The Dig (ii)

In the months after the operation I wasn’t me. I’d lay there in the black, heart palpitating wildly,  thoughts cluttered with vague, non-descript notions; sending and receiving the same remote feelings back and forth, over and over. What was I trying to feel? I’d heard it said – that this was the age of ghosts or something like that. Everything in the gut. But inherited. Like one ghost. So all symbol. And yet – all meaningless. But why? Because it wasn’t real?

I

A dot-to-dot of blood and guts. The anatomy of a thousand disembowelled flies. And not a working windscreen wiper in sight.   

The miles rolled by, one into another; the onrushing wind drying the dead splodges faster than we could remove them. 

Handicapped from the very beginning. 

No hints, no pathways.

No indication of a starting point.

When the petrol stations disappeared, we cursed one another. When the wipers died, we cursed some more. By the time the car followed, we just shrugged. There were no lights anywhere, anyway. We had walked thereafter, single-file, nothing to say for want of already having said it.

I always remember how we found it - or it found us - by chance, pushing through the branches till we had come to an opening.

Everything all at once.

At the edge of the clearing, some two-hundred by a hundred or so yards, were trees. They wandered off in all directions, smothering the things about them, extending beyond sight. Those closest to the clearing bent at their base.

In the half-light, a broken-down wire fence snaked a square around the quiet.

At the back, before the furthest embankment, looking quite out of place, were two stone structures; parts brick and branch.

 We slept in the smaller of the two that night. I couldn’t wait to strip down. You travel that far for that long, you’re glad for some stillness. Don’t recall a great deal after I’d climbed into my sleeping bag, either; something like serenity; while outside, in the impenetrable nearness, the movement of a stream.

The first morning was the worst: back out of place, throat backed-up, same dampness around the groin.

Going the way of a fucking baby.

He was up before me. Didn’t need to look where he’d slept - it would be spotless. I looked, all the same.

It was spotless.

I dragged myself, cursing, up and into the light.

What you think, he said, before clearing something in his throat.

I think we relied on that piece of shit too much.

It’s a big coincidence though.

Nothing on the map about those.

When my eyes had adjusted I saw that Manny was in his boiler suit, same as always.

Stained to shit.

Under its blue lapel was a name, pressed in plastic. He had a whole bagful and it changed every day.

That day it was Manny.

Mexican Manny.

    Was Manny Mexican?

 I never asked. I didn’t care.

What time do you reckon it is. 

God knows - late afternoon? 

He was looking up towards the grey. 

I miss it already, I heard myself say.

We had hopped and skipped across the bridge as best we could and rolled off the edge into the waters below.

 Mo stayed. Never really had the legs for it. A fine mouth on him, but not the legs. I shut my eyes and imagined missing the rocks below.

II

The scattered shapes of yesterday we now saw to be strewn rocks and wood.

The buildings, too, were different; larger and emptier in the new light. Both were bare inside, with soil where floors might have been. On closer inspection, they were breezeblock. One could see gaps where the filler had fallen away, with chips on the edges where they had taken to crumble. For some reason, they had been licked with a – by now dry - lacquer, maroon green, giving the effect of constant wetness. The smaller building looked to have seen the greater action; for piled up at the furthest wall, where we had slept, were banded scores of wood – bamboo. And to the left of those, before the wall, sheets of corrugated steel, piled flat against the floor. In the area of the barn most shadowed by the canopy, were tools – a hammer, some spades – the wheel of a dismembered wheelbarrow. 

They were building, I said at last.

Or digging, he said.

Hidden among the trees, and reached by an abrupt descent beyond the western-most bank of the clearing, was the stream. Boulders of all sizes gorged on the hillside, fed by foliage and unseen hands. We arrived in the bottom of a pit, feet away from a world of disappointment, watching as the piss-weak stream plunged, almost apologetically, into reeds and low-hanging leaves, the bulk of which clouded from view what was almost certainly a marsh.

Fuck, I said. And then, 

You’d think there’d be bigger pools up-river. 

Manny, on the edge of where the slush began, peeled back some of the long grass. I peered over his shoulder to see what he saw: stranded trees stretched out in muggy water; a few greens, a few greys and then dark. I couldn’t tell where it went or where it ended.      

No sausages, no fish, he had said, looking around.

Ever eaten fox? I asked, as we headed back to camp.    

Hunger followed us that night.

In search of something, anything,  we had made our way up the embankment and into the trees. Let me be clear: when I say anything, I mean anything other than liquorice.

It was so quiet up there.

 In fact, nothing to draw your attention but the quiet.

 The trees were grouped closely together and their leaves hung low and the only way we could make any headway was to move with our eyes shut and hands pushed out as feelers; hardly conducive to surprising a meal. At the point where the approaching dark made soil indistinguishable from leaves we made our way back; empty-handed, hungry.

