The Cosmology of the Wider World Read online

  “Get rid of them, mother. I’ve had enough,” he said.

  “A few more hours, Belius.”

  With this, he reached up and ripped off his tie, flinging it to the floor.

  “Please be calm,” she said.

  He settled down when he saw the look of embarrassment in his mother’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting back in his seat. It was too late, though. They’d heard him speak and seen that he was angry. Women and children were ushered out with great haste. The men looked over their shoulders with contempt but could barely restrain themselves from running.

  The night of the wake, after hammering the lid on the coffin and carrying it into the living room, Belius left his mother sitting at the kitchen table and went outside to the barn. He opened the big doors and stepped inside. Although the neighbors had dragged away the carcass and buried it, the smell of the dead bull still hung in the air. It sent a shiver through his human flank and raised the hackles behind his ears. He walked slowly down the center aisle, reliving in his mind the battle that seemed as if it had taken place only minutes before. The fit of dizziness finally passed, and he opened the stalls that held the two cows. They pushed back against the wall in fear.

  “Out with you both,” he bellowed, thinking that it was necessary to scream when dealing with animals. When they would not budge, he lifted his hoof in the air and reenacted the crushing blow he had dealt the bull. This signal was all that was needed to spur them to action. They left their cubicles and brushed quickly by him, mooing messages of fright to each other. Once out beneath the moon, they calmed down, slowing from a trot to a lazy amble. They led Belius to their usual grazing area between the corn field and the boundary of the woods. The night was unusually warm for autumn. A pleasant breeze blew dead leaves out of the nearby stands of trees and into the pasture. The stars were everywhere in the sky, leaving so little to darkness. After wandering around the field for a little while, the cows found a previously undiscovered thatch of clover and settled down to munching. Belius took off his jacket and sat, crossing human over beastly leg.

  “First,” he told himself, “I must find out whatever else has been kept secret from me. Then, as soon as father is buried, I must begin preparing the farm for winter. When the chores are caught up on, I will then show myself in town, take the abuse that is coming to me for being different and make them so used to the sight of me that I can come and go as I need to get groceries and supplies. I must be a friend to my mother and not punish her for trying to shelter me from my own horrible self. Last, I will learn how to read and write and cipher so that because I resemble an animal, no man or woman can say that I’m stupid.”

  “But face it, you’re a freak,” said a voice, drawing Belius’ attention from his plans. He looked up in astonishment to see that the cows had sidled up closer to him. Instantly, he remembered the words of the dying bull. Before speaking, he shot a glance over his shoulder, making sure there was no one else there.

  “Did you speak to me?” he asked.

  “Do you see any other freaks around?” said the cow, standing directly in front of him. “Plension, here, is all cow, as am I. You are the only halfling present.”

  “How is it possible?” said Belius.

  “Just listen to yourself,” said the cow. “Say your name and listen.”

  “Belius,” said the minotaur, but heard nothing strange in the pronunciation.

  “Again,” said the cow.

  “Belius, Belius, Belius …” He said his own name twenty times, listening with horror as the sound of it melted from human language into a prolonged animal bleating. Though he could hear the change in it, he still understood the word to be his name.

  “You see, you’re a monster for sure. There is enough human in you to murder and still enough bull in you to understand the language of your victim. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such a thing. Have you, Plension?”

  “Most certainly not,” answered the other cow. “I wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “What do you mean by monster?” asked Belius.

  “Calm yourself, I’m only trying to help you. You’re partially one of us, remember?”

  “No I’m not,” he said weakly.

  “I won’t even answer to that foolishness while I’m standing here conversing with you,” said the cow.

  “How do you think you’re helping me?” he asked.

  “I want you to understand a very important thing that your parents failed to mention to you. Perhaps you’re already beginning to see it for yourself?”

  “You mean that I won’t be accepted by people?”

  “Precisely.”

  “I may be part something else, but I’m also part human, and I have devised a plan for myself.”

  “Did you hear that, Plension? He has a plan.”

  For the first time ever, Belius heard a cow laugh.

