II
The draining of the water through the hole drained me and Natasha too, and as we coursed swift as stones through the downward vaulting water, our selves spread and warped through the whole of the water, or so it felt to me. We passed through sluices and culverts and through pipes and waterworks and slipped like leaches through the earth’s internal sewerage.
Somehow we held onto each other, and somehow we breathed, and after a while we found ourselves tumbling over a bright cascade at the foot of a cliff, with trees all about tumbling through our vision, and a wide vista letting onto a swamp of bracken ferns and horsetail and cycads. The waterfall spit us into a whirling choppy impenetrable pool where we were pushed up against a bank of wet lumpy stones that shifted in the water like loose teeth.
As the water poured over the cascade into the pool where we found ourselves, it became quickly apparent that there was no outlet. The water was rising. And since we’d been submerged and were only now above water, it took some time to realize that, on top of it all, it was raining.
Natasha and I clung to each other desperately, our fear rising with the flood, and desperately we clung to the slippery stones that rose above the wild, dark water. But soon these too began to disappear. There was only one rock left, and there we huddled, trembling, cold and frightened.
“At least we are together, dadda” Natasha said to me, “sharing the same fears and hopes.”
No sooner had she spoken than the rain began to fall more gently. Soon, it stopped altogether, and the water stopped rising.
*
The rock we clung to was covered in discolored protrusions and lumps, and as we clung to it, it seemed to heave and sway in the rising tide. The water began to sink about us, or was it the rock that was growing higher, out of the flood? Whatever it was, some living force had got us in its grip and, for the moment at least, had kept us from drowning.
Suddenly the two bulbous bubbles atop the highest part of the rock popped open to reveal two bright green eyes gleaming at us in the dark phosphorescence.
And then we realized that the large rock that had saved us was no rock at all. It was a toad.
*
Natasha smiled first, and then me. The toad’s eyes were green and clear and old, and it seemed to be frowning.
“You saved us!” Natasha shouted.
Sure enough, the water was sinking or the toad was rising, and the swirling whirling flood seemed to be subsiding.
“You saved us!” I repeated.
*
The sun came out soon enough, and sunrays chased silver minnows on the sandy bottom of the pond. I suddenly felt so happy I wanted to chase the swarms of butterflies that filled the air.
I had seen a lot in my years as an investigator, but I had never yet met a giant talking toad. Coming on late middle age as I was, I thought, it’s good to have new experiences…
“Well, so what’s your name, Mister Toad?” Natasha asked the toad on whose back we sat.
His body shook all over, but in a relaxed and pleasant way.
“Virgil,” he said.
Natasha stroked his warts affectionately. “Were you always a, a toad, Mister Virgil?”
“Funny you should ask,” the toad said in a hoarse voice, as if speaking did not come naturally to him. “I was once a man,” he said. “My family is from, oh, Italy. Tuscany to be precise. But everyone’s from somewhere, isn’t she?”
“Why yes, she is, I suppose,” Natasha said. “Though some of us don’t know where we’re from.”
“And others of us don’t know where we’re going,” I added.
“Ah,” croaked Virgil. “Wise children you are indeed.”
Natasha giggled. “Children? My daddy’s not a child!” she declared proudly. “He’s a grown man.”
The toad eyed me sideways.
“Well then children, that brings me to my next question: what is it that brings you down this way? It seems such a very long time since we’ve had passers-by.”
Natasha beamed a smile at me. “Dadda and me didn’t mean to come this way, but well, you see, there was the battle on the beach, and the demon, and the rhinos, and then the orcs, and Childe Harold, and, well, when he died – oh, poor Harold, he did die, didn’t he? – he told us to go into the tunnel, and then the caterpillar, and then there was the Ode to Beauty, very strange indeed, and, well, here we are. But maybe, just maybe, you can tell us how to get out of here?”
*
To our delight, the toad said, “To find your way out of this deep darkness, better to come with me than to go on your own. Yes yes, much better.”
“If you trust me,” he went on, “then let me guide you, and I’ll take you the rest of your way, to the other side. But be warned!” He tilted his warty head to and fro and batted his bulging, limpid eyes.
