I Am the River Page 11

“We will be in contact with the Mother Goddesses of the three realms,” Clotilde said before we began, pointing to the three framed pictures on the wall depicting a divine female figure in each scene of forest, water, and heaven. “They do not like to be interrupted.” Her tone told me everything I needed to know without asking. She then retreated to a corner of the room at my left, where I couldn’t see her from my position on the floor in front of the table, dressed in my trousers and undershirt, feet bare.

  Now, after this long wait, the musicians begin to play a simple, beautiful folk melody. The medium’s expressionless face changes, lighting up with a smile. Eyes wide, she rises gently to her feet and performs a series of small, precise dance steps. She speaks in three different voices, her face animated, taking on characters, the mask changing with each, forming her into an entirely different person, as she implores the Mother Goddesses to grant her access to the spirit realm. She repeats this several times, as the music changes tempo and pitch. She laughs, asking again, this time trying a new character, and holds up my shirt and one of my boots. I can’t imagine that any of this is going to work.

  As I contemplate getting up and getting out of this place, getting back to the cave to fend for myself in a way that makes sense to me, the boot falls from the medium’s hand and the cheery voice catches in her throat, staggering her. A hiss escapes her mouth as all of the air is pressed out of her lungs. The musicians continue playing, exchanging quick glances with wide eyes. I look for Clotilde but can’t find her. I look for the girl, and locate her across the room, the mask of dread on her face fading from view as the candles dip and gutter in their liquid wax, swallowing the light and sending more smoke into the room. Black smoke.

  The medium’s sudden scream cuts the smoky air, chopping off the music, and she falls to the floor, writhing as she hits the soft rug, the many layers and colors of her robe billowing around her like the release of ink from a rainbow octopus. Her lips pull back over clenched teeth, a buzzing growl building deep in her throat.

  The medium rises from her shed silk, naked and twisting at the waist like a broken music-box ballerina. Her ribs and sternum swell and pulsate, as if not connected to her spine. Things crack inside her small body, then pop, as joints detach from their sockets.

  She then slowly attempts to straighten, rising up with her body slightly out of order, everything crooked and misaligned. Sweat, tears, and sticky saliva carve rivulets through her makeup, streaking her face, dripping red, white, and black down the front of her pale body.

  The musicians scramble out of the room, mouthing oaths of protection. The door slams shut behind them.

  I get to my feet and find Clotilde in the gloom. She has moved somehow, and is on the opposite side of me than when we began, and much further away than the room should allow.

  “What’s happening?” I whisper.

  She shakes her head, stunned. “Je ne sais pas.”

  The medium’s mouth begins to move, but only harsh whispers slither out. Her eyes roll back in her head, and seem to come back around as solid black orbs, too large for her sockets, like those of a fly. Behind her, something large and dark, blacker than the shadows cast by the struggling candles, rises up to the ceiling. The medium flings her arms out straight from her sides. The black presence issues a thrumming vibration of sound, like a roar underwater, the low register splitting the atoms in the air and the brains of everyone in the room, bringing a chill to the air. This thing is huge and shapeless and composed of rage. I don’t know if it’s Black Shuck, as it doesn’t look like a hound, but it also looks like nothing I’ve ever seen. It roars again, that weird, horrible sound, and is pushed back into the corner of the room by the medium, who stands upright, her entire body so rigid I can hear tendons creak, muscles knot and rip. She is standing on her tiptoes, but doesn’t sway, as if held up by a wire looped through the top of her head.

  She screams, laughs, shouts out words in garbled Vietnamese, then other languages that sound unfamiliar, vaguely inhuman. The black presence shoots from the corner and meets her in the middle of the room, impacting with a dull thud that reverberates through my bones. The medium stumbles, and Clotilde is at her side, lifting her, holding up her arms, as she begins to wail. It’s a terrible sound, a familiar sound. I heard the same screams that night in Laos. She laughs again, a short, barking mess, then screams so forcefully it seems to tear her vocal cords, tapering off with a wet rasp. She shakes off Clotilde, and the larger woman is flung into a dresser.

