We Below: More Fragments Shored Against My Ruin

Black Book 110, March 30, 2022

You once traveled to the end of the rail line in Norway, above the Arctic Circle, and from there talked your way aboard a freight ship that took you to a jagged pile of rocks in the North Sea. This island, which appeared on maps—if it appeared at all—as Indio Triste, was a dark and rugged place. In Trondheim you had arranged to meet a woman on Indio Triste. This woman’s name was Oriska Fingal, and she had been referred to you as someone in possession of a certain rare and mythical knowledge. About what exactly you had not inquired, as at that point in your life you were incapable of articulating anything resembling an inquiry.

Indio Triste was a tiny island, and had one very small village, Wrensilva, which had a cramped and medieval feel and was said to have been settled by shipwrecked Spanish sailors at some point in the distant past.

The man who met you at the docks and took you to see Oriska Fingal had said to you, “Paradise is dark. It is the place where there is no distinction between outer space and inner space. You’re going to have to learn to manufacture your own light and your own gravity.”

“That sounds like some Carlos Castaneda shit,” you said, to which the man merely shrugged.

This theme of darkness was immediately taken up by Oriska Fingal, who upon shaking your hand said, “All our ideas about angels are the result of perpetual darkness; the angels have to function as lamps, torches, as our chaperones through the darkness.”

“Okay,” you said.

Oriska Fingal then told you that at the top of a very high mountain north of the village, there lived in a cave a man of pure, blazing light who was called The Enchanted Persuader. In the sprawling dumps at the foot of the mountain, she said, you would find a “crawling, scuttling, dying man, a bundle of sparks and embers,” who was known to the locals as The Vague Declaimer. This man, Oriska Fingal said, could lead you to the Enchanted Persuader, who had the answers to all questions.

“But first,” she said, “you will have to dream your way into the precinct. You have to call out to all the dogs in the village, have to hold them in your arms and cry with them, and then they will be your shepherds and will take you to The Vague Declaimer.”

As you wandered the village that evening in a futile search for dogs, you somehow found yourself in the bar of a ruined hotel, where you encountered a band of teenage cretins whose name was apparently translated as “We Below.” This band played an alien form of rock and roll that induced in you a brief spasm of happiness verging on disbelief. After hearing them, you wandered the dark streets along the water, trying to remember the laughter of everyone you had ever loved. You were startled by graffiti—in English—painted on the side of a house: “Will You Never Stop Asking Questions?”

Nearby, you discovered an alley full of battered suitcases, every one of them empty. At some point you fell asleep in a cemetery, which was little more than a landfill of toppled gravestones and litter. An elderly priest who was picking his way through the ruins briefly addressed you. “God’s kingdom has been reduced to a whiskey hourglass,” he said. “People in the last days will bring balloons to funerals and laugh at death.”

The priest handed you a piece of paper before he wandered away.

“Do not go to the Vague Declaimer,” he said in parting. “The Enchanted Persuader is a dream, an old figment of this haunted place. But the Vague Declaimer, alas, is very real.”

On the paper, written in elegant cursive, were the following words:

The Vague Declaimer, harnessed to a sled, is condemned to drag a man who is starving for salvation. Stumbling, hoarse with thirst, he must drag the man up and down steep mountain trails, as the starving man, trussed in the sled and curled up like a sleeping dog, grows more gaunt by the day.

The Vague Declaimer is an ancient penitent, and is condemned to drag his sled up and down the mountain until there is virtually nothing left of his starving passenger, until whatever flecks or specks or motes of him that remain have been carried away by the wind, at which time he whose burden the starving man had been will be freed from the harness.

The moment the last remains of his burden have been dispersed, however, the penitent discovers that he himself is now too exhausted and weak from starvation and thirst to carry on alone. Resigned, then, he will submit to being swaddled and secured in the sled, to be dragged up and down the mountain by yet another in the endless procession of Vague Declaimers who are waiting out their days in the village below.

All night you walked the streets of Wrensilva, calling out to the dogs.