Pyramids

Cradling a gas station high noon tequila soda tallboy with a resealable lid. Smushed in the middle seat in the last row of John’s van between two girls I’ve never met. One of the girls is holding her dog in her lap. The dog smells really bad. I don’t know any of the people in this car very well except Saul. I try to take another swig from the tallboy but the resealable lid is actually making things harder for me.

Before I ended up in the middle seat in the last row of this van I sat in my bathrobe for an hour feeling melancholic and cagey, debating whether or not to leave my house. We are headed across the river to look at the moon from the top of the mounds. Monk’s mound to be exact. More commonly known as Cahokia mounds, the largest pre-columbian earthwork in the Americas and the largest pyramid north of Mesoamerica. Built by a prehistoric river tribe we call the Mississippians. No one knows exactly what the Mississippians were doing on Monk’s Mound. One can only speculate as to what they were doing on Monk’s Mound. Perhaps they were drinking tequila soda high noon tallboys with resealable lids amongst strangers, feeling melancholic and cagey. More likely than not they were engaging in ritual human sacrifice.

The girl with the dog asks me if I ever went to zoo camp as a child because I look like her friend from zoo camp. I lie and say maybe I did go to zoo camp, I remember. Even though I have an eidetic memory and would obviously remember if I went to zoo camp, I hate to disappoint people. Even strangers. The Mississippians society collapsed due to the classic factors of environmental degradation, population decline and war. History repeats itself. And yet Monk’s Mound remains.

From the top of Monk’s Mound, we turn west to face the city from which we came. The lights sparkle. Farther east we can see Ani’s hometown of Belleville. Belleville is outlined by craggy bluffs. Ani says the Mississippi river used to flow where those bluffs are now. At some point, the river changed course. No one knows why. I wonder when the river will change course again and what it will leave behind. Are we sinking? Is the mound rising?

The smelly dog is barking and running around the grass in circles like she knows something we don’t.

We sit in a circle on the dusty ground on top of the mound. Looking up at the full moon, backlit by the sun. Thinking about how the dust on the surface of the moon is older than the rock underneath it. Ani says when she was a kid she thought we lived inside the earth, rather than on its surface. I wish it were true. I like the idea of being inside the earth.

The girl with the dog tells us the last time she came to the mounds to look at the moon was right after her father died. There was a meteor shower, her dad’s ride into the mystic.

The mosquitos are attacking us, the alcohol makes our blood taste sweeter. Mosquitos do well along the river where air is even more damp and humid. It is time to go.The mounds remind us whose land this is, creatures like the mosquitos who serve no purpose but keeping themselves alive. Creatures for whom the earth’s conditions are always satisfactory. Not us.

We are just passing through, like the river before it changes course. We know not where we go, and yet we find ourselves there, sometimes.