Jeffries was found lying at the back of a small room, the floor covered with shards of broken glass. They were still trying to determine his age and how long it had been since someone had last seen him, because the man they found at the back of that room looked as if he might have died of malnutrition. There was plenty of food in the cupboards in the kitchen, and authorities were speculating that he had somehow gotten himself downstairs and was unable to get back up again. After all, the article mentioned, he appeared to be well over one hundred years old.
I took the article with me the next time I went to visit my mother. She was fighting a cold that day, and she was still in bed, so I pulled a chair up and read her the entire piece. At the end, I told her that this Mr. Jeffries was the same man who had emptied her.
How much of what I told her she actually absorbed, I guess I’ll never know. But when she didn’t react, not even with a blink or an attempt to raise a hand, I found myself leaning over her, screaming with a rage that seemed as if it had been boiling at the bottom of a volcano for centuries.
A nurse came rushing in before I could do anything crazy. She pulled me away and scolded me as if I were a little boy who had gotten into a scuffle out on the playground during recess. As she hovered over my mother, making sure I hadn’t hurt her, I backed into the wall and suddenly became aware of what I had nearly done.
I had nearly struck her. I had wanted to strike her. I had wanted to knock her on the side of the head until she understood that Jeffries was dead and that I had helped make that decision for him.
I had wanted to hurt her.
Oh, my God.
It was the anger.
I didn’t know why I would have walked out of Jeffries’s cellar with his anger and only the anger. Maybe I hadn’t been as susceptible to the other emotions. Maybe the anger was far more potent. Or maybe this was as much my anger as it was his.
I just didn’t know.
All I knew was that it was my anger now, and I could feel whatever was left of it still churning inside me.
* * *
The Final Fête of Abba Adi
by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
The Grizla triplets were famous, if not quite notorious, for their beauty and artistry. While they were not courtesans in any boasted sense, a mythology arose regarding their skill at arts of love, which was imagined to be three times greater than that of other women, which together made them nine times greater, an ecstasy no man could survive should the Grizlas come upon him in concert.
Giulia was a songstress, Ernesta an actress, and Carlotta a dancer. The only means by which they could be told one from the other was by their variegated talents. Now there were those who said Giulia had a miniscule mole in the recesses of her navel; that Ernesta had an equally small one hidden between the moons of her ass; and Carlotta’s mole, likewise little, was tucked away midst her dark locks, high on her left temple. The belief in their discreet imperfections was promulgated by the Grizla sisters themselves, though it may have arisen only as a jest at a salon gathering. One or the other of them (who could tell which?) commented idly that by these differences they need have no fear of resting in a mismarked grave, for there was no reason that their corpses should be confused. While this long-remembered piece of offhand information may or may not have been meant seriously, the hidden moles nevertheless became as famous as were the purported bearers thereof.
They spoke often of corpses, in conversation and their varied arts, this being their one uncharming trait. In truth they frightened many people, for they were more than passing strange. Each was a similitude of the other, often laughing together as with a single tinkling voice—and their laughter was on occasion stunningly inappropriate. Or they would exclaim a thing together, for they were apt to have the same wickedly dark thought at exactly the same moment. Then again they might make a sudden motion this way or that way as though there were but one woman standing between mirrors. Every quirk of one was reduplicated in the others. There was thereby nothing about them that was unique, though nothing in this world was quite like them but themselves.
Ernesta, who was a dramaturge as well as actress, performed her own gloomy vignettes regarding such subjects as a princess languishing unto death awaiting each night the slowly murderous yet addictive embrace of a demon lover; or a young witch pining away of love for a celibate knight until, in her misguided affectionate desire, she transformed him irretrievably into an adoring puppet sans all the traits she had longed to possess. Giulia sang original compositions of tragic lovers’ ghosts who had committed suicide rather than be parted, and afterward (in Giulia’s successive verses) passed through level upon level of hellish places where suicides were condemned and lovers scoffed, places the singer comprehended in a singularly familiar manner. Carlotta, who choreographed her own ballets, sprang about the stage like a martyr in flames, a dance of sacred passion bordering on maniacal, so that her grace held each observer thrall to equal portions of awe and terror.
