Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  She lives alone, minding her own affairs, and the worst she ever receives is a suspicious, sidelong glance or a rude whisper on the bus. When she’s noticed at all, the busy, preoccupied people merely assume that this strange woman is most likely the victim of some mental illness, and, after all, there are pills, and worthy, tax-deductible charities, and board-certified psychologists, so it is nothing with which they need concern themselves.

  But even here, and even now, there are bound to be inconvenient exceptions. And worse yet, exceptional exceptions, who are not content with whatever voguish delusions might presently be permitted to the omnipresent lunatic fringe. Those for whom the lure of crop circles, psychic healing, UFO abduction, ancient pyramids on Mars, intelligent design, and even the comforts of hoary astrology have all proven insufficient, and so they might reach back almost a century, finding, say, the “Cottingley Fairies” hoax more to their tastes than the latest schemes of the Church of Scientology. Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright posing with their Art-Deco fay clipped from magazine pages, and it hardly matters that, as old women, the perpetrators of the fraud both confessed. Because, clearly, they were paid to confess, our inconvenient believer will declare, paid handsomely by unscrupulous television producers and the international conspiracy to hide The Truth.

  And this is how it starts, with a single, and distinctly inconvenient, exceptional exception. His name is Howard Groesbeck, and he is a nervous man who lives alone in a shabby apartment and works, ironically, in a convenience store. He will only eat foodstuffs that come in metal cans, and will only drink water that has been bottled in Canada (anywhere in Canada will do; Quebec, Nova Scotia, Manitoba—it’s all the same to him). His nights are spent looking at pornography on the internet, and his favorite color is brown. But, what is most important here is that at the tender age of thirteen (coincidence noted), he had the great misfortune to catch sight of a bogle while riding the subway. The bogle in question was wearing a knitted red cap, rather like a yarmulke, and was sitting next to an elderly Asian woman who was entirely too absorbed in her newspaper to notice the bogle. But Howard Groesbeck saw it quite clearly, and it saw him, as well. It winked. Ever since that day, he has been what the Irish cooper who murdered his wife might have called “pixy-led.”

  He first saw the fairy lady three days before midsummer, when she came into the convenience store to buy a Coke and a foil bag of something salty. In his sight, the glamour was no more than an odd glimmering about her head and shoulders. Where almost anyone else would have seen a pale but smartly dressed woman, with raven hair and sage-green eyes, he saw the changeling daughter of elfin royalty. For him, her eyes blazed so brightly that he almost had to turn away. Her skin had the appearance of the rough bark of an oak tree, except where it was obscured by patches of moss and small blue flowers. Her hair could have been spun at the behest of Rumpelstilzchen himself, and it hung almost down to the floor. When she paid him with a debit card, Howard saw that her ring finger was a third again longer than her middle finger, and that her nails appeared to have been chiseled from obsidian. She caught him staring at her, and though it had never happened before, the fairy lady knew, immediately, that this peculiar man was able, by some quirk of nature or nurture, to see through the magic to the heart of her.

  She winked at him, because she didn’t know what else to do. If she’d known about the bogle with the red cap, she might have only smiled.

  Either way, Howard’s fate became, in that instant of mutual recognition, inevitable. Though, one could say, instead, that it had become inevitable many years before, that day on the subway when he was thirteen. He spotted the fairy lady again a week later, coming out of a dry cleaner’s only a few blocks from his apartment, and after that, he began to follow her, imagining that he was very clever and stealthy and that she had no idea whatsoever that she was being watched by the skinny, nervous man who’d clocked her at the convenience store. This wasn’t the case, of course, and every time that he spotted her (having coffee at a Starbuck’s, browsing in an occult bookshop, buying lime Jell-O, a can of sardines, and a bundle of asparagus at the market, standing on a crowded street corner, and so on) was a sighting that she had carefully orchestrated. Only that first was happenstance.

  And, in the end—which, from another perspective might rightly be called the beginning—she allowed him to follow her from her apartment to a park at the edge of the city, where manufactured greenspace gave way to the real thing. There was a fairy ring of mushrooms here, a rough circle of fat toadstools, fly agaric, fleshy morels, and tiny white death caps sprouting from the leaf mold, clover, and dandelions. The centipedes often came to this ring to court moths and beetles, and the garden’s circumference was tended by seven rabbits and a mole (though all knew well enough to avoid the center). It was late in August, not far from September, and almost twilight. The evening was filled with the chartreuse flicker of fireflies, and with the songs of katydids, interrupted only by a catbird, scolding somewhere in the trees.

  Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes ani groves,

  And ye that on the sands with print less foot

  Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him

  When he comes back; you demi-puppets that

  By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,

  Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime

  Is to make midnight mushrooms...

  Howard Groesbeck, who had never read The Tempest, stood behind the bole of a maple for a while, thinking himself as good as invisible, certain that the fairy lady did not suspect she’d been followed. He’d found the courage to bring along his digital camera, hoping that it might capture what less exceptional human eyes could not see. Every other time he’d stalked the woman, the camera had remained in the bedroom closet. Now, it hung, forgotten, about his neck, dangling from its nylon strap, as his quarry stepped inside the ring of fungi and began, somewhat matter-of-factly, to undress. He did not guess that she removed her blouse and skirt, her bra and panties, her hose and shoes, for him, as that would have necessitated the knowledge that he was not half so clever as he believed himself to be. There is no need of fairy magic when a man’s own ego will suffice to lead him astray.

  Once she was entirely naked and her clothes folded in a neat bundle on the ground, the fairy lady looked over her shoulder, directly at the maple tree where Howard Groesbeck believed himself to be so shrewdly concealed. She only watched for a moment, allowing sufficient time for doubts to begin forming in his mind, time enough for his mouth to go dry, time for his already racing heart to double its tempo. She could smell the razor surge of adrenaline from where she stood, and she thought, briefly, that he might possibly turn and run. Which, admittedly, would have made the whole affair quite a bit more entertaining, so there was a small disappointment when he stayed put. She cleared her throat and called out his name. Not the name nailed to him at birth, the one he’d been baptized under, but another, secret name that even he had only heard once or twice at the corners of dreams. But he knew it now, and, hearing it, Howard Groesbeck almost wet himself.

  “I see no sense hiding,” the fairy lady told him. “You’ve gone to so much trouble, and come all this way into the wood, you shouldn’t be cowering behind a tree. Let me see you, please.”

  He hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second, and then stepped out into the open.

  “That’s much better,” she said, and, smiling, revealed to Howard the translucent, crystalline shards of her teeth.

  “I can see you,” he whispered, his voice trembling like the last light of the fading day. “I mean, I can see the real you. I know what you are.”

  “Yes,” she said, and turned about to face him. “It’s a relief truth be told. Don’t you think it must be a terribly lonely way to live, the way I do?”

  It was something that he’d never paused to consider, a possibility that had never once occurred to him. Howard Groesbeck had imagined that this creature must surely come and go, at a whim, as s
he pleased, between the mortal world and the Hollow Hills. She must have countless daemon lovers, he’d thought, on more than one occasion. And he had followed her into this wild place at the edge of the park expecting to overhear unspeakable conversations, and hoping to witness her indulgence in profane sexual acts with a veritable bestiary of eldritch beings.

  “They left me here, all alone,” she said, and, on cue, sighed and glanced down at her bare feet.

  “Alone?” he asked, his voice seeming impossibly frail, and he swallowed and licked his lips.

  “I’ve not seen another of my race in almost seventeen years now,” she replied. “They don’t come to me when I call. And, as you can imagine, the sons and daughters of Eve tend to shy away from me. So, yes, it can get quite lonely at times.” She looked lip then, her green eyes become searchlights in the gathering gloom.

  “Why?” he asked, and he dared to take one step towards the periphery of the circle. “Was it a punishment? Were you banished?”

  “Banished,” she said, and very nearly laughed. “Perhaps. But I could not say, as I do not know, and I don’t hazard to guess the intentions of my Lord Finn Bheara, King of the Daoine Sidhe, and his wise court in the glittering halls beneath the hill of Knockma.” It seemed to her that this was precisely the sort of nonsense that the nervous man from the convenience store expected to hear from a fairy changeling, and she congratulated herself for keeping a straight face.

  “So, you’re alone?” he asked again, as though the matter had not already been plainly stated and settled.

  “Not anymore, I’m not,” she told him, finding just the right tone for her voice, something that was not quite joy, but certainly more than common happiness. “Now I have you, don’t I?” And no sooner had the words left her tongue, than Howard Groesbeck found himself standing inside the circle of mushrooms, close enough to the fairy lady that he could have touched her, if he’d dared. There was no recollection of having walked from the maple to the fairy ring, or of having stepped inside. But, even so, staring into her bottomless green eyes, the confusion struck him as no more than a passing trifle, and he let it go.

