Myths of Origin (33 page)

They told me your sweet lips were famed in the province, and that the man who was neither sweaty nor pimpled secretly wanted you, even as he opened their obi under the stars.

{It was a Tuesday, dawned hot and blue, that she decided. No one was in the house, the doldrums of summer having boiled everyone red and driven them into town. She took a scythe from the shed-wall, the one with the smooth black handle. She marched out along the beaten dirt paths to the weedy fields like a general approaching his cavalry line. Stopping in the center of that yellow sea, she began, with long, sweeping strokes, to cut the gold-green stalks of thorny grass.}

They told me you were the middle child, and that you never listen, but they indulge you, because of your rosy lips, and how they came from the weeds. Will you not touch the wall of my throat, pretty Kaya? You can tell your birth-story over and over, it will not make you less dead.

{My mother loves me. She will cut us out, one day.}

Your mother forgot you as soon as the man who was neither fetid nor foul woke without his third wife. How many girls do you think she could lose before she no longer held you precious as the soup-eyes? Mothers forget, it is what they do. They cannot always be expected to be wet at the teat and smiling. And the prettiest girl, even the prettiest-save-the-last, does not always make the best soup.

{She panted with the effort of having me,}
all mothers do
{sweat ran down her face and back like delta-silt into the ocean.}
All mothers sweat so
. {The scythe rushed through the tender plants, her brown hair flapping like a nightingale’s wing in time to the strokes. She told me that imagined she must have looked like deathshead, this young woman with her great scythe and plain black dress, weeds falling before her like ranks of soldiers.}
No, darling, I am Death, and I bend the weeds, and I hold you inside me, and you are my child, and nevermore hers.
{Death with long-lashed eyes,
} eyes in soup, eyes in children, eyes in me
{gliding through the fields like a shadow, Death beautiful and terrible, with her gentle face and singing blade. Only the great curve of her belly called her liar, called her not-Death; she swung the scythe high, grimaced with the effort of the swing; her arms burned. She was no doctor, to induce labor peaceably in a clean room, but gave herself to the strain of her muscles in the sun. With a downward stroke she felt something move inside her, like a stone grinding aside.

It was the weed-trees for you, then, the little saplings not yet grown.
{She fell to her knees in the sweet-smelling earth, strands of grass stuck to her hair.}
And with the cicadas in your ears from the moment of your birth, you never learned to listen.
{I was born small, but my lips were perfectly formed, and so pink.}
They tasted of orchid, of orchid and crabgrass.

{The sun was hot so early in the day when we woke and Kiyomi was gone. The man who was neither lovely nor soft took me by the wrist—his hand went all the way around my bones!—and his face went blotched and black. He accused my mother of cheating him, said that he would burn her house and poor father’s fields if he was not given the wife he was promised. He said the others died because mother did not give proper obeisance to the gods; it spared him because he was pious}
I spared him because his blood smelled of oil and
shit
{ he took me there, that morning, into the rear rooms, and I cried, oh, I cried}
poor Kaya-bird
{I screamed and squealed as he tore my clothes, and he stopped up my mouth with his
tabi
and my tears soaked it through, and he pulled the bloody veil of my sisters’ weddings over my face and his breath came in hitching gasps, frightened, mouse-chirp wheezes.}

I was sleeping when you came, but your sobs, your sobs were like thrushes singing
{He dragged me from my mother’s house and she did not cry—I called back to her over and over—why are you not crying?}
You ask too much of mothers, to weep over every child they lose
. {Mother, why won’t you weep for me? And my father looked at his feet, mumbled that this was the way of marriages, sometimes, and one doesn’t approve, but when the grandsons are underfoot no one recalls the ceremony.}
He fell to his knees in immobile ecstasy when I reared up from the waving weeds, holding his arms out,
{and I stopped crying, for at least this I understood, understood I was no different, that the man who was neither young nor old was still dripping from between my legs and this was no shield, a wife is no safer than a maid}
and I sighed into my Kaya-bird, nuzzling your new-beloved face with my own, crooning to you in the Mouth-dialect, knowing you would understand it, hear the new chorus behind the lower registers, for you were open and pulseate, and I was ready, hungry for your form to fill the void I carry like an egg within me, ready to be full of you, like a pale moon, and heavy.
{ I held up my arms like a child waiting to be picked up, and the colors of the snake’s mouth, oh, they were brighter than festival lanterns, and in the wavering throats like weeds I saw my sisters’ mouths opening and closing like anemones, and I smiled, I smiled as you took me in, I was only frightened for a moment—}
He was weeping, shaking terribly—he understood, perhaps, what passion is. He hated my flesh and loved it, he cannot possess it, but it is possible he desired it, desired the thing glutted with the bodies of his wives, and knew that he was weak, that I could possess him, and their purity was no shield.

