Walls

Inspired by this and other graphite drawings by Miles Johnston. The photo sparked in me the wonder of what it might be like to have a civilization at the bottom or the insides of this slumbering giant. How might you interpret the fortunes of this land? What would be the source of your pressures and desires? The story eventually had less to do with the sleeping, sunken subject than with the people who lived within her. But this is the image that stuck in my head. I hope it sinks within you too.

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Aged twelve, Ivy was standing, facing the sheer steep walls of the world, from which the water tumbled and the vegetation descended, and there, shaking amid the fog and the fire and the sharp sharp sharp cutting scent of the sandstone air, she shored herself up and shouted: “Above you are now, but one day, you will be below!”

She shouted at an angle to the walls, and her voice sprinted across their rolling undulations, off into the horizon, pumping and marching, proud as a parade, but tightening as the echo distanced itself. “You will be below! Be below! Below! below. low. ow. o. o. o.”

She didn’t know what she meant, exactly. How would the walls be below her? They were the walls! The great stolid, solid stalwarts of the world, shooting noise up to the sky and sending water, sustenance, and stone down. But she felt the sentiment welling up within her, and she knew that sentiment to be a strong sentiment. It was a real feeling, a grand one, as strong as the river snaking along where the ground met the walls. It was best to get out of her own way and just let it come to be.

She said it once and never again, for once Ivy said a thing, she knew it was never necessary to repeat it. She voiced a truth, the world had heard the truth, and all that remained was for her to midwife the truth into existence. It was easier for everyone considered once the future was clarified. There was no more doubt. Just the mechanics of manifestation.

In this case, though, it wasn’t only the world that listened. Her grandmama Lele Ma had brought her here for a day out. They began the afternoon climbing up to the bluff for a picnic, which Ivy had been pleased about—she liked alone time with her grandmama—but which she suspected was even more pleasing to Lele Ma than to her. They ate cassava, beetroot, and cheese wraps, while watching the waterfalls rain down before them.

While Ivy laid on the edge and watched the ants climbing up stalks of grass, Lele Ma sat down on the picnic cloth and began doing stretches. She got on hands and knees and arched her butt in the air. She laid down on one side and reached an arm up to the sky, as if she were reaching for the tips of the walls. She bent herself forward over her toes and twisted left and right. Every time she reached the apex of a stretch, Ivy could hear an orchestra of pops and cracks sound off, moist and firm.

Her grandmama was solid and strong, she realized. Solid like the walls. They also sometimes cracked and made noises. And they also curved in wavy forms. But neither the walls nor Lele Ma ever bent.

Lele Ma sighed and threw herself on the grass next to Ivy, hands cradling her head.

Ivy kept looking down, playing with the tall strands of grass, bending and snapping them, making small weaves of their reeds. Her grandmama remained silence. She had her gaze fixed higher, up across the bluff’s edge, beyond the border river, up the escarpments, and on up and up and up those high walls.

Ivy noticed her watching and followed her gaze to the walls. “They stretch so tall and far, Lele Ma. Where do they go?”

Lele Ma turned toward her and her face was odd. Not happy, not angry, just expectant. Weightier than Ivy would have expected. “Why do you wonder, girl?”

Ivy paused there and did not respond for a full five minutes. Lele Ma, accustomed to her granddaughter’s pensive ways, gave her the time.

“I wonder where all the water and food comes from. Do they just grow on the wall? Do they just come from the sky? But if from the sky, why do we never get water falling elsewhere in the fields? Why does it only come down from the walls?”

Ivy ripped off one long stalk of grass and leaned back, holding the stalk vertical with her thumb and measuring it with one eye against the length of the wall. The stalk stood out against the fogginess of the topmost reaches of the walls.

Lele Ma grinned widely. “Those are good questions. Do you know how many grandchildren I have, girl?”

Ivy was confused. “Hmm, yes, you have nine—”

“Nineteen, yes, I have nineteen grandchildren,” Lele Ma interrupted. Ivy could tell that she was settling into her subject. “You are far from the oldest, and you are not the youngest either. I have six grown children too, and had my eldest back when I was sixteen, barely older than you. Now subtract away your three baby triplet cousines who are still rolling about, and that leaves twenty-two people in our clan who can talk.”

She looked serious suddenly. “I have brought each and every one of them here at one point in time or another. To this same spot. And I’ve waited for them to ask about the walls. How many of them do you think did so?”

Ivy considered. “Just me?” Ivy asked.

“No, fool girl. Everyone wonders about the walls. Everyone thinks of them as a child and wonders briefly, why they are here. But have you ever heard your mother talk about this with you?”