“I do not mean to frighten you any more than you have been, my little friends. But I must make you aware: here below ground there is horror the likes of which you have never imagined. Here there is an infernal boredom that maddens even the most hearty creatures. This is a place where spirits only come hoping one day to escape. But you have made it this far, haven’t you? You know, that caterpillar would have done you in, had you…” the toad raised the eyes under his strange bulbous lids and pointed them upwards at Natasha, “…had YOU not known better.”
“An ordinary child would have eaten from the toadstool,” he said, and then sighed, “Oh why do they have to call them toadstools? Such a vulgar name… In any case, you knew better, didn’t you? A sign, I say, a sign that you may be able to pass through this place.”
The toad by now had begun to move, slowly, through the subsiding water, with Natasha and me on its back. There was sky above, far above, afloat way up there in a kind of glassy aquamarine color. And in that distant sky shreds of crimson clouds floated in it as if it were a permanent dawn.
Then, his bulbous eyes darkened. “But,” he said, “there is one thing you may need, or well, that may come in, how do I say it, handy at a certain moment, and which, for my part, I would quite advise you to consider having at hand, that is, if it’s not too late, which I suppose, the three of us being deep in the bowels of the earth without a lot of resources nearby, it most likely is. Too late, that is.”
“And what would that be?” I asked, worried. “I mean, what’s the thing we need that will come in handy if it’s not too late?”
“Well, a little music may be nice at a certain moment,” he said, hesitatingly.
Natasha’s eyes twinkled, and she reached into her shirt and drew out the little clay whistle she’d kept tucked there. She put it to her lips and blew and out rang a melody high pitched and joyful as the trilling of the meadowlark. The toad’s long lipless mouth turned upwards in a wide smile.
“Ah, yes, yes. That’s precisely it,” he crooned.
I held Natasha close and straddled the toad’s warty humped back, and on we rode.
*
The landscape around us, so lush at first, grew quickly dry as Virgil slid and walked and periodically hopped through the air almost taking flight. The watery swampland turned to a yellow grassy savannah, and the sky changed from dark crystal blue to pale ochre. It was astonishing how quickly a toad could move. Not a creature was in sight, and despite the changes in landscape, the entire place had the uncanny look of a movie set, as if it were constructed of foam and pressboard and paint. Natasha seemed delighted by the scenery and began to chatter away with our host.
“So, we told you what we are doing here…sort of…,” she said. “But what are you doing here, Mister Virgil?”
“Ohhh,” the toad sighed. “That is a long story….”
*
“I am an exile here,” Virgil said as he carried us along beneath the pastel sky. “It began when the water, well, not the water, but the mists that lie above the earth, the misty mists I so love, when they grew itchy and then began to burn the skin. The very air became rank, and frankly poisonous. At the beginning we didn’t know what it was. Some thought it was a curse, and those ones set themselves to pray. Others believed it was a plague, and those ones went about seeking earthly remedy. Vaccines and masks and social distances and such like. Those who said it was a plague, or a curse, they were in some sense wrong, but indeed, indeed, they were in some sense more right than wrong. It was both a plague and a curse.”
“But, what sort of plague?” Natasha asked.
“Yes, yes,” I said, “and what sort of curse?”
“A chemical plague,” Virgil said, “and a curse of humankind. The worst of plagues. Atrazine, and 2-4-D, and glyphosate. Pesticides, and petrochemicals, and flame retardants – oh those flame retardants burn worse than any hellfire you can think of! PFAS!,” he croaked. “Humankind, in your ignorance – well, it wasn’t you so much, but it is so hard to avoid generalities – unleashed a chemical hell that just burned and burned. We couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“We?” I asked.
“The toads,” he said. “Actually, first the frogs: the pollywogs, the tadpoles, and then us, the toads. The salamanders too, and the newts, and the old axolotls. Some of us stopped being born, and some of us started to die…. Some of us were born with heads where our tails should be, or wih tails where our heads should be, and others with still more horrible deformities. Others of us simply gave up.”
