The bed was just a mattress on the floor. On a desk stood a lamp with a revolving translucent sleeve inside, upon which were printed fish and other aquatic life, the motion making them seem to swim around and around, and this cast their ghostly colors across the walls and the body of the woman who lay upon the mattress, under a blanket. More fluid light was cast from a muted TV, again with static-shot reception, perhaps as a result of the storm. Rain was pummeling the corrugated tin roof so hard that it sounded as if some industrial grinding machine were running in the next room.
“Hello,” French said uncomfortably as he stood by the doorway. He couldn’t make out the woman’s face in the gloom with its shifting bluish light, and her long black hair fell in stringy, tangled curtains about her face. “Ah, xin chao,” he said.
A slight stirring beneath the blanket. The compacted air of the room smelled of the sea, as if he had been swallowed like Jonah. He took a step forward, but he couldn’t say why. The deformities he had seen were not within his realm of study, and this woman if she had them too would be of no more interest to him, except out of general curiosity, than the others. But maybe he moved closer to see if she did indeed have them, and to what extent. Or maybe he moved closer for another reason. Distantly he was reminded of when he had taken the photo of the faceless foo dog, and when he had sat staring at that photo on his laptop. A compulsion he couldn’t consciously understand, only follow, like an urge as much from without as within.
The woman made a sinuous, slithering movement under her blanket again. The way the material fell across her lower body made her look like a mermaid. She took hold of an edge of the blanket, and as she raised it from her body, peeling it away to one side, French realized it had been soaked in water.
The naked body revealed to him was not golden-brown like No’s, but white. A white that was almost translucent, almost opalescent, or was that the hypnotic colored light from the whimsical lamp? Under the blanket the woman’s legs had been held together, rendering that mermaid effect, but now she slid them open, opened them wide as if she had been tied down spread-eagled on the mattress. Her limbs, he saw, were all fully formed. Only too perfectly, sensuously formed.
When the tips of his shoes touched the edge of the mattress, he realized how far he had shifted into the little cell-like room.
French tried to chuckle uncomfortably, but couldn’t even do that. His eyes had been drawn to the woman’s thick, wet mat of pubic hair...which against the almost luminous whiteness of her body appeared like a gaping black hole, a secret cave, a mystical creature’s lair.
She raised both arms to him languidly, but she didn’t speak. Her arms hung in the air as if buoyed, weightless, awaiting him. Her head lifted a little off her pillow, just enough for the TV’s glow to reflect off her eyes. Her eyes were bloated spheres, set twice as far apart as they should have been, her lips bloated too, a vivid red circle like a suction cup. Her nose was a bare suggestion, little more than two small nostrils like slits. But somehow, her oval face with its high cheekbones was exquisitely composed. Somehow, in an unearthly and terrible way, she was beautiful as a goddess.
He peeled his polo shirt, as soaked as her blanket, up over his head, dropped it to one side. She watched him unfasten his belt, the button of his jeans. She did not smile – the open ring of her lips did not seem capable of a smile – but her glistening orbs watched him avidly.
He had been wrong, only moments before, in thinking she was out of his realm of interest. Not the object of his quest. Oh, how wrong! She was the very object of his quest. He felt that more than saw it. She was everything he had come here for, all his desires embodied. Yes, a mermaid, a chimera: No and the dragon in one.
No. He wanted to thank her for bringing him to his Holy Grail, after all, but over the clamor of the rain on the roof he heard the motor of her departing Honda.
That hungry black hole was the sacred chalice, awaiting the touch of his lips. A black hole with a gravitational pull he could not resist, nor wanted to.
He crawled naked onto the mattress, and her arms folded around him, feeling boneless but heavy like tentacles. He slid into her without either of them having to guide him there. His face hovered above hers but the combination of rapture and terror he felt at its proximity was too much, and he had to close his eyes and bury his face in her neck, her skin that smelled of the surf and her hair wet as kelp. He felt a warm, fluttering exhalation against his cheek, and opened his eyes again to see a curved slit running under the edge of her jaw, a slit with a thin, delicate lip. As he watched, the gill opened briefly again, itself like some sexual orifice. French smiled dreamily, and laid his cheek against a shoulder that was indeed as opalescent as mother of pearl.
