by M F Sullivan
Not unlike being pierced by the sound. As if her flesh were stripped away and her consciousness, purely contacted by the psychedelic experience of the art. Her lips parted. Somehow, she sipped her wine. No wonder her Father spent so much time listening to music! No wonder human and martyr flesh so craved music when it afflicted the soul thus. It inspired a heat, a hot and furious anti-sexuality, founded in deep-set nerves she had never before felt and which the uninitiated might never understand. Behind closed eye, the world was naught but color, the formless texture of music more real than a body. Her fingertips did not exist, yet they filled with sublime delight. Were sublime delight. Perhaps it was the nature of the music, written for its composer’s own mortality: a grand celebration of life and a humble genuflection to the awe-inspiring power of death. She had already died once she knew of; how many times had she died eternally? How many times had Valentinian skipped from Dominia to Dominia? Who knew! She kept drinking.
All was well and fine until she reached the Benedictus. Then arose logical memories of Nogales, which had been, at the time, the worst experience of her life. The Battle for the Reclamation of Mexico had been horrific: one of the most profound wastes of martyr life in all military history. It proved a mark upon the lives of many humans, too. She never let herself forget that. Being a helpless prisoner changed her; or maybe it was her jailer, Benedict, a bright-eyed kid barely twenty-one who had been amazed to see that his charge—not only the infamous General but the only survivor of her ill-fated unit that dark night—looked all of twenty-six years old.
“I’m two hundred and forty,” was her curt response from behind the wood-and-iron door. Primitive, but its reinforcement served to trap her in that stone room reeking of shit and piss and rancid meat and base, animal sorrow. Too frequent a visitor in dreams, that room.
“Oh, gosh”—the boy laughed at himself—“I’m sorry.”
At the time, his laughter seemed mocking. “You’re going to apologize for that?” There was no humor for her while she huddled upon her bench, forced to stay awake all day to navigate her cell lest her flesh encounter that square of sunlight her captors refused to cover. A sleepless prisoner now mocked by a child, she snapped, “Don’t insult me. You killed my people. Good men and women with families whose children have already been orphaned or abandoned by one set of parents. Now you’ve orphaned them again, you keep me here like an animal, and you apologize for thinking I’m twenty-six? Like I give a shit how old you infants think I am.”
The boy blanched. “I don’t mean to apologize, it’s just—I’m real sorry, ma’am.”
If only something throw-able had been left in her possession. In reality, she was lucky they’d left her with shirt and pants—were she a man, they wouldn’t have. “Don’t call me that, and don’t apologize to me.” She pressed against the cell door, having strode through the patch of sunlight that the boy apparently thought impassible: so quick, he barely had time to jump. “I could rip your tongue out through this window. I don’t want to hear another apology. Frankly, I don’t want to hear the sound of your voice, but if you don’t talk to me, I’m just stuck here listening to you breathe, and that’s worse. Since you mongoloids are going to put me on trial instead of killing me right now, we’ve got a lot of time to fill. That’s a lot of wet mouth-breathing—”
“Mouth-breathing,” repeated the flabbergasted young man while the General railed on.
“—I’m forced to hear without interruption. So do me a favor and, if you insist on talking to me, talk to me about something—anything!—that isn’t an apology.”
With his brows knit in an expression that initially recalled worry, the boy slipped his hand through the tight-fit bars of the antique cell and startled her by touching the hand that gripped her window. “You’re right. I guess it’s disingenuous to apologize to you, since I didn’t have a hand in the battle and I’m only here to defend the things I care about. I just got here yesterday!” The boy laughed nervously and released her hand, sliding his own dampened palm back to safety with a glance down the hall. “They’re desperate for men. There’s a bunch of us here and more on the way, so don’t get any ideas…but you did a number on us, too.”
