Time of the Locust (23 page)

The man looked at the boy, and more things faded while others became clear. “I used to be really good at shooting them with someone,” said the man. And here he tried to remember Manden's face but could not. “That was a long time ago. Do you shoot them too?”

The boy shook his head. “No, but I like to make lines with them.”

“Yeah? I used to hold it just like this.” The man curled an ashen index finger under and around his arched thumb. And he wondered why he could remember these things and forget others. “I used to park my favorite cat's eye—it had this mean green streak straight down the center—right here in this finger pocket. Then I'd look along this imaginary line in my head, you know, a line that went from my mind to my hand to my target. Then I would just will it there. I would just will it to happen. You know what I mean?”

Sephiri did not know what to say. He had never thought of willing something before. He was not sure if he had willed the World of Water or if it had always been there. He was not sure if the Land of Air could be willed into something else. He knew only what was and how he felt it should be.

“I'll bet you could do it, if you tried,” said the man.

The boy looked at the sea foam scattered about. “If I went back there, do you think I will see you again?”

The man watched the current move to and fro. While they talked, the boat had floated back toward the white, sandy shore. He thought about the song sound in the boy's voice and the something that looked back at him from the child's eyes. “Yes. I'll meet you here at this shore,” he said, pointing.

“What will we do?”

“Oh, I don't know. We can ask each other questions.” And one question surfaced in the froth of the man's mind, and his heart answered it:
Yes, this is the child.

“Really?”

The man was filled with the wonder of his thoughts. “Yes. But only the ones worth finding the answers to. Only the ones worth asking.”

The boy looked out over the water. The dolphin hadn't come, and the ocean would no longer take him to the Obsidians. This world had abandoned him. “No one understands me in the other place.”

“But we understand each other here, don't we?” The man smiled.

Sephiri stared at the smile, feeling doubtful. “But that's because we're in this place.”

“Maybe it's because you wanted to hear me, and I wanted to hear you.”

Sephiri thought of what the Great Octopus said about a voice waiting and wondered if it were really true and why this man could understand him but his mother could not. “I tried for a long time to get my mother to hear and understand me, but she doesn't,” he said.

The man nodded, and a solution to the boy's problem came to him without having to think about it. “You could try with your heart.”

“With my heart?” The boy looked around at the empty world. There was only the sound of the wind and the water. He looked back at the man. “What's your name?”

The man was silent for a long time. More things faded while others became clear. “The thing I was called . . . It seems like the longer I've been here, the more I'm forgetting those kinds of things. But I don't think that's something to worry about. What's important is who you are.” And here the man remembered the words “I am dead to you” but could not remember what they meant together.

“But how can you forget who you are?” asked Sephiri.

“You'll remember for me, won't you? The important parts of me. Besides, the only thing left I know that's real is my voice. And you.”

“Me too. But inside,” said the boy.

“Me too. Deep down inside,” said the man.

“My name is Sephiri.”

“I know.”

“Oh . . . but how?”

The man looked intently at the boy. “I knew you before you were born.”

Sephiri was filled with wonder. He looked back at the shore.

The man pointed to the low, rolling sand mounds. “It's OK to go back sometimes, you know. Sometimes that's the way through.”

They floated on and landed in the shallow waters of the shore. They sat together in the boat and looked at the dunes. The tide came in again, and Sephiri knew that the boat would soon float out again. He thought of the warm bed in his room. His stomach churned with hunger at the thought of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And there was the smell of coconut oil and cinnamon. Always. These were guilty comforts, and Sephiri was not proud that he had stopped to consider them in the midst of such a time of uncertainty. But maybe if he tried . . .

Sephiri got out of the boat and stood in the shallow water. He turned to the man. “But where will you go?” he asked.

“I don't know,” said the man, and he was not bothered by the thought.

Sephiri looked at the horizon. “There is a line,” he said, pointing to the beyond. “The Great Octopus once told me about it. He said it marks the beginning and ending of all things.”

“What is it like?” asked the man.

Sephiri shrugged. “The anglerfish are the only ones who have gotten close enough to guess. The dolphin told me the others were afraid. They said it's like a great mirror that goes on forever.”

