The Drowned Life (10 page)

“What then?”

“I went to bed and woke up the next morning.”

“You're lucky,” I said.

“Yeah, sure, but wait a second…By morning I was feeling fine. I made a pot of coffee and took a cup outside and sat on the back stoop. It was a nice day. I was just sitting there, thinking, when suddenly I heard this loud cracking sound. I thought maybe the neighbor behind us was working on his house. A few minutes passed, and then I heard it again, only louder. I looked up and saw some twigs and crap fall out of the oak tree in the back. I looked closer and noticed it was swaying slightly. And then there came a sound of splintering wood and a crack so loud I jumped! I watched that giant oak tree break nine-tenths of the way to its base and just fall. It crushed the tool shed, blasted apart your mother's bus stop thing, and sheared off one side of the cherry tree.”

“What do you think happened? That's a lot of tree.”

“Must have died,” he said.

“What, termites?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I'm sure it died of a broken heart.”

A few days later Dolores phoned in her report.

“Did you hear about the tree?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Dad went out and bought this set of four gas-powered chain saws. One of them will even cut through metal. He said he could break out of a bank vault with it. He's busy taking the tree apart. That's all he does. He's cutting it up into these perfect little wheels, each about five inches in width and then cutting them each into four wedges.”

“He told me it died of a broken heart,” I told her.

“You should see the inside of it,” she said. “I was there the other day. I'm telling you, it's riddled with the most amazing little tunnels. They run all throughout the tree. It's like lace inside. Like a work of art,” she said.

“What's that all about?” I asked.

“How do I know? At least he's got something to keep himself busy.”

I called my father every couple days for a while, and then he told me not to call him so often because he didn't have that much to say. He promised me that we would talk every Sunday morning. During our weekly conversation about two months after the tree came down, he told me he had finished cutting it up. All he needed to do now was pull the root out of the ground, and he wanted me to come to Long Island the next weekend and help him if I could.

“That root's probably huge,” I said. “How are we going to get it out of there?”

“It's been dead for a while,” he said. “We'll dig down around it and cut the roots with the saws. If I can get to the taproot, we can get it out. Your brother has a chain. Once the bole is free, we're going to hook it up to the back of his truck with the chain and pull it out.”

“Sounds half-assed,” I said. “I'm in.”

When I arrived at his house early the next Saturday morning, I let myself in. He was sitting in the dining room with the lights out, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. All of the curtains and drapes were shut tight; the place needed to be vacuumed and dusted. The lawn mower was in pieces on the kitchen floor.

“Are you on the lam or something?” I asked him, opening the living room drapes.

He gave a brief snort. “Welcome to my world.”

“Are you ready to give me a hernia?” I asked him.

“Jim's out there already, digging. Go ahead out, I'll be right there.”

My brother showed me the stacked wedges of tree, the neatly bundled branches. “He puts only a few yards of it out a week, so the trash guy doesn't get pissed,” he told me.

“How's the root?” I asked.

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “A ball-buster,” he said. “I told him we should just pour gasoline on the damn thing and burn it out. But no, we can't burn it.”

My father came out and we set to work. I hadn't worked that hard since my days on the bay. It took all morning and well into the afternoon to move the huge tangled knot of wood enough to where my father could get under it with one of his saws. He climbed down into the trench we had dug around it, while Jim and I worked on the other side and pulled back on the loosened bole.

“Make sure you're cutting root and not leg,” said Jim, just before my father got the saw going.

Through the saw's smoke and the flying wood chips, we saw my father's face. He had his teeth gritted and his eyes and hair were wild. It was like he was battling a monster. Jim and I looked at each other and started laughing so hard I could barely hold on.

The weight of the bole nearly pulled the bumper off my broth
er's truck, but we managed to get it out of the hole. It sat in the middle of the backyard like some weird brain sculpture, wooden tentacles twisting together and reaching out. As twilight started to come on, we pulled up lawn chairs around it. Jim went inside and brought out a twelve-pack of beer. We were all dirty and sweating. My father smoked. I tried to think of something to say but couldn't. We just sat there.

When it was barely light enough to see, my father leaned forward in his chair. “What's that?” he said, and pointed at the gnarled behemoth.

“Where?” I said.

He got up and walked over to it. “There's something in here,” he said. Turning sideways, he stuck his arm into its tangled center. A few seconds passed while he worked to free whatever it was. Then he pulled out a small wrapped parcel. Walking back to where we sat, he handed it to Jim.

“What's that?” said my father.

