Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (25 page)

must
take my word, as
I
must pick at this weave with nails chewed down to the quick. My cuticles bleed more often than not. This next thread is as grey as raw oysters, and almost as slippery. Even when I hold it tightly as I may, it slithers through my fingers. I am holding a photostat of my birth certificate, which, if I admit its authenticity, denies the dreams and nightmares that began when I was still a child, and the loneliness that began sometime shortly thereafter. I don’t hold it very long. It slips away, as mere facts always slip away when truth is what we’re after. The spool turns like a spiral galaxy, like a Ferris wheel, like the moon going round the Earth to swaddle it in months and tides and other real or imagined lunar rhythms. That thread has left my fingers slick and sticky, and I fumble for any purchase among the labors of Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. “You keep picking like this, it’s never going to heal,” you laugh, then open antique books and show me pictures of those three maidens, watering the gnarled roots of Yggdrasill or busy at their spinning. “You say that as if I have a choice,” I reply, and you don’t answer me. I clutch at a moment, or a strand, stained as red as pomegranates, and as the strand comes free of the rest, I recognize this particular day and this particular place and this particular memory. You would interject here, hastening to add that it is hardly more than a figment from some restless night’s struggle between my conscious and unconscious mind. You know I don’t want Freud or Jung, but you’d persist. This thread has countless duplicates, and so I’ve lost count of how often I’ve described it to you. Invariably, you scowl and sigh and look away. “I am only seeking wholeness,” I whisper. “Reunification, and an end to this goddamned quarantine.
That’s
the source of the dream.” And you say something appropriately disapproving, perhaps even as mild as “Wishful thinking.” We do not argue. You are not angry. You are filled with all the same desires and emptinesses as am I; you have said that many, many times. It is only in how we might seek resolution, or even the
hope
of resolution, that we differ. “Yes, it’s a dream,” I admit. “But it’s a
true
dream,” and I know you aren’t about to contradict me, even though my eagerness makes you uncomfortable. So: here, below the ever-weaving Norns and the silver spindle of Heaven, my arms are filled to overflowing with this motley of moments that have been transmuted into innumerable threads. You lean back against the nest of pillows and the cast-iron headboard and listen while I talk. You don’t interrupt, just as I have not interrupted you when you’ve put your own dreams into words. I offer a silent prayer to a god I don’t believe in that you won’t cry this time, but I know you probably will. And then I say that we were lying here, on this same bed, and when I lay my hand upon your waist the distinction between the two was lost. We’d become as malleable, as pliant, as clay, and my palm and fingers vanished painlessly. You leaned forward then, and you were smiling the bright way you smile whenever you are truly, genuinely happy, and I see that as our nipples brushed, that flesh was also merged. No, not clay, I tell you, not clay, but waxworks. Somehow, we have been cut apart and molded into this masquerade of two, but finally that error is being put right. You press your forehead to mine, so that I melt into you, or you melt into me, not unlike the sculpture of the fair woman and the dark-haired woman, the one that reminded me of the letter A. Our frontal lobes flow together, and so our minds begin to commingle and the need for speech is gone. I say that I was afraid, and that the fear surprised me, but then it passed and I could not even recall why I’d been frightened. You pressed your hips and groin to mine. All melds together—pubic hair, labia, our clits, the bones of our pelvises, skin and fat and a host of muscles:
adductor magnus, adductor longus, adductor brevis, illiacus,
the
tensor fasciæ latæ
, etc. and etc. Nerves are fused, and, simultaneously, in perfect unison, we share a sensation that transcends any orgasm. I cry out, while you bite your lip and remain silent. You are kind, listening, not to point out that I have ceased to describe the dream in past tense, but have begun relating it as though it is occurring
as
I speak. And then you kiss me, and our lips fuse, and now we are one, and now we are whole, a closed system, an odd sort of Ouroboros, the perfected Gemini, freed finally from the tyranny of all former segregations. Except, I remark, that our tongues remain independent, and yours moves playfully across the roof of my mouth. I fall silent, and from your nest of pillows, you run your fingers through my hair and say that it is a pretty dream, an exquisite fairy tale. There’s not a trace of condescension in your voice. “No one would ever separate us,” you say, “not ever again.” And, having reached the end of my dream, I lie as still as I can, listening to the soothing cadence of your heartbeat, and listening also to the clock ticking on the bedside table and hearing traffic down on the street. I remind you that you’ll be late for work if you don’t get dressed soon, and the pomegranate thread pulls free of my grip, eager to rejoin the tangle. I start to reach for another strand, then hesitate, and for a time that might be very long or the most minute fraction of a second, I try to contemplate the whole. This
tapestry.
That is, if only it were a little more ordered. And lying here, in the fading warmth left on the cotton sheets by your departed body, I acknowledge the present futility of grasping the totality that is You and Me and Us. I settle for my tawdry threads, uncoiling, which I finger like the worn beads of a rosary. Tonight, you have promised that you’ll use the needle again, and so the day stretching out before me seems as wide as an ocean, or a desert, or the sky.

