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“Who is that?”
“R
m
.”
More silence. Down the big curve of the tunnel. The walls here were cracked, and it looked like they had been heat-treated more than usual to fuse them to impermeability. Crazed glazes of black on black. Craquelure to infinity.
She groaned and stood up from the cart and walked back to the west. “One moment, I have to go again.”
“Oh dear. Good luck.”
After a long while he heard a distant groan, maybe even a forlorn “Help.” He went back down the tunnel, pulling the cart with him.
She had collapsed again with her suit down. Again he had to clean her up. She was a little more conscious this time, and looked away; even at one point batted weakly at him. In the middle of his work she looked at him blearily, resentfully. “This isn’t really me,” she said. “I’m not really here.”
“Well,” he said, a little offended. “I’m not either.”
She slumped back. After a while she said, “So nobody’s here.”
When he was done and she was dressed again, he got her on the cart and pushed her forward. She lay there without a word.
In the next break he got her to drink some water dosed with nutrients and electrolytes. The cart, as she said at one point, was beginning to resemble a hospital bed. From time to time Wahram whistled a little, usually choosing Brahms. There was a stoic resolution at the heart of Brahms’s melancholy that was very appropriate now. They still had twenty-two days to go.
That evening they sat there in silence. The scene devolved into the desultory animal behaviors that often followed such little crises—the turned heads, the preparations for sleep pursued abstractedly; dull aching drop into sleep, that unseen refuge. Here the pseudoiterative needed to be held to as a comfort. Lick one’s wounds. All these things had happened before and would happen again.
O
ne morning she got up and tried to walk, and after twenty minutes she sat back on the cart again. “This is worrisome,” she said in a small voice. “If enough cells were busted…”
Wahram didn’t say anything. He pushed her along. Suddenly it occurred to him that she could die in this tunnel and there was nothing he could do about it, and a wave of nausea passed through him, making him weak in the legs. A stay in a hospital could have done so much.
After another long silence, she said in a low voice, “I suppose I used to enjoy risking death. The jolt of the fear. The thrill when you survive. It was a kind of decadence.”
“That’s what my mom used to say,” Wahram said.
“Like horror stories, where you try to shock yourself awake or something. But all that stuff is wrong. Say you attend the death of a person and help them out. All the images you see are out of horror stories. You see that those images came from where you are. But you stay anyway. And after a time you see that’s just the way it is. Everyone goes there. You help but really you can’t help, you
just sit there. And eventually you’re holding the hand of a dead person. Supposedly a nightmare. Bones thrust up out of the ground to clutch you and so on. And yet in the actual act, perfectly natural. All of it natural.”
“Yes?” Wahram said, after she had stopped for a while.
She heard him and went on. “The body tries to stay alive. It’s not so… It’s natural. Maybe you’ll see it now. First the human brain dies, then the animal brain, then the lizard brain. Like your Rm, only backward. The lizard brain tries to its very last bit of energy to keep things going. I’ve seen it. Some kind of desire. It’s a real force. Life wants to live. But eventually a link breaks. The energy stops getting to where it needs to be. The last ATP gets used. Then we die. Our bodies return to earth, go back to being soil. A natural cycle. So…” She looked up at him. “So what? Why the horror? What are we?”
Wahram shrugged. “Animal philosophers. An odd accident. A rarity.”
“Or common as can be, but—”
She didn’t continue.
“Dispersed?” Wahram ventured. “Temporary?”
“Alone. Always alone. Even when touching someone.”
“Well, we can talk,” he said hesitantly. “That’s part of life too. It’s not just lizard stuff. We throw ourselves out and span the gap, sometimes.”
She shook her head sadly. “I always fall in the gap.”
“Hmm,” he said, nonplussed. “That would be bad. But I don’t see how that could be right. Given what you’ve told me. And what I’ve seen of you.”
“It’s how it feels that matters.”
He thought about that for a while. The lights passed them overhead, he pushed her on the cart. Was that right? Was it how you felt about what you did that made it good or bad, rather than what you did, or what others saw? Well, you were stuck in your thoughts. The current medical definition of the term “neurotic”
was simply “a tendency to have bad thoughts.” If you had that tendency, he thought, looking down at Swan’s bare scaly head, if you were neurotic, then the material to work with would be nearly infinite. Was that true? Well, here they were, little spins of atoms which felt inside that something mattered, even while looking out at the stars, even inside a tunnel that looped downward forever. Then the spin would decohere and collapse. So, faced with that: good thoughts or bad thoughts?