  “Do you remember the bull you killed?”

  Belius nodded.

  “He also had a plan. He was going to escape, because he couldn’t stand living in the shadows anymore. It’s alright to live in the dark if you have never seen the sunlight, but, without sunlight, after a while, the eyes dim, the coat loses its sheen, the muscles ache for warmth and the mind goes mushy. We don’t like the dark either, but we’ve learned to adjust a little better. Now if you were to make us go out into the sunlight, we’d probably go crazy. Is that true, Plension?”

  “Stark raving mad,” said the other cow.

  “The bull I killed was trying to get back to the light. That’s what it said before it died.”

  “Yes, you smashed our husband’s head pretty handily and that was the end of all his plans. Take it as a lesson.”

  “It was my fault the bull was kept in the barn all day,” said Belius. “It was my fault that he had to try to escape, that he killed my father.”

  “One could say,” lowed Plension, taking the initiative for the first time.

  “Do you hate me?” Belius asked.

  “We hate the world that men have made. There’s no obvious good in the species. Wouldn’t you know they’d be the ones to run things.”

  Belius shook his head, realizing that perhaps the cow was right. The society that would be from that day forward his ‘yes’ and ‘no’ was comprised of frightened, dangerous creatures. “What’s the use?” he asked.

  “Just like a two legger,” said Plension, moving closer. Her spots, like her sister’s, seemed continents of black in a milky ocean. Her face was more gentle but her disposition more severe. “Everything has to be either one way or the other. If things don’t go well, then one might as well give up. There’s a way, Belius. There’s a place you could go to and not be lost as you are here.”

  “Shhh!” cautioned the other cow.

  “Now, Austina, we might as well tell him.”

  “Tell me. What place is this?”

  Plension pounded the earth with her right front hoof, deciding how best to explain. She looked to Austina for help. Austina dipped her massive head and said, “Pay attention, Belius. I’m only going to tell you about this once. You’re a halfling, so it isn’t exactly treason, but if the pond toads find out we told, or the field mice catch wind of this, we’ll never hear the end of it. There’s a place that can be gotten to, where, unlike here in the lesser world of men, every creature accepts every other creature. The fox converses with the quail, the condor with the spider, the whale with the wild dog. Language is used there to communicate. It’s the Wider World. I can tell you how to get there. It’s right next door to here, right over there, right under this field, just at the top of that tree. If I were you, I’d pack up and go. Don’t look back.” When she finished, both cows looked around to see if anything were crawling or creeping or flying close by.

  “I’ve never heard of such a place,” said Belius.

  Both cows laughed.

  “If it’s so wonderful, then why haven’t you two gone there?” he asked.

  “We’re old now and set in ou
r ways,” said Austina. “We haven’t the strength.”

  “What about my mother?” asked Belius. “She’s sitting right now in the kitchen, crying. I can’t leave her. Who’ll run the farm?”

  “Do as you like, Belius, but when you’ve been beaten and ridiculed to the point where you’d gladly trade places with your father, don’t say we didn’t try to help you. That’s all the talking that Plension and I will do for tonight. There’s still some healthy thistle that the frost hasn’t yet bitten.” Austina turned her huge body and, with a swish of her tail, walked off to another part of the field.

  “Where’s this place?” Belius asked Plension. “How do I get to the Wider World?”

  The cow slowly closed her eyes, shook her head and made the eerie noise that in years gone by would have made Belius duck for cover.

  “Tell me,” he demanded, but she moved off to join her sister. The confusion caused by what they’d told him created an unbearable pressure inside Belius’ skull. He knew that it demanded release or that his head would pop like a bubble on the surface of the pond. Having cried on and off for the past forty-eight hours, his tear ducts were barren, so instead the building spirit of destruction escaped in a bellowing laugh.

  “The Wider World,” he managed to say amidst fits of hysteria. The jostling his ribs took made them ache. Clasping his arms tightly around his middle, he rolled from the sitting position onto his side, drawing his legs up toward his chest and his snout down toward his knees.

