My twisted freak, my mouth is thirsty for your kiss.
I woke up. I paced the floor for hours, stopping to stare into a mirror, then pacing some more. I grinned and snapped my fingers. I went to see a plastic surgeon. I showed him drawings I’d made.
“Incisions here, stitches there. A realignment of these bones. This is possible?”
“Are you telling me you want to look like this?” he asked me, leaning on his desk as if it were suddenly a life raft.
I stared at him. I stared him down, in fact.
“You’re a very lovely woman. Why would you want to deface yourself that way?”
I shrugged. I smiled tightly. “Karma.”
Enough money persuaded him. I had plenty of that, having inherited it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? And when the bandages eventually came off and I asked for a mirror, Fear stared back at me. The eyes seemed to bolt from the sockets. The jaws had been broken and reset to resemble a permanent expression of disfiguring dread. Lips skinned back from the teeth in a rictal grimace. This last did cause me to have some trouble eating my meals in the hospital, and I chuckled thinking how it could make me very unpopular in restaurants.
But I had the look I’d been seeking, frozen with horror. The sort of fright which causes one to loose all control of bodily functions, to suffer skips in the proper rhythm of the heart, to lose consciousness, to go catatonic. That is, providing one was actually terrified into looking this way. Otherwise, it was just a mask, wasn’t it?
««—»»
Thus remade, I went on a spiritual journey back to France. I drove to that awful little town where I had existed over six hundred years ago. There was no village now. The wilds had overtaken it though no animals really lived there. Most of the wildlife in France was slaughtered long ago, to be eaten by the French. Wasn’t I once such a wild thing, torn apart and devoured?
I abandoned the rental car by the roadside, walking resolutely across the grass and stones, marveling that no sign of any of us remained. There were no places which marked where bodies of the residents of Larmes had been burned after the plague piles were created like dumps of rotting garbage. There was no plaque set to commemorate those from Sleep Near Heaven who were sealed up in their convent to keep from spreading a contamination it is arguable they possessed. I spied no ghosts weeping hollow-eyed among the wild, white rose bushes. The area wasn’t particularly haunted. If tragedy were to really infest locations with psychic and spectral traces, the whole world would be haunted.
But I did find the narrow river. And there was a pile of branches in which a fire was burning, sending up crackling sparks. There was a figure hunched near it, a cruel angel. This stood, red hair whipping in the wind.
She held out her arms, smiling in sharp teeth. “Crainte!”
“I’ve searched everywhere for you,” I said, waggling a finger like a chastising yet indulgent parent.
She shrugged those gaunt shoulders, grinning. “I have always been here. Waiting.”
“You made me a promise,” I told her.
“I’ve not forgotten it. Come. My mouth is thirsty for your kiss.”
I ran to her and she clutched me. Either her long hair burned as it wrapped about me or we fell into the fire.
The element of change molded us as we thrashed together, igniting with the lust born of too long a separation. It melted us until we ran together, fused us at the lips, breasts, groins, then boiled us unjoined again.
We must have resembled victims of a fiery train wreck, caught in the act of a passion so combustible that we couldn’t disengage to save ourselves. And no rescuers could have pried us apart. In the trap of the grotesque freak accident which is anthropophagic eroticism, there are no Jaws of Life. We consume and are consumed. It’s simple, really.
The years were incinerating away, one blackening layer a moment. And all I’d suffered across the centuries to reach this place for these minutes became insignificant.
Atroce crackled. “This is how the phoenix feels.”
Our flesh split like roasting lamb, blood simmering up to the surfaces. She licked at mine, sizzling it down, and I gulped at hers even if it did swallow like acid. At what point the rapture actually turned to agony, I couldn’t say. But my jaws flapped back with my blistered tongue waving like a crisping flag. Atroce had shriveled out of reach. My eyes had melted; I could no longer see her. I died, cremating, all those incarnations consumed and rendered into balls of fat not even good enough to make cheap candles from.
And then I opened my eyes. The pain from the fire was still intense. I looked down—pupils magically whole. But I wasn’t burned. There was no charring, no third degree, not even singed hair. Yet it hurt deeply, totally. I dragged myself to the narrow river to bathe it away in the cool water.
