Franz’s swallowed, guttural gasp and convulsions bought Arthur back to horrible reality. A warm, thick goo dribbled down his hand. It smelled awful, worse than cat’s piss. It had the feel of pulverized slugs. He removed his hand from the dying volcano of the crotch, and found his hand encased in ectoplasm. Arthur immediately began to wipe the slimy substance on the nearest available surface, Franz’ coat.
“Idiot,” Franz hissed, “don’t ruin my coat!”
What am I supposed to do with your filth? But he didn’t voice it. The slime was cooling, and left a queasy feeling in his stomach. He glanced around. His eyes fell upon the shocked countenance of saintly neighbor woman. Her lined face was frozen in a latticework of lines and disgust, her mouth a squashed O. She was no longer kindly. Her look cast him out of human society. The romance of the vagabond died, leaving behind the bitter metallic taste of criminality.
I’m sorry, mother. Her face superimposed over the woman’s face for a defining moment.
The exile from the garden; the pearly gates forever closed against him. He knew at that instant that Heaven would never be his. Cain, Judas, and the struggling Jacob and his fiendish angel—these were his kin. The pagan stain of Lucifer, always on him.
The knowledge that good, studious Arthur was banished awoke something within him. It was liberating. The nausea in the pit of his stomach became the feeling of bedazzlement. It spurred him to action.
He stood up, and Franz allowed this move away from the imprisoning seat. At the last moment, Arthur snatched the coat covering Franz’s crotch with a magician’s flourish. Instead of a cooing dove, or a rabbit, a flaccid wormy root was revealed, to the increased horror of the kind old lady.
“You, sir, are a pervert,” he announced to those who would hear. He dropped the coat in the aisle. As he prepared to flee to another car, he noticed the custard pastry, still untouched, next to lady.
“Madame, may I?” He bent toward her. She promptly swooned.
Arthur baptized the empty cloth seat next to her with the glistening excess ejaculate, and snatched the now profane pastry. He bit into the sugary crust—surely the apple of knowledge tasted no sweeter.
He dashed out onto the rickety platform between the cars. It was slippery and misty. The landscape was a blur of fields and trees, rushing by. He stepped into the next car, and was greeted by sullen and curious faces glancing up at him. Ignoring the rheumy-eyed glances, Arthur forded down the aisle of wooden benches. He took a seat next to a single woman.
Arthur wolfed down the rest of the pastry. Crisp, buttery layers crumbled on him while the vanilla-scented custard coated his throat. Each bite was heavenly. He knew that he wouldn’t be eating sweets for a long time. What could he expect? A daily diet of some gristly stew, thickened with suet, accompanied by moldy bread and withered vegetables. Watered wine and yeasty beer. He ate the last bite with regret.
The woman next to him was asleep. One part of her long brown hair tickled him. Her eyes wasn't quite closed. A thin half-moon sliver of opened eye, obscured by lashes, was barely visible. Her small, high breasts rose and fell in gentle rhythm. Her skin was pale, with a thin tracery of blue veins visible at the temple. Her blouse was simple, navy blue muslin with embroidered white flowers on the V that held the stalk of her neck. The breath that brushed his face was sweet and pure. She looked like a drowned girl. An aquatic angel, pale Ophelia drifting in the lagoon, with skin as white as farmer’s cheese. There was a sour smell to her, as if she had just left her morning chores before a journey to the city. What was the story there? Arthur let the gravity of sleep overtake his eyelids, telling himself that he was only resting his eyes.
