Myths of Origin (6 page)

“Yes, yes, I want a Key! But I have nothing to give you in return.”

He considered, cocking his cerulean head to one side. “I will take a lock of your hair. It still has some of the angelblack of your Assassination on it. I could make a good, strong Key.” I nodded assent almost at the same moment he reached up an enormous casual claw and clipped off a curl about six inches long. Tucking it away under his shell, in the same movement he produced a small Key made of a deep blue green shell. If it was possible, the Lobster blushed from feelers to tail, his body flushing a deep orange.

“It is my best Key,” he whispered, “I made it from my own shell, my own claws. Under the seventh moon I soldered it with my blood.” I took it quietly, away into my pack, but as I tucked it out of sight, a great, indignant screech froze my hand.

“Why does
she
get a Key? I ask and ask and get nothing but your wretched shell turned against me and she barges in and you give
her
one?” A mammoth Seagull pinwheeled before us, cawing and screaming in a frenzy. “She’s nothing but a
girl
. She doesn’t deserve to go forward, or back, or anywhere! You cannot give her one—give it to
me
, you vile . . . 
Crab
!” The bird spat this last deadly insult like a wad of tobacco, quivering with wrath. The Lobster leapt up, flushing orange and snapping his claws.

“I can give my Keys to whomever I wish,
Sparrow
! You go away! You are a rude beast and filthy—you eat rotted fish! I can smell it on you! I would never make a Key for your kind.”

“But why
would
you grant this to me?” I asked, bewildered.

The Lobster shrugged his jeweled shoulders. “I sleep the sleep of manic frog-songs. I pity you. You of all creatures know there is nothing here, not even Reasons Why. Yet you keep going.
He
thinks he knows all the Reasons. Take it before I change my mind.”

I nodded and thanked him. He gestured towards the spiral Road. “That is all there ever was or will be. You have to go now, girlthing. Or the Gull might try to bite us.
Isoganakereba narimasen
. I have to hurry, so do you. And keep going. Downdowndown.”

“No! It’s mine, you can’t have it! You’ll lose it or drop it down a well or some other wretched thing!” The Seagull wept and stormed overhead.

I rose with ache in my thighs, amid aviary outrage, ignoring him.

“You don’t even know what its for—you’ll never find the Lock. Even at the Uttermost End, you won’t know,” he warned, gnashing his beak. I turned my painted back to his protests.

“You are a very odd Beast,” I smiled at the smaller and quieter of the two, who was still blushing furiously.

Again, the jeweled shrug. “I am a Meaningful Lobster.”

As I retreated from the bloodstone Courtyard, I caught my image in the receding Mirror of his shell, framed in the squealing of the frustrated Seagull.

I had gone entirely blue, from heel to hair.

12

I look out of my skull at all this inky blue skin.

Lakshmi-flesh blossom, dark-soled deva. All evidence of the Angel’s work—my Assassination—vanished into sapphires and crow’s feathers. To my waist sea-colored hair rolls and slips, washing foamily up onto the shore of my now azure back, now period shoulders, now violet waist. Legs stalks of skies, cobalt lips, a seabed fulminating, birthing a bewildered undone on the canvas of my skin.

But the eyes, the eyes. Still blank and empty as a well, now blue within blue within blue. Another shake and smash of noses and eyes and hairlines, another stained checkered floor of cleft palate knights and thalidomide bishops. Walls like craven rooks, bursting out of an acetylene Road. Another, and another, and another. Is this set of walking beats different because a little blue-green Key lies nestled like an infant sparrow? I do not know what it Opens, so it is as though it does not exist. It has no Purpose. Yet I know deep as Self can go that Purpose is the worst kind of trick. I am in the fish, Daughter of the Whale. My mouth tastes of old tea water, these old questions recurring, spinning like bicycle wheels over and over, that same Queen of Spades click clacking against the spokes, the same black wheel and silver rim.

