When he was sixteen and ignorant of his future miseries, Solomon boasted, “I am the Song and the Song is my slave.” Even if that was true then, it’s no longer enough.
The two-hundred-fifth way to be lonely is to hear an echo and think it is the voice of a friend.
At twilight Solomon dresses himself in a wide-brimmed hat, long gloves, a scarf about his throat and shoulders, a thin saffron-dyed robe, and a veil over his face. He goes into the Jewish quarter.
The nine-hundred-sixty-eighth variety of loneliness is the loneliness of planning magic and keeping it to oneself.
The moon rises as Solomon walks. It’s spring and the trees are in bloom, but Solomon prefers the stars: they’re brighter in winter. Lightning laughs in the distance. Nighttime is, at least, less lonely. He’s free of the house. No one draws back from him in horror, because his garb covers everything.
He passes a garden and smells salt, clove, and cinnamon. The sky blooms with the roses of Venus, constellations of pale pink nard, falling stars of jasmine. He stops to inhale, and imagines sharing what he’s seen. He could bring a wife a bouquet of all the flowers of this city, both poetic and actual. He could tell her every secret he’s stored in his skull, every desire for murder, every yearning for love. He could pile them all at her feet and wait for her to look up and smile at the precious things he’d given her. He’d tell her about the assassination of his mentor, the way he wandered adrift after it. He’d tell her about the hundreds of elegies he’s written, and about the grammars, the dictionaries. He’d recite them all from memory, until she knelt before him to tell him that it was time to sleep. He would go. He would not be an unreasonable husband.
At last he arrives at the orange grove.
“I need a tree,” says Solomon. “Not too small a tree.” He shows the grove man the size he means, stretching his arms.
“The entire tree?” the owner asks, looking at Solomon. “What will you do with a tree? How will you carry a tree?”
“The roots as well,” says the poet.
The tree-seller sighs. “It won’t grow back once it’s cut. The roots should stay here in the earth, to feed the ground.”
“The roots,” says Solomon again.
The seller takes Solomon’s coins, shrugging, and brings out his shovel. The five-hundred-sixth form of loneliness is the loneliness of drought, trees dropping their leaves and fruit, humbled by heat, a tree-seller amongst them, praying in vain for the clouds to burst.
The tree-seller shovels.
Solomon has a cart’s worth of orange tree in the end, and he hires a donkey to haul it.
The seven-hundred-thirteenth variety of loneliness is the loneliness of driving a cart back to town in the dark, a donkey breathing loudly, smelling blossoms. The oranges from these trees are too bitter to eat, but their blooms are perfumed with the smell of sweat and sex.
At the carpenter’s house, Solomon gives the carpenter the tree with its heady blossoms and wilting leaves, the roots a tangle of black soil and beetles. With the tree, he passes over a green glass cup from his own kitchen, and the lusterware dish painted with the ship. At last he gives the carpenter his diagrams. He pays him in maravedís from the publication of The Fountain of Life, the only thing he’s written that seems likely to pay. Planets devoted to God, each one with its own section. He’s out of fashion now, he fears. No one pays for poetry.
“Hinged,” Solomon says, pointing at various places on the diagram. The carpenter usually makes doors. Solomon wonders if he’s literate.
He has no certainty, only longing. He’ll do the most difficult part of the magic himself, but for this part, the handwork, he has no skills. He goes home and waits, alone, alone, alone.
3.
“The poet’s commissioned a cabinet,” the carpenter tells his father. “But it’s a strange one. He insists I use the entire tree to build it, the shavings and the dust, the roots and the leaves, the flowers. It’ll take days of planing and shaping, and even then I’ll have to bend the wood in too many places. He wants it hinged at every compartment, and he wants a musical instrument built into it. I don’t know what to tell him.”
The carpenter’s father shakes his head, and so the carpenter goes to his mother. She’s not from Spain at all, but from a city across the sea. She has different skills than those his father possesses.
“He pays us well for this?” she asks.
