NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
We are standing behind Diddlie’s carport admiring the spring growth of her holly hedge with a willow oak sapling growing through it. A flock of sparrows fly into the density of the hedge as if they had ample space to maneuver. Disappearing like magic among the holly’s spiky leaves, shiny with highlights as bright in the sun as bare metal. Their defense against the red tail hawk circling slowly, seemingly nearer the clouds to the west than the ground where we stand.
“How do you like my green wall?”
“Hides Trip’s place pretty well.”
“That’s the idea!”
“You have some wisteria in there and greenbrier, I see.”
“So long it is leafy, it is okay with me!”
“A lot of seeding grass, and buttercups, and dandelions over there.”
“Yes, I’ve got a couple of nice ‘worts’ too.”
“What are those?”
“Wort is derived from ‘wyrt’. It’s old English you know.”
“I had no idea!”
“It meant a healing herb, or root, as opposed to weeds.”
“See, golden ragwort and over there, purple spiderwort, with yellow centers.”
“Quite a palette of colors!”
“You can barely see Trip’s place now.”
“The top of his house is going to be hard to block.”
“If we keep getting this much rain, it will only be a few years before those two post oaks are high enough to keep the top of Trip house out of sight until fall.”
“Maybe he will sell the thing?”
“Well, Fred, did you hear Chuck Newsom is selling his mansion?”
“What?”
“Yup, he’s broke. It is in the Wall Street Journal. ‘US Investor broken by sanctions.”
“Oh! you mean those against Russia?”
“What else?”
“We have sanctions against, Iran, and North Korea to mention only two others.
“Oh right, for years!”
“So, what do they achieve?”
“Search me!”
“They seem to be a way of doing something newsworthy without accomplishing anything but a privation.”
“News fodder!”
“Anyway, I thought Chuck had bailed out of all that oligarch stuff.”
“That was the word on the street.”
“I guess he still had ‘strings attached.”
“He has hired Sherman Shroud’s firm to get him out of trouble.”
“I wonder what he will use to pay Shroud?”
“Shroud got Boyd Nightingale off, you know.”
“Wasn’t that pro bono?”
“That was not on Back Stairs.”
“I didn’t know you read the Wall Street Journal!”
“Well, I found the article linked on ‘Back Stairs’.
“I don’t do much social media.”
“You know, that’s where I learned about Theo’s COVID.”
“I am sure there’s some useful info.”
“You need to catch up, Fred on our neighborhood gossip and news!”
Diddlie slaps both thighs.
“OH! I forgot to let Mr. Liddell out!”
Diddlie rushes back into the carport and brings out a chicken wire run, to enclose him on the long grass. She then carries the rabbit out from his hutch in the carport and puts him in through an opening in the top.
“This is good fresh spring grass and buttercups.”
She goes back towards the carport.
“Diddlie, Mr. Liddell has escaped, look! He was gone before I could take two steps.”
Diddlie is bending over with her back turned.
“OH, not again!”
She turns around carrying a heavy stone in both hands.
“Where did you last see him?”
She drops the stone.
“Over by that stump.”
She folds her arm in mine. We walk over to the spot where he entered. She has to let go of my arm. Bending over, and stepping across the crumbling stump, in single file, we find him.
Looking back, way ahead, in a tunnel through the thicket.
“This is going to be a creepy wild goose chase, Fred.”
“Yeah, a tame rabbit chase.”
She squeezes my arm.
“Stuff happens in here.”
“You mean you have followed him in here before?”
“Yes, after that, Lou built me the portable run.”
“It is so light Mr. Liddell found a way to crawl out from under!”
“Well, he built it so I could put a heavy stone at each end, but I should have done that first.”
“I think the vegetation underneath held it off the ground.”
Diddlie scans the thicket.
“Which way did he go?”
We have reached a point where the path forks in two directions humans might take and at least three others that rabbits could squeeze through.
“I feel as if we must be in the “Cyber Anthropic Interface”.
“No Fred, this is more like Sofonisba’s territory.”
“And her friend Osiris?”
