It’s the second. I’m glad we killed you when the zombies attacked.
(Somewhere, in some other slice of a world, I’m probably killing you again).
“No,” I say, “I must be mistaken.”
Your face is just like the face of the Aztec priest, obsidian knife in hand. “I thought so,” you say.
I nod and walk out of the gallery. It’s raining outside.
In another universe, you rush out of the gallery with an umbrella and we walk together, heads down, in a cryptic silence that does not break until we reach the subway and we both ask a startled question at the same time.
In this universe, however, I simply pull up my hood and splash through the puddles. We never kiss, in this universe.
The chamber of horrors. The cobwebs and the torture instruments and the lights. And Jack. She loves Jack most of all. He stands in a corner, past the mummies and the witches, in his cape and stylish top hat. Black satin. Gloves. Right hand raised, knife gleaming. He sports a wicked smile.
If you stand in front of Jack all you can see is the smile. The angle of the hat wraps the rest of his face in rich shadows. However, if you move to the side and step a bit forward, against the velvet ropes, you can look at him up close.
The quality of the wax sculptures varies. The older ones are good and the newer ones are less detailed. But Jack. Jack is not good, he is great. The one who crafted him did so with exquisite detail, labouring over the eyes and the skin, striving to approximate life as much as one can within the confines of a wax mold. The result is a face that seems alert, capable of speech, of drawing a breath. The fingers curl around the knife with true strength, the body tenses, ready to leap down from its dais.
Even the background of this exhibit is flawless. Behind Jack there is a bed, unmade, the sheets splattered with blood. The subdued lighting reveals a brick wall and a shuttered window.
Julia stands in front of Jack and touches the sleeve of his jacket. She is fourteen. During class she draws skulls and dragons in the margins of her notebooks. In the afternoons, she does her homework with more haste than effort. Twice a week she walks the wax museum, pausing before Jack and admiring him.
Her father works for the museum. He spends his days in a cramped, windowless office. Julia brings him his dinner on Mondays and Thursdays. Sometimes she also visits on Fridays, if mother is too preoccupied with the twins. Julia suspects father does not take his meals at home in an effort to avoid his six children, not because he is too busy to depart from his post.
Julia sets down the tin containers filled with food and goes behind the ropes, standing on her tiptoes to look at Jack. It’s Monday and the museum is closed but father still goes to the office. It’s Monday and it means there is no one to interrupt her. She removes Jack’s hat. She sets it on her head.
She tilts her head and stares at him. She brushes the knot of his necktie.
Finally, she sets the hat back on his head, jumps down and continues on to father’s office.
The teacher speaks of the Aztecs. Speaks of sacrifice. Of the tonacayotl, the spiritual flesh-hood. We only exist thanks to the sacrifice of the gods. There is a constant cycle of death and rebirth. The Aztecs pierced their body with maguey thorns, drawing blood from their tongues, their ear lobes, their feet, their genitals. Offerings written in blood.
Julia draws a snake. It curls on the page of her notebook, growing in size. She adds details: tiny little crosshatches for the skin, a forked tongue.
The teacher assigns partners for a project. Julia will work with David.
David lives four blocks from Julia’s house. His father owns a small convenience store. Julia has seen the boy there, with a green apron tied around his waist, assembling pyramids made out of soup cans.
David proposes that they consult his leather-bound encyclopedia for the project and Julia agrees. Julia sits on the floor of his living room while he turns the pages. An image of a sacrifice taken from a codex catches her attention and she places her palm upon the page, staring at it.
David turns on the radio. He pours her a glass of soda.
He has no siblings. The music echoes through his apartment without the wailing of a baby punctuating it in the background. She finds that odd.
While she looks at the picture, David’s hand falls upon her knee, brushing the hem of her skirt.
He should not touch her and she should remind him of this. She makes no effort to move the hand away. The touch irritates her, but she is also curious. She wonders whether he will attempt to move his hand higher. The hand remains at her knee and eventually she stands up, tossing the remains of her soda in the kitchen sink.
David walks Julia home a few times. She does nothing to encourage him or to refuse him. They walk together but she feels as though he is at a great distance. Curiosity and indifference mix together.
Twice a week David’s father has him come in to the store to work the cash register. One afternoon, David gives her a grand tour of the premises. He takes her to the storage room and they sit behind a pile of cardboard boxes. He runs a sweaty palm across her knees, touches her. Julia stares at a box filled with tuna cans. She leaves half an hour later, after purchasing milk and coffee for her mother.
In her bed that night she thinks about the tonacayotl. Everything is but one flesh. The world is but an illusion. Omeyocan. The dual space, the dual time. Everything is immaterial, innate, eternal, without beginning or end. We are but the manifestation of the gods, a fleck in the double pupil of Ometeötl. Everything dies, everything is abandoned, everything exists again and remains.
If time and flesh are an illusion … well, then …
Julia lays still upon the bed and relaxes her limbs. She breaths slowly, until her body feels very light. Until her body seems to drip onto the bed, through the bed, down. It sinks. The sounds of the city morph into sounds of carriages and horses. An unusual cold drifts into the room. She hears the patter of the rain upon cobblestones. Her bedroom window seems narrower and fog whirls outside, hiding the buildings and the sky.