  After his madness had diminished to giggles and then to silence, he lay there in the field, listening to pine cones dropping to the ground in the nearby woods. In the distance, he heard the storm door of the kitchen open. His mother’s voice came drifting out over the pasture.

  “Belius, Belius,” she called.

  “Yes, mother,” he shouted from his place on the ground.

  “What was that terrible noise? It sounded as if one of the cows was dying. Is everything alright?”

  “Yes,” he called back. The sound of the storm door closing came to him where he lay, and then the darkness moved in around him. In sleep, his plans came back to him disguised in the mask of perfection. That night he began the habit of snoring and the sonic force that rolled from his snout uprooted the willow tree and made the neighbors a mile off think a storm was on the way.

  Belius woke suddenly, a few hours before daybreak. Seeing as he hadn’t moved his position through the entire night, straightening his body out to its full length was a grim task. When finally he had loosened his knees with continued rubbing from his forearms, he crunched them a few times as a test and then stood up. He looked around to see if the cows were still nearby, but they’d returned to the warmth of their stalls.

  On his way back to the house, he noticed that the willow tree had been knocked over during the night. At first the sight saddened and puzzled him, but when he remembered that his father was to be buried that day and that he was responsible for digging the grave, he saw the gaping hole as an omen of good fortune.

  He found his mother still sitting in the kitchen, asleep, her head resting upon the table. With one burly arm, he lifted her bodily and carried her to the couch in the parlor, where he threw a blanket over her and tucked the edges in around her chin and shoulders. He sat next to her for a time, remembering his conversation with the two cows. Nothing he had ever learned while working the fields or wandering in the woods had prepared him for the events of the past few days.

  Without thinking, he lifted his father’s pipe from where it sat on the end table next to his chair. He stoked the bowl from the open tin that lay next to it. Lifting the matches, he struggled to light one. His first draw made him light headed. His second made him sick. Before he could worry about the nausea, though, his eyes fixed on the serpentine trail of smoke as it grew like a vine toward the ceiling. The shifting patterns that it drew in the half-light of dawn set his imagination in gear, and he began to think about what the Wider World must be like.

  Doctor Grey, the physician who had delivered Belius, was the only person who attended the burial. He was a man who liked to see all projects through to their completion. Since he had delivered Belius’ father many years before, in the time when his face was smooth and his hands trembled from uncertainty rather than alcohol, he felt it his duty to be present at the ceremony. In his gruff voice, he read a passage from the Bible—the first three or so pages of Genesis. The reading had no closure, it just sort of trailed off and ended when he felt as if he had given God his due.

  Belius’ mother leaned against the minotaur’s sturdy side, weeping into the rumpled cloth of his only suit. The day was cold and clear in a show of arrogance toward their grief. Then the doctor cleared his throat, signaling that it was time to lower the coffin. Belius tilted his mother to a standing position and stepped forward. He wrapped his arms around the coffin, his hooves meeting beneath it with a distinct click. With no more than a sigh, he lifted the box, walked over to the pit and cautiously lowered it down. He leaned as far forward as he could without falling in, but it was still four feet from the bottom. “Good-bye,” he said to the wooden lid that pressed against his snout and then opened his arms and let the weight drop with a thud. Doctor Grey led his mother back to the house.

  Instead of simply filling the grave in with dirt, he propped the willow, which lay nearby, back to an upright posture and filled in around it with dirt.

  By the time Belius had returned to the house, the doctor had given his mother a sedative and put her to bed. With flask in hand, the old man sat on the steps of the front porch, indulging in a quiet cry of his own.

  “Thank you for coming,” Belius said from a distance, not to let Grey think he was spying.

  “It’s my job,” said the doctor.

  “How’s my mother?”

  “She’ll be alright in a couple of days. I haven’t seen much of her in the past few years. Both her and your father shied away from us neighbors after she had you, but if she’s anything like her old self, I believe she’ll have the gumption to press on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know it won’t be easy. You’re old enough to understand that.”

  “I have plans.”

