The Einstein Intersection (3 page)

She brought me beautiful things.
And kept the dangerous away.
I think she did it the same way she threw the pebble.
One day I noticed that ugly and harmful things just weren’t happening; no lions, no condor bats.
The goats stayed together; the kids didn’t get lost and kept from cliffs.

“Little Jon, you don’t have to come up this morning.”

“Well, Lobey, if you don’t think-“

“Go on, stay home.”

So Easy, Friza, and me went out with the goats.

The beautiful things were like the flock of albino hawks that moved to the meadow. Or the mother woodchuck who brought her babies for us to see.

“Easy, there isn’t enough work for all of us here. Why don’t you find something else to do?”

“But I like coming up here, Lobey.”

“Friza and
me
can take care of the herd.”

“But I don’t mi-“

“Get lost, Easy.”

He said something else and I picked up a stone in my foot and hefted it. He looked confused,
then
lumbered away. Imagine, coming on like that with Easy.

Friza and I had the field and the herd to
ourselves
alone. It stayed good and beautiful with unremembered flowers beyond rises when we ran. If there were poisonous snakes, they turned off in lengths of scarlet, never coiling. And, ah!
did
I make music.

Something killed her.

She was hiding under a grove of lazy willows, the trees that droop lower than weeping, and I was searching and calling and grinning-she shrieked. That’s the only sound I ever heard her make other than laughter. The goats began to bleat.

I found her under the tree, face in the dirt.

As the goats bleated, the meadow went to pieces on their rasping noise. I was silent, confused, amazed by my despair.

I carried her back to the village. I remember La Dire’s face as I walked into the village square with the limber body in my arms.

“Lobey, what in the world ... How did
she .
.. Oh, no!
Lobey, no!”

So Easy and Little Jon took the herd again.
I went and sat at the entrance to the source-cave, sharpened my blade,

gnawed
my nails, slept and thought alone on the flat rock.
Which is where we began.

Once Easy came to talk to me.

“Hey, Lobey, help us with the goats. The lions are back. Not a lot of them, but we could still use you.” He squatted, still towering me by a foot, shook his head.
“Poor Lobey.”
He ran his hairy fingers over my head. “We need you. You need us. Help us hunt for the two missing kids?”

“Go away.”

“Poor Lobey.”
But he went.

Later Little Jon came. He stood around for a minute thinking of something to say. But by the time he did, he had to go behind a bush, got embarrassed, and didn’t come back.

Lo Hawk came too. “Come hunting, Lo Lobey. There’s a bull been seen a mile south. Horns as long as your arm, they say.”

“I feel rather non-functional today,” I said.
Which is not the sort of thing to joke about with Lo Hawk.
He
retired,
humphing
. But I just wasn’t up to his archaic manner.

When La Dire came, though, it was different. As I said, she has great wit and learning. She came and sat with a book on the other side of the flat rock, and ignored me for an hour.
Till I got mad.
“What are you doing here?” I asked at last.

“Probably the same thing you are.”

“What’s that?”

She looked serious. “Why don’t you tell me?”

I went back to my knife.
“Sharpening my machete.”

“I’m sharpening my mind,”
she said. “There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.”

“Huh?”

“Is that an inarticulate way of asking what it is?”

“Huh?” I said again.
“Yeah.
What is it?”

“To kill whatever killed Friza.” She closed her book. “Will you help?”

I leaned forward, feet and hands knotting, opened my mouth-then La Dire wavered behind tears. I cried. After all that time it surprised me. I put my forehead on the rock and bawled.

“Lo Lobey,” she said, the way Lo Hawk had, only it was different. Then she stroked my hair, like Easy.
Only different.
As I gained control again I sensed both her compassion and embarrassment. Like Little Jon’s; different.