Now Ernesta married into a bourgeois family; at least in theory she had done so. Her husband was large, curly-haired, with a distinctly Arabic countenance, despite his pallid complexion. This was due to some Moorish ancestor—or possibly the sole indiscretion of his otherwise priggishly moralistic mother—and of this nameless ancestor he was inordinately proud. He was no longer young, indeed could have been the father of women as youthful as the Grizlas. But he had the stamina and naiveté of ten youths alongside the mellowing cynicism and gentle wisdom of his years. He had gorgeous, delicate hands; a girl would envy them. Although he no longer had the litheness of his youth, and in fact was grown somewhat lumpish around the middle, his arms and legs were long and very powerful so that for all his girth he was graceful in his stride.
He wore Arabic costumes to highlight his forbidden ancestry (or bastardy), including a turban, a broad mustache, golden earrings and bracelets, blossoming trousers, slippers of emerald sheen that turned up at the ends, and a fabulous silk cummerbund from which dangled a scimitar given to him during his travels, he maintained, by a sacred harlot at the Well of Zumzum, where he had gone to honor the black stone personified by the name of Kubaba the Hagaritess.
In all, he was like unto a genie in a children’s book. Although nothing of his manner and appearance was the fashion, a few shirt-tail toadies imitated him. He was not handsome, but so eccentric and interesting in his appearance and speech that many a common Adonis regretted that his own looks were not more ruggedly bizarre.
He was known exclusively by his nom de plume, Abba Adi, to the relief of his bourgeois family, though it was said he was more embarrassed by their manner than they by his, and he missed only the cuffings he used to get from his mother. In his youth he had been a genius at poetry, and it was in those days he first acquired the habit of dwelling amidst musicians and courtesans and theater people. His choices in companions aggrieved his unforgiving family to such an extent that he was disowned by them.
Deprived of his family’s support, he was forced away from his poems and into a lamentable journalistic career, reviewing theater and books, and commenting with an idle elegance on each week’s raging fad soon to become passé, or favored personality soon to be forgotten. His opinion could make or break a theatrical performance or an author’s sales, yet he was sufficiently tactful (and, it must be said, generous of spirit) that he had only a few enemies, and these of such miniscule talent that he could not restrain himself from bantering at their expense. By contrast he had many friends, a few of them sincere, which fact alone gives proof that he was not a journalist at heart but only of necessity.
At his despised journalistic tasks he was gravely and moderately successful in the monetary sense. He personally hated every word he penned for the Lantern, spirited though that daily sheet could be. He lamented every day, nay, every hour, that he was no longer devoted to an art, but to the squib. Without these journalistic efforts which devoured the soul of his creative energies, he would have starved. But with such work, he was
able to sustain Ernesta in sufficient luxury (she did not require excess) to allow her to leave off performing in the public theaters and become, instead, the darling of the most distinguished private salons.
It was said who married one of the Grizlas married them all, and while Abba Adi never boasted, he often smiled. Certainly the sisters were rarely parted from each other, and lived in the house Abba Adi had rented in the newspaper district (he could not afford a more fashionable neighborhood, but none complained of traveling to the edge of the Flauberg to attend his charming fêtes). The three girls traveled about town in a gold-emblazoned carriage Abba Adi had bought for them, drawn by three white mares whose manes were black.
These women had strange accents that none could place. Their advent in the city of Aispont, some three years prior, and two years before one of them married the poet-cum-journalist, was an unutterable mystery to all, as though they had popped upward out of the ground from a world of light unmanifest into an earthly realm of play, pausing en route to heaven. A few knowing and vainglorious travelers stated with grandiose certainty where, within the geography of this expansive planet, the Grizlas’ manner of speech was common; their nationality or origin was thereby asserted to be no mystery at all, for the prettily indistinguishable Three were obviously from a certain country distantly placed and easily named. The trouble was that no two travelers gave out an identical assertion.
