She climbed down from the truck and stood resolute in the dirt of the drive, feet wide apart in new sneakers. “It’s a good day to die,” she said. A line from the movies, I suppose. Since then she’s been as still as a stone. The child is silent too, held within the frayed carrier that straps around Barbara’s middle, like a womb, as though he’s still waiting to be born. Maybe it’s Barbara’s activity at other times, banging around the kitchen and muttering, that makes him give those spectral wails.
I’m a little fearful, a little excited, like a boy off to his first day at a new school. Itur in antiquam silvam, stabula alta ferarum. The journey into the old woods, the deep dens of the beasts; the door into no-place. Where Æneas went following Odysseus, and Dante following Virgil. And now me following a Crow. They had no trouble finding the gate, and nor will I.
I’ve almost reached the end of this last pad of paper. Only a few leaves will be left unfilled. As the generation of leaves, so is that of men. I’ll now take a pill to keep my heart from racing distractingly, and another to keep my muscles working. It’s a fair climb up. This pad and the other filled-up ones I’ll leave here on the table, though I have no expectation that anyone will look at them, or take an interest in what they say. My continuation is elsewhere; and if it isn’t, I won’t care if anything of me persists here in this world, from which I’m already gone. I have sometimes thought of or felt the presence of a reader for what I’ve written: I suppose it’s impossible to write at length without feeling such a presence. When that reader momentarily has a face, the one I sense is Debra’s.
He’s here waiting, Dar Oakley: I saw the movement of a black branch of the flowering Cherry, and there he was, calling the call Ka. Death-bird. This pen is dry.
Well, Reader—you whose existence I only half believe in, and whom I mostly know to be me alone—I guess you’ll be able to tell by these further pages filled with writing that the journey must not have eventuated as envisioned. It didn’t. I’m uncertain, though, whether I can tell what things did happen—if any things at all happened. I may not be certain of anything ever again.
Certainly we set out in the truck, Barbara driving and me holding the child in the ragged denim straitjacket, not wrapped and belted around me but gathered in my arms. He seemed to weigh nothing at all, but he struggled to act, his head arching back and his tense hands grabbing air. Dar Oakley beat alongside, crossing over us now and then, skimming once so close to the open window that Barbara ducked instinctively; sometimes we lost sight of him and stopped, only to hear and see him on ahead. It seemed a long trip—longer than I remembered or imagined—and yet when the park entrance appeared it surprised me, and for a moment my heart rebelled.
“Here,” I said.
“Yeh,” Barbara said, and turned the wheel that way.
Pretty quickly it became apparent that the truck couldn’t get far past the entrance. It was hardly spring, but the heat had brought forth masses of creeper and kudzu-like green stuff I couldn’t name, each kind entangling with the others and trying to gain the high trees, like madmen trying to climb up each other to get out of a pit. The trees already bore thick cloaks of that vine I used to see only on the trees along highways, enriched with carbon dioxide from cars. Where these got their strength I didn’t know; it looked like another planet.
There aren’t many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been so shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving.
Barbara got out, carefully removing the truck keys and pocketing them. I held the child, clad in only a droopy diaper, while she tied on the carrier. She settled him in the pouch and nodded. It occurred to me I had never heard her speak a word to him. From farther on along what seemed the path I heard a Crow.
It was a longer climb than the last time I’d made it, with Debra. I thought Debra would be present to me as we went up, but she seemed to want no part of this expedition; she had a horror of suicide that I didn’t share but learned never to speak about. We stopped now and then to rest, and Dar Oakley would return to us and sit a branch and regard us. I’ve always been reluctant to speak to him in Barbara’s presence—I haven’t wanted her to think I’m nuts. It didn’t matter now.
“Do you know these ways?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I know these birds calling. That’s all.”
“All right,” I said. And then: “Is day night there?”
Dar Oakley shrugged his Crow shrug: this wasn’t his journey. “Well,” he said, “I think it has been. Who knows? It’s not ever the same.”
My old fear of a place of darkness, what I could sometimes think of as my mother’s curse. I thought that whatever else awaited me I wouldn’t be alone: but of course there was no promise even of that. Anyway when we got to the ridge I was leading us to, afternoon was passing. A cold wind off the lake was angering the trees and chilling the heated air.
“It’s only a few steps that way,” I said to Barbara. “Let’s sit and wait a while.”
“Wait?”
“We’ll wait till dark, or near it. So it will be day. Night here will be day there: he told me that,” I said, and looked up. Dar Oakley looked down, mum.
Anyway we waited there for sunset, the three of us wrapped in a blanket against our different chills, and Dar Oakley high on an extended branch of a tree I can’t name. I held Barbara’s fat, warm hand in mine, or maybe it was she who held my hand: both of us conscious that we might lose our nerve, that our resolve might weaken. When the sun was low behind the trees, we stood and went up to the high ledge. I had to be careful of my footing. Barbara, too, sensation in her feet damaged by her diabetes, walking with arms apart as though feeling her way in the dark. But we made it to our place, a wide shelf bald and flat, projecting out over the cliff. Barbara took my hand again. She was weeping softly but not in distress; the little painted head poking out from the carrier made an answering soft moan. I knew we mustn’t linger.
“Itur in antiquam silvam,” I said.
“Amen,” Barbara said.
Dar Oakley with a great cry—defiance? dismay? summons?—rose from his branch and dropped downward through the darkening air, as noble and plain as any being could be. With our own cries—I can hear them still—we too stepped into air.
Immediately it seemed we weren’t falling but climbing down the sheer walclass="underline" as though our descending bodies had left our spirits behind to follow after as best they could. It was a long way down; we clung to scragged branches, felt with our feet for the next step.
I didn’t think it would be like this, Barbara said.
We came upon a path that led down between riven blocks of stone, becoming less steep, gradual enough so that at least we could turn and face the way we went. On ahead I could see the Crow watching for us, taking this branch, then that, shaking his wings and tail once, twice, three times, as he always does.
We came out at the end of the narrow passage onto the stony shore of the lake. It was now neither day nor night. The shingle rattled as the low waves came in and drew the stones out, then again pushed them in. It seemed impossible that this shore could be all there was.
Are we there? I called to Dar Oakley.
We are where we are, I heard him call.
Is there more?
Much more, he said. I don’t know how much.
I thought to say that we couldn’t walk very far, the three of us on the ground, but that made no sense, and anyway it didn’t seem hard: it was more like imagining a long walk than taking one. We took the leftward way. As we went on, the shore widened; the sullen lake withdrew, as though wanting nothing to do with us. Dar Oakley once told me how even for him the things on this side, the trees and stones and ground and air, seem filled with conscious intentions, likes and dislikes, no matter that they never are like that for Crows in Ka. But it’s so for People wherever they are, he thinks; and in Ymr what People think is so is so.