That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me, she said. But what if—he knew what she was going to ask before she asked it—what if it wasn’t wild dogs? What if it were a pack of shar-pei puppies? Shar-peis were his family pet, his favorite breed. He loved to kiss their chubby, wrinkled cheeks. Often, to cheer him up while they were at work, she texted him GIFs of shar-peis. The last had been a looping clip of a shar-pei attempting to eat a strawberry off a hardwood floor: its cheeks were so heavy that they draped like theater curtains over the narrow aperture of its mouth, and each time it reared forward to snap at the strawberry its jowls made contact long before its jaws did, knocking the fruit across the floor like a hockey puck. He pictured a pack of puppies trying to nibble at her like this, as stymied by her remains as by the strawberry. If it were shar-peis, he admitted, I might just say, She’s in a better place now. A better place?! Yes, he said, and why not a better place? Wouldn’t you rather be buried in a puppy than a pyramid? But as soon as he said this he was struck by an eerily vivid mental image of a shar-pei: the dog was staring off in profile, solemn, the image in black and white. The camera of his mind’s eye zoomed in on the dog’s face, until gradually its gray cheek had filled the frame, then kept zooming in farther, magnifying its wrinkles to abstraction; seen up close, the wrinkles became a network of deep crevasses, with the multicursal lininess of a maze, and as the zooming camera approached this maze he could make out a human figure far below in it, a pale shape stumbling through one of the corridors with arms outstretched, and when finally the camera descended into this trench, bringing the trapped figure into focus, he saw that it was her, lost, distraught, doomed to wander forever through the cheek-flab labyrinth of the Leviathan who had swallowed her. He described what he had seen to her. It’s a premonition, she said. Now you know what will happen if you feed me to shar-peis. I’ll haunt you so bad. They left the restaurant and spent the weekend in archaeological parks, scrambling over the ruins of ancient temples and theaters, climbing collapsed column drums like boulders. On their last afternoon, driving back to the airport, they paused to admire a work of land art along the highway. A quilt of immense concrete blocks had been cast down a hillside, two acres of white rectangles with a network of narrow pedestrian paths running through them. Known as The Great Crack, she read aloud from her phone, the piece had been constructed as a memorial to the 1968 earthquake, which had leveled the town of Gibellina, killing hundreds. The concrete blocks had been cast according to the layout of the city: the gridded paths mapped onto its roads and alleys, while the blocks—which had been infilled with rubble and furniture from the ruins—stood in place of its buildings. Gibellina’s real ruins, collapsed houses and churches, were still visible around them, on the outskirts of the sculpture. And just down the highway was Gibellina’s real cemetery, with its rows of mausolea, neighborhoods of squat concrete houses for the dead. They were the only people there. They approached the monument together, entering one of its pathways at random. The blocks rose as high as their heads on either side, and the alley stretched before them in an endless white corridor. Following her, running his fingers along the concrete, he felt like an ant crawling across a tombstone: if an ant descended into the inscription, he imagined—if it entered the canyon of a letter, suddenly funneled forward by the high granite walls of the alphabet rising around it—it would never realize that the path it was tracing was a dead name. She announced that she wanted to see the monument from above, so they climbed toward the top of the hill, where there was a lookout platform. But the grade was steep, and as they trudged upward he had to keep stopping for her. Eventually she called to him to go ahead. He hiked to the platform alone, arriving cold with sweat and out of breath. Turning back, he saw the alleys he had just passed through as a labyrinth of craquelure, black lines fissuring a white surface. He scanned the expanse and found her: a small dark figure, wending through a white trench. A chill of recognition passed through him. When she reached the platform, he did not wait for her to catch her breath. Do you remember my premonition? he asked. He described the vision he had had of her ghost, lost in a shar-pei’s wrinkles. She nodded cautiously: Yes? He waved one hand over the maze beneath them. Oh my God, she said. We’re dead, he said. I’m really here, she said. It really ate me. We’re dead, he repeated, and we don’t even know it. We’ll never leave this place. Together they stepped off the platform and descended into the monument.
The Story and the Seed
AMBER SPARKS
The children were always sent up in pairs, one with the story and the other with the seeds. Always the same seeds: maize, rice, cowpea, beans, eggplant, lettuce, barley, potato, sorghum—seeds ready to plant in varying climates, varying soils. Always the same story: the earth is dying, the humans are dying, help us, house us, accept our gifts.
Hans kept the seeds, and Gzifa kept the story. They were both twelve, both twins, both the only surviving twin. Both lost sisters. Gzifa found Hans suffocatingly kind. His affection transferred easily from his sister, whom he had idolized, to Gzifa. She in turn did not love so quickly. But her father had raised her to be a storyteller, and stories made Hans easy to manage.
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