He feels his body undulating forward on the waves, the water tapping against his eardrum. The air above him is dark and still, and he can hear the water lapping against stone walls on all sides as he comes in, floating on his back. Then candles begin to glow somewhere ahead of him, and around him, the flames start from embers and then grow to steady, unwavering fires, each with its own powdery ball of amber light, emanating from it. He can see now the walls of the chapel encompassing him, striped with shadows from the slender pillars upon which rest the Gothic arches that rib the ceiling. The Golem is being washed diagonally, feet first, across the floor and up the nave toward the altar. Gliding and spinning slightly, he flows over the smooth backs of the pews like worn river stones, colliding with the floating hymnals and prayer books. As he drifts further in, he can see the night-dulled colors of the stained-glass windows slipping past, and the bowed and veiled head of the statue of the Virgin in mourning, flanked by two gallant saints with flowing golden beards, protecting her from a group of menacing brown bears. The force of the torrent spins him slowly around on the surface of the waves, and he can see the candles lighting themselves along the length of the nave, their lights reflecting serenely on the agitated surface of the water.
As he turns around again, he can see that the Virgin has the Magician’s face, and that she is looking at him from under her veil, smiling. The water stills, and she stares at him with her golden eyes, smiling. The Golem stops drifting and hangs motionless in front of the altar, and the formaldehyde permeating his clothes and skin spreads out in a film on the water. And from beneath the tombstones and markers, where the dead lie buried beneath the paving stones, tiny crumbs of earth are buoyed through the cracks and seams, floating up to the surface, rolling toward the Golem, and as they emerge they begin to shine like fireflies, drawn to the surface and to the Golem. Soon he is haloed with shining motes in the formaldehyde, and one by one they transmit to him the sibilant, humming voices from beneath the stones, buoying him up with noiseless resonation like a thrumming gust, pushing him up, and suddenly the water goes as clear as crystal and the ground and pavings beneath, and he can see them all lying in their graves in the dim orange light from the candles, reaching gently down the iron stalks of their stands and playing a gleam of false life across lifeless features lying supine only a few feet below him, and they are looking at him, smiling. The water is dripping down onto them through the transparent lids of their coffins, and all the while they gaze at him, smiling. And rising in him the same feeling makes him fall back into the water noiselessly, smiling, shining with the wan twilight phosphorescence of motes of grave dirt dissolving in formaldehyde, and painting his body with their eerie, sourceless, blue-green chemical light, and he rolls over in the water, staring down directly into something collapsed, blackened eyes gaping up out of a smudged face in a rectangular coffin, and then he rolls back upright again, and the windows lining one side of the church are blazing with sunlight and, on the other side, the windows have gone transparent, revealing a cobalt-blue sky with twinkling stars and a vast, full, white-and-grey moon. The pillars have become columns, carved in the likeness of gigantic reeds, and the stained-glass tableaux depict smooth-contoured profiles of caramel-colored figures in white linen and pharaoh’s masks, and likewise the Virgin is wearing Christine’s shining mask of blue and gold, and her guardian saints stare out at him through the eyes of a hawk’s head, and a dog’s head.
THE CATECHISM AND THE TEN PLAGUES
From the causeway where she is standing, she can see him far below, crossing the square (it’s actually a broad rectangular bridge connecting two large buildings, with a round planter in the middle). He lurches to and fro among the ghosts, who take no notice of him. She thinks a moment, and then from her purse she pulls a pair of binoculars which she raises smoothly to her face.
He jerks into focus and simultaneously stops walking. Even from this distance she can see the whites of his eyes flashing as he looks around, sensing her, trying to see where she is. In a moment he’s going to glance up and notice her, and then his eyes will pounce on hers like an arrow shot along her line of sight—she quickly pulls from her purse, which is resting on the railing, an antique stereo viewer. With a steady hand she brings it into position under the binoculars, then very gradually begins to raise the viewer’s frames up over the lenses, slipping the glass panels of the slides carefully underneath him, like scooping a spider up off the floor with the edge of a sheet of paper. Now the stereo viewer’s panes completely cover the lenses—she drops the binoculars back into her purse without moving the viewer from her face.
