The saskiad, p.16
The Saskiad, page 16
Perhaps when all the stones have been lichened to soil, when all the mother mosquitoes have blood for their babes, when all the horseflies have gotten a square meal, when all the people learn to love most the things that work simply and well, perhaps then the Laistrygones will disappear, the dams will stop being built, the whales will stop being slaughtered, and Saskia will know what she has been put on earth for.
13
How fortunate that Saskia learned patience from dealing with Lauren. Knowledge comes to those who wait. Thomas did have a dog.
"My father bought a puppy when I was three."
The man was probably trying to buy back the affection of the boy whom he had betrayed. He would have brought it inside, a brown wiggle with a red ribbon, and set it by his wary son. He would have smiled ingratiatingly, the revolting stubble twitching at the edges of his jutting beard. Why don't you like me? he would have asked. "It was becoming clear by then that there wouldn't be any siblings. My parents thought a dog might make me less lonely."
Thomos Monogeneios. Like father, like daughter. His shield is azure, charged with oar upright, or. Responsible, lonely, locked in his room.
Thomas stretched forth his hand and named the dog Lila. A liquid sound, for a sea dog. He and the dog grew up together. They played together, slept together. Lila, a rocking sound, to rock him to sleep. She was his best friend. She thought she was human. When he went off to school, she wanted to go, too. She would watch him do homework and later she would open his school books and hold them down with her front paws, dip her head and drool on the pages. "My parents were not dog people," he says.
Of course not. They were oblivious. Lila always ate the same food Thomas did. The vet pompously said you could not raise a dog a vegetarian. They are carnivores, my boy, he said, placing a plump hand on his fussy waistcoat and peering over his half-moon glasses. But Thomas proved him wrong. "She was a Border collie," Thomas says, eyes closed. "A glossy, black and white dog with coal-black eyes."
"I remember her," Saskia says. "I have photos of her."
"No. You never saw her. She died when I was seventeen."
"How?" Jane asks anxiously. Jane is a dog person. In England her family had a dog that her parents gave to friends when they came to America. She has never forgiven them for that. Boston is no place for a dog, they said, and anyway Peter was allergic. Dog stories make Jane cry even when they have happy endings.
"Old age," Thomas says. "She was fourteen. That's the tragedy of dogs. They're your friends for life, but they only live a dozen years. You feel guilty. It would have been the perfect friendship, but you lived too long." He sighs. "When she died I felt so alone. It was much harder than when my parents died."
How did his parents die? But Saskia is too timid to ask such a thing.
"So how did your parents die?" asks Jane.
"Ohh . . ." Thomas picks lint off a sleeve. "A car accident. When I was twenty."
"Well who was the dog then at White-on-the-Water?" Saskia asks. "She was black and white, too."
"All my dogs have been Border collies."
"What was her name?"
"Lila. All my dogs have been named Lila."
"And all your boats," Jane says.
"Only one boat."
And now no boat, and no dog either. Why? "So where s your boat now?" Saskia asks, taking the plunge.
Thomas grunts. He pitches his dregs, unsmiling. "I'll tell you about that some other time."
14
In Through the Looking-Glass, when Alice walks through the wood where things have no names, she puts her arm around the neck of a Fawn. The Fawn lets her do it because it doesn't know it's a Fawn, and Alice doesn't know she's human. When you forget who you are, anything is possible. The Jane Sing and Saskia White who lived in Novamundus are dead. In Hyperborea, they still say "Jane" and "Saskia" to avoid confusion, but in the two sleeping bags zipped together, they are Saskia Sing.
High against the sky he waves, he's found a campsite.
"Come," he calls. "Come home!"
They joke about things, walking along far behind him, holding hands. "He's so dreamy!" Jane says. They giggle. Together they crow, "What a dreamboat!"
