“Close them, then,” said Luc.

“We should’ve,” said Jean-Pierre.

“Then do it,” said Luc.

Desmond chanced leaving his corner to meet Jean-Pierre’s ear with a whisper. “The tit,” he said, cutting an eye to pale Sophie’s shape. “Try the tit,” and it was back to his corner, to his box and treasures.

The tit was dry, had been dry or soured or anything but giving, but Jean-Pierre tried it all the same, placing the baby on the lifeless chest, guiding its mouth to the cold nipple. “We should’ve closed her eyes,” he said, as the baby cried on.

“Goddammit!” said Luc. “She’s your problem. Hell with you and her eyes.”

Another voice, one from A Column called out an agreement, “And to hell with your shouting and that goddamn crying.”

Desmond’s box was nearing overflow, the little trays, their holes brimming with with buttons and coins and shell casings and pins and clasps—jewelry, too—all of it arranged tray by tray into categories of color and substance. He was fidgeting for a space for Sophie’s ring, the one he’d taken while whispering the word “push” into her ear. It wasn’t only a matter of room. It had to fit where it fit best, alongside gold or in with rings or in some other category, such as love. Every choice seemed wrong. Fifteen hours and thirty configurations, and he was no nearer a satisfying solution.

The surge. The sixteenth hour.

“She needs milk,” said Desmond.

“Milk?” said Luc. “She’s past milk.”

“The baby,” said Desmond. “The baby.”

“There is no milk,” said Luc. “It’ll die before long, besides. Then we’ll have some quiet, milk or no.”

Jean-Pierre squeezed the baby closer into his chest, until her breathing became labored. “Fuck you, she’ll die. You’ll die.”

Luc said nothing. He cleaned his gun, nothing resembling a thought on his face, for the thousandth time.

Desmond, grinning over his most inspired configuration of items in the box, looked up to say, “The Moins-Quinze.”

Luc laughed. “The Moins-Quinze,” he said. “So, there’s a dairy there, now. Where does it end?”

Desmond said nothing.

“The switch,” said Jean-Pierre.

“Fuck the switch,” said Luc. “There is no switch.” He stood, stretching his neck, his handgun hung at his side, and crossed to the grand door of Une, rusted and meaningless, for effect. He kicked it with the steel toe of his boot. “There is no switch. There’s no outside, no milk. There’s only this. So shut up that goddamn baby or I’ll throw it down the stair and leave it to find your goddamn switch.”

“You can feel it on Moins-Treize,” said Desmond. He traced the edges of the keys he’d found there with his index finger. “It’s too much to stand.”

“And on and on,” said Luc. “The baby will die like everything else, but these pointless fairy stories will keep for as long as there are idiots who’ll hear them.”

Desmond closed his box and pulled its strap over his neck as he stood. “Come then,” he said. “Prove me a liar.”

Luc smiled.

It was an hour’s walk to the stair. Desmond led. Luc followed, though each knew his way. The people before them, their fathers, if they’d had such, had called it L’esprit d’escalier, a joke of sorts whose meaning had been lost well before Luc and Desmond descended its steps. The baby’s cries had grown so thin by then that there was little telling if they were real or imagined.

“Probably dead, already,” said Luc. “This is pointless.”

“Of course it is,” said Desmond, his eyes nearly vanishing in the intense stairway lighting as the surge came to remind them of time’s persistence.

Approaching the landing for Moins-Trois, Desmond spotted a silver cuff-link and pocketed it.

“You’re a rat,” said Luc.

Desmond nodded, pushing on to the next flight.

The stair was largely untraveled below Moins-Cinq, the temperature too low and the ambient current too much for most. “Moins-Huit is my deepest,” said Luc, taking the lead as Desmond flagged. “You?”

“Moins-Treize,” Desmond replied, “but you knew that.”

“I suppose.”

With their slow descent, the surge-lights grew more and more intense. At Moins-Neuf, Desmond fished through the pockets of his coat and produced a pair of dark spectacles with a missing arm. It took some fidgeting to get them to stay in place, but they did, in time.

“I should take those from you,” said Luc.

“What would that make you?”

“It wouldn’t make me anything, my friend. There’s nothing to be.”

Two more levels and it was becoming difficult to breathe. Beyond that, the two found they had to consciously focus to remember their task. They tried hands at games, at first, but none stuck. In time, they agreed to the simple exercise of calling numbers in sequence.

“Seventy-eight,” Desmond would call.

“Seventy-nine,” would be Luc’s reply, and on and on.

By “two-hundred-ninety-seven” their voices were trembling too much to be understood. The air vibrated around them, inside of them. Their muscles twitched with external anticipation.

“Moins-Treize,” Desmond attempted to say, but there was no sense in the other of his words. The trinkets in his box shook, the material of their make taking on different tones as their resonant frequencies were met. The sound had become a sustained harmony, one that struck the travelers as familiar and ancient.

Luc struggled with his lungs to ask why anybody would have children in a place like this, why they shouldn’t be exiled down to these depths and away from the sane among them, but it was all nonsense, and then the surge came, and the two fell to their knees, and the voice of the box rose to become a choir of angels bent on their salvation. The two wept involuntarily. They stood when it had passed, now more able to live in the ambient wash, so subtle in contrast to what they’d just survived.

They moved more slowly, now, each action requiring conscious effort, down to breathing. They couldn’t forget to breathe. They couldn’t forget to remember. Luc turned and pointed up, a suggestion that they return to the surface. To Luc, Desmond, the light upon him as it was, looked as though he wore a halo, a saint with broken spectacles and a box of grave robbings.

Desmond shook his head, pointing further down. “One more,” he said, but the words were lost.

The understanding was enough. They ventured forward, lead in their feet, each step calculated and arriving from miles away. At the landing of Moins-Quinze, as the departed the humming steel of L’esprit, Luc’s nose let out a trickle of blood. Desmond checked below his own. He felt nothing.

Jean-Pierre had a book up top, one about divers. Desmond pictured the drawing on the cover, the man in the suit with its hose extending toward the surface. He looked over his shoulder to see if some hose of his own extended up the stair. There was none. There were only the two men, basements upon basements deep. The light on that floor had a quality of sound to it, so much so that the two senses seemed to blend.

