Lilly watched the shadow of her thinned body on the walls. The bulb was pulsing. Nothing made any sense. She wanted to think about her father and his accident now, lying still, and waiting for what more could happen to her. But the bulb was swelling again, and it was her mother who was forcing herself into Lilly’s mind, moving from remembered scene to scene.
She needed to lie still, be patient, unafraid now. Because, despite her terror, pieces of memory, fractures of time and feeling were struggling to come into focus, as if for the first time and she was safe. The vacuum inside her was stirring, an underground of groping questions swarming, moving, converging, all together, all as one, circle concentrating circle, point enveloping point, rising for a nebulous process to take shape in her—an alchemy from the impulses these three years had shackled and repressed inside her—desires and yearnings she had been harboring unaware. Substance to fill her emptiness. It was in this incarceration that she might find solutions, some relief.
Shadows were coming into her mind now, and then she was making a map for a journey backward into some realm other than her immediate life, and it included the realm of her own barely conscious memory, of the conscious secrecy of things.
Lilly scanned the pure white, soundless crucible that contained her now, the padded walls and locked door. Then she was struggling to put the last weeks of her life back into some order and clarity, before tonight’s moments of madness, her final fall.
Chapter Three
The walls of the apartment Lilly had shared with Jane in Little Italy were painted thickly in salmon-pink so unlike this room, with ornate moldings and golden brass doorknobs. And when Lilly lay in bed trying to write in her Little Italy apartment, there had been a glass chandelier over her head that mirrored reflections from its machine-carved, dangling icicles.
Outside the apartment there were the Albanese Fancy Meat and Poultry Store, Moe’s Meat Market, and the rows of bright orange-red tenement houses, the shine of their gunmetal gates and doors. Xylophone music traveled on the clam-scented winds from Grand Street where the restaurants stood, and the gusts also carried the odors of baking bread. The steam-baked bread scents, sauces, spices, and dirt collecting into waves… how much the earthy streets of Little Italy had aroused her! Sometimes it made her feel herself, lose herself—admit to being a living material, too.
Two days after she discovered the bulb that first morning, she listened to herself explain to Mitchell the reasons she couldn’t be with him anymore—telling him everything but that she had felt like an object to him, and now a strange bulb had appeared between her thighs, and she realized she couldn’t love him at all.
The city winter snows left the apartment feeling like a damp cave. The apartment reeked with moldy floor tiles, old painted walls. The winter stopped all the movement on the streets that were thick with ice because the New York City plows came last to the poorer neighborhoods. Sarah Lawrence shut down for “bad weather.”
Lilly stayed in the apartment, missing her classes at the college, and Jane returned from Sarah Lawrence in the evenings. One night, Jane bought them sandwiches that Moe made in his delicatessen—thick salami in rye bread, and sardines with tomato sauce laden with Italian olive oil. Jane and Lilly had sat together out on the balcony, on the rod-iron divan Helen gave them from the abandoned patio in Bedford—Jane with her knees brought up to her chin, eating unshelled peanuts from a bag, her lanky body wrapped in a blanket. Tall and reed-slender, Jane had yellow-white hair, soft down on her arms that bristled when she blushed which, shy, Jane did often. The neighborhood boys adored gazing up at Jane from the street whenever she ventured out on the balcony. Jane had blinked down at them, as if she were temporarily out of breath. Lilly would have imagined—with the effect made by the oily slums and dingy shops below them, their glass windows showing strings of hanging chicken heads, ham hocks, and meat carcasses inside—that Jane’s face would reflect back the sordidness of their lives there. But, beyond her form, a vista surfaced of night sky and earthy, dazzling tenements and shop fronts, and Lilly did not miss Mitchell. She was no longer hurt that Mitchell hadn’t tried to get her back. “Out to lunch,” Jane had said, meaning to describe both her perpetually vague but dizzy mental states and the neighborhood that loomed over her shoulders.
As weeks went on, the bulb reappeared and disappeared unpredictably, without Lilly’s control. It appeared at the times that the apartment was empty but something would be left of the night before with Jane—Jane’s handkerchief, a bowl with unshelled peanuts or ice cream they had shared, still sitting on the kitchen table, the faint echo of a conversation they’d had in the night—a feeling that Jane was possessing her with her warmth.
Lilly started setting the alarm early, to avoid meeting Jane in the kitchen or at the divan. She was already skipping classes at Sarah Lawrence before the snows came. Slowly, Lilly was becoming familiar with crises in unreality, in which the bulb inexplicably reappeared to her. She suffered exhaustion and depletion in late January and February, as if from months and miles of pointless, directionless travel, and hours spent analyzing and thinking.
The old St. Patrick’s Church stood in its dishevelment on Mulberry Street, gusts of wind driving papers and city trash into the wire fencing that hemmed in the graveyard like a chicken coop, enclosing old graves that were plaster-like, fragmentized. And Lilly had felt that if she followed the path toward the far end of the graveyard, soon she would hear the sounds of angels or unnatural fire, and the wind would blow to shreds all the boundaries between the dead and the living.