I thought I had worked this unto its uttermost end, had demarcated my world, river from stream from ocean from beam. I had encapsulated it, trapped it in my little coffins and lockets, figured it out. I did not exactly come here, and so there was no
beginningtime
, no entrance through some fantastic Gate. But it was a measurable moment ago that I was satisfied with the non-advent of nothing and its persistence, that eluding Doors had become easy enough, that I was metamorphosing into a kind of expert Labyrinth-Woman, I knew its tantrums and its dervishes. And now I tumble like a candle through the night, wax end over end. The Mirror changed me, took me in like a Door, but not a Door, a jeweled tunneling worm. But didn’t the Angel change me before that? I have lost the threads. Memory is masked here, and days dissolve into ripples and smears of movement almost as soon as they pass beyond the moonrise, and so I could not say if I have been eaten by a Mirror before, but I think not.

There are advents and newness stalking me. I could be certain before that the Labyrinth shifts, but it does not change. Yet I am within something else now, a sequence of events, beyond sheer movement, pure and dazzling. It boils all around. the tiny pale blue hairs on my arms bristle like a boar. I am waiting for the portents to come. I feel them cackling around me like a copse of witches.

The carried compass sends out trails of sickness like medieval sunbeams, lassoing organs into green grassfires. The slab of north lacerating my throat, spilled mercury and spoiled stew east roiling in my belly, south-arrow crackling in my bones like kindling. It travels through me as I travel through the Labyrinth, navigating the turns and traps, inhabiting slowly, imprinting the landscape. I have eaten Direction, and it has eaten me. Oh, the yin yang cycles of self upon self, oh zazen clay of form upon shape, oh wheels within wheels within scarlet-flaming wheels. Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the glabrous sky, bound with glowing spokes? What is it searing and smoking, scalding the hermetic moon in a boil of stone? What do you see dancing in primate patterns over and over?
In this sign thou shalt conquer.

How all we pretty snakes have a taste for our own tails.

CANTO
THE SECOND

13

It has been days upon days and still my eyes are slates.

Crack the egg for the answer, the gold and the white. It lies within like the ascended scrap folded in a fortune cookie, malignant scrawl of notime.

Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky?

Answer: the Void. The Void and the Stone.

I have stumbled into another layer of within, the sky and its signs are covered by intricacies of stone. This that surrounds—no circular Wall but a great Temple carved into existence in the center of the Road, luxuriating in columns and steps of striated granite, studded with quartz like roused eyes. Exhales into the viscous air like a sleeping dragon. Circus ropes of thick vine lie net-like over the Walls and crumbling balconies, weeping fat tears of wet crimson fruit, which comprises my breakfast in this abandoned place. Sky like a dove’s belly can be seen through vast cracks in the domed ceiling, crusted with flecks of ancient paint like flocks of birds. Copper bells gone to rust litter the floor, fallen in some antediluvian cataclysm. Mosaic with no picture to reveal, (as though any Revelation lies buried and smoking here)the stones of the floor have conquered their polish and lacquer, host to grass and occasional columbine. The wind prophesies in breaths of blades, slicing my inky skin.

In the shadows of the altarstone I chew my fibrous breakfast, savoring the musky juice, beckoning the strange. It is not long in coming. The air is stale, still, except for the Cossack-wind that gallops through on occasional pogroms. Oh, the scrabble and scramble of sequence closing in like hands on a fly. Where am I going, beneath this frenzied sky? Clinging to my knowledge that there is nothing, no Center, am I blind to the wheels of fire? Oh, what do you what do you what do you see in the sky?

I see the corner of the nave move silkily, shadow within shadow, suggestion of gesticulate limbs. I swallow the sliver of fruit on my tongue, peering closer, dreading the next in this idiosyncratic parade, this sequence. This episodic hermitage so full of opiate swans and painted mouths. How will it end, if an end is ever to be contemplated under an infinite train of Bo Trees and crusted snow, skipping projector illuminating this same arboreal testing ground over and over, the ascetic, the pearl, the slanting light? My turquoise fingers are sticky with apple-blood.

It is not long in coming, the breakfast-strangeness. Obligingly a creature darts out of its sanctuary, making for my tiny Bo with determined speed. A handsome golden macaque with a bodhisattva face, clever twisting hands, his gleaming fur bristled with excitement, clapping wildly and slapping his palms on the stone slabs. He stops short an inch from my face and sniffs sharp and greedily at my shimmerings of blue. I have not moved, and how we must seem like Temple statues, the Monkey and the Deva, sea-blue and still as time.

“Who are you?” He inquires on an intake of breath, words riding air like a camel.

