by Mark Teppo
I gather the energy to scratch open those wounds. My feet look like they could walk, they’re still there, blister-free. They look strong. No shoes, but I don’t think it will hurt. I’ve been barefoot before. I step carefully, but there is no way to protect feet from some grass, some burrs, some splinters; the skin has got to yield. Staying on the porch is safe, but what has safety ever given me? So out I go.
The feet work, and I think about the cats, their colors, as I step past the end of the back walkpath, into the grass, where cats used to leave the girl vole guts, past the shed where she found the unburned rabbit, past chipping paint snowing down in sheets the size of small papers, perhaps the size of a notice you’d see posted on a board in town, Saturday dance, a house, foreclosing.
"I’ll dance tonight, wear holes in my shoes, ‘til I am the one that she loves the best," I sing, lines from a song I used to know, but can’t remember more now, and can’t really hear myself singing. Like I said, in this story, there will be gaps.
It takes years to walk back to the field. Past the stubborn apple tree, arms cradling nothing now. Past the black walnut where the girl used to collect those green bombs, smelling of earth and salt. When she was young, not yet four, she fingernailed into a green hull, found dark inky wood, a walnut hidden inside that pungent package, and tried to hide it from her father. He hated walnuts, their smell, their existence, but he never cut down the tree. I think he liked to curse at it, liked having that tall, helpless enemy. It’s blurry, but I walk past it now, stepping on something round that feels like memory.
I think I see the girl’s father, but he’d be so old now. It’s a younger man I see, wearing a low hat, brim shielding his face, bending over and picking up something round, a ball, and here comes a child to him, speaking in child talk; I hear the notes but not the words. The man hands the ball to the child, who takes it and runs off. The ball is lots bigger but the same hue as that walnut-green, before it, like everything else, blackens toward decay.
You’d think I’d be there by now but it is a while more before I reach the field. My feet are slow, barely move. Sometimes that’s how things work. When I get there, I suspect I’m turned the wrong way, or perhaps I’m looking at the wrong field. It is darker than I remember, but that could be my eyes, as eyes work slowly sometimes, like feet, and other earthly parts.
I get no feel, cannot locate the cat bodies, so I decide to increase the surface of possibility; that is, I decide to lie down. Maybe if more of my body touches the ground, I’ll hear something. A few years later I am lying down, and it feels good.
There are ways of conjuring things, I’ve heard, ways of bringing things back. I don’t know if this can be done with cats, but people, yes. The man with the hat is there again; his child looks taller now, or is it just the angle of my body on the ground? The man looks taller too, but adult people don’t usually grow like that, people not being cornstalks. There are cornstalks farther back in the field, odd if it’s still spring, but I think the stalks are on fire, because I smell that walnut salt smell, which is often an indication. And then I hear a soft meow, and I know if I move three inches to the left, my belly will be directly above the first cat’s remains, the corpus of that blessed protector. I wonder if she can smell the fire too, but it barely matters now that I’ve found her. You never knew her name, but I did.
Several years later, I begin to dig.
The Thirteenth Goddess
— Claude Lalumière
1. The Blood of the Earth
Come the gibbous moon, the waters of Venera start to flow red with the blood the Earth. By the time of the full moon, the water coursing through the city’s waterways is of a burnt-red hue. As the Moon begins to wane, so does the color of the water. By the next day—today—all traces of Mother Earth’s monthly cycle have vanished. Such are the tenets of the Venera Church of Mother Earth, which has held power in the city-state since the aftermath of the Nazi occupation.
Sister Agnes takes off her shoes and, pulling up her skirt, walks down three steps on the stairs by the Via Gaia. The now-clear water caresses her toes, her feet, her freshly shaved calves. She delights in the briny smell of the salt water now that the pungency of the blood of the Earth has been washed away. Not for the first time, she dreads rather than welcomes the thought of having to bathe in the menses of the Goddess when next they flow. Not for the first time, she questions her life in the inner circles of the Church.