“A mirror?”

“At least, that's what they said it looks like. But they didn't want to get too close.”

“Oh,” said the man, staring at the horizon. There was a distant humming sound. There was a sudden breeze, and the ocean ebbed and flowed.

The waves grew higher and chilled Sephiri's shins. “Will you go there?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” said the man.

“But what if you can't find the shore again? This place is a big place.”

“Call to me, and I'll follow your voice.”

“You'll hear me?”

“I promise.”

And so the boy turned to go, and the man watched him walk over the sand and disappear.

Promises

T
he locust eggs continued incubating and birthing, and each new clan tunneled its way to the surface, prepared to live and die in this way, generation after generation . . .

Horus watched his son vanish from his sight, and it was a long time that he sat in the boat staring at the place where the little one had been standing just a moment ago. He was filled with an indescribable joy and longing. He distilled the sound of the boy's voice and imprinted the little brown eyes, pensive and wide, into his soul. These he would never forget. And he would remember the shore, this shore, always.

The tide rose higher still, and the boat headed out without being directed to do so. The sun once again moved across the sky. Horus sailed out on the water toward the line that the boy spoke of. Time melted into the waves. One moment was a day. One day was a lifetime. He lay down on his back in the little boat and looked up. The billowing sky lowered over him like a veil of chiffon, and it looked as if it was close enough to touch. He reached his hand up and felt the cool slip of atmosphere.

And then from afar, the locusts appeared. Horus heard them first, then he saw them in their countless multitudes roll closer and closer, a swarming, boiling mass. At last, they arrived above his head and hovered there. With their unremitting hum, the locusts spoke to him of the time of change, when today becomes yesterday and tomorrow becomes what is to be. They spoke of a universal law: life is a series of choices, and time is a series of lives. And when Horus had taken in all there was to take, when he absorbed the truth, both a poison and a cure, the locusts dispersed and were gone.

He sailed on.

The rays of the yellow sun warmed his head. He watched it move once more across the sky. One moment was a day. One day was a lifetime. Then he came to a place where the boat stopped of its own accord. Horus inched his head to the lip of the boat's side and looked down. Bright shimmering light rose from something below, blinding him. He sat up and leaned over the side of the boat for a closer look. There, reflected in a great mirror, he saw his face and his hunched back and his battered head. More of his memory faded, and other things became clear.

Horus looked deeper at his face in the water. “I promise,” he said to the reflection. “I promise to come back again, to start again.” And when he blinked in the awesome gleam, he saw a hawk, magnificent with plumes of black and gold. He would take this form, his heart decided. He would soar the sky. He would land on the shore when called by the boy that is him and not him. He would wait for the time when he could fly again.

Disappearing Acts

C
rowded deep in the earth, the locusts rubbed against one another and signaled exodus. And even the dormant incubating nymphs knew that they could no longer remain there . . .

Jimmy Eckert rode the elevator down to his lair. As he descended, the silence poured into him like a thick oil, filling his throat and plugging his ears. The kind of quiet he had grown accustomed to was a salve to the gratings his ears endured on the outside. The special silence in the Secured Housing Unit was something he learned to welcome, even miss, for he had neither patience nor use for the sounds of men outside of Black Plains, busy with futility, loud in nothingness.

The rodents made a special kind of noise that mixed with the silence, which he carefully observed for abnormalities. In fact, it was those times when the rodents were more talkative than usual that concerned him. Sometimes they even talked to themselves in different voices. He'd heard them before, among the sounds of the fallen. It was as if each changed voice was not just another voice but another person. Different personalities inside of a mind. There was this one rodent who spoke anxiously of his family being dead. Of course they were dead. He had killed them all. But the rodent had somehow blocked all of that out and talked only of a man in the shadows who was trying to do him harm, who was responsible for the atrocities to his family.

