Soundtrack: Bob Dylan, High Water (for Charlie Patton)
The fire burned down from heaven upon the vast, white wastes. When stone burns, it is like burning iron: it becomes a red and yellow liquid. So it was with the white wastes. They liquefied in the sun, but their lava was blue; a deep, absorbent blue. It sucked in the fire of the sun, and the fire burned through it, washing through the blue lava in warm currents of blue flame, liquefying more and more of the frozen wastes. This it did until the entire earth was awash in the blue lava, with hot spots spattering and raining the lava onto the land, sometimes cooling and hardening—sometimes streaming down landscapes back to the blue lava sea, or pooling up into seas on the land.
A warm, Hawaiian breeze blew across the surface of the great fog.
Deep under that placid lake surface, at the bottom of the fishless, stagnant white murk, Sam’s child-form lay sleeping, dreaming of koi fingerlings, slowly maturing into their reds, oranges, and blacks—flowing through ponds like flames of water.
The rain pattered and pattered on the pond surface, echoing the pattering on the roof over his head. The rain pattered and pattered on the streets, and the leaves of trees. It pattered on the canals, though the canals were already full. It puddled up around the corners of baseball diamonds, along the trails that cut through vacant lots, and randomly in supermarket parking lots. It puddled against curbs, and then it puddled against storm drains. It pressed against cellar windows, and trickled around the panes. Rivulets crept through the dusty earth in the crawlspace.
A glass fell over onto its table, and the water spilled out in all directions, covering every inch of the table, as though it were searching out every dry spot to consume.
In the mountains, the rain pattered the grassy slopes, the chaparral, the forests, and the exposed stone. Then it pattered the snow, breaking it up, pulverizing it—bit by bit, and liquefying it. The snows flowed into the rivers, over the spillways, through the canals, and over the levees.
And what were once fish ponds were suddenly fishing holes in a broad, shallow river. The koi arose from their sleep in the bottoms, following the flood into the resurrected lake.
Sam sprang up from his dreams, and lept out of bed to look out his bedroom window. He turned, ran out into the hall, across the back porch, and down the back steps into the flood. He slogged through the dark water, paused, turned back, and could only see the glare of the floodlight on the surface. He turned back ahead and slogged on toward the pond. He came to the gate, opened it against the current, and saw a gold flash through the water at his side. He turned around, then turned back through the open gate, and gazed across the black, rippling surface.