As Agnes begins to climb back up to the street, something bumps against her leg. At first, she can’t identify what she sees. But then her mind starts to make sense of the bloated, sickly object: it’s a severed arm, cut—no, torn—at the shoulder and the wrist.
She steps out of the water and stares quietly at the gruesome piece of flotsam.
2. Goddesses of Lust
Naked, the sweat and ichors of sex drying on her skin, Belinda Gerda applies paint to the canvas before her. The thirteenth and final canvas in her current project. She paints in watercolors; she rejects oils as too garish, too harsh. For this series, which is scheduled to hang in ten days at Tito Bronze’s Velvet Bronzemine, the nexus of the Venera arts scene, the artist has perfected a solution to add depth and texture to her hues. Red is the dominant scheme throughout the Goddesses of Lust tableaux; every color must also possess a hint of red—and so she has blended the watery menses of the Goddess into her colours. Included, too, to give the paint a fecund texture, are her own vaginal juices, blended with the spunk of her mad lover, Magus Amore, who is at this moment lying on the floor of her studio, writhing in a post-coital fit of delirium.
As he rubbed his engorged cock all over her body, as he repeatedly penetrated her every orifice until she could not tell where she ended and he began, he described the thirteenth goddess. By fucking her, he worshipped at the altars of the goddess’s body.
And so it had been with every previous goddess in this series: Magus’s insane, lustful ravings inspiring Belinda to bring her lover’s erotic visions to life. But Magus had revealed to her the names of the others, all of them goddesses of antiquity: Ninlil, Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Kali, Isis, Aphrodite, Athena, Hecate, Demeter, Venus, Gaia . . . This strange, anonymous goddess of Magus’s is unlike any deity Belinda has ever beheld. She has decided to call this painting The Thirteenth Goddess. There is no doubt in Belinda’s mind that this thirteenth goddess is in all ways a creation of her lover’s demented genius. The pomp and garishness of the goddess’s clothes remind Belinda of a comic strip superhero costume, but her body, although mostly humanoid, is disquietingly alien in many subtle details. She sits on a throne of organic technology, surrounded by glowing technovegetation. The goddess holds a picture frame against her chest. In that embedded picture, the naked goddess, her skin tattooed with the same patterns as Magus himself, is attended to by monstrous multilimbed creatures who lick and caress her face, her breasts, her feet, and her dripping cunt.
Belinda loses herself in her work. She does not notice when Magus rises from the floor and peers behind her shoulder at her work, his eyes gleaming with fascination and admiration.
After a while, he turns away, though, and leaves the room. Through the door that leads to the basement of Belinda’s apartment, he climbs down the stairs. He lifts a metal slab from the floor of the lower level, revealing a dark chasm. He slides into that darkness, downward into the bowels of Venera.
The Goddess calls; Magus Amore descends, through the mysterious and confounding vestiges of Venera’s past. Ancient, buried Venera is not draped in absolute darkness. A rusty gold-red glow emanates from veins in the walls, from rivulets of unknown origins that flow on and off through some of the most decrepit ruins. Here, in the subterranean world of the main island of the archipelago of Venera, he has been able to explore the ineffable mythologies of his imagination. The deeper he descends, the closer he gets to the core of his own primordial ur-story. To the archetypal narrative through which he makes sense of the world. Book after book, the writer had tried in vain to a
chieve such transcendent self-knowledge. Until his life’s quest took him, here, to Venera. To the drug vermilion, and to the deities, creatures, and realms it has revealed to him. Climbing down through the ever-changing ruins of Veneran history that hint at a panoply of divergent and improbable timelines, he reaches the whirlpool of iridescent vermilion, the sacred portal that delivers him into her presence. Never in the same location, the whirlpool appears to him at the end of his every subterranean odyssey. Magus Amore enters the glittering eddy, downward into mystery, and surrenders himself to the inscrutable whims of his most beloved and terrifying deity.
