reported, presumably of his own accord.
—You can sleep out here, Binelli told me, when all the tea was drunk and the small talk taxed. He pointed to the couch on which I was already sitting. He pointed then to a small pile of sheets. They were green sheets, like the Tropics. It was hot in the room but the sheets made things seem cool.—We’ll get you your papers tomorrow.
—Am I Russian, I wondered.
—You don’t appear to be, Binelli said.
The Lamb made a face as if to suggest my being Russian was the most absurd idea she’d yet come across.
—Good, I said.—I hate the Russians. I had no basis for this either, but it was something I knew from somewhere deep inside. Maybe a memory that had been slow or stubborn and hadn’t left with the rest. Or maybe not a memory at all but a new kind of fact, of which there might be more, revealing themselves at whim, over time.
There were in fact more. They did reveal themselves at whim. I couldn’t know that then, but I was aware of the possibility.
—I see, said Binelli, making surely a mental note of this innate distaste that he would, no later than The Very Next Day, use against me. For no apparent reason that I can yet see other than sheer spite.
But that evening I could not have known that Binelli was filled with spite, as full as most people are filled with blood. Binelli and The Lamb retired behind a door that was shut behind them and locked with a series of brisk clicks. I took the top sheet from the small pile and made to shake it out, but before I had even made one shake I looked again at what I thought I had seen sitting on the remaining sheets and I was absolutely one hundred percent correct that there was a very large and pale snake there, all coiled up, but for its head, which was not coiled up but instead lifted from its coil and facing me with the anguished look of a creature rudely awakened.
I stood very still and held the sheet. The snake made wavy snake moves with its head but remained otherwise still.
We stood off.
I have said already that I can win any such standoff and this particular circumstance was a case in point.
That is to say, the snake moved first.
The snake uncoiled with surprising dexterity, considering the intricacy of its coiling, and shot across the space between us and flicked my ankle with its angry tongue. And with its angry fangs, I found out soon enough, as I sank to the couch and the snake disappeared beneath it.
An examination of my ankle showed tiny twin teeth marks. I have never understood the logic behind sucking the venom from one’s snake wound, as it would seem to me to merely be ingesting the same poison through another equally vulnerable orifice; however, it was an impulse I made every attempt to carry out. Unfortunately, the bite was located on the outside of my ankle, which, if you were to try right now upon your own self, you’d realize is an impossible location on which to fasten one’s mouth. I am a flexible being and I was a no less flexible being back then, and I would think that if ever such a contortion could be managed, with the panic and adrenaline it would have been managed at that moment.
Like I said: however.
Et cetera.
I could not reach the outside of my ankle with my lips and then I stopped trying. I tried instead to beat down the door behind which Binelli and The Lamb had disappeared. I used my fists and one shoulder and then the other shoulder and my hips, and I used my freshly rediscovered voice to wake them from the apparent comas into which they had swiftly slipped upon barricading themselves in their fortress. There was no response and it was a very sturdy door. I did it relatively little damage. Relative to the damage incurred upon my aforementioned appendages, that is to say.
And then I lay down on the couch and covered myself with the cool green sheet and prepared to die. It seemed a terrible shame, so soon after recovering my voice, but it was all that was left me. I thought many a regretful thought while I waited, some of which seemed to me quite profound, and I did get up once to write some things down on a pad of paper Binelli had left on the coffee table. On the top of the first page, he had written: Finley, and below that: Russian, and I left those things there and turned to a fresh sheet and made to write down my final thoughts. But once faced with the paper, all I could manage was: Bit by snake. Thanks for the tea. Finley.
I ripped that sheet of paper carefully from the pad, making sure to leave the first intact, though I didn’t suppose Binelli would have further need of his notes on me, what with my untimely demise. But one hates to have it said that one’s last act was in fact the destruction of another’s property. I folded my note and left it sitting on the pad and I lay back down.
11
I woke to Binelli’s voice and, simultaneously, to the sensation of being pinned down by an automobile tire.
The voice was saying,—So I see you’ve met Lavendar.
The sensation was saying many things all at once but mostly, —You seem to have been pinned down by an automobile tire.
I chose to not open my eyes for a while. I heard domestic sounds: yawning, water flowing from a faucet, paper ripping, a tea kettle’s whistle, and so forth. I waited until I smelled the smell of tea close by, and then I opened my eyes.
I was not pinned down by an automobile tire.
I was pinned down by a tremendous coil of snake. The coil was on my stomach, exactly where I would pouch a baby if I were, as they say, With Child, which I thankfully was not. The coil showed both head and tail resting dead center. I wondered how exactly that worked; the coil seemed perfectly wound and not as if the two ends could end up in the same central location. It was extraordinarily heavy and I breathed shallow breaths. This was not from fear. I remembered immediately that the snake had already killed me quite neatly the previous night, so there was nothing more it could do. I pushed against the couch with my feet so I could sit up a little without disturbing the snake. I was not afraid but all the same, you know, I didn’t want to wake it up again. Seeing as that was exactly what had raised its ire the night before.
12
About the gravel, discussed only, if you’ll recall, cursorily quite early in the proceedings: It was no joke.
You may likely have thought, then, of the gravel one might find in somebody’s driveway in a rural community, or a vacant lot: vague scattered bits of stone, mostly dust really, covering a solid surface.
This gravel was not that gravel.
This gravel seemed to be covering nothing so much as more gravel. I don’t know a) how deep it went or b) what was below it, but my guesses would be a) deep and b) as already noted, gravel. Atop more gravel, atop marshland.
That’s how it seemed. To walk around atop this gravel was like walking in those dreams one sometimes has, where the walking one does can hardly be called walking at all. Those dreams where one’s legs seem to have lost all connection to the previously not-necessary-to-even-think-about-so-automatic-is-it mechanism attaching and coordinating the limbs and brain.
Or like how I would imagine it feels to be in one of those huge boxes of balls that they sometimes provide as an amusement for children at carnivals.
I
