The basement is a cavern, a dank stone shaft like an immense well, the air cold and fetid, thick with mold and methane and unknown Precambrian scents blowing up from the darkness below. Its walls are honeycombed with holes and the holes are filled with language: pre-lingual symbolism in bent sticks and notched bones, forcing stories into my head with even greater violence than the books above.
An ape hunches over its meal, eyes darting left and right, angry and afraid. It pisses on a nearby rock, just to be sure, then returns to the food at its feet: the juicy face meat of a rival troop’s young. A thousand insects crawl in the ape’s fur, unaware that the ape is an ape or that it’s alive or that they are, unaware of anything beyond the chemicals that tell them when to bite, when to suck, when to excrete eggs and die.
Life is a long ladder, Perry says. We climbed from deep pits. The lowest thought of the basest human is a staggering achievement.
I sink deeper and even the dim lights fade. The darkness is complete, frozen and airless, but the stories continue, reduced to almost nothing: microbial etchings of binary narratives, hungry/fed, living/dead.
But there’s more than this, Perry tells me. There are Higher shelves.
My feet finally allow me to stop. I hover in the smothering blackness and I look up. The skylight is a dim speck, a distant star.
“They’re so far away.”
My voice sounds muffled, like I’ve been buried. It trembles with a purity of sadness that I’ve never felt before, the simple core of loneliness inside every elaborate grief.
Some of you is up there, R. Some of me, too. We’ve lived most of our lives in the Lower, but we have a few scenes in those lovely books. Everyone does.
The worms surround my brain, gnawing at its walls. My body is gone; my face and skull are gone; I am a wrinkled gray planet adrift in space.
It’s easier to fall than to climb, and yet against all logic, life keeps rising. The line wavers, but the trajectory is upward.
I can feel the worms’ outrage at being detained. Their tails thrash as they strain toward my center.
So what’s your choice, R? Where will you shelve the last book of your life? Down here in the pit with the primordial slimes?
I close my eyes. I grit my teeth.
Or up there in the light?
Somewhere inside me, far deeper than my lungs and larynx, a scream rises. It rips up from miles beneath my basement, a sound so fierce it scares the brute out of its pit, it sends the wretch running, it roars up the staircase and down the hall and bursts out of my mouth, and the worms fall still.
I clench that invisible muscle hard enough to tear it, and the worms slide backward. Squealing with indignation, they peel away from my brain, squeezing down through my jaws and jugular and finally, back into the bite itself. I compress them into a dark, tumorous mass beneath the Dead man’s toothmarks, and I hold them there.
Perry smiles again, and his warmth spreads through me. My limbs tingle and return. My hands twitch and ball into fists.
Good, Perry says, and the chorus surges in around him, absorbing his voice into its vast and complex harmony. Now you know what to do.
In a shallow grave deep in the forest, I open my eyes. I dig my fingers into the mud. I climb out.
I
THE CHURCH is empty. The speakers hiss, waiting to amplify whoever steps to the mic.
The houses are empty. The doors are open, so I search each one. They looked vacant before—no decorations, no furniture, blankets on the floor for beds—but now even their squatters have moved on.
The RV is empty. My kids are gone. But this is a relief. Better they be locked up in a van on their way to Post than somewhere on the streets of this town.
Because the streets are not empty. The streets are full of corpses steaming in the morning sun. I step gingerly between them, fighting my way through a squawking murder of crows as I scan the withered faces, desperately hoping not to recognize any.
Only morbid curiosity brings me to the circus in the woods. Deep tire tracks mark the escape routes of the armored trucks and their trailers. And of course, the metal building is empty. The daylight leaking through its entry is the only illumination for its windowless interior, but there is nothing to see. It’s an empty box. The only hints of what it held are the scratches on the walls, the broken teeth and chips of bone, the strange, pointy footprints in the bare earth floor.
No one will ever bury this town’s corpses. No one will ever inhabit its sorrowful homes. Future generations will steer wide of this nameless place, whispering of ghosts and curses.
I suddenly remember that I’m carrying something. It was dented and corroded but the Atvist code still opened it. The musty documents inside are unreadable, but they never said anything to begin with. The case’s true contents are hidden under its false bottom. A gift for some unlucky Cascadian enclave, a box of death for the first one to resist.
I feel an urge to use it now. To “surrender” this town and blast its rot from the earth. But there is only one good deed this weapon can do, and only one place to do it.
“Julie!”
My hoarse voice echoes down the streets of the town square. I suck in a deep lungful and shred my throat on her name.
“Julie!”
Another personal volume record, but my only answer is the angry crows.
She is not here. No one is.
I walk to the highway and head toward the coast, leaving the birds to their grim festivities.
The bite in my neck throbs. My grip remains fierce, holding the worms in place, but no matter how hard I squeeze I can’t crush them. They writhe in my blood, bellowing demands like powerful old men unaccustomed to refusal.
How long can I hold them? I am a single guard transporting a bus full of prisoners, and it’s only a matter of time before they overpower me. I need backup.
Perry? I whisper into my mind. Can you help me?
I know it’s a foolish request, but I’m desperate.
Can you show me where she is?
I imagine him pretending not to hear, as if to save us both the embarrassment. Wherever and whatever Perry is, he is not my personal assistant. He did not emerge from that cosmic chorus to be my GPS.
This journey is mine.
The trees that surround the highway grow taller as I move west, until the sky is just a narrow inverted river winding above my head. The sun coaxes languid ghosts of steam out of the wet earth. It strikes my neck and warms the bite; the worms shrink to the corners of their cage.
I walk just short of a run and soon I’m breathing hard. Each inhalation brings a rich bouquet: pine and cedar oils, grass like green tea, and the more complex scents of more complex living things. The sweat and dander of wolves and deer, rats and wildcats, dusty birds and the subtle bitterness of the insects they eat. All the creatures carrying on behind our stage, absent from our dramas, too pure for our plagues.
Lost in hermetic contemplations, it doesn’t strike me as odd that my once useless nose has gained bloodhound sensitivity. My body and mind have taken many forms throughout my many lives. I am a walking canvas for reality’s new rules.
And somewhere beneath all that piney, musky redolence, I smell Julie.
Not the generic scent of biological life, that cheap and consumable commodity—the scent of her, distinct among a billion others.