“Did he actual call them persons?” Theo scoffs, and he turns away from her.
She is floating, and the feeling of suffocation has passed. Her lungs have filled with fluid, and there is no longer any need to breathe. The oxygen she requires will be transferred directly to her bloodstream now. There is no pain, despite the corrosively low pH environment surrounding her, and despite that, by now, various enzymes will have triggered the early stages of epidermal transformation and horizontal gene transfer. The digestive, amniotic fluid is filled with powerful analgesics, and the serums and months of conditioning have insured that her human neurology is receptive to them.
“Doesn’t it sound like the sea?” her mother asks, and Ttisa, not yet five years old, shakes her head and sets the conch back down on the white, white sand of the natatorium’s fabricated beach.
The six umbilical cords begin to wrap themselves tightly about her, each one attaching to a critical, predetermined site on Ttisa’s body by means of razor-sharp beaks composed primarily of chitin and complex cross-linked proteins. One for her throat (entering by way of her mouth), another through her sex, her belly, her rectum, and the base of her spine, and yet another penetrating the medulla oblongata via the foramen magnum.
I am not drowning, she thinks. I could never drown. I am held fast. Embraced, as I have never been embraced before, and I will not fall again.
“Has it started?”
“Yes,” whispers a voice that is not a voice. “It has started. Rest now. You will need it, farther along.”
Theo puts down his tab and squeezes his eyes shut. He rubs at his temples, as though his head aches. “It sounds like rape to me,” he says. “No, it sounds much worse than rape.”
“I wish I could make you understand,” she tells him. “I would, if I could.”
And around Ttisa, all the wide world has shrunken to this golden lagoon of kindly, flesh-filtered light and transmuting fluids, and the gentle, voiceless reassurances in a tongue she understands without having learned.
For the first time in her life, she is sure that she not falling.
6.
Though she didn’t go down to the departure bay in time to say goodbye to Theo (and, for that matter, he didn’t come to say goodbye to her), Ttisa did watch him leave. She stood alone on the observation deck, and, with an index finger pressed to the wall, traced the steady, silent path of the ungainly, multi-hulled sleeper as it exited the station and moved away towards the pulsing scarlet ring of the starboard ftl portal. She looked away before the embarkation flash, and when she looked back, the ship that would ferry him home was gone. He was gone. And she knew that she’d never see him again.
She knew that she should feel remorse.
And she knew, too, that there should be a profound emptiness inside her, an ache that she would carry for a long time to come. But there was nothing of the sort, and it seemed very silly to counterfeit, or to worry over the absence of emotions that would have only caused her pain.
They’ve changed me this much already, she thought, still watching the ftl portal as the lateral vector array stopped flashing while the entire circuit powered down. The plasma stream had dissipated, and there was nothing visible through the portal now but stars. She picked out the yellow speck of Arcturus, then pulled her hand back from the wall and stared at her fingertip, instead.
That’s it, then. He’s away. It is for the best, redly He was so unhappy.
“Sleep tight, my love,” she said aloud. “Sleep tight and dream.” Then, wondering if this was possibly only another part of the experiment, and, if so, how she’d scored, Ttisa turned and left the observation deck.
7.
This far along in the process, three Sol days and counting, there is no longer any meaningful distinction between her memory and that of the surrogate. “It” clearly recalls kneeling on a white beach and holding a plastic conch to its ear, listening for a phantom sea. “She” remembers, with equal clarity, the towering, crystalline spires buried miles deep, beneath the shhakizsas’ sprawling polar megalopolis, the quartz lattice of temples erected to long-forgotten gods and demons. “It” recalls a day at the beach, and “she” relives a pilgrimage to an archeological wonder. The rapidly mutating body that was Ttisa Fitzgerald drifts, not falling, safe within the sanctuary that has grown around it, the amniotic cyst that cradles what it has become and what it is still becoming.
