Story: The Fall and Ruin, a Rose

***

1

Her house was like a big, messy mind. And whenever she cleaned up downstairs, which was extremely seldom now, she always ended up brushing things under the rug or behind the sofa, stacking unread magazines in some other corner scarcely disturbing their dust, and throwing most of that stuff she was going to sort out one day into an unused old trunk she kept just under the stairs.

She thought sometimes that there must be things living under there, some enormous, uncharted animal, or rats and roaches and things, a teeming bed of life all covered up and not often talked about. "It was as if the house were built on the sea and if you opened the little door leading under the stairs you'd see the living waters shimmering with never-ending movement and undreamed excitement." That, she thought one time, was eternity...living just under her stairs like a sleeping hypothalamus.

And she never really went under there or even downstairs anymore, no more often than she had to. It was dirty: that was it.

She stood up to survey her work. Gleaming and clean, the tiny room lay before her.

All was prepared.

Mentally she surveyed the lab one floor below - the electrodes, the meters and computer, the as yet lifeless woman-model itself. Yes, all there too was waiting, ready, as she had left it. All was quietly awaiting tomorrow.

She stepped again across the tiled floor, stooped to peer into the crevice between the slick wall and the bottom of the stool, genuflected briefly as her aerofoam sponge swiped across the cool and curving stone. The drying film of moisture sparkled in the light.

She straightened again, and turned. Yes, here too in the tiny third floor room, all was neat and ordered. The sink, the tub, the stool itself, the cabinet before it where alone on the shining shelf sat her black box of bank statements and stock reports. All shone and winked at her, and she felt calm and relaxed.

"It does a woman good once in a while," she used to say, "to get down on her hands and knees." (Did her old mother used to say that?)

It had been during one of the times when she was reading over those bank and stock figures (her grandchildren, she called them), then when her neat little bathroom was still on the ground floor, one day already so long ago, when she had suddenly thought of all the dirty little things crawling around in her under-the-stairs basement. Perhaps she had been thinking of insecticides and rat poisons, and she had very distinctly heard a noise. Not a very frightening sound in itself, but definitely she heard, or was she only imagining it? a peculiar little rumble, or a snarl.
She had become somewhat alarmed, and had left that first tile-smooth chamber, somewhat dingy and old in those times, to prowl the great downstairs floor. She hadn't gone far, however, when there was something, was it a sound? a vibration? something which guided her attention to the doorway under the stairs.

It was then, and immediately too, that she had decided to move upstairs. For from behind the shadowed doorway there had been, or she felt there had been - she told herself now, of course, she must have been imagining it, "her reckless imagination" - what was it? how did she perceive it? a deep, sighing, groaning moan.

It had been - her eyes glazed now remembering it, and her stomach felt empty - "it was as if the house were built on a windstorm and now the winds were whirling through the aging beams of a pirate's trusty schooner, listing and creaking as the masts trembled and the ship groaned before splashing down, down into the turbulent waters of the sea below."

She had gathered all her things, her then small collection of equipment too, and had moved entirely and unhesitatingly to the house's middle floor. And ever after, despite the filth which had met her there (she surmised that the under-stairs pipes had been somehow blocked), despite the days of toil she had been forced to spend cleaning the foul rooms of the excrement she'd found there, she had made her decision final, and almost never again descended to her house's lower floor...no more often than she had to.

And soon, of course, she had been forced to leave that entire middle floor for her burgeoning laboratory, forced again to move up a floor, to lose days of valuable time cleaning the filth-choked rooms upstairs. But she had carried on, knowing then, of course, that there would soon be her own porcelain suite, spotless, bright and clean.

2

By now she had left the bathroom for the bedroom, and had begun to prepare for sleep.

She sat there in her clean little chamber with the fluorescent lights on before bed. She sat there, holding a shoe thoughtfully in her nimble hand. "Tomorrow," she said to the shoe.

Tomorrow she would descend to the lab (and there was warmth in the thought of it), and she would finish it, the woman she was building, her mirror image. Then she could begin, "and all her works would praise her name."

That, she thought to her shoe, is eternity.

She occasionally thought as well, though she said nothing of it since she didn't want it to seem she was complaining, that it was rather unpleasant to have to work where it was so dirty. Her laboratory was on the middle floor of her house, though sometimes she worked out of hours in her nice little room upstairs. And she couldn't help noticing now and again that there was a door which led from one dark corner of the lab into that eerie little storage room under the stairs by means of a short narrow staircase leading almost straight down. She would, on occasion, throw furtive glances in the direction of that little door, though it had long since been bolted and barred, and sometimes wondered if, when the lights were out in the lab, though they almost never were, she couldn't see just a little bit of a glowing, showing from underneath the door. "As if the house were built on the sunset and the door was the last cloud the old sol would wink behind before bubbling its hot orange magic underneath the very mountains she was standing on." (Where did these words come from?)

It had been only after the second move - she was getting into her pajamas - when she had left the middle floor for her lab, that her work had taken its new and decisive direction. She was building another woman, a model of herself, a woman which would walk and move and have her being just as she herself did. A perfect replica of the human form, just what humanity needed, a woman-model to observe. The model would show her what they required, for progress. And there would be no involvement, no uncontrolled subjectivity. She would be like a test tube or a centrifuge, the algae, or a mouth-watering dog.

It was such a great idea!

