by Brian Hodge
“Not all,” she said. “Almost. Very close.”
“It wasn’t the broken string?” Art asked. “I thought...”
Belle shook her head. She didn’t look up, but she replied. “The string broke because it wasn’t right. If it had been right, she would not have broken the string.”
Art frowned. Strings broke all the time. How could the mixture of a drink have any effect? He might have bought it if Sammy had been trashed, but she had one drink, and only one drink, and she had been playing beautifully. It had been real. Too real, in fact.
“Who was he?” Art asked, shifting subjects.
Belle did not look up. She did not answer. Her cheeks colored, and Art’s brow furrowed.
“He wasn’t real,” Art said at last. “He was a hallucination, Belle. A dream.”
She ignored him, but the muscles in her neck tightened, and she leaned more closely over her work.
“He wasn’t real.” Art mouthed the words, but did not breathe them to life. He turned away.
Three deep green sprigs of parsley sat on a napkin at Belle’s side. She pored over her notes. There was enough in the bottle for one, maybe two more attempts, and she’d have to start again. The process was slow and tedious, bringing the mixture back to the point she’d already reached would take weeks. She had narrowed the possible missing ingredients dramatically, but there were still unknowns. Secrets were never easy to steal.
Her mind drifted. She still felt the sharp tingling sensation of his gaze, probing her, commanding her. She felt the heat rising and drew in a quick breath, gritted her teeth and clamped her eyes closed hard enough to send dancing spots across the inner screen of her eyelids. She curled her leg back and pressed her heel tightly between her thighs, rocking against it for a moment and shaking. The moment faded, and she breathed more slowly, not trusting herself to move for a long moment. Everything she did had a price attached to it, and to spill the bottle, or ruin the mixture, would be more than she could bear. She was so close.
Sammy’s voice lingered in the background of Belle’s thoughts. She’d heard that voice so seldom, and never the poetry. It was a soft voice, rich in timbre, but subtle. The room had resonated with each verse, but Belle knew that the silence that had been the backdrop was largely responsible for the illusion of volume.
Belle’s thoughts were clouded with the memory of heat. Her body had reacted, held and stroked by each note from the dulcimer, bent and nearly broken by the words. She had felt his breath, had shivered with the beat of something so alien, so powerful and erotic, that if she had died in that instant, the only thing she would have regretted was the incompletion She’d been aware of Art, as well, had known his need and felt it funneled through her into the moment. The hint of licorice burned on her tongue, coated in peppermint and soaked in deeper flavors. So different from where she’d started, the green bottle with the white label, bought at an off-the-street liquor store for too much money and releasing only the slightest hint of the magic within.
That same day, the day she’d found the forbidden drink, she’d found the bookstore. Shelf after shelf of words coated in dust and forgotten. She’d tasted the absinthe moments after purchasing it, slipping into an alley and taking a too-long draught from the neck of the bottle. With her secret treasure tucked deep in the depths of her purse, she’d run her fingertips along the spines of novels and histories, biographies and collections, leather and cloth, some covered in brightly colored dust jackets, and others with gilt lettering stamped deep.
Then she was discovered as a squat, balding man with one eye much larger than the other suddenly appeared around the end of one bookcase. Belle, too startled to speak, backed away, her fingers gripping the first book that she touched and drawing it free, holding it out in penance for stolen moments of deeply clouded thought. Money changed hands, money she could not afford, and the book was hers, as much a stranger as the man who sold it and she was off with her bottle and her dreams.
Sometime that night, she’d begun to read.
The parsley was more difficult than the peppermint. The recipe was meant for a much larger batch than the single bottle Belle had concocted, and it took her more than an hour of teeth-gritting and mumbled curses to complete the calculations. Even when she had the figure in her mind and on the paper across her knees, she agonized, going over each number one at a time as if afraid they’d shift and rearrange if she didn’t pay close enough attention.
At last she clipped the top of a single sprig of parsley and dropped it into her mortar. She knew the faint dust of the peppermint remained, but it didn’t matter. She ground at the leaves with the pestle, pressing tightly and feeling the faint release of juice, the smearing. She made a mental note to be very careful in removing it. Pouring some of the absinthe into the mortar, stirring, and then pouring it all back through a funnel was the best way to be certain. Her measurements were very exact, and if she left anything out, she would not be able to calculate the difference later. She would have to start over. Her shoulders sagged, just for an instant, at the thought. So close.
She worked the parsley to a paste, tipping the bottle now and then to drip a trickle of green liquid over the top, then working patiently to blend the paste to a thick syrup. Finally, wrists aching from the effort, she set the pestle aside on the napkin and reached for her funnel. She inserted it in the neck of the bottle and with practiced grace, she poured the contents of the mortar through. There was no discernible change. Green to green, soft rush of bubbles and the bottle stood, still steeped in mystery. Drenched in dreams.
