Stories

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY SAAB IX

It was late afternoon and the cold orange sun was resting low over the cliffs.

Max Lavergne

24 Dec 2024 — 10 min read

Let me tell you about my Saab. It was late afternoon and the cold orange sun was resting low over the cliffs. I'd woken early in the day with a plan to hurry to the bottom of the canyon where by the ice I'd found a tunnel which no one else had seen me find and I wanted to explore for myself, and as the sun showed its face again after the long night I sensed it even while I was asleep and crawled from bed and Souk felt me move and sat up and said: "Now don't you freeze." And I said "Now now Souk. I've got my jacket, don't I." And I had slipped out of the camp and gone slow and careful down the trails, covering my face with a fox fur to stop my breath turning to ice in my nose. The canyon trails were no wider than a man and slippery and five times I had to stop in tunnel mouths to gather my nerve to keep going down as dirt had crumbled under my feet and icy grass had caused me to grab at a rock to stop from falling. A hundred man lengths up I was, or more. Halfway down I'd really slipped and fell a length and a half and only been saved by the mouth of a tunnel right below me and I didn't expect to be lucky twice. The tunnel I fell into had been a bathroom in a dwelling of old. White tiles on four sides, still keeping a beautiful square shape. Where the roof of the bathroom had been was on its side, so to say, where as I entered into it from the ledge in the wall it was right in front of me, all rotted away and showing crushed bricks and tangled plastic and angled concrete leading into a dark hole. If it had been a new tunnel I might have climbed inside to look but there was reeds and straw on the ground like someone had tried to make a home of the bathroom but they weren't here no more. Either they'd froze and been dragged out or they had figured out in time that the tiles was too cold to make a home on.

Anyway I had finally made it to the bottom and started to work at the tunnel which I had found. From 20 lengths up I had spied the corner of unbroken brick, often the sign of something protected inside, and all morning I worked to uncover it. Worked too hard, because I sweated and my sweat turned to ice and I had to stop and do breathing to make my body the right temperature. I looked up while I was doing the exercises and saw the others working lengths and lengths up, no one coming all the way down to the ice. Oh ho ho, I thought to myself, more for me, and even though I knew that I was trying to cheer myself up it still worked. I picked away at the bricks until there was a hole big enough for me to climb in, then inside pushed and pushed until the bricks caved outwards so light could come in. But as the light came in so came disappointment. There was nothing to take. There was only rusting pipes and white mud made by old plastic. And so with sadness slowing my step I had begun the climb back up, the cold of the ice in my clothes starting to cool my bones.

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I was slower going up of course. My legs and muscles were strong from the trails but not so much that I never got tired. And today don't forget I had gone further and was colder now. And so I had to rest to catch my breath, and each time the cold crept in more, but what option was there, and as I rested I looked up at the canyon wall. Like a great building carved in half, it was, tall and smooth, sheared away by Earth movements, although of course it was not one great building but instead many, tens or hundreds, mashed together and sliced straight down by the ice which had also protected it but was gone now. When I was a little boy the ice was already mostly gone, but the old people could still remember what it was like when ice had filled the canyon, right to the top. It was called a glacer. The glacer had flowed down from higher up, although they couldn’t say how ice could do that. Or how it had caused the buildings to become like this, but all the same I knew that it had happened because I could see it. Here a patch of small tiles making a picture which was beautiful and so big you could only see it from far back, the little tiles forming a blue ribbon and a white bird flying beneath it; there dark glass buttressed with steel, broken and exploded outwards but with the frames still remaining. In another place a slab of perfect smooth hard grey concrete as tall as 10 men and as wide as 200, and then a wall of bricks with a broken door still swinging on its hinges, and the inside of a room with crushed furniture pressed flat against the ice and now like a picture for us to look at. Sometimes a tall tree, almost turned into a fossil, with its leaves pressed and preserved; palm trees and fruit trees that once grew everywhere here but had been gone as long as memory now. Once this had been a great city, I guessed, maybe the capital of the whole world. Maybe ten thousand people had lived in these buildings, building the motors we found. Maybe ten million. Once I had opened a tunnel to find a yellow skeleton leaning against the brickwork as though it were pressing its ear to the outside, listening for news of its world, and I had said to it, "Don't worry, my friend, we are finding our way." But when I had touched its shoulder it had crumbled like chalk.

