“It seemed strange to me, too,” Suzanne says, and the tone of her voice has become hard and defensive, all the enthusiasm drained away. “But the church building was still standing in the thirties, and even that long after the Starry Wisdom left Providence, people on Federal Hill were scared to death of the place. In 1935, a painter named Robert Blake broke in—”
“Robert Blake?” I ask, opening my eyes again. “Like the guy who played Baretta?”
“Yeah, like the guy who played Baretta. He apparently broke into the abandoned church and found the trapczohedron on an altar in the steeple.” I hear her tarn a page. “He was from Milwaukee, but was staying near Brown, someplace on College Street close to the John Hay Library. And he died there, not long after he broke into the church. Struck by lightning in his apartment, if you can believe that.”
“This is what you drove all the way to Salem to find out?” I ask. “This is what Tirzah told you?”
“Yeah, but it’s not exactly a secret. These articles, they’re mostly from the Providence Journal. I just never heard of any of it. I guess it’s not the sort of stuff you learn in history class. Anyway, showing the box to Tirzah was your idea.”
And yeah, that part’s true. We met Tirzah a few years back, during a lesbian-only retreat out on the Cape. But that’s another story. She runs a witchcraft shop in Salem, reads Tarot cards for tourists, etc. & etc. “She’s undoubtedly the weirdest person we know,” I say. “It made sense, letting her see it. So... Baretta steals this thing, and gets struck by lightning.”
“I wish you wouldn’t drink before work,” Suzanne says.
“And I wish you’d left that damned box where you found it. If wishes were horses...” There’s a drawn out few moments of quiet then, as if neither of us knows our next line and we’re waiting on a helpful prompt from backstage.
“At any rate,” she says, finally breaking the silence. “One of the men who investigated Blake’s death, a doctor named Ambrose Dexter, found the stone among the dead man’s effects. He chartered a fishing boat in Newport, and dropped the metal box into Narragansett Bay, somewhere off Castle Hill. That’s the deepest part of the bay, you know. There in the Eastern Passage, between Newport and Beavertail.”
“No,” I say. “No, I didn’t know that. But I do know I’m gonna be late if I don’t get dressed and get out of here. We’ll talk about this later.” I stand, feeling dizzy, unsure if it’s from the Scotch or the nascent headache, or maybe a bit of both. I look at Suzanne, who’s still staring at the contents of the manila folder, and I point at the dented metal box on the counter. “You should just get rid of it,” I tell her. “Hell, sell the thing on eBay. I’m sure some freak would pay a pretty penny for it.”
She looks up and glares at me. “Jesus. You don’t sell something like this on eBay. Whether or not Enoch Bowen was a lunatic, it has historical significance.”
“Fine,” I tell her. “Whatever. Then give it to a museum.” Suzanne shakes her head, and goes back to reading the sheaf of photocopied pages.
“I found it,” she whispers. “It’s mine to do with as I please.” And I don’t disagree. I’m not in the mood for arguments, especially not one I know I’ll lose.
01.
“Hey! I think I’ve found something,” Suzanne shouts. The waves slamming against the rocks and the wind off the bay obscure her voice so that I can only just make out the words. I’m lying on the blanket we’ve spread out over a relatively flat place among the tilted, contorted beds of slate and phyllite. I’m lying there with my eyes shut, the sun too warm on my face, shining straight through my eyelids and making me sleepy. I don’t want to get up. If I get up to see whatever it is she’s found, I’ll have to bring the blanket along, or it’ll blow away.
“Come see!” she shouts.
“Bring it to me!” I shout back without bothering to open my eyes. Often, it seems that Suzanne and I love the rugged coast around the old Beavertail Lighthouse for entirely different reasons. I come here to get away from the city, for the smells and sounds of the sea. And she comes for the flotsam and jetsam, for whatever she can find dead or dying in the tide pools. Her apartment is littered with the garbage she’s brought back from the edge of the sea. Shells and bones, weathered shards of Wedgwood china, unusually shaped pieces of driftwood, rounded pebbles and cobbles, fishing lures, rusted and unrecognizable pieces of machinery, a page from a Chinese newspaper, a ruined lobster pot. You could decorate a good-sized chowder house with all the junk Suzanne’s scavenged from beaches up and down Rhode Island and Massachusetts, Maine and Nova Scotia. She has more jars of beach glass than I’ve ever bothered to count.
