The Dark Intestine

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”

“The straight way…” mirrored the son. His eyes were set on the fire, but his thoughts – his words – were set in echolalic stone, inherited. Words, his father passed down to him. Along with all the meanings and concepts they carried like devils on their backs. Where there was brimstone, there was also fire. 

When he turned his father was already watching him.

“That’s right,” he said.

 “Long, and hard, and leading up to light?” the son asked somewhat feverishly. He could spore connections in his mind the way fungi web their networks in the earth.

If his father was impressed, it could only be found in the slightest rise in inflection.

“Paradise Lost, book two. You remembered.” 

To that his son said earnestly: “I remember everything you’ve ever told me.” A confession that, were it not for the fact they had only spent the last month of their lives in each other’s company, would otherwise prove hard to believe.

In the soundless vacuum of that moment he could have counted beats in the subtle, soft landings of the snow. One beat per day they had shared together, he thought. Or, better yet, one per day they had yet to share with each other. It was close to midnight. Any pink and orange on the horizon had long been snuffed out; now, the sky was a faraway blueish-black, and he thought of the bruise under his skin. That fungal connectivity of his mind was lucid, but pathogenic.

“We need more wood for the fire,” his father said then.

Sore and under the surface, something swelled. 

*

Sometime in the spring of last year, when he still lived with his mother, he persuaded her to let him learn to drive. She knew a man who could take the both of them out to the backroads and be the one to teach him. No more words were exchanged than those concerning the rules of the road, and journeys there and back were silent on all but one trip. He would set off at a crawling pace and roll slowly through rural towns not unlike his own. The friend of his mother would lower the window, rest an arm on the passenger’s side of the truck, and, preoccupied, nod a sparing “good job” every now and again. On this particular day he could taste the air. In its stasis hung a heavy dampness, in its dampness, the musk of fresh pine. Whatever storm had passed now dripped and chimed in the forests close by.

They drove through a clearing that parted the woods and he pressed the gas harder. The rain trickled to a start again, lashing against the windows and mottling the road ahead. As they turned a sharp left the car half-spun. The sleeping man in the passenger seat barely stirred. Once they had straightened out again, he gave thought to slowing down, or pulling over. But before his foot touched the brake, an object flew from out the trees. A blur of angled limbs spawned so seamlessly into the air he could only brace for impact. The windscreen cracked on collision and sent the car skidding, and the man awoke only then to jerk forward like a reflex muscle and secure the wheel.

He had hit a deer. What they identified as a smaller white-tailed doe now lay on the roadside, dazed, and not yet dead. In a fleeting panic it thrashed and kicked its spindles for legs, before becoming overtaken by the exertion, or pain. It fell still in black blood pooling quickly.

“It’s dead.”

“No,” he replied, “It’s still twitching. Look.”

In his peripheral vision he saw some rocks scattered across the mossy slope on the forest side of the road. He approached the bank and kicked around for the biggest of them.

“What are you doing?” the man protested. “What–?”

He struck the doe. In one blow he half-expected its head to flop apart, like two halves of a watermelon, and to learn of some bright red brain-matter inside. But nothing flowered out nor fell apart like he had hoped, and he went home that day having only learned of guilt.

*

When he returned with more kindling for the fire, his father was on his way back from the cabin. He had already marked the point in Dante’s Inferno at which they stopped reading and left it there. Now he watched his son scatter the brushwood and stoke the flames and thought for a fraction of a second he felt it warm him, but by the time he swallowed the only warmth he felt was from the fire. Anything else was extinguished, doused out by the black ice he made sure lined his insides and pressed cold against all his numbed receptors. To so much as entertain what he’d feel was to stray from the path, from the straight way. To feel it was to turn round altogether. So, he swallowed and let it absolve him.

For the rest of that night he sat on top of a log in only the warmth he allowed himself and read the Book of Leviticus to his son who slept on and off at his feet. His low voice stayed steely and resolute whether the boy was sleeping or not. Someone can hear, he thought. Either way, Someone will be listening. And that Someone matters much, much more.

He looked down at his son, then: forgive him, he thought.

For he knows not what he’s done.

*

He had packed the few belongings he had and thrown them into the trunk of his mother’s car and driven two days and two nights to the city dusk of the summer just gone. It took until the dawn of fall to find him.

He thought he knew loneliness before then. He had known being alone; all those nights spent searching on his own, he had known being alone. But he hadn’t known loneliness. Not until he found him.  

“I don’t know who you are.” His father had been cold and unwelcoming.

“You don’t believe me. Look–”

“Goodnight to you.”

“–There. That’s me as a baby. And that’s you.”

He had taken the photograph off of him reluctantly and studied it for quite some time before he spoke another word.

“Where did you get this?” His voice didn’t waver.

The downpour was torrential, and the boy couldn’t help but notice how much more it smelled like sulfur than the fresh pine he had come to know. “I found it.”

Another moment passed.

“Go home,” said his father eventually, handing back the photo.

“What do you mean ‘go home?’ I came all this way to find you.”

“Well you shouldn’t have. You don’t know what kind of a life I lead, nor I, you; if I see you again, I won’t be as accommodating.”

