The Mother Serpent smelled the presence of Wyrm with her forked tongue. She told him, I have come for Wisdom. No, he told her, you will never be wise. She told him again, I have come for Wisdom. He dared her, saying, Take it from me if you can. She anchored herself with a coil and reared her hard body to its full height and swelled her muscles and flattened her neck and hissed, Give me Wisssdom. And Wyrm told her, bite your tail, worm.
Now to call a serpent a worm is the greatest insult. So Mother Serpent knew she had to battle him, and she knew that it was as he had said, she was not wise and she never would be, for she knew Wyrm would kill her.
So they battled, and he did. He sank his fiery fangs deep into her head, blinding her, and shook her until her spine snapped, and flung her far away. She dragged her broken body out of the dark place, and when she felt the rays of the sun she stopped, and laid many moon-round eggs, and then she died.
The sun serpents kept the eggs warm. And out of them hatched many serpents, tree boas and sea serpents and adders and glass snakes and sidewinders and anacondas and little striped garter snakes and many, many more, all the serpents of the world. And they crawled the earth, for none of them could fly, but each of them bore between its eyes a singular jewel, sapphire or ruby or topaz or emerald or amethyst, as befit the First Serpents of Earth. They all slipped through the great rib arches of the Mother Serpent’s body, then slithered away north and south and east and west. The first humans saw the First Serpents, and coveted the jewels between their eyes, and tried to kill them. And many humans died trying. Some snakes died also, but many lived, and mated and laid eggs and gave more serpents to the world.
As time and generations passed, the jewel could no longer be seen, but all serpents bear it still between their eyes, within their minds, and the name of that jewel is Wisdom. And to this day, humans still hate and fear serpents and try to kill them, although they have forgotten why.
That was the story the green snake told. After it was over, there was silence. I kept walking till the gray sky over the city turned even darker. But my mind no longer felt dark and gray. The story gave me an awesome feeling that stayed with me for hours afterward, like Eternity perfume.
“… startling development in the Troy Lindquist case,” the TV reporter said.
Halfway listening from my bedroom as Mom watched the news, I mumbled, “Uh-oh.”
“… when a mystery girl somehow bypassed hospital security, entered the stone boy’s room, and kissed him,” the anchorman was saying. “He responded …”
Mom yelled, “Dusie!”
I didn’t move or answer.
“… markedly elevated heartbeat, respiration, blood pressure, and brain activity.” The anchorman sounded smug, like this was supposed to make people chuckle. “Doctors are no longer in any doubt that Troy Lindquist has intact hearing and can react to external stimuli. The mystery girl, however, vanished in the confusion. Witnesses remember only that she was wearing a large blue velvet hat …”
Mom screamed, “Dusie Gorgon!”
SEVEN
Mom took away my blue velvet hat and made me absolutely promise not to go see Troy anymore.
So I knew I couldn’t.
It wasn’t like I had any idea what to do for him anyway.
Days kept going by.
Taking their good old time.
I felt so bummed.
And sooo bored. I kept my cell phone turned off because I couldn’t stand lying to my friends—they had started asking what was wrong with me. I’d returned my books to the library and looked for more and read them and I still hadn’t found a way to get rid of my snakes. A person gets tired of television even if she doesn’t have snakes on her head who want to watch boa constrictors like they’re soap opera stars. I couldn’t listen to my favorite music because my snakes complained in my head worse than static on a weak radio station. I couldn’t get on the computer because Mom wouldn’t tell me the password. She did not want me surfing the Internet unless she was home, which she hardly ever was. Even with all the volunteer work she did and the meetings she went to, I wondered where the heck she went all day, since she obviously wasn’t at her so-called studio sculpting great art. I felt like she was avoiding me, and that gave me another thing to resent. It never once dawned on me that maybe, yes, okay, she was staying away from me, but it was because she didn’t want me to see her crying.
