Alligators of Abraham (17 page)

And so Robert smiled unto you and said, “You see well a fellow would be wise to follow this man's lead.”

“Have you heard the choirs along the first dawn?”

And you became now this man in cream tweed suits, cramped into the cabs of flatbed trucks, traveling ever along dirt roads.

And in these years you built and owned several houses, one in the country, one in the city, and one along a stretch of water, and these were furnished with carpets and tapestries and furniture from many lands and civilizations. And you owned now many great paintings and statues and ancient manuscripts and first editions of novels, all of these certain to swell in value. And you had never seen these objects, nor your houses, nor the butlers and servants and cooks who worked in your houses and lived in quarters near the land of these houses. And some nights you dreamed of what these houses must be like, and some nights you sketched their appearance within your letters.

And you jotted letters in the passenger cabs of flatbed trucks, and you signed these with “love,” and you wrote within them, “How does he grow?” and you wrote, “I dream of you always” and there were nights now along those roads when you asked the child of your invention if he minded his mother when she said he banged his tin trucks too loudly, and when you could not recall this woman's name you addressed each letter to “My darling love,” and when you could not recall the expression of her face to inscribe the correct compliment, you wrote of how the sun shone through the wispy hairs of her neck and arms.

And you journeyed dusted roads, and your suit stiffened, and your glasses encrusted, and there were days in the midst of horizonless fields of corn and wheat, and there were days when all the horizon seemed the beating sun, and you journeyed roads rimmed by company men with their shirt sleeves rolled and their dirt faces leaned on shovels, the dust blackened by their sweat and streaked red with blood, and flies gathered, and mosquitoes grew fat upon their arms.

And the men worked beyond the fall of night, until they could move no longer, and when they could not erect their tents along the fields they slept in the dust and throbbing heat of the roads, and from the forests and swamps came the croaking of frogs and the chirruping of crickets and the stalking of wild dogs. And there were nights they could not sleep for the hissing of what they believed to be alligators. And there were nights they could not sleep for what sounded like the renewed explosions of insurrectionists, but those days the far-off explosions of insurrectionists seemed quelled, and these sounds were the firing of rockets into whatever world lies beyond this atmosphere.

And all the lands you strung with wires and poles. All the lands linked by a common hum and radiance. All minds lit by this common wire, all thoughts contained within a common pulse. And when your workers desired the light they peered into farmhouse windows crouched in the begonias until they were driven from the land by screams of “pervert” or by shotgun blasts, until you brought along generators and now the black and white throbbing within their tents and their common laughter and their sighs, synchronized and amazed.

And when you looked at these landscapes throbbing with light you could only say unto the fellow nearest, “Perhaps I will retire.” For to rise from the cab of your truck or the mattress upon the flatbed now required much creaking and struggle. And when you glanced into a mirror you saw nothing of the boy who began this project, only the gray haired man who finished it. And the lines in your eyes, and the fullness of your cheeks. And how many nights in your coming decrepitude you sat smoking and drinking and watching the light of the campsites, listening to your men, to all the men along the land, who you had made into one.

And when you walked the lines of men raising poles and stretching wires you called out names you believed they were called, for once men such as these had been called by such names. These men you pulled from the line, their dusty faces, their blue haunted eyes. These men you asked, “Do you know who I am?” and they said, “Of course” and you said, “Do you know my name?” and they said, “Of course” and you said, “Then say it?” and they said, “Sir?” and you said, “Say my name to my face” and so they did. And to the next man you turned and you said, “Is this true?

How many years now? How many miles of wire uncoiled and how many acres of forest pillaged? How many watts of radiance? How many cities and towns bloomed into black and white? How many cities and towns gathered into the total hum? How many cities and towns had you toured and known and brought into the light of the new world? The map you consulted for a time said only, “Most of them” and then, “All but a few” until it said, “All but one.” And so you then set forth to bring civilization to this final city.

This final city was a smudge on your map. This final city all crews had avoided until there was no option. This final city lit only by the flickering of fires. And there were no towers within this city, nor were there trucks except those trucks you brought and these idled along the roads, vacant and dusty. And there were no houses or children or stores. Here your workers wandered the roads and paced the town squares, gaping at long-off hillsides, and here they hefted bolt guns as if they were alien objects, slow turning and gazing at these, stroking the muzzles, and here they wore white masks shaped in the apparition of birds. And when you thundered unto these men, “What is the meaning of this?” they nodded and murmured or wandered in circles. And you ordered them thrashed, and you ordered their masks stripped and their guns confiscated, and throughout this process they made no sound; they remained in their limp, dumb posture, transfixed by the bleak hillsides some miles distant.

And now on either side of the roads, in the ditches and the fields and along the edges of the forests, piled one atop another into walls and small hillsides, were the blood-smeared and mud-grim bodies of alligators. Workers prodded these mounds with their boots, with sticks, and unto these men you asked, “What goes on here?” and they answered in inarticulate whispers and in sounds like “dangerous” and “microbes.” And they milled and wandered and turned in circles.

And the streets of this city were marked by the figures of men with the heads of wild dogs and the heads of alligators, their eyes and teeth constructed of glass, their features sculpted with mud and clay and sticks and grass and leather. And these seemed the figures of men as articulated by children, or by those in the midst of the deepest sleep. And company men bowed to these, lit torches before them, humming a gibberish with no melody.

Here hillsides of alligators sweltered over the ruins of department stores and water towers and apartment buildings, and painted upon the slopes were women with the heads of gulls and men with the heads of alligators, and the burning of the heavens, and the armies who once drifted along the rivers, the glint of their bayonets, their yellow eyes, their faces of eternal leather.

