Stories From the Plague Years (28 page)

It was wasteful to spill our Gift upon the train platform. My lover, his head bandaged with duct-tape and dishtowels, paid the mid-morning commuters no heed as we shoved past them. All we could focus on was the oblivion promised him upon the track down which eighty tons of careening metal rushed.

I stood to his back as he dove before the train as if into pure and cleansing waters.

I knew joy, and release, as my lover was pulped to moist, red clay . . . as he found the sublimation that would free him. No one could steal his Gift, now that the Art it allowed him to create had been taken from him. No lesser talent would ever desecrate or appropriate his blood for their own revisualizations. He’d not become paint for lesser talents, not while his flesh and blood and marrow were dispersed so thinly. I smiled to know he was free.

And I split along that smile, casting my blood upon the wind-swift metal canvas of the train. I shattered along my skeleton as the first flesh from which my lover had crafted me burst upon the track. My dissolution had none of my lover’s fire, had none of the profundity of his Art.

I hoped to ascend, to find myself in the sublime heaven my lover had painted with that Gift from which I’d been conjured.

But I found myself earthbound by a small metal nugget with the weight of a thousand suns. I . . . my lover’s least creation . . . reached to him through the liquidity that joined us, through the blood-spirit-thought that defines our Gift and that now forms my words.

We cooled together, two careless smears, blended as are cheap pigments by the hoses of those who washed us away.

For Marian Anderson (1968–2001)—neighbour and friend during the dark years. You left us to endure darker years without you.

David watched a red streak of November sunset turn to a bloody serpent hung in the darkening sky.

He knew, sitting in the wine-coloured dusk beneath the eaves of a great oak, that the vision was a phantom conjured by the seeping toxins in his blood. He chose not to dispel the vision by blinking or glancing away. It didn’t threaten him as did most others; it was not vivid nor clear enough to possibly be real. It had the quality of art. He found comfort in the serpent’s rich color, its slow smoke-like undulations.

After a long moment, the serpent became still, and slowly lost its shape to become again a burning cloud in the west.

When dusk gave way to moonlight, and the scent of autumn’s dead leaves meshed with that of smoke from fireplaces miles distant, and the sound of the brook that ran through the grove of oaks to the south became sharper with the cold night air, David stood and leaned on the branch he used as a walking staff. In his youth, not so very long ago, he’d secretly called this hill “Weathertop,” and carried a staff as a prop when he imagined himself a peer of Gandalf. Now he needed a staff to negotiate the terrain; the illness that had turned his blood to slow poison had also given him gout.

He hobbled down the hill toward the house where he’d grown up, past fields he’d once run and played in, now brown from the withering touch of Fall. When he reached the yard he was sweating with exertion, despite the night air. Drowsy greyness filled the corners of his sight, as if another phantom would accost his senses. At the door, he stood a moment, and breathed deeply until the greyness passed.

When he entered, he saw his work, the sheets of music he’d been composing, crumpled and torn and strewn about the living room. The piano bench had been toppled and shoved to a far corner, the piano itself dented and banged, its rich wood splintered and scuffed from the blows of the poker that lay upon it. A bottle of ink had been thrown against the far wall, leaving a blue smeary blossom upon the white paint and shards of glass upon the wood floor.

David stood aghast. For how long he didn’t know. The clatter of his staff as it toppled from his hand brought him out of his shock.

He limped to the center of the room, turned in circles, filled with panic, filled with fear, filled with rage. He was about to phone the police when an ugly thought struck him, making him flush, making his knees weak.

He searched the house for signs of break-in. Who would break into a house in the middle of the woods? No forced windows, no broken glass, no splintered wood on the doors.

David went to the ruined living room and sat, feeling his heart thud in his chest.

He could have done this, himself. Made drunk by the disease that was killing him. Enraged that the degradation of his mind would not allow him to compose a legacy of music before his body destroyed itself. He had been frustrated, angry for most of the day, unable to focus on his work or to experimentally play musical phrases.

He had no memory of what he’d done before he’d left the house . . . no memory of actually leaving. He could only recall a need to be outside, to feel wind and see the sky before he could resume composing.

He could have done this.

Not wanting to cry, feeling lancing pain in his gouty joints as he kneeled, David gathered the sheets off the floor, un-rumpled them, and placed them on the mantel. He righted the piano bench, and took the poker away from the scarred piano. He cleaned and tidied the room, but left the stain upon the wall, not wanting to make it worse by trying to wash it off.

Afterward, he put on his favourite recording of Mozart’s “Requiem” and pressed a razor against the blue veins of his forearm.

The hunt was on.

His pursuers mocked him by signaling the chase with horns.

The deposed commander of twenty-nine scattered legions ran through living muck that screamed and writhed under his monstrous footfall, then crossed a swampy river as a horse would ford churning waters, his head and neck craning and bobbing with the strokes of his shoulders and arms.

As he surged through the stagnant channel, a new crash of horns came like a storm wind across the wailing marsh. He stopped swimming and listened, looking back the way he’d come for his pursuers. Through the thick, perpetual fog of that starless, sunless place, he saw signal fires flash atop a watchtower on the shore he had just left.

Ahead, he saw answering fires atop the ramparts of the city of burning red iron on the shore before him.

He wanted to bellow his rage, scream his fury, but he dared not give away his location. Then he thought to make his position known in a manner that could save him.

He sounded the filthy, brackish water, warm as fresh blood yet laced with Death’s cold touch, and pulled from the corrupted slime at the bottom something ruined: something that had been breathing muck for the long centuries since it had breathed air.