“No.”

Lele Ma took on a more bitter tone. “Your mother asked me once, same as you. She hasn’t asked me in years, though. She’s busy.” She pursed her lips. “But that’s okay, she helped raise you. And now you are here, and now I am, and now I can ask you again the question that I have asked all others in the family.”

Ivy felt energy creeping around her sides. “What is that question, Lele Ma?”

Lele Ma sat up and looked Ivy in the eyes. “What if the walls don’t stretch forever? What if there’s an edge? What if you can stand on that edge? What if you could reach the top of the walls?”

Ivy almost gasped, but she kept it in. She knew Lele Ma preferred it when she took everything in stride. But it was true—Ivy had never even considered that possibility. The walls just were. Most people looked at them and thought about them from a practical perspective. But people didn’t think the walls carried any special meaning any more than the fields did. They were just a fact of life.

But just imagine that view!

“Does anyone else know?” asked Ivy, trying hard not to sound breathless. “Has anyone been up there?”

“What do you think, girl?” asked Lele Ma. “No one knows. And no one will know until someone does something about it.”

“How could one even get up?”

“It is first a question of will, girl, and only then a question of way. How interested are you? Are you curious enough to find out? Are you resolved enough? Our food, our water, our sun, everything comes from up there. Mightn’t it be worthwhile to find out more?”

But Ivy could just imagine the disappointment if it was useless. “What if it doesn’t help us at all?”

“What is the use of discovering anything? You never know if a thing is useful until you start poking at it.” Lele Ma pointed back to their half-eaten wraps. If no one had ever tried to bake cassava, we wouldn’t have had that tasty lunch from earlier. It didn’t come from nowhere. Someone had to have the ambition, someone had to ask the question, and someone had to try.”

“Why doesn’t anyone try? Why don’t you, if you’re asking me about it? You are as big and strong as anyone” asked Ivy.

Lele Ma laughed and laughed, but did not deny it. “Indeed, girl, perhaps I am. But I can no longer find out what’s atop those walls. Someone has to make you those little picnics. Someone has to make sure your little baby cousines grow up right. I have responsibilities."

Ivy considered some more and still saw a problem. “But I will have to do the same chores to do some day…” she trailed off.

Lele Ma nodded. “And that day will come soon. So,” she said, turning back to face the great walls. “what are you going to do about it?”

Ivy felt something fluttering in her chest. She looked at the walls and thought about how they made her feel. They had gone from feeling vast and imposing and irrelevant to vast and imposing and conquerable.

She sat up and stared out at the walls. The walls rolled and changed, but they had three fundamental characteristics.

First, they were made out of stone and almost entirely vertical. The stone had numerous cracks and chinks up and down. Some were big enough to serve as small caves. Bats and birds roosted in those zones.

Second, rivulets of water ran down the sandstone, some strong enough to come in raging flows, especially after it rained. These were dangerous, but they also fed the stream that supported the town’s livelihood and trade. The streams changed and shifted at times, darkening different sections of the wall as they snaked about.

Third, there was thick, heavy foliage that crept down the walls. The foliage was like nothing what was available elsewhere or grown in the ground. These leaves were fat and large, each one far bigger than a person and attached by minuscule claws to the rock face. Some leaves were bigger than multiple people. They were supported by a small stem that looked miniature relative to the leaves and from the distance of the bluff, but which Ivy knew to be sturdy and wider in diameter than her torso. Those were the same stems people used in their houses, because they were numerous, typically inching towards the vertical streams, and because they regenerated quickly, sprouting multiple leaves and attaching them to the stone in great green whorls.

Ivy didn’t say anything for thirty minutes. She just took in the walls, while Lele Ma sat quietly by. Maybe she was napping. Ivy didn’t know—she had a focus, and she was chewing away at the problem.

After thirty minutes, Ivy stood up, marched to the edge of the bluff, and shouted out her decision. “Above you are now, but one day, you will be below!”

She waited there, hands on hips, with the water thundering down and the vines rustling in the wind, and there was no response. There was just herself, and Lele Ma farther behind, shielding her eyes from the sun, and grinning up the bluff at her granddaughter.

They walked home that night and didn’t say a word to anyone else. Ivy didn’t talk very much in general. Her family always commented on it. They always felt she should be more active in conversation, more opinionated, more expressive. Lele Ma had never added that extra pressure on her.

The truth was that Ivy always felt that the day to day talk was meaningless. She could tell it helped smooth personalities and egos, and that talking about the weather was an easy way to not talk about the fact that the last harvest of plants from the wall hadn’t gone well or the fact that the last trade summit between the towns had failed spectacularly.

