Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  I stumbled out of the shower and stared at the lines on my mirror, and the steam collected between each squiggle. I toweled off with a vast bath towel of the kind I like, savoring the softness of the Turkish cotton, the absorbent dryness, the smell of lavender clinging to it.

  One more sunset.

  Some people like to think about that sort of thing. Their bucket list. If you had twenty-four hours to live, what would you eat and see and do and all of that? What people would you make confessions to or tell off?

  What was the joke about the magician who sees Death in the morning? As I heard it, he saw Death in the fish market in the early morning in Paris, and Death looked surprised to see him. So he fled immediately, by boat and carried in afreet arms and then by foot, high on the slopes of Mount Ararat and there he saw Death again. And Death said, There you are! I saw I was to meet you here tonight, however did you get here so quickly from Paris?

  I contemplated my wardrobe. I took out an abstract orange on black floral, shot through with blue streaks of pistils, over jeans and sneakers.

  I poured rum and vodka to my household gods and the three ancestors whose photographs I keep in the shrine beside my bed.

  “If I don’t come back,” I said to them, pouring vodka. “Haunt the fuck out of whoever buys this place. I give you full permission.”

  What if Lorca was some trick of Forseti’s? The old man was a god, after all, capable of all sorts of subtle illusions. Gods were a different kind of magic. They weren’t limited in the way that magicians were. Although Forseti had a focus, just as I had my shirts. His was justice.

  That seemed to be of little help under these circumstances. There is no cosmic justice that would ensure he had to play by the rules.

  Lorca was too perfect not to be some trick.

  But on the other hand, isn’t that how one imagined death? The ultimate lover, the soft voice who’d draw you down into oblivion in a Bob Fosse montage dance number?

  And Lorca had said he’d remove the poison, hadn’t he? There had been no accompanying, And then carry you off to the underground, at least that I could remember, I thought about calling him to me, asking him for clarification. But what if I only got one chance to call him?

  I went into Seattle to get my car.

  Yes, for some people the car wouldn’t have been a priority. But I like my car, and the thought of it just sitting there in the lot until it got towed away as abandoned bothered me.

  I felt better once I was behind the wheel. At fifteen years old, the car has some quirks and creaks, but there’s a Hawaiian dancing girl doll on the dash, a lei dangling from the rear view mirror, and some much less visible cantrips.

  I swung onto I-5. The day was so dazzling bright that it lifted my spirits, as least for just as long as it took for me to think about it possibly, quite probably, being my last day, and then my spirits sank again.

  The radio said there was a prayer vigil at Westlake Center tonight. For the playground victims.

  Forseti wanted me to surrender to him. To die and have meaning brought from my life, a few years of protection for the inhabitants of Friendly Village. Did they know that a god watched over them? Or did they attribute the placid, untroubled nature of their lives to some other force?

  I was still thinking about that after I left 520 and turned into the complex. Struck by some whimsy, I went widdershins rather than clockwise, began to circle the complex, examine the tiny streets, barely worthy of the name, named Steelhead and Pilchuck, Salish and Snoqualmie.

  I’d done this once before, when I was first thinking about buying into the complex. But I hadn’t looked hard enough then. I’d been complacent. Now I looked as deep as I could and found the clues I’d missed before: a swarm of leprechauns living in a lilac bush; a multitude of bird baths in a yard, shaped in a long curve to fetch fairies to the waters; orange and green witch-balls making a boundary between one trailer’s demesne and another’s.

  What a fool I was, to have missed this.

  But the supernatural isn’t like it is in fantasy books. Bits of it are farther between, fewer than they’re depicted. Most folks can go all their lives without seeing a ghost. I saw three as I circled this new Friendly Village: two suicides and a regret-filled natural death. Forseti had bound them to the place as watchers. Each trained its gaze on me, uncaring and cold as an ice-cube, but vigilant, as I passed.

  It would not take long for the god to know I had returned. He wouldn’t wait for me to come to him. He was too worried that the death he’d started growing in my bones would go wasted, that he wouldn’t be able to pluck it, harvest it. Use it.

