Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories

  He had come much farther than from Chicago or northern Alabama, Quito or Sydney, Damascus or Lioazhong or Lagos on the Slave Coast. He had been far afield, traveling through immense lightless distances; pausing to pass the time with a telepathically garrulous plant-creature; spending time unmeasurable observing hive-arachnids as they slowly mutated and grew toward sentience and the use of tools; taking a hand in the development of a complex henotic social system that united water and fish and the aquicludes that had ruled as autarchs since the silver moon had fractured to form Murus, Phurus and Veing. He had returned, weary beyond the telling, having seen it all, having done it all, come full circle through miracles, wandering, loneliness and loss.

  There had been centuries of despair, followed by centuries of acrimony and deeds too awful to recall without unbearable pain and guilt; centuries of sybaritic indulgence, followed by centuries of cataclysmic ennui; and finally, centuries and years and days reduced to odd moments now and then, of wonderful, random, unpredictable kindness. That were no more satisfying or lasting than all the acts of all the centuries that had preceded them.

  He was alone. Since the long, terrible night of ashes and screams, and the closing over of the waters, he had been alone. There were, of course, diabolists and fools who believed; but their belief was the product of insanity or delusion. No descendant of those who had come to the Great Temple walked this world.

  Nowhere was there to be found a true believer.

  And at last he had come to know that he must return, to the place that had brought him to existence, and there he must go down alone to find eternal rest. He could wander no longer. He simply didn't have it in him to continue.

  So he had come by way of Reykjavík and Naefurholt and Brún, in a great circle across the island of volcanoes, as June came to an end, the last June he would ever see. Came, at last, to stand here on Sunday the 28th, the last day but two of the month, with a sudden change of wind and a new moon that had brought salutary weather, the sun pouring its beaming rays to the very bottom of the crater.

  Snæfellsjökull.

  In Icelandic, all volcanoes bear the name of Yocul, and it means glacier, for in the lofty mountains of that region the volcanic eruptions come forth from icebound caverns. Snaeffels means snow mountain. There it towers on the western peninsula, and can be seen from Reykjavík, a great urban capital of the sophisticated modern world. Even in Reykjavík the mountain is known to possess great power, some say psychic power.

  He stood on the edge of the crater and smiled. Not even in Reykjavík, where they could feel the power, could they guess the enormity of Snæfellsjökull's secret. To a height of five thousand feet.

  In Sneffels Yoculis craterem, he thought, in dog Latin, kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, audus viator, et terrestre centrum attinges.

  He laughed lightly, and the metallic wind picked at his clothing, ruffled his ash-gray hair. Would anyone recognize those words without the fictional lines the writer had added for the story's benefit? Kod feci. Arne Saknussemm.

  Above him the blind spire of Mount Scartaris, black as the eclipse on that night of screaming stones and hungry water, rose in expectation of the movement of the sun. Waiting. Poised to aim its finger of shadow across the thighbone peninsula, passing across the fjord, swinging fast to cancel the flood of sunlight pouring into the center of the crater.

  Snæffels had been quiet since 1219. He remembered now, with another small smile, how it had been that the writer had come to expose the secret— while concealing it the more in tall tale—and he could see, even now, the face of the Franciscan monk as the words burned themselves into the illuminated manuscript as he sat with quill poised. That had been during one of the centuries of antic foolishness for him.

  Each hillock, every rock, every stone, every asperity of the soil had its share of the luminous effulgence, and the shadow of Scartaris fell heavily on the soil. The shadow of the spike that penetrated the sky was marked and clear, and moved rapidly as high noon approached.

  He watched with the first genuine tickle of anticipation he had felt in a dozen millennia. The shadow slid, roiled, faster and faster, and the sun came to rest with a gasp at its highest point, and the shadow fell upon the edge of the central pit in the heart of the crater. It rushed down the wall, across the caldera, and ink poured over the edge of the central pit in the heart of Snæffels. Forsaking all others, the shadow of Scartaris formed the road sign he had come across eternities to read.