Jim pulled away the outer layers of rotted string and tattered wax paper. When he had torn through to what lay beneath the wrappings, he said, “Holy shit, I think I know what this is.” He sloughed off the brown dry husk and tossed the object to me. As it landed in my lap, I could see that it was an old black-and-white composition book, a little damp, slightly mildewed, but still intact. I opened the cover and a water bug rolled out onto the ground. The writing on the first page, in the errant script of a child, had been rendered in pencil.

While my father and brother set to making a fire in the barbecue, I sat in the gathering dusk, scanning my own forgotten words. Then night rose up around me, and with its first exhalation, the blue lines, the red margin, the backwards “b”s, the dotless “i”s, all vanished and that book became a clear window into the past. Staring hard through the thin, impenetrable boundary, I saw myself
as a spindle-limbed, crew-cut boy in blue pajama bottoms, creeping quietly down the shadowed stairs after midnight. I passed my mother sleeping on the couch, passed the open, empty bottle on the kitchen counter, whose scent was ipecac and cotton candy, and let myself out the back door into the star-filled, cricket heat. Under my arm was a notebook, wrapped in wax paper and string, bound three times to protect the truth. I made my way over wet grass, beneath the lowering cherry tree, to the base of the oak where big roots erupted from underground and formed the opening of a small cave. There, I knelt, and thrust my words deep into the dark unknown.

The first reports of the creature, mere sightings, were absurd—a confusion of parts; a loss of words to describe the smile. The color, they said, was like a flame, a hot coal, a flower, and each of the witnesses tried to mimic the thing's song but none could. My master, the wizard Watkin, bade me record in word and image everything each one said. We'd been put to it by the king, whose comment was “Give an ear to their drollery. Make them think you're thinking about it at my command. It's naught but bad air, my old friend.” My master nodded and smiled, but after the king had left the room, the wizard turned to me and whispered, “Manticore.”

We watched from the balcony in late afternoon as the king's hunters returned from the forest across the wide green lawn to the palace, the blood of the manticore's victims trailing bright red through the grass. “It's the last one, no doubt,” said Watkin. “A very old one. You can tell by the fact that it devours the horses but the humans often return with a limb or two intact.” He cast a spell
of protection around the monster, threading the eye of a needle with a hummingbird feather.

“You want it to survive?” I asked.

“To live till it dies naturally” was his answer. “The king's hunters must not kill it.”

Beneath the moon and stars at the edge of autumn, we sat with the rest of the court along the ramparts of the castle and listened for the creature's flutelike trill, descending and ascending the scale, moving through the distant darkness of the trees. Its sound set the crystal goblets to vibrating. The ladies played hearts by candlelight, their hair upswept and powdered. The gentlemen leaned back, smoking their pipes, discussing how they'd fell the beast if the job was theirs.

“Wizard,” the king said. “I thought you'd taken measures.”

“I did,” said Watkin. “It's difficult, though. Magic against magic, and I'm an old man.”

A few moments later, the king's engineer appeared at his side. The man carried a mechanical weapon that shot an arrow made of elephant ivory. “The tip is dipped in acid that will eat the creature's flesh,” said the engineer. “Aim anywhere above the neck. Keep the gear work within the gun well-oiled.” His highness smiled and nodded.

A week later, just prior to dinner, at the daily ritual in which the king assessed the state of his kingdom, it was reported that the creature had devoured two horses and a hunter, took the right leg of the engineer's assistant, and so twisted and crumpled the new weapon of the engineer that the poison arrow set to strike the beast turned round and stabbed its inventor in the ear, the lobe of which now looked like molten candle wax.

“We fear the thing may lay eggs,” said the engineer. “I suggest we burn the forest.”

“We're not burning down the forest,” said the king. He turned and looked at the wizard. Watkin feigned sleep.

I helped the old man out of his chair and accompanied him down the stone steps to the corridor that led to our chambers. Before I let him go, he took me by the collar and whispered, “The spell's weakening, I can feel it in my gums.” I nodded, and he brushed me aside, walking the rest of the way to his rooms unassisted. Following behind, I looked over my shoulder, almost positive the king was aware that his wizard's art had been turned against him.

I lay down in my small space off the western side of the workroom. I could see the inverted, hairless pink corpse of the hunch monkey swinging from the ceiling in the other room. The wizard had ordered it from Palgeria, or so said his records. When it finally arrived, I could see by his reaction that he could no longer remember what he'd meant to do with it. Eventually, he came to me and said, “See what you can make of this hunch monkey.” I had no idea, so I hung the carcass in the workroom.

