by Robin Wyatt Dunn.
You have deep water: it could be down anything. The cicadas, the thick humid air above the marsh leading to the ocean. These reeds. The murder only suspected, not fulfilled, moving over the house just some yards distant. A distant and forgotten field. The sound of the rain.
I walked some hundred miles to see her again but then I remembered she is long dead. But that is not the story I wanted to tell. It is a story about a house sunken into the river that is itself sunken into the land, long ago before there were men here, or not the kind of thing we would call men.
When I was a boy, in some other life. When I could still dream. Men think they control the world—or some do. But it is the water: it drips and dreams and we ride its waves, even when it is swamp, as here.
As when the ocean becomes us in death.
You have these riders over the marsh: sweet occidental lichen. Washing slow against the marsh water. The smell of the open corpse.
I could tell you where I have been. But it is my job only to inform you of where I am now. There are other important things but I only have so much time.
There is a color of the lichen: really I only mean the marsh vegetation. But it grows like over a rock. Like rock was water. Or water rock. The deep sweeping kind of the rock who is water, set right at your feet. A sweet, pungent green like a teenaged girl, not long into her menses, who is rioted by the music in her feet, unable to stop herself from falling in:
Yes maybe we could all be that corpse. But now that you are with me I am shy. Still, I promise I will tell you everything you need to know.
– –
The electric current runs sideways for some hundred miles and then jerks up, a python, starring the air with his music, right where the house used to stand. Mayhap it was a lounging station, or roadhouse, perhaps even a launchpad. People think it was only a kind of country house. I think it was all of them, in a way we are no longer capable of understanding.
You think space comes from the feet but I say it comes from the head: the way dreams do. This is how we are invaded. Not from the sky but from sleep. When we awaken we bring back the ghosts who long to live here—and still do. It may be I am one of them. How am I to know? Still, I feel real enough.
But in a way it doesn’t matter if aliens invaded—as though you could claim not to be an alien. As though you could claim hegemony. These are poor substitutes for the reality of the marsh, who is indifferent to all such posturings. The humiliation is gentle, in a way: it reminds us we only came to stand by the water. No matter how many legs or arms we have. We all come here to die.
– –
She lay five meters below the water. In the white dress, as is customary. Preserved as a river boat is: a monument born out of neglect. But even she is only a passing shade: still the house is more important. But I know you are curious about her. But don’t be: she is only another demon. That’s what houses are: homes for us shades to live in for a while and then lapse into the great black fog of the earth.
Say you were building a roadhouse. You think of the timber and stone and lights and shambles, acacia trees for the pricking of thumbs and the music, of course. All important. But in its Nazca foundation you will find true memory, as in:
Why did you begin on the road. Why did you follow this woman here. Why is the sky the color it is now. Why did you dream of this place. Why are you a man.
Well honey if I knew that well then I could tell you. Aren’t you sweet. But that is not what I wanted to say. I apologize. I wanted to say only: I don’t know. But I feel like I know. So that’s what I’m gonna tell you.
The house is gone but I need you to understand what the location means. Glued into the rock. Glued in by time.
The sky is water too. Long into a flood. The soil is sandy. The woman’s hand is wet with sweat. The mosquitoes whine and you hit one with your hand, bringing up blood.
“Let’s set a piece and have our lunch,” she says, and you do. The way that a condemned man will force his mouth to chew in the interests of harmony with nature, though you are not long for it.
“I dreamt of this place too,” she says, “when I was still a girl. I was born just a few miles down, in a place called Marsdale. And quit that, by the way, you thinking I’m a ghost. I’m no more a ghost than you. Anyway, I knew this place was here even when I was five. I used to stand here looking at it, like you.”
Her hand is warmer now and so is the sun, and the tuna in my belly is turning into rot.
“I’m sorry I came,” I find myself saying.
But she is long gone under the water. The house is only a ruin. I myself am still standing, and able to walk, which I do, slow coursing the changing grasses around the estuary. Like a piton in the crevasse, I am standing to know how deep the earth can run.
Yes, it was a station. I wish I could see what kind. Not quite the elegant 19th century style: it feels to me more like the Renaissance variety. And we had a Renaissance here too in America though the books do a poor job of recording it—though some do. And we had native kings whose names no longer stand. Perhaps this was the work of one of them—I think so.
Southern Kings. It sounds like a cigarette brand. It sounds like the sound I will make when I die, a kind of wheeze. It must have been the nature of the weapon to hit here: to wrench out of the hand all thought of music, while you continue to make it anyway, a king of puppet.
Southern Kings. But this was not King’s Road. Because it preceded any thought of kings too, before the sky had been erected, and when the water was still fresh and new and cut into the rock, and the lights stood empty over the plain, in the black expanse.
A dropship moor. Yes moor is appropriate for it would be moored both in sky and sea. A meeting of the horizon in the form of a gas station. A park bench. An awning and a sarsaparilla seller. Who knows how long we have been drinking that? A thousand years. Maybe longer.
You think you know a thousand years but you don’t. You think you know a generation but you do not. For even a year—I’m sure you’re familiar with this—can take a very long time. Or a day or an hour.
