IAN GOODALE / THE KNOT
There was a town much like many other towns, so nondescript that
is was anonymous, seemingly placeless, or rather every place at once,
in which a story had been told for many generations—
it felt like forever—
about a type of knot that, once completed, could never be undone.
In the past knowledge of how to tie the knot was commonplace,
but it had since been utterly erased from the town’s collective
memory; amnesiac forces beyond our comprehension were at work,
whittling away at our collective recollection.
There was a network of caves outside of the town
rumored to contain the last remaining example of one of these
mystical knots—perhaps if it could be located, people said, the method
to arrive at the design could be deduced from examining the finished
product. Many people had tried to find it, but none had succeeded;
some had even died while searching, caught in one of the flash floods
common to the network of caverns. One day, as the clouds gathered
above the little town, a teenager added his name to the list of explorers
who had sought the glory beyond words: the inscrutable,
transcendent power of the knot.
He set out in the afternoon (he had unwittingly slept in) to find the final
surviving tangle of fibers, the mythic grail of all rope-workers within a ten-mile radius.
She hiked for almost two hours before she came upon the assortment
of campsites. Most near the entrance to the area were taken
despite, or because of, their proximity to the trail. She worked
her way back towards the rear of the camping area, walking
slowly along the trail that meandered through the assortment of
tents and portable kerosene stoves, through the makeshift homes
of the persons who had assigned themselves, some more amicably
than others, as neighbors. There were more spots open now—she
desired solitude—more space between the tents and campfires, but
the quality of the sites had visibly degraded. She settled for
a spot with rocky ground directly under power lines, and pitched
her tent in the shadow of their supporting pole. The site was
behind a row of bushes, at least, so privacy was abundant even
if bucolic charm was not. She settled in; felt the night encroach and
begin to envelop her like a blanket sewn from air.
The ancient story that was contained in the slightly-less-ancient
book foretold the end of the world in no uncertain terms—
bluntly, without ornament. Veiling the text as mystical served only
to add a veneer of sloppy poetry to a barely-literate attempt at
divination. The book, written in goat’s blood on the skin of the
same animal, described an eschatological event of paramount
importance to the society that had produced it. The script, as far as
it had been deciphered, had been found at a variety of sites
associated with mass executions, potentially as a result of a period
of warfare since forgotten by everyone but a small group of
historians. The casualties, resigned to the earth, are barely even
ghosts now—to be a ghost one must take up at least a little space in
others’ thoughts. But now they are deprived even the pleasure of
haunting the still-living—they live on, lonesome, only in a book
stained with the blood of the animal who was said to have
channeled the Goddess of Death and New Beginnings.
The sky churned above like an upset stomach—the clouds rushed by like flocks of birds.
He wandered headlong into the caves where the last knot
was said to be stored. He dreamed of finding
paintings splattered with primitive wisdom across
the rough, angular rock, the masterpieces of
mystic visions signed by a simple, beauteous hand
print outlining fingers that had themselves
unlocked the mystery of the knot, that had tied the
magic thing with blessed knuckles and holy fingernails.
Visions of touching the print,
of imprinting his own humble palm within the
holy outline of the long-rotted, ascended hand,
danced before his eyes.
Soft sandstone, weakened by a recent rain,
crushed under his feet as he made his way through
the vaulted entryway to the cave system. The dark
tunnels ahead of him, deep and uncompromisingly
black, smelled of mildew and moist stone. Spurred
on by his sense of history, determined to accomplish
the long-ago-completed, he set one foot in front
of the other, marching forward until he was utterly
absorbed by the cavernous darkness.
The clouds above danced themselves into
intricate patterns, weaving a tapestry to black out the
sun. Below the misty blanket, perhaps in anticipation
of their impending destruction by the looming
black of night, the deep purples and reds of twilight
melded into a phosphorescent peach that hung like a
misty tapestry over the still air of the earth. Its rotation
seemed to slow—evening fell quietly, in slow-motion,
with a yawn that rose into a crescendo of deafening
white noise, banshee cry of the slightly sleepy—the
earthworms and snails that loathed the midday sun
rose from their living graves under the dew-dusted
grass and danced, so slow that their steps were
imperceptible (a blind tango—or was it a waltz?—
of legless, silent grace) as they glided across
cement and moistened earth. Sprinkler systems
sounded symphonies in suburbs across North America.