I lay on my side, feet and hands clutching each other, sobbing towards the cavity of me. La Dire rubbed my shoulder, my bunched, distended hip, opening me with gentleness and words:

“Let’s talk about mythology, Lobey. Or let’s you listen. We’ve had quite a time assuming the rationale of this world. The
irrationale
presents just as much of a problem. You remember the legend of the Beatles? You remember the Beatle
Ringo
left his love even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day’s night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll.” I put my head in La Dire’s lap. She went on. “Well, that myth is a version of a much older story that is not so well known. There are no 45’s or 33’s from the time of this older story. There are only a few written versions, and reading is rapidly losing its interest for the young. In the older story
Ringo
was called Orpheus. He too was torn apart by screaming girls. But the details are different. He lost his love-in this version Eurydice-and she went straight to the great rock and the great roll, where Orpheus had to go to get her back. He went singing, for in this version Orpheus was the greatest singer, instead of the silent one. In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.”

I said, “How could he go into the great rock and the great roll? That’s all death and all life.”

“He did.”

“Did he bring her back?”

“No.”

I looked from La Dire’s old face and turned my head in her lap to the trees. “He lied, then. He didn’t really go. He probably went off into the woods for a while and just made up some story when he came back.”

“Perhaps,” La Dire said.

I looked up again. “He wanted her back,” I said. “I know he wanted her back. But if he had gone any place where there was even a chance of getting her, he wouldn’t have come back unless she was with him. That’s how I know he must have been lying. About going to the great rock and the great roll, I mean.”

“All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is rhythm suspended,
a syncopation
before life resumes.” She picked up my machete. “Play something.” She held the handle out. “Make music.”

I put the blade to my mouth, rolled over on my back, curled around the bright, dangerous length, and licked the sounds. I didn’t want to but it formed in the hollow of my tongue, and breathing carried it into the knife.

Low; first slow; I closed my eyes, feeling each note in the quadrangle of shoulder blades and buttocks pressed on the rock. Notes came with only the meter of my own breathing, and from beneath that, there was the quickening of the muscles of my fingers and toes that began to cramp for the faster, closer dance of the heart’s time. The mourning hymn began to quake.

“Lobey, when you were a boy, you used to beat the rock with your feet, making a rhythm, a dance, a drum.
Drum, Lobey!”

I let the melody speed,
then
flailed it up an octave so I could handle it. That means only fingers.

“Drum, Lobey!”

I rocked to my feet and began to slap my soles against the stone.

“Drum!”

I opened my eyes long enough to see the blood spiders scurry. The music laughed. Pound and pound, trill and warble, and La Dire laughed for me too, to play, hunched down while sweat quivered on my nape, threw up my head and it dribbled into the small of my back, while I, immobile above the waist, flung my hips, beating cross rhythms with toes and heels, blade up to prick the sun, new sweat trickling behind my ears, rolling the crevices of my corded neck.

“Drum, my Lo
Ringo
; play, my Lo Orpheus,” La Dire cried.
“Oh, Lobey! “
She clapped and clapped.

Then, when the only sound was my own breath, the leaves and the stream, she nodded, smiling. “Now you’ve mourned properly.”

I looked down. My chest glistened, my stomach wrinkled and smoothed and wrinkled. Dust on the tops of my feet had become tan mud.

“Now you’re almost ready to do what must be done. Go now, hunt, herd goats, play more. Soon Le Dorik will come for you.”

All sound from me stopped. Breath and heart too, I think, a syncopation before the rhythm resumed, “Le Dorik?”

“Go. Enjoy yourself before you begin your journey.”

Frightened, I shook my head, turned,
fled
from the cave mouth.

Le-

Suddenly the wandering little beast fled, leaving in my lap-O horror-a monster and misshapen maggot with a human head. “Where is your soul that I may ride
it!
”

Aloysius Bertrand/
The
Dwarf

Come ALIVE! You’re in the PEPSI generation!

Current catchphrase
/(
Commercial)

-Dorik!

