Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

LAST NIGHT WAS Sunday. I had lost track of the day until, as we were halfway up the stairs, Ell asked if I had remembered to wind the clock. She has asked me this every Sunday night for seven years. It used to irritate me.

It is an heirloom, the clock. It was my father’s, and his father’s, and the story goes that it has been around the world ten times: a great, gleaming ship’s chronometer. When I was young, my father would — rarely — consent to show me its works. I would dream about them, sometimes, in the conscious dreams that come before sleep. The gleam and the motion, the oddly susurrant ticking, merged with my pulse and my own breathing to whirr me into sleep.

At an early age I conceived the notion that the clock was responsible for time. I remain superstitious about keeping it wound, and have never let it stop since the day I inherited it, still ticking. When I opened its back that first day, I was surprised how my memory had magnified its works: the springs and cogs occupy no more than a quarter of the massive, largely empty casing. I use it to hide spare keys. Last night, when Ellen asked if I had remembered to wind the clock, I stopped on the stairs, and without a word turned back down. I felt her eyes on my back, and felt ashamed at my own carelessness.

IN LIFE I was the editor of a small science quarterly. I read widely in the literature, and so for ten years or more I was forewarned. But some part of me always believed that the world written up in the journals was imaginary. It never touched me: there were no people in it. It was an elegant entertainment, nothing more. This world — the one we live in — was real, and there could be no connection.

Can I understand what is happening? No, nor can I imagine the hour that launched it, some sixty thousand years ago, from the heart of the Milky Way. I can only tell myself facts: since I began this paragraph, it has moved two million miles closer. The words clatter emptily about the page. I know only that when it emerged last June — a faint gleam, low in the summer sky — the world changed.

Part of me feels certain this cannot be, that all of us are in a dream, a mass psychosis: the second week of January will come after all, and we will waken, grinning at ourselves. The other part of me feels the emptiness in those words.

THERE IS A quiet over the land. We drive often now — gasoline is plentiful once more — in the hills outside the town, past farmsteads that could have been abandoned last week, or ten years ago. The livestock have broken down their fences. Cattle, horses, pigs stand in the road, root in the ditches. I saw a goat standing on a porch, forefeet up in a swing-chair, staring abstractedly into the distance. I wonder where the owners of the animals have gone, if anyone still feeds or waters them. I worry for them, should the snow lie deep this winter, and the ponds ice over.

We stop at the grocery store, and the quiet has penetrated there, too, a chill emitted from the frozen foods, the dearth of certain products. The aisles are quiet, but there is no serenity in this place. Out in the countryside there could be something like serenity. I think when I am out there that my intrusion has shattered the peace, this edginess I feel will depart with me, and the pigs will lie down again in the road and sleep. Here in the supermarket, every selection asks us: This large? How long? For what?

The pet food aisle is empty. A man had hysterics there this week; we could hear him across the store. Everyone looked up, checked his neighbor, and looked down again.

When we found him, he was standing sobbing by his cart, his face gleaming in the fluorescent lights. I wanted to make him stop.

When I laid a hand on his shoulder, he wheeled.

— Do you have any?

I offered a package of cheese.

— No. He sleeved his nose. — Do you have any cats?

I tried to move him toward the dairy aisle, but he shrugged my hand away.

— It’s not fair , he howled. — She’s just a cat .

The last word made him blubber again. At the end of the aisle I saw Ell, looking diminished, mute — one of the frieze of strangers gathered there. I could not meet her eye.

Suddenly furious at him, I dragged him away, wanting to slap him into silence. Instead I pushed his cart across the back of the store, where he lapsed into a sullen calm. I pulled from the shelves anything I thought a cat might eat: marinated herring, heavy cream, Camembert. With each, I gestured, as if to say, — She’ll like this; there, that’s my favorite; isn’t this good? Until his flat stare unstrung me, and I led him to the checkout.

I HAD BEEN down to the bridge, watching the sun go down across the valley. The lake is icing early this winter; the town was sunk in blue shadow. Below me, the gorge was already dark.

The deck of the bridge is an open steel grid. I hate to look down through it: the trees, foreshortened, look like bushes. I came home and found Ellen gone.

I thought at once of the gorge. In the darkening hall I stood and listened to the kitchen clock, and wondered how long I could wait before going to see. Then the door behind me opened, and she entered, swathed in her old, over-large winter coat. She looked as if she had walked in from an earlier year. She looked so familiar — and everything familiar now looks strange — I could not catch my breath and only nodded. — The roads are getting terrible, she said, bearing down drolly on the last word, balancing on one leg as she took off her boots. When she caught the expression on my face, she laughed. — Were you worrying about me?

MY APPETITE DIMINISHES each day, as I wake before dawn and pad about the house, too restless to start writing. The time required to toast a slice of bread seems too long. Were it not for Ell, I would no longer cook at all. I am wasting, I know: my face in the mirror shows its bones clearly now in the morning light. But Ellen grows. She eats with an appetite she never had before, and seems taller, broader of hip, and of shoulder and breast as well. It suits her. Her face retains its graceful lines, and somehow her cheeks are still indented beneath the high, Slavic bones. Her eyes, too, are still hooded, guarded above the strong, straight bar of her nose.

She has stopped wearing her glasses. She focuses as best she can on the empty air above her lap. What does she see? I have not asked. I watch her, and try to guess. Sometimes she looks up — suddenly, as if she has seen something marvelous — her mouth opens, and I catch my breath.

THE TELEPHONE SYSTEM still works. I hear a tone when I lift the receiver. It sounds mournful now, this fabulously complex network reduced to carrying this message of no message, this signal that says only: Ready to send. Our phone has not rung in weeks, nor is there anyone I call: I cannot imagine what there is to say. Some numbers I try no longer respond: the weather, dial-a-joke, dial-a-prayer. The number for the time survives, telling the ten-second intervals in its precise, weary voice.

Tonight I was alone in the kitchen, washing dishes. Something was rotting in the trash. For a long time I failed to recognize the smell (my sinuses are bad this winter), or even that I was smelling anything at all. Something was wrong. What had I done? I worked faster, scrubbed harder, but the feeling grew. What had I done? When I finally recognized the smell, my guilt and anxiety changed abruptly into anger. It had been Ellen’s turn to take out the trash. I was certain of it.

When I found her, she was in the small upstairs room that still smells faintly of the coat of paint we gave it in the summer. She was sewing again; the light was bad. She looked up as I entered, her glasses on the table beside her, straining to focus on what I knew she could see only as the pale blur of my face. Her eyes still struggle to see at a distance; the effort gives her the look of a worried child. It is the expression that gazes out of the few early snapshots she still has. That look stopped me in the doorway. I tried to slow my breathing, hoping that, without her glasses, she had not seen the expression on my face. I pretended my grimace was a smile, walked over to her, and turned on the lamp. She smiled back and returned to her work, presenting me the part of her hair. I stooped, kissed it, and quickly left.