The Book of Accidents, page 27
Oliver grew weak. And numb. Even the pain slowed, became less the bright shock of hurt and more an ebbing, distant presence. Like it was happening to someone else, like it lived in another body.
There came a moment when he heard a scuttling sound. Not fast, either, not at first: but a gentle tack tack against the stone, like a crab walking. It was somewhere to his right, down the tunnel. Its slow movement became suddenly quicker, a flurry of clicks as it approached him—tacka tacka tacka tacka. Oliver recoiled, tensing his whole body up, wondering what horrible thing lived down here, what mad monster, some blind thing that had smelled his sweat, his blood, or the piss he’d left in the bend of the tunnel to his left.
Then the carbide lamp flared to life once more.
It was Eli.
Eli, who was not some crazy crab monster, but who simply crouched there in the flickering lamplight. His smiling teeth shone yellow, like the jaundice from a bad liver.
“I’ve been thinking about what you told me,” Eli said.
“Okay,” Oliver said quietly, unsure what that meant, or what he’d even told Eli that was worthy of thought.
“You really hate your father.”
“Wh…what?”
“Your father. To be fair, he sounds like a real monster. The things he did to you? And your mother? Don’t get me wrong, abuse is never okay, Oliver—but there’s a big difference between calling your kid a bad name here and there, or maybe giving him a slap or a spank, versus what he did to you and your mother. Like that time you broke the microwave when you accidentally microwaved a spoon in the soup? He didn’t take it out on you, no—he lay that hurt into your mother. Hurt her to hurt you. Broke her ribs, didn’t he? Just like your soft little tender ribs now.”
Oliver reeled. Had he told Eli these things? When? Maybe when he was unconscious, maybe he talked in his sleep…
Eli went on. “And how long did you spend in the hospital when he kicked you down the stairs? You were, what, seven years old at the time? Seven. Can you imagine? Being a little kid and your dad just…kicks you in the gut, and you tumble backwards down old wooden stairs. All those bruises, sure, and a few cuts, but the fall also broke your ankle like a broomstick, snap. And because he was mad at your mother, your whore mother—sorry, his words, not mine—and made you pay for her sins. Again, his words! I don’t believe in sin, Oliver, not at all. It’s just a concept we made up, sin. Some…transgression against God or the gods? Something that endangers our relationship with the fucking prick bastard Skyfather who lays down all these rules so we have to live life His way?”
“I…don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“I don’t want to talk about it either, Oliver, but…Here. We. Are. You and me. Down in the dark, talking like two old friends. Old friends with bad fathers.” Eli placed both his hands hard on Oliver’s knees, pinning him there. “That’s right. My father was horrible, too. Used to beat the snot out of me on the regular. You know what it was? I figured it out. Early on, when you’re little, you like what your father likes: football or fishing or fixing cars. But then you get a little older, you start becoming your own man, you know? You like what you like. I liked books and computers. And history. And he wasn’t a book learner, not that troglodyte fuck, oh no—gods, one time he whaled on me with one of my books, this Time-Life book called Our Universe, and I don’t think there was ever a crueler beating—oh, not because others weren’t more painful, no, they were, they definitely were, but because not only did it hurt me but it hurt the book, too, just busted it out of its binding. Pages everywhere. He burned it. Do you believe that? Burned it. And he did it because I grew into something that wasn’t him, and when he regarded the thing that I had become it infuriated him. Instead of him seeing pride in that, it made him vengeful. It was like…I got away. I learned more than he’d ever learn, and escaped who he was, and wow, how he hated that. I was a better monster than he was, though, oh ho, so I did what I had to do, boy, I did what I had to do.”
Oliver didn’t want to ask, but also, he did. Curiosity gnawed at his brainstem like a starving animal.
“Wh…what did you do?”
“I moved out of the house, Oliver. Got a life of my own.”
“Oh.”