“Well, Osiris doesn’t have a male god’s name for nothing!”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“It’s a gender thing, you know, LGBTQ.”
“So, what is her real name?”
“I heard she was Christened, ‘Mihaela’ but never took to it.”
“Don’t tell me that was on Back Stairs.”
“It wasn’t, I can’t remember where I got it.”
Diddlie lets go of my arm and leads me to the left fork, which is narrow but high enough to walk. We put up with frequent slaps from prickly holly, dead twigs, and a strange soft stalk that leaves a sticky deposit on my sleeve.
“Here! Look at that!”
“Fred! Don’t let it get on your skin!”
“What, is it poison?”
“No, you won’t breakout. I heard stories about a young girl in here who shrank to the size of a mouse from stuff like that.”
“Oh, that was years ago, in England!”
“That was the first instance, something she drank. There have been a few other cases over here since.
Diddlie stops again.
We face a path descending straight ahead and looking more like a tunnel into the ground. Water drips onto the path from the top. I step toward it to get a closer look and slip but don’t fall.
“Fred, don’t go down there.”
“No, we’d soon lose our footing!”
“Down there, is the way inside.”
“Yes, there is a distinct slope, and it is dark.”
“You can get stuck in the deep past that way.”
“What do you mean, the stone age?”
“No, I mean regression into your childhood.”
She points out a path curving to the left with walls of bamboo where the light is defused by the leaves above.
We notice a third path more sharply to the left which looks like a continuation of the one we are on, with some more sticky weeds drooping from the walls. She looks each way carefully examining the thick bundles of stems, interweaving as they go up.
“I think that is the way of belief.”
“What do you mean the ‘way of belief’?
“I have never been there, but I promise you it is way too confusing for us.”
“Oh, in what way?”
“Truth, doubt, and belief, I mean that stuff grows into a maze.”
“Philosophically you mean.”
“When a human comes in here Philosophy, metaphor, and all that stuff grows on all sides.”
“And what about the path we are on?
“Yes, we have been on the way to the future.”
“Aren’t we always on that?”
“Well, in here the present and future merge and make it hard to say where you are.”
“Some of us live in the past!”
“The past was back there. You probably missed it.”
“Why?”
“Because you weren’t looking for it.”
“I don’t know what to look for!”
“Right, a lot depends on where you’re standing.”
“No, I mean was it, holly or bamboo or earth or what?”
“For me, it was all those dead metaphors.”
“But that was impenetrable.”
“The past often is!”
“Yes, it is a matter of recall, of course.”
“Oh wow! look! more dead metaphors!”
“Where?”
She points back towards a bend in the thicket.
“Looks like green briar to me.”
“Yeah, it has been literalized!”
“You mean dead like, ‘door nails’?”
“More like fingernails.”
“What?”
“Small metal spikes!”
“This is too far in the past for me.”
“Let’s not go there!”
“Well, somebody called the past, ‘a foreign country’.”
“Yeah, I saw that movie, back in the seventies, with Julie Christie, Alan Bates and I forget who else.”
“We are getting into the past again.”
“See all those shriveled metaphors, with no poetic resonance!”
“Did. I don’t see them, but I am thinking of my old friend, Hartley. I forget his first name.”
Diddlie points out two white ears protruding above the gentle slope of the downward path.
“That must be him!”
“Is Mr. Liddle waiting for us down there?”
“It must be your old friend.”
“Wait a minute. With rabbit ears?”
“No, I presume Hartley was a person.”
“Why should he be in here?”
“Because you brought him.”
“Well, he came to mind, you know.”
“Right, see that mud on your shoes. It may be pulling you.”
“You mean that’s why Hartley, whom I had forgotten, came to mind?”
“We can’t be sure, but that is how you get drawn back.”
“Well, come on, let’s stay on the path we were on. I am going to concentrate on the here and now, wherever that is in this labyrinth.”
“I don’t know. Mr. Liddell moves through all these paths and others I haven’t even found.”
“It seems to be thinning out.”
We can hear the flock of sparrows up in the holly.
“Are you a regular in all this?”
“We all are!”