An hour later I was crouching, hidden, by the kage. But the kage-keeper, Le Dorik, wasn’t around. A white thing (I remember when the woman who was
Easy’s
mother flung it from her womb before dying) had crawled to the electrified fence to slobber. It would probably die soon. Out of sight I heard
Griga’s
laughter; he had been Lo
Griga
till he was sixteen. But something-nobody knew if it was genetic or not-rotted his mind inside his head, and laughter began to gush from his gums and lips. He lost his Lo and was placed in the kage. Le Dorik was probably inside now, putting out food, doctoring where doctoring would do some good, killing when there was some person beyond doctoring. So much sadness and horror penned up there; it was hard to remember they were people. They bore no title of purity, but they were people. Even Lo Hawk would get as offended over a joke about the kaged ones as he would about some titled citizen. “You don’t know what they did to them when I was a boy, young Lo man. You never saw them dragged back from the jungle when a few did manage to survive. You didn’t see the barbaric way complete norms acted, their reason shattered bloody by fear. Many people we call Lo and La today would not have been allowed to live had they been born fifty years ago. Be glad you are a child of more civilized times.” Yes, they were people. But this is not the first time I had wondered what it feels like to keep such people-Le Dorik?

I went back to the village.

Lo Hawk looked up from re-
thonging
his sports-bow. He’d piled the power cartridges on the ground in front of the door to check the caps.
“How you be, Lo Lobey? “

I picked a cartridge out with my foot, turned it over. “Catch that bull yet?
” .

“No.”’

I pried the clip back with the tip of my machete. It was good. “Let’s go,” I said.

“Check the rest first.”

While I did, he finished stringing the bow, went in and got a second one for me; then we went down to the river.

Silt stained the water yellow. The current was high and fast, bending ferns and long grass down, combing them from the shore like hair. We kept to the soggy bank for about two miles.

“What killed Friza?” I asked at last.

Lo Hawk squatted to examine a scarred log: tusk marks. “You were there. You saw. La Dire only guesses.”

We turned from the river. Brambles scratched against Lo Hawk’s leggings. I don’t need leggings. My skin is tough and tight. Neither does Easy or Little Jon.

“I didn’t see anything,” I said. “What does she guess?”

An albino hawk burst from a tree and gyred away. Friza hadn’t needed leggings either.

“Something killed Friza that was non-functional, something about her that was non-functional.”

“Friza was functional,” I said. “She was!”

“Keep your voice down, boy.”

“She kept the herd together,” I said more softly. “She could make the animals do what she wanted. She could move the dangerous things away and bring the beautiful ones nearer.”

“Bosh,” said Lo Hawk, stepping over ooze.

“Without a gesture or a word, she could move the animals anywhere she wanted, or I wanted.”

“That’s La Dire’s nonsense you’ve been listening to.”

“No. I saw it. She could move the animals just like the pebble.”

Lo Hawk started to say something else. Then I saw his thoughts backtrack. “What pebble?”

“The pebble she picked up and threw.”

“What pebble, Lobey?”

So I told him the story. “And it was functional,” I concluded. “She kept the herd safe, didn’t she? She could have kept it even without me.”

“Only she couldn’t keep herself alive,” Lo Hawk said. He started walking again.

We kept silent through the whispering growth, while I mulled. Then:

“
Yaaaaaa
-
“ on
three different tones.

The leaves whipped back and the
Bloi
triplets scooted out. One of them leaped at me and I had an armful of hysterical, redheaded ten-year-old.

“Hey there now,” I said sagely.

“Lo Hawk, Lobey!
Back there-“

“Watch it, will you? “ I added, avoiding an elbow.

“-back there!
It was stamping, and pawing the rocks-
“ This
from one of them at my hip.

“Back where?” Lo Hawk asked. “What happened?”

“Back there by the-“

“-
by
the old house near the place where the cave roof falls in-“

“-the bull came up and-“

“-
and
he was awful big and he stepped-“

“-he stepped on the old house that-“

“-
we
was playing inside-“