Lucia's Masks (6 page)
Even so, there are times when I seem literally to see hope slipping away from me. When I am in these states of mind, hope takes the form of a graceful sea anemone, amorphous, the colour of a rosy pearl. This vision of shimmering grace keeps rising so speedily that soon it is out of sight altogether. In these gloomy moods I picture myself sitting, hampered by the armature of my flesh and bones, on the bottom of the sea. I must make a tremendous effort to transcend the leaden despondency that invades my blood. I believe this depression is spawned by the evil I witnessed. Is it possible, I wonder, to look upon wickedness and not become contaminated? Yet of course I keep going. And then quite unexpectedly, as if the walking itself sets me to rights, I am once again in that state of grace where my flesh and bones seem filled with light, despite the surrounding sepulchral forest. The sea-flower is so close I am buoyed up by its breathtaking translucency and blithe ascent.
A lack of sleep was beginning to undermine my vigour and my pace. Even given my keen senses of hearing and smell, I spent much of the night tossing and wary, fearing I would fall into a deep and possibly dangerous slumber. I realized how helpful it would be to have a trustworthy companion with whom I could travel and take turns at a nightly fire-watch for our mutual protection.
Then yesterday I spied a woman with shoulder-length honey-blond hair several yards ahead of me. I stopped and hid myself so as to observe her carefully for some minutes. She appeared furtive, and walked with her shoulders bent as if to ward off a frontal attack. Every few seconds, she would stop to look behind her and into the trees that bounded the path. Her obvious anxiety reassured me she was not a living decoy for some murderous band waiting in ambush. I hallooed softly and she turned round, looking startled at first. Then she smiled at me, a smile so wide and white I was made just a little uneasy.
She rushed up to me exclaiming: “Oh, how wonderful to meet another woman travelling on her own. You are on your own, aren’t you?” She peered anxiously again into the thickness of the foliage on our either side.
“Yes. I am journeying north alone. My name is Lucia.”
She took a step back and regarded me frankly for a moment, as if assessing me according to a particular measure she had invented.
“Lucia! What an absolutely exquisite name! And mine is Candace. Isn’t this our lucky day, Lucia? Isn’t it simply a blessing that we’ve found each other and can forge on with our adventure together?”
I was uncomfortable with her gushiness but I had no choice in the matter. Now I had seen and spoken with her, I could not spurn her assumption that we would go on together. And I knew I had a moral obligation to give her what protection I could. There was no doubt I was far stronger and fitter than Candace. She then turned on me a smile so obviously manufactured I had an urge to look way. Already I was wishing myself alone again.
We set off and almost immediately Candace began to pry. She kept pressing me about why I fled the City and I had no desire to catalogue all those evils aloud. Finally I just told her the obvious: “It was because they stopped burying the dead. And then I knew for certain they would soon forget how to make pots.”
That shut her up for a while and I was grateful for the silence. But Candace is never quelled for long, and she soon started up again. She seems compelled to expound upon her own boundless gifts and the happy community she plans to found once we reach the northern zone. “I will be its earnest beating heart,” she tells me so repeatedly that I have begun to grimace secretly.
Yesterday, as we trudged onward, I glanced down at a particularly lacy bed of ferns. “Keep your head up when you walk,” Candace boomed at me. “You’ll look better and you’ll feel better.”
I was stunned. It would never occur to me to speak to someone I barely know in such a patronizing tone. The shameful thing was I wanted to retaliate with some mean retort about her plumpness or her unbecoming striped shorts. Of course I kept quiet. But I was upset by the intensity of my anger nonetheless.
And so now I long for some decent-hearted person to join us so that I might not always be listening to Candace. Most particularly, I would welcome someone who appreciates the blessings of silence. Together we might prevail on Candace to stop her self-obsessed chatter, if only for an hour or so each day.
Then too, I must admit that being alone with her sometimes makes me deeply uneasy. I know my vague suspicions of her are all likely unfounded, but the City left me with an ingrained, prickly mistrust. Is it possible Candace is not at all as she presents herself; that even her garrulousness is a guise to throw me off my guard? But what, then, could she be? A cannibal waiting until I let all my defences down so that she can murder me and feast on my flesh by moonlight? Is that why her teeth are so large?
