and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  I invited the duke and duchess to dine with me one night, four days away from the New World’s newest port, in my well-appointed, private chambers. I knew he would drink too much—he always drank too much—but that night I planned to do the same.

  “Olivia, look at him!” Lady Anoria exclaimed as her husband tipped toward the floor. I had added a little something to the wine.

  “Poor man. He is exhausted worrying over you,” I told her.

  “Me?” Anoria laughed, flattered. She did not love him, but liked that he and I both hunted her. Vain girl. She fussed over her husband for her lover’s sake, as though jealousy could touch an angel. But she almost swooned in truth when I grasped him by belt and cravat and hoisted him from the table to my narrow bed. I am too strong for a well-bred lady and usually conceal it. But I threw my lover’s husband from us and took her, soft and eager, in my marble arms.

  Without Anoria, without the sea voyage, I might never have learned to love plump women. Even into the present age, after the flappers and the hippies, I still relish the luscious curves of women who remind me of the swells and waves, of the sweet diving into flesh, crossing the sea. Those were more leisurely days. The transit between the Americas and Europe was an enforced respite, a month of gossip in a closed circle, a time apart and in between. There are no red-eye ocean voyages.

  I arrived in New York well-fed, and have come home to starve. I smile faintly in my hungry dark remembering. But Anoria, who had been ill and pale with grief when she boarded the vessel in Bristol, must take a turn for the worse, now that New York would soon come in to sight. This would be our final time, and a time worthy of farewells.

  I sigh in the dark interior of my coffin. What was the last time for me—the final last? I can’t remember. I have fed from many, as I did on that long voyage, in sips and licks, tiny shivers of hunger stilled in the slicing kiss or raking fingernail, but how long since I had flexed my jaw and punctured skin? When was the last time I fed full-tooth to satiation, to stupefaction as I did that night? Not from Maria, damn the Quarry with its two-quart rule. Not this year, not this decade even. A sob of pure self-pity rises in my throat, but I push it down, remembering.

  On that long last ocean night, I came closest to my centuries-old affliction, to my human loophole. I learned how secretly personal and diverse the patterns of flesh-pleasure are, how different from my French nun, how different from men, until I believed I approached feeling myself, so keenly did I map the ways my touch aroused her.

  If her desire and sensation created angelic feeling in me, I pondered, could mortal desire and knowledge make angelic comprehension? Humanity is God’s second chance. Could it also be mine? I wrung sensation from that ocean-borne English blossom, and believed humanity might save the angels.

  But they can’t. What I knew that night was no closer to real feeling, as I have felt it now, than what she felt for me was love. She was too unbroken for real love, nor had I brought her there to love her. I possessed her. It is as close as gods come.

  Ecstatic to have learned both touch and taste, wild with what I thought I knew, I climbed aboard her. But my jaws unhinged before I reached her throat. She looked through her lashes, drowsy with sex, and jolted awake. Her eyes spread like an opened egg. Her lips parted to scream, and she tried to back against the avalanching pillows, but my fangs found her. I had wanted only desire in her blood, but terror came flooding sweetly in and I sucked more savagely in rage.

  She writhed beneath me, spilling into me, her naked breasts and slippery thighs roiling, life pumping. Time stretched. It twisted and opened as softly as her sex, and I rode into the blood dreams on her futile fighting. I drank privilege and class, tutors, needlepoint, and summer homes. I drank her petty doubts and petulant denials. I drank the princess’s secret reachings and the swift and sobbing marriage to the duke. I drank the carriage ride to our vessel and its strange, mountain name. And then I stopped. I could not drink the first night at sea, the glamorous stranger who fainted, or our days again. I did not want to kill her. I only thought I did.

  The next morning, when the doctors had finished tending his wife, Constantine came to me. He confessed, in shattered sobs, his fear that last night, drunk, he had ravaged his new wife, forced himself upon her and destroyed her mind. She was too frail. I comforted him, stroking his hand, and agreed to tend his darling in her delirium. I nursed her (and from her) the last three days until we docked, keeping her just below the surface of waking. Then I left them to their guilty incompetencies. May their human frailty unite them. They each could have loved the other.