Ripples cascaded across the surface, flowed together to form a face. Atroce gazed at me from this, smiling and serene. Her red hair and hands gestured for me to come to her.
“It’s good in here,” her voice burbled into my ears. “We’ll be swans, preening each other’s feathers.”
Somehow I’d convinced myself I was too burned to walk, even if my skin was still smooth and white. So I had to use my arms to drag my body into the water, rolling down the bank, the reeds rustling past my cheeks like little girls with fans. Atroce’s arms caught hold of me and pulled me into the element of dreams.
Our legs scissored languidly, our hair spreading out like maps of Sargasso. The curves and hollows of her body tasted of rose blossoms dropped in wine. I flowed out of myself and into her, as she did into me, orgasms creeping across our bodies like tendrils of river weeds. It was as if we both lost solidity to become nothing but fluid blood, hers sweet as the water.
I was suddenly having trouble breathing, incarnations visible encapsulated within the bubbles which spewed from my mouth and nose, flowing surreal in soapy colors of compulsion and death. I struggled to return to the surface but Atroce had complete hold of me. My chest seemed to explode as I choked, ears bursting from the pressure. I think I even struck her, trying to get free, lungs splitting at indigo seams.
“Sleep,” Atroce murmured, voice drawn out, a ribbon on a wave. “Sleep.”
Eventually I did, giving up to it after the shattering pain disintegrated into droplets, leaking away like consciousness. Only then did my body rise, shoulders crested, face still submerged but gentle.
I opened my eyes. A waterspout lifted me out of the river. In its spinning liquid I could make out a swirl of Atroce. Water slung from my hair in a prismatic arc, the swift rotation drawing the sog out of my lungs. Even the moisture from the tornado moved away until it was only Atroce and me, climbing up through the sky in a upward blast of hard wind. Up, up until it was no longer night, the rays of the sun curving over the horizon to shower us with light.
I cried out, “Atroce!” expecting it to destroy her, as some legends said sunlight would do.
But she didn’t fry. She clung to me, fingers and nipples solid as thunderstones.
And what element was this, I wondered, as I clung to my lover, smelling summer blossoms, distant rain. And the evaporation of blood from a million breached veins across the globe. Here we were, the red cloud culled from that.
Our own came out as well, beaten by the wind, sucked through our pores as through straws of lightning bolts. Except there was no lightning burn; it was very cold. It jangled my skeleton as we were tossed up. It made ice in my belly that spread into my brain and groin like the heat which sex generates. I became brittle with hypothermia, up where only stars smoldered.
We were flung so high I couldn’t breathe, gasping down at a world growing small, no more than a blue wheel cranking out more souls for grist. I knew I was leaving that frightful wheel behind, going up, the direction of nirvana, wasn’t it? Perhaps the wind would pummel Atroce and I so much that we’d fuse, to be one at last. Maybe space would crush us, two origami figurines smashed until we were indistinguishable as ever having been separate.
I could see blackness above, sprinkled with stars. Out there with space was supposed to be the angle of time. Where else could we find eternity but there?
We were just inside the darkness when, with a queasy jolt, our ascent finished. We began to fall.
I began to fall. For Atroce slipped away, fluttering long hair like wings, staying aloft, arms extended down in a gesture not of loss but of blessing.
“This is how we are reborn,” her voice echoed. “Out of darkness every time.”
She gestured to the faraway sun, its rays slowly winking out beneath the earth’s curve.
“Maybe there is a flash of insight and then we go back into the darkness. For that is what rebirth is, cherie, darkness at both ends.”
