This morning, May turning to June, he draws into a three-tenth’s cc syringe half a milliliter of a drought concocted from the venom of a burrowing asp, .8 micrograms of quicksilver (specifically, mercuric chloride), and a drop of neurotoxin taken from the telson of a fat-tailed scorpion from the vast salt pan of Chott el Djerid, north of the Grand Erg Oriental of Tunisia. This is a new formula, and though he has run numerous computer simulations and tested it on rabbits and white mice, there is never any knowing, with certainty, the consequences in a human subject, especially one whose body has already been saturated with so many poisonous compounds. Daniel makes a fist and injects himself in the left arm, just above the bend of his elbow. He quickly jots a few notes, recording the time, his blood pressure and body temperature, and then retires to a sofa in the house adjacent to his workshop to wait out the coming sickness and to list what he can of the effects of the compound. He knows, in truth, there is very little reason for compiling such subjective details of his self-poisonings. He will live, or he will die, and very little else is important here. But the conceit that this is somehow a scientific undertaking helps to keep him focused through the pain and sickness and delirium, sometimes. And, sometimes, it does not.
Very often, during his “treatments” (as he thinks of them), there are hallucinations and wild fever dreams. So, Daniel has hired a nurse who watches over him on these days and nights, that he will not in his frenzied thrashings do himself some irreparable harm, thereby ruining all his work and allowing the predatory couple’s spree to continue, unchecked.
And as this morning gives way to afternoon, and the pain and nausea wraps him in its razor folds, she sits nearby, watching, attentive should some intervention be required. And at last he sets his clipboard and pen aside, and surrenders to the tarantella rhythm of the pollutants coursing through his veins.
And this time, the visions come fast and hard, more brilliant and more lucid than is usual, most likely owing (he will later hypothesize) to some quirk of the scorpion’s toxin, to its precise arrangement of tiny proteins and the potassium and sodium cations. He closes his eyes, and the world spills around him like rivers of flame and ice floes and the displaced sediment and volcanic ash and scalding incandescent gases of pyroclastic flows. And, for a time, he walks those grey fields again with Albert Perrault’s Pan, the grass crunching like frost beneath his bare feet and the satyrs hooves. The mold-tinted sky is low and velvety, and the air around them stinks of turpentine and linseed oil. The grey fields end, finally, at a precipice, and if there is some opposite side to this chasm, it is so tar away that sight of it is lost in the distance and the scattered light of the painted world. He looks down, even though the satyr told him not to, and the blackness there roils and curls back upon itself, as alive as the serpents in Daniel’s workshop, and incalculably more treacherous.
“Orpheus wouldn’t listen, either,” says the satyr, “and that poor bastard’s still wandering about in there somewhere.”
“No,” Daniel replies. “Orpheus found his way out. That’s the way the story goes. He found his way out of the underworld, but... he looked back and so lost Eurydice.”
“Ah, now. Is that the way they’re telling it these days?” And the satyr laughs and stares up at that sagging, moldy, zinc-tinged sky.
“On her wedding day,” Daniel replies, wishing he could look away from the chasm, “Eurydice was pursued by Aristaeus, and she came upon a snake that bit her. And she died,” and then he says something about Virgil’s Georgies and hexametric verse, and he cites Hansel and Gretel and Lot’s wife as examples of the dangers of looking back, but the satyr isn’t listening.
“The son of Calliope and Oeagrus was hardly more than a silly little faggot, him and that goddamned lyre. Not so different from that brother of yours—or you—really. I figure the punk pretty much got what was coming to him, the day he met up with those “Thracian Maenads. That was Ovid, by the way, not your sainted Mr. Virgil.”
“Rut,” Daniel protests, “you just said he’s still down there, wandering and lost.”
The satyr sighs and spits over the precipice. “Don’t you go cutting words in my mouth, boy. I said he was still there, somewhere, but I never said he was lost.”
“But if he died in Thrace—”
“You make me tired, boy,” the satyr says, tugging at its wiry beard, and soon he loses interest in Daniel and vanishes into the shadows of the painted world. And so Daniel stands alone at the place where land ends, there at the edge of a canvas, and he wonders if Hades and Persephone would ever take mercy on him. And if they did, he wonders if he could then walk those winding, labyrinthine paths leading back to this field that Perrault painted, before his motorcycle accident, back to this limbo created for the one who delights all the gods. Back to the enormous painting hung above the bed where his twin died, the twin and surely others, and where the killers still sleep.
