Last Plane to Heaven (32 page)

I will be free beyond the horizon.

“No. I bury him in pieces, in all the places he loved.” Such a lie; Grandfather had loved nothing but books. “He returns to soil.”

“You are as strange as he.”

Hassan had no answer for that.

*   *   *

A few weeks after Hassan found the beechwood for the keel, the Sea of Murmurs ran with mice and rats. The surf came rolling in oily sheets, tumbling the screaming animals to the sand. All of Telos scrambled along the beaches with nets and pots to harvest such a bounty of meat and pelts. In the normal course of life the village had only goats and a few surly chickens too precious to eat and too troublesome to roust out of the papaya trees.

This was a feast, one of the sea's rare gifts among its endless curses.

The bounty ended suddenly in a wave of larger things with teeth like needles and a dozen scampering feet. These creatures slaughtered the survivors of the rodent tide, then had to be driven back into the sea with sticks and shouts and some injuries.

Still they feasted, though many limped and Majid the Younger lost three toes and a piece of one calf.

*   *   *

“Boy,” his grandfather said. “Wake up.”

Hassan blinked. Had he been sleeping?

The old man was young, younger than Hassan had ever known him, his fingers strong and supple as he shook Hassan's shoulders. “There's a Tide of Spring coming. After that, fires and the fall of the moon. Be ready, boy.”

“I'm ready,” Hassan said, but he spoke only to the empty hut. He went out to work on the boat by moonlight.

*   *   *

The book had this to say, in a reeling purple hand which spoke but rarely throughout the threaded pages:

“A moon will fall in time, as it has before. The black city was broken by a bright fist from above. The red sea was poisoned by a dark fist from beneath. All life changes.”

All life changes.

The night after his grandfather came to him, Hassan carved those words in his chest with a bone needle and some fire ash, then cried for the old man for the first time until the pain and blood-slicked sweat sent him into fever dreams of green fields of tea and giant brass coolies with the slack faces of apes, the wicked eyes of goats, and the tears of a lonely young man.

*   *   *

Etienne's visits became fairly regular, usually while Hassan was polishing his grandfather's bones or fitting pieces of bone and wood into the boat.

“Maryam will soon wed Majid the Younger,” the hetman said one day. “They have trod the corn together, and he has already captured a gull for the feast.”

“Don't like gull meat.” Hassan tried to grin at Etienne. When had he last seen Maryam? “Stringy and sour.”

“You likewise.” Etienne patted the boat's gunnel. “I know what this is.”

“It's a boat.”

They both glanced toward the Sea of Murmurs. The water was a violent blue today, silver-finned mermaids singing sweetly perhaps half a kilometer offshore. Deadly.

“Such … craft and dedication … would serve Telos well. You could build a new council house. With your name upon the door for generations to read.”

I will live forever.

But Hassan said nothing.

After a while Etienne deposited a sack of papayas, squeezed Hassan's shoulder, and departed.

*   *   *

One day the boat was done. Hassan simply knew that. He measured its length in three paces, its breadth in one, sighted down the oars carved so painstakingly in accordance with the rare picture drawn in a stained brown hand in the last book. Then he covered it over with a woven mat, walked into Telos, and began to survey the ground for a new council house.

It was something to do while waiting for the Tide of Spring.

Etienne misunderstood.

“So you are finally done with the old man,” the hetman said. “Perhaps you would sup with my family tonight? Crazy cousin Hassan is come to town, my daughters are saying.”

Love while you can, live as you must.

“I will see the children,” Hassan said quietly. He was surprised to find his voice creaking so.

Something like a shadow flitted across Etienne's face. “They have not been children for a while.”

*   *   *

One evening as Hassan worked at carving out the notch in a cross-beam just so, he realized that the world felt different. Wrong.

It was the light.

He looked up.

The Round Moon was just bellying over the obsidian cliffs to the east. First and Third Little Moons danced in the mid-sky as always. But al-Maghrib, the Soulful Moon of Paradise, was too large, too low.

“The Fall of the Moon,” he whispered.

