The Bath Procession: part three

[The third part of my newest novel, The Bath Procession. This material is copyrighted]

When depressed, Abel was easy prey for bad news. He read the paper and the internet and imbibed a heavy dose of podcasts where the hosts warned of dark interlopers. His state of turmoil preceded and therefore demanded justification, so this explanation of the world as perpetual collapse felt appropriate. It made sense. The power outage had not been a disruption of any protective normalcy, but a brief return of the crudeness the world was designed for.

The most intoxicating of bad news was about war; there always seemed to be war, and the infrastructure built around it enabling constant coverage was immense. Wherever a child was starving, or some abstract region of the world had been carpet-bombed, there were cameras and so there were people eager to see. This meant that there were millions of other despair-addicted impotents like Abel. That the war which distressed them never ceased–in fact was facilitated by the very news which captivated them, normalizing warfare by its ubiquity–was a catastrophe so tremendous that few of the other impotents could bear it. But Abel languished in it, feeding his desire for hopelessness and self-hatred, scouring Orbitt and 2.br threads when he should have been sleeping. He soaked his crooked leg with epsom salt as the TV ran in the other room, stern voices carrying bad news down his hallway. There was no one around anymore to mediate. He was alone with the voices that reverberated up against the plaster and accosted him with brutal awareness while he sat shriveled in the bath. He emptied the apartment of all material possessions that wouldn’t channel bad news, leaving behind the TV, his laptops, and a two-way radio whose lost mate he subconsciously prayed some stranger would find to pass along sinister visions of an alternate world. He emptied his accounts at the bank–money was a disease, and he needed cash for painkillers. The front door hung open and sleepwalkers drifted in, talking about the dead, finding a place to lay down and not moving for days. The apartment filled with garbage and the sleepwalkers shit on the floor. Abel plunged himself into the bath with the water drawn to near boiling, hoping he might shred apart under the immense heat and cook down into nothing. The bad news became the sound of rats in the ceiling, of a woman choking in the kitchen, an early morning knife fight. The world had reimagined itself, and Abel wanted not to be in it.

Since possessions and shelter were ideas which had become subject to skepticism, it was unremarkable when Abel finally decided to exit the apartment and the city permanently. He was not alone. The outage had driven plenty into poverty, into the streets. Tents and plywood clustered around the entrances to apartment complexes where sleepwalkers were camped in the elevators and the stairwells and empty units, smothering the tenants with noise and smells until they were driven out completely. A four-story on Ocean collapsed one night, supposedly overloaded with squatters but the rumor was that really it had been internally sabotaged. CIA men disguised as legless veterans arrived in the night and dissolved the foundation with sulphuric acid and timed explosions. There were women and children inside. At the site of the collapse Abel found the remains of a shoebox containing some baseball cards, some exotic bottle caps, and a tiny plastic penguin. These treasures were not being reclaimed. He set them at the base of a humble vigil where strangers had lit a few candles and tagged the cement with the names of the dead. But in the morning, he awoke to find the cards had been stolen and the penguin was missing. The bottle caps lay strewn in the dirt, glowing orange as they reflected the sunrise.

They were pressing fent somewhere over the horizon. It filtered in through the usual networks, but when Abel tried to chase down the source it was always “out there,” with the finger pointed to the nearest window or the hills beyond the city. The little beige pills were everywhere. Addicts mindlessly checked their pockets as they ambled down the streets, again and again, scouring for a lost dot or at least a crumb. It was simply called digging. These lowest of the low, the ones who had been reduced to their basest cravings and only spoke in intricate gibberish, were called diggers. But even the ones who always kept a few dots on them in case of emergency were pure calculation, Abel witnessed. The pursuit of chemical fulfillment dehumanized them all. But Abel, who could always in a pinch find a doctor to supply him with opiates on account of the leg, had the privilege to dissolve further. Hindered by the leg, reliant on a titanium folding crutch that bruised the pit under his mangled arm, he floated on the outskirts of this opiate ecosystem. He observed the discourse unfolding before him, the socialization and the construction of a community, and he concluded he was witnessing the unfolding of fucking nothing. There was no community possible between people who stabbed each other over scraps.

