A Dirge for the Temporal Read online

  Right by the fountain she went, without a peek. Jan, more anxious than myself, took a quarter from her pocket, tossed it across the road into the fountain. The woman swept on. Jan found a piece of concrete at the corner of the step, tossed it just as accurately. Now the woman turned, a look of apprehension coming to her face. As she approached the fountain, that look became one of peering fascination. Carefully, as if retrieving a bubbly-hot pancake with a spatula, she put the flat end of her broom into the pool—the pool was ankle deep at best—then brought it up again with a sudden, quick motion. Two fishes and part of a thumb landed on the cement. The fishes flopped once or twice, and then rested their engorged bodies from the strain of it.

  The scream that came out of that woman woke the whole village. People came running from every house to look into the fountain. The reaction was the same, one and all, a yelp of horror followed by flight. We passed them still running three miles out of Nodding Fog.

  And that was the first of our adventures on the Road of Mystery.

  ~

  Danny Avian woke to find that he was no longer being transported to mysterious places in an old pickup truck. He had arrived.

  “What is this place? Who are you people?” he demanded.

  “Hello to you, sir. Our home is your home.”

  Avian shook his head violently. His nostrils felt burn-cleaned, as if he’d been inhaling fire; he wiped at his ears, imagined dry chemicals seeping from orifices. His 'under-attended' was swollen between his legs. Everything was hot and chlorinated.

  He was on a reclining lawn chair by a pool. Tile and cement and men of all shapes and sizes surrounded him. The pool, to his eyes, his fire-hollowed nose, stank of myriad nightmares, bubbling and drifting in patches of filth. Around the whole affair, pool and deck and brothers and all, were tall hedges, open at one end to a staircase and house of wood and glass. Cocoa was nowhere to be seen; nor her driver, Abe.

  The man who had spoken, naked like all of them, held out his hand. Avian started.

  For it was decidedly thumbless.

  The man lifted his other hand, also disfigured. “But if I still had another, I would offer it to you,” he told Avian.

  “What happened?” Avian whispered.

  “Don’t you know? As the original Gatherer, surely you must know…”

  Gatherer? Gatherer of what?!

  He was afraid to ask aloud.

  “Cocoa says that through your dreams they were gathered. That—” He sliced the thought cleanly as flesh beneath a razor, and with a certain religious grace, fell to his knees.

  Around the deck, all of them dropped to the position of obeisance. Or worship.

  Avian turned and there she was, their exotic goddess, bound in gold cloth, eyes opening up passages before her. In her wake, the glass of the house beneath which the terrace sprawled seemed to settle back into shape. As her eyes fell on Avian, his knees began to bend.

  “No!” she said. “Not you. Not ever you.”

  “What is this place?” his voice quivered.

  “Your palace. These pitiful creatures surrounding the well still do not comprehend that it is to you, the honor, the harvest is given. Hear me! you worms. Place your hands before you! Place your hands before him!”

  They did…out in front of them like a prayer…and not one among them possessed a thumb.

  “I don’t want it.” Lord God, no.

  “Was that your sentiment when you commanded one side of the mountain to invade the other, stealing the thumbs of every captive taken?”

  He didn’t intend for it to come blurting out. “You are a lunatic, woman!”

  “I remember their faces, my mother and father, when they discovered that I, alone in the whole village, had somehow been spared. I remember their faces when they dropped me down the well. They threw me away, Danny, but because they did, I came to know the fishes that are gods and the fishes gave me these eyes. With these eyes I swam through the mountain. With these eyes I appeared, in a spring, to the village I would come to know as home. With these thumbs, I escaped my origins. Since all of my birth village had been harvested, I could only have come from other realms.”

  He gaped at her. Not because she was a lunatic, not because he was in the claws of some cult, and God knew where on the map, but because he had dreamed it. The recurring nightmare had inspired him, hadn’t it? He had indeed attended a party, and at his own house. She had been there, eyes turning him to dripping butter. “Cocoa from South America,” Vanguard had introduced her.

  Let me see your hand, she’d said. She had led him by his hand into his bedroom.

  No, he mustn’t think of it.

  In his bedroom, she had been a woman to him, a woman who became something more as he caressed her, kissed her delicate, shiny, scaly skin. Her eyes poured into his as his horrified hands, and thumbs pressing into her windpipe, choked her, turned her face to rich colors by the shadows of the strange room out of time and place and reality.

  No, Vanguard, she tried to…she wasn’t human, Vanguard.

  Sober up. We’ll take her to the river, Vanguard said. No one will ever know what has happened.

  Sober up. Two words that had followed him out of his burial grounds. Lamenting the past abuse of alcohol and drugs made it easier to forget what really lay beneath the shoveled earth.

  Or surface of the river. Her spectral jewels transfixing him, burning their image into his tissue, as her dead body drifted away.

  “River? Did you mention the river, Danny?”

  Cocoa’s eyes transfixed him now.