  And to tell the truth, what good was my life doing anyone right now? I didn’t defend the world from anything. I existed and observed. I didn’t even have the excuse that most magicians did that, because most of them managed to live as well.

  To do amazing things. And I, I lived in a trailer park and spent my days putting tiny, almost invisible stitches in Hawaiian shirts.

  I left the keys in the Contessa when I parked her. I wasn’t sure I’d be driving again.

  As I was coming in the back, there was a knock on the front door. It sent a shock of adrenaline through me, even though I knew it had to be someone ordinary, a neighbor asking about something to do with lawn care, or the mail carrier with a package.

  But Jason stood there when I answered it. He’d never been to this place. I wasn’t sure how he’d found it. He must have asked around.

  His eyes were so blue in the sunlight. I thought to myself that perhaps I should resign myself to dying from this and just grab what gusto I could in the time I had left. I should pull Jason into the bedroom and have one of those sessions of sex so good it almost became tantric. I’ve been with sex magicians and would swear he’d been trained by one.

  Maybe that’s just partiality talking. Not love. I was sure it wasn’t love. He’d been good in bed but so bad elsewhere. He was arrogant about his beauty, felt he deserved the last cookie in the package, the best seat in the house, to have things set aside for him or given him.

  If they weren’t given, sometimes he’d take them, assuming you would have given them to him if you’d just thought of it. Yet another reason why we’d broken up. I felt taken for granted.

  And sometimes, I thought, I deserved that last cookie. At least every once in a while.

  All these thoughts flashed through my head, fast as the little barn swallows flickering through the air outside.

  Still, I stepped aside and gestured him in.

  He came in like a cautious cat, sniffing the air, looking around to inspect everything. When we had been together I’d been living in an apartment in an older building. It had a certain charm but I’d moved out because I could feel the press of people all around it, felt them pushing at my dreams when I was sleeping, trying to get in. They made things too random.

  “Nice place,” Jason said. “You’ve been here, what, a couple of months? I’d think it would look more lived in.”

  I tried to see it through his eyes. Yes, it was sparse. No decorations, no curtains, nothing to draw dust. My furniture was IKEA-simple, straight lines and no distractions. Uncluttered. The only place that wasn’t was my workroom. I glanced towards its door and saw it was closed. Relief. I didn’t need him snooping through there.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  He spread his hands. “Look. I said some things I didn’t need to say.”

  “You were being honest,” I said. “I’d be irritated too if someone showed up to use my spring.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that. You could have asked me. Why didn’t you tell me you needed help?”

  “That’s not how I work,” I admitted.

  His eyes were serious blue. “Why not? What would happen if you asked for help?”

  I hesitated. Why indeed? Why had I chosen this solitary existence, why did everyone accuse me of keeping them at arm's length?

  W
hat was wrong with me?

  Aside from the poison burning in my veins.

  I would have answered, but a wave of dizziness swept me up and I fell forward. The last thing I saw was Jason’s eyes, as blue as falling towards the sea.

  #

  There was chanting.

  There was the smell of my own bed, and someone tucking me in it.

  Then there were dreams, but why bother telling dreams?

  When I awoke, I could hear voices in the other room. I was, indeed, in my own bed. By the look of the light it was heading towards my last sunset. Forseti hadn’t said how long I’d linger after that.

  I could feel the poison, like a lazy snake along my spine, heavy water pooled in the muscles of my back, my buttocks, and thighs. It didn’t hurt, but it hovered there with a strong intimation that it could hurt, and could hurt very much indeed, under certain circumstances.

  I focused on listening to the voices. Jason’s and what I thought was Forseti’s.

  “No, back then it was very different,” Forseti’s voice said. “Just a few trailers. I nudged an old friend into buying the lot, setting up a perpetual trust.”

  “And the name?”

  “Things become what they are called. You should know that, Guardian.”

  My eyelids were heavy. I blinked, and the sunlight bars crawled a good inch across the pale blue plaster of my bedroom wall in that momentary darkness. The snake writhed along my back once as I thought about stirring, and I discarded the thought.

