The Lowest Heaven

AIR, WATER AND THE GROVE ^{KAARON WARREN}

We’ve got food for seven days. Water for 12. Because sometimes the Saturnalia doesn’t end when it should. It’s hard for people to settle, after. Mid slash, mid fuck, mid theft. Do you just stop, then carry on with your suburban life? Leave things half done? Most people prefer to see it through. Take the extra hour or two. Chase away the doldrums for a bit longer.

We’ve stocked up on hydrogen peroxide and oxalic acid. There are going to be a lot of blood stains and they’ll be coming in after with their bundles of clothes, “Oh, I had an accident,” is a good one. Or “I was helping an injured person”, is another, not one of them wanting to admit what they’ve been a part of.

Seven days where nobody works. Nothing is open. There are no arrests, although crime occurs, it does, I’ve had friends murdered. I’ve lost worldly possessions. But you’re not going to be arrested, not during Saturnalia.

We’ll be called out to deal with carpets and mattresses. We’ve stocked up on pepsin powder for those, and we’ll charge for travel. It’s a good business, stain removal. Especially after Saturnalia. I hate having to go into people’s homes, though. Other homes are dirty and they reek and I don’t feel safe there. You never know what people will do, what they consider normal, in their own homes. I’ve had clients stand naked watching me. I’ve had food offered that I wouldn’t feed a dog or a goat. I always need a shower after being in a stranger’s home.

Though people are mostly dull these days. They care less than they used to. They’re tired and old. I know I feel older.

We’ve stocked up on sodium percarbonate. That’s good for chocolate stains and there will be plenty of those. People think they are original, as if they’re the only ones to cover themselves in the stuff. I say, “Seen it before. Seen it plenty.”

I’m lining up my stocks, counting the bottles, when my son says, “I’m not staying home this year.” He’s 21 and perhaps I can’t keep him safe anymore. “This year, I’m going to be a part of it. I’ll help you with the clothes when I get back.”

“You should stay at home.” I try not to cry. I don’t want to make him feel guilty. That is never a good reason to do anything. “We can watch it on TV.”

“I want to be the one on TV. Can’t I be happy, for a little while?”

“Don’t go,” I say. “I’ll make you a steak dinner tonight. And tomorrow night a chicken dinner. I’ll cook you your favourite food every night for a month.” He nods, and he eats two steak dinners, but when I check his room at midnight he is gone.

He’s slow, though, and loud, so I hear him stumbling to the front door, kicking the umbrella stand as he does every single time, and knocking the Saturn Tree we keep high, under a light, as he does every time as well.

What can I do? Tie him down? Join him to commit our own saturnalian acts, in our own home?

Maybe it is time to let him free.

He fumbles with the door locks, as he always does, forgetting which turns which way, and how many turns, and whether or not he’s already turned one or the other. He looks almost like a shadow in the dark, not a real person at all.

I don’t say, “This is why you have to stay home,” because it’s my fault he’s that way.

I’m the one who did it to him.

It’s been 23 years since the return of the Tarvos. Can you call it a return, if the ship never made it back whole? I was only four when it set out amidst a wild fanfare, because they like to make a fuss, don’t they? The rocket scientists. As if they are the ones who’ll save us all. They’re still like it, years on. Discovering new planets. “Earth-like’”ones, and you find out it’s all bullshit. You know? What they mean is Earth ten million years ago when the only things here were crawly little worms or something.

Speaking of which, there will be dirt to get out. Some of them get buried, up their necks. They showed it on the TV last year. Being used as a toilet, one of them. If those clothes had come in, I would have burnt them and paid the difference.

I was nine by the time the Tarvos reached Saturn. Those pictures of the swirling north pole made me dizzy, that’s mostly what I remember.

Most people were more interested in watching it suck in samples of the icy particles orbiting the planet.

We’ve stocked up on bottles of filtered water. The drycleaners’ greatest trick is that air and water are the best cleaners, at the end of the day. We can charge what we like, but our basics costs can be minimal.

I was 14 when the Tarvos returned; I remember that clearly. All the adults so excited by the return of the thing, the rest of us not caring all that much. Happy that they were distracted so they’d leave us alone, and we could party. Skip school without anyone noticing.

But we were all out there, watching the sky for a glimpse, when it blew up.

They calculated wrong, or something. Didn’t think the ice would be as heavy as it was. It’s all about the micro millimetres, isn’t it? And they get it wrong.

We’ve stocked up on methylated spirits, and we’ve got plenty of clean absorbent paper. Candle wax stains are always a problem. People get carried away, and there’s spillage. There are fires, too, but that’s not up to us. Other people manage that. Or don’t.

