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- ...watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
- Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
- He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
- He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
- Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.
- The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk.
- They walked through the diningroom where the firebrick in the hearth was as yellow as the day it was laid because his mother could not bear to see it blackened.
- Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
- Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?
- Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
- He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.
- Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but unaccountable. And so it was. (48)
- In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burning on the slopes like stands of heathen candles. (48)
- Late in the day they came to a place where the fire had crossed the road and the macadam was still warm and further on it began to soften underfoot. The hot black mastic sucking at their shoes and stretching in thin bands as they stepped.
- He was as burntlooking as the country, his clothing scorched and black. One of his eyes was burnt shut and his hair was but a nitty wig of ash upon his blackened skull.
- They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.
- Once in those early years he'd wakened in a barren wood and lay listening to flocks of migratory birds overhead in that bitter dark. Their half muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.
- No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.
- She sat there smoking a slender length of dried grapevine as if it were some rare cheroot. Holding it with a certain elegance, her other hand across her knees where she'd drawn them up. She watched him across the small flame. (56)
- Death is not a lover. (57)
- The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. (57)
- The hundred nights they'd sat up debating the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall. (58)
- He came forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it marked the progress of his emaciation and the leather at one side had a lacquered look to it where he was used to stropping the blade of his knife. (63)
- ...and looked at the boy. Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance. He was lean, wiry, rachitic. Dressed in a pair of filthy blue coveralls and a black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it. (63)
- Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you won't have them anymore. They'll just be soup. (64)
- He looked around but there was nothing to see. He spoke into a blackness without depth or dimension. (67)
- This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job. Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire. (74)
- All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them. (74)
- The shapes of the small treelimbs burning incandescent orange in the coals. (74)
- The boy didn't stir. He sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god. Please don't tell me how the story ends. When he looked out again at the darkness beyond the bridge it was snowing. (75)
- This was the first human being other than the boy that he'd spoken to in more than a year. My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh. Who has made of the world a lie every word. (75)
- He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves. (78)
- The boy was so thin. He watched him while he slept. Taut face and hollow eyes. A strange beauty. He got up and dragged more wood into the fire.
- Fine Morris paper on the walls, waterstained and sagging. The plaster ceiling was bellied in great swags and the yellowed dentil molding was bowed and sprung from the upper walls. To the left through the doorway stood a large walnut buffet in what must have been the diningroom. The doors and the drawers were gone but the rest of it was too large to burn.
- Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly. (114)
- There was a moon somewhere beyond the ashen overcast and they could just make out the trees. They staggered on like drunks. (115)
- In what direction did lost men veer? (116)
- His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sleep. (116)
- ...the water swinging and gurgling in the shrunken swag of his gut. (123)
- Then they set out upon the road again, slumped and cowled and shivering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep. (126)
- The country was looted, ransacked, ravaged. Rifled of every crumb. The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before a battle. The boy's candlecolored skin was all but translucent. With his great staring eyes he'd the look of an alien. (129)
- There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn't about death. He wasn't sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. (129)
- He stood in a livingroom partly burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. [...] Everything damp. Rotting. [...] He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (130)
- What you alter in remembering has yet a reality, known or not. (131)
- He'd been ready to die and now he wasn't going to and he had to think about that. (144)
- Then he turned down the lamp until the flame puttered out and he kissed the boy & crawled into the other bunk under the clean blankets and gazed one more time at this tiny paradise trembling in the orange light from the heater and then he fell asleep. (149-150)
- He'd been visited in a dream by creatures of a kind he'd never seen before. They did not speak. He thought that they'd been crouching by the side of his cot as he slept & then had skulked away on his awakening. He turned and looked at boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well & he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. He tried to remember the dream but he could not. All that was left was the feeling of it. He thought perhaps they'd come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. Even now some part of him wished they'd never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over. (153-154)