“I am the Seek—”

“Ssst!” He interrupts me with a venomous hiss between enormous teeth. “I know all that. Who are you?” Each syllable punctuated by a slap of Monkey-palm against Temple floor. There is a long silence filled by a tabernacle of flapping birds over some distant Maze-territory, the slow, irrefutable crumbling of the Temple into divinatory dust, reading the future (nothing, of course) in its granite entrails.

“No one, I suppose.” The answer was meeker than I intended. “I am my Wandering.”

“At least you know it. I am myself, nothing more. And often not even that. I know my name, I found it in the belly of a sturgeon with a golden ring and salty Himalayan caviar. But I learned to ascend it in the hysterical ravage of the Turkish Baths at the Center of the Labyrinth.” The Compass in my belly lashed out in epileptic grandeur and I choked and sputtered. “There is no Center! There is none, nothing!”

“Silly girl with no tail, did you think there was no Center just because you had not found it? I showed it my teeth, and it was afraid. Hoo!”

The little Monkey danced triumphantly, waving his arms skyward and stamping his long feet. I could hardly speak for the pressure of sequence. How great lay the Lie of the Maze if there was a Center I had never guessed to Seek? How could I guess the shape of un-knowledge from the depths of the Road? I rasped coldly at him, grasping his golden fur.

“Where is it? Tell me, tell me, please. I have to know. Where?”

A grin of jubilant savagery seized his mouth, and he rubbed his iconic belly. “I ate it. It was afraid. Hoo!”

What relief there is in the reassurance that the world is as you suspected. His absurdity revealed his lie. The Compass calmed to its usual pulse and the winds dried blue sweat from my brow. Madness knows madness, delirium draws its own. He was caught in the same narcotic web of enchantment and counter-enchantment, trapped in the same Golgotha of perception. I knew it for a Lie and was comforted.

“All is the act of Devouring here,” he lectured, “it is how you conquer, it is how you survive, it is how you ascend. It is why you ate the Compass, and the Wall. This is a Labyrinth. Have you any doubt that its nature is
inside?
There are beyond a thousandthousand Walls. What did you think you had done by Devouring one corner of one? There are beyond a thousandthousand Centers. I ate one. Downdowndown. It tasted like a witch’s nipple dipped in morphine. Delicious. I ate my name, which was a Center of a three thousand and forty forever Centers, but mine. And so I become another in a writhing nest of Centers. You do not know your name and cannot achieve that kind of mastery—you do not know the tracks of your prey. I ascended its fish-eggs and padlocks. Now I am myself, whole. I carry the Center with me, and everywhere I go is the achievement of the Quest. With every step I conquer the Labyrinth, the world of my birth-tree and my first-milk.”

“But you don’t, really. You trick yourself. There is no end to it. You can’t leave it. So it makes no difference. You and I are the same. You just have a better Lie to tell yourself.”

His eyes glittered shrewdly. “Darlingblue, it is all a Lie. That does not make it lesser. Is it victory to abandon a thing like a wounded wolf? Is the truest expression of mastery is to Abscond? Not the vital thing, no. I choose. We are
not
alike, because I understand these things, and you do not.”

“You think you understand. It does not make it so. After all, it is all a Lie. Even you.”

“True. Even the purity of crocodiles is a derivation of moon-mother tea ceremony and a falsity. You have your Labyrinth and I mine. And I have had the Temple where you have had the Road. You have been Assassinated—it is something to see. Nevertheless, I have been waiting for you. I see the wheels in the sky and the shape of approaching. Hoo.” I shut my eyes, heavy-lead-bodied and grinding closed.

“I am weary of all this. I do not wish to listen patiently to your reed-mat ministrations and nod like an ignorant postulant. I must keep moving.”

“Yes, girlbodied thing, and I am going with you. For awhile.”

“You are not welcome.”

“It hardly matters.”

“I will not listen to you.”

“I will not speak.”

“The Doors will catch us both.”

He said nothing. I covered my eyes with my hand. “I don’t care. Come if you wish, Beast. Or stay. There is nothing new, even you.”

I rose, striding towards the Temple steps like a wave. Lost, lost in
sequence
, in the hagiography of this opaque menagerie, it is, it was, it will be all slipping away. I feel the slide of earth beneath my bare and cyanic feet. The Monkey dove into my Path and planted his limbs like a portcullis. “You must do something before we leave this place.”