“It’s big!” she calls out. “Get off your lazy ass and come look!”
I open my eyes, squinting at the afternoon light, and I see now that there’s a herring gull standing only a few feet away, watching me. It cocks its he id to one side, and its pale irises seem simultaneously startled and filled with questions. I make a shooing motion with my hands, and the bird squawks, then spreads its grey wings and the wind seems to snatch it away.
“Hold your horses,” I say, not shouting, though, not really caring whether Suzanne’s heard me or not. I stand and wad the blanket into a tight bundle, tucking it under my right arm. I’d thought that her voice was coming from somewhere to the south, but I soon spot her ten or fifteen yards north of me, kneeling on the smooth, dark shale next to one of the deeper pools of seawater left behind by the retreating tide. Her head is bowed slightly, her hands clasped in front of her, and I think she looks like someone praying to the bay. Then she turns towards me and points at something in the water. By the time I reach the edge of the pool, she’s already pulled it out onto the rocks, along with a rubbery, tat tangle of kelp and bladderwrack. The box gleams dully in the sun.
“What is it?” she asks me, and I tell her I have no idea. I stand there, gazing down at the yellow-white metal and the slippery knot of seaweed tangled around it. There are intricate, spiraling images worked into the gleaming surface of the box, and seeing them, the first word that comes to mind is unwholesome. Whatever the artist was trying to depict in these bas-reliefs, from life or only her or his imagination, it was unwholesome.
“I can’t figure out how it opens,” Suzanne says, sounding puzzled and chewing thoughtfully at her lower lip. She pulls away the strands of seaweed. “There are hinges, here and here, but no sign of a latch. I’m not even sure I can tell where the top and bottom parts fit together. I can’t find the seam. Is that gold, what it’s made from? Maybe white gold?”
And I want to say, Put it back, Suzanne. For god’s sake, put it back. Don’t touch it. I want to ask why she can’t see the obvious unwholesomeness of it. Rut I don’t, and then she presses her right thumb into a very subtle depression on the front of the box and it opens with an audible pop, easy as you please. She laughs, like a child delighted at having gotten all the sides of a Rubik’s Cube to match up.
Suzanne lifts the lid, and at first, all I can see in there is darkness, such an entirely complete darkness that my eyes are useless against it, and I have the distinct and disquieting impression that sunlight is unable to penetrate that umbral space.
“Shut it,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to have heard me. She doesn’t close the box, or tell me that I’m being silly. Instead, Suzanne reaches into that inviolable blackness, and I’m absolutely certain that she’s going to scream, and when she pulls her arm back, all that will be left is the bloody, spurting stump of her wrist. I’ll scream, too, as if in reply, as if in empathic agony.
She lifts something out of the box, and it also gleams beneath the sun.
“A crystal,” she says. “Some kind of crystal.” I feel sick, just looking at it. The same way I get nauseous on the deck of a listing boat, I feel sick when I look at the thing from the metal box. But, nonetheless, I do look at it. I don’t turn away. Its glassy, kiteshaped facets are vaguely iridescent, and I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out what color it is, if, indeed
, it’s any one color. At first, it appears to be greenish black, like an overripe avocado’s skin. But I catch hints of crimson, too, then hints of violet, and then the whole things glimmers a very deep cobalt blue. Suzanne holds it up, turning it this way and that so that I can get a better view. There’s an ugly, greasy quality to the light flashing off its perfectly delineated, four-sided faces.
“Put it back, please,” I say, speaking very softly. “Put it back inside.” Suzanne stares at me a second or two, then nods and does as I’ve asked. She closes the metal box, and there’s another pop when it shuts. I sit with her, at the edge of the tide pool, with the box between us. The pool is full of tiny mussels and the whorled shells of periwinkle snails, with seaweed and small, scuttling crabs. The rock beneath the water is scabbed with sharp barnacles.
