“Because you would not hear the song,” Sammie replied. She said nothing else after that, and Edith assumes she’s alone now, sitting here alone on Moonstone Beach, buffeted by the icy wind and doing her best not to see the thing half buried in the sand only a foot or so away. She understands perfectly well that she’s fighting a losing battle.
I will close my eyes, she thinks. I can’t see anything with my eyes shut. I’ll close my eyes, and keep them closed until I wake tip.
But shutting her eyes only releases the next doll in the stack, so to speak, and Edith finds herself adrift in an all-but-impenetrable blackness, a blackness that is almost absolute. She recalls, clearly, standing and walking out into Block Island Sound, recalls the freezing saltwater lapping at her ankles, and then her knees, recalls it rushing up her nostrils and down her throat, searing her lungs as she sink. But she was not drowned, and maybe that was the magic of the carved stone at work, and maybe it was some other magic, entirely. The currents carried her away from land and into the Atlantic, ferrying her north and east past Cape Cod, and at last she’d left the sheer bluffs of the continental shelf behind. Far below her, hidden in veils of perpetual night, lie flat abyssal plains of clay and silt and diatomaceous slime. She is suspended above them, unable to fall any farther, and yet incapable of ever again rising to the surface.
All around her—over and below and on every side—indistinct shapes come and go. Some are very small, a parade of eyeless fish and curious squid, jellies and other bathypelagic creatures that she knows no names for. Others, though, move by like enormous, halfglimpsed phantoms, and she can only guess at their identity. Some are surely whales, and probably also enormous deepwater sharks and cephalopods. But others are indescribable, and plainly much too vast to be any manner of cetacean or squid. Occasionally, she reaches out a hand, and her fingers glide over that alien flesh as it rushes by in the gloom. Sometimes, it seems smooth as any silk, and other times, rough as sandpaper. The haunted, endless night is filled with phantoms, And I am just one more, she thinks. They must wonder at me, too, at what I am, at where so strange a beast could have come from.
And the next leviathan glares back at her with a bulging ebony eye the size of a dinner plate. There’s no pupil in that eye, nor evidence of an iris, nothing to mar such an unfathomable countenance. And then the eye is gone, replaced by a flank adorned with huge photophores, each one glowing with a gentle pale-blue light. The sight delights her, and she extends a hand to stroke the thing as it moves past. And Edith clearly sees the thin, translucent webbing that’s grown between her own fingers, and the long hooked claws that have replaced the nails she chews to nubs. In the muted blue light cast by the bioluminescent creature, she sees that there are line scales dappling the backs of both her hands, and they shimmer dully, reminding her of the oily, prismatic stone.
Edith opens her eyes, and she is once more merely sitting within the mandala that she’s drawn on Moonstone Beach, thirteen years after the wreck of the North Cape. She’s still clutching the piece of driftwood and shivering in the wind. She looks over her shoulder, hoping to find Sammie there, but sees at once that she’s still alone.
“Sam, I don’t know what I’m meant to be listening for,” she says, almost shouting to hear herself over the wind. “I don’t know what it is, but I am listening.”
When there’s no reply, she isn’t disappointed or surprised, because she understood well enough that she wouldn’t be answered. Any answer she needs is right here before her, held within a crab-gnawed and gull-pecked anatomy, that misshapen mound of rotting flesh coughed up by whatever indifferent gods or goddesses or genderless deities call the globe’s ocean their domain.
