by John Klima
I found the ruined metal in midlake was in fact the palace. The people on the waterfront gave me odd glances as well, but one man said, “You’re that messenger, ain’t you?”
“Yes.”
He scratched at his bald scalp, then tugged a drooping moustache. “I can row you out there, I reckon. If you don’t want to just swim.”
The sun was sloping into the afternoon, and I really didn’t wish to get wet. “Please, if you’ll just drop me.”
“Ain’t nothing there no more,” he said pleasantly. “But if you’ve got the hankering, why, you’re the messenger.”
As he rowed I looked up at the sky. The blackstar was gone, for the first time in many months. “Where did it go?”
“Figured you’d know,” said the boatman. “You being the messenger and all. She was still up there this morning.”
I climbed out of the boat on a metal landing, and realized I had nothing to tip the boatman with save the clothes on my back. Even the coins and oddments of the trail seemed to have been lost to me.
“I would offer you my blessing…,” I began.
“No.” He smiled. “You just go on.”
Inside the hallways were metal—floor, wall, and roof. Everything was wet, rotting, damp, with mold blossoming in a hundred colors muted by the deep shadows. I wandered awhile as the light failed, before finding myself on a balcony high up the wall in an open chamber with a great chair at the center.
Not open, I corrected myself. There was a glass roof.
The chair was on a dais made of seven six-sided figures linked together. Much like the cells in the ground at Sucusa, but laid sideways instead of vertically. I climbed down a rusted ladder and walked up to the throne. Each of the hexagons had a clear cover. There was a sort of cushion within, hoses, little buttons. A tiny cell of a different sort.
Queen Taygete lay curled on the big chair. She looked to have died very young, and had since become a sort of leathery corpse. I could see how her face resembled her sisters. I wondered if she had come out of a seventh cell beneath this throne.
Were they better off in Velia, ruled by a dead queen? No kindness, no cruelty, the law being whatever made sense to the people. I did not know.
“You freed him, you know.”
Looking up, I saw Osmio on my balcony.
“I should not be so angry,” the little man said. “Legs-of-the-gong is happy now.” He turned and vanished.
I waited to see if anyone else would appear. Who, though? Ironpants was off drinking and whoring. As far as I knew, Pincus and the guide were in the woods finishing what they should have done long ago—becoming honestly, truly dead.
Would that I could speak to the high priestess back in Cermalus. I had taken her for a fat fool, but I now suspected she knew a lot more than I’d ever realized. Maybe this had all been my miracle, the blackstar and my journey of the Transept. Maybe it had been the queen’s miracle. Maybe no one’s at all.
I sat thinking awhile at Taygete’s feet before I finally fell asleep.
In the morning someone had left three apples and some cheese near me. I put one apple on the throne for Taygete and ate the rest. As the day grew older in the glass roof above me, blessedly clear of the blackstar, the boatman came climbing down the balcony with two young men following him.
“They been fighting, messenger,” he told me. “Won’t stop. Over a girl. I told ’em you’d give a fair judging, being as how you don’t know no one involved.”
Hope, I thought. This man finds hope in me.
Maybe that’s what the blackstar meant. Place your hope in what you don’t know. I’d done the Transept after all, the first in generations. Maybe I’d found wisdom.
I could only hope.
“Tell me about the girl,” I said.
Both young men began yelling at once.
* * *
P•S•O•R•I•A•S•I•S
pso·ri·a·sis se-'ri-e-ses
noun
: a chronic skin disease characterized by circumscribed red patches covered with white scales
* * *
Tsuris
LESLIE WHAT
WHEN I LOOK AT DENNY I can’t see the man I married twenty-five years ago. I see what he has become: his malformed fingers, twisted and swollen at the joints; yellow discharge from his eyes; raised red skin patches that dry and die and transform into silvery scales that slough away, until the next cycle, with new eruptions of red. Psoriasis is no simple malady of the skin; it is the body attacking itself. The heat exacerbates the symptoms, and in the summer we keep the curtains drawn in protest. The weather is unnaturally muggy and our house is dark, especially in the bedroom. The room smells cave-dank. While Denny is outside, mowing the back field, I prepare to sweep up the death with a broom and dustpan. I shake out the top sheet, an act generating a breeze so abrupt it does nothing to cool the room. A flurry of white flakes rises and settles over the floorboards. It’s a beautiful sight—like a dusting of snow on a dark road. But the moment is transient, and when it passes, I see skin cells dirtying the floor.
