Songs of the Dead (28 page)

Most of us do the same.

Oh, I shouldn't say that Allison and I don't change our lives. We start locking the doors at night, we buy guns, and I stop lying naked in the forest (although I don't tell Allison why). But we don't immediately flee.

We do make plans. Allison has a show opening in a month at a major gallery in New York City. Normally you wouldn't catch me dead in New York City, but given that the alternative is for me to get caught dead—for real, not cliché—in Spokane, I'm going to accompany her. After that we'll stay a while with her parents in northern California. We aren't sure what we'll do after that.

I don't tell Allison what I saw. She doesn't ask. I do tell my mother, though. She already knows about me falling through time. I tell her what I saw at the river, everything but the mutilations. I tell her where Allison and I are going.

She says, “I'm glad you're leaving.”

“What will you do?”

“I'll take care of your animals and your place until you decide where you're going to live. And then I'll move into the area.”

“You won't stay here?”

“In a town where you'll be murdered? Of course not. I don't want to think about you dead every time I think about the river. And if I did stay, I'd never see you: do you think I'd want you to visit if I knew you'd be murdered here?”

I go back to my mom's the next day. We sit at her kitchen table. The house is on a hill southwest of Spokane. You can see the city out the windows. You can see the valley where the Spokane River runs. She is drinking tea. I am drinking water.

“Is it possible,” she asks, “that what you saw was wrong?”

A pause. “No, I saw it was us.”

“I'm not suggesting you were mistaken. I mean, just because you saw it, does that mean it's bound to happen?”

I think a moment. “It hasn't been wrong yet.”

“I'm still not being clear. I don't even mean wrong. I guess I mean inevitable. Maybe you're being shown one possible future. Maybe it's not the only one. Maybe by acting you can change what only seems inevitable.”

“That's why I need to leave.”

“Yes, I understand.”

I am not simply telling the truth when I say that the inevitable end that I most want to change is not my own torture and murder, nor even Allison's, but rather the torture and murder of the planet. Compared to that, our own is very small.

We bid temporary farewell to my mother, our friends, and our animals, and we say good-bye to the forest, hugging and caressing trees we have grown to know and love over the past years. We're glad that at least we were able to get them a temporary stay of execution before we ran away. We say good-bye also to the apple trees, and to Latah Creek. We do not return to the Spokane River.

During all of this I do not fall through time.

On the last afternoon in Spokane, I see a small snake curled on the kitchen floor. I pick her up, carry her outside, put her on bare ground in the partial shade of a clump of wild grasses. I watch her. She stays coiled, and flicks her tail several times. I leave for a few mo- ments, and when I return she is gone.

We all have our own large and small delusions by which we live, delusions we wear like undershirts to keep ourselves from feeling the discomfort—the agony—of the cloaks of dread and terror that accompany and characterize this culture. One of my own delusions is that because I live next to a forest that there are forests everywhere, and even that the forest I live next to is not itself horribly wounded: remember, a forest is more than just trees (and young trees at that). But whenever I leave my home I'm reminded that even small areas of wild have become an exception. What was once everywhere now persists in patches. This reminder slaps me even harder each time I fly.

We fly to New York City.

In the West we fly over clearcuts, patchwork quilts of relatively bare ground alternating with sanctuaries of green that are smaller each time I see them. I've walked those clearcuts, and they look as bad from the ground as from the air. Worse, even. Sometimes moonscapes, sometimes patches of invasive weeds, sometimes intensive replantings of monocropped seedlings. Never a forest. There is no rest.

In the Great Plains it's field after field after field, circular patches of irrigated green in a landscape that should be tall- and short-grass prairie, that should be brown with bison. I've walked those fields, too, those killing fields where giant sprinklers suck the life out of rivers, streams, aquifers, where any nonhuman who threatens the production of saleable goods—anyone who threatens the production of money—is “treated” with herbicides, insecticides, rodenticides, is killed. Humans who threaten production are arrested, labeled as terrorists.

When we cross the Missouri the fields start to give way to towns and cities, until no matter where we are we can see the artifacts of this machine culture, shiny towers and ribbons of black asphalt, great masses of land devoid of any living being not surrounded by concrete, by stasis.

We're in New York City. I have seen the future, and the future is hell. It is a hell of concrete, steel, glass, asphalt, and people. It is an echo-chamber hell where the distorted voices of distorted human beings—and most especially the voices of the machines to which these humans have enslaved themselves—echo and re-echo and re-echo until they literally overwhelm with their deafening and deadening sameness, until there is no escape from this sameness, this constant repetition of the one overriding and underlying message of the supremacy of the manufactured, of the produced, of the artificial, of the machine-made over the living and the wild. It is the hell of a hall of mirrors reflecting back who and most especially what we have become.

It becomes easy to see why so many people are insane. Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, and in the city every sensation we receive—save that coming from pigeons, rats, roaches, and trees encased in concrete—is created or mediated by humans. It's no wonder, given the hellish church in which they worship, the hellish house in which they live, that so many people in cities lose the ability to perceive reality, lose the ability to perceive that anyone exists other than themselves and those just like them, and that they wear this narcissism like a suit of armor, never acknowledging that this armor weighs them down, that it constricts and ultimately kills them at the same time that it protects them from ever perceiving physical reality.

So many humans in cities are infected by the insane spirit of an insane God, and come to see themselves in the life-negating image of this life-negating God, and come to believe that there is no god but God, that there is no god but Man.

So many humans in cities are
wétikos
. It would be hard or almost impossible to survive in a city without becoming infected yourself, surrounded as you are by
wétikos
and their creations, their totems, their fetishes—from tall buildings to banks to razor-wire- topped fences to flattened sidewalks to dogs and humans whose paws have never touched the ground—with no wild available to heal you, replenish you, to help you remember what it is to be alive and to be human, to be wild, to remind you that this city is not all there is, that these wétikos are not all there are, that a real, physical world still lives beyond the reach of those who would control or destroy everything.

