“It has always been like that,” the Bear moaned. “It never heals. I have tried poultices of laurel and banana, honeybees’ wings and birch bark, bird-marrow and Wall-dust. Nothing helps. It laughs at me, with it bloody lips. But I have come to love it, now. It is warm and bright and pretty. It never fails me. Would you like to come and touch it?”
I said nothing, moved not an inch. The Monkey looked at me expectantly.
“If I put my hands on him,” I whispered, “he will only die like the rest.”
“You touch me, beloved Darlinggreen, and I am not dead,” Ezekiel crowed softly.
“Yes, see? Perhaps not, perhaps not, girl,” the mournful Bear brightened hopefully. “Come closer. I am very beautiful reflected in your skin.” His wound did reflect black and red on my thighs, pulsing like a womb, open and quivering as if to speak. He stared at himself reflected and refracted in me, preening. I did not move, frozen by a manic disgust.
“Don’t be afraid. If you are very, very good, you could have a wound, too. I would even administer it myself. My teeth are the color of the stars, aesthetically perfect. Orthodontia is so expensive. But see the results! Wouldn’t you like to have them in your nice green flesh? Be sweet to me and I will make you beautiful, paint your belly with blood.” He struggled to rise and come near me, but I backed away as best as my weak leafbody could manage, bile rising in me like the tide. The Monkey had also clambered off, and returned to me, protective and proprietary, grimacing at the beast. It kept on its imploring way:
“Don’t run away. You haven’t seen the pointillist masterpieces of my intestinal tract, the glory of my bruises, the majesty of my swollen tongue! You are very ugly now, girl, with no breaks in your body. All revolting solidity. Come, c
ome, I will make you splendid, seraphic, gloriana in the highest! I will make you the Queen of Capillaries, Empress of Bones! Don’t you want to be beautiful? I will love you forever, I will write masterpieces on your flesh!” I began to cry through my suffocation, drawing dagger-breath, loathing his nearness, the warmth of his mewling breath.
“Come closer, I cannot see myself in your mirrorbody any longer. You are too far off. I am being very generous. It is not polite to refuse.”
I broke and ran, stumbling and weeping. The Monkey sprinted after me, trying to keep up.
“Come back! It is useless to run, the Door is on your heels! One way or another, you will be like me, and bleed! We will all be beautiful before dawn!” His howls echoed after us, choking my poor neck.
But he was right, I could hear it now, clanging copper pots in my skull—
(—nam vos mutastis et illas—)
Latinate clams clattering in the water, their vulgate symphony of clicking nails and meaningless morse code, which translated reads as a meaningless clam-tongue, pink and meaty. The Door-tongue, the Hinge-dialect.
I cannot run far enough, ever and ever.
The sea takes back its stones. My limbs crumble. There is black mud under my nails, secret and ashamed. Such a private place I inhabit, with no Rosetta Stone to help you make sense of it, of my ceilings and windows. I never asked for comprehension.
Mask yourself, Ezekiel, with that knowing look, and pretend you can read the scroll. Pretend you know what we are doing. What do you see in the sky? You cannot say because you do not see. I with my irisless eyes swallow the vaulted air under an eyelid. You see nothing. You would sell my bones for katana hilts in some furtive bazaar, my eyes for jewels in heraldic shields, my ears for pincushions, ninepence each. you would hawk my green brocade skin for upholstery, my knees for inkwells, my hair for quills, my lips for slide rules, my breasts for goblets. Abandon me to a thousand hungry Beasts, partitioned and packaged, given away like a bride, devoured and burrowed-within, until I am no more.
(—In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora—)
But the language of the Doors clangs in my swollen head like a busy dockside, I can feel it behind us, the black circle, divining our tracks with a velvet nose. Is it past the Board in the desert now? Has it come past the coffin-body of the Queen? Its strange trilled consonants move over me like diamondback snakes, the rhythmic phrases like the charmer’s straw basket in the musky market, sidewinding somewhere in our shadow. With each pianowire strangle of sentence, a new lacerating chord is strummed in my thick-pooled brain, with each bevelled vowel, brightened under a glass cutter’s knife, finds its mark and pierces me like a gold-fletched arrow, and the Door turns towards the church-bell tone of word striking flesh. In this way I can feel it drawing closer, the heat of its black body like a secret sun.
(—torpor gravis occupat artus: mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro—)
Oh, it bears down like a woman giving birth, the pressing, all those massive hands on me, pushing down into the swallowing earth! And among those thousandthousand hands can I not detect a bull’s solid amber hooves? Can I not see ivory horns tossing above me, tips gilded with hemlock? The Minotaur at last, the monstrum lurking, the monster-that-is-not, hunting with powerful thighs my steps like crocus shoots in the spring, the Center of the Labyrinth that I know cannot be stealing along the Road, stalking me as though that Center were I. We circle each other, a fleshy yinyang covered in blood and dust and sapphires crushed like blueberries, seeking each other, spiraling like sumo wrestlers, stamping our fat feet in the sacred salt. And when one of us is perished, gored through like a potter’s wet vase, will not that crusted salt be found on our howling mouth?
(—pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret—)
Black eyed Bull behind me, lowing at the moon, fatal light flickering on his gold nose-ring, his blood shouting with the nearness of our meeting. As though that Center were I, as though I were what he sought, my presence in his belly the very completion of his bovine existence. As though it were not I that sought him, sought the terrible Center of death, as though I were not the Seeker-After, as though I were not aware of his breath smelling of sour mash and clay kilns, as though I were fleeing the inky ripple of muscle and not waiting for his milky teeth on my breast.
(—in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt—)
And still this hypnotic chanting in the confessional of my ear, the hissing syllables wreathed in smoky incense, the intimacy of his rust-red tongue lapping at my calves, a lover’s searching fingers grasping for me in the dark. These savage incantations meant to bind me still as nightwater or to warn? He is so close now, the wild smell of his mouth is so near. Perhaps I will lay down on this Road, covered in soft leaves how like a bed, perhaps I will lay down and let him slam shut over me, his Bull’s mouth clamp down at last on my emerald humanflesh. Perhaps I will not fight. Perhaps I would be more beautiful Devoured. Perhaps victory means collapsing in mid-stride, knowing the precise moment to give in. It is the fight which comes at the end of a Quest, is it not? Even a Quest-which-is-not. If I do not fight, there is no Quest. Perhaps then I will not. The Compass beats a steady time, a sparrow-waltz, ticking towards the north of my glacial eyes. It wants us Devoured, within that meaty belly; Compass-child Within me Within the Bull-Door, all of us together like a Russian doll.
(—ora cacumen habet; remanet nitor unus in illa—)
Come then, poor Beast, I am not afraid. You must admit I was a challenge; I have eluded you for such a long time. You do not need to ensorcell me with these murmured verses, black and red. I am still already, soft and quiet as a hedgerow in infinite fields like skies, dotted with lambs as with stars. I will sit and wait, draped in green, cypress-candle, palms resting on my knees in fertile quiescence. If I am yours, you are mine, wheelswithinwheels, and we will gobble each other up as though we were hook-nosed witches feasting on the plump calves of naughty children, gleefully sucking delicate bones and our long, greasy fingers.
I collapsed and knew nothing but a long expanse of blackness.
23
Fat raindrops like children’s hands slap my face.