Chapter 13
I became an archaeologist of the future. I began taking trips out to the lava field alone, scavenging, and for what, I was
afraid to really say. I broke our shovel breaking ground. I went to the nearest village and bought a new one and spent whole
days out there with it. Not that there was much to dig up. But if I dug deep enough, clunked hard enough into the burs of
magma, they would crack in half and reveal an etching inside, some petrified barbaric logo or a screw, wires or the remains
of wires, coat hangers, melted engines. If there was copper or any sort of refined metal, I’d take it home so we could sell
it. If there was plastic or something strange, something I couldn’t put my finger on but was sure it was a shape, a semblance
of something, I took it home as if just to say look. My people.
“How about you take the donkey with you next time and bring back some of the rocks,” said Simon, sounding like the apotheosis
of everything I never thought he would be. “It’s volcanic. It’d be good for the soil here.”
“I think I’ve found an entire car,” I said. I was lying on the ground in the middle of the wide-open yard.
“I don’t know what that is,” said Simon.
“It’s like a donkey but made of metal. Up to five people can sit inside it. You can fill it with your groceries.”
Simon was performing operatic busyness behind me, sweeping dust out of the house through the open front door, moving misplaced
cups, stools, cushions, making a racket while the rest of the summer pulsed around our little snow globe of a life. He chewed
on a skinny birch twig while he worked. He moved it from one side of his mouth to the other, annoying me. He asked, “How would
five people get inside a donkey?”
I didn’t respond, just stared at the sky, at the sun still up there. It was July? August? It was late in the evening but the
sun was still smack in the middle up there. I had once loved these long days of summer back in London—Pimm’s and lost Frisbees,
men running around half naked in parks while their girlfriends watched and wore, inexplicably, prairie dresses—but out here
these days were sixteen hours of haunting stasis, filled with labor, endless labor, pointless labor, digging and digging.
I picked at new blisters that had formed on my hands and wondered when we would see a dragon come soaring across the sky.
There was a whole-ass dragon out there. Wow.
I worried about how much I cared. My reaction to the dragon had initially been that of shock, but as these empty days of recuperation continued with no news from prince, king, or dragon, a cognitive dissonance took hold of me where I knew I wasn’t feeling the right kind of terror.
Part of me wondered if whatever the dragon was doing—did it matter?
Even if the dragon was some kind of time-traveling monster, I knew it had no bearing on my life because I knew that in the future there were no dragons.
There had been no world-ending invasion by a dragon in 1301 because there simply hadn’t been.
There was a dangerous freeness in the inconsequentiality of time travel and it made me feel too loose with everything else.
If dragons were a problem, then I would already know dragons were a problem just like I knew Oliver Cromwell would one day be a problem, like Henry VIII and Brexit and cars, nuclear weapons, pandemics, the internet, and confusing internet bills would all be problems—these would be things of more consequence than a giant dragon appearing for a few hours in the remote English countryside once a month.
I felt a sense of security in knowing nothing mattered.
I didn’t know how to convey this to Simon without it sounding like a horrific, nihilistic gasp.
“Don’t pick,” Simon said now, watching me inspect my blisters. “You didn’t want gloves, well now your hands are growing a
pair on their own.”
“Will you bring me my cough syrup?” I asked.
Again, we spoke at each other like buses on mismatched routes, flashing broad black and yellow words, no answers, just questions and demands.
He brought me the jar of nettle and yarrow, but took a pointedly long time, exhaling loudly.
He tossed it to me on the ground and then finally sat down, only not next to me, in a pile of hay instead.
He rubbed his face and looked straight ahead at the treeline beyond the meadow.
I wouldn’t say things were icy or irreparable between us but there was this distance, and boy did it look like a chasm when the never-setting sun hit it like this.
On my side of the rift there was my place in this world—and consequently my place in Simon’s life—and whether I truly belonged in either of them.
On Simon’s side—well, I don’t know. He was too far away.
