I remember the indefatigable screeching of insects, the gravelly voices of rivers and sometimes, when we climaxed, the clattering wings of disturbed birds.
Occasionally I considered writing a letter to Rileene, but inevitably concluded that she would think badly of me, or, worse yet, that she had conspired with her sister to kill me. But what if Wenuke had never meant me any harm?
18
Word came that my Greek corpse-bride had been resurrected, her skeleton-hands thrusting out of the ground like some Parisienne’s high-riding breasts. I received indisputable evidence that she was sucking children’s blood. That was low of her, but don’t we all decay? I remember for instance Wenuke, whose crotch became a deep weedy hole with black water shining across its depths.
Of all of them, that Greek corpse had loved me the most. But my grief at losing her had dissipated. It was gradually being revealed to me that Wenuke was the one I had been meant for. And we were parted.
If I could only avoid ever seeing Wenuke again, no matter how much I missed her, then I would not be forced to experience my new relationship to her, which must resemble the viewing of a lover’s corpse; she would still be there, but she could never be to me what she once had been. Each love has its habits, as I’ve said; and when that love breaks, the memories of those habits, or the attempted practice of them, comprise a skeleton of pain.
Meanwhile, there came a night event, a funeral, in fact; as you remember, I had met my Greek corpse at one of those; she knew that I would be at this new convocation, so I sent word to her by vampire bat to keep away; scanning the faces with a dread which would have erupted into anger had she been present in that cemetery of verdegrised urns on plinths, wilting marble mushrooms, I quickly began to feel her absence although I inspected each skull and mourner with an ever firmer despair; and when I saw that my ex-wife wasn’t there, I felt a patient ancient sadness.
The bronze woman was present, but I avoided her green frog’s grimace; later I heard that she had ripped a man’s heart out.
I went to California and stalked a high dark ocean-horizon from behind palms and bungalows; until one stormy night I spied a sea goddess whose garters were frilly white wave-tops and lacy sea-spittle. I especially remember a pointed brown-green breast gushing white froth. Swimming in her foamy white petticoats and her long green seaweed hair, she sang me the same melody she’d sung Ulysses, which made little impression on me; I’d heard it all before. Needless to say, I finally penetrated her, which was quite a trick, as you would know if you’d ever looked down through the foam, deep down into a green vulva. She had eyes like mirror-wet sand. Wringing out her dark sea-black skirt afterward, on her tiny lava-islet decorated with skulls, she offered me eternal life beneath the water; unfortunately, I was already diseased by that curse.
19
The elongated reflection of a seagull on wet sand kept me company once she swam away (she was hungry, she said). Then I was very much alone; and then, just as a dark wave rises suddenly out of the darkness, breaks open into spume and sprays you, longing for Mrs. Wenuke Lei McLeod came to me, and in my vision she was as humidly cool and perfect as jungleside sea air.
20
After that, there were slow late night sounds of heels on the just-shined tiles of hotel lobbies whose inset patterns now receded ever more vividly to ever greater distances. Beneath a potted plant, a longhaired slendernecked woman waited for midnight, her hands in her lap. I approached her, almost weeping. When she caressed my arm, her fingers reminded me of a crested iguana, slowly drawing itself along a branch.
And I thought, my God, my God, I am so weary of being a murderer; when can I find someone perfect enough to kill me? Who will she be? Will she first permit me to gorge my desires on her white-banded flesh and bluish face? And just before it happens, as her mouth suddenly tightens and for the very last time I stroke the preparatory pulsing of her tentacles, would it be hypocrisy or love if I asked her to remember me when it was over, and perhaps even put on widow’s weeds?
THE BANQUET OF DEATH
You must share death amongst you in order to exhaust it and cause its dissolution, so that in you and through you death may die.