At camp, the last of the liquorice swam headfirst into the heat. Sticky black strips of the stuff, foaming black into black. A far-cry from better days: sherbet bombs, jellied lips, gummy eggs, fizzy bottles, foam snakes, white mice, cherry colas, and anything else that could coalesce in a bag; showroom replica loaded with blanks in one hand, hard-boiled candy wrapper in the other.

 There’d been three of us back then, and she’d bled like a stuck pig.

 Nothing but remorse about the whole thing.

Fortunately, other more infinitely terrible things occupied the mind.

“Tomorrow, we’ll have a proper look; find the road and make a decision.”  

Manny smiled.

He already knew about us.

The following morning, the sun flush in our eyes, we began to dig.

Dug the colour out of our hands.

We didn’t have a timetable of operations or aught like that. How could we? We didn’t even really have ‘maps’. Just work as fast as you can. The squiggles and scratches underhand had likely been looked at a hundred times already anyway. At this point it was interpretation as much as anything.

A new language, then; read tired and dry-mouthed; its signs identified in haste, and not without doubt, as you flung yourself and a sack of biscuits onto the back of a speeding truck. You knew people worked things out and you knew squiggles didn’t have to be seen to be followed.

You know you didn’t have much time but couldn’t be sure how little was how much.

III

New things emerged every day, scattered around the clearing: scratched-out paper labels, a box of atrophied fabrics [jumpers, blankets, numerous groups of single shoes; puzzling, that one - a cardigan] – a muddy cap, and rope.

Rope. Frayed at the end. Smelt burnt.

It made you wonder, it really did.

Nights spent in the smaller building weren’t as cold as they might have been. The treetop roof shielded against the night, while thinned petrol and assorted CFC’s got us through the especially cold ones. Slow-burning heat was king; if you closed off your vents properly, you could be warm for days, didn’t even have to see the flames. Common sense, really.

The ‘river’, we learnt, existed in small tributaries prior to joining the main stream. The bits we could reach didn’t go past foot-level. There were no fish in any of it.

Most free-time was spent in the lower part. If you clung to the sides, you could dangle yourself in the swamp and on your way up rinse off in the stream plunging overhead. There was always a coolness there.

And something else.

Final proof of God’s desertion.

Served raw as a kind of sushi, one could extract a series of wildly disgusting tastes from the common slug. I’d broiled the bones of baby deer, washed out my mouth with the bloodied mucus of a window salesman’s wife and, later, ass, but nothing compared with the taste of sentient fat. Real meat was few and far between. Certainly, the further south you went, the less you encountered it. They were high in protein and high in fat. Tasted like ass, went down like dinner in reverse.

Some time in, Manny, still Manny - not unusual; when I met him, he’d been Mario for a full week- turned to me with the unthinkable:

Maybe she’s not here.

And why not? We’d found shit. Only the armour of exertion; my hands looked like maps in the evening sun.

I dropped my spade and fumbled for a cigarette.

A shrug between shoulders.

Some days it was him, others it was me.

All the while; the days passed around our little hideaway.

I should tell you about the lights.

In the day you couldn’t see them. The refracted prism of the sun nullified their glow. But at night, when the conditions were just right; sun reclining and clouds parted, winds swept back across the embankment; there they were. Way off in the forest.

It had taken awhile. And then he had seen them too.  

Over the coming days, we watched them appear and re-appear along different parts of the horizon, like pulse patterns thrown across a screen; never seeming to travel anywhere but where they’d already been. Some nights they looked so deep you would’ve sworn they were the insides of whole stars. And always they remained just beyond the point of total understanding. On the clearest nights, one could see spires on top. On the most windswept, one wondered if he was not really looking at lights but a gathering of flames flickering angrily towards the sky, the colours and shapes dilated in the breeze.

We sat there most nights, saying little. And there wasn’t a single night I wasn’t praying that we were right and it was real.    

IV

A deluge. I can’t begin to estimate how long it had been but I would hazard to guess a week. We’d carried on in the beginning; one scooping out water, the other working at sludge. But it was harder; each with his own role, and liberated in the worst way from collective responsibility. No amount of swapping eased the load. At the point where the mud started to slide back into the hole and settle around our bodies we beat a retreat. No sooner had we done so that the waiting mouth reclaimed the last mounds of its stomach.

Inside the barn was sticky and hot.

Time slowed to a crawl.

We tried to busy ourselves as best as we could. At Manny’s suggestion, we gathered up all of the loose bamboo and shaved it, to a cane, along a rough gradient. Then we arranged the canes into a semi-triangle and dragged a sheet of the shanty steel across the top. A roof! And it even  functioned as planned, with water gathering at the entrance. We spent many hours and days under the roof, bathing in our collective glory, while the torrent beat on an endless repeat above. From time to time a runaway puddle would outgrow itself and surge into the barn, where one of us could be found cross-legged, sports-casual; nonchalantly beating it back with one hand and a broom; or depending on its size and momentum, leaping up entirely from under the shelter to smash with reckless abandon.

