Trellises and Scaffolding

There’s a tower by the riverbank. Sometimes in mid to late July, when the summer rains blow out of the south and fill its dead sluices up to bursting, its lights abruptly shudder on. Then the decrepit structure begins to feel almost alive, and an ivory glow washes out over the nearby village. Lights up the little skiffs and dugouts, pools in the children’s ragged birchbark canoes, and for a few moments it reminds everyone of all the things that might have been.

That’s when they do their testing. A few bespectacled old Keepers stumble out, looking puzzled in the false moonlight, and disappear the cleverest children. And so it goes, your elders say. So it goes.

When you live in a descended world you accept the things you’re told. You give thanks for the autumn harvest, and the deft touch of a well-built skiff. You marry who the Keepers direct you to, learning one dance for your wedding and another for your spouse’s funeral. You watch the seasons, count the shyly reappearing stars, raise and love and lose a little brood. Once, when a squadron of abandoned birchbarks floated forgotten down the river until they fetched up against the narrow second bend, you even went to pick over the rotten shoal for the bluebellies that burrowed in their wreckage, muttering a hollow “Thank you,” to the gods you’d only heard of and the ancestors you knew.

Your sole concession to bereavement came that very evening when, desultorily baking your bushel of clams, a senile elder said that you could hear the stories of the taken children rattling inside the pot. You put your ear up to the fire and listened to the sound of the butter pop, the driftwood crackle.

And so it goes, you tried to think. So it goes.

What you don’t do is build a birchbark of your own. You don’t paddle out into the river, linger by the tower’s intake when the clouds bruise back the day. You don’t salute the fishes, or nod to your quick-fading wife where she stands by the river’s edge. So it goes, you try to think again, still haunted by those baking clams.

And when the burgeoned river pulls you over, you most certainly do not swim down into the sluices. You do not cut the matted webbing, tumble through alongside a tidal wave of rotten fish. You do not sink deeper into the humming tower with your gut knife trembling in your right hand. You do not crawl through the shadows, search for niches in the gloom, or jump with every thunder clap, as the world seems to balk and shiver.

You don’t do any of those things, do you? You are a sane, well-adjusted individual who would never go against traditions. You know the Keepers know what’s best: they are the students of an ancient wisdom, and so you never question their decrees. You are a credit to your village and your troop.

Or you were, until the Keepers came for him.

He was thin as the pygmy willows. He danced like them, too. At your mother’s wake, his whipcord lashings raised shouts from a passing nomad troop, and kindhearted as he was, the boy asked you to invite them in.

You called him Nahum, after a dead relative you hardly knew. Your wife insisted and you went along because you’d named the last three children, never dreaming that little Nahum would soon become your favorite, and you’d spend the rest of both your lives wondering, “Why?”

Your favorite quality about the boy was his preternatural sharpness. Show him a lure and he would reproduce it. Toss the tot a damaged net and he’d puzzle over it intently, climbing down the tangled lattice until he found the breaks inside the pattern and repaired them with his own small hands.

But this sharpness marked him out for the Keeper’s attention. The tower’s white lights flickered on and now you’ve shattered your traditions. You’ve come up from a fetid pool into some dark and dreary basement, and despite your clinging to its shadows your every footstep bounces off the walls. You echo as your screams did on those first few nights, when you went out to fling your voice against the dome of scattered stars.

Sweating, you push forward. You skulk out of the deeper caverns past whirring thickets of black belts and crouching monsters that spew gouts of steam. You push through a pair of double doors taller than the hut you built, and then you’re in. You’re in.

You were born into that river village. You took your first steps in its silty muck, and learned to fish along its reeded banks. Once, in a fit of youthful passion, you rowed three weeks down the winding channel and brought back a bison’s three-horned head. When you finally returned to your home village, it was said that a few more shreds of moonlight pierced the curtains of ancestral smog.

But you have never set foot inside the tower and so its scale and beauty shock you. It’s so much larger on the inside. The statues of whole troops stand ready in its niches while above, the branching forms of too-bright candelabrum light the far-off spiral of stairs and ceiling like a hundred-thousand newfound stars for as long as this storm looms.