  “Good man. You have the farm to take care of now. Remember, be tolerant of others. I have never seen intolerance work as a successful cure for itself.”

  “I am going to start learning things. My father didn’t think I was capable of learning from books, just like he never thought I would be capable of farming. That doesn’t matter now, as I see it.”

  “You’ll do well if you can keep that attitude,” said the doctor, capping his flask and standing. “I’ve got to get on my way. There’s a girl that lives over the hill there who broke her arm last week. I have to pay a visit and see how it’s mending. Why don’t you walk me to my carriage, I’ve got something in there that might help you out.”

  The uneven pair strolled out to the road where the horse and rig stood tied to a fence post. Doctor Grey assessed Belius’ development out of the corner of his eye. He could hardly believe how strong and healthy such an aberration of nature had grown. The way the boy thrived was as much a miracle to the shriveled healer as was the peculiar birth.

  As they drew up next to the rig, the doctor turned to Belius and said, “I owe you something. I swore when you were born, you wouldn’t live as long as a week. But here you are, bigger than life. Now I must pay up.” He reached into the carriage and retrieved something from off the seat. “Here,” he said, handing Belius a book. “I picked this out for you from my library this morning. I want you to have it. Have your mother help you with it. It’ll keep you out of trouble for a good long time.”

  “Thank you,” said Belius, accepting the gift.

  “Tell me what you think of it when you learn to read,” Grey said and hoisted himself up into the seat of the carriage.

  “What’s the name of this book?” Belius asked.

  “Inferno,” said the doctor. Then liftin
g his whip, he lashed viciously at the horse’s rump and was on his way.

  Pezimote thought he was hurrying, but any creature that measures its life in centuries knows only a lumbering imitation of haste. The gnat that is born, lives out all its years and dies in a matter of forty-eight hours would never perceive the old reptile as having life, but would have passed him in a blur, noting only a large, oddly colored boulder.

  “Your gait is kin to a yawn, Pezimote,” Belius would tease on their walks along the violet beach.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” the tortoise would hiss in reply. “I’ll hurry to your funeral the day they bury you.”

  Pezimote had been sluggishly creeping about for more than two hundred years. Because of his marvelous age, he was considered by many to be a reliable historian. In reality, his memory was as riddled with holes as a dried honeycomb. This deficiency never prevented him from fabricating past events to please his friends and rankle his foes.

  He paddled slowly through the water, heading up the coast toward the spit of land that held Belius’ tower. The blue sun was rising out of the sea to the west and, just as Nosthemus, the sperm whale, had prophesied for him on the way home the previous night, it was going to be a clear, yellow day with crisscrossing channels of warm air and plenty of fizz.

  “Poor Belius,” he muttered as he went, taking a beak full of saltwater for his sympathy. “Such an inquisitive fellow—always wanting to know the ‘why’ of things and always returning, sadly, to himself.” He hoped that their trip to the ape would result in a cure for his friend’s suffering. His pity was truly felt, but before he had paddled over the next two waves, he let the minotaur slip from his thoughts. The warm water, the vanishing constellations, brought to mind instead the young female tortoise he had been sneaking around with lately in the early hours of the morning. Unlike Chelonia’s, her shell was free of barnacles, her skin almost smooth. She had wondrous orange eyes and flashy markings of red and gold. Counting the diamond shaped quadrants on her underside while swimming with her in the lagoon, he discovered that she was a hundred and fifty years his junior. Contrary to what the prowling night creatures of sea and forest were gossiping, though, he had not yet made love to her. The union was coming soon, he was certain, because he often dreamed of it during the day while catching up on his sleep. They had met one night in the mango grove, not far from the stand of palm trees that he and Chelonia called home. He had been restless in his sleep for the past decade and had gotten into the practice of waking a few hours before sunrise and wandering out in search of a snack. His vast experience had lulled his innocence, leaving him an insomniac. He was not one to moan and fret like Belius. Usually an abalone or a dozen oysters would quell his empty feeling and send him back home tired enough to sleep until dawn.