“Gave up?” Natasha asked.
But Virgil fell silent, and merely kept moving through the strange scenery. Every so often he hopped through the air almost taking flight, and we held on with all our strength.
*
After some time, Virgil revealed his story. It turned out he had been a scientist, in Italy, and he had been the one to discover that atrazine, an agricultural chemical, was wiping out amphibians. So the industry gave him a choice: keep his research quiet, or be banished from the human race.
“I’ll admit,” he croaked, “I was surprised when I published my paper in Nature and became a…well, this. But soon I found the pleasures of burrowing into the mud and somehow … well, somehow, I found my way here.”
*
For a long time we passed through a cavern with wet walls, dripping with stalactites and erupting with stalagmites, the teeth of the underworld that at first glance seemed threatening as if they would grind us into gristle. But over time these same formations came to seem somehow peaceful, droplets of stone. It came to me preternaturally – same way, perhaps, that Natasha knew that peculiar poem about the demon, or how Queequeg had known that the path to seek the rhinos passed through the press offices of the UN Summit in Cancun…that the watery icicles of stone adorning these grottoes were nothing less than…time incarnate. On the walls of the cavern and up and down the stony features were drawings and prints in red ochre and white clay: pictographs of mammoths and horses and rhinos charging, and prints where some strange creatures had pressed their distorted hands against the gallery wall and blown pigment over them to form indelible shadows.
“What strange creature made those prints, Virgil?” I asked the toad as we hopped and slapped and scuttled through the half-light of the caverns.
For a while the toad said nothing and we walked to the sound of our footfalls in the dusty ground. When he spoke up at last he said, “Oh…that was us.”
*
As we traveled, the sky changed from a lemony yellow to a fiery rose to an iridescent violet, and the land changed too, from the scrubby brushland we’d been moving through to a high plain of mesas and red rock escarpments. We seemed to be climbing upwards, the stony landscape dropping away from us below. The higher we climbed, the further the drop until we were surrounded on both sides by an indigo mist like the spume of a thousand waterfalls. Through the mist we could make out shapes, bulky, cloudy shapes at first, like stones or metamorphic vegetation; strange mineral spires and piles of cave popcorn and towers of broccoli and flutes of impossible condensed glass. But soon the shapes condensed into bodies, human bodies, and faces, and they were contorted into impossible positions.
“Who….what…who are those people?” Natasha asked. “And why did they appear all of the sudden?”
Virgil yawned and shivered, and in his long croaking voice he said, “Oh, oh, I was hoping we’d have you to the other side before you saw them. It is, oh, it is such a sad and awful sight. But I simply can’t…can’t move quickly enough anymore,” he lamented.
“But, who are they?” Natasha asked again.
“Oh, my friends, these people have been there all along, just that, now your eyes have adjusted to the light, to the strange, sad, shifting light of this subterranean place. These doomed figures, my friends, are criminals, the damned, those condemned to live a life of eternal…well, to continue to be, in a sense, to be incomplete. You might say they are frustrated souls. Those who, well, yes, I think that said it best. Frustrated souls who, for reasons of their own choosing, have committed crimes.”
“Crimes?” I asked. “Like looting and stealing jewelry and robbing banks?”
“No, not so much. Well, I mean the ones you mention are crimes, if they are crimes at all, of a lesser degree, driven more often than not by necessity, by want. Such crimes do not follow one beyond the grave. To purloin a purse in order to feed one’s family is no crime. Indeed, indeed, to the contrary, the greatest crimes feed nobody, the greatest crimes are crimes of gluttony. Among those of us who escaped the chemical plague, we have a saying: Which is the greater crime, to rob a bank, or to own one?”
“Mmmm, good one,” I said.
“To rob a bank is a crime against the bank, perhaps against the state,” Virgil croaked. “But to own a bank, to own a bank, my friends, is not merely to engage in usury – the crime of earning money through other peoples’ labor. It is, indeed, indeed, a crime against the very nature of nature. For to accumulate, to hoard, is to build a dam across the river of time, and to stop it in its flow. This is violence in its purest form. And this is the kind of crime we are concerned about here.”