And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books then is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Ecclesiastes 12:12 (King James Version)

Following the 40
^th
Parallel of Latitude across the western frontiers, trace a straight line over any cartographer’s labors, and the buff-colored plains and cottonwood groves lead directly, inevitably, to this coal-smoke and cog-grind metropolis kneeling at the craggy feet of the Front Range of the Chippewans. And, by night, from her high garret windows overlooking the Littleton Row stockyards, this tall, pale woman watches the city, the wavering gaslights and the orange hellfire of half a hundred great Bessemer converters. Though many of the people of Cherry Creek—both the citizens and those only passing through, the white men and red Indians and negroes and coolies—have seen her, there are none here who know her name, for never has she
worn
a name—at least not the sort bestowed by mortal men. She was old millenia before the cacophony of this clattering, modern Industrious Age, and she suspects that she will still be watching when this age is done and consigned to history and the
next
age begins. She peers out through heavy velvet draperies, pressing her face to the glass and wishing, as often she wishes, for even the briefest glimpse of the stars and moon veiled by the unending smokestack exhalations of smog and steam. Whatever beliefs the city might tout on Founder’s Day and hold dear regarding purpose, commerce, and progress,
she
knows better, that this perpetual cloud has been erected so that humanity might at last lose sight of, and forget, its insignificance before the glittering Vault of Heaven.

There is a noise behind her, a small sound, as of someone stirring fitfully in troubled dreams, and she turns away from the tall windows. Without her hand to hold them apart, the cranberry drapes swing closed again, and so her world contracts down to only the garret and the bed and her guest tangled in the sheets. There is no gaslight permitted here, but only the kinder illumination of a few beeswax candles, and the nameless woman smiles to see her guest is waking. The woman on the bed was, until quite recently, the nearest thing she had to an adversary, because some are not content to let secrets remain secrets, or have so lost themselves in cul-de-sac delusions of right and wrong, fanciful dichotomies of good and evil, that they stray, finally, into the arms of that very thing they would strive to avoid. Or defeat. In her time, the woman lying here, sweating and tangled in the sheets, has styled herself a holy warrior, a crusader, and has imagined in this arrogance that the night and all its inhabitants feared her even as they might fear the morning or a cold iron spike, a hawthorn stake or the glint of a silver blade.

And, to be sure, it cannot be gainsaid that the guest has done some mean bit of mischief with those hands. Once, she used a tincture of strychnine and nightshade to poison a German horologist she thought to be a werewolf. He wasn’t. She has, on innumerable occasions, exhumed the blameless dead and rolled them over to lie face down in their coffins, then pierced their lifeless hearts with spears. Ten years ago, she made her way to East Azerbaijan and a necropolis deep beneath the city of Tabriz. There she found and shattered a clay tablet dating back almost five centuries to the reign of Shah Ismail I, believing, without a doubt, that she would thereby bind a powerful and renowned demon. Instead, she set free that selfsame being, and then watched helplessly as it brought plague and madness and slow death to town after town, village after village. And somehow, even
then
, her faith in her own rectitude did not waver; indeed, she only grew that much more zealous, more determined to seek out and exterminate all those she deemed unwholesome and malign.