  Descend into the crater of Yocul of Snatffels, which the shade of Scartaris caresses, before the kalends of July, audacious traveler, and you will reach the center of the earth. I did it. Arne Saknussemm.

  He went down into the crater and stood at the lip of the central pit. It measured about a hundred feet in diameter, three hundred in circumference. This tremendous, wondrous shaft, its sides almost as perpendicular as those of a well, a terrifying abyss more than eight hundred and fifty meters deep, which had come to be called Saknussemm's Chimney by those who had been fooled through the writer's misunderstanding of words in an ancient manuscript that had been manipulated under his gaze.

  The time was ended for tricks and make-work.

  Even gods can learn. Given enough time.

  Even gods forgotten, gods without disciples, gods whose times and lands had vanished before memory had formed in those who had come to claim the world.

  He stepped into the shadow, leaving sunlight for the last time, and began his descent. There was only one answer to what a god can do when everything has been taken from him; and he knew at last what that answer was. Not sleep, not immolation, not descent into final darkness, never to emerge. No, the answer lay beneath him: to recreate. To reify. To cause it all to come again, stronger and mightier and more golden than it had been when chance and disaster had wiped it away.

  And one day not that far off, perhaps only a few centuries hence, his people would arise, bringing with them a certain inheritance all others had debased. As they had long ago created him, now he would re-create them.

  And on that day they would go once more to the Great Temple, to sing his name, and to thank him for growing bored and foolish and for trivializing himself with the lives of those now vanished and themselves turned to myth.

  But he would keep the name of the place, and the moment in which he had learned. Scartaris, June 28th.

  She’s A Young Thing And Cannot Leave Her Mother

  This morning I woke to the infinitely sweet, yet lonely sound of Clair de Lune coming to me through closed windows, upstairs in a high-ceilinged suite of this century-old hotel; in a land that is not my own. I lay in bed and at first thought I was still in the dream: it was so ethereal and melancholy. Then I heard Camilla stir, where she lay wrapped in blankets on the floor, and I knew the dream was past. The bed had been too soft for her, an old fluffy mattress with a gully down the middle. She had chosen to sleep beyond the foot of the bed.

  I lay there and listened to the music, trying to snare just a wisp, even a scintilla, of the dream. It was the memory of something I was certain I'd lost among the ruins of the years that lay strewn behind me. Years in which Camilla and I had fled from place to place, neither citizens of a certain land nor citizens of the world: simply refugees whose most prominent baggage was fear. Years that bore our footprints on their every hour. Years like a pale golden desert stretching back and back, on the side of me that has no eyes; a desert in which lay items from my life's rucksack: items that I had jettisoned so I could continue walking. Because there was no possibility of ending the flight.

  I had untied those items and dropped them to lighten my load, because the flight had grown ever more arduous; the walking through years...the caretakership of the woman I loved.

  Like a wanderer without water, or a soldier separated from his companions, I moved forward with her minute by minute, discarding casual acquaintances and toys I had outgrown; names and faces of people with whom we had briefly traveled; the taste of can
dy no longer manufactured and songs no longer sung; books I had read simply because they had been at hand when there was time to be filled waiting for a train; all dropped in the shifting sand and quickly covered by time, and all that I retained, all that sustained me, was this love we shared, and the fear we shared.

  As far as the eye could see, on that side of me without eyes, empty vessels and odd items of clothing lay vanishing in the golden sand, marking our passage, Camilla's and mine.

  And one of those memories I had once held dear bore resonance with the strains of Debussy floating up to me in the cool ambiance of the nascent morning. I lay there in the old bed's gully, Camilla stirring on her pallet, and tried to remember what I wanted to reclaim from the desert. But without eyes on that side facing toward yesterday, looking out across the golden sands of all those years...I could not call it back.

  It was the music no one was playing that I had heard at Stonehenge, ten years ago. It was the sound of the pan pipes at Hanging Rock thirteen years ago, and the notes of a flute from the other side of the Valley of the Stonebow eight years ago. I had heard that recollection in a cave in the foothills overlooking the Fairchild Desert and, once, I heard it drifting through a misty downpour in the Sikkim rainforest.

