Hex: A Novel (6 page)

You can go and visit them. See for yourself.

It is mid afternoon by the time our own journey ends. It is a crisp, clear day and we are high enough that the trees have thinned. The sky has moved far away, as light and clean as a sheet snapped high over the bed, drifting slowly down. We aren’t on a ridge, but rather on a slope of the mountain and there is no view. We might as well be surrounded by more versions of this—identical, hexagonal scenes of these massy pines and mounting rock slopes, this moss greening a thick verge by the water’s edge and that bare stone crumbling into the mountain like a toothless mouth. That Jacob hunched over a tent of pine needles, blowing the fire to life and that Daniel craning his neck
to see sky between the shifting tops of the trees. Of course, this Alice putting bread and hunks of cold, greasy rabbit on our tin camp plates and that Ingrid, loosed finally from the confines of the sling, levering herself onto her side with one stiff leg.

It’s a pretty picture, actually. It comforts me to believe there may not be only one of me responsible for all my actions, though I know better. This is a singular place. I found it alone, have come here mostly alone and sense it still knows me first. Its awareness is an old one, cold and suspicious. As far as this place is concerned, the others—minus you, dear Ingrid—may as well be stray dogs run up the mountain from the distant garbage-strewn fringes of the town and paused here to piss on the bushes and snap at their yellow mange before ranging on. Lean and vicious and temporary.

The clearing is made by two streams wending down the mountainside. The first is why Daniel believes we have come. For most of its length, it is a creek, cold and thin, but here, due to a little bevel in the granite of the slope, the water is thrown back on itself and has churned a deep channel where it masses before slipping over the edge and tumbling in a shining rope 100 feet or so to rejoin the course of its bed. The result is a pool where the water is so restless nothing that needs shelter can live. The water is sharp and clean and the bottom of the pool is visible at all its depths: the rock licked smooth, the water plants standing like a miniature forest drowned along with all its own streams and caves and dogs and men.

The second stream is poisoned. It is not really a stream at all, but seepage leaking from the ruin of a collapsed mine wall. Somewhere far above us is the original shaft, perhaps now relaxed into a half-healed scar. It’s possible all that is left of the shaft is a slope of rubble and broken beams grown
over with beech saplings and tangles of blackberry vine, but I don’t think so.

A carpenter bee will bore a perfectly round circle into dead wood and from there will tunnel relentlessly, carting the sawdust out in pale jodhpurs on his back legs, until he has fashioned a straight hallway a foot or more long, at the end of which he installs his queen. I imagine the miner’s tunnel is something like this at first. It goes straight into the mountain, the rock tapped back, the thready vein of gold or silver or iron ore patiently trammeled through all its whimsical halts and flushes. But then, I imagine, something happens and a kind of madness ensues. It isn’t long before the miner is blasting—tamped explosions shuddering the mountain’s flanks—and the tunnels branch off, craze wildly, turn in on themselves.

I have never seen the miner’s camp, but I know it is like this because of what has been left behind. Carpenter bees form colonies, each black female armed with a painful sting. Eventually the males, who are single-minded and industrious, will tunnel their homes hollow and the whole structure—a log, a shed, a house—falls in on itself. It is like this with the mine, although the bees move on and I suspect were I to look at the end of one of the tunnels I would find the real bones of a real man jumbled dry under his rotting clothes.

Regardless, the mine tunnels collapsed. Downslope from the mine’s original diggings, we see the result as the mountain leans into itself and finds only still, black air. Here also are the poisons that were bound in the rock: acids and hard mineral leeching, natural toxins loosed and mixed with the chemicals the miner used to smelt the ore. They have seeped into the ground water that streams down the mountain’s sides and formed their own little gully where they leak from the lip of the cave and collect in
a second pool downhill from the one Daniel bathed his wrists in and used to wet his pretty beard. Here the water is sick, a mineral green that is almost luscious, and it leaves an orange stain on the rock. It smells and nothing will grow around its edges.

The cave is foul, soft and rotting. It is unnatural, an embarrassment. If we think of the place the old woman visited as the home of the Oracle—a round little chamber carved at the end of progress—then this is more like an Orifice, but not a tidy one that could speak or blink, excrete or lengthen and quiver. This cave is an interruption. A wound left open to weep and suck.