  She took his right hand in her left, then, and leaned close, kissing him lightly on the lips. He found she tasted of nutmeg and bay. “You are a kindly soul,” she said, “to come here and offer me your company so freely.” Hearing this, a pair of goblins hiding in a nearby thicket of green briar and blueberries almost spoiled her careful masquerade by snickering and farting and noisily snapping their twiggy fingers together. She ignored them, and, near as she could tell, the man from the convenience store hadn’t even heard the commotion.

  “I should probably be going,” Howard Groesbeck muttered, slurring and speaking the words the way a sleepwalker talks when questioned. “I’m working the late shift tonight.”

  “They won’t mind,” she said, “if you stay with me a little longer,” and, unexpectedly, Howard found himself agreeing.

  “You’ve told no one else about me?” she asked, and when he said that he hadn’t, she knew straight away that he was telling the truth. Indeed, there was so little genuine guile about this man, she thought, it was almost hard to believe he was human born.

  “And you told no one you were coming here?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” Howard told the fairy lady. “They would have laughed at me.”

  “Yes,” she agrees, “I believe they would have,” and with that, she plunged the sharpened tines of a shed deer’s antler deep into his belly and twisted it sharply, first to one side and then the other. Though she did nothing whatsoever to dull his pain, he didn’t so much as flinch. The man from the convenience store stood stock still for the disemboweling, his eyes not drifting from her own. This surprised her, and she gave him another kiss for taking it so well, when surely he must have hoped the night would go another way entirely. She cradled him in her arms as his life drained away into the soil to feed the hungry toadstools and the earthworms and a ravenous host of brownies hiding just below the sod. The light in his eyes faded slowly, and he smiled while the fairy lady helped herself to no small portion of his liver. It was a delicacy she’d tasted all too infrequently, and she was grateful to this man for not having struggled. She might even have felt a twinge of regret, were she capable, so peaceful was his lace as death folded itself around him.

  “Close your eyes,” she said, and he did. “Sleep here, and I will visit, from time to time.”

  There was no need to dig a grave, as so little remained of him when she was done. She left only a scatter of bones, gnawed and broken open to reach the marrow inside. When she’d had her fill, she let the brownies crawl up from their subterranean nests and lick her hair and body clean. Then she dressed, and walked back through the park to the city that has far too many things to worry about to be bothered with fairies. No one knows that she is a fairy lady. No one alive, at least. No one who is only a human man or woman. She returns to him, as she said she would, on the evenings that suit her fancy. She finds a weathered bit of shin bone in amongst the clover, or a scrap of skull that has not yet rotted away, and with it she bids him to rise and draws him forth from the ground there inside the ring of mushrooms, to dance with her beneath the moon and the stars and the lascivious eyes that watch from every corner of the night-bound wood. She gives him a new body woven not from blood and sinew, but from the earth, from roots and bugs and fallen leaves. She shapes his face from clay, trying as best she can to remember its angles, but recalling it less and less as time goes by. She gives him eyes she’s stolen from jaybirds, or a stray dog, or settles for two quarters from her coin purse. And never yet has the expression of awe faded from this rough simulacrum of his lost countenance, awe and delight and comprehension.

  She kisses his lips, which are usually provided by convenient and agreeable garden slugs. Sometimes, she allows him to peer through the glamour that she guards more closely now, though usually it is only the pale, raven-haired woman with sage-green eyes that the ghost of Howard Groesbeck meets when he awakens. No matter. He knows the fairy woman wears the mask.

