Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (39 page)

“I thought you’d be back sooner.”

“Like I said, all the fucking traffic,” she reminds me, then produces a manila folder from her pea-green laptop bag. She lays the folder on the countertop and taps it twice with her right index finger.

“So, what’d you find out!” I ask, and Suzanne taps the folder a third time, and answers me with a question of her own.

“Ever heard of the Church of Starry Wisdom?”

“Wasn’t that one of Aleister Crowley’s little clubs?” I ask, and watch the blank television screen.

“No, it isn’t. Or wasn’t. Whichever.” I hear her open the folder, but I don’t turn around. “This was way before Crowley’s time. Near as anyone can tell, the order was founded by an egyptologist and occultist named Enoch Bowen, sometime around 1844. At least, in May of that year he came back from a dig on the east bank of the Nile, at a site near Thebes. The following July, he bought an abandoned Free-Will Baptist sanctuary on Fedenl Hill, and started the Church of Starry Wisdom.”

“Never heard of it,” I tell her.

“Neither had I. But that’s not too surprising. Whatever Bowen and his followers were up to, seems it didn’t sit too well with the locals. By December 1844, ministers in Providence were denouncing the Starry Wisdom. Four years later, there were rumors of blood sacrifices, devil worship, that kind of thing. Various sordid scandals and hostilities ensued. Though by 1863, there appear to have been at least two hundred people in Bowen’s congregation. And sometime in 1876, Thomas Doyle, who was the mayor of Providence at the time, stepped in and the church was summarily shut down. After that, Professor Bowen and most of his followers left Providence, it seems. There are rumors of the Starry Wisdom cult reemerging in other places. First in Chicago, then, near the end of the 19
^th
Century, somewhere in Yorkshire.”

The way she’s talking, Suzanne reminds me of someone reading a book report to her high-school classmates.

“Colorful story,” I say, and take another sip of the lukewarm Scotch. “But what’s any of this got to do with your box and its bauble?”

“Just about everything,” Suzanne replies, her tone growing exasperated, and I glance at her over my shoulder. She looks tired, tired but excited. Jittery. On edge. She forces a smile for me, and continues.

“Look, now you’re being dense on purpose,” she says. “When Bowen returned from Egypt in 1844, he brought back an artifact he discovered during an excavation there. A carving or stone or cartouche. This artifact, which is only ever referred to as ‘the Shining Trapezohedron,’ was supposed to be some sort of magical gateway. Bowen and his cohorts though they could use it to talk to ancient Egyptian gods, or maybe gods older than the Egyptians. Babylonian. Sumerian. I don’t know That part’s not clear, exactly who or what they were worshipping. But the artifact was used to summon them. In return for blood offerings and profane sexual rites—the usual crap—the Starry Wisdom cult believed these gods would offer up all the hidden secrets of the universe.”

I turn back towards the television, and consider switching it on again.

“You’re not believing a word of this, are you?” she asks.

“Not especially,” I reply.

“It isn’t like I’m making it up. I have photocopies of contemporary newspaper accounts—”

“I didn’t
say
I think you’re making it up. That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I said.”

“That’s sure what it
sounded
like,” Suzanne sighs, and god, I hate it when she sulks. I finish the Scotch, and set the empty glass on the floor beside the futon.

“So, you’re saying the thing in your peculiar yellow box, that it’s Bowen’s Shining Trapezohedron?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

“But wouldn’t the cultists have hauled their holy of holies away with them when they fled Providence?”

“If you’re not going to take this seriously, I’m going to stop right now, okay?”

I close my eyes. I’m beginning to get a headache, that dull, faint throb winding itself up tight and jagged somewhere directly behind my eyes.

“I have to be at work in half an hour,” I say. “I traded shifts with that new guy. The restaurant will be packed wall to wall tonight, and I’m not looking forward to it, that’s all. I’m not trying to be a bitch. It just seems strange, that these Starry Wisdom fruitcakes wouldn’t have taken their sacred relic with them when they left.”

“It seemed strange to me, too,” Suzanne says, and the tone of her voice has become hard and defensive, all the enthusiasm drained away. “But the church building was still standing in the thirties, and even that long after the Starry Wisdom left Providence, people on Federal Hill were scared to death of the place. In 1935, a painter named Robert Blake broke in—”

“Robert Blake?” I ask, opening my eyes again. “Like the guy who played Baretta?”

“Yeah, like the guy who played Baretta. He apparently broke into the abandoned church and found the trapczohedron on an altar in the steeple.” I hear her tarn a page. “He was from Milwaukee, but was staying near Brown, someplace on College Street close to the John Hay Library. And he died there, not long after he broke into the church. Struck by lightning in his apartment, if you can believe that.”