There was never any discussion about whether we’d keep the box or leave it there. Never any question. When she’s ready to go, I carry it for her, and it weighs a lot less than I expected.
02.
And now I sit down to write about the dream, the dream I have the night after we find Enoch Bowen’s trapezohedron. It’s the same dream I have when I can no longer stay awake to draw vigilant runes around the binding circle where Suzanne lies, the circle and the star, the flaming, all-seeing eye and the shattered wreck of her. I can no longer take solace in a clock face or the track of the sun or moon across the sky. I am not contained in any single moment, and the assumed older of the world is lost on me. I’ve heard the piping flutes, and the drums, and the lumbering footfalls of titan gods who’ve danced away the eons of their exile. I’ve felt the precious safety net of time falling away. There’s only now. This moment, which I may call past or present or future. Suzanne sleeps peacefully beside me, and she’s whole, but she also lies broken and transformed within the Elder Sign carefully chalked upon the floor of her apartment. I’ve torn the story apart, no longer able to perceive the illusion of chronology, and I’ve haphazardly strewn the scenes, just as Suzanne has been torn, and as she’s been strewn. I rearrange and lie. I present the gorgon’s face reflected in a polished shield, and I will never be even half so strong as I’d need to be to tell the full, vicious truth of it. I’m amazed to have made it this far. I come to confess, but can at best drop hints and innuendo. Suzanne was the sacrifice, not me. It was Suzanne who swallowed the pomegranate seeds. Ask her.
Surely some revelation is at hand...
I used to think so.
All our roughest beasts have come and gone, slouching past, and now wait together impatiently at the threshold of what we, in our cherished ignorance, have named a universe. We see inconvenient shards of truth in dream, perhaps, or in the contents of a metal box coughed up by the sea.
I shouldn’t tarry, or digress. There is too little coherence remaining within me to squander even an ounce. This is the dream. The rest is hardly better than window dressing. Quit stalling and spit it out; the ocean has obliged, and now it’s my turn:
Suzanne and I are walking along a sandy beach, not the rocks at Beavertail, and the summer sun beats mercilessly down on the bloated corpses of innumerable thousands of crabs and huge lobsters and dead fish that have been tossed ashore by the waves. Haddock and cod, flounder and striped bass, tautog and weakfish and pollock. I ask her if it was a red tide did this, and she asks me if there’s ever been any other sort. The air is far too foul and heavy and hot to breathe, and I’m relieved when she turns away from the Atlantic and towards the low dunes. There’s a narrow, winding trail, almost overgrown by dog roses and poison ivy, and it leads to the old church on Federal Hill. I remember that the church was demolished decades ago, all its derelict secrets become anonymous landfill But in the dream, the shrine of the Starry Wisdom has been restored, or it has never precisely fallen, or we are removed to a time before its destruction. It hardly matters which. No, that’s not true. It matters not at all.
Suzanne leads me from the sun-blighted day into night, and into that crumbling antique sanctuary, past the fearful, praying throng that has gathered on its steps, those shriveled old Italian women clutching their onyx and coral rosaries. They spare a hateful peck at me,each and every one in her turn, and the curses that spill from their lips are more befitting witches than good New England Catholics.
“Oh,don’t mind them,” Suzanne says. “They’re bitter, that’s all. They can’t hear the music. Not a one of them has ever danced, and now they’re old and frail and won’t ever have the opportunity.” She leads me through silent vales of dust and shadow, and our path is as indirect as this cockeyed, wandering narrative. Together, we wind our way between apparently endless rows of warped and buckled pews, between chiseled marble columns rising around us to shoulder the awful, sagging burden of the church’s vaulted roof. Then we move away from the nave, revisiting the vestibule, and she shows me the concealed stairway spiraling up and up and up into the sky. We climb the wooden steps until the moon is only a silver coin far below us.