Hassan dropped his tools and sprinted from town. He had to get to his boat. Behind him people shouted, cried out, called to one another. Even as he left their words behind, Hassan could hear it was him they spoke of, not the Soulful Moon.

It did not matter. He would ride the Sea of Murmurs beyond the horizon and live forever.

*   *   *

Dragging his boat down the sand was back-breaking work. Small as it was, the craft was heavy. His grandfather's soul seemed to serve as an anchor, a tether. Had Hassan misunderstood it all?

“You are too late for doubts,” he told himself.

The Sea of Murmurs rumbled behind him. It sounded almost gravelly, running thick tonight.

“I follow your secrets, Grandfather.”

“Hassan.”

He looked up. It was Etienne, looking much like his grandfather by some trick of the moon's light. The hetman had half a dozen others with him, including two of his daughters.

“Leave it off, Hassan. Come home.”

“I must take my boat down to the sea.”

“No. There is work to be done. None of us have much, so each of us is precious. Leave off your grief.”

“It's hope, not grief!” Hassan shouted.

When they came for him, he laid to with the oar until he broke ribs on one of his girl-cousins.

As she screamed, Etienne waved the others off. “Please, Hassan. Come home.”

“No.” Secrets spilled from his lips like rain from a careless cloud. “This is the Fall of the Moon, and the Tide of Spring. I must away before the world ends. I must be free.”

“Come home and be free.”

Hassan threw the oar back into the boat and returned to his dragging. After a moment, Etienne leaned into the stern and pushed. “Come on,” the hetman shouted, “the sooner he sinks his silly boat, the sooner we all go home.”

But the growing light of the Soulful Moon gave lie to the words and hope to Hassan's heart.

I will be free beyond the horizon.

*   *   *

The Sea of Murmurs ran with sand and soil, a foam of wiggling worms atop the heaving brown tide. Was this the Tide of Spring? Hassan couldn't imagine how the boat could navigate such a muddy, almost-solid expanse.

Most of Telos had come down to the beach to watch the madman and his boat. Some cried, casting him hot looks, especially those tending his injured girl-cousin. Others stared at the blazing moon. Wind drove along the sand, carrying soil from the sea and an unexpected heat.

Hassan could believe this to be the end of the world.

“Look!” someone shouted.

There was color in the sea. Flashes here and there, like fire sparks on a distant stretch of beach.

The Tide of Spring?

Then all the muddy water burst into bloom, a thousand million billion flowers exploding on the Sea of Murmurs in a riot of color and scent. Hassan grabbed the bow of his boat and ran. It was light as a palm leaf, floating across the sand behind him. When he glanced back, he saw many hands helping.

His feet met the sea on the first spray of petals from the incoming tide. Hassan ran until the flowers were up to his knees. There was still water down below, a thick syrupy nectar, but even below the surface it was filled with the soft nudging of blooms. The boat slid in among the raging color as if made for the task, and Hassan tumbled into it. He would cross the horizon. He would live forever.

“Who will you take with you?” asked Etienne, waist-deep in flowers, his face glowing sad and hard by the blazing light of the Soulful Moon.

“Grandfather,” Hassan answered. He sat down on the single bench, nodded to the gleaming bones worked in among the planks of the boat, and bent to his oars. Each stroke broke the surface of the Sea of Murmurs with a spray of perfumed scent that shivered his spine.

Behind him, they cried on the beach as the Soulful Moon fell. When he looked over his shoulder, Hassan saw that lights winked on one by one in the black cities atop the obsidian cliffs.

Then Hassan turned his face to horizon, and freedom, even as the moon fell and the air burned and flowers carried him in his grandfather's arms to someplace he never could have known before.

 

A Critical Examination of Stigmata's Print
Taking the Rats to Riga

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer asked me to write a story for them. I did. They hated it, telling me the story did everything they wanted, but in a way that did not work for them. So I wrote this story instead. See how many genre writers you can spot in here somewhere.

