It was long. So long that you couldn’t see both ends up close, and so long that it took days and days and days to walk around it, where sometimes after a while you forget what you’re even doing, you’ve been walking so long. It was tall, too – tall enough that if you stood close enough at the right time of day it blotted out the sun like a mountain. It was very smooth, so smooth that even though it was apparently the very first thing I ever touched I never found anything smoother. Water ran right off it, and nobody ever successfully climbed up to the top. But what was it? Whenever anyone asked, I told them it was everything.
***
I woke up to the sound of children screaming outside my window. Today was the festival, unfortunately, which meant I wouldn’t be able to sleep in. Instead I would have to get up and set up Pete’s stand for him, and help my father cook the rice cakes, and teach everyone how to do Aunt Sammy’s special weaving technique because they always forgot from last year, all the while making sure Delilah didn’t run away into the jungle like she did three years ago even though she should be smart enough not to. I groaned and rolled around in my bed until eventually I threw my nice feather pillow at the wall and forced myself into the kitchen.
“Oh Elizabeth you’re finally awake, Pete wanted to tell you that he needs extra sugar from Thomas so get that before you go over. It’s so nice of you to help him, because of his back, you know.” My mom was busily arranging all of my basket making supplies in the baskets we made last year, stacking freshly picked vines with their pretty pink flowers and cut bamboo strands. It was her job to lead the dancing, and since I refused to have anything to do it I was handed down the basket weaving classes, because I learned how years ago since it was better than dancing. I grunted and grabbed a couple of hard-boiled eggs on my way out.
Thomas was thirty minutes straight if you followed the river west from the gate entrance, choosing to live just a little away from everyone else so he had plenty of space and lots of sunlight to farm what he called sugarcane. He didn’t really do anything else, but the sugar he made out of it was so popular ever since he started farming it that nobody really cared. I put on my sandals, walked out my house down to the gate entrance, and headed off, peeling the first egg and letting the shells fall on the ground. A type of bird my village called egg-birds lived in the surrounding jungle, and a couple now came to my egg shell droppings and picked at them, looking for the egg innards that I had saved for myself. Out of boredom I tossed the other egg onto the ground and watched the birds peck at the egg and then, confused, at the solid mass inside. They were used to fresh eggs, and had long black beaks that were for poking the shell and draining the raw yolk. Now a couple of the bigger birds tried to pick up my egg and drain it into their mouths by jerking their head back, and then when nothing came out threw it back on the ground and hopped around and squawked angrily.
I laughed to myself and kept on walking until I got to Thomas’ farm. It was big, way bigger than the hub, and showed off rows and rows of person-height bushels of green stalks and leaves. Mini rivers hand carved into the ground from the big river brought water along to keep the whole field wet. He says that from where he’s from they’re almost twice the height, but these looked pretty big to me already. The body of the house was made out of what he says are called Dipterocarp, but that I had always just called what they were: trees. His house was built up on stilts so it wouldn’t get ruined if the river flooded, and topped with palm fronds on a triangular roof for rain to roll off, and there were windows that were sometimes covered with leaves but now were open so that light could shine in. I walked up to his front door, which had a barely legible “Thomas P.” carved onto its front and banged on it with the side of my fist.
“Who is it?” I heard Thomas yell, muffled, from inside the house.
“It’s Elizabeth,” I shouted back, and then crossed my arms and waited for him to open the door.
“Oh, Lizzy,” he said, surprised, even though I had already told him, when he finally let me in. “What do you need? I was just about to leave.”
“Pete told me he needed more sugar,”
“More? How much sugar does that man need, my God!” Thomas said, as if he couldn’t believe it. I had asked a long time ago what God was but he never really told me what it meant, just that it was a ‘sign of exasperation’. I used to copy him all the time as a kid but then he told me that people from his home wouldn’t like that – I guess you needed special privileges. Even as he complained Thomas disappeared into the back of his farm house and motioned for me to come. We walked all the way through the back through tables covered in the few books he brought with him that only he or I could read, and one giant red one that I was dying to look at but Thomas wouldn’t let me touch until he finished writing it, and then we got outside into his big farm area. To get there you had to pass through a big outdoor kitchen where lots of giant clay pots full of sugar water were sitting. These ones had already been boiled and cooled, and would have already had some old sugar thrown in to make the sugar solidify. From here you could see the grinding area, where Thomas spent most of the harvesting season hand grinding all his sugarcane into paste with a big rock. He then filtered the paste through cloth made from sheep that are kept near the hub and are shaved all the time because it’s so hot and then puts what’s left into the big pots to boil.