Eli snorted and then bust out laughing. “I’m just kidding. I fucking killed him, Oliver. I stuck a steak knife in his belly as he slept, and when he lurched upright, I zipped it side to side, opening him up like a sack of fish. His guts spilled out and he thrashed around the room, tangled in his own literally shitty intestines, and then he slipped—whoopsy-doodle!—and fell against the dresser in the corner of the room. Corner of that old dresser embedded in his forehead, and he didn’t even fall all the way to the ground, nope! His body sat propped up there by the corner of that dresser, and then he shit himself and died. People shit themselves when they die, Oliver. Because they’re finally at peace. They can relax for once in their godsdamn lives.”
And again he laughed. A big belly laugh, this one.
“Please leave me alone,” Oliver whimpered.
“You should’ve killed your old monster man,” Eli said, his teeth gleaming, his eyes flickering. “Still a chance, if we ever get out of here. But that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”
Then he blew out the flame, plunging them both into darkness.
Oliver cried out: “No!” But it was too late.
As Eli hurried off, Oliver once again heard the scuttling of a crab, its claws and pincers clacka-clacking on the hard ground.
* * *
—
Eli came back sometimes and deposited more garbage he’d found in the mines. Most of it just incomprehensible piles of metal: rivets and scraps of tin and splintery, half-rotten boards. Then he’d douse the light and scurry off again. On the last trip, he brought something new: a short-handled coal pick. The kind you’d use in one hand to chip away rock.
* * *
—
I’m so hungry.
Oliver felt like his body was eating itself. Like his middle was that awful thing from that movie Revenge of the Jedi—the wet mouth and probing tentacles in the desert, sitting inside his body, slowly eating him from the inside out.
Eli was nearby. He could feel him in the dark. Roaming. Oliver couldn’t move. He was too weak. He wanted to die.
Eli whispered, as if on the verge of tears: “I’ve made mistakes, Oliver. I’ve trapped us down here. All because of my curiosity, my desire to know more. A mistake, an error. An experiment. An accident. But accidents are never really accidents, are they? No no no, no they are not.”
“We could go,” Oliver said, his words hoarse, pushed up through a brittle, dry throat. The words sounded more like wind than a human sound.
But Eli kept on.
“I, I, I feel like this, all of this, like I’ve been here before, like we’ve been here before, you and I, in this place, in this deepest dark. A turning of the gear. You know, Oliver, in cyclical cosmology, that’s a pattern, the turning of the ages, one after the next after the next. At the human level there’s what, there’s reincarnation—you live a life, you die, you come back. But at the cosmic level, it’s the same, too: An age goes, the wheel turns, and it all starts to break down. The machine starts to fall the fuck apart, Oliver, just shaking itself to godsdamn pieces, and only then do you get to start the new age. That’s it. That’s how you move on. But you can’t move on until you end the one cycle. And how true is that? You really wanna fix something, you gotta break it first, Oliver. You can’t fix a fucked-up floor. You just rip it up. Down to the struts. A house goes too bad, lost to termites and mold, you gotta bring out the old wrecking ball—whoosh, crash, knock it down to the ankle bones and build something better in its place.”
In a small voice, Oliver asked: “Is that why you killed your father?”
On this, Eli seemed to think.
As if discovering the truth of this, he answered, almost brightly: “I think that it is, Oliver. I think that it is.”
“I want to get out of here. If this has all happened before, then maybe we can do the right thing this time and we can leave. You said you thought you knew the way.”
Eli chuckled. “I do know the way. Maybe you do, too. Do you wonder, Oliver: Will death let you escape this? Does it start all over? Do you get a second chance? If you die, do you get out of the mine?”
Oliver thought, but did not say:
Not if I die.
But maybe if you do.
* * *
—
The smell of warm, cooked meat slithered into Oliver’s nostrils and stirred him from sleep. It was the smell of a pot roast—juicy and salty, a little greasy as you pulled the soft muscle apart with your fingers.
Eli said: “I found food.”
“How?” Oliver asked, because it didn’t make any sense.