He’s wandering around in the viewer slide now, disoriented. The scene is a sepia-tinted museum gallery, near the wall, with a gargantuan doorway looming next to him. Titanic people glide by like icebergs, women in antique gowns passing with the rustling of silk skirts, a rustling amplified to him like the roaring of waves, and men tapping by with walking sticks the size of pier pilings. (At this distance the scale of the slide wasn’t in exact correspondence with his size in perspective.) She adjusts the viewer, focusing the scene behind him like a rear-projection screen, and the next moment he’s full size. He is slithering along the wall, craning his head in all directions, looking either for her or the exit. He can feel her nearby—she takes her eyes away and examines the slide from behind: a tiny figure, more like a man-shaped smear, creeps along the surface of the glass, hovering over it, separated from the slide by an invisible meniscus of surface tension in three dimensions. If she is careful, she can slip a different slide underneath him, then remove the old one and raise the viewer back to the light again, changing the scene.
With care she selects a park in San Veneficio and eases it into the slot in front of the museum slide. Then she whips out the museum slide with a flick of her ring and little fingers and brings the viewer back up to her eyes.
The Golem is standing on the outskirts of the park, just by the gate, blinking and rubbing his eyes at the sudden burst of preserved daylight. The moment he’s able to see, he appears to recognize instantly where he is, and he darts through the wrought-iron gates and down the wide gravel path, threatening at any moment to vanish among the trees and bushes. He’s moving fast, right along the edge of the grass. The pedestrians in the park drift unhurriedly down the lane, pay him no mind. Without taking her eyes off him, Christine’s fingers flick smartly through the box of slides in her bag, plucking out another shot of the same park from further toward the center, including the same path the Golem is now taking. She holds it aloft over the viewer and waits. She waits without wavering or moving a muscle, smiling, enjoying herself patiently, watching his form shrinking, skulking at the verge of the path with his loping, crippled walk. Suddenly he drops neatly away to the right behind a sepia bush and disappears. Without losing a moment she drops the next slide into place and withdraws the first all in one continuous motion, and suddenly she can see him again, in the distance, weaving back and forth in the shrubs, trying not to be seen. She watches him coming, and as she does she has the strange idea that, although he is definitely coming toward her, his form appears to be dwindling away exactly as if he was moving away from her. Angling the viewer slightly from side to side, she notices that she can rotate her little window on the scene a full circle by turning around in place. At a roughly forty-five degree angle from his general position he seems to be approaching again—the shrinking effect is gone. Satisfied, she watches him coming slowly closer, hampered by his exaggerated strategy for not being seen. From time to time he stops completely, and his head swivels in all directions, trying to find her eyes. Every time, and the closer he gets, he seems to be guessing with greater and greater accuracy, and becoming harder to see as a consequence, since he is beginning to figure out in which direction he should cover himself.
He steps out from behind a tree into the square. She studies him intently, all at once he’s not trying to hide anymore. Instead, he walks across to the fountain and stands with one hand resting on
its lip, staring into it. The fountain is made of clear glass and its bottom rests on a huge kaleidoscope, flashing colored lights up from underneath through the water to spatter the trees and the faces of pedestrians with tiny panels of colored light, oozing into each other and refracting out of each other. Hovering motionless in the center of the pool is a freshwater octopus, shifting color and pattern to match the kaleiding from beneath, but always a little delayed, so that the last image lingers a moment above its replacement before fading altogether, never to be repeated, like a visual memory complete in one moment. The Golem’s eyes are fixed on the octopus. They stand there a moment, his eyes on it, her eyes on him, the octopus standing still in the middle of the fountain, the Golem standing still at the edge, and Christine standing still by the railing with her viewer.
Then the Golem reaches into his pocket, eyes unwavering, and produces a small tin box. He opens the box and pulls out something brown and glistening—it looks like a shred of liver. With two fingers he tosses it into the water. The octopus extends a languid tentacle and plucks it up before it touches the bottom, curling it toward its beak, underneath. Christine looks more closely—what is he up to? The Golem suddenly thrusts his head under the water. She can see his mouth moving, distorted by the curved glass wall of the fountain into a wide black stain, evidently giving instructions to the octopus. She rocks a little back, feels the reins being tugged from her hands . . .
