Short Fiction

Ascension

May 9, 2011

A short story.

SS Champlain, 1940…

The engine room sweat; its dripping pipes, and steaming valves, its pistons, which rose and fell like clockwork, turning the drive shafts and rotating the propellers below the dark sheen of ocean water, it was all a nightmare. Dankness filled the iron prison. A lone stoker heaved coal into the hungry boiler, his brow profusely sweating blackened beads. The droplets slipped down his forehead—perspired memories that escaped through his porous mind. The mechanized routine: shoveling, dripping, hurling coal, shovel crunching, lifting, throwing, burning flame, exhaustion, sweat wiping, cringing, perpetual shoveling. Coal burned from black to red to white—a myriad of tossed memories, lost excerpts, and destroyed drafts; fuel for others to be compressed and burned. He paused, wiped the salty fluid from his brow, and grunted another shovel load into the boiler.

His blue jumpsuit was stained with soot, the depressed grey patches over the elbows worn to holes. The nameless wretch pushed the ocean liner via the endless pile of coal, while bombs and Bolsheviks broke the dreams of Europe. He shoveled on, in his mechanical prison, while others more fortunate than he escaped to live in new suburban havens. While men of valor spill their blood on age old soil, writers gladly dip their pens in the well of human suffering. But not him, for he toiled and broke under the weight of serving his privileged countrymen. The Russian engineer subjected to the will of his nation’s finest, moving more fortunate people by the stress of his own bones. This man was a tool, he found no relief in his labor; he was alone in his ironwork prison. Confined by the lust and passions of a previous life, now unimaginable, these dreams could no longer live in this place. No open windows on lofty floors to end his suffering. He remained, pivoting, shoveling, groveling, and shoveling; as useless as the poet on a battlefield. 

How long had he been down there? The depths of his mind had become a dark alembic, a bubbling calcination of ideological obfuscation. The heat was intense, catalyzing his mind like a gelatinous bulk in the base of some tar-stained glass paraphernalia. But the question remained. How long? ‘Shovel more, never stop,’ he thought. It was an insatiable furnace, like that of a burning libido. The flame refused to extinguish, it burned like napalm released upon budding blades of grass. But it was a thirsty flame, and consumed faster than he could shovel. In fact, the more he shoveled, the more the fire consumed, the faster it consumed. The coal grew heavier as his mind grew weary, and the flame brightened as he dug deeper into the mound of coal. There, in the middle of that condensed pile, the coal burns hotter. The younger the carbon the more ferociously it burns.

‘I have moved one hundred tons of coal. I have. There is no hope for change in such a compressive place. Indifference has taken the better half of my mind. I have searched for less moderate ways to escape my reality. All have failed. The essence of this ship, its internal machinations beset me with a ravished mode of thought, my mind sweeps with the cylinders, my body exhausts like the release valves; the grind of metal workings, steam and sweat, mixes, comingles; wipe with sleeve, work with muscle, pure muscle, bone, and callused hands. It is I who works the black carbon into the boiler, where it burns, and makes the cogs turn—the furnace of my nation’s hopes and dreams. Every shovel-full moves the privileged towards dreams of freedom; and every shovel-full incinerates hope of my own. But I am the stoker, and I am Russian. Day after day I swell the furnace that moves us along. It seems I am the subject of an author of some twisted fairy tale.’ 

These were ill, discolored seeds of thought tossed upon a barren trough of dusty perception. He wiped his brow and stood up straight, letting the shovel fall from his blistered hands. The fire roared inside the iron boiler, provoking the bubbling water, which released the all-important steam into the shafts. It called for him to continue, but he would not. His eyelashes swayed beneath the heat as summer blades of grass in the countryside, a scene he had once forgotten long ago. He breathed a heavy sigh of exhaustion. His head heavily drooping form all that time spent standing hunched over shoveling. His head grew light as his pain became a sensation of tingling weightlessness. The room became vivid, a spallation of stars danced across his retinae. He followed the firefly specks across the glassy surface of his bloodshot eyes, but they fled from sight like darting minnows. Thirst took over his mind, forcing him to back away from the furnace, and crumble against a wall. He sat, legs outstretched as if he were a poor beggar in St. Petersburg, begging for mercy, for the cessation of his aching body’s misery. He sat like a half-crumpled, brown paper bag, leaning to one side, a folding house of cards about to topple under its own stress. 

