Oho! cried the warlock. Then we’ll be great friends. But see here: To live forever one must die.
I glanced at Sophie, who merely gazed around the company with charming openness, and presently returned the topic to the Upper Realm, where perfect truth is said to live. At this the warlock contradicted his own dig at Celestial Assassins by inviting her on a midnight promenade, commencing immediately. Destination: the Tree of Knowledge! That was how I first learned that the dead can be unfair. Frankly, I felt indignant; I thought I had gotten away from that. But I held my peace as usual, and so those two went their private way, while Mortensen shared tidbits with the Mummy Lady, whose little eyes were as lovely as gold coins. How far had we diminished death thus far? Goldman had already departed the table in order to measure the apparent speed of the moon between his thumb and forefinger. That left me friendless—for it had long since been clear that Mortensen and Goldman considered me a nothing. All I had ever offered them was Sophie.
4
By Mortensen’s command we now had to give up daylight altogether. On the final occasion, holding hands, Sophie and I walked our long street of dark cobbles, which were half silvered with New Year’s sunlight, and passed the old man squeezing oranges for juice in his hand-crank press, while the ladies smiled beneath the parasol of his wheeled stand, licking their painted lips. Once upon a time we too had been his customers. Even now Sophie declined to say what the warlock had showed her.— At least tell me if you ate anything, I said, but she answered: Don’t put me to the test.— Goldman and Mortensen were waiting at the cemetery gates. The former was calm, and the latter smiled with the same hopefulness as a child who expects something appetizing for dinner. Here came dusk. Reentering these shady, sky-roofed corridors whose domed, crossed, gabled porticoes and engraved stone-wreathed cells exhaled a half-imaginary odor of decomposition, we burgled a mausoleum and broke open four coffins whose contents would thicken tonight’s banquet. Here we promised to dwell until our knowledge could bring back the light. I admit that I would have hesitated, but Sophie swore her oath unflinchingly, and Goldman was so understatedly cavalier about everything that, reminding myself how grateful I had been on the night when Mortensen taught us to fix our meditations on the Dark Door, I too bound myself, at which a comforting dullness descended upon me.
Behind the concave-winged marble angel who clasped the gilded shell for FATHERS and FAMILY began a deep hollow where the Great Flood had wrenched away a full acre of old graves; and down there we held our nightly banquet, dining on overturned slabs, with crowds of new-made ghouls around us. Two or three times I thought about the street where Sophie and I used to live. It was as if I were at the bottom of a well gazing up at a blue marble of sky.
5
At first the banquets took place at what adepts refer as the time of the living midnight.— What is the color of death? Mortensen kept asking the dead. Soon he would have mapped the infinite. The warlock was with us from moonrise to dawn. He was gloomy, perhaps, but never asked for our pity. I nearly began to consider him a member of our society once I overheard him teaching Mortensen about the Bitter Sea. Rolling his last cigarette, Goldman recleaned the putrid bellows of his speaking-apparatus; while I modeled myself after the tall bronze soldier leaning on his saber before the wide rectangle of Pablo Riccheri’s tomb. Sophie was copulating with a swollen blue man—for isn’t miscegenation a sharing and exhausting of our common feast? After that I no longer wanted her.
We now ate nothing but cadavers and bones, aside from the occasional dead birds Sophie gathered just before dawn. From each repast to the next, it seemed, at least to me, that the light in our neighbors’ eyesockets was rekindled; and as centipedes and ashes commenced to fall from their ears they attended to Mortensen with diminished apathy. We four agreed that we were indeed in some measure depleting their deaths; so that what we had done for them, they could do for others; perhaps by midwinter we would be prepared even to meet the denizens of the Red Place. I asked the warlock which fruit he had fed Sophie, and he replied: That must be concealed from doubters such as you.— Enough now, said Mortensen, cracking open a skull for me.— Once I had eaten, nausea and misery kept me quiet. I reminded myself that the death of the One gives life to many.
