“My great grandfather, who had the greenhouse constructed, was especially interested in tree ferns,” you continue, without my having prompted you to do so. “And in temperate rainforests, like those in New Zealand and the Pacific Northwest. So, the plants didn’t suffer so much from the Rhode Island winters as one might expect. I can still remember some of the Latin names. Dickinsonia antarctica—the Tasmanian Tree Fern—that was one of my favorites. And Cyathea medullaris, or the Black Tree Fern. The Maori called it mamaku.”
“It amazes me, that you remember all that.”
“Lying there on the flagstones, in the moss and ferns and horsetails, listening to the incessant drone of dragonflies and mosquitoes, and with those gigantic fronds to form a drooping canopy above me, it was easy to pretend.”
“To pretend what?”
You’re silent For a minute or so, and I kneel in the mud, thinking about Zoeth Howland and the Narragansetts and Sin and Flesh Brook, watching the way the blood from my thumb flows across my palm and encircles my muddy wrist to make a living bracelet before dripping into the hole.
“It might have been the first day of all in there,” you say, finally. “It might have been any Carboniferous evening, or a Coal-Forest afternoon. I never wanted to be anywhere else besides the greenhouse, not really. I wanted those days to go on and on, unending. So the violation was not only of my body, but of that sanctuary. It might have been less cruel, if I had simply died.”
In the night, my blood is not red, but dark as the ink you scrawl your quotations in, and it could just as well be dripping from the nib of one of your fountain pens as from the torn vein in my thumb.
“Maybe if they had caught the man—” I begin, but you interrupt me.
“There was no man to catch,” you say. “It wasn’t any man who came to me that day.”
“Is that what you told them then? Is that what you told the police?”
“Yes,” you answer, turning to face me again, and so I look away from both my bleeding hand and the lamp. Your eyes are no longer blue. They have become the gaping tangerine eyes of an owl, but I don’t scream. I detest women who scream. You blink feathery eyelids, and with that beak could so easily part my soul from my skin. As an offering, I give you the last of the story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis:
The heavenly parents answered him from on high,
Their two-shaped son, the double votary.
Then they gave a secret virtue to the flood,
And tinged its source to make his wishes good.
The bony disk slips from my muck- and blood-slicked grip, and falls with a small splash into the pool, there in the hole I have made for your planting. I don’t reach for it again, knowing that I’m not meant to. It has what it needed from me, and I require nothing more of it.
“You’re hanging back,” you say, laying your head on my shoulder, fingering my nipples until they are both erect. “Holding out. Why is that? Do you resent my gift to you as much as Hermaphroditus resented the gift that the daughter of Zeus gave to him?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, closing my eyes, wishing there were nothing I had to feel but your touch.
“You do. You know exactly what I mean. It’s not the owls, or the moon, and it’s not the grave. It’s not even the drowning that matters. It’s what came later, and tonight you’ve dreamt everything and anything but that.”
“You never did have tact. Well, none to speak of,” I whisper and shut my eyes, which only results in my opening them in some other, less-traveled corridor of this turning net her ward spire. The place I have been trying, all along, not to see, the night I have resisted visiting; it hardly matters if what I view here ever truly took place or not, in an intrinsic, objective sense. We’ll let that question stand unanswered for the time being, as pausing to address it would only mislead and distort.
Another night, a night late in spring when the moon is only a slender, waning crescent, and the fields north of the Old Bulgarmarsh Road in Tiverton have yet to sprout. I have been back alone many times now, and this is not returning to the scene of the crime, as much as it is returning to the scene of the consequences of the crime. Though, I think, you would insist there has been no crime committed. I only acted as an extension of your will, in accordance with your desires. I was only ever the instrument of your suicide. And on this night, I go down to the banks of Sin and Flesh Brook alone, following it south to the swampy place where it meets the nameless pond.
Tonight, there are no owls. Rut the whippoorwills cry like lost children.
