Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  That’s right, they weren’t going to bring him back.

  Rather—

  They had brought him back. They had just been at the Gilead cemetery…burying him.

  Then, again, mercifully, painfully, it was there…

  Ed had come and told him how Shit had died. In the hospital. (Against the screening, Ed had said, I’m afraid I’m here with the bad news, sir. Everybody had known it was coming, everybody except him…) Only days before that, Ed had driven Eric down to Runcible Memorial—no, the old man with the tubes in his nose couldn’t have been…Shit—? Oh, you look so…He looked wonderful! Just to see him—tubes and all. Was that years ago? The first time Shit had spent a week in the hospital? Or just days? Yes, they’d smiled at each other, and held each other’s hands, and Eric had said, I want to hug him, and Ed had helped prop him up in the sheets that didn’t fit, and Shit had said, You’re hurtin’ me but it feels good. How odd when even the good things hurt.

  Shit had said, in his ear, You know I don’t sleep so well if I can’t slide my hand under your shoulder, there, something that, over the last thirty-five, forty-five years, had grown up between them. That’s the thing I miss, but you know that. (No, he hadn’t known.) Oh—and the nights, at the start of it, with one hand under Eric there, Shit had pumped at himself with the other for what seemed hours, unable to climax. (Over coffee in the morning, Shit would laugh, or sometimes grump, and say, I wonder if I’m turnin’ into one of them crazy old men what sits around pullin’ on his goddam dick all day and all night and never makin’ it. And Eric would say, Yeah, that’s exactly who you turned into. But that’s okay. If that’s who you are, I don’t mind…Shit would say, It’s frustratin’—I’m even lookin’ forward to comin’ soft now. I used to hate that. Wasn’t it amazing that he would say, that he would speak, that he was…) In the hospital—Anne’s bi-weekly flowers stood in the window in one of her own hand-thrown vases, next to Holly’s little cactus—Shit had said, You got to go, I know. It sure would be nice if this was a Hostel like your mama was in, where you could stay overnight sometimes. Then he grunted: Uhn. What would be nice is if they let a man do this dyin’ thing at home in his own goddam bed!

  Eric said, Oh, don’t talk like that, Shit.

  Why not? Shit had said. Nothin’ I say is gonna make no difference. Anyway, he sighed, I miss you, you crazy ol’ nigger.

  Eric had asked…something.

  Shit had said, Naw, I ain’t really scared…I mean a whole lot. I’m just tired. Hey, I love you, you fuckin’ crazy ol’ piss guzzlin’ cocksucker. I just wonder what you gonna do without me. ’Cause you’re crazy, you know? You gonna wander around the market, askin’ strange men to piss in your mouth? Or sit in the corner, playing with yourself through your pants? Or day dreamin’ and pickin’ your nose and eatin’ your snot? They ain’t gonna understand that, Eric. That you just do that ‘cause you’re thinkin’ about important things and ways to help other people. And I ain’t gonna be there to get you home where you can do all that. That’s the only thing that makes me sad. White hairs around the inner sides of his wide nostrils had grown long.

  Now, don’t get like that, Eric said. Hey, I’m gonna be all right.

  The hand’s grip tightened on his. You always wanted to be black. Well, white man, as far as I’m concerned you can be as black as you want…’Cause I say so, that’s why. Like you always tellin’ me. Hey, nigger. I love you.

  And Eric said…

  What had he said? (What had Shit said…) He couldn’t remember again. Well, it couldn’t have been important.

  They’d smiled. (But Shit’s smile looked so hesitant, so uncertain…)

  Eric searched around the kitchen of the cabin they’d lived in for…(Though he remembered when they’d moved in, in their forties, he’d already figured they were getting on. Odd, how forty years wasn’t that long in the second half of your life…)—till he realized once more he’d forgotten what he was looking for. Sitting at the kitchen table, out loud, he said: “But I’m not black. I’m a…a crazy old white man.” How among time’s neap and ebb and turnings had that come about? “I live out on Gilead Island, behind Gilead Bluff. And I’m all…all alone…and—Oh, this…this is dreadful!”

