Left to PANDÆMONIUM llms.txt

By the time Earl Sutter came to Mercy Junction the Ford had boiled dry twice, the rye was down below its label, and the envelope on the passenger seat had worked one corner under the floor mat as if trying to escape.

The envelope had been there since March. His daughter had written EARL on it instead of Dad, which gave him some idea of its contents. He kept it unopened between the tax notices and the owner’s manual. The Ford kept its own papers there too, service records going back to the years when service could still have helped it. Earl regarded all these documents as a family.

At Mercy Junction the road home went right. It ran past the Lutheran cemetery, the transmission shop, and the white house where a plastic buck leaned from the upstairs window. Earl knew every dip in that road and had been drunk in most of them. The left road was new. It entered the corn without a county number, black and narrow and freshly tarred, though no road crew had passed through Mercy all summer. A sign stood at the turn.

PANDÆMONIUM 29

Earl took the left because the radiator had begun knocking again and twenty-nine miles sounded like a place with a filling station.

He carried water for the Ford in two milk jugs behind the driver’s seat. One had lost its cap and grown a skin of road dust around the mouth. The other was full. Every ten miles he stopped, wrapped a rag around the radiator cap, and poured in what the engine had thrown away. The steam smelled faintly of pennies. By mile twelve it had dampened his hair. By mile seventeen the corn had grown high enough to meet over the road, and the light from his headlights moved through the leaves as through the ribs of a long green animal.

At mile twenty he passed a boy leading a white sow on a length of baling twine. The sow had a woman’s hands where its forefeet should have been and kept covering its teats as it walked. The boy wore a paper crown darkened with sweat. Under his free arm he carried a violin case from which something knocked three times, rested, then knocked twice more. Earl slowed. The boy bowed. His crown fell into the road, but he did not retrieve it, and the sow would not pass it until he covered the paper with dirt.

⁂

The light of PANDÆMONIUM came before the city, red at the centre and yellow along the clouds. The road rose between fields gone bare. At the crest Earl saw roofs packed together below, then mills, steeples, stockyards, chimneys, and the long black blocks of houses built one upon another until the lowest tenants lived beneath the paving stones and pressed their faces between them for air. In Mercy Square a body as large as a grain elevator turned over a fire. It had revolved there long enough for the hands to curl inward and the mouth to cook shut. Each time the spit brought the sound side down, the city heard a breath move through it.

There was no gate. The county road narrowed into Mercy Street and passed a table where three women sorted teeth according to colour and wear. Quart jars stood behind them in rows. The oldest woman looked at Earl’s plates and wrote something in a ledger. The youngest held up a molar to the evening light, found a red seed germinating in the root, and planted it in a flowerpot at her feet.

Earl drove on.

Nothing kept its business indoors. Tailors hung skins from balconies, some cut into sleeves and some still carrying the shape of the people who had worn them. Bakers cooled black loaves on windowsills while children beneath caught the grease in oyster shells. Outside a school, girls in blue uniforms traded tongues from their lunch tins and tried them briefly in their mouths. The largest church had been built upside down; its steeple entered the ground, and worshippers climbed through the upper windows by ladders that attendants removed once the service began.

At the next corner Earl saw a painted bottle above a doorway. He parked where the curb had buckled around the roots of a dead tree. A wagon had gone halfway through the front of the drinking house, horse and all, and remained there as part of the wall. The horse had dried without collapsing. Hats hung from its harness. County-fair ribbons, long since browned, clung to one wheel.

Earl took the rye and the full milk jug inside.

The room had the heat of a slaughterhouse in August and the motion of a church supper after somebody found liquor in the punch. Dice ran beneath the tables pursued by men on their knees. A fiddler with six elbows worked two tunes against one another while small red dancers stepped between the strings, blistering their feet and never losing the measure. In a curtained alcove, a sow in a bridal veil laboured on a mattress. Every few minutes a small judge emerged in powder and wig. The attending women washed each one in beer and held him to the sow, where he fed without closing his eyes.

The woman behind the bar was broad and pale, with flour on her hands and copper wire lacing a wound from her throat to the waistband of her apron. A candle burned between her ribs. Its flame leaned when she breathed and came upright when she held her breath to pour.

Earl put down a dollar. It darkened where the woman’s wet fingers touched it.