“Just eat. I’ll explain.”
And the smell was right beneath him now, and he sat up as straight as he could, struggling past the weakness and the pain, and he could taste the steam rising underneath his chin. Eli urged him to take a bite, so that’s what he did: He bent down, mouth open, and his teeth and tongue found that roast meat and it flooded his senses with pure joy. He greedily ate, getting his hands underneath the meat so he could pull it closer to his mouth. Juices dripped down his chin. The meat was pillowy and tender. Tasted more like pork than beef, though, despite the smell, but that was okay. It filled his belly and gave him strength and hope, and he pushed his face so far into it the meat squashed against his cheeks like the loving pressing hands of an old grandmother. What a good boy you are, she’d say, eat up, eat right up—
The carbide lamp flared to life.
Beneath him, on his lap, was blood. So much of it. It streaked his forearms. It dripped from his chin. The roast of meat in his lap was a leg, a human leg, the skin chewed open (oh no, I chewed it open) exposing the wet red gristle of flesh beneath it, blood oozing up, not pumping, but squeezing out like water from a gently compressed sponge. Nearby sat Eli, on his ass, one leg out, the other missing all the way to the hip. In his hand he held a round, rusted, circular saw blade, the teeth all gnarled and bent, and he cackled and said, “I found a saw, Oliver, look. I found a saw.”
The light went out as Oliver vomited.
* * *
—
As he pressed himself up against the wall, away from his puke, Oliver drifted once more into unconsciousness. When he awoke anew, the metal tang of rotten blood in his mouth was gone. His skin was no longer tacky with it, either. Everything felt dry again.
(Even though his stomach felt curiously full.)
A dream, he thought, all just a dream, but then he heard a soft chuckle ten or twenty feet away. It was Eli, who said, “Don’t tell me you’re hungry again, little mouse. I need one leg, at least.”
But then he walked off—and there, Oliver heard his footsteps distinctly, one after the next, the walk of a two-legged man, not the hop of one who’d removed one with a rusty saw.
Oliver didn’t know what was happening. He suspected his mind was breaking down, but even so, he also knew deep inside that something was wrong with Eli. He was messing with Oliver. Toying with him. Torturing him. And Oliver knew then that he had to get that light, had to steal it away from the man, and so later, when Eli came back, Oliver had already found what he needed: the coal pick. He was weak, but the desire for life and escape were stronger, and he clutched the handle until his knuckles were bloodless. As Eli toddled about, humming quietly to himself, Oliver crept closer, trying very hard to zero in on where the man was in the wide-open darkness. But he couldn’t get a fix on him. He seemed here, and then he seemed there—and Oliver knew he had only so much strength before he was out, before he was collapsing, before the pick tumbled from his hands.
Eli was mumbling: “World’s gone bad, Oliver. World’s gone rotten. Chewed up by the worms, by Those Who Eat, like a bad apple, chomp. Better to stay down here than to go back up there, yessir. It’s safe down here. It’s all falling apart, but the wheel turns and the wheel breaks and—”
There.
He was right in front of Oliver.
His head low.
The words soft and murmured.
Now, Oliver. Now!
Oliver grunted, hefted the tool, and swung the coal pick—
Thuckkk! It was like sticking a knife into a fat pumpkin. The sharp tip sank deep. He felt the skull give.
“—is remaaaade,” Eli groaned—
Before collapsing.
Oliver gasped as he let go of the pick. It fell with the body, still stuck in it. He recoiled from what he had done. Though he could see no part of his crime, he could smell the greasy stench of blood, and now, as Eli had promised, the sudden efflorescence of shit-stink. Then he felt an alien feeling, an insane feeling, rise up in him like soda bubbles: He laughed. Because Fuck you, Eli. Because You’re a batshit piece-of-shit shitty-pantsed monster, just like Oliver’s father, just like Eli’s own dad—a monster down in the dark, keeping the light away, measuring it out only in tantalizing, torturous doses. Oliver laughed, and crawled his way over to the dead man. He shoulder-bumped the handle of the coal pick by accident, and Eli’s dead chin scuffed against the hardscrabble ground.
