Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Since she now grinned at me with all her sharp black teeth, I hoped that this particular specimen of ghostly nubility was interested in me, although with ghosts one can never be sure. For that matter, how could I even be sure of myself? Not long after a young girl left me, seven doctors had diagnosed my syndrome as anililagnia, which is to say, sexual interest in older women. Well, when does that become necrophilia? If the lady happens to be a ghost, should we select a different syndrome?

  Here she came, her movements as complex and asymmetrical as a Japanese garden. Just as the sheen of rain on vermilion-lacquered shrines is counteracted by the dulling down or darkening of the cloudy atmosphere, so my ardor failed a smidgen, I do confess, the instant that she unfurled her iron claws; but I reminded myself not only of my prior intention to surrender to love, but also of the evident fact that now was no time to be undiplomatic—after all, what in the Devil’s name had I expected her to look like?—so I strode forward to embrace her, hooking my thumbs most conveniently on her cold ribs while her talons settled upon my collarbones. She smelled of moss, not death. Narrowing her glowing eyes, she inclined her head to kiss me. Those teeth of hers could have nibbled my lips right off, but since she derived from a gentle species, kissing her proved no worse than pressing my mouth against a cold railing. To tell you the truth, I was reminded of the vulva of that young woman who had recently decided to leave me; visiting for old times’ sake, she lay down on my bed, so I naturally slid my hand up her skirt, caressing for the sake of those same old times the perfect closed lips of the slit I used to know, at which she opened her eyes and murmured: Stop.— The ghost of Rainy Mountain uttered no such prohibition. Her claws rested ever so delicately around my throat.

  She taught me how to beat the lacquered drum, and make the dead dance. When she opened her legs, I found myself looking up into the petals of a gilded lotus. She showed me what lies hid in vermilion darkness. With great kindness she presented to me the hidden opening of that crypt where the urns of our cremated hopes are buried. Entering my preordained place, I became as free as rain falling down a yellow moss-hole.

  2

  Oftentimes I fluttered out of her, after which we drifted hand in hand through the soft cool mists of Rainy Mountain where nobody else ever came. Educated into confidence, I now began to reach inside her to withdraw the urns of my hopes, one at time. The lids had been screwed down for eternity, but not far from the door to our vault, a rusty iron band ringed an immense cedar; this served for an urn-smasher. Just as most nongaseous chemical elements in our universe appear white or silvery-grey (not to mention the odd yellow, purple or gold exception), so my pulverized memory-ashes tended to resemble gunmetal, with more or less of a turquoise component; once an urn offered up a mound of granules as scarlet as ladybugs, and I wondered what that particular hope had consisted of; unfortunately, the undertaker had engraved his urns with nothing but my postmortem name, so that the only way to identify their contents would have been to taste them, a prospect of peculiar loathsomeness for me who still lived. Moreover, my sweet Rainy Mountain ghost used to hover behind my shoulder, watching these various residua depart. She might well have felt neglected had I displayed much curiosity about my own waste-years. Affectionately she traced her claws down my back, her rickety metacarpii reminding me of long sticks rattling in the wind. In the drizzles of Rainy Mountain those heaps of urn-matter quickly liquefied and flowed away; although drops of the scarlet element persisted among the moss like menstrual blood; I almost dabbled my finger in the stuff.

  Around that cedar tree, urn-shards slowly assembled themselves into a ring-shaped midden of irrelevance.

  3

  Stroking her smooth hard breasts, I learned how to pleasure her, at which she would sigh like a child blowing through a bamboo pipe, the breath which issued between her cold black teeth then taking on the odor of pickled metal. Now that she permitted me to withdraw my urns of departed substance from between her thighs whenever I pleased, I felt quite satisfied, not having considered how any such procedure might have compromised me.