The woman drew from a clay tub and filled a cup with brown liquor carrying a faint green shine. The cup rattled once against the bar. Earl trapped it between both hands and asked what she had given him. She said the house had served it longer than it had served names, and if he needed to call it something before drinking, he was not yet thirsty enough. Earl told her names had nothing to do with thirst. Names were for knowing what had blinded you afterward. She wiped her hands, folded them over the bar, and waited for the matter to settle itself.

Earl drank.

The liquor entered his mouth as heat and turned cold before the throat. It found every split in his gums. It passed through him with the slow exploratory pressure of an auger pushed down a drain, touching one organ, then another, then returning to the first as if uncertain where the blockage lay. His eyes watered. The candle in the woman’s chest doubled, blurred, and joined itself again. Nothing else yielded. The room remained hard around him.

He tasted the cup a second time, smaller. Whoever made it had kept everything that ought to have been thrown away. The char was wrong. The strength sat above the flavour rather than carrying it. Beneath the rot there might once have been grain.

Earl pulled the cap from the milk jug and poured a little water into his cup.

The woman reached too late. The water struck the liquor and raised a grey skin that tightened across the surface, wrinkled, opened one blind eye, and sank. Grease moved to the rim. Black sediment gathered at the bottom. Earl turned the cup once and drank.

The liquor remained foul, but its parts had begun speaking to one another. Heat opened across his chest. The room withdrew one inch and grew tolerable there.

It needs water, Earl said.

The woman repeated the word without understanding it, first with the weight on the wrong syllable, then again in a whisper that moved the candle between her ribs. The fiddler looked over. One of his backward notes escaped and crossed the room under the tables. The bridal sow bit through her veil. Two card players turned in their chairs, waited, then returned to a hand in which the queen had already been swallowed.

The woman held the milk jug before her candle. Light went through the clear water and broke against the scratches in the plastic. She turned it slowly, watching a single drowned ant circle the bottom. Earl put his hand out for the jug. She returned it, though not before wetting one finger beneath the cap and touching the finger to the copper wire at her throat.

Earl finished his cup. He finished the rye. The woman refilled him twice from the clay tub and once from a bottle she kept inside the cold body of a goose. Near midnight he lay down beneath the wagon horse with his jacket under his head. Above him the dried belly made small settling sounds. Somewhere in the room the fiddler found a fourth tune and threaded it through the others. Earl slept before hearing how it ended.

⁂

The first rain in PANDÆMONIUM began at three in the morning.

It began beneath the courthouse eaves, where dry stone gave up a clot of feathers and one clear drop. Across the square, water ran upward over the dome. Steam covered the rooftops before anything touched the great body on the spit. Then the clouds opened without thunder and the rain came down dense, warm, and nearly black from passing through the air.

The city received it badly.

Roof tiles split. Tar loosened and moved in sheets. Gutters that had served as nests, shelves, beds, burial trenches, and nurseries remembered their old slope all at once and emptied into the streets. Spoons came first, then hair, buttons, eggs, small mirrors, wax saints, dead letters, live mice, and a black paste made from everything light enough to be thrown upward and heavy enough to remain. The dry fountains filled from cracks in their basins. Families living inside them woke floating among their furniture. Wood swelled. Doors closed for the first time and trapped whole houses indoors. Other doors, held shut by nine hundred years of dust, opened and released those who had continued knocking after their hands wore away.

Rain entered the drinking house through the wound around the wagon.

It struck the horse. The hide softened, drew tight, and split along its old seams. Flesh returned beneath it in dark red folds. The ribs gathered with the sound of green branches bent under snow. One eye clouded, cleared, and rolled toward Earl. The horse did not stand. It had learned the wagon too thoroughly. It lay breathing through the hole in the wall while the broken shafts rose and fell inside its chest.

Earl woke with rain in his ear and the empty cup still in his hand. The room had climbed onto the tables. Men held coats above their heads. The small judges were drowning in the punch bowl and continued issuing orders from beneath the surface. The red dancers had abandoned the fiddle strings for the dry cave of the fiddler’s mouth. Their feet shone through his cheeks.

Behind the bar, the woman’s wound was closing.

It began at the throat. New skin crept over the copper holes, pushing each loop outward. The wire fell against her apron with small green sounds. She gripped the loose end and pulled downward, trying to keep the old seam open. Flesh gathered behind the wire. It followed too quickly. She called for a knife, then rejected the first two brought to her because their blades were wider than the original cut. From beneath the till she found a narrow boning knife worn thin by sharpening. She set its point in the highest copper hole and drew it toward the next, careful despite the horse, the shouting, and the water running over the bottles.

