The Lobster was hopping from one row of chopstick feet to another with excitement. “Do you want a Key? Is that why you came? It has been so long since I have had an order.” My vision had filled with dancing Keys, all in a paper-doll chain, all promising Entrance, Passage, Motion.
“Yes, yes, I want a Key! But I have nothing to give you in return.”
He considered, cocking his cerulean head to one side. “I will take a lock of your hair. It still has some of the angelblack of your Assassination on it. I could make a good, strong Key.” I nodded assent almost at the same moment he reached up an enormous casual claw and clipped off a curl about six inches long. Tucking it away under his shell, in the same movement he produced a small Key made of a deep blue green shell. If it was possible, the Lobster blushed from feelers to tail, his body flushing a deep orange.
“It is my best Key,” he whispered, “I made it from my own shell, my own claws. Under the seventh moon I soldered it with my blood.” I took it quietly, away into my pack, but as I tucked it out of sight, a great, indignant screech froze my hand.
“Why does she get a Key? I ask and ask and get nothing but your wretched shell turned against me and she barges in and you give her one?” A mammoth Seagull pinwheeled before us, cawing and screaming in a frenzy. “She’s nothing but a girl. She doesn’t deserve to go forward, or back, or anywhere! You cannot give her one—give it to me, you vile . . . Crab!” The bird spat this last deadly insult like a wad of tobacco, quivering with wrath. The Lobster leapt up, flushing orange and snapping his claws.
“I can give my Keys to whomever I wish, Sparrow! You go away! You are a rude beast and filthy—you eat rotted fish! I can smell it on you! I would never make a Key for your kind.”
“But why would you grant this to me?” I asked, bewildered.
The Lobster shrugged his jeweled shoulders. “I sleep the sleep of manic frog-songs. I pity you. You of all creatures know there is nothing here, not even Reasons Why. Yet you keep going. He thinks he knows all the Reasons. Take it before I change my mind.”
I nodded and thanked him. He gestured towards the spiral Road. “That is all there ever was or will be. You have to go now, girlthing. Or the Gull might try to bite us. Isoganakereba narimasen. I have to hurry, so do you. And keep going. Downdowndown.”
“No! It’s mine, you can’t have it! You’ll lose it or drop it down a well or some other wretched thing!” The Seagull wept and stormed overhead.
I rose with ache in my thighs, amid aviary outrage, ignoring him.
“You don’t even know what its for—you’ll never find the Lock. Even at the Uttermost End, you won’t know,” he warned, gnashing his beak. I turned my painted back to his protests.
“You are a very odd Beast,” I smiled at the smaller and quieter of the two, who was still blushing furiously.
Again, the jeweled shrug. “I am a Meaningful Lobster.”
As I retreated from the bloodstone Courtyard, I caught my image in the receding Mirror of his shell, framed in the squealing of the frustrated Seagull.
I had gone entirely blue, from heel to hair.
12
I look out of my skull at all this inky blue skin.
Lakshmi-flesh blossom, dark-soled deva. All evidence of the Angel’s work—my Assassination—vanished into sapphires and
crow’s feathers. To my waist sea-colored hair rolls and slips, washing foamily up onto the shore of my now azure back, now period shoulders, now violet waist. Legs stalks of skies, cobalt lips, a seabed fulminating, birthing a bewildered undone on the canvas of my skin.
But the eyes, the eyes. Still blank and empty as a well, now blue within blue within blue. Another shake and smash of noses and eyes and hairlines, another stained checkered floor of cleft palate knights and thalidomide bishops. Walls like craven rooks, bursting out of an acetylene Road. Another, and another, and another. Is this set of walking beats different because a little blue-green Key lies nestled like an infant sparrow? I do not know what it Opens, so it is as though it does not exist. It has no Purpose. Yet I know deep as Self can go that Purpose is the worst kind of trick. I am in the fish, Daughter of the Whale. My mouth tastes of old tea water, these old questions recurring, spinning like bicycle wheels over and over, that same Queen of Spades click clacking against the spokes, the same black wheel and silver rim.
I thought I had worked this unto its uttermost end, had demarcated my world, river from stream from ocean from beam. I had encapsulated it, trapped it in my little coffins and lockets, figured it out. I did not exactly come here, and so there was no beginningtime, no entrance through some fantastic Gate. But it was a measurable moment ago that I was satisfied with the non-advent of nothing and its persistence, that eluding Doors had become easy enough, that I was metamorphosing into a kind of expert Labyrinth-Woman, I knew its tantrums and its dervishes. And now I tumble like a candle through the night, wax end over end. The Mirror changed me, took me in like a Door, but not a Door, a jeweled tunneling worm. But didn’t the Angel change me before that? I have lost the threads. Memory is masked here, and days dissolve into ripples and smears of movement almost as soon as they pass beyond the moonrise, and so I could not say if I have been eaten by a Mirror before, but I think not.
There are advents and newness stalking me. I could be certain before that the Labyrinth shifts, but it does not change. Yet I am within something else now, a sequence of events, beyond sheer movement, pure and dazzling. It boils all around. the tiny pale blue hairs on my arms bristle like a boar. I am waiting for the portents to come. I feel them cackling around me like a copse of witches.
The carried compass sends out trails of sickness like medieval sunbeams, lassoing organs into green grassfires. The slab of north lacerating my throat, spilled mercury and spoiled stew east roiling in my belly, south-arrow crackling in my bones like kindling. It travels through me as I travel through the Labyrinth, navigating the turns and traps, inhabiting slowly, imprinting the landscape. I have eaten Direction, and it has eaten me. Oh, the yin yang cycles of self upon self, oh zazen clay of form upon shape, oh wheels within wheels within scarlet-flaming wheels. Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the glabrous sky, bound with glowing spokes? What is it searing and smoking, scalding the hermetic moon in a boil of stone? What do you see dancing in primate patterns over and over? In this sign thou shalt conquer.
How all we pretty snakes have a taste for our own tails.
CANTO
THE SECOND
13
It has been days upon days and still my eyes are slates.
Crack the egg for the answer, the gold and the white. It lies within like the ascended scrap folded in a fortune cookie, malignant scrawl of notime.