Saskia can tell that Thomas is exactly on her wavelength. When Jane takes the gray roll and walks slim-legged away over the turf, Saskia watches Thomas's eyes follow her until she disappears behind an outcropping. On days when Jane and Saskia are hiking apart, it becomes obvious that Thomas's frequent stops are to wait for Jane, not Saskia. Saskia clambers up to him, but he continues to look down, shading his eyes. "Where did you last see her?" he asks. "How far back was she?" He slings off his pack and sits down. He will wait patiently. Saskia wants to go ahead, and Thomas lets her. "If you get all the way to this point, stop and wait for us." Saskia hikes on, excited at the thought that Thomas is waiting alone for Jane.
Evidence: He is standing with Jane and explaining the life cycle of some ferny thing. He puts his hand on her shoulder. He leaves it there longer than he would with Saskia. He pauses and looks at her, his eyes look deeply and steadily into her eyes while he talks about reproductive cycles. All he would have to do is gently pull her toward him and kiss her. But Jane is looking down and the chance is lost. She kneels to touch the ferny thing and he stands over her, arms akimbo, frustrated.
Yin and yang. Dark and light, willowy and compact, adventuress and adventurer, mercury and sulfur, female and male. Getting a back rub in the tent, Saskia drifts contentedly, imagining ... She and he would be all alone beneath the brick vaults of Uraniborg, in the alchemical cellar. Alembics and retorts crowd tables and shelves. The furnace roars like a lion. Litharge bubbles. His best student, she lies on a marble slab in the hot cellar while he applies to her back his famous elixir, dispensed by every apothecary in plague-bedeviled Europe: Venice treacle mixed with aloe, myrrh, and saffron, to which is added tincture of corals and solution of pearls. It flows across her back, tingling, gold-lit by the roaring furnace like hairs on the back of a hand. Tycho works the potion deep into her skin, his arms glistening with sweat, bulging with muscles developed from adjusting his huge Augsburg quadrant, his four-cubit sextant. Yet he is gentle handling her, entrancing her with his unguent as witches of old did for each other before riding their wicked brooms to midnight sabbaths. The master is balding and bullet-headed, his nose wobbles. She is not embarrassed to lie naked before him, because he is as ugly as she is.
15
Dateline:
12:45 A.M., July 28, A.N.T. 1. In Camp, Hyperborea.
A river is a wild and beautiful thing. In the spring it flows high and carries nutrients up to the soil all around, like the Nile. In the autumn it's low and all kinds of flowers and plants grow in the exposed river bottom. Insects come and feed on the plants, and birds come to feed on the insects. Fish swim up the river to spawn, and bears and wolverines come to catch the fish. Whales come up as far as they can, and sport in the pools. They surface, blowing oar uprights of steam. They are the geniuses of the place. Reindeer come down from the highlands to lick the minerals and drink the pure water.
Building a dam on a river is like cutting its throat. It bloats up like a corpse, becoming stagnant and smelly. The fish are trapped. The plants die and the animals go away.
So why, you ask, would anyone build a dam? Some people in this world are:
a) greedy
b) wasteful
c) stupid
d) all of the above
"Everything spoke to primitive man," Thomas said. "You don't cut down a forest when you can feel its soul bleeding, you don't strip-mine when you know it's the skin of your mother you're flaying." He was not looking at them but through them, wrestling with his vision. "The wrong people won history's battle. The Christians were the empty ones, with their creed that said only humans had souls, their greed that could never fill their own emptiness. Primitive peoples didn't lose to the Europeans because of technology, they lost because they tried to understand these blank-eyed invaders. They tried to connect, and they fell into the void."
Thomas says that Masters in India teach you how to enter into the being of other things. In communing with them, you commune with God. God is in a mosquito, and you touch God when you become a mosquito, when you feel yourself flying around, looking for someone to land on. You breathe yourself into things, which is the origin of the word "inspire." So I'm not killing mosquitoes anymore. It is a good Discipline. There was a Native American chief, Thomas says, who said: "What happens to beasts will happen to man. All things are connected. If the great beasts are gone, men would surely die of a great loneliness of spirit." When you come to feel that even insects are your friends, then surely you will never be lonely.
16
A Thomas tale: "Lila was the perfect traveling companion." On long and lonely roads he would sing and she would croon along. While he cooked, she sniffed out onion grass, wild thyme, and sage. "She carried her own pack. She never disagreed with me about when to stop or which way to go. She never complained." She slept in his tent, at his feet. She jumped up growling, hackles raised, at sounds in the night. She was almost shot by a drunken soldier in Burma when he grabbed Thomas by the shirt front and she lunged at him.