But let me get back to where I began. I had finally climbed over the lip of the canyon and hauled myself into camp to sit by the fire. Just like I said, the sun was orange and low, with no warmth to share with the world, and I sat silently while Souk placed a blanket on my shoulders and handed me some bread. She could feel my cold and when she finished her jobs she came and sat beside me and put her thin hand on my shoulders and rubbed. I was grateful for her kindness toward me, having spent a day climbing with nothing to show for it. I put an arm around her.

At that moment Eziel, a child of the camp, came to run over to me. He liked Souk so was not afraid to talk to me while she was around. His father was Harald and he looked at me and said, "My father Harald needs your help now." I didn't want to help, or leave the fire, but I was curious and so I said to Eziel: "Tell me what he needs help with and I will think about it."

The boy blushed. He said: "My father needs a strong man to help."

I said to him, "Plenty of strong men around here. Pick another."

At that he came closer and whispered to Souk and Souk bent her neck and then looked at me and said in a quiet voice, "The boy's father has found a motor."

"Where is your father, Eziel," I asked, and he pointed at the canyon, and I sighed and climbed to my feet. "Be careful," Souk said, which was a common thing to say but was understood uncommonly by me, because Souk knew Eziel's father, who was a thin sneak of a man who could not be trusted if he was seen around your hut. But I did not think that he would try to trick me if his boy was there. I took a knife and followed Eziel to the edge and down the first and broadest path.

As the path zigzagged, descending back in the direction we'd come from, Eziel instead kept walking forwards, climbing over a grass tuft and then disappearing over the edge. In surprise and alarm I rushed to the edge and saw him leaping down a staircase of large boulders and around a bend in the cliff. I sat on the edge and swiveled my legs over, swinging down as fast as I dared. On a narrow rock lip hanging over a dizzying drop the boy waited. He smiled shyly at me. "This way, please," he said, and scampered into the mouth of a tunnel.

Some tunnels in the canyon wall were as short as a few metres. Those that were longer were usually made from joined rooms in the great buildings of old, twisting and turning through bare doorways and rotten walls, sometimes still decorated with blackened frames in which the decaying fragments of pictures had once been. As a boy I had scouted a tunnel with my own father in which a frame had hung on a wall with a vivid image inside it. The frame was made of a metal that had remained bright silver through season and century and the image inside was of brightly coloured plastic pieces that had been assembled in a pattern which resembled a woman holding a simple flower. I was spellbound by it. My father, too, although he had not usually shown interest for those things and would bark at me if I paused for them on our rounds. We had both stood, staring at the image, transfixed by the brightness of the colours and the perfection of the image's preservation, afraid to move because to move meant to go forward and leave this image also to the past. Eventually my father, not looking at me, had sighed deeply and said: "They who made it are gone, boy. We continue our rounds so that someday they may return."

I followed Eziel down, through rooms damp and rotten with the wet and the stinking plastic, through caverns hollowed out by ice and meltwater, in which huge pools glowed by eerie green lights and crumbling stalactites made from dissolved bones dripped filthy slime onto the rippling surface. Eziel led me through crushed buses and train tunnels, shuddering houses left almost intact by the whims of the living Earth, finally arriving in a narrow but unimaginably tall crevice in the darkness. In front of us stood a building of the old world, undamaged except for the fact that it rested on its side, sticking straight up in the air. I tilted my head to read the words painted onto its front. "T... G... AUTOMOTIVE."