Luc wiped nervously at his face as they made their way toward the center of the floor, bloodying his sleeves and cheeks. There was no dairy, no lost tribe, no nothing—two idiots and nothing more. He raised his gun to Desmond, desperate or angry, but his finger was too wild to trust, and he quickly lowered it. Desmond paid no mind. He pushed forward, past Luc. He could feel the machines ahead. He could feel the whole of it all up there, the source of—

The surge came. The box at Desmond’s side, its little voices, screamed until they could only be heard in his bones. Luc’s gun discharged, untouched. Before he could turn, Desmond fell, blacked out. The surge passed. Desmond stood. He stood alone. He checked Luc and saw no wound from the errant bullet, but he was dead, all the same—a victim of the surge. He took the necklace from around the dead man’s neck, silver and as worthless as anything, closed the dead eyes that regarded his theft, and continued along his course.

The machines were there as he’d imagined, the tops of them, at least. A great circle of catwalk stretched around a shaft too vast to be understood in a single glance. Huge corkscrews twisted slowly at the bellows bags that kept Treppenwitz breathing and lit, the works described by the fathers and long since relegated to myth. It was the heart of the world. Below, far below, there was no end. The geothermals were down there, but he saw no sign.

As for the switch, the key to the outside, if it was real, it was too well hid to be found. If he had a suit like the divers, he thought, he might be better able to search. The mind was too fragile for open exposure, was all, and he had no suit. There was only his little box and its singing. There was only the knowing that he couldn’t make it away before the next surge and that he wouldn’t survive it when it came. The baby would die, sure, but so would everything else in its time; so he tried to sing in step with his treasures, a joyous sound down through the well of machinery, and he smiled for knowing that at least he’d die with a purpose greater than trying to live. He smiled. He sang. He pulled his box to his chest like a baby, felt it sing through him, and stared into the infinite, awaiting its coming hand.

It’s a point worthy of concession, but never that. Instead, I say, “I saw some glass in the yard, broken, reflecting potential. I saw some glass,” I say, “and only part of the bloody futures were you. None of them were me.”

“Desolate,” I say, dropping the pencils from the desk. “Clitter-clatter and none of it is a thing. If you’ve got skin enough to cover your empty, I’ve got teeth enough to see it gone.”

I remember the early you, but there’s no recalling it, here, not now, at least. As naked as we find ourselves through the hours of dispute, I start to think we’ve never met. “Descents like these,” you say, your hands low on my hips, “are better spelled out in shadows than in books.”

When they find us, there won’t be much left to identify. “Husks,” they’ll say.

“Let’s never suppose a they,” you say; to which I say, “What?” mid-thrust and in step with the through-the-wall deliverance.

“They,” you say as I withdraw. “If they’ll be there regardless, I’d rather not give them faces.”

“Of course,” I say, mostly not ignoring as I push toward you.

Dressed and well beyond bloodied, you sit on the culvert as I pace with an unlit cigarette between my fingers. The church is letting out, moving into its cars with its phones to its ears.

“Light it, then,” you say.

I refuse. I’ll keep your smell on me, thank you, and it’s best in the fingertips. The holding’s enough. “No,” I say. “Fuck off, already.”

You don’t fuck off, not then, at least, but I love your face, and I’m not afraid to say it.

When we kiss at the edge of houses, I quietly hope the known issues will move on, move out, or die, and you say, “I know,” hoping for some similarly sad impossibility. “It wouldn’t make anything better, though.”

I’ll be lying if I tell you I’ll drive safely, but I’ll say it, just the same. They’ll find the car near the bus station, burnt clean. You won’t be notified, but you’ll know. You’ll know I lived, this time, that my course was pastward by way of space.

“Light it,” you say, and I do.

It’s good, the smoke. Through my hand, you look like every pair of lips and floating eye I’ve ever loved.

“Who won?” you say.

“You,” I say. “It’s always you.”

The hallelujahs are imagined but appropriate to the ballroom’s spilling contents.

“How do you know?” is your question, your hair moving with the patience of seafloors in the August staleness.

“Because,” I say. “I flinched first.”

If you were smoking, I’d have an easier time knowing the faces of your clocks, and if you swoon you do it standing, like cattle or happy accidents.

“Just try explaining tonight to anybody,” you say, smiling.

“I wouldn’t dare,” I say.

I have a train to catch, anyway. A car. A bus. There’s your hand on mine, just an hour from now, and I can already feel the cold of its absence, up past that. When I reverse it’s all yes and slowly down and now, but it’s a forward facing trap, this thinking, and there you are, walking on. There’s no fixing you in the feed, and the church caravan has disbanded to the corners of its mission field. Only us. No tumbleweeds in these flats. No horses of note.

We kiss, again, and I ask forgiveness. You offer nothing. You offer words, thin and lacking arms.

“Seems sorta specific,” I say, the sky gone yellow through the city noise and the sun’s descent.

“So are swans,” you say, and I’d pay to hate you.

“Sure,” I say, and you call me a liar.

“Sure,” I say, and the wind moves across us, the first we’ve felt in years, the same wind, so differently received.

“Good,” you say, and it is.

The crater was as wide as the new Taco Bell up on West Camel, parking lot and all, but not so deep as all that. It was real hot, even from the lip, kind of glowing. Ally went like she was going down in there, but I grabbed her arm and said, “Hold up.”

She pulled away. “Fuck off,” she said, “I told you not to touch me anymore, Beck.”

So I fucked off, and she went in. I figured the vapors or smoke or heat would kill her, and I sort of hoped they would. Who says that sort of shit when someone’s trying to help? But she lived, made it all the way to the glow, already dimming by then, and yelled back that it was a Volkswagen or something.

“A what?”

“A Volkswagen.”

Bug came over our way and yelled something about Cassie being real fucked up or something, about needing help to get her back to the car.

“It’s a Volkswagen,” I yelled back at her.

“Help me,” was her reply.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just a minute,” and then I was in there, huffing the vapors and getting a look of my own. Sure as shit, there it was. “How the fuck?” I said.

Ally snorted and said “I know, right?” her hands turning out for emphasis.

I asked if there was an airplane or something, but she was all, “Naw,” and, “No way it would’a caught fire like that just falling from an airplane.” So I said, “Space?” and she just kind of looked up there and nodded.

