Through the window of his room at Road Home Hospice, day after day, hour after hour, Dolf took inventory of what little of the world was left for him to know. He counted:
one honey locust tree
one rundown dock to which was tied a rusty boat
& one charcoal-blue lake, whose waters he couldn’t recall the last time he had swum in
The landscape—besides its shriveling wither from fall to winter, from explosions of red-orange to a sepia much like the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz—had not changed since Dolf was admitted to Road Home. At least not until today, because now he also saw:
one mountain, far off in the lake, shrouded in fog, and crisp with lightning that made the clouds seem as if they were exploding from within
The heck’s that mountain called? Lived here in Kansas my whole life, never noticed it before.
Though the nurse squeezed Dolf’s hand gently and smiled at him in a way that approximated love, she did not confirm the mountain’s presence nor the storm eclipsing its peak. Dolf knew he had been in hospice a while, but surely he hadn’t been here for the kind of timespans required for continental plates to shift, collide, and give way to vast elevations. And don’t tell me that’s some pyramid, either. I would know! Three times I’ve been to Egypt to see very important friends.
When Dolf first arrived at Road Home, he had been asked many questions, including what his favorite meal and song were. He hadn’t seen the relevance until a nurse explained that this hospice had a tradition of serving each patient their favorite meal as a last one. They also played each patient’s favorite song just after they were pronounced. Dolf thought it was a funny thing to call a dead person—pronounced. But then again, there was a mountain rising up from nowhere and pretty nurses stroking his arm with almost-love; yes, his was a topsy-turvy world. Play that song about the place where “happy little bluebirds fly.” And I’ll take veal cutlets.
The hospice was clean, gentle even, with peach-pink walls, easy on his milky eyes. Dolf’s only complaint, Can’t you do something about the damn snakes?! He had known a risk of bedsores and endless hubbub came with the conditions of end of life, but he’d never expected snakes.
Of course, what Dolf was seeing was only the tubing that hung down from the IVs administering his fluids, which to any person doused in as many pain medications as Dolf was now prescribed, such confusions were to be expected. Yet to Dolf, the snakes were as real as the mountain that now loomed on the lake, engulfed in ashy storm clouds that ignited the sky and danced light across the eyes of Dolf’s many serpentine roommates. Supposed to be a private room!
At times, Dolf swore he could hear a deep wailing, that the mountain’s cries were rattling his windowpanes. He asked the nurse about the moaning, to which she smiled, checked his vitals, and stroked his liver-spotted hand, which lulled him right back to sleep.
In the mornings, as doctors gathered, asking Dolf to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten, he reiterated that the pain was no bother, but the snakes sure were. If I wanted to see so many cobras, I’d have gone to India to visit my best pal, the snake charmer!
Lately, Dolf mentioned places like Egypt and India in most conversations—not because he’d ever visited these far-off lands, but because he needed to pretend that he hadn’t squandered the majority of his 89 years. That he wasn’t leaving a world he’d entirely failed to know. So, he wove in tidbits about his “dear acquaintances” on distant continents to remind the hospice staff that the man before them was a man of planet Earth. That he knew things, that he’d had experiences, and that he, Dolf Grey, was deeply engaged in relationships with interesting people like Egyptologists and snake charmers who knew and loved him, just as he did them; dear relations who had lived big lives just as he had, who would be visiting him daily if not for the miles between them. Because in all the months that Dolf had been in hospice, he’d had not one single visitor. Dying is often a very lonely endeavor.
By day, Dolf didn’t mind the snakes draped about his room, as they behaved when the lights were on and he liked to think they were communicating, sharing stories about the vast and rewarding adventures of their lives. But come nightfall, being surrounded by serpents made it difficult to sleep, and sometimes Dolf had a feeling the snakes were conspiring to make his end of life altogether grueling, which scared him, as he was very afraid that dying would be painful.
It wasn’t that Dolf was biased against creatures without legs. In fact, as a boy, he had been particularly fond of earthworms. After every heavy rain that pummeled his small hometown in Kansas, when there was always a rainbow that he truly believed stretched all the way to Oz, Dolf would walk the streets, gently scooping up all those worms who had been washed out onto the pavement, returning them to the safety of the damp soil. Back then, Dolf never made up friends in faraway lands, for it had been enough for him, his unspoken fellowship with these worms.
Dolf had all but forgotten about this ritual with the worms—hadn’t even thought about earthworms at all—but his body was shutting down now, resurfacing long-lost relics of his life. The snakes who dangled about his hospice room were reminding him of all those worms he’d once loved as his dearest relations, despite their differences. The worms had no legs, whereas Dolf had two. Dolf also knew that the worms had five hearts, whereas he had but one. Of course, now his legs were useless, so in a way, he was a legless creature, too. And his one heart, big as it was, was steadying into stillness. He wondered if the only way he might ever again leave the hospital bed would be by wiggling out like a worm. But he’d been tired for as long as he could remember and was now just another octogenarian, waiting for relief—to remember what it had been like to be a child, pudgy hands plunged deep into this home place as if he might touch the juicy heartbeat of his world and know what it means to be a part of something.