The octopus turns toward her. It can see her. It can draw her out of herself, as a favor to the Golem. In a moment the patterns change to splotched purple and yellow across its hide and everything around her goes dark except for a patch of light across the upper half of her face, across her eyes, where curling patterns of purple and yellow spangle her cheeks and glitter like embers reflected in her golden eyes. The colors get more intense and deepen, as if they’d been hollowed out and filled with light like paper lanterns, until her eyes are overflowing with them and they run down her cheeks in streaks of white-hot silver. She leans back as if a chasm had opened at her feet, but she’s still falling forward, looking down at the scene in the viewer now and seeing the aperture between his hovering figure and the slide, and watching that aperture gape wide, and feeling it swing round like a frame in a revolving door, without the glass, flashing past her and swallowing her up, toppling past a mirror frame into the picture. She turns around and then it’s light again—but dimmer, domesticated light—she’s not where she was.
The room is enormous, with a high domed roof over her head, and the city spread out far below, visible through the many small windows, small enough to be out of proportion with the wall. A hallway with a window and stairwell at the end stretches off in front of her. The viewer’s gone—she’s been sucked inside it. She turns around, looking at the roof, the pillars supporting it sprouting in the corners, turning toward the unusually high elevated stage at the far end.
The Golem is standing on the stage. It’s incredible—he’s smiling at her! They stare at each other a moment. Then, with slow deliberation, he takes a step toward her, on the short flight of steps from the stage. She is so surprised that she can think of nothing better to do than turn and run as fast as she can down the hall.
From where he stands he sweeps the head of his cane across her feet (in perspective) and she is whipped to the floor, landing flat on her stomach, knocking the wind out of her—the gold mask flies off and out of her face and skitters across the floor. Breathless, she scrambles out onto the landing after it, pinwheeling her arms through the bars of the banister after it shoots through them, watching it ricochet off an open windowsill and go spinning off into the shadows, flicking spangles of reflected gold onto brick walls and darkened windows, plummeting down the shaft toward the black waters of the lake below. She runs down the steps to the window and pokes out her head in time to see the mask wink once more in the light before vanishing between the gaping jaws of a massive fish. It stares blankly up at her for a moment before sinking into deep water again with a faint gurging sound.
The Golem’s coming—slow, regular, ponderous footfalls. She turns without looking up and steps out onto the lower landing. Then she takes the next step more quickly, and then another and another until she’s running down the stairs.
The stairs stop. She bounds down and finds nothing but floor where the well ought to continue. Overhead, the stairs creak slowly and regularly, a measured, heavy tread. She ducks out the door into the hall, heading for the stairwell on the opposite side of the building.
#1.) Hanged Men: She’s almost through the doorway when all the doors lining the hall crash to the floor. As she crosses, a long silhouette swings up from the near right-hand doorway momentarily barring her path, bobbing on a gust of wind from the window in the room—a pair of legs, one with a brace, tied together at the ankles, swinging back into the room attached to a figure in a long black coat, with his hands tied behind his back, hanging from the ceiling just inside the door—there’s one in every doorway, swinging back and forth on creaking ropes. Their heads are hooded with demure pink satin bags cinched tight around their necks, just inside the noose. She starts forward again but the roof splinters apart just above and ahead of her and more of them come slamming down directly blocking her way—she can hear the click of their necks snapping as the ropes crack taut like whips, but they’re still twisting and jerking weakly back and forth, strangling. Behind her, Christine can hear the Golem creaking down the stairs and into the hall after her. She elbows the hanging men aside and pushes forward, but a whole broadside of gallows trapdoors burst open along the ceiling and more of them drop down snapping their necks, and their chins flop down flat on their chests, cocking their heads too far on either side: one after another but all more or less at the same time, the bound feet swinging down and bouncing back, all the same. She has to wade in among them, shoving them out on either side like a little girl forcing her way back into a closet full of heavy coats and stinking of mold and rot . . . The way they jerk and swing she can hardly pass between them. She’s almost to the fire escape—she looks behind her: as the Golem approaches the hanging bodies around him whip sideways to let him pass, like hotel doormen or a phalanx of synchronized dancers, and he creeps through, spiderlike with his cane and an evilly patient expression on his face. Now she’s at the stairs—bolts down to the next floor and once again stops short at a blank expanse of concrete between her and the floor below. She barges out into the hall heading for the opposite stairwell like before.