Their speech patterns were dramatic and musical; hence Giulia’s success as a singer and Ernesta’s in performing tragedies. Carlotta by comparison rarely spoke, except with motions of her body. Yet none doubted she could have sung or acted had she pleased, for it was supposed they had once drawn lots to see which arts they would separately dominate.
It was rumored they were Catholics, a rare sect of worshipers, for they spoke reverently of a Goddess called Meris, whose son was a tortured King of Summer who sang of his love for Dynamis the Female Power of the Universe. His limbs (all of them, as they explained) were lopped off one by one to be planted amidst the com while virgins danced and lamented. Virtually everyone took Meris to be a mispronunciation (on account of the sisters’ weirdly beautiful accents) of Mary, and her slain son was Logos, that dying God who had been chopped into little bits and sprinkled on the ever-shifting page of that small yet infinitely changing Book of the Dreaming Aeons.
Never mind that the Grizlas never spoke of any Logos per se, but only of a nameless paramour of Meris, slain for love of Her. The rumor of their Catholicism was taken for gospel, for rumor was as good as truth in Aispont, and often better. To confirm this general belief, it was noted that the three damosels had a look of Italia about them, commingled, it was true, with a touch of the Oriental in the flashing darkness of their sinister eyes and in their raven’s-wing hair glimmering with night’s rainbows.
Inexplicably (to those who were apolitical their whole lives) there was a bourgeois uprising, and the newspapers were taken over. Abba Adi besmeared his noble soul by ingratiating himself before men who were, in point of fact, his cousins. But they were unforgiving of his years of persistent tweaks at their hypocrisies, their petty obsessions, their unmerited self-importance. Indeed, he had made them squirm so many times, it was the Lantern they conquered first, to put an end to his quaint and lovely ravings. When they slung hot tar upon the pate of that newspaper’s publisher and set his head afire, Abba Adi perceived he could expect nothing from his cousins beyond safe passage through the revolution, like a bit of flotsam too insignificant even to brush from the surface of the water.
From that moment on he lived in poverty. Months went by without a moment’s relief from his increasingly penurious state. It was expected that at any moment aristocratic forces would unseat the new bourgeois establishment in order to reinstate elegance, decadence, and liberty—amusing though it was to consider noblemen the protectors thereof—or at least to restore the former pleasing chaos, wherein marvels and beauty flourished.
Nothing of the sort occurred. Pacts had been made between the bourgeoisie and aristocrats in order that the latter continue as the figureheads they practically constituted in any case. The precise intricacies and machinations would be too dull to recount herein. All that need be said is that these things would indeed come undone in their own good time, when the rounded bourgeoisie were pounded back into their square holes. In the meantime the arts were treated much as were houses of prostitution (which, perhaps, they indeed resembled). Both areas of endeavor were so heavily besieged as to have all but closed shop for the duration. A journalist not of the right persuasion could not expect to earn a sou.
Abba Adi could no longer maintain his spacious and comfortable rental in the wrong part of town. One day he was served notice to vacate within the week, for his landlord was greatly feeling his oats, being now a part of an empowered caste. It was instantly rumored that Abba Adi with his wife and her two sisters would depart—afoot, their carriage having been confiscated for use by a member of the present city government—for a boarded-up theater, in the dressing rooms of which they were to live meagerly.
In the meantime, invitations were sent out to all the cowed intelligentsia of Aispont, announcing the final fête. There was certainly nothing else happening in the city that was delightful, so the event was better attended than any previous (or subsequent) gathering in that house. It was fortunately large enough to hold a great number of people, and had its own theater room on the main floor. Many extra couches were crowded into that room for ease of lounging while devouring sweetmeats and pastries and exchanging witticisms and flatteries between performances on the stage.