Early this morning, just before sunrise, Dolf had been served blended veal cutlets, which he slurped two tiny sips of through a straw. The doctors were huddled about his bedside now, though Dolf didn’t need their low whispers to tell him what he already knew—that the snakes were gaining a foothold on Road Home’s facilities. That it was time to hatch a plan. Dolf tried to gauge their expressions, but their faces had become blurry and everything in the room, save the snakes, now appeared as if viewed through delicate paper, the kind his mother had given him to wrap up the little bodies of the earthworms that Dolf brought home, those whom he hadn’t transported in time to save. Dolf was wondering who would wrap his body once he was gone?
As the hospice room turned gauzier still, suddenly the snakes began to lunge at Dolf’s abdomen, at his jugular—even his eyeballs. The doctors ignored Dolf’s shrieks in favor of studying his toes for curling, his skin for mottling—his chest for that final breath, rumored to release us all.
Try to relax, Mr. Grey. This is all very natural.
Natural, my ass! I’ve got to get out of here, down to the water, to that boat! Most snakes can’t swim!
Do you see anyone waiting for you in the boat? Your mother or father? Perhaps a sibling or grandparent? It’s okay to let go now, Mr. Grey. Everything will be all right.
Hell yeah, I’m going! Screw this place! Hell of a way to care for the dying, dumping snakes all over them! Could have at least been worms. You know, I really did once love worms…
Dolf found himself overcome with emotion, by a deep yearning to again hold an earthworm, to save one last life before he left this world forever. He was about to articulate his final wish when a particularly hefty viper sprang at his cheek. Dolf ripped the IV tubing from his veins, leaped out of his hospice bed, and dashed across the floor, which was blanketed in slithers and coils on the verge of a spring.
In nothing but grippy socks and a hospital gown that left his backside exposed, Dolf yanked himself out the window of his hospice room, fell two floors onto the frozen ground, and took off in a sprint toward the dock where the rusty boat bobbed in the inky waters of the lake.
Haha! I’m free! Off to Amazonia to see my good friend who looks after the ruins! Though they weren’t looking, Dolf still flipped the hospice doctors the bird, as someplace deep within renewed in vigor.
Though he didn’t fully trust the little vessel, sure enough, the snakes had followed him out the window and were now gathered along the edge of the shoreline. Lightning flashed across the lake, reflecting the mountain in every pair of twinkling serpent eyes. As Dolf set sail, he turned to face this sudden mountain. He could feel his heart beating hard, pounding in his chest—What a thing to have a heart!, something deep in him cried out. What a thing to see a mountain on an island, so entire of itself! If only his friends, the Egyptologist and snake charmer, weren’t pretend—they’d get such a kick hearing Dolf’s story of such a narrow escape.
Dolf had never been particularly adventurous. Or religious. As a boy, on the kneeler in church, he had actually been praying to earthworms, his hands clasped together as he imagined some simple hope—for a snow cone or the right kind of love. Paddling himself across the vast lake, he considered why he had ever stopped praying to earthworms. Because for as certain as he was that this boat was real and that the snakes and the hospice doctors and his narrow escape through the window had been real, too, as the fog momentarily parted and he caught a glimpse of the mountain before him, the surreal nature of the moment was undeniable, and he began to question whether or not he was still alive.
Living his whole life in Kansas, Dolf had heard two key theories about what happens after we die—one from the preacher, one from the movies.
According to scripture, which rippled thick in Kansas, death meant judgment. Of the way you had treated other humans. Of the earnestness of your faith in the doctrines of the Bible, of Christ as King and Lord God as creator of the Earth and everything she held, including earthworms, all of which had been put here for the sole purpose of serving the needs and desires of man. When Dolf had asked the preacher if earthworms had souls, he was met with a severe—No. Scripture insisted that one of two possible paths awaited the dead—reunification with humans in heaven or eternal damnation.
Another theory floated on the playgrounds of Kansas was that the Land of Oz was an afterlife. When you died, you’d be spun through a twister in your house, fall on a wicked witch, and meet some profoundly loyal companions with whom you’d pursue a yellow brick road to a wizard who would send you right back to Kansas; all this, assuming you had been able, in your sparkling red pumps, to successfully make your way out of “the forest of flying monkeys” and lug your hefty picnic basket through vast fields of soporific poppies.
Thinking of Oz made Dolf smile, and he wondered if all those kids from the playground had thought of the Tin Man and Cowardly Lion on their deathbeds, had died hoping Dorothy’s shoes might just fit them.
