Pilgrimage for the Great Green Oak

Steam billows through the gaps of the portcullis, long since rusted shut.

The room is a massive cavern of sheer basalt, exposed mineral veins, and white oil paint. Pipes burrow and snake across the concrete-covered ground as I shuffle to avoid falling into the great towers of coal dust that collect on the floor. The pale-faced, soot-covered congregation ignore these hazards, banging their heads into the webs of obstacles in rhythmic collisions as they scatter. They chip at the rock with pickaxes and jackhammers, their faces blank, their eyes glazed with cheap-donut icing.

I walk forward to the beckoning strum of the Great Green Oak.

The Great Green Oak that lies ahead.

I’m sure of it.

I’ll carve my name on its trunk.

I’ll climb to safety by its branches.

For now, I must walk through the cavern.

The cavern that twists and winds.

The carver that teethes and whines.

I tap on the shoulder of the jackhammer’s operator. Its skin is milk-skim and forced over its skull, tight enough to stretch into a smile; its jackhammer, nailed to its wrists, leaks water of the womb.

“Excuse me, Serf of the Jackhammer, which way to the Great Green Oak?” The sound of rock falling apart drowns my voice.

I must be louder, yes, I think.

“EXCUSE ME, SERF OF THE JACKHAMMER, WHICH WAY TO THE GREAT GREEN OAK?”

It slews its head like a turret.

It looks me in my eye.

It unsews its mouth and coughs up dust, from its lips leaks brine.

“Why, Pilgrim of the Cavern, don’t you see? To get to the Great Green Oak you must work hard like me!”

I stare at the Serf of the Jackhammer.

Its smile stretches wider with every drill.

The earth trembles.

Its wrists bleed rust.

“Work?” I ask.

“Work!” it chirps.

The jackhammer bucks in its paws, though I see now there are no paws at all. Only cuffs of iron where wrists ought to end, riveted into the machine.

“How will you climb the Oak with no hands?” I demand.

For a minute, the creature is puzzled and stalls its jackhammer.

Its ears sew themselves shut and the jackhammer begins to drill.

“How will you climb the Oak if you’ve done none of the work it demands?” it replies.

Its mouth sews itself and its head turns to the rocks.

I need to hear something beside a serf’s plea: something great, something new.

What am I to do?

But of course!

I must venture deeper into the cavern.

I walk forward to the beckoning strum of the Green Oak.

The Great Green Oak that lies ahead.

I’ll carve my name on its trunk.

I’ll climb to safety by its branches.

I stumble at the smell of the putrid scion of neglected time and flesh.

The door has a lock but is left askew by a pizza box’s wedge. Maggots burrow from the cardboard.

The walls are more poster than drywall and air. Celebrities dash the paper, leering at each other with boredom.

Yet still the ire of the postermen lies atop the Creature of the Couch. The threads of the fibers are sewn with the sinew of the slovenly soul. He undulates and comes undone at the seams, threatening to leak the remnants of his soul onto the threadbare floor. His body is bloated, yet gaunt and neglected, as if he had drowned three times in a vat of reused Crisco before being mummified.

I remember the Serf of the Jackhammer’s statement and I stutter.

“Creature of the Couch, what coaxes you to complacency? Don’t you see beyond the cavern, beyond the dried-up seas, it is work that shall set us free!”

He chortles a skin-clogged chuckle. Then he looks at me. “Foolish pilgrim of the tree, foolish fiend who irks at me, foolish drone who chips at rocks and mines at rubble, I live a life with no earthly troubles.”

I stumble at the words.

“How can you feel alive in this vinyl bubble?”

He scratches the fungi beneath his third chin and raises his head, straining to escape the lure of the picture box.

“Excitement is for those with silly needs, I only care for moving pictures and evocative feed!”

The fibers knit over his ears, then his eyes, then his mouth, constricting until nothing is left of him but a lump in the upholstery and the blue flicker of the picture box.

I step over the pizza box and leave him to ouroborize in peace.

I walk forward to the beckoning strum of the Oak.

The Great Green Oak that lies ahead.

Surely.

I’ll carve my name on its trunk.

I’ll climb to safety by its branches.

The cavern slopes and softens. Concrete gives way to clay; clay gives way to compost. The sludge rises to my knees with a wet, sucking slurp. The pipes abandon their snakish form as they drown in the cesspool. Great eels of PVC pull at my appendages as steam billows and bursts from the swamp with a gurgle. Above the waterline a zoo labours. Badgers shovel muck into carts yoked to three geese apiece, driven by slime-slicked bullfrogs. Everywhere, frogs.

In the middle of the mire, a mound of mud morphs into what a myopic man might mislabel as a mouth.

From its maw manifests a miserable moan.

“More! Move my menagerie, mindless muttering mopes! If I merited this mediocrity, I misspoke!” It plops and putters as the two dots point towards me. In the dots burn hot coals kilning the mud back to clay.