A shadow drifts across the room, towards her. He stands in the ghostly light that filters through the yellowed curtains.
She knows his face. She knows his smile.
He lowers the knife, plunging it deep into her stomach.
She screams.
In the morning she wakes to find blood on her thighs. Her period has arrived.
She showers and when she emerges the bathroom is filled with steam. The mirror has clouded. She traces a serpent upon its surface, then wipes it off with the palm of her hand. She observes her reflection.
The bodies of war captives were carefully handled. The locks to the captor, the heart to the Sun, the head skewered onto a skull rack. David’s encyclopedia provides facts, words, pictures, but no knowledge.
Julia sits cross-legged, turning the pages. She asks David for the J volume, asks him if he’s heard about Jack Ripper. David turns the volume of the stereo higher, making the walls of the apartment reverberate.
He rubs her legs and touches her arms. She feels like a doll that is being maneuvered into different poses. Her body feels like it is made of rubber or wax.
She asks David if he believes that all flesh is but an illusion but the music is loud and he isn’t listening.
Julia sinks into the sheets, drowns upon the bed. Her whole body dissolves, ceases to be, is assembled again. She resurfaces in the room she’s seen before — his room — to the scent of incense, the sound of rain upon the streets.
He comes into focus, a blurry figure at first, his face growing clearer. Jack’s eyes narrow when he sees her.
She breaths slowly.
Her mouth is dry.
He nicks her with his knife. He cuts her arm. Tiny, sharp, little cuts.
But she doesn’t mind. This is the art of sacrifice. Thorns and bones and blades to make the body sing.
There’s an anatomical illustration of a man and a woman, their skin removed, that she enjoys looking at. Th
e illustration consists of several layer of acetate that you can flip on or off. Flip and you reveal the muscles. Flip again and see the veins. Flip to see the naked skeleton.
Peeling layers of reality. This is exactly what the Aztecs understood.
David looks at her with a bored expression as she spreads his books on the floor. He has no use for books. Those are his parents’ things, tomes that contain no useful lessons for him.
Julia agrees. The pages cannot hold knowledge. Only the body — fragile, immaterial as it is — can hope to transmit a hint of truths.
David understands only the body. She does not fault him for it. The language of hands, nails, tongue, is as honest as any saga upon the printed page.
But David only understands the first layer. The skin and the flesh. He cannot peel the acetate to reveal the muscle and blood. He does not see the shape of her skull beneath her face.
Perhaps she should be content with this one layer of truth, this slim understanding.
She can’t. She just can’t.
She takes David to the museum, to see Jack. David acts like he is not impressed by the chamber of horrors. He laughs at the mummies and snorts at the witches. When they reach Jack, Julia tells him about the crimes.
David has been all laughter and bluster, but as they stand in front of this wax figure, he seems to shrink a bit. What are we doing here when we could be at the movies, he asks. Beneath the irritation there is a hint of dread.
Julia says nothing. The feeling of distance, of disinterest, invades her once more.
He runs his hands down her arm. He wants to do something fun. He wants to make out. Sex. It’s all David understands.
David understands nothing.
“Not now,” she says, her eyes upon Jack.
David kisses her, wraps his arms around her. His insistent hand palms her breast, as if he were kneading dough.
She bites down on his lip. She bites down until it bleeds. David yelps like a puppy.
He shoves her away and rushes out of the chamber of horrors with an angry curse.
Julia stumbles and falls in front of Jack, bruising her knees. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
David walks another girl home. Julia watches them with the same vague indifference as before. Her mother sends her to buy eggs at the little store and when she comes in David ignores her, busy rearranging some cans.
When she returns home her mother tells her to cook some eggs. Mother is busy with the twins and the other children are hungry. Julia cracks an egg. It is bloody in the centre. She stirs it with a wooden spoon, as though she were scrying. The egg burns.
She touches the tiny points on her arm where Jack nicked her with his knife.
Julia pictures the universe like an infinite, incessant assembly of fractals branching out into forever. She sinks into them. Cahuitl, the Aztec’s word for space, derives from the word for abandon. To abandon oneself. And so she abandons herself upon her bed — which is no longer her bed. She opens her eyes to a room that is not her room.
But in the currents of time and being, here can be there.
The light from an oil lamp washes the scene in warm yellows and browns. A sweet, pungent scent clouds the room. A man rises from a chair and gazes at her with familiar eyes.
She peels off her nightgown and prepares for the knife to nick her stomach. He spreads open her legs instead, digs his finger into her flesh until he draws bruises.
The scent in the room is the memory of altars and incense.
The rains have arrived. Julia watches the water swirl into the sewer grate. She waits under her umbrella until David walks by. He hasn’t spoken to her in several weeks, but he turns his head when she calls his name, like a charm.
It’s Monday. The museum is closed, but she always has access to its wax figures and its hallways.
She asks him if he’d like to go with her.