I follow a narrow, uneven dirt path that has become familiar as my face in a mirror, and that must have only been a deer trail before I found it. Stepping through the briars and skunk cabbages and the high cattails, then just past the gnarled and rotting trunk of a dead hemlock tree, I can find this spot in my sleep. The mud is deep here, and already I am in up to my ankles. I never bother with shoes on these pilgrimages, no matter the weather; they would only be ruined. I have worn a loose, sleaveless dress you made for me, a simple floral cotton print, and no jacket, despite the cool of the evening. Neither did I see the need for undergarments.
This is each and every night I have ever made the trip. But always it is the first time, and always I swear a futile promise that it will be my last. No one who has joined the Heleads has need of my meager devotion, and maybe, I think, it’s only (at best) an insult to you, my coming here, something that was never apart of your plan. I stand there in the mud, shivering, my ears filled with whippoorwills, my head filled with loss and regret and memories like a millstone around my neck.
“It wasn’t any man who came to me that day.”
And it will be no woman, nor any mere woman’s shade, who comes to me tonight. Woman is far too small a word, I think, as you rise from the thick mud, a form already so dimly recollected coalescing from whatever is at hand and from bits of dream and, possibly, your own whimsy. On this dark night, the weeds might almost pass for your black hair, and the marsh slime for the skin you gave up months ago. But it is restless, this temporary body, always shifting, as though too great an effort is required to hold the form, and maybe in the years to come you will grow more skilled in this alchemy. Your face comes and goes, one second a perfected likeness, down to the scar on your left cheek, but it melts, coming apart, dissolving, and only a crude and featureless parody of it remains.
Your wet voice is the primordial voice of all bogs—your tongue and teeth, larynx and palate spun from a weave of sundew and peatlands, fishbone, white cedar, sweet gale, bog rosemary, dragonfly larvae and empty turtle shells, waterlogged carpets of red maple leaves, the scurry of predatory water bugs sewn into a gurgling out wash of crayfish and sphagnum, sedges, cranberries, leatherleaf, and the treacherous, seductive traps of insectivorous pitcher plants. Your shoulders writhe with clots of leeches, like living epaulets, and here and there a frog or small snake has been caught up in the suddenness of your accretion, and they squirm in and out of view, as do the gasping mouths, eyes, and fins of perch and pout and calico bass. There are other things, more fantastical and unlikely components of your being—the creeping, segmented shells of trilobites, perhaps. The whorl of an ammonite’s shell. Rut this might only be my imagination. The weeds hang down your shoulders and back and cover your ass like a mane.
“My gift,” you say, and there’s a rheumy, squelching sort of a sound as you raise your arms so that I can see what you have hauled up from the bottom of the nameless pond at the end of Sin and Flesh Brook. And I do not have words to describe what you hold in both hands, but I know, instinctively, that is has grown, somehow, from a disk of bone-like matter engraved with triple spirals and anointed, fertilized, awakened by my own blood. It has swelled, ripening, and sprouted countless chitinous spines. On the side turned towards me, there is something akin to a proboscis or snout, and from beneath it spills a wriggling tendril. It shines slickly in the night, twisting and thrashing this way and that, and as I watch, the tendril bifurcates, and
where it was at first smooth, it quickly becomes festooned with an assortment of quivering prongs and thorn-like projections. And all these words are a sorry excuse for the sight of the thing, whether I have seen it with my eyes or with nothing but my mind. It is horrifying, and it is sublime, and I have never yet beheld anything else so beautiful.
“It was like a church,” you say. “All that glass and iron, those domes, and I would lie there beneath it, safe from the eyes of Heaven, as we are now safe from the eyes of Heaven.”
Until, piercing each the others flesh, they run
Together, and incorporate, becoming one.
I know that I should be afraid, but there is no fear in me, and as that tendril twines about my left thigh (and I am surprised to find its touch is unexpectedly warm), I open myself to it. Which is only opening myself to you, and I have done that so many times past counting. And there is a kindly smile on the clay and ooze pretending to be your lips as it enters me, as I welcome that entry. The pain is so small and brief as to hardly bear mentioning here. The busy tendrils, their work complete, withdraw, slipping nosily back inside the prickly mass in your hands.
