Matt Bell - In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

How next my muscles slipped waxy down my bones. How my hair faded, star white as my wife’s eyes after they paled with her sadness, after the making of the moon and the coming of the foundling. How with no seasons there was only watch-time left to track, a circle circling circles, that mechanism passed down by my father, which had marked all the hours of his marriage until he gave it to me, at the beginning of mine.

How then my watch stopped.

How something like years passed, even with no record, and still I climbed farther downward into the deep house, into its spires plunging into the depths of the earth, until at last there were no more rooms, no more passageways, only a chamber that led to the landing at the top of a great stairs, of a series of steps spiraling into a blackness that my sight could not penetrate or pierce.

Into a black , the twelfth and final element, into which I would not go.

Into a black, which unlike all the other elements had no twin I then knew upon the surface, between the dirt and the sky.

The black, awful as it was, I believed then it could be found only in caves, in lakes, at the bottom of houses, and who knew what was below it, what was waiting within?

We looked out into the darkness from atop those first widened and also taller steps, perceived the enormity yawning before us: At that depth, there was again wind, blowing up from the chasm below, and also there was something like rain, water dropping from some ceiling above, some higher height far above where the fingerling and I stood, that low spot we had descended to that was still not low enough, for it did not contain what we sought. The walls ahead were so distant as to be invisible, or else the dark was so dense that they were close but not knowable, and below us that bottomless black soared, and despite my long want I trembled, and so did the fingerling.

I was already an old man, skin flapping upon the flagpole of my bones, and still I waited as if there were more time coming, as if my clock were not run out. But after I grew restless I also grew brave, or at least brave enough to crawl on my belly to the dark end of that platform, to yell my wife’s name down into the void.

There was no answer to my many shouts, not even an echo, and how far did the drop have to be for there to be no echo? How far away the walls?

How far away my wife?

The fingerling claimed that even if she had descended these stairs into the black, she could not have survived the cold and darkness I felt from below, nor whatever worse world surely lay at such a bottom, and as I lay there, lacking the will to go on, my belly upon the freezing stone, I felt each tensile moment stretch, closed my eyes as if to sleep. But then I did not sleep, could not against the pain that followed, as the fingerling divided himself again and again, found unclaimed organs to inhabit, new stations from which to weave a plan, one befitting my increased cowardice, and when at last he spoke his voice was newly deeper, aged as I had aged.

He said, IF YOUR PURSUIT IS ENDED, THEN IT IS TIME FOR US TO LEAVE.

For an age I ceded some sliver of control, then more and more, so that I would not always have to think of what I’d done, what I knew he would compel me soon to do. And then to pretend that I could turn back, once I had stepped even one foot upon that path, but not to have to pay for my mistake, not quickly, and always to carry this reminder, this memory as an inversion of responsibility: To no longer want to fish for fish or trap for mammals. To no longer want to eat at all. To be so old already, and to feel my long life heavy upon me, upon the body that was not quite mine now that the fingerling had aged too, so that from the womb of my stomach he might grow into a ghost the shape and size of a man, or else many ghosts assembled in the shape of the same, and in my frustrated despair I let this ghost lead us upward, away from the great stairs, toward the trapdoor miles above, at the back of our first cellar, that threshold that I hoped might still exist. And also to know that it was not the father who was supposed to take orders from the son. To know that it was not the son who was meant to show the father how to exist in the world, how to be one with the qualities of its elements.

If only I had been stronger.

If only I had not pretended to believe his lie, that his plan would smoke her out, would again return her to the surface, where I might more easily beg of her what I wished to beg.

If only that, then not this: Together the fingerling and I left that landing, ascended until we reached the next-highest floor, the deepest of the deeper rooms, the last proper chamber before the climb down to the landing atop the great stairs.

There we moved as one, acted together in deed no matter how separate our reasons, and together we took kit and kindle from my satchel, sparked flames to light one of the last torches we had brought, and with it we set fire to one room after another, until the flames spread to all the deep house my wife had made, the house she had made for me.

THE SLATE AND STONE OFthe walls refused to burn, but in between there were plenty of shapes that would, and so the deep house was emptied. Soon my fingers streaked and burned with the hot pitch of my torches, and if I had only begun to cough before, now I started again, my body often bent and stalled, jerking against the smoky walls of my wife’s hallways until my lungs were cleared enough to go on. When I could walk again I continued to light my fires, and as I moved away from their consumption I climbed always upward, through the rising smoke. At last I crouched along some smallest passage, and at its end I found a ladder that led to a trapdoor, an entrance to the house not previously used. Behind me I could see the flames following, and so I did not hesitate, did not turn back to look for the entrance I had previously used: With what haste I could muster I climbed past the trapdoor’s sung hinges to stand into the original cellar of our house, that cubed dirt lined with long-rotted tubers and dusty jars of what had once been fruit, and although the fire had climbed behind me it did not yet burst through. For a while I was afraid, not yet sure if it would, but like so many other elements of our world it seemed unable to cross over even the least threshold, this trapdoor’s lip up from the deep house. For some time the smoke still exited that hole and also some others, and its heat persisted for many months, a danger also made some grace, for that heat warmed the house that otherwise would have been so very cold, too frozen to hope to hold our happy living.

Returned to the house I had built, I found its rooms as empty of wife and foundling as ever, and also newly damaged, shattered upon their frames: Unguarded, our house had been visited by the bear, whose footprints now circled the house, and I found the windows smashed in by her blows, the logs of our walls tortured loose from their studs. Everywhere there was loosed fur and dried snot marking the house as no territory of ours, and then I knew what I should have suspected, that she had tried to follow us down into the deep house, that if she had fit through any of the openings leading below, then surely we would have seen her there.

What foolishness it was to return, I told the fingerling. What danger you have put us both in, and still we are no closer to your mother, to the better son that clings to her side.

To prove he could, he tortured me for my words, pressed in upon all the many nerves now at his command—and so our climb was ended by this homecoming celebrated only with weeping upon my knees, with beating my fists against the cursed dirt I found waiting outside the house, with hurling my voice at the moon-bent sky, its tortured gossamer hanging lower now than ever before.