In the sand before her is a slit, and at first she thinks it is no more than some depression fashioned with her own busy fingers. She leans towards it, and now the wind is speaking, though she cannot say that the words are meant for her ears. She cannot say they are meant for any ears, at all:
There are stories that have no proper beginning. Stories for which no convenient, familiar “Once upon a time...” praeambulum exists. They may, for instance, be contained within larger stories, interwoven with the finest of gradations, and so setting them apart is a necessarily arbitrary undertaking. Let us say, then, that this story is of that species. Where it truly began is not where we will start its telling, for to attempt such a thing would require a patience and the requisite time for infinite regression. I may say that the sea had a daughter, though she has spent every day of her life on dry land. At once, the tumult of a hundred questions about how such a thing ever came to be will spring to mind. What is the nature of the sea’s womb? With what or whom did she or he have congress to find himself or herself with child? What of the midwife? What is the gestation time of all the oceans of the worlds or its sperm count, when considered as a single being? And, while we’re at it, which being, and from which pantheon, do I mean when I say “the sea”? Am I speaking of the incestuous union of Oceanus and his sister Tethys? Do I mean to say Poseidon, or Neptune, Ægir and Rán, or Susanoo of the Shinto, or Arnapkapfaaluk of the Inuitt?
I mean only to say the sea.
The sea had a daughter, but she was orphaned. She grew up in a city of men, a city at the months of two rivers that flowed down into a wide bay fed by other rivers and dotted by more than thirty rocky, weathered islands. Here she was a child, and then a young woman. Here, she thought, she would grow to be an old woman. She’d never desired to travel, and had never ventured very far inland. She had seen photographs of mountain ranges, and read descriptions of the world’s great deserts, and that was sufficient.
Edith places the tip of one index finger into the nearer end of the slit in the sand. Except it is not merely sand, though there is something of quartz granules and mica flakes and dark: specks of feldspar in its composition. It is flesh crafted from sand, she thinks, or sand painstakingly crafted from flesh. The gross physiology is self evident now, the labia majora and labia minor, the glans clitoris and clitoral hood. It weeps, or simply secretes, something not so different from sea foam. And lying within it is the teardrop-shaped stone that Sammie slipped inside herself while standing in the tub.
Do you think that was such a good idea?
It’s a message in a bottle. Messages like that, no one ever expects to get an answer, but we keep sending them off anyway.
And Edith removes the stone from the slit in the sand, which then immediately closes, leaving behind no trace that it was ever actually there. She stares at the spot for a moment, comprehending, and then she flings the stone into the sea. There’s no splash; the waves take it back without any sound and without so much as a ripple.
The circuit has been closed, she thinks, though the metaphor strikes her as not entirely appropriate.
She looks to the sky, and sees birds wheeling against the curdled clouds. The dream pushes her back into wakefulness, then, and, for a while, Edith lies still, squinting at the half-light of dawn and listening to a woman sobbing softly somewhere in the room.
5.
When Edith was seven years old, she saw a mermaid. One summer’s day, she’d gone on a picnic with the aunt and uncle who raised her (after the death of her parents), to the rocky shore below Beavertail Lighthouse on Conanicut Island. There are tidal pools there, deep and gaping clefts opened between tilted beds of slate and phyllite, and in one of them she saw the mermaid. It rose, suddenly, towards the surface, as if lunging towards her. What most surprised her child’s mind was how little it resembled any of the mermaids she’d seen in movies and storybooks, in that it was not a pretty girl with the tail of a fish. Still, she recognized it at once for what it was, if only because there was nothing else it could have been. Also, she was surprised that it seemed so hungry. The mermaid never broke the surface of the pool, but floated just beneath that turbulent, glistening membrane dividing one world from the other.
I may say that the sea had a daughter, though she has spent even day of her life on dry land.
/>
The mermaid watched her fora while, and Edith watched the mermaid. It had black eyes, eyes like holes poked into the night sky, and did not seem to have eyelids of any sort. At least, Edith never saw it blink. And then, as abruptly as it had risen, the mermaid sank back into the deep cleft in the rock, leaving behind nothing for a seven-year-old girl to stare at but the sloshing surface of the pool. Later, she told her aunt and uncle what she’d seen, and they both smiled and laughed (though not unkindly) and explained that it had only been a harbor seal, not a mermaid.
