IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
II: Tests of Fire and Blood
Chapter 46 The Road Gives You Too Much Time to Think
Thursday, May 28, 2708 We descend a bit today,
winding up and down the mountain roads looking for stray rebels who might've
climbed this far by now. Fatima
wisecracks around like nothing happened yesterday, her eyes gone stony cold
once more, shielded behind her smirk, but she carries herself like someone
recovering from a fever. Malcolm gives
her plenty of privacy, his eyes casting about with every turn of the road,
focused far from us. (He really did it, made the
Big Step. And sent all his money into my
account--just when I no longer need it.
Can't quite do anything right, Uncle, but you keep on trying.) Me, I feel okay, but
Malcolm says I still run a good risk of a relapse if we ascend too fast, and he
still won't let me smoke. And that does not
feel okay. (It felt good, what Uncle
used to do. I have to admit that, now.) I can feel the smoke curl in my mouth, I can
taste its mean, strong satisfaction--and then nothing. I can feel and taste the nothing. (I can taste the candy even now, the
peppermint and the chocolate and the butter pecan--but I lied to myself, to say
that the pleasure came from the taste, had nothing whatsoever to do with
the...the touching. While I ate--while I
pretended that nothing happened below my belly—that my body, my appetite
stopped right there.) I crave that taste so much
that my body trembles with it like a child on the verge of a tantrum. ("I know your mother said you can't
have sweets, Malcolm," he'd say to me, the bag of candy rattling just a
little in his hand, "But you know I just can't resist pleasing you.") A shameful thing, to have ever even allowed
myself to get into this state--but wave a pipe in front of me right now, and
we'd see how far that shame would last. ("You
can be naughty when it's just you and me," he'd say. "It's okay--I love it when you're
naughty.") "Go further
north," Fatima says, “to a side-road where the dirt takes on a pale golden
color mixed with gravel.” We find and
take the turnoff that goes down and up and down till my stomach remembers that
it didn't feel well yesterday and may not be in such a good mood today, either. "I know a path that Chulan likes when
she gets the chance to travel it." (Poor,
shy, childlike Uncle, stuttering when the other adults would speak to him, a
wreck when they fixed him up with dates.
He really could only be himself when entertaining the children. Innocent, they used to say of him.) "It has a waterfall along the way, and a
clean, clear pool." (And maybe
they spoke the truth--a grotesque kind of innocence, twisted like any other
human thing can be--who can find any truly clean thing, this far from
Paradise?) "We once found
statuettes there, and clay vessels--we think it might have been one of the
sacred pools, before the government stamped out the Hill Cults a century
ago." (What, exactly, is so
sacred about childhood, anyway? "I
only want to give you pleasure," he'd say, "I only live to see you
happy." What was so terrible about
what he did, his need to please, that violated something so basic in me, left
me so hopelessly voracious for some sweetness that I'd lost?) "That tree over there,
bent over like that--see where a lightning blast broke it and the half-broken
part just kept on growing? Take the very
next turn-off after that." (He gave me candy, that first night, while he did what he
did for the very first time, back when I was pretty, as slim as any other
child. It surprised and delighted him
when I gobbled down the entire bag. "And why not?" he cried. "Let's go out and celebrate our
senses!" He took me to the
ice-cream parlor and bought me the biggest sundae I ever saw in my life,
swirled up and down with a rainbow of sugar-sparkled fruit, mounded with
whipped cream, drenched and sprinkled with the most luxurious toppings, and I
ate it all, scraped at the very smears left on the glass, though I felt a
little queasy. So I told Uncle I needed
real food, no more sweets, and he bought me the hamburger I pointed out--the
double one with cheese and bacon and mushrooms dripping grease. And fries--what's a hamburger without the
fries? I forced down every bit of it,
trying not to groan. He owed it to me, I
thought, though I couldn't quite say why. "Are you sure?"
he asked me when I next pointed to the cake, for dessert after the meat--the
delicate chocolate cake with the layers of raspberry and the finger-thick shell
of icing. But he bought it for me when I
nodded, though the nausea had turned to pain; he wouldn't deny me anything, he
said, his most beautiful and precious nephew.
My belly stretched so achingly heavy that nothing below it seemed to
exist anymore. And that seemed
right. That seemed...fulfilling.) "We've traveled a lot
this way, Chulan and I, with the Egalitarians.
She's all right, Chulan." I ask her, "Have you
two been friends a long time?" "She nursed me back to
health when I first arrived at Madame's."