“But where is here?” Natasha asked.
“Oh, names are of such little import,” the toad said. “But if you must, this place is called il settimo cerchio della violenza.”
“The seventh circle? of violence?” Natasha said. “That sounds so medieval.”
Virgil sat humped over and shrugged.
“And so esoteric,” I added.
Virgil stopped and cranked his head and rolled his eyes at me in a gesture that mimicked boredom. “Esoteric, yes, I suppose,” he croaked. “But do not forget, wherever you go, wherever you go, children…there you are.”
He let out a bullfrog’s belch that nearly sent us flying from his broad lumpy back. Then he started up again, moving first one foreleg, then a hind leg, then the other foreleg, then the other hind leg, making slow progress through these grim shadow lands.
“Is it not true,” Virgil asked, as he – as we – strode carefully between a basaltic cliff rising into infinity and an empty mist falling away towards eternity, “is it not true that all crimes, any crimes you can ever commit, any crime involving injury to someone else or to nature herself, that such crimes are carried out either by violence or by fakery?”
Natasha turned to me with a shrug.
“I suppose so, yes,” I said.
“Well, violence of course is bad, very bad indeed,” Virgil croaked. “Most certainly the violence of the chemical plague, let’s say, must be considered a crime of the vilest sort. But as far as offending nature is concerned, fakery, fakery, is worse. Fakery is worse because it is a form of violence itself, in disguise. Fakery, I tell you, is a crime that is purely human in essence. No other animal can do it so handily. That is to say, yes, we toads can camouflage to look like, for example, mud. And yes, the chameleon is famed for her ability to change color, and yes stickbugs and all those insects so good at, at blending in. But blending in, too, is the opposite of fakery…of…if you will, blending out. So the fakers get worse punishment than the rest. They’re lower in Hell, if you will.”
“Hell?” Natasha exclaimed. “Are we in Hell?”
She shivered against me, the truth of our situation breaking like a twilit dawn over us both.
“Well,” Virgil said, “the situation is not so…simple. We are, passing through Hell, yes. But we are not, technically speaking, in Hell. That would be bad.”
“Yes,” Natasha agreed. “That would be bad.”
“Honey,” I said. “Before we get too freaked out, let’s listen to what Virgil has to say.”
“Thank you, Irving,” the toad croaked.
“People who commit violence, and people who commit fakery, which is worse than violence, they get sent to this place. And, now, there are three forms of violence.”
“You said two,” Natasha said. “Regular violence and fakery.”
“No,” croaked Virgil, “three. Yes, you listen well, but what I mean to say is, there are three forms of violence and fakery, or better put, three ways that they are expressed. And so, as you will see, there are three, what shall we call them, three staging areas here where the criminals are condemned.”
*
In the thick purplish-gray fog, figures teemed and writhed. Some were tied in knots, others splayed out as if strung to a wall, others curled in little balls of agony.
“And what are the three forms?” I asked.
“There’s violence against nature, violence against yourself, and violence against others,” Virgil hiccupped. “There’s also a violence against the rights of all, which I’ll explain in a moment.
“You see, people – and by people, I mean people: human beings – are constantly hurting each other, killing each other, stealing things, extorting money, destroying property that doesn’t belong to them – better yet, that isn’t really property, since nobody really owns anything – the list is endless.”
“So then, the first staging area is for people who intentionally hurt other people, who kill and maim and rape and abuse. Even soldiers, at least the malicious ones, are here, along with gangbangers and wife beaters and that sort.
“Now, in the next staging area you have people who hurt themselves or hurt the world’s things – those who committed suicide or gambled or burned down their own homes, or their neighbor’s – the ones who destroyed things and wasted their lives, the ones who failed to recognize the value of their lives and everything they touched. Depressed people come here, too, because they should get over it.”
“That’s pretty harsh,” I said. I mean, that’s pretty harsh.
“But now, compared to that, fraud and fakery, these, my friends, are the worst. But not all fraud is created equal,” Virgil croaked.