There was a blinking light above us, way out in the darker than dark, red and slow. It was as clear a night as any, but there was no telling how far away it was. Still, it looked too steady to be an airplane, too far away, too.

“Maybe it’s a satellite,” said Ally.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Guys,” said Bug from beyond the rim of the crater. “Hurry, we need—”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I yelled back, “I said gimme a goddamn second. There’s a fucking Volkswagen down here and it came from fucking space.”

“Cassie’s fucking dying!”

“I don’t fucking care.”

Maybe she cried when she ran off, but I don’t think so. It was quiet up there, was all I knew. There was only the sound of the metal warping with the temperature shift, the melting and burning, the wind. Everything was blown and charred, more than a word like smashed could manage, but there was just enough to make things out—the emblem, for one. Among the bits and parts, the smoking rubber, there was enough to know it, a thing so knowable. The glow was still bright enough, alongside the moon, to make out the scene. There was a shape there in the mess, parts of shapes suggesting some whole, maybe a body—maybe.

“That was too much,” said Ally.

I kept quiet.

“What if she dies?”

“Then she was a cunt, anyhow.”

Ally made like she was going off to help Cassie, but got lost in another long stare at the wreckage. “How do you think?” she said.

I had a theory forming, too small for words. “Dunno,” I said.

“Sorry for what I said,” she said, eyes on the bits before us. “It’s just soon, you know.”

I didn’t say anything. The heat on my ankles was nice, weird. The crystal had shattered on the blackened watch near my shoe, but there was no mistaking it for anything but a watch. The ash around it was probably the wrist—no telling, really.

Ally kicked the door handle beside her foot and said, “We gotta go,” the spell broken.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“We’ll hafta take the car.”

“Just come back later.”

She sort of sighed or something.

“Or don’t,” I said. “Just go, already.”

If someone came along and filled the crater with water, I figured—the others gone off someplace else, nothing but the clear sky and the motion of the planet to make a sound—maybe some fish would come. That’d be two miracles, enough to start a chain. The ground was still hot when I sat. My head was light. The soles of my shoes were soft. The light was fading.

I stared. I stared and stared, and when I’d stared long enough I spotted the teeth, one of them gold, and followed them out to most of a burned-clean jaw. It was just a few feet away, conversation distance, you know?

“What were you thinking?” I said.

It kept its secrets.

“If this was the ocean,” I said, “nobody’d know shit about this, about you and all.”

Its grin was fixed, but it seemed right enough.

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re probably right.”

“Take it off,” I said, and she did.

When we fucked she smiled, absent minded, eyes low and to the ground. She asked if we could do it hard, and I tried as best I could.

“I’d like to wear you for a week,” I said, that or something like it.

She laughed, or I laughed and she followed, and either way it was nice under the fan, her head on my stomach, some forgettable band on the air around us. I hope she didn’t tell me anything true, right then. If she did, it’s gone, now. She probably said some things about home. I probably told her to stop, to keep that stuff separate, to go down on me in the silence. If I don’t remember, it’s not an act of omission. If I do, it’s been lost enough that it’s in someone else’s file, by now. What matters is it was nice right there, no matter what was around it.

I don’t think I’d recognize myself if I was better at choices. I don’t think I’d care too, anyhow.

So he says, “Why?” and I say, “Because,” and the answers don’t stack up for shit, and it’s just him looking at me and her so far gone that neither of us can remember the taste of her in any specific sense. There’s this shape, though, the edge of a word on a dumb tongue. I think to say I’m sorry, but I’m not. I say nothing, then. I know it was worth this but spare him that truth.

He looks more sad than angry. He’s months past fists, by now.

We don’t get a drink or recollect as we stare out over an overpass railing. We don’t fight. He was me, once before, and I’ve been him enough to know the ins of the whole mess. We stand there. We absorb the comfort of pathetic company, and we think of all the things we might’ve said, given the chance.

The buses stop at the edge of the city, turn, and return. If the airplanes are still running, it’s news to me. Trains roll outside my window, but it’s only for effect. In the darkness, I shift and sweat. I try sleep and booze in an alternating pattern, but neither satisfies.

Olfstead froze at that, mid-pantomime of a chimney’s collision with a derelict freightliner. “This,” he said, “is it. If there’s to be anything, it begins with this.”

So we twiddled. We tolerated. We absently swallowed, panicking in those moments when our throats would freeze due to excessive, pointless use, relaxed and allowed the panic to pass, and swallowed, again, to know we could.

The tale of the return journey went on for nearly two hours. Olfstead would stop, during that time, to request water for his throat or camphor for his joints. Our numbers thinned in that second hour. The women were the first to leave, using the noisiness of their bored children as their excuses. The men, resenting their lacks of excuses, tried to hold, but even tradition couldn’t mask their disgust with Olfstead. Their numbers thinned, in time, so much so that as Olfstead recalled the final minutia of his return, he did so to an audience of three: myself, Mr. Napp, and Sandy Wallace, the Larkings’ eldest.

Mr. Napp ventured, “So, that’s it, then?” as Olfstead wiped his forehead with the damp cloth he’d requested. I was glad for the question, my attention so invested in the crinkled skin above Olfstead’s wavering Adam’s apple that I could think of nothing else until Napp’s words broke the spell.

“Yes,” said Olfstead.

“So?” I said, the question rising without a thought to support it.

“So?” He repeated.

“News,” said Mr. Napp. “Now that you’ve prattled away the night at the cost of our town’s patience.”

Olfstead frowned. “Ah,” he said. “News. Well, it’s… He said no.”

“No?” said Napp. “Just no?”

Olfstead nodded. “I showed him the portrait. I spoke her name. I offered proofs of parentage. I even mentioned the swears. I did it all, just as I always have.”

“And he said no?” said Napp.

“He said, my dear fellows, that she was not clean. He said that even her portrait stank of corruption, that the swears weren’t fit for the paper that held them. He said there would be no stay, that he would continue to seed the clouds in preparation for the coming night, that the offering was rejected, that all would move ahead.”

Sandy said, “But he’s never said no, has he?”

“No,” said Olfstead, cutting his eyes at Mr. Napp. “He never has.”

“Then what,” said Sandy, “can we do?”

I looked the room over, unsure of the moment. My voice made itself known without my assistance. “He said no.”

Olfstead grunted at that. “Jasper gets it,” he said. “He said no. There’s nothing else.”