But even if Ivy knew, she didn’t much care. There had to be something odd about her parents, about her cousins, about her elder brothers. They chatted and chatted about nonsense, and they did not change. Her loved ones got older, some had new children, some died, but pretty much all were content to live the same lives in the same way, year in and year out. They ate and talked and shat and laughed and harvested and fished and traded and sexed and birthed and just continued on and on and on, until they were dead.

It wasn’t that people were interchangeable. Of course, some had distinct interests. But Ivy just felt that she couldn’t care less about the interests her family had, and not about the interests of most of her friends either. She preferred to spend time around people who got her to think big thoughts, exciting thoughts. That’s why Lele Ma was her favorite. And why Ivy’s had methodically chosen her best friend Gloria, for her interest in history.

Ivy remembered Gloria’s last project—collecting writings from long-passed members of their town—and thought it might be relevant to ask Gloria about what had come before. Perhaps if someone had ever attempted the walls in the past, or at least wondered about them.

Gloria’s eyes lit up when Ivy asked to see what she had collected. She brought Ivy to her working room, and spoke reverently. “Only the greatest historians,” said Gloria in a hushed voice, “recognize that if they are to be remembered, if they are to help future historians, they must act and they must record and they must write.” Gloria repeated and punctuated each verb with a punch to the sky. Act PUNCH. Record PUNCH. Write PUNCH. “It is not enough to be a historian. One must be a maker of history too.”

Ivy couldn’t help getting caught up in the thrill. She couldn’t remember Gloria being so animated before. That introduction given, like the opening ceremony before a sacred and long-lost ritual, Gloria began revealing what she had been collecting. She had a pile of thin, but old books in her room, pages strung together with the smooth strings of the platno leaves, making them durable and keeping them clear of pests, though giving them quite a stench meanwhile. And though the descriptions felt stiff, and though the handwriting in those books was arched and angular and hard to read, the details were clear. Gloria pointed out the relevant passages where one ancestor described her day, and where another described her town, and on and on and on went their research.

“Where did you find these books, Gloria?” asked Ivy, partway into their afternoon.

Gloria smiled. “Ivy, I’ll tell you a secret. These books are just sitting, waiting in the basement of the burgohaus. Anyone can go see them. And no one ever does.”

“Why did you decide to use all your free time to get these, Gloria? No one else has tried this.”

Gloria scoffed. “Everyone else can go jump into the river! Who cares what they prefer? None of them know about the fact that everything we are, all the choices we make, and all the preferences we have, are all the outcome of a culture that we’ve built, piece by piece, for hundreds of years. You have to know that past, or else you just go around randomly. Like a little clockwork piece, wound up and dancing in circles, with no idea that you are doing something because of what people behind you did first.”

Ivy read deep into the evening, even the parts of the books that Gloria hadn’t pointed out to her. Gloria was clever, and she meant well, but Ivy had learned some time ago that sometimes people imply total knowledge even when they don’t have it. If Ivy wanted to get all the facts, she would need to verify them herself.

She finished the books by nine that night, long after Gloria had dozed off in a corner and long after they had both missed their suppertime calls. She then paused and sat in silence for another twenty minutes.

After her meditation, she had reached two conclusions. One was about Gloria. She needed to know the past. That’s who she was. The second was about her ancestors, even ones long, long, long ago, so long ago that their language diverged and used words she had never learned of. Those ancestors treated the walls the same way her community did now. It was a source of bounty, a source of wealth, a source for the river, but all the focus was on what was extractable from the walls, not what was atop them.

She roused Gloria, and they both went to their respective homes to scoldings, but it had been worth it.

The next morning, she decided to test her theory with her mother. She sidled up to her mother, who was working at her desk, papers strewn about everywhere with scribbled calculations on them all.

“Mama,” Ivy asked, “why is everyone so worried the trade deal isn’t going to pass?”

Her mother barely looked up at her before returning to her papers. “Because it probably isn’t. Our negotiating position has worsened significantly over the past few months. And our friends”—she said this word through gritted teeth—”across the fields think they can get a better price for the fish and the platno that we develop.”

“Why is it worse?”

She looked up sharply at her. “The world is a fickle place, Ivy. The walls give, and the walls take away. We don’t have any control over whether the flows are strong or weak. When they are weak, our rivers thin out, our reservoirs get used up, and there is less we can offer our partners. Next year, perhaps, it will be they who have more trouble.”

“Mama,” Ivy asked, changing tack, “have you ever wondered where the walls come from or what they mean?”