Thomas picked up a few rodent skin bags and gave them to me to hold open while he scooped dried sugar from a pot into the bag with a little bowl, picking out dead insects as they came. Once he filled up three of these bags he gave me one to hold and we headed back to the hub to deliver them to Pete. On our way back I asked him if he knew what Pete was doing with all the sugar.
“Well, last year all he did was mix it with sheep milk, which was pretty popular. I told him if he burnt it he could make caramel, but that’s more effort than he’s probably willing to deal with. It’s a shame, but for the better, Lord knows I don’t need the temptation.” Thomas slapped his stomach, as if to make fun of his weight, but he was actually very skinny. He always complained about being fat, which made everyone that actually was fat kind of angry. People started getting fatter every since he showed up with his sugar too. Some of the egg-birds flew by and Thomas pointed to them excitedly.
“Those are called magpies, Lizzy. You can tell by the blue stripe along the wing, and the black head and white chest. Quirky little things, so much personality. Not very good to eat though, even in a pinch.”
“Eat? How would you even catch them?”
“Skillfully,” Thomas said. “I’ll show you some day.” Eventually we made it back, but it took longer because of all the sugar we were carrying. The hub was a big circle, with all the houses lined up along the sides, and a big open area in the middle. Pete’s place was twenty houses around the circle to the right of my house, and the closer we got the more it smelled like something burning.
“That dumbass.” Thomas rolled his eyes, then looked at me awkwardly. “Uh, you’re not allowed to say that either.” We let ourselves in and found Pete over a clay pot poking at what looked like the last of his sugar. He was holding one hand to his cheek, as he did, and murmuring worriedly to himself. He looked up as Thomas dropped the bags to the floor and silently begged for help with his big, watery eyes. Thomas asked where his other pots were and I left them to it to get Pete’s stand ready. It was stuck behind his house out of sight, left out in the sun and dust so long it had lost all of the color from when we first dyed it with bark and seeds and fruit. I tried to wipe it clean with an old cloth I got wet from the river but it didn’t help all that much. Luckily it was very light, being left out to dry for years and years, so even I could drag it to the front of Pete’s house where everybody would be coming once the party started.
I knew my mom would get mad at me if I just left it like that so I went back to my house and grabbed some fresh yellow dye that my mom liked to use and used my fingers to trace “Pete’s Specialty Cakes” over the faded remains from the last time it got painted. Nobody but Thomas and I knew how to read, but everyone thought it looked very cool anyways and Thomas would always say “it’s part of the aesthetic”.
Eventually my dad came over with all of the rice cakes, which was a relief for me because it meant he got up early enough to do it without my help, and then Pete and Thomas had finished their caramel by then so they poured it all over the cakes. Thomas was talking to my dad, something about how they added sheep milk to keep it from getting too hard, but I didn’t pay too much attention because I was greedily eating one Pete secretly handed to me in his kitchen – it was delicious. By the time I finished the shadow over the whole village was reaching the hub’s edge so I knew it was time for the festival to start soon. I licked my fingers and ran back home to get the basket weaving supplies for my class, running past my mom and Delilah all dressed up in dancing dresses and carrying more of them to the center of the hub and laughing all the way over. Delilah was finally getting old enough to start helping, but unlike me at that age who hated having to do anything she loved the attention she got from our mom. Even if I didn’t care as much I was just happy she was turning out kind of normal – she was weird when she was younger, always staring off into the jungle. She always would look at this one particular section of it, opposite end of the big entrance I always used, northeastwards to where the river ran into the jungle because it curved the bottom part of a “C” in the middle of the hub. I knew she must have gone into that part when my mom started screaming that she was missing.
I ran back with all my vines and leaves just in time for everyone to start coming out to celebrate, collecting around our village leader Young Laura, and who, in continuing the theme of what Thomas would call “tongue-in-cheek” naming in the village, was actually very old. She hobbled up our mound of dirt in the center of the hub without her usual walking stick, looking carefully to make sure she would not fall and embarrass herself in front of the village. Once she made it to the top she stood there and looked past the houses and fence and fields and distant mountaintops and waited until the sun came over it and draped diagonally across her chest like a blanket of light, and then spread her arms like she was holding her words in front of her and spoke.