Napp was unable to meet our eyes, Elizabeth being his daughter and all. Sandy filled the silence with, “It’s good news, in a sense, for you, Jasper. Not that you’d have her, though.” Reflecting on a passing thought, he added, “Not that any of us’ll be around for the wedding.”

“He’s wrong,” said Napp.

Olfstead made His sign above his head and said, “That isn’t possible.”

“If he can be wrong—” Sandy whispered.

“He can’t,” said Olfstead.

“But—” said Sandy.

“No,” said Napp. “No. This is the purest of insults. It was more than I could bear to offer her. That this insult should—”

My voice, again, rose. Though my mind considered the arrangements of the men in the room, Olfstead’s superior position on the middle stair of His altar, it said, “I’d still have her.”

“The hell you would,” said Olfstead. “A man to a dog? By no means, boy.”

“Take that back,” said Napp.

“I’ll not,” said Olfstead. “Besides, there’s the matter of finding a suitable girl. A clean girl.”

Sandy was quick to break apart the scuff that followed, Mr. Napp lunging at Olfstead, Olfstead stumbling and knocking the candles with his elbows and backside.

“And this blasphemy,” said Olfstead. “Here! It’s no wonder the girl has crimed us. See the family, what it counts for respect.”

“Enough,” I said.

“No,” said Olfstead. “There is no enough. Unfit. As the girl, so the father, and, by their deeds, so, too, us in His eyes.”

I eyed His relief above the altar, the teeth, the cunning eyes. “Is he kind?” I said. “Olfstead, is he just?”

“He,” said Olfstead, the ruckus set aside for matters of truth and saying, “is neither kind nor just. He is. He demands. We kneel to offer. He judges. There is no room for kindness or justice. The ones before us understood.”

“He isn’t real,” said Napp.

If anybody had ever said it before, I hadn’t heard. It was too much to hear, leaving silence as the only possible response. The moment stretched long into the night, voiceless and without tick or span. The men returned, seeking news, perhaps, but were wrapped into and accepting of our silence without initiation. Then came the women, the children having been put to bed, and it was only with the arrival of the last of them, of Elizabeth, that Olfstead granted release, filling the quiet with purpose beyond truth.

“Do you suppose,” he said, “Mr. Napp, that he hasn’t heard? Do you think he awaits repetition of your blasphemy? It’s not enough that you submit your whore of a daughter. No, you choose to expedite our downfall with your…your fantasies.”

“How,” I said, realizing the arc of the thought in my mouth and helpless to stop its completion, “do we know he’s real?”

Olfstead spat at the words. He spat on the ground at the sound of them and into his hands, that he could rub the spit into his ears for having heard them. “And the simpleton speaks,” he said. “Again and again, the idiot forms words for all to hear.”

I flushed, at that, the hot of my head spreading to the tips of my ears and the skin of my arms, but I said nothing as he continued.

“The whore has infected his simple mind. Forgive him,” he said to the altar, “he knows—”

“Whore?” said Elizabeth.

“Yes,” said Napp. “Whore. He says it. You hear him say it, don’t you? You’ve shamed us if—”

Olfstead interrupted. “No ‘us,’” he said. “No ‘us’ at all, Mr. Napp. You’ll not bring fire upon us twice in a night. You speak for yourself, you and yours, alone. Your claims to ‘us’ are in forfeit, sir. Take your whore and her simple lover with you to die in the fields. There is a matter for men to consider, a matter—”

I hit him. I heard the words and my arm pulled back at the sound of them. It was unintentional, at best, a reflex, but he fell on the altar stairs like he meant it.

One of the women, in defense of Olfstead, said, “Do you think he sits in the smoke of the Vanagon and hears nothing all day? You think you know better His will?”

They ran us out. If Olfstead was present, I can’t recall. I like to think he was, but I figure I hit him hard enough that he wasn’t. Elizabeth didn’t say much. It helped that Mr. Napp couldn’t look at her and that my voice showed no interest in speaking up on her behalf.

“I think you should know,” she later told me, after Mr. Napp had fallen asleep by the old chopping stump to the bleating of the sheep in the southern field, “that I was with Tamie Rowls before he died. I loved him, Jass, but I loved you more.”

“Loved?” I said.

“Love,” she said. “I love you more. You believe me?”

I smiled, I think. “Don’t suppose it matters much. I love you’s what matters. Don’t know a way out of that.”

“You could pretend,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’ve never been any good at that.”

Laying with her in the grooves of the fallow field, I thought about Him. I tried to imagine the fire and the wing, but I could only see the words. “I don’t think he’s real,” I said. She was asleep by then, white in the moon’s glow, but I said it anyway. “If he is, though, I don’t care if he kills the lot.”

How the days that followed landed our feet on the walk to his peak, I can’t say. There was a conversation with Mr. Napp the first morning of our exile, but I was no part of it. It was theirs, their raised voices and their sadness. I was lost in the wave of the grass, I think. There was something in the lay of the heavily blown stalks and those that kept their upright shapes, a question of which were stronger. I was preparing to offer voice to the thought when Napp said, “So we’ll see,” and, so, we went.

The bones were real enough, ages of sacrifice discernable in their adornments of charms and fine cloth. I held Elizabeth close to my chest as we walked, stepping over what we could, but crushing so much, still, underfoot. There was no stink of sulfur, though, no shed of tooth or scale.

“Tell me,” said Mr. Napp to his daughter. “Is it true?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then it’s all for nothing?”

“Yes,” she said.

I smelled it, then, the sulfur, a sting in the nostril. “It’s OK,” I said. “I love her. She loves me. It’s OK.”

She smiled, I think.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Napp. “Not anymore, it doesn’t. OK’s back there.”

The sky was yellow, that morning. The sky was the loveliest shade of yellow.

There were nine-hundred-seventy-two books, in all. She’d individually selected each, first on the basis of nautical themes—a matter of luck—and second according to size. The hardbacks would make up the outer hull; the paperbacks, the inner. The wax would come from the boxes upon boxes of handmade candles she’d discovered in the basement, some months earlier, hold-overs from a time before the house had known electric light. There were other odds and ends, as well, rubber flanges and the like for the more functional aspects of ship-building.