He looks reluctant only for a second. She knows, by the way he smiles, that he’s been expecting this. In some corner of his mind he’s thought she’d pursue him, grovel, beg for his renewed attentions.
She takes him to the chamber of horrors. She goes behind the velvet rope, behind Jack, and sits on the bed. David’s eagerness has subsided.
Yes it’s dark here, she says. No one comes here. No one can see us.
He hesitates. She casts off her sweater and her shirt and David follows her to the bed. He pinches her nipple, tries to get on top of her.
Julia reaches beneath her and clutches the knife, making a firm cut. Warm blood splutters upon her chest. She strikes again. Again. Again. And David slides down, wriggling, twisting.
Julia holds up her hand. It’s stained crimson. She rubs her hand against her lips and heads towards Jack. She stands on her tiptoes and kisses him. She can feel the acetate film of the here and now peeling off, like a dead skin.
His waxen flesh grows warm.
His mouth tastes of incense.
When she first saw the man she thought him a ghost and even though she knew ghosts were dangerous and could drag people down into the water, she still moved closer to him. When she knelt by his side it was clear he was still alive, but barely.
“Brock! Come and help me! There’s a man injured!” she cried.
Brock grumbled and approached, staring at the man lying between the rushes.
“Come on Brock, we’ve got to get him home,” she urged him.
“What for? The fellow’s almost dead.”
The man did look pale but Andry had pressed her hand against his chest and felt his heart steady beneath her palm.
“Well he’s not dead yet,” she said. “Come on, give me a hand.”
“He’ll be dead in the morning.”
“And leave him here in the meantime? With no proper burial?”
“The river will grant him a proper burial.”
“Give me a hand,” she repeated.
He sighed and complained and they dragged the man onto their little skiff. It started raining shortly thereafter. Brock whistled a merry tune while Andry looked at the man next to her.
“He’s probably a brigand or a deserter,” Brock said once they were sitting in front of the fire, the smell of fish stew filling every corner of the little abode.
“He is not,” Andry said. “Those are good clothes. A gentleman’s clothes.”
“When he dies, could I have his dagger?” asked Brock, turning towards the corner of the room where Andry’s mother was tending to the stranger’s wounds.
“Why would you need such a silly trinket?” said the older woman, covering the pale man with yet another blanket.
“To gut fish.”
“He’s not going to die yet, Brock,” Andry muttered as she handed him a bowl with stew. “You’re such a greedy fool.”
Brock shrugged. “You take what the river gives.”
“The river didn’t give you anything. And if he does die we’ll bury him with his things so his ghost won’t come back looking for them, isn’t that right mother?”
“That is right,” nodded the woman, sliding away from the bed and the pale stranger and towards the fire.
“Well I think it would have been more merciful if we’d just left him back there. Now the fellow will be tossing and turning for a few hours before he’s dead and bothering you with his moans,” Brock said.
Andry placed a cool rag against the stranger’s forehead and made a charm of ferns and twigs to drive evil spirits away.
He was handsome, this waxen man, and it was more out of admiration than compassion that Andry watched over him. She did not reveal this to her mother or Brock, knowing they would botch snicker at her childish fancy.
It was not odd though, considering the circumstances, that Andry should find herself entranced by a half-dead man.
There were tiny towns speckled throughout the area, but none close to them. When her father had been alive commerce was decent. Theirs was a prosperous hamlet. Travelers had often gone down the river on their skiffs
and life was good. Brock’s older brothers also had skiffs and fished and traded along the river. War came and many homes were burned or sacked. Her father and Brock’s brothers were unwillingly recruited by a group of soldiers passing through the area just like all the other men of age. Brock was lucky; he had only been a small child or they might have taken him too.
Their tiny hamlet had dwindled down to nothing. Only elderly fish folk, some widows and a handful of dirty children remained.
With his brothers lost Brock could have headed over to his aunt’s home, a strict and stiff faced woman he despised. But Brock stayed. He felt safer than in a bigger city where the soldiers might easily choose him as an unwilling recruit. Brock was, after all, now a grown man of seventeen.
A grown man and the only person her own age for many leagues. Her mother worried about this situation and tried to put away some money for a dowry. There was, she had told Andry, a nice, suitable butcher’s son over at Azun. When Brock heard this he laughed and told Andry the butcher’s son had a hare lip.
Still, she supposed hare lip or not she could expect to be married to him one day. Or to Brock, but Brock had nothing, was nothing and Andry’s mother hoped for a better match.
In the meantime Andry peered at the stranger and dragged the wet rag across his forehead.
“He needs medicine,” Andry said. “We should get him some medicine.”
Her mother and Brock stared at her.
“It’s not a good time. The rains are coming. The river-hag will be outside,” Brock grumbled.
“She comes on the cold, misty nights from the water. If you cannot see her she cannot harm you, so hide well under the covers,” Brock had said when they were children. “If a single toe peeks from under the covers she will grab you by it and pull you into the river.”
The river-hag. Brock’s favourite tale used to skilfully torment Andry. It still worked. For a moment Andry felt like stopping her arguing but then she swallowed her fear and spoke.
Love and Other Poisons Page 11