Watching something like a moon rise over the top of the mountain, Dolf caught glimpses of meadows and woods, in which he faintly discerned the silhouettes of animals and birds in herds and flocks that appeared to be in the tens of thousands. He even thought, for a moment, that he saw a mother polar bear and her cub, but this was Kansas, after all, and so Dolf determined his failing vision was the cause of so much unexpected beauty. Reaching the shore, he tried to pull the boat onto the mountain’s craggy base, but the lake ripped it back, splitting the bilge.
The base of this mountain was so thick with vapor that Dolf had to physically part it with his arms. With each brush, he thought he saw farm animals, faintly even heard someone say, Mooooo.
Making his way through the haze, Dolf was reminded of a third version of the afterlife he’d once heard, not from the church of Lord God or films made by MGM, but by the old woman who had lived on the edge of Dolf’s hometown. The neighborhood kids called her Newt and were always sneaking onto her property to steal fence finials and other trinkets from her yard. Dolf recalled that on one occasion, a band of teenagers, including Dolf’s older brother, had attempted to sacrifice a chicken on the steps of Newt’s porch. Though she’d caught them mid-ritual and chased them off, the chicken had been left nearly headless, her blood spouting like oil freshly sprung. Dolf, who had been hiding in the bushes, watched, as with the deftest of mercy, Newt helped the chicken die, though she did so through tears. Dolf knew her tears, as they were the same ones he cried whenever he was too late after a rainstorm, whenever he needed his mother’s delicate paper to wrap an earthworm for burial.
After the incident, Newt wrote a pamphlet and distributed a copy to every house in town. It was titled: We Each Have a Mountain. In it, she described yet another vision of the afterlife, in which every person must climb a mountain populated by the ghosts of all the creatures neglected and enslaved, all those who had suffered or were slayed, so that just one human could live. Every chicken you ate. Every cow. Every fish. Every dog you kicked, even the strays you failed to provide shelter to in winter. Every bug you squashed. Every bird you shot down from the wire with your slingshot. Every bunny, beagle, and chimpanzee who lived out their days in a laboratory cage so that you might have vaccines, hand lotions, and aftershave. Every single being who suffered for you to go about your living would be on that mountain. And it was only if you could reach the top—if you could face all the anguish you’d wrought—that you might ever ascend. Otherwise, you would spend eternity surrounded by the shadows of your own cruelty and wanton disregard for life.
Newt’s vision of a netherworld of suffering had frightened Dolf when he was young. Yet also, he had kept her pamphlet for years, treasured it even, until his father discovered and destroyed it, just as he destroyed so many true things. Dolf had liked thinking of all people—particularly his father, brother, and 4th-grade science teacher—having to atone for the harm they had caused. But Dolf’s father had been obstinate that Newt was broken beyond reason, not only a lunatic who was perversely sensitive to animals, but an apostate who would one day burn in hell. And so, because it was forbidden, Dolf had forgotten about mountains as afterlives. Until now.
As the fog parted, Dolf felt his heart tenderizing inside his chest, pounded into softness by the gazes of seven thousand-plus cows. They ranged in age from the very old to the very young, though none frolicked and none grazed, they merely stared at Dolf, who immediately recognized one face—from a pasture back in his hometown—the face of a cow he’d known as a boy. He remembered now that her name had been Lucy and he recalled, too, how he’d enjoyed hamburgers at his neighbor’s house right around the time that Lucy had gone missing. Back then, Dolf hadn’t understood just where hamburger meat came from because nobody had ever explained this to him. Of mammal to slaughter to raw meat to the grill to his little belly, hungry from a day out in the meadow.
Seeing Lucy, a wispy apparition of her once warm and rippling fullness, her rounded belly into which Dolf would press his head to listen as her stomach digested the prairie grasses of Kansas, he required no further explanation—he knew that these cows were the ones he had eaten, had taken the milk meant for their calves from, had worn as the soles of his shoes. Moving through them, Dolf was compelled to stroke their backs, to offer some gentle touch, but each time he tried to pet tenderly, his hand passed right through, spirits as they were. Dolf had known as a boy that the preacher was wrong about animal souls—how had he forgotten that as a man?
Next came the sheep and the goats, who Dolf had consumed for their cheeses. The alpacas and llamas whose wool Dolf had worn for warmth. Just when he thought he could bear moving past them if only he kept his gaze low and avoided their eyes, he came upon the lambs, limbs made fragile by the constraint of a box, eyes white from the darkness in which they waited until slaughter. Dolf had to stop now, had to sit down upon his mountain. Sinking into the cold, jagged stone, one of the lambs stumbled toward him as if asking for help. Her useless hind limbs dragged behind, and though Dolf tried to lift her onto his lap to offer her some relief, she, like the cows, passed through his trembling fingers.