  But one rainy night after nibbling sweetly on my lower lip in her accustomed manner, her gaze glowing right through my closed eyelids (it now seemed less orange than ocher—perhaps the hue of a tiger’s-eye stone), she abruptly unflexed her claws to full length, which she had never yet done before; and then, as I ought to have expected (no wonder that the girl from the tourist office had declined to accompany me here!), rocketed into the mist like an owl-faced moon, plunged down, and in several slow and, I must confess, excruciating swipes, eviscerated me, so that I too became a ghost, with my intestines left to hang high up on that iron-banded cedar (a crow cawed four times).— More rapidly than the living might suppose, I came to resemble her, not only in my hollowness but also in my ability to fly. Thus I could be to her all that she had been to me; and on certain very humid nights, while the entire mountain wept most pleasantly, she liked to muse in the air beside me, her slit-eyes glowing with affection, her black mouth smiling; and then, in much the way that the giggly hot springs waitress pulls off each new guest’s shoes, she would reach into my unsexed pelvic cradle, presently withdrawing some urn or other of her own cremated past, cradling it in her gristle-blue arms as she bore it above the treetops, in the fashion of the seagull which soars before dropping a closed clam onto sharp rocks. These pulverized hopes of hers, if such they were, appeared less bluish-grey than mine, more charcoal-like; for isn’t each disappointment unique? I admit that I never could have foreseen discovering my dead past within her, much less hers within me—hadn’t I come to her alive, and hadn’t I treasured my ignorance of whoever she had been before our first meeting? Well, this must be what love is.

  4

  Surreptitiously I alighted on a single shard, touched my forefinger to a lingering rosy drop of my former substance, then sucked. At once I retasted the humiliation which had permeated my flesh when in my youth a woman I admired met my praises with wary condescension; and at the shining ball to which I brought her, nobody smiled at me all night; she went off and danced with anyone and everyone, while I sat among the old ladies on the long sofa against the wall. One of these kindly souls, laying her wrinkled hand upon my own, said: Dear, it happens to all of us.— That was when I first perceived the comforts of anililagnia. With the right sort of woman, I too could be free; I could be a grey ghost.

  Since it was now her turn, my Rainy Mountain ghost swiggled her claws inside my pelvis, withdrew another leaden-colored urn, smashed it against the cedar, and gloated cat-eyed over the blackish powder spilling out. How could I know what she really felt about it? Flittering down to lick up a granule of her discarded old substance, I understood at once how it had been for her on her sixteenth birthday, when she was rejected at the first dance. Grimacing cheerfully and smacking his lips as he pulled, the dark boatman had ferried them all across that river of dirty jade. The farther they went, the cleaner the water became, until it was as crisp as the pleats in the schoolgirls’ navy-blue knee-high skirts. Docking, they awaited the headmistress’s signal. When she raised her arm, they filed by threes into the distant living world of summer: Die if you leap down there! And indeed they were all dead now; but she was the only one before me who had become a ghost upon Rainy Mountain. The girls formed ranks upon the edge of the outdoor stage, their shy hopes nearly as pale as the sun between the evening clouds. There came flute-songs and the crackle of those two flaming tripods, raining sparks some of which flew diagonally upward across the illuminated yellow-green treescape, vanishing into the rainclouds. The boys filed out in chorus, led by the child with the queue, her little brother, who had rotted for a hundred years now in a bomb crater, with mud in his mouth. In his white tabi socks he knelt, awaiting the next flute. It could never have been this way; certainly the face of the boy who eyed her across the polished boards could not have been a mask ivory-colored in the light; nor was his kimono greenish-grey, metallic and tarnished, the effect antique unli
ke the fresh green trees; but within the ancient soul of my Rainy Mountain ghost, semblances had decomposed and revivified in other images; rendering what had happened all the more true. That was why the ashes of her bygone disappointment tasted metallic to me, like the golden fan ahead and upward of that boy’s forward-bowing face; he came slowly gliding out with unearthly music toward the girl, sad and demonic now, a golden skull with a golden queue, catching the red flickering light—then halted, and although every other pair in the facing lines had met, touching fan to fan, and begun to dance, the dead boy in the ivory mask now struck the fan out of her hand, wheeled and rose up into the air like an incomprehensible ghost! Now every mouth was laughing behind a fan—laughing at the girl, who in her humiliation sank slowly to the ground.

