Lilith

by J. R. Salamanca

  When I came down in the elevator remembered that I had used a tire pump this afternoon, and went back to see if I had locked the bicycle shed. Wonderful warm summer night, with locusts singing in the trees and the poplar leaves stirring softly. There was someone there behind the shed, lying in the dark grass. Could see them faintly through the hedge, and hear their whispering. Mandel and a girl. I stood there listening for a minute until I heard him whisper, “No, leave them on.” Could not go then until I had discovered her identity. Waited, listening and peering with rabid curiosity through the hedge until I caught a glimpse of her clothing in the moonlight—blue-striped uniform with white collar and apron: one of the student nurses. Do not understand why I was so shocked and disturbed by this. Ugly feeling in the mind. I can’t stand that boy.

  Then, when I came back down the drive, saw someone standing under Lilith’s window in the moonlight. Warren, looking enormously tall and sallow, with dark hollows in his eye pits and huge luminous hands. He was moved from Second Floor to Field House this morning.

  “Is anything the matter?” I asked him.

  “No, no. I’m just not very sleepy. He raised his eyes rather feverishly. “She sits at her window sometimes at night. I’ve seen her. I think she sits there all night sometimes.”

  “Well, not tonight,” I said. “You’d better go to bed.”

  “Yes. Did you know that I was in Field House now? They moved me this morning.”

  “I know. Congratulations. I hope you’ll stay.”

  “Oh, I will. I know I will. Until I move out for good, that is. I feel so much better. So much surer of everything. I think I’m beginning to make some real progress.”

  “It’s good to hear that, Warren.”

  “Thank you. I’ll be outside by this time next year, I’m sure of it. Even working, perhaps. I feel as if I could work again; my mind is so much steadier. I may even be married—you can’t tell. What would you think of that?”

  “I’d be delighted to hear it.”

  “Yes. That’s very kind of you.” He raised his head again to her window and lifted his long hands, glowing in the moonlight, to bite pieces of flesh from the tips of his fingers, spitting them out with an unpleasant soft plosive sound.

  “You’d better go to bed now, Warren.”

  “I will, yes.” He turned his face down suddenly, looking at me out of the black hollows of his eyes. “Have you given her my message? That I asked about her?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said to thank you. She isn’t ill. She’s been very busy on a piece of tapestry she’s making.”

  “Oh, thank you! That was very good of you. You’ve no idea how pleased I am to hear it! Good night, Mr. Bruce.”

  “Good night.”

  He turned and walked off under the shadow of the poplars, chuckling and muttering to himself.

  Should not have lied to him, but the poor devil needed it. What else could I do? I’m glad he wasn’t there last night. . . .

  MON., MAY 11:

  . . . Stopped by this afternoon to speak to Lilith for a moment. She did not answer my tap, but as her door was slightly ajar I pushed it open and looked into her room. She was standing in front of the window, her body latticed by pale gray diamonds of shadow from the wire netting and patched with blazing rags of sunlight, like a slender, smiling Harlequin, holding her breasts and dreaming. I closed the door gently, without speaking to her.

  Terrible scene with Mr. Palakis. He is on Third Floor again, and in a dreadful hunted state of fear. After much persuasion I got him downstairs, but as we came out of the elevator he looked down at that slowly rotating ventilation fan in the basement window. A clatter of cutlery and kitchenware and the smell of cooking meat blew out from between its blades. He stared down at it with a look of horror, his face turning pale.

  “What is down there?” he asked.

  “The kitchen.”

  “Yes.” He raised his head and stared at me, asking in a terrified voice, “That’s where you’re taking me, isn’t it?”

  “No. I thought we’d walk down to the pond.”

  “Oh, that’s very clever; but I know what they’re going to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re going to eat me! That’s what they want, isn’t it? That’s what they do with all of us.” He thrust his face forward suddenly, peering into my eyes with a stealthy, cunning look. “What’s happened to Waters and Archmore?”

  “Why, they’ve been discharged,” I said. “They went home last month.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s a very satisfactory answer! Do you think I don’t know what’s happened to them? Do you think I don’t know what it is that you give us to eat? You keep us locked in here until you eat us, one by one!”

  “That’s nonsense, Mr. Palakis,” I said.

  He backed away from me suddenly, striking out with his hand. “You want to take me down there and kill me. Hack my body into pieces and cook it, and then sit there munching it at those long white tables. Monsters! Eaters of the earth!”