These are tainted thoughts I struggle to control, just as I must the foolish idea that these words she spouts all day contain the spores of a pestilence that will gradually weaken my body and my will, and make me her slave.
So I stay wary. I walk. I wait. I hope. I am grateful for the profusion of ferns at my feet and for the wildflowers I sometimes see, like tiny blue cups a blessed spirit might drink from. We will meet like-hearted folk who will keep us company in our journey towards the north. I am sure of it.
A
FTER THREE MONTHS ON THE ROAD
, the boy still has a horror of the sky. Up until then he had never smelled or tasted the air of the real physical world. He had lived from birth under an opaque, impermeable, sealed dome located over one hundred miles from the nearest city. His father, who inherited great wealth, had built this fortress to insulate himself and wife and only child from the filth and greed of the world, and most especially kidnappers and other such predators.
He conceived the structure first in his mind: a white dome sitting upon the land like a glistening, new-laid egg. Like the World Egg of the ancient Orphic mysteries, he told himself, spun out of primeval Chaos and holding the perfect body of Eros. He became obsessed with this idea of his family’s own World Egg, immaculate, self-contained, yet boundless. He spent a fortune on its self-operating climate control; robotics (for he could no longer put his trust in frail human servants); telemedicine; even telepsychiatry. He had a library — both paper and electronic — that rivalled the finest anywhere.
The only landscapes the boy knew growing up were the murals decorating the maze of corridors connecting the various functional areas inside the dome. He walked through the wet lushness and serpentine vines of a painted rain forest on the way to his bedroom. He saw the shimmer of a tranquil silver sea (outside his mother’s dressing room); and the sharp visual clamour of granite cliffs thronged with gannets (the wall of his father’s library). He knew too the melancholy stubble of a newly shorn hay field, the bales heaped and rounded, and rimmed with heat. He imagined their warmth when he traced the thick yellow of those bales with his fingertip. He touched the blue-painted swathe above the mown field and said “sky” to himself.
But “sky” remained an abstraction for the child. Until that fatal day when the dome of the fortress cracked like a fissure in a gigantic ice-floe, and he was flung into the world by the force of an enormous explosion. The Egg was built to withstand floods and all types of poison gas and germ warfare. Its entrances and exits were so well concealed that not even a master engineer or a genuinely gifted psychic could spy them out. But the boy’s father had neglected to consider the brute force of dynamite. He was so besotted with the uncluttered form of his creation that the possibility of its wanton destruction never occurred to him.
Just before the blast, the boy was well into his morning run around the track built right inside the Egg’s perimeter. He had the good fortune, or supreme misfortune as he often thought afterwards, to be much farther away from the main force of the explosion than were his parents. First he heard the wall beside him shatter. Next he was briefly aware of flying beyond the Egg’s confines and up into the air. Then he plunged down into the lake whose waters had supplied the basic plumbing needs of the Egg. He immediately began to swim, using the strong breaststroke his father had taught him. His lungs felt like small bellows that had been set on fire. The smell and taste and look of the world — all so alien — dizzied and disoriented him.
He flew out of the smashed Egg and survived, brimful of knowledge. Over the course of his fourteen years, living in total seclusion with his parents in their fortress, he had absorbed vast amounts of fact and wisdom from his father’s libraries. He held in his head much of the best that human beings had thought and written down over thousands of years. But at that instant on that dire morning, with his parents and the only home he had ever known blown to pieces, he could not even recall his own name.
In the lake, whose frigid cold assaulted his flesh, he kept swimming, urged on by his body’s desperate need to survive, despite the ominous questions that throbbed in his head. What had happened? Where were his parents?
By the time he reached shore, he was exhausted and disoriented. He looked up, dazed. The sight of the endless blue vault above him made his gut coil in on itself. The boy saw the sky and vomited and then could look no more. He crawled on his belly.
I am Snake,
he thought.
Snake
.
Of all earth’s species, the boy loved reptiles and amphibians best. He had virtually to heart all the volumes of his father’s library devoted to lizards, snakes and tortoises. He had never seen an actual snake or a lizard or a tortoise. But he identified instinctively with a belly that constantly kissed the earth in what he saw as a holy embrace; and a hugging tight to the ground on which all human life began.
