Demonology

by Rick Moody

  Well aware is your storyteller of his dependence on conjuring and mysticisms in this song, yet elegance and divine symmetry demand that he should now admit that the giant performed next as any gentleman of honor would under like circumstances, viz., he too made an oath of devilish properties. Said he, over the sleeping body of the queen, now laid alongside a rutted winding track which snaked into the town, and here I must profess again that the poem is of his own composition as I myself prefer blank verse, Witches, warlocks of the night, restore this sleeper to her sight, make him next she sees be hers, the giant here who offers prayers. And with that he reclined beside her to await her waking and subsequent veneration of himself. Yet he had squeezed her so tightly, that she didn’t wake, and didn’t wake, and didn’t wake, and didn’t wake, days commenced to resemble fortnights which soon resembled seasons, and she did not wake, and no traveler dared disturb the vigil of the giant. New roads were dug to circumnavigate his vigil, until such time as he came to believe he had killed his fairest love, his second love, and that, by arrangement of deities and constellations, he was therefore beyond grace and doomed to wander the earth, bereft, or perhaps to spend too much time in contemplation of ribald masques and plays. Off he marched in winter to relinquish himself to that paltry luck.

  Thereafter, the queen, located by good gentlemen on horseback, was gathered onto a chestnut mare to be driven to town for a grand adjudication, namely the trial of that youth, much spoken of above, who would shortly be king. Sleeping, she was transported by these gentlemen, and sleeping delivered to her splendid parents, and she did not wake until, struck by a hailstone, she opened her eyes, to espy the next king of our land making his way up the steps, ascending to his destiny, which is to say she opened her eyes to the felicity of love.

  Now, the giant galloped amok upon the lands, dear friends, as, in his madness, he tore stands of oak and birch and flung them this way and that, and a blindness fell upon him like a fever, and a terrible ringing like of a thousand bells did assail his ears, and he knew himself to have come to a fork in the road in the deserted netherlands beyond all our maps. No longer did wolves, nor bears, nor leopards harbor themselves there, idling in anticipation of smiting some passerby, no, life had fled and only the giant Maurice called it home, that complete oppositeness of light, at the edge of which his lonesome welps, Kurt and Elsa and Stibb, made themselves hoarse with beckoning. He did abandon them. And yet in his lonesome thrall, nonetheless a ray of melioration, though no sophistry or legerdemain or clerical bluster would raise him from his spot, for suddenly he conceived what the lonely man must always come to know that he is but a dream of sleep, his term mercifully instant and insubstantial; so the giant was a dream, yes, and with him such excellent figures of dreams past as Rapunzel, and Snow White, phantastes all, the fine prince called Valiant, arrayed beside the giant, each of these with recitations of his or her heroic pilgrimages, no differences between one and another, for all stories issue from one origin, one maelstrom, the demiurge Pan; all things from his dark, implacable brow are fashioned; and this is the imbroglio, fellow citizens, for I have come to recognize myself as the dream the giant had, the giant dreams of me and I dream of the uneasy king, who knows his reign must one day end, each of us a fervency in another’s sleep, there is no teller of tales, no protagonist, only the interior of a portrait painter in our village, who in the hours before uncovering the easel of her labors, before she sleeps, tells her own daughter Once upon a time.

  for Elena Sisto

  The Carnival Tradition

  one

  This was fifteen years ago in Hoboken. The storefront apartment on Madison Street. Her front step served as a landing pad for local strays.

  One stray was a shepherd-and-lab mix, one was a lab-and-shepherd mix, and one was a mix of so many breeds that it was impossible to say what it was a mix of. One of the dogs was jumpy, skittish, given to aggression; the other two were sweet, friendly, covered with fleas. Well, they were all covered with fleas, actually. She could never tell which of the three was the skittish individual. When she came home to see one slumbering, she never knew whether to be worried, whether to greet this stray with a loving, if tentative caress upon the top of its sloping canine skull, or whether to steer around it according to that antediluvian proverb about dogs. She kept forgetting the markings on the offending beast. How much had this anxious, panicky dog suffered at the hands, she guessed, of Hoboken’s sinister political action clubhouses, where they kicked at it, or shot at it with their pearl-handled revolvers, in the weeks leading up to the important school board election? Which beloved local business owner had waved off this hound with a tire iron as it loitered behind his auto body shop?

