Love in Vein

by Poppy Z. Brite

  As if this insinuating lecture were not alarming enough, it must be added that when someone asked Abba Adi to change the mood and to please recite one of his most beloved poems, he gave out that he had never written such a thing. He seemed quite surprised that anyone thought he had ever written a word in his life, let alone anything so precious and ridiculous as a poem.

  Some few suspected he was having a nervous breakdown, but to observe the depths of his serenity they wished for some of that madness for themselves. Lines of verse were recited for his edification, in an effort to stimulate his memory, but he merely gazed about with a bewildering condescension, denying all knowledge of such trivialities.

  Others chimed in with this or that example of his poetic prowess, each in disagreement as to which was the signal masterpiece of his youth, for all of them would certainly be sung in Aispont for centuries to come. How could he have forgotten that he wrote them? But Abba Adi continued to smile with such amazing benignity that he seemed no longer an Arabian genie, but a universal god. In the veritable gleam of that mildly condescending smile, many became instantly convinced he had, after all, never been a poet, nor even a journalist, but was, at least, divinely forgiving of their delusions regarding supposed and valueless achievements.

  Now Carlotta danced into the place of Giulia, and played the harpsichord as Giulia stood to sing. It was a weird hymn in a language none had before heard, an ancient and liturgical language no doubt, for it sounded all mournful and malignant. The guests became uneasy, and wondered what caprice Or practical joke was being perpetrated against them. Someone said to Abba Adi, “This is too monstrous! You must clear the air of this mockery at once. Can you not see your fête is no success?”

  But if it were not successful, why then did no one rise to leave? They were riveted by the subtleness of the pageant, by their inability to ascertain jest from madness, malignancy from radiance, spectacle from tedium, insult from romance, or philosophy from foolishness. They were not certain what it was that held them in their seats, save the strange gorgeousness of the three women who wove about the gathering an invisible net, as well as the equally splendid (if mad) serenity of Abba Adi. None of this was reassuring, but it was undeniably captivating.

  None wished to confess they, the bohemian intelligentsia of Aispont’s most fashionable streets, lacked a sufficiency of wit to comprehend every subtlety placed before them. None would say they were bewildered, only that they were held rapt. All pretended to be privy to some stunt they dare not reveal until the moment it was made manifest to others.

  Much wine was available to all. It smelled sweet. Someone remarked that it contained opium, though only enough to ease the bitterness of a concoction of wormwood, bay laurel, spores of exotic fungi, and extract of morning glory germination. It was a deadly brew, to be sure, but none reproved it, assuming its degree of poison was safely measured by a perversely expert chemist. They quaffed deeply for the sake of the promise of an hallucinatory revelation such as had already begun to invest the assembly with a kind of “quiet hysteria” from which they could not rouse themselves.

  By stages they became convinced, by their own whisperings from mouth to ear, that they were beginning to share a mass illusion, to experience in congregate a stunning vision of Truth that, upon awakening, might well reveal itself as nothing whatsoever.

  As the evening progressed, it was Ernesta’s turn to entertain the gathering, who now sat as though within a stupefying and visionary vapor, a veritable cloud of unknowing. Upon their faces was something distantly resembling Abba Adi’s serenity, though lacking his uncanny emptiness such as was wisdom’s fullest purity. Indeed, they were filled to the brim with contradictive thoughts and explanations and half-formulated queries. They could neither express themselves nor expel from their brains the myriad of ideas pouring into them as from a ceaseless fount. Many composed, upon ephemeral pages in their minds, essays and verses such as might have brought about an eerie renaissance, save that every turn of phrase was instantly mislaid in the subconscious.

  This very rampancy of thought meant they were no closer to nirvana today than they had been yesterday, though they mistook these flights of fancy and emotion for just that. They comprehended a deep profundity shared among themselves without requiring speech. One by one, they felt as though they had come to a very chasm of a dark imagining. Their eyes would momentarily penetrate the bleak abyss, where All’s secrets were to be revealed.

