A Bit of Black Fire (1)

To all red dragonflies, whenever and wherever they alight.

"Call me Virgil," he said quietly, his face holding a wry grin.  "It would be altogether appropriate."  Peering hard in the softly pulsating, ethereal light, I could see through purplish lips to toothless gums painted white.  He wore a heavy robe, his face cowled, the hood throwing shadows carefully across his jaws and the upper half of his face, so that only his mouth was visible.  His concealment, it would seem, was purposeful.  I put my hand out to the side, arm extended, and touched what felt like a cold stone wall; it was wet and smooth, like one would expect from the inside of a water-eroded cave.  As my eyes adjusted to the dimness of the lighting, I discovered that the illumination emanated from scones fastened firmly into the upper reaches of the high-vaulted passageway.  The color of the flame therein was a peculiar white, as if perhaps a distillation of chained lightning muted by a succession of filters. An odd bit of chicanery, it appeared, but I was nearly certain that the light was electric, without conductor, and without restraint.  The man’s–no, creature’s–feet clicked as he turned about abruptly and began marching, all long strides and face forward, down the tunnel.  He set a quick pace.  It was then that I noticed his unusual height; while not impossibly tall, he towered at least a foot over my six feet, two inches.  It was clear that he expected me to follow him.  I started off at a trot, my shorter legs straining to maintain the brevity of distance between us.  As I was unsure to the length of our journey, and because this strange creature was profoundly disconcerting, I felt compelled to engage him in conversation.

"This is a strange sort of rock," I ventured hesitantly into the silence.  "Of what…of what sort is it?  Is it granite?  The light isn’t great, but what light there is seems to be refracted by something quartzose in the walls."  He did not respond, and I retreated back into the uneasy silence.  I couldn’t see well, and I was scared.  Where was he leading me?  Would what I want be there?  Was it possible?  It did seem, though, as if the passage was widening, the lights were dimming, and I could hear an odd rushing noise, constant and growing.  Suddenly the formerly narrow walls fell back into the unseen distances to both sides of us, and we were confronted by a barren riverbed.  Its banks dropped steeply to an ashen gray bottom, about six feet below where Virgil and I stood.  The rushing noise persisted, almost as if the memory of flowing water reverberated throughout the unseen expanse of the cavern.  Virgil spoke again, and the suddenness of his words visible startled me.  "This river has many names when it flows," he murmured, the sound of his voice scuttling on soft-slippered feet, "and only one when it does not."  My arms tingled as goosebumps grew about their length; I involuntarily took half of a step back as Virgil’s eyes met mine.  "Why have you come here, stranger?  Few things in life end well, and fewer things still, here."  The implication that what might transpire here did so beyond the realm of life hung heavily in the stagnant air.

I severed the uncomfortable eye contact with a sigh and a shudder, and contemplated his question.  The rushing noise was beckoning, I thought, daring me, and it seemed to be coming from the distance on both sides.  It could have been a flight of fancy on my part, of course, but I almost felt like there was a river in the bed at my feet, tucked safely out of sight underneath the coverlets and comforters of time.  Time.  "I surmised," I said tremulously, before reinforcing my voice with a bit of feigned strength, "that perhaps time might be bought here." For me, or for whoever might wish to borrow it.  "That a price might be paid, and that, quid pro quo, I might be compensated in turn."  Virgil took in a deep breath and shut his eyes.  He seemed almost euphoric as he repeated the words silently: quid pro quo.  "Follow me," he ordered, although I knew that I was not and would not be compelled to do so by anyone but myself.  As we carefully descended into the gray silt below us, our feet slipping on the banks before catching on solid slabs of gray rock that occasionally protruded outward, he continued speaking.  His self-assurance unnerved me, and the words themselves I cannot bear to relate.  Not yet, at least.  As we surmounted the far bank, Virgil bid me to consider the trail that we had blazed.  To my shock, what had once been a denuded riverbed now ran with water.  Not much–barely any at all, really–but just the same, a rivulet meandered lazily through the deepest point of the trough.  Occasionally it happened that it crossed paths with one of my footprints, and the water would fill it completely before moving on.  "It will deepen," my guide informed me, "every stolen second you spend on this side."