There are storms near dawn, shortly after the delirium and agony release Daniel to consciousness and the nurse’s care. He sits propped up on the sofa, still drenched in corrupted sweat, still dizzy and ill. He sips a hot cup of tea she has made tor him and watches the lightning, feeling the reverberation of thunderclaps deep in his chest. He sits and thinks of the gift sent to Alexander by the Indian giant, Raja Puru, the maiden “brought up with poison from her infancy.”
4.
And now it is three days, three nights from midsummer’s eve. No matter all the tests and notes, all his exacting attention to detail, the nurse and the detective and the hundreds of exotic toxins and venoms obtained from all around the globe, and the many long months of suffering endured as Daniel gradually made his body like unto that of the young woman “brought up with poison from her infancy” and then sent away to Alexander by Raja Puru—in the end it came down to a simple matter of chance and probability, and also, maybe, the whim of half-forgotten deities. Using the detective as a courier, he sent a hand-written letter to the couple who had murdered his brother. Along with a set of nude photos Daniel had taken of himself (using the vanity mirror in his bedroom and a Polaroid). The detective delivered the following letter, by hand:
Dear Sir and Madam,
Possibly, from the enclosed photographs, you will remember me. But possibly not. Sometime ago now, you killed my identical twin brother and, for reasons I can only begin to surmise, left me alive. Though I suspect I should be grateful for whatever mercy or caprice spared my life, the truth is that you took half of my soul that night. My days since have not been worth living, and yet I confess I am weak and find myself without the courage to commit suicide. So, I’m offering to you the opportunity to finish what you started, by whatever means you may deem appropriate. I am not afraid of death or pain, only of being left alive and alone. I pray you will find this offer agreeable, and know that the gentleman who delivered this package will bring me your reply. You will find his contact information on the attached card. I leave it to you to choose the date and time and place, should I be so fortunate that my offer appeals to the both of you.
Sincerely,
Daniel
Taking his vision of Pan as an omen, following the delivery of this letter, Daniel made an offering to the three Moirae, having constructed a modest stone alter behind his greenhouse. Though, in the end, his preparations left him too ill to get around without a wheelchair, he made what he deemed a generous blood sacrifice of his nurse, calling upon the three bearded daughters of Zeus and Themis—the ladies Clotho, Atropos, and Lachesis—to tilt the scales in his favor. The detective helped with the ritual, in exchange for having been willed Daniel’s estate and what remained of his inheritance. Shortly thereafter, an answer came from Manhattan, typed in red ink upon the whitest possible stationary imaginable, perfectly matching the note that Daniel had discovered in the pocket of the chinchilla coat. The terms were, in fact, acceptable, and a date and a time and a place were set. All non-negotiable. Take it or leave it, and at once Daniel sent the detective away from Connecticut to New Yor
k to deliver word that the arrangements were entirely unobjectionable. June 17th, 11:35 p.m. sharp, their loft on the Upper West Side. Daniel took the train down, and there was a driver and limo waiting for him at Pennsylvania Station. On the way to their flat, he sips vodka and watches the lights of Manhattan glittering like the stars of an alien sky beyond the tinted windows. He took two white tablets of oxycodone hydrochloride and three dextroamphetamine capsules on the train, something against the pain and fatigue, against his failing kidneys and liver, against the charcoal-grey fog the satyr had left in his head. Before leaving home, he’d done his best with powder and rouge, trying to hide the ravages of his experiments. He will explain to them that his diminished condition is the result of alcoholism, mourning, and drug addiction, and hope that they believe the story.
Three nights before midsummer’s eve.
If the white couple (he in an alabaster suit of Egyptian cotton, she attired in a dress of eggshell sateen) doubt the story, they kept those doubts ti) themselves. The driver pushed Daniel’s wheelchair to the elevator, and then down the long hallway to their door. There is precious little small talk, and Daniel can smell their eagerness, their hungry urgency, as surely as he can smell his own sweat and the vase of callalilies on a bedside table. He grew the same species in his own greenhouse, admiring the fact that every part of the plant is fatal if ingested. The blossoms are snowy white, of course. The painting by Albert Perrault still hangs like an ashen blotch above the bed.
