Nocturnals
Page 8
“Tell them to God. We don’t have the time.”
But then, in a sudden convulsion of deus ex machina, a hundred lustrous tendrils penetrated the dingy windows and with relentless benevolence began sucking away the omnidarkness. The guillotine stocks vanished. I scrambled to my feet, whereupon the frame, blade, winch, and basket also disappeared.
“I can’t take any more of this!” I screamed at Stephanie, rushing up to the spectators’ box.
“I’m sorry, Lenny. Truly.”
“Fuck your magic prism! Fuck your Nocturnomicon!”
“You didn’t have to come here,” Stephanie noted.
The android dissolved. The wall clock melted. The balcony disintegrated along with the mob it held. The judges’ bench turned to dust, and then the same fate befell the twelve.
“At least Newton and Vermeer never had to endure Omega,” said Stephanie. “It would have driven them mad. Without differential calculus and Girl with a Pearl Earring, Western civilization would be much the poorer.”
“Get me out of this place!”
As it happened, one final surprise awaited us on the far side of the ∆. Before my astonished eyes, the courtroom transmogrified into a cathedral, complete with altar, chancel, choir screen, and pulpit, plus six-foot candelabra posted like footmen between pairs of stainedglass windows. The box in which Stephanie sat morphed into a pew.
Now the cathedral doors burst open, releasing torrents of light, and a resplendent throng streamed into the nave. They numbered a dozen, including four bearded, whey-faced men wearing white robes and indecipherable expressions (supernaturally appointed prophets, I surmised), four silver-feathered angels hovering on fiery wings, and four humanoid entities that I sensed were, mirabile dictu, actual deities.
“The cosmos has appointed us your keepers,” said the eldest prophet.
“From now until the end of days,” said the brightest angel, “holy guardians will watch over you.”
“Even after time succumbs to chaos,” said the most majestic god, “sacred harmony will rule and divine justice reign supreme.”
“Run!” cried a familiar female voice from the back of the cathedral. “This way! Run!”
Stephanie and I turned synchronously. A frantic, wild-eyed Olivia stood beside the farthest pew, panting and wheezing, a diadem of sweat glistening on her brow. An instant later an equally exhausted Cyril appeared in the doorway, holding a copper tureen, its sides stained with dribbles of Paracelsus’s pigment.
“I’ve marked the way back!” he cried.
“We’re all in great danger!” Olivia insisted.
Although I felt a powerful desire to linger among the prophets, angels, and deities, the urgency in the philosopher’s voice persuaded me to flee, and Stephanie was likewise moved by her fiancée’s distress. As Olivia guided me to the doorway, my ex-wife overtook us, brushed past Cyril, and ran pell-mell into the light.
Cyril had done a masterful job of marking the proper path. Splotch by splotch, the four of us jogged, loped, gimped, tottered, and staggered our way toward our customary dimension. At last we vaulted free of the canvas and tumbled into my studio.
Newton’s prism still rested on the worktable. The iris diaphragm was closed. Beyond the Pale had become unrecognizable. What had begun as a simple white rectangle was now a four-sided swath of pure luminescence, blazing, bewitching—and unequivocally malign.
“Now tell me what the hell’s been going on,” Stephanie demanded.
“Not before we burn Leonard’s painting,” said Olivia.
“Safety first, theology second,” said Cyril.
Nobody questioned the necessity of incineration. Squinting against the baleful glow, we cut apart the canvas with scissors, utility knives, and tinsnips, each segment no larger than a facecloth. We carried the dazzling pieces down twelve flights of stairs and, slipping into the back alley, deposited them in an amorphous heap. Heedless of a half dozen municipal ordinances, we poured lighter fluid on the coruscating pile of hemp and pigment, applied a match, and let the laws of combustion have their way with the imperatives of night.
“When the Omega canvas failed to turn white,” Olivia told Stephanie, “we became afraid for you.”
“Very afraid,” said Cyril.
“We expected you back no later than 2:50,” said Olivia. “At 3:15 the canvas was still black, and then came 3:30, then 3:45. I’ll never forget Cyril’s moment of epiphany. He actually shouted ‘Eureka!’”
Ashes floated like a swarm of gnats above the smoldering remains of Beyond the Pale.
“The problem, you see, was that we’d been defining Newton’s prism as a three-sided solid,” said Cyril. “But it’s really four-sided. The triangular base is interchangeable with the other three faces. What Spinoza carved from Newton’s quoxite is rightly called a pyramid, but an equally precise term is—”
“Tetrahedron—tetra, meaning four,” I said. “Damn, I should have thought of that.”
“Be grateful Cyril did,” said Olivia.
“Four prophets, four angels, four deities,” Stephanie muttered, stirring the ashes with a discarded pogo stick.
“So I tipped the prism onto its Omega face and tore away the green felt, exposing the fourth triangle,” said Cyril. “It bore no Greek letter, but we weren’t surprised.”
“Certain phenomena eluded even Newton’s powers of induction,” said Stephanie evenly.