  He turned and began to run wildly across the lawn toward Crowfields. I caught up to him at the edge of the plowed soil and we struggled for several minutes, stumbling in the furrows. He is very strong, in spite of his size, and I couldn’t have held him very long if Mandel had not run down the shop stairs to help me. One of the few times I’ve ever been pleased to see him. Bob and Brewster, one of the floor attendants, came to our aid in a few minutes, and the four of us carried him back to the Lodge, shrieking and stammering, his face scarlet and his lips covered with spittle. We dragged him into an isolation room and stripped him of everything but his underwear. He became suddenly inert, slumping onto the padded floor, where he lay moaning and breathing heavily, like a wounded animal. Have been in an unpleasant state of agitation ever since. My hand is still trembling as I write this. . .

  THURS., MAY 14:

  Took Lilith walking this morning to the pond. It was quite early and there was still dew on the grass and mist above the water. She sat on the bank with her skirt touseled about her, gathering tulip blossoms that fell down from the poplars. They were all blown and broken; she smoothed the orange petals with her fingers, making them like candle flames. On the opposite shore there was a blue heron hunting for frogs, wading very slowly with delicate stealth, lifting its spoked feet clear of the surface with every step and turning its head sideways to peer among the rushes, its cockade trembling. There was sometimes the soft plash of the falling blossoms on the water. It was delightful to lean against one of the poplars, watching her.

  “May I wade?” she asked.

  “Yes, if you promise not to drown.” She swung her shining head to look at me. “I would hate to have to go in after you,” I said immediately. And then, while I looked at her, another of those vivid, startling images that come into my mind when I am with her: myself walking up through the rushes with her body in my arms, her wet frock clinging to her slender body, her drenched hair hanging in ragged, dripping strands, her drowned eyes open, their violet washed pale as opals.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Are you going in?”

  “Yes. Will you come?”

  “No. When my feet get cold I’m miserable all day.”

  She stood up in the grass and gathered her skirt in her hands, stepping out cautiously into the placid water that glittered in the morning light. There were two Liliths, joined at their calves: one fallen, tremulous girl with rippling breasts looking up from her silver underworld, mocking every move my Lilith made. They watched each other merrily and tenderly.

  “Look at her,” Lilith said. “She wants to be like me. Oh, she is lovely!” She leaned down swiftly and kissed the floating face, which shattered at the touch of her lips, then stood watching with astonished, rueful eyes.

  “My kisses kill her. She is like all of them; it destroys them to be loved.”

  “Is it cold?” I asked, although
I did not wish to speak.

  “Oh, it’s sweet. You must come, Vincent.”

  “No.”

  She moved out farther into the pond, clutching her skirt in her hands, the cool water devouring the white columns of her legs, wading in mercury to her thighs. In a moment she had almost disappeared into a bank of milky mist that hung above the water. Only her head and shoulders faded forth from it into the nebulous light above the lake which made her hair glow with a soft, tarnished brilliance. She stood silently, sunken in pale mist, staring out across the water; and I had for a moment the bewildering conviction that she would truly vanish.

  “Lilith, come back!” I called, my voice hollow over the lake in the quiet morning air. It echoed three times from the far shore. She turned and came toward me through a patch of water lilies by the shore, the great green leaves and floating lavender blossoms slipping along her wet thighs as she parted them. She stopped and lifted one, glowing in her hand like palely tinted paraffin, the long tubular stem dripping silver.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Yes.”

  “I must take one to Yvonne.”

  She lifted it higher and, leaning down to the water, bit the stem through with her teeth, her head turned sideways and her hair floating, smiling at me as she did so.

  “They’re bitter.” She waded to the bank and held her hand out to me. “Help me.”

  Cold, fragile hands, like a frozen sparrow I picked up once when I was a boy. I pulled her up onto the bank and she stood with her wet hair clinging to her throat, lifting the pale flower to her nostrils.

  “Do you mean Mrs. Meaghan?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you take her flowers?”

  “Because she loves them, and she is afraid to go out by herself to get them.” She watched me for a moment, her eyes becoming still. “Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You called me ‘Lilith.’”

  “It seems a little odd to go on being so formal.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re all wet,” I said. “We must go back and get you dry, or you’ll catch cold.”

  “I never catch cold,” she said. “But we’ll go, because I want to take my flower back before it withers.”

  We walked back silently to the Lodge, a curious tension between us, almost a bitterness.

  I felt listless all the rest of the day, impatient and disinterested in my work. Kept thinking about the pond and wanting to return there. Had the feeling that I had forgotten something that I must return for. Even went through my pockets to see if I could discover what was “missing.”

  It is not possible any longer to consider this a general and “normal” anxiety about my work. It may be partly this; but I recognize, too, my involvement with this girl. She “persuades” me, in some unaccountable way, although she is never openly disobedient or defiant. I can never seem to understand what it is that she persuades me to, although I am aware that in spite of my determination my handling of her is never successfully objective, and I know that I cannot be effective here until I learn to correct this. She makes me see things with her eyes, as it were—there are those “visions,” for example, which she seems to evoke. They are not really visions, of course, but ideas about her—conceptions—which are so spontaneous and intense that I almost seem to see them.