I sweep the faded oak planks, traversing a wide circle from the walls inward. The circle grows smaller with each broom pass, and a mound takes shape as I push detritus toward the center of the room. My dustpan fills with Denny’s skin, and bits of dust and hair.
He woke up this morning with his joints burning, and got more salty than usual when I nagged him about the grass. He’s been promising to mow it for days.
“This is why God made goats,” Denny said, but he knew better than to argue theology with me—I majored in religious studies.
“This is why God made riding mowers,” I said.
He scratched at his head and examined his nails for blood. He looked so uncomfortable I said, “Why don’t you let me do it? Can’t be all that hard to drive.”
My offer just made things worse. He clomped outside and got to work, and now he’s mowing like a martyr. His skin will crawl from so much sun, and he’ll blame me, but won’t say so.
I should have let him borrow the goat.
There’s a funeral this afternoon—my friend Becky’s only boy, killed by an IED in Baghdad. In another month, he would have been twenty-two. In another month, he would have come home from his tour of duty. He’d only just written to let Becky know he didn’t plan to reenlist. I’m so sad for her I can’t think about the irony.
Denny comes in and heads for the shower. The well’s down so his shower will be shorter than he’d like. It hasn’t rained in two months—no water for luxuries like keeping up the lawn. Certainly no water to wash your hair twice, my biggest sin—well, maybe not my biggest one. The fescue has deteriorated into a field of scrawny stick figures. It’s a fire danger, and all it would take is one spark from the mower, or a partially crushed cigarette to set the world ablaze.
The phone rings.
Ned.
“What are you wearing?” he asks.
“Don’t call me at home,” I whisper, and he asks, “You’ll stop by later?”
I think about hanging up. At first, I didn’t care if anyone discovered my affair, but now that I’ve determined I don’t love Ned, I want it to stay secret. I don’t understand that about myself. “Sure,” I say. “I’ll try.”
“See you then,” Ned says.
It’s too hot to bake, but I want to bring something for after the service. I look up a recipe for crab dip and crackers. A squeeze of lemon, chopped green onions, Worcestershire sauce, a dash of nutmeg, grated Parmesan, cream cheese, ground pepper and salt to taste. I doubt anyone else will appreciate the extravagance. I bought a can of crabmeat our last trip to Portland. It was very expensive, and too much meat for the two of us. We’re five hours to the east of Portland, far enough so we only drive in three or four times a year. Blue Valley isn’t that far as the crow flies. As the Dodge drives, you cross a mountain range and a cultural divide, and those kinds of crossing take their toll. We moved out here to get away from all the things we hated abo
ut the city life. In a way, it seems like cheating to return just to shop.
The pipes make noise like the sound of pebbles tumbling in the dryer. The faucets squeal and the flow of water closes to a trickle and stops. In a few minutes, Denny, a green towel wrapped around his hips, finds me in the kitchen and asks, “Will you do my back?” There are only a few spots he can’t reach, but he likes when I do them all. When it first started, we made a game of it. I was younger then. I thought I loved him enough not to care. I scoop crab dip into Tupperware and burp it shut.
Our place is in the Blue Hills River Valley, on the twenty acres that’s still left of Denny’s family farm. We farm cantaloupes and onions and potatoes and keep a small henhouse and large garden. I trade the extra eggs for milk. I put up jars of zucchini like I’d learned how from my mother instead of from books, and once I won a ribbon for my deep-dish cherry cobbler. In winter, the creek fills and Denny hooks rainbows and the occasional steelhead that takes a wrong turn and ends up swimming through our property. What they didn’t teach me in college was that when you married a farmer’s son you married his acreage. Nor did I learn how hard I’d have to work to be accepted. Even if I die in the country I’ll always be thought of as a city girl.