Here, while young Proserpine, among the maids,
Diverts herself in these delicious shades;
While like a child with busy speed and cart
She gathers lilies here, and vi’lets there;
While first to fill her little lap she strives,
Hell’s grizzly monarch at the shade arrives...
You come apart as readily as you came together, and the marsh eagerly, jealously, takes you back, reabsorbing all that it has generously leant in order for its guardian spirit and most secret daughter to be, however impermanently, corporeal. And, too, it takes back that thing you held, and I do not wonder if you were this night my lover, or if my lover were the marsh, or that if it were, instead, the tentacles or tendrils of your peculiar oblation. For I know, now, it was all these at once, and any division drawn between them must be entirely arbitrary.
And the sun rises, and shining through the drapes it rouses me from all dreams, and I lie still in the bed we no longer share. For a long while, I watch the pattern the morning light makes on the walls, and then my hand strays to my sex, which is no longer precisely what it once was. The swelling lips of my vagina, the purple-red arils embedded in the walls of my cunt that anyone might mistake only for the seeds of the pomegranate that damned Persephone. Only that is blood they leak, not juice, when pressed with a thumbnail. The fruit of our union, and I lie here thinking of your great-grandfather’s ruined greenhouse, and what might have visited you there. Slipping a finger into myself, past those maturing seeds, I see your face, and think on all the fenny, verdant ages yet to come.
I Am the Abyss, and I Am Light
1.
There is only a passing, brief glint of panic when the process has reached the point that cognitive integrity is finally, and almost irrevocably, compromised. During all the interminable months of psychological prep and antemorphic therapy, Ttisa was repeatedly trained for this moment, against this moment, and both the shhakizsa midwives and her human counselors have taught her meditation techniques for making the transition with as little trauma as possible. But, most importantly, as her mind and the mind of the surrogate suddenly bleed one into the other, a carefully constructed series of posthypnotic images is triggered. And Ttisa finds herself staring down from suborbit at a living planet that might be Earth, and a muddy, winding river that might be the Mississippi, or perhaps the Nile, or the Ganges, or no river that has ever flowed any where but across the floodplains of her imagination. She sees that the river has reached the sea, as rivers do, and here is the place where sediment-laden freshwater collides with the brine, where an opaque torrent the color of almonds interfaces with blue-green saltwater. The confluence, and there is nothing here to tear, for gravity drags all rivers oceanward, just as it drags all raindrops from the sky, and then hauls water vapor up again.
The confluence, she thinks. The meeting of the waters. Encontro das Aguas. And so the surrogate echoes, The confluence, the meeting of the waters. It continues, then, finding thoughts that are no longer only Ttisa’s thoughts, before she has had time to find them herself. Or it is only one river meeting another, they each think almost in unison. In Brazil, they call it Encontro das Aguas, where the Rio Negro joins with the upper Amazon. Brown water and black water, but then, linked thus, they come to the next bead on this chain. Ttisa sits at a table, and having just added cream to a cup of coffee, she watches while the cold white swirls like a tiny galaxy, its spiral arms starting to blend with the steaming void. Soon, they think (for now there is near-perfect synchronization) the coffee will be cooler, or the milk will be warmer. The milk will he darker; or the coffee will have brightened. It can hardly matter which.
Across the breakfast table, a teacher that Ttisa never actually had says, “Now, Ttisa, tell me, where, exactly, does the galaxy begin and intergalactic space end? Likewise, where does each of this galaxy’s constituent solar systems begin and end?”
And the new coconsciousness that is neither precisely Ttisa nor her shhakizsa surrogate, but which fully accommodates them both, begins to answer. It very nearly offers the teacher facts and theories from dutifully recollected lectures on the heliopause and solar winds, hydrogen walls and the interstellar medium. But then it stops itself and glances back down at the muted caramel-colored liquid inside the cup, and the mind can no longer distinguish milk from coffee, nor coffee from milk. Strictly speaking, both have ceased to exist in the creation of a third and novel substance.