  After a while, Eric got up, went in the bedroom, and lay on the bed’s red and black blanket. Someone who’d been in earlier to help must have spread it up. Hannibal, surely. He rarely did himself, anymore. (Under the edge, on the rug, sat that plastic urinal thing you used three times a night, pressin’ it hard up under your dick to get it flowin’—or squirtin’, more accurately—so you didn’t have to go all the way to the bathroom and that you cleaned with the same flat pills Shit had used to soak his dentures with…if one of you remembered. A lot of weeks there, recently, he’d let it sit and stink.) Lowering himself to lie down, he thought: This bit of stuttering light—they call it life—between black shoals…But what was the point of thinking like that? What I should do is get up and make a pot of coffee. It’ll never taste like Shit’s, but at least I know how to do it. He lay there, blinking at the ceiling’s boards.

  Maybe I can…make him come back. I mean, I’m crazy, ain’t I?

  That’s what they all say.

  Maybe I can give myself…what do they call it? An…illustration? (No. Blurred from ink migration and all but illegible, that’s what covered his arms’ sun-browned flesh, his blue, standing veins…) A hallucination. That was it. Maybe I can make him be lyin’ here, on the bed, like we were taking a nap. He don’t have to talk none—we didn’t do all that much talkin’, anyway. He could have his hand under…no. He don’t have to have his hand under my shoulder, either. He can be asleep…that’d be okay. I could look at him, for a little. If there’s a God—or a universe that does the same things—do you think, Eric thought, it could give me…that? Naw, I don’t even have to look at him. My eyes could be closed. Maybe Shit could…just be here—I could believe he was here…For a hallucination, that ain’t much for a crazy man—

  But the dementia at whose edge Eric had lived for the last years did not give. It only took—memory, strength, sureness of movement, conviction of thought…

  So little of life is direct experience, Eric pondered: Only an instant of it at a time. That’s all. No more. The rest is memory. And expectation…and memory is what so much of time’s failings had struck away. And what do I got left to expect? Oh, Lord, he thought. What’s there to do, other than wait, to get through this awful day?

  So I can start another one, without sex, companionship, or love…

  One of them, Hannibal, Lucille, would come tomorrow. And if they didn’t…?

  Wait?

  But that’s pretty much all you had to do to get through any of them.

  I should read my book. Mama Grace’s. He hadn’t done that for a long time—since…Shit had gotten sick. And tomorrow I could make something for the market—sandwiches. He hadn’t done that for even longer. An aluminum tray of oatmeal cookies. Raisin. Walnut. Take ’em to the market to give away. My book? It’s over there on the bureau. What’s its name? Aw, no…again I can’t remember its name. Come on, now—Eric Jeffers! You been reading that book, over and over, since Mama Grace gave it to you forty-five years ago. He said he’d give it to me if I promised to read it through three times. And I read it a lot more times than that by a long shot. “Concerning God”—that’s the name of the first Part. Which is funny, because about the fifth or sixth time I went through it, I realized that man didn’t believe in no God at all. He believed in the stars and the sea and the hills, and what grows on them and lives in them and your body and what you could figure out with your mind—and if you wanted to call that God it was all right with him. Deus sivi Natura. He remembered that from the Introduction. “Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind,” that was Part II. “Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emotions” was, yes, Part III, and “Nature and Origins” are backward between them. And I can never remember what he called Part IV. But there was another big book w
ith the same name someone had told him about—a story book about a crippled English feller who becomes a doctor, what he’d never actually read; just read about it a few times. He didn’t like storybooks.

  Eric thrust a middle finger up one nostril. (He wasn’t no doctor. They were never his story. It was never about him. Or Shit. Or even niggers like that Caleb kid, who got off watching them do what they did.) Because he twisted his finger loose and, because he was alone, put it in his mouth. There you were, having lived most of a hundred years, half the time wantin’ everyone to know and the other half tryin’ to keep everyone from knowing; though the fact was, most of the time you weren’t even thinking about it—but if the time you were was suddenly taken from you, you wouldn’t be you anymore. That was desire.