  The dream abandoned, I have never been able to unearth the greater substance of that memory. And each time it floats back to me—like the remembrance of an aunt I had adored, who died long long ago, with me again for just an instant in the sweet scent of perfume worn by a passing woman on a city street—I am filled with a sense of loss and helplessness. And not even Camilla can damp the sorrow.

  I lay there, knowing it was no dream, weak and without resources, dreading the day to come, afraid to leave the safe gully of the bed, once more to shoulder the remaining gear of my life; for another terrible day in the endless flight.

  Then Clair de Lune was interrupted by three warm, mellifluous tones— B, F Sharp, D Sharp—and, distantly, as if rising from within a crystal palace in a lost city on a sunken continent, I heard a woman's voice announcing the departure of a train to Edinburgh; resonating through the domed vastness of Glasgow's Central Station; drifting up to me in my bed in the Central Hotel built above the terminal; the murky glass dome lying just two storeys below my window; forming a postcard depiction of the Great Bubble of the Capital City of Lost Atlantis. If such a place ever existed, it would have looked that way. And if it had ever existed, it could have had no more magical presence than through the strains of Debussy.

  Clair de Lune resumed, I sighed, threw back the covers, swung my feet out onto the cold floor, and resumed the walk that was a flight that was the remainder of my time that was my life, on the desert littered with my past.

  I tried not to think about what might happen today, and went to the walk-in clothes closet, and took down the brown satchel with the flensing equipment in it. Then I selected something slim and sharp, and dutifully scraped the encrusted material that had accumulated during the night, off the body of the woman I loved.

  Out there in Atlantis, Clair de Lune died away.

  One would think history could never forget them, Sawney and all the rest of them. But not even the great library in Edinburgh had more than vague and cursory references. Nothing in Christie's history of Scotland, nothing in Sharp or Frankfort. A mere thirty-eight words in Donaldson and Morpeth's A DICTIONARY OF SCOTTISH HISTORY. The library in Enid, Oklahoma, where I was born and raised till I ran off to find my fortune, would have had nothing. I could in no way have been alerted.

  One would think such things too terrible to be forgotten. But I understand there are college students all over the world these days for whom the words Dachau and Buchenwald and Belsen have no meaning.

  In such a world, I'm grateful to have found love to sustain me.

  We drove the rental car south out of Glasgow on 77. It was barely eight o'clock. We wanted an early start, though Ballantrae was less than seventy miles; 111.021 kilometers, to be precise. The southwest seacoast. Galloway.

  We had discussed settling down here: Portpatrick, Glen App, or Cairnryan; perhaps take a freehold on a crofter's cottage near Castle Kennedy; or even nearer Bennane Head, possibly on the sheltered southern shore of Loch Ryan. But the councils weren't sanctioning freeholds for Americans, and Camilla had no birth certificate proving she was of Scottish birth, of course. So we had come to visit, at last. After all the years Camilla had begged me for this hometurning in our flight, we passed through Milmarnock, and reached the Firth of Clyde at Prestwick, just as the rain began sweeping the coast. After all those years, it was an unpleasant omen. And my trepidation about returning Camilla to her ancestral environs deepened. But she had implored me so heartbreakingly.

  We drove the short distance to Ayr and cut over to 719 that trailed deeper south right along the coastline; it was perhaps an hour, then, to travel the thirty-five miles to Ballantrae, the rain barely increasing in intensity, though the sky blended in gray metal with the water of the North Channel. Sheet metal from top to bottom, and we sloughing along the extruded wetness of the road that edged the moors.

  Camilla did not speak, had not spoken since we'd passed Dunure; but she had her face pressed to the window, looking out at the dismal machinery of leaden scenery, leaving for an instant four halations of breath fog on the glass before turning to stare ahead through the windshield. Her breath rasped and puffs of exhalation warned me she was getting too cold. I pulled over and took a blanket from the back seat, and wrapped her more securely. She smiled and mewled softly.

  I scratched the nape of her neck, said, "Soon," and turned back onto the road and kept going.