"Is this the first Lila?" Jane asks. She is chewing mercilessly on one of Saskia's pens. In order to get out of the downwind spot at story time and to improve her wind on the ascents, she is trying to give up smoking, but she says it's driving her nuts.
"No, I got her when I was eighteen. We took off when I was twenty. I was searching for enlightenment." He strokes quotes in the air around the word. "The sixties."
"Where did you and Lila go?" Saskia asks.
"Easier to say where we didn't go."
"You were in Tasmania," Jane points out.
"Twice," Saskia adds.
"That was our down-under period. We were mainly in the Australian outback."
"Following songlines," Saskia says.
"We did some of that, yes. With a good friend."
An Aborigine, who stood on one leg. My people have never let a white man come on a Walk, he would have said in noble tones. But for you, Thomas, friend ... At night under the stars in the desert wastes, around the campfire, he would sing his songline songs and Thomas and Lila would respond with Phaiakian sea chanteys. Thomas would be stirring the campfire with the end of his oar, hardening it in the process. But Thomas, my friend, the noble Aborigine would say, why are you hardening your winnowing fan?
"This is the Lila I knew," Saskia says.
"No."
"This Lila sounds like she thought she was human, too," Jane says.
"All my Lilas thought they were human."
"I guess we could have guessed that."
"I never treated them like 'dogs.' Chase slobbering after this stick, go eat this crap in your corner, stay off the goddamn furniture. If you bind a child's hands from infancy, it will grow up an idiot: no opposable thumb. Most dogs have been brain-damaged by their owners, who should be held legally responsible."
"Was Lila with you in the ashram?"
"Yes."
He knocked on the gate of the court of the wisest Master of all wide India, an oar on his muscled shoulder and his pack on his back, his faithful companion by his side. Lila flew an oriflamme: her shield was gules, bowl attendant, ermine.
"There was a wise guru at that ashram," Saskia says.
Thomas shrugs. "I thought so at the time."
"He was small, coffee-colored."
"So Lauren still has that photo."
"On the wall."
Thomas grimaces. "I took that picture at a wedding. I was trying to get a shot of him manifesting, but he stopped while I was focusing."
"Manifesting?"
"Vibhuti. A special ash for putting on your forehead and using in rituals." He laughs. "Some of us even ate the stuff. Anything to suck up some of that holiness. In some ashrams the followers drank the guru's urine."
"Gross!" the girls chorus.
"Fortunately our guru wasn't into that particular fetish. Because we certainly would have done it."
"Not you!" Saskia says.
He looks at her, half smiling. "Why don't you think so?"
"You were the favorite."
He chuckles. "Maybe that's why I was the favorite. Maybe I was the one who would smack his lips the loudest."
"But what's manifesting?" Jane asks.
"Creation. Proof of god-like power. His hands would be empty, his arms bared to the shoulder. Nothing up his sleeve, you see. He would put his hand over yours and vibhuti would pour into your palm."
"Wow!"
"Indeed. It bothered me. I didn't want to believe something so material. He would do it with rice, too. It added a whole extra symbolic level to throwing rice on newlyweds."
Saskia is not surprised. If you can make gold from lead, surely you can also make rice from nothing. She wonders if it was real rice he made, or whether if you mold it out of nothing it tastes like nothing, like Mrs. Sing's rice. Perhaps Mrs. Sing just puts her hand over the pot. . . But no, Saskia saw the box. "And he came with you to Wonderland to start the commune, right?"
"Who?"
"The guru."
Thomas looks at her. "Hasn't Lauren explained all this to you?"
"She never says anything, except the guru was named Truth, and I thought he came from India."
"You have no idea what Truth looked like?"
"Lauren showed me a photo with everybody on the porch. It's true he doesn't look like the ashram guru, I always kind of wondered about that. But I thought —"
"What does he look like in the photo?" "He's the bald guy standing next to you." "Right. That's Raymond." "I thought his name was Truth."