The boy had looked back at her with a hard, significant glance, one hand lifting his feldgrau rebel’s cap while the other scratched his blond hair. It occurred to her, despite his deep tan, he was from nowhere near Nogales, or even Mexico. The 64th Jurisdiction of the Front had long been a subject of conflict, and the seat of terrorist activities whose impacts stretched not quite as far as the Jurisdictions of the Canadian Winterlands—this was why the General had stayed in those generously dark and quiet states during her twenty-year sabbatical, until Operation Sole Sovereign was put into motion and the Hierophant ordered her return. During her absence, hundreds of citizen militias had popped up across the Front, and all of them champed for an opportunity to slaughter their martyr oppressors. The idea had been to abandon unsuccessful drone tactics and take Mexico City by city, the good old-fashioned Roman way; and there was no one to lead such an assault but Dominia di Mephitoli.
The problem was intelligence about human military capacity proved wrong, time and time again. While things had started well and many target locations were secured, the martyr army—more brainwashed human slaves than martyr overseers, truth be told—was harmed by its own prior efforts to deny Mexico necessary supplies. What supplies the Mexican citizens had were funneled by the South American Resistance Army troops and various other Hunter cells; the same could be said of the weapons, which were easily passed along routes built to exchange precious goods. All that was to say: martyrs had expected a primitive and scrambling group of testy animals, and were met with many waves of well-armed fighters, guerilla or otherwise, who so wore the General’s army down over the four-year campaign that, by the time the strike was launched on Mexico City, defeat was inevitable. Four years they had marched around in circles, and their human troops were stymied by malnutrition. Of her sizable unit drawn from the whole during the Battle for the Reclamation of Mexico, Dominia was the only one shipped to long-since ruined Nogales—the only survivor. She was shipped up, and Benedict, down, to a location that had become a storehouse for the tiny smattering of living martyr soldiers captured alive. She deserved it. Benedict, decidedly, did not.
Dominia drained her glass and filled it again, and wondered how many times she had repeated the motion. How many times had the record skipped, waiting for her to pick its successor? How long had the doppelgänger leaned against the bookshelf far behind her Father’s empty seat, pale cheek pressed to the cherry wood? It looked more physical: a more compelling rendition of her deceased wife. With that horrific thought, the thing bit its lip as though acting coy.
The General’s eye narrowed. “What do you want?”
The thing continued staring, the hand not braced against the bookshelf lifting to play with the dark curls tumbling down its neck. They were lighter in color today, those curls; the neck they surrounded seemed so like Cassandra’s fragrant one that Dominia felt herself kissing it. She took a burning swallow of wine.
“Don’t look at me.” Her faltering words strengthened. “Don’t look at me, you thief.”
The parody did not move, though it did smile in that horrible shark’s way. So unlike Cassandra’s it sent a shiver down the spine. As she rose, the General demanded, “Did you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Dominia,” it whispered.
The wine was on the verge of backing up her throat. “Don’t use her voice.”
Gaze unfaltering, the abomination took a step. Did it ever blink?
“Don’t you love me, Dominia?”
The question ended in a shriek as the General hurled her glass past the thing, which lifted its arms over its face and cowered against the bookshelf. Dominia approached it for the first time, to grip the front of its dress and rattle it as a wolf might a rabbit.
“You bitch,” she said into the vacantly fearful f
ace. As Dominia spoke, she reexperienced all the times Cassandra had called her the same: their most violent fights, times of fury and panic early in their marriage. Those first few troubled years, when Cassandra had pushed her and slapped her and accused Dominia of ruining her life. Of taking everything from her. All accusations from which Dominia could not possibly defend herself, because they were true. What was she to say to things like, “You killed the man who should have been my husband,” or, “If it weren’t for you I wouldn’t have to stay alive,” or, the worst: “I wish I hated you, so I’d have a reason to leave you.”