Virgil and I continued our journey.  The walls gradually collapsed back down upon us, before they regained their original corridor distance apart.  It was then that I noticed the first One.  Although I can’t say for certain, the One appeared to be standing guard.  He wielded no weapon, but his carriage was definitely that of one being belligerent and vigilant at once.  Upon seeing me, the One made a sudden, threatening move toward me.  Upon seeing my guide, however, the One relaxed, nodding amiably at the both of us.  Virgil nodded back.  Some time later–I think, but time might be the wrong word; perhaps it might be better to measure the time in distance?–some three miles farther, maybe, Virgil turned toward me and spoke.  "Welcome, traveler, to the Hall of Memory."  It was then that I realized that the confines of the hallway had opened up into a tremendous open space, a chamber shaped like a massive basilica.  Against the walls of the Antaen ceiling, blurry images flickered and popped and skipped like ancient thirty-five millimeter film.  Beneath the dome that stretched a thousand feet into the air, Ones toiled in utter silence.

Before each One, something much like a canvas–but somehow more ambiguous, less tangible–stood, propped up against the back of the One in front of Them.  The Ones’ arms (appendages?  they were not human, really, and they definitely defy description) moved in steady strokes, creating pieces of art that seemed impossibly real.  As they worked, other Ones moved down thin aisles that stretched between each column of Them, gathering completed works, and leaving behind new pieces of the medium upon which they worked (I will not call it canvas again, for I am sure that it was not canvas).  "All memories come from here," Virgil said reverently toward the amazing scene, "and it is sancrosanct."  He led me down a winding staircase comprised of short, steeply graduated steps.  "Be careful," I was told, "for many have fallen down these steps, and have been left at the bottom to die."  I had to put my feet down roughly sideways to keep my balance.  "Like all travelers who make it this far, you are allowed four memories to keep."  I chose not to tell him that these memories would not be only for me.  "Remember, though, we all depend on something to see us through the day.  Let it be love and hope, and not memory, and not anything else."

I traversed the columns, then, and studied each memory in turn.  While some were similar in theme, no two were identical.  The Ones paid me no attention as I peered over their shoulders.  They did not care or pay any attention as I cocked my head to the side, muttered a few ruminations to myself, and then left without a memory in tow.  As I rejected memory after memory, I stopped really seeing them.  Just blurs of color, all of them classed under an overarching emotion: joy, sadness, anger, and even the humdrum malaise that hides in the mundane and the routine.  Some of them were grayed with age, whole segments of the memory erased by the censors of time.  Some of them actually were just blurs of color, memories of memories of an emotion that is missed but can’t quite be named.  A few were dulled by alcohol, obscured by smoke, or blued by the habitually bleak mindset or blackened by a constitution of despair.  I began to think that none of them would suffice for my purposes.

As I made my way down the last line of Ones, I happened upon a memory of a willow tree.  A red-haired girl sat comfortably, grasped by the sturdy hand of a bough, the freckles on her face flashing in the softly billowing shade of the harlequin green curtains.  The Mediterranean Sea can’t be heard at this distance, not from the tree, but its promise rises up the horizon like a tidal wave of history, of everything that ever was and will be.  But it is now, and she is there, not yet knowing that some tidal waves traverse oceans, and that where tidal waves go, everything changes.  I reached out as if to choose it.  It seemed the perfect memory, the perfect memory for her, of her.  I returned my arm to its side, though, because I knew that it wasn’t mine to give.

A few memories later, I happened upon one of myself, face down beside a translated tome of Guillaume Apollinaire.  My hair was lank with grease, the bags under my eyes heavy and filled dark with restless thoughts.  I reached forward to brush my hair behind my ears, to turn the page, maybe to tamp out the butter lamp that could do no more than exile the darkness.  When Virgil finally spoke, I nearly died from surprise; I’d forgotten that he was following me.  "Careful," he whispered, as if he could somehow guess at my extreme bemusement at such a surreal scene; it was like watching yourself on television.  "You can reach back and touch a memory, of course, but you cannot change it.  Not honestly.  And if you try to enter it, if you try to climb into what was, you will never escape it."  So I left the light burning, the page unturned, and pressed on down the last column on Ones.  Besides, that particular memory would not fulfill my self-imposed quest, either.  It might interest her, but it would not include her.