When they got back home that evening, her uncle even showed her a color picture of a harbor seal in one of his encyclopedias. It made Edith think of a fat dog that had learned to live in the ocean, and looked nothing whatsoever like the mermaid that had watched her. But she didn’t say this to her uncle, because she’d begun to suspect that it was somehow wrong to see mermaids, and that any time you saw one, you were expected to agree that what you’d really seen was a harbor seal, instead. Which is what she did. Her aunt and uncle surely had enough trouble without her seeing mermaids that she shouldn’t see.
A week later, they had her baptized again.
Her uncle nailed her bedroom window shut.
Her aunt made her say the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed, and also sewed sprigs of dried wormwood into her clothes.
And they never went back down to the rocky place below the lighthouse at Beavertail, and always thereafter had their picnics far from the sea.
6.
Edith does not doubt that she’s now awake, any more than, a moment before she opened her eyes, she doubted that she was still dreaming. This is not the next tier, nor merely the next painted wooden doll in the matryoshka’s stack. This is the world of her waking, conscious mind, and this time she will not deny that for the sake of sanity or convenience. There has always been too much of lies about her, too much pretend. When her eyes have grown accustomed to the early morning light, she sits up in bed. Sammie is still crying, somewhere in the room, somewhere very close by, and as soon as Edith sits up, she sees her crouching naked on the hardwood floor near the foot of the bed. All around her, the floor is wet. She has her back turned to Edith, and her head is bowed so that her black hair hangs down to the pine floorboards. Edith glances immediately to the little table beside the bed, but the peculiar tear-shaped pebble from Moonstone Beach is gone. She knew that it would be, but she looked anyway. The air in the room smells like a fish market.
Sammie, or the thing that now occupies the place in this universe where Sammie used to be, has stopped sobbing and has begun a ragged sort of trilling chant in no language that Edith knows or thinks she’s ever heard. It sounds much more like the winter wind, and like waves rolling against sand, and the screech of herring gulls, than it sounds like human speech. Edith opens her mouth and almost calls out to Sammie, but then she stops herself. The thing on the floor probably wouldn’t answer to that name, anyway. And she’d rather not use any of the names to which it might respond.
Its skin is the same murky pea green as the vanished stone, and bears all the same marks that were carved into the stone. All the same wounds, each pregnant with significance and connotations that Edith has only just begun to grasp. There is a pentacle—or something almost like a pentacle—cut deeply into each of Sammie’s shoulders, and a vertical line of left-facing swastikas decorates the length of her spine. Wherever this new flesh has been sliced open, it leaks a greasy black substance that must be blood. Below the swastikas, there is the symbol that reminded them both of a Greek ichthus, centered just above Sammie’s ass. Edith cannot help but wonder if Sammie was reborn with these wounds already in place, like birthmarks, or if they came later, not so differently than the stigmata of Catholic saints. Or if maybe they’re self inflicted, and Edith remembers her own hands in the dream, the sharp claw’s where her nails had been. In the end, it hardly matters how the marks came to be; the meaning is the same, either way.
Do you think that was such a good idea?
It’s a message in a bottle. No one ever expects to get an answer, hut we keep sending them off...
“When you’re ready,” Edith says, almost whispering, “I’ll be right here. There’s no hurry. I know how long you’ve been waiting.” Then she lies back down, and turns to face the wall.
A Canvas for Incoherent Arts
No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Terry Pratchett
The game is ours, or so we like to imagine. We cannot, of course, ever know for certain that the game is our own invention. Indeed, whenever either of us pauses to consider the matter, we both must readily admit how exceedingly unlikely it is that we are the first to have conceived so simple and obvious a diversion.
I would say simple and obvious; you would say inherently elegant. You would say the genius of the game resides in its elegance. I wouldn’t disagree, but I have never had your way with words. For that matter, I have never had your way with darkness. I understand, full well, that I’m the student, struggling to keep pace. I also understand this amuses you, that you always have the edge, that the advantage is always yours.