“Oops,” Oliver said, and giggled again.
He felt around for the treasure—felt down to the right arm, nope, then down to the left, and still not there. No no no, where is the light? And now the fear surged within him that he’d done this wrong. He should’ve gotten a fix on the lamp first, now it could be anywhere. Eli might’ve been keeping it somewhere else, down in the tunnel, or behind a rock, or—
Or underneath him.
Moving Eli was easy—the man was lighter than a bundle of sticks—and he rolled him over and there it was. He hurriedly rescued the lamp—
And what?
A new realization struck him, cold as the plunge into a frozen lake.
I don’t know how to light it.
He found no button, no auto-lighting mechanism. He found a key like the kind you’d use to wind up an old toy, but he turned it left and right and it didn’t do a damn thing.
Somehow, Eli had been lighting this, right? It needed fire. But had he ever seen Eli strike a match? Or use a…a flint or any kind of spark? He would’ve seen that, wouldn’t he? Even still he went through the man’s pockets, finding nothing but lint and coins. Coins. That could do it. Oliver didn’t pay much attention in class, but he knew metal against stone could create sparks, and so he took one of the coins—a nickel by the feel of it—and dragged it against the ground, kkt, kkkt, kkkkkt, but it didn’t do anything so he went to the wall instead and tried again, dragging it back and forth, faster and faster. And still? No sparks.
Oliver cried out in rage and despair.
He’d done it. He’d ruined it. He took his shot and screwed it up. His father was always telling him he was a fuckup, and sure enough, the old monster was right. He’d fucked up. Big-time.
You were right, Dad.
You were right.
Oliver fell to his knees. He couldn’t even cry. He just knelt, penitent to the darkness, forehead against the ground, waiting for nothing.
* * *
—
It became too much.
The smell of death. The stink of feces. The darkness. The loneliness. Oliver almost preferred being tormented by Eli to this.
I need to end this.
Oliver struggled to unbury the coal pick from Eli’s skull, rocking it back and forth. It gave way, eventually. Then he moved it back toward the wall, and he felt along the rocks until he found a crevice. Using his last ounce of strength, he gave a heave-ho and wedged the pick into that slit. He jostled it, and it held. Again he knelt.
He lined his head up to the curve of the pick, which faced him.
The softest part of him was, he thought, his eye.
So he closed his left eye and pressed it gently against the one end of the pick, the end sticking up.
Then he slowly reared his head back.
He knew that when he launched his head forward, the pick would go into his eye. Into his brain. And he would die.
And maybe, just maybe, there would be a blessing in that—the blessing that Eli, in his torment, in his madness, had figured out some essential truth, that sure enough, death was the way free. With it, Oliver would reawaken somewhere else. Somewhere new.
Somewhere better.
“The wheel breaks,” Oliver said, as if a prayer. “And it is remade.”
“Oliiiiiver,” Eli groaned, the voice stretching out, a bleated echo.
Oliver gasped.
Behind him came a rasping shuffle sound. And then came the gentle ticka-tack of carapace on stone.
Oliver spun, pressing his back against the wall, steadying himself alongside the pick. There in the darkness he saw a shadow: a human-like shape, but too long, too lean, too tall. It rose from where Eli had been. It shined not with its own light but like moonsilver on an oil slick. Ribbons of white light flashing with rainbow iridescence.
“Who…what…”
“Oliver,” said the voice again. It was Eli’s voice, but it wasn’t. It was only Eli’s voice at the top, but beneath it were hundreds of other voices, layered there, each on top of the last.
“You died.”
“And yet, I stand.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I killed you.”
A wet chuckle. “Don’t be. It’s time, Oliver.”
“Time…? For what?”
“Time to see your purpose. To learn magic. To break the world.”