And in transparent cages on the dusty display floor there are skeletons. On lecterns standing sentinel beside them, books.

You pass a child hunched over one of the lecterns and you grab them by the hand. You yank so hard they squeal “It hurts! It hurts!” but this child is not Nahum. You do not recognize him, red hair burning off his sallow skin, so you move on, knife at the ready.

Eyes follow from the mezzanines above. Predators at the edges of the firelight, they lean out far beyond the rail.

Your vague pretense at silence begins to feel like parody and so you drop it. You straighten up and move into the center of the endless hall. Robes rustle, voices hemorrhage mournful tones. ‘A song?’ you think, but then all thoughts abruptly vanish as a man descends a nearby stair. He’s tall and frail and sallow and you could gut him like an eel; his hands are open, placating.

“Welcome,” he says, “to the Museum of Futures Passed.”

And the rain roars up anew. Fat drops suicide against the tower’s skin, rattling the walls and shaking dust off of the books and skeletons. The tall man who stands before you flinches and you realize that this is a Keeper, this stripling youth whose soft hands would be shredded by a net or rope. He squints at you, and as the tower’s lights all brighten with another burst of energy, you follow him into the gallery’s intermittent gloom.

“We are rarely blessed with visitors,” says your young guide softly. His voice is rattling, pneumonic. Passing the sleeping forms of metal giants, their treads and armor plating cordoned by a velvet rope, you expect their turrets to turn and follow you like dogs after their master’s voice.

But like you, the turrets do not respond. There are no words. For as long as anyone remembers the tower, it has loomed above your world. As a child you assumed that it had grown there, taking the structure’s monsoon flowering for some showy sign of life.

And yet it feels so dead inside. Your guide’s words mean nothing to you. Museums, Pasts, and Futures? What you know are fish and currents. The wrecks laden with bluebellied clams. Shaking off your sudden lethargy you point at a display and croak, “What is that thing?” hoping that he has an answer, but certain you aren’t fit to hear it.

He looks up. Excitement lights his wan expression. Your knife’s point indicates a structure perhaps twice as tall as he is, a skeleton partially exposed and partially sheathed in some transparent metal. Tiny model men peer out of tiny model offices while smaller, wheeled devices revolve on painted tracks around it, and trees waver in an imaginary breeze.

“The Flizzlebork!” your guide exclaims. “Or at least, that’s what I called it. If the vessels orbiting its trunk ever cease revolving then our world will stop, as well. Would you like to fall off of the world, sir?”

You brush your fingers down the Flizzlebork’s surface—tacky with the dust of countless seasons—and move on.

Warming to your presence, your guide points here and there. “The Guzzadroon,” he says, pointing reverently at a sword-armed monster made out of more rust than steel. Two legs root it to the ground and a light blinks like a dying man inside its cockpit.

“The Tree of Heaven,” your guide intones, leading you to an observation platform situated high above a pit dug in the ground. You crane your neck and see a massive arrow fletched with three black and white vanes. Strangely conical, its almost as if a man could fit inside it.

“The ancients used this device to pierce the firmament,” your guide says. “Once there, the Tree of Heaven spread its seeds into the great beyond so that one day we might recapture some fragment of the beauty lost.” He leans against your shoulder in his childish need to share his knowledge, and you remember the knife clutched in your aching hand.

“The stars appearing in the night sky?” he says. “They are this tree’s descendants.”

“And this tree,” you ask. “Has it ever flowered?”

He stares at you dumbly.

“Take me to the children.”

With a glance down at your knife, he does.

The Sacrospect, the Septahaunt. Another monster called the Oag. Walking quickly now, your guide still takes the time to point out a skeleton he calls the Cummerscup, but which to you looks like a three-horned bison.

“The children!” you scream at last. He flinches, blue eyes beseeching the other Keepers who have followed at a safer distance. You stand now in a vast enclosure from whose ceiling hangs a flock of fixed-wing birds. Chipped paint streaks their sides and bombs hang from their bulbous bellies. You know bombs. A bomb exploded last spring when your neighbor tilled his nearest field and you sat among the small stalks of your asparagus thinking, that’s me. That’s how I feel.