Jimmy Eckert learned as a boy that so many things happened for so few reasons, too few to matter. It was love, hate, redemption, revenge, or fate. There were infinite combinations, but the ingredients were always the same. Still, this rodent would chant over and over about how he had tried to protect his family, but now the shadow man was after him. The rodent's “friends” assured him, according to the rants he'd taken to just before they had to use the stun gun on him and put him in restraints, that they would help him, that they wouldn't let him down. His friends would accompany him when the time came to kill the man in the shadows. They would meet him at his end and help him understand what his life had been. “They haven't made it yet,” he would say at the end of his ravings. “But they'll be here.”

One day, when Jimmy Eckert looked through the slot of his door, he smelled something fouler than usual. Something dead. When he opened the door, he found the rodent on the ground next to the toilet. Staring at the body, Eckert wondered if he died in his hallucination, with the different parts of his self, his hated life, bleeding out of him. The inmate had smeared feces all over the cell and all over his body, before whatever happened had happened. This was not too great a shock to Jimmy Eckert, since he had seen more than one phantasm, and the worst that dreams could create. But what sent tremors through him was the look of the dead man. Bluish-gray and mouth agape, he looked like a different person. His hair was blond, not brown. The fingers were long and contorted in the pose of death, not the stubby nubs they had been before. Jimmy Eckert stared at the body, unable to move. And there again came the difficult questions with difficult answers. Who was this dead rodent on the floor, and whom had he been guarding all of this time? The prisoners could not walk through walls of concrete and doors of steel, he reminded himself. There were coercions and restraints. There were bars and locks. Gravity pulled them toward the core of the earth. Time held their minds in a vise. They were flesh and bone. And yet this dead man was not the man he had been guarding.

Years later, when Jimmy Eckert could stand to go to edges of his mind and think of it, for it frightened him, he wondered if the dead man he saw that day had been the man in the shadows that the inmate spoke about. And he wondered if the rodent had become the shadow man and then killed him or if it was the other way around. And he wondered how many pieces someone could split himself into, if a man could really break apart—one man into many—on and on in infinite patterns, with cells splitting down into more cells, then atoms, then nuclei, then . . . oblivion. These were the peculiar questions, the rare mysteries born of the Black Plains realm. These were the things that none of the guards discussed, that no one dared speak of. Warden Stotsky called such things pure fantasy but never ordered further explanation. The silence and the frost settled over everything once more, and time made it all seem distant and imagined.

Jimmy Eckert was thinking of the shadow man when the elevator touched down on the lower level, like feet on the lush carpet of a funeral parlor. He reminded himself that Black Plains could be like rust on the mind, eating at it slowly. The shadow man was a phantom of what this place could do to both the guarded and the guards. His thoughts were not to be trusted. His eyes were not to be believed.

That was why Eckert liked making up his chants, his special poetry. It kept him anchored to the despair he believed he did control, to that which could never be changed, a liniment for his angst. The small masterpieces described a certain kind of truth, one he alone inflicted on the rodents, one he alone authored. The chants empowered him, and he used the poisonous words to erect a prison within a prison. To remind the rodents that there were levels of existence that they would have to be prepared to deal with at his hands. He had conceived of a new chant for Horus Thompson, something more they could share in the long stretches of time to come. The words appeared to him so clearly when he was driving down the two-lane road to the facility for the day's shift:

When the sun has stopped burning

When the wind has stopped blowing

When the earth has stopped turning

And the world is dust and ash

I will be there . . .

The elevator doors hissed open, and Jimmy Eckert walked down the corridor. As always, each door of the Secured Housing Unit stood at attention, saluting him. The fluorescent lights were made brighter only by what was hidden in the darkness. The rodents were braced, as usual, for the worst. And the worst would be theirs, forever. Jimmy Eckert walked slowly by each door and listened. He could hear some whimpers, some cries. He could hear whispering, manic rants, and euphoric screams of madness. But he did not hear a sound from behind Horus Thompson's door, as was most often the case. And Jimmy Eckert relished the thought that the rodent would be in a mood to match his chant, to consider ceaseless misery once again, to partake in the acrimony that Black Plains, that fate, had forced them all to share.

Jimmy Eckert approached Horus Thompson's door as he had a thousand times, as he would do a thousand more. He opened it and found the cell empty.