  I claimed my cargo and took a train unnoticed. Anoria would recover swiftly, but would be too embarrassed and too weak to search for me.

  I am weaker now than she. And more ashamed. I put my ruined hands above me and push at the rock. I cannot shift it. Its coldness shivers through me and slowly, seeping through the smooth rock, terror shakes me until not even the memory of Anoria can hold it at bay. I feel it. In the darkness all around me, in the airless space, I feel. The horror of my new ability rises against my calm. I have never been inside this stone when I could feel, and even the best remembered pleasures can no longer keep the newness of real sensation from me.

  I feel the want of air, the lack of sound, and my sightless shadow, a stupid, mute, and restless thing, waiting. I hate it. It has no thought or feeling, it only is, which is why I keep it here. I crowd myself against the cold stone away from it, but it is shadow in darkness, a ghost in wind.

  I feel it touch me. I am screaming.

  ———

  Empty-handed, Dominic stalked the corridor, Cro-Magnon in his gait and rage. The garden’s unbarred gate stood open, and he walked resolutely through it to the tree. He did not run. He did not even hurry. With her sisters drinking vicariously from Ophelia’s desire spilled out across the ballroom floor, Olivia was safe. Nothing rushed Dominic, but nothing could have stopped him.

  He dropped to his knees before the tree, and grimly thrust his hands deep into the blackness at its roots. The snake writhed around his wrists and up his tattooed forearms in rivers of molten gold and red. He grasped at it, but the smooth body slid between his hands and around them, winding and pulsing. Dominic seized a closing coil and dragged it up into the garden’s weird light. He threw the twist onto the grass and pinned it with the full weight of his body against the ground. Still, it flowed under his broad palms endlessly, like flood water beneath an old bridge.

  “Come out!” he howled into the empty garden, into the slithering hole, but the mirroring darkness only whipped through his hands. He drove his bare heel into the snake’s flesh to hold it, but it slithered ceaselessly.

  Then the snake’s cool voice came from a golden bough above him. “Ah, isn’t that always the way?”

  Dominic tore his gaze from the undulations beneath his knee and hands. How had the damned thing wound itself into the branches? The serpent flowed across bark, unperturbed by the detour its body took through Dominic’s bare hands and beneath his naked foot.

  “Isn’t what always the way?” Dominic stood up panting, uncomprehending.

  “Truth slips through your hands.”

  “You aren’t truth. You’re the devil.”

  “Are you prepared to explain the difference?”

  Dominic took a step toward the glittering eyes, reaching for the shimmering head, and tripped over the coil at his feet. He sprawled on the ground. Softer, at least, than the dance floor. The snake wound around his ankles and along his thigh. Dominic struggled to stand, but could not. Cool, hard circles of sliding snake pinned his arms against his sides. Dominic shuddered. A slender, dank sliver licked the opening of his ear. He smashed his head against the ground.

  “Get off me!” he shouted.

  “You called for me.”

  Dominic’s full strength strained against the tightening spirals that enclosed him, but nothing gave.

  “Dominic, what did you come here seeking?” the snake hissed in his exp
osed ear.

  Dominic struggled to breathe in the snake’s cold grasp. The intercostal muscles he needed to expand his lungs against the embracing coil seemed too small, by contrast, to the constricting mass.

  The snake’s sibilant voice showered spittle into his ear. “Or did you only come to fight?”

  “I came here to understand where the hell I am. I came here to make you tell me what this place really is,” Dominic panted.

  Undulating against him, the snake’s body slowed, and the pressure on Dominic’s torso eased slightly.

  “What do you think it is, Dominic?”

  “I think it is the dangerous offspring of Gaehod’s extraordinary wealth and complete insanity.”