And, so, in this space we have set aside for the game, I’m the one who finds herself cuffed to the stainless-steel ring bolt set deep into the old masonry. There is a length of chain connecting the steel bolt to a D-ring, fastened securely to the padded leather wrist restraints I wear. It’s not uncomfortable, and the chain is long enough that I can stand, and even move as far as the center of the room. There’s nothing in the room, except the ring bolt and the chain and the cuffs that hold me. And you, of course. The walls and ceiling and even the floor have all been painted the same matte black, four heavy coats on every surface. The one window has been boarded over, and we have seen to it that no light can leak in around the door. We are thorough, and have insured that, once a new round of the game begins, no illumination enters the room from any source whatsoever.
There is a single, naked 60-watt bulb screwed into a socket mounted on the high ceiling, but it can only be switched on from the hallway outside the black room. Once, on a whim, you left me alone in the room for three hours with that bulb burning starkly overhead. On several occasions,you’ve left me alone in the room, and for extended periods of time, but only that once with the light shining. Somehow, the light made being alone in there much worse. Held at bay, the darkness pregnant in every plane and angle of that space seemed far more threatful. Perhaps, I imagined it was conscious and resented the light holding it back, much the same way a hungry lion or jaguar might resent a roaring fire. And, as you have repeatedly reminded me, imagination is the necessary catalyst or reagent, if the room is to become anything more than merely an empty room painted black.
You are fond of a line from Hamlet, and how it applies to our game and to our black arena or theatre.
... there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
And this night might well be any other night when we’ve chosen to play, which is not to say that our game has become repetitious or monotonous. Accepting the inviolable blackness as a given, as square one, there is an almost infinite number of permutations that might follow. I am alone in the room, cuffed to the chain fastened to the ring bolt driven into bricks and mortar, and I have absolutely no way of knowing what will happen next. Usually (but not always), you leave me for a time with only the dark for company. It might be five minutes, or thirty, or an hour. I have no way of knowing. You’ve referred to this as the prelude, and the overture, and also described it as “a palate cleanser.” Oh, and there’s another line of verse you’re fond of quoting, this one from Milton, and I find it applicable to the customary waiting period that comes before the game begins in earnest.
The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.
I lie naked on the hard floor, and when you’re ready, you’ll open the door and slip inside. And, usually, that’s
the last I’ll get of light until the game is done, the muted rectangle from the doorway, creating and framing your silhouette. And even this is not a constant, as you have devised many clever techniques of altering the shade and the quality of light from the hall beyond the room, and also of altering what I might see of your profile. Once in a while, I’ll miss your entrance altogether. My face will be turned away from the door, my eyes will be shut, or my light-starved optic nerves will have become preoccupied with nonexistent patterns that appear to dart and swoop about me. You are especially pleased whenever this happens, when my usual disadvantage is increased by an extra element of surprise.
But, to my credit, I have never yet screamed. You’ve told me that if I ever scream, we might stop playing the game.
“What would even be the point in continuing after that,” you’ve said. “Once I’ve heard you scream, I mean. It’s a sort of threshold, and once it’s been crossed, I don’t really see much to be gained by crossing it again.”
I took these words to heart, and, so far, they have been sufficient to stop me from screaming or crying out in any other way, regardless what might happen in the black room. I cannot bear the thought of our game coming to an end. And I don’t need to be warned twice.
I lie here on the floor, and the door opens, and then the door closes again. This is one of the times when I happen to be turned towards it, and so I catch the light from the hallway, which has a reddish hue tonight. It’s dim, but still bright enough that my pupils ache after all that dark. I squint into the murky red light and see your silhouette, though something about the proportion of your head to your shoulders is wrong. Before I have a chance to figure it out, how exactly you’ve managed to change your appearance, the door closes again, and the lock clicks loudly as the deadbolt slides into place, and the greater darkness returns.
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Page 26