Valentinus
1
In keeping with this aphorism, we formed a society, Goldman, Mortensen, Sophie and I, and commenced to hold secret banquets at the graveyard. Mortensen could read the gashes and angles of any rune on a stone. It was he who had uncovered certain possibilities. Although I now suspect that he doubted Valentinus, for curiosity he went forward, which is to say downward. I no longer remember why Sophie and I committed ourselves. Being younger in those days, we owned more to lose, but our losses seemed proportionately less permanent. As for Goldman, whom we acknowledged as our cleverest executor, he managed by virtue of feeling needed. Before the moon had waned twice he achieved communication with the dead.
The first was a very tall yellow skeleton, who began shyly enough with three taps from behind the mausoleum wall; I hypothesized that its skull must be the percussive transmitter, at which Sophie put her finger to her lips. We must have been happy then. Goldman replied three times with the tip of his pickaxe, carefully or solemnly. Within the hour, he and the skeleton were conversing in Morse code. Mortensen, who possessed equal facility with that system, now took the pickaxe and excitedly tapped out: DEATH MAY DIE. After a long time the skeleton replied: DIE. Sophie gripped my hand.— YOU MUST SHARE DEATH, signaled Mortensen, and the skeleton tapped back: DIE. As soon as that fingernail moon had misted over, the tomb-door commenced to creak outward, and within the slowly widening column of blackness I saw my first animated death’s-head, which reminded me of another moon rising sideways, or perhaps of the peculiar yellow-white glare, which pretends not to be luminous but nonetheless imprisons our gaze, of a locomotive approaching in fog, before that single light has drawn close enough to subdivide into three. Anyhow, out it shambled, its long toenails clicking like a dog’s, and joined us at our abominable table.— But this is extraordinary! said Mortensen. May I remind you all to repress whatever horror you feel?— We know that, said Sophie, carving up the meat.
In the service of mutual understanding, Goldman had prepared a vocal apparatus out of silk, leather, catgut and rubber, the bellows being powered by a shielded air compressor placed within the patient’s ribcage. It was almost comical to watch him hook it up to the skeleton, which might have been wary, wooden or irresolute (lacking facial muscles, it conveyed no such niceties). Sophie stared; Goldman turned on the device; the skeleton wheezed: I am dead.
But death may die, insisted Mortensen, leaning forward.
Die, agreed the skeleton. Accordingly, it began to grapple at its ribcage, breaking out bone-slats, pitifully striving to pull itself into yellow kindling, as if dissolution could be something to yearn for.— You’re mistaken! cried Mortensen.— Fortunately, Goldman the practical knew what to whisper.— I wonder what he said? I also wonder which premortem occupation taught him his tricks: Was he once a motivational counselor, an unlicensed abortionist or a combat sergeant? Strange to say, he lacked an interest in people. The outcome was that Old Bones gave over trying to destroy itself, its skull swivelling heavily down against its sternum even while it spied on us through the tops of its eyesockets. (The mystery of consciousness is no greater for a death’s-head than for, say, Mortsensen.) Sitting down in its own flinders, it chewed a cutlet, and its jaws squeaked like unoiled hinges.
Second was the sad brittle lady with the spiderwebs in her eyes. She persuaded Sophie to tickle her inside her ribs. I suppose she climaxed. Her friends had friends, and before we knew it we who still lived were outnumbered.
We always began with a toast: To death. But you already know that what our society intended was its extirpation. To what extent the dead lay ready to ratify that project remained debatable, no matter how interestingly they enunciated through Goldman’s apparatus. They resembled children in a way, or perhaps we
were children to them; but they were less alien than loathsomely familiar. With the exception of the warlock, I acquit them of making illicit advances or offering temptations of any sort. They never even intimated that through their example we could shake off the misery of being alive. All we could hope for was a temporary compromise, so I believed; while Mortensen for his part demanded that we set out with the utmost straightforwardness to understand and obey the rules of death no matter how long that took. My reading of Valentinus was that whatever we might learn would derive from the reaction-process of consumption, not from the dead themselves. I might have been wrong about this, for whenever a corpse stalks toward me in the darkness, unfurling its putrid fingers, grinning, snarling or doing whatever else its rotting substance accidentally impels it to, even now I can’t help but imagine (I wouldn’t say hope for) a significant experience. Mortensen and Goldman disagreed as to whether the dead were enchained in forgetfulness or merely existed in a state of being which we had not yet mapped out. In either case, once we four and our new friends had consumed enough death, what lay beneath it must begin to show, like the fossil of a great beast in the bed of a receding lake. I refrained from voicing my minuscule differences of opinion, even to Sophie, since I had nearly reached that age (oh, but never quite yet!) when whatever we do is worse than useless; besides, seven years before, when our leader first opened unto us his sweet treasury of aspirations, we had hoped and believed. As dark as the way might be, the end was undeniably glorious.