Eventually, and in a coincidence that fell well beyond improbable, I found them, all four of them, in a row.  The first: she sat upon the bar stool beside me, her hands on my thighs, and mine on hers.  The place was crowded except for us; we were not there.  Perhaps we floated in a vacuum, or, more likely, someplace outside of spacetime, a place the clock couldn’t touch.  A memory set out of time unharmed by time.  We talked, and we laughed, and we understood each other too well for people who hadn’t talked more.  And when she described her dreams, and what made her smile, and who she was, my shell almost burst with her own joy.  I picked the memory up by its edges–an odd thing, that, and a process that cannot be conveyed–and, as I did so, Virgil intoned, "One."  As those words died, I saw the second, some few memories ahead.  Perhaps it was the day after the memory I’d already chosen.  I don’t know, and I’m not certain it would matter.  She lay there in the bed, swaddled in a plaid blanket, her autumn tresses in indecipherable tangles.  I do not know, either, if anything or anyone has ever looked so beautiful naked, the truth included.  "Two," my guide proclaimed, while They busily ignored him.

Within the third, she was hugging me.  It wasn’t an out of the ordinary hug; just arms entwined, with the lengths of our bodies touching in their entirety.  But as we parted, and I stared into her almond shaped, almond colored eyes, I thought I spied an ember of contentment fanned to life, as if I’d emptied the bellows of her lungs into the fire of her soul.  As we began to converse, a baritone voice bellowed from behind the bar: bar time.  I guess, in this case, we had run out of time.  Dammit, where is it there might be just a dram more of time?  "Three," Virgil proclaimed, the noise of it bouncing about in the Hall.  In the fourth and final memory, we were standing beside a pond.  Perhaps a bit larger than a pond, but calling it such lends it a bit of intimacy.  The autumn was tumbling about the undulating water, gently genuflecting toward the approaching season while bidding farewell to its wellspring.  We took root there, turning leaves toward the red sun, and everything was red beneath it; my heart, her heart, the leaves, and the perpetual waterfall of her hair.  And the dragonfly that skipped pell-mell across the water, before nimbly alighting upon her slightly coiled hand, was so red that its depth was indiscernible.  She opened her fingers farther, then, allowing the dragonfly to make its home.  I left some roots there, then, in the ground, even as we left.  "The fourth," Virgil announced solemnly, "and the final." 

With that, all of Them stopped and regarded me, none of them making a sound.  As I regarded them curiously, I gathered all four of the memories underneath my arm, and approached the far end of the basilica; from there, at the exact opposite end of the Hall from where I had entered, a double-leaved wooden door sat flush against the stone wall.  It beckoned me mysteriously, seeming to promise that for which I had begun my sojourn.  The stairs that emerged from the ground emerged mid-step, as if they extended for some distance downward, to someplace beneath the Hall.  Virgil watched me study it, before drolly telling me, "You shouldn’t ever have to know."  The sudden injection of joviality into his tone surprised me.  Who is this…thing?  The Ones behind me continued their labor as my foot landed on the bottom step.  I had chosen the memories not because she had forgotten them, or because they were particularly forgettable, but because I wanted her to keep them.  Them, and the entire beautiful storm therein.  As I approached the exit, I realized the flickering images upon the converging walls of the dome above me were me, in my entirety.  I stopped and looked for her, finding her near the top.

I crested the staircase, and turned to gaze upon the Hall–no, no, whatever its official name, it was a studio–and watched for awhile.  They created like I’d never passed through, Their exertions coating the stone enclosure like a verdant, living moss.  A roiling mass of the living made to stand still, the moving parsed down to nanoseconds.  Virgil had followed me up the stairs, and he delicately rested his hand upon the shoulder of my woolen jacket.  The coarse, black material of his robe drew up his arm, displaying a pinkish hand devoid of nails.  Of nail beds, too, for that matter.  His aristocratic fingers were coiled in tattoos, stylized vines that, at the fingertips, were hale and green, and, by his wrists, were brittle and brown.  The fingers would have thrown sparks, I think, as if they were capacitors and chock full.  But he did not want them to, and for reasons I cannot fathom.  He gently pulled on my shoulder, turning me around, the tall wooden doors looming over us.  "Beyond these doors," he said, "lie two more Halls.  Will you soldier on?"  As I opened my mouth to answer, he interrupted me.  "Remember, though, the words I shared with you as we entered the riverbed."  He leaned in, as if for emphasis.  "And remember still the riverbed, which was once dry, and then a trickle, and, by now, a creek."  I walked toward the door, and he laughed.  It was the rattle of a snake, and it was shocking.  "And, soon enough, it will be a wild torrent of a river."  The heavy doors banged open with alacrity as I ran through them.

