Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

“I am telling you that none of this is real but you are certainly not imagining it. And just as truly you are imagining it yet it is real.”

“Look, I sure as hell couldn’t have made this up. I mean look at the Ledge there. It extends as far as I can see in either direction.”

“It always will.”

“So the Ledge is infinite.”

“More or less.”

“An infinite ledge on an infinite plain.”

“The Ledge was not always there. The entire Park was once a single flat and borderless surface. The Ledge is a tectonic upthrust fault.”

“Say what?”

“There was an earthquake.”

“An earthquake did this?”

“About two thousand years ago. We do not discuss it much.”

“But—”

“We do not discuss it much.”

“All right.”

“WHAT’S IT LIKE having wings?”

“Do you mock me? I remind you that it is still a long way down.”

“I’m completely serious.”

“Well. I have never really thought about it. Does a fish think about water or a bird think about air? I have always had them. It is difficult to imagine not having them. That would be worse than naked. Crippled.”

“Us poor mortals do all right crippled.”

“You do not miss what you never had.”

“You hold all mortals in great disdain I think.”

“What you are would be pitiable if you were not so absurd. So limited.”

“Tell me what we’re missing then.”

“It would be playing music to a deaf man.”

“Beethoven’s Ninth was composed by a deaf man.”

“A good point. All right then musician. I will make you an offer.”

“I’ve learned to be suspicious of your people’s offers.”

“Have we not always been good as our word?”

“It’s your words that haven’t always been so good.”

“But it was your choice to listen to them or not. The price of free will is responsibility for your soul, you know.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“Why not hear my offer? You wish to know how it feels to have wings. When we land I will show you a thing. I will give you an experience. It will not be dangerous or harmful, but I cannot describe it to you.”

“Why not?”

“It lives in a place where language decays. It occurs before language begins. In exchange for your trust I will tell you that I would be obliterated for showing such a thing to a guest.”

“Then why take the risk?”

“Because you are mortal and will forget.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I have shown it to you before and you do not remember.”

“Maybe I’ll remember this time.”

“Memory is the re-creation of experience. This experience is one your mortal senses are not equipped to retain. The very act of remembering the experience will falsify it, even destroy it—make it a thing unhappened. Think of it as a beautiful picture mounted on a slide made of something that dissolves when touched by light.”

“You’ll show me something beautiful here.”

“You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.”

“But isn’t the cargo that survives all the more valuable for that very reason?”

“Yes exactly. Which is why it is a mercy perhaps that so much meaning and emotion are lost. Because you are so limited. Because you could not contain the whole of it.”

“Our cups runneth over.”

“Those of you who glimpse that broader apprehension of the world beyond the world of your perception and who endeavor all their sad short lives to convey it directly and completely to their fellow mortals—your Blakes, van Goghs, Stravinskys—were driven mad by the knowledge of the separation of one mind from another and by their own inadequacy to cross the gulf. Anything told is by definition insufficient.”

“Words may be inadequate but they’re all we’ve got.”

“All that mortals have, you mean. And even then you are wrong. I have heard your music—oh yes—and you are wrong. you have all these different little boats named speech and writing and painting and sculpture and music and dance. They are none of them seaworthy but you do have something of a fleet. And you have them precisely because your shores are so distant from each other.”

“Tell me anyway. Tell me what it feels like to have wings.”

“It feels like singing with your muscles.”

“Poetic.”

“Poetry afflicts me. Let me ask you something and perhaps you will better understand my difficulty giving your question a meaningful answer.”

“Fire away.”

“Tell me what it feels like to be mortal.”

“Hell that’s easy. It feels like not having wings.”

LOCOMOTIVE BREATH ROLLS out ahead of Niko as he trudges on across the frozen plain. Biting wind has turned his fingers, toes, and nose to wood. His feet are bound in pitiful remnants of recovered underwear he tore and tied in lieu of shoes when the plain gave way to this vast sheet of ice. Niko constantly alternates hands to carry the battered guitar case, his free fist thrust into the pocket of his skimpy summer jacket as he leans into the knifeblade wind.

He’s trying to remember something. Something that happened to him. Something he was shown. If he concentrates on what it was perhaps it will help him make his way across this huge expanse of ice on which his internal compass needle has gone awry.

Available light comes from the ice itself. Pale bluewhite like the phosphorescent trails that bled from around his trailing fingertips certain rare nights on Malibu Beach.

Niko trudges over bodies frozen screaming in the ice. Their stiff hands claw skyward in the milky ice as if to rob him of whatever ember gutters deep in his core. Niko has long since stopped staring down at them. One soul frozen and aware is an object of pity and compassion. A continent of frozen damned is as numbing as the cold of their estate. The truth is, if he had skates to hurry himself along he would glide without regret across their frozen moments and leave these transfixed wretches gaping upward at the lines that stretch like contrails across their reddish sky.

It is so cold. Each muscle is a slab of unkneaded clay, each step an effort of will. Niko tries to tell himself the biting cold is good and that as long as he can feel it he’s okay. When he doesn’t feel it anymore is when he’ll be in trouble.

What is it he’s forgotten? He tries to remember. To think back on when the monster left him on the Lower Plain.

GERYON HAD SET down on a huge rock outcropping. Inset on one rough slope of it were massive iron rings with battleship anchorchains attached, and manacled hand and foot to those was the eviscerated form of a blinded giant. Eyes pecked out and liver torn and eaten from his body. He lay mutilated and unmoving, and though there was no sign of life upon him Niko sensed a weary endurance, a geologic waiting. The patience of stones.

The shriek of a giant bird echoed across the plain.

Geryon bent down low and Niko climbed from off the monster’s back.

“Do you know the word hubris?” Geryon said.

“Greek.”

“Yes.” The beast straightened and pointed one of many fingers at the bound form.

“As is he. That is his crime.”

“Being Greek?”

The finger lowered and the travestied face turned to Niko. “It might serve you to reflect on why I thought it appropriate to land here.”