You’re lead on through a creaking doorway. Where before the world smelled of must and damp you now detect a cooler, cleaner odor. Your guide calls out “Aliyah!” and you recognize the word as the name of a girl taken in your childhood. How many seasons ago? You remember threading dandelions through the inky tangle of her hair.

She is older now. Bespectacled. She emerged from a connected room wearing a dark and shapeless robe, hidebound tomes stacked up in her veiny hands. She stares at you, stunned, a ghost dredged out of her past.

“I had a son,” you whisper. “Nahum.”

She considers you. Considers. Time passes, and your knife becomes a cancer sprouting from your arm. Aliyah looks so sickly, her black skin lusterless and faded, as if the building were a prison designed to keep her from the sun.

She turns. You follow. Shelves line every surface, some poor forest’s stolen children, and those shelves are loaded down with more books than you had ever thought existed, or dreamt that anyone would want to read.

Aliyah leads you to a place where robed children sit in solemn rows. At each seat there is a desk, at each desk a brace of charcoal pencils. A teacher distributes white sheets of parchment and the children fall on them like starving animals on prey.

One of them is Nahum. He is older, too. Whole seasons have burned past you and now he writes with the most angelic concentration, directing his whole being into the sharp point of his pencil.

You sag against Aliyah. “What is this? What’s happening?”

“Discovery,” she says.

You share the ghost of an old look.

“First, we teach them how to read,” she tells you. “That’s why we take them bright and young. Then, as the children find their words, we turn them loose inside themselves. They are delvers in our racial memory. They mine the truths inscribed on themselves, the truths that only children are innocent enough to see.”

“The Flizzlebork!” your guide says, startling you. You hadn’t realized that he’d followed.

“The Tamrak Veda,” corrects Aliyah, in a tone you’ve only ever heard out of the village priest, debating scriptures with the wise woman above the dammed banks of her sunken altar.

You shake your head. “But,” you say, eyes riveted to Nahum, “how do you recognize the truth? If two children write conflicting stories, how do you know which one has merit and which is just a child’s fiction?”

“What is fiction?” asks your guide.

“What is truth?” challenges Aliyah.

Then she answers: “The truth is a viable organism. It sprouts its own trellises and scaffolding. Truth is not for us to know. It is for the children, looking inward, to discover on their own. If the Flizzlebork takes center stage in a dozen of their future tellings, then we know it has the ring of truth. Likewise, if Nahum and the others obsess over the deeper meanings of the Tamrak Veda, the second and third circles of the prophecy I was never able to discover…well. That will tell us all we need to know, and we’ll move on to the next ancient secret, the next perplexing artifact, until we’ve cataloged the whole Museum, this life raft from a prior world.”

“And then,” your guide says, “we’ll begin remaking this one.”

It’s all too much. The knife falls from your hand. You watch Aliyah go to Nahum. You watch her stroke his tawny hair. You fall down the hunched ridge of his little shoulders, claw your way back up again, and gaze down at your descended world from the high crown of your youngest child’s head. You’re three weeks paddle past the clouds, where the bluebellies grow fatter, sweeter, on the shores of those reseeded stars.

You stumble out through the tower’s main entrance. You stand in front of the monstrous structure and stare at the distant chimneys of your village, and at your wife’s figure standing motionless a short way from the doors. What will you say to her? What can you?

‘I met Nahum and he’s in good hands?’

You go down to the riverside. You sit down in the muck and reeds.

Things happened that you cannot understand. Things happened that no one understands.

Your wife reaches you. She clasps your hands. You look up and she’s taller than the Flizzlebork. Black clouds swirl in her crown, and when she frowns the rain beats down, and down, and down.

What do you say? What can you?

How can you go back to the life you lived, the children you still have to raise, knowing no one keeps the answers? Knowing that it all spills from a child’s pen, and that any security you might have felt was an illusion? The cold comfort of waking in the darkness, and sometimes finding a light.

“I met Nahum,” you start to say. But before you can speak again the tower’s lights shudder off, the river shrouds itself in dying evening, and all the landmarks that you’ve ever known just disappear.