Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “My partner and me,” Eric said, “I just took him to the hospital. In Runcible—Runcible Memorial. And I thought I’d come see this place, ’cause we used to live here, back in oh-nine, fifteen, eighteen…” The explanation felt unnecessary and awkward. Ten feet from the porch, Eric stopped.

  “That’s a long time ago.” The woman smiled.

  “Yeah.” Eric smiled back. “I guess it is.” Eric’s smile was mostly at himself for having grown so old, so garrulous. “For you, anyway. But it don’t seem that long to me. Name’s Jeffers. We live out on the island now—me and my partner. He’s gonna be back soon. They said three or four days.” How in the world was he going to get back to pick up Shit? Of course, he could take the air shuttle. But then they’d have to return…“From the hospital.”

  The woman said, “That’s good,” as, behind her, someone else started out the door, hesitated—then came on. The second woman was almost as tall as the first and almost as dark. She, too, wore only pants and boots. Both looked remarkably buff.

  The first woman glanced back, lifted an arm and put it around the second woman’s shoulder as she stepped up. “This old fella says he used to live here. He lives on Gilead now. We been here a week. We took our group out to the island on the first day. It’s nice out there—Oh, this is Sally. I’m Deena. Laura, Phyllis, David, Rona, and Ole are down in the house across the way. I want to go back and see more of the market. We’re married—”

  “—at least we’re all married anywhere north of Washington D.C.” After the hug, the second woman—Sally—moved a little away from the first. “We’re down here to campaign for the multiple partner referendum Georgia’s voting on this coming November. Hope you’ll remember us, when you go in to vote.”

  “Are you hungry?” Deena—the first woman—stepped forward to the porch edge, then squatted. “There’s some kind of dinner goin’ at the house. You’re welcome to stay and have some.”

  “That’s nice of you…!” Eric said, surprised.

  He watched her jump down among the loud ferns around the front of the porch. Above her, Sally squatted, too—and jumped. She landed, boots roaring in the brush.

  “Did this house ever have steps here?” Sally asked.

  Eric backed up as they walked out.

  “Sure it did,” Eric said. “I was kind of wonderin’ myself what happened to ’em.”

  Sally laughed. “So were we.” She extended her hand to shake; so Eric grasped it. “Glad to meet you.”

  “Sally’s pretty much the head of the family,” Deena said. “She’s from California—and she’s writing a book about us.”

  Sally said, “I think they must have had those little mechanical lifts they used to use on houses back in the forties. Those things always used to break down, anyway. They didn’t replace them when people moved out. I think it was a way of discouraging itinerant homeless folks from moving in.”

  “Like us?” Deena laughed.

  “Yeah.” Sally laughed after her.

  An image of the lifts with their thin rails remained in memory’s corner; they’d never caught on in Gilead. Briefly, they might have been standard in the Dump, during the years when he’d never visited. Another surprise for him. “Eh…Nice to meet you,” Eric said. On the Island, Californians’ reputation—they had lived in Bomb country, after all—was that they had iron backbones and could survive anything. Since most of the ones Eric had known were from the herds of homeless cut loose from the coast who had ended up for days, weeks, months in the Opera, thirty years before, his personal estimation of them was aimless, easy going, and generally devoid of goals—with, perhaps, a higher percentage of outright psychotics than with other groups.

  “Gilead’s like a little time capsule, even from before the thirties,” Sally said. “I mean with the market and everything.”

  Eric laughed. (Nothing about Gilead seemed to him particularly twenties.) “Oh, we ain’t that backwards…”

  “It’s wonderful…nice, I mean. But it’s so…odd.”

  What did these kids, who had been born when he was forty, fifty, or older find odd? Eric blinked. “Writin’ a book? That’s interestin’.” But this woman seemed pretty focused. “We got some writers out on Gilead. Mostly what I know is painters and sculptors, though.”

