Night Soul and Other Stories (21 page)

Knowing each other curiously, negotiating their situation politely, gathering wood, reconnoitering the clearing. Negotiating the next few, well,
hours
in an exchange almost jocose at times, argued like two lawyers in cahoots across the hard ground. Though feeling each other out not undarkly, nonetheless, the still green branches of blow-down she found herself gathering into a pile upon which to place she knew not what cloth or fur to pillow the spirit from the night of trees, of animal life that would contemptibly dare to take advantage of her—attempted rape by the unknown that did not know it was already known by her even as also we are known as scripture will say in even such a place as this.

Did silence fall between them? He found his matches, she a personal flashlight in her bag; she complaining that the administration seemed unconscionably undecided whether to call this new region a territory or a district; he that a one hundred and some foot Coast Guard cutter had just been flown in—yes, she had heard that too—to close that part of the new northern border that was a huge kidney-shaped lake known for fifty-pound walleyes; she, that among multiple other things, it reminded her of a dangerous and ravaged part of Africa she had visited; he, that there were thirteen ways of looking at the lake—a charming word from him, an echo somehow for her, as he approached her now, and she said a storm was coming up and maybe they’d be among the first to help the survivors; he, that the weather coming here might well be artificially precipitated by the Administration. And just like that they sat down, they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, grounded, she remembering she’d wanted a vacation in Michigan for some reason, demographics, waterscape, no reason, and then they heard their stomachs growl, it reminded her of her husband…Yet it was the woods, wasn’t it? And they were up in a second standing back to back, buttock to buttock, for they were hearing more than their inner selves, but what?

We know they were in the woods soon afterward, where lingering music of late sunset layering its touch among the trees led beautifully beyond a huge hemlock to a bouldered den and a shock it held in store. Here the man, the woman a few yards behind him, had surprised an animal he had never seen, fangs tearing at the yellow-pink hams and inner thigh of a fawn caught in a trap like those sold in our country to tourists. About to come at him, gory teeth like eyes, this dark, bushy-coated, heavy-clawed wolverine-like creature (unlike what we’re familiar with along the northern borders of our nation)—longer-tailed yet almost bearlike, its claws disproportionately heavy for its body—turned back to feed a moment—yet
that
proved almost a ruse or a stark evolutionary vagary of the creature poised to spring. Yet as, suddenly, the man, always game himself, dodged its strike, and dodged again—and would have grappled fatally with it in a moment, had there not flashed into his hand a blade seemingly too long for the compact switch-blade unit housing it, a blade unfolding somehow out of lengths of itself—a shot now exploded from behind him in an instant smashing the wolverine’s head to blood, the animal already incredibly by two strokes of the man’s knife disemboweled.

The stuff of legends that moment when, seeing this angry glutton indigenous to our northern neighbor about to rake her rival’s arm shoulder neck rib groin, the woman had drawn from a side pocket of her tailored camouflage fatigues a pistol she liked the feel of, the heft, the history of freedoms in, though had never fired: a souvenir slipped her somehow in public by a forestry-and-marketing professor at a truck stop where she’d gone formica to formica, hand to hand, at midnight—liked
her
—as a
woman
—and admired her animal eye-color change from hazel to blue to green, one of her recent feats a feature of her no-holds-barred campaign answering her opponent’s own iris-pigment menu, still more his simultaneous look left and right embracing a range of people and what is in them.

How could the man have skinned and butchered and cooked their prey
and
left quality time before they settled down for the night? We may never know. “Veni, vidi, vici,” he mutters at his work. “I could taste him,” the woman said standing by as the man peeled away in a mess of harsh hair and fur a section of hide and flesh warm with then intestine that fell crawling around his wrist and as he reached the blade to grope for rib between rib and said, drily, “It’s a sow” (wondering if that was the right wolverine word for a female, if this thang
was
a wolverine), in the corner of his eye he saw the partly eaten fawn move, the dead wolverine’s prey, for the act of inhaling had slid its eye to one side, and its breath-out then was its last—and the woman, “An inch or two to the left and it would have been your head,” and he, “It was what it was,” and she (for the fawn did breathe once more), “Thanks, are we gonna eat the baby too?” yet he (meaning the pistol), “How did your handlers let you…where did you…?”