So he shed more of himself, in his open-ended pursuit. He picked up other languages from listening to the voices around him. He never slept somewhere twice. The color left his hair, and the crutch began to bend under his weight to allow for more comfortable walks–endless walks, through the city districts and the industrial sectors and the suburbs and the towns that fruited off the highway pressing Southward through the desert. The exposure turned his skin brittle. He consumed only water, painkillers, and gas station hot-dogs. For the long stretches hobbling through dust and shimmering heat, where the highway and its steady flow of people would veer off to the East and disappear until the nightfall, he thought nothing. The totems of his subconscious dropped out and were lost in the desert. He began to know nothing, forgetting himself entirely, thriving only on the root memories required to function.

These were not strictly chunks of knowledge data, per se. The sun could not bake out of Abel his ability to add and subtract or ride a bike, sure. But the memories which were left gleaming after all the detritus had washed away were those of his loved ones. Cate, who had seemed to pretty easily discard him, was high among them. Sadie, poor girl. His father–the best version, not the crippled waste he had become, or the cheap facsimile still sitting on the hard drive.

The hard drive. Abel slapped his chest to make sure it was still there, sitting in his coat pocket. And the light? He peeled back the sweaty layers of coat to check the little green glow. The battery was still running after all this time. Abel had long since given up trying to find a power hookup, it was evidently self-sustaining–until that inevitable unannounceable point when it would not be. But for now, feeling the little green light on his face in the desert at night, it was like having a star in his pocket. Like one of the sparkling headlights inching across the horizon had found its way into his possession. It was a message of invitation from a universal place–a place, for lack of a better term, he would have to call ‘the future.’

A new chunk separated itself from the slough of Abel’s memory. He was drinking watery beer in a cantina near the border, on the television mounted above a plaster recreation of an Olmec head was the familiar face of Ely Phelps. It was a face tied primarily to Cate (her first boyfriend, back when Ely would’ve been just young enough to get away with being too old for Abel’s sister) but still had its own relevance to Abel, who instantly recalled Ely on the basketball team, his car’s sound system as he sped out of the school parking lot, his long blonde hair as seen from across campus. It appeared he still wore the hair long, but it looked dyed. The chyron said Ely was a correspondent covering “spatial dilation” (Abel had no clue what that meant) in Southern Chile. He was sweating, chiding the host of a talk show and making the entire panel uncomfortable. But his rabid weariness made it seem like a warning. He knew too much, and he was tired of explaining. He looked like he might be hiding a drink just out of frame.

According to the captions at the bottom of the screen, Ely was working very far South, almost at the end of the continent, near a place called Yendegaia.

Abel slapped his chest. Still there.

Without much further to consider, he got up and started on the journey to Chile.

Moving South meant moving upstream. The influx of everything from caravans to pregnant women on foot, which was pulled from every inch of the Southern continent, concentrated its flow on the border wall. Once past that (for an American, more a matter of time-wasting procedure and paperwork), Abel kept to the routes he watched the other people trickle in from, broken roads and dried creeks grown over with manzanita. When he camped under the stars, he often found himself with company. He would answer the questions of the refugees, trying to sound hopeful. They had come from everywhere, it seemed. But he was from just one place.

“What a shame,” he’d say in English, as the refugees shrugged and walked off the next morning in the opposite direction.

Over time, the landscape changed. Dilapidated cities rose and fell. Forests bloomed and the sandy dunes receded. The people Abel met were less anxious, not going anywhere. They invited the bearded stranger to sit with them and share a few drinks. They loved a foreigner who spoke their language. They took him to the rural counties where he was traded among a network of friends, kept overnight on a farm in the mountains, then driven in the morning to a market on the East coast, in the back of a van full of coffee beans.

At port the people were fascinated and confused by the cripple who wanted work, in exchange for a one-way voyage to Barranquilla. They gave him the work–he was only good for pulling a single rope against the weight of cargo, heavy metal barrels, again and again for two days before he’d earned the requisite amount, the good arm and leg almost failing him–and they shared in his relief when he was allowed to rest.

