“What?”

“They say it will feel real refreshing, like we’ll finally start to feel alive again,” he spoke almost wistfully. I could picture it like any warm-blooded creature enjoying a cold shower on a winter night. “Then after the pain sets in, everyone will hate you for it. But I’m sure there will be those who will love you in the end even if they don’t ever know it or ever show it.”

And just as my mind moved with the similarities of inebriation, so did my mouth now strive to shape itself with a stiff formality and controlling eloquence to overcome its numbness; lips wooden with the procaine of fear.

“I... do not know where I am, and for that reason it’s understandable that the customs of your people are strange to me... But such a violent act I should not-”

He acquired a strange look on his face as though I was speaking words I should not have. By his line of sight I saw he was not focusing his attention on me, but on a quiet noise just behind where I stood. I turned, and this time it was not a torpid transitioning that allowed me to keep my composure, but total leadening shock.

Here was an aberration, a species of something containing so many chimerical features that all previous familiar connections in my mind almost refused to calculate the geometry of it. But had no choice. My eyes had to accept it. An ashen face, gray and creased like baked mud, tired, calm, piled its way towards a brow heavy with horns overly large for the head. The body was wizened, tough and hard like an old tree root. His garb was strange. I almost took it for wings wrapped tight about his midsection to keep out the cold.

“How’s the pig iron coming?” He asked my associate in words rasping his throat like sand.

“It’s oinking along,” was the answer, matter-of-factually.

“What?” He cupped a large bat ear and winced half his face.

“It’s fully capacitating.”

The wince remained and its nature turned quizzical.

“The cracked crucibles, repaired like we needed?”

“Of course,” my acquaintance replied. “Almost ready,” he added. Noting the nervous chuckle and smile he was holding back, I believed he was just saying what he guessed this inquisitor wanted to hear. In all likelihood he probably knew very little of what was being spoken of.

“Give that fat sluggard, Barabraeus, an extra few liquid tons and a swift kick in the ass. Don’t be shy with that stuff when it comes to him.”

He walked on, staring off into space, placing his hand on my shoulder and giving a tight squeeze as he passed by.

“The bosses are counting on you. There’s something they like about you.”

I gazed at him incredulously as though he were having fun with me. It was too much. I had to sit down. I slumped and made room against a pile of what I learned were iron ore pellets. They trickled heavily against my ankles and bare feet. I was wearing clothing, but strangely, remained shoeless.

“Oh yeah, we all are.”

I waited for the gray monster to pass further on.

If I had not felt so sick and afraid I would have tried to escape.

Where to?

“Not that it’s not an honor,” I began, heart heavy. “But why exactly do you need me to do this, and if you could tell me, why I’m I even here? Whatever it is you and they are trying to do, such a job is not for me. I can’t understand...” I had to stop as my breath began to give on me. I could not imagine what would be best: to suffer more acutely and less chronically or vice versa. What I did know is that I wanted out of this now, even at a hard price.

“Look,” he said, and leaned against the pile alongside me. He produced an object from his jacket pocket, placed it in his mouth and lit it. Smoke curled around the corners of his mouth and issued out his nose. “Everyone can drive themselves insane, always asking Why me, or why am I here? Don’t worry about finding the answer, because it’s not as important as you might think, and you’ll have nothing to show for it in the end if that’s all you worry about. Ask yourself what you’re going to do and you’ll be much better off.”

Thanks, Gandalf, I wanted to say, but figured the remark would have been lost on him. I also wanted to ask him, for being a damned whatever-he-was, where he got the cheek to give me advice like that, but thought better of it. He was right. Whatever wrongs he may have committed they were giving him some wisdom of experience. Sometimes a hot stove and a burnt hand are the best teachers. He gave good advice. I just wondered how often he followed it himself.

“And,” he said, “We need you for a number of reasons. For one, you’re an outsider. We can’t fairly pick one of our own to do the burning. Plus, he might want revenge on someone. You come with a clean slate.”

“But why at all?”

He stared forward, veiled in his own smoke. “I found you—me and another person—lying near a watermill beneath one of the greater waterfalls. This watermill helps feed air into the blast furnaces. You’ll have to learn these things soon. I didn’t know what you were. Looked like you had been out skinny dipping—you had no clothes on. I thought you were dead. We took turns poking you with a piece of rebar after drawing lots so see who had to go first. I lost. When you started coming to, we ran for it, thinking you were coming back from the dead. Someone saw us and reported us for screwing around. Then we brought everyone to you. The bosses cleared the area and took me with them as they carried you away. You had fits, coming in and out. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“My head lying on a table. Then of a sudden, following you around.”

