Thomas Disch - The Genocides

“Good idea!” Orville said. They all handed their jackets to Neil.

“Blossom!” he said. “I didn’t mean you . It isn’t right.” She didn’t say anything. Neil sort of giggled. “Well, if that’s the way you want it,” he said.

The stuff gushed from the small opening above as from a burst water main. Quite properly, it could not be called sap. It was more like water. For a while they were happy because it cleaned them off. But it was cold, too cold.

The roots, as they ascended through them, had been growing smaller instead of larger. To get through them now they had to crawl on hands and knees, and even so they could scrape their heads on the ceiling if they weren’t careful. The water was up to their elbows.

“I think,” Orville said cautiously, “that we’re coming up underneath Lake Superior. This much water can’t be coming from spring thaws.” He waited for Neil to protest. Then, still more cautiously: “I think we’ll have to go back the way we came. Let’s hope we have better luck a second time.”

The reason Neil had not protested was that he had not heard. Orville’s voice had been drowned out by the roar of the water, which acres and acres of thirsty Plants were siphoning from the lake bottom. Orville explained his theory several times over when they had backed off to a quieter spot. Then Blossom tried.

“Neil, look, it’s very simple—the only way away from the lake is down . Because if we try to move along at this level, we can as easily be going east—farther on into the lake—as west—away from it. If we had the lamp, we could use your compass, but we don’t have the lamp. We might just go along north or south and follow the shore. There’s no telling how much area beneath the lake Daddy explored last winter. We just have to go down . Do you understand?”

Orville took advantage of this occasion to have some private words with Buddy: “What the hell—let’s leave him here if he doesn’t want to go with us. It’ll be his own fault if he drowns.”

“No,” said Buddy, “that wouldn’t be right . I want to do this by the book.”

“Okay, I’ll go,” Neil told Blossom, “but I think it’s a lot of hooey. I’m only agreeing for your sake. Remember that.”

Down: the sap was in spate. It jostled their bodies together or tore them apart as casually as floodwaters bearing off the trees of the riverbank. Strong currents dashed them against the walls of the root wherever the curves were too sharp or too steep. Days of climbing were retraced in minutes.

Deeper down: the stream became less chill, grew thicker, like pudding coming to a boil. But its pace did not slacken. It was like going down a ski trail on a piece of cardboard. At least they need not worry about repeating their mistake: it was no longer possible to move “upstream” toward the lake.

At this depth there were now whole stretches where the hot sap filled the entire hollow of the root. Hoarding a lungful of air, Orville (who was the first to test any new passage) followed the current resistlessly and hoped. There had always been some branch root feeding into the flooded root from above, too small to ascend through perhaps but large enough to butt one’s head into for a breath of air. But the next time, of course, there might not be such an opening. There might only be a dead end.

That fear—that the current was leading them down a blind alley—absorbed their whole attention. More and more often their bodies were swept into entangling networks of the sap-swollen capillaries that lined the unexplored passages. Once Orville was caught in such a net where the root had split abruptly in two. Buddy and Blossom, next behind, found him there, his legs moving only as the current moved them. His head had struck against the hard wedge separating the two branches of the root. He was unconscious, perhaps drowned.

They hauled at his pants leg, and his pants slid right off his narrow hips. Then they each took a foot and pulled him out. A short distance away they found an area where the root, sloping gently upward, was only half-filled with sap. Buddy embraced Orville in a bear hug and began squeezing the water out of his lungs rhythmically. Then Blossom tried mouth-to-mouth respiration, which she’d learned in Red Cross swimming classes.

“What are you doing?” Neil asked. Unfamiliar sounds made him nervous.

“She’s giving Orville artificial respiration,” Buddy answered testily. “He half-drowned back there.”

Neil reached out fingers to confirm this. The fingers came between Orville’s mouth and Blossom’s, then clamped down tightly over Orville’s. “You’re kissing him!”

“Neil!” Blossom screamed. She tried to tear away her brother’s fingers, but even desperation did not lend her sufficient strength. One can only be desperate so long, and she’d passed that limit long ago. “You’ll kill him!”

Buddy struck a blow in the direction he supposed Neil to be, but it glanced off Orville’s shoulder. Neil began to drag Orville’s body away.

“He doesn’t have pants on either,” Neil fretted.

“They came off when we were pulling him out. We told you that, remember?”

The sudden deprivation of oxygen, coming after their efforts at revival, proved to be exactly the stimulus Orville required—he came to.

When the body he was carrying began to stir, Neil let go abruptly, spooked. He had thought Orville was dead, or very nearly.

Buddy and Neil then had a long debate on the propriety of nudity (both in the particular case of Orville and in general) under the present, exceptional circumstances. The argument was mainly a pretext on Buddy’s part to give Orville a chance to regain his strength. “Do you want to get back to the surface,” Buddy asked, “or do you want to stay down here and be drowned?”

“No!” Neil said, yet once more. “It isn’t right. No! ”

“You’ve got to choose . Which is it?” Buddy was pleased to discover that he could play on Neil’s fears as easily as on a harmonica. “Because if we’re going to go up, we’ll have to go up together, and we’ll need some kind of rope.”

“We had a rope.”

“And you lost it, Neil.”

“I didn’t. I did not. I—”

“Well, you were the last one who had a hold on it, and now it’s gone. Now we need another rope. Of course, if you don’t care about getting back…. Or if you think you’ll do better on your own…”

Eventually Neil agreed. “But Blossom ain’t going to touch him, understand? She’s my sister, and I ain’t going to have it. Understand? ”

“Neil, you don’t have to worry about anything of that sort till we’re all home safe,” Buddy temporized. “Nobody’s going to—”

“And they better not speak to each other either. Cause I say so, and what I say goes. Blossom, you go on ahead of me, and Buddy behind. Orville goes last.”

Neil, naked now except for belt and holster, knotted the legs of their several trousers together, and they set off, each with a grip on the line. The water was deep and so hot their skin seemed to be coming off their bones, like a chicken that boils too long. The current was weakening, however, and they moved more slowly.

Soon they had found a root angling upward from which the trickle of water was not much worse than when they’d first noticed it—how many days ago? Wearily, almost mechanically, they began to climb again.

Blossom remembered a song from nursery school days about a spider washed down a water spout by the rain:

She began to laugh, as she had laughed at the strange words of Jeremiah’s poem, but this time she couldn’t stop laughing, despite how much the laughter hurt.