For six days Abel wandered about the deck of the ship, admiring the flicker on the ocean’s surface. It was barren and blue all day, but at night he could see the light from the other ships and the buoys anchored close to land that bobbed like anxious children. They rounded the Yucatan peninsula and saw Cancun dancing like a fire with its tendrils laced over the black mountains. Abel watched the land rotate before him, a hazy mess through the porthole but, as he shut one eyelid then the next, it was as if the space before him was opening up like a flower. New space foamed out from the top of a mountain and spilled into the sea but was gone the second the next eye opened.

It was spatial dilation.

A fellow stowaway had allowed Abel the use of his laptop, and he’d spent his empty days brushing up on Ely’s specialty. Once he saw it, he couldn’t help but notice it everywhere. It was easiest to observe at night, when other visual factors weren’t interrupting the display. It felt to Abel most like a roadside attraction his father had taken him to as a child. It was a house that was all lopsided, where billiards would roll uphill and, off between two tall pine trees, if you waited patiently, a sharp emerald mountain would appear to rock back and forth like a pendulum every half-hour. The night was the best time to see, and the boat was the best place. There was tranquility on the windswept deck. Distance from the land and its people. In the desert he spent every night hallucinating the sounds of trucks driving over the dunes, looking for him. But on the ship all he could hear was the howl of wind, a single breathy note. He slapped his chest.

***

“First: the human eye is made to be fooled.”

Ely paused for a hiccup, then resumed:

“The eye makes mistakes, but mistakes have made the eye. Deception is a discreet entity which has evolved like a predator to penetrate our minds, through the eyes. What this means: when we make instruments to compensate for our eyes’ inborn limitations—lenses with object-detection, large language models running in the background, based on the faculties of the eye itself, designed to see everything we cannot see–these are the children of Deception. They carry the seeds and, it only stands to reason that, now that we are at a time of harvest. They reap alongside us.

“Second: the blind man is immune to Spatial Dilation. This must not go without saying. For, in articulating, we recognize the miracle: the blind man sees without his eyes. He has no need for crutches, and so no need for deception.” Ely looked over at the titanium crutch leaning against Abel’s chair. “No offense.”

A stray came up sniffing and Abel took a piece of his fish to feed him under the table. He assured Ely he’d said nothing offensive and asked him to continue.

Ely blinked; he’d been pontificating to an imagined camera. The crowded restaurant now swirled around him, as if the other groups were listening to versions of his speech translated into their own languages at varying delays. The waitress returned with a new beer, and Ely waved the matter away, suddenly bored. He wanted to know about Cate.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken,” Abel said.

“I know the feeling. My work has really pulled me away from family–any family at all really. It can be a real challenge.” Ely threw his napkin onto his plate and felt around his person for a cigarette. He was forlorn for a beat, then a familiar waitress arrived and locked him in a chesty embrace. They joked in Spanish as if Abel didn’t speak it. He sipped his beer patiently, watching the dimly lit plaza. There were shadows moving in and out of the alleys. He could hear the grumble of an idling engine.

“Tell me about the blind man,” Abel said. “You said he ‘sees without his eyes’?”

The waitress walked off in disgust and Ely tried to pick up where he left off in the soliloquy:

“The condition of the blind man is Sight Without Eyes, and it’s arguably more accurate than sighted vision. Who would you trust to navigate the city? The blind man who walks the same route every day, or the new driver splitting their focus between maps and the road?”

“But the blind man, in this case, knows his surroundings through familiarity…”

“In practice, locals serve as our “blind men.” Again, no offense. I spend all my time canvassing the villages in the surrounding area, anywhere near the epicenter of the dilation, tapping the ancestral memory to field the pace of land shifts. It’s tricky because there’s always been land movement, it isn’t anything new out here. But that doesn’t mean they live with it easily. It’s disruptive. They can’t grow their own food here anymore. I’ve known entire towns that simply drifted apart, but it can’t even be recorded. They didn’t even bother to name the place.”

Ely rubbed his brow. He dropped the cigarette in his empty bottle.

“And the epicenter? Is there one–a single place of origin?”

“Well,” Ely scratched his chin. “Yes and no. Like I said, the land is always moving. It’s impossible to say where it is now–”

Ely stopped talking. He gripped his collar and for a second. Abel thought he was choking. But Ely put his hands out, as if to start a new point entirely.