- The day was brief, hardly a day at all. (155)
- The faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark of the yard like a grave yawning at judgment day in some old apocalyptic painting. (155)
- He looked like a pile of rags fallen off a cart. (162)
- He looked down at the old man. Perhaps he'd turn into a god and they to trees. (163)
- The old man lowered his hand from his head. He blinked. Grayblue eyes half buried in the thin and sooty creases of his skin. (163)
- They ate and the old man sat wrapped in his solitary quilt and gripped his spoon like a child. They had only two cups & he drank his coffee from the bowl he'd eaten from, his thumbs hooked over the rim. Sitting like a starved and threadbare buddha, staring into the coals. (168)
- How would you know if you were the last man on earth? - I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it. - Nobody would know it. - It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too. - I guess God would know it. Is that it? - There is no God. - No? - There is no God and we are his prophets. (169)
- When he looked bad the old man had set out with his cane, tapping his way, dwindling slowly on the road behind them like some storybook peddler from an antique time, dark and bent and spider thin and soon to vanish forever. The boy never looked back at all. (174)
- They plodded on, thin and filthy as street addicts. Cowled in their blankets against the cold and their breath smoking, shuffling through the black & silky drifts... the noon sky black as the cellars of hell. (177)
- Bleak dawn in the east. The alien sun commencing its cold transit. (178)
- He made train noises but he wasn't sure what these might mean to the boy[...] If they saw different worlds what they knew was the same. That the train would sit there slowly decomposing for all eternity and that no train would ever run again. (180)
- The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient world beyond. (181)
- He'd pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived. Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory. Themselves among others, everything in its place. Justified in the world. (182)
- Feeling out the pavement under their feet. (186)
- Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy and bloated pages. (187)
- He looked at the boy out of his sunken haggard eyes. Some new distance between them. (190)
- Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. (190)
- Like victims of some ghastly envacuuming. Passing them in silence down that silent corridor through the drifting ash where they struggled forever in the road's cold coagulate. (191)
- He watched him lick the lid of the tin. With great care. Like a cat licking its reflection in a glass. Stop watching me, he said. (192)
- No sound of any kind. The leaves were soft from the recent rain and quiet underfoot. (197)
- They slept more and more. More than once they woke sprawled in the road like traffic victims. The sleep of death. (202)
- They wandered through the house like skeptical housebuyers. (206)
- They ate slowly out of bone china bowls, sitting at opposite sides of the table with a single candle burning between them. The pistol lying to hand like another dining implement. The warming house creaked and groaned. Like a thing being called out of long hibernation. The boy nodded over his bowl and his spoon clattered to the floor. (209)
- Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash. He looked at the boy. He could see the disappointment in his face. I'm sorry it's not blue, he said. That's okay, said the boy. (215)
- He stood naked, clutching himself and dancing. Then he went running down the beach. So white. Knobby spinebones. The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin. Running naked and leaping and screaming into the slow roll of the surf. (218)
- They drank tea and sat by the fire and they slept in the sand and listened to the roll of the surf in the bay. The long shudder and fall of it. He got up in the night and walked out and stood on the beach wrapped in his blankets. Too black to see. Taste of salt on his lips.Waiting. Waiting. (218)
- Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness. Shuttling past like trains, eyes the size of saucers. And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun. (219)
- We're beachcombers, he said. - What is that? - It's people who walk along the beach looking for things of value that might have washed up. (220)
- He thought the boat had been ransacked but it was the sea that had done it. (224)
- The weak sea light fell through the clerestory portholes. (225)
- That good luck might be no such thing. There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead. (230)
- He wiped his white mouth while he slept. I will do what I promised, he whispered. No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone. (248)
- He held the boy and bent to hear the labored suck of air. His hand on the thin and laddered ribs. He walked out on the beach to the edge of the light and stood with his clenched fists on top of his skull and fell to his knees sobbing in rage. (250)
- He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.
- He stood at the sink and looked down the driveway. Light the color of washwater congealing in the dirty panes of the glass. The boy sat slumped at the table with his head in his hands.
- In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of the birds, the sun.
- Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.
- The wreckage of buildings strewn over the landscape and skeins of wire from the roadside poles garbled like knitting. (274)
- ...and watched the cold rain coming in from the north. It fell harder, dimpling the sand.
- "You can't. You have to carry the fire. [...] It's inside you. It was always there."
- Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. __In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
jul 8 2020 ∞
jul 8 2020 +
jul 8 2020 +