Was true—terror, despair, knife-edge severing all. No hiding place.
Make it gone.
No keep on truckin’—out of chants. Out of weeping. Lost the word Mom. Others too. Almost, almost had a lock on meadow. No need to recall bleak. It’s there, uprooting him. So few fragments of communication to embrace.
Sits. Silent. He’s drifting, beyond sorrow, beyond hopes. An animal lost in the wilds of now.
Now. Succumbing to the bludgeon of cold.
No sailor. No adventurer. No one along to survive. No one could there be.
Silent.
Now.
Degraded, every nerve, every instinct. Sleepy depths beyond half-mad, stripped of sensibilities, and can’t hang on to the touch of human.
Now.
Only the cold white fire.
Alone.
One hundred degrees below zero. Wind that left no whisker of a trail.
“Wind.”
Whip with no thrift. Blowing all bare … and dumb.
“Cold.”
Greater than any god. Blind to pleas for once, or curses to circumstance.
COLD
. Burns cheeks. Closes the pages of hands. Cultivating nothing. Pressing on. Sledgehammer. Fangs in the cloister of flesh and within. Cold that reads no crucifix or scripture. No pity. No melt. Tide that paralyzes rhyme and fact, nulls accuracy.
Loose gone.
Breast hollow of need. Parts of him, no more
take it
to pour over tortured, stiff after the negative of give up, barred from the dance of sensation.
Dreamlike in this grave, his few starts and shapes and all worth gone from his tongue. Nothing resonant, nothing to depend on.
Cracked, but didn’t surrender. Tried to press on until his heels couldn’t release him from hobbled, from the blinding white construction.
Bombarded and denied. He never endorsed this with syllables, or thought. Frenzy, fear, and grieve as the thief left no room for next. As it took.
A little at first. Lips and toes—got in and under, the prowler moved block to block. Increments. Thighs. Inner, deeper, the cannonball warlord leapt. Took away wings. Took sense. Wasted. Froze nature’s order. Grew.
Coming apart. His streets, once round as sacred sun-choir calling, now quiet of even halfheartedly, some now dead, the others dying, but not quick enough.
The white fire burns.
White blinds.
Melted from the external world he can’t see the sled. Can’t tell if the dogs are still there.
Cold holds. Takes skill from the hand. Takes little plans from the mind. Replaces got with slavery.
No next. No possible.
Whirlwind pulled awareness’ oars from the water.
“Fucking … cold.”
Mom believed in a Loving God. Eternal love too. Compassion. Gently …
Her cherry pies. Oozing. Still warm … Wasn’t even stern when I brought the bees in the kitchen … Butter … Make your tongue soar on songs of bliss.
America.
There was a sundial in Nic’s dad’s yard.
Big yellow moon too. That wasn’t a mirage … Was a masterpiece.
I. I
… “like tomatoes.”
Little salt … mayo. On toasted rye.
Put your feet up and climb into sleep in front of the TV.
Fifty trillion cells in this shell and each feels like a crystal of ice.
Ice.
WHITE
. Pure white.
No strength for desperate. Nothing out loud.
Knew he’d never survive without shelter.
Nothing left to concede.
blurry
blinking
Doesn’t change the throttling
WHITENESS
.
pain
curling up
End this.
Called them shoggoths. They came out of the door. Rushed—no snarling. Took. Took Sinclair and Dickey. Both. Panic. Seized. Yelped. Screamed, started to, as their consciousness was gnawed by madness … Lost toes, desire—They all screamed as they died …
Shoggoths.
One of the few things they knew from the documentation.
So little they understood. Fragments, not the magnitude, no time to take it all in. Barely enough time to begin to calculate. Jammed—they shot—ran—dropped every rule mother and science and church had instilled—scattered—tried to retreat—shot and shot and cursed chance and risk, the mistake that spilled blood, at the terrible fury that did not growl as things were shred—ran—dropped the guns that had no strength left in them—ran—but not fast enough—lost their heads—
Died.
Connelly … And Jeanrenaud—John-Claude’s broad shoulders—his equations and procedures—
”Glory, my friend”
—no face …
Shoggoths—
Pitiless wind stops. Dead hush.
Still snowing too hard to allow sky.