They love the fireworks, don’t they? And the fires, they don’t care about safety or property. They’ll set things on fire purposely, to see them burn. In the shade of the Saturn Trees, all of it seems to make sense. Is it because of the Tarvos? How it burned on entry, exploded in the night sky like fireworks?

Six crew onboard (and the ones with children mattered more, according to the media), all of them now with streets named after them. Suburbs.

It felt like rain but the drops were solid and stayed heavy on your skin if you left it. I wiped all the drops off but some clung to my hair, and my ears, and in my eyebrows.

People dragged their children inside, because there were parts raining down as well. There were deaths, though not in our neighbourhood. I heard one girl my age was pierced through the heart by a shard of metal.

Workers in Bangkok offices, Singapore noodle houses, sheep farms. Miners dredging gold and oil and zinc. All of them went out and stood in it. Most of them felt it.

The ice particles, melted. The pieces of ship. The other pieces. Those poor astronauts.

The astrologers told us they predicted it. That this was bound to happen, it was fate. Saturn was in the eighth house and that meant horrible death.

“For who?” people like my dad asked. “What, all of us?”

“Prepare for the grave,” the astrologers said.

Wasn’t long before many of us wished we’d been one of those early ones. Knocked down flat by debris. Gone in a flash.

We all feel the melancholy. The taller the trees grow, the more the melancholy sinks into us.

We’re all whirled up into Saturn’s dark heart now.

The ice, the ship, the others. All of this rained upon us.

The ancient alchemists, were partly right; for them, Saturn designated lead. They believed the planet was made of lead. And these water droplets, when they were tested?

Traces of lead. Surprised them all, the so-called smart ones. They hadn’t thought that.

Once the particles touched ground, they crystallised. It was beautiful to watch; we all thought so. Especially once they started to grow.

In the forests. In backyards. In bowls set as centrepieces. On roofs and walls, on the heads of statues, in footpath-cracks and sewers.

So many crystal trees.

Each of them growing up, up, towards Saturn.

My father worried that the magnetism would shift the earth off its axis, but he didn’t finish school. I told him lead isn’t magnetic.

It looks like silver, he said. He was one of many who broke pieces off, grew more trees.

Share the wealth, he said. The beautiful crystals shouldn’t only be for the rich, he said, and they weren’t.

The richest people in the world used to be the ones who owned the land that provided the metal. People like me didn’t get a look in. But now we all have own trees; they grow anywhere.

Air quality testing showed that the Saturn Trees were not only beautiful, but healthful; they attracted lead particles, literally sucking lead out of the atmosphere.

Places whose high lead content led to birth defects and early death grew more and more of them. We all did. All you needed was a small piece. Every home soon filled with the air-purifying trees. Every school. Every hospital.

Some trees grew tall as houses.

Some trees grew fat.

The trees were so beautiful you wanted to watch them all the time, and people did.

It seemed the trees absorbed light as well as lead because the world seemed duller, anywhere the trees grew.

They bore no fruit.

Not at first.

Saturn is time. Saturn is the Bringer of Age. Saturn is the bringer of melancholy and dismay. We didn’t notice the effect; the tiredness, the melancholy. The graveness.

We didn’t notice.

Not at first.

I scoop up the shards my son’s clumsiness knocked off and drop them onto the upper branches of our Saturn Tree. If I had the patience I could sit and watch them being absorbed. It’s hypnotic. It would distract me from thinking of him, out there amongst it. There are no good people this week. No one who will look after him, bring him home to me.

I wasn’t allowed out during the first Saturnalia. I stayed at home, listened to the dogs howl. By the time I was 16, though, they were mandatory and I was out amongst it. Blind drunk most of the time. Those crystals! And no regret the next day because who remembered anything? It’s why we don’t know who his dad is. Could be one of many. I don’t blame any of them. I don’t feel used by any of them. It’s how it was, it how it still is.

I don’t like having methylated spirits in the house. The alcohol smell of it takes me back. I’ve not touched a drink since the day he was born and we knew. We could see what he was. So many of them like that; damaged by the booze we’d drunk during Saturnalia and beyond. We didn’t know. We didn’t think. All we knew was that the crystals, dissolved in alcohol, provided an almost instant high and somehow negated the hangovers. Sparkle, we called it. They still call it. I spent a month in a state of numb euphoria; I didn’t care when Saturnalia started or finished.

He came out smelling of booze. I swear it. Not that sweet baby smell they are supposed to have. And his tiny eyes, his flattened cheekbones.

“We’re seeing a lot of these,” they told me gravely at the time, as if that made it better. Holding that tiny baby, his tiny head, and they say no one was to blame. Because no one wanted the Saturnalias stopped; they still don’t.

