ADDISON ZELLER / 3 PALEOLITHIC STORIES
THE CAVE OF THE EXCELLENT HORSES
I dreamed the cave was full of Upper Paleolithic paintings. There was nothing important about the dream and I don’t remember what the paintings looked like—only that the cave had a charming name: the Cave of the Excellent Horses. Most of the real caves are closed now—Lascaux, Altamira—human breath is so bad for them, and they’re opening faithful replicas instead. It’s too late, I understand, to save the real ones, they were doomed as soon as we found them, the decay can only be arrested, not stopped. The good thing is, with no one to see, we never have to know when the paintings have disappeared. We can pretend they’re still there, comfortably blanketed in the same old darkness. As if they were never disturbed at all, as if the animals in them, the aurochs, the excellent horses, have all resumed their long hibernation. Much the way we remember things or people that have gone, and they don’t seem so far away—we can still see them almost clearly in our heads, perhaps their faces and voices have changed imperceptibly, we can’t be sure. In fact, they’re totally safe, well beyond the corrosive effects of certainty: they’ve escaped back underground, to the land of potential. And they’re so full of animals—no people—that they flow together in the memory after all, they’re almost indivisible, like parts of the same thought. It’s said the human figure is almost absent from the art of deep time, if art’s the word for something at least half magic. You do have tracings of hands and feet, there are little figurines of women with exaggerated breasts, vulvas, and no faces. There’s a carving of a man who has a face, the face of a lion. In only one painting I know of, a hunting scene, a man falls down, a man with a vast erection, I say a man but I mean a stick figure, five or six black strokes, nothing like the exquisitely natural beasts he chases, and his face is beaked—he is either masked or has the face of a bird. A bison nearby is dropping its organs in the grass from a wound in its belly, but it seems unperturbed to be losing so much of itself. And why shouldn’t it be? Lucky bison, to be given such astonishing organs by your loving cave painter, who couldn’t bring himself to paint a human face: we’ll never forget you, even if sunlight and a little breath make you crumble from the cave wall to the cave floor and wherever atoms swirl to. You’ll still appear in a million copies of several hundred books, and when anyone mentions the disemboweled bison in the cave painting you’ll flicker in their mind and in the minds of whoever hear them, there can be only one such bison, and there you will be, imperfectly, of course, but vividly yourself, while we fall into the grass, we lose precision, our faces aren’t even ours.
THE CONSERVATORS
I’m sorry not to know ornithology; birds are my favorite, they don’t have to be smart or pretty to interest me. I like how they hop in the grass and leap into trees. If you discount spiders, I saw only birds before I turned six; the conservators told me to face the wall when they entered to feed me. No window gave a clear view of the grounds, but a rectangular sliver of glass in the door offered a prospect of the bird feeder in the stairwell. Songbirds, many kinds, swooped down in the mornings and again in the late afternoons; there were points in the midpart of the day when the breeze stopped, the feeder no longer rotated on its hook, and no birds came; this happened again at night; then, nothing would be visible in the stairwell except a little light from my room that passed through the sliver of window and formed a rectangle over the hook of the bird feeder, and that was enough for me to tell if there was a bird feeding or a breeze in motion, except on stormy nights, when they told me, as they came in, not to look out the sliver of window when they left, because I might be injured if the glass were broken. At dinnertime they rolled a trolley in with half a chicken they cut in pieces. I knew bird faces, beaks and eyes, but of those ladies and the one gentleman, who came in last to perform what he called the evening examination, I only saw a sliver of eye in the narrow slits of their close-fitting masks (dust brown, velvety, feathered, tending to jiggle when the beaks opened and shut) and then only briefly, as I turned to face the wall. I expected the human eye to be a darker, shinier thing than it is, because the masks must have irritated the eyes of their wearers; they must have been on the verge of tears, the way their eyes glistened through those slits like keys traveling down keyholes. Human eyes seem dull and drab compared to the brown, wet gemstones under those masks. I don’t think they meant me to have no mirror, but they had forgotten to provide one since they didn’t live in the room themselves; it came as a shock when I learned I did not look like a bird and they likely didn’t either, or I suppose it confirmed an unpleasant intuition, since it was always possible to feel a nose under my fingers and a mouth that was flat on the surface and sank in deep. “What’s in there?” I must have wondered, plunging my fingers in, fingers that were clearly not wings. When the day came, I screamed, uncontrollably I’m told, at the sight of a friendly human face.
