Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (40 page)

Surely some revelation is at hand
...

I used to think so.

All our roughest beasts have come and gone, slouching past, and now wait together impatiently at the threshold of what we, in our cherished ignorance, have named a
universe
. We see inconvenient shards of truth in dream, perhaps, or in the contents of a metal box coughed up by the sea.

I shouldn’t tarry, or digress. There is too little coherence remaining within me to squander even an ounce.
This
is the dream. The rest is hardly better than window dressing. Quit stalling and spit it out; the ocean has obliged, and now it’s my turn:

Suzanne and I are walking along a sandy beach, not the rocks at Beavertail, and the summer sun beats mercilessly down on the bloated corpses of innumerable thousands of crabs and huge lobsters and dead fish that have been tossed ashore by the waves. Haddock and cod, flounder and striped bass, tautog and weakfish and pollock. I ask her if it was a red tide did this, and she asks me if there’s ever been any other sort. The air is far too foul and heavy and hot to breathe, and I’m relieved when she turns away from the Atlantic and towards the low dunes. There’s a narrow, winding trail, almost overgrown by dog roses and poison ivy, and it leads to the old church on Federal Hill. I remember that the church was demolished decades ago, all its derelict secrets become anonymous landfill But in the dream, the shrine of the Starry Wisdom has been restored, or it has never precisely fallen, or we are removed to a time before its destruction. It hardly matters which. No, that’s not true. It matters not at all.

Suzanne leads me from the sun-blighted day into night, and into that crumbling antique sanctuary, past the fearful, praying throng that has gathered on its steps, those shriveled old Italian women clutching their onyx and coral rosaries. They spare a hateful peck at me,each and every one in her turn, and the curses that spill from their lips are more befitting witches than good New England Catholics.

“Oh,don’t mind them,” Suzanne says. “They’re bitter, that’s all. They can’t hear the music. Not a one of them has ever danced, and now they’re old and frail and won’t ever have the opportunity.” She leads me through silent vales of dust and shadow, and our path is as indirect as this cockeyed, wandering narrative. Together, we wind our way between apparently endless rows of warped and buckled pews, between chiseled marble columns rising around us to shoulder the awful, sagging burden of the church’s vaulted roof. Then we move away from the nave, revisiting the vestibule, and she shows me the concealed stairway spiraling up and up and up into the sky. We climb the wooden steps until the moon is only a silver coin far below us.

“Wipe your feet,” Suzanne tells me, and I see we’ve finally reached the top of the stairs and gained the steeple. If this place has ever held a peal of bells to chime the hour and call the faithful to worship, they’ve been removed. There are four tall lancet windows, painted over so that the daylight might never enter the circular room.

“You should have waited for me below,” Suzanne says, and her eyes flash yellow-white in the gloom. “You should have waited on the beach. I can see that now.”

I don’t reply, and I don’t glance back the way we’ve come.

I know it’s much too late to retrace that route, and I don’t try. There’s a ring of seven high-backed chairs arranged about a low stone pillar. And in each chair sits a robed figure, their faces veiled with folds of golden silk. They don’t look up when we enter the steeple, but keep their attentions focused on the peculiar metal box sitting oil the stone pillar. The box is open. There can be no doubt whatsoever that it’s the same box she found in the tide pool, the box Enoch Bowen brought home from Thebes, so I don’t have to peer inside to know its contents.

The seven seated figures have begun to chant, and I watch while she undresses, then takes her place before the altar. I watch as a tangible, freezing blackness is disgorged by the box, by the thing
inside
the box. I watch as those hungry tendrils wrap themselves tightly about her, and draw her down, and enter her.

“Yes,” she whispers. “I will be the bride. I will be the doorway. I will be the conduit.” And there is so much more. I don’t doubt that I could write page after page setting down the blasphemous things that I dreamt I saw in the steeple of the rotting church. I could never spend a moment doing anything else, and what remains of my life would be utterly insufficient to record more than a fraction of those depreciations. There is no bottom to this dream. Wherever I choose to stop, the point is chosen arbitrarily.

I stand among the dunes, looking out across a dying sea, and watch while clouds gather on the bruised horizon.

