Bat Cave

The cave looked much like any other from a little distance but as we approached, came almost to its mouth, we saw its walls within that slanted up into a dome were beating like a wild black lung— it was plastered and hung with the pulsing bodies of bats, the organ music of the body’s deep interior, alive, the sacred cave with its ten thousand gleaming eyes near the clustered rocks where the sea beat with the leather wings of its own dark waves. Below the bat-hung, throbbing walls, an altar stood, glittering with guano, a stucco sculpture like a Gaudi church, berserk Baroque, stone translated into flux—murk and mud and the floral extravagance of wet sand dripped from a giant hand, giving back blessing, excrement—return for the first fruits offered to the gods. We stayed outside, superior with fear, like tourists peering through a door, whose hanging beads rattle in the air from one who disappeared into the dim interior; we thought of the caves of Marabar, of a writer who entered and never quite emerged— the caves’ echoing black emptiness a tunnel in the English soul where he is wandering still. So the bat cave on the Bali coast, not far from Denpasar, holds us off, and beckons ... Standing there now, at the mouth of the cave—this time we enter, feel inside the flutter of those many hearts, the radiant heat of pumping veins, the stretch of wing on bone like a benediction, and the familiar faces of this many-headed god, benevolent as night is to the weary—the way at dark the cave releases them all, how they must lift like the foam on a wave breaking, how many they are as they enter the starlit air, and scatter in wild wide arcs in search of fruit, the sweet bites of mosquito ... while the great domes of our own kind slide open, the eye that watches, tracks the skies, and the huge doors roll slowly back on the hangars, the planes push out their noses of steel, their wings a bright alloy of aluminum and death, they roar down the runways, tear into the night, their heavy bodies fueled from sucking at the hidden veins of earth; they leave a trail of fire behind them as they scar the air, filling the dreams of children, sleeping—anywhere, Chicago, Baghdad—with blood, as the bombs drop, as the world splits open, as the mothers reach for their own in the night of the falling sky, madness in method, nature gone into reverse ... here, nearly unperturbed, the bats from the sacred cave fill the night with their calls, high-pitched, tuned to the solid world as eyes to the spectrum of light, gnats to the glow of a lamp—the bats circle, the clouds wheel, the earth turns pulling the dome of stars among the spinning trees, blurring the sweet globes of fruit, shaped exactly to desire—dizzy, we swing back to the cave on our stiff dark wings, the sweet juice of papaya drying on our jaws, home to the cave, to attach ourselves back to the pulsing dome, until, hanging there, sated and sleepy, we can see what was once our world upside down as it is and wonder whose altars those are, white, encrusted with shit.