“In any objective sense, the question you’ve asked is meaningless,” the woman seated at the table across from the teacher construct replies. The woman wears the face that Ttisa once wore, when Ttisa was only herself. It speaks with the same voice Ttisa spoke with, and the coconscious entity immediately recognizes the face’s residual utility as a cushion avatar—a useful tool, so long as that likeness is not mistaken for anything possessed of singularity.
“Well said,” the teacher smiles. “You’re doing much better than anticipated. Shall we continue?”
The avatar thoughtfully sips her coffee, and then she nods to the teacher. “Please,” she replies, and the teacher returns her nod and glances back down at his notes, displayed in the flickering tabletop.
“You’re doing so well, in fact, there’s quite a bit here we can skip over—heterogeneous mixtures, including suspensions and colloids, for example.”
“Which brings us to compounds,” the avatar says.
“Indeed, it does.”
From its vantage point in geospace, the new mind goes back to watching the nameless river as it empties into that unknown marine gulf, and it marvels at the memory of the taste of milk and coffee, simultaneously familiar and exotic. There is a line of dark clouds moving in from the northwest, and soon they will hide the landscape below from view. Lightning sparks and arcs, belying the violence inside those thunderheads, and Ttisa shivers, despite the temperature of the amnion, which is identical to her own. Here, there is a slip, a misstep, and in this instant, she is almost Ttisa again. Identity and discreteness threaten to reassert themselves, dissolving the compound back into its constituent parts; there is a second (and stronger) flare of panic before the surrogate can react.
Without hesitation, it points to the next bead on the chain. And the teacher looks up from his notes and clears his throat.
“We might call it binary fusion,” he says, “taking care to distinguish this bonding process from the binary fission commonly witnessed in the prokaryotic organisms of the Sol system. Nothing here of either partner is split away, but only combined to create a third, which mentally subsumes the parents, in a sense, even though the end product does retain two functionally independent bodies.”
“Am I dying?” Ttisa asks him. The man scowls and furrows his eyebrows, but she continues. “Is it like Theodore said? Is the surrogate devouring me alive?”
“You alre
ady have the requisite knowledge to answer those questions for yourself,” the teacher tells her. “I’m not here to cater to a lazy pupil.”
The confluence, her surrogate whispers wordlessly, in silent tones as soothing as the sight of that primeval, earthly river, flowing fifty kilometers below. The meeting of the welters. Encontro das Aguas, as they say in Brazil.
“Encontro das Aguas,” she says, and sips her coffee. The teacher smiles, satisfied, and, once again, there is only a single mind, and once again, the face and voice of the woman at the table is only an avatar to ease the crossing, and nothing that is being lost.
2.
Four months earlier, Ttisa Fitzgerald opens her eyes again, because Theodore is still talking to her. Talking at her. Ttisa wants to sleep, not talk. Lately, it seems that all she wants to do is sleep, and she knows it’s mostly a side effect of the drugs and dendrimer serums, her antemorphic regimen combined with the demands of her psych conditioning schedule. The doctors told her to expect the grogginess, but it still annoys her. Right now, Theodore is also annoying her. He’s sitting naked on the bed next to her, talking. He’s turned away from her, facing the wall, which is currently displaying a realtime image of the north polar region of the planet below. Seventy years before Ttisa was born, a team of Mars-based astronomers christened The Planet Iota Draconis c. If she were not so tired, and beginning to feel nauseous again, she might find the sight moving—the vast boreal icecaps hiding an arctic sea, a wide desert of frozen water which, even from orbit, is more blue than white. The light of an alien star reflected off a swirl of high-latitude clouds. The network of lights marking the ancient shhakizsa city, waiting to receive her in only a few more weeks. It is all surely still as wondrous as the day her transport dropped out of sublight, more than thirty parsecs from Earth, and Ttisa first laid eyes on this new world circling a third-magnitude star. But she’s sleepy. And nauseous. And her head is beginning to ache.
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Page 15