Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (50 page)

“Eons ago,” she says, “it lost its mind. Though I don’t think it ever really
had
a mind, not like a human mind. But still, it went insane, from the knowledge of what it is and what it can’t ever stop being.”

“You said you’d forgotten what was on the other side.”

“I have. Almost all of it. This is
nothing
. If I went on a trip to Antarctica and came back and all I could tell you about my trip was that it had been very white, Antarctica, that would be like what I’m telling you now about the dream.”

The Four of Spades. The Four of Swords, which cartomancers read as stillness, peace, withdrawal, the act of turning sight back upon itself. They say nothing of the attendant perils of introspection or the damnation that would be visited upon an intelligence that could never look
away
.

“It’s blind,” she says. “It’s blind, and insane, and the music from the pipes never ends. Though they aren’t really pipes.”

This is when I ask her to stand up, and she only stares at me a moment or two before doing as I’ve asked. This is when I kneel in front of her, and I’m dimly aware that I’m kneeling before the inadvertent avatar of a god, or God, or a pantheon, or something so immeasurably ancient and pervasive that it may as well be divine. Divine or infernal; there’s really no difference, I think.

“What are you doing?” she wants to know.

“I’m losing you,” I reply, “that’s what I’m doing. Somewhere, some
when
, I’ve
already
lost you. And that means I have nothing
left
to lose.”

Charlotte takes a quick step back from me, retreating towards the bedroom door, and I’m wondering if she runs, will I chase her? Having made this decision, to what lengths will I go to see it through? Would I force her? Would it be rape?

“I know what you’re going to do,” she says. “Only you’re
not
going to do it, because I won’t let you.”

“You’re being devoured.”

“It was a dream, Em. It was only a stupid, crazy dream, and I’m not even sure what I actually remember and what I’m just making up.”

“Please,” I say, “please let me try.” And I watch as whatever resolve she might have had breaks apart. She wants as badly as I do to hope, even though we both know there’s no hope left. I watch that hideous black gyre above her hip, below her left breast. She takes two steps back towards me.

“I don’t think it will hurt,” she tells me. And I can’t see any point in asking whether she means,
I don’t think it will hurt me
, or
I don’t think it will hurt you
. “I don’t think there will be any pain.”

“I can’t see how it possibly matters anymore,” I tell her. I don’t say anything else. With my right hand, I reach into the hole, and my arm vanishes almost up to my shoulder. There’s cold beyond any comprehension of cold. I glance up, and she’s watching me. I think she’s going to scream, but she doesn’t. Her lips part, but she doesn’t scream. I feel my arm being tugged so violently I’m sure that it’s about to be torn from its socket, the humerus ripped from the glenoid fossa of the scapula, cartilage and ligaments snapped, the subclavian artery severed before I tumble back to the floor and bleed to death. I’m almost certain that’s what will happen, and I grit my teeth against that impending amputation.

“I can’t feel you,” Charlotte whispers. “You’re inside me now, but I can’t feel you anywhere.”

Then.

The hole is closing. We both watch as that clockwise spiral stops spinning, then begins to turn widdershins. My freezing hand clutches at the void, my fingers straining for any purchase. Something’s changed; I understand that perfectly well. Out of desperation, I’ve chanced upon some remedy, entirely by instinct or luck, the solution to an insoluble puzzle. I also understand that I need to pull my arm back out again, before the edges of the hole reach my bicep. I imagine the collapsing rim of curved spacetime slicing cleanly through sinew and bone, and then I imagine myself fused at the shoulder to that point just above Charlotte’s hip. Horror vies with cartoon absurdities in an instant that seems so swollen it could accommodate an age.

Charlotte’s hands are on my shoulders, gripping me tightly, pushing me away, shoving me as hard as she’s able. She’s saying something, too, words I can’t quite hear over the roar at the edges of that cataract created by the implosion of the quantum foam.

Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft as gauze, so that we can get through…

I’m watching a shadow race across the sea.

Warm sun fills the kitchen.

I draw another card.

Charlotte is only ten years old, and a BB fired by her brother strikes her ankle. Twenty-three years later, she falls at the edge of our flower garden.

Time. Space. Shadows. Gravity and velocity. Past, present, and future. All smeared, every distinction lost, and nothing remaining that can possibly be quantified.

I shut my eyes and feel her hands on my shoulders.

And across the space within her, as my arm bridges countless light years, something brushes against my hand. Something wet and soft, something indescribably abhorrent. Charlotte pushed me, and I was falling backwards, and now I’m not. It has seized my hand in its own – or wrapped some celestial tendril about my wrist – and for a single heartbeat it holds on before letting go.