In the dark I was at my worst. I did things I shouldn’t have; ugly things. Things I’d done before. Sometimes he’d twitch and cough. Of course, I’d pretend I was sleeping. But it wasn’t unusual to carry on.   

Didn’t think about food much either. There were ways of forgetting. Take stagnation, for example. Just sitting there. Under the rain and rot; the irreversible reek of days.

For a while there was a Game – short-lived and played in the worst of spirits. To the victor went the spoils - just as soon as he’d unpicked his face of pine needles. No logic at all.

   In actuality, we seldom left the barn, and only ever for slugs. Manny was the king of their capture; the stuff of nightmare. He mocked my returns, and only boasted harder when I said the two had much in common. And I cannot really complain; his long forays into the wild afforded me a certain space and time in which to gather my thoughts and one true organ in a single place  

One morning he outdid even himself.

“They love the rain”, he had said, dropping a bag by my feet. 

Inside were slugs, close to a hundred. 

And that’s when it began:

A season of taste tests flavours beyond the call of duty. We sprinkled them with crushed stones and weeds, wrapped them in leaves with bark and mud and rain. At one point – I can’t remember when - we tried to get them to fight and even created a currency from stones (the greater the ridges, the greater the value) but slugs do not fight, in fact they barely seem to acknowledge one another, and anyone who says otherwise is being insincere.

V

Looking back, it feels like forever, but perhaps it was just a week. The sky lightened and the rain thinned - long enough to leave the barn and assess the camp. The water had stripped away and drowned much of the grass. Like an all-over cricket crease. Much of the apparatus we had intended to use in the hole – pickaxe in case of rocks; several square, branchless logs I had cut at Manny’s suggestion for later use as beams, had washed up in different areas of the camp. At one side we came across some boxes. They must have been in the other barn and escaped our attention because I didn’t recall having seen them before. They were small, real small: two or three inches in length; one -one and a half in diameter. Looked to have been fashioned from some kind of treated wood because they still had that plastic-y shine. On what I would call the topmost side of each was some design, rendered into the surface of the wood, now colourless and identified only by the side-on outline of what appeared to be two women facing one another. I supposed they were cigar boxes. There was nothing in either.

The hole, we saw, had expunged much of its fluid and, when pressed, felt soft to the touch.  It was just a case of scooping away the sludge that had returned, and then digging into the damp beyond.

With the digging resumed and no timeframe for our work, a rota was devised:  shifts; night and day  

The arrangement had its perks. No Manny. Regular sleep. But it was lonely, too; just me and a spade. I’m sure Manny felt the same. After a while I saw the stripped cycle of Time - life as a spoke-less bicycle wheel spinning between unalterable cycles of digging and not digging. Sometimes I heard things, sometimes I saw things. It was not uncommon when lost in these spinning cycles of Time to see things moving around the corners of one’s eye; little things, things consciously wanting to go unseen.

The lights, meanwhile, were never as bright as when the arriving chill froze the soil in the ground, taking the leaves of the trees with it.  

The contrast changed from a deep and oily aurora of yellow to something brighter and less-contained. They arrived earlier each day and I’d zone out in the uncertainty. Manny told me of a dream he’d had: something about a sun falling out of a sky. I told him that it was hardly original and wasn’t very high on logic. Of course, I was privy to the same dreams, but who wouldn’t be in conditions like those?

It’s moving at an alarming rate, he said looking ahead.

Maybe we’re in the right place, after all. 

Maybe we’re fucked either way. 

No shit. I said.   

Each night they got brighter and brighter. And then one night you could see beyond them. And then the next you could see further.

And one day they were gone.

And they didn’t return. Not the next day, nor the day after.

I’d hoped it would be relieving, but it was almost sad seeing further.

They were never as bright as then, when the wind made whistles of every hollowed symbol in sight. 

There was less to say after that. Almost nothing. It had been a distraction. That’s what I told myself. They had slowed us down. I told myself that, too. Everything changed. The hole began to grow faster than before, hungrier than ever.

To facilitate its growth, a ladder was constructed from branches and folded bits of corrugated steel. The effort outgrew our plans. Every day or two we would extend the ladder a little further. 

Slugs were harder to come about in winter so we laid traps using the sugar from our pit of collected sachets. Unable to resist the trail of dreams, they would fall, or rather slide leisurely, into a dish of their own making: candy slug. It’s true to say, however, that most probably died out in the cold. Still, the trap takes credit for serving as a siren to their sugar tooth. Do slugs have teeth? I assume they do, the way they eat leaves.