My son; what worries me most is what happens when I die. But I probably won’t die before him. He’s clumsy, so accident prone. His liver is shit and he’s impulsive. I can’t see him lasting too long. If he survives this Saturnalia, out there with the lunatics (not lunatics though. We’re not talking about the moon. The Saturnine) then perhaps he’ll be safe for another year.

He should be safe, and return to me and our quiet, clean life. He can help me move some heavy furniture around. It’s a good time for change, after Saturnalia. Good time to pretend things are different.

If he comes home in time he can eat with me, but I don’t mind eating alone. It’s a quick clean up. No spillage.

We are in the Saturnian days, my father used to say. He liked to quote from things he didn’t understand. “The days of dullness, when everything is venal,” he’d say, nodding as if we should know what he was talking about.

I feel dull. We all feel dull, but they numb that with alcohol. Drugs. Sparkle. With sex and dancing, throwing themselves to the ground in a passion they do not feel. These times are when Saturn is unbound. When we are all so grave on the inside if you cut us we’d bleed tears.

My father always did call me fanciful. I used to talk about Saturn, bound with woollen strips beneath Rome to stop him leaving, unbound only during Saturnalia. I think he is with us now, unbound because we worship him with our dullness, our melancholy.

Satin stains badly and is difficult to clean. I can do it, though, if you give me the time, some cool water and some delicate soap.

I hope my son comes home unbloodied.

I hope he kills no one.

He is back. He leaps and jumps about like a frog in a box; I’ve never seen him energised before. His clothing is in disarray, stained, his hair is shaved on one side, his face cut, his chin dark, his arms bruised, his legs bleeding. He talks without taking a breather for an hour or more, while I clean his cuts, feed him and give him tall, cold, sugary drinks. I sponge the stains with cool salted water, then rinse a dozen times with clean water. The rest I remove with hydrogen peroxide.

Dark days follow. After the excitement fades and the ordinary returns, the melancholy seems more intense. As if Saturn is angry that the revels have ended, and is exerting his power, laying his lead-weight against us. Some communities leave up the banners and bright ribbons, but they fade with the sun and became sadder than anything. I could wash them in vinegar but that wouldn’t be enough.

I try to help my son. I put him to work, because work distracts, and I need him to keep up. We took in more purple stains than usual; he told me they were passing around a grape drink that tasted like medicine but that numbed the entire body. I tried to find this drink, to give him a taste, cheer him up but there were no supplies in town.

He carries a tiny Saturn’s Tree with him everywhere, carefully, as if it was a full cup of tea.

Then a customer tells him about the grove.

“The greatest Saturn Trees you’ll ever see!” she says. “And you walk in amongst them and can feel your blood racing, your heart so solid and strong, and you smile, and you should hear the laughter in there. Strangers all together as one. It’s beautiful.”

I think of our own Saturn Tree, how even standing next to it makes my mouth droop, and my eyelids heavy.

“That doesn’t sound right,” I say. The customer laughs.

“It’s not really for people like you.” She actually winks at my son, and he winks back, as if he knows what she is talking about.

He leaves with her. I tell her that he needs help and she laughs at me again, as if I am making things up, have invented all the hours I spent cleaning him up, trying to teach him.

He isn’t gone long. He comes back quiet, but he seems happier.

“It’s so beautiful there. The sky looks bluer than it does here. But she was wrong, that woman. It is for people like you. It’s for everyone. Next time, can you take me?”

“Maybe,” I say, the universal, eternally polite parental No.

Ninety-seven customers later, he goes out and doesn’t return. I know where he’s gone; I only wonder how he travelled. I call him. He says, “Come and see, Mum. You’ll love it, you really will. I’ll meet you at the entrance.”

He sounds so bright I wonder if something has changed within him.

I set some clothes to spin and close the shop.

The streets are quiet with the Saturnalia well over. There is a low hum, a low moaning, I think, but I see that people are humming and I realise it is music.

I drive to Saturn’s Grove. The sign is cracked, tired-looking; the “o” lookes like an “a”.

From the moment I enter, I am filled with a sense of my own worthlessness. Pointlessness. I am uninteresting. Unlovable. I think the customer was right; this place is not for me.

There are hundreds of metallic trees, growing as tall as redwoods, wide as sequoias. I can barely see the top of them.

I find my son, his arms stretched around the base of one of them.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he says. He’s never cared about anything before, beyond food. He reaches his hands up to swing on one shining branch. He winces, pulls away, and I see that his skin has reddened.

At the base of many of the trees are clothes. Perfectly good, most of them.