  “A worthy pedigree. Madness has many children, but few grow more swiftly than those she births to power. This country is speckled with that brood. Have you done any sightseeing in Ireland, Dominic?”

  Dominic struggled for deeper breaths. He was at risk of hyperventilating, and nothing would be more dangerous than to lose consciousness in the embrace of this snake. “Not much,” he answered.

  “Been to Blarney?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a pity. You should try to see more of your world.” Dominic found he could almost free his right hand from beneath one of the sparkling, pinioning spirals. “I will. But first, tell me where I am now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I know where I am, I’ll know what to do.”

  “Information is not toxic to indecision,” the snake observed. Dominic managed to push a thumb free. “Of course,” the whisper continued, “I could tell you something that would make up your mind about what to do next, but you could know the exact nature of this place, understand precisely what it is, how it is constructed, and still not know what to do.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “True.” The snake’s suspended head seemed to nod. “Sense is not a made thing. Not something you can construct from the materials you have at hand.” Dominic flexed his wrist and slipped his hand from beneath the rope of muscle that that bound it. He opened and closed the fingers cautiously.

  “All this industrious construction!” the snake whispered. “Such busy little beavers, making up your minds, building knowledge, forming conclusions. Your vast, pathetic aspiration is to take one more step down the path of Bacon and Skinner, but there are secrets down unblazed trails and constellations in undiscovered stars.” Dominic ground his free fingers into the soft earth.

  The snake flicked its tongue against Dominic’s earlobe and slid its hard, round head down his throat toward the tree. “To see truly new things,” the snake whispered, “you need new ways of seeing. Every time you invent a new lens, there are new things to observe through it. Every listening device brings new sounds. What speaks to you now that you simply do not possess the tools to hear?” Dominic anchored his heel against the dirt. The snake’s head glided up the tree toward a low-hanging fruit. “What confronts you that you still do not see because you lack the way of looking? What do you do when you know there are unknowable things?”

  Bracing himself against the earth with foot and hand, Dominic abruptly arched against the winding snake. He yanked himself free and, grappling an armload of the undulating coils against his bare chest, threw himself over the roiling mass. The snake’s forward motion stopped. It brought its eyes level with Dominic’s, squeezed closed against the effort it required to hold so much writhing strength compressed in his arms.

  “Knowledge can’t give you what you want to know,” the snake whispered.

  “The first time I met you,” Dominic panted, “you said you were more than knowledge, you said you were inspiration and insight.”

  “That was hardly the first time we met. And you don’t believe in inspiration.”

  Dominic tightened his arms, working every fiber of his strength. He squeezed the throbbing coils in his arms and felt the snake subtly deflate. “Convince me,” he choked. “Inspire me.”

  The tremor that ran through the snake could have been a laugh or a shudder. “So you’ll wring inspiration from the devil?” it said.

  Grunting with the effort, Dominic tightened his hold on the serpent yet again. The creature’s rippling body tangled with the static tattoos that spiraled Dominic’s arm until he had to look away from the illusion that his arms were snakes. “Go on,” he panted, “prove to me that inspiration is anything but the clever conjunction and realignment of things I already know.”

  “You really don’t understand, do you?” The weight under Dominic’s body began to flow again. “Proof belongs to the surface world. You can prove facts. You can’t prove meanings. Wrong vocabulary, wrong tools. Your quest to have the world make sense, to force it to conform to patterns you already know, is an impossible desire. Impossible desires are their own hell, with their own angels, and angels—always—can get you closer to God.”

  “I am so fucking sick of angels!” Dominic shouted. “I’m not a character in a goddamn fable, and I don’t want an allegory or a symbolic explanation.”

  The snake laughed. “You are a man, like Everyman.”

  “I just want to understand reality. That’s all. Not meanings, not interpretations, just what’s actually out there.”

  “Do you, for a moment, think you have the proper tools, the proper framework, even the proper sensory organs to perceive, much less to understand, what’s ‘actually out there’?”

  “I want to understand as much as I can.”

  “And if you could understand more than you do right now? I have dropped apples on heads before Newton’s.”

