Natasha and I leaped into the boxcar. As soon as we hit the deck, we began scrambling about looking for the way out. We looked up, at the rusted sides of the container, toward the blank, remote sky, but there was no ladder, just corroded metal walls and empty space. Then we looked down, and just as Childe Harold had said: on the floor there was a mat, aged and shredding, hand woven of, maybe, agave fibers? Natasha pushed away the mat with her foot – she still wore the shredded magenta ballerina shoes her mother had bought for her when she was four – and where the mat had been, in the floor of the boxcar, there was steel trapdoor.
I yanked at the handle and it opened. A purple cloud of musty vapor blasted skyward from the pit.
As the sky above seemed to tear asunder with howling winds and flashes of green lightning, Natasha climbed onto my back.
“Let’s go, dadda!” she sang into my ear.
*
And so it happened that we found ourselves half falling and half cavorting down through a sudden tunnel into the earth. First, it was dark, too dark to see. Then, as we rappelled from the walls and bounded from the earthen shelves, from the granitic brackets and cliffs and outcroppings, the dark gave way to a strange phosphorescence. You could see. I don’t know why you could see, but you could.
And either the hole was very deep, or we fell very slowly, for we had plenty of time as we went down to look around, and to wonder what would happen next.
When my vision grew accustomed to the half-dark, the view within the tunnel was suddenly magnificent. I saw flowers – flowers lit up and swirling, with trailing shreds of light full in flux like roman candles, airbrushing clouds of color… We walked on some sort of sliding steps and fell through some sort of thick watery air, as if we were traveling through algae, as if the flowers were bacteria and stars at once, a swarm of warm brilliance isolated in space and drifting through the tunnel like clusters of tiny bees drifting in summer air.
*
Natasha look downward to see what was coming, but it was too dark; then she looked at the walls of the tunnel and began to reach out, like a cat pawing at mice, to swat at the luminescent blossomings around us as we fell. She almost grabbed one: her hand clasped for a moment an orange flower, a flaming marigold, but the flower burst into a thousand loose petals and scattered upward, fanned by our fall.
“I wonder how many miles we’ve fallen by now!” Natasha said aloud.
Her voice rang in my ears as if she spoke from inside my own head. “We must be heading toward the center of the earth…Let me see, that would be four thousand miles down, I think.”
I could see she was beginning to lose her senses.
*
Down, down, down we fell as if the fall would never end, and as we descended, Natasha chattered strange silly things, “How funny it will be to come out among people that walk with their heads upright, the Antipathies, I think they call the place…. I’ll have to ask if this is the same cave Plato spoke of…”
Falling and falling further, Natasha seemed to grow sleepy, and she went on chattering in a dreamy sort of manner, “Cats are rats that live in flats,” “Mean old mouses, flipping houses,” “If birds used words like us today, they’d dine on curds and sup on whey…” “The governments banksters marketers mobsters rockstars and pollsters want to swab your cheeks and sell the ground from underneath your unborn feet.”
And down, down, down we fell, Natasha chirping streams of childish phrases:
“At the edge of the world,” she said, “I wait for the travelers-who-will-not-come, give me some milk of childhood some loaves of rain some meal of midnight, my hands pricked in thickets of stars but lately gathered from the foam… Give us some poor demon to chase, some lantern in the mealy hours, in the very tough star thicket, where the wind leaps and pulses, where the rain dies in the mountains, where the volcano sucks in the sky like a funnel cake.”
*
Down, down, down we fell. But somehow, too, as dark day swapped places with dark night, we sometimes slept, sprawled in our descent, or sometimes cuddled, spooning in the long tumbling collapse. Like any parent, I’d sometimes lie awake admiring her molasses lashes or puffy lips, the one dimple in her cheek, the curved cheekbone and squat nose, her tangled, flapping hair, and, in the cold wind of our descent, her warm air.
For a warm air came off of her. Lost in the forest of middle age as I was, it was Natasha’s warm air that kept me okay as we plummeted toward the center of the earth.
*
The wind blew up from below suspending the two swimmers in an endless fit of dropsy, and Irving the dreamingman as he slupped down the mudhole with his flailing, gibbering daughter, became instantly and powerfully aware that he was, in the most awful sense, responsible for Natasha – if not for her coming into the world, at least for her continuing on in it – and that their flailing helplessly downward into the bottomless gullet of the earth’s core represented a vast and at-this-point-irredeemable parental failure.
Irving’s reflections grew on the walls of the cavernous tube like reflections in a curved glass: the simplest expression or gesture becoame monstrous, as if the entrails of the earth had become a funhouse mirror, enlarging and engorging his physical body, and with it, too, his naked human soul. Irving had been a failure all his life, and even if no one else knew, or cared enough to recognize the fact, he knew. Projected onto the walls of the earthen pit he saw visions of accumulated regret, his life’s monumental chain of missed opportunities and dropped balls and half-extinguished effervescences.
In the light of day, the human soul appears vast and undifferentiated, like a single-celled amoeba or bright oceanic plain. But in the dim subterranean light of the earth’s insides it becomes a warren of dens more like a mole’s home or the honeycombed spongy flesh of a cow’s intestines, each compartment housing bits of undigested cud, bacterial knobs and other germy bits. This labyrinth of yuck is where Irving found himself, staring regret in the face.