The confluence, this new, compounded consciousness thinks again. The meeting of the waters. Encontro das Aguas.
Milk in coffee.
The cold swirl of stars in near vacuum.
All but one of the surrogate’s umbilici has withdrawn, completely resorbed into the host’s endometrium. The one that remains is there for no other reason than the carnal pleasure of contact, of masturbation. It has swollen to completely fill the thorny, cilia-lined slit that can no longer be described as a human vagina. The enormous body of the surrogate and the far smaller body of the reborn shiver in unison.
We are whole, it thinks, as the latest in a seemingly ceaseless series of orgasms fades. This is our gift, the gift we have given to ourself. This wholeness, unfettered by the jail of individuality. Our minds are laid ban, and there can be no mental isolation here, and no secrets.
Being alone is unbearable, it thinks.
We will never be alone again, it replies. Even when the cyst ruptures and we divide, we will remain as one.
Is she still here, watching from somewhere within us? The one who was named Ttisa Fitzgerald? but it knows the answer even before the question has been fully articulated. Nothing has been lost, save the abyss between one consciousness and another.
Hold it up to your car and listen. Tell me what you hear.
Tort might have asked me to stay.
And I’ll say, “She was a woman, once. She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, and I loved her.” I’ll say, “You might find that hard to believe, but she was a woman, once.”
And, if not woman, and if not shhakizsa, what are we now?, it asks itself. What is this beast we have become?
There are many words available with which to answer that question, but they all, each and every one, signify unification. It pauses in the flow of questioning and revelry to examine what has been fashioned from the willing offering of Ttisa Fitzgerald—the reborn child, the holy feast, the marriage consummated. In combined lifetimes, it has beheld precious few things so singular in their loveliness, so unlikely in their realization. That impatient daughter tugs roughly at the remaining umbilicus, snared between her legs. And, pleased at the unprecedented fruits of so painful and perilous a labor—a labor that failed six times previously—the amalgam resumes its ministrations.
8.
It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensees
Dancing With the
Eight of Swords
I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
I open my eyes, and She is still sitting in the only chair in this dingy, dim room. She is still watching me. I must have been sleeping again. If I ask Her, She will tell me that I was sleeping, and I can imagine nothing She would gain by lying. There is no resistance or power left to me, and She is all the world now, so I cannot fathom why She would lie. I don’t ask the question. I was sleeping. I know I was sleeping, because in my sleep I dreamed, and in my dream I was not here, in this dim and dingy room with its one chair and the harpy who sits there and the bed where I lie sweating and sick and, I think, always dying. I do not know how long I’ve lain here, hurting and dreaming and waking and wishing I were only dying. I think no one is brought here to die. I think I was brought here to he, because of what I have been and what I have done. I a in a dying (or merely dead) woman
who has done so many things, and it is difficult for me to envision a universe that does not exact retribution. She sits so near, and Her golden eyes glint like antique coins in the candlelight. I think it must be candlelight, as it has that quality possessed by candlelight, though I cannot actually ever see the candles. You ask me, I have done so very many inexcusable things, and they come back to me in what I believe are dreams, as I believe I am now awake. I want to ask Her, how many rooms like this are there? A hundred? K thousand? Some number nearing infinity? She sees that I am awake, and She smiles. Oh, those teeth. Those teeth that would be the envy of any shark or wolf or hyena or demon. She merely smiles, to see me awake again. “Hello,” She says, and I don’t reply. Not yet. I shut my eyes again, the dreaming still too fresh and sharp and stinking. I shut my eyes, and so, of course, She wants to know why I have shut my eyes. That I will not see, I reply, and She laughs, knowing goddamn well that I see, eyes open or closed, either way I see one thing or another. Either way, there is no escape. We come here, to this room, and we do not escape. This is what I think. And then She wants to know my dreams, because