  I jump to my feet and go to Clotilde, maybe as much to help her as to find safety in numbers. The girl is already there with her and I can’t seem to reach either of them, as the room keeps expanding in random and sudden directions, unfolding into confusing angles. Behind me, the naked woman crouches down, her voice a broken growl, collapsing with her. She snarls and coughs, expelling yellow mucus from her mouth, letting it run unchecked down her chin.

  Then she goes silent. Her black eyes roll back into her head again and return entirely white as she rises to her feet, scanning the faces in the room while the mouth works, the nose sniffs. She begins to slowly spin on the very tips of her toes, nails digging into the rug, cutting through it to the hardwood below as she rotates like a nightmare ballerina.

  She revolves on her tiny axis, knocking over the table and scattering the simple offerings, those white eyes searching each face, before finding me. She stops. One of her hands rises, then the other. Her fingers bend, squeeze tightly together, forming into a fist, then a shape resembling paws.

  The invisible wire is cut and she breaks down into a crouch, heaving, sucking in huge gasps of air, her nose flaring. She drops onto her haunches like a dog, mouth open. Sounds leak out from deep down inside her that don’t sound human, or even like an animal. She cocks her head to one side, then the other, and a long stream of words in Vietnamese pushes through—slow and low in register at first, then speeding up, rising in pitch, until it is a pure scream of sound constructed of rapidly blended words.

  I lean back, as if that will protect me, but the sound pierces the center of me like a blade. This is a sharp pain, hurting the ears and the organs, not the dull mental rending of the last night with Chapel above the river valley.

  Just as I reach my limit of agony, feeling a new seam of madness open up inside, the sound cuts off, and she collapses on the rug. She lands heavily and awkwardly, like a dropped deer, nothing catching her fall. Things break inside her, or maybe just return to how they should be, which might be worse.

  Clotilde goes to her, pulls back her eyelids, presses two fingers to her neck.

  “Is she dead?” I whisper, my head ringing, the chambers of my heart flexing to steady themselves. I feel turned inside out.

  “Close.”

  “Will she die… because of this?”

  “I-I do not know,” Clotilde says, a spooked expression on her face. Something that I imagine is very unfamiliar to her, the way she wears it. “I do not know what this is.”

  “I hope I… If I caused…”

  “What is one more?” Her look is challenging, fear twisting to loathing. She is resentful that I’m here, angry about what I’ve done now that she knows, and requiring the type of services that can kill one of her seers. “Wait downstairs,” she says coldly, and returns to tending to the woman on the floor, covering her with the discarded robe.

  I walk to the door and look back at the girl I came with, the girl who showed up at the doorway of the Night Man and saved his life, asking for a simple favor that he wouldn’t grant because he’s a selfish, craven motherfucker. She saved my life twice, maybe three times, and I don’t know her name. I never asked, and she never offered. Because she’s not like me. She’s not a selfish, craven motherfucker. I am ashamed that I don’t know her name and don’t know her but want her to leave with me. I need someone on my side.

  She doesn’t look at me, her head turned away, focused on those deeper shadows in the room, where the black thing stood up. She is rocking slightl
y, humming a tune I don’t recognize.

  I leave the room, alone. I never see her again.

  I wait downstairs, looking out the front door, at the mist swirling outside the house, obscuring the rest of the Floating City that waits beyond. The rain has stopped, or maybe it never rained at all. I might have spent a year in this house.

  Clotilde stands at the foot of the stairs, her hands folded in front of her. I didn’t hear her descend.

  “What is it?” I say, not turning around but seeing her with my new set of eyes now starting to age. They’re getting tired. The foyer is full of people waiting, but they seem like furniture to me, part of the house without eyes or ears. I’m back inside myself again, utterly alone in crowded room.

  “It is not a dog,” she says.

  “I know that.”

  “It takes the shape of a dog.”

  “Why?” I say. “Why does it look like that?”