3. The Unveiling of Venera
The sun rises, and Venera slowly, teasingly reveals itself, sensuously slipping off one thin layer of dawn mist at a time. It is as if it were freshly born this very morning, complete and perfect, like Venus from the half-shell. This is Detective-Lieutenant Pietro Dovelander’s first trip to the city-state, and, despite himself, he is awed by the otherworldly sight of this notorious metropolis. None of those ubiquitous photographs do justice to its weird magnificence.
First, there are the rows of lights emerging from the water: markers to guide the archipelagic city’s heavy boat traffic. Their glow, made ambiguous by the mist, imbues the air with an ethereal atmosphere. With precise determination, the gulls fly through this ether, miniature angels single-mindedly performing ineffable duties. The countless small boats busily but unhurriedly navigating the waters seem like phantasms of long-dead vessels floating on a ghostly sea. Then a few buildings can be vaguely discerned—bizarre apparitions of utterly alien architecture to the detective’s gaze. Suddenly, the cityscape is visible: breastlike domes and serpentine elevated walkways; bulbous walls and strangely sinuous towers; vegetation suggestively entwined with wood and masonry; bright, childlike colors; pagan ornaments and monuments, at once playful and terrifying; giant sculptures of mythic beasts, voluptuous women, and intimidatingly endowed men, often engaged in prurient acts; gargoyles jutting out from walls and roofs at unexpected and menacing angles; numerous staircases leading down from the streets to the waterways that crisscross the city; tendrils of seaweed crawling up the masonry from the water to the surface; dogs trotting through the narrow streets, crossing the ornate mossy bridges, or simply staring out at the passing maritime traffic; cats and birds calmly perched on or nestled in the various nooks and ledges offered by the architecture that refuses boxlike construction and eschews right angles.
Unsettling beauty, tantalizing opulence, unfettered imagination, unabashed eroticism . . . wild nature enmeshed with sophisticated civilization . . . Venera, Pietro surmises, is the woman every man secretly yearns for and even more secretly fears.
Regardless—he did not request this assignment, nor does he want it. Venera is not in his jurisdiction, and the detective resents being taken away from his own city to deal with someone else’s problem. But celebrity has its costs. Credited for the safe return of the triplets in the Sanangelo kidnapping and with the collar of two serial killers, Pietro is uncomfortable with his fame. It hinders his work that his face is so well-known now, and he resents that simply doing his job and doing it well is somehow newsworthy.
And now this! The High Countess of the Venera Church of Mother Earth has personally requested that he—and only he—be assigned to the macabre case besetting the insular city-state, and his government, sensing a diplomatic coup, did not give him a choice. Not if he wanted to continue working as a detective.
The boat bringing him from the mainland to Venera is the High Countess’s own official state vessel. The domelike interior of the cabin forms one continuous fresco: a sea of naked women of all shapes and sizes with limbs entwined like vines, the women’s nipples ripe like succulent grapes, menstrual blood flowing from between their legs into a rust-red backdrop. The joints, cabinets, doors, and window frames are all adorned with totemic gilded sculptures of exaggeratedly voluptuous women.
From the outside, the boat is black and sober—an anomaly in this city that celebrates excess—with only the gold crest of the Church on each side. Despite the rain, after a cursory examination, Pietro shunned the inside and trusted his grey raincoat to protect him from the weather for the three-hour journey.
What he really wants to do is smoke his pipe, but the Countess’s eagerness to engage his services did not include permission to light up in her vessel. In fact, he would not be able to smoke for the duration of this investigation: tobacco is strictly prohibited in Venera.
Whatever it takes, Pietro will wrap up this case quickly.
4. The High Countess of the Venera Church of Mother Earth
The High Countess of the Venera Church of Mother Earth spreads the sheets of paper on her desk, making a show of examining them, but Detective-Lieutenant Dovelander can see that she is not truly reading. In fact, he’s certain that she knows that he’s noticed this, that, furthermore, she wants him to know. She’s decided to make him wait; although he resents her attitude, he is trained to respect the chain of command, and for the duration he will be reporting to her. But her lack of respect irritates him. The day before, their appointment was canceled at the last minute, with no explanation. And now, these silly head games.