Far away, somewhere in Eastern Europe,
an elderly woman in a headscarf
scolded a young man for propping his feet on the seat
across from him on a subway car.
Click-click—the passage of the train through a subterranean tunnel. Chirp-chirp—the warblers
awaken and roost on the power lines stretched like an untied noose across the pre-dawn sky.
There were no stars dancing in the void of the black
expanse above. No sounds littered the air, no flowers
sent their scents to scour the earth for nostrils to fly up
and perfume with their pollenous waft. Her tent was pitched
in a void of sense, an overflowing cornucopia of silence.
Black blood spattered on a cave wall tattooed with
ritual paintings. No knives, no untrimmed nails, no
too-sharp teeth allowed in the sanctuary of the blunt
and battering. Aspectual nuisances, vague
unbecomings blossoming and shriveling into
fractured memories of a world that never-was.
Dulled canines chomp at the frayed edges of the
Book.
She lay in her sleeping bag, body atop her thin,
self-inflating sleeping pad and her head supported by
her balled-up hoodie, listening to the quiet queries of
the wind. Questions were uttered by a variety of voices,
all separate currents interlocking into one, unified voice.
An overarching interrogator, enveloping her, threatening
to lift up her tent and carry her off into worlds unknown
and undesirable, balloons tethered to the current universe
angling their strings in an attempt to loop around her
consciousness, made thin by the oncoming oppression of
sleep, and drag her off into their own self-contained labyrinths
of being. But she had no interest in navigating their mazelike
otherworlds; submission to the authority of the present, weighed
down as it was by the laborious heaviness of her tired body and
mind, was all she hoped to accomplish. The vanquishing of
waking by the sharp sword of sleep—slaying the dragon of
the mind and falling into the oblivion of nothingness. The queries
of the wind, wordless but demanding, would have
to go unanswered.
She listened to the wind for a few minutes before a faint
sound, like the light crackling of electrical static, began to creep into
the interrogatory symphony. The static shifted, like water moving
around a hand dangled limply off a slow-moving canoe, as if it were
working towards manifesting a more finalized form—something
definite and whole, beyond the battered confusion of the droning fuzz.
Eventually, after what seemed a monumental effort, it began to
coagulate into a series of successive, and sometimes interlocking,
human voices. One was male, the other that of a child, one
French, one Russian, one in a language she did not
recognize, a voice deep and mellow. The absurdity of
the self, of the present, of the never-ending struggle either
for or against or indifferent to the Not—the inescapability
of something indefinable, beyond the absurd and the rational,
divorced from the iron strictures of meaning. An empty-eyed
gaze across the lake of a future without time.
The voices swelled in undulating currents, clashed like
trails of wake cast by different boats sailing around the same
lake, their paths all different—some circuitous, figure eights
infinitely looping in the clear, sun-stabbed water (its depths
gutted by bladelike sunbeams), others straight and direct—as
they hounded her attention.
The sound of rain falling faintly outside of the
cave echoed into the cavern. He worried about
the state of the trail on his way back out—the way
in was on a downward slope, and if muddy could
easily become difficult to climb. His lantern was
fine now, but had acted up in humid air before; without
it he would be utterly lost. He made a mental list of
everything he could think of that might possibly go
wrong, dooming him to the sorry fate of spending
eternity in the cave, buried along with the mystic rope:
his boots' soles could be torn to shreds,
his flashlight could die, shutting him into a tomb of impenetrable darkness,
he could trip and break his ankle,
the cave could collapse, crushing him into a patty of raw flesh,
he could succumb to claustrophobia, leading his mouth to dry out, leading him to choke on his suddenly unlubricated and unwieldy tongue,
and so on and so forth.