“There are two kinds – fraud against strangers, and fraud against your own kin. The ones that commit fraud against strangers, the Ponzi schemers like Bernie Madoff and Elon Musk and most of Silicon Valley, and the presidents like Richard Nixon, they burn forever from the inside, because there’s a universal bond between humans, and they’ve broken it.”
“And Donald Trump, well, his sort of fraud is…let us just say, as many have said, that there is a special place in Hell reserved for him.”
As Virgil spoke a cold scream seemed to rise from some smoky gallery far below.
“But nothing’s worse than deceiving your own kin and kind,” Virgil said. “That’s betraying sacred bonds of love. That’s why we’ll see in the center here, on that small island below: a permanent platform of torture.”
There, the path seemed to come to an end, and Virgil stopped at the edge of a bottomless, cavernous pit. In the middle of the pit was a spire of rock that stood in isolation, and you could see, at its very peak, like angels on the head of a pin, a crowd of creatures, human creatures, pressed together and howling away under what looked like a fountain of sand.
“Those,” Virgil croaked, “are the real fakers. The ones that would trick their own mother into buying Okeechobee swampland out from under a Seminole grandmother if it would get them a new x-box game. Not that swampland is so bad... Anyway, that place is a veritable pig-pile of crooks, thieves, liars, con-men, forgers, pimps, grifters, schmoozers, moochers, banksters, and creeps.”
As we gazed down on this island of suffering, time seemed to stand still. Why had we come to this place? And how would we get out?
*
As we looked over the edge into pit, a frozen wind circled upward. What looked like steam, it became soon apparent, was ice vapor.
“You are almost free,” Virgil croaked. “We merely have to cross this crevice.”
Natasha and I looked at each other. “Cross this?” we said.
There was no way across, but a thin lip of rock circling the pit. The bottom was lost in violet fog. Then, Virgil gestured with his pale, lumpy chin to some dark spot across the void. Clinging like a lizard to the chasm’s lip, a thousand feet away in the smoke and haze, was some kind of creature.
*
Before we’d sized it up, Virgil let out a shrill whistle, right in the creature’s direction.
Nothing happened. It didn’t move. Virgil rolled his heavy-lidded eyes upwards at Natasha.
“My darling girl,” he croaked. “Would you be so generous as to play a tune on your little ocarina? I do believe it will provide just the remedy we need.”
Natasha drew the clay whistle from beneath her shirt and put it to her lips. She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath and blew a little melody: “Summer is a-comin’ in” – a crazy old ancient song about cuckoo birds, with a goofy chorus where all the singers go “Sing cuckoo! Sing cuckoo!”
The blank beast across the abyss lurched its featureless head in our direction. A slash of red tongue escaped its lips. It started scaling the earthen wall towards us.
It appeared to move slowly, but advanced quickly across the chasm, and soon the monster was approaching the edge of the rocky path where we stood. As it neared, we saw, the thing was huge, the size of three limousines one atop the other, and hideous. The monster’s body was like a huge snake. It had paws covered with thick, bristly fur up to the armpits. But it had an almost human face and wore a benign expression, and its lumbering movement made it appear peaceful. It’s chest and body were covered in beautifully colored effervescent nacreous rings and markings in designs more wild and colorful than a Moroccan rug – as intricate as an orb spider’s weaving in bells of morning fog. When it moved, the colors rippled hypnotically, like the rainbow ripples of oil on water. From its long serpentine tail a steady flow of shimmering black ooze appeared to drip into the impossible depths below.
The creature came toward us and gently set its enormous head and body on the edge of the bank with its spiked tail flapping in the air.
Virgil gestured to the monster’s torso.
“Lower yourselves from my back,” Virgil said.
One by one, Natasha and I each slid from Virgil’s back, where we’d traveled in such security through what turned out to be a harsh and unpleasant country.
“Climb aboard,” Virgil said.
*
In a hop, Virgil sprung from the ledge and clung to the monster’s body. Looking closer, I saw that the body was covered with infinite scales, angled upwards. From under the scales issued a viscous liquid, black and iridescent. Repulsive as it was, the gooey substance seemed to be what held Virgil to the vast body of the thing, like glue.