I coated my finger with the green slime and shoved it down my throat. I tried not to trigger a wave of coughing, which had
gotten worse since the dragon attack. There was a permanently wheezy, ashy taste in the back of my throat, and I struggled
to catch my breath if I exerted myself too much. Simon still helped with it, keeping me well supplied with herbal concoctions,
but the romance of his care was gone, replaced with rote tenderness, tossed jars. We still made love and shared a bed, but
Prince Edward’s warnings reverberated in my mind with every act of reconciliation.
You need to break his heart. You need to shatter his reality and hope he’s able to put something of it back together on his
own.
I continued my trips back to the lava field to dig, spending whole days out there, where lay all the reverberations of everything
that had fallen between me and Simon, all of the things I thought I had left behind, entombed in rock and ash, and what choice
did I have but to excavate them, to make use of them.
The land didn’t look like England anymore. The ashen plane had taken on a pale gray, almost lavender hue, and the hardened
ribbons of lava looked completely alien, which helped me accept my own foreignness here, my helpless self-pollution.
The “entire car” I thought I had found was more of a hunch.
It was the outline of a windshield, then the frame of some kind of sedan, a place for a door, another door, a few podlike rocks in the shape of what could have been wheels before they had been eviscerated in flame.
I cracked one of them open to reveal what looked like, if I held it at the right angle, the outline of a hubcap.
After three days of digging I had exhumed the whole perimeter of what I thought was the car.
Sweat coated my face, bringing relief from the ash.
No birds or insects accompanied me and there was hardly any wind.
Even the thwacks of the shovel sounded hollow and muted, not echoing out across the crater.
By the time the sun was a notch lower than the great height it maintained all day, I knew I had worked too long and would be late getting back home.
Home. Hmmm.
I sighed.
“OK,” I said to no one. (I hadn’t brought the donkey like Simon had asked.) I filled a satchel with some of the aerated rock,
but it felt too heavy to drag back on my own, so I left it over by the shovel. One of the rocks rolled out of the bag and
hit the shovel, knocking it over. When I went to stand the shovel back up again, the ground around me sunk. It was as easy
as that. The ground impressed itself deeper by a few inches—not dramatically, but enough to startle me. Dust flew up. There
was silence. I didn’t move. Then, with complete disregard, I fell through.
The ground had been deceitful, a brittle roof caved in. I landed painfully, ten feet below onto a new plane of earth under
its crust. All the parts of what I thought had been a car shattered and rained over me in chunks of pumice and stray metal.
I held my breath and waved away the dust and ash, coughing.
I had fallen inside a shallow lava tube.
The ground here was smoother, less possible to break with a shovel, and black with a moonlit sheen despite the sun overhead.
The tube continued into a twisting, downward slope, opening up into a larger cavern, which I entered, amazed.
As the lava had cooled and hardened and the landslides settled, these deposits of empty space must have formed, sealing themselves up.
The walls would have been cool to the touch, but now exposed to the sun, they were warm.
I realized I was bleeding. Not from any one place in particular, but I felt soreness and stinging pain. I had landed poorly.
I wiped blood off my leg, then wiped blood off my hand onto the obsidian wall. Then I realized I was crying. I was crying
because I had wanted to call for Simon, but he was miles away. I was weak. I had had so many things wrong all this time. We
had survived because we were together. But now I was out here and he was back there and he was so far away. And just when
I thought I could wrestle my emotions onto a sturdier plateau of reason, the ground, once again, fell out from under me.
Black obsidian shattered. Gravity pulled me gracelessly. I plunged even farther into the earth, sliding along with an uncomfortable
mixture of rock, glass, metal—as close to a liquid as those solids could be. I landed with an unsettling plonk, triggering
nausea and blurred vision. I braced forward in a prone position as real pain flared out from within me. Droplets of tears
and blood mixed. Everything was dark and spread out wide. Sunlight only trickled into this new space like fine grains of sand
dashed across a black expanse until in front of me—right there—two fiery orange eyes opened. Awakened.
Each pupil was a narrow slit as tall as me, each horn, claw, and tooth the size of a dead tree. Its mouth was ajar, half open
like the folded remains of a sunken battleship—not as if to eat me but as if to pause in thoughtful repose before speech,