The exercise was not very motivating, but he found it
oddly calming. He decided to press on—partially because
his desire to uncover the mysteries of the knot
overpowered his instincts of self-preservation, but primarily
because he was so deep into the cave by this point that to
attempt a retreat would be both cowardly and fruitless. So
onward, downward, he pressed.
The rain played a primal drumbeat punctuated
by peals of lecherous thunder and buoyed
by the quiet lilt of the stream running in muddy
rush around his slopping feet. He enjoyed the
music that accompanied him on his journey, and was so
focused on what lay ahead of him that he remained
unconcerned about the troubles it might bode.
His surroundings were so bland that any sort of
stimulus beyond the same repeating texture of rough
limestone—inevitably tattooed with a hint of moss
or a few clusters of long-legged spiders—
was welcome to him.
Above her head, in neat, uniform lines of rubber-coated
wire, coursed a million conversations all bleeding in and
out of one another into the deaf night sky. Stars spinning
like unfeeling lobes, canals hollow and connected to brains
unable to parse the soundwaves coursing like translucent
blood through their passages. A million spoken words
drifting a million undiscovered worlds above her, filling
heaven with sounds it could not hear or understand.
He was getting closer now—he could feel it, sense
the closeness of the knot, its layers of rope twisting
and tightening over his chest, encircling his lungs
and extending up towards his throat like tentacles,
a living organism of fiber clinching tighter and
tighter with each step he took towards beholding its
poetic, incomprehensible beauty.
The voices swelled, quivering with the volume
racking their incorporeal bodies, straining the tenuous
tendons of their being. It seemed as if they might
explode, all in unison, a cosmic bomb of aural ferocity—
and if they did, their shrapnel of sound threatened
to rip through the fabric of the sky, raining down angels
on the unsuspecting earth.
The world as we knew it was over, of course, but
that's not to say we couldn't enjoy what was left. All
charred and ash, a mythomanmade hellscape of
brimstone conjured and let loose to rot all it touched
upon the defeated earth. The knot tightened as a light
started to shine on the horizon of the subterranean
incline he was climbing, glowing hazily, like a halo
breaking through the must and mold of the caverns, on
the cusp of his sight, barely illuminating the lonely
depths of his path.
The voices flew like a flock of birds all rising in
unison, sharply pulled up toward heaven, threatening
to finally break a wave of cacophonous sound in the
otherwise silent sky, a harbinger of destruction, or new
creation, or both, or an indefinable aural purgatory, a mystery
quilt of sound woven together from so many disparate,
auditory threads.
Cracked concrete and sodden ground, washed out by
the blood pouring from one of so many piles of
corpses.
His vision was fading now as he grew ever closer,
blurring into a haze of almost hallucinatory fervor.
He could feel it getting closer, closer, close—!
The sound was all one now, unified in its volume, no
individual voices distinguishable in the great collective
tornado of insane, buzzing sound, as if the sky were
filled with a swarm of humanoid bees all shouting at once.
No sky, even, to look down wearily upon the
degraded ground.
He saw it, he thought, or the top of it, at least,
as he neared the crown of the hill now towering
like a mountain beneath his tired legs.
Sisters separated, no more
sun and moon to great their
sibling earth.
The noise swelled. No light now, stars hidden
somehow by the thickness of the sound.
The light emanating from the knot was not just
blinding, but all consuming. He was lost in it,
moving from waking consciousness to something
else, something he feared but could not resist—
A permanent twilight shone over all. No clouds, only emptiness above—not even
much of a sky to speak of. No one knew where the light came from. Somewhere
in the distance another camper stirred
in his too-small tent, the rustling of the pitched plastic sounding like muffled
voices through the still gloaming of the air.
Ian Goodale’s work has recently appeared in The Hamilton Stone Review, Black Flowers, and Otoliths, in addition to other journals. He works as an academic librarian in Austin, TX, where he lives with his wife and children. His website can be found at iangoodale.com.