The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (39 page)

The House of Water

I
HURTLED THROUGH A MAZE
of haunted houses, an unending city of dark-eyed monoliths that clustered close and made the road into a deep valley of paper shadows. A gigantic clap of thunder coughed behind me and something slowly cut the air in my way: a torpedo the size of a snow pea, dragging a wobbling, glassy icicle of vacuum behind it. As I passed it, the torpedo hit a wall and starburst into a flowering nebula of tumbling splinters.

The Big Bang,
I thought. I kept running.

I wasn’t sure what I was running from: my own deteriorated mental condition, or the man with the gun.

I was deep into the desert by the time I realized I couldn’t outrun my own mind. I jounced to a stop like a fat man, stumbling in the dirt as my legs rippled from my attempts to stop myself. I fell to my knees in the sagebrush and dry-heaved, but this time, nothing came up.

I wanted to scrape the “Sacrament” out of me, I wanted to stop the madness. I scratched at my tongue with my grimy fingernails and stuck my fingers down my throat, but I couldn’t get it out.

After a long while I spat. It did not hang in the air in front of my face, but hit the ground with a soft
thump.
Seemed the Acolouthis was beginning to wear off. Perhaps I had survived it after all. I stood up, pushing myself straight with my hands on my knees, and looked around, shivering sweaty in the breeze.

I was alone, in a flat cool wasteland that bristled with sparse sagebrush. The night sky was a rippling black dome ten feet over my head, like a plastic tent shotgunned with a trillion holes through which I could see an unspeakable light. I couldn’t say that it was beautiful.

There was an ineffable malice to it that I could not place, as if there was something back there with that light, something on the outside watching me through those holes.

They twinkled that way because there was someone outside the sky walking back and forth trying to get a better look at me.

I didn’t want to be watched anymore. I hated being out in the open.

I got down and groveled in the dirt, thought about digging to China, then crawled into the bushes, trying to find a place to hide from that terrible sky-warden.

Claws of grass scraped at my face and naked back as I found my way through it, cutting and bruising my knees, pushing sprays of rattling thistle out of my path. I fought to understand, to feel the right way in the darkness.

In my searching I put my hand on something that moved away from me with a growl. I recoiled, and kept moving.

I must have crawled a mile.

I looked up, over my shoulder, through the cottony milkweed and realized the moon(s) was still in the sky. I wiped drool from my chin with my forearm, wiped it on my filth-caked pants. When had the moon(s) ever not been there?

I found a break in the brush and dragged myself out into a clearing. As I emerged, a scraggly hand of bristle raked across the hole in my arm and a kaleidoscope grenade went off next to my face. I fell over and screamed into the many-colored ripple trilling from my thirty-two-flavor Crayola wound.

The riot of shades evaporated as something rustled in the desert grass. Something big.

I paused, unmoving, my breath held, listening through the scuff of the wind.

“Who’s there?”

I was answered with silence.

The suspense was killing me. I stood up and, glancing at the trash-bag sky, peered over the brush.

I was surprised to see a lantern bobbing in the darkness. It dangled from the end of a chain, attached to a pike held aloft by a man in a monk-brown robe. He looked like an angler that had reeled in one of the stars.

“Hello?” I asked, feeling a slow panic rise up within me. “Hello? Could you help me? I’m really—”

The monk turned and left, the lantern swinging as he walked. I ran through the briars and I ran through the brambles to catch up, careless in dagger-thorns where a rabbit couldn’t go. Their tips stung my skin as I crashed through them, my hand clasped gently over my wound to protect it.

I approached him and explained myself. My voice sounded like a death rattle; I was doing little more than whispering. “Friend, sir, you don’t know me but I’m in a bit of trouble.”

The monk said nothing, simply kept walking. I met his pace and walked alongside him.

“I’ve been drugged, and my friends are gone.”

We wandered for a while across the desert floor like deep-sea divers, he in the lead, holding the swaying lantern out like a Catholic censer. I considered several times trying to make small talk, but his hood obscured his face. The thought of conversating with him unnerved me. One question was eating at me, though.

“Where are we going?” I asked, waving away a fly.

He still did not answer.

We walked for a very long time. We passed a butte, tunneling through the semisolid shadow of the gargantuan rock formation with his teetering light. We crossed several dry riverbeds, sliding down into the arroyo and trudging back up the other side, knocking loose rocks down the bank. The robed man traveled like a mountain goat, negotiating the precarious land with ease and grace.

I noticed by and by that something had been painted on the back of his coarse linen robe. It was the stylized head of a bull, the snout protruding down to his buttocks, the broad horns hooking across his shoulder blades.

The eastern horizon was beginning to lighten as the coarse sands gave way to rocky soil and great expanses of heather and wheatgrass listing in sideways air. I could see a monolithic structure on a rise at the other end of a colossal field, silhouetted by the coming day.

As we got closer, wading through a landscape furred with the color of pennies and hoared by the soaking frost of the morning, I began to recognize it as a house. It was a familiar house, two stories, white, with a roomy porch and leggy Roman columns that went all the way up to the topmost roof.