  “Oh,” Sally said. “Deena’s a sculptor.” Then she laughed. “Being family head pretty much means my job is to tell everyone we meet what everybody else in the group does. Deena went into the Navy when she was seventeen, then to Mars. She’s actually fairly famous. You must have heard of the Phobos-Countersurge. Deena was in that—and survived!”

  Eric frowned. He had not heard of it, though it was the kind of thing Shit might know something about. “Yeah, I could have. Ain’t a lot of people been up there on Mars. What—about four hundred? Or is it six?”

  “About seven or eight years ago, it was six hundred.” Deena laughed. “Now though, it’s more like six or seven thousand—but you could still say there wasn’t that many. Anyway, it took coming back to Earth from all that to make me realize I only wanted to do my sculptures and have some people around who wanted to hold onto me cause I was warm and fun…instead of—” she took in a sudden breath—“’cause they were screamin’ with their blood and their shit running through a couple of rips across their bellies—”

  Eric grunted at the image.

  “Sometimes it got pretty rough up there,” Deena said. After a moment she ventured: “Jeffers…?”

  Eric glanced over.

  “You said your name was Jeffers? You wouldn’t have anything to do with the guy who used to manage the big fuck-movie theater they used to have over in Runcible, did you? My mama told me how her dad—my grandpa—would take her over there, when they used to have these big chili picnics for all the people in the neighborhood and the guys in the—”

  “Yeah. That was me—and Shit, my partner.”

  “That’s right,” Deena said, smiling at Sally. “That was his name. Jeffers…and Shit Haskell. I used to think that was so funny.”

  “Yeah—it was, I guess. But that’s what everybody called him. And they still do today.”

  “Of course, now it doesn’t seem funny at all.” Deena said. (Eric wasn’t sure why. But probably some rebellious youth movement had taken up obscene names just to shock—something else he’d missed.) “You guys were pretty famous down here. My mama told me how you gave her a plate of chili right out in front of the theater—off that big cooking counter with the awning and the wheels you used to keep in that place. My grandpa brought her and about three of my brothers and four of my half-sisters over there—do you remember him. Al Havers?”

  Eric frowned. “You’re…Al Havers granddaughter?” It struck him that Deena was well into her thirties, not her twenties, as he’d assumed.

  She laughed. “I’m one of about fifty-five or sixty of ’em.”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right.” Eric found himself chuckling. “I guess you come by your interest in group marriages honestly.”

  “Maybe. I…guess I do.” Deena said, “I used to be really down on that stuff—’cause my mother was so set against it. I mean, you wouldn’t believe the kind of arguments they would have. My dad was always defending Gramps: ‘You can’t say there was no surprises. He told ’em how it was gonna be from the beginnin’.’ And she would say it wasn’t fair, because her mother didn’t know what ‘how-it-was-gonna-be-from-the-beginning’ would mean. I was always on her side. But then Gramps sent for us, and he really did love his kids; even if some of their moms could rub him the wrong way—actually, he was a pretty patient guy. And being the father of twenty or thirty kids, he really thought that was the greatest thing in the world. And I know he went hungry a few times, there, so they could eat. Now, a dozen years later, I’m living in the same kinda messed up life he was always in. But with two kids instead of two dozen. Only—funny—it never occurred to me, until little while ago, it was the same.”

  “Odd,” Sally said. “Th
e first time you told me about your…prolific granddad, it occurred to me!”

  Futilely, Eric tried to remember a black girl in the hungry happy crowd around the theatre through the years. He asked, “How long ago did Al die…?”

  “I came down here about seven years back, when he was going,” Deena said. “A whole bunch of his kids did—and about six of our moms came, too. “He was very happy about that. He died while we were here—and then we went home. Hey, you want to see my sculpture?”

  “Eh…sure,” Eric said.

  A sound like a wave rose in the pines. For some reason, it made Eric frown.They walked toward the light among the trees.

  Sally said, “Deena makes her sculptures out of pure light. We were up there in your old house, and I was asking her questions about how she did it, so I could write about it in my book.”

  They stepped between more trees.

  And Eric saw it—and realized he hadn’t till now because he hadn’t known what he was looking at.