Materials gathered, she took to assembly. It was a slow process, the success of the project demanding as much precision in placement as it did. Slow or otherwise, her progress throughout the day was impressive. She’d completed the outer hull a short time after lunch; set the rudder and the mast’s mount shortly after that. Upon coating the structural hardbacks with another layer of wax, she began the inner hull. The logistics of this leg were difficult, given her distance from the fire, but she managed, having worked out the maximum amount of melted wax she could carry without worry of premature hardening. By nightfall, the principle work was done. A night for the wax to cure, she determined, and the craft would be seaworthy—a few minor adjustments aside.

Morning arrived with its usual soft-boiled eggs and dry toast. Conversation was kept to a minimum. There were papers to read, stocks to consider, the work of servants to scrutinize and correct. She ate her meal with a chart of the lake in her mind, working out the best possible course for the boat’s maiden voyage. Close to the shore, she reasoned, would be safest. Father asked after her studies, and she reminded him that break was only half completed. Mother asked after her studies, as well, having been in another room for the initial asking. Father assured Mother that the girl was seeing to her responsibilities.

The sun was high by the time the boat was ready for launch. Even with the rails she’d made, the push from dry-dock to lake was a difficult one. Her shoes—sandals, really—were no good for the task, but she’d come a long way. It was only a matter of digging in, of pushing harder. She fell in the mud when the boat splashed free, panting. It wobbled in the shallow water, and she smiled, her face on the ground, at the scope of the thing she’d made.

She didn’t dust herself off when she stood. She went directly to climbing aboard, to pushing away from the shore with a long stretch of electrical conduit she’d found beside the storehouse. She checked the wind. It was good. She raised the sail of bed sheets. It filled. She manned the rudder. She began to sail.

It was a grand lake with few houses at its edge. There were docks and permanent rafts of timber at regular intervals, but, given the time of year, she was the lone human representative. She shaped her hands into a spyglass and tracked the land around her, noting the point at which it vanished into glittery sunlight. From her position she could see no hint of the other side. There was only water and the familiar shore. There was only her, her and the faces of the books at her feet, her and the ruffling of the sail. She set a course across the lake’s wide middle, her thirst for exploration too great to restrict herself to path she’d planned over breakfast.

The going was slow. The boat was heavier in the water than she’d imagined it might be. She sang ballads of the sea to pass the time. She pictured the boy at the far, unseen edge, the one who’d given up hope for completing his own ship, the one waiting, though he didn’t know, for her to arrive. His eyes would be a comfortable blue. He would smile, the wind tussling his hair, as she approached. His mother would offer tea. She would politely decline, insisting there were fortunes, yet, to be made on the sea, that the boy and she had narrow hours left in which to beat the Scrapyard Fleet to the sunken ship in the trench in the lake’s northern finger.

Lost in sleepy thoughts of salvage and romance, lounging on her back, the rudder’s handle fixed in the crook of her arm, it took her longer to notice the water that’d begun to pool around her heel than it might have in more sober circumstances. Picturing the scene as she did, the boy holding her by the hand along the shallow shoreline, the two barefooted, her boat of books and their raised Spanish wreck moored in the distance behind them, the cold sensation rising along her leg seemed fitting and true. It wasn’t until it mixed in with her clothes and rose to the base of her spine that she became aware of the problem.

The joints hadn’t held. Thin jets of water sprayed up between the spines and pages of the vessel’s shell. Floating at her thighs were the makings of her inner hull. Books like The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Odyssey danced lazily, bouncing against her knees, as they took on water and considered the options of sink and float. She made weak attempts at holding back the flow, but she was aware, even before she’d begun, that the damage was too far reaching for a real solution. The wax, she thought, the sun and the wax—too little; too much.

The firmer, outer shell of thick, hardbound volumes like Moby Dick shifted below her with each step. She moved gingerly toward the boat’s aft for a better view of her surroundings, but even at her most cautious, there seemed little more than firmer water below her, firmer water that threatened to give at every slight motion. So she rose gently on her toes, just enough to see beyond the books surrounding her—no land. There was only water, only a soggy boat, only her.

She fell through. The books below her gave under the pointed pressure of her stance. She fell and stuck at her ribs. She pushed to raise her face above the waterline, but the books she pushed gave, as well. Cold washed over her. She thought to kick, to break clear, but then she thought of captains. The captain goes down, she thought. The captain goes down.

It was a calm thought, her hair floating above her. Breath held, she looked up to the sun. She thought of the boy who waited, of his mother calling for him when night grew near. Maybe he’d finish his boat, after all. Maybe he’d count her among his salvaged treasures. She fixed her thoughts on his eyes, their reflection of the calm, expansive water before him. She smiled. She breathed the heavy air. She slept. She sank.

I have six to go, and I'm working on most of them at the same time. A few are fairly old, unfinished projects--two years, in one case--and a few are based on the ideas of friends from recent conversations.

When I've hit the mark, I'll be taking the site down for redesign and new focus. When it comes back, I'll no longer be posting new stories. I've given thought to my career, in recent times, considered the advice of friends, and, given the length of time and loss of readers, as well as the unfortunate nature of First Serial Rights, I think the time has come to start submitting work to publications--reserve rights, all of that bullshit.

This will affect the handful of you who happen to be reading this entry. It's a small number, but it means something to me that you've continued to read over the course of time. So, thank you. There are six more to go. Here's hoping they don't disappoint. Furthermore, maybe we can find something on the other side of all of this to talk about. Also, there'll be a book over there to memorialize these last five years of my on-again, off-again romance with short work, one of those self-published numbers from the good-old days.]]> 2008-03-24T00:14:09Z 2008-03-16T21:45:57Z tag:www.apeinfinitum.net,2008://1.481 2008-03-16T21:45:57Z

Time passed. The scene grew harder to piece together. Maybe he’d inserted the romance. Probably definitely he had. He’d done it to all of the memories he could muster, down to tasks as mundane as washing raw chicken in a stainless steel basin, the sensation of bones scratching his wrists as he shifted the flesh. The apparatus couldn’t be trusted, he decided. In the quiet times, it could do nothing more than generate context, arrange the elements of the scenes in ways suggesting significance.

“What are you thinking about?” said this she, a different she in fresh context.

“Nothing,” he said with a smile. “Just daydreaming.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I do that.”