  “You knew what you were doing when you gave him the Friendly Village flyer. You knew he’d take a look.”

  Jason murmured, “It was up to him to examine things.”

  “He didn’t because he trusted you.”

  Jason coughed out laughter. “Yeah? A momentary lapse on his part, no doubt. Not his practice.” Then, as though startled at his own bitterness, he said, “But I didn’t mean for it to come to this.”

  Silence, which was Forseti’s way of saying Didn’t you? At least that was how I read it.

  “What now?” Jason asked.

  A creak. Forseti was in the leather-covered armchair closest the bedroom door. Jason would surely be on the couch confronting him.

  Jason, who had wished me ill enough to feed me to this ancient god.

  The thought hurt, hurt badly.

  Forseti said, “He has a few hours. He’ll wake soon. If he hasn’t already.”

  Silence again. I imagined the two of them looking at the half-closed bedroom door.

  Jason said, “Is there still time to heal him? If I willed the spring to do it?”

  “No. You’ve delayed too long, waiting for him to ask you for help. You thought you’d win your lover to you forever, make him incur a debt to you he never could repay.”

  I inventoried the magic close at hand. But I was so tired, I couldn’t imagine using the handful of charged marbles in the bottom drawer of the bedside fixture, or even going so far as to extract the thin silver blade, small enough that someone might think it a letter opener, that I’d slid between the two mattresses as one of my first acts of moving in.

  I was dying. Was this what death was like, this heaviness, like bags of sand holding down my bones, as though everything, my flesh, the air in my lungs, the bedclothes heaped on me, were growing thicker and denser, more difficult to move? As though I were becoming frozen in a block of glass, unable to even change the direction of my helpless stare?

  There was only one alternative.

  But still I hesitated. I stretched out my consciousness, tried to extend it beyond the bounds of Friendly Village. But something deftly caught my thought tendrils, twisted them back around to this trailer, this room.

  I could call Death.

  Death, who claimed to love me.

  Love, the same force Jason claimed motivated him.

  What would happen if I abandoned myself to love?

  Love was a rasping frustration, a teeth-grinding experience of shouting against the wind. Love was feeling small and misunderstood and feeble-minded and sad.

  And yet a desire one came back to, again and again, because sometimes it wasn’t that. Sometimes it pulsed in you, a song teeth-achingly sweet, a sound that hollowed out your heart, cored it like an apple, and replaced it with something else, fierce and hot as brandy and flame and drumming along my veins as though they were full of swallows, swallows battering themselves against me from the inside, soft insistent buffets like a toddler’s blows.

  Was that what would come about with Lorca? Was it possible? You can’t force love, after all. And love traded for something else, whether money or some other commodity, like your life—what did that do to it?

  Think of what Forseti could do with my death, after all. He’d use it to keep these lives serene, and who was to say they didn’t deserve a little peace and spots of luck in their declining years? Particularly creatures of the supernatural, increasingly driven and hounded by forces of technology, disbelief fraying away at their existence? Imagine how much protection a magician’s death could buy them.

  But no one wants to die.

  So I whispered, so soft that only I could hear it, “Lorca.”

  #

  He was there.

  He seemed so real somehow. Realer than real. Like something in a movie about to burn a hole in the film with its presence.

  His breath cool on my cheek as he leaned over to whisper, “You want to be healed?”

  There was a bargain being made here, I just didn’t know its terms.

  How do we read Death? You can begin with what signifies Death—a skeleton carrying a sickle, a grinning skull. A glimpse of the inside of things.

  And the message of such things is to remind us of our own mortality. To tell us to live.

  How odd, that we should say Death when the message is Live.

  But when the thing itself, not the icon, stands before you with long-fingered elegant hands, and a mouth like a sunset’s sigh, how do you read that?

  Because surely, what it’s saying is something entirely different.

  My hand went up to touch his cheek. Yes, I said, without any words at all.

  “Stop,” Jason said from the doorway.