Before long, we were eating our slug-leaf dinners in the hole; talking when it got too quiet, barely moving when the quiet was all our own. 

The logical conclusion was a joint one.   

“If we just place the tarpaulin over the hole, we can sleep in here. The work will do itself.” 

“We’d only have to leave the hole for shits, food, dumping the soil, and ladder bits. The rest would be digging and sleeping. We’ll find the body in no time!” 

It was a productive time and I was even able to construct a pulley system for dumping the soil which relied on first filling a bag fashioned from diced sand sacks and then levering it up along a network of vines. It worked well enough to consider a triumph. Of course, we didn’t ever discuss it in those terms.   

Sometimes we forgot to eat, other times the idea of actually climbing the ladder to raid our sticky sugar slug traps for the ever dwindling number that actually got stuck seemed a pointless waste of energy. How much drive and time was wasted curing, cooking and consuming them anyway? And weren’t they just parcels of fat? And wasn’t fat the reason your sister had skipped school?

So they became something of a treat, collected in bulk when one could be bothered or was already out on the surface dismantling the barns for serviceable ladder parts, which was seldom, in itself, as we had heaps of useable junk, much of it interchangeable between functions.

On the morning we stopped adding to the ladder. Manny, half way up en-route to the surface, had paused before shouting down to me,  

“Hey, I was just thinking; if we find the body tonight, we won’t need to extend the ladder tomorrow.”  

It was sound reasoning.

Right up to the point when we didn’t find it.

“You know, there’s still the earth-bag. I reckon it could get one of us out, and he could spring for the other up there, somehow”. 

It was a reasonable suggestion, particularly as the soil we were sending up likely weighed more than the two of us combined. Hope returned, we laboured on in the earth’s damp chest, digging deep past black lungs; feeling for a heart with each shake of a spade. 

The days grew wider, seeming to hang a little longer in the sky; a confidence thing, maybe.

“When this is all over, I’m going to write a book”, Manny proclaimed aloud one morning.

“A book? About this?” I asked.

“Nah, about an Italian soldier in love with a nurse”.

I told him it was a book I’d dearly love to read and that when we found the body and got out I’d love nothing more than to help him research the lives of Italian soldiers and nurses.

“No! No!” he cried,  

“The nurse isn’t Italian –  

She might be French”.

I paused, felt the warm sting of tears on my cheek.

“It’s beautiful,  

“If you don’t write that book, I swear to God I’ll crack your head open with a rock”.

We laboured on; for the book as much as the body. 

(There must have been a point where we stopped looking to the sky because)  

The hole got darker.

In the months when we had first moved down, I had looked up to the light at every opportunity, remembering, or at least trying to remember, how certain things felt; but time spent looking at soil will turn your eyes to dirt.

The times I did look up, I only ever saw shadows cut against the light of the hole. They flitted back and forth like lights at a disco; circles, thin rectangles.

The last time it had happened; Manny had also been looking. 

“One of us should go up, and I think that person is you” he had said. 

As all things of consequence do, it came down to Rock-Paper-Scissors. 

ROCK>SCISSORS 

SCISSORS>PAPER  

SCISSORS>SCISSORS 

PAPER>ROCK 

My superior system of randomly selecting three options in a random sequence thoroughly shamed his inferior system of randomly selecting three options in a random sequence.

We hugged. 

The last I saw of Manny he was nearing the top of the hole, hoisted up in the arms of an Earth-Bag on its last legs, to meet whatever it was had made up those shadows.

The next I saw of him he was coming back down in the same Earth-Bag, the frayed cord in his hands.

Well? What did they say? 

What do you mean?

I mean, what did they say? 

That they’re going away. 

That’s it? 

And something else – slowly - as though the words were being fed through an ear piece. 

What, I asked impatiently. 

That we should keep digging, he said. 

Manny says he hates the taste of slugs. I hate it too. There’s no seasoning this far down. He refuses to eat. All the more for me I tell him, but I’m not that bothered; my ribs have gone away; something’s making me fat. He can’t find his name badges anywhere. They disappeared that time the heavens opened. It’s the sloped roof, I tell him. It was a stupid idea. But he’s too vain to understand. He shakes his head at the soil and mumbles the same tired shit. Sometimes I think he talks to the walls.

The handles on the spades are done for. They’re like big plates now. Hands feel fevered and itchy. Every day we clock in and every night we clock out. Nothing much has changed, in that respect. Every day I do the same things, I have no choice. Manny, too.

And every night I fumble around with the monster in my pants, feel it reaching out for the names in my pocket, circulating a different expression with every passing stroke.

There’s a new world coming and you’re gonna need all the faces you can carry.

Maybe my hands were always this dirty.

 Ha!