They were halfway to Chattanooga. It was a short drive, but he’d already forgotten why they were going there. He considered asking, but she seemed too intent on the road ahead, too smiley for questions like that to fly. The radio hadn’t worked in weeks.

“A game?” she said.

He wondered if there’d been umbrellas, that night, if they’d eaten. There were only the eyes, though, the cryptic words, and the exit that followed. “Sure,” he said. “A game.”

As they played, he tried to record the details of the drive. It was a matter of preserving the moment with authenticity. If he allowed himself that then there’d be no second guessing, later. He’d know why it had ended without any embellishment or added significance. They were just bodies in space, after all, just large chemical reactions.

“Fix the still,” she said.

He knew this one. “Brecht,” he said. For his turn, he offered the only one he could think of. “The cold from space.”

“You’ve done that one, before,” she said. “You’re not trying.”

“I get things mixed up, sometimes—time and stuff—preoccupied, maybe.”

“Maybe a different game?”

If there were a song on the radio, if the radio worked, it would have made the job of keeping things together easier, a familiar song with no prior attachments. He tried humming, but it added nothing.

“Are you alright?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just trying to figure something out.”

“What’s that?”

“A couple things, really. There’s the why—like why Chattanooga? But there’s also this whole thing of now and then—like is now ever not then and how do you keep them apart.”

She looked out the window at the spinning wheels of a semi as they passed.

“Well,” she said, “this has to be now, doesn’t it?”

He looked her over. “Is this the game?”

“The new one? You tell me.”

“Probably not,” he said.

His hand fit nicely on her leg. The silence fit nicely in his ears. They wore it between them for a stretch, up until the outside-Chattanooga signs reading, “Bee alert, arrive unhurt,” and even then it was only a laugh at a remembered moment that broke it.

In the hotel room they watched a documentary about Sacco and Vanzetti. They left the curtains open so they could see the rain, the gray skies over the sleeping elephant of a city.

“Why are we here?” he said, after a while.

She frowned. “I don’t know if I think about that, too much. There was the drive, though. That was nice.”

“It’s not going anyplace,” he said, “this place, this drive.”

“I feel the same way, I think. I know I feel similarly. If it was going anyplace, was anyplace, even, there wouldn’t be any room for these questions.”

“Yeah,” he said. “This is probably then, then.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “Probably.”

“Do you remember if there were umbrellas over the tables?”

“I don’t see how I could, baby. Besides, this is different, I think. We were maybe at the coast, then.”

He nodded. He wondered why more stories weren’t set at the coast. There was more room for loss to expand at the coast—no room for that with all of the mountains now surrounding them. “We probably came for fun,” he said.

“I’m sure of it.”

“Good,” he said. “Let’s have some, then.”

“Like how?” She was already standing, already finding her shoes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ve got that in us.”

“We did, though. So we should, right?”

“Maybe. Maybe the moon’ll be out. We can watch it from the patio.”

“Sure,” she said. “We could have a drink, and I could say the moon is shaped like a dinner plate, white as fresh china.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That sounds nice. But you have to promise it won’t be the last time.”

“I would,” she said, “but I think that’s up to you.”

“Probably,” he said.

“Maybe,” she agreed.

Not a coastal wind, he pretended to remember. It was some other kind, colder and more evil. There were no tables, maybe. The umbrellas were below them, strategically placed around the pool. They leaned against the rail. The words came—the pleading eyes—a laugh. She looked away.

It seemed closer to right, but so much remained to doubt, so many added details. It was too much, probably, to ever remember correctly. It was only pictures. It was only what they meant. There was nothing else.

“Well,” said Hep, “I suppose it connects like a hammer. You know, ‘cause it’s a hammer.”

It felt better than most. “No,” said Slesh. “To the show, I mean.”

Slesh dropped the hammer on the stage. “I won’t do it.”

“Do you think she’ll wear the green dress?”

“This will kill you.”

“I know,” said Hep, “a real show stopper. I hope she’ll wear the green dress.”

“She won’t come.”

“We played the World’s Fair.”

“I know, Hep. I know.”

“Then whadda you mean, she won’t come?”

“I mean just that, what I said.”

“But this is Cincinnati. Besides, Slesh, this is us—you and me. We played the World’s Fair. Don’t you wanna go out with a show stopper?”

“Course I do, but not by killing you.”

Hep grinned, if only inwardly for a moment. He felt the sweat gathering at the corners of his mouth. “But,” he said, “you said—”

Slesh interrupted. “I didn’t mean it. I was hot. That’s it. I was hot and I didn’t mean it. I’m tired and I just wanna sit out by the old lake for a bit, not worry about shoes or hotels for a bit. I don’t want this. It’s all what I said, already.” He’d been backing toward the wings as he spoke. He was nearly out when Hep hollered, “You owe me, buddy.”

Slesh stopped. “No,” he said. “I don’t owe you a thing.”

“It’s hot,” Hep said, pulling a kerchief from his breast pocket and mopping his cheeks and forehead. “You think she’ll wear the green dress? She was always pretty in green.”

“You’ve lost it,” said Slesh before turning to follow through on his exit. “Lost it.”

“True. True. I’ve lost everything, I think, but you owe me on account of that. Besides, you said—”

Slesh froze mid-step. “What?”

Hep idly kicked the hammer. “I said,” he said, his eyes on the stage boards, “that you sai—”

Slesh crossed the space between them before Hep could make the “d” sound and slapped his partner across the mouth. “Don’t say that,” he said. “I said don’t say that. I was hot, was all.”

Past the lights there was an odd grumble, even something close to a gasp—no laughs, though.

Hep didn’t respond much to the slap. He gave the hammer another little kick, kept his eyes low, and said, “OK, Slesh. You win, buddy. ‘Sides, we played the World’s Fair—right pal?”

Past the lights, a cough.

“If she comes,” Hep continued, “if she wears the green dress, let’s open with the dime store bit.”

“She’s not coming,” Slesh said, placing his hand on Hep’s sore cheek. “I know it hurts, but she’s never coming again.”

Hep sat down where he stood. The spot narrowed in. Slesh leaned close, whispered, “You’re falling apart, here, buddy.”

Hep looked out over the footlights, traced the outlines of the cloudy shapes beyond. There was too much motion, no laughs. “Done that already, pal.”

Slesh stood straight.