She poured a little of the liquid into her mortar bowl, swirled it once, and poured it back through the funnel once again. Nothing left behind but a thin greenish coating on the porcelain skin of the bowl. She corked the bottle carefully, stood holding it in both hands, and carried it to the altar. It was actually a bar, or had been, but Art had renamed it the altar when Belle began insisting that nothing but her bottle be kept there. The bottle and the book. Pressed beneath a sheet of glass in an old picture frame, it remained open to the same page that it had been open to for nearly three years.
Belle whispered softly to herself as she placed the bottle reverently on the bar.
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph the sacred river, ran,
Through caverns measureless to man …
Down to a sunless sea....”
She shivered and the bottle nearly tipped as a moment of vertigo sliced through her. She righted it quickly and stepped back. The book and its frame seemed to watch her as she retreated, as she stumbled among the ingredients and tools and notes, as she tripped, finally, dropping to her knees. She cried out at the sharp contact with the floor, but bit the sound off quickly. She wanted no one else in the room. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
This time, she knew, it would have to be her. Art could not paint this moment. Sammy could not draw it from the strings of her dulcimer, or whisper it from her silent lips. The bottle glittered, and Belle looked away. She fought the urge to drink now, to soar and burn with the deep green liquor sliding through her system. It wasn’t time. If she drank now, he might not come. He might never come. He might come, and leave her. It had to be the afternoon. She had to be alone.
She stacked her papers as neatly as her trembling hands would allow and gathered her tools. She needed to clean up, and to ready herself. The others would have to be told, warned away and far from the bottle, and the room, when the time came. Belle had work to do.
Without a backward glance, she slipped from the room and into the kitchen. Behind her, the bottle continued to glitter, as if that flickering, captured light dancing along the green glass could watch, or think. Or dream.
Art didn’t want to leave, but he knew from the expression on Belle’s face that it was not a request. It was her house, after all. It was her gig, her dream or dementia or whatever you wanted to call it. As much as Art liked to see himself as the other half of a couple invo
lving Belle, he knew it was never going to happen.
Sammy only nodded, packing up her dulcimer and donning a long, shapeless jacket before slipping out the back door and into the alley beyond. Neither Art nor Belle knew where Sammy went when she wasn’t with them. Just that moment, Art would have liked to know. He would have liked to have been invited to follow, to belong somewhere during the period when he didn’t belong in his own home.
It was silliness, he knew, this jealousy he felt toward the bottle. Pointless and foolish. Any other night of the week he would have been up and out and gone without a word, but the thought that he was forbidden changed it all. He hated it, chomped against the invisible bit it implied, and, in the end he grabbed his coat and stomped out into the city without a word. As he moved steadily down the street and away, he felt the vague flicker of something familiar and distant, and he stopped frowning. He glanced at his hands, then back over his shoulder.
Very suddenly, he felt like painting. The urge came over him from nowhere, slipped into his thoughts and displaced his anger. He stood, undecided, the scents of oils and canvas wafting enticingly from his memory.
“Damn,” he breathed softly. He knew he couldn’t go back. Not yet. Not now. Belle wouldn’t even open the door, and if he grew more insistent, she might go to his studio and his rooms and throw his things out the windows. Images flickered through his mind. Belle prostrate, lying back across the floor. Sammy, fingers poised near the broken string, speaking softly, her words palpable in the incense-thick air. The green bottle, pulsing, growing and winding in a coil that reached to circle Belle’s prone form. He wanted to capture it, but was forced to memorize, eyes closed, gripping tightly each sinuous roll of what he had seen and refusing to let it fade.
He would paint. Not now. Not tonight probably, but he would paint, and when he did, he would bring that image to life. If he couldn’t give Belle her magic, he could record their combined failures. He could make it so real that the music and the lust burned the edges of the canvas.
He couldn’t shake the image of the coils.
“Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread.”
Art whispered the words, and again he shivered. He pulled his jacket more tightly about himself and headed off for Sid’s, a club where the music was dark and dreary and the lighting was more so. He wasn’t in a mood to dance or mingle, but the nightly call of alcohol rang in his ears.
“Fuck it,” he muttered to no one in particular. “Just fuck it.”
Belle poured the absinthe into a tumbler and set it on the altar. She knelt before it, trembling, feeling the weight of the empty house heavy on her shoulders. Now that she’d sent the others away she felt vulnerable, fragile and inadequate to the task she had set herself.