The monk walked up the stoop and onto the porch. He hung the lantern from a hook and leaned the pole against the wall, then produced a key, unlocked the door, and went inside. I followed him into the house and closed the door behind me, shutting out the distant sighing of the sea.

I was standing in a grand two-story foyer, looking up at the mezzanine of the second floor. There was no furniture. The floor was bone-pale wood planks, the walls unpainted sheetrock. Plastic sheeting was nailed over the windows to keep the draft out. A massive chandelier hung over my head like the sword of Damocles refracted into a thousand blades of cloudy ice.

The sheer whiteness caught the light from the windows and made a drafty, wintry tomb out of the house. I could’ve said the house had never been lived in, that it was new, except for the cobwebs in the corners and the unmistakable sickly-sweet yeasty smell of old age.

The floor looked so washed-out because it was covered in a carpet of dust. To my left, there were eight spots of clean floor: one big square indicated by four clean spots, and a smaller rectangle that abutted the square, visible the same way.

I looked around for the monk, and wandered through a bare living room into a kitchen.

There were cabinets, and nothing in them. The fridge, though it was running (better catch it!), was hollow as well. I climbed the sweeping staircase in the foyer and found the monk in an austere study, standing in front of a window that overlooked the field in front of the house.

He gazed through the opening of his hood at the tousled grain, and the sparse boulders that threw tall, sharp purple shadows across the ocean of copper.

I stood beside him, but I still couldn’t see his face. He spoke.

“Welcome to the House of Water.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am whoever you need me to be.”

“Are you a hallucination?”

“That depends,” said the monk-robed figure, “Are you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. The only other thing in the room was a fold-up card table with an antique vinyl turntable on it.

The bay window flooded the room with a diffuse white light that seeped into the gray floorboards and wall joists, pulling woolen blue shadows from secret places. The high vaulted ceiling was crosshatched with beams and buttresses.

“That’s the question,” he said.

I sighed. I could see this turning into an Abbott and Costello skit. “Yes, it is, that why I’m asking you it.”

“He’s coming.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Exactly. And you’d better come up with an answer before he gets here. This house won’t protect you from him forever.”

“Who is he?” I asked. “You’re talking about the—the man, the one that brought the whirlwind. The man that followed me.”

“The man goin’ round taking names.”

I stood there with him staring out the window. I looked down at the rug we were standing on, a big rectangle of Persian carpet busy with red and blue curlicues, paisley tadpoles, and gold mandalas. Eventually I realized that the darkened west was obscuring the faint anti-glow I’d felt in the sticks of Synecdoche.

He was out there.

“He comes not for what you need, but for what you do not want,” said the monk. “He is the unremembered man. He is the shadow, not the shadow-caster. He is the shadow of forgotten things, of neglect and of apathy and of lost cities. He is the end of all stories. He was the end of mine.”

The monk reached up and tossed off his hood.

Ed Brigham (Lord Eddick Bridger) smiled at me.

He said, “You have come here to show him that he will not be finishing this one.”

I backed away from him in fright and surprise. “You’re a hallucination,” I said. “You can’t be real. I came to your funeral. I saw you dead in your coffin.”

Ed gave me a sort of sad smirk. “You don’t sound happy to see this old face.”

“I am—I guess. It’s just...a shock. You can’t be real.”

He turned back to the window. “I’m real, believe me. I’m just not your father.”

“What?”

“I’ve been around a long time,” said the robed man. “A long, long,
long
time. I don’t remember who I am, but I am not your father; he remains yet interred. Some call me the Mariner. Some called me the Duke of the Field. You may call me Ink, if you like. It’s the only name I remember.”

“Okay,” I said, stepping closer to get a better look at his face.

When I was close to him, he glanced at me over the rim of his spectacles, which had whited over with the glare from the window, and smiled kindly.

At this distance, I could tell that there was something odd about his face. Moments when it felt as if I were looking at someone else through a pane of glass with Ed Brigham painted on it. Occasionally a ripple of vagueness would flicker across his features, rendering them indistinct for an instant.

“Once,” he said, “I used to be much more than the useless old man you see before you. Men prostrated themselves before me in a bid for mercy and compassion. Temples were erected in my honor.”

He let the sentiment linger, then turned to me in a stage-aside and said, “I was a big shot, in other words,” and chuckled. “Then he came and took it all away as punishment for my hubris. What they say is definitely true: you don’t know what you got until it’s gone. All that I had gained, all that should have been important to me, wasn’t. And I lost it.

“He took my very face,” he said, softly raking his fingertips across his face. The gesture distorted his features only long enough for me to blink, and then he was my father again.

“She couldn’t—
wouldn’t—
give me back who I once was, but she gave me a new face and a new lease on existence. The face of the Father. In exchange, I agreed to stay here, in the Void-Between-The-Worlds, and serve as a guide, a signpost for all those who are lost. The keeper of the lighthouse, the House of Water, at the edge of the boundless sea.”

Dead ladybugs lay in a scarce pile where the window met the floor, dozens of tiny orange-and-black marbles. As I noticed them, I also caught sight of the rosebushes lining the front porch. They were a lush blood-crimson.

“The face of the Father,” I said. “Everyone’s father.”