The Sea Beast Takes a Lover

by Michael Andreasen

  “‘Thy Holy Providence, the better to serve Thee,’” says Saint Upside-Down Skull. “Or ‘Your/You.’ Don’t mix forms.”

  “Or metaphors,” says Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate. “Adrift at sea and wandering the wasteland?”

  “It is hardly a wasteland,” says Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin. “Is that, or is it not, a working samovar?”

  The ember at Saint Tongue of Flame’s brow glows a perturbed vestal blue.

  “Amen,” he says through clenched teeth.

  “Amen,” the other saints reply.

  Saint Upside-Down Skull gathers his sackcloth robes and rises to his feet, recovering the skull of the venerated apostle from the davenport and resettling it teeth-up into his cupped palms. Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin also rises, causing the thousand rings of his armor to tinkle like a chandelier. His halo is ornamented with residual pagan symbology, the small whorls and the serpentine squiggles of precursor gods. His trident, stained with the blood and offal of the Beast of Padua, glows patiently from the umbrella stand.

  There is a sudden draft. For a moment, the fire in the fireplace and Saint Tongue of Flame’s tongue of flame gesture in the direction of a door nudged slightly ajar, hinting at a world beyond the parlor.

  Is this the much-anticipated sign? Perhaps a better question is: Was there ever a chance it might not be interpreted as such? Can a draft ever be just a draft in such hallowed company?

  “At last,” says Saint Upside-Down Skull. “The way is opened.”

  “God be praised,” says Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate, and immediately they kneel again to offer prayers of thanksgiving. They cross the threshold into the foyer filled with confidence and direction. They are lambs, safe in a herd, following an invisible, unknowable shepherd.

  * * *

  —

  But why then would they separate? Why, for example, would Saint Tongue of Flame lag behind the others before ducking surreptitiously into the trophy room?

  It may have been their open criticism of his prayer, only the latest of several barely perceived slights since they all arrived inexplicably in the parlor. He has often been the object of ridicule, ever since that day in 1270 when, falling asleep beside the Volga, he had dreamed of being cast into a fire that did not harm him, and had awakened to find that very fire resting at his forehead for all to see and be awed. To be blessed with the Pentecostal fingerprint of the Lord, that burning gift of prophecy and panglottery, is to be made apart, separate and distinct from other men. You shall be cast out, the Voice had said in the dream, reviled and hated, simply for speaking my name. Dejection and mockery, he knew, were in the job description, and he was used to receiving abuse from heathens and blasphemers. But from his own spiritual kin? When the opportunity to turn left when the others turned right presented itself, he seized it without thinking twice.

  And now, look! The bear in the trophy room is so fierce! So tall! The rug is white Bengal. The sofa boasts lynx and ocelot throws. The twenty-three-point buck mounted above the wet bar is the lord of all he surveys. Saint Tongue of Flame wrests a long-nosed Browning X-Bolt from the standing rifle rack, lines up the rearing bear, stills his breath.

  There is liquor in the wet bar. He considers a drink as he draws a bead between the bear’s eyes. This is an unfamiliar place. He doesn’t know their hosts, and besides, he wouldn’t want a repeat of the court of Philip IV. He fires a pretend bullet in a straight line from the rifle’s muzzle to the bear’s. The tongue of flame marks the imaginary impact with a pop.

  Before receiving the tongue of flame, Saint Tongue of Flame never had much of a gift for oratory. Imagine then how disappointed he must have felt when that same artlessness followed him into his evangelical career. True, the tongue of flame had allowed him to proselytize to all peoples in all languages, but it had failed to imbue in him the requisite oratorical charisma to ensnare the hearts and minds of men in the crook of his fervor. In Albacete, he had preached for days in front of the old Moorish bazaar, but aside from the occasional grin at the novelty of a Slav with a burning forehead speaking flawless Arabic, few had paid him any heed. It was the same story in Capetian France. And among the Seljuks. And the Nords. The last of the Pictish tribes had evicted him at spear point, and the Saracens had found him too tiresome to bother beheading.