  Maybe twenty feet across, a sphere of white light, smoky, ghostly, hung about two feet off the ground. Sitting in the grass, half on a scattering of brown leaves, was some mechanism—a box about ten by ten inches, with glowing holes across its top—which Eric realized was a projector.

  Centered in the white sphere was a darker, luminously blue one, maybe four feet across. Almost immediately it made Eric think of a giant…cabbage! Leaves interfolded with more leaves.

  As he stood looking, one leaf pulled away and drifted off to hover in the air, and, mistily, condense and spin itself into a blue satellite some fifteen feet over his head.

  Deena said, “It’s not really finished. Hey, tell me. Which do you think works better? This way…the way it is now, or—” she raised her hands, so that muscles pulled to prominence across her cannon metal shoulders—“this way?” She moved her hands for the world like a conductor. At each change of direction, a color or some internal movement in the light changed, too, so that now the globe was gold with red embers burning through it. The leaves peeled off faster to shoot into the air and spin in a line of orange balls, which smoked, faded, and dissolved, making a misty diagonal through the golden sky.

  Deena looked back at him.

  “I…” Eric said. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen one of these before.”

  Deena frowned. “Never…? You’ve never seen reproductions of any of the works Danely Phylum did—the great Central American sculptor? Or Klarakot? Half the people I know have miniature reproductions of the Dark Gate on a bookshelf or their desk or something.”

  “No.” Eric shook his head. “That’s…pretty, though.”

  “Didn’t your school ever take you to the museum when you were kids?”

  “But we never saw nothing like this.”

  Sally moved up beside her. “Deena, I think he’s really old—seventy, seventy-five. This stuff comes out of the late twenties…and the thirties. I don’t think they had this when he was a kid.”

  Eric wanted to nod. “They didn’t.” He felt bewildered and humbled. And annoyed—discussions of most art bothered him, even as he made himself listen to them; though it always seemed there were some aspect to it everybody understood but him—which, finally, even as Shit laughed at him for it, Eric was always putting himself in the way of.

  “Oh,” Deena said. “Well, I never saw any light sculpture down in this part of the country, anyway. Wait a minute—let me put it back the other way.” She moved her hands again, one making a wiping gesture (which seemed to change the color), and one pointing here and there, which didn’t do anything Eric could figure out. “You just tell me which one…you know, feels better. Feels righter—more complete.” She gestured again, with both hands—Eric did not quite follow how, but again it had become a blue sphere in an envelope of white.

  Another leaf peeled away and shot off, spinning.

  The image of a luminous, exploding cabbage made Eric, out of nervousness, laugh.

  Deena looked at him and beamed. “See…? He gets it! I told you. It’s supposed to embody humor, as well as beauty.”

  “Oh…!” Eric said, surprised, losing all the access to its sense of wit, now that he knew his had been a proper response. He could laugh at the thing, but he was completely uncomfortable laughing with it.

  “You don’t have to be an art critic just to respond to a piece of art. But you really get it—I can tell. Don’t you?”

  A naked young man ambled into the clearing, a baby harnessed high on his belly. “They told me to come and see what was keeping you guys.” He smiled at Eric. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” Eric said.

  “Hey, Ole.” Deena stepped back from the sculpture. “This is Mr. Jeffers. My mom used to talk about him when I was a kid. He knew my grandfather.”

  “That’s the grandfather you told us about who liked to fuck everything like I do.” Holding his cock in one hand, Ole reached out the other to shake.

  Eric shook hands with him.

  “I’m sexually psychotic.” The young man smiled, pumping vigorously. “See my balls jogglin’ down there, under my kid? Even somethin’ like that can turn me on. It makes me very polymorphous. I like fuckin’ everything. Even old people, like you. I’ll fuck around with you, if you’ll talk to me and stuff about things. You ever fuck any animals? That’s one of my favorite nasty things to talk about—especially when I’m fuckin around with guys. Not so much girls, though…”

  He had not released Eric’s hands, and now he tugged Eric’s fist back to rub it against the red hair over his groin and the bone beneath. His abdomen seemed nervously taut.