At this, her mother stopped and sat back on her haunches. She sighed. “Has your grandmama been speaking to you about the walls?”

Ivy couldn’t deny it. She tried to hold that face she had practiced for Lele Ma, where she pretended nothing surprised her. “Yes.”

“And she’s told you how we don’t know much about the walls?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she’s right. We don’t. And that’s just life is about. But we are here, we live our lives, and we enjoy what we can out of them. Pining after the truth certainly hasn’t changed your grandmama’s life one bit. It’s just made her bitter.”

Ivy frowned, and her mother softened her tone a little bit.

“Listen, Ivy. The work I’m doing here is important to me. It makes me happy, because, I can help make the community stronger. Sometimes I do that work well. Sometimes I mess up. Just like you! But it makes me proud. Worrying about things I can’t change don’t give me that same feeling. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Ivy thought about this. She sat down and started really thinking. Her mother, who knew Ivy’s ways just as much as Lele Ma, gave her space. This time it didn’t take Ivy thirty minutes. Just ten. She restarted the conversation. “Yes, mama, I understand why you are doing this. Making the community better is your truth. It is what you have to make happen.”

Her mother had gone back to her desk while Ivy thought, and she came back around and squeezed Ivy in a big hug. “You got it, little one. Good. Now go along. I want to do this work just as well as I can, fair?”

“Fair.” Ivy walked off.

She headed straight to her aunt’s home, where Lele Ma was staying this week. Ivy had one more thing to confirm.

Lele Ma was in the middle of shelling peanuts. It was a violent thing, to Ivy’s eyes, and Lele Ma always did it while wearing a cruel smile, as if she was putting years of resentment, exhaustion, and disappointment into the shelling of these peanuts. Smash, crack, tear, pour. Often, her smashing was so strong that the peanuts themselves would fracture into small minute versions of their former selves.

“Lele Ma,” asked Ivy, “I have been thinking.”

Lele Ma did not pause at all. “Evidently you have, girl, so spill.”

“You have your own truth.”

“I have many truths, girl. Whatever could you mean?”

“I mean,” Ivy tried again, “you have a thing that you want to see happen.”

Smash crack, tear, pour. “Yes, that’s right.”

“You want us to learn what’s atop the walls.”

“Indeed, I do. How could you have possibly guessed.” Lele Ma rolled her eyes.

“And you are big, Lele Ma, and you are strong. But when you were younger, too many things fell on your shoulders. So you don’t think you have the time left to learn for yourself anymore,” Ivy continued. “You’re hoping that one of us might continue in your path to help bring your truth to life.” She paused there, watching Lele Ma’s thumbs work. “But,” said Ivy, “you’re not the only one with a truth.”

“Oh?”

“Gloria has a truth. My mama has a truth.”

“Is that so?”

“And their truths matter to them just as much. But neither of them has very much to do with the walls. Their truths are about how they see themselves, what they can do.”

Lele Ma grunted and didn’t say anything. Smash, crack, tear, pour.

Ivy didn’t hold back. “I have a truth too.”

Lele Ma stopped here, wiped the peanut dust from her powerful hands, and began wiping herself down with a washcloth. “What is it, girl? Out with it.”

Ivy took a deep breath. “I want… I want you to win your truth.”

Lele Ma stopped. “What?”

“Yes. What would make me happiest is if I can help you achieve your truth. And I think you can do it yourself.”

“That’s absurd, girl.”

“It’s not. I know what work you have to do. I know how to fill in those jobs. And I think I can do that and still have time to help you work out your plans, the way you can start your climb.”

For one of the first times, Ivy saw Lele Ma look uncertain. “How can you do the things I do, girl? You don’t know how.”

“But you can teach me. And yes, I may not do it well, but I’ll do it well enough to give you the time to try, before so much time passes that you no longer have the strength.”

Lele Ma flexed her forearms, maybe unconsciously. “And you’ll help me work out how to start, and how to get going?”

“I will,” nodded Ivy.

“You’ll watch as I figure out how to get footing on those damned platno leaves, and understand how to stay safe on those walls?”

“I will.”

“And if I die, if I fall, will you mourn me? Will you accept the guilt that will come from the family for helping me?”

“I will. It is your truth. They all know this.”

Lele Ma started to grin. “What about your oath, girl? That you would stand atop the wall someday?”

“Well,” Ivy smiled. “I might still come along with you. And if I don’t, all I said was that the wall that is now above will one day be below. I never said below whom.”

Lele Ma laughed and laughed, raucous and deep. “Well then,” she said, still chuckling lightly. “Why don’t we get started?”