And he moved upon her rhythmically as if swimming. Fucking the monster, fucking the mystery, inside of and swallowed by it.
The woman moaned, the only sound he had heard from her. He felt her head rise again from the pillow, and a remote part of his mind wondered if No had come back, or perhaps never left, and stood in the doorway watching them. He cranked his own head up and around as if drugged, saw that it wasn’t the doorway the woman was watching, but the television. The image there was from an unsteady handheld camera, with rain whipping past and spattering the lens, making the footage indistinct. It was a shot of Hoan Kiem Lake. A vast dark figure was rising from the water, blurred and vague despite its size. Its back appeared to be a turtle’s gleaming carapace, but could those be two wings folded tight and hard against it instead? Its back was to the camera, so French couldn’t see its face, but weeds from the lake appeared to be hanging from the creature’s lower jaw – though the weeds looked to be twining and twisting of their own volition.
For scale, it held a limp human figure in one of its forelegs. For scale, it was pulling itself up onto the small island at the center of the lake by using the “Tortoise Tower,” Thap Rua, for support...but this structure was collapsing under the strain.
It was not from pleasure – at least, not any pleasure French was administering – that caused the woman to moan, but the appearance of the entity from the lake. A sustained moan of longing like a mating call.
Seeing the leviathan pierced through the fog of French’s mind like a lighthouse beacon, if only feebly. Pierced it just enough for him to let out a moan, too.
But his moan held no longing whatsoever. No...no longing anymore.
THE SEA OF FLESH
For White Orchid
“I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time”
– Carl Jung
1: Witch City
Often when she dreamed – and sometimes even when she was awake, when she was at orgasm – Dot would find herself briefly on the shore of the strange living sea.
Her mother had named her Dorothy, because it was the custom of many transplanted Vietnamese to give their children Anglo names, but children in school had always asked her where Toto was or if the legs of the Wicked Witch of the East stuck out from beneath her house, so from the age of thirteen she had called herself Dot. Her mother still called her Dorothy, but on the rare occasion that her father addressed her by name, he used Dot, too. Maybe it sounded more Vietnamese to him.
In Junior High, when there had once been a paper that required Dot to put down her race, she had checked “White.” The teacher had pointed out that she should check “Asian.” Dot had argued that she had never been to Asia. And for her country of origin, she had written in “United States.” Her teacher had told her she should write “Vietnam” instead. Dot had replied that she had never even been to Vietnam.
To her face, at least, white classmates had never really called her the names they might have: “chink,” “slope,” “gook.” Ironically, it had been Asian children who had mocked her, accusing her of being “white.” Though she had labeled herself such, on those occasions this word – spoken in a derogatory way – had angered and somewhat confused her.
At home, when h
er mother would try to speak Vietnamese to her, this younger Dot would say, “I don’t speak Japanese!” Or she would imitate her, like an ignorant American, by mouthing nonsense such as, “Ching chang chong.” Even now, Vietnam was a place less real to Dot than the sea she visited in dreams.
In the city of Salem, Massachusetts, tourists and even her coworkers and friends might easily think of Dot as a goth first, and an Asian-American second.
She had to wear the same uniform of white blouse and dark skirt the other young female servers in The Pier restaurant wore, so at work she might not be as readily categorized as a goth. But though she no longer dyed her short spiky hair crimson (other goths could only achieve her natural jet black with the help of a bottle) – and for work painted her lips dark brown or bruised deep purple instead of outright black as she might wear outside the restaurant – one might still guess from the jewelry she wore, or her patchouli scent, or simply from her detached, solemn air that she was inclined toward goth aesthetics.