  Lullaby of Partition

  and Reunion

  The moments themselves have become threads, and the threads have become tangled as the spool turns, reeling them out. The spool, I see, is time, and the threads are moments thrown free, unwound, and then left to dangle, to fray, to snarl one into the other until the integrity of each individual filament is lost. Together, they become something incoherent, and, yet also, something surpassing the need for mere coherence. We close our eyes, or I only close mine, and here I am trying foolishly to tease a single thread free again. You may as well call this action memory as to call it anything else. The spool turns, and days and words, similes and metaphors wrap, hopelessly, one about the other, all but indistinguishable. I can hear you speaking quietly in a sunlit room that smells of the cracked leather of old books, and of crumbling pages, and I think this is the first time that we ever talked. If this is the first time, then it may have all begun with the Norns, and, as you talk, you show me illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Johannes Gehrts and Ludwig Burger. Three woman seated or standing together among the gnarled roots of the World Ash, weaving fate, and you tick off their names one by one, as though I’m listening. I hear you, and I do hear you well enough that the moments are captured to then be wound about the spool and then unwound and matted into this grand tangle with all the rest. I am hearing the words spilling from your thin lips, but it is hard to think clearly of anything but that bright shimmer of auburn hair, a few strands of which have pulled free of your ponytail and now frame the pale mystery of your face. We sit together in the library, and your eyelids have been stitched shut, though I cannot see that this is proving any sort of inconvenience as you turn the crisp, dry pages and smile for me and breathe out hushed enthusiasm. “We are twined,” you say. “We are twined, all of us, but some twinings are more intimate than others. We are bound, and there is no unbinding, not in this existence, nor any that may come
, or that may already have been.” But my fingers pick restlessly at the skein, never leaving well enough alone, and I lose the library and the three ladies and Arthur Rackham. I lose you, too, for a moment. It is a dazzling moment, laced with that terrible brittleness that precedes genuine panic. I pull another thread free, rolling it between thumb and forefinger, and this one here is a night in Boston, at the Kidder Smith Gallery, after our long, chilling walk in the snow along Newbury Street. There are severe black pedestals to support the tiny sculptures, and you’re telling me that you met the artist when you were in Tokyo last year. I know that you have never been to Tokyo, but I like the sound of the lie, so I don’t contradict you. “They are beautiful,” you say, and this is true. The dolls have been sculpted from polymer days, and a very few have been cast in bronze. Not one of these manufactured women is more than seven inches tall. On each black pedestal there are two figurines, although that is not precisely true. On each black pedestal stand two figurines caught in the act of becoming one. Unless the eye and mind assumes the process is one of unbecoming, and then they have been caught in the process of division. You’re talking, in whispers, about Eve and the Midrash Kabbah, the first man and woman created as a single hermaphroditic organism, and I point out that these figurines are all female. You laugh, and we move along to the next black pillar and the next fusing or dividing pair. “Did you ever imagine that you had a twin,” you say, leaning close and whispering directly into my left ear. “Only, something happened, and your twin was lost.” I’d never told you that, and it makes me angry for a second or two, hearing you say those things aloud, as though, somehow, you’ve stolen secret thoughts when I was distracted by these tiny women. “Does it frighten you?” and I allow your question to fill the space between us, unanswered, forcing you to continue. “Fear of disillusion, or assimilation? Becoming less or more than what you presently are?” I bend close to have a better look at the sculpture, not replying right away. I don’t want you to think that I’m easy. I don’t want to turn and see smug satisfaction in your eyes, to have guessed so much (though, I might have confessed it all, and then forgotten; I am certainly open to that possibility). The two tiny women have skin that is the color of the skin of an unripe apricot. The woman on the left has black hair, while the woman of the right has hair so fair it makes me think, again, of the snow piling up outside the gallery. They lean towards one another, hands on hips, hands on shoulders, but it is impossible to discern precisely where one ends and the other begins. Fingers have sunken into malleable flesh, or fingers have yet to manifest. The foreheads of the two women touch, and here, too, they are one, and white hair and crow-black hair is as snarled as all these moments that have become tangled threads. The two women, leaning together, bring to mind the letter A, and I almost tell you this. But you’re talking again, having apparently decided that no response to your questions are presently forthcoming. “They remind me of the letter A,” you say, speaking a little louder now, and I nod and gaze down at the sculpture. I’ve only just begun to comprehend—at this moment, within the weave of this