The new cut closed behind the blade.

She tried again. This time a man held the skin apart with sugar tongs while she worked the knife through each old green hole in order. The candle had gone out. Smoke came from her mouth. When the last hole closed she placed the cold candle against her chest and pressed until the wick bent.

Earl watched her begin a third time. Then he noticed that the cup in his hand had stopped rattling.

He held it before him. His hand remained level while the floor shook under the reviving horse. He changed hands. The other held steady too. He spread his fingers, made a fist, struck his wrist against the bar, and waited. Nothing returned.

The woman had reached the fourth copper hole. Earl asked whether she had anything sealed, stoppered, buried, anything the rain could not have reached. She did not answer. Three men were forcing a pair of shears between her ribs while she guided them toward the old line. Earl went into the street.

⁂

A shallow enamel box struck Earl in the hip. The woman carrying it did not turn; she pressed the box against her chest with one arm and clamped its lid with the other. Two smiths hurried behind her with a brazier sheltered beneath a sheet of roofing tin. Wheels rolled through water hub-deep while the men who belonged inside them walked beside the rims, pointing to pale marks the rain was taking from their limbs. At the eastern prison, a queue wound around the block: ropes darkening on shoulders, stones trundled in barrows, zinc tubs balanced on heads. Those nearest the door had brought measurements.

At the wheelwright’s yard a tall man stood naked inside an iron wheel while six assistants studied a faded diagram. His arms and legs had straightened in the rain. Scars that once showed where the spokes entered him were disappearing from the skin. The oldest assistant tapped the left shin, compared the sound with the right, and bored a hole. The man screamed that it was too low. They plugged it with tallow, measured again, and broke the bone higher. By the time they threaded the spoke through, both holes had closed around empty flesh. The man wept with anger. He knew the difference. His old break had carried winter in it; this one was merely broken.

Across the street, a burned woman sat inside a brick oven while her family fed the original furniture into the fire. They had brought the settee on which she first caught, the curtains that carried flame to her hair, the cedar chest whose brass latch had melted into her thigh. But the settee was damp, the curtains smoked, and the chest would not burn. Her new skin pinkened, blistered, healed, and pinkened again. She kept asking for the smell. Nobody could give it to her.

On the burned woman’s shoulder, the last black patch thinned to pink and then to the colour of her cheek. Her sister kept one thumb over the place and lost it beneath the thumb.

Earl passed among them looking for liquor.

Every open bottle had thinned. Every barrel had taken rain through its seams. Beer ran pale from the tavern doors and gathered in gutters where children knelt to drink it. Earl swallowed from cups, jars, cooking pots, a cracked lamp chimney, and the cupped hands of a woman who charged him his belt. Nothing held. After each swallow he waited for the knees to soften, the left eye to lose its edges, the next ten minutes to become the only ten minutes. His knees stayed locked. His sight stayed clear. Memory accumulated without shape.

He remembered the right turn at Mercy Junction. He remembered the envelope beneath the floor mat. He remembered his daughter at twelve, holding a glass of water and asking why his hand shook. He remembered taking the glass from her and spilling half of it. The rain kept falling.

⁂

Rumour moved northward beneath the awnings. The Grand Hotel had burned before the city learned to keep records. Its lowest room had been sealed while the upper floors burned. The bottles there were corked under pitch and the casks bound in lead. Someone had opened it. The rain had not entered.

Earl began walking north.

Northbound traffic thickened around him. Two undertakers overtook him carrying a wardrobe upright between them; its doors opened whenever their steps fell out of time and showed only rain. An old man pulled a kitchen drawer on a leash and stopped at each crossing until it quit scratching at the cobbles. Nobody asked where Earl was going. They had chosen the same direction and allowed that to be enough.

At Mercy Square they passed the boy with the violin case. The paper crown was gone. Rain had plastered his hair to his face. The white sow stood beneath the courthouse steps with her woman’s hands held open. Rain filled both palms and would not overflow. The boy held the violin case against his chest. The knocking inside had stopped. When they passed he joined them.