So I spent most of the time alone and bored and feeling sorry for myself. Finally I started walking. For hours. Every day. Partly because I felt like I was fat and needed the exercise, partly because there was nothing else to do, but mostly because walking seemed to make me feel a little better.
After the first two days I got sick of SoHo and I took the subway to explore other places. South Street Seaport, Battery Park. Little Italy. Chinatown. Chelsea, with its wrought-iron fences and sunken gardens and all kinds of dogs walking their people. Greenwich Village. Specifically, Washington Square Park.
I didn’t have to take the subway; I walked there. It wasn’t that far away, and it was a sunny afternoon, with just a whiff of a breeze. Aside from a few winos I had to step over, Washington Square Park was cool. The NYU students dressed to be noticed. I was wearing my pink-and-yellow madras hippie hat and I fit right in. Street musicians played all around the park—my snakes didn’t mind their music—a mime kept running into invisible obstacles, and a team of jugglers kept six wooden swords in the air at once, and there was a modern dance troupe in purple outfits and orange body paint trying to present something under the triumphal arch.
Let usss sssee! demanded a black racer, picking up the images from my mind.
Oh, God.
Sure enough, just like I was running a preschool, the rest of them started in. We want to sssee, too! Sssee them dance! Dance like cobrasss! Let usss sssee, too!
I felt little heads starting to poke out from under my hat.
“Stop it,” I ordered between my teeth, walking away from the dance troupe and tugging down on the brim of my hat with both hands.
Dusssie, remove thisss absssurd headgear, ordered the scarlet king snake.
“Choke and die,” I told her.
I’ll bite your ssscalp!
“I’m sure I can find a freezer around here somewhere. You promised not to bite, remember?” Like me, they seemed to know they had to keep their promises. I glanced around to see whether anybody noticed that I was talking to myself and my hat was moving. But, duh, no problem. This was New York. Just like in midtown, people hurried by, barely noticing the violinists or the mimes or the dancers or me. All kinds of people. Guys in suits, businesswomen in fur coats and cross trainers, people with dreadlocks, hospital workers in scrubs, tweedy people who might have been professors, people in military uniforms, bag ladies pushing shopping carts, street people and commuters and kids and old people—I was keeping an eye out for the old man, what was his name? Cy, because he had said he went to NYU, but I didn’t see him. Maybe it was too cold for him.
My snakes settled down and coiled close to my head for warmth. It got even colder, and darker, almost nighttime. The square swarmed with taxicabs, their white lights blinking on like they were big glowworms. People hurried even more, wanting to get home. It was time for me to get home, too. I sighed and headed down a narrow street toward SoHo.
Once I got away from the park, the neighborhood changed. No bistros, no shops, just apartment buildings, with almost nobody on the street. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood, but it spooked me to be all alone. I walked faster, staying alert.
It’sss okay to be ssscared, whispered my yellow-bellied racer, his voice all green and worried. Unlike the other racers, he seemed to make being ssscared his ssspecialty. But he had picked a good time for it. On my head I heard other snakes start to hiss softly.
“Shush,” I told them. “There’s nobody around.” Except about a block ahead of me was one other person, his back to me, an old guy with a funny bent-over, bow-legged walk. Because I’d never seen him from the b
ack, I didn’t recognize him till he paused under a street lamp and raised his head like a turtle to look around.
“Cy!” I blurted.
Too far away to hear me, he lowered his head and limped on. I smiled and started to trot to catch up to him.
But just as he stepped into the shadows before the next streetlight, somebody grabbed him.
An arm darted seemingly from the wall of a building, snatched Cy by the elbow, and yanked him out of sight.
I gasped and lunged into a run, sprinting toward where I had seen him. If there had been a car or anything coming at the intersection, it would have creamed me, because I didn’t even look, just ran across. Halfway up the next block, I saw the alley, and in the shadows a cluster of street punks in do-rags and hip-hop pants. Among them I could hear Cy’s sunny voice. “… boys want to rob people?” he was saying without a trace of anything except kindness in his tone. “Why? You’re young. You could—”
“Shut up!” one of them snarled. “Give us your money, old man. Now!”