She always wants to know my dreams. I tell Her they are mine, and She assures me this is true and that She has no wish to deprive me of them. And I ask, my mouth so dry, my throat so raw that I can only just manage the words, I say, Ton know already. Why do you ask me, when you know already? I imagine She is smiling, still, though I don’t open my eyes to see if this is true. “Maybe,” She replies, “there was something new. They change, sometimes, our dreams.” And yes, She says this as though She is a being who dreams, and no, I don’t believe this. That She is. “So,” She says, “tell me what I know already, as I would hear the words again. They are precious, whether novel or threadbare.” For a moment, my mind is filled with curses I will not speak, no, not aloud, for my fury only seems to please Her as much as anything else. Novelty and worn-out memories, truth and falsehoods, pain and pleasure, and I cannot now recall how many times She has sworn to me that I will learn to see that there are no such distinctions, not in truth, and She only makes reference to them as a kindness to me. I have been consigned to this dim and dingy room, this Pit, this unending moment, and a thoughtful beast has been sent to watch over me. When I do not reply, She asks if my throat is dry, if it aches, and then, before I reply, She offers me something to drink. But I know what will he in the cup She raises to my lips. I know that thick, warm draught. I know too well the taste, that some have said is like iron or old pennies, but I have found it to be neither one. I refuse. I will refuse until I can no longer bear to refuse. “Then, please, tell me,” She says, Her patient voice still smiling. I do not open my eyes. But I clear my ragged throat, and my voice is hardly more than a whisper. “You know already,” I say. And how I do loathe the sound of it, my own voice, and how I do wish and have prayed to dark things that She would finally take mercy upon me and rip my throat open and take away my voice, take it away forever. But I know She needs it, needs me able to speak my confessions. “One of your beautiful ones?” She asks, prompting me. “Is that what it was?” I used to think that She was mocking me, but I know now that She is not. “Yes,” I whisper. “One of my beautiful ones.” And it’s not a lie, as I have learned there is no profit whatsoever in lying to the naked, violet-skinned woman (who is, I know, no woman) who sits in the room’s single chair. “I was begging her to be silent. I was begging her, begging her to try harder than she was already trying.” And from Her chair, the harpy—no, she is no real harpy, nothing so simple or familiar; it is only a convenient word—asks me, “Did she try? Did she listen to you?” I shake my head, because that’s easier than saying no, and I squeeze my eyes shut even tighter than before. I understand that She can see what I see behind my closed eyelids, that there is no shutting Her out, not ever, no, and it’s so completely fucking absurd, the way She makes me put it all into words, watering it down, failing entirely to capture the truth. “One of my beautiful ones,” I say. “I can’t recall her name.” And from Her chair, the violet skinned beast says, “It doesn’t matter. Their names are lost.” I nod, because it’s true. I always stole their names. I always took great care to bury their names long before I ever buried any of their bodies. “I said, ‘Please, lie still for me. Lie still and do not breathe.’ And I told her that if she could just do that, if she could just do her best, I would give her name back to her when I was done.” There is a sound then, like water dripping, but it isn’t water, no, not here in this dry, dim, and dingy room, and I open my eyes. She’s still watching me from Her chair. She’s leaning forward very slightly, and Her longhair looks much like the pregnant moments before a thunderstorm. Her eyes are like clusters of pomegranate seeds, and She blinks for me. No, She only blinks. Not for me. I want to look away, as I always want to look away, as I never want to look away, as I would look into Her forever until my soul is burned to soot, were that an option. Maybe, it’s an option farther along. She’s leaning forward, very slightly, and She says to me, “It is not an unreasonable request. But still, they never could lie still enough, could they? And not a single one of them ever managed to hold her breath even half so long enough.” I tell Her, then, that I was not lying to them, that I would have released them afterwards, if they’d just done as I asked. I tell Her this again, again, again, as if I think it