The carpenter shows the coins, looking uneasily at the branches he’s meant to shape.
“Well enough,” she says, counting them. She examines the diagram with interest, annotating it, drawing the outlines of an instrument from her homeland. At last she scratches in another small alteration, a tiny compartment to be placed deep within the creation, and sealed.
“I should not make this,” the carpenter says. “It will offend.”
The carpenter’s mother glances sharply at him. “The commission is a kind of cabinet, whatever it looks like. Deny what you’ve made if anyone asks who made it. But we’ll take his payment.”
She hides the poet’s coins away in her apron, then brings her son sheets of metal, pounded thin, a curved knife, and a tiny hammer. She consults the diagram again, goes to the market, and returns with a stillborn goat, bought for its tender hide, and the tanned skin of a doe. She brings tools for carving and stitching: awls, a vial of a particular oil, sand for polishing.
What the poet has commissioned is no sin to her people. The desert has wandering fountains, and the holy have help.
The thirty-ninth form of loneliness is the loneliness of a woman who can see her home from across a sea but cannot return to it. The loneliness of childbirth in a foreign land, none of the rituals, none of the other women. The loneliness of a marriage made across a table, cooking food, the sound of men talking the language of this country, not of the one you came from.
The carpenter’s wife comes from a family whose men made objects for kings. Her son and husband are not what she’d have chosen for herself had she been doing the choosing. If she were a man, she’d have spent her life working metal and dark wood, inlaying it with gemstones and camel bones.
Instead she lives on the southern coast, looking over the water at the weather of the continent she’s lost.
So the carpenter and his mother work the wood of the orange tree, sanding and polishing, putting in hinges. They work at night when the other work is done, and in the dark the workshop fills with the scent of sap, fruit, and pitch. There are the sounds of strings being plucked and then bowed, the sounds of taut leather being tapped. The carpenter’s mother adds an instrument from her home, and while she builds the instrument she sings the songs it should play.
The carpenter’s mother sits on her heels, looking at the blistered hearth where the fire caught out of control one afternoon beneath a spitted goat. The goat, with its twisted horns and yellow eyes, is long gone, but she remembers its voice, the song it sang, beheaded. She takes a handful of the ash, presses it hard into her palm, shapes it.
Her son crouches beside her. “People want strange things,” he says. “Nothing I’d wish for.”
“Most people don’t,” she says, working the ash, adding a tiny piece of parchment with something scrawled upon it, a word in her own language, and then more ash. “Most people want things to remain the same forever, but the world changes, and we change with it.”
She pets the wood, finds a long splinter, and tests its sharpness. She soaks it carefully in the oil until it shines. Perhaps things like this cabinet are made all over the world, and always have been, but she only knows them from her home city, and then only small ones, playthings for the wealthy. This one is different.
She kneels, and opens doors until she arrives at the secret door hidden deep within the commission. She places her handful of ash there, a gift to it.
The carpenter’s mother closes that door again and seals it with beeswax. She closes the next door and the next, until all the doors are tightly shut.
4.
The golem isn’t alive, and then she is.
The first loneliness is the loneliness of birth. The golem opens her eyelid hinges, delicate doe leather. Her eyes are cold and dry, but she can see the man she’s been created to serve, standing over her.
“You,” he says. “You.”
The golem has pale yellow-brown skin, smoothly sanded. Her hair is made of creamy white flowers with canary streaks, and there are shining green leaves throughout it. She smells of biting honey. She’s small and slender, her waist narrow. No taller than he is. Her arms show the tracks of the tools that made her. There’s a gouge between her breasts where there was a knot in the orange tree’s trunk.
The poet has hammered one of the secret names of God into her palate, and this is what has brought her to life. She tries to speak, but she has no tongue. There is a pain, a stabbing where the silver tablet is. She can’t tell what it is, only that it hurts.
It stretches inside of her body, a tentacled name. There is a loneliness in this too, the two hundred sixty-seventh, the loneliness of the only name one can speak being unspeakable.