Still it is just a southern marsh ruin. Aliens built it, or just some card sharps feeling homely who wanted a taste of home cooking before they took their final trick.
– –
Almost I am ready to tell it. Because it was I who killed this place. Took out its life and squeezed it between my fingers until it burst. I who drive in the spikes to moor the land to the water in these tattered rips. Like a sorcerer will course his beard through wine, and his hand through the electric air.
I who called in the armaments to make what was a station into southern rot. You think you know the story but you do not. So I could tell you any one of them and make you believe it. That is the tragedy of the south: not too many stories but too few. All crowded together to make room, and taking it away in the process.
I told the gods to strike this place into oblivion.
I can still hear the piano, its ghostly electric hand tracing over the keys . . .
But I am not damned. I am only permitted to visit. Good behavior.
Here is where we can walk around the water. Here is where we can climb in the boat, to stare down at the women’s faces, locked in their shame beneath the dark and fertile water.
Here is the sound of the playfield, stretched out over the trees.
Here is why I came.
It isn’t a history lesson but I see they’ll make me make it into one. It shouldn’t be so. Names and places and dates are not the point but the feeling is. For the feeling will lead you into the deeper truth, of how you came to be here. And what the Nazca line is telling you.
The Nazca lines are cut into the rock. They are not only Peruvian. On some grass will grow, to mark the line. On some grass will not grow, to mark the line. Or, as here, water will fill it. They were the circuits that powered this Earth, and still do. And they are themselves the vestiges of an older history, from before men came to live here.
I don’t know if the ghost women below the water were human, though they appear so to me. They serve as a figure for the necessity of it, in the cordoning off of the place from public view. Here, step kindly, right out of the breach, into the marsh:
– –
Squish. It’s only three foot down. Like a fancy spa bath. The smell of the wild onions and the breeze and honeysuckle. The sound of the dogs running out your name.
Cut forty thousand miles across the surface of the planet. Cut deeper too, to draw power. Put in your posts and lines, erect trains, and waiting rooms, and harps and drays. Draw your water. Hew your timber. Mark your lines and set in to wait as a hunter for your quarry: ape men out of the trees.
Set in and mark to wait the color of the world come out of your ears, to shape this coming: the fountains and parades and all a harvest in time for your kingdom, who were here not at first, and not at last, but early enough to know the benefit of laying in an early claim and defending it, the way a peculiar restroom thief might jealously guard his particular graffito writ on one corner of the crowded wall in thick red pen, you too: this is your legacy self-made.
American Kings, American Slaves. Tartary Waters.
The water is rising over your head, and so clutch the skeletal hand of the woman who is waiting for you, down in the reeds:
For each kingdom carries with her a drowned kingdom, as a good Southern family carry with them a ghost, who does not always want to move addresses when the time has come to leave for chance or war or simple indignation.
Her face blue and black against the green dimness. Down below where the lines are so clear. Both clear and not: some of the cutting you can see, like light through dust, and then others are just felt, a demon road to some other star.
You laugh at transmigrations of the soul and electric vivification as some old nursery rhyme in fabled waystations of yore: those stupid Victorians and Edwardians, etc. But what you know is that we survive on their legacy, and we less grand than them. We the ruin know only our own arrogance, and not what was torn away from us.
Still, it does not matter that I did it. Perhaps I am even lying: a servant of this place even now like the dead women, to keep the place alive in my serving of it, standing by the water and sinking down below it, to spin tales of its antiquity.
Perhaps I am a kind of device myself, set into the rock like the Nazca, to spin every traveler who traverses this concourse a tale out of birth-time to charm ears both fresh and old of the horror who is time, when it comes to make solid beams and halls out of the dust.
– –
Lie with me beneath the water. Feel it spinning overhead. Being dead is like dreaming, you know that: you can see the colors as much as feel them. The voices are only colors in the sound, washing gentle beneath your head.
The sound is only a color of the space in your head, where we will lie together in silence before the beginning of the world.
Now, hear the sound of her engines:
Didn’t you know the world is a kind of machine? She spins and we gin our motors, like good farm machinery, ready to do the harvest:
This many women. This many colors of sky. Your skeletal hand in mind.
This naked stretch of rock. This beach.
This southern town, blasted out of history. I who laid in the targeting mechanism. I who stand a southern gentleman, in a time now erased.
Even the regalia were wired. The epaulettes transmitting. But that is not important. People shame you for being a cargo cult? It is a beautiful thing. One day your wooden AK47 shall become real and I will be there to see it if I can, and shake your hand.
“I . . .” but it seems she is finished talking.
I think I will come back. I only wanted to say hello. Come and see it; it is east of Houston Texas. Or that was one of its names. You can find it by its signal: some Mississippi Kingdom, who marked the land with his fulgurite to dredge up his ornery gold. Whose mud, though only incidental, tore our bodies in his wake.
The color of the rotting hulk is like dirty bone. Like a moorsman, washer of divines, countrymen of my own, come to rake his hand over waters hidden from the suns.