THE RECORD OF THE HORSES
Many reasons; my philosophy, for example: that the discontinuities of the world are manmade; that the initial discovery of the human is that it is human, not animal; that disjection from the womb is the first indication of discontinuity, but that this was not always so, for we were born once in grassland, like horses, or within damp caves; it is possible that the umbilical cord was not severed until a much later stage in our development; there is speculation that early humans were quite sausage-like beings, strung together until the primary organism had died and decayed; it was this debilitating condition that led no doubt to the patriarchy (I digress); the wild horse was once the dominant creature of this island; it remains its most distinguishing feature; the characteristics and behaviors of the species are of undeniable antiquity; even the domestic horse is of interest to me, how it has weathered adjustment once again to a new condition, that of luxury item, now that it is, in practical terms, as obsolete as the sword. The wild island horse, observed through binoculars, as my chin presses into the mint and clover, aromatic forests insects tramp beneath, my tweed jacket elbow pads soaking in dew, sometimes mist, my back the rain, keeps to the coast in the morning, withdraws to the meadow at dusk, tends to glow in wet weather, gain torpidity in hot, adopting a glazed expression, one of concentration or recollection, as of minor tasks forgotten in the course of the morning; it revolves in its field sometimes, circles the flanks of another, which it dutifully inspects, then canters forward abruptly, flinging droplets across my glasses, mane shining in the post-rain sun—I could smell, once, the rotten odor of thrush in the hoof of a galloping mare—while its eye excretes, or rather rejects, salt driven inland on the air. The eye of the horse stares from its head like another animal: rounded, gelid, black, crouched in an autumn field. Clouds reflect in it at night like splashes of milk in coffee; or rather, not much like that; I should not poeticize it; nearly everything is invisible on this island at night; clouds are hardly more than scratches in a matte plane of absence, distinct only when the moon is distinct; the horses, too, lose distinction unless I shine my flashlight directly on them; they are otherwise detected by smell, or a sensation of warmth as they brush past my shoulder in the dark. They are activity, in other words, on a level below the material; they gain body when they attract my conscious thought; the eye is like a being of the deepest sea, illuminated as I turn my light, then sinking again into the abyss of potential. In my mind, ashore, I have definite shape; knowing this, I grant them theirs; it is possible they regard me only as a small, circular light, an irritant at best; when the light is off, only sounds are left, and my desire to record; they make few sounds at night; I hear the insects, ocean, and my own movements, which are startlingly loud. A report on the horses must include the following observation; one evening, at sunset, I heard a rush of feet; something jumped a paddock fence; I raised my binoculars; it was a horse. It stood in the lane ahead of me, on its hind legs; it was now a person, dressed in dark clothes; it appeared to collect its bearings. It turned, after a short time, to wave its hand in the direction of the paddock; my binoculars felt strangely light in my grasp; I felt they would drop upward if I let go; another horse jumped the fence and I watched them walk together, a man and a woman; they chatted casually until they reached a farmhouse, which they entered. I returned to the spot where they had leaped; the paddock was still and empty apart from a gleaming black cricket that sprang in the dew; the place where the horses met was identifiable by a lingering fragrance, sweet and oaty. Later, as I passed the cottage of the town physician, I saw the old man through his window; he was seated alone at a table under a hurricane lamp; he buttered a piece of toast; as he did so, he began to cough; his body shook; his gray beard trembled on the end of his chin; he was a horse; he left the table and disappeared behind the drapery; in thirty or forty seconds, the horse stepped out of the cottage; it inspected the sky and paused as it saw me, turned toward the meadow, and bolted past. A smell of tweed as it did so.
Even in the dark I continue to record. If not to write, then to memorize. Prop my flashlight in the grass, open pad, scratch notation. The pencil, in the dark, feels strangely light in my grasp; I feel it will drop upward if I let go; the horses have proceeded together along a ridge over the field; the ridge forms one side of a valley, into which I may peer with the aid of the moon; my impressions flutter as clouds move above me; there is much wind; grass blows between my light and the pad; in the distance, the horses are acquiring sound; when the herd passes over the ridge, it assumes a rhombus; the rhombus, as it reaches the valley, contracts into a razor-sharp triangle of ochre; clouds deny me a view; clouds part; a flat rectangle flickers down the valley; a diamond ascends the ridge on its far side; along the top of this ridge, a trapezoid glows with starlight; it turns, a square replaces it, sinks over the ridge, a line is formed; I have taken to sketching; my pencil can’t keep up; it is too dark to continue; even that basic unit, the line, dies under my hands.
Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge. His work appears in 3:AM, Epiphany, The Cincinnati Review, minor literature[s], and many other publications.