The droning machinery that rattled in his ears finally worked its way to the back of his consciousness. He dissolved, rather diffused throughout the room, while the rumbling levers and hissing pipes gradually dissipated. Then there was nothing but his short breaths, a slight wheeze, everything sounded as a child plugging its ears. Sounds, all known signifiers of reality checked out. It was not quite sleep, the spell was weak, but still he dozed, half-drugged. His eyes fluttered, and his head lulled and fell, his cheek placidly smashed against his shoulder. But just as the clutches of sleep wrapped its silky threads around the spadix of his brainstem, the flowering dream was plucked from the garden of his mind. Within the split second of that imperceptible silence, a noise arose in a crackling burst of laughter. It was a child’s laugh, which carried through the depths of the ship’s belly and rolled from ear to ear like a tongue-trilling goddess. He knew that laugh, that innocent emanation. A child, but not a child. His eyes shot open and he slurped up a thread of drool.  

He searched for the source of this laughter. The moaning engines droned on, steam spewing forth as always. He rose, wobbling, wiping and rubbing his eyes. Suddenly, he saw the flutter of a flowery dress slip behind one of the giant turbines. He chased after the specter, ducked beneath a pipe, and knelt down to peer around the corner. Nothing. He heard another spurt of laughter come from the base of the stairs. He turned to find its owner, but only saw a pair of legs, bare feet, shuffle and disappear at the top of the stairwell. He shook his head. He knew those legs, those creamy bare feet, the lilac soles which scampered up the steps with gentle imprecision. He ran after the running memory.  

 Lunging up the stairs on all fours he found an empty hallway on the next level of the ship. A blinking red emergency light illuminated the hall like a tiny lighthouse in the dead of night. The rhythmic flashing was in tune with his heartbeat. At the end of the hall, the nascent figure appeared again. His eyes widened, then squinted to capture the evasive nymph. He made his way down the hall with a brutish stride, stumbling against the white walls and groping for the rickety metal railing. Another stairwell, another hall. More laughter, naked legs, running, and stumbling. On and on. Up the walkways, throughout the gigantic innards of the SS Champlain.            Without cognizance he chased the fleeting image of his past. The lustrous seduction of that phantasmal being. A being he had destroyed and immortalized in one action. He wanted to see more of those ethereal legs, that sculptured face of…ivory…porcelain…pearly — oh what? —pure beauty. There she sat, in the lap of his mind as he lumbered towards the top deck. He was roused from the depths of that dark, hot underworks; a pestilent madness to consuming entire legions of those legs. The sloping figure, deranged, stumbled through reddened hallways. His face gleamed with maddened eyes, straining and relaxing with horror and then disappointment after the turn of each corner. The light, on and off, chiaroscuro profile, the light swirling—no—the swirling light. The engineer chased that pair of legs, seeking the body to which they belonged. The legs slipped up another set of stairs, another hallway. Another hell. 

The engineer burst out onto the deck of the ocean liner. A creampuff moon hid behind a misty streak of lifted ocean spray. The liner streamed forward on the glinting black pool. The negative liquid reflected the glorious, yet invisible sun. The roaring swells broken by the pointed bow overwhelmed his ears, a double to the grumbling engine room. He had been down there too long. Stale air and animosity of machinery. He skirted along the railing, looking overboard at the depths below. Had that pair of legs jumped the rail? No. It was an idea that would not sit well in his mind. He refused to admit the reality of the situation, and went to search the dining cabin. There he found passengers communing with one another. 

He paced back and forth in front of the double doors. He was hidden by the dark, imperceptible to the crowd of passengers inside the well lit room. After long moments of deliberation, he worked his way around the perimeter of the dining hall, peering through the large rectangular glass windows like those of a museum. His reflection in the windowpane was transposed into the ballroom, a vagrant ghost unnoticed. He peered upon the guests like a prisoner, spying on a purgatorial underwater ball, searching for that pair of elusive legs. He crept to the other side, and was the only figure on the open deck, all alone except for two others, two silhouettes in the moonlight. The engineer slipped towards these two, ducking and sliding between the shadows. The two figures leaned against the railing. One, a man, released mouthfuls of spectral smoke, which slowly diffused in the air around his head. The other, a woman possessing elegant features, shone in a pea coat in the cool night air. By the way she was speaking it was obvious that she was a professor or scholar. Her posture was orientated towards the smoking man in casual interrogation. Teacher and pupil they seemed, in concentrated conversation—she, pressing the issue, whatever it may be, and he retreating back on his elbow against the railing in tacit defense. 