She swung her legs onto the bed, and, sighing, lay back. The fluorescents above sparkled through the water in her eyes.

She was never quite sure whether or not she liked her work. Not that that was important, but it sometimes amused her to try to decide, "lying there waiting for sleep to invade, like Ethiopia over Mussolini."

There was, of course, the money. Reluctant governments were nevertheless paying dearly those days for research and construction perhaps destined to solve oh so many problems facing humankind at the moment, perhaps at any moment.

"I'm not doing if for that," she said to herself. "Oh I'm not working for the money." For indeed, she had no real need for money, her house, her equipment, her food and simple pleasures all so freely provided by the government or from privately donated funds. Yet there was the little black metal box placed carefully on the empty white shelf in the bathroom cabinet, before her when she sat; and she would often pass an hour or two there, reading eagerly the records she kept in the box, the increasing figures, the history of her prolific little grandsons and grand-daughters running around from bank to bank, from pile to pile, from hand to hand, making people happy while they bred a little more the months ahead.

"That too," she liked to think, "was eternity: coins breeding in a fertile pile of gold."

She knew she must like all that sort of thing - and the calculations too - but somewhere, somewhere beneath the while rubberized laboratory trousers she always wore or next to the superthin calculator she often carried in her breast pocket, somewhere where her eyes could not see, nor her microscope, nor her fluoroscope, there a voice "like a warm breeze wandering through the hot fingers of a dry summer night's grass fire" was telling her there was something else in the work, in the lab itself, "something dark and fierce like the uncharted waters in some Louisiana pool." There was something fierce and dark in the lab which drove her on "as a midnight blaze drives a mad, blind stallion charging into the darkness where he cannot see, but charging on and on."

She rolled onto her back; she was panting.

But her work was important, perhaps vital, she told herself, to all humanity; and she would go on with it day by day, carrying on cheerfully, even eagerly. And tomorrow, she would . . .

She yawned, and the fluorescents swam above her. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she dreamed of a racetrack and of herself clocking a speeding unicorn.

3

She had risen early that day, nervous with anticipation. She had stubbed her toe on the cold white stool while her eyes were still filled with sleep. She had dressed carefully, favoring her throbbing toe and concentrating on remaining calm.

She had descended from her little room...as usual, she had thought to herself; it's just a normal day. Yet the key had somehow crawled through her fingers and bounced to the floor when she began to unlock the lab door, and somewhere she knew.

She had entered the lab; there was nothing changed. Her equipment lay still before her, meticulously arranged and prepared. Yet she had not begun her work. She had been drawn instead to turn about the room, which was quiet and somehow unbalanced by the slanting rays of morning sunlight which were playing through the only little window near the back. She had paused there before the little door leading down to the under-stairs; she had carefully reached out her hand to check the bolts and bars, and could not now forget that they had distinctly felt warm to her cold, unsteady fingers.

It had been months since she had checked her small white cabinet just beside the outer door across the room. But now she did; today she felt it was important. She ran a short test on a drop she took from the small black vial she kept there.

It was still potent.

It was foolish, she thought cynically to himself, to keep it there. Yet she did not trust the glowing, snarling, softly waving under-stairs, and the poison she'd distilled from monkey urine would kill any beast or monster she might have to face. Perhaps it was - yes, she smiled at her hesitancy, it was foolish; but she had humored herself that morning and had found there a sort of confidence.

She had moved on and on about the room, and had finally begun.

And just as the woman was born, just as the model began slowly to stir, to blink her glazed eyes and to scowl, then - she could not now forget it - then, she had felt the floor shift "like the deck of a faltering vessel." The room was suddenly warm, and from the little door - she must have been imaging it - there was a glowing like the sunrise and a moaning like a strange imprisoned animal.

The model-woman now sat before her, and knew why she'd been made. The model was wise, and her creator quick to note all her motions and thoughts, though the noting mind often clouded with a dark thought of the cabineted vial.

"I am empty,” said the model-woman.

And she knew that it was true.

Just then, as the model-woman had begun to speak, the floor started to shake and the walls rattle. The fluorescents flashed and died, but the room was light.

There was a rumbling, a snarling, a roaring like the wind in a fire, and the bars on the little door glowed with heat, then fell away.

There was fire everywhere, the floor, the lights. The model- woman's eyes flashed in wonder and in terror as her creator vomited and writhed in her burning rubber pants.

The door smashed open. The model-woman fled, and, running out and up the stairs to the clear white room, she gulped greedily from the foul vial.

But she herself, she did not flee, and knew she did not want to go. She was standing then, awaiting it, and it washed over her in a boiling bath. She stood fast, her hands raised high above her head, knowing that she did not want to run, exulting savagely and painfully in the violent burning of her flesh as the uncharted animal, the swimming seas of boiling unction, the blind, wind-blown, charging stallion, and the flames crashed upon her like black waves on a sunny rock.

And as she died, as she perished in the awful sea from the under-stairs, her house fell to ruin about her, an innocent victim of the dark savage fight between the flowing sunsets from below the floor and the piles of excrement on the roof.

Her house had fallen into smoldering rubble, floating like smelly scum on a sunlit sea.

And today the wet, charred ruins of her house cry out to the never-ending skies: "One day, oh humanity, let there be built a house where seas and stools can live united, as in the well-ordered mind of a rose!"

***