“This is what you drove all the way to Salem to find out?” I ask. “This is what Tirzah told you?”

“Yeah, but it’s not exactly a secret. These articles, they’re mostly from the
Providence Journal.
I just never heard of any of it. I guess it’s not the sort of stuff you learn in history class. Anyway, showing the box to Tirzah was
your
idea.”

And yeah, that part’s true. We met Tirzah a few years back, during a lesbian-only retreat out on the Cape. But that’s another story. She runs a witchcraft shop in Salem, reads Tarot cards for tourists, etc. & etc. “She’s undoubtedly the weirdest person we know,” I say. “It made sense, letting her see it. So... Baretta steals this thing, and gets struck by lightning.”

“I wish you wouldn’t drink before work,” Suzanne says.

“And I wish you’d left that damned box where you found it. If wishes were horses...” There’s a drawn out few moments of quiet then, as if neither of us knows our next line and we’re waiting on a helpful prompt from backstage.

“At any rate,” she says, finally breaking the silence. “One of the men who investigated Blake’s death, a doctor named Ambrose Dexter, found the stone among the dead man’s effects. He chartered a fishing boat in Newport, and dropped the metal box into Narragansett Bay, somewhere off Castle Hill. That’s the deepest part of the bay, you know. There in the Eastern Passage, between Newport and Beavertail.”

“No,” I say. “No, I didn’t know that. But I
do
know I’m gonna be late if I don’t get dressed and get out of here. We’ll talk about this later.” I stand, feeling dizzy, unsure if it’s from the Scotch or the nascent headache, or maybe a bit of both. I look at Suzanne, who’s still staring at the contents of the manila folder, and I point at the dented metal box on the counter. “You should just get rid of it,” I tell her. “Hell, sell the thing on eBay. I’m sure some freak would pay a pretty penny for it.”

She looks up and glares at me. “Jesus. You don’t
sell
something like this on eBay. Whether or not Enoch Bowen was a lunatic, it has historical significance.”

“Fine,” I tell her. “Whatever. Then give it to a museum.” Suzanne shakes her head, and goes back to reading the sheaf of photocopied pages.

“I found it,” she whispers. “It’s mine to do with as I please.” And I don’t disagree. I’m not in the mood for arguments, especially not one I know I’ll lose.

01.

“Hey! I think I’ve found something,” Suzanne shouts. The waves slamming against the rocks and the wind off the bay obscure her voice so that I can only just make out the words. I’m lying on the blanket we’ve spread out over a relatively flat place among the tilted, contorted beds of slate and phyllite. I’m lying there with my eyes shut, the sun too warm on my face, shining straight through my eyelids and making me sleepy. I don’t want to get up. If I get up to see whatever it is she’s found, I’ll have to bring the blanket along, or it’ll blow away.

“Come see!” she shouts.

“Bring it
to
me!” I shout back without bothering to open my eyes. Often, it seems that Suzanne and I love the rugged coast around the old Beavertail Lighthouse for entirely different reasons. I come here to get away from the city, for the smells and sounds of the sea. And she comes for the flotsam and jetsam, for whatever she can find dead or dying in the tide pools. Her apartment is littered
with
the garbage she’s brought back from the edge of the sea. Shells and bones, weathered shards of Wedgwood china, unusually shaped pieces of driftwood, rounded pebbles and cobbles, fishing lures, rusted and unrecognizable pieces of machinery, a page from a Chinese newspaper, a ruined lobster pot. You could decorate a good-sized chowder house with all the junk Suzanne’s scavenged from beaches up and down Rhode Island and Massachusetts, Maine and Nova Scotia. She has more jars of beach glass than I’ve ever bothered to count.

“It’s
big
!” she calls out. “Get off your lazy ass and come look!”

I open my eyes, squinting at the afternoon light, and I see now that there’s a herring gull standing only a few feet away, watching me. It cocks its he id to one side, and its pale irises seem simultaneously startled and filled with questions. I make a shooing motion with my hands, and the bird squawks, then spreads its grey wings and the wind seems to snatch it away.

“Hold your horses,” I say, not shouting, though, not really caring whether Suzanne’s heard me or not. I stand and wad the blanket into a tight bundle, tucking it under my right arm. I’d thought that her voice was coming from somewhere to the south, but I soon spot her ten or fifteen yards north of me, kneeling on the smooth, dark shale next to one of the deeper pools of seawater left behind by the retreating tide. Her head is bowed slightly, her hands clasped in front of her, and I think she looks like someone praying to the bay. Then she turns towards me and points at something in the water. By the time I reach the edge of the pool, she’s already pulled it out onto the rocks, along with a rubbery, tat tangle of kelp and bladderwrack. The box gleams dully in the sun.