He quietly approached the couple and stumbled upon their calculated exchange. The man articulated while periodically pausing to take a drag of his cigarette, “…They are to live and die in feudal iniquities…to hate upon the souls of others, and clash against them like ravenous dogs…to seek their temptations with fervor…to kill their enemies without mercy…to love the ones they should not, with bad judgment…The have an expectancy of something great waiting for them for these deeds. To actually find it is outside of their own control, and to fail to touch it becomes inevitable, for there is no real form to grasp onto—it relinquishes all purpose of their creation. It is like clutching at broken branches, grasping thorns, without sight of where they fall. Why should they not readily jump, and struggle not? Are we to look down through the abyss and hear their voices before we join them in some similar fashion? Do they also wait for us all to pass into a realm of our own without the least resistance? The story becomes an extant of their voices lost, like the echo in a cave that has lost all connection to its source, its owner. Without me they are nothing, and without them I am nothing. They are but fictional characters in a world that does not exist, and I am a real man that will cease to exist in a world that does. They are either the shadow of our minds, or the image of our soul.”

The stout man took a belated drag from his freshly rolled cigarette. The smoke diffused into the night through a pair of unwavering nostrils. The professor expatiated with intensity.  

“Oh, Vlad, how can it be that they are but mere cogs in the machine of your own invention? Luzhin, Krug, Humbert, Shade…is it not cruel to believe that one can dream up these characters without some remorse for their devised doom? Leading a life of crafted misery for the enjoyment of readers. What if the life of the reader is just as fabricated and surreal as the life of the characters that you create?”

            He took another drag of his cigarette, the cherry end burned lividly.

“You must see my point then, that I am restricted to their existence as they are to mine. Take this lad lurking in the shadows for instance, Sara,” Vlad extended his open hand and smiled, “here is one in the flesh. Let us enjoy his company.” 

            The professor turned to meet the stoker, who had taken the liberty to emerge from the shadows of his own accord. He shuffled towards them, searching their faces in bewilderment. 

“It is I who brought him here for the sake of providing evidence for our little debate, Professor.”

“How is that possible?” she replied.

“Just as you are here with me now. I have created you, myself, him, this entire reality. If you do not believe me, ask him who he is yourself.”

            The professor laughed, “You can’t be serious…” But Vlad casually nodded and blew a fresh stream of creamy smoke through pursed lips.

“What is your name, sir?” Sara inquired.  

            The stoker shook his head,

“I don’t know.”

“Well?” Vlad said bluntly, “Of course, he doesn’t know. I never gave him a name!”

            The professor laughed again, this time in disbelief. 

“I am the stoker. I work in the boiler room,” he mumbled in defense. 

            Vlad placed the cigarette in his mouth, shook his head, and inhaled, 

“There is absolutely no purpose for your existence except to prove my point to Sara. For all you know, we doesn’t even exist, nor this ship, nor the ocean, moon or universe.”

            She turned to the ignorant man who stood in his dark jumpsuit, flickering on the verge of inanity, about to be cast from his reality into oblivion. 

“But what about his life, his memories?” asked Sara.

            Vlad smiled, “Let us see what we have.” The stoker’s mind went back, far back. Or maybe not at all…‘A boy wandered through a carnival. He held a blue elephant balloon in his right hand. His little black shoes were covered with wet grassy mulch. He rode the Carousel. He waved to his family each revolution. The ride stopped. No one helped him off the hobby horse. The carnival was empty. He was alone. Where had his family gone? What was his name? He let go of the blue elephant balloon, it floated away. Away it went with the flickering of images he once knew, dangling from the shiny string he once held tight in his hand.’

“So you see, Sara, like most characters, this one depends on me—he is born from my mind. However, they are in fact not part of me, and though I have power in their actions, I cannot be responsible for the fate of their soul. Certainly, they may resemble aspects of my life, but which aspect of my life does this one symbolize? And who has created me? Or you?”

“I‘m not real?” The stoker asked.

“I’m sorry friend, but you haven’t even got a name. You certainly cannot be real,” Vlad replied, leaning against the railing, “As for Sara and I, one can never be sure…”

            The stoker swallowed thickly, and saw a flicker of hazel shaded fabric dangling from the railing, flapping like a banner in the wind. He gasped and lunged for the flowery fabric, and toppled over the railing. A lengthy scream, a faint splash. The stoker was enraptured by the freezing ocean current. He sank beneath the rumbling swells, searching the blackness for the flowery dress, the unattainable. 

Who’s thoughts are these? They are scattered dots amongst a pile of index cards of simple truths. Let me sink in silence…

            Vlad shrugged, taking another drag of his cigarette. His limbs became translucent in the moonlight. His form dissipated with the exhalation from his lungs. Amidst the smoke a Cheshire smile spread in front of the professor and disappeared in an instant. Sara peered over the railing, down the rabbit hole. 

“Curiouser and curiouser,” she whispered.

2011