“My name is Solomon ibn Gabirol,” the man says, and blinks nervously. “You are my wife and servant. You’ll help me write. I’ve need of someone to keep my words contained.”
She examines the man before her. His hair is turning white, and his skin is red, black, and yellow. His cracked flesh bleeds. Salt water runs from his eyes.
Solomon, she mouths. There is no sound.
“Yes,” he says. “You’re a thing made for me.”
The man feeds her a piece of paper, on which is written a line of a poem, and then he feeds her another. They taste like termite, wasp, worm. A hinge creaks in her jaw.
She’s never seen a man before, not from this angle. She wants to take his tears and use them for some purpose. A ship, she thinks, catching a bewildering taste of his old thoughts. On a salt sea. An island where they have never seen a woman.
She tries to make a noise, but only a rattle comes out. There’s a lock on her lips, a bent metal hook through a bent metal eye, and he has latched it. He takes her through his house, showing her its rooms.
“You’ll clean for me,” he says. “You’ll rid my house of dust.”
She understands. She begins to shovel with her hands. She buries her fingers in the mess and thinks of rooting there, falls to her side and stretches, planting herself, but he pulls her up, telling her he wishes her to sweep the dirt, not roll in it like a sow.
She learns quickly. She’s made to learn.
5.
When he ordered her, Solomon gave only the measures of the golem’s body, writing figures in the margins of his diagram. The carpenter was no sculptor. The golem is full in the hips and breasts, but one breast is bigger than the other, and her hips are tilted.
She has no heart, and no soul. She is therefore no sin.
This is what Solomon thinks to himself when he is trying to sleep in a house in which he is no longer alone.
Solomon’s diagrams included no more than suggestions for her face. She therefore has crude features, a mosaic of lustered ceramic for a mouth, and green glass eyes neither the same size nor the same shape. One is oval, and the other is wide and round. The lids, at least, are neat half-moons. Her nose is an angled slope with a bump at the bridge where the grain of the orange tree arcs. She has only an approximation of a woman’s looks, but her hinges are perfect. All over her body there are metal hinges and wooden ones, leather hinges and string ones.
She’s held together to come apart.
Sometimes, after the first days when she has to be kept from dropping in the garden and pressing her long fingers into the soil, or from standing too many hours outside with her face upturned, waiting for bees to land on her skin, the poet opens a door in her abdomen to remove a word and use it in a sentence. He talks more and more, all day, all night. He paces the room, telling her of injustices, years of woe, jealous companions and patrons murdered. He tells her of his childhood and his disease. He reports every injury done to him, and then writes more lines and feeds them to her.
My throat is parched with pleading, he scribbles. I am buried in the coffin of my home. I combine my blood with my tears, and stir my tears into my wine. I am treated as a stranger, despised—as though I were living with ostriches, caught between thieves and fools, who think their hearts have grown wise.
Solomon wonders why he still feels lonely. What kind of loneliness is this? One that hasn’t been given a number. It makes him itch, all over, everything from his fingertips to his brain.
6.
The golem is busy. She sweeps the house’s dust into the street. She washes the clothes. She clatters on the stones of his floor, her feet too loud in the night, and sometimes she sits, looking out the window, waiting for him to wake, breathing in the new dust that falls from the old walls of the city. She doesn’t sleep or eat. She has no need for it.
He writes a list of his enemies and puts them into her mouth. He wants them dead or forgotten, himself remembered. He burns his name onto her wooden skin, a thin line of characters, black and smudged, a circle around her wrist. She looks at the words, curious. They’re nothing magical. He is, for all his labor and verse, an ordinary man.
I am your thing, she thinks. Thing. She has no name. It is his job to give her one, and he has not.
The poet writes poems, and the golem walks in circles. She lifts his pallet with one hand, to dust around and beneath it. She beats a rug with her fist.
