is still screaming.
Big removes the hard pustules from his eyes, his ears and his mouth. Resting his ear against Small’s chest, he listens for a heartbeat, but hears nothing. He’s not sure if he is dead or alive. He puts his mouth against Small’s mouth and blows, and then he presses into his ribs with his hands, and then blows again. He doesn’t even know what he is doing, but his movements are driven by instinct and he goes along with it, repeating them as many times as necessary. Nothing happens, there are no changes. His brother doesn’t move. The blowing turns into a reverberating cry that travels across their mouths and the compressions turn into violent, unbridled thumps, like blows from a mallet coming down on a casket of bones. He takes him by the shoulders and shakes him against the ground, and he can’t stop because his hands are locked into fists and they will not open.