  We reached Ballantrae before noon, and Camilla decided to wait in the car while I went to get a bite to eat. I told her I'd bring something back, and she leaned across and kissed me, and smiled, and moved her head in that sweet sidewise way that I adored. "Haggis?" I said, teasing her. She hated haggis. She gave me a look, and I quickly said, "I'm kidding, I'm just kidding," before she cuffed me a good one. "Howzabout some eggs?" That brought back the smile.

  I didn't feel like going into the rental's boot for a bowl...everything was packed tightly. So after I found Wimpy's and choked down three burgers, I cruised till I found a Woolworth's and laid out three quid for an aluminum mixing bowl. There was a delay in the checkout line, with an old woman in a snood raising such a fuss about something or other that the teen-age cashier had to call the manager. And everyone stood in line, more or less embarrassed by the whole thing, till they stopped shouting and the manager took the old woman off upstairs to his office to sort things out. I was impressed at how kindly he treated her, after all the ruckus. He seemed a nice man, and I felt sorry for the old woman, who looked widowed, cast alone, and hopeless. It made me sad for a moment, but the line moved quickly and I paid for the bowl and went back out into the slanting rain.

  There was a grocer's on the way back to the public parking lot where I'd left the little Vauxhall Cavalier, and I waited in another short queue to pay for a half dozen free-range eggs carefully placed in a paper bag by ah overweight, ruddy-faced man who carried on a running diatribe with his wife, at the rear of the shop, about how he would absolutely not carry Mrs. Bassandyne's box of groceries out to her car, no matter how many times she imperiously honked her horn. His wife looked like a typical telly version of a little old mum, and she agreed with him that Mrs. Bassandyne was indeed a right miserable cow. He managed to thank me for my purchase, in the middle of a Bassandyne sentence, and I went out again into the rain, which had grown heavier.

  Camilla wasn't in the car.

  The rain had soaked through the shoulders of my mac, and every time I took a step my feet sqooshed in my wellies. The door of the rental was unlocked, and I put the bag of eggs on the front seat. Camilla was nowhere in sight, and I was an amputated leg. At first distressed, then troubled, then quickly frightened, I began running up and down the rows of parked cars. All I found was casual litter, a penny lying face-up in an oil slick, and
the bones of what had probably been a small dog; very white and clean, with the marks of tiny teeth all over them.

  When finally I circled back to the Vauxhall, Camilla was there, standing in the rain, the soaking blanket around her. I hustled her into the car, went around and, dripping wet, climbed in. She looked at me mischievously, and I apologized for having taken so long. "There was a line at the Woolworth's and the grocer's," I said. "Are you hungry?"

  She told me she was hungry, but she said it with that subtext of tone that reprimanded me for having kept her waiting. I pulled the aluminum bowl out of the deep pocket of my mac, and broke the eggs into it. I put it on the lowered ledge of the opened glove compartment, and she went right to it. I watched in silence, determined not to ask her why she had wandered off into the storm.

  When we drove out of the parking lot, a sizzle of lightning illuminated the delicate calligraphy of dog bones that still lay between a Ford Escort and a Mazda.

  We left 77 just south of Ballantrae and took a weary, flooded dirt road out along the cliffs above Bennane Head. I could not contain my growing fear, and Camilla's reassuring smile only made me dwell more darkly on the ivory luster of bone in water.

  Fame and fortune always eluded me. I laugh when I think how completely they had eluded me. I never had a clue. Not the smallest indication how to go about sinking roots, or making money, or bettering myself, or taking hold. There are people—well, I suppose almost all people, really—who manage to do it. They find mates, they get jobs, they buy homes, they have children, they furnish apartments, they get an education, they learn the ins and outs of electrical wiring or plastering or office temp, and they make lives for themselves.

  I never knew how to do any of that. I couldn't talk to people, I was afraid of women, I never went into a restaurant or bookstore where anyone recognized me a second time. It was just the road, always the road, from here to there, and on again to someplace else. And no one place was even the tiniest bit better than the place I had just left. I was cold as an ice bucket, and had strong legs for walking. A job here, a job there, and I never became good enough at anything for an employer to suggest that I might, to our mutual advantage, stay on, settle down, take a position.