The Heaven of Mercury (20 page)

A word escaped her lips as little more than a breath: -Parnell, she said, her lips barely moving. Her eyes no longer penetrated him, but softened in focus and seemed to drift away.

-What is it? Parnell whispered in return.

-Parnell, she said, I want to pretend.

-Pretend what? he said, his voice scarcely more than the last little bit of a breath to empty the lungs.

She made an absent gesture with her hand, turning it outward, palm up, as if to receive a coin, or a key.

-Pretend I am more beautiful than alive.

When his pounding heart subsided enough to allow it, he held her by the arms and laid her down upon the daybed. She looked at him again in that absent way, then tilted her head back onto the mattress, her mouth parted. She whispered again, -Parnell. And she said something else, too faint to be heard. Hands upon her cheeks, growing cold, he leaned down to her lips. He laid his ear just barely against them. -Parnell, he heard her whisper again, something's wrong.

He knelt and grasped her by the arms again, and believed he could feel something in her beginning to slow and thicken, heard a gentle rasping deep in her throat. The shadow of her dusky blood crept into tender crescents below her eyes. The delicate fibers in her cornea quivered, and in her dark pupils the tiny reflected image of Parnell's face seemed to dissipate and disappear.

-Parnell, she whispered, barely audible, save me.

Then she lay still, eyes upon the ceiling. The cottage timbers shuddered in the gusts off the Gulf. Parnell rested his head upon her breast. He could hear the crushing sound as breakers collapsed against the beach. -Parnell, she whispered again, don't be ashamed. Take me, like you want to do. Parnell began to tremble. He knelt before her on the daybed, and pulled apart her cool and sticky, lovely white legs. In a moment he groaned as heat flushed through him. He gave in and fell upon her. Her breath huffed out as from a cushion, her arms lay rigid at her sides, her head arched away as if in the throes of some horrible death, eyes turned to look unseeing out the Florida windows, lovely mouth opening in dry exhaustion. Parnell crushed his lips to hers, the ripe taste of shrimp still upon them. He squeezed her small and lolling breasts to his chest. And slowly she began to change again, her whisper taking voice again, love literally coming alive beneath him. He heard himself saying her name, his voice deep and crusty as a troll's, and she responded with a cry that shot into his spine. Blood slammed at the ends of his fingers and toes. He was momentarily blinded. She gripped him with her heels and nails and he felt as if there were no longer any bed beneath them, and a roaring in his ears became their own sobs. She clasped him to her. She knew then, she would tell him one day, that he had unbound her from the tyrannies of grief and fear. Those who would embrace the beautiful dead are most open to the living, have nothing to fear, neither loss nor oblivion. The world was flesh and blood and bone, and through the blessed privilege of sensual touch lay contact with the spiritual world. The air is adrift with what presences are left behind, which find new forms in the living, in those who are most open and alive themselves, not slaves to ignorance and fear. In this world, Parnell had given her that. But in his secret heart Parnell knew, and he would always believe Selena knew, that it was Selena who had saved Parnell.

W
HEN SHE WAS
a child listening to her mother's sermons she came to realize the possibility of the divine in an ordinary life, this miracle that had occurred with Our Lord Jesus Christ was as much chance and the openness of one's divine nature to the miracle as it was the big finger of God pointing out he or she.
We do not choose God
, her mother had boomed from the pulpit over and over.
God chooses us
. Our choice, she always said, was to be open to God or to close our hearts forever and ever. Her mother was obsessed with death. She always said she couldn't wait to go to the other side, to be in heaven. Such words had so frightened Selena that her own obsession with death took a hard turn toward salvation and the only way to guarantee that was to be the agent of it herself. She drew pictures of heaven in her first-grade class, and all the angels were her mother. God was a very old man with wild hair that hid his eyes, and a fierce beard that hid his features, and in his hand he held a long-handled scythe. Beside him stood a smaller figure with jet-black hair and a little wand of her own. And who is that? her teacher asked brightly. That's me. Really? the teacher said brightly as before. Why are you standing next to God, hon? I am standing at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Selena said. The Christ Selena, who died for your sins. You're not dead, though, honey, the teacher said. And Selena hon, it's the angel of death that carries the scythe, her teacher said. Not God. God
is
the angel of death, Selena replied. Selena the Christ is the life everlasting.
Selena is a very wise child
, her teacher wrote home in a note,
but with somewhat disturbing notions. Perhaps she has been exposed to ideas which she is not yet equipped to handle.

