Were (A Man’s Worth)

Spinning, spinning, spinning, head creaking like the floorboards beneath paw-claws. I can barely turn my head up to see that dead gaping maw. Oh, God, there’s blood on the fur and fur on the floor. Mine? Prick the neck—twinge—mine. But surely, yours, too. Back, back, back to sleep…

Sun moved a few hours lower in the sky and shook me up. Terrible dream that I snapped out of, but it was a moment of respite before shooting back to the shotgun shack I clawed my way into last night. This kind of comedown… guilt flashes and hunger pangs… neighbors must be heavy sleepers…

Up now, must get up now. Pad down, beamed by clawless toes, soft, fragile, then a long sharp thump of bone, after the arch, down to the ground. It takes that ball of bone, more bone in one place than I have anywhere else in my body, to get upright. Repeat with the second foot. And that’s all. Bend, bend upright, it’s easier on the bed, I can’t let myself fall to the ground or there will be no up again. Curl digits around the bedframe to ensure the bend doesn’t break. Lift off, and I’m on my way. Up too quickly and the blood-brain brakes, punishes me for the moment left behind. Alllll back again. Forward so fast the blood whiplash left my eyes red. Shot. Digits splayed, grasping for what they can on the thin, flat hall-walls. Stagger to the room with the water, with the mirror, slowly—yes, that’s my blood. And that’s me. I wouldn’t have known that last night. It’s incredible how fast it all comes back. Less so how much it all hurts. Thirty days in a moon… can feel like forever… but still a forever gone too soon. A whole moon without speaking, and now the grunt flies out of my mouth with acrobatic precision. Lips rounded, tongue quickly curling to the roof, a small breath cut by a back-throat-click—“O-K.” O-K grunt comes and goes, followed by one less articulated, more of an “ehhhh” as I place my finger-digits onto the blood, my blood, its spigot now mostly sealed. Prick, urge to pick it open, but you have to control yourself with this much dexterity. Hands off, down to the water, then back up. My blood and the foreigners’ blood down the drain.

I lose some time in that reflection. I lose time to the numb stupor of eyes-to-eyes. See myself, know yourself, even covered in soot. And then: thump, thump… thump, thump, thump…

I whip my head out of the bathroom and glare down the barrel of the shack, my eyes shoot towards the key bolt on the front door just as another thump cracks out from behind the cypress-board door. Unlocked? But still miraculously closed. How did I not hear them coming? My blood again trails me as I leap towards the foreigner, down the shack toward the door, quick left into the bedroom. I silence the punishment from my insides with some force from deeper inside still and rip out any rags from the room I can fit in my hand. I am naked, and finally the cold realizes it too, just as I look at you. It’s only a glance, but it catches me, a glance of your face, eyes open, mouth open, everything open. A new perverse ugliness you can only glimpse from such gracelessness in a defenseless animal. That glance catches me until… thump, thump, thump…

Legs one, two, one two, and out the back of the shack in nearly a single bound, racing towards the horizon as if it would take only one more bound to jump on top of the low sun itself. The last thing I definitively hear is the creak of the door hinges before my world is consumed by the patter-pound of my feet hitting the wet ground. They hit flat, the soft metatarsal beneath the toes and the hard mass of heel bone at once, until all the weight shifts under the metatarsal and the heel bone flings itself backwards, perpendicular motion to the knee as it bends forward. What legs these are! My feet’s rhythm on the terrain can only sustain the trance for so long, then I was back to the start. The first memory of its kind.