“Let’s go for a smoke?”

“Can’t we just stay here and smoke–?”

Abel heard it too. He turned to see a line of tanks, each the size of a clydesdale, being escorted through the plaza by a squad of young commandos. They were wearing black and, once they drew close, Abel could see their faces were not real, but masks made of some grayish vellum that looked like a hundred different faces at once. They glared as they passed, the tanks rumbling. Ely looked into his lap until they were gone and then pulled Abel up to his feet.

They took a cobblestone path to the unlit streets where the roads were covered in dead leaves. The people were still up in their houses. Abel could hear music and laughter. Ely led them to a garage where there were a few men playing cards, and they let Abel sit and rest his leg. After some beer and conversation, Ely pulled Abel outside. He took out a small vial of powder and dropped some on the part of his hand he had put caviar on at dinner. He snorted it, and asked Abel how long he would be staying.

“I’m here now,” Abel said.

“Why? To find me?”

“Kind of.”

Ely lit a cigarette and shook his head.

“They’re coming to fucking kill me, you know?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Those men in the plaza–those boys. You know there’s nobody in those tanks? They’re run as drones by an AI back at the station, probably feeding straight to the CIA. And the AI is the one in charge. It hates us. It would police the city on its own, blow the place up if it had the firepower,” Ely burned himself on his cigarette and dropped it. Something made a sound a few yards over. They waited in silence until he resumed: “They will blow it all up. One day…”

They would find him eventually, Ely said. They knew everything. They were not Americans, but they represented America’s interests incidentally. Ely smoked to the filter. He looked up to the stars and told Abel it wouldn’t be long.

“When they get me,” he said, “Cyrus will take you to Olamehd.”

***

In the months it had taken Abel to hitchhike across the continent, he’d developed a sense for the way people fought the onslaught of geography. There were certain canyons where you could expect to see a bridge, and certain canyons where the bridge would be a pile of stone at the bottom of a river. There were places for building cities, and there were places best left to the wilderness. It wasn’t something Abel or anyone else decided, but what they tolerated. So when Ely told him Cyrus would meet him at the monastery, Abel’s response was simple:

There were no monasteries this far South. If there had been, he would have heard of them. Monasteries are not secret places, but foundational pillars of community. Surely this was a codeword. ‘The Monastery’ was another sort of place with a similar sanctitude. But Ely was adamant–even after a few too many drinks, leaning over a bush puking, he insisted–Cyrus; at the monastery.

Abel conferred silently with his own reflection as he shaved, shearing years’ worth of growth with slow steady swipes. He’d been hiding away in a hostel since the outing with Ely. He’d taken a sample from Ely’s vial. He couldn’t resist. It had been months since his last dose, and the brief period of euphoria was now being followed by unimagined waves of pain. Abel scrounged up the last of his money from dock work and found a place to lock himself indoors and pass through the worst nights in solitude. But he was far from alone.

The building was overflowing with addicts. It wasn’t long, hearing Abel’s moans of pains through the ceiling, until his downstairs neighbors supplied him with something to carry him through. In a week he was back to his old self, dependent, floating, drawn in all directions. The other addicts called him ermitaño. He’d shave and the beard would grow back overnight. He hobbled around town looking for Ely. He slapped his chest. There was nothing there. He opened the coat and there was nothing there. No little green light. It was dark, and down the black street he could see it–the little green light. He started to run, but in the other direction, away from the truck, and his leg snapped beneath him and sent his limbless torso spinning in the gutter.

He woke sweating. The hard drive was still in the coat pocket on the floor. But when he rolled over and tried to steady his breathing, something loud shook the back wall. The sound was short. Like a gunshot, Abel thought, putting on pants and his coat.

There was no one in the hallway, but the light was on.

“Hello?” Abel called.

A person ran down a flight of stairs.

The elevator bell rang, and Abel decided to walk in the other direction. He’d forgotten his crutch.

The door slid open, and a pair of angry voices spilled out and followed him. He made it to the stairwell but froze at the very top. It was the downstairs neighbors, crooked on their backs, motionless three flights below him. They had blood coming out holes in the back of their heads.