  I must speak to Dr. Lavrier about it. I feel that these things need to be discussed with him, because it is impossible to get them into a report. When I brought her back this afternoon, for example, I had only the time and space to write: “Accompanied patient to pond at her suggestion. Agreeable and composed. Went wading, gathered flowers, and talked in lighthearted, happy way. Habitual carelessness about appearance. Asked if she could go out again tomorrow. 9:00-10:00 A.M.” Yet how little does this express what actually occurred, or what I felt to have occurred, beyond the actual events. How totally misleading or inadequate language can be if used in too precise, too categorical a way! I’m sure that much of this can be illuminated if I speak to him in person. After all, what I feel disturbed about may be some very common occupational thing that he can give me immediate insight into. I will try to make an appointment with him tomorrow. . . .

  AT the next morning’s meeting I said to Bea, “I took Lilith down to the pond yesterday. She seemed in very good spirits.”

  “Good, Vincent. Keep her stirring if you can.”

  “She wants to go to one of the tournaments they have around the county. I told her I’d ask about it.”

  “Why, that’s wonderful,” Bea said. “But she’ll have to have special permission to go outside the grounds, and I don’t have the authority for that. You’ll have to ask Dr. Lavrier about it.”

  “Yes, I wanted to. I wonder when I can see him?”

  “This morning, if you like. He has staff conferences from eleven to twelve. Shall I ring him?”

  “Yes, I wish you would.”

  I took Doris Glassman to Field House for a game of ping-pong in the early morning, enjoying in a vagrant, thoughtless way the incessant clattering rhythm of the celluloid ball and the swift mechanical adjustments my bent arm made from side to side, to meet it with the paddle. She kept up her endless senseless civilities while we played: “You’re a very good player, Mr. Bruce. Oh, that was very good. I guess you must be winning, aren’t you, Mr. Bruce? You certainly play well, Mr. Bruce.” Once, when she stooped to retrieve the ball, she held it for a moment in her fingers, seeming to lose her orientation completely while she stared at it.

  “What kind of an egg is this, Mr. Bruce?” she asked.

  “A linnet egg,” I said. “A silver songbird will hatch out of it if you hold it to your throat.”

  “Will it really, Mr. Bruce? I will, then. That would be very exciting.” She lifted the ball to her throat and clasped it there with her hand, smiling at me foolishly. I had not said this out of mockery or impatience with the poor girl—I don’t really know why I said it—but watching her stand there at the end of the table, holding the ball against her throat with foolish, patient delight, I felt suddenly alarmed and ashamed. She must have sensed this in some unexpectedly acute manner, for she removed the ball and laid it on the table, her smile widening with a look of appallingly sensitive and humble understanding, and said, “I guess you must have been fooling me, Mr. Bruce.”

  “Yes, I was,” I said gently. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Bruce. I like to joke myself. I like people with a sense of humor. You certainly seem to be a very nice young man, Mr. Bruce.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not, Doris,” I said.

  When I had returned her to her floor I felt compelled, out of some nameless uncertainty, to visit Lilith for a moment before my interview with Dr. Lavrier. She was bent above her desk, working with painful concentration on her illuminations. I stood above her and pointed to a line of the ornate Gothic script.

  “What does that say?” I asked her.

  “This is one of the very oldest of the Data,” she said. “Which is a sort of Gospel. It was given by a scribe from Lamora, after his Recapitulation.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “After many years the Elders are required, for a period, to renounce. They must abjure joy, and resume the old gods, and relive their mortality. It is a kind of imposed anguish, which greatens the joy of those who are wise enough to bear it, and to understand. The line says, ‘Although I was grown too great for them, I found that my old sins fitted me like the folded garments of childhood, if one should remove them from an attic hamper. And in this was my astonishment and delight. For how should we trust God if He did not allow us to possess what He had, in love, relieved us of?’”

  I tried for a moment to understand it, but I suppose I must have been too preoccupied, for it seemed to shimmer just beyond the reach of reason.

  “It seems that your sages have the same passion for obscurity as ours,” I said.

  “You must remember that he
was writing out of darkness. He was suffering. These are the Dark Gospels.”

  She laid a sheet of tissue across her work and stood up, stretching her hands above her head, her fingers twined together, while she arched her back.

  “I don’t want to work any more. Will you take me walking?”

  “I can’t just now,” I said. “I have an interview with Dr. Lavrier in a few minutes.”

  She dropped her laced hands to the back of her head, clasping her neck with them, and looked out at me somberly from between her pointing elbows.