“Pond-apple?” she offered.
Sha. Was this a stalling tactic or dramatic prelapsarian irony?
Moishe looked vaguely at the river, then accepted a piece of the fruit. What was he thinking? Ver veyst? Who knows? One may have a head filled with boiling soup yet look like a kneydl. A dumpling. He said gornisht. Nothing.
“Where’s the Fountain?” Jacome asked, not one to let catering get in the way of eternity.
“Inside the cavern,” Utina said. “You find what you seek.”
Still, the evasive half-answers of a tzadik.
There was a hot spring that burbled up from the cenote, its waters rising from a crack deep in the earth.
“Now,” Jacome said. “Where’s the door?”
On the top of the mound were several small openings. We peered in but could see nothing. Moishe dropped a rock into one. A minute passed and there was an almost inaudible splash.
The only other entrance was to follow the river into the cave, but the churning water would shlog smash you against the rocks. You’d end up the kind of immortal where you don’t live forever because you’re already dead. Unless you could hold your breath for ten minutes and avoid the rocks.
“The water was not always so strong,” she said.
Ach. As helpful as bloodletting a corpse.
“We’ll dam the river,” Jacome said. “We’ll move boulders.”
Moishe took several sacks of arquebus gunpowder out of the bag hanging from his shoulder. They would blow their way to kingdom come.
I flew to the top of the mound. I’d squeeze myself into one of the openings.
Reverse birth.
It’d be almost entirely dark inside, the small holes like stars far above. Perhaps I could find the Fountain and bring back its waters.
One squeeze of Aaron, the immortal sponge, and they’d forget their pain. Or live forever.
I eyed a likely hole behind a jagged rock.
Perhaps if I weren’t so ample. If I’d watched myself: Did I need to do all that fressing? Still, I thought I might fit inside.
I pushed myself through. How? Like anyone else, first one wing and then the other. Immediately I began to fall. I only knew which way was up because it was the direction I wasn’t going. Then I found my wings and began to flap.
I saw bupkes. Nothing. Nada. I flew in little circles, not knowing where the walls were, not knowing how far was down. I heard the gurgling of water. The Fountain or the shpritzing of a kvetchy sea serpent? I could not tell.
Then a rumbling. Some kind of upset tuml in the kishkas of the cave. Then a raining down of water from above. Then—Sh’ma Yisroel—the vessels of the world burst open.
Gevalt. An explosion. Then another. Keneynehoreh. Suddenly it was light and I saw the outside above me.
Boulders fell. Water roared over me as if the sky had turned liquid. Up was down and I was swept into the churning of a hot current, flapping, trying not to drown. The ceiling of the cenote had collapsed. The firmament was broken. There were no stars but only the shocking blue sky.
I’d fallen into the Fountain. If I was going to die, I was going to die wet with immortality. I flapped. Each sinew and bone ached but I was able to rise.
Moishe? Where was Moishe? What had happened?
The cenote was an open volcano, but with water and air instead of fire. And falling stone. I flew into the sky above this grave pit. The river poured over the broken edge, no longer into the cave mouth where Moishe and Jacome had been.
Though I burned with pain, I searched.
My captain. My Moishe. My other.
He was gone.
Nothing but the unbridled river flowing over the open pit of the Fountain. It was a jumble of broken rock. Moses lost before he reached the Promised Land.
They all were gone.
Moishe. Jacome. Utina.
They must have been buried beneath the fallen stones.
Moishe. My captain. My shoulder.
Nu. So there’s that question, And then what happened? Let me tell you. Five hundred years. It happens. It’s takeh why I have these words.
Was I shpritzed by the Fountain when I fell? Or did it pish on the gantseh megillah, the whole story?
They say when I tell it, it seems as if it goes on forever. Na. I was that story, have become the whole shpiel. Have passed it down to a long line of pisher parrots who also tell it. And tell it to you now. What, they were busy being something else? Any life is just another life out of order.
As long as you have the words.
Emes, I always said: I want to live forever. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
And Moishe? I flew over the broken Fountain. Along the river. Through the gantseh jungle. For days. Weeks. Months. I could not find him.
This never leaves my farmishteh feygeleh mind.
I saw bupkes. Nothing. Emptiness. No finger reaching, no shmatte scrap of britches, no moaning voice. Maybe he thought I had died? Maybe he searched for me?
Maybe Jacome pushed him, or he jumped in and spluttered down the river and was dunked in the Fountain, his head klopped, stars prickling for a moment instead of eyes.