There came the night when the dead began to look around them of their own volition, and so they perceived each other’s hideousness. Mortensen lectured them that the most hateful thing is to be dead in secret, because that avoids the question of what one is.
Die, said our tall yellow skeleton, in what I thought to be insolent or threatening style.
6
As it happened, this skeleton possessed a more excellent memory than most of the other dead; it could even remember kissing someone. I asked how we could kill death, and it said: Love.
Sophie demanded: What do you mean? If I loved you, could I kill your death?
The warlock said: Even Christians say you must give up your life to save it.
That’s not to the purpose, said Sophie, almost sharply. I was asking about you people who’ve already lost your lives.
We’re not people, laughed the blue man, behind whom several pairs of living eyes glowed as glossily as berries in various dead skulls.
We’re advising you to die, the warlock reminded us. Nothing but cowardice keeps you from taking that step.
Goldman was completing his explanation to Mortensen about the mathematical proportions of skulls in relation to their inner content, so it was to Sophie whom I whispered my question: Could the dead mean us evil?— She turned away, leaving me to my own miseries. Now Mr. Mooncrow was leading her inside a dome filled with murmuring ghouls. I knew what knowledge she would give and get of him. Truth to tell, each night the dead seemed more active. So did the many beautiful things which claimed the moistness beneath our banquet slab before dawn: the snails whose jet-black shells glistened like cloisonné, the clean-picked little skulls goggling up at us like bespectacled elementary-school students who hoped to be called upon by the teacher even as luna moths emerged from their nostrils; the hard seedpods filled with stars. Beneath the table, sweet small bats were parting purple-velvet leaves of funereal cabbage with their darling claws, so that they could watch our demonstrations. The bird-skulled woman bowed and pecked at her glass of urine-infused wine, as if she might soon pay attention to me. Perhaps if each one of us swallowed down more, we could reverse all imperfections, and achieve what Mortensen had begun to call the dark comfort. Watching me, or so I supposed, certain decayed banqueters worked their jaws, as if they were preparing to speak. Had Mr. Mooncrow uttered a syllable just now? Perhaps it was merely that my hearing was sharpened since I had so long avoided the hummings of the sun. (I should have asked Goldman about this.) Turning his back on the rest of us now that Sophie had gone, the warlock passed his hand over the ground, and blue hands began to claw themselves out of it. Meanwhile the Mummy Lady played with Mortensen—who, truth to tell, was undersexed; but he rose to the occasion, thereby fulfilling the interests of science. The warlock raised his glass to mine and toasted: To death.
Since my curiosity had not died yet entirely, I asked him whether there might be a Dead Book of the Dead with naked meanings in it, which would save its reader even at the cost of death to many others, but he replied: Has your name been spoken?
By whom? I said.
Then you’re among the ignorant, said he, baring his teeth. I walked away, but the skeleton followed me, saying: Die.
Goldman was digging a rectangular hole. Even he had begun to shrivel a little bit—but then, don’t we all? One of the articles of our society was that we must resist pitying one another, much less ourselves; anyhow, Goldman, surely the most sensible of any of them, was by that very token my most depressing companion, at least among the living, so his decay touched me less than Sophie’s.— When I took him aside, he said: Analyze the problem. Do what you have to do.
Die, the skeleton advised me.<
br />
Accordingly, I took up Goldman’s pickaxe. Mortensen would not approve, and indeed I rarely sanctioned my own deeds anymore; be that as it may, I smashed that skeleton, skull and spine, while other dead sat eating. Mr. Mooncrow and I collected the fragments and threw them into the stewpot, and Sophie, obediently opening her cunt, satisfied Goldman. I tried to remember the way her eyes used to be when she daydreamed. Saying nothing about my transgression, Mortensen ladled out the latest broth. The stench of his breath was worse than my coffin’s. To tell you truth, I hated my existence. I poured out rainwater from an antique ewer, but no one wanted any. Goldman’s corpse-women kept wandering to and fro among the tombs, gathering shrouds with which to feed the fire. Sophie scratched herself with her long black fingernails. Her hair was finer than spiderwebs. The warlock and Mortensen discussed the wisdom of worms, and the interesting operations of decomposing corpses. It was not unpleasant. In a very committed voice Mortensen asked Mr. Mooncrow what, if anything, the dead might feel for us, at which his interlocutor contented himself with so horrific a hoot that all the churchyard owls came wheeling round his grisly head; Mortensen muttered inexplicably: Give and take, that’s all.— I sat remembering how outside the cemetery one often saw a mother lift up her child as it smiled into her face. How many times had that action been carried out in this world? There was certainly no more need for it. I was sick to death of it, and so for a moment I nearly became desperate.