He whistled the beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth, thinking to drag her through her black mood and out the other side, by way of the old maestro’s deepest tragedy, the Ninth’s first movement. He shifted ahead to the repeated phrase near the end of the movement, the one that Berlioz had thought proof of madness. He repeated it. It was the simple tune he had used for walking uphill all his life. Now they were walking downhill, at the top of a great circle, but it fit his mood perfectly well. He kept on whistling the eight notes over and over. Six down, two up. Simple and clear.
Finally Swan, sitting below him on the cart, her back against the bar he held, facing forward, spoke again, but slurring her words a bit, and talking as if to Pauline. “I wonder if people know we’re alive. You can never tell. It meant everything at the time, but then the time changed, and you changed, and they changed. And then it’s gone. She doesn’t have anything to say to me.”
Long pause. Wahram said, “Who was your child’s father? You had one each way?”
“Yes. I don’t know who the father was. I got pregnant on Fassnacht, when everyone is in masks. Some man I liked the look of. She knows who it is, she had him traced.”
“You liked the look of a masked person?”
“I did. The look of what you might call his demeanor.”
“I see.”
“I wanted to keep it simple. It was a conventional practice at the time. Now I wouldn’t do it that way. But you never know
until it’s too late. You develop a folie à deux for a few years, it’s very intense, but it’s a folly, and after you come out you can’t look back at it without feeling… You have to wonder whether it was a good thing or not. You miss it but you regret it too, it’s stupid. I keep on doing things, but I still haven’t figured out what to do.”
“Live and make art,” he said.
“Who said that?”
“You did, I thought.”
“I don’t remember that. Maybe I did. But what if I’m not a very good artist?”
“It’s a long-term project.”
“And some people are late bloomers, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, I suppose. Something like that. You keep getting chances.”
“Maybe. But, you know, it would be good to be making progress somehow. Not making the same mistakes over and over.”
“Spirals,” he suggested. “Spiral up, doing the same things at a higher level. That’s the art of it no matter what you do.”
“Maybe for you.”
“But there’s nothing unusual about me.”
“I beg to differ.”
“No, nothing unusual. Principle of mediocrity.”
“You’re an advocate of that?”
“An exemplar of it. The middle way. Middle of the cosmos. But only just as much as anyone else. A strange feature of infinity. We’re all in the middle somehow. Anyway, it’s a view I find useful. I use it to work on things. To structure my project, so to speak. Part of a philosophy.”
“Philosophy.”
“Well, yes.”
She fell silent at the thought.
M
aybe we missed it,” Swan said one day as she walked behind him. “Maybe we walked all the way under the brightside and the
nightside too, and are back under the sun again. Maybe we’ve lost track of the time or the distance. Maybe you’ve screwed us with your ineptitude, just like Pauline.”
“No,” he said.
She ignored him and muttered about things that could have gone wrong while they had been underground. It unreeled into quite an amazingly long list, gothically inventive: they could have gotten disoriented and were now actually walking west; they could have gotten into another utilidor, angled toward the north pole; Mercury could have been evacuated and them the only ones left on the planet; they could have died in the sun and the first elevator taken them down to hell. Wahram wondered if she was serious, hoped she wasn’t. There was so much that made her unhappy. Circadian rhythms; possibly she was walking when she should be sleeping. Many years before, he had learned you could not trust anything you thought between two and five a.m.; in those dark hours the brain was deprived of certain fuels or functions necessary for right mentation. One’s thoughts and moods darkened to a sometimes fugilin black. Better to sleep or, failing that, to discount in advance any thought or mood from those hours and see what a new day brought in the way of a fresh perspective. He wondered if he could ask her about this without offending her. Possibly not. She was irritable already, and seemed miserable.
“How are you doing?” he would ask.
“We never get anywhere.”
“Imagine that we were never getting anywhere, even before we came to this place. No matter where we move, we have never gotten anywhere.”
“But that is so wrong. God, I hate your
philosophy
. Of course we’ve
gotten somewhere
.”
“We’ve come a long way, we have a long way to go.”
“Oh please. Fuck you and your fortune cookies. Here we are
now
. It’s too
long
. Too
long
…”
“Think of it as an ostinato passage. Stubbornly repetitive.”
But then she fell silent, and then began to moan—almost a hum, a sound she was unaware that she made. Little miserable grunts. Someone crying. “I don’t want to talk,” she said when he asked again. “Shut up and let me be. You’re worthless to me. When things get tough, you’re worthless.”