  He stood there, Forseti just behind him. They both looked angry. I doubted that either had factored an appearance of this sort by Death into their plan. Jason had meant to drive me to asking him for help, thinking that it would change things between us.

  Well, it certainly had changed things.

  Lorca said, “Will you heal him, or shall I?”

  “I will,” Jason said. He stepped up. In his hand was one of my wine glasses, filled with a clear liquid.

  Lorca looked at Forseti. “It is not the Guardian’s decision, but yours. It will not work unless you allow it to.”

  “Which I will not permit,” Forseti said. “A death was promised me.”

  All of this flew over my head, because I found another wave of lethargy washing over me, forcing my eyes closed. Each breath was long and labored; I could feel the room waver whenever I exhaled.

  Jason’s voice was small and subdued. “Will you take a substitute?”

  No, I wanted to say, but the air pressed too tightly in my lungs. Lorca’s hand was on mine, holding it. His fingers remained cool.

  Forseti said, “That is not for me to decide.”

  I couldn’t see who he indicated, but it must have been Lorca, for he spoke. “Rahul has chosen to live, or so he says. But he must agree to take on certain obligations if he is to exchange places.”

  How do we read Death, even in the flesh?

  Always, he’s that voice saying live. The message is unchanged. The signifier changes; the signified does not.

  That’s what the universe was telling me.

  So I chose, and Jason chose.

  Later, I woke. Lorca was sitting by the foot of the bed, drowsing in a chair that he must have brought in from the kitchen. It was fu
lly dark outside, and there was no light on in the room. In the faint, faint light, he looked sinister, then childlike as a car passed outside and its headlights spilled over his face for a moment.

  He said, without opening his eyes, “Go back to sleep. There is plenty to do in the morning. Forseti wishes to move the spring here.”

  “Why does the spring need a guardian?” I asked. The question had never occurred to me before.

  “It doesn’t. But it wishes one, and there is always someone willing to do it. Now it’s your turn.”

  “What do I get out of it?”

  “The same thing that comes with caring for anything. Irritation and petty annoyance, and the occasional flush of happiness.”

  He opened his eyes to regard me, underscoring his words.

  “Why don’t any Hawaiian shirts have pictures of Death on them?”

  “Because no one wants a postcard that reminds them of mortality.”

  Why did he want my heart, as threadbare as an old shirt, too worn and tattered to keep out the wind?

  But he did.

  “Everyone wants a little happiness, now and again,” he said. “Even Death.”

  “It occurs to me,” I said, “that Jason’s death benefits you a little. Removes a rival, in a sense.”

  He cocked his head and gave me a dazzling smile.

  And I let that slide.

  For now.

  IMPERATOR NOSTER

  Sonya Taaffe

  The trade roads of ancient Rome are still legendary for their wealth, but it has never compared to that endless bounty beneath the sea, and the sea was the one realm which the Caesars were never able to tame.

  He was the Emperor Retiarius and he never ruled from Rome, but they called him Caesar and Imperator nonetheless. Who else would rise from the Tiber-mouth with laurels dripping greener-grey than the waves of Tyrrhenum, a glistening rust-furl of cloak pinned at the shoulder with a whelk? He laughed at the name of Neptunus; he refused the Greek trappings of split-tailed Triton, his shins greaved in armor the pale gleam of an oyster’s inner shell. His cuirass was of the same twisting pearl, ornamented with small snails and figures of murex-red algae that crawled so slowly, an observer could not mark the changes except by glancing back to see their stances had shifted: the riding figure was kneeling now, head bent before an edge of water that a moment ago had been crown-spiked rays of sun, and then a tree was a stream, and then the figure was rising, and then the waves had swallowed it. Caligula had claimed victory over him, he said, while Claudius had given him a tribute of land. His trident was bronze-barbed, taking his weight as if he stood on sand where ships of Egyptian grain rode low in the harbor. His eyes were blacker than mussels, than onyx or opal or the depth in the eyes of drowned men. None saw him come ashore; some said he could not. The sailors kept to Ostia’s docks and prayed.