“He’s gone. He took the faces with him,” handing me the snuffbox. “He wants you to have this. Now you must carry on. You’re the juggler.”
December 11, 1974
Form and the Method
I might say the air here is less rarefied. I might, because I’ve been able to breathe, eat and sleep, at least a little, without the assistance of the machine. That’s all behind me now. The bodily functions are at work again.
In the beginning it was an effort just to get up. I had reached an impasse. My wrists and ankles, no longer strapped to the rug, were so drawn by the absent leather, so chafed and swollen by what had been its constant pressure, that I couldn’t, I didn’t even want to, move them or raise them up, even though the touch of the rug made my shoulder blades, the backs of my calves and my buttocks itch unbearably. The ceiling is too far off to be anything more than the idea of a ceiling lost behind light diffused through the lattice window, the window I could almost see if I tilted my head all the way back. The light breaks on swimming particles of dust. Light. Dust. The rug and the walls—so many watts! The only tangibles.
1
At first I made shadows on the wall with my hands. Elementary shadows: the traditional hare, the alligator, the rooster in profile. Then I tried a face, the face of a man with a low, rippling forehead, more like a cat without ears or lip antennae.
Before long I managed a full face. Two eyes, a nose, the mouth of a woman. The contours were rough, I admit—contrasted areas of black and the color of the wall. But soon I learned to use the walls to my advantage. At a certain time of day (I could take up my hobby only in those few hours when the daylight filtered in) the sun would strike one of the walls at a particularly good angle for soft, half-lit portraits. I learned which hours of the day, and which walls, were good for a Leonardo, a Titian, a Rembrandt or a Vermeer; in one I even succeeded in making the eyes roll. The lips moved as if the shadow-puppet were about to speak.
2
More and more I studied the walls. Sometimes I would go for days without making a single portrait. It became a question of varying the textures of a surface with the play of light. Without using my hands I saw skeleton landscapes in each of the bare walls—even a few ichthyological remains, high up where one wouldn’t expect to find them. No landscape was complete at any given time. As the sun moved, isolated tree fragments became the tributaries of a mountain lake, fence posts and rocks vanished; the grass pitched upward, thick with weeds and gnarled roots, to make the eaves of a depthless promontory.
3
The perspective from one object to another is never consistent. If I could calculate which elements in a wall have correspondence in lighting and depth, I might, by that selection, be able to reconstruct the successive views latent in it.
To fix the image if it is a leaf, a pebble, or even a blade of grass . . . Strands taken from the rug are stuck to the wall, assuming the negative form of the image desired. The wall is covered with strands; let the light pass over it day by day for close to a year, then peel the strands away—work from the earliest to the latest configurations to ensure a sameness in the overall image.
4
The strands of matted wool are a mossy negative between the wall and the sun. When the wall sheds its skin, the landscape will finally be there.
A way out behind shadows scarcely darker than the wall itself.
December 18, 1974
In the Evening
The same every evening. I stop under the archway to relight my cigarette, then I go on. The rain seems to have stopped. The last of it drips off the eaves to a noise of gurgling downspouts. The muddy cascade washes over the cobblestones, sweeping my match toward sunken gutters. An odor of wet stones beyond the gatehouse to the end of the street, the same corner I had turned with the match still in my pocket.
When the gutters fill there is just enough water on the streets to leave reflections quivering in the interstices of the cobblestones: gas lamps, tongues of blue flame until the lamplighter’s bell snuffs them out.
1
If the door opens . . . A clump of stray hair falls across her face to hide the eyes. “Yes, what is it? What do you want?” Her hands are red and swollen, they smooth her apron down in an absent way.
As usual, I make no answer. Then, if the door had opened, she slams it in my face.
2
Back in the vestibule darkness, she begins to wind the clock. She crawls upstairs, puts her ear to one of the bedroom doors and waits for him to ask about the visitor.
But he says nothing until after she falls asleep. Then: “When? When will he speak?”