matters. I don’t know if it’s true. It may be that She does. That She knows. She always seems to believe me, but that might simply be part of this game, or pantomime, or dance, or whatever the proper fucking word would be for what it is we are doing in this dim and dingy room, She and I. Our vicious, soft-spoken pas de deux, recurring, as once night followed day, or day followed night. She is become the sun and I the moon, or conversely, I am the one who burns, and She only reflects the ghost of my light. “I knew, from the start,” I say, not taking my eyes from Her, “that no one would ever believe that. The police, I mean. Or if they did believe me, they wouldn’t care. It would not matter that I gave them all a fair and equal chance to walk away. They didn’t have to die.” And, blinking those red, ripe eyes, She says, “They would all have died anyway, in time. You know that. What matter the day? What matter the conveyance? Life has a single outcome, and the hour of that consequence may as well be sooner as be later.” I want to ask if these words are meant to console me, or lull me, or if She is, instead, mocking what I say to Her. I don’t, though. I mocked Her once, what strikes me as many ages ago, and, for my insolence, She showed me daylight and green meadows and blue skies, and so I know better now. I hold my tongue, as they say. “Which one was it?” She asks. “Which of your beautiful ones were you dreaming of this time?” And, truthfully, I say that I’m uncertain. One of the blondes, which isn’t very helpful, as they were almost always blondes. It was a weakness, though I tried to avoid obvious patterns, it was a weakness, the blondes. So, yes, I was dreaming of one of the blondes, begging her not to move, not to speak, not to breathe. I was dreaming of the tub filled with icy water. I was dreaming of her flesh, cold as death, but not yet dead. Her heartbeat, pulse, inhalations and exhalations, all of it there to spoil the illusion. And I stop, stop relating the dream, and I say, again, I never understood the source of these appetites of mine. That I never invited them in. And then She says, her voice so soothing, so sincere, that She knows this, She knows this perfectly well. “Our appetites choose us,” She says. “Or, they are given unto us. Or they are curses. Regardless, we are not to he faulted for deigning to accept them.” And I say (though I’ve said it already) that it was one of the blondes, and, yes, I took her name and placed it in the jar where I kept all their names. Once, the jar held a quart of dill pickles, but I had washed it, steamed off the label, scrubbed it clean, and so it was a perfectly fit receptacle to hold the slips of white paper on which I placed the names of my beautiful ones after I stole them away. White slips of paper and blue Pelican ink. I used to know the particular shade of blue, but it’s something I have since forgotten. I talk about the tub of icy water, and I talk about the girl’s lips going ano
ther shade of blue, but not blue enough. “I told her, I said she must not shiver. No matter what, she must not shiver,” I say. “But she did shiver, didn’t she?” my keeper asks, my keeper, or my warden, or whatever. “After all, the response is involuntary, a reflex triggered during the earliest stages of hypothermia. The body shuddering in a self-defeating attempt to warm itself. There is a portion of the hypothalamus located near the ventriculus tertius, and it serves as the motor center responsible for shivering. A valuable adaptation, but also a deadly one. It increases the heat output in endotherms by two or three-fold, but at such a great cost to the shivering organism.” And I’ve heard all this before, for human morphology and physiology are among the subjects of which She has proven a connoisseur. I never will say, I know that, I’ve known that shit since college. When She is done, I glance at the ceiling. There is a ceiling in the dim and dingy room, just as there is a floor, and four walls, and a door, and all these things have never ceased to amaze me in their stark simplicity. “I’m sorry,” She says. “Please, continue. You were saying that she did shiver, even though you begged her not to do so.” And I nod. “Yes,” I reply. “She did. She shivered, and her teeth chattered. I showed her the jar with her name, as I sometimes would do, hoping it would prove to her that I had the power to restore her name.” Which is true, I did. I held the jar of names in front of her open eyes. “Which,” I add, “were hazel green.” “But it was to no avail,” the harpy says. The gargoyle. The siren. The unspeakably beautiful