strand—what has been set in motion, and so your words are more startling than they ought to be. I fail to grasp the inappropriateness of my anger and the sense of violation. I want to raise my hands and search my scalp for the window you must have put there in my sleep. It would be smooth, glass or Lucite, skillfully hidden, invisible unless one goes looking for it, a window into all my thoughts. “They spent time together in a sensory deprivation tank,” you tell me, and I realize I must be farther along this thread than I’d thought, because I’m not sure who you mean. I ask, and you reply, “The sculptor and her lover. That’s how this phase of her work began, this systematic deconstruction of individuality. So, they are fusing.” I want to touch the tiny women in front of me, thinking that perhaps my groping fingers could find answers and points of contact undetectable by my eyes alone. “Her lover,” you say, “a woman from Copenhagen, a painter, she had a sort of nervous breakdown, afterwards.” And then, by unspoken agreement, we move along down that narrow white space, the gallery’s throat, to the next pair. On the wall above and behind the sculpture is a small white card printed with the words, “The Love of Souls.”” I read it aloud, and you inform me that the title was possibly borrowed from a painting by a Belgian symbolist named Jean Deville. “He founded Le Salon d’Art Idealiste,” you continue, knowing that I lack your knowledge of art history, and so also knowing that this means next to nothing to me. I want to accuse you of showing off and lingering on trivia, but I know better. No strand emerging from off the spool is genuinely trivial. So, instead, I stand and stare at “The Love of Souls,” and you stand so close behind me I can feel the heat from your body. Or I only imagine that I can. I am fairly certain, though, that the two figurines on the pedestal before me are meant to represent the same two persons as those on the previous pedestal. The black-haired woman and the fair, and I wish I knew what the artist and her girlfriend look like. I wish I knew their faces. How literal has the sculptor been, in working through the aftermath of the experiences you have described? Thinking this, I feel suddenly like a voyeur, and I am sure that you see me blush, even though your eyelids are still sewn shut. On the pedestal there is a crow and a white dove, or a lump of coal to contrast with freshly fallen snow. Simple comparisons spring to mind (you have, on more than a single occasion, chided my fondness for metaphor, calling it an intellectual crutch, and I suspect you are correct). Two women, sitting now back to back, though, in truth, they share a single back. A single spine, bifurcating at the neck, affording each her own set of cervical vertebrae. The lair woman’s head is tilted forward at such an angle that her chin almost rests against the intersection of her clavicles and manubrium. In contrast, the dark-haired woman’s head is raised, as if gazing at the snowy night sky hidden by the gallery ceiling. The fair woman’s legs are splayed open in an immodest V, revealing her vagina, while her companion’s legs are pulled up close to her chest, her arms wrapped around them, fingers linked. “I don’t think I like seeing these,” I say. “I think I am not meant to see them.” You apologize for having dragged me out into the storm, and then for suggesting the installation, and I say no, you couldn’t have known that these pieces would make me uncomfortable. “Anyway, that’s the proper function of art, isn’t it?” I ask you. “To unsettle us?” and I force my eyes to Loiter on these Lilliputian figures, Siamese twins by different mothers. “I don’t pretend to know the proper function of art,” you say, but there is only the faintest bit of derision in your voice, just enough to make me wish that I’d said something else, instead. The spool turns, and the threads become so hopelessly tangled I sincerely wish that I were able to stop picking at them and simply accept the fact of this unsightly mess. I pull one that seems dyed a sort of indigo, and this is the night we first made love, then got stinking drunk on Pernod Anise. This is your cluttered loft, only a few blocks from Harvard Square. We lie together on the floor, and I’m telling you about the time I used a needle and thread to sew the fingers and thumb of my left hand together, sliding the needle all but painlessly into and through the uppermost layers of skin. I thought you would laugh, but you don’t. I’m never very good at making you laugh, even when we’re drunk and stupid from sex. “It didn’t hurt,” I say, and you reply, “Would that have made any difference?” I release the indigo thread, and, in its place, choose one the color of lichens or dead moss. I only tug very, very gently, hoping for no more than a glimpse, a glimpse at most, but! really should know better. I tug gently, but quite a lot of the green thread comes free of the tangle. “You’ll tell me if I hurt you? You’ll use the signal. You have to promise that you will,” and I do promise, even if my assurance is a lie. It should be painful, and I have, over the months, finally come to comprehend this. What we are seeking, it will not come without discomfort. It isn’t meant to. You use surgical thread and a twelve-gauge stainless steel needle, implant grade, and I sit up very straight and watch myself in the bathroom mirror as you work.