Sometimes she outlined her eyes in heavy kohl. But she would never, never have her eyeliner tattooed on as her mother had done, as many Asian women did. Her mother had also had her lips tattooed bright pink. Dot had told her that if she ever had her eyebrows tattooed, as some of her mother’s friends had done, she would disown her altogether. Sometimes Dot felt like the scolding world-weary mother, and her mother the innocent, awkward child.
Dot’s best friend at work, Erin, called Dot “Goth Gook.” Again, Dot had never been called “gook” in a hateful way; it was the word “goth” that was actually beginning to irk her...almost as much as “Vietnamese” did. Was this growing disgust a result of seeing the constant stream of goth types that flocked the streets of Salem, even more so in the autumn, like a migration of preening crows (or The Crow wannabes)? Witches in silken or velvet robes, silver glittering against all that ebon. Men with long hair flowing freely or in ponytails like androgynous vampires. Fishnet stockings and pierced eyebrows and lips. Floating along like storm clouds. Trying to frighten, to shock or outrage. Broadcasting “look at me, notice me” at the same time they claimed a loathing rejection of others. Flaunting their alienation while they congregated together. Strutting emblems of individuality while they all looked more or less the same, listened to more or less the same music, created websites (with names like “Whispers of Desolation” and “The Grove of Emptiness”) filled with cemetery photos (preferably with themselves posed before the gravestones) and angst-heavy poetry, in purple fonts against black backgrounds. Not that Dot hadn’t made just such a website, too, when she was seventeen – three years ago – but she hadn’t even looked at it herself in months.
She was no longer even sure of how the black-garbed ghouls had appropriated the word “goth.” It seemed a stretch, to her, connecting these modern coffee-jockey vampires with traditional gothic literature.
For the past year or more, she had tried to change the way she dressed. No more buying clothes at the Hot Topic chain. She assembled her own outfits. Her mother, a skilled seamstress, had helped her adapt her clothing to a more personal look – without straying too far from the goth feel; it was still an aesthetic she favored, but in a form more subdued than that of many of Salem’s young citizens.
She had even begun to break off in search of less generically goth forms of music. Her love of the brilliant group Dead Can Dance – a long-time favorite of goths – with their work heavily inspired by international music, had led to her seeking out contemporary Middle Eastern and Indian musicians; artists such as Natacha Atlas, and collections with titles like Xtra Hot Hindi Mixes. On her walk to and from work, on her portable disk player she would listen again and again to the mysterious ambient sounds of Lustmord’s Metavoid, Poe’s Haunted (this CD inspired in part by the novel House of Leaves, written by the musician’s brother), Julee Cruise’s Floating Into The Night, the soundtracks for Eraserhead (with its “Dance Mix”) and Fight Club.
When she rode with her mother, her mother played only Vietnamese ballads sung by weepy/warbly-voiced women in that language Dot barely understood. Sometimes her mother sang along briefly, softly. “This stuff makes me want to commit suicide,” Dot had teased her once.
Though she loved the fall more than any other season, and Halloween in Salem – the Witch City, as it was officially dubbed – was almost like Mardi Gras in its aura of excitement, it irritated Dot greatly that there had never even been actual witches in Salem’s history...just some poor, tragic victims of ignorant persecution, murdered for no good reason. Not that there would have been any justification if they had been real witches. But it was as though the city’s whole identity – despite its restaging of the witch trial, the wax museum which explained the history of the witchcraft hysteria, and the monument erected to the memory of the victims – was based on a misconception, on outright lies. As though the ignorance of those persecutors persisted, still. To the tourists (sometimes even Asian, Dot noticed), to the trinket sellers and tarot readers, to the white-faced goth nosferatu, this was still the city of magic, of witches. Sometimes Dot hated the word “witch,” even as she loved her Witch City. She hated the word “goth,” though she still frequently dressed all in black and often painted her lips black, when out of work, to this day. She hated the word “Vietnamese”...even though she loved her mother dearly, and the eyes she greeted in the mirror every morning were lidded with the distinctive “oriental fold.” Many women in Vietnam, her mother had told her, underwent cheap plastic surgery to alter the shape of their eyes, noses, cheekbones, so as to look more Anglo. Even her mother tinted her own hair a lighter brown so that it wouldn’t be an Asian’s jet black. As much as Dot thought of herself as an American, the idea of such surgical reconfiguration repulsed her more than the most extravagant goth piercing or tattoo.