Wiping some sweat from his neck, Hep said, “Full house.”

“Yep,” said Slesh. “Solid night, I suppose.”

“Let’s end it,” Hep said, “finish this out.”

Slesh turned, once more, to exit the stage. “It’s already done. You finished it for the both of us.”

Hep stood. “Take that back.”

Slesh made no response, keeping, instead, to his silent ascent to the wings.

“Take it back,” Hep said, “or I’ll take this to you.” He’d gathered the hammer at some point. There were unmistakable gasps—fewer sounds of fidgeting, too.

Without turning, Slesh said, “Go on and do it, then.”

Hep charged him, even made it halfway across the stage before it set in that he couldn’t follow through. He dropped the hammer, hunched over with his hands on his knees.

Slesh, his back to everything, said, “Never had the nuts for the real stuff.”

“Please,” said Hep, sweat dripping from every part of him. “Let’s give ‘em a real ending.”

“She said you never had the nuts.”

“Please,” Hep repeated. “Please.”

“You want your ending?” Slesh said, motionless. “Tell them you want it, then.”

Hep hung his drenched head and moved downstage. The spot followed. Reaching the edge, he looked out, squinting. “I want it,” he said. “I really want it.”

A cough. Another. The creaking of seats.

Slesh turned. He took time to walk to the hammer, took time to pick it up.

Hep continued to speak. “I want it,” he said. There was no telling the sweat in his eyes from the tears.

“They can’t hear you,” said Slesh as he approached. “You’ll have to say it louder.”

“I want it!”

The sound of the hammer against the skull was perfectly clear throughout the theater, a dull crack, wet and full. Hep fell gracelessly into the pit. A commotion began, mostly silent, mostly hushed and fast, a rustling.

“What’s this supposed to be?” called some voice from beyond the lights.

Slesh bowed with a smile before making his exit. Hep remained where he fell, as still as anything, despite the rules of spectacle. Screams came, in time, sharp and meaningful.

However, Casey is nothing if not a drinker and a fan of the endeavors of his fellow man.]]> 2008-02-12T15:10:57Z 2008-02-12T12:34:18Z tag:www.apeinfinitum.net,2008://1.477 2008-02-12T12:34:18Z

The old folks say he used to sell oil filters. “First job,” they say. “First time folks called him by his old man’s name, at least. Used to call him Junior, before that.”

To see that clock, though, to know the challenges presented in its engineering and construction, it was pretty hard to imagine calling the man who’d seen it through Junior, regardless of his age when it was so. The notion that it’d never felt a human hand in its works since its completion was enough to give a speaker pause.

They say something else, too, the old timers, something quiet, something the boys don’t. They say time moves a little slower in these parts. It’s the sort of thing people say in little towns like this, little places off the main roads where the old timers still split the street with the boys. Only here it’s a whisper, a confidence spoken with looks to the side and a lead that defies nostalgia as much as it chills. They say time moves just a little slower in these parts and that it’s all on account of that clock, how it’s more for making time than marking it, and on account of the author of its design.

“Young God,” they’ll say as they lock your king in check or play a domino, “a little present before he quit us, a little present for HQ.”

It’s just old men talking, though, just the sort of thing they say sometimes. Never mind if they mean it. It’s just that sort of thing. But the curious fact remains that the clock tower has no doors, no access from the street or the roof. Likewise, there’s the absence of its plans in the hall of records. There’s only the clock to speak for itself, locked from the inside, silent.

The street clears when the minute hand locks noon into place, lunchtimes in towns like this being as sacred as anything. The foot traffic stripped away, the shoes and clothes of the common era with it, it’s not hard to see things the way they must have looked, back then. It’s not even hard to strip out that clock, to picture High Quality, himself, the town’s son, grinning as he walks the workmen through their tasks.

“A thing of beauty,” he might have said. “Make no mistake, boys. We’re building a wonder.”

If the plans existed, if the annotations could be compared to Young God’s recorded samples, it would be easy enough to dismiss the matter, to know that time moved at the same clip here as it did anyplace else. That wouldn’t stop the old folks from talking, though. It wouldn’t do anything but give some outsider a sense of rightness to which he probably wasn’t entitled. Besides, the story’s probably better than any truth so mundane.

It’d been a year to the day since he’d parted with Professor Hawthorne at the base of Mount Mystery—Young God, that is. It’d been a year to the day since he and the other boys had stood in their circle around the broken body of August DiNova, a year to the day since he’d spoken his final words to them of, “I’ve done too much, already,” and set off toward his absence. It’d been a year of wandering, a year that ended here in this town, his eyes heavy, that day, his skin brown.

The barbershop across from the clock is where it happened, where he sat in Nat Bugle’s chair and said, “I’d like a shave.” That’s the whole of it, a little shave before the end, most normal thing in the world, a little something to feel human for just a little longer. Nat didn’t know him from anyone, not that it would’ve made a difference. He was just some stranger from out there, just a customer in need of a job well done.

They say he ran the back of his hand along his chin when Nat was done—Young God, I mean. “Hell of a shave,” he said. “Best I’ve known in my years.”

They say old Nat just smiled, running his blade up and down his strap as he did. “Right tools,” he said. “Right hands. That’s all. Just the way we do things in these parts, I suppose.”

As for the tools, they were the trade of HQ, a little pricier than most but the work of true masters. The truth came out soon enough. A slice of pie at The Highlight: “Best I’ve known,” said Young God. The transistor radio at the five and dime: “So clear,” he said. Even the paper and pen he’d used to draft his schematic were things of beauty. At every stop he was confronted by the truth of a name and the worthiness of a town.

The ribbon-cutting was held until the Mayor’s Day celebration, that year, according to the story—a story lacking in dry eyes by this point in its telling. They’ll tell it if you’ve got the time. They’ll tell it in whispers, but, if you’re patient with them, with their jokes and their digressions, they’ll tell it to its end. It’s just a little story about a little clock in a little town, no more magical than anything else but a good enough sign of times that are passing, whether more slowly or quickly in this place or that.

Jess took a long look at the koalas before responding. “I used to think that, too,” she said. “I don’t go enough for it to really matter, though, not in any real way.”

“You’d go more if they were better.”

“Maybe. I doubt it, though. People are only so interested in anything—me less than most.”

“What if it was an alien zoo?”