…whatever it is, it’s been there since before there was time. It’s been there alone since before the universe was born
.

There’s pain when my head hits the bedroom floor. There’s pain and stars and twittering birds. I taste blood and realize that I’ve bitten my lip. I open my eyes, and Charlotte’s bending over me. I think there are galaxies trapped within her eyes. I glance down at that spot above her left hip, and the skin is smooth and whole. She’s starting to cry, and that makes it harder to see the constellations in her irises. I move my fingers, surprised that my arm and hand are both still there.

“I’m sorry,” I say, even if I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for.

“No,” she says, “don’t be sorry, Em. Don’t let’s be sorry for anything. Not now. Not ever again.”

TIDAL FORCES

As I’ve noted elsewhere, quite some time after I finished writing this story I realized that I’d written almost precisely the same story twice already, first with “The Bone’s Prayer” (2009) and then with “Sanderlings” (2010), two other tales of seaside personal apocalypse. There was clearly something lodged deeply in my mind that I was trying to work through, and I believe the third time was the charm. Occasionally, I finally get it right.

And the Cloud That Took the Form

The memories wash over me like sunlight through the window of a moving car, a car moving swiftly along a wooded road so that the warm light is regularly divided by the cold shadows of intervening trees. Increments of sunlight measured out – shadow, sunlight, shadow – a chiaroscuro, train-track rhythm tapping itself into being upon my face. She whispers, “How quickly a metaphor replaces the real thing,” and I shut my eyes, wishing dusk had already come and gone, and there were no light, at all. Well, perhaps the moon, but that light is only borrowed, and the moon spins more honest conceits. For a few moments, it
is
that day on the road to Abington, speeding along the too-colorfully named Wolf’s Den Road. We’re pressed here between the pages of rustling autumn forest and an autumn sky so blue you’ll go blind if you stare into it too long. And then the trees and the greenbrier underbrush and their dappled rhythm are behind us, and there are only yellow-brown fields waiting for the snow and then spring and the plow. The fields are partitioned by dry-stone walls of granite, those postcard clichés of New England fitted together just so two hundred, two hundred and fifty years ago. Out here, clear of the woods, we’ll find no shelter from the sky, and it wraps around, from horizon to horizon. When I glance up I see a few stray white wisps like pinfeathers.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she says, smiling.

“I was remembering that day on the road,” I tell her, and her smiles fades, but slowly, by increments. Not all at once.

“The day after you told me about Jupiter, and the floaters and the sinkers and the hunters. The day after you showed me those pictures.”

“They were only paintings,” she says. “A thought exercise, what the Germans call a
Gedankenexperiment.
” I say I didn’t know she spoke German, and she informs me that she doesn’t, that she picked the word up in a seminar on Schrödinger’s cat and Maxwell’s demon, that sort of thing. “Intellectual masturbation,” she adds.

She frowns and waves a dismissive hand, meaning we should move along to another topic of conversation, because we’re getting too, too near whatever did or didn’t happen that day on Wolf’s Den Road. But those paintings, they’re fixed here in my mind’s eye, and it’s obviously easier for her to move along than it is for me. I can’t say why. Maybe she’s stopped having the dreams. I don’t ask, though, because if she has, I’d rather not know that I’m alone with them now.

She’s behind the wheel, and I’m sitting beside her, my face pressed to the window. The glass is chilly. Glancing up, it doesn’t seem so unlikely that someone might open her eyes wide enough to choke to death on a November sky.

“The idea’s very simple, really,” she said, the night she showed me Adolf Schaller’s paintings, printed in one of Carl Sagan’s books. “We tend to assume life needs a terrestrial matrix to evolve, because that’s the way it happened here on earth. But that assumption follows from a single data point, which makes it highly suspect.” I’m lying on the floor, staring at the paintings, and they’re strange and terrible and beautiful. “Jupiter may have a rocky core, or it may not. It may have had one that was lost long ago, due to the convection of hot metallic hydrogen.”

She talks, and I take it for granted that she knows what she’s talking about. I don’t exactly tune her out, but I’m more interested in the paintings than the theories behind the paintings. Here are vast canyons and rivers of ammonia, methane, water vapor, helium, hydrogen, and through them sail the hypothetical floaters, living gasbags the size of cities. More than balloons, they remind me of mushrooms, and specifically the fruiting bodies of puffballs. They drift in herds a thousand kilometers across, or they drift alone, passively subsisting on whatever organic molecules come their way. Or they might be photosynthetic creatures, autotrophs converting sunlight into the nutrients they need. There are also the predatory hunters, tiny by comparison, sleek-winged things that put me in mind of manta rays and B-2 stealth bombers.