“Wipe your feet,” Suzanne tells me, and I see we’ve finally reached the top of the stairs and gained the steeple. If this place has ever held a peal of bells to chime the hour and call the faithful to worship, they’ve been removed. There are four tall lancet windows, painted over so that the daylight might never enter the circular room.
“You should have waited for me below,” Suzanne says, and her eyes flash yellow-white in the gloom. “You should have waited on the beach. I can see that now.”
I don’t reply, and I don’t glance back the way we’ve come.
I know it’s much too late to retrace that route, and I don’t try. There’s a ring of seven high-backed chairs arranged about a low stone pillar. And in each chair sits a robed figure, their faces veiled with folds of golden silk. They don’t look up when we enter the steeple, but keep their attentions focused on the peculiar metal box sitting oil the stone pillar. The box is open. There can be no doubt whatsoever that it’s the same box she found in the tide pool, the box Enoch Bowen brought home from Thebes, so I don’t have to peer inside to know its contents.
The seven seated figures have begun to chant, and I watch while she undresses, then takes her place before the altar. I watch as a tangible, freezing blackness is disgorged by the box, by the thing inside the box. I watch as those hungry tendrils wrap themselves tightly about her, and draw her down, and enter her.
“Yes,” she whispers. “I will be the bride. I will be the doorway. I will be the conduit.” And there is so much more. I don’t doubt that I could write page after page setting down the blasphemous things that I dreamt I saw in the steeple of the rotting church. I could never spend a moment doing anything else, and what remains of my life would be utterly insufficient to record more than a fraction of those depreciations. There is no bottom to this dream. Wherever I choose to stop, the point is chosen arbitrarily.
I stand among the dunes, looking out across a dying sea, and watch while clouds gather on the bruised horizon.
The wind is scalding, and I cannot find the sun.
There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
00.
The afternoon is fading quickly towards dusk, and I sit outside the chalk and blood circle drawn on the floorboards. From time to time, I glance at the sky outside, or at the door leading to the hallway. Or I scrounge the courage to look inside the circle again. But she’s gone forever, even the ruin it made of her. She’s gone, and the box is gone, and the trapezohedron is gone. There’s very little remaining to prove she was ever here. I cannot conceive that one woman’s body and soul were possibly enough to appease that hunger. Ir is all beyond my comprehension.
There is a bloody spot where she lay, blood and bile, and a few lumps of something colorless and translucent that remind me of beached jellyfish. There are scorch marks where the box sat. There’s the faint odor of ammonia and charred wood.
“It was a beautiful day,” I say, and at first the sound of my own voice startles me. “The sky was blue, Suzanne. There were no cl
ouds, and the sky was blue. I think it will be a beautiful night.”
And then, with the heel of my bare palm, I begin to erase the protective circle, and the five-pointed star, and the burning eye.
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.
T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
Fish Bride (1970)
We lie here together, naked on her sheets which are always damp, no matter the weather, and she’s still sleeping. I’ve lain next to her, watching the long cold sunrise, the walls of this dingy room in this dingy house turning so slowly from charcoal to a hundred successively lighter shades of grey. The weak November morning has a hard time at the window, because the glass was knocked out years ago and she chose as a substitute a sheet of tattered and not-quite-clear plastic she found washed up on the shore now, held in place with mismatched nails and a few thumbtacks. But it deters the worst of the wind and rain and snow, and she says there’s nothing out there she wants to see, anyway. I’ve offered to replace the broken glass, a couple of times I’ve said that, but it’s just another of the hundred or so things that I’ve promised I would do for her and haven’t yet gotten around to doing; she doesn’t seem to mind. That’s not why she keeps letting me come here. Whatever she wants from me, it isn’t handouts and pity and someone to fix her broken windows and leaky ceiling. Which is fortunate, as I’ve never fixed anything in my whole life. I can’t even change a flat tire. I’ve only ever been the sort of man who does the harm and leaves it for someone else to put right again, or simply sweep beneath a rug where no one will have to notice the damage I’ve done. So, why should she be any different? And yet, to my knowledge, I’ve done her no harm so far.
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Page 32