The St. Patrick’s School for Boys occupied the width of an entire city block, taking up all the space between Mott and Mulberry streets. Above the doors of the Byzantine church building was a plaque that read “Divine Liturgy.” The figure of the archangel Michael was a sculpture made from bronze in the run-down front entrance. But Lilly was drawn into the baptistery from the back entrance, on Mulberry Street. She followed a long, dark walkway, and there was a wire fence that hemmed the walkway from the cemetery. The vines growing around the fence and on the gravestones were so desiccated that they looked like scorpions in a cold desert.
Lilly walked through a quiet dark, following the path of the laid flagstones. She came to a sunlit cloister and stole inside the baptistery, through a tiny vestibule. She entered, pulling open a splintered, beat-up old door and sat down in a pew. She imagined the stories of boys’ baptisms, boys faint from fasting, shivering in the cold, until the moment of their rite of passage. The old baptistery was rank with a Manhattan smell but still like a sanctum towering up high, an arborlike pavilion of green, gold, purple, and white mosaic from a marble floor to a domed ceiling. In the highest point of the ballooning dome was a naked Jesus standing up to his waist in a long river as an unkempt apostle poured water on him and God’s disem-bodied hand pointed to the Holy Spirit at Jesus’ head in the form of a white bird. The deteriorated stone floor had the romanticism of a forbidden dream, and Lilly had remembered kneeling before an alabaster statue of Mother Mary, inside a raw stone Lazarist monastery in Jerusalem with her mother. It was on a road called Mamilla, which the Christian Arabs called the Waters of God, and the neighborhood, off-limits to Jews, had terrible alarming military signs, threats, and warnings. “This Mother Mary, she thinks we are nothing,” Lilly had heard her mother say, in tears. Lilly had tried to console Helen. Her mother had carried a hunger like Lilly felt now in the baptistery, something insatiable and off-limits, too. It hadn’t shamed Helen as it shamed Lilly now, to feel such overwhelming appetite for the love of the nurturing figure who was all powerful. Now in the baptistery, years later, Lilly felt painfully empty. Only this little boy on Mother Mary’s lap was loved, Lilly thought, as she found herself yearning to fall into oblivious sleep on the lap of the Mother Mary statue whose arms—strong and loving—had no animal raw body underneath the pure white gown. Lilly could not bear this, a lust to be loved so ideally and completely. Her mother was incomplete, she thought, searching and
starving, and Lilly was born from a hungry, wandering womb.
The baptistery was humid and sultry, as one of those sordid bathhouses in the East Village where male strangers went to copulate, men on men. The windows sweated, and Lilly felt as though she were in a tomb and a bath-house all at once.
Death and water filled her dreams later that night. She found herself imagining she was a young boy and a part of this elevated rite of passage, and then her dreams began to disturb and terrify her.
The bulb became turbulence within her, a threat of nightmare confusions.
Lilly avoided the baptistery. She tried to sleep late, and after she heard Jane leave the apartment for somewhere else, Lilly gathered herself up for no reason but to wash and eat something and return to her room to try to write and read one of her schoolbooks—not so much to study, or to write coherently, but to wait for something to happen to pull her out of living this way.
The snows cleared, and the school reopened. One late February afternoon Lilly decided to try going back to her classes at Sarah Lawrence. She returned to the college but could not go to the seminar rooms and classrooms.
That same evening, she didn’t take the train back to the city, spending her supper money on three Mars bars from the vending machines in the library basement. Her head was filled with darkness, and she felt frightened to return to Little Italy—the apartment with its memories of being unable to hold onto Mitchell, Jane’s threatening warmth, and the images in the baptistery.
The temperature was dropping; she saw it in the little red dial on the thermostats inside the library building. Outside the wide window, the vast, whitened blur of campus buildings and trees collected more ominous signs of the forbidding cold.
Lilly took the spiral stairway up to the library’s third floor.
Scattered books were sprawled haphazardly on different wheeled conveyances in the hall. Some were lying on their sides, not yet catalogued. There were three such dollies jammed with course books, thick texts from a hundred courses Lilly didn’t know about.
At first, she thought she was drawn to the books because she recognized the same religious symbols she had seen in the baptistery; figures of deacons, lustrous crowns, and crosses.
Slowly, she advanced through the stack.
Lilly was warm when she carried the books into a study room filled with enormous pillows and study areas with desks and lamps. Forty or so gigantic pillows were laid down to make a floor that could be utilized to lie, sit, and study on through the night. Lilly stumbled through the field of pillows with one of the thick volumes.
Alchemy and Hermetic Philosophy: A Brief Overview of Alchemy… she started reading as she let herself sink into a nest of floor pillows.