Sometimes Dot didn’t know what to embrace, what to reject. She had to concede that the Asian symbol of the yin and yang expressed her dilemma best. She was a goth who didn’t want to be called a goth. An Asian-American who didn’t want to be called Vietnamese. And thoroughly loved a city whose identity was based on illusion, and death.
2: Sea Gift
“Oh my God, Dot, you’ve got to come outside and see this,” Erin said, gripping Dot’s arm. Erin was tall and shapely in her tight white blouse and curve-hugging black skirt, whereas Dot was only five feet two inches (an inch taller than her mother, at least) when not wearing shoes with impossibly thick platforms, a mere one hundred pounds, her legs short (stunted, she called them) in their membranes of black hose. The Pier had not yet opened for lunch. It was her favorite time of day: pre-customers, the lull before the storm. She followed Erin out of the restaurant’s gloomy interior, to the tables clustered under umbrellas on the wooden pier where customers preferred to eat in the summer.
It was the first week of September, and a sharp breeze ruffled her blouse and jagged hair. Last night it had been autumnally cool, the climate Dot favored. Tonight it was supposed to be even cooler, and from the overcast sky she could believe that it would rain as was forecasted.
She had worked an interminable double shift last night to fill in for a sick coworker and to collect some overtime to help pay her apartment’s rent. Last night it had been clear, and from this pier she had seen the moon’s reflection unraveled in the water. It would become full on September eleventh, her mother had told her. Also glowing in the sky last night had been the red ember of Mars, a world closer to this world than it had been for thousands and thousands of years...nearer to this world than it would be again for thousands and thousands of years to come.
There was already a bit of a commotion at the railing of Pickering Wharf, overlooking the water where white, bobbing yachts were docked. (Beyond loomed the masts of the antique ship the Friendship, in a little alley of water between Central and Derby Wharves.) Several others of the wait staff, and a loud young Brazilian cook whom Dot had turned down repeatedly for a date, were chattering at the metal railing. She and Erin crowded in beside them,
and followed their gaze down into this boxed-in, domesticated sea water.
“Oh my God, does it stink,” Erin laughed with delighted revulsion.
“It’s probably part of a whale,” said Josh, a gay waiter Dot was fond of. “Blubber, or...whale hide...”
“No,” said the Brazilian cook. “It’s a giant squid. It’s a giant fucking squid, man. We could sell this to somebody and get rich.”
“Or you could cook it up as calamari,” Erin told him.
Dot stared down wordlessly at the great pulpy mass in the gently lapping water. It was partly buoyed up, partly caught in the legs of the wharf and perhaps the mooring lines of the boats. If asked to give its color, she might at first say gray. Then say grayish yellow. With areas of subtle pink. But there was also a silvery sheen to the vast membrane, as if the formless body had been infused with mercury.
“It looks like a squid that a whale chewed up and puked out,” Erin said.
“How big would you say that is?” Josh wondered.
“Forty feet,” said the cook expertly.
Erin pushed away from the railing to see that Dot was walking off, but not back toward the restaurant. “Hey, girl, where are you going?”
“For a closer look,” Dot murmured. She walked briskly to the end of the wharf, and to the ramp that led down to where the boats were tied. Erin jogged to catch up with her, shoes clattering on the weathered boards.
“Hey, if Anoush sees us out here he’ll have a fit.” Anoush was the head of the wait staff, an amicable Iranian with a noisy temper.
Dot said nothing. She had reached the narrow walkway between the boats, and clomped along it in her towering platforms until she was as near as she could get to the huge mass that had apparently been carried during the night into this humble, tiny dead end of the Atlantic ocean.
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