The latex gloves on your fingers are soon red with my blood. There is more pain than I’d anticipated, as the needle enters and exits, exits and enters, but I don’t raise my hand to stop you. I need to know this sensation, if there is ever to be any progress towards a goal. And, besides, soon enough the rush of endorphins is making me giddy. We leave my mouth sewn shut for almost five hours. And then you snip the scabby thread with a pair of embroidery scissors. You sterilized them in boiling water and rubbing alcohol, and I have begun to worry that your fear of infection will hold us back. The first words I say when I can speak again are “Thank you.” And you respond, “You’re very welcome.” I choose an orange thread now, the gaudy, rich orange of a tangerine. I choose a tangerine thread from this varicolored complication, and when I touch it, you’re asking me again if I ever suspected I’d have a twin, someone who was lost, someone I only almost remember, but sometimes seem to miss more than I can endure. “Isn’t that a fairly common neurosis?” I ask. “Like thinking that you were adopted, but your parents kept it from you?” I stare at you a moment. And in this moment, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. No, you are the most beautiful person. “The sense that something is missing,” you say, prompting me. “That something has been stolen.” I nod, and speaking hardly louder than a whisper, I reply, “And I have always felt alone. There’s never been a time when I haven’t felt alone, except...” Rut I don’t finish the sentence, and you don’t push me. You change the subject, as you often do upon realizing how near you’ve come to the truth. “My mother cried for a week when she learned I was a lesbian,” you say, and it makes me laugh, because my mother never shed a tear, but said only that she’d always known I was a mistake. “She actually said that, a mistake?” you ask. “She said worse,” I tell you. I select a new thread, one that is almost the same shade of brown as your eyes, and I loop it snugly about my index finger. The spool turns, though there is no spool, reeling out these moments I have chosen to interpret as threads. Here we are having coffee, and I wish that I could recollect the name of the café. There is nothing at all remarkable about this thread, and so I treasure it, but almost immediately move along to another. “No,” you say “I’m not shitting you, this is truly bizarre,” and you stare out the window above my bed at a different thunderstorm than the one we watched, or will watch, from the nameless café. Beads of rain streak the glass, and when the thunderclaps are loud enough, the pane rattles in its aluminum frame. “You remember that I said the girlfriend had some sort of nervous breakdown, right?” And so I know you’re talking about the sculptor whose tiny women we saw on display at the Kidder Smith Gallery the previous January. “Yes,” I answer. “I remember.” There’s a flash of lightning, reflected on your face and the walls, and you wait for the thunder to come and go before continuing. “She became utterly obsessed,” you say. “After that business in the sensory deprivation tank, she became obsessed with the thought that her lover was in fact her twin sister, and not only that. She believed that they’d been conjoined at birth and surgically separated thereafter. She saw the figurines, the same ones that we saw, and she took this as a sort of confirmation, that the sculptor knew, as well.” I believe that you meant to deliver this story as though it were a joke, an anecdote so weird that I would be forced to laugh, but already the tone of your voice has changed. We are still three weeks away from the night you sew my lips together, but you know well enough what’s coming. It began with your questions, after all. Yours were the prying fingers, there at the start, and I’m quite certain I’d have remained silent, otherwise. That’s not blame, by the way, because there is no blame in me. It’s just that these threads and moments are become so tangled now, I’d at least like to try to be clear about my feelings. “Obsessed,” I say, and you nod and tell me that while the sculptor slept, the girlfriend used Krazy glue to fuse their bodies together. She smeared it on their legs and chest, their breasts and bellies, even the palms of their hands. She managed to glue the left side of her face to the right side of her partner’s face. A friend found them the next morning, and called an ambulance. I don’t ask what procedure or solvent was required to separate the two, or how the girlfriend accomplished all this without waking her victim, but you add that the sculptor has obtained a restraining order, though she isn’t pressing criminal charges. “How very kind of her,” I say, and the sarcasm and bitterness in my voice takes me aback. I’m not sure you even caught it. It was only a small bitterness, after all, like a hint of unsweetened chocolate or citrus zest. And I release the thread, so that the moment dissolves, which is not at all the same as its being forgotten. I cannot presently explain the difference, so you must take my word that the two things are not the same. You must take my word, as I must pick at this weave with nails chewed down to the quick. My cuticles bleed more often than not. This next thread is as grey as raw oysters, and almost as slippery. Even when I hold it tightly as I may, it slithers through my fingers. I am holding a photostat of my birth certificate, which, if I admit its authenticity, denies the dreams and nightmares that began when I was still a child, and the loneliness that began sometime shortly