After a time, we could hear the Mord proxies barely at all, and despite the ghoulish mausoleum-like lurch and repetition of our progress, we could tell from a downward slant and a new, fresher quality to the air that we were headed in the right direction. There was the feeling, unspoken between us, that although hungry and thirsty, we would make it out. That though our hands shook from the aftershocks and when we sat to rest our minds were full of bears, we had a goal and a shelter waiting: Wick’s safe place. Food and water awaited us. That was motivation enough. We were almost free.
The last doorway led to a stairwell heading down and I knew that at the bottom lay a disguised door and on the outside no hint at all but fallen rock, fallen branches, and a light covering of lichen.
We stood there teetering at the top of the stairs, far older than we had been just hours before. About to leave our home. About to be tossed out into the world we’d taken such pains to keep at arm’s length, to only meet on our terms.
“Are you ready?” I asked Wick, his arm around me. The blood on his hand was smudging warm and moist onto my dusty shirt and I didn’t care.
“We’ll be like hermit crabs without their shells,” Wick said.
“We’ll find new shells.”
A long, drawn-out, trembling sigh from Wick, an exhalation almost like a death rattle.
“I’m ready,” he said.
Thus diminished, we left the Balcony Cliffs.
WHAT FREEDOM MEANT
Some landscapes in the city let you play pretend for at least a short time, and that is a good thing: to control in your thoughts what you can’t yet control in reality. The terrain we emerged into, wincing and squinting from the harsh sunlight of midday, might in play-pretend land have resembled a slanted field of weeds that led down to a gentle ravine lined with pine trees and the tops of buried buildings. You might even have imagined the ravine had been formed by water erosion and that down in its glistening dark depths water still bubbled out, churned across jagged rocks, and then ran its course to a destination farther down, where the ravine flattened out to the desolate plain that defended the approaches to the Company building.
But there hadn’t been water flowing for years and the trees were all dead and leafless and half fossilized, their lie exposed by the gnarled green cactus that had grown up around them. The weeds were fractious and yellow against the sandy ground and near the slope of the ravine had to burst up through a cracked asphalt so old, so dislodged and broken up, that in its blackened aspect that surface could as well have been the upsurge of some vast underground volcano.
Vultures circled above—a good sign. Something dead below meant too that things had lived, at least for a while, and broken tree trunks and a few mounds of refuse gathered around the nubs of old walls provided good cover if we wanted to try our luck down the ravine.
Wick’s safe place lay to the west, a little to the north of our position. The ravine would take us out of our way, but otherwise to the immediate northwest there was little cover past the shadow of the Balcony Cliffs and we were fearful of being exposed to the Mord proxies.
My throat was parched. I had on my worst pair of shoes. In my pockets I’d found a dried-out alcohol minnow I split with Wick and not much else other than a pocketknife. Whatever Wick had he would not say, only that he would “hold it in reserve.”
We started toward the ravine, scrambling down the incline to where it leveled out before a steeper descent, now walking on the field of asphalt and weeds. I looked back at the Balcony Cliffs, so overgrown with moss and grass at this angle it did look like a cliff top and not the edge of a vast building at all.
But as I stared, there came a glitch or stoppage in time, and the sound of Wick’s voice as he screamed at me some far distance and pulled at my arm, and I thought it odd that the sun had gone away and that there was a shadow across the Balcony Cliffs when there was no cloud in the sky.
A sun carious and bloodshot alongside the real sun. The Balcony Cliffs ripped away from me, a wall of dark brown between us. A counting out of my heartbeats so slow that each became like the drip of the last honey out of the jar onto a plate far, far below, and as elastic.
The world was full of noise and then full of silence, and in the silence all the air left my lungs and a great peace came over me and I was on my back on the ground as if I’d always been there.
A thunderous wave, a monstrous vibration through the earth, had flung me to the ground. I was falling away from Wick or he was falling away from me down the incline, come to rest tossed to the side, bleeding among the weeds, startling white against black asphalt. I could see him at the edge of my vision, but I had to force my gaze skyward, as if a weight already pressed down on me from those coordinates.
Mord rose above me, had been hiding or invisible, and the asphalt thrown into the air with the impact of him smashing his feet into the ground near us now rained down in clumps and I put up one hand to protect my face but could not stop staring. The blue sky, curiously calm, and the silence, and Mord, a huge golden-brown bear rearing up on hind legs to blot out the sky, to destroy everything from the dust motes to the sun … and me lying there looking up at that as his body extended higher still and the sky around that mass of fur burning and seething, a corona around the utter impossible smothering thickness of his fur, and there was his mighty foot raised and there his claws and above that the sight of a paw and at an impossible height up that golden length the muzzle, the fangs, the great yellow eye, the deranged beacon, as dangerous as in my dreams. And the eye saw me, I swear it saw me, locked onto me and worried at me and would not let go. I swear Mord knew me and yet I was still on my back, adrift in aftershocks, one of my eardrums burst and something moist and sticky running down the side of my head. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs, those poor sad twigs.
With excruciating slowness, Mord grew larger and larger in my field of vision. Weeks passed as I lay there and Mord contrived in his infinite mercy and patience to remove the sky, remove the world, and become God of Nothing. Until one day, in harsh sunlight, Wick bleeding beside me, I could see the scarred black pads of his raised foot so close, every whorl and tuft of fur around the toes, the huge clods of dirt there dislodged and now lazily spiraling down with the foot while still waves of dust spilled off the sides. He smelled of rich mud and subtle honeysuckle. He smelled of shit and, impossibly, of mint. The long, yellow claws were so very large, the tips curling over me so sharp, and I could see the fracture lines in them, the places where those claws had been split and repaired many times, how they were in their way as delicate and miraculous as they were deadly.
Less blue and more Mord, and I was about to be pulverized by our god, made into pulp beneath his tread, and then everything would be over and this stuttering, stilted attempt I had made at life would be over. All that effort relaxed into not-moving, not-thinking, my atoms released to become something else.