3
He opens the drawer of his desk. He’s looking for something. Not the pencil. Not the street guide. Not the stapler. Not the hairbrush. Neither the candle nor the shoestrings.
“What is it?” he says. “What am I looking for?”
4
He goes to bed and dreams of the street as it is in the evening. The rain seems to have stopped, etc. He asks the lamplighter for a match . . .
February 25, 1975
The Barrier
Depending upon the point of view, a very slight inclination of the head one way or the other is apt to produce a second or even a third pair of hands from out of nowhere. This time the barrier takes shape as a small brass amphora stippled with a few specks of verdigris. A red shirt connects the upper pair of hands to the lower. The blotter appears at the top (upside down) and at the bottom, with a middle space of black between.
He spreads the fingers of his left hand. Raises them. The fingers expand, merging with another set of fingers that comes down to meet them at the tips. The game ends here for the time being. The operation was brief, painless. Yet he knows he will have to wait a while longer. It has ended badly, not in the way he would have expected it to end. He must begin again later at still another barrier.
1
He no longer recognizes any of the paintings on the walls. The mirror. Even the furniture has changed. A knotty-pine wardrobe replaces the bureau, and what was in the bureau drawers lies scattered over the floor. The mirror has left a pale stain in the wallpaper. The bed is in its proper place, but it isn’t his bed. Something is wrong.
As to the four walls, there’s nothing strange or unexpected. The dimensions of the room remain the same even if the wallpaper is wrong. But if the wallpaper is wrong, why that oval afterimage where the mirror used to hang? The view from the window is as it has always been—a nondescript street, completely deserted.
2
The second barrier, yes it’s the oval stain turning black. An opening. Call it a stain, it wasn’t that. It began as the lack of a stain or of any of the other signs of weathering that marked the aging wall.
A neutral space within the oval. He can put his hand through. His hand disappears. He sticks his head through. It disappears.
3
He’s been on the other side for close to twenty minutes, floating, afraid to open his eyes until he bumps his head against a blunt object, part of the ceiling of another, much larger room—mahogany coffers as far as the eye can see. He passes one then another until he finds the ingress, pressing with his hands until he feels his fingers slip through the woodwork.
Paddling like a blind swimmer, he rises through the third barrier.
4
The next person to rent the room finds the brass amphora in a bureau drawer. She turns it about in her hands, slowly tilting it until the double image, scarcely visible beneath its patina, breaks in two. Then she puts it back in the drawer. She is already late for her appointment.
On her way out, she stops before the oval mirror to smooth a stray wisp of hair.
March 1975
Rhomb
It has but one side. Try to turn it over and (if what they say is true) it will disappear, never to be seen or felt or looked through again. Four edges—a bare outline of the abstraction itself—become one, and that’s the end of it.
Up until now there has been n
o question of an anti-Rhomb. Tonight, for the first time, the possibility exists.
1
You close your eyes. Turn it over in your hand. Feel it— four pinpricks in the bunching skin of your palm. The instant you open your eyes it will have vanished.
No one has ever risked the chance of losing the Rhomb. No man ever dared to open his eyes once he had turned it blind-side up. Yet, rising to what can only be termed a private challenge, you tell yourself it’s nothing after all but an odd-looking slice of tinted quartz or a sliver of amber. You recall the common housefly preserved in a cube of amber long before caves were houses, and an image (a complex or a simple image, it matters little) spins out of that fly’s transparent wings.
2
You begin to wonder. Is it the Rhomb or that antediluvian fly—not the one that already exists in an obscure natural history museum, but the one you have created for the Rhomb—that triggers the maiden images?
They come less vividly now: the women I (or the Rhomb) have imagined, less beautiful; the trees and sky—even the rocks, whether boulders or pebbles half buried in the river bed or under some hypothetical pile of rubble—less of the gem-like color I had gotten used to. Or maybe because I had become accustomed to the images I grew bored and began to weigh my one alternative.