Without a word, Natasha leapt too, imitating the toad, and clung onto the scales.
“Come on, dadda! It’s easy.”
As I stepped from the security of the ledge onto the monster’s body, the shifting oily colors seemed to capture and enthrall me, and eased my mind. I grasped the scales and found the oozing body sticky and warm. Virgil and Natasha clambered upward toward the monster’s armpits. The thing didn’t appear to register that we were hitching a ride.
Natasha was right: it was easy.
We clambered onto its back, just below its neck.
“This is the only way to get across the final reach,” Virgil called out. A wind had begun to howl about us.
And then Virgil called to the monster, “Take us across Lake Cocytus, to the end of the line, monstrosity! These two are friends from above. If you serve them well, they’re sure to bring about an end to your exile, and all of ours here below.”
It gave a bodily shrug that felt like an earth tremor, and then began to climb sideways, moving swiftly and keenly across the frigid pit. We clung on. Below, space fell away in gulps toward a black nub of nothingness that must have been Lake Cocytus, some hellish frozen depth so far from the surface of the earth that it was another world.
*
I don’t know how long our transit was across that infinite gap, but it seemed like less than minutes, and in a blink of time we were across, and came level with a wide ledge. The air was warm as if a Santa Ana wind blew up from below and a strange light hovered. The monster stopped, and stood still.
One by one we climbed off the monster’s back, and we found ourselves on a ledge of rock at the entrance to a crevice that appeared to open beyond into a tunnel, upward. There was shimmering in the rock opening – a light, as it were, at the end of the tunnel. Behind and below us, the monster climbed away and was quickly gone into the purple distance.
*
Virgil took a half step toward the opening, and halted there.
“This is as far as I can take you,” he said. “For the rest of the journey, you are on your own.”
“What? Virgil, you can’t!” Natasha said. “We’ll be lost!”
“No, my child,” our guide croaked. “You’ll be found, I’m quite sure. And, we will meet again, someday.”
I too was filled with sadness, I’ll admit, but I bit my lip, resolved to carry on. But I had one question.
“Mister Virgil,” I said, not quite knowing how to address the toad. “Shouldn’t the demon Zoellick be condemned to the icy fires of that…that place?”
A cloud crossed Virgil’s enormous mud-brown eyes, and he blinked.
“Yes, Irving,” Virgil croaked. “He should be. And if you are successful in your quest…he will be.”
“Is this why you showed us these visions, of thieves and fakers?” Natasha asked.
Virgil tilted his head from side to side, neither yes nor no.
“As I think of it,” the toad said, “There is one more thing before we part: you will notice when you leave this place that you have no hunger. Why is this? It is because hell is hunger. Above all what drives all beings here is the curse of appetite. You see, it is the insatiability of appetite that lures them here – the Neanderthals, the repressed Protestants, homo economicus europeus…. All of them.”
Suddenly, sweet as the nightingale, another voice emerged from the darkness. “Do you know the story of the boy who tried to kill hunger?”
“Beatrix!” Virgil exclaimed in a rough loud belch.
“Virgil,” the voice purred. From out of the darkness another huge toad appeared, camouflaged in the half-light. The toad had long eyelashes and kind eyes, which she laid on Natasha.
“There was a boy who lived in a very hungry village,” she purred, if a giant toad can be said to purr. “One morning, fed up with hunger, he gathered up his bow and arrow and started to set out. ‘Where are you going?’ asked his mother. ‘I’m going to kill this hunger that eats away at us like a vulture,’ the boy said. And so he set out. But at the end of the day he returned home empty handed, sad and dejected. ‘Did you kill hunger?’ his mother asked. ‘No!’ he stamped in frustration. ‘Well,’ said his mother, ‘all the better, because if it weren’t for hunger we’d have nothing to drive us out of bed in the morning, no reason to plant our gardens and go a-gathering in golden afternoons, no need to climb the pear trees or to fish in the winding rivers…’”
“But,” she went on, “as Virgil is trying to tell you, there is hunger, and there is hunger.” She swiveled her massive warty head towards Virgil, who sat smiling broadly.
