***
“The arm grew stronger even as she did not,” I would tell my fellow cast-away, both our beards gray and encrusted with barnacles and dangling crabs. I’m sure I would have practically had to kidnap him to get him into the bungalow, but once there I’d convince him to stay.
Over a cup of tea in the living room I’d say this as he looked at me, incredulous.
“Something in the magic I’d used,” I’d say. “There was a dim glow to the arm. It even seemed to shimmer, an icy green. So I had succeeded, don’t you see? I’d succeeded as well as I was ever going to. Magic might be almost utterly gone from the world now, but it still had a toe-hold when we were both young. Surely you remember, Lucius?”
In the clear morning light, the old man would say, “My name isn’t Lucius and I think you’ve gone mad.”
And he might be right.
***
Ultimately, the love in my heart led to my decision, not any fear of discovery. I couldn’t bear the ache anymore. If she no longer existed, that ache would be gone. Foolish boys know no better. Everything is physical to them. But that ache is still here in my heart.
It was a clear night. I stole a boat from the docks and rowed my way to the hidden cove. She was there, of course, unchanged. I had with me jars of oil.
I had a hard time getting her from the bed of sargassum into the boat. I remember being surprised at her weight as I held her in my arms in the water for a time and cried into her hair, her hand caressing the back of my head.
After she was in the boat, I took it out to where the currents would bring it to deep water. I poured the oil all over her body. I lit the match. I stared into those amazing eyes one last time, then tossed the match onto the oil as I jumped into the sea. Behind me, I heard the whoosh of air and felt a rush of heat as flames engulfed the rowboat. I swam to shore without looking back. If I had looked back, I would have turned around, swum out to the burning boat, and let myself be immolated beside her.
As I staggered out of the water, I felt relief mixed with the sadness. It was over with. I felt I had saved myself from something I did not quite understand.
***
“What happened then,” old man Lucius would say, intent on my story, forgetting the thread of his own.
“For three days, everything returned to a kind of normal,” I’d tell him. “Or as normal as it could be. I slept. I went out with a couple of the first-years who didn’t know you had abandoned me. I felt calm as a waveless sea.”
“Calm? After all of that?”
“Perhaps I was in shock. I don’t know.”
“What happened after the third day?”
My guest would have to ask this, if I didn’t tell him right away.
“What happened after the third day? Nothing much. The animated right arm of a dead woman climbed up the side of my building and crawled in through the window.”
And with that, Lucius would be frozen in time, cup cantilevered toward his mouth, shock suffusing his face like honey crystals melting in tea.
***
I woke up with the arm beside me in bed. I tried to scream, but the hand closed gently over my mouth. The skin was smooth but smelled of brine. With an effort of will, I got up, pulled the arm away, and threw it back onto the bed. It lay there, twitching. There was sand under its fingernails.
I began to laugh. It was after midnight. I was alone in my room with a reanimated, disembodied arm.
Her arm. Her hand.
It had come to me from the depths of the sea, crawling across the sea floor like some odd creature in an old book.
What would you have done? I remembered Lucius’ comment that the arm displayed the same mindless motion as a wounded starfish.
I took the arm downstairs and buried it in the backyard, weighed down with bricks and string like an unwanted kitten. Then I went back to bed, unable to sleep, living with a constant sense of terror the next day.
The next night, the arm was in my room again, last remnant of my lost love.
I buried it three more nights. It came back. I tossed it into the sea. It came back. I became more creative. I mixed the arm in with the offal behind a butcher’s shop, holding my nose against the stench. It came back, smeared with blood and grease. I slipped it into an artist’s bag at a coffee shop. It came back, mottled with vermillion and umber paint. I tried to cut it to pieces with a bone saw. It reconstituted itself. I tried to burn it, but, of course, it would not burn.
Eventually, I came to see it meant me no harm. Not really. Whatever magic bound it, it did not seek revenge. I hadn’t killed the woman. I just hadn’t brought her fully back to life. In return she hadn’t come fully back to me.
***
“So then you kept it locked in a box in your room, you say?”
“Yes,” I would tell my shadow. “There was no real danger of discovery—no one came to visit me anymore. And I rarely went to classes. I was searching for answers, for a way out. You have to understand, I was in an altered state by then.”
“Of course.”
A sip of tea and no inclination to divulge his own secrets.
The sea beyond the window is the source of the biggest changes for me now. It goes from calm to stormy in minutes. The color of it, the tone of the waves, varies by the hour. Over the months, it brings me different things: the debris of a sunken ship, a cornucopia of jellyfish, and, of course, strands of sargassum washed up from the bay.
“I was insane,” I tell him.
“Of course you were. With grief.”
Youth is a kind of insanity. It robs you of experience, of perspective, of history. Without those, you are adrift.
***
Back to the libraries I went, and back again and again. But it was as if the floors had been swept and I could not trace my own footprints. In those echoing halls, I found every book but the one that would have helped me. Had my long-ago counterpart, standing there deliberating, thought about stealing the book? No matter now, but I found myself reliving the moment when I had slid the tome back into the stacks rather than hiding it in my satchel with at first horror and then resignation.