(Health! You know no more
about health than I do, Fatima.) Fool
of me to forget. For a long moment I say
nothing in reply. I don't want to think
about that. (I don't want to think
about afterwards, when he nursed me so tenderly that it almost felt like an
apology, sweet penance for sickening me on "pleasure." His shamefaced, gentle caring for me felt so
good, I remember feeling that I wanted to get sick like that more often--I
don't want to recall that. But he owed
it to me--somehow it seemed that way at the time. "Poor nephew," he said, gently
sponging off my brow. "Too much
fun--life just got too sweet for you. I
am so sorry--I just love too much to please.") After enduring enough of my
silence, Fatima says, "And yeah, we pal'd around a lot after that. She showed me the ropes." I don't want to know about
the ropes, Fatima--please don't tell me.
(I don’t want to think about how much I loved him. He shared so many things with me, not just
food and...and that other. He gave me
music, and theater, the subtleties of wine-tasting, the appreciation of art, the
marvels of the library and the secret joy of scented baths. We celebrated all the senses. He gave me so much good. And rat poison is mostly wholesome grain.) "She told me she
wasn't really Mountainfolk, but part Chinese--yeah, right, like Chinese comes
in brown. But we all had our fantasies
in those days." She laughs nastily,
as brown as me, herself. (Soon I became
"beautiful" only in his fantasies–his “little cherub”. And then, eventually, even he had to admit
that we had a "problem"--by the time my belly had completely buried
that which he desired, tucked safely away beneath an avalanche of fat. Yet still, by some habit or compulsion to
break rules, or some perverted recompense, he continued to feed me on
demand. I watched him grow sadder and
sadder as I grew bigger and bigger--I could punish him by eating, all the while
appearing to cooperate! Even to myself I
appeared to cooperate. And I did, really, to my
everlasting shame. I let him caress my
buttocks, still accessible to him, while I stuffed my mouth, not looking on
him, lying on my side, turned away from him.
And then I let him...oh my God! “Love handles,” he'd
say. “What do people have against love
handles, anyway?”) "She and I, we'd slip
out to church together--we'd stay up for morning Mass, bathe, wash each other's
hair, then go out in some proper clothes that we'd set aside for
Sundays." Fatima giggled. "Funny, to watch our clients in the
front pews, trying not to look at us! We
wouldn't take communion, but we'd watch them do it, kneeling oh so primly while
the others rose, and we'd smile. Just a
little smile, catch their eye with it, hear the wives say, 'Are you okay,
Honey? You look a little flushed.' That's how we punished the men who 'loved'
us." I can hear the sneering quote
marks in her voice. (But why did I feel such a
need to punish a man who meant me only joy?
It made no sense to me, for a long, long time, these warring
emotions. I'd feel so achingly guilty
about my cruelty to my Uncle, who adored me, fat or no, when everyone else by
now had only mean words for my size, who indeed saw nothing else of me anymore
but fat. Shame on me for exploiting his
love like that! Who else would cherish a
disgusting glutton like me, after all?
Certainly not the young girls that I used to watch with such impossible
desire.) She pulls out a cigarette
and puffs at it absentmindedly while I watch her in agony. "And what's the big deal, anyway, that
some people make? Can't a whore
pray? Didn't Jesus die for my sins same
as theirs?" I try to get whiffs of
the secondhand smoke, but it doesn't come near enough to satisfying me. "Put that out,
please," Malcolm says, not taking his eyes off the road. She shrugs and grinds it out, wasting a brief
scowl on the back of his head as he glances away. (I'd run to church and pray
to be a better person. I became an altar
boy and a choir boy--the robes hid a lot, I fancied. I headed junior charities--all on my Uncle's
money, since my parents had none, since they had so many debts that only Uncle
stood between them and jail. But he
couldn't refuse me anything--anymore than they could refuse him anything--and
it did him good to give of his surplus, it made him feel better about himself,
almost innocent again. "I'm the glutton, not
you," he'd say, "for I padded my life with all this wealth at other
people's expense--but giving sets it right again." He thanked me for offering him this
opportunity to save his soul, and then he would come to me, feeling pure...Oh
God! "I know you're
supposed to be on a diet, Malcolm, but we can't be saints all the
time." No, we can't, can we?) We come around a bend and I
first hear, then see the most breathtaking waterfall sparkle before us,
spilling down a sister-slope from an angel-high height above us, separated from
our road by a deep and narrow gorge. We
wind and we wind ever downward now, away from that roaring music and then back
again, sometimes so close that Malcolm has to use his squeaking windshield
wipers, sometimes completely out of sight and sound, yet always headed towards
the pool, even as a labyrinth always leads to its heart though it might seem to
veer away. And somehow I know that
generations of reverent feet beat down this path on their way to the sacred
waters, long before the government widened it into a road. "Look--over
there! That's Chulan's mark, the branch
tied to the branch. She knew I'd find
her here.” (The hell of it is that,
despite everything, I still love him, too.
Now, is that saintly or is that another kind of sick?) We turn off the road, jolting over the rocks
and roots till we reach a point of concealment, then pile out to find a
footpath still well-worn, and not by animal paws. We leave the car and put our feet on the
ancient track, wherever it might lead. |
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