I'm walking down the street. I have no skin left. It's been worn off by sharp corners of buildings and too many people. This is how I feel every time in a city. The pain is physical.

I see a billboard of a man reclining in a chair, holding a beer bottle, base at his groin. The bottle stands like an erect penis. A seminude woman sprawls between his legs. I'm surprised they don't show her sucking on his bottle. Another billboard shows a woman, an erect whiskey bottle, and an invitation to slip into something smooth.

I hear a horn blare, and another, and another. A siren. I'm at the edge of a park. I hear the rhythmic thumping of a woodpecker and I marvel at the ability of any creature to survive this environment.

“That's not a woodpecker,” Allison says. “That's a helicopter.”

She's right. I soon hear it more clearly, and finally I see it.

We walk. I remember an analysis I read of cities saying that if you pack any other mammal this tight the gutters would constantly run with blood. Rats packed this close begin to cannibalize each other. And the humans I see
are
eating each other, just not always physically.

Allison asks, “Have you noticed how skinny so many of the women are?”

I nod.

She continues, “And how disproportionately large their breasts are?”

It looks freakish. I respond, “I wonder how much of this is real.”

“This?” She points at the buildings, the cars, the people. “Almost none of it.”

We're in a hotel. Allison sits on the bed. I sit in the room's lone chair. “I've been wondering,” I say to Allison, “if maybe I haven't been falling through time at all.”

She looks at me out of the corners of her eyes.

“Maybe I'm not falling or going
anywhere
.”

She waits.

“Maybe I'm staying right where I am, and the land is showing her memories to me. Maybe the land is moving inside of me.”

She thinks about it.

I say, “I've read lots of accounts of plants hitchhiking into people. That's a standard part of some indigenous peoples' experience. A plant might jump inside of you and ride along with you for a while, then go back to its own body.”

“Kind of like your or my muse,” she says, excited.

I nod. “I once asked an Indian friend where dreams come from, and she said, ‘Oh, everyone knows the animals give them to us.' I think it's plants, too.”

“And dreamgivers, and muses, and others.”

“And others.” I pause, then say, “In areas with a lot of plants, this joyriding—which I've read is often beneficial or at least entirely benign but sometimes harmful—can get to be incredibly distracting, almost like being with someone you love to make love with, but at some point you've got to carry in the firewood for the winter. . . .”

“I know that one,” she says.

“Me too.” I think a moment, smile, then continue, “I've heard that in some places that constant joyriding has led people to incorporate into their cosmologies certain spiritual practices necessary to keep the plant and animal joyriding manageable.”

She laughs. I love her laugh. Then she says, “Why does the land share memories specifically with you?”

“I think this might happen to everyone, but most people don't notice, at least consciously. Most people don't even pay attention to other
humans
around them, much less plants.”

“That's one reason,” she says, “that I always touch and say hello to trees in the city. I want to acknowledge their existence, let them know that
someone
thinks they're beautiful, that someone's sorry they're in prison.

“Yes,” I say. “Me, too.”

“But why don't
I
perceive the land's memories?”

“You probably do. Just not the same way I do. And remember, I didn't start perceiving them this clearly until a couple of months ago. Why did I start then? I wish I knew.”

Suddenly I hear a voice, clear as Allison's, yet different: solid, sharp, short, certain, slightly hissing, male. It says, “You will.”

I say, “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

I tell her what I heard. She didn't hear it.

Silence. Finally Allison says, “What about seeing the future? If you're seeing memories, how do you see the future?”

I bring my hands directly in front of me. She catches on before I can do anything, and brings up her hands to make the circular motion the Indian elder made to show me how time winds around itself. I think of the snake who was curled around herself in our kitchen.

Allison says, “I don't mean to be contrary, but I've got another question. What about the man who grabbed you at the river, the man who died? If it was a memory, how did he grab you? You wouldn't have been there at the time.”

I make that motion with my hands. I say, “That's part of the answer. But also, if a memory is alive, why can't it affect us physically, just like any other hitchhiker? A virus can affect us physically.”

“You're right,” she says. “Memories do affect us physically.”

I'm thinking of what I saw at the river: Allison's body, mine. I feel the memory tightening its hold on my back, the sides of my neck, my stomach. I say, “They can grab us tight, even tighter than the man grabbed me.”

“Or,” she says, “they can make us smile. Sometimes memories of you and me make me smile. They touch me.”

We take a walk. It begins like any other stroll through hell. Heat. Pavement. Concrete. People on cell phones. People driving cars. People in line for restaurants. Billboards. Advertisements. Automobile exhaust.

In the middle of our third block I stop, take Allison's arm, say, “It's happening.”

“Do you want to sit?”

“No.” I step to the side, out of the stream of people, against a building. The building becomes a deciduous tree that stretches up through thick leaves farther than I can see. I'm instantly cooler. I touch the smooth bark, look down at the duff and forest litter. I am transfixed by the beauty and by the embodied knowledge that this place was not always hell. Not even so long ago it was someplace completely different. I see oaks, tulip trees. In front of me I see a meadow, and a reach of open sky. I close my eyes and breathe deeper than I have since we arrived in this city. The air smells so good, so rich, so moist, so clean. I hear the delicious sound of a slight breeze in the trees, and I open my eyes. I take two small steps so I can hear the leaves beneath my feet.

And then I hear something else. Distant thunder, perhaps, but it doesn't stop. A train, but I know the land is sharing with me a memory of a time before trains. The sound grows louder, and louder still. I can't imagine what's making it.