The road narrowed. More came from the side streets: a woman balancing a bowl of blue screws on a prayer stool, children dragging a dry branch that left green prints on the stones. They moved without hymn or banner. At the far end of Mercy Square the enormous body had stopped turning. One hand opened above the attendants on the spit and searched the rain with the slow uncertainty of roots uncovered from soil.

The Grand Hotel stood north of the stockyards. Five storeys of stone front remained, its empty windows looking onto a lobby filled with sky. Two lions guarded the entrance. They had grown moss in the rain. Water ran from their mouths. Earl passed between them with the others.

The lobby had fallen into the basement. Chandeliers, bedsteads, luggage, folding screens, bath fixtures, and the numbered doors of rooms no longer present formed a slope into the dark. Cigarettes had been pushed ember-first into the walls to mark a passage. They burned despite the rain. The crowd descended as the rubble allowed, passing its possessions downward without asking which hands owned them.

An oak door blackened with stove grease closed the passage. A square opened at eye level. The woman behind it asked what Earl had brought. He showed her his steady hand. She looked past him at the bodies packed into the tunnel and opened the door.

The cellar had no room for all of them, but they entered.

The joists had been packed with rolled carpets, barley sacks, window putty, bundles of newspaper, and the stiff black aprons of the hotel kitchen. Six casks bound in dull lead stood under canvas. Bottles lay on their sides with each neck sealed black. The air cracked Earl’s lower lip before the door had shut. Whatever order the room once possessed had collapsed: a woman held a stopped clock against her naked stomach while a narrow man stood ankle-deep in a washbasin of millet writing numbers on his knees.

Earl paid with the car key. The doorkeeper bit it, bent it once against the doorframe, and gave him a cup.

The liquor was black but shone brown where it climbed the cup. It smelled of corn forgotten in a pan, iodine, and the vinyl pocket behind the Ford’s seat where Earl kept a half-pint for mornings. He had emptied that pocket at filling stations from Omaha to Peoria and stocked it again before the smell could leave.

Earl did not throw the first measure back. He wet his upper lip, took enough to cover the tongue, swallowed with his chin lowered, and waited for the heat to reach the notch below his breastbone. He had kept this sequence at kitchen sinks with the tap running, in filling-station toilets, behind the feed store among pallets of sheep salt, and in the locked wash bay at the county garage. Speed wasted the first drink. Hesitation wasted all the drinks after.

He took the second before the heat finished. The cellar shortened. Rain withdrew beyond the walls. His left hand rested on his knee, steady and pale, an object returned to him by mistake. Earl watched the pad of his thumb. A movement began there, crossed to the first finger, travelled through the wrist, and entered the cup with the faint old insect sound of glass against a wedding ring.

There it was.

He raised the cup and the tremor showed itself properly. Liquor struck the rim, ran over one knuckle, and Earl put the knuckle in his mouth. His stomach drew tight. Sweat opened along his hairline. Before the cup was empty his free hand had opened on the table for the next one. The unopened envelope returned to its corner beneath the passenger floor mat. Nothing written inside it followed.

The room altered by noises Earl did not investigate. A thimble spun down on stone. Somebody behind him laughed in recognition, then coughed until the laugh was gone. The stopped clock rang against the woman’s stomach. Earl held out his cup. A ladle dipped somewhere in the dark, and the cup came back full.

The boy with the violin case sat near the door. He did not drink. He rested both hands on the lid while the knocking resumed inside, three times, then two. The white sow had followed him down and lay with its head across his shoes. Her hands were folded beneath her chin.

⁂

Above them the rain continued searching.

It entered the ruined hotel through chimneys and cracks, crossed burnt rooms, and filled bathtubs on floors that no longer existed. One stream found the chain of a service bell and travelled down it link by link. It passed behind flowered wallpaper, drowned a nest of paper wasps, and entered the limestone joint above the cellar.

A dark point appeared between two stones overhead.

The people in the cellar watched it grow. Nobody spoke. The point became a bead; the bead became a drop.

It fell onto an empty chair.

The woman nearest moved the chair to the eastern wall. A second drop formed above the chair’s new place.

The company shifted east. Earl drew in his knees. A brass cage passed over his head and came down where his feet had been. Cups and possessions travelled hand to hand above the crush.

By morning the water had followed them. Shoulders overlapped. Earl kept his cup beneath his chin and drank what the tremor spilled onto his wrist.

A drop gathered above the last dry place.

There was nowhere left to move.

They made room.