“What are these?” I say, smiling. I think He brought me here, to collect the clothes. It is kind of him, bringing me here.

“People don’t want them any more,” my son says. So I start to gather them up, to take home and clean. At least washing clothes gives me a kind of purpose. I feel giddy if I look up, so I look mostly at the clothes on the ground.

“We’ll be able to get most of these stains out easily,” I say. He was right; I do feel delighted now. Excited.

He doesn’t answer. I thought he was behind me but no.

He has stripped naked and is already three metres up a tree. I haven’t seen him naked since he was 14 and insisted that he could wash himself. “This is the one. This is my tree.”

I look up. “It’s very high.”

With my head tilted back, I can see that many of the trees have do have flowers at the top. Some are bulbous. Some brightly coloured.

“I thought they didn’t flower?”

“That’s the others. That’s each one who’s climbed. As the tree grows, they reach closer to Saturn.”

He drags himself up further.

“Don’t go any higher,” I say. I fall to my knees. I don’t want him up there. “I’ll make you any meal you like, just name it. And you don’t have to clean the clothes if you don’t want to. We’ll find you something else. And we’ll find you someone nice to be with and don’t forget Saturnalia, how much you loved it! Only another ten months and there’s another!”

But he climbs up. I watch him and want to follow him, but even the feel of the tree under my palm makes me sick. I sit at the base, waiting for him to come back down again. I can hear him crying.

“Son! Come down! You don’t need to feel pain!”

“It’s not painful,” he calls, but his voice is shaky, withered. “I’ll be down soon. Wait there.”

I have to trust that he will return. I sort the clothes I’ve collected by material and colour. People watch, asking questions. Distracting me. Until one woman says, “Do you need a hand to get all those things home?”

“I’m waiting for my son. He’s climbing up. He’ll come down soon.”

The woman shakes her head. “Look,” she says. She leads me through the trees.

Some have tiny thin trails of blood to the ground, crystallised. “Every last one of them climbed like he did,” she says. “Step by step as if there was no other way. This one’s my daughter’s tree.” She stands and puts her hand near a tree that dwarfs many around it. She doesn’t touch it.

My son has become one of them.

There are others, lost like me, gazing up and weeping. The woman says to me, “The only certainties in life are air, water and the grave. Saturn’s sons, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. The only ones he didn’t kill. That’s all that’s real anymore.”

“I’m going to get my son down.”

I don’t want to go up. The thought of it makes me want to cry and never stop.

But my son is up there and I want to bring him down.

Each step is like climbing on sharpened knives. Blood pouring

I don’t have the strength. I can’t do it.

“He won’t come down anyway. There’s nothing you can do. Once he’s climbed all the way up, it’s too late,” the woman calls. She tugs at my ankles.

As if to demonstrate, one bright green bead of liquid drips down past my face.

Do I love him enough to die trying to get to him? I climb for another hour, making no progress, slipping backwards, dragging the skin from my arms and hands, from my cheek. Then I’m stuck. I can’t move up and down. Frozen.

“Stretch your fingers. Spread them. Let go. We’ll catch you,” they call from below, and I do, and they do.

“It’s too late. He’s so deep now, you’ll never get him out, even if you get him down. They climb up there to die; at least it’s a choice. No one has come back down again, not alive.” My new friend shakes, rolls her shoulders. “I come back every now and then to take a piece of my daughter’s tree,” she says. “She’s happier now her suffering has ended.”

“What about us? What about our suffering?”

She lifts her arms. Smiles. The rest of her is shivering; only her lips are still. She reaches into her bag and offers me a small bottle of vodka. It sparkles. I shake my head at her; not that.

I cry then. I’ve always known I’ll lose him, but I didn’t know he’d choose to go. I cry, leaning against his tree, until I realise my tears re being drawn in. Absorbed.

I break a piece of his tree off to bury it. It is stained slightly with his fluids.

I make his grave in a tiny, tiny pot next to my other Saturn’s Tree. It will grow if I look after it. Feed it. Water it. It may fruit one day, as do the trees in the grove. We watch them grow, the other grievers and I. I say to them, “Whoever said these trees don’t flower? There are our children up there, fruiting.” Sometimes one drops and shatters, looking like an arum lily, the corpse kind. Surrounded by crystals worth a lot of money, and I wonder if people will use them, if it will come to that, and what they’d call the drink. A friend brings me some Sparkle, and another does too, and once I remember how good it is, and forget all the rest, things are better.

I re-open my shop when I run out of clothes to clean. My job is so instinctive I can do it Sparkled or not.

Air, water, the grave.

And Sparkle.