Mortensen and the warlock now raised a new toast to necrophores, while a furry, moldy woman paired up with a beautiful dead Gypsy to carry to our larder a body which might still be breathing—an appetizing development which appeared to fascinate the shy, worried-looking woman-thing whose chalky face glowed as she squatted between two graves, lowering her slender arms, casting off her mushroom garments.— Who strikes down the wicked? groaned the blue man.
Why the scene should have wearied me I cannot tell; anyhow, I strolled up out of the hollow, and arrived at a glowing hole in the hillside I had never seen before, doubtless because Mortensen was right, and ever more of whatever contained death was revealing itself as death receded, leaving decorations behind. As I looked in I could see a fair sepulcher, and within it a lady’s corpse, nude and greenish-yellow like some deliciously unripe fruit, and in a ring around her, five hundred worms were chasing each other in such perfect array that I marvelled. When I asked her name, she replied: I call myself alive, but am I rooted in anything?
Remembering the warlock’s words, even if not understanding them, I asked: Has your name been spoken?
Do you have the knowledge to name me, or would you eat first?
Mortensen had rehearsed us on the three perturbations of life: fear, grief and desire. All are but vain reachings after life itself, whereas in death there is nothing but peace—if one sets aside the dead’s angry hunger after the living.— So I said: Would you eat with me?
We’ll eat knowledge down to nothing.
I said: My first duty is to eat death.
When I climaxed inside her, it felt more as if she had climaxed inside of me. I was filled with her death. She asked no question afterward; better yet, I felt even less for Sophie, as if I were lighter in my guts; my gross matter was becoming moss. Sobbing, Sophie stuffed herself with dead meat. As for me, I was eating less than I was supposed to.
And someday, said Mortensen, we’ll make it so we won’t die. Not ever. And all the dead who aren’t too dead might even come back to life. And then cemeteries will never again be places of horror and sadness.
What will they be then? asked Sophie.
First they’ll be museums. And then, when we don’t even need to remember death anymore, they’ll become fields, gardens and homes.
Sophie cracked a marrowbone between her teeth and said: But if no one dies, won’t there be too many people?
That won’t be our problem. We’ll have solved the greatest problem of all time. Let someone else fix that one.
Mortensen sat smiling with love for the future. Goldman, whom I knew less than anyone, kept the fire going, and there were now three more shriveled corpse-women who always helped him, stirring the ladle round and round and moaning like the wind. So we made our toast: To death! Dead children took Sophie by the hand, and led her to places where corruption had advanced so far that there was nothing left to do with its traces but scrape them up and dump them into the cauldron. Before dawn we invariably withdrew into our open coffins, and Mortensen would edify us with such old poems as:
Search while thou wilt, and let thy reason goe
To ransome truth even to the Abysse below.
We three lay staring straight up at the spiderwebs at such moments, and a black marble statue of a nude woman watched over us. Sophie was asleep, her face a purple jelly-jewel, more ovoid than it used to be, her blue hands slightly swollen. My growing indifference to everything deepened my trust in Mortensen, who had so consistently proclaimed that the living and the dead are one.