2
Certain know-it-alls insist: Death is nothingness.— Lucretius pointed out that if this be so, there is literally nothing to fear. (The pain and grief of dying shine no relevance on the state of being dead.) But people do fear cemeteries, and still more the dead themselves—for in their progression away from us, corpses wax not merely pitiable but (if I may employ an unscientific term) hateful. Might this reaction of ours, which among living humans approaches the universal, be explained simply as the assertion of the life instinct? Mortensen posited otherwise (and when he did, a knowing eye sometimes began shining out of a hole in a hunk of fossil driftwood). Thus the four of us founded our society on the principle that death is a positive state, which the living acknowledge, although they pretend not to. The seeming malignity of the dead may be reduced to a projection of our desire not to comprehend them. Mortensen’s antidote: Partake of death generously, with opened eyes.
Because the benefit for which we banqueted was so material, none of us broached the matter of whether we had accepted sorrow into our partnership. Speaking only for myself, I now wonder if some prior melancholy could have in some way weakened my constitution, or perhaps even my judgment, in the years before I haunted cemeteries. Concerning Sophie and Goldman I cannot say, but in his youth Mortensen seems to have imbibed the horror of some dying person’s ever more futile, wordless and mad beseechings. Perhaps he had attended the deathbed of a slowly asphyxiating parent or spouse (there was a pallid circle of naked flesh on his ring finger). Valentinus teaches that once one crosses that particular divide, his gaze comes to resemble a cat’s—although as I recollect that passage I find myself at sea as to whether the crosser was supposed to be the watcher or the performer of death. On the subject of Mortensen, I sometimes thought to read desperation in his eyes. Wasn’t it something of just that sort which he meant to stamp out?
3
Sophie had the dreamy lips of a Sphinx. The first time that the dead lady kissed her, she barely managed not to scream. When we left the cemetery, she rushed to the bathtub to scrub herself; it took an hour before she called herself clean. Goldman reminded her that to get to the meat of death one does unpleasant things. She knew that, she said. Now I suspect that the only reason she declined to quit our society was her loyalty to me—although her smile always used to be sad in any case; and well before she first kissed me she had already begun collecting dead butterflies. As for my motivations, I should have asked Goldman, who remembered everything, and did not even express perplexity as to the effects of the foul medicine we so busily imbibed. He and I had first met at Mortensen’s famous speech, which asserted that we who live resign ourselves to death for no better reason than people were once resigned to slavery, operations without anesthetic, and any number of such evils. Mortensen, you see, was young once. He hated suffering of any sort. His blood circulated at a velocity sufficient for hope, or evil-fighting. Once the audience had departed the lecture hall—which process took less than two breaststrokes of my watch’s spider-arms since there were so few cultivated people in Boston, even including the county medical examiner and his staff—then we three ascended the steps to Mortensen at the podium, and the dusty purple stage curtain behind him became the opaquest entity ever when we clinked our water-glasses against his and toasted: To death! While he scarcely looked at Sophie, I knew that of all of us she had made the most delightful impression on him, not that it mattered to me. All I yearned for then was to accomplish something marvelous. Goldman was already proposing to fit us out with silver-plated pickaxes.
Although her sincerity attracted me, I barely knew Sophie in those days. She too must have grieved for some stale corpse. Soon enough I got fond of her and wished to save her from death; and had I resigned from the society there would have been no hope of that. For my own part, the more I banqueted, the less I cared about dying. Thus I seemed to be freeing myself from error.
