The Worm in Every Heart

Albedo from nigredo. This is the lowest point. So low, so deep, that the only thing left to do from here on in is . . . rise. Again.

Nigredo to albedo. The alchemical distillation process. Garbage into gold. Shit into salvation.

And: Iss that what they’re doing up there, do you think? Your enemiess, thesse oness who alsso bear the Crosss, though twissted to their own particular endss?

Can they posssibly know they’re creating gold ssuch as you?

Saint Xawery, M

onster-Martyr, lays his latest victim down in the filthy water gently, as in a warm bath. Strokes her dazed eyes closed, with soft and tender touch. Thinking, while he does so—

Ah, little Ssephardesss, little Jew-girl. You’ll make ssuch a fine, black joke to play on the upsside world.

But don’t come back down here, daughter. Not ever. For God has given me this place for mine, and I will cede my share in it to no one . . .

( . . . not even you.)

The seventeen-year-old who once knew herself as Katarczyna Mendesh lies there in the clammy water of the Warsaw sewer, cursing the Saint and both their rotten Gods at once—all three or four, equally. She feels everything drain away.

And when night comes fresh once more, Kotzeleh wakes up for the last time, or the first: Swollen, filth-encrusted, thirsty with a brand new, deep red thirst. Again and again, and then yet again.

That night, and every night after.

Ring of Fire

Late June, 1857:

“The sepoys themselves, strangely enough, have a phrase which describes my current state of mind to perfection: ‘Sub lal hogea hai’—’Everything has become red.’”

* * *

Unlike most madmen, Desbarrats Grammar was debatably lucky enough to be gifted with an enduring understanding of the exact instant when his sanity had collapsed. The moment in question had occurred shortly after the retaking of Calcutta, during what his commanding officer had then referred to as “the mopping up,” post-Indian Mutiny—a process of justice which, in keeping with the usual British reinterpretation of Biblical tradition, required considerably more for the price of an eye than payment in kind. Correspondingly, a method of retribution had to be improvised which would be both impressive and educative.

And this was how Grammar, then a mere twenty-two years of age, soon came to be standing next to a cannon across the mouth of which a lucklessly uprisen native soldier of the British Army had been strapped, briskly dropping his sword in one neat arc in order to visually indicate that the order to fire had been given—upon which the cannon bucked, swinging a bit to one side on the recoil, and enveloped him in a halo of molten blood before his attentive native second-in-command even had a chance to get him out of the way.

Grammar stood a moment, suitably frozen, only his eyebrows—still lightly sketched in gold—indicating that he had not been born with red hair.

His second-in-command asked him something, presumably in Urdu, which Grammar spoke quite well; his service in India had soon revealed an unpredictable facility for languages. But the man’s voice, usually so clear and strong, had apparently dulled to a scanty murmur in the brief space between order and result. Grammar narrowed his eyes at him, straining to read his lips.

“Repeat that,” he said.

The second-in-command did. No enlightenment ensued—until frustration brought him around the other side of Grammar’s blood-soaked head.

“ . . . thee, art thou hurt? Sahib, I have asked thee—”

Grammar nodded, slowly. He was beginning to form a theory, but knew it would have to wait some while yet to be confirmed.

“Keep by that shoulder, I pray thee,” he replied, “that I might have the benefit of thy protection a little closer to hand, in the future. And bring on the next one.”

Hours later, when the work was done, a physician reported that, yes, the cannon’s concussion had blown out one of Grammar’s eardrums, causing him to consequently lose all hearing on his right side. Grammar nodded again, thanked him, and left the tent—refusing, gracefully, the doctor’s offer of a pan and cloth to wash himself with before he saw his commanding officer to ask that his duty be extended to finding and executing those remaining sepoys who had fled beyond Calcutta’s limits.

Grammar wore his mask of sepoy’s blood until it flaked and ran, until his own sweat washed the worst of it away. Only then did he accept a handful of rice from his second-in-command, with which to rub away the flies which had gorged themselves and died in his sanguine crown. Because he could not shave, he avoided mirrors; occasionally, however, the unexpected sight of his own stained face would waver momentarily in streams and puddles, or grin at him from the broad surface of a rain-soaked leaf. And he would pause, obscurely flattered to recognize—once again—how well this red dust suited him, redefining all those subtle undercurrents which had once swum invisible beneath his honest British skin. Reminding him of who—and what—he had always been, in truth as well as unvoiced dream.

This was the beginning of it.

The two mental games he had kept to for most of his life, Home-face and Acting-as-though-one-were-Away, had suddenly been discarded in favor of a third, less well remembered play: Don’t-Care Island. For madness had always lain dormant in him, the hidden loot in his genetic plum-pudding—generations of half-lies and after-the-fact explanations for inexplicable behavior, as when his grandfather had suddenly thrust his Aunt Myrtle’s forehead down against a lamp during the playing of a game of cards, causing her hair to blaze up like a torch. Or unknown facts, like the layers of mutilated bird- and mouse-corpses which had, for so long, fertilized Strait Gate Hall’s incomparable gardens. Now, due to a combination of circumstances no Grammar had ever faced before or ever would again, that madness had been given whip-hand.

And thus it remained.