Here company men hoisted poles until they stood upright, and when you asked these men where they found their masks, they no longer knew, and when they said your name an absent sound emerged. And all throughout this town the men of your company milled in those masks, dug into mounds with shovels and picks and spades, and when you asked them “Why?” they could not answer. And they gazed at the sky, firing at gulls with their shovel handles, and when the birds did not drop they shook at the handles as if they were broken.

And some hills dwarfed all others. And all lay in the shadow of these, save those gulls that perched atop their peaks, shrieking and prying at the ancient and dead leather.

And you stood with this men who milled about those fallen poles, and when the skies dimmed you lit your lantern while these men heaped leather from one mound to another, though when you asked them to what purpose they now built, these men insisted they did not know, and perhaps had never known, and when you invited them to share your light they demurred and said it was better not to risk His wrath, and when you asked, “Whose wrath?” they gestured to the largest of the hillsides along the land.

And you reached into the smaller of these mounds and found only wiry hair and bones, skulls and femurs and teeth, and you wondered who these had been, and you were told that these bones were nameless. They said, “Perhaps they died of disease” and “Perhaps we beat them to death” and “Perhaps
they
built all of this” and they gestured to the enormous hillsides.

*

In the morning you scaled the first of these hillsides while from below men shouted of contagions, and your fingers caught and bled in their fissures, and when you tired you slept astride their leather, and when you dreamed you dreamt of soldiers firing at natives, and when you woke you woke coughing pond water and peat. And you climbed until the sun bulged, until the leather heated into musk, and here flies gathered and clouded and the sky entire seemed warped with their clamor.

You climbed until your arms sagged and burned and numbed, you climbed until the wind screamed against you, you climbed until the air thinned and the voices from below became small echoes and then echoes-not-at-all, and gulls ambled along the slopes and eyed you silently, and they milled and picked at the leather until a crevice seemed revealed, a shaft of darkness, and you contemplated this humid night until you no longer heard the picking and screaming and swirling of gulls, until you sensed from within a lonesome cry or a weeping or your name articulated, and by the force of some strange will you called within the name of your father and you called within the name of Abraham and these returned only the language of your voice reverberated and dim.

You climbed into this humidity, through a shaft so slender your head knocked and scrapped even as your chin dragged, and there were moments you cried out until your breath became too weak and your arms wearied and you rested your chin. And even when you seemed to fade and doze you pulled yourself forward. And you no longer knew if your eyes were opened or closed, and you could not know if the mice and beetles you perceived were real or imagined, and there came men you knew well, their faces bearded and sneering and frosted over, and you continued along and passed through them as vapors. And there were hours where you seemed immersed in the humid waters of the swamp, in the mire of the peat, the snarl of the weeds, and the fish passing, and the bloated, chewed upon bodies. And then you knew you had entered a new cavern or a larger tunnel and if you lifted your head now it would not crack against a ceiling, and if you lifted your back it would not strike against some surface. And you understood that if you attempted to stand you would be able to stand, and when you were able to stand without falling again into your numbed limbs, you did. And you lit your lantern and there shone this room of figures and shadows and the smell of ammonia and the smell of dust. And before you lay a figure on a slate table, a gathering of bones and leather and tin and gold, with the body of a young child and the face of an apparition. And when you breathed you breathed in this boy, and through your blood the substance of this boy. Your fingers along the child's hand, the pocket knife therein, and along his alligator nose and into the glass-jeweled sockets of his eyes, and the peak of his brow and top of his head, over what seemed a headpiece but may have simply been his hair crafted of leather and bone. And you cast your lantern along the walls of this chamber and there suspended were daguerreotypes of the boy and his mother, the child's pencil sketches showing a man and a boy and his mother; a boy alongside a horse; a boy outside of a house; a boy amongst a great many soldiers; and along the opposite wall you found a child's short pants and a child's blouse and a child's stockings, moth-eaten and nearing dust, styled as from another lifetime. And for the longest while you peered into the glass and leather eyes of this lad upon a table.

They waited for your return in the shadows of those hillsides, and when you set foot upon the cobbled ground how they backed away, and murmured of infection and disease, and there were those who wondered what you had seen inside of the monument, and there were those who wished to never know, for they had long dreamed of the impossibilities housed therein.

And within the next construct you found a woman, immense and horrid, composed of bones and leather and dust. And a child's drawings hung upon the wall: a boy in a suit, a woman in a feathered hat and a frilled collar, a boy and a woman holding hands, and there were endless lists of names, smudged and smeared beyond all comprehension. And a charred and tattered carpet hung from the ceiling, and a sooty and beaten sofa rested along the wall, and you inspected these at length before you had any concept of what they were. And in the flickering light, her lips seemed to move and her eyes to adjust, although these were composed of scales and glass and bone. And it seemed her arms shifted to reach for you, although these were sticks and wires and dust. And it seemed her voice spoke from somewhere within her mouth, although you understood that this was merely the wind echoing along the corridors.

And you stood before those men in their masks and their fires and their bolt guns and their idling trucks and gestured to those hillsides saying, “Are there bodies in all of these?” and these men answered, “Bodies?” and you said, “Who constructed these figures?” and they said, “Figures?” and you said, “What is the metal they used?” and their blank eyes while their mouths worked around the words, until you said, “Was it tin or copper or steel or gold or aluminum or some other fiber?” and one man said one of these words and another man said a different word until the response become a cacophony of sounds and metals.

And you gestured to the tallest hillside some miles distant, and this seemed whitewashed with language or design, although perhaps this was merely in the arrangement of the materials, and you gestured and said, “Is
he
in there?” and they mouthed the word “he” and one of these men responded only, “I wouldn't go in there” and the others nodded, and the others agreed, and you said unto these men gathered, “But I must.”