  The last Part was “Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom.” That “or” was the same or, he was certain, was the same sivi which had joined Nature and God. Which meant either Intellect was not exactly what most people thought it was. Or Freedom wasn’t. The first time through that Part had seemed the easiest of it. The last few times it had seemed the hardest. Hurt others and you hurt a part of yourself because you hurt a part of Nature or God. Help others and you help a part of Nature or…But that’s why you sit out on an old crate at the edge of the market and give away sandwiches and cookies and a wicker basket of plums, peaches, and apples to anyone who’s hungry. People smile and think you’re crazy—though you always feel better afterwards. No matter what. But why can’t I remember the whole thing—its name?

  I could get up and look.

  But I’m so tired.

  Tomorrow, I got to make some food and take it to the market, to give away. Because otherwise I’ll die of grief.

  Will I be able to get it down the bluff? Hell, even if it’s just some peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat, some bologna and mayonnaise. That’s what Ed should have been checking in the damned refrigerator for. See, I remember that. Thank God there’s always hungry kids passing through, hanging out down there on Rockside, on Settlement Road…

  Sometimes it just goes so fast…

  Why can’t I remember the name of my book?

  Maybe he should just stop tryin’. Sitting in her green wooden lawn chair, under the willow tree that was at least twenty-five years old but had only come to the island on Ed’s boat a dozen years ago, roots wrapped in burlap bound with plastic bands, Anne had said: Honey, if you can read Spinoza, you can make sense out of anything. I know you don’t like those readers. I don’t blame you. Don’t seem like real books to me, either. And I used them all through school. But in the end, he hadn’t read it. He worried about her willows. Sure, they were pretty. But they drank up so much water, and in twenty-five years—not to mention a hundred—if you put them too close to the house, their roots could ruin just about any cellar wall. He’d seen it in those old houses on the mainland…

  —Spinoza’s Ethica!

  …there, got it! (Just put your mind on something else for a minute.) Now I got to recall that other one. It was only one word, too. A made up word. Though, he remembered, right across from Reba’s restaurant used to be a dress shop with the same name, which had started out selling all black dresses and black slacks and black blouses and T-shirts and black denim jackets. Unlike Reba’s, she’d only stayed in business a couple of years. (Reba had gone years ago. But the place and the name—Reba’s Place—were still there.) Odd, how he could remember that and still not remember the name of that other book he’d read—not as many times as he’d read the Ethica, but more than six, more than seven.

  I can remember—with their knapsacks, like vagabonds from a hundred years in the past, them two girls who stopped by my table, where I used to sit by the Unitarian Meetin’ House. Black as coal, both—they could’ve been my daddy’s cousins. Mike’s. Such beautiful arms and breasts and faces. Both talked more proper than even Caleb. That was a few years back. Five? Seven? No—a lot longer. Fifteen. Or twenty. Even thirty—’cause we hadn’t been here that long. The tall one got out her sketchbook and sat cross-legged right on the ground and began drawing. The other—her friend she was going around with—was tall. One had a shaved head, the other a wealth of dreadlocks. (Mike had really disliked dreads on pretty much anyone, not that he’d ever considered them for himself.) Eric had run into them a day before, on the mainland. They were part of some persecuted marriage group. You know, now that I think of it, the reason Shit and me never got married is probably because we didn’t know any married men when we was little kids—so it never really occurred to us. Though there was half dozen in the Dump, later on, when we were older. That’s what ol’ Potts wanted for his boy, Lurrie. I bet he was damned surprised—when all six of them niggers took up together. Leave it to the Dump to have the first group gay marriage in the state. And we talked an hour-and-a-half, and they ate up half the cake Dr. Zaya had left with me to give out—that Dr. Zaya was a good person. And understood. And wanted to give things to people, too. Like she gave Shit pills for his hips and knees. (Damned things had made Shit horny, till he got used to them. But then, everything made that boy horny—sunsets, Bach [Is all that diddly-doodly stuff draggin’ you this way and that, up and down, back and forth practically at the same time supposed to make me wanna fuck? ’Cause it do.], honey, and grapes…) She let me do it for her, ’cause she was working at the clinic. And when the fat one finally showed me her picture, I was so surprised because it…wasn’t me!