Her name was Sidonie. She was going to the city to meet her betrothed; she had been sold in marriage to a creditor, to secure the farm. Her old Monsieur, who’d had a former wife and a brood of snot-nosed brats, could hardly wait to get her. Such young, unblemished flesh, waiting to be kneaded by his liver-spotted claws. Her firm, ample bosom and wide, curved hips, perfect for planting more of his wretched seed in. Sidonie would live a life of domestic drudgery, until childbirth and floor scrubbing bent her back. That is, until young Arthur came to her rescue. Oh, he was not much to look at—a waif, a bohemian poet, slight of stature, with fawn hair and a long, sorrowful nose. But he’d liberate his drowned love, and immortalize her in verse. Once freed from the clutches of old Monsieur, they would live in a basement apartment, around the corner from some squalid café. At night he would write poetry by candlelight, while she made a meager living as a haberdasher, sewing lace and ribbons on the velvet pastry of hats. Just before bed, he and Sidonie would share a glass of cheap claret wine, and, after blowing out the candles, fuck like rabbits in their junky, cluttered yet clean apartment. It was like one of Perrault’s fairy stories.
Some motion, or another awakened him abruptly. He heard, “…that’s him! That is the little bastard who assaulted me!”
He opened his eyes to three pairs of hostile eyes: Sidonie-who-was-not-Sidonie, her lovely face ruined with disgust; vindictive Franz, and the annoyed conductor.
“Sir,” said the conductor, “I don’t believe I saw you during my rounds.”
Franz cut in: “He hid underneath my coat when you were checking tickets, and threatened to harm me with a knife, if I did not stay quiet.”
“Did I?” said Arthur. “Where, then, is this imaginary knife of mine?” He sat up, and began to pat his clothes theatrically. “I see that it has vanished, into thin air!”
Franz sneered. “How am I to know the secret ways of criminals?”
Arthur laughed. Franz was the very model of unsavoriness, with his beady, rat’s eyes and unshaven face.
“You must jest! Sir, this man assaulted me. And in a manner that the young lady sitting next me would blanche to hear. He is a pervert, as I announced to the car I had previously left. I am sure that others could vouch for me—”
The conductor was implacable; he was the apotheosis of a civil servant, brusque and stalwart. His beaky nose was the only thing that quivered on his body. “May I see your ticket?”
Arthur opened his mouth, closed it. He patted his coat, his pants. “I seem to have misplaced it. In my haste to escape the lurid attentions of—that man—I must have dropped it.”
The conductor looked bored. “All passengers must have tickets.” Arthur could almost see the text of the conductor’s instruction manual floating in the front of him.
“But sir, surely the circumstances surrounding the loss—”
“All passengers must have tickets.” This was said more forcefully. Just barely. The conductor was clearly flipping forward in his manual, to the part where the proper procedure to eject a stowaway passenger was. “Young man, please come with me.”
Choice spread out before him, as long as the train aisle that he could run down. He could become some Dionysian wild man, dashing up and down the train corridors, dodging a bevy of beaked civil servants. Or he could be as crafty as gypsy, and live by his wits and discretion.
Arthur stood proud in the midst of his defeat. Sidonie looked as if she wanted to scrub his now abandoned seat with lye. Franz stood aside, while Arthur joined the conductor. Franz said, sotto voce, “Catamite.”
Civilization and craftiness slipped away, like Ophelia into the dark water. The mad man took over. Arthur stood up, and pushed the conductor away, onto a hapless couple on the opposite side of the aisle.
“Villain,” he said to Franz, and cuffed his ear as hard as he could. Sidonie screamed. Another woman prayed to God. Arthur snatched his rucksack, and bounded down the narrow aisle. He almost reached the door that led to another car, when he tripped. He fell, hard. No soft carpet cushioned his fall. A splintery, unfinished wood floor met his face with a hard smack. He was momentarily stunned. Then he stood up, or tried to. But something—a foot—dug into the small of his back. The toe of a work boot ground his shoulder blade muscle to pulp. Breath was expelled from his body, like juice from a grape. Arthur yelled, word
s, sounds. They were unheeded. He heard a mostly indistinguishable smear of babble, where he could pick out outraged and shocked voices.
- - -
The guard slid a tray in the opening at the floor of the cell. Arthur saw it was a cold haunch of some beast, rabbit or chicken, accompanied by chunk of grayish, moldy bread. His stomach stirred with hunger, or disgust. He could no longer tell the difference between the two of them. Eating the prison’s food had left him ill, expelling the foul stuff from both orifices. He was not so eager to revisit the experience. The past two days he had subsisted on the metallic tasting water and eaten around the inedible parts of the bread. He crawled toward the tray. The meat was encased in an opaque membrane of yellow fat. A wave of hunger-nausea engulfed him. When it passed, he picked up the bread, which was hard and stale.