  Ernesta’s drama started as a pantomime, which was surprising, as she was so famous for her voice and her emotive monologues. She seemed only a ghostly projection of herself by not speaking. When words were at length added to the tableau, it was not she who spake, but her husband, for he had joined her on the upraised stage. His voice was resonant and powerful and, it must be added, very masculinely beautiful, for which reason at every fête he had ever given, he was asked to recite those early poems he now denied were his.

  At first it seemed as though Abba Adi was only expostulating on a common subject, more vigorously than was usual, with points well met. He said, “A belief in the divinity of poetry and the sacred calling of the poet is not egoism, but naïveté. When you are young and dream of writing a masterpiece, it is very well to live in a garret with a pack of excitable drunkards who have heard the divine call. But when your masterpiece is written, and so soon becomes a rare book collected by few; when your bones show signs of creaking, and still your famished stomach aches; then will you know what an awful lot of rubbish those youthful passions were, and true divinity lies elsewhere than in art. This is why the aged poet regrets never having started revolutions or torching a governor’s palace. And if, ironically, the aged revolutionist wishes he had been a poet, it is only because each wishes to unlearn what each has learned.”

  He continued thus for some while, standing in front of an ornate chair, as Ernesta made incomprehensible preparations on the dais. She revealed a dancer’s grace equal to that of Carlotta as she waved a peacock feather like a wand, wove mystic signs with her fingers, seemingly bestowing blessings or performing purification rites with a frightening intensity. By imperceptible degrees (and by what means no one quite observed) her smooth hair became wild and tangled. Her long garments, which were those of a priestess very neatly arranged, began to fling about her body in an otherwise unperceived gale. Her expression was that of an ecstatic hyena inconceivably possessed of grace.

  What now was Abba Adi jabbering? The familiarity of his ideas became increasingly alien as he progressed, bounding toward themes either so advanced, or so irrational, little could be fathomed. He seemed more mesmerist than orator, and slowly the congregation began to sway from side to side in time with his intonations.

  “No more bitterness, my friends. No more regrets, O my beloved companions of years ill spent; no anger, no more unhappiness, never again to feel yourself adrift and alone, cut away from some unknown greatness. I feel such pity, such pity; and I feel a love for you with an immensity I cannot express in any physical or speaking manner. The road to full expression is paved with blood, for mine is the road to Dissolution; I would give you my limbs, my eyes, this broad chest, my very mind, if by this means might you know all things I have come to know.”

  It was then that Carlotta stepped upon the stage with Abba Adi’s famous scimitar and, without preamble or forewarning, severed his arm expertly, handing it behind to Ernesta. The audience, captured in the dream, did not so much as gasp, for what could this be, beyond harmless illusion? They turned their gazes stage left to see, as they suspected, if Giulia would appear. She did so, and received the bloodied scimitar from Carlotta. With a clean sweep the task was done, with such ease she might have done it a thousand times before. She caught the severed arm and handed it to Ernesta.

  Blood gouted from Abba Adi’s shoulders. In this twinned ablution, the ethereal white garments of Carlotta and Giulia were made heavy with crimson. Their master’s expression was all this while blissful. He took two steps backward to the orn
ate chair, sat down heavily, and sighed not as with affliction, but with sweet pleasure. He was still speaking, but of what he spoke no one could quite hear, for it was as though they were striving to catch his meaning from an altogether different realm.

  Such speech, insofar as they could make it out, was akin to a sermon heard in a dream, or a revelatory essay encountered in a book within the selfsame dream. Every word was recognized for its profundity, and yet, upon awakening, nothing could be recalled to mind, or, what little speck remained was nonsense. In days to follow, some recollections were compared among the guests of that night.