—as time, whose quality or qualities once upon a library table he had found for himself with science, philosophy, and international law all working together in his thesis—what was it?—extended audaciously our own look back into where we
are
, Time’s aspiration imagining we grasp what grasps us and our institutions. His knife does its work. “Getting some experience,” she murmurs, needing to defend herself now against who could quite say what. Experience is also the lack of it, experience is experience, he thinks, and cuts himself almost unnoticeably in the thick of his work, and what will happen next, he asks, eating and sleeping and in the sky and tomorrow? A boy’s thought, she replies. The lost sun speaks dark wind now. Well experience comes from you not just to you, he said. She gasps. “There you go again,” she cried suddenly and he looked over his shoulder to see her pocket’s cargo where it belonged, but it was the wind she had cried out upon, from the cliff, the cold grace that knows us in the sky, she recalled someone thinking. “Well I hope you can cook,” she said like a mind reading what a girlfriend—was it in college?—had said to a guy when he had done something…what was it?

Home again, the fire rises to the occasion, it is not angry at the meat, the lean, the gristle. The storm somewhere near the clearing but not here, the flames gnaw at the night. She has found a thinly surfacing spring running past a corner of their camp and brought him to wash his wound, water in a dented beer can left in the fire with other plausible litter provided by our advance team that traveled this trail of our future leaders, which was reopened after a racist sniper from our northern neighbor or a separatist, or both, shot two hikers a fortnight ago evidently tragically just as they turned, hand in hand, to look each other in the eye outdoors.

Yes, I can cook, he says. They exchange a look. Is the river its water or the banks that shape it, she thinks out loud, and she knows he is listening with those big ears of his and she doesn’t mind, for, in a gust of smoke coughing, he jokes, “Is that your Christian energy plan? You’re sounding like me.” “Can’t stand the smoke get out of the kitchen,” she says, time elapsing how, when—for she is like a woman who has agreed to spend the night with a man she hardly knows.

They were the land’s, the land vaguely realizing northward toward water. Something we were withholding from our land of the living. It comes out of nowhere but months of talk, what he says now, but out of nowhere still: they have no right to ask if and where and why you go to church, temple, or—it’s unconstitutional, he says to the fire. She pricks up her ears, some woods person’s instinct, something Out There, while with one part of her mind replies out loud, “Unconstitutional, eh?”—for in her heart of hearts she knows those founding fathers would have been astonished to find God in the three-person of our checks and balances laboring openly in our vineyards loving every minute of it.

“A piece of him,” it came to her, his words so self-effacing, she thought they were from the Avon Bard when some medieval noble, asked if he was ready, laid his neck upon the block, it moved her the more she remembered a play
she
had been in as Portia dropping mercy like rain upon a place of justice. “You have survived your experience,” he said. “I’m not so sure,” she said, and picked out a faint glint back in the trees and at the same moment a glint in the dark sky like a tonal frequency there then gone, and wondered if their privacy was breached. “What, though, is it we have survived?” he said to her, as she let her eyes seem to close but in thought not sleep. “If you have to ask that,” she murmured, “we don’t need some philosopher as king.”

Yet now far keener than a philosopher’s parse is detected suddenly the surveillance unmistakable, violently unsurprising after all these months in the public eye, the discovery simultaneous by the two of them as a couple, her hand suddenly on him, his forearm, his spare shoulder and rib, seeking
his
anger wherever in his body it might be found—our satellite listening system at last kicking in, thought both, now huddling, preparing for the night and acquainted with it, they now in some intimacy knew—beyond speech, the blank terrible chance—like a blanket absent but to be replaced by the not-too-wide, not at all thick, NASA mylar tarp the man unfolded from his pack—that she, still young, would not get what she deserved, nor even quite he, imagining how his government might work.

Just then in her reaction to the triple pop from vein of hardwood log—locust, she thought, recalling the man who had made her a gift of the pistol or her father or her child—though where were locust trees here in this tract of earth vaguely realizing outward or even inward toward and away from our northern neighbor?—the man with her saw her face as he might upon waking in the fresh damp of dawn, makeup-less, as formed as chiseled Presidential stone, her skin both fresh from the unknown of sleep and worn by the terrible campaign waged from war zone to war zone for weeks reflecting years of belief that what she ran for was hers already while her opponent elsewhere put it to a field of mystified but impressed migrant farm laborers, You would not seek me if you had not found me.

“Why did you come?” she says, her eyes closed. “Because you’d be here. Also the fossil beds.” “Why?” she said. “These very,” he said, “small Cambrian soft-bodied animals—the fittest don’t necessarily survive.” “But me?” “One of yours told one of mine you had a free day.”

We watch them really sleep—together sleep. She wakefuller than he for certain moments. A pallor in her heart. A new state of affairs in her mussed hair—while we prepared to defend the signed contract covering the use of these audio-visual tapes rolling far and near. She’s cold, he too, they may be dreaming now (of which they will later compare notes uncannily kindred, of the iron kettle, it sings on the stove, a time to plant tears the almanac says) yet dreams are pathless pathmaking.