First there was Ophelia – Oh had it been a mistake to marry her? What did they have in common after all, beyond their vague, misguided past? Or was his mistake that he left her, a lifetime of promise cast to the winds by following Queequeg’s crazy advice? Oh what a failure! And why Queequeg? What had Irving seen in him – some token of an imagined insurrectionary history, some exotic virgin continent of ancient beech forests and sparkling crystalline waters, some neo-primitive shamanic hallucination? Who was Queequeg but a big crazy caricature of an Indian out a 19th century novel? Even if he was real, wasn’t he too late for this world, anyway?
The drumbeat of his failures thrummed as the wall’s reflections melted into a painterly mess, as if some dark-humored God had spilled turpentine down the earth’s freshly pigmented gullet, the colors streamed together in bleeding gravy running down the walls…
“Hideous!” Irving yawped.
Suddenly, thump! thump! down they crashed onto a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.
*
The light was dark, but the dark was just a little light, and we cast our eyes about the thicket like two blind mice. The place, for it seemed very much a place, smelled of hay and mud and, was that the sweet tang of water?
Despite the fall, Natasha and I appeared to be unhurt. We stood and tested our legs, and Natasha shrugged off her rucksack and checked the contents: the baby jaguar was fine, and the safety flares, still unused, and the Queen Canteen in one piece. She unscrewed the cap of the opalescent bottle, handed it to me to drink, took a long draught herself, replaced the cap and dropped it into the bag. As soon as we’d drunk and begun to orient ourselves to the feeling of solid ground, a grey cloud of fog enshrouded us with the deeply musty scent of charcoal and tobacco, and just as it did, we were nearly deafened – so it seemed to me – by the sound of an enormous cough.
As the fog lifted I saw in front of me what appeared to be a tremendous toadstool, whose stem was as high as my body and whose cap drooped down as if melting. The thing glowed with a slimy bronze patina. But the mushroom, strange as it was, was a mere cushion, for on it, sucking from a vast water pipe and letting out bursts of sweet-and-sour smoke, sat a man-sized prickly yellow and green Caterpillar.
“Lord love a duck!” Natasha exclaimed.
The Caterpillar stretched and swayed, gazing down over us in a strange, kingly manner. Natasha grasped my hand.
“Demeaning!” the caterpillar suddenly shouted. And then, “Behavior!”
And then a wet and eerie silence.
“Well?!” The thing cast its eyes down toward us, which were like brass casters set upright on either side of its prickly slime-coated head. “How do you pleeead?”
“Uh…plead?” I said.
“Yes, plead! Demeaning behavior! Downtrodden existence! Smallish, wayward, silly, demeaning ways!”
Natasha let go of my hand and stepped toward the thing.
“Who are you, sir?” she asked.
“Who who who am IIIII? Botheritall!” it cried. “Demeaning the sky and the land and the waters, and demeaning the kingdoms of life! Kingdoms!” he spat.
“To even call them kingdoms is to demean them… Demeaning to life itself, to the mathematicalorganic depths of the infinite, the…the…” he stuttered “…the macrofiliousmicrofiliacbiotaplasmicjelatinobacteriumofitall!”
The caterpillar paused, put his wide plush mouth on the tip of the hookah, and drew in an enormous breath that caused his entire body to ripple and swell like a water balloon. Natasha took a step back and took my hand again.
After a few moments, he let the breath out and another cloud of sugary acrid smoke enveloped us.
“Who am I?” the beast retorted again. “I think you ought to tell me who you are first.”
“Well I hardly know who I am,” Natasha said.
“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”
“I can’t explain myself, sir, because I’m not myself. None of us is, don’t you see?”
“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.
“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Natasha replied very politely. “But – and maybe this is because I’m adopted, or perhaps because I am a member of la raza cosmica – but, I don’t know where my SELF ends, and the next one begins. My veins don’t end in me, you see. It’s very confusing.”
“No it isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, you may not think so now,” said Natasha. “But when you have to melt into pus and seclude yourself inside a chrysalis – like a caterpillar soup, if you don’t mind me saying – you will someday, you know – and then after that into a butterfly, and then after that into the merest wormfood again, I’d expect you’ll end up feeling a little less yourself, won’t you?”
Natasha paused, looked around coquettishly, it seemed to me, and set her gaze back on the Caterpillar. “And won’t that feel queer?” she said.
“WHO ARE YOU!!?” the Caterpillar suddenly screamed.
Which brought us back to the beginning of the conversation. I looked around but I couldn’t make out much of anything, just shadows of shadows.
Natasha seemed irritated. “I’m Natasha the Exploradora,” she said. “And this is my Dad, Irving. We’re looking for the gone rhinoceri.”
*
“The gone…rhinoceri?” said the Caterpillar, blowing a smoke ring.
“Yes,” Natasha said, blinking.
“Why?” the Caterpillar asked.
“Have you seen them?”
For some minutes the Caterpillar puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, “So you think you can find them, do you?”