  5

  For love and pity I kissed her then, with the dark powder of her life still staining my vaporous lips. Nibbling me fondly with her sharp black teeth, she gestured as if to imply that she felt flattered by my interest. I supposed that she had lost the capacity to weep—although it might also have been that this youthful incident had grown trivial to her. For a fact, she appeared less affected by it than I.

  Until now she had (for all her manifold ectoplasmic virtues) reminded me of the woman I once knew who eternally alluded to her secret gynecological difficulty but refused to explicate it. Now I was getting somewhere with her, thank goodness; my darling Rainy Mountain ghost might even love me! Or did she hate me, or did she consider me merely as a thing upon which to feed? She had killed me (I decline to accuse her of murder, since I had given myself to her of my own choice), in order to render my bony substance fit to entrust with the regermination of her own forgotten secrets.

  Just as at dawn a sleeping lover’s face so often appears young, open, yet far away, like a zo-onna mask, the countenance of my Rainy Mountain ghost opened unto me as if I were lying beside her on a tatami mat, marveling at her hair. Most days and nights we played with one another as luminously as green- or red-skinned demons on a golden screen. In her yellow-orange eyes a reddish tincture sometimes teased me; could it have been the reflection of my own new ghostly gaze; did I sport red eyes? I hoped not to be ugly, for then how could she love me?

  6

  It was not until she had begun to draw her dead emotions out of me that I suspected how dejected I must seem to her, or anyone—and might well always have been, not that it mattered. But how can a ghost be anything but sad? In the words of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu: If you consider suffering as an ordinary state, you will never feel discontent.

  They say that the first Shogun would kill the songbird that failed to sing, the second would teach it notes, and the third would wait until it sang beautifully. Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu was the third. Well, then, like him I would now await the silent singing of my Rainy Mountain ghost in the same spirit that the growing pine needles reach up. Side by side we would learn how to gaze at white rain-jewels and pink magnolia blossoms. The reason I had first approached her was to overcome the defining human error of despising death’s carnality. I had sought to offer my love and desire to her; now I continued to present it to her, continuing the love after the grave, trusting that the breath of corruption would in time become the breath of a flower.

  7

  The hinges of our home were all engraved in crowds of flower-crowned hexagons. Moisture beaded in tiny white pimples upon our black door. On the infrequent occasions when the mist blew away from Rainy Mountain, we withdrew to our vault and concealed ourselves within the skull of a stone lamp. She kept me company as elegantly as if she were kneeling on a white tatami mat, gently pouring sake. Helpmeets to each other, we disposed of our miseries, wearing the red laughs of white-toothed dragons.

  The longer we dwelled together, the less I could remember. After a season or a century, she ceased to grow gravid with my burial urns. I continued to incubate hers, which she withdrew ever less eagerly. I could not tell whether my tasting of her bygone failures made her bashful, grateful or something else, but I continued to sample their dust, because I wished to know her. These sorrows of hers were pools of silvery-pink water flooding my old life.

