How important that sounds. I mean only to say that the published etiquette for life in these times is slim. A code of conduct for people like me is unavailable, and if it were, it would damage one’s body to read it.
What is it called when a dark, hard magnet has been run over one’s moral compass so many times that the needle of the compass quivers so badly that it cannot be read?
Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.
I forget who said it and I no longer care.
I suppose with my time I could farm and hunt and subsist through harvest, but all of those food products on shelves in empty stores off the quiet freeway make such labors unnecessary.
As to hunting, when I consider it now, there is a certain version I have practiced. I had not really named that form of smallwork. Hunting. But if hunting means the careful tracking and subsequent acquisition of a living resource, for whatever reasons, then, yes, I have hunted.
Just the few times.
48
When I monitor the quarantine across the river, what I see is not so much anymore. The child quarantines here at this final New York—and staggered in settlements up and down the coast, even as the salt rises—have developed an orderly form of dispatch when they need to eject their own, young citizens of eroded immunity, tongues hard in their mouths, newly pained by language.
All of them will age, and all of them will have to leave, and then my town, my house, will be free of their kind, the easy-speaking ones. I cannot fathom another outcome.
Now the little gate opens and out they come, dazed and already ill. No doubt they will not live long, unless they can quickly adapt to the laws of the speechless world.
Hide yourself away, is one of these laws.
And, If you see someone, goes another one, exercise the necessary evasions.
The laws apply because I am not the only person hidden in these hills watching the exits. I am not the only one with an interest in these young people.
There are others like me, but they are not really like me. Escorts, predators, parents. So many different words might apply to them.
I’ve seen them rush to meet the exiles, using a mixed weaponry of kindness and cruelty. A gracious welcome, the offer of a blanket, a comfortable ride in a cart. Or instead a quick capture, a stifling, the enclosure of rope, an abduction. From my distance these transactions play out slowly, without feeling. They suffer from problems of believability.
The rescuers move alone or in groups, faces covered, and most often their lure is food, which our little speakers have had trouble securing. The exiles hardly ever resist. They get so hungry! They are still children, really, and they are sick, but now they are alone. So when the welcome wagon comes, they climb in.
Off they go with their new families to a life without words somewhere west of here. That is how they compass, usually, west, then south. Probably they go to Wheeling, Marion, Danville. I’ve been too bored to follow them beyond Albert Farm. They almost never drag back this way, into the salt, where nothing is good for anything and nobody would ever think to set up a life.
Perhaps the mute, gazeless family life in underground berms, where even eye contact must be kept in check for its lurches into nuance and meaning, is more pleasant in the sunshine of our warmer towns. Perhaps the salt is finer there, easier to sweep away.
Now that Esther has come to me, or I to her, as the case was, fighting off some rescuer waving sugary hunks of bread at her, then dragging her by spoiled light through the marsh, over the river, and up to the hut, I have little reason to keep watch of the town gate. I’ve gotten what I came for. My daughter is back in my custody. But sometimes I sit under cover in any case, hills away, watching these exits through binoculars. It’s a habit of years.
Over time people either gave up on the children harbored within, or the children came out of their own accord, contrite and quiet. If the parents were lucky, they got to them before anyone else did. But what they did next, where they went and what happened after they arrived, what those people actually did with their days when silence was enforced by the speech fever, that information is not available to me. I refuse to make up stories about such people. To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.
Too many nights, hiding in the brush, I’ve lost track of time during my observational work and found it too dark to return to the hut. I’ve spent sunless hours dug in against some low hillside, forcing from myself an artificial laughter to keep warm. You’ve heard of laughter in the hills. This is all it is. It’s no mystery and nothing is funny. Just a person like me, pulsing sound and breath through his body, trying to stay warm.
I’ve lived these winters before, speechless, waiting. They bring one too close to the doings of one’s own mind, some of which—I finally believe this—must remain unheard, must have their meaning amputated until they’re reduced to babble. A careful listener to such interior speech is not rewarded. These winters fail to blot the mind, and what now could the mind even be for, since its fears and lies cannot be shared? Often I have wished that the toxicity, when it came, had reached deeper, into the unspoken speech we stalk and hound ourselves with.
Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it’s the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us.
Oh, I fucking hope so.
49
So yesterday I left Esther asleep on her cot and went out to get wood. I have a chain saw for clearing, but a tool like this is a luxury for someone who wants mostly to sit in his hut and listen carefully at the hole for news that never comes, for a person who is really getting late. I’d settle for a hiss from the wire, just the crackling of static, even, suggesting the orange cable has been plugged in again to Buffalo, to Albany, to I don’t care where. Then I might listen to a story from the old days.
They really are the old days. They have aged. They are not pretty to consider.
Why the Jewish feed is so long silent is a question I cannot resolve. Or maybe I should say that I don’t know why there’s no more bait on the line. Perhaps Rabbi Burke, in the tomb of Forsythe, is mouthing silences on the other end and that’s all that is left. Do the birds still bathe in his glass tank, I wonder?
For some years now, since leaving Forsythe by tunnel, I have been alone, and I have worked to leave no evidence of myself in this place. My solitude was corrected by Esther’s arrival, an arrival I arranged through years of patience, waiting under cover for her exile to end, hoping that through binoculars I’d see her emerge by horse and cart, by sled, on foot, out of the town gates.
She is my first visitor. Well, that’s not accurate. One or two times I brought another person into this hut, three times, a person unknown to me. Maybe we could say this happened five times altogether, persons other than Esther. Is person the right word? In truth I do not care for a tabulation of the activity.