*

That morning the son washed himself alone in the stream at the edge of the thicket. Come daybreak he saw smoke rising above the trees even in the rain, and, knowing it was time to return to the cabin, took the shortcut even if it meant wading through the mud left by the snowmelt.

When he got there his father peeled his wet clothes off of him and dried him with an unforeseen tenderness and then he sat him down.

“Take this,” he said, and tossed his son a brown-colored bag. “Ever stalked deer?”

The boy withdrew a slender, bolt action rifle from its case. “Not really.”

Also in the hunting bag was a handgun, a pair of binoculars, and a gut hook knife.

“We’re going hunting,” said his father militantly. “But we’ll need to hike first.”

“For how long?”

“About three days.”

“How far is that?”

His father looked over his shoulder and out the window.

“Don’t ask so many questions,” he said.

*

In the days following their first exchange he couldn’t sleep and he knew it was because of the boy. It began to affect his work – ‘it’ being not so much guilt as fear. Fear for what his fate entailed on his Day of Judgement should he have made the wrong call. Fear for having forsaken his son.

Lord, you have taught me the value in expecting the unexpected, he would write. For the truth of my old life, which I had been looking at through a glass darkly, has revealed itself. I met a boy in the early hours of the morning. He claimed to know me and presented me with a photograph from my other life.

I turned him away. Tell me: How can I be a father to him now?

There unfolded the inner workings of his mind. Like his son, the geometric associations – the thoughts spun like webs – splintered off, and underground, would re-root themselves.

They, like him, found their bearings in the dirt.

This is a more fruitful testament to You than any living fruit of my loins.

His whole head was ablaze with connections, with pattern recognition, spilling gasoline in cornfields and burning crop circles at the drop of a match:

Any living, he watched himself write a second time.

*

Before they set off he talked through the next three days with liturgical precision. He held the map in front of his son and pointed to where they stood. Then he traced a finger all along the trails they were to take like veins from which he sought to draw blood.

“Are you ready?”

He bent down to kiss his son’s forehead unexpectedly: “Look alive,” he said.

The rain stopped on the second day and he knew it would stay dry for the rest of their journey.

“This is a pilgrimage,” he would say matter-of-factly, and to which his son would nod in agreement.

They spent most of the afternoon splitting logs for their firewood. Now it was able to be carried and used nomadically without the risk of a downpour to catch them off guard.

“It’s just weird,” said the son.

“What?”

“How the weather’s all dried up suddenly.”

His father tied the last butcher’s knot around the bundle of blocks. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Then he took the wood for their fire and placed it on his boy’s shoulders and the two of them walked on together.

Any living. Any alive.

*

That evening the son noticed one of the logs was soft and discolored in places. He rolled it over to reveal a pattern of fruitbodies suckling the underbelly like barnacles.

“This one’s gone bad,” he said.

“It’s heart rot.”

“It’s what?”

“Heart rot.”

He could tell from the look on the boy’s face what he was thinking, and on the verge of exasperation he opened his mouth to explain the phenomenon when something stopped him. Instead he sighed, and, colorlessly, said: “Yes. Its heart has rotted.”

They were to fall asleep side by side somewhere in the hours to come without saying another word.

*

Lord, you have called on me.

Dawn of a new day. In two more hours they would reach the top of the mountain. The boy took up the wood for his father without being asked, and the father the cross for his. That was the dark intestine. Nothing could be done about it. That was the third day.

And like Abraham: I am here.

His son was at his heels like a stray and he took satisfaction in it. As they mounted the slope, that mycelium mind’s eye saw all the possible shapes they could be said to take. The stray dog trailing at his feet was one. The shepherd and the lamb another.

Then he stretched out his arm to stop his very own Isaac walking any further.

“In the middle of the journey,” he said firmly, “within a dark wood: the straight way was found.”  

“We’re here?”

“Yes.”

“…Oh?” The son looked around, wide-eyed. His father lifted the firewood off his back.

“Hold out your arms,” he said. So he did.

Cradling the wood he followed his father to a grove atop the mountain’s edge. He bowed his head and saw that the slow-moving river down below looked almost stagnant. He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder.

“Throw it away.”

“What?”

“We won’t need it anymore. Throw it away.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I won’t ask again.”

The boy let go of the firewood and it fell apart on release. He watched some pieces splinter against the rock that jutted out of the mountain and those that narrowly missed shrink out of sight. He turned to face his father, trying his hardest to keep his composure.

“What now?”

“Walk with me.”

He had him kneel down under the bough of a tree he had marked. One per day they had yet to share with each other.

Then he told his son to ask him where the lamb was for the burnt offering, and he did. There was fear in his voice, and when he got no answer he looked up at his father to see that he was smiling.

“Where?” the boy repeated, swallowing the lump in his throat. He bowed his head again so that through teary eyes he could only see his father’s legs. This was how he watched him walk off and come back with their hunting bag a moment later.

“God himself has provided the lamb for the burnt offering, my son,” he said. “God himself.”

*

Later that evening the father alone returned to the tree. He knelt down and sat beside the body of the lamb and kissed his head once more. Then, in the soundless vacuum of that moment, he could have counted beats in the subtle, soft landings of the snow as it started to fall again.

It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear.

Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto I