He climbed into the backseat, and at the same time the motorcycle let out a horrible roar, broke free from Randy, and, jumping high into the air, headed right for the cloaca. “Stop!” shouted Randy, dropping to his haunches. Everyone stopped in their tracks. The motorcycle hit a hummock, screeched wildly, stood upright on its rear wheel, then fell into the cloaca. It seemed to Peretz that the protoplasm yielded beneath the motorcycle, as if to soften the blow. Then it silently and effortlessly let the motorcycle inside and closed over it. The engine went quiet.
“You clumsy bastard,” Stoyan told Randy. “What the hell did you just do?”
The cloaca became a maw—a sucking, savoring, relishing maw. It was rolling the motorcycle around like a little boy rolls a large candy from cheek to cheek with his tongue. The motorcycle kept circling the foaming mass, appearing and disappearing again, impotently wiggling its handlebars and getting smaller and smaller with each reappearance—the metal skin was thinning, it became as translucent as tissue paper, they could see the engine through it, then the skin came apart at the seams, the tires disappeared, and finally, the motorcycle took one last dip and never emerged again.
“It ate it,” Randy said with imbecilic delight.
“You clumsy bastard,” Stoyan repeated. “You’re going to pay for this. You’re going to spend your whole damn life paying for this.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Randy said. “I’ll pay for this, sure. What did I do, really? All I did was turn the throttle the wrong way,” he told Peretz. “That’s how it got away from me. See, Signor Peretz, I wanted to throttle down so it wouldn’t make such a racket, and I turned the throttle the wrong way. Could have happened to anyone. And anyway, it was just an old bike . . . Then I’m off,” he told Stoyan. “There’s nothing left for me to do here. I’ll head home.”
“What are you looking at?” Quentin suddenly said, in a tone that made Peretz involuntarily recoil.
“Huh?” said Randy. “I’ll look wherever I please.” He was looking over his shoulder, watching the path, where Rita’s orange shawl was flickering beneath the lime green canopy of branches, receding into the distance.
“Let me get by,” Quentin told Peretz. “I need to have a talk with him.”
“Wait, wait,” Stoyan began to mutter. “Calm down, Quentin—”
“Calm down, sure—I’ve been watching him a long time, I know what he’s after!”
“Come on, don’t be an idiot . . . Get a grip! Calm down!”
“Let me go, I’m not kidding, let go of my hand!”
They were tussling noisily, shoving Peretz on both sides. Stoyan was holding Quentin’s sleeve and the flap of his jacket, while Quentin, suddenly red and sweaty, refusing to take his eyes off Randy, was pushing Stoyan away with one arm and trying as hard as he could to bend Peretz in half with the other so he could step over him. He was moving in jerks, and with each jerk, he left more and more of his jacket behind. Peretz waited for his chance and rolled out of the ATV. Randy was still looking in Rita’s direction—his lips parted, his eyes lascivious and tender.
“Why do they wear pants?” he asked Peretz. “That’s the style nowadays, pants . . .”
“Don’t defend him!” Quentin screamed from the ATV. “He’s not a sexual neurotic, he’s just an asshole! Let me go, or I’ll let you have it, too!”
“They used to have these skirts,” Randy was saying dreamily. “They’d wrap a piece of cloth around themselves and secure it with a safety pin. And I’d go ahead and open it . . .”
If this had been a park . . . If this had been a hotel, or a library, in an auditorium . . . And this actually had happened before—in parks, in libraries, even in an auditorium, during Kim’s presentation “The Statistical Methods Each Administration Employee Needs to Know.” And now the forest was witnessing it all: the salacious gleam in Randy’s eyes, and Quentin’s purple face bobbing in the ATV doors, looking strangely stupid and bovine, and Stoyan’s tormented muttering—something about work, about responsibility, about stupidity—and the sound of buttons popping off and cracking against the windshield . . . And it was impossible to know what it thought about all this, whether it was horrified, amused, or grimacing in disgust . . .
“$%#@!” Randy said with relish.
And then Peretz punched him. He punched Randy in the face, hitting what felt like his cheekbone with a crunch, and he dislocated his finger. Everyone immediately stopped talking. Randy grabbed his cheekbone and looked at Peretz with astonishment.
“We can’t have this,” Peretz said firmly. “We can’t have this here. Stop.”
“Fine by me,” Randy said, shrugging his shoulders. “I was just saying that there’s no reason for me to be here anymore—see for yourself, there’s no motorcycle . . . What am I doing here?”
Quentin inquired loudly, “You punched him in the face?”
“Yeah,” Randy said with vexation. “He got my cheek, right on the bone . . . Lucky it wasn’t my eye.”
“No, really, you punched him in the face?”
“Yes,” Peretz said firmly. “Because we can’t have this here.”
“Then let’s go,” Quentin said, leaning back in his seat.
“Randall,” said Stoyan, “get in. You can help push if we get stuck.”
“I’m wearing new pants,” Randy objected. “How about I take the wheel?”
No one answered him, so he climbed into the backseat and sat down next to Quentin, who had scooted over. Peretz got in next to Stoyan, and they were off.
The pups had already covered a good distance, but Stoyan, maneuvering with a lot of precision, his right wheels on the path and his left wheels on the lush moss, caught up to them, then slowly crept behind them, carefully adjusting the speed with the clutch. “You’ll burn the clutch,” said Randy, then he turned to Quentin and started to explain that he didn’t mean anything by it, that one way or another, he no longer had a motorcycle, and that a man was always a man, and if everything was working right, he always would be a man, whether he was in a forest or someplace else . . . “Didn’t you already get punched in the face?” Quentin would ask. “Come on, give it to me straight—did you or did you not already get punched in the face?” he would insert occasionally. “Come on,” Randy would reply, “come on, wait, hear me out first . . .”
Peretz stroked his swelling finger and watched the pups. The children of the forest. Or maybe the servants of the forest. Or maybe the excrement of the forest . . . They moved slowly and tirelessly in a single file, seeming to flow along the ground, streaming over the rotten tree trunks, over the ditches, across the stagnant puddles, through the tall grass, and through the thornbushes. The trail would disappear, plunging into the fragrant mud or hiding beneath the layers of hard gray mushrooms that crunched under their wheels, then it would appear again, and the pups kept to the trail and managed to remain white, clean, and smooth—no dust clung to them, no thorn left a mark on them, and they didn’t get covered in the sticky black mud. They flowed forward with dull, unreflecting confidence, as if following a familiar road, one they knew well. There were forty-three of them.
I was dying to get here, and now I’m here, and I’m finally seeing the forest from within, and I don’t see a thing. I could have thought all this up without leaving the hotel, in my bare room with its three empty cots, late at night, when I’m suffering from insomnia and all is silence, and then suddenly the pile driver begins to bang as it hammers in the piles at the construction site. I could have probably thought up everything in this forest: the mermaids, and the wandering trees, and these pups, and how they suddenly turn into forest explorer Selivan—I could have come up with all the most absurd, all the most sacred things. And I could have thought up everything in the Administration without leaving my house; I could have thought it all up lying on the sofa next to the radio, listening to symphonic jazz and to voices speaking in foreign tongues. But that doesn’t mean anything. If you see something without understanding it, you may as well have thought it all up.
I’m living it, seeing it, and not understanding it; I’m living in a world that someone else has thought up without bothering to explain it to me, or maybe even to themselves . . . I’m longing to understand, Peretz thought suddenly. That’s what I’m sick with: the longing to understand.
He leaned out of the window and pressed his aching finger to the vehicle’s cold side. The pups paid no attention to the ATV. They probably didn’t even realize it existed. They emanated a strong, unpleasant odor, their skin now looked transparent, and waves of something shadowlike moved beneath it.
“Let’s catch one,” suggested Quentin. “It’d be a piece of cake—just wrap it in my coat and bring it back to the lab.”
“It’s not worth it,” said Stoyan.
“Why not?” asked Quentin. “We’ll need to catch one someday anyway.”
“I’m scared to,” said Stoyan. “First and foremost, if it dies, God forbid, then we’d have to write a report for Bootlicherson . . .”
“We used to cook them,” Randy suddenly informed them. “I didn’t like the taste, but the guys said it wasn’t bad. It tasted like rabbit, and I never touch the stuff—to my mind, a rabbit’s no better than a cat. I’m too squeamish.”
“I’ve noticed one thing,” said Quentin. “The size of the litter is always a prime: thirteen, forty-three, forty-seven . . .”
“Nonsense,” objected Stoyan. “I’ve met groups of six and twelve in the forest.”
“That’s in the forest,” said Quentin. “After a while, they split off in different directions. But the number of pups in a litter is always prime—you can check the logbook, I recorded every number . . .”
“And one time,” said Randy, “me and my pals caught one of the local girls—that was a hoot!”
“Well, then, write a paper,” said Stoyan.