  Some believed he had spoken of a spice. Was it frankincense? Why, no, he had spoken of myrrh, that’s right! Or had he spoken of a woman called Myrrh? Oh, or he had declared himself a Catholic, that was it! No, no, that wasn’t at all what he intended, but he had declared himself a savior, and promised to drag the bourgeoisie downward into dark regions, there to ponder their banal criminality until the time of Dissolution. Or, no, rather, he had spoken of a shooting star and of a dew-damp stalk of corn; of sheepfolds and a golden buckle (or was it an adamantine sickle?) and two great and wonderful pots, one of oil, one of honey, huge and round and sealed on top. Then, hadn’t he given a little homily about his mother? They thought he had, and he spoke also of the nameless Arab who made of him a bastard. But then again no—he had claimed to be adopted, yes, that was it—that was why he looked like an Arab though his kin did not. Or was he speaking of a mother and a nameless father in another sense than they perceived?

  Many other fragments of the speech were repostulated in feeble attempts at restoration. It was as though naught but an ineffable mist had emanated from his mouth. No one had gotten from it quite the same thing. Nothing was certain; none of it cohered into a meaning or purpose the conscious mind could fully grasp.

  That which was most clearly recollected was not of mind or ear, but what the eye beheld, whereas it should have been the other way around, had they greater inward vision. Abba Adi spoke half-mystically, half-mundanely, of things that could be taken this way or that way or another way altogether. While he spoke thus in riddles, Carlotta and Giulia cut away his garments with a pair of scissors, until he sat with neither arms nor clothing. When his codpiece was discarded, his rigid member was revealed, poking upward, dare we say it, like a dew-damp stalk of corn.

  Then with a pair of pincers Carlotta and Giulia by turns removed his toes one after the other, first a right toe, then a left, and so on until there were none left; and when this was done, they carved away his feet.

  Then Ernesta handed over a matching pair of curved garden saws with which they pruned his legs at the knees.

  Through all this he spoke as though he were unaffected by any misery or surprise, although it must be confessed his voice grew quieter and quieter as his blood decreased. The vermilion liquor of his arteries drained onto the floor and sluiced toward the front of the stage, where slow gobbets formed a little falls which oozed its way thence amidst the motionless feet of the spectators.

  Meanwhile Ernesta was performing increasingly incomprehensible acts with Abba Adi’s various parts, arranging them on the dais, climbing upon the dais in order to roll amidst the severed pieces, painting herself with her husband’s blood. She kissed his beloved arms that had so often held her near. She hugged his thighs, first one then the other. She selected a dainty from amidst the array of toes, licked it like a candy, and with it added color to her full pale lips.

  She was groaning, but her groaning was a song, an erotic melody, as she lifted one of his splendid lithe hands and rubbed it around her face and along her breasts and between her thighs. She writhed upon her knees amidst the sundry portions of Abba Adi. When at last she received from the hand of Carlotta the thick and solid penis, she took it reverently. It was like a well-carved thing of fig-wood that never once throughout these horrible events failed to express its plain uprightness and delight. It did not bleed, but pulsed with life that could never be eradicated, and, if anything, grew increasingly rigid, void of flaccidity.

  She held it upward and forth, showing it left and right, that all might see the splendor of her lover’s organ. She blessed it, and took it into herself, calling it by the name of Osiris and Damuzi and Yesod and Dionysus and other mysterious personages who may or may not have had meaning to various of the observers. She spoke of it with adoration, as though it were not a part of a man, but a whole man, and more than a man, a god.

  During this display, Giulia regained the scimitar, and Abba Adi finally spoke no more, for with one swipe of the blade his head was removed, and Carlotta had it by the curly locks. Giulia dipped her face to the stump of his neck and drank deeply of the blood that welled there, while Carlotta held the head face-forward for the audience to witness the unbroken serenity of Aba Addi’s expression. His lips still moved with a silent prayer of gratitude, love, and benediction.