During Abba Adi’s final fête, many attendees remarked in whispers as regarded an unaccountable expression of serenity upon their host’s visage, a look that belied his plight. His expression might have been carved in ivory, so ghostly pale and motionless was his untragic pose. He gave himself over to none of his usual verbosity and poignant observations, nor yet a single criticism of the present state of affairs. It was as though he had said all in his life that needed to be said, and could now rest in a comfortable quietude amidst his laurels.
On the other hand, there was something about his face that made it seem as though he might well be dead, that this was his death mask and not his head. But if this were so, he must have died without convulsions or terror, and, what is more, without sorrow or triumph, for there was neither regret nor glee upon that placidly satisfied expression.
The change was extraordinary and nevertheless subtle. It was as though he had obtained by magery the visage of a perfect saint of such humble disposition he sought never to reveal even his beatitude, but only this astonishing serenity, born of a secret certainty requiring no past, no present, no future. One would suspect he had not wept in his entire life, nor suffered for so much as an hour. No, he had not even wept when he was born, a time when we all have no capacity for anything other than to suck and to weep—and to swim, by the by, though we forget within a week or so.
His wife, Ernesta, remarked upon just such capacities and incapacities of newborns, saying, “In heaven we perpetually drink from the Mother’s left breast of oil, and Her right breast of honey. We swim as do joyful careless dolphins in oceans of Her blood and milk, never suspecting Fisher Death is hooking us one by one. Therefore, finding ourselves gasping in the world of matter, the first thing we do is cry out in our tragic little agonies. We seek desperately for the breasts, settling for whatever first we find. When we’ve forgotten why it was we were anguished in our first moments of illusory existence, only then do we begin to learn to speak and laugh, and by degrees give up our pointless sucking.”
Carlotta whirled by as Ernesta was speaking, a leaf caught in a pretended gale, rushing fantastically in and around the seats and couches. All the while, Giulia played wildly upon the harpsichord. The dance and instrumentation were together called “A Tempest.” All eyes were riveted upon the flourishes of dance, all ears upon the startling glissades of melody, so that Ernesta’s strange sermon cam
e by way of a back door into the subconscious. Although her words were never to be forgotten in the realm of dreams, even so, no one present in the aftermath could quote a single word when asked.
“The serene man,” she continued, in the love seat at her husband’s side, placing her lithe fingers in the crook of his arm, “is like unto a thing of stone. He might indeed have been created without spirit, hence there is nothing he requires to forget, nothing which he misses, for he had not a before-life wherein he sucked and swam. This serenity we personify as Lucifer, King of Matter, not forgetting Lucifer was God’s favorite. He is called Light-giver whose Light is Unmanifest and thus of the darkest pitch beneath the loam; and he is the Motherless One, who, being carved of rock, never sucked. Rather, observing acutely the beauty of materiality, he has imagined through his verse that this is a heavenly place worthy of his beautiful words.
“He is the Earth’s foremost paramour, this stone of serenity, and his lover the Earth is none other than the Heavenly Mother descended to the material sphere in search of Her lost children, leaving Her perfect realm of spirit far behind, polluting Herself in order to regain those whom She loves.
“The arms of this Serene Man, this carven giant, are broken off, and rendered into alabaster dust and mixed with wine that She may drink and become giddy with delight. His toes and ankles and feet and legs and knees and thighs are taken in pieces to be placed according to ancient regulations in specific locations all about a field of corn. His final rigid member, that is petrified, stands outside Her shrine where worshipers may honor Her with orgasms astride the mounted olisbos that is symbolic of the whole of the Man of Serenity. His head is taken to Her island temple far away, where he awakens nightly to give oracular advice in exquisite rhyme, and to praise the Mother who adopted him, yes only him, this lowly and motherless savior whom She made to be reborn in the grain. As for his torso, this becomes the planet Jupiter, to rule in Her stead while She busily gives birth to all things of the world, sustains and suckles them, and afterward devours them whole.”
Love in Vein Page 11