A pair of hands tried to grab Abel from behind, but he’d already gone limp and was falling down the stairs. Before his skull could make contact with the final step, a demolitions team setting up in his downstairs neighbors room made a fatal error in wiring, causing an explosion to take out the entire third floor–including the pursuing officers, demolitions team, and forty seven residents–in under a second, and send the rest of the building crumpling into a mound of loose brick and rebar.

Abel could only hear a ringing. Everything else was disconnected sensation, dust, screams, weight, pain from all over. There were troops everywhere, the many-faced men in black, running around scared. They were looking for their comrades, collecting bodies of innocents and tossing them aside. No one had expected it. Flames shot out of a severed pipe shooting up from the ground. There had been children inside, Abel said, but couldn’t hear it. One of the many-faced men removed his mask–he couldn’t have been older than fifteen. He was sobbing. The rest brought water to the wreckage and pulled mangled corpses from the fire.

They’d left their vehicles in park, and Abel slipped into a driver’s seat and disappeared down the only highway leading South.

***

It began to snow. Delicate flakes drifted down from a single immense cloud which rose with the sun in the morning. It piled up around the road, quickly covering the outside lanes with dark slush. The sheer white reflecting off the fresh swept hill made Abel’s headache worse. His breathing was short and painful. There were several alarms going off on the panel of the car, likely advising him that he was being tailed.

The road was soon completely smothered and the valley sucked up sleet until everything was a single black bog. The car slid to an uneven halt and Abel took off on foot Southward, bringing a spare snow coat left in the back seat.

The cold settled into the bad leg and caused everything to lock up. Without the crutch, he was in for a long walk.

There were little concrete shacks scattered throughout the valley, which led Abel through a meandering wash. The hills on either side rose sharp enough to pierce their own snow cover. The shacks were empty, and some were missing walls. They had all been scoured for any remaining supplies, so Abel kept moving until the valley deepened into a rift that divided the land into islands, forcing Abel out along a wide beach. He followed the coast in hopes of a bridge or a friendly sailor. It was too foggy to see much more than ten feet in front of him, and the ocean looked deadly. He kept moving, missing his crutch, needing more breaks than he ever needed in the desert. He lifted his shirt to check the wounds he’d gotten during the demolition–there was an enormous purple cloud spreading out under the skin and one of his ribs was jutting out at an abrupt angle. Little dashes and dots of red swept over him like a swarm of gnats.

He gently patted his chest; still there.

The beach started to veer back around until it made a complete circle. Abel’s island had somehow separated from the mainland. How long had he been walking? He collapsed onto the good arm, the good side, the unbroken rib.

“I wonder if there’s a monastery on this island.”

He leaned on his good elbow and looked through the fog for any sign of the sun, instead finding an immense shadow on top of the hill behind him. It took a few tries, but he got back to his feet and approached slowly.

It was an immense concrete dome, rippled across the surface and cut open at one end, exposing rows of hexagonal portals under the ceiling inside. It was a wasp’s nest–a distinctly brutalist interpretation and made for wasps that would’ve been six feet tall. But Abel could see each one of the hexagons opened to a small chamber. Some were padded with straw nests, or wooden doors. It was warm inside. As he entered, Abel could hear the sounds of scratching and scurrying above him, but said nothing. He curled up in a corner of the dome and closed his eyes.

In the dream he had, the giant concrete structure molted away like paper and left him exposed in the eye of a silent hurricane. He slapped his chest but felt nothing. He peeked into his pocket and the light was dim, something was in the way. They’re bodies, he said. A thousand frigid corpses tumbling around the little green light, grasping at it with limp fingers. Abel reached his hand down toward the light, but it was too far below him. Rotten lips and toes brushed against him, glassy eyes and wisps of hair. He lost his footing, and the light pulled him down, through the preterite masses like the blessed child of Hell.