Unfailingly strict, Mortensen quizzed her on the snake, the ibis, the eye. Although, indeed because she breathed the living’s natural resentment of the dead, she did not fail him. More than any of us, it seemed, she longed for our purpose to be achieved. So on the following night, when we strolled down to the domes among the cypress trees, all four of us ready if not exactly hungry for the Banquet of Death, she saw the snake before Mortensen did, and when the eye appeared (on the site of a Masonic burial), she chaffed him on not having spotted the ibis. By now the graves were already opening like the covers of drowned books in a tidal current, and that night we met the warlock, who could transform himself into a worm whenever he liked. From him we learned that the Black Depths, as his kind call this earth, extend down into bedrock, and through crooked channels to the Red Place. This news expanded Mortensen’s ambitions, not that I cared. (I mostly tried to avoid talking with anyone.) Mortensen, however, proposed to refrain from harrowing hell, since that might be construed as aggression, not to mention that it would destroy a previously unstudied system. Therefore we ought to form an alliance with its inhabitants, based on common interest. And so we wined and dined the warlock, famishing for knowledge and greatness.
By now I more definitely inclined against the miasma of vileness which ever overhung our banquets, like a wall of withered ivy. Perhaps you too would consider them dislikeable occasions. In the style of lovers and of alchemists, we sought to recombine opposites into some divine substance; so our repasts were invariably a mix of succulence and filth, our salad greens being jeweled with maggots, our bread baked from powdered bones, our savory meats basted with cadaveric fluid, while we drank fine old wine mulled with cinnamon and humerus-sticks, slurped up blood puddings topped with spun sugar, and (for our digestions’ sake) finished with prunes stewed in rancid ichor. Nibbling Mortensen’s earlobe, the warlock said he hadn’t eaten so well for a hundred years! He was glad to share with us both life and death; he quite admitted to liking our point of view. I wish you could have heard the sound his eyeballs made when he rolled them. The fact that he kept clear of Goldman, who was so superior in emergencies, stimulated my mistrust; for with his inventory of evil tricks he might prove yet more practical than our cleverest member. In short, what if he cultivated Mortensen in order to gull him? Valentinus implies that death extends up as well as down, so why did the warlock harp only on the Red Place? Forcing myself out of silence, I inquired what he knew about worlds above. The warlock replied with a truly unpleasant grin that he declined to traffick with Celestial Assassins. I most tactfully sank my canine teeth
into my lower lip until dawn arrived, and the dead had clattered, sunk or oozed back into their graves, at which point I made known my concern that our research emphasis might be disproportionately negative.— First we must get to the heart of death and share it out, explained Mortensen. Think of rotten leaves in a drainpipe. Until they’re cleared nothing goes deeper. Then, when we’ve descended to solid rock, we’ll change course, and drink sky nectar!— Meanwhile our banquets wore on, and I had so far advanced as to gulp a bowlful of corpse-suet without even seasoning it with a sprig of the wild fennel that grew so rankly in the cemetery. Each night I saw new egg-white faces bending over their portions, slurping up marrow through artificial beaks fashioned of unicorn’s horn, while beneath the table dead cat-children prowled as wide-eyed as owls, opening their mouths in quest of food. On a gaunt horse whose bones kept falling off, a one-eyed man came riding. He reached into his chest, withdrew his heart and tossed it into our stewpot with a fuming splash. We toasted: To death!— Nor did the warlock’s blandishments raise my eyebrows anymore. That gentleman was nearly intact, although his face was moldy. He had even kept all his teeth. One night in late summer he invited us to tour the ocean floor, which even at this date lies mostly uninhabited by the dead, although certain drowned people have taken it upon themselves to represent the rest of us. He explained that the Mummy Lady on Sophie’s right would drown us in the stewpot, or else we could ask ghastly Mr. Mooncrow to gnaw our throats.— Well, actually, said Mortensen, we mean to stay alive, you see, forever if possible—
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