The man and woman are kindly and polite, and even offer to show Daniel pictures that they took of his brother before disposing of the corpse. He declines, and soon the three of them are naked together in the wide white bed. Together and apart, the man and woman explore every crevice and orifice of Daniel’s flesh, delivering and accepting lingering kisses, working at his dick until the man’s mouth and the woman’s vagina are filled with cum. She demonstrates a fondness for the act of analingus, forcing her tongue repeatedly in and out of his asshole. And Daniel tries to think only of this fortunate opportunity, that the Fates have smiled upon him. He feels the couple’s loathsome caresses and violations, but those sensations seem to reach him from at least another lifetime, or a dream of grey grass, or across a considerable distance.
“So sweet,” she says, and “So much better even than your pretty brother,” he says. The woman whispers how she wishes they could keep him alive, keep him forever, and the man reminds her how many other delights the world yet holds for them, and this night is only a transient pleasure.
“So very easy to forget,” she says. It has been maybe twenty or thirty minutes since he lay down upon their silk sheets, and Daniel notes that the woman has gone pale and is slurring her words. He notes a similar paleness in her husband, and offers mute gratitude to the satyr squatting there beneath the charcoal tree, hanging there above the bed. Another five minutes, and the man is vomiting and the woman has begun to shiver uncontrollably.
Their deaths are neither pretty nor painless.
He props himself up against the headboard and watches as they writhe and moan and shit themselves, as blood flows from their nostrils and from underneath their fingernails. He smiles when they mutter weak appeals for help and mercy. The woman goes into convulsions first, and Daniel has the pleasure of seeing the fear in the man’s cloudy eyes as she thrashes upon the varnished hardwood floor.
“So sweet,” Daniel whispers, smiling, and when they have both stopped moving, he realizes that it has begun to rain. He lies down in the cool, sex-stained sheets and rests, watching the night fade to a wet dawn and soggy morning light almost as sooty as the satyr’s painted universe. Sometime later, he drifts into the last dreams he will have before his corrupted physiology finally ceases to function. He walks the stony, briar-strewn labyrinths leading down and down through lightness tunnels and ebony hallways and inconceivable subterranean galleries to the shadowy abode of Hades and Persephone. Daniel has no trouble with the ferryman, nor in locating the gates, for they have been left open in expectation of his imminent arrival. His brother is waiting there, and together they seek the waters of Lethe and the blessed forgetfulness of that conclusive drowning.
For Robin Hazen, who suggested the title of this story.
Unter den Augen des Mondes
Only rarely is she awake at daybreak or at late morning or afternoon. But in those infrequent hours when she finds herself staring past the bars of her cage at the dusty shaft of light leaking in through a basement window, the werewolf almost remembers how it began. How she came to be here. Who she might have been before. There are iron bars bolted across the window, as well, and so the light makes a checkered shadow on the earthen floor. She squints and distrusts the light, for all the things it would have her remember, memories she suspects are only lies told by the sun that she might forget the moon and so, too, forget herself. This illumination is much too plain, she knows, too obvious, and she whimpers and turns her face away, wishing her dim wishes for sleep and dreams and the night. There are two dominions in the heavens, the Kingdom of the Sun and the Kingdom of the Moon, and long ago now did she cast her lot with the latter. The sun would tell her it was not an irrevocable decision, but the werewolf knows better. The sun promises green fields, where she walks upright beneath blue skies. It promises yellow flowers and bees and warmth across her upturned cheeks. It promises one body, instead of the two she inhabits, a single state of being never countermanded by the violence of metamorphosis. But she knows it lies, the sun, the flaming, devouring sun. She huddles in a corner of her cage, curled into the folds of filthy blankets, cowering as far from the checkered wash of light as she may. The werewolf whispers to herself one of the stories the moon has taught her, and in this story the moon is named Selene, and the sun—named Helios—is her brother, as is the dawn, Eos. The moon loves a mortal man named Endymion, and he is so beautiful and so pleases her that the moon asks Zeus to gift Endymion with eternal sleep that they would never again be parted by the cruel day. The werewolf tells herself that story, as the light moves across the dirt floor, and she tells others, too, of the wolves who chase the sun’s chariot across the sky, and of the great Egyptian serpent, Apophis, who swims deep rivers and strives always to swallow the sun. These are her stories, this mismatched, patchwork mythology to comfort a scalded soul on those rare occasions when she is so unfortunate as to awaken before the balm of dusk. She tells herself these tales, fables fingered