  Eric’s wrist brushed the sleeping child’s dangling foot. “A long time ago, yeah. A few,” Eric said.

  “Oh, wow. Will you tell me all about ’em? Maybe after dinner, we can go off and talk about ’em and play with each other’s cocks—”

  “Cut it out, Ole,” Sally said.

  Deena said, “Mr. Jeffers used to run a whole pornographic theater. He probably knows more about fucking than you ever dreamed of. Ole basically just likes to say things that shock people.”

  “Yeah?” the young man asked. “I probably won’t be able to pay a lot of attention to what you tell me. That’s ’cause I’m nuts. Still, it’s nice to meet you. Let’s go eat.” He dropped Eric’s hand, turned, and wandered off.

  Eric said to Deena. “What do you call it?” (That’s what the artists always asked each other on Gilead.) “Your sculpture.”

  Deena looked at Eric. “The working title is The Valley.”

  Eric was bewildered.

  Sally said, “Are you gonna tell him why you named it that?”

  Deena looked bemused. “No—I wasn’t. Not unless he asked.”

  “Go on,” Sally insisted. “Tell him. It’s interesting.”

  “Doesn’t it look less like a valley…than anything you can think of?” (Deena started walking away, and Sally—with Eric—followed.) “I mean, valleys are depressions, but my sculpture is all outside. A sphere—and things coming off a sphere. So you have to think real hard to figure out any way at all that it’s like a valley—and even think about all the ways it isn’t like a valley. Which means you have to think about a valley and what makes something a valley even more. And what about this is different.”

  They stepped from among the trees—

  And the house that they were approaching was not Bull’s cabin: the first thing Eric realized. For one, the front wall was entirely glass. And it was wider than Bull’s house had been. Before it in the yard, a fire burned. Racks were set up over it, with pots and spits and, Eric saw now, fish cooking between the tines of the turning grills. It gave off little or no smoke, which was why he hadn’t seen it from the distance. But, then, of course, he hadn’t been looking.

  Five or six people walked around.

  Rough log benches stood at various angles to the fire.

  “Hey,” Eric said. “You mind if I sit?” Seven or eight others already were. (How much daily medic
ine did it take so that, at his age, Eric could walk comfortably for an hour-and-a-half, for two hours? He knew that Shit took a lot more.) Someone said, “Sure—” Another black woman with eight inch dreadlocks smiled at up at him and moved to make room.

  As soon as he sat on the awkward bench, he realized he had to go to the bathroom. “Um…” Eric began.

  Besides naked Ole, the only other man was a dark brown bear of a fellow, with a curly pad of hair over his chest, equally nappy hair on his head, and a beard. He wore pants and boots like the women. He sat a seat away, on the bench, leaning forward on his knees.

  “Excuse me,” Eric said. “Do you guys have a latrine area—or a working bathroom available?”

  The guy looked at Eric, then laughed. “Sure. Use the one in the house.”

  “Oh…” Eric said.

  “Just go right in and turn to the left. You’ll see it in front of you.”

  “Thank you.” Eric stood again, wondering how to get into the glass-enclosed room.

  There was no porch at all.

  It must have been pure accident that he was close enough to some sensor. The glass wall parted and an opening spread between gleaming panes.

  Eric glanced back. The bear nodded at him, grinning.

  Eric walked forward. Inside, the floor was stone. A door stood to the left, so he walked toward it. It opened automatically, and he went inside.

  It was a very modern bathroom, with a dozen planters built into one wall, trailing leaves and tendrils down the tiles. Two others were bright mirrors. (The commode was also some silvery-mirrored substance, and when he unfastened his pants, dropped them down his thin thighs, and sat, he realized the silver seat was heated. He actually felt too tired to stand and urinate—he had been sitting more and more, of late.) Beside him, was a table with three different levels, each of which held a pile of magazines.

  The cover illustration moved as he looked at the top one. The glimmering title said,