3
When you stare at the Rhomb you stare at nothing. The Rhomb sees for you. It puts your eyes to sleep.
Who can say for certain that the anti-Rhomb does not exist? The paradox is readily apparent. As long as I keep my eyes closed I can feel the four angles pricking my hand, even after I have turned up the so-called blind, or nonexistent, side.
4
But if, when I open my eyes, the anti-Rhomb has vanished without a trace . . . One side only. I turn it over.
Four pale imprints, each no larger than a pinprick, redden on my open palm.
May 6, 1975
Feuillet au Livre du Coeur d’Amour épris (ca.1465)
Snuff out the candle, Jehan, And take the warmer from the coverlet, for I would lie abed. Sing naught to me of Summer winds that tear the blossom from the bough and murder Spring. I am weary of all that, and pine to quit this world.
Put the candle on the floor. Snuff it out. And let us sing no more of her Sweet Face.
1
Rene, his hair tucked in a linen skullcap, sinks back into the canopied depths, pulling the curtains around him.
The wall flickers, green to blue above a well-worn shadow-bench, colors of the Archer’s wings as he descends, catching sight of his own face lit from beneath in the cabinet glass.
2
Rene dreams. First the four lines, then her body’s image. Exceeding faire / Of face and heire / Whose circles / Passeth all compare.
Jessonde with her back to him. All her whiteness come to an almost transparent gray in these shadows.
3
The rug and parquetry, all now that catch the guttering flame. He has pushed the candle under the bench to make a tunnel of light.
Then he stoops to open the curtains. Rene lies on his side, cheek propped in his hand, staring but not awake. Turning the coverlet down, the Archer is a shadow on Rene’s face, a gold-limned silhouette between the sleeper and the wall.
4
The tip of the arrow makes a little dent in Rene’s skin. The Archer draws a bloodless seam in the sleeper’s flesh, opens the warm flap and reaches in, without having heard the footsteps, without having felt the heat of another’s breath on his neck. The Man in White taps his arm, and he turns with the heart of Rene in his hands.
They are frozen thus: Rene, the Archer, and the Man in White—who may be Jehan, or perhaps Rene.
May-June 1975
Return
Somewhere, a piece of dust. The background absolutely black. No, blue. I assume he’s looking down at it, his eyes more than slightly crossed, since the speck, a fuzz-gray wisp curled in on itself (he is that close), seems to lie in repose. Unless his eyes are moving with it. He keeps it at the very center of his field of vision, locus of all lines converging on infinity. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that he has always been able to do it when drunk, to get away with tracking his gaze over the edge of the wainscot or, from his bed, along the commissure of ceiling and wall. It is likely, but not possible.
So it drifts then, this particle of dust. It floats through blue air without seeming to have gone anywhere at all. He moves with it. Not just his eyes. The speck takes him. He has the sensation of following after it, of the floor abandoning the soles of his shoes, intermittently, as he bends his knees. The right, then the left, the right again . . . He makes a turn. Blue, was it? Brighter now. Other shapes. Vague forms behind the dust. More than one speck, neutralized, disappears or blends with something that is still indistinct. Something that hasn’t moved.
1
He walks toward the door. No walls to be seen but the one. The ceiling, if it’s there at all, lost behind a shadow. The door is soft, yielding to the pressure of his hand. Fingers, thumb and palm unstick with a moist hiss no louder than a whisper, leaving their hollows in the wood.
The ceiling is low behind the door. When he opens the door the row of lights, a double track of fluorescent tubes above the corridor, is enough to blind him. Some of the tubes pulse and flicker erratically; almost a third of them have already gone dead gray. No one has bothered to replace them. They are all waiting for the rest of the tubes to burn out. Then it will be over. No more work. No more forms to fill out. Nothing to sign. It will happen, sooner or later. But before that he is standing in front of one of the desks that line both sides of the corridor, waiting for the clatter of typewriter keys, sliding carriages and bells to die down. The woman behind the desk—gray, unkempt hair, bifocals strung to a thin brass chain, like all the others— goes on with her typing, though there is nothing left to type. She and the others believe they know why he is here. None of them had ever dreamed he would get this far. Already, almost two pages have been wasted on nothing. She begins to improvise as she goes along. Soon she is not even typing recognizable words.