How had those fights come about? Dominia had never been able to discern. She once ceased drinking in hopes it would help them get along, but when the fights didn’t stop, she doubled her previous alcohol consumption. All those failed attempts to make her wife happy—to get her to move past what seemed increasingly to Dominia like a blip near the start of Cassandra’s otherwise beautiful life of ninety martyred years—made the General a miserable wretch. Every time her wife wept over life not lived and death not died, the Governess felt so inadequate she often wished she might just disappear. But things had improved with time, and distance, and love, and patience, and communication: until one day, many years later, it became apparent they weren’t communicating at all in the necessary ways. After all, Cassandra would rather be the confidant of a bullet than the then-Governess.
It had not been Dominia’s fault. She had told herself that, and so had everyone else, but it was hard to believe. Hard to ignore the resentment now that she held this false Cassandra. This lying Cassandra. Her Father had a point when he said Cassandra had always been a liar. This was merely the amalgamation of her lies, or perhaps her lies as personified by Dominia. This thing stared through a convincing recreation of Cassandra’s largest, most terrified eyes, and the General laid a heavy slap across its face.
This was not the first slap she had laid across Cassandra’s face, but it was the first that felt good. She did it again, and as it cried her name, she grasped its delicate jaw as though to shatter it.
“You’re not Cassandra. You’ll never be Cassandra, and if you keep talking to me like you’re Cassandra, I’ll kill you.”
“Dominia,” the thing sighed, half whining, squirming in her grip and against her body. She glanced down and saw its own, naked beneath the thin fabric of its violet dress. The General might have let her fingers push new holes through its pale cheeks had she not noticed the motions of its hand, pinned between thighs she knew too well, had missed so much, were not real, were not there. Yet—
Her hand was there, too, like it was one hand. The General’s kisses lay bruises on those lips as she dragged the vile thing, writhing, to the floor where she pinned it. There, it keened at and reached for and begged of her in ways Cassandra never had. Cassandra had been more inclined to make sure Dominia watched her undress. Her motions would slow to sensual drag, and cream shoulders came rolling out of her blouse like the soft hills of breasts already spilling from the chocolate lace bra. The hair would come down, followed by the panties. Then she’d recline upon the couch, the bed, the floor, and look at Dominia in nude expectation that reminded her so much of the first time, so much, oh…the General never had any choice but crawl to her side in devotion. How she had loved Cassandra! She had hated their fights, but craved their tenderness!
But: this thing. She loved abusing it and hated it more than ever now that it rolled her over with its sex-hungry body and pulled its dress over its head. There she was. Every bit of her. Tragic, beautiful memory, profaned. The thing bent its head over the General’s belt, over the stolen, fumbling fingers. Dominia wondered if this was less or more a betrayal of her late wife than would have been a jaunt with Miki in the train or the pawnshop or the dentist’s apartment. As she winced, then relaxed into the caress of the thing’s cold tongue, she became aware of her Father’s distant voice, and felt she sat again in the chair across from his now-filled one. Around the edge of his seat, there was herself, lying on the floor with the doppelgänger’s head between her legs. Incredible, to be so out-of-body: yet, from time to time, she felt its mouth.
“Sexual fantasies”—he spoke as if in answer to some query and was either oblivious to the activity behind him or, more likely, felt toward it the distant interest any alien scientist might reserve for a pair of coupling subjects—“are a misapplication of the creative libido down into the sexual drive, rather than upward, toward God.”
From her position sprawled upon the floor, she turned her head to watch with her good eye herself in that velvet chair. Her Father, on rising, took the skipping needle from the record, then withdrew from the sleeve collection an album she could not see. As the black sun sank and with it night cooled all remaining definitions of environment, the cobalt fire spontaneously emerged in the fireplace, and the thing between her legs redoubled its efforts for her attention; efforts that, undeniably, had effect, so Dominia panted and struggled to divine the lyrics of the ancient United Front ballad she’d heard more than a few times growing up. It went almost unrecognized in the wet heat of pleasure. The whole world was muted by the long curls of dark hair that tangled around the General’s fingers while she pushed ever tighter the creature’s jaw against the apex of her thighs. All the while, the Hierophant talked on. “The average man is incapable of salvation because he is so wrapped up in the material world that he cannot see that his own lust for flesh is truly a lust for a higher power. The average martyr, even, cannot be saved, and the best he can hope for is a close connection with his community in the form of the living Church.”
