Jonathan Lethem - The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

And the nearby territories to the north somehow seemed less hackneyed to me at the moment.

The forest to the north quickly gives way to an open field. It’s called the Field of Tubers, because of the knuckled roots that grow there. Sort of like carrots, or potatoes, or knees. Like carrots in that they’re orange, like potatoes in the way the vines link them all together, under the ground. Like knees, or elbows, in the way they twitch, and bleed when you kick them.

The first few times I came to the Field of Tubers I tried to run across. Now I walk, slowly, carefully. That way I avoid falling into the breeding holes. The holes don’t look like much if you don’t step on them; just little circular holes, like wet anthills in the dirt. They throb a little. But if your foot lands on them they gape open, the entrance stretching like a mouth, and you fall in.

The breeding holes are about four feet deep, and muddy. Inside, the newborn tubers writhe in heaps. They’re not old enough to take root yet. It’s a mess.

Sure, you can run across the field, scrambling back out of the breeding holes, scraping the crushed tubers off the bottom of your shoes. You get to the other side of the field either way. It’s not important. Myself, I walk.

Time, which is frozen at the witch’s breakfast table, starts moving once I enter the forest. But time in Hell takes a very predictable course. The sun, which has been sitting at the top of the trees, refusing to set, goes down as I cross the Field of Tubers. It’s night when I reach the other side, no matter how long it takes me to cross. If I run, looking back over my shoulder, I can watch the sun plummet through the treetops and disappear. Of course, if I run looking back over my shoulder I trip over the tubers and fall into the breeding holes constantly. If I idle in the field, squatting at the edge of a breeding hole, poking it with my finger to watch it spasm open, the sun refuses to set.

But why would I ever want to do that?

When I first came back, when they wanned me up and put me back together, they didn’t send me home right away. I had to spend a week in an observation ward, and on the fourth day they sent a doctor in to let me know where I stood.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “You won’t have any trouble holding down your job. Most people won’t know the difference. But you will cross over.”

“I’ve heard,” I said.

“It shouldn’t affect your public life,” he said. “You’ll be able to carry on most conversations in a perfunctory way. You just won’t seem very interested in personal questions. Your mind will appear to be wandering. And you won’t be very affectionate. Your co-workers won’t notice, but your wife will.”

“I won’t want to fuck her,” I said.

“No, you won’t.”

“Okay,” I said. “How often will I go?”

“That varies from person to person. Some get lucky, and cross over just once or twice for the rest of their lives. It’s rare, but it does happen. At the other extreme, some spend most of their time over there. For most, it’s somewhere in between.”

“You’re not saying anything.”

“That’s right; I’m not. But I should say that how often you cross over isn’t always as important as how you handle it. The stress of not knowing is as bad or worse than actually going through it. The anticipation. It can cast a pall over the times when you’re back. A lot of marriages… don’t survive the resurrection.”

“And there’s no way to change it.”

“Not really. You’ll get a prescription for Valizax. It’s a hormone that stimulates the secretions of a gland associated, in some studies, with the migration. Some people claim it helps, and maybe it does, in their cases. Or maybe it’s just a placebo effect. And then there’s therapy.”

“Therapy?”

“They’ll give you the brochure when you leave. There are several support groups for migrators. Some better than others. We recommend one in particular. It’s grounded in solid psychoanalytic theory, and like the drug, some people have said it improves the condition. But that’s not for me to say.”

I went to the support group. The good one. Once. I don’t know what I was expecting. There were seven or eight people there that night, and the group counselor, who I learned wasn’t resurrected, had never made the trips back and forth from his own Hell. After some coffee and uneasy socializing we went and sat in a circle. They went around, bringing each other up to date on their progress, and the counselor handed out brownie points for every little epiphany. When they got to me, they wanted to hear about my Hell.

Only they didn’t call it Hell. They called it a “psychic landscape.” And I quickly learned that they wanted me to consider it symbolic. The counselor wanted me to explain what my Hell meant.

I managed to contain my anger, but I left at the first break. Hell doesn’t mean anything. Excuse me —my Hell doesn’t mean anything. Maybe yours does.

But mine doesn’t. That’s what makes it Hell.

And it’s not symbolic. It’s very, very real.

On the other side of the Field of Tubers, if I go straight over the crest, is the Grove of the Robot Maker. A dense patch of trees nestled at the base of a hill.

The moon is up by this time.

The robot maker is an old man. A tired old man. He putters around in the grove in a welder’s helmet, but he never welds. His robots are put together with wire and tinsnips. They’re mostly pathetic. Half of them barely make it up to the Battle Pavilion before collapsing. He made better ones, once, if you believe him. He’s badly in need of a young apprentice.

That’s where I come in.

“Boy, you’re here,” he says when I arrive. He hands me a pliers or a ball-peen hammer. “Let me show you what Pm working on,” he says. “I’ll let you help.” He tries to involve me in his current project, whatever it is. Whatever heap of refuse he’s currently animating.

His problem, which he describes to me at length, is that his proudest creation, Colonel Eagery, went renegade on his way up to the Battle Pavilion. Back when the robot maker was young and strong and built robots with fantastic capabilities. Colonel Eagery, he says, was his triumph, but the triumph went sour. The robot rebelled, and set up shop on the far side of the mountains, building evil counterparts to the robot maker’s creations. The strong, evil robots that so routinely demolish the robot maker’s own robots out on the Battle Pavilion.

I have two problems with this story.

First of all, I know Colonel Eagery, and he isn’t a robot. Oh no. I know all too well that Eagery, who I also call The Happy Man, is flesh and blood.

The second is that the robot maker is too old and feeble for me to imagine that he’s ever been able to build anything capable and effective at all, let alone something as capable and effective as I know Eagery to be.

Besides, Hell doesn’t have a before. Hell is stuck in time, repeating endlessly. Hell doesn’t have a past. It just is. The robot maker is always old and ineffectual, and he always has been.

But I never say this. My role is just as predetermined as the robot maker’s. I humor him. When I’m passing through this part of Hell, I’m the robot maker’s apprentice. I make a show of interest in his latest project. I help him steer it up to the Battle Pavilion. I can’t say why. That’s just the way things are in this corner of Hell.

This time, when I entered the grove, I found the robot maker already heading up toward the pavilion. He’d built a little robot terrier this time. It was surprisingly mobile and lively, yipping and snapping at the robot maker’s heels. I fell in with them, and the robot maker put his heavy, dry hand on my shoulder. The mechanical terrier sniffed at my shoes and barked once, then ran ahead, rooting frantically in the moss.