  Don’t forget Latvia, the Voice reminds him. And Cappadocia, where you were nearly drowned in spit. And just a minute ago in the parlor.

  Saint Tongue of Flame pours himself three fingers of Bushmills from the wet bar, swallows it whole, pours three more, and settles himself into a gorilla leather chair to stew. The tongue of flame’s orange flicker is almost invisible in the looking glass of the tumbler. Without an audience, it can barely break a shadow.

  Cast out, the Voice says. Reviled and hated.

  Saint Tongue of Flame belches. His tongue of flame farts a puff of sulfur.

  Simply for speaking my name.

  * * *

  —

  In the secret passage, Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate tries to remain calm, to breathe. The cold stone walls are narrow, the passage prohibitively dark. Why had she not taken one of the oil lamps with her?

  Because of her hand, stupid. Because to have only one hand is to be constantly made to choose. Because when a casual inspection of sundry cold cuts and boxed crackers results in the back wall of the larder sliding open with a revealing creak, exposing a forgotten corridor to its first sip of light in ages, the inquisitive one-handed person has a choice: bring the oil lamp stationed conveniently on a nearby oak barrel, or bring the plate containing your own severed hand, the undecayed symbol of your steadfast devotion and purity, the object present in all earthly depictions of you, from statues to icons to oil paintings hanging in nearly every transept in Eastern Europe, the one thing from which, all evidence to the contrary, you have never been parted.

  For Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate, it’s a no-brainer. It isn’t until the secret door, controlled by a temperamental hydraulic lock, closes firmly behind her that she has the good sense to regret her choice.

  At first it had felt good to break away from the others. After the disappearance of Saint Tongue of Flame, the three remaining saints had spent several minutes in the library praying for further guidance before their meditation was disturbed by the growling of Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate’s stomach.

  “You are in need of repast,” Saint Upside-Down Skull had said with the unconcealed scorn of the perpetually fasting.

  “It’s nothing,” she had said.

  “You’re not hungry?” asked Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin, eyeing her belly with suspicion.

  “I’m fine,” she insisted.

  “Then it is the Beast, come to us in the guise of an empty stomach!” He drew a small dirk from his gilded belt. “Come, fiend,” he said to the stomach. “I’ll put an end to your growling. Let’s have you out of there and into the light where we can stab you!”

  “I’ll find something in the kitchen,” Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate said, glowering at the two men, “for all of us.”

  She had left the room annoyed, but relieved. The company of men, even very holy men, has always made her uncomfortable. Perhaps it is because those first few months in the convent were so freeing, so wonderfully peaceful. Or perhaps it is because the last time she was in a room full of men she cut off her own hand.

  “I will have your hand,” the heretic king had proclaimed to the young nun before a great hall crowded with degenerate nobles and corrupt bishops. “You will be my bride, sup at my table, warm my bed, and supply my heirs.”

  Your hand, the Voice had echoed, your hand, your hand, and suddenly it was as though she was not herself, but acting a part in a play, in which the stage direction called for the young, comely initiate nun to place her wrist at the center of a nearby serving dish, remove the small gardening axe fro
m her postulant’s habit, and with a single, confident whack rend forever what God had made whole. Had there been more light in the passage, she might once again have admired the hand’s miraculously preserved state, as she had done so many times in her cell in the king’s dungeon. Again she might have noted the palm’s sweet rosé, the crumbs of brown bread still scattered on the plate, the garden soil still tucked under her fingernails, the clean bisection of the wrist revealing bones still white and veins still blue, a mirror image of the bones and veins on the impossibly fresh wound of her stump, the ends so identically preserved that it seemed with one easy gesture she might kiss the two poles together and find them suddenly reunited, returning her to a world of two hands, which is to say: a world to which freedom of choice has been restored, where one hand might never again be burdened by the other.

  But it is too dark in the passage for such observations. The walls are too close, and growing closer. It is too much like the cell where she had been kept, the quiet dampness too much like that quiet dampness, the dim light from her halo too much like the light emerging meekly from under the barred and bolted door, which at any moment might be impeded by the wine-drenched shadow of a man.

