| I had to stop. I simply couldn’t walk, so I braced myself on structural beams that jutted up like stalks. Oh, Ingrid made a show out of my being slow. She backtracked in her footprints and twirled, weightless, on a toe. I couldn’t keep up with her tireless pace, but then, my chin she took to turn my face that I would look: The ground beside us shivered, unsettling the snow. Steam escaped the swells of crumbling ice--this amused her. A buried mass wrestled free, its beastly odor striking me, as wet clumps fell away, revealing patches of matted fur. Dwarfed in the brilliant fields of DisOrient, half snow-blind and still shell-shocked, I watched a prehistoric monster exercise its lungs and thaw. I saw the girl grimacing as she bent all her thoughts to raise a mammal from the Pleistocene. It was quite a scene. Its prow-like tusks, its eye-watering musk. The mammoth breached out like a whale against the endless dusk. Like an ancient sunken ship bobbing up through a rift in a graveyard of icebergs--a relic in the mist. She scampered up the creature’s unraveling trunk. I grabbed a dirty tuft of warm, red wool; up I pulled. The white nights, the wind-chill, the tundra was interminable. I woke up on the back of a lurching animal. She drove us through blizzards--no echo location, no magnetic poles, not one peek at the North Star to guide her. At last, we reached a place: a dangling nest on the cliff of time. Here was a city made of tin cans and stacked tires in the lee of a bridge collapsed that cradled all with broken slabs and cables. What was left of the wind stalked on the roofs with whispering hooves; it stole the shingles one by one and complained on the gables. The denizens hunted hobbled hyenas with toothpicks and tacks, dowsed for hibernating rodents using flimsy wishbones. They never brought anything home. A fisherman lost his grip, one torn fin in his fist. His tears melted a leak in the dinghy carved from Styrofoam. And the lockjaw bear-traps never snared a thing. Cunning moths stole the bait, juggled them on hairy wings. An asthmatic child managed to get his ankle caught. He fed the whole town for a week; his mother could hardly swallow. A mouthful cornered inside her cheek. The mayor was a soothsayer in a balaclava. Bright pink boils on his knuckles dripping like lava. He hailed us from the stoop of his buckling lean-to home, spouting puns and proverbs through a permanent megaphone. He gave us a tour of their tumbleweed garden, praying to the shoots, but they wouldn’t grow green. Livid aphids stripped the plants, ravened the unlikely seeds. The townsfolk waited ‘til they left to suck the tattered leafage clean. A farmer clutched his useless hoe--he’d eaten his nose to spite his hunger. Cartilaginous craters where his ears once had been. Racked with lifelong weeping throes that seemed to originate outside himself: the man heard his sobs only distantly so he asked if we could ever be consoled. Ingrid was preoccupied; she squatted in the flea-bitten cabbage, down where the roots were fitful and ravaged. With her face pressed to the ground she seemed to hear a far-off sound, a subtle purr that failed to even tickle the callus of a sole. She said, "Do you know where blessings go? They’re in the ground below. Through miles of rock are waters drained and wasting poisons slowly strained." Sideways skyscrapers housed the feral dogs. Five dozen floors began to howl a hungry canon that rang and resounded inside our frozen valley, our vista resignation, ruin, and rubble. A knot in my throat that threatened to choke; Tongue and tonsils fat with infection. I stared at Ingrid, surpassed by her mystique as the staggered whines of predators crescendoed with anxious inflection. So, here it was: the dead center of a world effaced by winter. There seemed no use in walking farther through drifts of snow as hard as diamond. But--just then, the ground bucked, plates of ice buckled like scissors in shark-teeth shapes. A glacier with volcanic speed, we all fell down as spasms tore the city into two halves like the loaves we all imagined, and sideways-up I watched as Ingrid stumbled to the chasm--she teetered on a platform with the mindlessness of mannequins, on the edge and gazing in--she plunged into the waiting fathoms. Eaten by the earth. My tears froze over. Glass eyes stared at the sky. The last small flame winked out in me; I lay there with a strange relief. But I sat up at the sound of water, watched a dozen geysers grow like ivory towers. They bloomed high above, unfurled in the wind. They rained on us with feather heat. Where I knelt the ground began to melt. A pool of slush collected around me as I felt the old, old aches loosen and break and slide down to join the hot, widening lake. We waded, bathed, made bowls of our tingling hands. Warmth shed on our backs like something breathing. We blinked at each other, not yet daring to try to catch this spark of hope. |