She did not see God as evil, but indifferent to the kinds of things that so grieved human beings. He was above all that, and so she strove to be more like God in this way, and this made her an aloof child, difficult to reach or decipher emotionally. At twelve she knew from the scriptures it was time to shoulder the burden to which she had opened her infinite heart. It was in the evening, very late, in her bed. She rose to her knees in the moonlight soft on her bedcovers and asked God to take her then and to use her to His ends, and a flood of emotion washed through her as she had not felt in her life to that point. She wept a long time, wept herself into exhaustion, and then it was that the spirit entered her and gained a hold.

There were miracles she performed, in her own quiet way. She could make her teacher call on her for an answer, if she wanted her to. And if she wanted to be passed over, she could control that, too. It was a simple matter of will, and something she did through her eyes, which were large and such a dark brown as to appear almost solid black globes of softened glass. If she wanted into a group of other children who were occupied with something, she approached them and they parted to let her in. And if she was not interested, she was invisible, they never even sensed she was near. She could arrest animals with her eyes, as well, and keep them from approaching or slinking away. Her cat, Rosebud, understood her every mulling thought, and watched her as she would an object of prey, but one beyond her powers to prey upon, and therefore a kind of god. She did not worship, though, being a cat. She expected to be worshiped herself, Rosebud did, and so was always unsatisfied. But when Selena touched her on the top of her head between her ears, she gently closed her eyes and was absolved of her envy and felt content, for a brief while anyway, to be just a cat. Other things she could do were make birds fly from a bush without herself making a sound or a move, turn bad dogs away tails tucked, shut up talkative grown-ups who got on her nerves, and if she really wanted to and it was something she rarely did, knowing it would be an abuse if she did it too often, she could change the weather. But more often she merely willed weather to stay as it was, since she liked most kinds of it, rain and storms as well as sunny days and clear nights. She could make a tree die, if she thought it was a bad tree, though this was rare. She could make other people, the whole town, sleep later in the morning, if she wished. If she was sleepy and didn't want to get up for school, she could do this, and when she finally dragged herself to the schoolhouse, her father's old postal bag stuffed with her books slung over her shoulder, the others would be just arriving, too, all sleepy and draggy, including the teachers, who yawned and slurped from cup after cup of coffee, and declared they just couldn't wake up this morning to save their lives. She could simply slow things down. And sometimes she did. Riding in the backseat of their old black lurching car to church she could tell there were fewer cars on the road, the people inside looking sleepy and tired, and there were fewer people in the church itself, and her mother had to work extra hard at her sermon to keep them awake and responding with Amens and nods of the head that weren't nod-dings-off. When Selena noticed that, and before the collection plate was passed, she willed them to wake up a little bit, and they would. At home she scaled herself back. For some time she wasn't sure if she wanted her mother to know her secret or not. She realized she might not be believed, and that her mother might think it a sacrilege that she even would think such a thing.

When her mother fell to her early death Selena at first believed she had been horribly wrong, deluded in her sense of herself, but in prayer that day and following she came to understand she had seen this about to occur, had felt its presence in the hand her mother used to stroke her head as she lay falling asleep in bed in recent evenings. And if she were not some kind of Christ, a notion that had begun to slip from her presence of mind after all in the way that the awareness of breathing slips away from those who have their health, that was okay. It was not necessary to save the world or mankind in order to practice her obsessions.

She knew Parnell to be someone in touch with God, in his own way, a person through whose hands people passed on their way to God. She saw him as an instrument whose own powers he didn't understand, and therefore an innocent. He was the last person to see her mother in her natural earthly form, before the preparation for burial and the soothing of the living souls. When she held his hand there in the funeral parlor she could first feel its presence and then she could see the divine glow in him as a faint blue aura about his oddly beautiful body. She could see something soulful in him that had come, she knew, from his having been so intimate with so much death. He had his hands on death, and wasn't afraid. He understood something about it that other people did not. After they married, when people were brought into the funeral home to be embalmed and buried, she absolved them all of all their sins, quietly, to herself. They would all enter heaven, to keep her mother company, and she would send them all with a message, that when her work on earth was done she would join her in paradise.