“Are you going to eat that, darling?” The rough voice of Herve, the prisoner in an adjacent cell interrupted him.
Remaining quiet, he picked up the leg bone of the portion, and slid it through the bars. Arthur continued eating his bread, softening it in the water that was also on the tray. He heard Herve’s mastication, devouring the flesh.
“You are such a sweetheart,” said Herve when he was finished eating. “You must tolerate this food, or you will die. Such a tragedy for such a beautiful boy.”
It was all familiar now. The smells of excrement and piss, the pallet of straw, the rustling and snoring of his fellow prisoners, the dank light, the mind numbing boredom. He had been here for centuries, it seemed. He saw the cruel, indifferent faces of the guards, and the glittering lustful eyes of the criminals. From the screams and groans in the night, Arthur knew that it was only a matter of time before he was either killed, or worse. Franz’s abuse of him on the train, ages ago, would seem like a tryst in a primrose path.
I am in Hell, Arthur thought for the millionth time. He moldered away in this Stygian nightmare. He lay back on the pallet, and closed his eyes, a Tantalus: outside the city teeming with poets and other iconoclasts.
Maman. How he missed her. Her sorrowful, disapproving face, her cheerless piety. Yes, even she would be a welcome alternative to this hive of depravity. One look at her boy lying in filth would crumble the blackened coal of her heart. She would embrace him; lay his head on dark bosom. A tear leaked from his eyes. He could hear her heart beating beneath the constrained clothing. The itchy hairshirt fabric, and the punishing corset of whalebones. He was just like his father, leaving her with a dingy farm.
How could you? He heard her voice, no longer soothing and maternal. May you rot, like your worthless father.
But Maman…
Her face was stone, as was her bosom. Cold emanated from her. Her heart of coal returned, her dress and corset seethed with flies: if he was Tantalus, she was a Fury, casting him into Hell with the entire world of sinners.
He cursed loudly, a sound to destroy the horrible images that plagued his mind.
“Shut up!” someone yelled.
Arthur didn’t care. The hoarseness in his voice felt good. To think, days ago, he was actively seeking darkness and criminal experiences. Vagabondage held no romance anymore, not if the roads led to here. He was a fool. What was he thinking—that he would somehow escape the chaos of the war in the countryside, and live a halcyon, bohemian existence in the capital? No, Charville could be boring and stifling, but at least it was safe.
He cursed again, louder this time. The word turned into a scream, formless and piercing. It was art that lead him to this Hell. His damned, lazy, poetic nature! He was a fool. He thrashed in the straw, upsetting the droppings of rats. If he was not made of the stern, religious cloth of his mother, he was also not made of the mercurial fabric of a poet.
I curse you, Izambard, for tempting me.
I curse you, poetry, you agent of Satan, for making me see illusion and leading me into rot.
Arthur sat up. When he finally got out of here—if he ever got out of here—he swore to devote himself to his studies, learn a useful trade, and leave his childish dreams of being a poet behind him, forever. Ravenously hungry, he devoured the remaining bread, mold and all, and washed its musty taste down with the stale water.
With new resolve and strength, Arthur composed a letter in his head to his mother as he paced around the cell. He could endure her scorn for another few years.
Dear Maman, he began, Lying here in the lice-strewn straw of this cell has made me see the wickedness of my ways. Surely, Satan has been after my soul for many years now, and only you, through your vigilance have seen him lurking around me…
“What is this you are writing?”
Arthur jumped. The voice—where did it come from? He saw Herve in the adjacent cell, his back turned towards him; he was either sleeping or masturbating. At any rate, there was no way that he could have known what he was thinking.
“I am over here.”