{I}
you
{can hear}
me
{you, always, even if I do not like to listen. Sometimes I}
you
{touch the gullet-flesh}
my body
{with my}
your
{tongue, like an icicle, and it burns me}
it thrills through me

{it tastes sweet, like the old soup.}

V
NE NO KUNI

Izanagi was alone on Onogoro.

The jellyfish had gone, somehow, learning at last what was and was not ocean, or at least, failing their lessons elsewhere. The strand was silent, and the ruins of the house of the pillar rose up like broken black jaws on the bluff. The pillar still stood, blasted and tall, and it seemed to laugh at him.

“Izanami!” He called to the cinders.

“Izanami!” He called to the empty shore.

“Izanami!” He called to the churning sea, and to the Heaven-Spanning Bridge, whose girded underside he could still glimpse, on clear days, far up behind the blue of the sky.

First of all things that are left behind, Izanagi could not think where she might have got to. He put Kagu-tsuchi, and his sisters to bed in the rushes and asked them what happened to women when they burned—they being the source of fire, and the death, and there being no one else to ask.

Kagu-tsuchi did not know. He sucked his thumb like a match-head.

Midzu-ha-no-me did not know. She sucked her thumb like a faucet.

Hani-yama-hime did not know. She sucked her thumb like a stalk of grass.

With the shadow of the bridge thin and receding on the shoals, Izanagi lashed together the trunks of eight young trees, and taking a lock of his son’s hair to light his way, tucked the three bright-eyed children of Izanami’s flesh away in the charred shell of the house with the last of the jellyfish to give them suck. On his raft of trees, the first widower of all things bereft set out across the churning sea, across the foam and the tipped waves, across the violet water and the black.

When he ran aground on Honshu, his beard was tangled and clotted with salt. He marveled at how Honshu-his-child had grown, how the acacia had brambled, how the mountains had grown braids and top-knots of snow. How the stones had rolled up from the barrels of earth. And he wandered.

“Izanami!” he called to the bloody-flowered acacia.

“Izanami!” he called to the top-knots of snow.

“Izanami!” he called to the stones from the barrels of earth.

And it was the stones that answered.

“Here,” they murmured in their grinding, “here.”

Izanagi pushed stone aside from stone, slate from shale.

“Here,” they sighed, and moved from their loam, “here.”

Behind a certain stone, there was a hole, tangled with roots and sifting soil, tangled with the dead-skin bells of mushroom and the sinuous movements of centipedes retreating from the light.

“Come in,” sighed the centipedes as their ruby tails vanished, “this is Ne no Kuni, the Root-Country. She is here, she is here.”

It was small, only wide enough for his shoulders, for his own hips, and it was open and dark as a mouth.

“Izanami?” he whispered.

No answer came, and thus, second of all things that go under the earth, Izanagi wriggled through the scrim of mud into Ne no Kuni.

In the Root-Country, there is no light. Even before there was land, there was light, and Izanagi crawled through the sludge trying to taste the dark, to breathe it, to understand how so complete and utter a thing could have come to be without his knowledge. The darkness grew around him until he no longer felt the wet earth stroking his limbs, but was simply over-hung with it, like curtains and veils, and he could see nothing, first of all blinded things. His feet squelched in a kind of softness underfoot; his hands groped in a mist like breath. There was no sound but himself and the darkness, which seemed to draw into itself and out again.

He pulled a comb from his hair, fashioned in the days before Kagu-tsuchi from pieces of the tortoise-floor, days Izanagi recalled as happy, when Izanami was quiet and fat with islands. He fumbled in the black with the curl of his son’s hair, and lit the edge of the green comb. Fire flared out of the prongs, white and gold as a blanched sun, and the tile-teeth burned slowly down.