This passage way was a buzzing neon red, and it, too, stretched into the unseen distance.  These walls were less drab; upon closer inspection, I determined them to be weathered brick.  What sort of brick, and from what sort of bricklayer, was a mystery.  Virgil and I traveled at a canter, now, side-by-side.  As we ran, I dragged a fingernail along the wall, feeling it grind away to the cuticle.  "Run," a One told me, the first words a One had spoken to me.  The sound was coarse and shrill, like a whetstone sliding down the length of a long blade.  Hidden away in a cubbyhole in the wall, the One elaborated, "If you don’t want to swim."  I increased my pace, and Virgil dutifully kept it.  Quite abruptly, he demanded of me, "Will you stop ruining the brickwork?  It took forever."  I slowed a moment, and so did he.  The brickwork were perfect, the mortar in precise parallel and perpendicular lines, and where the hell does someone obtain brick and mortar in this place?  "I’m sorry," he apologized, his voice neither contrite nor diffident, "but this hallway took me a very long time.  A length of time that you might understand, if you could leave the rest of it behind."  He noted my confusion, but said nothing.

I nearly fell down the stairs leading into the next chamber.  They, too, were steep, and on the flanks of each step, massive poles supported thin, graceful torches that burned with red flame.  Virgil had ceased jogging, and announced, "Welcome, traveller, to the Hall of Love."  He rested that same discomfiting hand upon the same woolen shoulder, and quietly bade me, "So descend, then."  The vastness of the scene before me nearly floored me, if it wasn’t for the unsettling knowledge that the floor was some two hundred feet below.  The roof here was just as high, here, but this one was translucent, refracting the light, throwing spectral light across the floor.  Much like the Hall of Memory, the Ones here worked in exact columns.  What made this place different, though, was their labor.  At each of their feet, small, square boxes etched in vines contained what looked to be rich, gray silt.  In each box, a plethora of plants of myriad sorts turned leaves upward toward the light above.  Some of the plants were in full bloom, and the ones that gathered around them simply breathed them, their visages inured in euphoria.  Of those that were blossoming, there was every sort of flower.  Delicate petals that threatened to fall at the slightest breeze, or fuzzed, stately flowers challenging the winter to do its worst, some flora was doing better than others.

As I approached the first column of Ones, Virgil explained the horticulture arrayed before me.  "Every plant you see is love, a love, that is transpiring back beyond the river."  These Ones, like the Ones before, paid him no mind, going about their work.  As I approached the sides of the rotunda, I realized that they were covered in vines.  Some of them were hale and green, and others were brittle brown.  They were all mixed together, intertwined, and it became difficult to follow them, to separate one from the other.  "Some of these plants were never meant to flower.  Some were never flowering plants at all."  As he spoke, a One picked up Their box, walked over to the wall, and uprooted the entire plant.  The plant (love?) had budded, but never bloomed.  Around the aborted flowers, jagged thorns formed a dangerous crown.  The One paid them no mind as he wove the entire thing, about four feet tall, in the vines that helped enclose the area.  "These flowers are representative in all ways.  A microcosm.  Everything from the sturdiness of the stalks to the size and shape of the flower; the fragrance, forbidden but tempting, commonplace but profound, anything, nothing, everything in between."  As the multi-hued light threw shadows around my feet, some of the more sinuous shaped plants looked like black snares snapping at my ankles.  "And you may choose one," Virgil finished, a furtive, wry smile upon his face.  "Just one."

This seemed a little more important than the choices prior, and I was determined to take my time in my deliberations.  Mindful of the riverbed now flowing with an unknown amount of water, I jogged from plant to plant, before stopping to study it.  The choices were, for the most part, aesthetically pleasing, yet personally unappealing.  I wanted it to snow in summer, and find Céraiste.  Perhaps the royalty of la Chicorée sauvage, purple like the curtains chasing the Mediterranean sun, potted and smiling from the perch of her windowsill.  I wanted to wield a gigantic spade, dig up all of Versailles, and replant it in her front yard.  Some loves are oil fires that roll like a parade ground’s drum across the top of submerged Atlantis.  A tall, languorous specimen caught my eye, about two-thirds of the way down the third column.  I cut my way across the aisles to study it, the Ones in my way showing no irritation as I cut between them and their plants.  It had broad, trifoliate leaves, speckled yellow like those of an orangetree.  I reached and ran my finger down the length of a vein.  As I did so, I shivered.  "Not a good sign," Virgil drawled laconically, the first words he had spoken since he’d introduced me to the task at hand.  I turned and frowned at him.  "Speed, like judgment, is most certainly of the essence, traveler," he reminded me.  "I am not you, and grateful not to be you–as odd as that may seem-but if I happened to be you, I would stop glaring at me and hurry."  I turned and hurried on, a little miffed at the enjoyment that my guide seemed to be deriving from my situation.