Thomas is getting impatient. "That was the name he gave himself but his real name was Raymond."
"Lauren just said the guru was named Truth and he eventually had the commune build a tower for him to live in. She said you were the only one he allowed to come up and speak to him while he was in the tower, because you were his favorite."
"She said I was Truth's favorite?" He looks amused. "I suppose she was trying to be complimentary. Yes, that was always the holygrail, to be the favorite. Lauren didn't mention that Truth went off the deep
end?"
"Um ... no."
He waves that away. "Misplaced loyalty. Truth was on the wrong path, and on the way to finding that out, he went nuts for a while. Lauren should have let go. She's too loyal"
"So Truth wasn't Indian."Saskia is still trying to negotiate that
curve.
"A cab driver from Brooklyn. How did we get on this, anyway?"
"The ashram." "Didn't you meet Lauren at the ashram?" Jane asks.
"Yes. In fact, that does finally bring us back to Lila. Lauren and I met because of her."
He and Lila were sitting out under the stars, and Thomas was pointing up, saying, Look at the Wagon! Lila leaped up, growling
into the darkness. Who's there? Thomas asked, pointing forward the fire-hardened oar. Then Lila, with that unerring dog sense, wagged her tail. Tall, capable Lauren materialized out of the darkness and stroked the sleek coat of the intelligent dog. What a superb dog, she said. And isn't the Plow beautiful tonight?
"Lila died at the ashram," Thomas is saying.
"What happened?" Jane asks, her hands raised protectively to her throat, fearing the worst.
"She was hit by a motorcyclist."
The girls moan.
"I didn't see it. She came to me limping, I had no idea what had happened. She wasn't bleeding. Dogs usually try to go off by themselves if they're in a bad way, but she stuck right by me. I assumed she was all right. I should have known she would stick by me no matter what. She died during the night, at my feet."
"That's so sad," Jane whimpers, rocking.
Thomas is looking away from them, across a valley with a dead cobalt lake in the middle of it. "What about Lauren?" Jane asks.
"What about her?"
"You said you got to know her because of Lila."
"Lauren saw the incident. Unfortunately, Lila ran away from her. It took her until the next day to find out who the 'owner' was. She came to tell me, but it was too late." Wrapped in a colorful toga, hesitating at the door of his prayer hut. You don't know me, she says, hanging back, circumspect, but — I know you, he says. You are Striding Tree, rooted in the ground yet not immobile. The Wagon you call the Plow, although it never sinks into the earth. She steps into the hut, the bright day at her back. And you are Thomas, always yourself, pure Thomasness. The Plow you call the Wagon, although it circles, going nowhere. She reaches out a hand. I.. .
Tears are spilling down Jane's cheeks. Dog stories do it every time. Thomas is looking at her. "Aren't you going to finish your coffee?"
"I still don't like it," Jane boohoos.
"What a waste!" He grimaces down into the black liquid. He is about to toss it out. But instead he drains the cup and grinds the dregs between his teeth.
17
They follow a wide river valley for miles into the backcountry, through pine trees with rosy jigsaw bark, walking in eye-bathing shadow on a sea of needles, the sunlight tapping their shoulders. Thomas picks up a stick and discards it, picks up another, hefts it, keeps it.
"What's that for?"
"You'll see."
They zigzag up until the trees thin out. The mountain starts to play a favorite mountain trick, saying, Here's my summit; ha ha, that was only my shoulder; no, my real summit is up here; whoops! fooled you again; now this time I'm serious . . . They climb up by a mossy waterfall out of tundra completely, into a stony wasteland, where they find snow, first in streaks, then swaths, finally fields. Water rills from the lower ends, pooling, overspilling, muttering single-mindedly toward the river. Snowy peaks rise another thousand feet. Thomas tells the girls to wait and crosses a steep snowfield, testing for firmness ahead of him with the stick that he knew, mage-like, he would need. He calls the girls across after. The snow is wet and coarse like the salt the trucks spew on Tylerian roads, rusting Betsy and murdering trees. When they stop for a rest on a rock there is nothing but snow, silence, empty sky.