I have spent many moons in different beds, that’s the only way I know it. Many moons, and I know how many it has been since I was burdened with this burden… to travail like a woman travails. I am bowed down at the thought of it. But I remember it. The first thing I noticed was the cold, loins filled with pain, naked. The second were the ribs bitten… We lay there, together, as in any bed of our making, holding each other's warmth. My love. She lay there, until it happened. In an instant, she shot up, every one of my brothers and sisters locked rigid, woken as if by a rifle shot. The look of me must have sounded like one, must have smelt like strychnine. That smell… it was to us like sulfur. And so my face became the devil’s face, my scent became gunpowder. With all their ears pinned, hackles exploded from neck to tail, lips wrinkled, snarling. I am dismayed at the sight of it! The yearlings dropped to their bellies, hair on end, lifting their hindlegs, as if to hide their innocence from me and transform into beasts. The confused, high-pitched whines of a forcedly precocious child stimulated a new wetness from my eyes which made the cold colder, and seemed to drag all the heat out of my blood and onto my skin. I was freezing, sweating. I felt like I was burning alive. My family! I could feel the wetness bulge backwards into my skull and explode into a sharp pain. I wanted to scream, I was in so much pain, tremors rippled through this new form as if it were crumbling under its own weight. My heart panted, fearfulness affrightened me, the night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me! Former challengers and compatriots alike bristled and barked hysterically, and my love, my love, she who curved against my flank for many moons… scent overruled memory. Now I had made the first use of my finger-digits to snatch her snout away from the hollow of my neck. And then, as shock submerged into reality, they simply vanished. It would be too ironic to say I was lucky to be alive. My flat face had imprinted in them my true menace. But in that moment I wanted myself dead more than they ever could. And so all that I ever knew disappeared in an instant, and I was left in the cold.

It was around 35 degrees when the sun came out that morning. Springtime. I dug into the snow, against the base of a blown-down spruce, burrowing until hitting insulating needles. Packed the entrance with boughs, curled fetal, knees to chest, arms inside a freshly killed rabbit for warmth. Why bother living now? I did it anyway. I must have been propelled by the vanilla aroma of springtime, hidden behind hares’ ears and in pockets of snowmelt. I would lose that smell and gain new ones. Fire came to me easily and so aroused me with its warmth and ash. I found myself entangled in its gaze, as if looking into the sun. And with my ears I found my voice and began to sing birdsong, until a bird found me, and began to speak with me. His name was Weden, a raven. The first name I knew! Most men don’t know that ravens can speak, but they speak better than most men. To know what men know is worse than not knowing what men don’t know, though. Weden taught me to weave my song into speech. And I always understood him. He had no need to teach me what came naturally: to feel cold, to feel ashamed.

I feel cold. Though now I am covered in cloth again, I feel ashamed. Bloodstains covered by dirt covered by bloodstains. I narrow in on the symmetry of my heartbeat and foot-pace to escape this feeling. In this haze I lose the trace of the foreigners tracking me. I can only hope they lost me too. Listening to the rhythm of my pace I wonder if it wouldn’t have submerged into the silence of that distant screaming. Thwack, thwack, thwack, the beat of my foot against wet leaves. I dare not let the cold feeling on my feet become the cold feeling of dead skin.

Now I hear only my footfalls and breathing. I arrive out of the trees into a luxuriant high meadow as the sky darkens. I move through a dusk of greys and blacks and outlines while the Pleistocene cries of sandhill cranes flute overhead. I try to focus on the topography in front of me, against a moaning pastel sky in its final moments. The mess narrows up ahead into a cliffside, and I feel its point must make a straight line running back all the way to the cypress doorway of that shotgun shack. What legs these are!

At this point, illusion begins to set its insidious traps. The sky is lit up by the sudden blaze of the sun curling into the horizon, towards the flat calm sea of grass and weeds, like a coin thrown over the cliffside by some heavenly miser. Its disc outlines knolls like a metal sheet, at once hard and lacy. And just as its light finally dims, I have a brief vision of the indecipherable forces which afflict me, whose obscure conflicts I can glimpse vaguely within the depths of myself. If only I could follow the sun out of the night, I could understand why…