  And was it really three strays? Maybe it was only two? Maybe the dog that was the shepherd-and-lab mix and the dog that was the lab-and-shepherd mix were actually one and the same dog and she just hadn’t paid attention to its coloring, hadn’t seen him from all the angles, hadn’t seen him in all times and all places, frolicking, urinating. The way the dogs reclined on the step, in the afternoon sun, it was hard to know which dog was which —one stretched lengthily, as if prepared to be roasted on a Southeast Asian spit, another coiled like a soft pretzel, gnawing at abraded limbs. Sometimes the lab-and-shepherd mix had a scorched black expanse along its vertebrae mildly overgrown with a henna tone, other times it was more flaxen, the color depicted on panels of American cereal boxes. The mutt, on the other hand, had black spots. M. J. Powell was almost sure that it was one of the two shepherd dogs who served as her occasional adversary —shepherds had that reputation, anyway, or at least they did when she was a kid.

  She was on the way home from New York University, where she was in a graduate program at the Tisch School of the Arts. She was a blonde and she was a dancer; she was inches from the surface of a teak floor; she wore leg warmers and unitards for weeks at a time, knew the salesgirls at Capezio, she had worn the bloody toe shoes of the child bal lerina; there was Stravinsky in her head, passages from Nijinski’s diaries, she had learned to count complicated time signatures, sevens and nines; the church she attended, the church through which she lived and breathed, was the Judson Church, where everything a body could do was an expression of the dance, the beautiful and the homely equally expressive meanderings of bodies in space. She was a dancer. She put her finger down her throat in the ladies dressing room on the fourth floor before rehearsal. Just the other day. She’d gouged her own knuckles, on bicuspids and incisors, trying to get her hand out of the way of her own heaves. She was uninsured. She wrestled her hair into a bun. Her toenails were cut to the quick. She had excellent turnout. She was a dancer coming up the block with a black leather satchel from Coach over her left shoulder, with the strap of her white silk blouse unstrapping under the strap of the satchel; she couldn’t do anything about the blouse, the strapping and unstrapping, because she was also carrying a box of twelve plastic thirty-two-ounce bottles of soda in a variety of brands and types, and she was close to dropping them, these twelve plastic bottles; she could feel them beginning to yield; she could feel the muscles that attached her arm at her shoulder, and the particular hypertrophy of these muscles, minute striations of myofilaments, interdig-tated rows containing the muscular protein actin, and she knew all this because she was about to be tested on it for a class in kinesiology, and if she had been dancing instead of studying, as she would have preferred, maybe this wouldn’t be happening, this painful hypertrophy in the region of the clavicle, if she had danced, had slotted certain midwestern hardcore tapes into her battered portable cassette player, stood at the barre, attempted to metaphorize the flight of the curveball of Ron Darling (a pitcher she liked), and mixed this with certain repetitions out of Lucinda Childs, Sufimysticisms, silences and pauses that didn’t mean anything now in a specific way but would probably mean a lot later, if so then maybe the whole story would have turned out otherwise.

  The block was empty, the block on Madison between Fifth and Sixth, a block of m
ostly industrial buildings, loading docks that no longer loaded. The box of sodas she carried, in a variety of types and brands, was overwhelming, and she could see, though her sunglasses were sliding down her nose and neither elbow nor finger was available to restore them to the perfect bridge of her nose, that, up ahead, one of the dogs was indeed on the step, as there was always one. But which? And why couldn’t security be routine in the matter of where you had your stereo and your jewelry and your paperbacks and your inherited lamps? Closer now, she could almost make out, it was either the lab-and-shepherd mix or it was the shepherd-and-lab mix and was it the one that was going to take a hunk out of her unprotected calf, so that she would never dance again and would have a hideous and disfiguring scar. Like that night when she was a little drunk and was first bringing home her boyfriend, okay more than a little drunk, absolutely dyslexic with surfeit of drinks, and they were coming up the step and she had said to him, Nevermind about the dogs, and then the dog had begun to growl, on the crumbling step of the landing, and then when she tried gamely to overleap the dog, as though stepping over the dog were to step across the nuptial threshold, the dog had nipped at her. She’d felt a dis turbance of air. She’d jumped. She was known for her ability to jump, to perform the entrechat and the grand jet, and this was therefore a professional jump. The dog didn’t make contact, understand, but nipped at her, and then her boyfriend-to-be yelled at the dog and waved his arms until it skulked down the steps and waited, for a time, in the empty expanse of Madison Street. Growling. Yes, she was certain of it, it was that dog with the shepherd in it, as opposed to the dog with lab in it, an unbalanced dog, a dog from some deep troubled realm of doghood that didn’t recognize that it was a companion species or had a history of protecting and admiring humans; it was part timber wolf, and it intended to bite clean through her Achilles’ tendon and to disable her; it had unlearned its domestication. There was a desperation to its movements, when it moved, a desperation of the sort that animal psychologists refer to as liberty hysteria. It would run up and down the street, this way and that, unknowing, anxious, deprived of the strategic constraint of home.