Perhaps the most quotidian detail of the print
Taking the Rats to Riga
(1969) is the eponymous rats themselves. This is somewhat uncharacteristic of the work of the artist Stigmata (b. Crispus Chang-Evans, Nanking, China, 1942; d. Khyber Pass, Pakistan, 1992). The artist was notorious for eschewing both representation and naturalism, noting in a 1967 interview with Andy Warhol, “The dial ain't set on sketch, and I'll never be a d**ned camera” (
artINterCHANGE
; vol. III, no. 4; 1968).

The unusual inclusion of such readily identifiable elements strongly hints that
Rats
is based on an actual event. The precise nature of this event is obscured by our distance in time from the origins of this print, as well as Stigmata's notoriously poor record-keeping. Lambshead's own acquisition notes on the print are strangely sparse as well. Art-world rumor whispers that the print depicts a scene from
Karneval der Naviscaputer,
an occasional festival of deviant performance art held within East Berlin's underground club culture during the mid- to late 1960s.

The astute observer would do well to attempt deconstruction of some of the other elements in
Rats
. Art unexamined is, after all, art unexperienced. In this case, even a close examination is unlikely to reveal the mundane truths behind the print. The emotive truths are, however, most certainly available.

Consider the chain that the rats are climbing. Why do they ascend? From where have they come? A hook dangles or swings not far below the lower rat. It appears ornamented in both shape and detail. Bejeweled, this cannot be an artifact of the working man. Nor does it conform to the Continental notion of
kunstbrukt,
that design should be both beautiful and functional. This hook is curious and attractive, but hardly something to lift a bale of opium from the decks of a shabby Ceylonese trawler. One must also consider the possibility hinted at in the print's title, that these are the plague rats Renfield carries into the world for his master Dracula, as depicted repeatedly in cinema.

Examine the chain itself. In Stigmata's rendering, this could just as easily be a motorcycle chain as a cargo chain or an anchor chain. Were that to be the case, we might assume the rats were being drawn upward, toward the top verge of the image. The dynamism of their forms suggests that they are more than mere passengers. Still, is that no different from a man walking up an escalator?

Once we have evaluated the context in which the rats appear, the image begins to lose its coherence. Most observers consider the smaller lines in the background to be more distant chains of the same sort the rats are climbing, but Priest has advanced the argument that those may be strings of light bulbs (
Struggles in European Aesthetics,
Eden Moore Press, London, 1978). Her assertion is undercut by the strong front lighting on the primary figures in the composition, but given Stigmata's well-documented disregard for artistic convention, this is an inherently irresolvable issue.

The most visually dominant element in
Rats
is the tentacled skeleton in the left side of the image. Sarcastically dubbed “The Devil Dog” in a critical essay by Robyn (
Contemporary Images,
Malachite Books, Ann Arbor, 1975), this name has stuck, and is sometimes misattributed as Stigmata's title for the work. In stark contrast with the climbing rats, there is nothing natural or realistic about the Devil Dog. Rather, it combines elements of fictional nightmare ranging from Lovecraft's imaginary Cthulhu mythos to the classic satanic imagery of Christian art.

Priest (op. cit.) nevertheless suggests that the Devil Dog may, in fact, be representational. Presuming even a grain of truth, this theory could represent the source of Lambshead's interest in acquiring
Rats
for his collection, given the doctor's well-known dedication to his own extensive
wunderkammer.
It is difficult for the observer to seriously credit Priest's notion, however, as she advances no reasonable theory as to what creature or artifact the Devil Dog could represent. She simply uses scare words such as “mutant” and “chimera” without substantiation. The burden of proof for such an outlandish assertion lies very strongly with the theorist, not with her critics.

Robyn and other observers have offered the far simpler hypothesis that the Devil Dog is an expression of Stigmata's own deeper fears. The open jaw seems almost to have been caught in the act of speech. While the eyes are vacant, the detail along the center line of the skull and above the orbitals can be interpreted as flames rather than horns or spurs. For a deep analysis of this interpretation, see Abraham (
Oops, I Ate the Rainbow: Challenges of Visual Metaphor,
University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1986). The tentacles dangle, horrifying yet not precisely threatening to either the artist or the observer. Rising above and behind is an empty rib cage—heartless, gutless, a body devoid of those things that make us real. This is a monster that shames but does not shamble, that bites but does not shit, that writhes but does not grasp.