  He found himself falling, falling down the shaft of a well, to his knees.

  “Forgive me, Cocoa.”

  “Not ever you, I said. Rise. Rise, poet.”

  He rose.

  She turned to the glass, secret glass, her gaze warping its properties as she summoned the whiskered man, Abe.

  “Abe has gathered and Abe has fed the hungry mouths. Now Abe will step aside for the original Gatherer, for whom all of this exists. You know what to do, Danny, yes?”

  He stared.

  “Lay him gently beneath the surface. It is poetry that way.”

  “No.”

  “If I do it, Danny, I fear it won’t be the same.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “Let me show you how easy…”

  She walked Abe to the edge of the murky stew. “He has given the thumbs of his hands. Now we will give the rest. Job well done, Abe.” And he did not resist as she pushed him over the bank.

  The entire surface of the pool came to life as the mouths converged on him, and in seconds his body and its pieces had disappeared beneath.

  “There is but one thing left then,” she said, turning back to Avian.

  “To wake up?”

  Shaking her head, she held out her thumbs.

  She held out her thumbs.

  September

  As he drove by the sign marking the limit of the village, Galen compulsively shifted his gaze to the mirror. This side of the sign provided the same information as the other, except the word had a slash through it, to indicate one was leaving town. Sept, the metal plate bluntly maintained. Out in the middle of nowhere, a village bearing his own surname. What were the odds?

  The road had followed a rushing Alpine stream for the past twenty kilometers or so, venturing deeper into the mountains than his ambling path had previously carried him. The village lay in a wider area of the canyon, its thirty-odd structures located along both sides of the stream. Two parallel streets joined by a bridge appeared to be the extent of Sept's road plan.

  Sept. The village was pristinely beautiful, contrary to the wa
y those four letters had served Galen in his youth. Septic Tank they had called him in middle school; in high school it had been a more concise Septic. The handle had been used by all save one, a girl who wrote poetry and told him how insecure he was behind his handsome face. To Ginger he was September. Funny that he should think of her now, funny that he should think of school, for these belonged to that taboo place, the past. When his wife, Laura, walked out after four years of marriage, he had decreed the past a place not to be visited. Laura had told him she needed to go home to be with her family, but he knew it was forever. He knew what being abroad had done to each of them. The sense of setting had nearly consumed him, to her alienation. The sense of distance had gotten her, to his alienation.

  That sense of setting was at its peak now as he pulled into a space that might have been reserved for him. A lovely, gnarled chestnut tree stood between his car and a painted footbridge over the stream. Beyond the bridge, chimneys poured smoke into the nippy afternoon air. Beyond the roofs of the houses, golden unharvested fields lapped at the base of a steep fir-covered slope. To his right stood a small church, stained glass windows narrow and arched in its rough yellow wall. Galen looked at his watch, wondering if he need go any further than this village today. Four o’clock resounded no—as if the time of day might really be a factor when the gods had brought him here to a village by his own name.

  Stepping out of the car, he looked around for the inevitable Gasthaus, staple of central European villages. He spotted the friendly structure on the other side of the street, near the motorist bridge. He left the car where it was and walked the short distance, admiring the building as he approached. A scene from farm life had been painted on the side of it: the proverbial plump, aproned Austrian woman bending to scoop up a handful of hay. On the half-timbered façade hung some of the implements of that life, painted black to stand out against the ivory stucco. Windows were plenty, their ledges covered in red flowers, their curtains drawn back to let in the sunshine. The house itself was the solid body of construction they all were, tall and deep in its dimensions. If Galen had stayed in one of these, he had stayed in a half dozen, more often than not to Laura’s protests because she had once found a pair of pubic hairs on the seat of the community bathroom. She had always regretted the shortage of big American hotels.

  The small lobby was lit by electric lamps made to look like wick and oil jobs. A massive disgruntled boar’s head dominated one wall, while against the adjacent one rested a cigarette machine and a feeble supply of travel brochures. A set of stairs stood straight ahead, and to the left was the reception counter, with a bell. Galen rang it and waited. Emerging from a door in the wall behind the counter, a young woman interrupted his stare-down with the boar.

  “Gross Gott,” she said, smiling. She wasn’t plump, she didn’t wear an apron, she smelled nothing like the farm.

  “Gross Gott,” he said. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

  “A little, yes.”

  “I would like a room for the night.”

  “How many in your party, sir?”

  “One, if you count me.”

  She didn’t seem to get it—and there was nothing to get anyway. She produced a registration card, and as he accepted it, their hands brushed. The brief sensation reminded him how far along the road of loneliness he was. Yes, he had shared an office with females during this past year of his separation from his wife, but co-workers didn’t count. Did Austrians? he wondered. Did Europeans? Did the whole blessed gender?

  “I’m curious,” he said as he tapped the card with the pen, brows furled with the effort of remembering his new address in Brussels. “How did Sept come by its name?”

