Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  You are standing filled with yearning before the temple of the Sun, the mortuary monument of Amenemhet III, constructed as a labyrinth and now lost beneath the sands of Hewara. It is already past noon, and you have spent an exhausting morning trying one false entrance after another, all ending without issue in some dark subterranean chamber.

  The guide now takes you silently to a point you have walked past many times, an entrance disguised to the unwary eye as one of countless crenellations in the base of the edifice. No sooner are you inside than you begin to have doubts. You had not expected the noise—each door is constructed to open with a rumble of thunder; artfully wrought ducts channel air in whistles or moans all along the dim passageways; your footsteps return to your ears with an echo of brass.

  But your guide moves forward so you plunge on after her, drawn by fantastic reports of a single complex more splendid than all the pyramids, more costly in labour and resources than the sum of all the architecture of Greece. Here was the project that finally exhausted the empire, a vast structure housing twelve courts and twelve golden palaces, great halls and galleries with tessellated floors and vaulted with marble, laid out on several stories above and below ground, all connected by colonnades and curved passageways and tunnels that wound and advanced and retreated, pathways redolent of spices and rotting flesh.

  You are stunned by the artistry … you walk on past murals and mosaics of ivory and precious hardwood, beneath painted ceilings, past ornate porches harbouring statues of marble and stone and brass, carvings of slender kings and perverse creatures part-human and part-crocodile, -hippopotamus and -boar. You recognize jackal-headed Anubis, and a figure of such beauty and power she can only be the Goddess Isis. But as your way winds deeper and down—the dimness illuminated by fresh marvels along paths that snarl and echo with the voices of chaos—you find your pace slowing, each step forward freighted with a growing reluctance. You have been falling farther and farther behind your guide and as you round the next corner she is gone.

  Horror rises up through your limbs like an icy sap, through the branching paths of your capilliaries, knotting your bowels, soughing through the chambers of your lungs; your solar plexus resonates with the hammering of a heart, and the winding pathways of your inner ear resound with the long, withdrawing roar of an inland sea. A false floor gives way and you fall into a deeper passage, which you attempt to follow.

  Central to the antic experience of the labyrinth is to first believe you stand above it all, with a god’s-eye view. Then, like a fading dream, your conviction evaporates.

  From around the next corner comes the notion that the little mazerunner, questing—lonely and afraid … is you.

  It started again with a phone call.

  Sometime during the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, 1995.I hadn’t seen Beulah in almost eighteen months, since our meltdown in Banff. I thought about her only infrequently, briefly, hardly at all.

  The weatherman on the drive-home show was in raptures over the arrival of a chinook within the hour. We accept the chinook winds of local winters as a mixed blessing. Temperatures may soar fifty degrees in a few hours, bringing a brief end to long, often bitter spates of cold. Bringing also the full tumult of an ice age lifted: flooded, slush-choked streets, local insanities of intemperate dress, migraines and euphoria—before a hot winter wind that roars in like a train off the Sahara. Other such disturbances of our inner weathers range from mild confusions and irritabilities to mania and sudden rage. On the road home I found myself musing distractedly that the history of war and domestic crimes could be profitably rewritten under chapters like “Wind” and “Moon” and “Tide.”

  My own little tide was turning, my sea of faith was at the full. If I sensed anything at all amiss, it was the little knot of perplexity I then nursed in the area roughly above a now clouded third eye, and that I attributed to the approaching chinook. The innocent on the eve of disaster make for a touching study.

  I arrived home at about six as agreed. Our plan was to tire Catherine out with an hour or so of frenetic fun, then an early supper, breathless bedtime story—and bed. While I played wild animal tamer Madeleine would get a head start on preparations for our own candlelit dinner.

  From our first date, dinners together had been a great success for us. We seemed to be hosting epicurean parties every other month now. To beef up our infrastructure we installed a prep island halfway between fridge and oven. Overhead hung a rack of copper and glass pots, and chromium-steel implements clustered with a dense authority. I could hear her chopping furiously away as I came in. My assignment for the evening was under the table: a little blonde playing mysteriously in a cardboard box with a stuffed grey cat code-named Douglas.

