Wilderness

December 30, 2008

Somewhere, sixteen thousand worlds away, a man was working on his house. He couldn’t do the work all alone, so he called up someone experienced in this kind of thing. This world was interesting in the respect that it had not evolved much beyond scraggly things and half-understood concepts. Mostly, no one understood anything, and they spent a good deal of time regarding a slow-moving and milky-colored river that flowed across the entire planet. Things sometimes floated by in the water, and the people would point and say things, speculate about what the item might be, or even rush down to the water’s edge to put their bare feet into the muddy and desultory current. They hoped, in their way, that they could get a sense of the thing out there in the water. It never really worked, but they kept trying.

On this planet there was no Paris, no Arc de Triomphe, nothing like that. No cities suffused with the warmth of culture and art, of history and knowledge, with lights playing over the rainy streets, dancing as if in spectacle for the sheer enjoyment of the people who lived there. There was little to triumph over, for that matter, and the inhabitants of that place didn’t consider many things that interesting—other than the river, of course, and the occasional thing that floated by. They were pretty happy just to let things be.

The man with the house was himself scraggly, wore thin pants that often had to be hitched up to keep from falling down. For some time, he worked with another—the one who had some additional knowing, and was able to make things work a little better—but not TOO well. He relied on the man, because he himself had a small garden patch he felt needed tending, even though it really required little time at all. The one thing he produced in the reluctant and clay-like soil was a kind of white potato—and sometimes he loaded them on his back and brought them to the market, where they didn’t sell very well. They weren’t any better or worse than the white potatoes the others had, but everything in this world was pretty much indistinguishable from everything else, so there was nothing to make his potatoes stand out from the crowd. He considered this once, to draw some attention to his market offering: On a worn piece of cardboard he’d plucked from the river, had then dried out in front of the fire, he scrawled this: “TASTE GOOD.” He’d propped this up in front of the pile of things, had watched as the market people pointed at his sign and laughed or tried to touch it. After that, he simply put his potatoes out the same as everyone else.

While he was at the market, watching the small space he occupied, and trying to come up with ways that his potatoes might sell better, but not daring such a risky move, the granddaughter of the man he’d hired to help him out was being murdered. She’d gone very far to meet a man she didn’t know, had crossed the river at one of the places you could pay to get across, then had covered about a fourth of the world to get to the man. He wasn’t a nice man, but she took him back home, tried to make things work. No one understood where that person had come from, what made him show up in that place. They were all at a loss, which wasn’t unusual. The holiday feast, which celebrated the lowering of the river after a particularly rainy period, was made unpleasant by this individual. The holiday could occur at any time: With the rising of the river, or at the lowering—or sometimes in between if people forgot where exactly the water level should be.

The woman was dragged outside, stomped on, then dragged some more, then stomped on again until she showed no more signs of life. The bad man ran off, headed into the river, where he didn’t know how to swim, and was caught by the bewildered and confused people. They paraded him through the town, where some people thought maybe he was a hero, and others thought he was a god. Some of the older ones saw that he was wet, and guessed that maybe the river had brought him to them, and that he was born in the water. Those people parading him tried to explain that he had just murdered a young woman, but no one understood. This went on until nightfall, when everyone got tired and closed their doors for the night.

In his house by the muddy river, the scant man with the leaning roof and crumbling steps waited. His helper wouldn’t be coming. He sat on a broken step and pulled at his trouser legs, then picked at one of his toes. Around the little dwelling all was mud and confusion and bits of broken twigs over in his garden patch to mark where he’d planted the potatoes. Sometimes he forgot where they’d been planted, went to a different area altogether. These little sticks helped quite a bit.

He thought about the news, after he’d heard from the townsfolk the confused messages about a killing and a hero and a god that had emanated straight from the river. He knew that somehow his man was mixed up in all this, and that—according to the muddy and incomprehensible laws that governed that riverside area—his helper would have to give up all work for an undetermined amount of time—possibly forever. He picked at his big toe, a particularly ugly specimen that was somewhat misshapen and sometimes looked like one of the potatoes he’d plucked from the ground.
“I guess maybe I’ll have to see about learning how to work on this place my own self,” he said.

He tried the library, where there were some printed documents about different things. Nothing was complete, however. For his subject, the one publication, written by a neighbor actually, contained only ten pages. Five of those pages were devoted to the subject of “walls,” but did not address how to construct them or what they should be made of even. Rather, there were headings that listed the Uses of Walls, Where a Wall might be Desired, Where you shouldn’t have a Wall, and so on--which was all written in a supposedly learned manner that differed greatly from how people actually spoke. The following five pages contained footnotes that cited different people of the town, some of whom the scraggly man knew—as references for the book. He looked down the list of names, did not recognize in those pages even one individual who’d ever built anything or even knew how to use any kind of tool. As a hasty addition to the subject of walls in the ten-page pamphlet, there was a paragraph about “windows.” This is how it went:

“When one looks upon a wall, it is often not possible to traverse the material of the wall with one’s gaze. It is at these times that a window might be advantageous. The window serves the purpose of allowing one to gaze at things beyond the wall.”
Then there was a citation just below this paragraph that credited the name of an insane man who lived not too far away, and whom the scant man had once caught scavenging in his garden with his bare hands. To protect his potatoes, he’d pretended he was a wild beast, and had made howling noises, which had scared the man in the pamphlet’s citation. He’d not been seen for some time after that.

He hitched up his pants, went back to the library, where the overseer told him he’d have to pay a large amount for the pamphlet, because others had asked about it while he had it. He explained that everyone had to share the pamphlet. The overseer, who was both deaf and blind, had made a mistake, as the two discovered after many hours of discussing the matter. He’d been there since morning, convinced that no one could possibly have wanted this pamphlet, and tried to make the overseer understand that, too. It was now evening. Finally the overseer understood, with painstaking drawings that the scant man forced the library man to touch and follow with his bony fingers. It was not the pamphlet about walls, after all, that had been so highly sought after: It was a very popular book of about three pages that described some things that had floated down the river. Everyone loved that book, and couldn’t wait to get their hands on it.

With nothing in the way of home improvement books at the town’s library—or any other kind of book for that matter, the potato farmer borrowed the leaflet about the river items, which had just been returned. He took it back home and sat on the front step, watched as one of the pages fell out. Now it had only two. He looked up, saw what appeared to be a stump slowly drifting by in the water. He turned to the dirty and tattered page, saw a similar illustration, noticed that it was labeled “Large Water Bird.”

On the other side of the river there was a celebration going on. A fire shone against the brown muddy water, and people sang about a river god who’d come to them straight from the dirty, swirling currents.