The song was one the Holy Father had sang playfully to her so many times. Its eerie tune, its themes of eyes and stars and the moon in a superposition of existence and nonexistence, were a playful paternal melody in those nights. She even turned around and sung it to Cassandra! Now she knew the song of devotion for what it was: a teasing promise of that fateful night at the McLintock farm. As her Father poured wine, then abruptly reappeared in his seat, his voice carried on: “When we find our lover manifested in the flesh, we derive from them a surge of inspiration because the soul is liberated from the surly bonds of lust. Our fantasies are revealed as the poisonous wastes of time they have always been. Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings.” He lifted his glass in toast to her.
“You really are the Devil.” She marveled to watch herself, eyes glassy, stomach churning at the thought of more wine but brain unable to stop the movement of her hand to the glass to her lips. Her Father smiled, onyx eyes as burning as his fireplace while darkness ended its descent.
“Labels like that seem such primitive notions in this place, don’t they? ‘You’ and ‘I,’ ‘Valentinian’ and ‘Basil,’ ‘Cassandra’ and ‘it’”—for the first time he acknowledged the scene behind him with a glance and, from the floor, Dominia met his black eyes and looked away, not embarrassed so much as furious he would interrupt this moment of what was supposed to be private shame. The Dominia of the chair was calmer: perhaps because of the wine, or the conversation, or the way her Father said—“‘God’ and ‘the Devil.’”
She was capable of only mechanical motion while the Dominia upon the chessboard floor, exhaling, forbade exaltation of her pleasure. The thing carried on, carried on, carried her away. The darkness around the study quivered. She chronicled its motions through one hazy eye that dissolved into a burst of color and pleasure along with the rest of her, then recollected to discover a new ceiling upon which was painted quite a fresco. An old religious story called the Assumption of Mary. A primitive, pre-Hierophant interpretation of the Truth, but a small part of the story after the addition of the Post Testament. The music had also changed. She recognized neither it, nor its lyrics, but she heard a distant keyboard and saw from her chair that her Father had moved. Now, he tended the fire.
“You have been alone so long, and refused yourself an outlet lest you offend your dead wife. All this time you’ve clung to the hope she’ll return as once you knew h
er. But would she want that? If you brought her back, would you ever find peace? All these questions, poisoning your mind. What relief awaits you, if only you’d accept your pet!”
On the floor, the thing crawled the length of Dominia’s body to kiss her mouth. She gritted her teeth but nonetheless found herself absorbed into its kisses while her Father carried on. “This pursuit of fantasy has been the ultimate in distractions. A lesson on the life-ruining power of inaction, of lust. Poor child, poor girl, poor daughter! I cannot stand to see you throw away your life on so fruitless a cause. My tragic angel; your hopes are being manipulated by cruel and greedy forces. You are trapped in a dream—a tahgmahr such you cannot remember the girl you were.”
He was back in the seat across from her; the poker, abandoned, leaned against the marble of the fireplace. “My girl, first plagued by bad dreams, as so many young martyrs—who then one evening looked so prideful, victorious, over breakfast.”
And she was that girl, sitting in that too-big, ornate wooden chair at the expansive dining room table of their Vatican home (where they stayed frequently to bribe her into good behavior, for the child was always in a better temper when upon Mephitolian soil), silver spoon grasped in her hand as was the wineglass pinched in her fingers. Had she not broken it? Had it not shattered behind the cringing tulpa? Even now, it fell from her hand to break once more upon the floor: in the Vatican, her Father asked, “What’s pleased my princess this fine evening?”