  Her breathing quickens. She wants to release the plate, to reach for her gardening axe in defense of whatever might be out there in the dark. But that was another time, another habit. Here there is only the hand on the plate pulling her toward an even deeper darkness.

  * * *

  —

  Just beyond the aviary, the sculpture garden is a hodgepodge of styles and subjects. Greek heroes and Spanish bulls. Classical odalisques lounging beside postmodern pyramids and exploded steel girders. Alabaster cherubs by the hundreds, dancing and flirting and pissing into every open pool. Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin rests his trident between the horns of a stone satyr and sits on the edge of the koi pond. It is night. A half-moon is in the sky, and in the water, and in the glittering disco ball of his chain mail. Somewhere a cricket chirps. A warm evening breeze kisses Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin’s cheek, licks his hair, ruffles his wings.

  He has wings now. Sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes his trident is a Norman cavalry lance. Sometimes he wears a burning crown, and the Beast of Padua is a salamander. In an hour his wings might be gone, replaced by a mantle of snow-white fleece. By morning his sigiled halo may be swapped out for the antlers of King David’s stag. Some nights he goes to bed a man and wakes up a woman. His past is only lore, existing in the imagination of perhaps a dozen conflicting medieval scrolls and apocrypha. He is not a saint that was, but a saint that might have been, surviving through enough stories that enough people want to believe.

  Beyond the pool of bubbling carp, somewhere deep within the garden, the Beast of Padua purrs like a jungle cat, announcing its readiness to be slain again. Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin reaches for his trident, which is now a knobbed blackthorn shillelagh, and tiptoes into a grove of bashful nudes. He feels eyes on him. His grip on the shillelagh tightens as he marks the creature’s scent on the wind.

  Inside him, the Voice growls, too. The Voice is always growling.

  Soon a furious melee, a wrecking ball of bludgeoning and teeth. He can feel it. Soon a garden of rubble, amputated granite limbs, and plaster polyhedrons reduced to blasted ageometric chunks. Soon the Beast smote and the saint victorious, or gravely wounded, or perished beside his prey, claws buried in each other’s throats, hate in both sets of dead eyes, and then too soon after, on their feet again, relocated to a sun-bleached desert or a forgotten cave, some other version of their story in some other grand, theological metaphor, the whole maddening engine primed and kick-started and revving to life again.

  But here in the antebellum moment, Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin is at his least confused. He perfectly comprehends the ever-shifting amalgam of his own iconography, the animal barking of his own brain. In this moment, he is the most consistent and real that he will ever be. The shillelagh feels like a part of his own hand, and like the hand of something greater—a mightier, more righteous hand with which he might cave in the skull of the world.

  Under the hoof of the stone satyr, the same cricket chirps.

  “Quiet, flea,” says Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin. “Can’t you see I’m stalking?”

  “Whatcha stalkin’ there, big guy?” asks the cricket.

  “The Beast of Padua,” says the saint. “The Enemy of Creation.”

  “Nobody here but us crickets,” says the cricket.

  “I feel it approaching,” says the saint.

  “You need to chill out, pal,” says the cricket, giving the saint the double guns with its antennae. “Take a load off.”

  “Do not tempt me with rest,” Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin says, “for my vigil is long, and fraught with peril.”

  “In that case,” the cricket says, “how about some vigiling music?” And with its legs it violins the first few bars of nature’s most recognizable lullaby.

  Saint of Dubious, Possibly Mythical Origin is, of course, exhausted. His vigil, it turns out, has been very long. Several centuries too long. As the cricket serenades, it is all the saint can do to stay upright and alert.

  “Relax, guy,” says the cricket, looking down on him now from the collarbone of a traipsing marble nymph. The creature’s legs continue their minstrelling. It is such a powerful symbol, that chirping, so synonymous with drowse, with the oscitant laying down of burdens. Before he knows it, the saint is on his ass.