I am hugging tight
, he thought, as he propelled himself on his elbows and knees toward the open door of a rusted Quonset hut.
I am Snake
, he told himself.
Snake making his way toward his hole, where he can wrap himself in that soft, waiting gloom. The shadows will soothe my hurt. Snake will be healed in the darkness
.
He kept his eyes squeezed shut against the mass of hard sapphire above him.
Sky
, he thought. And then tried not to think. Sky still watched him, pinned him to the ground with its tack-sharp brightness. And tried to swallow him. Yes, swallow him with its boundless hunger. The boy had tasted infinity and found it vile. Later it was Snake who helped him cope with this aversion too. Or rather, an image of Snake that the boy pulled up from the deep well of story-pictures stored in his spine. Salvation came through Snake-as-Circle. Snake-with-his-tail-in-his-mouth. Snake had many marvellous shapes.
The boy slept some hours in the Quonset hut. He woke sporadically and felt his body swoop sickeningly. There were stars in his head and he understood these to be the close companions of his pain because they flashed simultaneously with the jabs and spasms along the edge of his nerves. Then he willed Sleep to come: sweet-faced Morpheus in his swirling cloak of scented smoke, who pressed crimson poppy petals to his lips and eyelids. Morpheus, who had never yet failed him, sent him drifting down into a yielding oblivion.
He did not know then that his power to summon mythic presences was rare. He was a chordate, and the mythic beings slumbered in his spine. He knew them to be that close. His father had taught him how to exploit this most human capacity
When he woke, sky was a trumpet. Someone, he thought, had set an orange ball on fire and rolled it across Sky. This blazing orange was trumpeting. A blast in his head harsh and fierce. An arrow in his eye. Sky, he saw, had many guises. Sky would always ambush him with some new and frightening face.
He crawled out of the Quonset hut on his belly, under a sky that was now a heaped and angry pyre concentrated in the east.
I will be thrown upon that pyre
, he thought.
I will be consumed. I will crumple like ash
. So he moved faster, still on his hands and knees, back toward the wrecked dome that had once been his home. The stench over the remains of the fortress burned his nostrils and made his eyes water. For this reason he did not at first recognize the clammy object his fingers brushed against as he groped through the rubble.
When his vision cleared he saw the white, once-living thing for what it was. The jolt that went through his body was every bit as brutal as when the blast had hurled him out of the Egg. He knew this thing and he did not know this thing. It was a severed human hand, ragged and red around the wrist, like bleeding meat. The top two joints of the middle finger were missing, the knuckle healed over in a puckered stump. This was the shape of his father’s hand as the boy had always known it.
He retched as a sick fear swept from his belly to his brain. He put his head to his knees and dug into the hot earth. He flinched as his fingers encountered something hard and smooth and instinctively he gripped the thing and pulled it out of the debris. He studied the object in his hand, with its base of pale green stone mounted with a little metal paddle, and saw that it was streaked with blood. He realized the blood was his father’s and that this was probably the last thing in life his father had touched. But the boy could no longer remember what this tool or instrument or artifact was. He could not fathom its purpose. He knew only that this thing belonged to his father and that he must keep it safe. So he thrust it deep in his pocket.
He forced himself to look again to his left, where the dismembered hand still lay. And in a spot where the reeking smoke had cleared, he saw what no child ought ever to see: the headless corpse of his father.
The shock left his mouth dry. He felt his testicles shrink and retract inside his body. Then his legs went numb. He was overcome by foolish, childish thoughts.
I will search for the pieces of his body and put them back together
, he told himself.
I will breathe new life into him
. A part of his brain recognized that these notions were completely mad. And then a new anxiety assailed him, that he might be driven insane by what he saw here. This had happened to his mother long ago, when her sanity had been undone by evil-doers in the world outside the Egg who hurt her so badly that parts of her froze inside. So his father had explained to him his mother’s apparent coldness and self-absorption. In the Egg, she spent most of her time immersed in her Renaissance art books with their colour plates and tiny script. His mother could not touch him. She did not like him to touch her. His visits with her often left him unbearably sad. Was that why this awful thing had happened to them?