I found the plant that suited me.  It wasn’t something that I knew, either.  I stood there, transfixed, pushing at the curious shackles that bound me to it.  I ran two trembling hands up and down the length of it, wary of snapping it; it was thin, young, tremulous in its tenuous life.  The main stalk diverged many times until it reached its full height of approximately five and a half feet tall.  At the end of each stem, a green bud hugged tight a bloom of unknown color.  Virgil quietly murmured behind me, and I nearly jumped at his mouth just a few inches from my ear.  "Ah, the way it is supposed to be, then.  If I didn’t know any better, Traveler (I knew by now that it had become my name, and that it demanded capitalization), I’d say that plant has chosen you."  I heard him walk away from me, the decrescendo of his voice describing our expanding proximity.  "The way it’s supposed to be."  The One who was tending the plant regarded me somberly, silently telling me something I was too preoccupied to hear.  I gathered up the plant, box and all, and followed Virgil to the far end of the Hall.  No, no, not a hall; most definitely a greenhouse, a nursery where green things are nurtured.  At the far end of the hall, another staircase stretched straight upward.  Although my vantage point did not allow me vision of the landing that I was sure waiting up top, I was just as certain there was yet another door.  One more chamber, I thought, and if it isn’t there, then it isn’t meant to be found.

As if on cue, Virgil told me, "All that’s left, Traveler, is the Hall of Time, wherein all the scrips and scraps of time are produced.  Something you haven’t much more of, though your dawdling might belie that fact."  Although increasingly irritated by his repeated reminders about the scarcity of my time on that side of the river, I sped up minutely.  I didn’t want him to derive any satisfaction from his commandments, thinly veiled as advice.  My lungs labored heavily as I took the steps upward two at a time.  The saturated smell of a sea of greenery fell back behind me.  As I achieved the crest of the stairs, a monstrous door–perhaps fifty feet tall, and double-leaved, like the last–slowly came into view.  The hinges were joined to fluted, black, iron support pieces that stretched across three-quarters of the door near its top and bottom.  Virgil made no move toward the door, so I took the lead, and put my hand across its smooth, yet unstained, surface.  It did not budge.  A tentative push, followed by a firm shove from the shoulders, and the door did not move a fraction of a nanometer.  "If it hasn’t become obvious, Traveler, that you’re supposed to do something other than push, then I’m not certain that you’re meant to survive this journey."  I stared toward the door, refusing to reward his snide comment with a scowl.  There are only so many things one can do with a door, so I settled upon the most obvious.  The subtle percussion of my tentative tapping was swallowed whole by the vastness of the chamber in which we were.  "Harder," I was advised.  I turned, rocked back on my left foot, and slammed the bottom of my right into the middle of the massive door.  "Now wait," he told me, strangely hushed. 

The door noiselessly open, emitting a rush of something stale and stagnant.  It was more than air, just as fear is more than an emotion.  A One made notable by his impressive size waited on the other side; I had the impression he had waited for some time.  The passageway that stretched into the distance before me was circular, like a rabbit’s burrow, except that it was perfectly circular.  It was illuminated by black light; strange fires licked downward from the ceiling, and a strange, dark incandescence dripped down from it.  Occasionally, the fire touched the top of the giant One, but he didn’t seem to feel it or mind.  The One began moving, surprisingly nimble, down the tunnel, and Virgil and I followed him wordlessly.  After awhile, I asked Virgil, "Did you polish this, too?  It must have taken some time to do it."  Virgil did not answer for a mile, and I resigned myself to the silence, until Virgil hesitantly broke the spell of the passageway.  "No.  No, this was here when I came here."  This gave me pause, because if I had to guess before, I would’ve assumed that Virgil and the network of halls and tunnels were not mutually exclusive.  It was obvious that he did not want to talk about the nature of the tunnel or the task ahead, so I let it lie.