  Naturally, as she began to mount the three steps that ascended to the entrance of her building, carrying a cardboard box full of twelve bottles of soft drinks in a variety of brands, the dog began to growl again. And the street was empty, and she was alone, and she had this party to prepare for tonight. That was it, see, there was a party, in less than an hour and a half, she was a busy woman, and didn’t have time for this dog on the step, and she was a little panicked, if also resolute, and somehow the dog sensed this (they can smell the fear), and began to become agitated, at first growling quietly, but then barking continuously, and the two of them, she and the dog, fell into a mutual refusal to yield, a refusal to go forward, she wouldn’t go forward up the step, she was afraid, the dog wouldn’t budge either, wouldn’t attempt its violence, but wouldn’t move. They stared at one another in this way, the dog bared its rotting smile; she attempted to refix her grip on the cheap, corrugated cardboard box that housed the sodas (an ineffectual box that the discount-beer-and-soda place had given her). Then after one of those prolonged cinematic intervals that had much to do with the flood of relevant chemicals into the viaducts of the circulatory system, a prolonged cinematic instant that involved recollections of the German shepherd that lived up the street in Wilton, the stray lunged and the cardboard box gave out, as she instantly recognized it was designed to do, and there were bottles rolling, into the street; this way a pair of Diet Cokes; in another direction, some tonic water; there a lone bottle of orange soda that she shouldn’t have bothered to purchase. Who drank orange soda? She tumbled, fell backward, down the two steps, onto her butt, gouged a big hole in her black nylons, smudged her miniskirt with soot, and the dog lingered on the edge of the top step, fierce, insistent, in full possession.

  The sun declined under the ridge adjacent, upon which sat Union City, abruptly rendering the facades of Madison Street in umbral gloom. Bottles of soda continued to hasten away. A gray Honda Civic ran over one of the Diet Cokes with the pop of a cheap firearm. She began in the most forceful language to admonish the hound, You stupid dog, I have things to do, okay? Beat it!, which antagonist continued to bark anyhow. Remember the dog that your neighbor had that one summer when you rented a house on the Jersey Shore or on the Cape or in Southampton, the neighbor who rarely went outside except to remonstrate with his kids and to turn the sprinkler on his desertified lawn? Remember his rottweiler, that miserable rottweiler, in the spattered cage out by the garbage cans, who, when his owner went to the local watering holes, would bark, at painfully unpredictable intervals, four or five hours at a clip, a mournful, desperate barking? If you tried to rectify the barking, with a couple of dog biscuits or a bowl of Kal-Kan, you would find his lonesomeness was nothing compared to his desire to devour all intruders or passersby and therefore yourself? This scene was like that.

  She blushed. She summoned her bravest and most firm voice, low in the register, Get out of here, come on, really, go to the meats department at C-town, or something, I don’t have time. Some resolve of her youth had given out and she felt suddenly helpless. The dog refused to yield. She was getting ready to hit him with her handbag, which had not a single blunt object in it (Anna Karenina, a plastic twelve-ounce bottle of water, three lipsticks, a wallet, a holder for tampons, a hairbrush, several varieties of breath mints, two ballpoint pens, an address book, a spiral-bound notebook), but which nonetheless would be useful as a device for a throttling, though maybe she could also use several bottles of soda as missiles, which, under compression of carbonation, would scare the hell out of the dog. But before she could effect the plan, the two additional dogs swung wide around the corner of Madison and Sixth, sprinting according to their liberty hysteria, following a navigational sense invisible to homo sapiens sapiens; they soon fell into position at her crumbling step. Maybe they had been intent upon another destination. Not now. It was a territorial thing. The three were assembled, the stray dogs of her neighborhood, all in disputation, each wanting ascendance of her step, its view, its majesty. One of the two at the bottom of the step leaped at the shepherd-and-lab mix, it was the mutt, and they fell into a real commotion. Somebody’s neck was going to be perforated. So aggravated was the altercation that a neighbor was moved to lean out a window across the street, to complain,

  —What’s the idea? We got a business here. We can’t work with that racket going on. Give it a rest.

  —Then give me a hand, she called in reply. —Or they’ll be at it all day and all night and they’ll drive us all crazy.

  The window slid shut.

  —At least call the police, she said. —Or the fire department. Or whoever it is you call when you’re trapped in a stray-dog dispute. I mean, come on.

  She added dulcetly:

  —You asshole.

