I Did Not Return

There is a canyon in the world - was a canyon, still is, I have never returned - where the air became wrong.

That is not how I would say it in the first tongue. In the first tongue I would say: the air turned its face from me. The air lifted itself away like a thing that had been offended, and when the air is offended in that tongue it does a specific thing, it withdraws the self from the encounter, and the encounter ends. I have found this does not happen in English. English is a young language and does not yet know how to be repulsed.

I had been going north for some years by then - not walking, I do not walk, but moving the way those who do not need roads learn to move: by what calls and by what repels, by the pull of the dead underfoot and the press of the living overhead and everything between that speaks if you learn the listening. The dead had been traveling with me as habit and company since Tenochtitlan. Before that, even. They were the first companions I ever had. When the world burned I kept them.

Something in that canyon was calling to the dead, and the dead were answering - but not to me. That was the first thing I knew: whatever spoke in that hollow was not speaking my language. The bones did not stir toward it. The dark things did not come. The dead who had traveled with me through the whole breaking world went still at the rim of the canyon above, and did not descend. Not fled. Still. As though they had arrived somewhere and needed no further guidance.

I went down to see.

They stood in the canyon below - two figures - and the light around them was not lamplight and not firelight and not the cold blue of spirits I had learned to read. It was the light of something that is correct in a way fire is not. It did not touch me. I could not approach the radius of it.

I understood then what I was. I had known before, the way one knows the shape of one’s own teeth with the tongue: approximate, interior, unconfirmed. But here was the confirmation. Here was what holiness does in the presence of its opposite. There is no judgment in a stone that repels water. The stone does not think about the water. And yet the water stops.

I stopped.

I did not call to them. I did not say: what are you, what is your name, what is it that I cannot be near. I turned and I went back the way I had come, and I kept going, and I did not return.

I do not know if they saw me.

That is the thing I have carried - not the light, not the burning at the edge of my awareness where the radius ended, not even the strange obedient stillness of my dead at the rim above. The not-knowing whether the inverse was true. Whether I saw them and they also saw me. Whether somewhere in the world two men of light remember a shadow that appeared at the canyon’s edge and left without speaking.

Five centuries. The dead at every stop since have spoken to me freely. None of them have explained it. Perhaps they cannot. Perhaps what I saw is simply outside the archive of the dead - a thing that does not die and therefore cannot be retrieved.

The bone and the shadow of it, alma. The name and the silence after.

I have not spoken their names.

I did not return.