The alchemical tradition came from the earlier practitioners of the “spagyric” science… (from Greek spaein—to rend, tear apart— and ageirein—to bring together) and claimed matter as both the source of their wisdom and the salvation of their soul’s desire. The Egyptian goddess, Isis, was said to be the founder of alchemy. However, the science probably originated with the women who used the chemical processes to formulate perfumes and cosmetics in ancient Mesopotamia.
Similarly, Babylonian women chemists used recipes and equipment derived from the kitchen. Thus, ancient alchemy was identified with women, and the work of the early alchemists occasionally was referred to as opus mulierum, or “women’s work.”
There were drawings, too, of symbols and the body—bones and genitals. A transforming furnace known as the “Athanor” was a kiln with adorned nipples at its upper part. There were also charcoal-black etchings in the book, of figures neither male nor female but created with ambiguous genitalia—males spawned large oval eggs, dropping from penises like sacs; the pubes of women sprouted rods and long snakes. Hermaphrodites possessed acacias for genitals that shot up with pulp red flowers into the heavens. Symbols of citadels with towers prevailed on the pages, as did drawbridges over long and wavy rivers, hawks, green lions, lambs, and people with yellow solar faces and skulls.
The entire opus was steeped in confounding symbols, a combination of real chemical reactions with the alchemist’s own projections. In the pictorial language of the alchemists, “Trees grew between the legs… and phalluses and royal peacocks, the royal marriage of the king and queen took place….” It was known that the fumes from heated mercury could induce orgasms in the alchemist’s body that were not literal, but hallucinatory, the properties of the alchemist merged with those from the substances burning in the furnace.
The alchemist, explained the books, could no longer tell “the psychically real from the physically real, they were one and the same to the alchemist… They [the orgasms] are recognized for what they are only much later, if ever. Secrecy is essential.”
She had only been in the pillow room an hour before she felt a shock as she recognized the same bizarre symbols and illustrations she once saw in the texts on her mother’s bookbinding table. There was no mistaking some of the etchings: spheres of fire and wind, gold painted animals, birds, and naked figures called “the bibliotheca hebraea” in these alchemy books. Helen was there powerfully with her in the task and the subject.
“It began like this,” she would write in her first alchemy notebook that same night, when she found her own words. And then as she wrote, the moments in the bathtub during the night of her father’s accident began to come back to her. She described the bathroom window she had looked out, waiting for her mother to return that evening, the sounds of the old pipes. She heard the thud again below her and felt her mind go blank as it had in the bathtub that night. She remembered the intense pleasure she had in the water, and she felt her old confusion, groping again for something that might explain why she had ignored the warning that her father had fallen again, something to show her she wasn’t to blame for her father’s coma. But again she was enveloped by the amnesiac haze. Guilt seized her again, and an anguished shame.
“Something worthless can be burnished into gold,” Lilly read from one of the texts, imagining herself burnishing as one of the crude metals personified in the text, setting a fire in which she would burn as both arsonist and arsonist’s victim. And then, nobody would be destroyed but her, she thought.
Filled and embraced as if the books had souls, Lilly searched and found the bulb in different alchemy books.
The bulb between a naked woman’s legs was in one of the illustrations made by Maria the Jewess from Babylon in the second century. Finding it, Lilly felt her body lighten as if she had crossed through the barrier of her shame. There were other women like this, she thought. Like her.
One of the books described the bulb as “a consolidated nucleus of the personality which can appear to the alchemist as symbols, shadows like the philosophic trees that spring from the phalluses of the androgens, from Saturn and Venus…”
That night, Lilly’s own bulb returned, less frightening and disturbing. She felt it nestled firmly between her thighs.
By around midnight, Lilly heard the student librarian below calling up the stairway, asking if anyone were left in the library. Hearing nothing, the girl locked up the building and it was completely dark. Lilly waited and then turned one study light on in the pillow room.
The room was soft and private. She gathered the texts, piled them on the floor so that they looked like square rocks resting on the waves of a sea of pillows in the room. Helen was there in her mind, along with the skeins of leather her mother hung in the basement workroom when Lilly was a child. Throbbing with a delicious loneliness, she caught herself wondering if Helen felt like this in the basement, a foreigner except for the hours she spent bookbinding.
By morning, Lilly read through more than eleven texts, and the real world had become unreal again. The pictures and images she saw in the etchings in the alchemy books became a formulating guide to her madness. She would arrive at something meaningful, she told herself. She could become an outside investigator of the mysterious bulb, her labile states between real
ity and unreality—observing an exemplary case of madness in a long history of fathomless depths. She would document the history in her notebooks. It belonged only to that world of alchemy and ancient texts. Lilly carefully put all the alchemy books back on the dolly and then washed herself in the bathroom in the basement. She entered the outside by prying open a window before the librarians came back to the building.
She went back to Manhattan; Jane wasn’t there when she returned to the apartment. She went into the empty kitchen. Mitchell had left a lint cloth on the counter weeks ago, the one he cleaned his violin with, and now she picked it up and dropped it into a garbage pail.
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