In the sudden glare, he lifted one foot and then the other out of the yielding ground; in the sudden glare there was no ground but flesh; in the sudden glare there was no air but the thick fumes of decay spiraling yellow and gray; in the sudden glare there was no Ne no Kuni, there was only Izanami, spread out over the gloam like a shroud, her body become the Root-Country. He was deep in her, in the pooled, moon-shot morass of her stomach, stretched now into a vast and planted field, wavering with untold grasses, with straggling trees clutching at her navel like dead hands. Her breasts rose up stiff and capped with black ice—clouds and cracks clustered at their peaks. Her arms lay out straight as highways, pocked with moldering wells and sinks where her blood had become brackish rivers moving sluggish and sere through the hollows of her elbows. Her knees had split open, and the flora of the dead already bloomed there, asphodel and dragonfruit and oranges like leering faces. Her thighs and calves spread off behind him; he could not see their end. She was gargantuan, the landscape itself, and her skin was broken so often, still streaked with scorch-streaks, that the red curve of her liver rivaled her femur for color-ghast, and her broken ribs rose up in jagged, thin-tipped stalactites. Her heart did not beat, but sat huge in the center of the world like an anchor dropped into an unguessable sea, cut by wiry meridians, its ventricles swollen and spider-blown, congealed and flayed and burning still.

Izanagi’s lips curled back in disgust, and he vomited onto the navel of his wife—but the sight of his trickling sour seeping into her flesh caused his dry throat to retch again, and again, pushing against itself and finding nothing more to give to the country of Izanami.

Somewhere behind the ice-caps of her teeth, a cry began. It hurtled up from the depths of the rocks of her bones, it shook the hand-roots of the trees worming at her sternum. The roof of the Izanami-world shook, and strands of her hair, which he could see now had made up the great darkness stretching over him and over her. Great, ropy shafts of it tumbled down, crashing onto the wet-flesh earth, sending up sprays of stilled, clotted blood. The cry grew until he knew it for the voice of Izanami, and amid the spray of long braids slashing through liquefying vertebrae, Izanagi, first of all things that feared, ran from the bellow of his wife towards the tunnel which had emptied him into her.

“OUT! OUT!” it snarled, and shards of cartilage shot through with starlight and mosses cut through his back like shrapnel. He scrambled up through the mud and the skein of roots, through the centipedes laughing “Here, here!” and the stones gurgling dryly around him like swallowing throats.

“OUT! OUT!” the cry shook the dirt from the tunnel, and it sifted onto the face of Izanagi, it drifted into his eyes, his nose, his mouth, until he could not breathe, nor see. He choked, first of all things in the world to suffocate, and he was filled up with her, her voice stopping his ears like wax, flakes of her skin closing up every open part of him.

The stones moved aside like water and with a cloud of sweat and dust Izanagi was thrown onto the long grass still clutching his burning comb—though it scalded him, he held it before him as though it were his only dear thing. There was a sudden detonation of light, and he sprawled, prostrate as a penitent, on the green earth, beaten down by the sky and covered in the detritus of the Root-Country-which-is-Izanami, soaked in her dead-sour ablutions, clammy and shuddering.

Yet still, the cry barreled up from the weed-massed crevice, and he covered his hands with his face as it serrated the air:

“OUTOUTOUT! OUT OF MY GRAVE, OUT OF MY FLESH, YOU HAVE NO PLACE IN ME! EATER OF CHILDREN, EATER OF DEATH, GLUTTON, GLUTTON, GLUTTON! GO WITH THE CHILDREN WHO ARE TOO BIG FOR YOU TO EAT, GO WITH HONSHU, GO WITH KYUSHU, GO WITH KAGU-TSUCHI. COME NEVER HERE AGAIN, I WILL LET NO ONE PASS. I WILL DEVOUR EVERYTHING YOU MAKE, I WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU SIRE WITH THAT SICK, MEWLING BODY. IN THE MOMENT THEY DRAW BREATH, I WILL BE THERE TO SNATCH IT BACK. THIS IS MY WORLD, NOW, IN THE DEEPS AND THE DARK. KEEP TO YOUR HALF, SPOILED BY LIGHT. GO, GET OUT, GOBBLE UP THE WHOLE WORLD IF YOU CAN, BUT COME NEAR MY COUNTRY AGAIN AND I WILL BURN YOU, BELLY-OUT, AS YOU BURNED ME.”