I came upon this place as a girl and was so leveled by it I squatted on the loamy ground and peed, my urine soaking into the heavy fabric of my jeans. Even now, my instinct is the same, but I am much older and have mastered those parts of myself that were once strange and wild. Now, I listen, edging closer to the cave’s mouth as the wind picks up and sweeps across it. What I hear is broken, senseless, a mad jumble as all the voices of the mountain cross each other, a blatting as of gasses channeled the wrong way through the body. A hideous release. It is the Orifice and I write down every sound, hoping for some recognizable truth.

Sad to say, Ingrid, you are a prop in this scene. I have left you by the fire where Daniel wedges you in the crook of his arm as he sucks the lasts of the rabbit’s juices from his fingers. Jacob, squatting between Daniel and the fire pit, shifts his weight to protect you from the heat, but also to shield me from Daniel should he look up. To hide what I am doing which is taking sheets of paper from the manuscript I have stashed in my pack and dipping them one by one in the Orifice’s waters.

“Okay,” says Daniel, passing you to Jacob who has motioned for you. “Keep the fire up,” he says to me, “will you?”

I will. I am good at this, at stoking, at coaxing something higher.

I clear away the luncheon things, scrub out the camp plates with pine straw and toss the last scraps of the rabbit into the fire where they blacken and shrivel. Jacob, with you in his arms, crosses the poisoned stream in one long stride and Daniel follows him, stumbling into a jog, lunging over the water. I can see your head bobbing over Jacob’s shoulder. He holds you with a firm, practical air the way a man might hold a loaf of bread still wrapped in its white paper, or a round rock he was planning to transform into part of a wall. Though he’s doing nothing wrong—you are calm, your chin resting on his shoulder, your mouth loose and wet—Jacob looks so little like a man holding a baby that he makes Daniel nervous. He trails behind Jacob, lifting his arms to you at each dip or hummock in the ground.

When Jacob reaches the water’s edge, Daniel says, “I’ll do it. Can I do it? Does it matter which one of us holds her?” and, for once, lifts you out of Jacob’s arms without waiting for a reply. Daniel cradles you on your back, too low. This is a mistake: you’re cramped, your lungs compressed and you can no longer see the view. You begin to greet and stretch your neck, thrusting your hands in fists out before you. Jacob stands back and looks at me. He nods; my husband, brown and sleek as a mink, just as solitary. It is time to begin.

I first found the manuscript in the bottom of the cedar trunk Thingy kept at the foot of her and Daniel’s bed and used to house extra blankets and sweaters. I was clearing up. It was only a few days after she died, in that dark period when you were taken from me and kept in the hospital for observation while Mrs. Clawson perched in the waiting room like a blonde mantis,
shocked temporarily sober and brittle with suspicion. Mrs. Clawson is many things, but she is not a fool. I’m sorry to say, Ingrid, she disliked you from the start.

Thingy was keeping the manuscript in a series of biscuit tins, three of them, different sizes and patterns. They were under everything else in the trunk: the pink sateen-trimmed blanket and white and pink jacquard bedspread her mother had chosen for one of her childhood beds, the cable-knit sweaters—in mulberry, goldenrod, chestnut—and the tumble of wool hats, some with poms, some with rainbow ear flaps, all marked by strands of hair that poked like golden wire through the loose weave. As I lifted the first of them, I thought I had found a memento box. I was breathless, you understand, overwhelmed. It had been a strange few days. I felt something was off in me: a lodestone stripped of its magnetism, needle wildly oscillating. The house was empty. Jacob was in town making funeral arrangements and Daniel was in the hospital with Mrs. Clawson who would not speak or look at him. You were there, too: blue as a spacewoman in your plexiglass pod, your eyes bandaged lest they be dazzled by this planet’s strange light. I had opened a window and outside I could hear the sounds of summer coming to the mountain. Bird song and ambient rustle of new leaves spreading their palms toward the sky.