like prayer beads, familiar, worn so smooth, and she tries hard not to hear the deceitful white-hot tongue of that blinding star. And more rarely still, there are the terrible days when the pale man comes down his creaking basement steps and purposefully wakes her. With an old broom handle, he roughly jabs her in the ribs, spoiling dreams, and she tumbles out across milky constellation rivers and moonless midwinters to the stink of mold and dust and her own shit. To the sour reek of him, which is the reek of sunlight, for she has long since come to understand that the pale man is a servant of the Kingdom of the Sun. He keeps her always locked inside this cage so that his god will be pleased and smile its molten approval. The man sits safely out of reach on a metal folding chair, and he drinks his whisky and smokes his cigarettes and prods her roughly with the broom handle. He talks, sometimes, though she knows enough to understand these are not the man’s own words, for in ages past the sun entered him, and it burned him until nothing more than a hollow shell remained. Now, when he speaks, it is the sun’s voice, and the words sear her ears as surely as the light sears her eyes. He asks, “How long’s it been now, puppy?” or “Wouldn’t it feel good to run free again, out there beneath that twinkling bitch-whore sky you call your mistress?” But seldomly does she answer with anything more than a snarl or a low, warning growl. The werewolf knows perfectly well she is being taunted with rhetoric, that these questions are not meant to be answered. There was a time when she offered up replies, against the moon’s advice, hoping to satisfy the hollow, pale man. But when she spoke, he only jabbed her that much harder with the broom handle
and refused to feed her for nights and nights afterwards. “You are an animal,” he would sneer. “A filthy animal, and it is unseemly when animals deign to speak. It is an insult to the Order of the World.” She knows better, for with her ears the werewolf listens to the gentle songs of owls and whippoorwills, eavesdrops on the chittering of bats, the busy conversations of hunting coyotes and the raccoons snuffling about the garbage cans. She knows the languages of crickets and katydids, and understands that the sun and all its agents loathe this multitude of voices that speak only when their backs are turned. “Crazy as a fucking loon,” the pale man laughs and taps his stick against the hard dirt floor. He laughs a lot, and she thinks that’s probably so he won’t remember how the sun slid down his throat and made, at most, a papery husk of him, only a convenient mouth to spew fire and anger and the heat that comes with fire, only a puppet stuffed with soot and cinders to wield a broken broom handle. “What did she eve:” do for you, anyway?” he asks. “What did she ever do, puppy, but warp you and lead you astray and drive you insane? Seems to me, you’ve been worshipping in the wrong goddamn churches.” Rut she only sits back on her haunches and watches him through the bars, watching with the brilliant amber eyes that were her reward on that first night the moon kissed her and she realized she was meant to return the kiss. There was a grove of apple trees, an orchard longneglected and claimed by wild grapes, honeysuckle, and the pricking vines of greenbriers. And the moon, two nights past full, found her hiding in the crisscross shadow of the branches, and whispered that they had always, always been lovers. The werewolf wept and tried to hide herself beneath the carpet of fallen, rotting leaves, because she thought it was another trick. All her life had been comprised of tricks, wicked tricks of one sort or the other. There had been many men and women, in almost equal measure, who said that they loved her, and yet she had never once felt loved. And why, she asked the moon, should you be any different? The moon replied, but not with words, as words are too easily doubted and vows too easily broken. The moon replied by giving her a second skin, a pelt, sharp claws and shirper teeth, and that night she ran on all fours beneath the forest’s concealing limbs, all the way down to the rocky place where the land falls away to the sea. She opened her new, quick jaws and sang ancient, thankful, reverent songs for the moon. That night, the werewolf caught and killed a rabbit, and what she didn’t eat, she buried for later. She pissed oil the trunks and gnarled roots of oaks and hemlocks and maples, leaving her invisible, inkless signature scattered about for any other wolves to note, should they happen across it. She searched tirelessly for them, those other wolves, that night and on many nights thereafter, not yet comprehending that men had long since slaughtered and driven away the wolves that had once haunted those woods. That is why I have made you, daughter, lover, confidant, the moon whispered from the star-dabbed sky. Hearing this, the werewolf felt disappointment and an awful, aching loneliness, but she also, finally, felt loved, and knew she was not alone. “Are you listening to me, bitch?” the man asks, and jabs her again with his broom handle. “Puppy, has she so addled your poor bitch brains that you can’t even tell when someone’s talking to you?” But the day is almost done, so that now the checkered pattern on the floor has slipped all the way across the