“Manager of the Menagerie,” I hearken, wading close, “which way to the Great Green Oak?”

“Which way? WHICH WAY?” Bubbles burst across the bog. “You’ve interrupted my flow! Leave me be! Because of you I’ve lost my marvelous-M-filled streak! All for what? Do I look like I know what you seek?”

He forms a hand; a goose flinches. “Pilgrim of the Cavern, the Oak is down below! Where exactly? If my maliciously maddening menagerie did their JOB, then I’d know!”

“What drives you to dig and hoe? The Great Green Oak is a tree; in mud it’d never sow.”

He sinks an inch. Sick pours from algae-covered stalactites into his mouth.

“Not my job to question corporate’s will,” he gurgles. “I need it found ever still!” He surfaces again, streaming silt. “Find the Oak by Friday, corporate tells me. Find the Oak by Friday, I tell my menagerie. Is it Friday? It is always Friday and it is never found! Thus I must suffer these infernal coals as a vengeful toll!”

“I’m looking for the Oak myself,” I mutter. “I need to escape and preserve my health.”

“Perfect! Then you must already be working for me.” He grins and recites without stutter, “Sink to the bottom of the mire and report to Steve!”

So I do. I cease paddling in the mud and descend—to the beckoning strum of the Green Oak.

The Great Green Oak that lies ahead.

I’ll carve my name on its trunk.

I’ll climb to safety by its branches.

I sluice into his home.

Or what he considers a home.

The domicile is quite similar to any other domicile beneath the mud, but ever Steve, Steve tries to make it his own.

Steve sits at a folding card table on the only dry patch in his boggy oubliette, beneath a lacrosse stick screwed into the basalt. There is a futon with no cover. There is a mini fridge with one unflavored, skim, yogurt in it. There is a picture of a family where someone has been torn out.

“Pilgrim! Steve. Sales.” He shakes my hand with both of his. He hands me a slip of paper with frantic glyphs. “Love the energy. Love the hustle. Let’s get you onboarded and circle back on the Oak.”

“Do you know where the Great Green Oak is?”

“Great question. Big question. Let’s not boil the ocean before we butter the lobster.” He leans back and winces. “Sorry. Knee. Tore my ACL playing lacrosse at Bucknell. Used to be an adventurer like you.”

“The Oak, please tell me before I croak,” I try again.

“Right. So the Oak is really more of a north star. We’re all aligned on the Oak. It’s the deliverable. We just need the bandwidth.” He rubs his knee. “Still tender. Bucknell. Tore it clean through. Junior year.”

“You haven’t reciprocated any of my rhymes. What is it you’re doing here and what do you wish to find?”

Steve looks at the yogurt. He looks at the photo with the missing piece. For a flicker of the overworked filament light bulb, his eyes leak blood.

“I mean,” he says, “it’s just kind of what you do, right? We’ve got to do something now that Molly’s gone and there’s nothing left to do.”

Then he brightens, and the depth shallows as the crimson retreats.

“Anyway! Pond’s that way.” He points to a humid crack in the cavern beside the cocktail of ambient and alcohol. “Talk to the Pioneer. Real self-starter. Tore his ACL, I think.” He frowns. “No, wait. That was me.”

I walk forward to the beckoning strum of the Green Oak.

The Great Green Oak that lies ahead.

I’ll carve my name on its trunk.

I’ll climb to safety by its branches.

The pond is a puddle of runoff leaking from the greatest pipe, slick with oil and reeking of petrol. On a lily pad of rusted sheet metal squats a frog in a tiny necktie.

A toad holds the lily pad up on its back. A salamander holds up the toad. And beneath the salamander, half-sunk in the slime, a newt holds up all of them, trembling.

“Pioneer of the Pond,” I say, “which way to the Great Green Oak?”

“Pilgrim!” The frog swells his throat until it shines. “Do you know who you’re speaking to? You should have brought a suit! I am the first amphibian in history to own an amphibian who owns an amphibian who owns a newt.”

The newt whimpers. The salamander kicks it.

“Isn’t a newt an amphibian?” I question.

“As if we would associate with such a vile plebeian!” The three masters beckon.

“When I started out, I was the one on the bottom,” the Pioneer says. “The Manager’s weight on my back is far from forgotten. Did anybody lift me up? No, but I was tough, even when I was hurting!” He stamps a webbed foot, and the whole tower shudders. “Fair is fair. He carries me; that’s the system working!”

Below, I notice the newt has pinned a beetle under one tiny foot and is pressing down with a leer.

The Pioneer’s tongue snaps out, catches a gnat, and he chews it thoughtfully. “An Oak, you said. What’s an Oak?”

“The Great Green Oak. It’s what everyone is looking for.”

“Does the Manager want it? Please don’t jest.”

I ponder, counting my missing toes.

“I am quite certain, yes.”

The frog’s eyes bulge with sudden vitriol.