With a reverence that regularly brought scornful comments from Art, she opened her journal. In the pages of this book she’d documented her quest, her dreams, each and every mistake and small success. She had also recorded her research, and it was to this she turned for strength. The words that had dragged her into this surreal otherworld. The history of Xanadu.
"The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, –
Here Belle had scribbled a furious note, drawn from other sources - letters and fragments, notes of Lord Byron himself. She had crossed it all out, including the word anodyne, and replaced it with Absinthe –
from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage':
Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.’
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. "A person on business from Porlock" interrupted him and he was never able to recapture more than "some eight or ten scattered lines and images."
Belle closed the book. She had read the words so many times she could recite them as litany. She had researched and delved into the letters of Coleridge and Byron, certain she would find the answers she sought. Hundreds of lines, reduced to a snippet of rhyme, and still so powerful that movies had been centered on small quotes from the verse, and novels written in the attempt to finish the work. To close the portal, or open it, as Coleridge had seen it. To present to the world the quality that inspired Byron to insist on the publication of a broken poem, as if it were a key. As if, beyond the inspiration of Coleridge himself, Byron alone could see.
On the altar sat the fruits of years of labor. Belle believed that she knew more of the science and magic of Absinthe than any living being, and still she quaked at her ignorance. It was a gamble, each time, pouring the essence of each long-dead master’s work into her bottles and vials, crashing into the walls of their failures and seeing, just beyond her grasp, the essence, the purity of form that would show her what he had seen, what he would have written. The essence and completion of Xanadu that would make it real.
Art had made it surreal. He had grasped the tenuous threads of all Belle had striven for and woven them into an incomplete tapestry that teased her with its borderline truth. She loved him for his devotion and cursed him for the failure, but she knew that the failure was really hers. Sammy haunted her. There was more to the tiny, frail musician than met the eye, but there was no history, no record of things gone and those to come to measure her against. Sammy was as she was, and she, in the end, had failed as well. This one, also, on Belle.
Now came the test. No conduit. No half-truth or interpretation. Belle, the glass, the deep green magic, and the words. She would find the caves of ice and prostrate herself on their cold, sharp edges until she was accepted, taken or broken, but one with what had been lost. Dark powerful eyes haunted her, tracking each motion and each thought, seeing through flesh and bone and soul. Waiting.
She took the tumbler gently into her hands. Candlelight flickered about her, and the incense, ever-present, grew cloying and thick, a taste that lingered in the back of her throat, drying her out and reaching to the absinthe for succor and warmth. Belle shivered a final time, so deeply that she shook and nearly spilled the thick green liquid over her hands and the floor. Her knees rattled on the floor, and she gasped.
Throwing her head back, she brought the drink to her lips and upended it. The heat was intense, the burn glorious and excruciating and powerful, all at once, washing down through her in a burst of fire and dripping behind, bringing secondary sizzle to slowly singe her throat. She did not move, fearing it would be too strong, that she might vomit or pass out, that she might fail herself as so many others who had gone before. They hadn’t failed, though, because they hadn’t been reaching out for anything. Only Belle had failed, and as the hot liquor burned down her throat, she knew it was her courage that had been lacking, not the ingredients, or the mix, not the strength of will of another, presented as her sacrifice. Placing the glass on the altar, she glanced at her book – her notes – in scorn. She had been hiding in the research, hiding between the pages, lacking the courage to see. To know.
/> She closed her eyes, and the words came unbidden, slowly, then with growing force. She recited in a steady, throaty voice that purred with strength and resolution.
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery...”
Belle clamped her eyes tightly, her hands out to her sides for balance. The Absinthe leaked into her thoughts and drew her deeper, thickening her tongue as she fought for completion. Images opened in her mind. Art’s painting flashed into view, but with details he had never seen. The ice rippled with fire. The ground shook with the marching cadence of a horde of booted feet. The landscape surged with greenery, and huge, spouting geysers splashed into the air and fell to the earth, all in the rhythm of a huge heartbeat, drawing her inward.
Her body arched once more, prone against the floor, the altar before her and her knees spreading wider, inviting. She wore a short, soft linen dress, nothing beneath, but it didn’t matter. The sensations that washed through her had nothing to do with clothing, or the room surrounding her, or the world where she lived and breathed and lusted for … what?
“For he on honeydew hath fed,”
The words seeped up from beneath her, hands fashioned of letters that lifted her and offered her….
“And drunk the milk of paradise.”
She saw a young man, long flowing dark hair and a broad nose, dark eyebrows furrowed in concentration. In his hand he held a quill, dark with ink. He seemed to see her in that same instant, studying her, every inch and curve, eyes bright. His hand trembled, and a droplet of ink threatened to fall to whatever surface he penned upon.