I even visited the remnants of the mage’s college, following the ancient right wing of the library until it dissolved into the even more crumbling walls of that venerable institution. All I found there was a ruined amphitheater erupting in sedgeweeds, with a couple dozen students at the bottom, dressed in black robes. They were being lectured at by a man so old he seemed part of the eroded stones on which he sat. If magic still remained in the world, it did not exist in this place.
All I had left were the more modern texts and the memory of a phrase among the signs and symbols I had used to animate the arm: “Make what you bring back your own.”
Each time I took the arm out of the box, it came garlanded with thoughts I did not want but could not make go away. Each time, I unraveled a little more. Dream and reality blended like one of my parents’ more potent concoctions. Day became night and night became day with startling rapidity. I had hallucinations in which giant flowers became giant hands. I had visions of arms reaching from a turbulent, bloody sea. I had nightmares of wrists coated with downy hair and mold.
I stopped bathing entirely. I wore the same clothes for weeks. Her skin’s briny taste filled my mouth no matter what cup I drank from. Her eyes stared from every corner.
***
“What did you do then?” my guest would prod once again. He’d have finished his tea by now and he would be wanting to leave, but ask despite himself.
“Don’t you know, Lucius?” I’d reply. “Don’t you remember?”
“Tell me anyway,” he’d say, to humor the other crazy old man.
“One night, sick with weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school’s operating theater and performed surgery on myself.”
A rapid intake of breath. “You did?’
“No, of course not. You can’t perform that kind of surgery on yourself. Impossible. Besides, the o
perating theater has students and doctors in it day and night. You can’t sneak into an operating theater the way you sneak into a cadaver room. Too many living people to see you.”
“Oh,” he’d say, and lapse into silence.
Maybe that’s all I’d be willing to tell my Lucius surrogate. Maybe that’s the end of the story for him.
***
One night, sick with weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school’s operating theater and performed surgery on myself.
It wasn’t the operating theater and I wasn’t alone. No, my friend was with me the whole time.
Me, tossing the proverbial pebbles from some romantic play at the window of Lucius’ new apartment one desperate, sleepless night. Hissing as loud as I could: “Lucius! I know you’re in there!”
More pebbles, more hissing, and then he, finally, reluctantly, opening the window. In the light pouring out, I could see a woman behind him, blonde and young, clutching a bed sheet.
Lucius stared down at me as if I were an anonymous beggar.
“Come down, Lucius,” I said. “Just for a moment.”
It was a rich neighborhood, not where one typically finds starving medical students. Not the kind of street where any resident wants a scene.
“What do you want?” he whispered down at me.
“Just come down. I won’t leave until you do.”
Again, that measured stare. Suddenly I was afraid.
He scowled and closed the window, but a minute later he stood in the shadow of the doorway with me, his hair disheveled, his eyes slits. He reeked of beer.
“You look like shit,” he said to me. “You look half-dead.” Laughed at his own joke. “Do you need money? Will that make you go away?”
Even a few days earlier that would have hurt me, but I was too far gone to care.
“I need you to come down to the medical school.”
“Not in a million years. We’re done. We’re through.”
I took the arm out of my satchel and unwrapped it from the gauze in which it writhed
Lucius backed away, against the door, as I proffered it to him. He put out his hand to push it away, thought better of it.
“She came back to me. I burned the body, but the arm came back.”
“My god, what were you thinking? Put it away. Now.”
I carefully rewrapped it, put it back in the satchel. The point had been made.
“So you’ll help me?”
“No. Take that abomination and leave now.”
He turned to open the door.
I said: “I need your help. If you don’t help, I’ll go to the medical school board, show them the arm, and tell them your role in this.” There was a wound in me because of Lucius. Part of me wanted to hurt him. Badly.
Lucius stopped with his hand on the doorknob, his back to me. I knew he was searching furiously for an escape.
“You can help me or you can kill me, Lucius,” I said, “but I’m not going away.”
Finally, his shoulders slumped and he stared out into the night.
“I’ll help, all right? I’ll help. But if you ever come here again after this, I’ll…”
I knew exactly what he’d do, what he might be capable of.
***
My parents had a hard life. I didn’t see this usually, but at times I would catch hints of it. Preservation was a taxing combination of intuition, experimentation, and magic. It wasn’t just the physical cost—my mother’s wrists aching from hundreds of hours of grinding the pestle in the mortar, my father’s back throbbing from hauling buckets out of the boat nearly every day. The late hours, the dead-end ideas that resulted in nothing they could sell. The stress of going out in a cockleshell of a boat in seas that could grow sullen and rough in minutes.
No, preservation came with a greater cost than that. My parents aged faster than normal—well-preserved, of course, even healthy, perhaps, but the wrinkles gathered more quickly on their faces, as did the age spots I thought were acid blotches and that they tried to disguise or hide. None of this was normal, although I could not know it at the time. I had no other parents to compare them to or examine as closely.
