Thomas Disch - The Genocides

“Wha’d you say?” Neil asked.

“I said—”

“I heard what you said! And I don’t want you to use that word again, understand? You remember who’s leader here, huh?”

“What word, Neil?” Blossom asked.

“ My dears! ” Neil screamed. Neil had always been able to scream when he felt the occasion called for it. He was not overcivilized, and the primordial was very close to the surface of his mind. It seemed to grow closer all the time.

The quiet, which for months had been absolute, was broken by the trickling of the sap. It was a sound like the sound of water in early spring, flowing through the town gutters underneath unmelted banks of snow.

While they rested they did not speak, for the most innocuous statements could throw Neil into a state of hysterical excitement. Naturally, they knew better than mention Anderson or Alice, but why, when Buddy began to worry out loud about his wife and son, should Neil complain that he was “selfish,” that all he thought about was sex? When Orville spoke of their predicament and speculated (with more good cheer than he felt) on their chances of reaching the surface, Neil thought they were blaming him. Silence seemed altogether the best policy, but Neil could not endure more than a few moments of silence either. Then he would start to complain: “If only we’d brought down the lamp, we wouldn’t be having any trouble now.” Or, remembering one of his father’s favorite themes: “Why do I have to do the thinking for everybody? Why is that?”

Or he would whistle. His favorite tunes were the Beer-Barrel Polka , Red River Valley , Donkey Serenade (which he accompanied percussively with the popping of his cheeks), and the theme from Exodus . Once he had started any of these, he could go on perpetuum mobile for the duration of the time they rested. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been able to stay in the same key for eight bars running.

It was hardest for Buddy. Blossom and Orville had each other. In the darkness they would hold each other’s hands, while Neil ground out the tune one more time around, like a diligent monkey; they could even kiss, quietly.

Here there was neither north nor south, east nor west; there was only up and down. There were no measurable units of distance, only rough estimates of temperature and depth, and their only measure of elapsed time was the time it took their bodies to drop, too exhausted to continue without another rest.

They never knew whether they were at the periphery or near the heart of labyrinth. They might ascend, through channels already opened, to within a few hundred feet—or even ten—of the surface only to find themselves at a dead end. It was necessary not simply to find a way up but to find the way up. It was hard to make Neil understand why this was so. When Blossom had explained it to him, he had seemed to agree, but later when Orville brought up the subject again, the argument started all over.

They were soaked through with their own sweat and with the sap, which in the least steep roots reached levels of four and five inches. After hours of climbing they were at a height where the heat was not so overwhelming (the lower depths felt like a sauna), and the air seemed to be gas again. Orville estimated the temperature as seventy-five, which placed them a probable fifteen hundred feet from the surface. Ordinarily, over a known route, they could have climbed that height in little more than three hours. Now it might very well take days.

Orville had hoped that the flow of sap would abate as they reached higher levels; instead it was worsening. Where did it all come from? The logistics of the Plant’s water supply was something he had never stopped to consider. Well, he couldn’t stop now either.

You couldn’t just grab hold of a vine and haul yourself up the slope; you had to make your hand into a sort of hook and slip it into a stirrup. You couldn’t just reach back and help the next person up after you; you had to grapple the two hooks together. So it was always the hands that hurt worst and were first to give out. You’d hang there and feel them letting loose, and you’d hope that you wouldn’t slide back with the sap too far. Once you let go, it wasn’t so bad—you’d slide along soft and easy if the slope wasn’t too steep, or else shoot down like a toboggan, until you came up against someone or something with a bump, and then you had to get your hooks bent back into shape and start clawing your way back up through the slime. But you knew your body could go a long way yet, and you hoped that would be far enough.

They might have been climbing twelve or twice twelve hours. They had eaten and rested a few times, but they had not slept. They had not slept, in fact, since before the night of Anderson’s dying and Maryann’s delivery. Now it must be night again. Their minds were leaden with the necessity for sleep.

“Absolute necessity,” Orville repeated.

Neil objected. This was just going to be a resting period. He feared that if he went to sleep first, they would take away his gun. They weren’t to be trusted. But if he just sat here and let his body relax … dog-tired, that’s what he….

He was the first to sleep after all, and they didn’t take his gun. They didn’t care. They didn’t want his gun: they only wanted to sleep.

Neil’s repertoire of dreams was no larger than his stock of songs. First he dreamed his baseball dream. Then he was walking up the stairs of the old house in town. Then he dreamed of Blossom. Then he dreamed his baseball dream again, except this time it was different: when he opened the closet door, his father was the first baseman. Blood spurted from the deep cleft of the first baseman’s mitt, which opened and closed, opened and closed, in the dead man’s hand. But otherwise the dreams were just the same as always.

The next day, after an hour or so, the hurt went out of their hands, and it was the stickiness that was hardest to endure. Their clothes clung to their straining limbs or hung loose and heavy like skins that could not be sloughed off. “We’d move faster,” Orville said, “if we weren’t weighted down with these denim jackets.”

Somewhat later, since it appeared that the idea was not going to come to Neil of itself, Buddy added, “If we knotted our jackets together, sleeve to sleeve, and used them for rope, we could climb faster.”

“Yeah,” Neil said, “but you’re forgetting there’s a lady with us.”

“Oh, don’t bother about me ,” Blossom protested.

“Just our jackets, Neil. It wouldn’t be any different than going swimming.”

“No!” The strident tone was creeping into his voice again. “It wouldn’t be right! ” There was no use arguing with him once he had made up his mind. He was their leader.

The next time they stopped to rest and eat, the sap was raining down on them in great globs, like the waterdrops that announce a summer-thunderstorm. The central stream of sap flowing through the root was now well over their ankles. As soon as they were not quite sopping wet, their clothes stuck to them like suits of adhesive tape. They could move freely only when they were drenched.

“I can’t stand it any longer,” Blossom said, beginning to cry. “I can’t stand it.”

“There now, Miss Anderson. Chin up! Tally-ho! Remember the Titanic!”

“Stand what?” Neil asked.

“These clothes,” she said. And indeed that was a part of what she couldn’t stand.

“Oh, I guess she’s right,” Neil said, as uncomfortable as the others. “It can’t hurt if we just take off our jackets. Hand them to me, and I’ll knot the sleeves together.”