The House of Water - 5. The Village of All Seasons: Summer

“anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

spring summer autumn winter

he sang his didn’t he danced his did . . .”

--e. e. cummings

“This is no place to sleep.”

Something nudged my ribs. I assumed it was a foot. I was regaining consciousness, trying to move my body or say something, but still unable to. Fingers tapped my face.

“Please, wake up.”

I tried as hard as I could to shout, to open my eyes. Soon, I knew, I would wake up. The process was taking longer than usual, but soon I would wake up.

“That’s better,” said the young man coming into focus. “If you can follow me to my house, I can clean you up and feed you, but first we have to make sure you aren’t hurt.”

He had creature eyes. That is the best way I can describe them. I have seen those eyes in the faces of others, but not so bright as his. He looked down at me unabashedly, as if he had never learned what it meant to stare, or as if I were just another event among so many arranged and paraded out for his amusement.

“Well?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Let’s try to sit you up.”

He kneeled at my side, on the stone, braced himself with one hand and pulled me up by the shoulder with the other. I felt no pain, but feared I would soon faint. I would not maintain consciousness for long.

“So far, so good, right?” he said. His hair sat in curls over his ears and down his forehead. It was the provisional shade of brown that in the sun seems blonde and under candle light turns auburn, the hair of coy angels in paintings.

He shifted next to me so we were facing the same direction, crouched on his feet, and looped an arm around my back and under my opposite arm. “Let’s stand up, slowly now.”

Together we stood up, him taking most of my weight. Black webs moved across my vision. We were in a village I had never seen before. The road was made of stone. The houses shared a uniform archiecture: timber frames like old villages in Germany and Denmark, steep roofs, stone chimneys. From what I could see, the village was composed of an oblong block of these houses in the center of the town, with another ring of houses encompassing it and serving as the outer wall. Between the center block and the outer ring was the stone road. The population of this place, I thought, could not be above two hundred people.

“I live with my mother in that house at the corner. It only looks smaller than the other ones. We’ll have you laid up there in a jiffy.”

Slowly he led me to a house that did, indeed, seem smaller than all of the others. The sun was beginning its descent behind that corner of the village, and so the front of the house was cast in shadow. He leaned me against its front wall while he opened the door.

“Almost there,” he said, putting his arm around me more tightly than before. “There is the problem of the stairs—.”

The light was dim inside the small parlor. I could make out furniture and many candles of different shapes and sizes. To my right were wooden stairs leading up to darkness. “We can make it if we go slowly,” he said.

“I don’t know if I can,” I said. I felt like giving out there on the floor.

“Not with that attitude. Buck up now. I have plans for you.”

Stair by stair, while the blackness at the top of the stairs compounded my blackening vision, we made it to a small hallway at the top of the stairs. At the end of the hall was a door.

“Just in here now,” he said.

He opened the wooden door. The setting sun shone through a narrow window that closed with a latch. There was a small bed in the far corner, some shelves with heavy, leather-bound books, several handmade stuffed animals, and a small dresser.

“It’s not a lot, I know,” he said. “But let’s get you into my bed.”

I looked down at the bed. I do not remember climbing inside.

*

In a strange bed in the room of a stranger in a town I had never seen before, I dreamt—for the first time I can remember—a blind dream. I heard a scratching sound, not the scratching of an animal, but a productive, controlled scratching. My right hand was curled up purposively; friction had warmed the side of it extending down from my little finger. I smelled unfinished wood.

The dream did not last long. It felt not like a dream of deep sleep, but rather like the nonsense that plays across the consciousness before sleep: the kinds of visions businessmen dismiss and artists venerate.

I do not remember if, the first time I had this dream, I recognized that it was a dream of writing.

*

When I woke again, the room was lit by several candles. I could tell without looking that night had fallen upon the village. Backlit by those candles, the light catching upon his curls like an unstable halo, the young man was looking down at me with his creature eyes.

