Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

I fall, the ice falls, the Ring revolves, and still I remember.

HOW LONG I will remember what Aurora has given me, I cannot say. Already one revolution has passed, and none of it vanishes: the world grows clearer. And still clearer. I wonder where it will end. But though the darkness has achieved a new transparency, though the stars and Saturn and the ice all grow brighter, and I among them also almost whole, and I feel myself almost uninterrupted, with a past that reaches back now almost as far as the Ring goes onward, there is within me still some flaw. I feel it there: an emptiness still at center, an omission, some failure of memory or comprehension that keeps me somehow still apart, still adrift, still insubstantial: still, I fall.

These words I form against the silence, they will not stop. They slice me fine, interminably articulating time. A word, a thought, a thought, a moment passing on the Ring, and then another word, another thought, another moment and I am still here, still falling among the stars, still burning, still thinking, still here, still turning on the Ring.

I know now why the gift they gave was not only life, but its forgetting.

AURORA DOES NOT lie. I need only wait, and I will be returned to a life much like the one I knew. It is only a matter of time.

I listen in the darkness, and hear the voice of Saturn singing time, the low murmur that pulls so deep within me that I feel as though my life is anchored there, tethered, pulled, drawn out like a wire that stretches fine and finer and still it will not break. How much longer can I wait? How many more revolutions on the Ring? How many more of these moments will fill me, that are already more than I can hold? Why do I not break?

And why should I not? What is the life she promised but something marred in its making? If I am born again on Earth, returned to a body stranger than a house long unused, will anyone wait there to enter it with me? And what will all those years have done to her?

If she visits my grave, she is older now, changed by years that I will never know, by change that does not come to me. I am only dimmer to her, and although when I recall the color of her eyes the stars fade, and the pain becomes so sharp I have no other form but pain — though all of this should endure in me I know: she will change, and I grow dim for her, dissolve as my heart dissolves in rain and thaw beneath the soil, as the ice is ground here, ground down to darkness, and only the Ring remains.

And I remain in it. And still, I remember.

I REMEMBER A window through which a wind blew; curtains, lucent in moonlight, holding a slow, lapsing breath.

I REMEMBER AN evening in my third or fourth summer, and the moan of a distant siren that touched some chord in me.

I REMEMBER, TWO months after we met, her first words of affection, and how closely I held her so that she could not see my face, because in that moment I was afraid. But I do not remember her words, nor how the moment ended, only that I held her until the moment passed, because I knew it would.

I REMEMBER WAKING to the slide of legs over legs; warmth, and weight upon my arm. I have been dreaming, something I almost remember. I have just rolled over and will sleep again, but I am rolling also to grapple with this ice beside me, rolling through darkness, the stars, and ice falling everywhere.

I REMEMBER ENDLESSLY, but every memory ends, and I return to the Ring, and with each return something turns within me: each moment, before I am aware of it, something vital has escaped, and with it my knowledge of what it might be. It turns within me, unmistakable as pain, but what it is I cannot say.

I call it pain, but it is not pain. I call it turning, but it does not turn. I call it burning, I call it ice, I call it emptiness, falling, silence, dark, and it is all of these, but in the naming it turns again, it sheds whatever I have given it of brilliance or of cold, of nothingness or night. I call it sidelong, I call it limit; I call it error, wither, change. I conjure it with names, with images, fragments of memory, of desire: wind, and a flying fire. I call it smoke. None of these answers.

I solicit it with likenesses: it is a reflection on a stream, a mote within my eye, the moon upon a hill, the sun that still I cannot bring myself to see. It is nothing at all like these. I call it maimed.

I call, and call, and nothing answers.

IT PURSUES ME, like my shadow racing at my side: it drives me, like the force of falling itself. It draws me on, like Saturn drawing out my guts. Like ice that will not melt, it cleaves inside me, undissolving, consuming me — and yet I do not melt. We fall, this thing and I, and I wish it were something solid, something I could batter myself against, but I can open no distance between us, nothing through which to collide: we fall together, a mass of pain and fire, fire that does not burn, a fall that never ends, ice that never melts, only the eternal turning of it on the Ring, and still I do not know what it is I do not know.

IT IS NOT what I do not know: it is that I want to know.

Nor is it that: it is why I want to know.

Nor is it that: it is who might want to know it.

It is not that: it is not that: not that, nor that, nor that, nor that.

I have found myself striking blindly at the ice, fragments of it exploding in every direction until I strike at empty space and whirl, falling, still revolving, still unable to break.

It is not what I do not know that torments me: it is that I need to know.

I HAVE LEARNED to ignore the radar, the spectrograph, the cameras, and the sensors, all but the weight I feel within, the light that flies before me, my susceptibility to falling. I no longer fly from falling: I no longer feel it as pain. It has become something like sleep to me to hold the falling close, to let it fill the space where dreams might dwell, and turn there, turning as I turn, falling as I fall. For a time we fall together, the ice and I, and there is no voice between us and the night.

And when I awake, I mine the Ring, and wonder what it is I do not know.

MY IMAGE IN the mirror of the Ring returns: I see ahead its rising, breaking from the Ring on its high angle. In the stillness inside something turns: something echoes, something burns, yearning to follow. I am falling, and with a fall once more into burning, I feel the falling as pain.

I HAVE SEEN it now for five thousand three hundred and twenty revolutions, rising from the Ring and falling, falling beneath and rising, returning twice each revolution to the Ring.

And on each return, it has drawn nearer: the shape of the cylinder tumbling in sunlight, an arm reaching out to me, reaching away as it tumbles. Sunlight flashes from glass.

I fall, it falls, the ice falls, and I mine the Ring.

But within me I watch as it draws near. I watch, and the hope that grows within me is a pain I cannot let go.

I HAVE MET myself at last.

In the near distance, the shattered hulk of a hold is tumbling, end over end; a long scar slithers down its side. The head, bent back at neck, rolls into view. Its cameras goggle emptily now up, now down, now up again: the lens nearest me is fractured, like a star. An arm, twisted crazily askew, waves up at me, waves down.

I remember the arm I saw waving. I remember the glass that flashed. I remember believing it called me to follow, but now I know that I saw only this: a dead hulk falling, more helpless even than I.

I watch as it batters, and shards of ice, a slash of metal, hang in the sun. I am hanging as well, watching it dwindle, watching it fade until amid the ice its form is lost.