and violet-skinned beast with its delicate, long fingers. “To no avail,” I say, playing Echo to Her Narcissus. “She was so exquisitely pale, and her lips and earlobes and the tips of her fingers were going that soft shade of blue,” I say. And from Her chair, She nods and leans closer to the bed and says, “Stage-two hypothermia. Is that when you admitted defeat?” And I tell Her, “Yes, that time. But sometimes, some other times, I let it go farther. Sometimes, I was more hopeful, or persistent, than other times, and I could control the anger.” So I sit on the bed, and She watches me for a while, and for that time, there are no words exchanged between us. And then I spoil the silence by continuing. “I used glue, that time. Ethyl-2 cyanoacrylate. Krazy Glue. Whatever. On her lips and inside her nostrils. I held her lips together and pinched her nostrils shut until it set. I know that I could have made it easier for her. But, I was so very furious. I was so fucking pissed off. I’d shown her the jar, and even that wasn’t enough. There were times I thought of doing that to myself, and being done with it. Using the glue, I mean.” She frowns slightly, which She does on occasion, and tells me that my frustration and despair were inevitable, to be expected, and I should not be ashamed. “They failed you,” She says. “You did not fail them. Your beautiful ones, you only gave to them what they were unable to manage on their own.” And I laugh, without meaning to, and quickly cover my mouth and stare down at the bare, stained mattress. At my naked belly and thighs and legs. I awoke here without clothes, and they have never been offered, but neither is She ever clothed, so it doesn’t seem unfair. “It is good to laugh,” She tells me, and She tells me not to be repentant if I find humor in Her words, even when She did not intend to imbue them with humor. “Do not cover your pretty mouth,” She says, so I let my hand drift back down to my left side. “That’s better,” She smiles. “Now, when she was dead? What then?” And I take a deep breath, an especially deep breath, and I hold it maybe ten or fifteen seconds. The spent air rushes loudly from my mouth and nose. “There is no dignity in a death like that. It is an ugly way to die. Asphyxiation. But you already know that.” And, “Of course I do,” She says in the most agreeable tone of voice. “When I was done—” I begin, but She interrupts me. “When you were done with what?” She asks me, and now Her tone is somewhat less agreeable. She does not permit me to abridge my divulgences. “What did you do when she’d stopped struggling, when her body had ceased to convulse, once the hypoxia had run its course and she was dead? What did you do then?” And I tell Her that I used my fingers, first, and then my tongue, and when She asks me if it was good, I tell Her no, that it was sublime. And now She laughs, and oh, that laugh, that laugh is incalculably more frigid than any bath I ever give my beautiful ones, and it cuts me in a thousand secret, invisible, incorporeal places. She knows that, knows it well, and, so, She laughs again. When She is finished laughing, She sits up straighter, and crosses Her thin arms. Watching Her watching me, I’m struck again by how, in the apparent candlelight filling the dim and dingy room, the horns sprouting from either side of Her head appear as though they have been mold-blown from molten glass. An almost entirely opaque glass, tinted aubergine. They coil round and back upon themselves like a ram’s horns, or a satyr’s, though all other visible evidence paints Her as something female. “Your fingers, and then your tongue,” She says,so now I’ve become Narcissus. “This was before you placed the corpse in the freezer,” and I tell Her yes, that this was before. She wants to know, then, if I went back later, when the body had frozen, and I tell Her, honestly, that part wasn’t in my dream. Regardless, I would know. Did you go back to her, this blonde of yours, after she was frozen?” And risking so much and, in the end, risking hardly anything at all, I say to Her, “You love this.” She nods and tells me yes, there is great delight for Her in hearing these words spoken, and hearing also the accompanying dissonance inside my mind. “Was there not love in you?” She asks. “Each one of them, were they not your heart’s own truest love? Was there even one among that number to whom you were not entirely devoted?” I say She already knows the answer, but then I say, because She needs to hear it spoken, then I say, “No, there was not even one of them I did not, in turn, love. I took the same chance for