As he spoke, I realized I wasn’t ready for his revelations. I had made a mistake—I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I needed distance from this shivering, shuddering wreck of a man. He clung to the edges of the smock I had given him like a corpse curling fingers around a coffin’s lining. The look on his face made me think of our father dying in the summer grass. It frightened me. I tried to put boundaries on the conversation.
“What happened to the book you were working on?” I asked him.
He grimaced, but the expression made him look more human, and his gaze turned inward, the horrors reflected there no longer trying to get out.
“Stillborn,” he gasped, as if breaking to the surface after being held down in black water. He lurched to his feet, fell back down again. Every surface he touched became covered in fine black powder. “Stillborn,” he repeated. “Or I killed it. I don’t know which. Maybe I’m a murderer. I was … I was halfway through. On fire with ancient texts. Bloated with the knowledge in them. Didn’t think I needed firsthand experience to write the book. Such a web of words, Janice. I have never used so many words. I used so many there weren’t any left to write with. And yet, I still had this fear deep in my skull. I couldn’t get it out.” (I still can’t get it out of my head, sometimes. Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.)
He relinquished his grasp on the object in his hand, which I had almost forgotten.
It rolled across the floor. We both stared at it, he as astonished as I. A honey-and-parchment-colored ball. Of flesh? Of tissue? Of stone?
He looked up at me. “I remember now. It needs moisture. If it dries, it dies. Cracks form in its skin. It’s curled into a ball to preserve a pearl of moisture between its cilia.”
“What is it?” I said, unable to keep the fear from my voice.
He grinned in recognition of my tone. “Before Dad died,” he said, “you would have found this creature a wonderful mystery. You would have followed me out into the woods and we would have dug up fire-red salamanders just to see their eyes glow in the dark.”
“No,” I said. “No. There was no time when I would have found this thing a wonderful mystery. Where did you find it?”
His smirk, the way it ate up his face, the way it accentuated the suddenly taut bones in his neck, made the flesh around his mouth a vassal to his mirth, sickened me.
“Where do you think it came from?”
I ignored the question, turned away, said, “I have a canteen of water in the front, near my desk. But keep talking. Keep telling me about your book.”
He frowned as I walked past him into the main room of the gallery. From behind me, his disembodied voice rose up, quavered, continued. A thrush caught in a hunter’s snare, flapping this way and that, ever more entangled and near its death. His smell had coated the entire gallery. In a sense, I was as close to him searching for the canteen as if I stood beside him. Beyond the gallery windows lay the real world, composed of unnaturally bright colors and shoppers walking briskly by.
“So I never finished it, Janice. What do you think of that? I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. I wrote and wrote. I wrote with the energy of ten men each evening. All texts I consulted interlocked under my dexterous manipulations. It all made such perfect sense … and then I began to panic. Each word, I realized, had been leading me further and further away from the central mystery. Every sentence left a false trail. Every paragraph formed another wall between me and my thesis. Soon, I stopped writing. It had all been going so well. How could it get so bad so quickly?
“I soon found out. I backtracked through the abyss of words, searching for a flaw, a fissure, a crack in the foundation. Perhaps some paragraph had turned traitor and would reveal itself. Only it wasn’t a paragraph. It was a single word, five pages from the end of my silly scribblings, in a sentence of no particular importance. Just a single word. I know the sentence by heart, because I’ve repeated it to myself over and over again. It’s all that’s left of my book. Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t sure. I was still searching for the canteen under all the canvases.
“Here it is: ‘But surely, if Tonsure had not known the truth then, he knew it after traveling underground.’ The word was ‘truth,’ and I could not get past the truth. The truth stank of the underground, buried under dead leaves and hidden in cold, dry, dark caverns. The truth had little to do with the surface of things.
“From that word, in that context, on that page, written in my nearly illegible hand, my masterwork, my beautiful, marvelous book unraveled syllable by syllable. I began by crossing out words that did not belong in the sentence. Then I began to delete words by rules as illegitimate and illogical as the gray caps themselves. Until after a week, I woke up one morning, determined to continue my surgical editing of the manuscript—only to find that not even the original sentence had been spared: all that remained of my once-proud manuscript was that single word: ‘truth.’ And, truth, my dear sister, was not a big enough word to constitute an entire book—at least not to me.” (Or my publishers, come to think of it. If there had been any publishers.)
I had found the canteen. I came back into the room and handed it to him. “You should drink some. Rinse out the lie you’ve just told.”
He snorted, took the canteen, raised it to his lips, and, drinking from it, kissed it as seriously as he would a lover.
“Perhaps it is in part a metaphor,” he said, “but it is still, ironically enough, the truth.”
“Don’t speak in metaphors, then. How do you tell truth from lies otherwise?”
“I want to be taken literally.”
“You mean literarily, Duncan. Except you’ve already been taken literarily—they’ve all ravished you and gone on to the next victim.”
“Literally.”
“Is that why you brought this horrible rolled up ball of an animal with you?”
“No. I forgot I had it. Now that I’ve brought it here, I can’t let it die.” (Actually, Janice, I did bring it with me on purpose. I had just forgotten the purpose.)
He sidled over to the golden ball of flesh, poured water into his hand.
He looked up at me, the expression on his face taking me back to all of his foolish explorations as a child. “Watch now! Watch carefully!”
Slowly, he poured water over the golden ball. After a moment the gold color blushed into a haze of purple-yellow-blue-green, which then returned to gold, but a more vibrant shade of gold that flashed in the dim light. Duncan poured more water over the creature. It seemed to crack apart, fissures erupting across its skin at regular intervals. But no—it was merely opening up, each of its four legs unfurling from the top of the ball, to settle upside down on the floor. Immediately, it leapt up, spun, and landed, cilia down, revealed as a kind of phosphorescent starfish.
Duncan dribbled still more water over it. Each of its four arms shone a different glittering shade—green-blue-yellow-purple—the edges of the blue arm tinged green on one side, yellow on the other.
“A starfish,” I said.
“A compass,” he said. “Just one of the many wonders to be found belowground. A living compass. North is blue, so if you turn it like so,” and he reached over and carefully turned the starfish, “the arm shines perfectly blue, facing as it does due north.”