He broke the surface, and held aloft by one hand the screaming ghost he had pulled from below, hiding most of his own bulk under the water, yet keeping his gaze above the surface . . . watching through the low mist with the careful expectation of a predator.

The debased soul, able at last to shriek the agony it had felt since it had dropped to this spiritual vomitorium, summoned the river’s guardian. Fast as an arrow freed from a bowstring, the guardian’s skiff skimmed the water. The twisted grey creature on board smiled gleefully, eyes alight with the color of ice as he poised his oar like a weapon at the screaming soul’s breast.

“You are
mine
!” said the guardian.

The hunted prince lashed out from the water, hurling the ruined soul aside. He crashed his head and his single, spiraling horn against the skiff’s prow, then gripped the prow in his claws. The guardian shrieked, raised his oar overhead, was about to bring it down on the prince’s claws when the prince hissed, “I’ll sink you!”

The boatman froze, eyes burning with cold fire, teeth clenched.

“I’ll sink you!” said the prince. “All your little charges will be on you, biting, gnashing and clawing. They’ll rise up for you from below, and the ones from the shallows will be on you like the water itself.”

Again, the crash of horns came, this time from the shore, so close it made the air shudder. The twisted boatman smiled and set down his oar.

“There’s no room in
this
ark for you, either.”

The prince growled, then splintered the prow’s lip, rocked the skiff to and fro.

The boatman stepped toward the prow, leaned forward to the prince’s equine face, and spoke calmly. “The boat cannot hold your royal weight. Were you to come aboard, it would sink beneath you as if you stood on a floating leaf. Rage away,
Regulus
. Rage away.”

The prince lunged and gripped the boatman’s corded throat in one claw. The skiff tilted forward with his bulk, pressed into his belly, and began to fill with the river’s broth-thick water.

The prince spoke in an intonation he had used in cold defiance against the Archangels: “Enough theatre. Take me to the safe shore.”

He released the boatman’s throat, slid back into the water. Without a word, the boatman piloted the skiff along the shores of the city of burning red iron; the prince hidden, clinging to the skiff’s underside. In the shallows, far from the city’s ramparts and gate, the prince let go the skiff and waded ashore through water choked with rotted souls, slick as stalks of decayed kelp.

Standing upon the bank, he pried several of these gurgling souls from his limbs, his chest, back and genitals. They were too corrupted to scream as his claws tore them.

Soon he was running again, the hoof beats of creatures both two-and four-legged thundering behind him.

The razor broke David’s skin as the voices of the chorus gave earthly expression to the sound of Heaven.

Blood ran down David’s wrist, baptizing his hand in red warmth, when he stopped the razor’s path through his flesh.

“
If I survive this, I won’t be able to play
,” he thought. His riot of emotions fell quiet; grief and anger and despair calmed within him like a breaking tempest. “
The tendons will be cut, then I’ll have nothing left. Nothing. Not able to play or compose. Or I’ll be put in a ward somewhere, not allowed anything as sharp as a pen to compose with on scrap paper. . . .
”

Leaning over the deep kitchen basin, watching red drops make sudden blossom on the white porcelain, he knew he would not survive the opening of his veins. No one knew where he was. No one would look for him. No ambulance could reach him in time if he phoned, bleeding, for help.

His own sister didn’t know what continent he was on. He was hiding from people who would want to hospitalize him, who would keep him bedridden in the name of caring for him, who would not allow him to exhaust himself while composing his legacy, while he gave meaning to his last months in this world.

And if he died now, there would be no meaning to his life. Nothing left behind. A few minor compositions already performed that his teachers and a few critics had said showed the potential for greatness. But nothing of lasting value. Nothing that would endure as a testament to the sacrifices his parents had made for him and his music.

He, and his music, would not survive this.

He set down the razor and inspected the wound.

It was minor. No vein had been opened. He flexed his fingers. No tendon had been cut. He washed the wound under warm water, and watched currents of red flow within the stream of water.

“
If only I could clean my blood. Wash out the enzymes my liver is leaking into it. I wouldn’t be in this fog. My music wouldn’t be hidden away in my head, all nestled in cotton wool. I’m drowning in my own mind.
”

A thought struck him as he watched bloody water swirl down the drain and the “Requiem” played itself out. David took a wine glass from the cabinet beside the sink and let his blood flow into it, making a fist around a dish towel as he did so.

He made a tight bandage around his forearm with gauze, and carried the glass to the living room. He took from the shelves there the books bound in dusty leather that had belonged to his mother, and that he could not bear to sell to collectors after she had died. He took from the mantel the large clay bowl his mother had had made at great expense by an artisan who lived near Jerusalem. Dust covered the vermilion lines of concentric lettering inside the bowl: lettering in Hebrew and Aramaic and other languages David did not know.

David wiped away the dust and set the bowl in the center of the room. His joints felt full of sand as he kneeled over the books and began to read.

The prince ran through a forest of those who had, in life, made a gibbet of their existences, and had ripped their souls from out of their bodies so that they dropped here and germinated to twisted, black trees. Knotted branches inlaid with tendons and veins quivered with unreleased suffering. Blood spurted from the branches that he broke as he ran, and the blood wept, vibrating softly as if each drop were a tiny throat pressed upon his skin.

The prince stopped, listened for his enemies. He did not hear them above the steady cries that hung thick in the forest’s air. Harpies, perched in the upper branches, pecked at the trees, taking communion in small bites from the ruined souls, from their unreal flesh transubstantiated to twisted wood. The wounds the harpies caused gave ruby outlets to the pain of the suicides; their droppings, in turn, nourished the soil that fed the souls that had been so wretchedly starved in life.