“As long as I’ve been alive I’ve been crippled. First it was my mind, lost in the mountains rather than staying in my head where it should be, playing with the forest rats that steal our bread and the forest birds that eat each other’s eggs, so that I would not work when I should, or learn when I could. Then it was my legs, so I could not follow that mind where it so desired, and instead I had to watch from this village and imagine what I could be seeing – it was only then that I worked, when there was nothing else. And once I had imagined all that there was to imagine and worked all there was to work it was my soul, that yearned for youth and beauty and adventure and received instead the same views I had seen thousands of time before, slowly ground away by life’s pestle to a nothingness that knew only to wait for the end to come. Now I am here, on this same mound I grew up playing around, basking in the symmetry of light and shadow, to represent the two ways of life we know: to live within, and to live without. I have done both, and now I stay here, as I should… as I must. But even if I must die here, no one else does – it is your choice, based on what you have been given. Choose wisely, so that you won’t regret it when you’re old and withered and tired like me.”
Young Laura turned suddenly and walked off the stage into the shade to sit and relax by the side of the festival. Everyone in the village was nice and waited for her to sit down and then all hurried around to get everything started. Pete ran off to sell his cakes over by his house, my mom and Delilah took their time and walked slowly over to the center of the hub behind the mound since they had changed earlier, and I went to the mound and sat down and waited for enough people to sit down in front of me to learn. It was always the same people – Aunt Sammy’s family, which was her old husband and two adult children and five grandchildren, but not Aunt Sammy because she was dead; Young Laura and an actual young person Eva, short for Evangeline, who helped Young Laura make the basket because she could barely see; Thomas, which pleased me because even though I didn’t really like teaching because it was a chore I did like being able to show off that I was good at something to people I liked. There was also Patrick and Steve and Johnathan who all went everywhere together, and Melissa and Mitchell who were only a few years older than me and already together and who the kids would collectively call “Mmmm” with their lips together to try to make fun of them. Then Alice and May who were friends and looked oddly similar even though they looked totally different, and finally Jimmy who stared at me in ways I didn’t like and was kind of ugly but never said anything which is good because my mom sat me down and told me about a guy who liked her when she and dad were still courting one time and he sounded a hundred times worse. I didn’t really understand why there always came to learn, because they’d learned six or seven times at this point and weren’t all stupid, except for maybe Patrick who really was only good for talking at. Sometimes some new people would come try it out and actually learn and leave, or give up because it was too hard even though it really wasn’t, but every year it was mostly these people. Jimmy I kind of understood, even though I wish I didn’t – it seemed like a big waste of time to me but at least I had an audience.
Basket weaving itself, like I said, is not very hard. Aunt Sammy’s husband Phil is the one that cut down and prepared the bamboo into strips for weaving. He taught me how once and I promised myself I would stop teaching weaving if he died because it took forever to make the bamboo strips and I would not make them myself. Anyways, to weave a basket you need some flat, wider strips as the general structure, and then smaller strands maybe a third the width to tie everything together. You lay 7 down over eachother so that they only cross over in the middle and spread out in a circle, and then with a smaller strand you loop it underneath one of the larger strands and bring it up to the center. Then all you have to do is go over the next strand and under the one after that and so on, and once you get far enough you kind of push and bend the larger strands to make the shape you want and then eventually you’re done and you can cut off all the loose strands with a knife. Like I said, not that hard, and if I had to guess the only thing that made the technique “special” is that no one else knew anything about weaving before Aunt Sammy came along one day with her husband and newborn baby so pregnant she gave birth that night to a second daughter, much to the delight of the younger Young Laura who was letting her sleep in her house. Young Laura always loved kids, because, she once told me, more people in the village now meant more people in the village later, and more people was always better.
So I made a basket with everyone, walked around with it half finished to show people, and corrected mistakes and answered questions. Young Laura made half decent baskets all things considered, but Eva who always did one for herself as well made the best. Melissa made the second best, which annoyed Mitchell I think who would always try very hard and still not be as good, and then if I had to pick a third I would say Steve, just because everyone else’s were always lopsided or had big holes.