Watched, however, even into their joined and interinanimate dreams not so much by our satellite in its synchronous earth orbit able to record only a dream’s visible signs, but in fact now by another, a third person, were their eyes open upon this creature standing over them with what looked like a chain-saw or a ghetto blaster, a denizen of our northern neighbor we had learned originally but a separatist at the very moment that our own nation had annexed this region?—and now and now and now—what was this language he spoke, picked up by our satellite like the images of these three people down to the very interlaced fingers of the two sleepers on the ground still adream, closer perhaps than ever, what did they, we, our technology, hear him say, this weird mountain person caped and overalled could he be speaking of our own election campaign—your stomach growls—a light from the very breath of the speaker: “I know you both, I’m here, I left the army, the country, the church, thrown out because I didn’t believe as you, though my belief is just as much a belief as your own knowledge in the absence of evidence and you share mine though you don’t know it and I would vote for you both had I the vote but I am here,” the wilderness man continued, his eyes under the killer-shaggiest of eyebrows turning into luminous mist, his time passing perhaps and his voice receding, until our man on the ground, letting go the woman’s hand yet gripping it again, now protectively aroused to eloquence spoke up to him, upward, still aware of the battery-operated chain-saw half swinging above them—“You are, you are, you’re saying why wait, aren’t you? Why I know you, you are Ahab on a stump speaking to all of us”—
all of us
the syllables seemed sucked upward and toward a glinting acoustic receiver out in the trees near the wolverine’s den—sounds of us like thoughts we have retracted, thinking better of them; and he was gone, the atheist deserter once a litigant suing our government, now a denizen of this new territory. Gone now from their awakening view, the woman and man on the ground, turning toward each other chilled, their stomachs growling, hands clasped in some fugitive and passing union, thinking almost one thought if that.

This might have been inferred by our extreme lenses from the position the next morning of the sleeping bodies—the embers ready for the next camper or campers, though this protected territory not yet legal for visitors. The two known tracks gave access to the clearing from the dense old growth woods of this new 40- by 50-mile tract just acquired by us from our northern neighbor, is all we need to know. The still frontier-like state of our union. Waiting the return of our rivals to the campaign reflecting as we with our endemic lens might too on the survival of the campaign trail in a new century.

It will not go away, this curious survival of ours. We tour the crater, contemplate its 1760-mile (though possibly immeasurable) perimeter. It is already in the atlases, where schoolchildren may trace it. It is history. It is where our neighbor used to be. We internalize this crater. We express it in other terms. That twist that left us so little to work with that it might be nothing but ourselves.

We see it again to grasp what happened to that distinguished member of the community of nations. Powerful out of all proportion to its landlocked size, it one night became in seconds this awful map of itself cut into the earth. What an unusual map, life-size, with a visible depth yet a height absent perhaps only to the eye. Instead of mountain peaks and moving rivers, factories and airports, teeming cities and calm old towns, now these cliffs like the receding coast independent of a vanished sea go far beyond the horizon perhaps to make the horizon us. We keep returning to the wonder of it. The crater proves to be the exact shape of that vanished nation. What had we here?

That terrible night, the bright blast spiked to a pale plume many miles high. Night collected into a pillar of day. But while we who were near enough to watch could not think why we were living through it, the read-outs on the quake-activated monitors were showing even more astonishingly that the firestorm kept exactly within that nation’s airspace. Air-samples taken during the following weeks uniformly said the same for fallout. Stranger still,
within
the perimeter of the crater no fallout either. The holocaust was clean.

We keep returning to the wonder of it. A seventy-mile-high blast that incredibly did not overflow their frontiers. Did they ever really want us with them? They had outdone themselves.

The blast had risen like a computer-generated mesa faithful at all points of the atlas outline any schoolchild might scan. Indeed, because of certain phenomena we mobilized schoolchildren to give us their thinking. The World Council set a zone around the new vacancy where only authorized persons might go. So we had what once was known in those days as a no-man’s-land, an incised micro-map of frontier embracing depth but within it now no mountains or river beds, no vales or unexpected cols. During those first weeks thousands came to look as they could. They saw of our former neighbor a crater outlined with infinite care and fractal fate. Adjacent nations that endured this tourism must needs control it.