From the first day of my service to Watkin, five years earlier, he insisted that each morning I tell him my dreams of the previous night. “Dreams are the manner in which those who mean you harm infiltrate the defenses of your existence,” he told me during a thunderstorm. It was mid-August, and we stood, dry, beneath the spreading branches of a hemlock one afternoon as the hard rain fell in curtains around us.

During the evening of the day the king's engineer encountered the manticore in the forest, I dreamed I followed a woman through a field of purple flowers that eventually sloped down to the edge of a cliff. Below, an enormous mound of black rock heaved as if it were breathing, and when it expanded I could see through cracks and fissures red and orange light radiating out from within. The dream woman looked over her shoulder and said, “Do you remember the day you came to serve the wizard?”

Then the light was in my eyes and I was surprised to find I was awake. Watkin, holding a lantern up to my face, said, “It's perished.
Come quickly.” He spun away from the bed, casting me in shadow again. I trembled as I dressed. For some reason I recalled the time I'd seen the old man pull, with his teeth, the spirit of a spitting demon from the nostril of one of the ladies of court. Unfathomable. His flowered robe was a brilliant design of peonies in the snow, but I no longer trusted the sun.

I stepped into the workroom as Watkin was clearing things from the huge table at which he mixed his powders and dissected the reptiles whose small brains had a region that when mashed and dried quickened his potions. “Fetch your pen and paper,” he said. “We will record everything.” I did as I was told. At one point he tried to lift a large crystal globe of blue powder and his thin wrists shook with the exertion. I took it from him just as it slipped from his fingers.

Suddenly, everywhere, the scent of roses and cinnamon. The wizard sniffed the air and warned me that its arrival was imminent. Six hunters carried the corpse, draped across three battle stretchers, and covered by the frayed tapestry of the War of the Willows, which had hung in the corridor that ran directly from the Treasury to the Pity Fountain. Watkin and I stood back as the dark-bearded men grunted, gritted their teeth, and hoisted the stretchers onto the table. As they filed out of our chambers, my master handed each of them a small packet of powder tied up with a ribbon—an aphrodisiac, I suspected. Before collecting his reward and leaving, the last of the hunters took the edge of the tapestry and, lifting the corner high, walked swiftly around the table, unveiling the manticore.

I glanced for a mere second and instinctually looked away. While my eyes were averted, I heard the old man purr, squeal, chitter. The thick cloud of the creature's scent was a weight on my shoulders, and then I noticed the first buzz of the flies. The wizard slapped my face and forced me to look. His grip on the back of my neck could not be denied.

It was crimson and shades of crimson. And after I noted the color, I saw the teeth and looked at nothing else for a time. Both a wince and a smile. I saw the lion paws, the fur, the breasts, the long beautiful hair. The tail of shining segments led to a smooth, sharp stinger—a green bubble of venom at its tip. “Write this down,” said Watkin. I fumbled for my pen. “
Female manticore
,” he said. I wrote at the top of the page.

The wizard took one step that seemed to last for minutes. Then he took another and another, until he was pacing slowly around the table, studying the creature from all sides. In his right hand he held the cane topped by a carved wizard's head. Its tip was not touching the floor. “Draw it,” he commanded. I set to the task, but this was a skill I was deficient at. Still, I drew—the human head and torso, the powerful body of a lion, the tail of the scorpion. It turned out to be my best drawing, but it, too, was terrible.

“The first time I saw one of these,” Watkin said, “I was a schoolboy. My class had gone on a walk to the lake, and we'd just passed through an orchard and into a large meadow with yellow flowers. My teacher, a woman named Levu, with a mole beside her lip, pointed into the distance, one hand on my shoulder, and whispered, ‘A husband and wife manticore, look.' I saw them, blurs of crimson, grazing the low-hanging fruit by the edge of the meadow. On our way back to town that evening, we heard their distinctive trill and then were attacked by two of them. They each had three rows of teeth chewing perfectly in sync. I watched them devour the teacher as she frantically confessed to me. While I prayed for her, the monsters recited poems in an exotic tongue and licked the blood from their lips.”

I wrote down all of what Watkin said, although I wasn't sure it was to the point. He never looked me in the eye, but moved slowly, slowly, around the thing, lightly prodding it with his cane, squinting with one eye into the darkness of its recesses. “Do you see the
face?” he asked me. I told him I did. “But for that fiendish smile, she's beautiful,” he said. I tried to see her without the smile and what I saw in my mind was the smile without her. Suffice it to say, her skin was crimson as was her fur, her eyes yellow diamonds. Her long hair had its own mind, deep red-violet whips at her command. And then that smile.