The wind is scalding, and I cannot find the sun.

There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

00.

The afternoon is fading quickly towards dusk, and I sit outside the chalk and blood circle drawn on the floorboards. From time to time, I glance at the sky outside, or at the door leading to the hallway. Or I scrounge the courage to look inside the circle again. But she’s gone forever, even the ruin it made of her. She’s gone, and the box is gone, and the trapezohedron is gone. There’s very little remaining to prove she was ever here. I cannot conceive that one woman’s body and soul were possibly enough to appease that hunger. Ir is all beyond my comprehension.

There is a bloody spot where she lay, blood and bile, and a few lumps of something colorless and translucent that remind me of beached jellyfish. There are scorch marks where the box sat. There’s the faint odor of ammonia and charred wood.

“It was a beautiful day,” I say, and at first the sound of my own voice startles me. “The sky was blue, Suzanne. There were no clouds, and the sky was blue. I think it will be a beautiful night.”

And then, with the heel of my bare palm, I begin to erase the protective circle, and the five-pointed star, and the burning eye.

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless

Or of an ocean not littered with wastage

Or of a future that is not liable

Like the past, to have no destination.

T. S. Eliot,
The Dry Salvages

We lie here together, naked on her sheets which are always damp, no matter the weather, and she’s still sleeping. I’ve lain next to her, watching the long cold sunrise, the walls of this dingy room in this dingy house turning so slowly from charcoal to a hundred successively lighter shades of grey. The weak November morning has a hard time at the window, because the glass was knocked out years ago and she chose as a substitute a sheet of tattered and not-quite-clear plastic she found washed up on the shore now, held in place with mismatched nails and a few thumbtacks. But it deters the worst of the wind and rain and snow, and she says there’s nothing out there she wants to see, anyway. I’ve offered to replace the broken glass, a couple of times I’ve said that, but it’s just another of the hundred or so things that I’ve promised I would do for her and haven’t yet gotten around to doing; she doesn’t seem to mind. That’s not why she keeps letting me come here. Whatever she wants from me, it isn’t handouts and pity and someone to fix her broken windows and leaky ceiling. Which is fortunate, as I’ve never fixed anything in my whole life. I can’t even change a flat tire. I’ve only ever been the sort of man who does the harm and leaves it for someone else to put right again, or simply sweep beneath a rug where no one will have to notice the damage I’ve done. So, why should she be any different? And yet, to my knowledge, I’ve done her no harm so far.

I come down the hill from the village on those interminable nights and afternoons when I can’t write and don’t feel like getting drunk alone. I leave that other world, that safe and smothering kingdom of clean sheets and typescript, electric lights and indoor plumbing and radio and window frames with window-panes, and follow the sandy path through gale-stunted trees and stolen, burned-out automobiles, smoldering trash-barrel fires and suspicious, under-lit glances.

They all know I don’t belong here with them, all the other men and women who share her squalid existence it the edge of the sea, the ones who have come down and never gone backup the hill again. When I call them her apostles, she gets sullen and angry.

“No,” she says, “it’s not like that. They’re nothing of the sort.”

But I understand well enough that’s exactly what they are, even if she doesn’t want to admit it, either to herself or to me. And so they hold me in contempt, because she’s taken me into her bed—me, an interloper who comes and goes, who has some choice in the matter, who has that option because the world beyond these dunes and shanty walls still imagines it has some use for me. One of these nights, I think, her apostles will do murder against me. One of them alone, or all of them together. It may be stones or sticks or an old filleting knife. It may even be a gun. I wouldn’t put it past them. They are resourceful, and there’s a lot on the line. They’ll bury me in the dog roses, or sink me in some deep place among the tide-worn rocks, or carve me up like a fat sow and have themselves a feast. She’ll likely join them, if they are bold enough and offer a few scraps of my charred, anonymous flesh to complete the sacrifice. And later, much, much later, she’ll remember and miss me, in her sloppy, indifferent way, and wonder whatever became of the man who brought her beer and whiskey, candles and chocolate bars, the man who said he’d fix the window, but never did. She might recall my name, but I wouldn’t hold it against her if she doesn’t.