them all. I placed myself in mortal danger for all of my beautiful ones, and so I know that I loved them. I hurt, looking into their eyes, and so I know I loved. I hurt so much, and every time in the most inaccessible recesses of my being, and so I know, and I don’t doubt that I did truly love them.” Then I hear the faint, discordant music that sometimes drifts through the dim and dingy room, like careless hands on a piano badly in need of tuning. Several times, or more times than several, I have come near to asking Her where the music originates, what it signifies, if it has some purpose. But I never have,and I don’t this time. I just wait for it to pass. She never even seems to notice it. “Why did this one go to the freezer?” She asks, though She already knows that answer, too. “Why the freezer, instead of the box? Was the box preoccupied?” And I shake my head, and, is the last jangling strains of the music fade, I say, “No. The box was empty. But there was no need of the box. The glue did the trick. It would have been pointless to place her in the box, to go to the trouble of burying her and having to dig her up again, when she was already dead.” And “Yes,” She says. “Yes, of course. I shouldn’t have asked that question. Of course, it would have been unnecessary and meaningless to place her in the box. And an artist must always conserve her energy. It mustn’t be squandered on futile endeavors.” I say again, so softly that even I hardly hear myself, “She was already dead.” She blinks (and it has occurred to me, repeatedly, that if I could only be sufficiently attentive, I would be able to catch a pattern to Her blinking; it must be something not dissimilar to Morse code, the blinking of Her eyes like clusters of ripe pomegranate seeds). She blinks. And She glances at the door. I have never yet seen that door open, but I assume it is more than trompe-l’œil, surely. The assumption is baseless, and I freely acknowledge that. What was it that Carl Sagan wrote? “A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.” So, yes, what a sad spectacle is that door. If it is a fake, only paint over plaster, what a waste of space. And if it is, in truth, an actual door, what a scope for misery and folly. She would say, “It might be hope.” And I would remind Her that April is the cruelest month, and She, dutifully, would agree. I’m not guessing. We have played that scene more than once. “Did you hear something?” I ask. “Out there, did you
hear something?” She turns back to me, and She asks, “No, dear. Did you?” I tell Her that I didn’t. Because I didn’t. And She blinks. And She smiles. And Her predatory teeth glint in the candlelight. She asks, “Was she left long in the freezer?” I answer that, as best I can recollect, she was left two or three days. “Before you took her to the river,” She says, “there was more Your fingers or your tongue? Or both?” And now my head fills up with the vision of the blonde, her flesh gone hard as stone, and, since water ice is, indeed, a mineral, she was stone, yes, and she was fossilized, and I’d become Pygmalion inverted. She was not so thoroughly colorless as marble, but the frost that dappled the white, white skin of this Galatea was near enough, I think. “I kissed her frozen lips,” I say. “But Aphrodite took no mercy on me.” This causes Her to laugh again, and it seems safe for me to laugh, as well, and so I do. “I kissed her lips, ever at the risk of thawing them with my scalding breath. I laid my hand on the cairn of her breast.” And She blinks and says, “You’d shaved her, yes.” It’s not a question. “Yes, but that was before the bath, That was always at the beginning.” “So she was bare and smooth, as would befit such a sculpture,” my custodian, or caretaker, or tormentor says. “Of course,” I reply. “And I laid my hand there, between her legs, at her sex, and the cold was so cold it seemed almost hot, beneath my palm.” Leaning forward again, She asks, beetling her violet brows, “That was all?” I say that yes, that was all. “The ice would not permit me entry, and that was always a rule. It was a rule that I never once violated. The ice was final, and the ice was not ever to be breeched.” “No matter your desire?” “No matter my desire,” I tell Her, trying hard not to sound bitter, though I am, and though She knows I am. I lose count of the masks I wear. The futile lies I tell Her. “I took her to the river, to a deep place below one of the bridges. There are gulls there, sometimes, and cormorants. The sun was almost up, but it is quite a desolate place. Still, I was cautious. Always, I was cautious. They