“What is it?” she asks me, and I tell her I have no idea. I stand there, gazing down at the yellow-white metal and the slippery knot of seaweed tangled around it. There are intricate, spiraling images worked into the gleaming surface of the box, and seeing them, the first word that comes to mind is
unwholesome
. Whatever the artist was trying to depict in these bas-reliefs, from life or only her or his imagination, it was unwholesome.

“I can’t figure out how it opens,” Suzanne says, sounding puzzled and chewing thoughtfully at her lower lip. She pulls away the strands of seaweed. “There are hinges,
here
and
here,
but no sign of a latch. I’m not even sure I can tell where the top and bottom parts fit together. I can’t find the seam. Is that gold, what it’s made from? Maybe white gold?”

And I want to say,
Put it back, Suzanne. For god’s sake, put it back. Don’t touch it.
I want to ask why she can’t see the obvious
unwholesomeness
of it. Rut I don’t, and then she presses her right thumb into a very subtle depression on the front of the box and it opens with an audible pop, easy as you please. She laughs, like a child delighted at having gotten all the sides of a Rubik’s Cube to match up.

Suzanne lifts the lid, and at first, all I can see in there is darkness, such an entirely complete darkness that my eyes are useless against it, and I have the distinct and disquieting impression that sunlight is unable to penetrate that umbral space.

“Shut it,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to have heard me. She doesn’t close the box, or tell me that I’m being silly. Instead, Suzanne reaches
into
that inviolable blackness, and I’m absolutely
certain
that she’s going to scream, and when she pulls her arm back, all that will be left is the bloody, spurting stump of her wrist. I’ll scream, too, as if in reply, as if in empathic agony.

She lifts something out of the box, and it also gleams beneath the sun.

“A crystal,” she says. “Some kind of crystal.” I feel sick, just looking at it. The same way I get nauseous on the deck of a listing boat, I feel sick when I look at the thing from the metal box. But, nonetheless, I
do
look at it. I
don’t
turn away. Its glassy, kiteshaped facets are vaguely iridescent, and I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out what color it is, if, indeed, it’s any
one
color. At first, it appears to be greenish black, like an overripe avocado’s skin. But I catch hints of crimson, too, then hints of violet, and
then
the whole things glimmers a very deep cobalt blue. Suzanne holds it up, turning it this way and that so that I can get a better view. There’s an ugly, greasy quality to the light flashing off its perfectly delineated, four-sided faces.

“Put it back, please,” I say, speaking very softly. “Put it back inside.” Suzanne stares at me a second or two, then nods and does as I’ve asked. She closes the metal box, and there’s another pop when it shuts. I sit with her, at the edge of the tide pool, with the box between us. The pool is full of tiny mussels and the whorled shells of periwinkle snails, with seaweed and small, scuttling crabs. The rock beneath the water is scabbed with sharp barnacles.

There was never any discussion about whether we’d keep the box or leave it there. Never any question. When she’s ready to go, I carry it for her, and it weighs a lot less than I expected.

02.

And now I sit down to write about the dream, the dream I have the night after we find Enoch Bowen’s trapezohedron. It’s the same dream I have when I can no longer stay awake to draw vigilant runes around the binding circle where Suzanne lies, the circle and the star, the flaming, all-seeing eye and the shattered wreck of her. I can no longer take solace in a clock face or the track of the sun or moon across the sky. I am not contained in any single moment, and the assumed older of the world is lost on me. I’ve heard the piping flutes, and the drums, and the lumbering footfalls of titan gods who’ve danced away the eons of their exile. I’ve felt the precious safety net of time falling away. There’s only now. This moment, which I may call past or present or future. Suzanne sleeps peacefully beside me, and she’s whole, but she also lies broken and transformed within the Elder Sign carefully chalked upon the floor of her apartment. I’ve torn the story apart, no longer able to perceive the illusion of chronology, and I’ve haphazardly strewn the scenes, just as Suzanne has been torn, and as she’s been strewn. I rearrange and lie. I present the gorgon’s face reflected in a polished shield, and I will never be even half so strong as I’d need to be to tell the full, vicious truth of it. I’m amazed to have made it this far. I come to confess, but can at best drop hints and innuendo. Suzanne was the sacrifice, not me. It was Suzanne who swallowed the pomegranate seeds. Ask her.