  I pause to stress that it is not my intent to wax ironic at Madeleine’s expense, Catherine’s much less. If irony is due, it’s to the man who can live his life in a garden yet be unable to grasp the essential fact of its fragility. This was the best part of my life, of any part—any time of my life.

  Miracles unremarkable in a neighbour’s child … the extraordinary names Catherine settled on for pets, real and manufactured. Lucy (goose, stuffed). Percy (fish, tanked). Margaret (rabbit, hutched). Meet Douglas the cat, charmed. The deliberation with which Catherine chose her words and the clarity with which she spoke them startled people, even us at times. She had the face of a old man when she was born. Still had that gypsy face, thin and lined, with down-turned eyes that seemed sad only when she smiled. Bright blue eyes with a cast that in her mother I would describe as watchful. Odd that Madeleine should already have her in pyjamas. I realized I was disappointed. How my life had changed that this should number among my disappointments, not to dress my daughter in pyjamas—fresh-smelling, sturdy terrycloth—the one-piece kind with the padded feet and quick-access snaps along the inseam.

  I hoisted Catherine into the Jolly Jumper hanging in the doorway and watched her catapult herself from the ground. Over and over again, tirelessly. Catherine Rose Gregory, infant cannonball. Face suffused with the elation of daring, each bow-legged landing the squat of a tiny European weightlifter—then up again, arms flung wide … the yearning for flight hard-wired into all things alive. Like the nostalgia for an infancy half-remembered. A moment of grace, unearned. A hovering, weightless, in the air. A voice whispering, the return to earth.

  Poultry is on this evening’s menu. The cleaver’s sullen chok—O the tragic gulf between flap and fly. I went to the kitchen for a glass of white, pausing on the return trip at the island of flashing steel for a kiss, more perfunctory than indicated for the Valentine. Had we spoken yet? Had she answered my hello as I called from the front door? Is she planning to look at me?

  Over the past few months I’d begun to see Madeleine’s loveliness for myself. Where had I been? When did I get back? Her hair was cut short now, sandy, less blond than when we’d met. Her smooth face had more hollows these days, endowed with what’s loosely called character. But maybe that was there all along. Like the beauty.

  Slate-blue eyes looking up into mine, a pause on the island of steel … watchful.

  “How was the day?” I asked, massaging a furrow above my left eyebrow.

  “Great.” Resumption of chopping. Wooden chok on cutting board. Growing expectation of seeing the cucumber between her fingers erupt in blood. “We had a call today.”

  “From?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Didn’t leave a name?”

  “You can listen yourself.”

  “OK.” I made no move towards the answering machine.

  “Strange though.”

  “Yes?”

  “She wished you a happy anniversary.”

  I peered through a pearling glass of ice-cold Chardonnay. A narrowing of focus, contraction of light. Clarity. “Sounds like a wrong number.”

  I have no clear idea of how my voice sounded.

  “You mean since our anniversary’s in September.”

  GAVIN

  In
which Beulah stops over on her way to Mexico, to cut her ties.

  [10 December 1994]

  CALGARY AIRPORT, SNOWSTORM GATHERING. A last flight out. Blizzard breaks blankness on the land of forgetting, on the land of nod a total whiteout. Landing lights snuffed stanched in snowflake seas, in popcorn wreaths of air. Fog on the coast. Vancouver lost beneath, but Gavin is there, Gavin is there.

  Weeks of snowbanks and frost—how green this new world where she walks, how green in the fog. Find the four-flat walkup on Green Street. Next door Knight’s Funeral Chapel huddled back of hale hedges of holly—haven of rich chlorophyll, drinking her fill from a bench up the street, watching his window for hours till full dark. Will he be glad to see her, will he be home alone, alone as she?