The smoker’s smoke seeks any old lung, our roving Mach’monster machines spread bedlam on the still waters of untold semi-circular canals. Had a medium-size post-industrial state with a device that sealed off all other states from its explosive force achieved a technology downright self-containing? Yet self-
reflective
, it occurs to me. If so, why self-destroying? Was this holocaust a mistake? A folly of overreaching? If so, why the lack of contamination. Or would some new, unheard-of fallout follow in time? If not a mistake, was our vanished neighbor’s act suicide in some tradition ancient and modern of pride and refusal? A nation swallowing to the last-mega-drop the adventure of its own will, so swallower and responsibility went up as one.

We know a nation is one nation. But a nation, we have been told, of individuals and
their
powers. For population—a statistical, strange, perhaps incomprehensible term—is an intelligent resource poignant with human nuance and friction. Here, Us and Them. They had always said that in the light of their sovereignty they would never disarm. Had they at last been moved by us, the growing majority of unilateral disarmers? Yet never really wanted us with them. And when their power to outdo themselves found its last logic of undoing, they alone lived it. Was that annihilation, then, their way of respecting our convictions? A gift, and to us, if we’d take it, and at first we would. Yet if a gift, of what? Surely not the mere gross reduction in global numbers.

And the space. Whose was this new void? It repelled with some garden-variety inverse magnetism most winds and other air-currents, common particles of globally freewheeling dust and flesh. It repelled early test personnel who tried to install devices with which to descend the cliffs—and repelled at some frequencies light as well—beamed or in curious new forms of our naked sight. And if a gift from that now absent nation, who would we thank? Upwards of two thousand of their nationals traveling or residing outside the country at the moment of the event? Safely outside, we assumed—as with discretion in my laboratory circle we began to interview them, fission thinkers, architects, political scientists, artists, consultants, tourists, parents, many in near-amnesiac shock, some curiously alive unable still to think out loud about their home. One psycho-biologist who had been asked before he left not to make this trip somehow could not speak of research he had been engaged in or of what he might have lost; yet, chastened, he pointed out how many
un
imaginative ways our thus far unchastened species had found to gradually kill itself. He recommended patience, a strangely elusive man—what was it?—and seemed to have in him a palpable thing he could not locate. Yet he had no wish to return to his homeland. Was it legally still there to be his? Could you return to such a place? The floor of the crater three miles down? We kept returning to the event, a technological twist, a coup. A nation swallowing to the last drop, or becoming, some task of its will. We had dared think the event could not happen. Yet if in thinking such holocaust
un
thinkable we had in fact thought it, still it didn’t then happen to
us
, the unilateral disarmers. Was this a holocaust to end all such, the last disarmament?

What had held the blast within these frontiers?

The upward gust of the event had drawn after it itself. With it went the breakthrough thinking, the unprecedented originality it had sprung from, we concluded. Yet do not some thoughts need to forget the work they sprang from? Like childbirth, like hatred toward a friend, even the materials from which a formula is framed. The relief we felt that the one-man arms race was over gave way to a new drive toward understanding. This neighbor nation, reaching one end of its time line like an unusual music, had ventured so far that, in fascination, one might forget one’s good fortune that one had not oneself been incinerated.

Some of us needed to know how it had been done, hear that music, for in fact the literal vector of honest inquiry that confronts premises may have heard in the metaphor of our widespread thought that there was indeed an unusual music to be heard. Yet the relief we felt that the one-man arms race, as we used to call it, was over gave way to a suspicion that we had better know how the thing had been done.

Vanished yet still among us, that nation had been monitored; so in the event we had a wealth of data. They revealed an eerie scene that night. Micro-forces unique in our experience had barraged transparent interfaces along the risen ghost frontiers, yet both barrier and forces seemed there only at instants of collision, so the forces themselves appeared to at once create the transparencies they were rebuffed by. As best we could make out, the forces “shimmered.” They
were
shimmers, and appeared at first at all points of boundary. We guessed they kept some secret of what had been done and how.

When I heard people say the force gave off an aura of purpose, I said to myself, as usual, No: the forces captured or were captured by their own field of purpose. The forces were called Shimmer Emission Demonstration or, the alternative
D
word, Doubt. In either case SHED. Not only because acronymed from Shimmer Emission Demonstration (or Doubt), but because they
shed
, it seemed limitlessly, though, like the old Einsteinian light, weighably, an aim. Thus, it seemed to come to us as, in another sense, simultaneously it was lost or went somewhere. Theory agreed that each of the SHEDs
felt
unique, but split on whether SHEDs were clusters or individuals; also, whether they were only a “shimmer-function” of this miles-high-risen, roughly (or perhaps exactly) cylindrical envelope of presumed electro-magnetism, or had for some reason in their millions-fold net of points chosen to stop there. Shimmer Theory had its satisfactions, its elegance, but with the advent of the What and the How approaches, it began to be argued that the barrier did not exist except as an illusion propagated by the very forces it seemed to enclose.