“This used to
be
someplace,” she’s told me time and time again. “Oh, sure, you’d never know it now. But when my mother was a girl, this used to be a town. When I was little, it was still a town. There were dress shops, and a diner, and a jail. There was a public park with a bandshell and a hundred-year-old oak tree. In the summer, there was music in the park, and picnics. There were even churches,
two
of them, one Catholic and one Presbyterian. But then the storm came and took it all away.”

And it’s true, most of what she says. There was a town here once. A decade’s neglect hasn’t quite erased all signs of it. She’s shown me some of what there’s left to see—the stump of a brick chimney, a few broken pilings where the waterfront once stood—and I’ve asked questions around the village. But people up there don’t like to speak openly about this place, or even allow their thoughts to linger on it very long. Every now and then, usually after a burglary or before an election, there’s talk of cleaning it up, pulling down these listing, clapboard shacks and chasing away the vagrants and squatters and winos. So far, the talk has come to nothing.

A sudden gust of wind blows in from off the beach, and the sheet of plastic stretched across the window flaps and rustles, and she opens her eyes.

“You’re still here,” she says, not sounding surprised, merely telling me what I already know. “I was dreaming that you’d gone away and would never come back to me again. I dreamed there was a boat called the
Silver Star
, and it took you away.”

“I get seasick,” I tell her. “I don’t do boats. I haven’t been on a boat since I was fifteen.”

“Well, you got on this one,” she insists, and the dim light filling up the room catches in the facets of her sleepy grey eyes. “You said that you were going to seek your fortune on the Ivory Coast. You had your typewriter, and a suitcase, and you were wearing a brand new suit of worsted wool. I was standing on the dock, watching as the
Silver Star
got smaller and smaller.”

“I’m not even sure I know where the Ivory Coast is supposed to be,” I say.

“Africa,” she replies.

“Well, I know that much, sure. But I don’t know
where
in Africa. And it’s an awfully big place.”

“In the dream, you knew,” she assures me, and I don’t press the point further. It’s her dream, not mine, even if it’s not a dream she’s actually ever had, even if it’s only something she’s making up as she goes along. “In the dream,” she continues, undaunted, “you had a travel brochure that the ticket agent had given you. It was printed all in color. There was a sort of tree called a bombax tree, with bright red flowers. There were elephants, and a parrot. There were pretty women with skin the color of roasted coffee beans.”

“That’s quite a brochure,” I say, and for a moment I watch the plastic tacked over the window as it rustles in the wind off the bay. “I wish I could have a look at it right now.”

“I thought what a warm place it must be, the Ivory Coast,” and I glance down at her, at those drowsy eyes watching me. She lilts her right hand from the damp sheets, and patches of iridescent skin shimmer ever so faintly in the morning light. The sun shows through the thin, translucent webbing stretched between her long fingers. Her slurp nails brush gently across my unshaven cheek, and she smiles. Even I don’t like to look at those teeth for very long, and I let my eyes wander back to the flapping plastic. The wind is picking up, and I think maybe this might be the day when I finally have to find a hammer, a few ten-penny nails, and enough discarded pine slats to board up the hole in the wall.

“Not much longer before the snow comes,” she says, as if she doesn’t need to hear me speak to know my thoughts.

“Probably not for a couple of weeks yet,” I counter, and she blinks and turns her head towards the window.

In the village, I have a tiny room in a boardinghouse on Darling Street, and I keep a spiral-bound notebook hidden between my mattress and box springs. I’ve written a lot of things in that book that I shouldn’t like any other human being to ever read—secret desires, things I’ve heard, and read; things she’s told me, and things I’ve come to suspect all on my own. Sometimes, I think it would be wise to keep the notebook better hidden. But it’s true that the old woman who owns the place, and who does all the housekeeping herself, is afraid of me, and she never goes into my room. She leaves the clean linen and towels in a stack outside my door. Months ago, I stopped taking my meals with the other lodgers, because the strained silence and fleeting, leery glimpses that attended those breakfasts and dinners only served to give me indigestion. I expect the widow O’Dwyer would ask me to find a room elsewhere, if she weren’t so intimidated by me. Or, rather, if she weren’t so intimidated by the company I keep.