  Sweet Gavin. First words at four—spiting a slew of specialists—serenely sucking a thumb, answering with just a nod or a shake. Then says—Can I have ice cream? one day to be rid of them. Dear sweet Gavin, but O how our pet’s sucking cheeks must have driven daddy mad. Why should anyone be surprised they’d ended up fucking, little Gavin and big sister?—useless protector. Donald’s charming shockthenlust—no don’t be ashamed for us Dr. Gregory these things were natural at our house-is-our-palace—it’s in the Limosneros line, the royal tradition is dynastic congress, the sport of kings.

  The real surprise was it took so long. Years of sweet sibling chastity. Sleeping together, consoling, consoling, but not every night, just when, just after. The nights of Mummy’s martini migraines. No, admit the real surprise the stunner was the hunger—gone forgotten whereIwonder all those brothersister years of tender comforts? Where? And whither that shyness—his first time after all? with a woman at least and he barely fourteen. That first term at university, Mummydaddy having at it again—hammer nice-tongs—Gavin coming to the dorm to get some sleep. He said. Two spoons, just like old times. Just not quite. Silvery slippery spoons without drawers—nothing fishy here—only doing what was natural in such a narrow little bed. Who’d’ve guessed little brother’d grow such a big one.

  Remember Gavin? Though she tries and tries she can’t forget—jaws that seize them like rabbits at the nape and shake—panic a slippage a sliding beyond their depth / a falling through ice into heat. Jam the young sweet cob down—chew now the gristly stump, rake the smooth back so taut and slender as he fucks her angrytender till the walls tumbledown around the bed / forehead banging against the stead her wattled neck bent back to snap / pale ribbons of serum and sweat streak the sheets / hawkcries from her deathrattling trap / tongues passed from beak to beak like meat.

  And she knows now. Knows this hunger is not abstract, a tale to frighten children but pure / sweet / malevolence. A gloating dog presence that follows wherever, that waits slouched in a corner, that raises its black head whenever you turn to leave the room. Gavin leaves near dawn—one parting glance of disgust. She calls out I don’t want you to come anymore, knows it’s what he wants too / gets up bow-legged, mechanical bullrider—kneels to pray she would never fuck like this again.

  One night. Everything changes. As everything must as each thing settles down to dust. Now four years on she wants him to want it again one last time want it with her so she can go for good, burn her bridges / her fleet on the beach—head inland in-country up the creek. She gets up from her bench, walks across the street.

  To what owes the honour? says Gavin surprised at the door. The honour’s in the offer—of a quick visitation a slick assignation. Not going to ask me in? Please say you’re happy to see me, Gavin dear—Christmas, this our last season of cheer. How are they, he wonders. Don’t ask, the answer. And don’t let me interrupt your pathetic TBdinner—but tomorrow night I’ll cook for you a real meal, a real consumptive consummation if you’ll let me stay. Of course you can you’re my sister. Ah filial duty courtly manners, such a prince of man, the little sun of our benighted clan. And how he’s grown straight as waving grain! So tall olive skinned, and brawny—effortless, unbidden, in the royal genes. His upper lip a saddle of softest eider / o how the girlfriends must love a ride on that.

  Surprised to find you alone you must have to beat them off with sticks. Studying? What—on Christmas break, birthday of the baby Jesus? Fuck that, let’s have some Christmas cheer—a manic, mantic moment distilled in forty ounces of Morgan’s demon rum.

  Call it a duty-free dance with the faeries.

  Duty-free from Calgary? Not that kind of duty, silly. Suspicious now his narrowed eyes. Some enchanted evening—two hours of drinkies hastily gulped. Tell me why you’ve come, Beulah. Mexico? Mexico City, alone? But he really means why tonight, why here, why him?

  Why?—to chat chew the fat break bread, hermanito. With you. After all silly it’s our anniversary—four long years give or take a week or two. Roseate blush in those olive cheeks, eyes bright, a startled hart in headlights. Never to mention that night our unspoken compact, never to mention the savage little tryst, all our brotherlove hangs on this siblingness. Your dream that I’d never mention it / my dream that we’d never have to pretend. You’re eighteen, I’m twenty-one. We’re not kids anymore, I waited. Rip yourself off some, it’ll be unforgettable I promise you. Let’s lose our heads together—come be your own man, break with the well-bred, we’ll stage our own fuck convention.