“The two of you have shown by your devotion that you have surpassed the sort of appetite that drives the greedy spirits here,” Beatrix the toad said. “You have endured fire and flood, and gravity of all sorts. Natasha, how you crossed the sea; Irving, how you forsook all to divine the rhinos’ plight. Little do you know what dangers you might have encountered here – but the bowels of Hell did not see fit to swallow you.”
She looked demurely at Virgil and batted her eyes.
“In the remainder of your journey,” Virgil blurted, “you will find not only that you have no appetite, but that you have no food.”
The toads blinked.
“Scratch that,” Virgil said. “Reverse it: not only will you have no food – you will have no hunger.”
Natasha looked at me and back at the toads, agog.
“So our physiological state will be attuned to the material conditions in which we find ourselves?” Natasha asked.
Virgil blinked. “Indeed,” he said.
“And with that, we bid you adieu,” he croaked.
Natasha threw herself at the toad and spread her arms across his chest and gave him a farewell hug.
“Natasha, and Irving, allow me to give you something for your journey.”
The she-toad let out a cheerful, girlish belch.
“When you emerge into the light, you will be at the edge of the great waters,” she said. “You will find it strange, and remote, and lonely there. And you may find yourself without allies. But in the waters of the great deep, in the soft sediment, a small spiny bush grows. It has sharp spikes that will prick a man’s fingers like iron barbs. If you find this plant and bring it to the surface, you will have gained a great friend.”
I looked at Natasha, whose face was illuminated.
“I can get it!” she fairly hollered. Her squeal echoed vibrato in the damp hollow of the earth.
She dropped her voice a notch and said to Beatrix the toad, “I’ve sailed the ocean in a pea green boat. I’ve journeyed through the center of the earth…”
“No,” the girl-toad said, firmly. “It must be Irving who gathers the plant.”
She leveled her fluttering eyes at me, and said, “Irving: by embarking on this journey, you have allowed yourself to be touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world. Each of us,” she said, “is all the sums she has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in San Francisco. You shall bear in Ambergris Island the fruit that was sown twelve thousand years ago in Siberia.”
“Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home, and every moment is a window on all time.”
I was captivated.
Beatrix continued: “The seed of your devotion, Irving, will blossom in the flames of the desert. And Natasha: always remember that life does not begin with tears of grief and rage, but with the sweetly melodious cry, a slight whistle of wind through the dry reeds at the water’s edge…”
Her strange words hung a moment in the air, and her body faded, glowed, faded, faintly outlined against the earthen wall, her eyes aflutter for a moment beyond when her body had all but vanished, and then, one more instant passed, and poof! – Beatrix the toad was gone.
In our astonishment, we didn’t notice that Virgil, with perhaps a slight wet slap of his webbed feet that we most barely registered, had disappeared as well.
*
Natasha and I peered into the lit crevice in front of us. The crack was vertical, like a slice of lightning parting the rock. Natasha looked up at me, and smiled and shrugged her little shoulders, and then climbed through and disappeared. A moment later, her little hand reached through. I took her hand and pressed my moderately overweight body against the cold stone and squeezed into the crevice and stepped through to the other side.
*
It was nighttime out in the world, and the salt sea air was moving over the earth, and over us.
When we had clambered out of the pit, we stood in a warm zephyr wind, and we looked up and all around at a sky full of bristling, naked, brilliant, bursting stars. Under our feet, sand in warm heaps fell away toward dark patches of distance and then brightened into foam where an ocean curled in and crashed with a whooshing sound against the stillness of the night. On the other side of us, inland, the open beach rose gently into darkness. I looked down, and saw Natasha, curled up in the sand at my feet, fallen fast asleep.
With my feet I dug a shallow hole in the sand the length of my body, and I lay down and put my arms around Natasha and felt the wind across my face. As my eyelids drooped shut I saw stars raining down like the seeds of strange tropical fruits, and I fell fast asleep too.