2
The breathing apparatus; just tell me where I can find the breathing apparatus, he says. But she goes on typing without looking up. Typing: the breathing apparatus just tell me where . . . It’s in a room (perhaps a janitor’s closet) in the dark, looming through cobwebs behind empty pails, drums half eaten away by rust, rags and tins of disinfectant, behind leaning joists and mops.
He isn’t there. It’s in the dark, and the door hasn’t been opened for months. He doesn’t see any of it. “Just tell me where it is.
3
I’m looking for someone. A woman. Do you know anything about it? A woman kept alive by the breathing apparatus. She’s not particularly tall or short. The color of her hair . . . Her eyes. Let me think. Some special feature . . . It’s no good, I can’t remember.”
The gray-haired woman does not look up. Maybe he will be gone before she runs out of paper. By then they will all be gone.
4
Maybe by now he will have found his way to the room where the walls are faint with pictures. The maze of walls. A small window letting in the light where he will be alone. Just the wickerwork matting of a rug without the nap. Warp and woof. Grayish piles. Ashes at the bottom of the walls. He remembers. He remembers nothing. I am the one who remembers.
June 1975
LOTOPHAGI
Edward Morris
Edward Morris lives in Portland, Oregon, and has been nominated for both the Rhysling Award and the British SF Association Award. “Lotophagi” was reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror series.
When I wrote the following pages, or most of them, it was 2002. I lived in the woods, twenty miles from the nearest store, seven miles upland from the nearest mailbox, three miles from the nearest land-line telephone.
If you believe the stoners in Washington, there really are trolls in the Seattle steam-tunnels. The whole Northwest is legendary for the Americanized Yeti of th
e Sasquatch Nation. The filmic hoax of Bigfoot was no more or less than the Left Coast branch of the Alamagoosalum of New England, themselves mossy scions of the Midwestern Jackalope, kissing cousins of the Texan Chocolocco and Chupacabra, the far-branched family tree limb of the Jersey Devil . . .
And fuck you, too. There are forests where Man trying to protect the environment is utterly irrelevant. Those forests are the ones that people Don’t Go In. Or if they do, not all of them makes it out.
Pandora was nineteen. Her parents told me she was nineteen. Then they slammed the door in my face. After that, I drove all night to the first strip club I found open at 8:00 a.m., and drank myself into a motel. Later Days, as we used to say at Aeolus Farm. Later Days, and better lays . . .
I went to the woods when I dropped out of college, down that miles-long potholy driveway where, as in the rest of the Willamette Region, enterprising land barons imported half the native flora from other worlds than this . . . I went to the mountains, to the old growth of the Cascade Range. I went to learn their ways.
I cast back my mind to 2002 and I’m right there, with flowers everywhere, flowers in Pandora’s weird honey hair. I’m right there, in the stinky, grubby shades of humanity bickering in tiny close quarters.
Bickering around all the parts of Outside that made it in to our little cultural reservation, in every hut and yurt, every hurt, wrapped in pillowcases and socks, the unnumbered poppets of Maya let loose to lay waste inside the wire, and eggs. . .
I went to the woods because I wished to die, to shuck off the last vestiges of civilization long before some stump-jumper found my bones. I went to the woods to abandon my origins and be claimed only by the loving arms of the forest mast, To slough off the life I squandered back in the city.
Back in that one-room palace on Burnside Boulevard, where the outsides of the windows were always black with soot. Back when I was still puzzled, waiting for a future that never happened, shoveling through Augean stables of horseshit just because someone told me there was a pony underneath.
ODD? Page 11