“I do,” Natasha said.
“Well you can’t even find yourself,” said the Caterpillar. “How can you expect, then, to find rhinoceri that aren’t even there?”
“I’m afraid I have to, sir. Now what do you want from us?” she demanded.
“What do I want from you? I want you to recite a poem for me. I want you to recite, ‘You Are Old, Demon Zoellick,’” ordered the Caterpillar.
“Oh!” said Natasha, as if in a flurry of recognition. “You mean the whole thing, verse by verse?”
And then she blinked and looked up at me and back at the caterpillar and said, “Odd…that poem just entered my head, when? Maybe, in the fall?”
“Verse by verse,” said the Caterpillar sternly.
Natasha folded her hands, looked up at me, looked down at her feet, and began in a chirrupy voice:
“In my youth,” hissed the demon, and his voice let off sparks,
“I played in the dark bosky dells.
I rambled by rivers and piddled in parks,
And I ambled through heavens and hells.”
“You are old,” said the girl, “and your flesh has grown weak.
Your gaze has got thick as burnt honey.
You’ve finished the goose, with the bones and the beak
And you’ve traded your heavens for money!”
“In my youth,” said the djinn, “I studied the law,
and I pleaded my case with the gods…
They threw coins and tossed bones and I looked on in awe
As I tried to sort evens from odds.”
“You are old,” said the girl, “as I told you already,
and have grown most pathetically common.
You might’ve scored better if your hands weren’t so bloody
And you’d curbed your desire for mammon.”
“In my age,” said the beast, “I levied the taxes.
I shook down the peasants and fattened the banks.
I cut down the forests with chainsaws and axes
And not once did I stop to say ‘thanks’.”
“You are done,” said the girl. “One would hardly suppose
that a being so sick yet so clever
would believe that his rude and imperious ways
could keep the world hostage forever.”
“You have spoken enough,” screamed the demon, enraged,
“I will cook you like bacon and eat you like ham!
I’ll swallow and digest you and shit you back out
And THEN you will know who I am!”
“Begone!” said the girl, “I banish you hence!
Your troublesome theories and burdensome fights
Are turning my stomach and trying my patience –
I order you out of my sight!”
The demon looked down and spit fire on the ground –
“I will burn you to ashes,” he cried.
“You are young, I am old, is that how you see it?
Look again – You are dead, I’m alive!”
“You’re DONE,” said the girl, “and your life was a joke
– your legacy nothing but bones.”
She blew out his flames and she sloughed off the smoke
then turned ‘round and went galloping home…
“Hoorah!” said the Caterpillar, his fat body trembling with delight. “You’ve got it right, word for word. I didn’t believe it possible! Oh, its been so long… For your reward, my child, you may have a taste of my toadstool.”
Natasha hesitated. “Thank you, Mister Caterpillar,” she said. “But I don’t want a taste of your toadstool,” Natasha said.
The Caterpillar abruptly bowed its head and rounded its prickly shoulders, and a low sound came from it. Natasha and I looked at each other. It was weeping.
“Oh don’t cry, Mister Caterpillar,” Natasha said. “It’s not that I mean to be rude…It’s that, well, a girl like me – I mean, a girl who’s seen a few things –she knows better than to eat a toadstool. Some of them make your neck swell all up, and your head grow light and bubbly. And we’re in no position to let that happen.”
The Caterpillar sniffled. “It’s not the toadstool,” he snorted. “It’s that, well, no one’s ever recited poetry to me before. Not, ‘The Demon Zoellick,’ not ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,” not ‘I sing of Olaf glad and big’. Nothing. And now you’ve come along and done it.”
Natasha looked at me, her face suddenly lit up like a glowworm in the chiaroscuro darkness. “I get it!” she said. “Toadstool! Poetry! Remember all you owed to trut’!”
The caterpillar’s tears began to fall faster, and bigger, and they gathered into a pool at the base of the toadstool.
“Jes’ float away,” Natasha said to herself. “Mr. Caterpillar, sir! Its what Childe Harold said! Ode to Beauty, Ode to Truth…”
I was lost. But Natasha clearly wasn’t.
Natasha turned to the toadstool and said sharply, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty! That is all you shall know on earth, and all you need to know!”
And then she suddenly exclaimed, “Water is life!”
A flood of tears rained from the Caterpillar’s swollen eyes, pouring so fast and thick the water rose to my ankles, to my knees. The mushroom began to dissolve before the flood. The caterpillar hovered atop it, weeping and weeping, oblivious. Before the rising water, I quickly picked up Natasha and put her on my shoulders.
“What do we do?” Natasha hollered as the water rose to my hips. “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”
There was nothing to do. The water kept rising.
I heard the water in my ears as if it were the very ocean and I tasted the salt of it. Just before my head went under, I heard Natasha’s tiny voice:
“What pipes and timbrels?” she called out. “What wild ecstasy?”
And then we were under.
The water was warm, and clear. Natasha floated from my shoulders, and darted through the water like a squid. She gestured to me, pointing toward the ground we’d stood on just moments before. Down below, where I’d been standing, there was a drain plug.
She dove down and in a single unhesitating gesture, pulled the plug.