  “To…scare you,” Clotilde says, finding the right word in English, realizing that it doesn’t do the meaning any justice.

  “If it’s not that, not a dog, then what is it? What is it really?”

  “Un furieux,” Clotilde says.

  “A Furious One.” I turn around. “I don’t understand.”

  “It is one who is angry,” Clotilde says. “With you.”

  “Why is it angry with me?”

  “You know the reason.”

  “I don’t. I don’t,” I say, approaching her, wanting to grab her and make her understand. I stop several feet away, never trusting my hands anymore. “I wouldn’t be here if I did.”

  “You do, you just refuse to…admit.”

  “Whatever I did, let me apologize. I’ll apologize…” I look up the staircase, address the ceiling and the floors above, filled with dusty, heavy air scented with mildew and incense and rotting flowers. “I’m sorry!”

  “You cannot apologize. That will not work, and will not change anything. It will not…” She gestures with her hands, needing help with an abstraction. “Move the particles, no?”

  “Move the particles?”

  “You can only return what you have stolen,” she says, refolding her hands.

  “I haven’t stolen anything. I don’t have anything. You think I have anything? I don’t have shit in this world.”

  Clotilde’s face gives away nothing. “The Furious One thinks otherwise.”

  I collapse to the floor, holding the side of my face, feeling a little bit more of sanity slip into my fingers. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this.”

  Clotilde sits on her knees and places a hand on my shoulder. “It is a Wandering Soul, this Furious One. It cries out to be buried in the ground of its ancestors.”

  “I don’t… I don’t…” But I do. I know now. But it’s impossible. All of it. I hear the River roaring underneath me. It clogs my ears, blotting out her voice. The English makes no sense. She realizes this, and comes to me in French, taking me back to the bayou.

  “Avez-vous tué…les gens au Vietnam?”

  I nod my head.

  “Beaucoup?”

  I shake my head.

  “Combien?”

  I hold up one finger.

  “Avez-vous tué cet homme dans son village? Sur le terrain de sa famille?”

  I shake my head.

  “Si ses restes retournaient au village?”

  I shake my head.

  “Comment le savez-vous avec certitude?”

  I look at her. I don’t have the English for this either. Sensing this, she finds hers again, if only to give me back the voice of my adult life. My childhood in the bayou can’t keep me safe anymore. It never did anyway, acting only as an accomplice in bringing me here. The River drops out from under me, leaving me on the clammy rug, spongy from the rain and smelling like cats.

  “Did you take a part of this man with you?”

  I nod my head.

  “Do you still have it?”

  I nod my head.

  Clotilde sits back, a look of concern tinged with disgust on her face. “Why would you do this?”

  “I don’t know… I don’t remember…”

  She looks at me for a long time, judging what she can see that’s coming to the surface. “You know what you must do.”

  I hold my head in my hands, trying to keep it together before it explodes. Tears start to form in my eyes, and I pinch them away with my lids. “I don’t know where it is anymore. I never knew.”

  “You must find a way.” She leans in closer, taking my hand in hers. “If you are to find peace, and remove the Furious One from your scent.”

  Hell hound on my trail. The lyrics snake their way inside my head. The look on Clotilde’s face shows that they also came out of my mouth.

  “The spirit realm knows nothing of hell, of heaven,” she says. “Only what is real, and what we think is real.”

  I look up at the top of the grand staircase, hoping to see the girl, her wispy frame, standing in the darkness. “I’m sorry,” I say. But no one is there.

  On the way back to the cave, cutting through the fog that dissipates the further I get from the house, no one calls me Night Man. No one looks at me at all. I’m not here anymore.

  Underneath the Floating City, the River rushes on, leaching into the invisible jungle. Everything in life eventually ends up back in the jungle. I want it to take me there. I want the River to take me anywhere tonight, but it refuses, because it knows to leave me here, with myself and no one else in a city where I don’t belong, stalked by a cosmic hound and afraid to sleep, is the worst sentence of all.