How would we rethink this breakthrough? I felt my words change. Not at first so much in isotope, spike, chain reaction, as, on our globe with its own spherical endlessness now not shadowed by terminal ignition, how nonetheless the unthinkable came to mind afresh.

I took my child to school, went in to work as I always did, and I drew my own sketches from what instruments had recorded digitally along the perimeter during and after the blast. Not just a lab person but a participating father of a study group, I spoke up: How and What had somehow become alternative visions. Easy enough to say. A workman observed, “Process and Essence.” But when my child’s fourth-grade teacher agreed yet asked passionately if no
matter
How they’d pulled it off our vanished nation’s removal were not a What—the What was what mattered!

Which in turn, it came to her, asked a whole new How: How we could take ad
vant
age of the nuclear disarmament we had
dreamed
of (if this event wasn’t in fact
beyond
nuclear). She was a fine and strong and beautiful mentor for the young but she was asking for it, we thought.

Majority “Hows” kept to two central points. What had held the blast within the boundary of our fellow nation? And what system of waste disposal could have created this great vacancy—this void that for weeks actually pushed
back
currents of air and common particles of globally freewheeling dust and flesh and even repelled at some frequencies light as well, beamed, or in new, apparently thinking forms.

Minority “Whats” asked what new way we would think, free now of nuclear anxiety. But how had the people of that nation really thought? Had secret tests been tolerated even so much as they seemed to have been by their disarmament faction? And why so few exit-visa applications—somewhere between seventeen and eighteen hundred where there were so few restrictions anyhow, and when in the absence of unusual restrictions a healthy opposition had waxed so eloquent against arms development? The Hows jumped in here to ridicule the Whats on the visa question: why try to escape a thermonuclear event likely horizoning the entire globe? Unilateral disaster had been in the cards all along, Whats surprisingly concluded, so the anti’s would have had good reason to get out with their families, which mostly hadn’t happened.

Between me and my child’s teacher there came a thought. Well, she was a learner from the young. And their dreams, she said. Shimmer dreams, we were hearing. Future Shimmers in fact, promises lodging in you like both unknown insight and un-charted infection. The writing was on the wall and having originally chosen the civil service secondary school track which meant she had security, my child’s teacher must go where they told her. I made a friend of her. I loved her, I found. I would not own her. She was interested in my inclination to gather some of the Transitionals from the vanished nation and work with them, as in fact with some care I was already doing. Yet for dismissing the majority Hows and with them the riddle of this bold and heretofore inconceivable discrete holocaust, certain authorized persons suspected her both of starting a world movement against research and on the other hand of withholding information on the Shimmers along the boundary of the blast. And so it happened that she was given a much-sought-after administrative post in a distant sector known for its year-round fruits and vegetables and for the mineral from which was made a luminous stained glass of vivid and transparent color but little utility.

Films of the barrier force were aired worldwide and psychologists ascribed to its discovery a sadness which overtook many of us, Hows or Whats, though the World Council called it a low-level contagion emanating from a few of the especially uncommunicative Transitionals. Hard to define as a group across national, income, job, or age lines, these so much shared among themselves this sadness that it need hardly be voiced.

My child’s former teacher made much of it; she had become notorious. Those who had seen she was transferred to that remote region of endless produce and a population of hundreds of stained glass designers and their support cadres, waited for her to go too far. She had remarked that for her it was as if a raw gap at our heart where there had been some wonderful person must now in pain be either filled or narrowed and we could not tell which or how. She had gathered a group of children of all ages and they were studying Global Communication.

Three old friends of the transferred teacher not apparently in touch with her reported in themselves a heavy, hole-like place burning in the muscle interstices of the heart’s left ventricle usually occupied by phosphorus compounds. The burn did not hurt like a sore on a skinned knee or like normal chromosome damage in the urinary tract; it hurt more like a tiny interior lens magnifying perhaps sun at some point in the chest area. It was painful to describe. One of these friends told me I and our modest nation had turned up in his hands and feet, he was certain.

Hows or Whats, we found memorials being held somewhere on the globe every day. Thus we continued to feel the presence of our lost neighbor. The crown of its technology. Its generally calm polis. Its culture now ever with us in museums, concert domes, and conversations. All this grew compelling as if around some almost formulable belief. One reported child dreamed “up” (as the official phrase had it) a tale of refugee body-souls blasted so small they could not now
be
destroyed any more, nor resisted when they traveled out upon the globe finding space in each of us. Newspapers got hold of this, only then to retroactively erase from their pages a fiction that might spawn communal anxiety.