I could taste my stomach, taste the shit that compacted in my colon as every lower organ was pushed upward. Then the rectum released, as well as the squeezed bladder. My lungs flattened and even my naked breasts went concave, seeking some unanimity with the crumbling backbone. My eyes took on a kind of tunnel vision, seeing an elevator shaft a thousand stories long, where I could hear voices drifting from floors I fell past. Hallucinations. Insanities. The prose musings of a hopeless romantic. Starving French children with broken blades in their skinny fingers sang as they whittled from the living meal. Skulls chattered mantras about the neck of a black goddess as her murmurs resembled rubies in goblets of blood. Spanish curses of righteousness and Aztecs chanting in Nahuatl as priests mined for inner divinity with obsidian knives. Strigoi wandering the hallways of a Rumanian madhouse, calling out the names of suspected mortals. A Mexican woman blindly seeking a window to find the moon, begging for revenants to shed tears with which to make a new face. And lastly, my own face before I had it surgically twisted, whispering mantras of Fear as poetic as the ages.
This was the womb I careened through. I could see that old wheel of incarnations waiting to give me another ride. I screamed out Atroce’s name, no sound coming out since my lungs were blue pancakes. I closed my eyes and struck the ground.
And opened my eyes.
I wasn’t shattered. No crater held me in the imprint of my shape. No dust plumed as from the kiss of a meteorite. The ground was firm and faintly cool, slightly warm when compared to the element of the wind. How metaphysical! I might have laughed. Fire, water, air: change, dreams, rebirth. What was next? Earth, naturally. But what would it symbolize?
I felt as if I was a character created out of Kafka, Jung, Poppy Brite. Some bizarre cross between the Bhagavad-Gita and Roger Vadim’s Blood And Roses.
“Crainte.”
It was Atroce’s voice, yet she was nowhere to be seen.
“Ma tortu.”
The soil stirred, rustled in clods and clumps as if ants were busily rearranging it. And then she rose up from it, all of black earth, molded from the very dirt she’d been buried alive under centuries ago. It was a statue of dark clay which beckoned to me, as erotic as any red sandstone apsara from Devi Jagadambi.
I went to her, able to walk, even able to run… We sank to the ground, earthen limbs twining about flesh ones. She tasted of late summer blossoms and ripe yellow seeds. Of the nearby river when it overflowed its banks in the spring or froze solid in winter. Like the dust of the nuns of Sleep Near Heaven buried beneath, and like the fat worms. She tasted of new life and old rot, a mixture of future and history. No wonder so many religions have honored an earth goddess.
And the orgasms passing through me were of miles of soil and stone, underground springs hot and cold, molten rapture in the very center. I felt it rotate inside me. Of a turning, cabal world. Of a wheel. But I couldn’t pinpoint what element it was. Healing? Revelation?
“Promises,” Atroce murmured, answering my unspoken question.
Abruptly I felt the earth sifting into me, starving the pores. It ground into my eyes and ears, stuffing up my nose and throttling down my throat. I gasped, convulsing until my arms which were clasped around Atroce went too tight. Then she crumbled in my arms.
I woke up, surprised I could see. I looked down at my skin. I was black, dyed with soil until I resembled the dirt version of Atroce who’d risen before me earlier, until I might have been Kali Herself. I rubbed it with my fingers but it didn’t flake off.
There was earth under my nails, in my ears until my heart pounded. It was wedged in my mouth and in my nostrils although I could breathe now, very well, even if what I tasted came from fields and graves. It trickled through my veins. It solidly filled up my womb until I had to be content. For here Atroce would ever be part of me, when she slept in her native soil.
Fear sat across from me, wearing my deformed face. Red hair flamed out behind it. Atroce’s eyes blazed from the eye slits. She smiled and her flawless, sharp teeth glittered with moonlight.
I grinned back, reaching up to touch a ripple of loose scraps that were cheeks and forehead, pulling it taut across my own. Feeling in its texture the streaks that striped it from the masks of all those nuns. I could taste her blood, and mine from what she’d drunk from me. The skin was oozing, gluey and glorious. And it didn’t slip off, but hung there like a life in the balance, as a spirit that’s stepped off the wheel—never to return.
Bonded in meat and soul. Part of her, part of me: connected forever. How lovely Fear was on her. And how Terrible was my new beauty.
| — | — |
WINDOW FOR ANON
“What is soundless, touchless, formless, imperishable,
Likewise tasteless, constant, odorless,
Without beginning, without end, higher than the great, stable—
By discerning That, one is liberated from the mouth of death.”