  When Giulia stepped away from the torso, it did not topple from the seat, but was shining like a star. The three ensanguined women, chanting in unison, moving in unison, had each the same posture, save only that Ernesta was on her knees upon the dais with her wide, drooling vagina exposed to the audience.

  As they sang, the shining torso of Abba Adi began to rise into the air. The least of magicians could do no less, yet the levitation impressed itself upon the congregation. The torso hovered above them, dripping on their faces. They gazed upward with mouths agape, droning mantrically the same weird tune of the three sisters, receiving from the drippings of the flying torso a sacrament of blood.

  Since the audience had taken up the song, the women let off singing, but were devouring parts of the beloved Abba Adi, with tears clearing white tracks on their bloodstained cheeks. They seemed not ghouls, but goddesses, and who can say by what method divine beings must grieve? They feasted, blood and flesh and froth gorging their pretty mouths, filling out their cheeks.

  The incredible scene set before Aispont’s cleverest artists and sharpest thinkers—a scene which they could not afterward adequately penetrate in either their art or their thoughts—began to fade away into darkness. It was as though candles were being snuffed one by one, and night drew close around. But the light was not dimming; it was only the consciousness of the guests that was fading into slumber.

  Sleep was a side effect of the drugged wine, or a safety device that assured them their sanity just at the point when they were beginning to suspect they shared not fanciful visions of revelation, but a cruel reality, whether or not divine. And so light became again Unmanifest, to spare them further blasts of fiery enlightenment.

  The looks upon their nodding faces, with eyes shut tight, were indeed blissful and serene, with a beauty spoiled only by the awkward drooping of their limp positions and the occasional individual who snored.

  A few things may be said of the aftermath of the last fête of Abba Adi. Shortly after that gathering, the bourgeois revolution came to an abrupt close due to internal squabbling. Some few who had attended the fête though they recollected a fragment of Abba Adi’s speech, but couldn’t quite place the connection it might have with the thankful reverses in the power structure of the city.

  Then, too, the price of grain plunged downward so that many farmers, bringing in record harvests of wheat and corn, were bankrupted by their success. Again someone recalled how Abba Adi might have said a thing or two about the sacredness of grain profaned by a profiteering motive such as required a few with money to be well fattened while the many starved.

  However, it must be admitted that many easy fabrications were concocted after that sadistic night—a night attendees came more and more to think of as sacred although those who missed it (even those without religious convictions) considered that which had occurred to have been blasphemous.

  No one was able to speculate forcefully on the meaning of the event, though many were inspired by the challenge, and strove, within the context of that night, toward a priestly avocation.

  Founders or conv
erts to the cult of Abba Adi, Poet of Splendor, ascribed many occurrences to the effects of the Night Macabre. His cult flourished for about fifteen years, at the end of which time a rival cult of thuggees began assassinating Abbiadites with such effectiveness that inside a few more months, not one such worshiper was to be found in all of Aispont or the surrounding countryside.

  The three sisters were never seen again. Nor were quite all the separated pieces of Abba Adi recovered. His torso had simply vanished, as had his head. Fables held that the head had been transported by Mary’s Tripartate to the Isle of Myrrh (the location of which was unknown) and placed in Her temple of sublime iniquities. At the same time, “Torso” became an epithet for the planet Jupiter, and remained so even after the sinister elimination of the Abbiadites.

  Several of his lesser parts were gathered and preserved as relics. Some of these were used in planting and harvest rituals during the fifteen years of the cult’s existence, and thereafter fell into the hands of private collectors and thaumaturgists. Among the magical texts of the latter, a decayed remnant of Abbiadite ritual has been preserved.

  Abba Adi’s most private part was, naturally enough, the best cherished of the short-lived cult’s treasured relics. It had become petrified by what means none could surmise nor reduplicate in the imitative sacrifices that occurred on anniversaries of the key event. Though this relic had somewhat darkened in the unknown process of its preservation, it was otherwise unchanged from life, as a dozen converted harlots testified at Abbiadite rallies.