“I’ve waited all evening for you to wake up,” he said. “And I’ve been waiting as long as I can remember for you to arrive.”

I shook my head.

“You’ll understand in time, but first I bet you’re hungry,” he said.

I sat myself up in his bed. I was comfortable in his bed in the same way I remember being comfortable in my friends’ beds growing up, something about the lack of responsibility one feels in the hospitality of another.

“Mother made a stew and some bread. She knows you’re here. She’s excited for me, but a little worried too for whatever reason.”

“I don’t understand where I am. I don’t understand how I got here,” I said, understanding meanwhile that I was not meant to understand.

“In time,” he said. “First, supper.”

When he disappeared from sight, I took the time to glance over his room. On his dresser were some uniquely shaped rocks. In the corner next to the shelves was a case that looked like it might hold some kind of stringed instrument. Next to me in the bed was a stuffed rabbit with button eyes, long ears, and a pink heart stitched onto its cream body. As I picked it up, he reappeared with a tray.

“That’s Patches. He’s my favorite,” he said. “Was my favorite, I mean. He was my favorite when I was younger. I thought you could use him though, since you aren’t feeling so good.”

He carried the tray over to me, placed it on my lap. My stomach growled as if some demon in it had hatched just then.

“Sounds like you’re hungry,” he said, smiling.

I thanked him and began eating like a man lifted out of a multi-millenial stasis. The stew was simple—beef, vegetables, potatoes, and a hearty stock—and I ate it with a chunk of a sort of artisan bread. I swallowed the whole meal and a jar of water within two minutes while my caretaker looked on.

“Golly.” He took my tray downstairs and returned.

“Who are you?” I asked, less fatigued now.

“My name’s Ryle, if you’ll remember,” he said.

“I’m Michael,” I said.

Ryle smiled. “I’ve always known that.”

I thought about asking how he might know that, but such a question clearly belonged to the field of others I knew better than to articulate: where was I? where was Stephen? how did I get there? how might I return?

“So,” he said, sitting Indian style on the bed near my knees, “how do you feel now?”

“Tired. I’ll sleep again soon, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not. I’m getting tired myself.” He went around the room and blew out several candles until only two remained lit.

“I can’t thank you enough.” Something felt redundant about my saying this.

“Don’t you worry about that,” he said. “Tomorrow will be a good day. If you are feeling well I’ll take you around the village, maybe even to the Grove. You’ll see what Mother keeps in her cages. We’ll make a fine lunch. Tomorrow really will be a great day.”

“I can’t wait,” I said, honest in my excitement, but not so certain that tomorrow could be realized.

“We’d better get to sleep then. You seem tired still. You need rest.” Ryle stood up from the bed and peeled off clothes until he wore nothing but an undershirt and something like boxers.

“Where will you sleep?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“You’re my bedfellow.” He blew out the last two candles, climbed over me, and crawled under the covers, all fairly quickly. They were, it seemed, movements he had rehearsed. “You don’t mind?” he asked.

“No, of course not.” I had not yet thought of sex around Ryle, but as soon as I could feel his heat next to me, I felt myself harden, and my heart began to race. I was in bed, in the dark, I realized, with a young man with the features of an untamed angel who seemed, at the time, naïve of what it meant to share bed space.

I felt hands pushing my shoulder in the dark. “Here. Lie on your side. The other way. Face away from me,” he said.

When I did as he said, his hands went to work on my back. “It feels nice, right?”

I grunted an affirmation, more suggestively than I had intended.

“It should. I’ve practiced a lot, you know. Waiting for you, you know.”

“Me?”

“Well, someone like you. It’ll make more sense in time.”

He massaged me from shoulders to hips. His fingers lingered at the waistband of my underwear. I stiffened slightly, then let myself relax into his pillow, his bed, his body.

“I heard it’s so much easier to sleep like this.” He put his arm around my waist and pulled himself close to me. He, too, I could feel, was excited. I became harder yet.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” I said. “And thank you.”