“I’ve already written it,” said Quentin. “It’ll be my fifteenth.”
“I’ve published seventeen,” said Stoyan, “and I have another one due to appear. And who’s going to be your coauthor?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Quentin. “Kim recommends the garage foreman—he says that transportation is essential nowadays—and Rita suggests the hotel manager.”
“Anyone but the hotel manager,” said Stoyan.
“Why?” asked Quentin.
“Not the hotel manager,” Stoyan repeated. “I won’t say another word, but be advised.”
“The hotel manager used to water down the buttermilk with brake fluid,” said Randy. “That was back when he ran the barbershop. So the guys and I tossed some bedbugs into his apartment.”
“They say that there’s an order in the works,” said Stoyan. “Anyone who’s published fewer than fifteen papers will be required to undergo a special treatment.”
“Oh yeah?” said Quentin. “Bummer, I know those special treatments—your hair stops growing and your breath stinks for a year . . .”
I need to go home, Peretz thought. I need to hurry on home. Now there’s really nothing left for me to do here. Then he saw the pups break formation. Peretz counted: thirty-two pups went straight, while the remaining eleven, lining up single file like before, turned left and began to descend toward the body of dark, motionless water that had suddenly appeared between the trees not far from the ATV. Peretz saw a low, foggy sky and the dim outline of the Administration’s cliff on the horizon. The eleven pups were confidently proceeding toward the lake. Stoyan turned off the engine and everyone got out, watching as the pups flowed over the crooked tree stump right on the shore, then plopped heavily into the lake, one by one. Oily ripples spread through the dark water.
“They’re going in the water,” Quentin said in surprise. “Drowning themselves.”
Stoyan took out the map and spread it on the hood of the ATV. “I knew it,” he said. “This lake isn’t on here. It shows a village, not a lake . . . It says, Nat. vill. seventeen point eleven.”
“That’s how it always goes,” said Randy. “Who the hell uses a map here? First of all, the maps are all crap, and second, you don’t need them. When it comes to the forest, one day something’s a road, the next it’s a river; one day something’s a swamp, the next it’s surrounded by barbed wire and has a watchtower in the middle. Or you suddenly find a brand-new repository.”
“For some reason I don’t feel like going farther,” Stoyan said, stretching. “Maybe that’s enough for today?”
“Of course it’s enough,” said Quentin. “Peretz still has to get his money. Let’s get back in the ATV.”
“What I’d give for a pair of binoculars,” said Randy suddenly, avidly peering into the lake, a hand shading his eyes. “I think I see a girl swimming.”
Quentin stopped in his tracks. “Where?”
“All naked,” said Randy. “All naked, honest to God. Without a stitch on.”
Quentin suddenly turned white and sprinted to the ATV. “Where do you see her?”
“Over there, on the other shore.”
“There’s nothing there,” Quentin said hoarsely. He was standing on the running board, sweeping the distant shore with his binoculars. His hands were shaking. “The fucking liar . . . Begging to be punched in the face again . . . There’s nothing there!” he repeated, passing the binoculars to Stoyan.
“What do you mean, nothing?” said Randy. “I’m not some near-sighted egghead, I have the eyes of an eagle—”
“Patience, patience, don’t grab,” Stoyan said to him. “Didn’t your mother teach you to wait your turn?”
“There’s nothing there,” Quentin was mumbling. “It’s all lies. Nothing but tall tales.”
“I know what it is,” said Randy. “It’s a mermaid. I’m telling you.”
Peretz started. “Let me have the binoculars,” he said hurriedly.
“Like you can believe a word he says,” Quentin kept mumbling, slowly calming down.
“I saw her, I swear,” said Randy. “She must have gone underwater. She’s about to come up . . .”
Peretz adjusted the binoculars. He didn’t expect to see anything—that would be too easy. And he didn’t see anything. Only the smooth surface of a lake, a distant, thickly forested shore, and the outline of a cliff above the jagged tree line. “What did she look like?” he asked.
Randy started to describe what she looked like, giving lots of detail and gesturing expressively. He was giving a highly appetizing description with great gusto, but this wasn’t at all what Peretz had wanted.
“Yes, of course . . .” he said. “Yes . . . Uh-huh.”