  It was a sketch of Shit, with the apple basket he’d brought, against his hip, bending over the table, putting them out on the pile with the other fruit, and grinnin’ at me, with most of his teeth gone…it was the weekend so he didn’t bother with his plate.

  ’Cause he thought I was crazy.

  ’Cause I’m not in the sketch.

  He was the one who really thought I was nuts.

  But he’d been helpin’ me do it anyway, back since I started at the Opera House. (Four times a year, I did my Dynamite Memorial Free Feeds at the Opera, one each season. Solstice, equinox, solstice, equinox, just like Anne. Where it started. Yeah. And he’d look at me, shake his head, smile—and help.) He must have come by three or four times while they were sitting there with me, bringing more stuff for me to make sandwiches with. And apples. And peaches from Bulah. And clementines. And she drew…him. She give me that drawing, too, before they left. Hey, the picture’s still in the bottom drawer—right on top of the picture of Dynamite and Stovepipe…I got to take it out. It’s under my HUNGRY? FREE SANDWICHES, CAKE, COOKIES, & FRUIT!…sign. (’Cause the chili was too complicated and the cooker finally broke, anyway.) I’ll ask one of them—Lucille, maybe—to help me. They can laminate it in some plastic and I can hang it up.

  I always liked it. But now I need it…

  Maybe when I’m gone, the library will come over and get all that stuff. But what’ll they want with some pictures in the drawer of an old, crazy man like me. And the one of Dynamite and a pig what was dead before I was born. Sure, they already had Kyle’s pictures of Black Bull and Whiteboy carryin’ on in that dungeon. But then, I ain’t no nigger millionaire, either…Some day I got to sit down and write who they all are on the backs, so I can remember, even if nobody else can…

  Yes, I got to get that picture of Shit out, so I can find out what he looks…looked like.

  I was so surprised when I saw it, too. I thought she’d been drawing me and the table the whole while. But she was drawing Shit, bent over it, with his sweatshirt, fifty years out of date, hangin’ open there, smiling and puttin’ out apples. For us. She got him, too—his likeness. It was just like him. His beard and his baldhead, how beautiful he was. And his smile and missin’ teeth, ’cause he’d just come back from the hospital and he hadn’t bothered to put his plates back in, showing how quiet and easy he was, puttin’ up with his crazy life-partner, and so, though it’s a picture of him, it’s still a picture—of how much I…how much I love him.

  Oh, others…!

  Others help so mu
ch. Just looking. And seeing what they see, they help…

  Which is why you have to help…

  …others.

  Outside the window, down the sloped grass, overlong, a breeze and the ocean that had once been the whole world mingled their whispers—which, in a way, was a blessing, because, if you let it, it could put you to sleep in minutes.

  So, in minutes, Eric slept—among dreams of edging sideways through narrowing alleys, sometimes lit with green fire, sometimes underground with no light at all, while a horned and winged creature that couldn’t fly in there anymore than could Eric scrabbled closer and closer, and it grew harder and harder to breathe.

  —and woke, thinking, in the dark, No. I have a bit more time. He relaxed before the rumoring sea.

  *

  * * *

  *

  —November 2004–July 2011,

  Philadelphia, Boulder, New York

  Acknowledments

  Much of the dream imagery associated with the “Bottom” in this novel comes from Mia Wolff’s superb triptych of paintings, The City of Green Fire. My great gratitude goes to Chesya Burke for pictures and verbal descriptions of that lively neighborhood, Atlanta’s Little Five Points. My thanks as well to Joshua Lukin for steering me to the work of Rane Arroyo.

  Gratitude beyond any expressable must go to Kevin Donaker-Ring for years of help—five for this book alone—readings, notes, reminders, and (without exaggeration) thousands of corrections, as generously offered for this one (without him, I could not have completed it), as for any in the past. Many writers have written many times on many, many acknowledgement pages, “without whose help this book could not have been written.” Kevin’s help makes me intensely aware of the myriad forms of truth that can nest in that assertion. Equally invaluable help came—repeatedly—from Ric Best, to whom I am equally grateful.