Adrian McKinty - Dead I Well May Be

I ran the whole of the night, and when day came I slept under the giant roots of a jungle tree, and when night came I got up and ran again.

Out of the waste and in the prodigal rain nothing animate breathes or moves or lives above the height of man…

The abyss, emptiness, a scorched and sunken earth. An abandoned quarter. A place out of a nightmare. A slough over a hard ground and an impenetrable sky. Night and day are indistinguishable and become one long dread universe outside of time. The rain is cold and falling with such force and mettle that it makes divots in the clay. The wind with it whips and buries itself into every groove and crevice on the ground. It veers and backs and brings the rain horizontal and slantwise and sometimes, in mock of physical laws, upwards.

Nature has cast itself as the destroyer, as the scourge, Shiva wiping the slate clean. And here, out here in the wild land, it is being born again of water.

It’s the hurricane and everything has a burrow.

Well, nearly everything…

Above is a vast black cloud out of which comes terrible light and the downpour, which leaches out loam and color and washes everything away. An awful wind that carries seawater, stones, bicycle parts, branches.

The topography is frozen into fragile inclines and declines and a horizonless perspective. A vast steppe devoid of beings and every living thing. Underneath there are sharp stones and lava rocks and here and there are ghosts of trees and a ruined house, as if from the days of the famine.

Another Ireland, the far northwest, the Sperrins, the bogland around Slemish Mount.

A pulverized sheet of ground and a landscape so familiar and yet unfamiliar that there can be naught but an epidemic of memory. Coffins of wet glassy stones and withered alphabets and celestial tracks in the red clay.

And everything punctuated by wind and rain. Rain, especially that.

Another mile, another ten, and over this hill ancient pylons are clambering on the terrain like a virus, following a line of steel and wire, clumping together perhaps in the direction of a settlement. In the country that is and can be. Civil and uncivil and metallic. But you’re on the run and that way is barred, if it is the way of people.

West, then. A green land of slabber, an invisible mesa on the world’s edge. A rise and a valley, hours of movement and a lake that did not exist a week before. There are scrubby bushes and reeds and suffocated trees. The world postdiluvian with water everywhere. No lizard or insect or belly crawler remains above the ground. Their homes are inundated and battle-scarred, gone into the book of insurance agents and loss adjusters. Mars has used his influence and braised the globe closer to the fastness underneath.

It’s the hurricane and rain is unceasing. Aye, it’s obvious now. Apparent in the signs and portents. The rain is a baptism and a cleansing agent. There is transparency in its coldness. The wind, too, speaks. It casts up euphonies of the dead. They have promises and they make you swear. Their talk is easy and reposed, but such are the words of phantoms, for they have time on their hands and are removed from the pressures of the Earth. They haunt you and urge you on. Pressure you, hint. It isn’t the banshee, there’s no death, at least not yet. Just voices. Their talk is Spanish and Mayan and Olmec and languages that have died here long ago but whose parallel exists somewhere in Kamchatka or Mongolia or the Aleutians. They murmur softly and tug your beard and trip your feet.

Paddy fields, a river valley, a collapsed stone wall for shelter. A cough and an adjourned heartbeat. Your eyes close and reopen again slowly, with sleep in them. The grass makes a hole for you.

The rivers rise and the rain and wind come so loud you lose yourself. The trees are less (or more) than dead now, they are stone: fossils, and around them the smell of sage becomes overwhelming. It’s almost enough to make you long for the jungle. But it’ll come again. You’ll see.

One foot in front of another. Pain that is no longer there. It has ceased to exist, for how can there be pain when there cannot be that intensity of feeling. It is possible to move to a plane beyond pain and beyond hunger. It is possible to exist just barely above the level of the realm about us. To coast on a slender splinter of consciousness. That’s how a shadow moves. A ghost.

How many days?

Half a week?

A skeleton, a specter, sliding across the land.

A hill, a river, and now a place where humans have been-evidence in the dead wood of telegraph poles. Ancient pines that have been blackened and grooved by weathering and that have numbers on them and strange symbols and the cracks of heat and cold.

But no birds on the wire or the uprights, for the animal realm entire is disappeared; indeed, only the simpler forms of plants survive: sage and small grasses and shrubs and blue lichen and black mosses that coat themselves thinly over a hard, dark soil and bare rock.

Where are compassionate stars, where the sequences of people, the friendly cows and horses? It’s the hurricane, and they have all abandoned ship, deserted and left behind only their music and their trace.

Inclines, rolling valleys.

Scrub that eventually gives way to high grasses.

Fields flooded and everywhere the tracks of creatures making for higher ground. A corn crop ruined. Maize. A commonplace field of potatoes. You dig them up, those livid white tubers.

It’s still night, it’s always night. You can’t see the moon, or Orion, you can’t see where anything is. At least is this still the Earth? Or is it some new place conceived and brought forth by the ocean? These are answers to impossible questions.

A day of this and the contour lines are narrowing and there are palms, and before it is even announced, the forest is there again like a wall. Dense and vine-covered and resistant a little to the gale and rain. The trees whisper to themselves in a vocabulary that no human will understand. They are talking about water and the brown volcanic earth between their toes and the wind that tears through the upper branches and kills the young and very old.

You can’t follow it but you are enough now of a jungle creature to get the gist. The trepidation. The excitement. The waxy creatures with a thousand eyes and ears. The forest thickens and darkens and there is some cover from the weather. Unlit, and there are demons here. Black, coiled snakes. Jaguars, panthers, monkeys, and the beasts of childhood dreams. Great el tigre above you and fantastic beings: griffin and hawkman and things from the last book of Gulliver.

Run-off golden water, wild fruits, bananas. Half of them are poison. Crouch down on one knee and vomit them up, vomit them and drink off a leaf and get up and go on.

You’re walking through the submerged and almost disappeared crater, two hundred miles wide, from a cometary impact sixty-five million years ago, a comet that struck the Yucatán with many times the force of every nuclear weapon currently on the planet, a comet that threw millions of tons of dirt and rock into the atmosphere and blackened the sun for months and changed the climate forever. That wiped out the dinosaurs and two thirds of all other living things on the planet. That made space for a little lemurlike creature that evolved through sixty-five million years into you.

You walk through the crater and you are weak and your wounds are not healing and animals inhabit spaces beneath your pale skin. You limp and the nails have fallen off your toes. You walk and you hallucinate and it occurs to you that perhaps you are already dead. That you are dead and this is hell. That this and all that follows is a rite of passage and a fantasy and you are dead on the wire or mad and in your cell.