If a truck had gone by or someone shouted, a dog barked or a lawnmower chugged into reluctant life, I would have been transported to my own childhood lying on the floor of my bedroom with a book open on my chest, watching the green dapple of the tulip poplar across the ceiling. Waiting for Thingy to come home from her swimming lessons and let herself in the backdoor. Calling to me, “Alice! Alice! Come on. I haven’t got all day,” as she crossed our kitchen, flip-flops slapping her heels, a
trail of water snaking behind her as if she were a selkie or one of those lost children come back from the world underneath our world to rummage in my father’s refrigerator for something to eat.

I opened the first box—a winter scene, children skating on a frozen pond ringed by dark, precise firs while in the far distance a doe, exposed!, sprung across a clearing, her white tail lost in the dazzle of the drifts. Instead of treasure, the junk of memory (a resurrection) I found a manuscript; chapters twelve through twenty-one, to be precise. Eventually, I read the whole thing. It was typed (when had she done this?
where
had she done this? there was no typewriter in the house, not even in the clutter of Daniel’s study which, you may be sure after this, Jacob thoroughly searched), neatly annotated and close to finished. Thingy, displaying a facility for both subterfuge and psychological theory I had never suspected, had compiled her research, analyzed her data sets, crafted charts and bar codes, carefully codified the experiences of a life I had thought she was merely living. All that remained was to draw her conclusions. She had left notes, hand written on graph paper in her loose cursive, but her final word on the subject had been a question.

“Given the directly quantifiable development of the motherless child into the fanatical narcissist can Subject A’s reaction to the introduction of a proxy-child (female: Subject X) be extrapolated within secure parameters? Does the cultural history of Subject A’s titular hive rival (Self) render the data-set too specifically referential? Consult Ellis and Wilson,”
Thingy had written.

Underneath this, in a different pen and dated the day she died—her last word on this, and almost any, subject—she had
written,
“If A is the worker who figures Self as the Queen, how will she perceive Subject X? Rival, sister, or child?”

The other two tins—one red, one green and stamped with a worn, Nordic version of St. Nicholas—contained the rest of the manuscript. The middle and the beginning; I had started with the end.

I found the title page in the green box.
Narcissist Delusion in Collectivist Isolation
, she had called the thing; then a semicolon,
Broken Matrilineage as a Developmental Model for Gender Pathology;
then another semicolon, Thingy never did know when to stop,
Wicked Witches and How They Come to Be(e)
; long dash,
A Case Study
. Underneath all this she had typed: by Ingrid Isolte Clawson, and after her name, in letters that had been traced over many times, etched into the page, Thingy had written: PhD.

So. That is what I was burning, Ingrid, if you would like to know, on the day your father and Jacob introduced you to the mountain.

Thingy’s manuscript burned quickly in spite of its dampness. By the time I stirred the last pages into ash—“. . .indicative of both malevolence and a contradictory desire to please. . .” I read as the page disintegrated into lacework, spiderweb—the men had already waded out into the pool and thrust you under the water once, twice, three times, the spray which fanned out behind you glittering like gems, or magic seeds, or scales. With my eyes closed, I listened. In my mind, I copied what I heard, what echoed back from the mouth of the cave as the words Thingy had labored over lifted up on the drafts of smoke, drifted unmoored from their meaning.

The water was very cold, the feel of it on skin like crunching an ice cube between one’s molars. Understandably, you were screaming by the time the men waded back to shore. Your face, usually so placid, was drawn tight as a knot and your ears, the skin around your flared nostrils and howling mouth, your fingertips and toes and the bobbed plug of your navel were turning a delicate bluish-gray. But I was there, a conscientious minder. I stoked the fire high and bright and soon we had you warm again, swaddled in towels like a grub pinking inside its cocoon. You were calm and I was calm. A wind across the Orifice carried over to us an old lost song about a turkey in the autumn forest, looking for his meal, imagining the sweet gold of the acorn when he finally found what he sought. A knot popped in the fire and a drift of papery ash rode up the spire of the flames.

By the time we came back around the mountain to the house, it was night. The clearing was dark and unremarkable, the hens asleep, the house just a collection of boards and nails fastened together and bid to stay put. You were exhausted and made the transition from darkness to electric light without waking up. I took you upstairs, set you in the bassinet and lay down beside you in Jacob and my bed.