#2.) Laboratory Specimens: This time the hall doors have been removed in advance, and in each doorway a different body falls swooning to the floor with exaggerated slowness. Gigantic fetal pigs, foals, calves, lambs, chicks, ducklings, monitor lizards, chimpanzees, etc., so large that each fills the room it’s in, and swells as its head drifts past the doorframe and splats to the floor. Their tongues flap between their slack jaws or loll out one side of their mouths, their eyes are partially collapsed and scummed with white film, their flesh is gray and clammy and stinks of formaldehyde: each is already slit open down the front with two symmetrical flaps, exposing multicolored shapes with gleaming contours, that spill out across the floor in voluptuously spreading pools of blood and rubbing alcohol. As their heads hit the floor, perfectly circular sheets of stinking gray-brown fluid flow out from them evenly into the hall. Running from the Golem, Christine is involuntarily jarred backward—the specimens’ blood bonds her feet to the floor like glue. Grabbing her leg, she tries to yank it free, and, meeting with no success, she is forced to spit around her shoes: the blood foams on contact with her acidic saliva and her foot comes free. From then on she is forced to weave in and out of the pools, finally hopscotching wildly as patches of dry floor become more rare. All the while the bodies are swelling, the heads in particular, forcing her to leap around them as well, and finally to clamber over them as best she can, slipping awkwardly on their cold, oozing flesh and sodden hair or feathers.
The level of rotted blood on the floor is r
ising—she has to jump from head to head to get to the stairwell, where a low glass riser prevents the blood from spilling down to the next floor. If she falls in, she’ll be stuck forever in blood amber. Behind her, the Golem is following effortlessly, if slowly, walking on the surface of the blood.
#3.) Mold: From where she is standing, the light filters in through the opposite window through floating threads of spores, like tiny hooks sequenced on a line. They undulate together in minute drafts, forming semivisible banners crisscrossing each other along the length of the hall, and in and out of the open rooms. More threads, finer than hair, ooze up from volcanic mounds of livid fungus heaped across the floor. Still more fungus creeps up the walls in ladders and gills and leprous stalagmites, and hangs in stubby icicles from the ceiling. In the rooms, it forms chains of gold and gray ringing the walls, chandeliers of pliant, clear puffballs strung together like bulbs of blown glass, and pastel-colored cocoons that hatch violet fireflies and hummingbirds whose wings are green and red and white, and who trail an exhaust of rust-colored spores. And here and there, people, looking half-melted, waving and murmuring, rooted to the floor, with rolling puffball eyes and cheeks rouged with blue and green molds.
Her first breath of the air in here clogs her throat like a wad of dry tissue paper. A mildewy stink, mingled with a rancid, meaty odor, flutters up from corrugated, fleshy funnels and veiny platters sprouting from the wainscoting. Clamping her hand over her lips, she struts disgustedly out onto the floor heading for the opposite stairway, as usual. But each step kicks up puffs of spores that rustle up the sides of her dress and begin tracing tiny filaments across her hands and face, like a butcher’s map sectioning a carcass into cuts. A buzzing sensation starting behind her nose, in her sinuses, begins creeping back into her skull, and in an instant she feels the channels that connect her brain to her body being dammed, one after another. An indolent, pulsing, numb feeling spreads up her body, her momentum crashes down around her ankles and she begins to weave back and forth, dragging her feet through more spore fronds and kicking up thicker and thicker ropes of spores that weave her up and down with tacky orange webs hovering a few millimeters above her skin.
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