She couldn’t look away from the koalas’ blank stares. “Like the book?” she said.

“No. Not a zoo run by aliens. Forget it. Stupid idea.”

“It’s not stupid,” she said, unconvinced or distracted or both.

“That does it,” he said. “I’m going in.”

“Careful,” she said.

“I always am,” he said, grinning, as he limbered up for the climb.

He was up the fence before anyone took notice. Jess was just remembering how nimble he’d always been—so few occasions to be nimble in his line, in their lives—when she heard the kid.

“I wanna go in, too,” said the kid.

Then came a gasp or two, nothing compared to the reaction when he punched the first koala he came to.

“Ungrateful bastards,” he said, and he said it loud enough to hear clear across the habitat.

The koala didn’t pay him any mind. It didn’t move away or jump at him with its teeth or claws. It just took the punch, took it like a man, and dropped from its tree. Then came the real gasps—crying, too.

Jess thought to say, “Give ‘em hell,” but she kept her mouth shut. No point rocking the boat, the boat so squarely facing the koala’s side of the scuffle as it was.

“Why would he do that?” said a woman to her left.

Jess laughed. “Why wouldn’t he?”

Security: that was the answer. Despite their longstanding disuse, they moved quickly. Then it was all hauling Craig away and relief in the spectators and a sense of satisfaction that Jess hadn’t felt in so long.

Craig shouted, “Wait for me, babe,” from his side of the growing crowd.

“I will,” she shouted back. “You know I will, baby.”

She didn’t.

Assaulting a koala proved a graver offense than either of them had suspected. Beyond that, the court had ordered visits with a psychiatrist, one whose evaluation of Craig involved words like “dangerously” and “unbalanced” and “person,” words that took on greater authority when Craig spoke on his behalf during sentencing.

“My only regret,” he said, “is not getting to the rest of them.”

The months weren’t hard so much as they were months. Time had afforded certain distances in Jess’s perspective of her relationship with Craig. It had brought new neighbors, as well—The Jogger, for instance. Ultimately, waiting was a matter of time, and time, along with Jess’s particular attention span, had found waiting wanting.

For their first date, The Jogger took Jess to the zoo. She’d told him it was her “very favorite place of all.” He’d smiled at that, smiled his jogger’s smile and said in his big-boy voice, “Then that’s just where we’ll go.”

She thought about Craig as they walked, but only so much. Mostly she thought about his alien zoo, what it might be. She asked The Jogger what he thought.

“I think,” was his reply, “you’re about ten kinds of alright.”

She smiled. “I’d’ve bought seven.”

The sex was rough, comforting. She smoked a cigarette in his room, afterward. She liked the look of how uncomfortable it made him.

“My old man’s in jail,” she said.

“Sounds like a winner.”

“I’m waiting for him.”

He ran his hand over her back. “Well,” he said, “I guess you’re doing a solid job of it.”

“He punched a koala,” she said.

“For you?”

“What?”

“You’re prettier when you don’t talk.”

She smiled. “I know.”

“Sounds pretty crazy,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what they say. He’s nimble, though, something like a real man, maybe, but different, too.” After a silence of distracted stares at blank walls, her cigarette spent, she added, “I think I should go.”

“Yeah,” said The Jogger. “I think that’s probably a good idea.”

“I don’t know from good ideas,” she said. “See you around?”

“You know it,” he said with a wink. “You fucking know it.”

“I know how you’ll die,” I say.

I nod. You tell me to take it back, but I can’t. “I can’t,” I say.

“Are you sure?” you say.

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s darker, on ahead. Darker still, after that. It’s a sound like whales. There’s a time. There always was a time, but this is it, now, the time ahead. There’s a sound like whales, like too much water and too fast hands. It can’t be stopped, I think, not the way we’re walking, not the where.”

“But how?”

“Just is.”

You say you’re scared.

“It’s OK,” I say. “It’s OK. I’ll keep walking with you.”

If we hug, it’s between streetlamps, two cold things wringing themselves on themselves, lost so effectively in the thick darkness that when we kiss it’s like relearning the world from the mouth out, all rainwet and trembling. I try to tell you everything in that kiss, in the shaking of my lips, the pressure, the soft electricity the water conducts. I try to shallow my breathing and hear yours for the first time, again, but the more I try the more my lungs struggle. I’m not strong enough for this. Neither of us are. Why are we walking?

You say, “It’s not important why,” but I wasn’t speaking. Are you answering yourself? It doesn’t matter. Foot follows foot, splash and soaking shoe. The banners twist in the wind. They never ask why.

“They’re just banners, though,” I say.

Maybe you nod. Whatever you do, you tug in closer to me and we have to relearn how to walk. There are no headlights to make sense of the shifting shapes in the thin pools of yellow from the lamps above. We have eyes, though. We have eyes and eyes and eyes and we walk. How did you become so much stronger than me in this stretch? It feels like you’re pulling me.

“I can’t wait,” you say. “If it can’t be changed—”

I squint even though I already know every inch of up there, if only as a dream. “It’s darker, still, on ahead. This is only the beginning of it.”

So we kiss again. This time I’m sure you’ll see the truths I can’t find the words for, but it’s me who sees, instead. I see the red pillowcase, you on the old dryer outside some old back door waving it like a flag. No signal is returned in the distance. I see the mosquitoes. I see your feet, so small in memories. You ask if I’ll hold onto that for you. You whisper into my ear, or you bite it. Regardless, I say, “I will.”

It’s a sound like whales. The last of the lights is in sight, now. All darkness after that. Who would build a street like this? Who could live here?

If you smile, I don’t see it, but your voice has that shape in it. “Nobody lives out here,” you say, and I can see the truth of it.

No body. No thing. It’s only darkness. Even the moon sees no use in its presence, here, and it’s darker, still, on ahead.

“Strange,” you say, “how much color there still is.”

Some wet blue, some moth’s-wing gray; they survive the light’s abdication, somehow, painting the loose shapes of whales and thunderclouds on the void’s more substantial nothings.

“Do you hear it?” I say, but you’re gone from my side, now. I nearly fall in your absence, so much of how I’d stood till now so tied up in the balance of your weight. I call out, but there’s no speed left for a voice like mine. There’s only a sound like whales, a palette of darkness reserved for last moments, never intermissions.