  When she didn’t answer immediately, he glanced up. She was looking at his name on the card.

  Their eyes met. Hers were a rich brown touched by a certain joylessness, like his own. Her cascading hair was brown as well, more than complementing her eyes—lending to their momentary intensity.

  “You are Austrian?” she asked.

  “I’m of German ancestry…maybe Austrian, I don’t know. Is it an Austrian name?”

  “I…” She hesitated, frowning. “I do not really know, sir. If so, it is uncommon.”

  He nodded.

  “Where are you coming from, Mr. Sept?”

  “I’ve lived in Vienna for the past three years, working for the Atomic Energy Agency.” He gestured behind him with his thumb. “Today I’m coming from Salzburg.”

  “What brought you…here?”

  He shrugged. “I’m being transferred to Brussels. I'm not due there for a few weeks, so I thought I would wander some of the less traveled roads. I'm at the whim of my path, if you like.”

  “No map?”

  He mirrored her look, which was markedly strange. “No map.”

  Slowly, with an elegance that moved him, she extended her hand. “Verena,” she said.

  He shook it without his usual flare because he was disturbed.

  “Shall I get the key?” she said, glancing down. He realized he still held her hand.

  “Yes of course. I’m sorry.”

  “Please,” she said, smiling.

  He assumed she was coming right back, that the key would be hanging on a rack behind the door, or somewhere equally convenient. When she didn’t, he wandered over to the brochures. One showed a skier, radiant against a clear blue sky as her streamlined superimposed image jumped Olympic distances. Another depicted the very house in which he stood. Yet another was for the village itself, the word Sept appearing above a silvery picture of the mountain stream. A fourth leaflet was apparently a map of the region. He picked up one of these.

  There was nothing inside.

  He picked up another of the maps. Nothing. Shrugging, he picked up one of the skiing brochures. This time the absence of printed matter startled him. He picked up the Gasthaus brochure. Nothing. The last one…again nothing.

  “Mr. Sept?”

  “Yes,” he said, turning. “Yeah…these brochures, they’re…”

  “You aren’t supposed to look at them,” she smiled, wrinkling her nose. “They are…the word—it is ornaments?”

  “Like a Christmas tree?” he said with irony. And realized as he said it that it wasn’t fair. She was the one making the effort to use his language.

  As he stepped up to the counter, she gestured at his hand. “You wear a wedding band. May I ask…where is she?”

  He thought about this for several seconds. At last he gave her the answer he felt spoke to the greater truth:

  “Not here.”

  She nodded, led him up the stairs, skeleton key dangling on a ring.

  At the door to Room 11 she stopped, inserted the key, stood back to let him enter. Again he brushed her. Again he was reminded.

  She waited as he glanced around the room. “It is OK?”

  “Yes, very much. Before you go, can you recommend a place for dinner?”

  She smiled. “Our own restaurant perhaps? A table has been waiting, I think, for a long time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We don’t get many visitors here, Mr. Sept. We are honored to have you.”

  Leaving the key, she closed the door, and he was alone.

  Room 11 was on the back side of the building, with a balcony and a view that swallowed him into its oblivions upon the moment of first contact. The slope behind the Gasthaus was rocky and steep, one section boasting a waterfall draping in quivering iridescence from the lip of a high cliff. A scent not especially pleasant, but raw, real, came off the pool formed by the falls. On the brink of the sheer face stood trees whose twisted roots dug into the stone, forming the knitted, contemplative brow of a sage old man. Down by the pool stoo
d another chestnut tree, and another, and grass as green as May.

  But May is September, September is May,

  The fields that we play in, we always will play

  He could not recall where the verse came from, and chose not to go searching among the relics. The past was not to be visited; so it had been decreed. Then why could he not avoid his images as he gazed out across the rich grass? Delete the waterfall and wasn’t this the park where he had lain with his poet Ginger and understood the secrets of the universe? Hadn’t he made love to her only there, beneath the tree, while she spoke to him in whispers of September, that whispering time of year? Ah, the verse was hers, of course. Where did she go, with stars in her brown eyes, poet of his?

  She had been his inspiration for dabbling in the arts himself. He had taken up painting, then photography, then, in college, writing. After a year of submitting his fiction to the same responses—mainly that he spent too much time on exposition and not enough on narration—he gave it up. The psychiatrist his mother was seeing at the time—a probing, discerning man—had expounded on the theory for him. Galen’s approach to literature was Galen’s approach to life. If he spent as much time actually living his life as he did setting it up, he would live as living was meant to be. The aside was that almost all people took the approach Galen did. This gratis observation no doubt encouraged Galen’s falling into the European setting with such love. With only one year separating his degree from its application, he had leapt into the world offered to him, perhaps at Laura’s expense. While she screamed permanence, he belted about the rare opportunity they had. They’d best seize it while it was in their grasp because one day it would be back to Iowa and they would have missed their chance to live.