  24. Everything’s Green Here

  Operation Algernon had been five days in the jungle. Chapel had promised no more than two before they reached their objective. The men noticed.

  One would think that being drowned in the green hell for days on end would warp time, mash it down into one long smudge of wet, pain, sweat, and fear. But being in the jungle made them pay close attention to each and every hour, every second, spent there. Everyone in war hated the jungle, and especially in this war. Even Darby, who never complained about a thing related to the soldier’s life, muttered to himself as he slapped at the dizzying variety of invertebrates that assaulted every inch of exposed skin and each orifice in turn. Tiny biting sandflies whined inside ears. Fire ants crawled up legs and backs and necks, spiting acid into pinprick wounds like an army of miniature devils. Leeches, long and thin and reaching out like blind, gasping baby birds, showed up everywhere. And the mosquitoes, always the mosquitoes, the size of houseflies, digging into the flesh to find blood and deposit fevered madness. These were the first enemies of any and all wars, shock troops of the natural world, and every step was another battle in a crusade declared against the arrogant apes a million years ago. The boneless ones would outlive everything else in the kingdom.

  Then came the plants and trees, branches whipping faces, thorns cutting hands, and low-lying creepers grabbing at ankles. Walls of bamboo blocking easy trails, each cane twenty feet high and strong as ferry poles. The land did not want men here, and grew things on its surface to keep them out.

  The rain was always in the background, coming and going as it pleased, and the mud it created sucked at boots and rotted the feet inside them. Five days in, and everything from the ankle down was either pickled or blistered, silver dollars of skin coming off with drenched socks soaked in blood. Wet feet had lost wars, and this one was no exception.

  Mammals didn’t even need to join the fray from their perch at the top of the chain. Grunt tales told of wild boars and a rogue tiger occasionally taking scalps from both sides, but they didn’t factor in the grand grind of material attrition, only weighing in on occasional nights of specialty death when gibbons in the high branches and muntjac sniffing through the leaves could sound like anything and everything the mind feared.

  Whatever the percentage, the combination of the wilderness war machine could lay low a battalion before anyone with guns even showed up. A
nimalia and Plantae doing the jab and cross with an unlimited store of energy, and motivation that predated recorded time.

  No one with guns showed up in the Laotian jungle for five days, and by the end of the fifth, the rigors of the elements without a clear end game in sight to keep them focused and moving forward wore the men down like spent wind-up toys, the keys in their backs turning one last time before they came to a stop. Chapel felt the exhaustion of the men, and sensed the growing frustration, and called to shut it down for the night an hour earlier than the previous two days. To the men, it felt like a holiday.

  They bedded down in what passed for a clearing. Broussard arranged his hooch next to a small alcove in a rock escarpment pushed up from the damp ground, then set out to find Chapel before his body put his mind to sleep. He found him at the far end of camp, tending a fire built in the wet gap of a tangle of huge gray tentacle roots billowing out from a massive Australian fig tree that rose above him, standing vigil. Chapel poked at the flames with a metal rod, watching the sparks jump before being smothered by the damp air. Soldiers didn’t see many fires out in the bush, due to lack of dry fuel, concerns about visibility, and a host of more mundane issues, but Chapel had conjured one out of the mud like a gun-barrel wizard. The roots seemed to writhe and move in closer to Chapel as Broussard approached. Tricks of the tired mind. Ruse of the jungle.

  “Where’s Morganfield?” Broussard said.

  “What can I do for you, Specialist Broussard?”

  Broussard paused, weighing out a portion of delicacy. “I just wanted to tell you that the men are getting a little…”

  Chapel waited for him to continue.

  “A little restless.”

  “They nominate you to come tell me?”

  “No, sir.”

  Chapel ruminated, watching the fire. “I know they are,” he said.

  “They want to know where we’re going.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “You going to tell them? Tell us?”

  Chapel dug the rod deep into the flames, poking metal into the mud underneath it, striking one of the roots. “Do you like poetry, Specialist Broussard?”