Drowned in the stampede of cold and ice-blind he does not notice the absolute silence. Thrown far from the nest of sober reason sees no chance.
Drowsy.
Can’t—
the burn violently ending another thought before it becomes whole.
Sputtering.
Disabled. Running out of things for yearning to reach for. One hand dead. Useless after losing its mitten.
Cold. Empty and it will not change the mountain that barred any escape.
Head down. Beyond madness, wrecked by a thing with no philosophy. Explain with no place to stand. Body out of hill and breath, fields that cannot paint color as they shrink under bitter. Horse standing in the rain, waiting for it to pass, but he knows cold and its inferno will not pass. Not while his shell—a crumb of error, numb—and all it contained burns to rubble.
Caught in finished. Over soon, then he won’t have to care, won’t be torn by fool. Will never stare at ruin again.
Ruin. Blackened prison reducing all to rubbish.
Looks at the brittle hand of an inmate, never hold a cigarette again … Just a thing now. An appendage.
Frozen meat in a land where meat was scarce.
“Do they eat?”
Dark power from the deep crypts. Dark forever—
Black.
Things
.
Shapeless.
Unrelenting—
Coming.
One shot left in the rifle. His fingers, like his eyes and the corners of his mouth, are thick with ice. Can’t position it to finish things.
“Call them.”
Let them come.
Silence the white fire. Put an end to the irrevocable.
Worn out. Snowblind. One scream would call them.
Opens his mouth—
Let the
BLACK FIRE
consume him
(
after Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”
)
H
ERE’S HOW SECLUDED THE PROFESSOR WAS
. F
ROM THE AIRPORT
outside Marseille I took a taxi to the mid-city train station, and there I bought a ticket for Arles, where I boarded the Avignon-bound bus, from which I disembarked on two-lane blacktop between parched alfalfa fields. The driver, who had a postcard of a cicada taped to his dashboard, was adamant that Domaine St. Jude was two or three kilometers down the unpromising byway before me. I never did resolve whether the road was paved or not, because nothing but rounded tips of tawny stones broke the monotony of pale impacted dust. Let the record moreover state, I had to negotiate this trying geography under the handicap of stupefying jetlag, after eight-hour flight from JFK.
Before I’d trudged the first kilometer, I was pleased as ever I’d been with my dedication to traveling light. A backpack tidily under the weight limit for carry-on was it for these two weeks abroad. All the same, the straps were chafing my shoulders raw, and sweat had fused the flimsy cotton shirt to my back. Sycamores and pines and a smattering of palms flanked my route, though arid drainage gullies on both sides kept shade at a maddening remove. And the August sun was merciless, like a scouring pad abrading my scalp. Worse yet, mean, sporadic gusts whipped road grit into my oily face, like drafts from a cindery furnace.
The cicadas, at least, liked the climate, to judge by the welter of buzzing that waxed and waned in the foliage like phantom power tools sawing through one phantom branch after another. It made a fitting soundtrack to my fatigue and dehydration, and on the verge of cursing the heat aloud and deliriously, I plodded into a crossroad and found my second wind. Ahead on the right was a rusty wrought-iron crucifix atop a truncated brick pyramid, just as the fax had described. This ordeal was near its end! A scant hundred yards would bring me to the dilapidated gaggle of several farmsteads dignified as Domaine St. Jude, a name absent from Rand McNally atlas and highway signage. The closest village on Institut Géographique National maps was Boulbon, where the épicerie must have put a fax machine at the professor’s disposal.
In the year since his retirement and retreat to native precincts, he’d forsworn phone and e-mail and even pen and paper, so when the secretary at the department called about his message for me, I was elated, although his excited mélange of French and English also mystified and worried me a little.
Someone he claimed I had to meet was
“à la maison,”
and he beseeched me to come
“vite! Aussitôt que possible!”
This someone he then referred to as
“quelque chose incroyable,”
and with me alone was he comfortable sharing this incredible something. Henceforth he would be incommunicado, but guaranteed he’d always be home to welcome me, and “don’t fail to catch the soonest plane you can.
Une farce cosmique!
The dogma has exploded.” He signed off, as was his custom, “Take care. Do not hope too much. I’m sure it will be all right.”