THE UPANISHADS
There was a breeze earlier, when the church doors were propped open. No air moved now. Being in the vacated room—altar like a stationary and indistinct articulation, pews as oiled rows of horizontal parts in an infinite lattice—was surely what it must be like to be stranded in a silent part of the universe. It was easy to imagine the void outside, clear as cellophane black, pulsing with red shift blood like some ancient entity. Living midnight, with its own volition, own agenda waiting on a timetable even the creaking solar systems couldn’t fathom.
Gellie liked it when she was the only one in the chapel. The place had been full only fifteen minutes before. Many of the congregation had gone home, the rest adjourning to a meeting room, to discuss plans for raising money. It had been tough on Garza, Texas ever since the factories did the NAFTA shuffle, leaving for cheaper climes in Mexico.
She could have joined the committee for coffee and donuts, but she was pregnant with her second child—a daughter—and didn’t want the caffeine or empty calories. She’d excused herself to clean out dust which had drifted in with the beginning of evening mass. She also had ammonia to mop with and lemon oil to polish the altar with.
It was peaceful alone here. A few rosy candles burned. Gellie glanced up at flames sparkling in the stained glass window. The scene was from a story not well known among the gospels. It was from OPHIRIANS, the only book from the New Testament to be left out of the King James Bible. The other texts in the Apocrypha were from the Old Testament. The window showed Christ with hands up, holding back a wasteland wind threatening to blow everything into the Dead Sea. The wind was a dark cloud made of winged black scorpions.
Gellie sang as she swept between the pews, making little piles like a fine diamond ash.
“As she was walkin’ o’er the fields, she heard the dead-bell knellin’; and every jow the dead-bell gave cried ‘Woe to Barbara Allen…’”
She smiled, feeling the foolishness of her own past ignorance.
She’d first read ‘Barbara Allen’ years ago, seeing it attributed to Anon. There were things she’d seen since credited to this brilliant individual. From The Epic Of Gilgamesh to Beowulf and The Song of Roland. She’d honestly believed that Anon was a philosopher, or perhaps a poet. It sounded sophisticated, singular as Homer or Ovid.
When her
son was born she’d wanted a dignified name for him so she’d told the nurse, “I want to call him Anon.”
She didn’t realize that it was an abbreviation for anonymous.
So Angela Stirling’s boy was Nonnie for short. She’d resolved to be better educated so that neither of her babies would ever have cause to be ashamed of their mother. She started reading books on philosophy, physics, mysticism. There were pop treatises you didn’t have to be a scholar to understand. All she had to do was visit the local Half Price Books for copies of The Tao of Physics, The Tao of Chaos, The Tao of Symbols… People treated you differently when you could spout Oppenheimer and Om, Zeno and Zen. You treated yourself differently.
She felt balanced up high, inside the church like some stained glass-fronted starship. There was a giddy sense of nothing finite, no moorings, spread out in all conceivable directions. She shuddered with a sudden revelation that accompanying this soaring sense was a(n) (im)moral imperative that each direction be DOWN. She experienced a prickle of electricity as if she’d just brushed consciousness with that living midnight.
(Living? Who said it was living?)
Midnight, it definitely was. There was a shadow of it, solid on the opposite side of the stained glass. Gellie’s skin broke out in gooseflesh, feeling it out there, agile as it slid down in a greasy micro-tornado from the sky, raced up broken paving like shards of dark matter, then leapt to smash through the church’s window—ignoring all other windows neighboring, not even disturbing pigeon coops on the roof next door.
She heard it rise abruptly, booming thunder between galaxies, shattering the stained glass with a tempest fist. Candles guttered, sparked, set fire to altar cloths and then turned the carpet ablaze.
It made her deaf, staring at what smashed through the glass, a heavy blackness flittering with wings and stingers. She thought the poisonous tails had whipped across her before they simply vanished, not understanding that she was now on fire. Then pain bit down hard and she also couldn’t see, stumbling out through that shattered window. Outside, hands grabbed her and rolled her in the dirt.
Guises Page 26