But still, I was born a lie, I was made a secret, and that sort of thing can’t help but leave a mark, like a slap. How could I be anything other than this, hunkered down in the dunes with the scorpions lashing their tails at the moon? A man told his sister he loved her—what of that? Tawdry tragedy, except that a child was all hung with shadows, a child that no one could ever know about, lest it get its fool head knocked out on some unfortunate granite stairs.
I am no one.
I was not supposed to be.
I have no name, either. No one would give me one, for to name a thing means it is real, it exists, it displaces air.
Please, father, look at how I move the air around me. I am right here. Look at me.
III. Earth
Earth comprises distances, great and small;
danger and security; open ground and narrow passes;
the chances of life and death.
This is La Cienega. This is Camlann. There is a river; there is a sea; there is sand and the wend of snakes rattling through the throat-scoured soil. There is stone and a road and light like albumen floating yellow and white. I walk down to the city because I have to, because the light is also a lie, but it lies only about itself, and is holy. I have always been told that light is holy. Even I cannot quite imagine a world where the dark is sacrosanct—I am a mushroom fulminating in shit and decay, but still I acknowledge the sun, though it too lies. It lies and says it is the center of everything, the source of all possible light.
I go into the city because my mother lives there still, and my father will smell her like a deer, and go after her, hoping to find her gracefully bent in the snow, her nose snuffling out acorns under the ice. I know she would never do such a thing; I look for her as she is. This is her place, all full of glamors and illusions and images spinning.
A son told his mother he loved her. What of that? I have heard of a man in Thebes who fucked his mother—he made four children in her, two kings, two beauties, and one of those beauties was an anti-establishment revolution in a twelve-year-old’s body. Certainly this bested the previous score of one shriveled, club-footed boy, marked on that tired womb with a Greek fingernail. I confess I had hoped, too, to best my father, to people the vineyards and humble little rivers with laughing, dark-eyed revolutions. But somewhere in the city’s dark crease she found a lesson learned: no more children hung with shadow, no more lies hung upside down from a weeping woman, umbilicus black and blaming on their little throats.
No more nephews, she said to an apothecary with eyes like spinning wheels, whose counter was greasy with aqua vitae and typical tonics—what otherworld physic does not vend hemlock, belladonna, mandrake? The wheels clicked round—thirty times left, twenty times right, ten times left again, and out of a dry drawer popped her panacea, and though her legs were open to me her body was shut, and she put her hand on my face when I came to her and whispered that a ruin called to a ruin, and what were we both but stones already crumbling, and what did it matter after all, what was any of it but solace, and solace she had, solace thick as clouds.
The other boy breathed heavy and gold. The other boy told her to lie to him.
I love you, she said.
We never spoke of my father when I was young. The universal pronoun. The only possible him. He hung in our house like Cicero’s head, but we never looked, we never spoke of it, how its blood dripped on the tablecloth, spattering the spoons. Instead of a father I had two crows, pets caught out on the moor by young girls with leather cages and horsewhips at their hips. I did not call them Thought and Memory. I called them Gaheris and Agravaine for the brothers who were not brothers, and therefore would not look at me, would not speak to me, but chased the girls with the leather cages and caught them round the throat like thrushes. I called my birds brothers and they cawed in my ears, perched on my bed while I slept, shook their feathers and clacked talons against wood when my mother la
y beside me.
Gaheris and Agravaine pick through the trash which blows along the central thoroughfare of Camlann, which is Los Angeles, which is not a road but a river, which is not a river but a road—Gaheris picks up the refrain, disappearing down alleys glutted with old paper, crying: a river is a road, a river is a road—gray and flat, ripple-less, proceeding on and empty, and if she is there, if my mother is there and my father, I can catch no sight of them from here, where lights flicker behind monoliths—light of the moon? Of stars? Of sickness and electric haze? Agravaine tosses a beetle into the air and severs it with a snap of his black beak.
The sun is coming up, banging over the black hills like an old, dirty shop-sign.
IV. The Commander
The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom,
sincerely, benevolence, courage and strictness.
There is a crown lying on an iron grating. It is studded with opals and cat’s eyes. A crown always watches you, you know. Watches for the smallest weakness, the smallest excuse to roll off, grinding over the ground to another bone-battered skull. It sees me, but it won’t move towards me, not the smallest inch.
The other boy would grab for it. Gaheris and Agravaine, my crows, my true brothers, snap at the blinking jewels. I hunch under a little bridge and stare at the circle of metal. The troll under the bridge—when have I been anything else? I am crypt-hidden; I am secreted, and the secreted thing wants nothing more than to come into the light—no, to be beckoned into it, to be called, to be invited. The other boy put on a coat of red and black; the other boy stood at attention and drilled the mission into me.
We are here because the old man has bound himself up in virtue, and would bind the rest of us so, would tell us how to be, how to think, would tell us what was right, what creature virtue, and no inch of space would be left for us to see behind him, beyond him, to see anything but him. He would take up our vision like a sun, a lying sun who screeches that he is the source of all possible light, and would burn our eyes under we saw nothing but holes in the sky, purple and green. Of course, those he loves, those he cannot live without will be pardoned, with a kneel and a dry kiss, for any breach.
Except us. We are unforgivable. His whoring wife has grace and we have a broken staircase and an old beehive, exile that tastes like desert weeds.
The old man worships order, and those who worship order cannot abide anything which is not-order. We are not-order. We are a cut in the immaculate flesh. We are not allowed to be; he will not let us be. He is not Hammurabi, not Moses—what right has he to hand us laws in stone?
I put my head on my knees. I want to be called into the light. I am here to be asked into the gold, to be beckoned, I am here to stand on the stone and wait for my father to tell me it was all a mistake—had he only known, had he only known.
A river is a road, caws Gaheris, down a gutter, past a courtyard which still seems to hold the refuse of pilgrims, old relics sucked dry of divinity, shoes more hole than leather, crosses dented and softened at their joint by rust and rain, swords and sackcloth and old paper, blowing in whip-wound dervishes, tentpoles and helmets and bibles empty of pages. They were here, in Camlann, on La Cienega, in Holy-Land. I am here—I should not have come down into the city. Cities connect to each other, some dark, glittering network, they know each others’ secrets, they pass each other’s fluids down sluices of concrete and thatch and creaking, swinging iron.
Once, I saw my mother as he must have seen her. She was down at the riverside, fishing with her hands. We lived alone by then, the other sons gone, the young girls she collected like butterflies alighting on her lips grown and wandering, wild as she. We were alone, she and I and that old crumbling manor with its stairs breaking off into nothing, an arm dashed at the wrist. We ate honey from her bees and wore cloth spun from her spiders and chewed the bones of her frogs and my mother was always the queen of small and creeping things—which is why she drew me from the deck for a son, I suppose.