But now it is dark. I find myself under the moon of my labor. Bright white dead dot in the sky, beaming even cast in mist that obscures all else. The clear figure of a face: two brows cleave downward into a nose ridge, beneath which lay a too-familiar grin. That swindler’s grin stares at me, knowing. I grin back, and for a moment I can see the grin widen, as if the face I see in that great big white world is my own reflection. Men say my kind, my birth-kind, call to that world. Really they mean to say that we call for them. No, it couldn’t be further from the truth. It is the moon which calls to men, silently, with its own flat-face. Berated by all else in the landscape, I can lock eyes with that gleaming smiling face and forgive it for the cycle with which it has sickened me. It grins now with me, not at me, the way men laugh at my birth-kind. Wuh— Wuh— Wuh— I still cannot bring myself to say it! Of all the grunts that they articulate, they mock us! Mock our calls back to us, and that is a name? That is what it means to be named? Nomen, nomen, to name is to know—but in this way it is better not to be named! They call us like they call crows. I still cannot bring myself to say it. I have not spoken a word today except for “O-K.” I wish I had spoken with you, foreigner…

And then suddenly, I hear: crow! Wingspan my arms length breaks through the crystalline orb, silhouette shines indigo in its light before fluttering to a long branch, my vision trailing it, curling its toe fingers on the pine without the slightest shake. “The first man was made in much the same way,” he spoke. Weden!

He found me here, on the cliff’s edge. A cliff’s edge of which I cannot quite understand the significance, but I can sense it. Had he not landed on that branch, I don’t think that tree would have been there at all. I am almost certain there was no tree on the cliffside before his feathers broke my gaze against the moon.

“Man, brother, foreigner, nanabozho, ma’iingan, nobody.” This is what it means to call my name. I can hear it only from Weden, all at once, as though a single word. I shout back, “Weden!”

He repeated my name to dismiss me. “Ma’iingan.” Whenever he spoke, I understood it. I always understood him. Many moons and he still spoke better than any man I had heard elsewhere.

“Did you find it in the sun, in your chase?”

“No... I am not sure if the men are still following me.”

“The men… As a man, have you learned to read?” “No… Do you know wh—”

“Then I will tell you.” “What do you know about my travail? When can I—” “You cannot! I will tell you!” He spoke in a grizzly baritone. If you have never heard a raven speak…

I look out over the cliff’s edge. I begin to understand, remembering myself, its significance… I can see bones and bodies and bison, and men. Before there were horses here, this was a man’s killing place. Where men dressed as my birth-kind, to steal our power, to kill our prey. It’s hard not to have a sense of humor about the whole thing.

“One-thousand-nine-hundred-and-fifty-seven years,” Weden spoke. Whatever that means!

“Listen!” He cawed, catching my eyes searching the plain below. He speaks as if to summon more light from the moon than it could possibly reflect from the sunface. “The last man… was made in such a way as the first man. You cannot return, even though you do, in your rhythm…”

I look over at Weden, his blue form all dressed in white starlight. I look back over the cliff, and after bathing my eyes in moonlight I can no longer see the plane below. I close my eyes, open them again. It is so dark in the valley that it makes no difference. Weden continues, “I will tell you in this way, as a man has said:

“Die Menschheit wird jetzt integriert

Die Mosel wird kanalisiert

Das Sakrament bleibt umgedreht

Der Laie bleibt ohne Kelch

Verborgen bleibt der liebe Gott

Die ganze Welt wird Melting-pot

Das Automatische wird global

Der Laie nimmt Veronal

Humanity is now being integrated,

The moselle is being canalized.

The sacrament remains inverted,

To the laity a chalice, denied.

God’s love is now lost,

The whole world a melting-pot.

The automatic becomes global,

The laity takes veronal.”

I stared over the cliff’s edge. Weden, I always understood him. But what the hell is veronal?

Snap. “Crow!” My hair stands on edge. Is it because I was so roused by his speech? Or because of his sudden caw? He isn’t finished!

“Weden!”

Weden is gone, flying in an instant into me, then under, into the valley. Snap. I snap my head back. That smell… the smell of gunpowder.