But the masses pulled back, lacing brittle limbs around Abel’s body, clawing at his eyes and mouth, stinking with decay, moaning, all asleep. The light vanished behind their weight which grew and grew, taking on its own mass until it swelled off Abel like a massive tear drop and rose above him with thick arms and a single vacant eye. This swirling cloud of death sauntered over to the other corner of the dome and found a rock to sit on. There was a fire already going at his feet. He removed a heavy coat, a pair of mudded boots, lit a wrinkled cigarillo. The shade lifted off of him like steam. He was old, about Abel’s father’s age, with long and matted locks of gray hair which swayed in front of his one unpatched eye. He looked at Abel without response, without a sense that the form in front of him was another man.

“You came back?” he said.

“Did I?” Abel asked.

“Maybe not,” he took a single pensive draw on the cigar and shut his eye. “Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.”

“Maybe.” Abel scooted closer to the fire. “But maybe not.”

“Don’t try to confuse me,” the man wagged a finger playfully. “It won’t work. Not on me.”

There were faces in the dark. Abel couldn’t see them, but his primate brain sensed their wide eyes flitting in and out of the chambers on the ceiling. He tried the eye trick–shutting the one and then the next in sequence–and a sea of people sprung out of the darkness, washing back and forth with each shutting of the eye like they were being tossed around on an ocean. They were old and young, and they watched Abel from safety, dissolving into the blanket of night.

“Is this place the monastery?” Abel asked the man.

“I’ve heard some people call it that. They don’t have a word for what this thing really is.”

“Then you’re Cyrus.”

He nodded. Suddenly he stopped smoking. He looked toward Abel and gripped his knees eagerly as he leaned toward him.

“Did you bring it?”

Abel slapped his chest; still there.

In the sky above, past layers of heady fog and rooted atop the wandering eye of the storm, a murky cloud was inflating, swelling with hail and static and prodding up into the vacant atmosphere, its open end scouring the archipelago of Yendegaia for the little green light.

Rain swept up the beach to where Cyrus and Abel stood knee-deep in whitewash, watching a boat glide toward them. It was an outrigger with a pontoon that managed to stay just under the surface of the water. Clearly, Abel saw, it was overloaded, teetering back and forth as people in the hull and standing on the submerged pontoon threw their bodies in countervailing waves to stay steady. But maybe they were an essential force for this sort of boat, Abel considered. The people and the boat had a symbiotic relationship, as evidenced by the fact that the boat, which had carved itself into a nice resting spot in the sand, had once more become a flimsy piece of driftwood after all the riders jumped off.

“They are going to see Saint Catherine,” Cyrus said. He pointed off into the weird array of islands. She was somewhere out there.

The sailors brought thin sheets of silk to Abel and swaddled him. They were already wrapped in the fabric, which didn’t seem to shield the rain so much as direct it in swift currents that circled around the eyes, off the wrists, back to the ocean. They placed him at the rear, and before he could think to say bye to Cyrus, their boat was coursing through the waves and darting around islands as if on its own. Abel found there was no rudder near him. The people were controlling it with their weight, he realized. Bouncing off their knees the way a toddler learns to dance, rocking the boat into its course. They put Abel at the center axis, just along the spine. He calculated the vertex as running straight through his middle, bisecting the broken half from the one which supported him. He dared not move.

He could see the green light glowing through the wraps on his chest. A few of the sailors looked back, remarked casually. It was something they’d seen before. They spoke in a language Abel had never heard.

They sailed into the heart of a vast crater and quickly lost the true horizon. Around them were endless options, avenues between the stray islands that stretched into the eternal fog. Occasionally the remnants of a concrete shack could be seen on the land, but never with any people. Mostly the islands were coarse rock, dense gray boulders freshly leaking sand and turning the sea foamy with mud. The islands moved faster than erosion, flailing off from each like severed limbs, leaving gore in a fecund trail out of which spawned grassy ridges, slick obsidian, stalactites basking in the fresh air and glossy bulbs of calcium shot straight up from secret caves. On one of the islands there must have been a forest as a few rotting logs popped up from the depths and into the boat’s path. Garbage and decrepit furniture were sucked through the channels, reduced to crumbs against the rough sea walls. But where were the people? Abel spotted beer bottles and sandals and children’s toys–somewhere close there was civilization. There were pointed shadows in the distance that grew darker, like the discarded land was returning for vengeance. Loose clumps of dirt and grass collected in tiny bays and washed up on the shore. There were islands with fresh wounds, reeling from collisions and released from the sea floor, spinning freely towards foreign coasts.