7
Yes, we were sharing in death, although (with the possible exception of Sophie) we had not yet learned any Names, much less been called by our own. We had achieved first emptiness, then delusion, then the contemplation of delusion, so that we could commence to understand that even emptiness is a delusion. And so we did not care when the warlock, who might have been testing us but more likely was merely lonely, informed us that he knew the whereabouts of hidden treasure. I can’t say whether anything terrified him. Even had he offered to mix the most precious jewels with the most rotten carrion, it would not have fit our program, unless his stones were small enough to swallow whole. Likewise, Mortensen’s reminders of our purpose might as well have been an accountant’s sums. I felt certain that our project could never, no matter how brilliantly it might succeed, lead us into any freshness of being. That might have been another reason that all three of the other members of our society grew ever duller in my estimation.
But Sophie still sometimes reached out, however mechanically, for a dead child’s hand. Twice she devoured banquet-meat as she was expected to, then rushed off to vomit between the tombs. Many a shy corpse shambled after her.
Mortensen enthusiastically informed me: This so-called hateful state she’s in must be her dialectical maximum. It will intensify, and then she’ll be free.
Sophie whispered: I’m not worth anything. I eat filth and death.
Mortensen confided: She’s our treasure. She’s deeper than any of us.
There came the happiness of another banquet, where we and our dead friends all felt like ourselves, throwing the pallid exoskeletons of crayfish out of our abundant boiling-pot, so that the armless, legless dead could graze them up; and Sophie withdrew into the tall chalky corpse-weeds whose leaves were many-fingered hands. Agreeing with Mortensen that the finest course is to face everything, I drank off another bowl of a highly disagreeable soup—although it had begun to strike me that the eating of death might signify far less than I had imagined, for in death even the sorrow dies, leaving mere innocuous moldiness. Was this the secret we had devoured so much to find? If not, how would we know when we attained it? The greenish-yellow lady with whom I had eaten knowledge reached for another tidbit, moaning: Why did no one save my life?—which I interpreted as evidence that she was closer to us than were we to her.
Now it was winter. The corpses had begun to pillage each other’s coffins for firewood, and some of the bolder ones pulled the weaker apart, so there was always something to eat.
We’re on the verge, said Mortensen.
The warlock confided: Soon I’ll be Lord of the Ten Thousand Things.
Looking up from the fire, Goldman asked: What about us?
His three corpse-ladies sang: Die.
I thickened our broth with the contents of a much-cracked cremation urn, and Mortensen revealed more to us about the peculiar perfections and beauties of death, which do not lead to rest. For Goldma
n I cannot speak, but Sophie and I already knew everything.
8
One very cold night Mortensen, shivering, withdrew, and sat against a decrepit monument, saying: Too much unshared death! No matter what we choke down, we’ll never reach the bottom of the bowl!— At this, his interlocutor, Mr. Mooncrow, hooted, leaping over a family tomb. The fellow had been literally skin and bones, and now look at him! As for Mortensen, he’d become a creature of angles, gaunt and wretched. Thus both approached their zenith, there in the place of marble tombs eroded into dead white woman-silhouettes. Through the dreamy dullness which defined us I felt grief’s bite, but why? Wearying of my eavesdropping, I stole away to inform Goldman or Sophie of our leader’s despair; for in our line of work one of the last enthusiasms to perish is the desire to tell tales. I encountered Sophie first. She was cutting up a dead child. Her hair had gone grey, and she wore dead beetles for earrings. Almost pityingly (although she never opened her eyes), she replied: Now you see the obvious.
Then why go on eating wormy meat?
We’ll never get the taste out of our mouths now. And if we run away, we’ll die eventually and come back to this.
But if we reach the Red Place—
The same. Even when I eat their hearts I’ve stopped believing in sweetness.
Mortensen said—
He’s exhausting life and death. He’s almost won.
What about you?
I wanted eternal life for you. Don’t you remember what we promised each other?
No.
Instead I found myself remembering daylight, the time of the dead noon; I remembered standing where the terra-cotta sidewalk tiles are shadowed, and the old man pressing oranges into juice, the ladies smiling thirstily all around him as I stood ankle-deep in the paper ruins of the old year. My greenish-yellow lady was claiming prior acquaintance with me, while the blue man said: Whatever will become of us has already become of us.— Sophie was plucking somebody’s long white hairs out of her mouth.
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