thereafter. I don’t hold it very long. It slips away, as mere facts always slip away when truth is what we’re after. The spool turns like a spiral galaxy, like a Ferris wheel, like the moon going round the Earth to swaddle it in months and tides and other real or imagined lunar rhythms. That thread has left my fingers slick and sticky, and I fumble for any purchase among the labors of Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. “You keep picking like this, it’s never going to heal,” you laugh, then open antique books and show me pictures of those three maidens, watering the gnarled roots of Yggdrasill or busy at their spinning. “You say that as if I have a choice,” I reply, and you don’t answer me. I clutch at a moment, or a strand, stained as red as pomegranates, and as the strand comes free of the rest, I recognize this particular day and this particular place and this particular memory. You would interject here, hastening to add that it is hardly more than a figment from some restless night’s struggle between my conscious and unconscious mind. You know I don’t want Freud or Jung, but you’d persist. This thread has countless duplicates, and so I’ve lost count of how often I’ve described it to you. Invariably, you scowl and sigh and look away. “I am only seeking wholeness,” I whisper. “Reunification, and an end to this goddamned quarantine. That’s the source of the dream.” And you say something appropriately disapproving, perhaps even as mild as “Wishful thinking.” We do not argue. You are not angry. You are filled with all the same desires and emptinesses as am I; you have said that many, many times. It is only in how we might seek resolution, or even the hope of resolution, that we differ. “Yes, it’s a dream,” I admit. “But it’s a true dream,” and I know you aren’t about to contradict me, even though my eagerness makes you uncomfortable. So: here, below the ever-weaving Norns and the silver spindle of Heaven, my arms are filled to overflowing with this motley of moments that have been transmuted into innumerable threads. You lean back against the nest of pillows and the cast-iron headboard and listen while I talk. You don’t interrupt, just as I have not interrupted you when you’ve put your own dreams into words. I offer a silent prayer to a god I don’t believe in that you won’t cry this time, but I know you probably will. And then I say that we were lying here, on this same bed, and when I lay my hand upon your waist the distinction between the two was lost. We’d become as malleable, as pliant, as clay, and my palm and fingers vanished painlessly. You leaned forward then, and you were smiling the bright way you smile whenever you are truly, genuinely happy, and I see that as our nipples brushed, that flesh was also merged. No, not clay, I tell you, not clay, but waxworks. Somehow, we have been cut apart and molded into this masquerade of two, but finally that error is being put right. You press your forehead to mine, so that I melt into you, or you melt into me, not unlike the sculpture of the fair woman and the dark-haired woman, the one that reminded me of the letter A. Our frontal lobes flow together, and so our minds begin t
o commingle and the need for speech is gone. I say that I was afraid, and that the fear surprised me, but then it passed and I could not even recall why I’d been frightened. You pressed your hips and groin to mine. All melds together—pubic hair, labia, our clits, the bones of our pelvises, skin and fat and a host of muscles: adductor magnus, adductor longus, adductor brevis, illiacus, the tensor fasciæ latæ, etc. and etc. Nerves are fused, and, simultaneously, in perfect unison, we share a sensation that transcends any orgasm. I cry out, while you bite your lip and remain silent. You are kind, listening, not to point out that I have ceased to describe the dream in past tense, but have begun relating it as though it is occurring as I speak. And then you kiss me, and our lips fuse, and now we are one, and now we are whole, a closed system, an odd sort of Ouroboros, the perfected Gemini, freed finally from the tyranny of all former segregations. Except, I remark, that our tongues remain independent, and yours moves playfully across the roof of my mouth. I fall silent, and from your nest of pillows, you run your fingers through my hair and say that it is a pretty dream, an exquisite fairy tale. There’s not a trace of condescension in your voice. “No one would ever separate us,” you say, “not ever again.” And, having reached the end of my dream, I lie as still as I can, listening to the soothing cadence of your heartbeat, and listening also to the clock ticking on the bedside table and hearing traffic down on the street. I remind you that you’ll be late for work if you don’t get dressed soon, and the pomegranate thread pulls free of my grip, eager to rejoin the tangle. I start to reach for another strand, then hesitate, and for a time that might be very long or the most minute fraction of a second, I try to contemplate the whole. This tapestry. That is, if only it were a little more ordered. And lying here, in the fading warmth left on the cotton sheets by your departed body, I acknowledge the present futility of grasping the totality that is You and Me and Us. I settle for my tawdry threads, uncoiling, which I finger like the worn beads of a rosary. Tonight, you have promised that you’ll use the needle again, and so the day stretching out before me seems as wide as an ocean, or a desert, or the sky.