Once, I remember hearing their voices in the kitchen. Something in their tone made me walk close enough to listen, but not close enough to be seen.
“You must slow down,” she said to him.
“I can’t. So many want so much.”
“Then let them want. Let them go without.”
“Maybe it’s an addiction. Giving them what they want.”
“I want you with me, my dear, not down in the basement of the Preservation Guild waiting for a resurrection that will never come.”
“I’ll try…I’ll be better…”
“…Look at my hands…”
“…I love your hands…”
“…so dry, so old…”
“They’re the hands of someone who works for a living.”
“Works too hard.”
“I’ll try. I’ll try.”
Part III
I’ll try. I’ll try. To tell the rest of the story. To make it to the end. Some moments are more difficult than others.
When Lucius discovered what I planned to do, he called me crazy. He called me reckless and insane. I just stood there and let him pace like a trapped animal and curse at me. It hardly mattered. I was resolute in my decision.
“Lucius,” I said. “You can make this hard or you can make this easy. You can make it last longer or you can make it short.”
“I wish I’d never known you,” he said to me. “I wish I’d never introduced you to my friends.”
In the end, my calm won him over. Knowing what I had to do, the nervousness had left me. I had reached a state so beyond that of normal human existence, so beyond what even Lucius could imagine, that I had achieved perfect clarity. I can’t explain it any other way. The doubt, in that moment, had fallen from me.
“So you’ll do it?” I asked again.
“Let’s get on with it,” Lucius growled, and I had a fleeting notion that he would kill me rather than do it when he said, “But not at the operating theater. That’s madness. There’s a place outside the city. A house my father owns. You will wait for me there. I’ll get the tools and supplies I need from the school.”
Desperation, lack of sleep, and a handful of pills Lucius had been able to steal served as my only anesthetics. I had no idea, even with Lucius’ help, even with my knowledge of preservation powders, if it would work. In effect, it might have been the equivalent of an assisted suicide attempt. I lay spread out on the long dining room table of that house while Lucius prepared his instruments, knowing that these minutes, these seconds, might be my last among the living.
The pain was unbelievable. I jolted in and out of consciousness to hear Lucius panting like a dog. Lucius sawing. Lucius cursing. Lucius cutting and suturing and weeping, blood everywhere, me delirious and singing an old nursery rhyme my mother had taught me, Lucius bellowing his distress in counterpoint.
“I never want to see you again,” he gasped in my ear as he finished up. “Never.”
I smiled up at him and reached out with my good arm to touch his bloodstained face, to say “It’s all right, Lucius. It’s going to be okay.” And: “Thank you.” The pain burned through my skull like a wildfire. The pain was telling me I was alive.
When Lucius was done, he slumped against the side of the table, wiping at his hands, mumbling something I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t important. All I knew was that my own right arm had been consigned to the morgue and the woman’s arm had replaced my own.
Lucius saw to it that I got back to my apartment, although all I have are vague flashbacks to the inside of a cart and a painful rolling sensation. Afterwards I spent two feverish weeks in bed, the landlady knocking on the door every day, asking for the rent. I think Lucius visited me to clean and check the wound, but I can’t be sure.
My memory of that time comes and goes in phases like the
tide.
***
In the end, the same sorcery that animated the woman’s arm saved me. Over time, I healed. Over time, my new arm learned to live with me. I worried at first about gangrene in the place where the arm met my flesh, but I managed to prevent that. In the mornings, I woke with it as though it was a stranger I had brought home from a tavern. Eventually, it would wake me, stroking my forehead and touching my lips so delicately that I would groan my passion out into its palm.
It was the beginning of my life, in a way. A life in exile, but a life nonetheless, with a new partner. Lucius had helped me see to that.
So it was that when I went back to my parents’ bungalow, I had a purpose and a plan.
They met me at the door and hugged me tight, for they hadn’t heard from me in months and I was gaunt, pale.
I did not have to tell them everything. Or anything. I tried to hide the new arm from them, but it reached out for my mother as though gathering in a confidante. What did it say to her, woman to woman? What secrets did it spell into her hands? I had to look away, as though intruding on their conversation.
“What will you do?” my father asked.
As my mother held my new arm, he had run a fingertip across it, come away with a preserving dust.
I wanted to say that I had come to ask his advice, but the truth was I had only returned after I had settled my fate. In the days, the hours, before everything had become irrevocable, I hadn’t sought their counsel. And he knew that, knew it in a way that filled his eyes with bewilderment, like a solution of cobalt chloride heated to its purest color.
“What will I do?” I knew, but I didn’t know if I could tell them.
My father had his hand on my shoulder, as if needing support. My mother released the arm and it returned to me and tucked its hand into my pocket, taking refuge. She had not yet said a word to me.
I told them: “I’ve signed on as a ship’s doctor. I’ve enough experience for that. My ship leaves for the southern islands in three days.” The arm stirred, but only barely, like an eavesdropper that has overheard its own name.
Winter 2007 Page 4