Next were the pigs, many of them piglets hiding behind their mothers. The chickens, ducks, pheasant, and quail, some still in their eggs, quivering in the cold of Dolf’s highland, forever unfertilized, forever in limbo. There must have been thirty thousand birds, Dolf thought—probably more. For a moment, he considered counting them, but something told him this mountain was no place for reason. That here there was no Lord God or Wizard of an Emerald City before whom he might take to his knees, grasp the robes of, and beg for clemency. No, he simply had to keep climbing, past the eyes of all the ghosts he’d rendered, past all those he had failed to consider while slogging along through the years of his life.
Dolf wasn’t a fraction of the way up when he reached a lake. In it, all the salmon, trout, and whitefish—whose true name, beyond what they were called on a menu, Dolf couldn’t manage to recall. They swam without abandon. Swam with eyes that stared—unblinking—back at Dolf as he stumbled into the water. A few kicks in, Dolf’s grippy socks were gone. And he wasn’t halfway across when his hospital gown snagged on a fallen tree limb, tearing it down the middle and leaving Dolf fully exposed. His naked flesh—all those amino acids bound up into proteins, those fats that made him soft—contained parts of the forms of all these souls he was swimming among. He was made of them, was made of all the once-living flesh of this mountain, but what had he given back in return? How had he nourished them as they had nourished him? He hadn’t and now it was too late, for he had nothing left to offer. Sinking to the bottom of the lake, Dolf opened his mouth to let the water fill him, but nothing entered—for even the water was a spirit that passed through him now.
Beyond the lake was a forest, and Dolf took shelter in a grove, as if he might hide from the more than a million eyes of the mountain. He attempted to lean against a pine tree, but it could not hold him, for even the trees were shadows of selves, chopped down for the roofs and tables and toilet paper Dolf had consumed. Spotting a fawn who eyed him with something deeper than fear, Dolf determined that the only thing he could offer the souls of his mountain was to disappear.
Plunging his hands into the Earth to dig himself a grave, Dolf’s fingertips were met by something squirming. Unlike all the others who slipped through his fingers, this creature was solid to the touch. And the sensation was as familiar to Dolf as the womb—an earthworm, a particular earthworm.
This was the earthworm who had curled up in the corner of an aluminum tray—desperate to get back to someplace dark and moist and quiet—who Dolf’s 4th-grade teacher had demanded Dolf dissect. With every slice, Dolf had felt the scalpel entering his own body, too, the pain so tremendous that he had thought he was dying. And Dolf realized now that indeed he had, at least a part of him. For that had been the day when, after the spring rainstorm ended, Dolf had not gone outside to provide merciful transport for all those worms caught on the pavement as the sun broke through. The day that had revealed to him the dark heart of the man he was expected to grow up to become.
Dolf was crying now. Big, juicy tears that warmed the ground beneath him. I’m sorry, old friend, said Dolf to the earthworm. He tried again to recall Newt’s pamphlet—some detail that might serve as a clue about what he was supposed to do now that he had found one being still alive. This one being so much more true and divine than all the gods and wizards of history and fantasy combined, this little one made of smooth segments, the first creature he’d been instructed to harm. But it had been eighty years since his father had destroyed the pamphlet and Dolf couldn’t remember.
With this little worm cupped in his hand, Dolf rose to continue his ascent. But with each step upwards, the worm recoiled, same as back on the dissection tray. Climbing was painful.
Please, stop, said the little earthworm.
I won’t harm you this time, I promise.
Dolf tried another step, but again the worm seized in excruciation. Dolf turned his gaze up the mountain, where he now clearly saw the mother polar bear and her cub. Nearly every species on Earth was here on his mountain, all of whom he now understood had been lost so that he might live.
Just go, said the worm. I cannot leave this place.
Contemplating the earthworm’s words, Dolf recalled something from Newt’s pamphlet, something about how, on our mountains, we will each meet one animal who we can still comfort.
There must something I can do. Please, tell me what you need—
Uncoiling in Dolf’s hand, the earthworm appeared weak, perhaps even dying, and it was then that Dolf knew, You’re starving. Here he had been wondering who would wrap his body in delicate paper, but maybe delicate paper wasn’t needed, maybe there was another way.
I’m sorry, I know it’s such big a thing to ask of you, earthworm whispered.
No. It’s really not. Actually, it’s the least I can do.
As Dolf laid his naked body down atop the dirt, in the distance, he could hear the opening notes of Over the Rainbow. Delicately, he placed the earthworm back into the soil. Then with one ear, he listened to a song that made him remember what it had been like to have dreams, to hold wonder—and the other ear he turned toward the Earth, to hear the most beautiful music in the universe, the subtle pulsing of the five hearts of this one little earthworm beneath him.
Newt had been right—we each have a mountain, not meant to be climbed.