“It’s a lazy habit,” she says, “always describing an unfamiliar object by recourse to familiar ones.”

The herd of floaters is buoyed by updrafts above titanic storms depicted by the artist in all the shades of autumn leaves.

“It may not be a matter of finding an earth-like planet,” she says, speaking to me the way she speaks to her students, “but of broadening our expectations of alien life.” It’s not a condescending voice, but it’s confident and wears an air of authority.

The road isn’t asphalt, but it isn’t dirt, either. I have to ask what it’s called, this sort of paving, and she tells me it’s called tar and chip. So, the wheels whir loudly as we race along the ribbon of tar and chip below all that blue. I finally look away, turning to watch her, instead, and I wonder how much farther to Abington and the intersection with U.S. 44. It seems to me as though we should have already reached the end of Wolf’s Den Road.

“Not much farther,” she assures me, though I catch a nervous wash of doubt across her face. I start to ask if we might have taken a wrong turn somewhere, if maybe we should go back and try again, or stop and consult the map. But I don’t. I don’t know
why
I don’t, except that the car is moving very fast, objects in motion tending to remain in motion, and we’ve been down this road so many times before. She knows the way, and I know the way, and the dry-stone walls are there on either side to prevent our straying from the path. We’re not wayward fairy-tale children, no matter what the name of the road might suggest. We’re in no danger of being roasted alive by witches in gingerbread houses, or being offered tainted apples, or gobbled up by a big bad wolf. We’re merely driving along a road in eastern Connecticut beneath an autumn sky.

 In the painting, the enormous floaters are almost the same color as the clouds they inhabit, grey-brown camouflage hues to hide them from the hunters. She describes how the floaters might be capable of expelling heavier gases, somehow separating helium and methane deep within those billowing anatomies, keeping only the useful, buoyant hydrogen. Hunters, she says, wouldn’t only attack the floaters for their flesh, but also for the reserves of pure, refined hydrogen stored within the conjectural bladders that keep them aloft.

“It’s an eloquent scenario,” she says.

“Don’t you mean
elegant
?”

“Do I?” she asks.

Late one night when I was six years old, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a sound like a car backfiring. It dragged me to wakefulness again, and I lay waiting for it to be repeated. But it wasn’t, and finally I sat up and looked out the window, peering at the stars. We lived far enough out from the city that the light pollution only hid the dimmest stars, and I’d learned to recognize a number of constellations: the Big Dipper, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Cassiopeia and Cepheus. But the night I heard the sound like a backfire, there was an unfamiliar light in the sky, to the east, hanging low above the rustling trees. It didn’t twinkle, and so I imagined it might be a planet. It was the color of ripe cherries, and its glow grew fainter as I watched. After only half an hour or so, it had vanished entirely.

The tires against that chip-and-tar pavement, the smothering blue overhead, and the nagging sense that we should have already reached Abington.

“It’s called
ouranophobia,
” she says, not the night she showed me Adolf Schaller’s aliens, but some other night. It’s August, and we’ve gone to the beach to watch the Perseids, but the moon’s almost full, and we aren’t having much luck. We’ve spotted only seven or eight meteors in a couple of hours. This is the first time I tell to her how the sky makes me uneasy, how sometimes it makes me more than uneasy. I watch for falling stars and try to explain the anxiety I often feel at the sight of a clear sky.

“I didn’t know there was a word for it,” I reply.

“From the Greek,” she says. “
Ouranos,
meaning heaven.”

“I’m not afraid of Heaven. I don’t even believe in Heaven,” and she tells me to stop being so literal.

“Only in the daytime,” I tell her. “And it’s much worse in the autumn. Though, the sky above the sea never seems to bother me.”

“That’s a lot of provisos,” she laughs. “Maybe there should be a special sub-phobia erected just for you.”

“It’s not funny. I can get dizzy, genuinely dizzy, staring directly up at the sky.” I don’t admit to her that sometimes it’s a lot worse than just the dizziness, that sometimes it’s also a shortness of breath, nausea, sweating, a racing heart. That sometimes it’s so bad that I can hardly speak, and my hands shake, and I’m convinced that if I don’t sit down and dig my fingers into the ground or hold onto something sturdy I’ll tumble upwards.

I’ve had dreams wherein I fall into the sky, the laws of gravity reversed or negated, and I fall away from the world, plunging through the stratosphere and mesosphere and exosphere and on and on until the earth is no larger than a baseball, a glimmering azure baseball I can eclipse with the palm of a hand.