There is a thumping and pleasurable loneliness in this, the loneliness of a drummer in the desert, pounding a sound into leather, untethered by any city. She pounds the rug and feels a song inside herself, the song of falling oranges in a storm, the noise of their ripe roundness rolling away. The rug is silk, and she ravels a strand of scarlet loose and wraps it around her fingers, weaving it through her hinges. There is pleasure in this too, the feeling of an orange tree surrounded by dancers, the feeling of a gourd strung across by strings. She pulls the silk through her hands, stretching it, thinking of spiderwebs. She was once companioned by hundreds of spiders, each one using her branches as an anchor for an instrument of its own, fishing at night. She unravels the whole rug and makes a delicate web in a doorway.
“What is that?”
She has no answer, of course. She’s standing beside her web, moving silk over silk, patterning the web to mimic the ones she’s seen in her own twigs. With dawn there would be dew on each thread, and the spider in the center, waiting quietly for whatever might be drawn to something with so much gleam.
“This is nothing you’ll do again,” he says to her, taking the threads in his fist, tugging at them until they detach. He takes the tangled silk and throws it over the cliff. She watches it unspool, red loops caught in the wind, spun strings. Scarlet words in the air for a moment and then gone.
The loneliness of a bird trapped in a web, its wings twisting backward as it swings, struggling and trapped. The spider’s venom, the twisting of thread to cover the beak, the glittering eyes, the feet and flight. The loneliness of being too much body to eat, and killed anyway. A mummified silence, a veiled singer dangling from a chain of silver threads.
Solomon leaves her mouth unlocked one night, and she tests it, stretching the hinges, coughing up half a poem. She feels dirty, and so she goes out into the rain and opens nearly every door in her body.
She thinks of sap. There are roots inside her, her stomach and her intestines made of them, and she places a hand on the ground and takes water from the soil. The sun is part of her skin, and so are the wind and the salt from the sea. She’s three hundred years old, and grew from an orange seed dropped by a gull. She’s birthed thousands of oranges, and they’ve fallen from her boughs, taken into the ocean and into compote dishes. A few of them grew into trees.
Now she’s a golem, but she’s still what she used to be.
In the morning the poet finds her with her head still upturned and screams at her, fearful
of rust stiffening her smallest hinges.
She looks toward the blaze on the horizon, her jaws wide for the rain until he closes them again, muttering that his hidden words will get wet. He locks her mouth. She grinds her tiny wooden teeth, tasting dust, which she swallows, but she isn’t built for anger at her maker.
She’s seen the stars now, and she longs to see them again. They’re familiar, the green haloes around them, the way the bird-hunting bats swoop and hang from her fingers, the way darkness turns to dawn, bleeding at the edge of the sky.
7.
The poet brings her inside the house and locks the front door, just as he locked her lips.
“You must be as a wife,” Solomon says, his hands shaking. “That is what you were created to do.”
The house is very clean. He arranges her on the bed, and she opens for him. She is built to do this. Her diagrams were clear. The secret hinges he requested are small and soft, made of the leather of the stillborn goat. They unfold, door after door, until the second to last door unhinges. He shoves himself inside it.
There’s still the final sealed compartment. He doesn’t know it exists. Nothing of him gets in.
The golem wonders suddenly if the house is like her, if she’s inside the mouth of a larger golem. The loneliness of the motherless daughter, the loneliness of the daughter eaten by the mother, the loneliness of a roomful of wooden teeth. She looks at the chairs and table. She looks up over the poet’s shoulder to see if the name of God is hammered to the ceiling. The loneliness of the result of magic.
When he’s finished with her, the golem’s doors shut themselves, one by one. She stands up and sands herself; there’s a spot of blood on her breast from a wound on his. Sawdust flies until she’s clean again. He coughs blood, and curses. She sweeps the dust away.
He gives her a chestnut to crack between her teeth. She hands him the meat and keeps the shell for herself to suck. It’s like a nub of tongue. The golem makes a tiny sound, balancing it in her mouth, a rattle. She wedges it there with her fingers, pressed against the metal name.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 34