  “I mustn’t,” he says, battening down a yawn.

  “Hey, check out these insane tits!” the cricket shouts from atop the nymph’s galloping bosom. “Imagine laying your head down on these babies!”

  The saint imagines laying his head down on the cold stone of the nymph’s insane tits.

  “That’s right,” says the cricket. “Let it all go. Eternal vigilance is a young man’s game, and you and I are as old as they come.”

  “Beast!” cries the bewitched saint with sudden revelation. “Beguiler!”

  “You sure?” says the cricket, grinning a microscopic grin. “Looks like an ordinary cricket to me. And yet . . .”

  The cricket begins to grow. It grows until the marble nymph crumbles beneath it, until its compound eye is a dinner plate, until the stridulation of its legs and wings echoes for miles. The saint is barely able to raise his arms in defense. It is not just the paralyzing song. His arms have become the arms of a much weaker man, a scholar or a sage, and the shillelagh has become a goose-feather quill. The saint tries to grip it like a weapon, but is unsure which is the more threatening end.

  “No stalemate this time,” says the Beast of Padua through an enormous, quivering labrum. “No spear ventilating my side. Just you, alone, howling.”

  The saint’s peal rises high above the sound of gleeful chewing, loud enough that the birds of the aviary take wing, a sudden squadron of mynahs, toucans, and flamingos launching from their perches in search of better sanctuary.

  * * *

  —

  Alone in the claw-footed bathtub, a hallway and two walk-in closets off the master suite, Saint Upside-Down Skull can’t come up with a next move.

  “Tell me,” he implores the venerated apostle’s upside-down skull. “What am I to do in this place without sickness or malaise, where no soul needs my help?” The skull, molars up and sockets empty, offers no counsel.

  “Should I take a bath?” Saint Upside-Down Skull asks.

  “Carry me with you,” the venerated apostle had croaked to his followers in his final moments, the sun already setting on the seventh day of his inverted crucifixion. “Follow me always,” his toes grasping at sky, his knee-level head purple and fat with blood. “Do as I have done, and know peace.”

  The hills of the Roman pomerium were awash with columbines and crocuses, the scaffolds of the c
ondemned stretching along the Via Appia in both directions like moaning telephone poles. For weeks after his death, the apostle’s followers had sat along the roadside in lamentation from rise to set, until the day a passing imperial lictor punctuated a roadside urination by kicking the head of the venerated apostle free from his thoroughly rigorous body, where it fell, scalp to sand, and did not roll.

  It did not roll! It merely sat there, oblong but upright on the sloped gravel of the Appia in open defiance of physical law. And what’s more, when the lictor tried to kick the skull again, he stubbed his toe against it and collapsed to the ground, wailing and cradling his sandaled foot in his arms like a stillbirth.

  And still the skull did not roll! Saint Upside-Down Skull, kneeling at the base of the scaffold, seized the moment and recovered the relic (so light it had been!) before spiriting it away to the catacombs, where for days he and his fellow acolytes contemplated and revered it, marveling at its serene expression, its stubborn reluctance to be turned upright, and its persistent smell—despite weeks of putrefaction—of columbines and crocuses. For the next several years, Saint Upside-Down Skull would bear the skull of the venerated apostle from settlement to settlement, performing miracles of healing and prophecy, overturning iniquity and quelling strife, continuing a mission death itself could not forestall.

  But here in the labyrinth of the house, there is no body to heal, no demon to harrow. Only his fellow saints, who appear hale and sinless enough, and their hosts, who have yet to reveal themselves.

  Saint Upside-Down Skull allows the skull of the venerated apostle a moment to pitch and roll in the freshly drawn bathwater before stripping off his robe and entering the tub. The skull of the venerated apostle bobs and lolls but does not capsize. Its coronal sutures are airtight, its brainpan dry as sand.

  “Tell me what to do,” Saint Upside-Down Skull implores the skull. He swishes a finger in water that smells of flowers. The skull of the venerated apostle wobbles inscrutably.