An island sailed by on the right and from it Abel heard a single note, a sustained cry. It was the sound of howling wolves. He whipped around to see but only caught their lithe shadows bounding across the land like a zoetrope.

The green light met the fog and refracted into a large bolus of light. The men at the front of the boat shouted–this was either very good or very bad. Then Abel heard a growl that sent him thrashing about in his soaked cocoon. It was the roar of an engine–no warning growl this time. It was angry.

“Where is it?” was all Abel could think to yell, but the others didn’t hear.

Something creaked underneath them, deep deep under water, under the sandy floor. A wave of terrified fish rocked the boat. The sailors leapt toward the center, focusing their weight to a single point that Abel could only watch from the rear, struggling to unwrap himself.

“There is nowhere to hide.”

Abel fell to the deck writhing free one limb at a time. The leg had frozen completely. He cursed it and tried kicking it with the good one.

“There is no need to hide.”

The sailors squeezed closer, their cheeks touching, clenching into their embrace further and further.

“We can be friends.”

Abel wasn’t thinking these words. He opened his eyes to the rain and the waves, and the metallic sound of a voice being projected out over the ocean. It had a West Texas accent. It wanted to be friends, it said.

An industrial screeching bubbled up from the other side of the boat. A wall of iron lined with immense black boltheads shot out of the water and over Abel’s head. The voice wanted not to have any enemies. Another metal wall rose up and over, then another. The sailors were preparing to die.

The first wall fell.

The second wall…

The third wall… Abel burst up from the foam for air, bound and squirming for up.

The fourth wall.

The fifth wall.

Et cetera.

The walls were falling when everything went black, the crashes louder than any abyss could subsume.

***

After Abel’s self-imposed sanitation period, followed by the near-total replacement of his memories–the voyage through South America constituted an entirely new life, new struggles and new aspirations between which to open a new microcosmic life—little remained of any previous life. The light had finally shone through Abel’s window and cleansed his interior, but it was only appreciable in retrospect. There are many, many clichés written about this.

But at the instant of his terminal ecstasy, when Abel’s soul was sure it was lifting from the dry soil of his body, another gleaming chunk surfaced. Something totally forgotten. Something truly, completely insignificant:

Cate stood at the top of a hill with the sun behind her. She was a silhouette, a shapeless void. The floaters in Abel’s vision gravitated to her, orbited around her. He picked up a fist full of dirt. An urge in his young body wanted his sister to fall. He was ready with his arm wound back to send a meteor into the side of her head when his dad snatched his wrist. He crunched Abel’s hand up and the dirt clod within with a single clench of his monstrous grip. And Abel cried. And his dad opened up the hand and kissed the throbbing pink palm. The urge didn’t like this, and so Abel threw his tiny fists into his father’s face and screamed at Cate, who was gone, somewhere over the grassy hill which was rendered without end in this memory. His father was watching her go, telling Abel to watch, too. She was off doing something amazing, skipping into the abyss.

But Abel didn’t remember that. He remembered that he stopped punching only when, recognizing it even as a toddler, The Look came over his dad’s face: boredom. Or something like it. Fatigue? Registering the indescribable and taking a whack on the chin, submitting himself to progress, was a bigger thing than himself. He was made for this: to be insignificant. To die, slowly and in patient servitude, every day at labor, every day in love, every day like the previous, an unbearable monotony that would cripple him and kill him.

He must have seen everything coming. Everything may even have been caused by his predicting it, imagined into existence, the pain and the suffering and the ecstatic joy. It was sight without eyes. Wade saw something unbelievable. It didn’t make sense to Abel, but he believed his father believed in it. He would carry it with him wherever he went, lost in a recirculated wilderness and praying for a lighthouse.

Warm rain brushed over Abel’s body. Each drop was a drum beat on his bruised ribs, his fishy skin stained with a poisoned cloud of bruise. He found his hands rummaging over his torso, looking for wounds. He was alive; he registered this as simply a fact and tried to stand, to put at least the good foot on something steady.