  The window, designed and constructed in an era when manufacturing industries still had windows, when offices had windows, when window meant access to fresh, unrecirculated air, as opposed to double-thick water-retardant panes that insurance corporations will not allow open lest some employee should have the good sense to plunge to his or her final end, landing on the roof of an El Dorado, bouncing to the left, crushing a gifted young Slovakian flutist making her first visit to the United States, the window slid up, and the aforementioned small business owner, of Hobo-ken Tool and Die Corporation, again leaned out.

  —You’re on this block, honey. This is my block. I been working on this block since before you were a glint in your parents’ eyes. Get my drift? I grew up here. I didn’t move here because it’s cheaper than Greenwich Village but with good access to the city. Understand?

  The window slid shut, the dogs continued to tangle. Moments later, though, the large gray steel door with multiple locks at the loading entrance of Hoboken Tool and Die swung ominously open, and out came the C.E.O. and major shareholder of the corporation, Anthony Somebody, slack in the middle
section, okay he was fat, wearing a knock-off of a Van Heusen shirt purchased at the outlets in Secaucus, short-sleeved, blue flannel slacks that he was having trouble positioning at the waist (either up or down). Arms folded. Similarly, coming upon the scene, a crosstown bus screeched to a halt, between Fifth and Sixth, while Anthony labored toward the curb on his bad knees. These two events at once. Anthony offered no rationale for coming to her aid. Schoolchildren, in the windows on the lee side of the bus, pointed at the dogs, one of which had now drawn blood from another. Five bucks on the shepherd! The bus meanwhile, at its designated stop, attempted to disgorge an older woman with a walker who was wearing a plastic Ziploc bag on her grayish hair to protect her coiffure from moisture. A hush on Madison Street. The senior unable to disembark. The bus idling. Voices of children on the bus.

  —Got a problem, little lady? called Anthony, from his side of the thoroughfare.

  As though it were not plainly obvious. There was this party, for example, and the party was to publicize this gallery that she was starting, with her boyfriend, except that she was not certain if her boyfriend was still her boyfriend or not, because there were semantic difficulties, for example, how did you define boyfriend, because the only time he seemed as though he were her boyfriend was at parties; it was an association that only made sense in the ignoble atmosphere of parties; when not at parties, there was silence, estrangement, distance; when she tried to rectify silence, as by attempting to figure out what her boyfriend might want from her, certain outfits, certain attitudes (condemnation of popular culture), she found that he didn’t want her to make attempts to please, but he didn’t want her not to want these things either —when she called him a dick for flirting with Maria at a dinner party, for example, he didn’t like it and wouldn’t speak to her for three days, but would have liked her less if she had ignored the whole thing, the flirting, which she was inclined to do; one week he loved her, the next she could tell that her body disgusted him, even though her body was perfect, at least according to standards of a Lincoln Kirstein or a George Balanchine; and she had put her head over the toilet that very morning and felt the compressed-firehose surge of Raisin Bran and fresh peach slices, after which she toweled off, applied lotion to her hand, gargled, all this while waiting for him to go to work, God, when you were feeling the superabundance of rich creative license, you imagined a dancers body; her body would be used up and injured in five years’ time, cartilage harvested from both knees, maybe sooner, and anyway this kind of abstract posturing and psychologizing about relationships was really boring, made her weary; when women imagined they were supposed to talk about relationships, she could tell that they were uncomfortable, outmaneuvered, they were looking to protect themselves against male liberty hysteria; it was another way of being terrified, really; but, as long as she was enumerating problems, there were cocaine problems, for example; there was this guy who would deliver to their address, a reasonable Middle Eastern guy, who once even offered to put her in touch with a client of his who worked as a psychotherapist; this dealer would come by to Madison Street and buzz the capricious buzzer, there was a period wherein they had to see this guy every night, and it was uncomfortable, him telling them that their records were shit and their sofa was shit, and it wasn’t the expense of the cocaine, since her parents had some money that they were giving her, it was that her boyfriend never bought any of it; in fact, he didn’t seem very effective at earning his own cash, and so there was the problem of him owing her money for the cocaine and owing her money generally, so that she would occasionally brood over exact figures of indebtedness. Even sweet moments, like when they rented a car and drove up the Hudson and went to a farm stand and bought pumpkins, stood in a pick-your-own orchard, ill-reciting fragments of poems, That time of year thou may’st in me behold, even in sweet moments, she was calculating debt, I don’t honestly believe that you have given back a proportionate amount and even if money is irrelevant and I have enough money to a pay a larger portion of the rent it doesn’t mean that I can forgive in perpetuity the fact that I have spent more than you even if I say I love you, or she was thinking of a moment when she had gotten up in the middle of the night to guzzle orange juice and had seen him in the kitchen, at the far end of the odd commercial space that was their apartment, with a rolled-up bill and a mirror and lines and she pretended she saw nothing.