“We decided to call it Sigma,” said Olivia. “The eclipse had long since peaked, but that seemed irrelevant, because—”
“Because the fourth species of darkness,” Stephanie interrupted in measured tones, “eternally allied with political darkness but not its identical twin, represents itself as light.”
“So Cyril aligned the new face with the black canvas,” said Olivia, “and I opened the iris.”
“The Sigma ray was like a laser beam—sharp, brilliant, and red,” said Cyril. “By 4:05 it had burned away the Omega zone, leaving behind a blindingly lustrous painting. I braved the radiance and scanned the canvas until I found a small Delta.”
“And then you touched the apex,” I said.
“The Delta grew and kept on growing,” said Cyril. “Olivia closed the iris, and together we walked through the gateway.”
“So the android was wrong,” I said. “The worst realm isn’t Omega. Beneath that plane lies an even more terrible dimension.”
“Night masquerading as day,” mused Olivia the philosopher. “Mendacity camouflaged as revelation. Duplicity disguised as numinous truth.”
“Darling, I predict we’ll soon find ourselves submitting the Nocturnomicon to Cambridge University Press,” said Stephanie to Olivia, “complete with an addendum describing the most paradoxical of all possible worlds.”
Just as they’d planned, my ex-wife and her fiancée got married in April of 2018, “tying the non-Euclidean knot,” as Stephanie put it. They invited Cyril and me to the ceremony, but my former apprentice had to prepare his graduation project—a triptych of political murals evocative of Diego Rivera—and I had to meet a deadline on the cover for the first volume of the Sword of Caliban octet.
Stephanie and Olivia eventually decided against showing the Nocturnomicon (plus their Sigma addendum) to Cambridge University Press or any other publisher. They’d come to believe that humankind must never learn about hidden portals to Φ, Ω, Σ, or even Ψ. And while Stephanie has sanctioned this particular account of the bizarre events of August the twenty-first, 2017, she made me promise to label it as fiction before submitting it to any periodical.
As for Newton’s prism, Stephanie gave it to me as a souvenir of our metaphysical adventures. Right now it’s on my desk, holding down an earlier draft of this story. In the days to come, I may also use it as a doorstop, a chock, a woodcut press, an exercise weight, and a conversation piece. Physics, like art, is where you find it.
Strange as it sounds, my only regret is that I made no attempt to bring Jacqueline—yes, Jacqueline the Ripper—back
with me. True, in the Φ zone she was a homicidal maniac, but I believe I might have rehabilitated her here in New York City. By day, of course, she would attend Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. By night she would lounge on my divan, studying her medical texts and occasionally diverting herself with a private art lesson taught by me. I can imagine us spending romantic Sunday mornings together, standing before adjacent easels, brushes in hand, palettes at the ready—kneading light, fashioning shadows, confecting colors that have no name.
Haunt
Carmen Maria Machado
Two months into my time as Fred and Elsie’s ghost, they wake up in the middle of the night to find me at the kitchen table, staring at the Ouija board unfolded over the unfinished pine. I didn’t mean to be staring at the board when they came down the stairs. I’d snuck down after they’d gone to bed to skim from their leftovers and it was already there, waiting.
They come into the room slowly, but not out of fear—they’re used to me now. They’re just old, the kind of old where you always look like you’re moving around underwater.
“Now you can talk back to us,” Elsie says. She burns a little incense, for effect. She sits down across from me, touches the heart-shaped planchette, and waits. I drop my fingertips onto the wood, not touching Elsie, but able to move it just the same. T-H-A-N-K-Y-O-U, I spell, the curved glass window amplifying each letter like a raindrop.
After that, Elsie and Fred watch Law & Order, and I doze in the recliner. When the cops run after the suspect, Elsie sits forward in her chair and hollers. I wake a little and watch her through my lashes, then drift away again. It feels safe to sleep in this house. No one is going to hurt me. Common sense dictates you don’t just go about touching ghosts.
I’m not really a ghost. I’m just a runaway, a broken-home girl whose home broke for good. When Fred and Elsie first found me, I was sitting on the floor of their warm kitchen, soaked from an autumn storm. My curls plastered to my forehead like leeches, my clothes vacuum sealed to my skin. I had no way of knowing that this house—the one whose back door had been so helpfully unlocked—belonged to a couple whose teenage daughter had drowned in their pool years ago after hopping the fence in the dark, a teenager who looked a little like me. They drew their own conclusions.
I would tell them I was real, if I could. I would run to Elsie and press my fingers into the soft meat of her cheek and say, “I’m real, I’m real, I have a name and a heartbeat and I used to be afraid but I’m not anymore, because I’m here.” But what if they call the police? What if they send me away or, worse, back? It’s better for them to think I’m dead. Everyone else does anyway. And it’s pleasant, to be able to listen and observe, to not have to talk to anyone. It’s probably a good thing I don’t believe in ghosts myself, or else this old house would seem really creepy.
Elsie sings to me. I think she thinks it placates me, keeps me from doing—I don’t know. Whatever ghosts do to people they’re mad at. For the first week Elsie kept a vial of table salt with her, in case she needed to fend me off. In case I had wicked intentions. But now the salt lives next to the pepper and Elsie belts country songs at me all night. Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, anything by Dolly Parton.