As I said the words a harsh rattling sound began. In the vast space it was horribly loud and I dashed to the wall, full of terror that the ceiling, though it was hundreds of lengths up, were caving in. But it was only Eziel's father, opening a door with a chain. He wore a mocking grin. "Scared ye," he said. "Aye," I told him. I could not pretend.

"Well, forgive me," he said. "Seeing as I brought you here that you might help me."

"What nature of help?" I asked.

"Come see," he said slyly. I stepped cautiously towards the yawning black of the open door, and my eye caught the gleam of something metal inside. "What is this, Harald?" I demanded.

"A miracle of old," was all he said. I stepped into the darkness. Before my eyes could adjust he clicked on a bright torch. It was an old world car - sleek, smooth and untarnished. I was so used to seeing the pulverised wrecks of the machines that the pearlescent perfection of the silver paint on this one was shocking. My hand moved to touch it. "A thing of beauty," I told him, and edged around to inspect the deep blue badge on the front. "SAAB", I read.

"We need to get it out of here," Harald said.

I laughed incredulously. "How can we possibly do that, brother Harald?"

"We know a way out," Harald said bitterly. "We need a strong man to help us push to start."

"It will not start," I told him. "The gasoline will be spoiled. The engine will not work."

There was a gleam in his eye. "We have gasoline," he said. "I have fixed the engine. We just need you to push."

As he said it another figure stepped out of the gloom. A huge man, a giant, a length and a half tall, with a round and bumpy skull like a boulder. He was unknown to me. "Who is this, Harald," I demanded.

"We just need you to help push," Harald repeated. I looked from Harald to the giant to Eziel. Something was wrong. The way we had come down was impossible to move a car through, narrow, steep and twisting. The entrance to the tunnel had been of steep rocks along the cliff wall. But they had a way to get a car out, a way with a wide and gentle incline - so why had they not brought me in this way? And how did Harald come by a supply of gasoline? To their expressions came the realisation that I suspected them, and the giant pulled a wrench from behind his back and swung it at me. I leapt onto the hood of the car and heard Harald curse. "Do not... harm it!" He hissed. The giant lunged at me, grabbing with one huge hand, but I was nimble and skipped up on the roof of the car and leaped onto his back. I plunged my knife in at the base of his skull. Harald wailed and grabbed at a saw that was fixed to what had been the workshop wall and was now at his feet. It would not become loose. I ran to him and he hauled on it frantically, heaving and crying, until it dislodged and he staggered backwards, slamming into a wall. Lengths above him an old doorframe crumbled with the impact, showering chunks of wood around him, and as he staggered to his feet a trolley laden with heavy tools rolled lazily through the doorway and landed on top of him, crushing his thin body instantly.

I looked at Eziel, who shook his head and said, "He was no true father to me."

I told him: “You are a betrayer as much as he was.”

He looked at me feebly and pulled his cap low over his eyes, as though to protect himself from seeing the moment of his death. When I did not strike him he said slowly, his hat still covering his face amusingly, “I am just a seed in the pod, sir. Will you punish the seed, sir, because the plant that made it grew too wild?”

In the afternoon of that day when my father and I had found the bright picture in the old tunnel we had walked as the sun set to a pointed outcrop of rock that hung over the canyon. We sat with our legs dangling over the edge, looking out at the land and the sky. Near to us we could see the fossils of the world before the ice: just fragments, oddly coloured and combined; but further away the detail was lost and the earth became dull, a brown that expanded to the horizon and beyond, jagged and old. I had wanted to ask him why he would not linger at the picture, but because I knew the answer and was afraid to hear him say it I sat in silence. Eventually he had sighed and said: “Would ye fix the apple back to the tree, or return the moth to its cocoon?” I had stared at him, afraid to give the wrong answer, as the boy stared at me now.

"Do you know the way out?" I asked, and Eziel told me he did. "You will help me start this," I said, "and I will drive us both out of here." That's how I got my Saab.