“So they drift,” she says, “and float, rise and fall. They skim through thunderheads of ammonium hydrosulfide and ammonia crystals. They prowl the tropopause, able to survive only within that vertical column of clouds, which is no more than fifty kilometers, top to bottom. They may be struck down, incinerated, by flashes of lightning a thousand times more powerful than any lightning flash on earth. They skirt the edges of hurricanes larger than our planet. They die, one way or another, and tumble into the pyrolytic depths of the atmosphere.”

“But there’s no actual evidence,” I say.

“Not yet,” she replies, and smiles, and talks awhile about sending probes to explore what she calls the “habitable zone” of the Jovian firmament.

I was six, and I stood at my bedroom window and watched a shining crimson star or planet I would never see again. Maybe others saw it that night; I have no idea whether they did or not. I can’t say either way.

“Really, it’s sort of a chauvinist attitude,” she says, “thinking biogenesis and evolution can only occur in lakes and oceans and muddy, stagnant pools of water.”

And later, on
this
day, I’m listening to the drone of the tires against the tar and chip, trying hard to keep my mind off the sky and the way Wolf’s Den Road seems longer than it ever has before, how it seems we’ll never find Abington and the highway. I wish I’d brought a book with me, and I’m about to reach into the backseat for the map, when she tells me to look at the sky, when she asks if I see what
she
sees. I don’t look right away. I don’t want to
see,
but she slows down and pulls over into the narrow, weedy strip between the road and the dry-stone wall. The car idles, and when I glance at her she’s shielding her eyes with her right hand, blocking out the glare of the sun, and her left index finger is pointing towards all that unbearable, suffocating blue.

“Good fucking god,” she whispers. “Please tell me I’m not hallucinating. You see that, too, right?”

I hesitate for a last precious handful of seconds, and then, when it would be obvious that I’m afraid to look, my eyes follow her pointing finger to the sky. And yes, I see it, too, just like I knew that I would. I tell her that it’s really there, which I imagine is no less difficult than admitting to murder or rape or to having vandalized a church or graveyard.

“Get the camera,” she says.

“We didn’t bring it,” I tell her. My mouth has gone dry, and I feel sick. I’m speaking so quietly I think maybe she won’t hear me. “Remember? We left it on the counter in the kitchen,” and she curses again, so I know that she’s heard me, after all.

It hovers directly above the tar-and-chip slash of Wolf’s Den Road. In some ways, it reminds me of a wolf, even though it bears not even the faintest resemblance to a wolf. It reminds me of the emotions the word
wolf
can evoke in a child at her bedroom window, staring out into the night. I can’t take my eyes off it now, and she cuts the engine and shifts the car into park. I’m afraid she’s going to open the door, and I ask her not to, please. I insist we can see it just as well from where we’re sitting, that there’s no point in getting out of the car.

Above the road, it seems to roll to one side, then right itself again. It shines dully in the sunlight, and makes me think of cherries. She’s hazarding guesses about how high up it is – a hundred feet, a hundred and twenty-five – and about its diameter and circumference. To me it looks as big as a whale.

“And not only Jupiter,” she says, that night I see the painting for the first time. “There’s also Saturn to consider.” Then she takes down another book, a science-fiction novel by an author I’ve never heard of, and she reads a passage aloud to me:

Birds that have never seen land, living out their entire lives aloft. Gossamer spider-kites that trapped microscopic spores. Particles of long-chain carbon molecules that form in the clouds and sift downward, toward the global ocean below
.

We sit there, alone and together, gazing breathlessly through the windshield at the abomination hovering above the road. We watch, hardly speaking, she in wonder and I in silent terror. I keep hoping that another car will come along, or a truck, and someone else will stop and watch it with us. I want to ask her to start the car again, but I don’t dare. It’s a windy day, but the same wind that disturbs the trees and the tall grass, the thickets of goldenrod and ragweed, doesn’t seem to disturb the thing above the road in the least. I tell myself maybe it’s high enough there’s no wind up there, but I know better.

And then there’s a sound, not so unlike an automobile backfiring, and we both jump, startled out of our respective trances. I do more than jump; I cry out, and she takes her eyes off it just long enough to glare at me. She looks disappointed, I think. But it’s begun to move away, slowly and with no evident goal, drifting as a jellyfish drifts on the tide, or a derelict ship, or maybe only the way herds of floaters drift through gas-giant skies. Neither of us says anything until after it’s out of sight, and then she asks me to turn on the radio, and I do. She starts the car again, and it only takes us five minutes more to reach the end of Wolf’s Den Road.