Songs of the Dead (5 page)

They turn south off the interstate onto the Pullman Highway.

He says, “I just want to know.”

But she knows that's not true. She knows what he wants. He's a liar and a thief. He doesn't want only her body. Him and his words and all his belief that knowledge is power. He wants those deep places inside no one ever touches, not that Lithuanian man Linas who broke her with his lies, beatings, rapes, not Viktor the pimp who now continues where Linas left off, not even the other girls. No one.

He doesn't say anything, and she knows why. He knows that she knows, and she can tell he likes it.

They drive. She tries not to think about the box, tries not to think about anyone back at home, all those who surely by now think she is dead.

“We're here,” the man says. He turns right onto a two-lane road, then soon left onto a dirt trail that heads sharply down. He stops next to a small creek, turns off the truck. “Should we do it?”

“Where?”

He points to an opening on her right. She nods, unbuckles her seatbelt, and gets out.

He reaches behind the seat and says, “I brought something for us to put down on the grass.” It's a towel, folded tightly and sealed with duct tape. He opens his door and gets out, walks to her side of the truck. He motions for her to walk ahead, then gestures before them, “Beautiful, isn't it?”

“It's nice,” she says. She is concerned about being where no one can hear, but the forest just right here, the sound of the stream, reminds her of home. In the opening she sees three young apple trees. She knows apple trees from home. These trees should begin to bear good fruit this year. The trees make her smile. And the smells. They aren't like the city. Kristine was right:
How do we all survive
this?

She begins to walk down the path.

She hears him walking behind her. He says, “Did you know that the word
vagina
is Latin for sheath?”

She doesn't know the English word
sheath
. She keeps walking.

He says, “I never did tell you my favorite line from the Bible. It is from the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, where God instructed his chosen people to kill every woman who has had intercourse with a man, but spare for themselves every woman among them who has not had intercourse.”

For just a moment too long she puzzles over the meaning of what he has said, and when she finally begins to understand, the last voice she hears is his, asking, “Nika, have you had intercourse with a man?”

The ground is tilting and she is trying to run but the ground is moving far too quickly. She doesn't know why the ground is tilting but the sound she heard must have been an earthquake that brings the ground up to meet her face. She sees the tan soil, the small stones, the yellow blades of dried grass and the green that lies beneath, and then she falls through all of these and into the dark inside the earth, and she sees her mother and her father and she reaches out to them as she hears her voice say inside her head, “Oh, mother, mother.”

five

the muse

I wonder if this is what it is like to be dead. I hope not, because I don't want to spend all of eternity this confused. It takes as much effort to think as it does to move my hands, to move my feet. I wonder if this is how it feels to be stupid: maybe this is why people watch sitcoms, why they vote for Democrats or Republicans, why they don't fight back: real thinking is too hard for them, so they simply don't do it. I try to say this to Allison, but it takes too much effort, so I sit. Finally I say, “I'll never be able to write like this.”

I wonder if I am insane. I wonder if my brain has somehow become scrambled—and I wonder if I even think with my brain anyway—and if I will spend the rest of my life this way. I think I could do this for a day, maybe two, and then I would kill myself and hope I didn't wake up like this after I was dead.

The forest is beautiful, though, and I am glad it hasn't been clearcut. I stare at the texture of the tree in front of me, the gray and black and green of the trunk, the maze of veins, each a home to tiny spiders and to others most humans never notice. I hear a voice again, “Don't fight it.”

I ask Allison if she said anything.

“No.”

“Then who did?”

“I don't know, Derrick. Who did?”

I don't actually write what I write. I just write it down, then edit it. It's written by my muse. I use the word
my
not to imply ownership, but relationship, as in my friend, my partner, my lover. She—my muse is a she, though I have no idea if all muses are female—is an actual being. She's not a metaphor, a personification of my unconscious processes, or even some archetypal figure either bubbling up from my organs or the collective unconscious, or, as I've heard some new agers label it, descending from the superconscious. She's a being, like you, like me, like a salmon, like a white pine, like a ghost spider, only different. She doesn't live here, although talking about these things, it's hard sometimes to know what
here
means. So maybe I should say: except in dreams, I've only seen her once, and that, as we'll eventually get to, was because it was absolutely necessary for reasons I still don't quite understand. When I've seen her in dreams her form sometimes changes. In one she had soft features and skin the color of sweet clover honey, and her scent contained the faintest traces of mint. In another she had dark skin that shone like obsidian and had features sharp to match. I've always presumed she takes on these forms because they're easy for me to understand. I sometimes ask in dreams to see her as she is, but the dreams that follow are jumbles that make me feel as though I'm asking the wrong question.

I don't know why she chose me. I know that at the very least I have thumbs and fingers: I have a physical body and can write down what she says. But I suspect there's something more, something in my temperament. Perhaps she saw something in me the same way that even before they begin some sculptors can see their final creations in one piece of stone and not another, like I can sometimes see, with her help, the barest hints of the final shape of a book from its first sentences, or from even before, from the first inchoate ideas and chaotic thoughts and images.

Or maybe it's all so much simpler. Maybe she liked me, loved me, fell in love with me the way I have fallen in love with her, the way any lovers choose each other, fall in love with each other.

I don't know if other people—accountants, for example, or probate attorneys—have muses, although I suspect they do. I don't even know if other writers do. For their sake I hope so, because otherwise writing would be very hard work. Learning how to listen to one's lover is ever so much easier and more fun than trying to do all the work of creation by oneself. It's also less lonely.