The Countess’s attire jars with her portentous title. A woman of 58, the Countess looks almost twenty years younger and dresses to flatter her relatively youthful appearance. Her skin is smooth, the color of cream into which are diluted a few drops of dark wine. Her long hair reaches down to her breasts, which are squeezed tight, still noticeably ample, by a push-up bra. Her black dress, with low décolletage but long sleeves, reaches to just above the knee. The dress is garlanded with gold, some strands of the soft metal dyed red. Her legs are otherwise bare, and her feet shorn in high-heeled evening sandals that show off her elegant feet and vermilion-painted toes. Her fingernails, however, are not painted, nor is she wearing any jewellery. In newspaper photographs, Dovelander distinctly remembers, the High Countess is always copiously adorned. This room disturbs Pietro. In fact, every room and corridor he’s seen since his arrival in Venera yesterday has left him unsettled. For example, there are no corners as such in this room, nothing he can properly identify as a wall, no clearly defined ceiling. Pietro can discern no pattern to the network of arches and bulges, and he cannot even guess at the function of the various nooks and niches, or the purpose behind the division of space. Through stained-glass windows, from confounding angles, and reflected on haphazardly scattered mirrors, the sunlight wafts through the room like a heavy fog, challenging his sense of balance. The rainbow of bright colours, the ubiquitous decorative flourishes, the alien geometry, the way the light filters through the room—all of this combines to short-circuit his powers of observation. More than ever, he is convinced that this assignment is a mistake. He will not be able to pursue any kind of worthwhile investigation in this environment. He lacks the required knowledge and familiarity, which only a local or an expert could possess.
At least the floor is flat, although it, too, is heavily decorated, every tile handcrafted with intricate designs, flourishes, and symbols.
Everything is overwhelming in Venera. All of his training and experience—useless. How is he expected to know how people living in such an environment think? Or understand enough of their behavior and customs to know how to question them? Without any frame of reference how can he possibly see the truth hidden in their lies? He’ll bungle this job, create a diplomatic mess, and his career will end just as certainly as if he’d outright refused to take the case.
"You’re a Christian. A Catholic."
Her gruff voice startles him. He’d expected her to speak in a smoky voice. Instead, she barks. Not in a menacing way, but, regardless, hers is a voice that insists on being heard. Under his shirt, the crucifix hanging around his neck seems to sear his skin, as if the High Countess could see through his shirt and burn the pendant with heat vision, like an American superhero.
It occurs to him, though, that she’s sensed his discomfort
and might be offering him a graceful way to bow out. "I regret that poses a problem, Your Highness. I’m sure my government can assign another—"
"No. You’ll do. We need your skills. Crime is rare here, and violent crime even more so. We do not have the appropriate resources to deal with the current situation. We need this resolved before the next gibbous moon. I only bring up your religion to mention that, although Venera does not officially permit proselytizing faiths to congregate, services are held in various embassies, including that of your government. We tolerate it as long as such activity remains private, with no missionary agenda."
Pietro is surprised by the courtesy. His own government, undoubtedly aware of the services, never bothered to inform him. Neither did anyone at the embassy yesterday. "Thank you, Your Highness."
Is that almost a smile on her face?
"Also, I hear one of the attachés at your country’s embassy has a profitable sideline procuring black-market tobacco for the diplomatic community . . ."—Dovelander tries but can’t contain the sigh of relief that escapes from his gut—". . . . owever, do make sure to contain your filthy habit to embassy grounds." Her tone is censorious, but she makes sure that Pietro sees her grin and nod.
Pietro jumps at the sound of someone clearing her throat behind him. He hadn’t even been aware that anyone else was in the room with them. He can’t remember the last time someone successfully snuck up on him; has it, in fact, ever happened before? Again, a disquieting feeling of inadequacy gnaws at his usually imperturbable confidence.