In Boston, Philadelphia, and then New Amsterdam, she founded chapters of an occult and esoteric society devoted unwaveringly to her cause. Thereafter, she was no more a lone fanatic, but a commander of many likeminded fools and psychopathies, true believers and aspiring martyrs. So it was, at last, that her depredations could no longer be ignored. An example would have to be made, the sort of example that needs be made but once. A message that would instill futility and despair in even in the unquestioning, impassioned minds of such a self-proclaimed “Army of Light.” There was a lottery—which is another story—to determine to whom would fall the responsibility of sending this message, and the nameless woman from Cherry Creek won the honor.

“I thought you would sleep another night away,” she says, smiling a guileless smile, and goes to stand beside the bed. “Can you hear me, Miss? Or are you still lost and wandering in dreams?” Her guest only moans the softest moan for a response, and the pale woman glances to the slate-topped bedside table cluttered with its assortment of laudanum bottles and morphine-tainted syringes.

“I know too well the sweet, forgetful lure of sleep,” she tells her guest, her prize, this fallen prophet from the East. “But we cannot ever surrender ourselves wholly to the kindly embrace of Lord Hypnos and his Oneiroi, lest we forsake all that we are when waking. And
you
, Miss, you would be forsaking so very, very much, for such great hopes ride upon your shoulders.”

Her guest’s eyelids flutter, almost opening, and the pale, nameless woman bends close to wipe away a string of spittle from her guest’s lips and chin. “Wake up,” she says, speaking now more firmly than before. “For the moment, dear Tess, the time for sleeping is over and done. It will come again, soon enough, but first...” And, with that, the tall, pale woman lightly slaps her guest’s face, and the woman gasps and opens wide her drowsy brown eyes. For a time, there’s room in her eyes for only confusion and the haze of the narcotics, only the disorientation and surprise of one waking from a long quiescence to unaccustomed surroundings.

The garret tills up with a slow, dull whir, the windy drone of propellers as one of the big airships comes in low overhead, making its final approach to the Arapahoe Station dirigible terminal. The nameless woman gazes towards the peaked ceiling. then back to her guest, and she smiles, revealing recurved incisors and hooked eyeteeth grown as sharp as some anatomist’s dissecting tool. She sits down on the edge of the bed and waits patiently for the racket to fade. The odd sense of stillness that follows has always intrigued her, the illusion that the passing airships leave a great silence, like a wake of calm spilled forth from the drive shafts turning the screws, from those anthracite-fueled engines. In fact, of course, it only, briefly, makes the usual din from the stockyards and the city’s background soundscape appear inconsequential by comparison.

She slaps the woman named Tess again, somewhat harder than before, and this time the blow elicits more than a gasp. The guest raises her right hand to shield her face and fend off further attacks. “Please,” she begs, though her mouth and tongue are so dry, so disused from her long sleep, that her voice is hardly more than a raw whisper.

“Please?” the nameless woman asks, feigning quite a bit more surprise than she actually feels. A creature such as she does not long survive without gaining considerable skill at the breaking and disassembly of even the most resilient of wills. “I was not aware you were acquainted with so base a word as
please.
How... unlikely... that the formidable and righteous Stephanie Brockett would actually have need of
please.
And, what’s more, should lower herself to speak it to the likes of
me
.”

“Mock me...” the guest begins, then trails off, her mouth too parched to complete the thought. The nameless woman offers her a glass of tepid water, and holds it to her lips while Tess Brockett manages to swallow a few small mouthfuls. Then the glass is taken away and returned to the table with the needles and vials and laudanum bottles, and the nameless woman uses her long white fingers to gently brush strands of Tess’ greying russet hair from her drug- and sleep-addled face.

“How long has it been?” she asks.

“Why? Does it feel as though it has been very long?” the nameless woman replies, still smiling. And, after a second, she adds, “No longer than was necessary.”

Tess Brockett’s left hand strays to her bare right breast, and the nameless woman laughs.