  8

  Come the middle of a certain rainy morning, when a cool yellow sky somehow found means to insinuate itself between the clouds and the lowlands from which I originated, I could see all the way past Dripping Pine, beyond those high-crowned cryptomerias and down to the city whose front row of houses loomed two-dimensionally like a multitowered battleship. Surely now the railroad tracks must be shining wet, the ballast-stones soft and mossy, the girl at the tourist office sweetly composing herself to perish, for it must have been nearly a lifetime already since my death. Her flesh might have been as sweet to me as all the drops of rain on a plum tree’s galaxy of tiny white blossoms, but I felt no regret, so well suited had I become to my own Rainy Mountain ghost. All the same, that was when I began to study her for hints of change, not realizing that I myself continued to alter, in contradiction to every supposition which premortem entities make about ghosts. It might have been that she was discovering secrets from the urns she drew out of me, although so far as I could tell, the powders which swirled and tumbled from each terra-cotta vessel remained identically ebony—well, their separate blacknesses might vary by a hint of purple or green; or was that merely a trick of my glowing eyes, whose color I could never know? For my part, whenever I tasted the ashes of her life, my love for her softened further, like the mellowing rice brandy which learns to conceal its power within sweet water-blandness. Turning toward me like a slow whitish-beige fish, she taught me how to silhouette myself upon the moon. Her fixed face, the grey-and-black teeth in her dark mouth, her hand frozen on the bamboo staff she sometimes carried, and the fantastic smokelike hair around her skull, all seemed cheerful to me now. From the side, her mouth was a downcurving crescent of darkness. As a girl she had been taught to express not with the face but with the heart; and I would have said that she did so to perfection, although just what she expressed I cannot tell you. She had learned that when one wears one’s death, it grows difficult to look down. When one emerges from a mist or a vault, one cannot feel one’s feet, so it is best to hover. In company one wears, for instance, a memory of the V-necklined dark kimono with the white chrysanthemum pattern, the lavender obi embroidered with white plum blossoms—no matter that what’s left of it is three fibers, four worms and a pinch of ashes.

  For her fan I gave her a dewy fern, with which she danced for me on the rainiest nights. It soon decayed, but then we learned that she did not need it; for when she danced, our memory of her fan moved as inevitably as water.

  9

  When she withdrew her final urn from my bones and broke it, I greedily descended to nourish myself on its blackish cinders, and at once tasted the occasion when she had first masked herself in a mirror room, pleading with her Elder Sister: I just wish to be more and more feminine. That’s my wish.— Never before had I heard her voice, nor would I again; and these words reached me by bone conduction, as if they derived from my own speech resonating within my skull. How often do we need to remember our own words? Most often it is the words and deeds of others which most eloquently relate our own chapters. Masked, the girl took her place among the kneeling geishas, who locked their hands in their laps. I awaited her error. How would it come? Just as lacquer wears off a shrine’s door, revealing grey wood, so our expectations flake away, leaving dullness struggling to disguise itself in Rainy Mountain’s grey clouds. When would Elder Sister slap her in the face? Bowing, the shamisen-player glided to the corner, then knelt and tuned her instrument. The girl arose. It was her turn to dance.

  She disappointed no one, not even herself. Her excellence remained as pure as mountain rainwater. No one could strike her or do anything but bow in awe and gratitude. Here came the clatter of prayer-coins falling between wooden slats while people bowed—to her! To her they clapped two times. She was someone accomplished, even great, who founded the Three Fer
n School of Rainy Mountain. When she died, crowds burned incense for her.

  To be sure, her most fearsome disappointments outlived her—the reason she was compelled to become a ghost—but thanks to these last ashes (which I assure you appeared no different, at least to me, from others), she now spied light instead of darkness through her own skeleton’s latticework. Was she looking out through black-lacquered blinds at the pale branches of early spring?

  Until now I had supposed her to be my counterpart. Well, perhaps she was. If only I had tasted that scarlet powder, I might have learned that I too contained more than disappointments.

  So was she happy now? Her orange gaze found something in the distance. But then it seemed once again as if she were seeking something within me. Just as out of Keisai Eisen’s woodblock prints an Edo beauty peers sidelong with her glossy black eyes, kissing the air with her tiny red mouth, just so my Rainy Mountain ghost studied me as if she were sorry for me. Her smile resembled one of those multiplying triple circles in a green pond when the rain begins, the ripples pulsing faster and faster, while beneath them, unaltered, comes a carp-flash in the greenish water, a pallid sparkle of shrine-gold. As slowly as a Noh actor, she rotated away from me, as if she were turning upon an invisible roasting-spit. More curious than alarmed, I flittered round to learn her smile’s next chapter. Naturally she couldn’t have forgotten me! Her twin orange eye-beams yellowed the grey-clouded summit of Rainy Mountain. Her gruesome arms sprang out of immobility, her claws parted, and then, head bowed, she flew away forever over Rainy Mountain, with her long hair dripping down her bowed back.