“My back?” Denny says. “I’ll wait if you’re busy.”
I wash my hands, dry them on a linen towel that’s older than I am. There’s a black scar in the Formica, where the surface dips from when I set down a pan that had caught fire, and it slipped off the potholder. It looks like something that could be rubbed out, but it’s there for the life of the counter. “It’s okay,” I say. His scalp reeks of coal tar, a pungent smell like something burnt.
Denny sits on a stool that’s too short for him. Both knees are puffy and red. A blue jar sits out beside the canisters of salt and flour and sugar, and near the jar’s the box of disposable gloves. I steady my nerves, open the jar, and smile, trying to make it look sincere.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Might as well get this over with.” He closes his eyes and waits for me to touch him. Silvery scales cover his back, whiten his chest. Across his shoulder is a tattooed skull whose flaming hair has mellowed into gray ringlets, just as his scaling skin has muted the once fiery ink. We met at the tattoo parlor. I was getting decorated, a rose on my ankle I thought would look sexy. He was adding to his collection of skulls—one for every buddy lost in Vietnam. Denny’s tattooed skulls shine across both shoulders, his upper arms. There’s a smaller skull on the back of one hand, and a treasure chest overflowing with snakelike jewels that squirm from five grinning skulls on his left forearm. His elbows are scratched raw and the hair under his arms grows in tufts. The skin looks like it should hurt, but the root of the pain is deeper, enflaming his joints and leaving him struggling to stand by the end of the day.
Back in college I wrote a paper on Miriam for my comparative religions class, and how the Bible says God caused her skin to whiten after she questioned the wisdom and prophecy of her brother, Moses. People assume God gave her leprosy, but that’s inaccurate. The Hebrew word for her punishment was tzara’as. Say it out loud, a couple of times fast, and it sounds an awful lot like psoriasis. Scholars say tzara’as was more a disease of the soul than of the skin. Humans tend to conflate the two, but the Bible is all about explaining the differences. There’s another word, this one Yiddish, tsuris, which means trouble, or the condition of being in trouble. Like Denny’s skin disease, which is trouble you can see.
I dip my fingers into the gloves and dip the gloves into the jar and smear white over his skin. The cream won’t cure anything; it just covers things up, keeps new scales from forming until his clothes wick up the moisture.
I feel the roughness through the gloves, grateful for the layer separating my skin from his. I smear cream in a circular motion, like polishing furniture. It’s not so bad once the rhythm takes over. I’m soothing the small of Denny’s back when he turns his body to face mine. He stills my hands and slides his arms around my waist. He pulls me toward him. I stumble into his lap and before I can think straight, he is kissing me.
“My blouse,” I say, annoyed that he might stain more of my clothes, because the only thing that’s worse than being a farm wife is looking like one.
“Screw the blouse. Take it off,” he says. He claws the buttons.
“Let me do that,” I say, but first I pull free from my gloves. I set them on the counter yet they fall to the floor, the call of gravity being stronger than the force of intent. The blouse soon follows.
He grabs beneath my waistband with sandpaper fingers.
My hands fall limp to my sides. I can’t do this, I think, wanting it to end as quickly as it began.
The flame of his tongue licks at my ears. His hot breath blows against my neck. He lifts me to a stand, presses hard against me. His towel slides away. I withdraw from the probe of his tongue as his kisses intensify. He leads me to the bedroom, and I feel relieved to be back in that intimate darkness, where I can avoid looking at the part of him that’s animal and raw, pulsing and decayed.
I close my eyes. He guides my hand toward him and I work to relax, to touch him with the love and longing I once felt. Then my fingers brush his scales and my hand falls limp. I cannot stifle my groan in time.
My husband is turning into a dragon.
Only now does he notice how my tongue lies dead against his. He recoils. “I’m still me,” he says, and turns away.