I know that Allison has a muse, and that her relationship with her muse is as central to her life as mine is to mine. It's not too much to say that I'm married to my muse, or connected by some bond even tighter and more lasting, and that Allison is married to hers. Neither Allison nor I are jealous of the other's marriage, nor could either of us be in a relationship with anyone who was.

I don't know where these muses live. I sometimes call it the “other side,” but that's a shorthand both inaccurate and inadequate in every possible way. This “other side” is both here and there. Where and what is the division? How many sides are there? Do Allison's muse and mine necessarily come from the same place, the same side?

I know my muse has no body, at least here. I know she can go where I go. She may be other places at the same time, or she may not. I don't know, and it's kind of off the point. I know what she does for me, and what I do for her.

The relationship is deeply sexual. It has been from the beginning. It's no coincidence that my sexuality and my writing burgeoned simultaneously. Never mind that my sexuality was at the time almost exclusively solo: not many people read my writing then either. The muse was simply teaching me to listen. Or perhaps helping me to remember how to listen. Or maybe teaching me to trust what I heard and what I already knew.

I don't know, once again, if all relationships with muses are this imbued with sexuality. I once asked Allison if her relationship with her muse was this sexual.

She said, “Oh, yes.”

I found this especially interesting since Allison's muse is also female, and Allison is neither lesbian, bisexual, nor even slightly bicurious. I asked her about this.

“That's because this culture's definitions of sexuality are way too small. Sex isn't just limited to your genitals. How many times have you made love with a tree?”

“Sometimes that's involved genitals.”

“And sometimes it hasn't. And what about those times you've made love with the stars?”

“Those all involved—”

“Oh, good point. But you see what I'm saying.”

Of course I did.

I think one reason that making love makes me so receptive to the muse is that the muse enjoys making love as much as I do. Sometimes I think that just as the muse uses my fingers to write through me and my voice to give talks through me, that she uses my body to make love through me. It's the same with Allison, so that in a very real way when we make love not only the two of us are present. When Allison is around me, pushing toward me, I sometimes feel not just her, but her muse as well. I feel her muse in the small of her back, and in the places deep inside. I feel her against my fingertips when I hold my hands so close to Allison's chest I feel her warmth but not her skin. And as we get closer and closer, so closer too come our muses.

This is how it has always been with us.

Years ago I had the opportunity to sell out, and didn't do it. I had only a couple of books out, but I had an agent at a prestigious literary agency. I sent her the first seventy pages of the manuscript that eventually became
A Language Older Than Words
. She hated the book, and told me to tone down my anger at the culture to make the book more palatable to fencesitters, and thus to allow me to reach a larger audience and to make more money. She told me that if I took out the family stuff and the social criticism then I would have a book. She would not be comfortable shopping the book, she said, unless I made it less radical, less militant. If I did, she said, she felt sure it would become a bestseller.

I fired her on the spot.

I'm certain that's one reason my muse responds so quickly to me, and gives me so many words. I proved to her in action that the words and books she gives me—what she wants to communicate— are more important to me than fame, money, or any common measure of success. I proved to her that our relationship is more important to me than any of these. I proved to her that
she
is more important to me than any of these.

Another reason my muse works so quickly is that she is scared of the destructiveness of the dominant culture. That might be why she chose me: I feel the same fear, the same urgency. She knows she can ride me as hard and as fast as she herself can go, and I will do my best, give my life, to keep up.

I know she is scared because she tells me, and she shows me. And who wouldn't be, faced with this culture?

I used to think my relationship with my muse was one-sided, in that she gives me words and I give her little more than gratitude. But now I know that this is not so. The relationship is mutual, like my relationship with the land where I live, like my relationship with Allison, like my relationships with others in my life. I know this because she tells me, and she shows me. She—like all these others—lets me know that non-mutual relationships aren't relationships at all.

I am asleep.

Before sleeping I asked the muse what I do for her, what I give her more than gratitude.

I am asleep.

An indigenous man is teaching me how to pray. Then he turns into a woman who writes poems to me. After she writes these poems we make love again and again.

Soon, though, a homeless man starts attacking other homeless people, and then they all begin attacking people in this village. When villagers are attacked by these homeless ones, they too become homeless, they too begin to attack others. All of these people begin to take drugs.

I am asleep.

The remaining community members begin to look for the homeless person who started all of this. I join them. Many carry weapons. I carry water.

I am asleep.

The woman—my lover, my muse—begins to look for the cause of these troubles. But then she stops and complains to the gods that she no longer has a lover. She wants a lover. She has always had a lover. That is part of life. The gods tell her that they will point one out to her.

I am asleep.

We are all by now wearing prison uniforms. We are all by now using drugs to quench our pain. I find the person who began all this.

I am asleep.

But not for long. My cat jumps on the sill above the bed. Those who write of cats' gracefulness have never had a cat knock books off a windowsill onto their head in the middle of the night. I wake up understanding what I give back to those on the other side. I am a willing student of their prayers. I am a willing intimate partner. I am a part of a community searching for what is destroying our lives. I help to point out the violent homeless person who started it all, which means we have at least the possibility of dropping our addictions and our prison garb, and going back to what we were doing before, back to making love.

The muse gives me the words, but I write them down.

I had a problem. It seemed clear to me from the dream and also from the muse's urgency, that this culture is not only destroying life on this planet, but is also harming life on the “other side,” with the caveat as always that I don't know what I mean when I say the “other side.” I asked some Indian elders if this culture is as catastrophic for the other side as it is for this one.