“More! Move my menagerie, mindless muttering mopes! If I merited this mediocrity, I misspoke!” he cries, and the toad and the salamander and the newt lurch forward as one, carrying him off into the tunnels, the beetle toe-dragged beneath them.

I walk forward to the beckoning strum of the Great Green Oak.

The Oak that lies ahead.

I think.

I’ll carve my name on its trunk.

I’ll climb to safety by its—

I’ll climb.

The tunnel opens into a hall so tall the light rests in pockets before continuing the ascent. The strum is thunderous here.

Out of the abyssal darkness come the Interns of Interment.

There are six of them, gray and bent, six lanyards stitched through their six lips. They carry a palanquin of glass and galvanized steel on their shoulders in the grim burden pallbearers carry a coffin, and on the palanquin, sunk deep in a white leather recliner, rides the CEO of the Cavern.

The procession shatters to a halt.

One of the Interns convulses. From between its scrounged stitches oozes a thin black stream of Nespresso drip coffee, which it catches in a paper cup and passes up to the recliner without a word. The CEO sets the cup on a tower of similar cups, all full and cold. He accounts for them. He counts them again.

He is thin as the piano wire used to garrote interlopers. His pupils are the size of dimes. Between whispered sentences he lifts a little white nasal spray to his nostril and puffs, his eyes go glassy, as if he is watching himself from the far end of a long hallway deliberating whether to wave.

“You’re new,” he says, to a point beyond my shoulder.

“I’m a pilgrim looking for the Great Green Oak.”

He laughs.

He sobs.

Then it stops all at once.

“Everyone’s looking for that damn Oak. I’ve found it. I’ve found it hundreds of times.” He flaps a hand. “Show him.”

“What is it that you speak? Surely this must be deceit,” I say with a flourish.

“Stop rhyming. You don’t have to.” He looks tired.

The Interns grunt and turn, and behind them uproots a mountain.

It is composed of oaks. Hundreds of them, torn and splintered, heaped up into the dark. Moss clings to the bark like a leper’s rash. Leaves hang from their branches, gone brown and nooselike without the sun. Into every trunk, a name is carved in glyphs.

“Too short,” the CEO says, pointing. “Too crooked. Too wide. That one—”

His finger trembles.

“—I sat in for a whole fiscal-quarter, and never felt truly safety. Not once. All I realized was how far I’d fall if I loosened my grip.”

He presses the heels of his hands into his sockets.

“So I need a bigger one. A greener one. The real one. It’s down there.” He points at the floor. “We dig. We keep digging. I’ll know it when I find it.” His voice cracks. “I’ll know it. I know it! Tell me you know it, too!” He breathes. “Pilgrim, please?”

“What if it exists only in desire?” I reply weary.

The CEO of the Cavern goes very still. The nasal spray hovers at his nostril. I think he might answer.

Then he puffs.

The Interns grunt, and lift, and the palanquin lurches off into the dark, and from somewhere deep inside it, faint and far, he murmurs.

“NO! Deeper, deeper, down below. There’s a greener one. I know. I know! Where are you? I MISS YOU!” And then I am alone at the foot of the mountain of oaks.

Behind me, the cavern screams. The jackhammer chips. The picture box flickers. The Manager bellows at a frog. Steve rambles about his knee. The newt holds up the salamander holds up the toad holds up the frog. Somewhere far below, the CEO of the Cavern digs for an oak beneath the oaks.

I listen for the strum.

It is not coming from ahead. Perhaps it never was.

It is coming from the ceiling.

I slide my hands on the nearest trunk.

Hands.

Not cuffs.

Not rivets.

Fingers.

Digits.

Mine.

Mine alone

I climb.

The bark rough–

The bark real.

I climb the trunk of that which was too short, and that which sinned to be too crooked. I climb every oak.

I climb in jeopardy.

His name scrapes my knees, carved again and again, in infernal glyphs.

I think of my own name, and I keep it to myself, for I do not wish to barter it again. Branches fracture beneath my heels. I slip, and catch, and climb. My arms shudder and tremble. My lungs clog with coal dust, I cough out tarry phlegm, and I climb.

Near the top, the pile narrows. The branches knot together like the fibers of the flesh couch, like the stitches of sewn mouths, until there is no gap left to climb through, only a skylight leaking an exhausted shimmer. I wedge my shoulders between two trunks. They embrace me as one of their own. Something warm and wet runs down the bark and over my face.

I cannot move.

This is where the cavern keeps me.

I hold my breath. I push with my weary bones.

My head strikes rock. Strikes dirt. Then roots, thin and white and tangled, hanging down into the dark. I claw at them. Soil pours into my eye and my mouth. I squeeze both shut, and I dig with fingers.

My fist breaks through into nothingness.

Warmth on my back.

The strum is all around me now, and there is only wind. Wind, through leaves.

I open my eye.

I weep slick with afterbirth.

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