“I can’t. Wouldn’t be right. I’d be helping to corrupt you youngsters—”
They yelled, cursed, and there was a sick, smacking noise, and Cy gave a cry—they’d hit him. His cry went through me like getting struck by lightning. There was no time to think, only react. I screamed, “Stop it!” and my snakes hissed like a hive of dragons and reared, striking the inside of my hat as I snatched it off. Snakes bared, I charged, yelling “Stop it! Let him alone! Slimeballs, stop it or I’ll …”
As the punks turned on me, I saw Cy fall, hitting the stony pavement with his frail old arms flung out, and it took all the control I never knew I had, every spark of willpower in my mind, to keep myself from giving them the glare that could kill them. Thank God I only had to hold myself back for an instant. They saw what I was, saw twenty-seven snakes on my head with their pale mouths wide open, striking and hissing and spitting. And those punks froze and went so white that they actually seemed to petrify for a moment before they ran like—
“Cockroaches!” I yelled after them, fists clenched. That was the way they ran, like cockroaches, like I’d flipped the light on. “Scumbugs!”
Then I heard a small, painful sound behind me and spun around, all my anger gone in a moment like water down the drain. “Cy! Cy, are you all right?”
He lay on the pavement hugging his one arm with the other and staring up at me with wide-eyed wonder, like I was the most amazing birthday surprise. “Well, I never,” he murmured.
“Cy.” I folded to my knees beside him, starting to shake. The sound of hissing whispered away as my snakes relaxed. The milk snake draped his checkered belly across my nose. I lifted him gently back to where he belonged, because I needed to see. “Cy, is your arm hurt?”
He barely seemed to hear me. “Well, I never in all my born days,” he murmured, gazing at my head and smiling like an angel. “You are a doozy.”
Then it hit me. Panic, I mean. I gasped, “Cy, please don’t tell. Please, don’t.” I wasn’t worried about the others, the street punks, because they’d never admit that a girl scared them, and even if they did talk about me and my snakes, nobody would believe them. But—“Cy, if people find out …” I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. I sobbed, “They’ll lock me up and—”
“Shhh. Dusie, it’ll be all right.” He reached out with his good hand and patted my knee.
“But—”
“I won’t tell a soul about your beautiful, vehement snakes. I promise.”
“But your arm—if it’s broken—” I was bawling so hard I couldn’t make sense, but I had my cell phone out, switching it on, so he knew I was thinking we should call an ambulance, and then there would be cops, too, and everybody would want to know all about it.
“Not at all, Dusie,” he said in the most soothing voice. “Just help me up, if you would. Better find your hat first.”
So I did. I couldn’t stop crying, but I turned my cell phone off again, put it in my pocket, and got moving. I jammed my hat back on, then helped Cy up. It was like lifting a person made of dry sticks and Styrofoam, he was so light. On his feet, he stood unsteadily, still hugging his right arm with his left hand. I made myself calm down. “We’d better get you to a doctor,” I said.
“I’ll go to my own doctor. In the morning.”
“But—”
“Could you walk me home, Dusie? I can walk, if we take it slow. Just keep me company, that’s my girl. And please, tell me how you got your snakes.”
So I did. As we slowfooted along the dark streets I told him the whole story, because he wanted to know and because having him by me felt so good. I’d never had a grandfather, but talking to him, I felt like now I did. I told him about waking up with the worst bad hair day of all time. I told him what I’d found out about my mother. I told him about meeting the Sisterhood in Central Park. I even told him I could hear my snakes thinking in my head. I told him—well, I told him everything. Even about Troy.
“I heard about that boy on the news. So that’s what happened to him!” Cy murmured.
“It’s all my fault,” I said. My crying had quieted as we walked and I talked, but now I start sniffling again.
“Not at all,” he said firmly. “It was an accident.”