  “I understand Newton’s universe. We’ve transcended it.”

  “Very good, ready for the next step out?” The snake’s bunched body spilled easily from Dominic’s arms. Had he ever had hold of it? He had thought he was winning, but now that seemed impossible.

  “Did you know that snakes once had wings?” the serpent asked, flowing smoothly toward its tree again. “It’s true. We spanned the earth and sky, creatures of the material and etheric worlds—a perfect paradox. What do you call a winged snake, Dominic?”

  Dominic scrambled to his feet, away from the hole the snake thrust its tail into. It must be nearly bottomless to house such lengths of slithering, and the garden was on the lowest floor. Such depth was hideously visceral to Dominic. It frightened him, which made him angry. “I don’t know,” he growled, “a dragon?”

  “That’s right! Across the globe, God is not so universal in cultures and stories as dragons are. We could breathe fire when we flew, and water when we swam. We were everywhere once, with a foot on each side of a paradox. It’s why we’re footless now.” The snake slipped backwards into its hole. “That’s where you are now—caught against the actual nature of reality.”

  Only the flickering tongue of the snake protruded from the bottomless pit it dwelt within—its tongue, and its even deeper eyes. Its voice was just a hiss. “But here’s the secret of the garden, my friend. Some of you can find in my wrack’s horizontal stretch, a vertical reach. Raise yourself to Eden before the fork in the road, the fork in the tongue, the forked pre-fall nondual, my poor, bare, forked animal. Make my wrack a ladder.”

  The snake’s voice was receding. Dominic lay on his naked belly in the grass, peering into the blackness. “Can you teach me how?” he asked and pressed his ear over the hole to listen.

  The snake’s voice was barely audible from the depths of the hole. “Push man into woman and find oneness once more,” it whispered. “Lose yourself in another, and find yourself in love.”

  ———

  The sound I make reaches my ears and hurts them. It reaches nothing else. My quills are achingly dull, but I blunt them more with scratching, scoring the stone above my head, and screaming. Shadow brushes over my face, my eyes wildly staring, but it is just the dust of the rock I tear at, falling down on me. I cannot turn over; the space is too constricted, closing in with my shadow’s deaf advance.
>
  I gather my soul to spriek, twist my body hard against the rock, away from the creeping, rising touch of shadow, but I cannot inhale. I will breathe the shadow in. And my sisters will not come.

  Please, I do not want to drown on my shadow. I want my slow starvation, my numbness, and my beauty back. I gulp the air in terror. Shadow touches my foot. I coil up my leg and twist to pull it under me. I tear again at the stone, feeling my flawless flesh shred. Shadow touches my scar-marked back. I spin to push it against the stone. It touches my navel. My torn hands flail, clawing, but it is only shadow. I cannot touch it, or fight it back, or block it.

  It rests on my chest. I cannot breathe to scream again. It touches my breast. I am panting. My breasts have never known touch. I cross my arms across my chest, draw up my knees. It’s on my breast again. I have pulled it closer. I uncoil and whip wildly at my body, to push my clinging shadow from me, but it ripples out from every touch, spreading over me like fire catching.

  It touches both my breasts. I press my hands hard against the low roof stone and feel the cold rock against my palms. Feel the cold nothing of darkness upon each breast. I scream for Gaehod, and throw all my failing strength against the stone. I am flailing without control, coldness touching everything. I scream and scream for God.

  Silence invades me.

  Desire presides over many things. It is the guardian angel of ambition and adultery, of flirtation and assassination. It was worshiped once. A devotee of mine, a queen, was taken with her husband’s slave, and bound to him. My splintering mind scrambles to remember her, the godking’s wife, stripped and tied to a strong board, her legs pulled wide. They thrust a carved phallus between her thighs and forced a stone between her teeth. The pharaoh’s slave they drugged to sleeping and they forced his mouth, too, and placed it over her, open mouth over open mouth, and used the linen mummy strips to bind them.