The funeral starts at five, but we need to get there early because Denny’s motorcycle group, the Patriot Guard Riders, were asked to be the honor guards. The Riders are a group of veterans who came together to do something to honor fallen soldiers. Some, like Denny, are against the war, but some are staunch believers in the president’s policy. They set aside any differences to do what they think is right, go anywhere they’re asked to go, cross the country if needed. Bikers or not, they’re the good guys here. I’m proud that Denny’s one of them.
We’ve been warned that some people from the Kansas Westboro Church have come out here to protest, as they’ve done at other soldiers’ funerals over the last couple of years. The demonstrators are known to carry signs that say things like, “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” and “God Hates Fags.” They insult the mourners, accuse the grieving parents of raising children who hate God. Their credo says that everything bad happens to show how God is punishing the United States for being an evil nation of “fags” and “fag enablers.” These are terrible people and they don’t belong here. Nobody understands why they do it. Losing someone you love is tragic enough. You shouldn’t have to listen to taunts and jeers.
I iron a lightweight cotton blouse and pair of pants. I’d wear a dress if it wasn’t too hot to wear pantyhose. My veins popped out last summer, tiny rivers meandering down my legs. I’m too embarrassed of my legs to go anywhere without stockings. Denny hauls his duffel bag out to his hog and straps it in place. “Sure you don’t want to ride with me?” he asks, but it’s too hot to think about wearing leather over my outfit just so I can look cool by showing up on the back of a Harley.
“I don’t know,” I say, like I’m thinking it over. “Hmm. Air conditioning, or a zillion degrees? Hmmm.”
“Your hair flying in the wind or the scent of exhaust backing up into the cab?” Denny says.
“It’s a draw, but I’ll take the truck.”
He salutes me and ties a bandana over his hair. He’s wearing black jeans and leather chaps and a white T-shirt with an American flag on one side and an eagle holding a “Remember the POWs” banner on the other. He works himself into a black leather vest that’s getting more and more snug. “See you there,” he says. “Don’t forget your crab dip.”
Despite our problems, the man knows me. I’ve left the Tupperware in the fridge. “See you there,” I say, and rush in to grab the crab dip and a couple of bottles of cold water. I find a serving tray and a box of Triscuits and climb into the cab to head toward church.
It’s so hot that even with t
he air blasting me full force it can’t disguise the furnace on the windshield’s other side. It’s not the dry heat that I’m used to, but the kind of steam heat we only get once or twice a year. I can feel my hair frizz and stand out with static electricity. The AC’s on and cool air through the vents stirs up a whirlwind of white—scales that have crumbled into dust. I sneeze.
The farms are an uneven checkerboard of green fields and fallowed patches. One red-winged blackbird chases another from the telephone wire. On the far side of the Blue Hills there’s a flash of lightning. Even from this distance, its power is strong enough to ignite the resting juncos, who startle from a dead pine and scatter until the lead bird leads his flock in a spiral that disappears into the sky. The road before me looks like molten black glass and I slow down even though I know it’s a mirage. But up ahead I see something—an old man walking on water—and because I’ve slowed, when I slam on the brakes, I stop a few yards short of hitting him.
Up close, the asphalt looks solid black; the shimmering light waves I thought were water have moved up the road. In my head I know this is an optical illusion, that this floating road is only the bending and distortion of light rays. But how close do you need to stand to discover the true nature of the world?
The old man’s face is red and he’s dripping in sweat. He’s wearing wrinkled black wool pants and a white shirt made transparent by sweat. He’s carrying his jacket, neatly folded over his arm. He points to a ten-year-old sky blue Buick with Kansas plates that’s parked askew on the shoulder. The hood is open and the radiator steams. He looks like a grandfather who’s wandered away from the family picnic and can’t find his way home.
There’s another lightning flash. I hope to God it’s soon followed by rain, because the world out here looks ready to ignite. The old man comes around the side of the cab and I let down the window to talk.
“Miss,” he says. His voice breaks and he makes a strangled sound like a tickle that’s too dry to form a cough. Beneath the red burn, his face is sallow, wrinkled, dehydrated. His hands are thin, the fingers long, the skin transparent. “God bless you for stopping.”