Maybe she had come out to meet the pups, he thought, bouncing up and down next to the morose Quentin in the backseat, and watching Randy’s ears moving rhythmically as he chewed something. She had come out of the thicket, pale, cold, and confident, and she had stepped into the water, into the familiar water; she had walked into the lake like I walk into a library; she plunged into the murky green depths and swam out toward the pups. And by now, she has met them midway, at the bottom of the lake, and she’s taking them somewhere, to someone, for some reason, and another tangle of events will form in the forest, and something else might happen or start to happen many miles away: clouds of lilac fog, which isn’t actually fog, will began to swirl between the trees, or another cloaca will open up in some peaceful meadow. Or maybe a group of colorfully dressed natives, who have just been sitting quietly, watching educational films and patiently listening to a lecture by Beatrice Wah, whose voice has gone hoarse from the zealous effort, will suddenly get up and go into the forest, never to return again . . . And everything will be full of deep meaning, in the same way that the behavior of any complicated system is full of deep meaning, and it will all be strange, and it will therefore be meaningless to us, at least to those of us who still haven’t gotten used to the meaninglessness and accepted it as the norm. And he felt the significance of every event, every phenomenon around them: the fact that there couldn’t be forty-two or forty-five pups in a litter; the fact that the trunk of this tree was covered in red mos
s and not something else; the fact that the overhanging branches were blocking his view of the sky . . .
The ATV was bouncing up and down, Stoyan was driving very slowly, and Peretz saw the sign on the rickety post from a good distance away. Rain had partially washed away the writing and the sun had faded it, it was very old writing on a very old dirty-gray sign, and it was nailed to the pole with two huge rusty nails: IN MEMORY OF FOREST EXPLORER GUSTAV, WHO TRAGICALLY DROWNED HERE TWO YEARS AGO. A MONUMENT WILL BE ERECTED HERE IN HIS HONOR. The ATV went past the pole, lurching from side to side.
Gustav, Gustav, thought Peretz. How in the world did you manage to drown here? You were probably a big guy, Gustav, with a shaved head, a stubbly square jaw, and a gold tooth, and you were covered in tattoos from head to toe, and your arms hung down past your knees, and there was a finger missing on your right hand, which had been bitten off in a drunken brawl. And it wasn’t in response to an inner calling that you had become a forest explorer, of course, it had just worked out that way: you were serving your time on the cliff that currently houses the Administration, and there was nowhere to run but the forest. And you didn’t write papers in the forest, and never even thought about them—the laws of nature weren’t your thing; the only laws you ever cared about had been written before your time and had always been against you. And you had been building a strategic road, laying down concrete slabs and felling trees on both sides of the road, clearing a wide swath, in order to make it possible for eight-engine bombers to land on the road if the situation required it. And you thought the forest would put up with it? So it went ahead and drowned you in a dry place. But in ten years they’ll put up a statue in your honor, and they’ll name a diner after you. The diner will be called Gustav’s, and truck driver Randy will drink his buttermilk here and pet the blowzy girls from the local choir . . .
I think Randy has two convictions on his record, and for some reason, neither is for the right kind of thing. The first time he wound up behind bars was for stealing a company’s business stationery, and the second time was for breaking passport laws. Stoyan, on the other hand, doesn’t have a record. He doesn’t drink buttermilk; he doesn’t drink anything at all. He loves Alevtina with a pure and tender love—Alevtina, who has never been loved with a pure and tender love in her life. When his twentieth paper comes out, he will offer his heart and hand to Alevtina, and he will be rejected, despite his publications, despite his broad shoulders and his handsome Roman nose, because Alevtina can’t stand prigs, suspecting them (not without reason) of being impossibly refined degenerates. Stoyan lives in the forest, and he came here voluntarily, unlike Gustav, although for him the forest is nothing more than a gigantic heap of untapped material for papers that will save him from special treatments . . . You can remain endlessly surprised that there exist people who can get used to the forest, but this is actually true of the vast majority of people. At first the forest attracts them as a romantic spot, or as a place to make a buck, or as a community where much is allowed, or as a refuge. Then it frightens them a bit, and then they suddenly discover for themselves that “things are just as fucked up here as anywhere else,” and this allows them to come to terms with the forest’s strangeness, but none of them intend to spend their lives here . . . Now, Quentin, rumor has it, only stays here because he’s afraid to leave his Rita unsupervised, whereas Rita refuses to leave for any price and won’t tell anyone why . . . And now I’ve come to Rita. Rita can go into the forest and not return for weeks. Rita swims in the forest lakes. Rita breaks all the rules and no one dares reprimand her. Rita doesn’t write papers; Rita doesn’t write anything at all, even letters. It’s very well known that Quentin cries at night and never sleeps at home—he always spends the night with the cafeteria girl, unless she’s busy with someone else.