hard-packed dirt to the far eastern end of the basement. She knows the dance—sun east to west, sunlight through the barred window west to east—and she watches on, relieved as those skewed, divided squares of white light grow ever fainter and are steadily consumed by patient, waiting shadows. Already, the sky above her will be going countless shades of purple and indigo, bruising to match those ugly marks the hollow man has inscribed upon her ribs and shoulders and thighs. And, of course, he knows it, too, that the moon will be up soon, that the sun is going down, deserting him as the earth spins round about. When he speaks again there is a seething desperation in his voice. He sounds cheated. He sounds the smallest bit less certain, and so the werewolf knows that the soot inside him is already growing cold and heavy. “It hardly matters,” he tells her. “Ten hours, then you’re mine again, if I want you. Truth be told, I’ve half a mind to go upstairs and get my shotgun, put an end to this abomination, once and for all. Would she want you then, I wonder, full of buckshot and buried six feet down below the turnips and cucumbers?” And, even though she knows the price for daring to talk, she answers the man in his own clumsy tongue. “You will not kill me, ghost, for in death you may not torment me, and buried six feet down, below the turnips and the cucumbers, your master would never again burn me. He might burn what’s left of you, though, for robbing him of me.” She waits a moment, watching his face and the embers in his eyes as he raises the broom handle. “Even by daylight,” she whispers, “you are a coward.” She makes no sound when he strikes her, does not yelp or scream or beg for mercy he does not have to give. She lies still, tasting her own blood, knowing that he knows that everything she’s said is true. Three times he brings the broken handle down across her head and shoulders, and he has passed now beyond the power of coherent speech and can only roar like the beast he will never have the freedom to be. The fourth time that he strikes the werewolf, catching her smartly across the face just above her left eyebrow, a consoling nothingness surges up to wash over and through her, unconsciousness interceding, stealing his punching bag away. And for a while, then, there is neither pain nor fear, neither contempt nor regret, and when she opens her eyes again, silvery moonlight lies in its own checkered pattern across the basement floor. And she hurts, yes. She hurts like hell, but still not so badly that she’s ungrateful to be awake. A far worse thing it would have been if she’d not come to before dawn, and the night had passed her painlessly by. She lies motionless in her blankets and the soiled straw the man sometimes bothers to rake out and change with clean straw. She lies there and gently murmurs through split and swollen lips all the names she has ever learned for the moon, and from her eccentric, ecliptic orbit, across more than two hundred thousand miles of near vacuum, the moon replies with benediction. It is an old war, the struggle between the Kingdom of the Moon and the Kingdom of the Sun, and the werewolf knows that there have been prisoners and casualties beyond reckoning. And she knows, as well, that her captivity is not her mistress’ will, but, rather, her sorrow. Unlike the sun, the moon asks for no sacrifices, no immolated flesh, no blood spilled in anything but the immemorial joy of life and death. The moon would have long since freed the werewolf, were that an option, if her light but had the power to dissolve iron bars or shatter steel padlocks. The moon would have strangled and frozen the sun’s sour puppet in his sleep, if she were that manner of goddess. But she is not, and the werewolf has never asked for anything that cannot be granted. She does not blame the moon, and she does not blame herself. The man’s trap was clever and baited well, and that night she was hungry enough to risk the snare. She lies in her cage, blinking only when she must, and allows her soul to slowly fill with that wan, redeeming glow, trying not the think upon the open fields or the tree-lined labyrinths where she has not run for more than a year and may never run again. Instead, she imagines a day when the man will come too close, the day when his fury will overcome his caution, the day when she will spring from this pen and drag him down. She stares deeply into the moonlight pooled on the basement floor, and sees his blood splashed across the dirt walls, his throat held fast between in her jaws. She imagines him dead, and her padding quietly, warily, up the creaky stairs to the house above, and then, it last, back out into the world. She even permits herself the fantasy of a time when the Kingdom of the Moon defeats the Kingdom of the Sun, and the vanished wolves return. And then, recalling a few lines of poetry from the life before she was anything but a human woman, before she was blessed and loved, the werewolf, changing only a single syllable, whispers, “... and she will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.” And the moonshines brightly down, and somewhere out beyond the basement an owl swoops down upon a careless mouse, an
d the mouse screams, and, in her welded cage, the werewolf smiles, and waits.
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Page 11