“But if I told the hospital or anybody—”
“Better not do that. I agree with your mother; they would not understand. Officialdom lacks imagination.”
“But I feel like a criminal.”
“You’re not.” He hobbled along clutching his hurt arm, his face tight with pain, yet he was able to give me a look like a blessing. “Dusie, you’re a nice girl with your heart in the right place, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re a hero. You saved my life. Those boys would have killed me.”
I shivered. “You should have just given them your wallet.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t be right.”
“But—”
“I know, I know. But I’m eighty-seven years old. If I can’t stand up for what’s right by now, when can I?”
“You’re crazy,” I told him.
“Most of my friends would agree with you.” He tried to smile, but winced with pain.
“We ought to get you a taxi,” I said. “Or an ambulance.”
“It’s not far now.”
His apartment was only a block down the street from mine. He fished his keys out of his pocket, but his hand shook, and he let me open the door. Inside, he collapsed in a chair. That’s all there was, one big old recliner and a table with a lamp and a radio. The rest was all books, shelves and shelves and piles and piles of books. Books towering on the sofa, books stacked on the countertops in the tiny kitchen.
“Where’s the phone?” I asked. “We should call somebody.”
“There’s nobody to call, Dusie.”
“You don’t have kids around here?”
“My children predeceased me. If you can help me rig up a sling, I’ll be fine.”
I barely heard him, because I was figuring out that he’d had kids but they were dead, that was what predeceased meant. Ow. Owww, that must have hurt. I said, “We should call your doctor, at least.”
“You can try. The telephone is by the microwave.”
I wondered whether there were books in the nuker, too. I found the cordless phone in its cradle behind a pile of Rudyard Kipling novels, along with a notepad, a pencil cup, and a list of emergency phone numbers. He was organized enough. I noticed the books were kind of stacked by topic or author. Robert Frost in the refrigerator, maybe, and Robert Burns in the oven. I dialed the doctor and got the answering service; an operator said she’d have the doctor call back.
I found the bathroom—yeah, he had stacks of books in there, too, all along the walls and around the toilet—and I grabbed a big, thin beach towel for a sling. Cy chatted with me while I eased it under his arm and tied it behind his neck. “So your mother is Euryale Gorgon. The sculptor.”
He sounded a bit dazed, as if too much had happened too fast.
“Right,” I said, even though I’d already told him how the stone people had so not been carved.
But he kept talking like Mom was a real sculptor. “She’s the one who did the statue in the Whitney—what’s the name of it?”
“The man standing in the lobby? Beyond.” Although I had no idea why that was its name. Artists were expected to give weird names to their stuff.
“Yes!” Cy sounded excited that I knew what he was talking about. “Beyond. What a masterly work of art. Totally detailed and individual, yet you can’t tell whether the subject is black or white or Asian or aboriginal or—or any other ethnicity. He can’t be pigeonholed. He’s Everyman. And the expression on his face … all the sorrow and joy and longing and love of the whole world.”
“Um, I’m glad you like it.”
“I’m dying to meet your mother,” Cy said, “but I believe I’m a bit frightened of her.”
So was I, but I wouldn’t admit it. “Because she’s a gorgon?”
“Because she’s a genius.”
“But, Cy, she’s …” But my voice choked when I tried to say she was a fake, and all of a sudden I felt like Mom was a genius just by surviving, and kind of an artist just by—by being?
Could a life be a work of art?
Whatever, because just then the phone rang.
It was the doctor calling back. I brought Cy the phone, and he made an appointment to be at the hospital for an X-ray at six in the morning. I wrote stuff down on the notepad for him. After he beeped the phone off he told me, “Dusie, I’ll be fine. I promise.”
He wanted me to go home now, but he was too polite to say so.
“Don’t you need some help getting to bed?” I asked.
“I’ll stay right here. Just turn on the radio for me, Dusie, if you would.”
I must have looked at him sideways, because he added, “I often spend the night here with my radio.” He tilted the recliner back. “I’ve gotten too old to sleep much.”
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