He’d washed into the tangled arms of a mangrove that wove like sutures through the beach, fusing land to sea, and blooming into a massive knot. There was nothing underneath his feet but more roots, coated in slime and reaching toward the invisible bottoms. So Abel gripped onto a branch and pulled himself into the knot, squirming with the last invertebrate strength in him through the knitted exterior, past yards of smooth and sinewy branch, velvet of leaf and the stick of sap.

He spilled out onto the edge of a shallow pond. The inside of the mangrove knot was apparently hollowed out, the walls reaching thirty feet up and terminating around a perfectly circular opening, which cast a direct beam of sunlight from an unknown place. It couldn’t be from outside, Abel thought, recalling the storm, the lightning scars on the underbelly of transcendent gloom.

The sunlight fell on the back of Saint Catherine’s stony head, illuminating the dust and bird-feathers and pollen that washed over her. She was ten feet tall with a placid expression. There was a crack which split her hairline and ran along her cheek as thin as a thread. Her clothes were frozen mid-waft, ripples in the concrete fabric echoing down toward her knees, toward the pool from which she had seemingly once sprung and turned to stone.

There were bloody tears coming out from her eyes. And there were others in the pond, wailing, slumped forward with their faces in the water in prostration. They moaned and Saint Catherine wept, the trails of her tears rounding her cheeks and tumbling onto her breast, leaving a cloud of orange stains.

The people cried in waves–peaks of harmony and valleys of somber discord. They were wearing black. Some of them were laying in the shallow water as if dead. There were all ages present, but they had arrayed themselves by age–the elders leaning into the statue’s circle, closer to the damp concrete of her hem. The young ones stayed on the beach, splashing one another, awkwardly aware of their youth, their unearned vigor. Those who were too young to mourn, too old to simply watch and learn, carried water from the outside of the pond and bathed the statue, washing away her bloody tears, trudging back out then in with a full pale of water.

Abel stood with great difficulty and carried himself to Saint Catherine’s feet. He reached up and put a palm on her cheek, letting the blood of her eyes run through his fingers.

He tasted it.

“Iron.”

Metal deposits. Likely placed in the mold when they poured the concrete, Abel realized. It was a trick.

He found a spot on the shore and unfolded the leg from the shreds of silk. He rubbed it, trying to move blood through it but feeling nothing. It wouldn’t twitch.

A group of children were spying on him, perplexed by the scars—the dotted scars lining the snaky scars and making an intricate map of trauma. The sections of leg skin completely cut off from the rest by rivulets of scar, islands of flesh that had been forced back onto his body. The children were staring, making each other laugh and drawing shapes in the air, trying to explain this disaster to each other.

Abel flipped back the fabric on his bad arm. He held the scars up to the kids: you see?

They liked that.

“Fucked up,” he told them. A few of the older ones laughed, recognizing the swear. They came in closer.

“You’ve seen the wolves? On the other island?” He put his fingers to his head like pointed ears and barked twice. The children hunched over and started howling, stomping around in a circle and gnashing their teeth.

They’d seen the wolves.

“You know who she is?” Abel pointed at the Saint. “That’s my big sister.”

The children stopped howling.

This was not a silly thing anymore.

Abel drew the hard drive from his chest and held it in front of the kids.

“You know what this is?”

A man yelled from across the pond, cursing in another language but his message was universal:

“Stay the hell away from those kids.” He was holding a knife. The other people stopped to watch.

Abel pulled the hard drive back to his body but found it was hot. The light was red. It slipped out of his hand and hit his lap with a loud crack which sent the people running. Abel looked up to see the angry man and his hands were clasped around his throat like he’d swallowed a bee, and a wave of blood poured out onto his chest.

They filtered in through the mangrove–the men masked in anonymous vellum. They carried guns but they were wearing white coats this time. They chased the people out into the sea, firing blindly at their feet. Abel tried to leap up–backwards, maybe forwards–but fell back again. He sank deeper into the sand as he thrashed, bad-leg-first. It had finally given up. It buried itself as the men took care of Abel and retrieved the hard drive. They took care of Saint Catherine and forced the mourners into the ocean, where God only knows what would become of them.

[This is the third part of four of my newest novel, The Bath Procession. Physical copies available here]