They’re retired now, but Elsie was once a math teacher, and Fred an engineer. Sometimes they go to a local bar for karaoke. On their way out, Elsie sings back into the darkness, “We’ll see you soon, sweet girl.” They always return laughing. I can hear Elsie’s voice even when she’s blocks away, tripping down the last few notes of “Walkin’ after Midnight,” asking Fred if he remembers a moment of their shared past. His voice is low. I can only identify it by the spaces in between hers.
Nowadays, they love the night. They love that they can sleep all day and visit with me when the sun goes down. They love that the night has brought them back what they lost.
Then one night, Fred doesn’t wake up.
I can hear Elsie saying his name, and there’s a moment when it changes. Her voice sort of bends over, like it’s given up on something. I resist the urge to run, because ghosts never run. In the doorway, I see Elsie sitting up in bed, her hand pressed flat to Fred’s chest. She isn’t crying, just holding her hand there. She sees me in the doorway.
“Where is he?” she asks. I must look confused, because her hand begins to gesticulate wildly, like she is shooing away a bee. I realize she is referring to the world I can see and she can’t, the other room inside this room, where the dead live. Where I live.
But he is nowhere, except on the bed, not moving.
Elsie kneels in front of me and I can smell her body, and it is human and confusing. She doesn’t touch me but her hands come so close.
“Can you see him?” she asks.
I back out of the doorway and run down the stairs, breaking my own rule. Elsie follows me, slowly. In the kitchen, she sits down at the table and flips open the Ouija board.
“Please,” she says. “Talk to me. Tell me where he is.”
I do not want to. I want to run to the back door, shove it open into the moonlight, and tear across the lawn and find some other place to be a teenage runaway, somewhere less safe and kind, somewhere less haunted. But then Elsie would know. She would realize I was real and, soon after, realize I was abandoning her.
So I sit. She runs the planchette over hello and then she writes F-R-E-D-F-R-E-D-F-R-E-D. I place my fingers outside of hers and push.
N-O-W-H-E-R-E, I spell.
“Now, here?” she whispers.
I do it again.
“Nowhere?” she says.
I gather her fingers in my own. “Just us now,” I tell her, in my own voice. “Just us.”
Ship of State
Peter Gizzi
1.
I sat next to the corpse … I kept vigil everywhere … it
traveled with me … down streets, on walks, in coffee
shops … it became indistinguishable from my own
form … from my own … I often wonder if people see
it, see me … consider the corpse in front of the night
sky … it was the particulate vocal pattern that is
mine … was in fact mine …
2.
when the voice says this is your room now … it has
been arranged for you … the room alive speaks when
the corpse speaks … and the earth speaks this estate of
dirt … this is your room, it has been arranged for
you … this room with its satin and its sash … with its
velvet and its black … its paper and glue, some pages
sewn … a room so plush so deep saying … this is your
room now … take care …
3.
the corpse was joy, the joy was forever, transitive and
ever … everything going off at various intervals all at
once humming and ill harmonizing … the larger
ongoing … the cold matter, dark, and the trans of that
nimbus … of that, of which, no longer of, sing … the
organs gel, become waxy, slowly congeal … a
thickening quickens throughout … at first patchy,
then a wooden feeling … changing states and stranger
codes … I was here and not here I was everywhere and
slid easily out of the head and had no shape, had
no … whoa, whoa, the cyclone kept faster and then
all … ticking, hammering, ringing, slight tings, a
distant volume increasing and … every inanimate
thing emitting a stronger sound, a note, a click,
popping popping … a total bell ringer, I was now and
not now … a something in a world of things, a piece
of petrified dizzy … the stars were screaming brass,
I could hear their gain, a symphony of the gone, a
heady vertigo … an orchestral whatchamacallit …
and the dead welcomed me as they, now
we, listened to
the banging … I was tuning … a wood chime thinging
when the putrefied lips of the corpses curled a bit to
smile at me …
4.
to enter a paperlike glen … gullies speckled with moon
and moss … and those surface effects on water …
music too gently pulsed at first … then broke into
swoon … and now I remain each line opened …
before summer deepened like tone on flesh … and
how does a boy begin to love a corpse … a stinking
mass of rotten flesh …
5.
I wrote to speak to my autopsy, my dropsy, my falling
sickness … I wrote one season forever changing into
the night sky … I wrote to see the core as my corpse
began to open up to that surround …
6.
some people survive battle, some their childhood …
some survive nothing … some children are forever lost
in their body … wave upon wave … voices, sound
effects, phantasmagoria … there is no return, only the
idea, there is no return only narrative … to survive is
to …
7.
I wandered all night with my corpse … I passed over
the scene … I was waking and I was dawning … to
watch it move across a face … the features change in
shadow … the changing features of a mind … when I
spoke to the corpse it was as though I spoke to the
curtains or the rug … the body lay there in permanent
discourse with the object world … the curtain, the
rug, the candle, the ring, now on speaking terms
with the corpse … and they were singing to each
other … I was happy to be free with my corpse …