Suddenly it was time for the dancing – my mom and sister had gotten all the girls and women changed and made everybody practice all the moves and now they had to perform. Pete and my dad and a kind of older guy named Samuel were already by the clearing with drums made from sheep skin and jungle trees and wool, and then everyone lined up and Pete started to play. I’m no good at describing music without words but it was a steady dun… dun and then my dad started to sing but he didn’t sing any words just sang and then Samuel and my dad started to play the drums faster and faster like people running along the river and then everyone was stomping their feet and dancing. People didn’t learn very well after just an hour or two so they just kind of danced and swayed together and made a big circle so my mom could do the actual dance. She was really good – I would have been proud if I didn’t hate the dance itself so much. It had lots of hip movement and the dress showed off more than the normal clothes she wore and I hated more than anything the way everyone looked at her when she danced, the way Jimmy looked at me but worse, so much worse, like they were all about to attack her. Everybody except Thomas, who looked just as disgusted as I felt whenever he watched, and this time he walked up next to me with that expression on his face that I appreciated more than he could know. The weirdest part about the dancing was the way my mom would face it, that thing that covered the sun and was always there and nobody knew why or when or how just that it wasn’t a mountain because nothing grew on it. She would face it and drop to her knees and cry and shout as if it was the only thing that ever mattered but it didn’t, the village mattered, me and dad and Delilah mattered, she cared so much it made me jealous because it was nothing.
“I’ll never understand this. Primitive, base, ignoble, pagan, your choice… Anyways I know you hate this so how about we steal a couple of cakes and I’ll show you that book I’ve been writing – you’ll love it I promise.”
I didn’t know what those words meant yet so we snuck over to Pete’s house but there was only one cake left so we took it and then we walked off through the entrance and followed the river to his house. It was a relief to get away the whole thing made me sick and I really wanted to read that big red book so I was happy the whole way there as we shared the last cake.
When we got to his house Thomas said the big book was on the table and he disappeared into his backyard. I opened the first page and was amazed – it was full of drawings of the local wildlife, with descriptions on the bottom and sides and top. Thomas’s handwriting was very neat, and the pictures were beautiful, and looked just like each animal. There were the egg-birds and our sheep and the rats and snakes and little flying insects and on and on so that I was so fascinated I didn’t even notice what was happening outside until I heard this strange whining sound getting louder and louder until I couldn’t stand it and I went outside with the book in my arms and saw this giant thing floating down on top of Thomas’s sugarcane, crushing and burning all of the unharvested crops beneath it as if they were paper in a fire. It was gigantic, twice the size of the house, and the most beautiful thing I had ever seen – it reminded me of the thing in the Hub. Thomas was standing by the exit to the backyard with a bag full of books and a frown on his face, and when a giant slab of metal opened up out of the ship he walked on top of it into the incredibly bright yellow light and told me to follow him. I was scared, but more curious about it than even the red book so I walked inside and didn’t understand anything that I saw.
There were glowing things everywhere, and that smooth material that was so much different from the rocks I was used to cutting things with, and all these colors that were somehow inside of it and not painted on. Everything was smooth, even the doorways were round like giant hollow eyeball sockets in a skull, and I followed Thomas through one of them to a room full of more bright glowing things and invisible stuff that was there because I went up and touched it but couldn’t see it no matter how I looked at it. And suddenly we were moving and I ducked down and I covered my face because I thought there would be wind like you were running really fast but there wasn’t and we kept going up and up and up and I felt like there was something pushing me into the ground until I barely see Thomas’s house but could still make out the Hub and then Thomas said Lizzy everybody was going to die now and I said What? and I looked down on my village that was now so small and I realized how big it was that mysterious not-mountain that was made of that mysterious material and then it started turning kind of red and my mom and dad and Delilah and Pete and Young Laura and Eva and Phil and Mitchel and Melissa and my home and my village and my everything all burst into flame with the forest and it was white now and then there was this giant noise and everything got blown away and I was screaming and crying and had dropped the book and was grabbing Thomas’s arm so hard that blood started coming out around my fingertips where my nails cut into his flesh and Thomas just stood there and watched as everything was destroyed and that’s why I tell people that it was everything because if something can destroy your everything then it becomes everything itself.
Now it’s been a while and I’m in this room covered in that weird material and Thomas gave me some paper and some stick that I can write with like he taught me before. I finally was calm enough to let him talk to me today and he said that I was too smart to let die but only he and I and the pilot, whatever that is, can know and that I should write about what happened because it would make me feel better but I wrote everything down, having to ask again and again how to spell all the big words he used, and now I feel worse. I hate you Thomas I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you but now you’re all I have.
The Scenic Climax 