Arthur turned around and saw a figure sitting on his pallet, amidst the straw. He gasped. The figure was—himself. A trick of the half-light, or a hallucination? In the past week, he’d heard hardened criminals scream out in pain and madness in the pitch-black of the prison. The figure, his twin, possessed a paleness that became a ghostly beacon against the dank darkness of the prison. Though naked, he was immaculately clean, and his auburn hair stood in tufts, hillocks and peaks as sharp as knives. Something shimmered and scrolled over his body: black snakes just beneath the skin, slithering.
“You cannot cast me out,” it said. The lips did not move. Phrases and questions oozed on his double’s milk pale skin. Equations and formulae appeared and faded tantalizingly on the skin.
Arthur moved closer to the boy on the pallet, mesmerized. He knelt on his knees, about three feet away from him. “But I am afraid.”
The flesh of this other Rimbaud was translucent, as delicate as the wing of a white moth. A tracery of blue veins could be seen underneath. And the letters of a strange alphabet, forming itself into shapes, poems and paragraphs, slid across his skin. The vowels glowed in colors, silver white, blood red, chartreuse and cerulean.
“But such visions, such adventures you will have.” The other Rimbaud began to stroke his own penis, which also displayed letters. “You will live in Hell. But you will touch Heaven.”
Arthur shivered. I must be going mad. But the figure sat before him. He knew that only he could see apparition. It was implicit. Maybe if I close my eyes… He closed, then opened them. The other Rimbaud still sat on the pallet, as wise and inscrutable as a statue. Arthur asked, “What is Heaven like?”
His own face smiled back at him, and there was something mischievous in the curling of his lips. “Worse than this.”
A map of an unknown region splashed against that face, blue and silver, regions and shapes labeled with hair thin script.
The letter to Maman forgotten, Arthur asked of himself, “Can you teach me that language?”
A smile played on the other’s lips. “The price is high.”
“I will pay it.” The words were so luminous. Surely it was the writing of angels. The pale him, made of words, leaned forward on the pallet. Arthur came forward, too, closing his eyes. The kiss—that transference of pressure, saliva and secret knowledge—was gentle. He drowned within himself.
“Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud!” The voice came from behind him. He heard the clanking of the key in the door, the rusty squeak of hinges, and scrape of the door on the floor. “You are free to go. A friend has vouched for you, and paid your fine. Please follow me.”
A guard stood in the cell door, unsmiling and official. Turning back toward the pallet, Arthur saw the illumined letters against the body of an invisible boy. They faded.
He was cursed by poetry, and it felt divine.
Magpie Sisters
Sister Magpie was the greatest thief of all, greater than the crow or the fox. Her top half was darker than the spaces between the stars. But her underside was splashed with white, where she had been burned when she mistook a fragment of a fallen s
tar for a coin. She was a true daughter of the night. On nights of the blue moon, she could shift her shape like all of animal kind could. In her human form, she was a black woman mantled in a robe of black feathers. A single stripe of white bisected her body, from the wild tufts of her hair, down her face, through her torso. You could see the things she stole woven into a necklace: bits of glitter, a thimble, the nib of a pen. Only a glimpse, though, before the moon hid behind sapphire-lined clouds. Then she was in bird-form, off in the air, searching for brightness.
- - -
Vonda tried to ignore the calling as she walked in Greenwich Village. The vendors set things out to tempt her, wares on dirty blankets on the street. DVDs, books arranged in neat stacks, empty perfume bottles, knock-off Hermes bags. I don’t need any of this shit, she reminded herself. Her room in a Queens townhouse was overflowing as it was with knickknacks. She had enough earrings to open a shop herself.
No.
She quieted the urge with the mantras Seline, her counselor, had given her. I am strong and whole, she thought to herself, swimming through crowds of hipsters in colorful T-shirts and gay boys in tighter versions of the same T-shirts. She had a new job (a crappy one) at a clothing store for a month; her record was going to be expunged. No way was she gonna fuck it up. But the calling was persistent. The calling was like an tickling behind the eyes, a feather-touched shiver. It quarreled in her ear, mocking and singing, just below comprehension.
Sea Swallow Me and Other Stories Page 14