never found me.” And then She asks a question that consists of a single word. “Police?” I don’t want to answer. I want to close my eyes, and sleep, sleep forever, and dream of my beautiful ones, and of a world beyond the dim and dry and dingy room lit with unseen candles. ‘“Police,” I nod. “I never fucked up. Or I never fucked up badly enough that they took note. I’m proud of that. I am.” She tells me that I should be proud, and now She stands, which She rarely does. She stands, rising to Her full height, which must be seven feet, at least. “You should be proud,” She says, repeating Herself. “You got my attention. Which is why it pains me so, that you avoid the mirrors.” No, I’ve not mentioned the mirrors. There are two in the room. When I sit up in the bed, my back to the headboard, facing Her, there is a mirror on my right, and another almost directly in front of me. She continues, staring down at me now. “If I were less understanding of your situation,” She says, “I would unquestionably be insulted, as you were insulted by your beautiful ones, each time they refused the gift you offered them.” If I explain that I mean no insult, I know that will only be another sort of insult, and so I don’t. “I am growing sickofour monotonous jousting,” She tells me, without there being a hint of anger in Her voice. “Worse, I am growing disgusted with your delusions. I watched over you so long, dear child, and, you must know, that was much more the source of your success than any cleverness of your own devising. The police did not see, because I didn’t wish them to see.” This is nothing I haven’t heard before, though the words pound the air with more force and more ferocity than is usual for Her. “I delivered you here, to me,” and I know precisely what She wishes me to recall in this precise moment. The gun that I placed to my temple, and the trigger I did not ever have the nerve to squeeze. The bottle of pills I never swallowed. And, then, the noose, tied expertly with yellow nylon rope, and, as they say, the third time is a charm. “No,” She says, speaking louder than before. “No, I am new less understanding, and I no longer cave about your situation. There is too much work to be still done for us to go on like this, me mollifying you, as though you are some lost and pathetic soul, consigned to her own private nook of Hell. As though you do not know. It sickens me, the way you deny.” And I don’t ask what it is She thinks that I am denying. I might, but She bends close and places a hand firmly on either side of my face. She has never been so near, and I have never before noticed the stinging odor of Her breath, like cinnamon and gasoline and chrysanthemums and bleach. I gag, and when I try to turn away, She forces my face in another direction, towards the vanity mirror on my right. “You will look,” She says. “Or I will take away your eyelids and leave you with no choice in the matter. It is shameful a disgrace, for one of us to fear its own reflection.” And here I am, in the instant that has ever been arriving, ever overdue, and She whispers, “An artist must always conserve her energy. It mustn’t be squandered on futile endeavors.” And I see that there are two demons in the mirror, two violet-skinned monsters, two sets of pomegranate eyes and aubergine horns. And the four wills melt away, and I see this is because they were never more solid than my guilty, fevered thoughts. “You are so beautiful,” She says, “Such terrible beauty. And I will not have you believing any longer the lies that men and women tell, the falsehoods that would have you believe you are not beautiful and not without your rightful place in this Creation.” I start to say something, amazed at the configuration of my own jaws, but She places a forestalling index finger to my orchid lips. “Apologize, and I will rip the tongue from out your mouth. You will not apologize ever again. There is no shame remaining.” So, I’m silent. I don’t explain that I’d only meant to thank her, and that it hadn’t even occurred to me to apologize. The walls have fallen away, and the stars go on in all directions, and the Void embraces me. “We’ve all been changed,” She says, “from what we were,” and I do not disagree. And in the mirror, now, there is only one of us reflected, one of me, only a single violet-skinned monster and just a single set of pomegranate eyes and one pair of glassy aubergine horns. And I laugh. I laugh until stars flinch, and dead women sleeping in the mud beds of distant rivers stir uneasily in dreams of dim, dry rooms.
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Page 17