“They told me not to ask you questions.” He exhaled and gave me a sidelong glance. “Only show you around and answer them. You feel like talking?”

“No. Not yet.” Not ever. But then I asked one of the most important question of them all, both existential and immediately practical. “What’s going on here?”

He looked at me, waiting.

I was hurting to know everything at once, but was dizzy and capable of taking only one or two small mental steps at a time. I decided to start from where I stood.

“Here.” I pointed beneath my toes and at the iron ore pellets.

“This is the Forge. The company who owns it has been hiring a lot of people over the past few months. They won a bid on a bridge. One that leads up. This company is looking to earn their stew by making a road that leads out of here. I’m in no hurry to leave, but I need to eat myself. The pay is enough to live by.”

“Honest work?”

“You get written up or fired for lying.”

Honest enough. A way out, but I do not even know what it is I am running from or to. “They at least expect honesty from their employees,” I noted.

“Least of all the things they expect. But don’t go repeating my words. I’ll know where it came from.” He eyed me.

“Tell me one more time about this odd job they want me for.”

“Third time’s the trick,” he humored me. “Molten metal hurts, but it doesn’t destroy completely. At least not in small doses for us. So you can ease yourself on that point. Part of its punishment, part of its motivation. It started before I got here when some workers were pushing each other into it. The crew involved all had to suffer for it and made to stand under a shower on pain of losing their jobs. The company found that attitudes changed for the better.”

“Have you been subjected to it?”

“Not yet. You’ll have the honors sure enough.”

“With all respect to you, I can’t help but think you’re taking me for a ride. You keep smiling.”

“Believe want you want to,” he chuckled. “You’ll know soon one way or the other. You have an opportunity here.”

“To earn the enmity of people I don’t even know?”

“What? Oh. If you mean turning yourself into our enemy it’s possible. But its also possible to hate somebody without him being your enemy, or I should say, not hate him even though he is your enemy.”

A lengthy pause. Then he continued. “I’m supposed to tell you that this job requires great passion, because it won’t be easy, and it won’t go right if you don’t have it. You’ll hate it. And if you don’t hate it then they picked the wrong wretch to do it.”

I wished to tell him the truth, that I was about as passionate as a bowl of oatmeal and skim milk, but stated, “If enough of you desperately wanted to get out that you’d be willing to undertake building a bridge to do it, one would think that would be enough passion already.”

“Yeah, logically, but like I said, it’s not really all that bad down here—if you go in for this sort of stuff. Sometimes we want to get out, but kind of don’t care at the same time (and whether this company can profit by it as well). Logically it’s easy to conclude anything in one’s head, but unless it’s actually felt it can never be realized.”

“So I have to do this?” I asked.

“No, you don’t have to, but I’m assuming you’re eventually going to need to eat,” he answered, almost testily, “and you’ll need money for that.”

Nothing was said for a while. Then, mustering the courage, I asked. “Where are we?”

“The Tumulus. That’s the name they give for it. Somewhere far below the surface.”

“What’s on the surface?”

“A world with a sky and sun. You can’t see it now with all the light from the Forge, but this is a very dark place.” He stared off vacantly. “You don’t have to work for this company. You’re free to try to make your own way. But I don’t think you’re the type that can last very long here. The sooner you get out the better. If you can help others get out they will not like you for who you are and what you did, but they might still love you in the end.”

A surge of foreboding melancholy passed within me. I teared briefly, trying to mask it. I no longer felt a man, but a child, and that child wanted to ask him, “Do you promise?”

If anyone ever has a had a very sad dream where something or someone was denied or taken from them, and somehow the sadness of that dream allows them the privilege to have experienced a kind of beauty that exists only in such deep sadness, then this is the closest measure of understanding I am able to convey. The closest words: saudade and sehnsucht. The nearest analogy I can contrive is the shameful despondency Adam must have felt when driven from Eden and made a promise by the archangel Michael that he may only half believed in and could only have been granted after trudging through insurmountable odds; wading through that mire called Earth towards Heaven, heartbroken with the nostalgia of lost Paradise. But Adam had his Eve. I was alone.

“My name is Karmiyl,” he stated by way of answer. “Someone once told me the world looks more interesting through a veil of tears.”

“I wasn’t crying.”

“The less you cry the more people will think you can take. And they will give it to you.”

Next Chapter: Sample excerpts from various chapters