  Tickle tickle tickle his fly, can’t hide that siege engine—here let me give that thing some air.

  Please Beulah.

  Here, I’ve brought you a token, a gift a green / silk / scarf, real gold thread in the hem and seam. Wear it like a sash like a pirate you’ll look so dashing in that—

  At least give your half-sister a little half-kiss of welcome, am I such a hag undine undead dragon queen? That’s better. One more—bust loose. Now three—now let me kiss it bigger for you. Let me. Such a scholar high-neck collared, but I see your puppy straining dew-nosed at the leash. You loved this once let me set him free. Come Gavin my prince, cough up the little emerald of your virtue. Together let us open our veins on its gem-green girdle, renew our blood pact against the common enemy. Won’t you give it up for me? Don’t put your nobility ahead of my great need.

  No? NO?

  Then let me make you bleed like you once bled me—my turn, fair turnabout sweet prince, let me make you suffer for it just a bit.

  If it’s not raping you want, is it romance? Then stoop with me, my love, amidst these blooms of foxglove and loosestrife, and strive with me this longest of nights, in this green bower, by the glow of the street. There, close the blinds, but not completely. Now let us bewitch us both this hour with potions of digitalis. While on the wall above us the rain pours down the light’s frail trellises. I’ve brought mistletoe—see? kiss me I don’t care if it’s holly—come sharp-eyed little botanist let me stem that sweet bloom of confusion, let me lay this cool green silk against thy skin, and for breakfast I will serve thee black currants in a stew of brawn and holly berries. Come taste this with me, come taste what I have prepared for thee. See that it is good. Come little battle-hawk make the sea hag a girl again. Come taste all this—the budding splitfig at the crotch of this tree, the furry little foxgrapes at these swollen tips, come taste. Lay down here with me on this bed of foxfur—for, you see, our pelted plot, the leafy periphery of this narrow couch holds toxin enough / to speed the world’s wild heart this one long night. So let us make us a solstice, and let our hearts run and rut till the tocsined dawn lifts foxfire from the rotting in our burned-out bed.

  Burn. Doubt. Bed.

  Fuck yes I’m unhappy you know what I want, you have what I need—and it is not the upright standard of your nobility. Why then and not now, why once and not twice—you what? fucked my ass not to hurt my feelings? No Gavin don’t worry yourself for me, those aren’t tears, really onions are my aromatherapy. Yes well exactly precisely schoolboy, let’s dissect me let’s see what’s wrong with me. What about you?—you did me rougher than he ever did.

  Come little healer, let us feed our disease.

  You don’t want me Beulah! you
want another chapter for your diary, you want proof, testimony—you’re already planning to write this up aren’t you, admit it we’re all grist for your crazemill. Do you hate him that much—isn’t it because I am his son? but I’m not just his—you’re my big sister.

  I’ve become just like HIM …?

  Have I?

  Take it out on little brother, make him pay for the sins of the father? Is it true—is that what this is?—could I do that? What kind of monster feeds the son’s heart to the unknowing father? God say it isn’t so, make it untrue. I am your big sister, Gavin—I will always be. Who has made this thing this monstrous thing? Of me.

  They say ruin runs in the family.

  What kind of freak was made here—made more and more like him no matter what I do. How have I become so vile so low?

  Sinking.

  Sinking.

  Sinking still. Slow the mind REELS—look at him! My little brother. No Gavin I can’t stay. RIGHT NOW tonight. It’s not your fault no don’t be sorry, no you’re right you spoke true, you always do. O Gavin you deserve so much better, every happiness every promise better than this, you still have a chance, a disease less advanced.

  I’m sorry for the things I have done. For things I will do. It’s just beginning. And it will keep going. On and on until it is stopped.

  Yes I’ll call you soon, see you in the spring from Mexico—call you soon. Yes, promise.

  Gavin …? I’m so sorry.

  Snow falls heavily all night in the streets. Obliterating steps.