And here I was, silently mouthing those words at the head of his bramble-lined driveway, drawn by friendship and concern and, yes, some twinge of obligation. Thanks to his influence at the Life Sciences Department I’d stepped into his tenured shoes, and couldn’t very well repay him now by ignoring his urgent summons.
I was punchy to the point of mistaking an oversized shed for the main house, understandably insofar as it boasted a residential-looking tile roof and mortared walls and green louvered door. I knocked twice before noticing a more substantial candidate for a home up ahead; and unlike the shed, it had windows, from one of which a pair of goggle eyes, distinctly not the professor’s, was studying me. A querulous voice, also not the professor’s, loosed a babel of syllables toward the interior of the house.
I hadn’t marshaled the strength to move when Hervé Bayard bounded outside, in cool vanilla linen shirt and trousers, sensibly seasonal but almost alarmingly loose, as if he’d shed too many pounds. With his perennial vitality he shook my hand and hugged me and thanked me profusely for indulging an old coot. I was still hemming and hawing a semicoherent reply in French as he staggered backward and turned aside to expel a slew of wracking coughs. He waved away my concerns for his health, which only grew upon observing twin inflamed swaths, of a finely granular texture, along his ocular orbits.
I was in no shape to comment on these tactfully, and anyway the professor was escorting me to a side yard and a rickety square table, with a hole drilled into it for a parasol. He put up the parasol, of the same buttery yellow as the table, and bid me sit while he disappeared into the house and dispensed instructions about readying dinner and guestroom, to which he received the somber Provençal assent,
“Très bieng.”
He reappeared with a tray containing a bowl of reddish olives, a liter of pastis, a pitcher of water, and a pair of shot glasses.
“Relax and be refreshed,” he prescribed, and though hard liquor after roughly twenty-four hours on the go sounded counterproductive, what the hell. I was running on fumes already. Adding distilled fumes might even help. Hervé clucked in mock reprimand as I raised the drink to my lips without remembering to add water. Then he quizzed me on my arduous journey and stateside current events and a year’s worth of campus gossip. Baffling how my explosive reason for crossing the Atlantic had apparently slipped his mind, but I was tired beyond bringing that up, and the pastis hadn’t even begun to hit me yet.
Presently the sturdy owner of the goggling eyes addressed the professor from the doorstep. She was dressed in modest, stifling black woolens, and a black Spanish comb clenched thin gray hair away from coarse-grained face. I garnered from the decipherable snatches of her idiom that dinner was served. To me she remarked, in plainer French, “It is always better the second night.” She ducked back inside.
“That is Clairette,” Hervé explained as he set our half-empty glasses beside the untouched olives on the tray, and picked up the tray. “She was here when I signed the lease. I cannot find a way to dismiss her.” He shrugged resignedly. “And why should I, really?”
We ate cold pork roast and stewed apricots with reheated ratatouille at a worn oak table in the kitchen. It was sweltering, and I wished in vain for the wherewithal to ask politely if this house didn’t have a better-ventilated dining room.
Clairette leaned against the gaping iron crevasse of a sink and occasionally swabbed her craggy brow with a dishrag. During a lull in our small talk, she made a rapid-fire announcement, which the professor rendered in English. “Clairette says you are in luck. No doubt you were annoyed by the marin, the hot wind, as you walked from the bus, but her bones tell her the mistral is due tonight, and that brings the fresher weather.” I thanked Clairette for the encouraging forecast. She regarded me blankly as if my French were gibberish. Then she prepared us a cutting board of bread and cheeses and a platter of peaches and pears and bananas.
I finally contrived an opening to say what needed saying. “Where is this incredible houseguest you were dying for me to meet? Why isn’t he eating with us? Is he all right?”
“He is taken care of.” The professor wasn’t normally evasive, and that dismayed me as much as his recurrent coughing spells and the pebbly rash beneath his eyes. “In good time,” he amended more affably. “Soon, if you are not too weary from your long trip.” He smiled hospitably and poured us more pastis.
With the heels of his hands against the tabletop, Hervé laboriously boosted himself from his chair after we’d finished our third glass, or was it our fourth? “Let us get you situated before anything else,” he advised.