His arm tightened around me.

*

The smell of warm wood and a diligent scratching. Still I cannot see. I am as blind as ever.

*

I woke first in the morning. Carefully, without any sudden movements, I turned myself around in bed to face Ryle. In the morning the light did not shine into his window, but even so his skin still had a tawny warmth. His eyelashes were so long; I have never, to this day, to this writing, seen their likeness: an arachnid with too many legs; the rays of a negative sun. I put a hand on his side.

He opened his eyes and sat up quickly. “Excuse you, mister, sneaking up on me in my sleep like that.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“I’m just kidding. Let’s go make breakfast.”

He leapt over me in bed, pulled on his clothes and went downstairs. More groggy, apparently, than he was, I took my time crawling out of bed, getting dressed, and following him. I went back down the stairs he had dragged me up, through the living space with dozens of candles, and into a kitchen with stone floors and wooden cabinets. In the kitchen was a basin and what seemed to be an early model of a gas stove.

“I make eggs and sliced potatoes well,” said Ryle.

“That sounds good. I’m hungry.” And truly, my stomach felt empty the way it does when I’ve gorged myself the night before, as if my stomach had stretch itself out and required pounds of food for me ever to feel satisfied again.

“I’ll make you more then,” he said. “You’re still recovering, after all.”

I watched him cook breakfast. His movements suggested that he was trying to seem casual about it, but his eyebrows showed his concentration.

I sat myself at the plain kitchen table. Before long Ryle slid before me a plate with heavily seasoned eggs and potatoes.

“Every bite!” He waved a finger.

I ate quickly, saying nothing. He seemed happy to watch me eat, only taking occasional bites from the smaller dish he had prepared for himself.

“I had said that this house only looked smaller than the others, remember?” he asked.

I nodded, taking my last bite of breakfast.

“Wait until you see our Underground.”

“Underground?” I asked. From 19^th century Germany it seemed we had moved into a drug-trafficking ring.

“Yeah, our Underground. Your house doesn’t have an Underground? Where do you keep your wines? Where do you go when the storms come?”

“A basement?”

“I don’t know that word,” said Ryle. “Anyway, our Underground is really impressive. And wait until you see Mother’s hobby.”

He stood up and led me to a door under the stairs. It opened into blackness.

“Better take a candle,” said Ryle.

We walked slowly down a long flight of stairs into an empty room. In the corner of the room was another door.

“This way,” he said, holding the candle out in front of us.

He opened the door, which led into a darker depth. We went down more steps, steeper, more slowly. Yet again the stairs led to an empty room with a door at one corner. The door opened to more steps leading to another empty room with a door in the corner, which in turn led to another door and more stairs, and yet another room with a door and more stairs, leading finally to a room with several burning candles. We were, I knew, well below the Earth’s surface. In this stagnant, cold space, Ryle introduced me to Mother.

“Michael’s here with me,” he said.

“So it’s you,” said Mother. “Love and illness and hatching past death.”

“Come again?” I said.

“Nothing, dear, or riddles answered by time and space, that is, time in speech is space on a page, or: writing converts time into space.”

I said nothing.

“Show him your hobby,” said Ryle.

“Not that he won’t see it in time,” said Mother. She walked to a large assembly of lumber and wire which turned out to be a row of cages. “These are my work.” She walked a candle along the outside of the cages so I could see the hundreds of small brown pouches inside.

“Cocoons,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mother. “It’s a good job you didn’t said chryalises. Those are for butterflies. From these will hatch moths, giant moths.”

“I see.”

“Isn’t it something?” said Ryle. “There’s nothing like it when they hatch. Hundreds of giant moths that don’t mind you. It’s a really great day when they hatch. I get wine.”

“Not if you sound so eager for it,” said Mother.

We stood in silence for a long time, shifting the triangle between us, the minority species deep within the Earth.