“When I was at the age between a man and a boy, there was a young woman who lived in the house next to ours. She had hair as long as this creature's but golden,” Watkin said, pointing. “I, a little younger than you, she a little older. Only once we went out together into the desert and climbed down into the dunes. Underground there, in the ruins, we saw the stone-carved face of the hunch monkey. We lay down in front of it together, kissed, and went to sleep. Our parents and neighbors were looking for us. Late in the night while she slept, a wind blew through the pursed lips of the stone face, warning me of
treachery
and
time
. When she woke, she said in sleep she'd visited the ocean and gone fishing with a manticore. The next time we kissed was at our wedding.”

“Draw that,” he shouted. I did my best, but didn't know whether to depict the manticore or the wizard with her at the beach. “One more thing about the smile,” he said. “It continually, perpetually grinds with the organic rotary mechanism of a well-lubricated jaw and three sets of teeth—even after death, in the grave, it masticates the pitch black.”

“Should I draw that?” I asked.

He'd begun walking. A few moments later, he said, “No.”

He laid down his cane on the edge of the table and took one of the paws in both his hands. “Look here at this claw,” he said. “How many heads do you think it's taken off?”

“Ten,” I said.

“Ten thousand,” he said, dropping the paw and retrieving his cane. “How many will it take off now?” he asked. I didn't answer.
“The lion is fur, muscle, tendon, claw, and speed, five important ingredients of the unfathomable. Once a king of Dreesha captured and tamed a brood of manticore. He led them into battles on long, thousand-link, iron chains. They cut through the forward ranks of the charging Igridots with the artful tenacity his royal highness reserves for only the largest pastries.”

“Take this down?” I asked.

“To the last dribbling vowel,” he said, nodding and slowly moving. His cane finally tapped the floor. “Supposedly,” he said, “there's another smaller organ floating within their single-chambered heart. At the center of this small organ is a smaller ball of gold—the purest gold imaginable. So pure it could be eaten. And if it were, I am told the result is one million beautiful dreams of flying.

“I had an a uncle,” said the wizard, “who hunted the creature, bagged one, cut out its ball of gold, and proceeded to eat the entire thing in one swallow. After that, my uncle was sane only five times a day. Always, he had his hands up. His tongue was forever wagging, his eyes shivering. He walked away from home one night when no one was watching and wandered into the forest. There were reports for a while of a ragged holy man but then a visitor returned his ring and watch and told us they had been found next to his head. Once the head was safely under glass, I performed my first magic on it and had it tell me about its final appointment with a manticore.

“Take a lock of this hair, boy, when we're done,” he said. “When you get old, tie it into a knot and wear it in your vest pocket. It will ward off danger…to an extent.”

“How fast do they run?” I asked.

“How fast?” he said, and then he stopped walking. A breeze blew through the windows and porticos of the workroom. He turned quickly and looked over his shoulder out the window. Storm clouds, lush hedge, and a humidity of roses and cinnamon. The flies now swarmed. “That fast,” he said. “Draw it.”

“Notice,” he said, “there is no wound. The hunters didn't kill it. It died of old age and they found it.” He stood very silent, his hands behind his back. I wondered if he'd run out of things to say. Then he cleared his throat and said, “There's a point at which a wince and a smile share the same shape and intensity, almost but not quite the same meaning. It's at that point and that point alone that you can begin to understand the beast's scorpion tail. Sleek, black, poisonous, and needle-sharp, it moves like lightning, piercing flesh and bone, depositing a chemical that halts all memory. When stung you want to scream, to run, to aim your crossbow at its magenta heart, but alas…you forget.”

“I'm drawing it,” I said.

“Excellent,” he said and ran his free hand over one of the smooth sections of the scorpion tail. “Don't forget to capture the forgetting.” He laughed to himself. “The manticore venom was at one time used to cure certain cases of melancholia. There's very often some incident from the past at the heart of depression. The green poison, measured judiciously, and administered with a long syringe to the corner of the eye, will instantly paralyze memory, negating the cause of sorrow. There was one fellow, I'd heard, who took too much of it and forgot to forget—he remembered everything and could let nothing go. His head filled up with every second of every day and it finally exploded.

“The poison doesn't kill you, though. It only dazes you with the inability to remember, so those teeth can have their way. There are those few who'd been stung by the beast but not devoured. In every case, they described experiencing the same illusion—an eye-blink journey to an old summer home, with four floors of guest rooms, sunset, mosquitoes. For the duration of the poison's strength, around two days, the victim lives at this retreat…in the mind, of course. There are cool breezes as the dark comes on, moths against the screen, the sound of waves far off, and the victim comes to the
conclusion that he or she is alone. I suppose to die while in the throes of the poison is to stay alone at that beautiful place by the sea for eternity.”