 

SHE KNEW OF
Parnell's sickness, something she had divined anyway, through various things he said to her which first implied it and later confirmed it for her in the months of their courtship. When she had first taken his hand in the funeral parlor she had sensed something strong in terms of his relation to the dead, but had not included sexual passion in what she sensed until he told her of the girl who'd been in the farming accident and how she had changed him. A general anxiety had to that point given him such problems he thought they would undermine his chosen career: sweaty palms, a nervous pallor, a popeyed uncertainty in his speech. His father barred him from working the parlors. This continued until one day when the body of a girl in his high school class, mortally wounded in a hay baling accident, was brought from the hospital to the Grimes embalming table—naked, flayed, pale, and cold. Her child's face mauled by indifferent machinery. It had been a face, Parnell recalled, upon which none of her peers' eyes had rested in admiration. She'd been as plain, even homely, as a day-old drop biscuit. And now he looked upon her remains (beyond the corruption of his confused imagination, Selena would come to understand), disfigured with slices and gashes from the baler, and he saw beyond them more clearly than anyone had ever been able to see just what her perfection had been, and realized that he loved her and mourned her loss. That day, he began to understand something of his mission, and the experience was liberating. His grief filled him with a bouyant joy, and immediately he arrived at a deeper understanding of all that he'd felt and feared. Later, when they had no such secrets between them, after he had further confessed the nature of these fears, telling her what had happened with the Littleton girl, she comforted him, absolved him. Together they giggled like children over the fact that the messenger of such a mission had been unspeakable lust.

From the time they married and she moved into the second floor of the funeral home with Parnell, this place that had been his lonely habitation since his parents had died when he was only sixteen, when he had taken over the business at that young age and done quite well with it, she had felt more at home than she had since the day her mother died. Her own home, since then, had been such a lonely place, even with her father and brother living there with her. She had felt more comforted by her cat, Rosebud, than she had with her family, though they loved her and she loved them. The cat, Rosebud, had a way of looking at her that was so unguarded, so frankly a look into who she really was and what she felt, that she knew no living human being could match it. And the week she'd been at the Gulf with Parnell on their honeymoon, Rosebud had disappeared, and she knew this was because Rosebud's role in her life had come to an end. That her life with Parnell in the funeral home would now supplant it in ways she would come to understand. So she grieved for Rosebud, but not unconsolably.

In only that first week she had asked Parnell to let her assist him in the embalming downstairs in the basement. He hesitated only a moment, and then she could see settle into his features the knowledge that this was her destiny as much as it was his own. He gave his regular assistant, Mr. Peach, a two-week vacation, and she worked with him on every body that came to the home during that time. The greater her experience at handling the dead, the greater her desire for communion with them.

It had been entirely a risk, an experiment, that first time she had drifted herself to near-death to be revived by Parnell on their honeymoon. As a child, and soon after her mother's death, she'd discovered the ability quite on her own. She'd walked away from the house on a cool and overcast day when low gray clouds carried over with a breeze from the front that pushed them. She walked to an old pecan grove a couple of blocks away and lay down in the tall grass that had grown up around them, an old crop of nuts from the now sterile trees knobby on the earth beneath her back and legs. She could see the clouds pass as if through the gnarled and flay-barked limbs and ragged narrow leaves of the pecans. She closed her eyes and pushed herself in her mind toward where her mother had gone. She saw a nebulous blue glow aswirl in the spot just between her closed eyes and put her concentration into it. And passed into it and through it. She felt herself traveling somehow in this direction, not through the limbs of the trees and the billowy clouds above them but beyond them in some other-dimensional way. As if sucked in upon herself the weight of her body seemed released, she herself was weightless. She traveled as if flying in a dream but without the sense of moving through the world, or of there even being a world. Through time, perhaps, but not thinking that, either. And after some time of very swift but relative travel in this way she slowed, something like slowing, or came into herself, what that was she couldn't say, and seemed to float there, and had the sense she was waiting. Some harmonious and distant, untraceable musical sound. And she began to fill with a kind of happiness. She was content to be just there, and was not disturbed for a time with the expectation of there being anything else. But something began to nudge its way into this state, and gradually she became aware of it as a presence, and something physical in the world, and there was a heaviness on her as well as a warm wetness about her face. She opened her eyes. There sat Rosebud two inches from her eyes, sitting on her chest, licking her face. Rosebud mewed, a question,
Mggrrrow?
As her sense of being in the world again curled into her body, she roused, petted Rosebud. How did you follow me way down here? she said. Rosebud wound her way around her legs, her tail straight up, stopped and looked up at her words. They walked back home together.

In time, with Parnell, she began to love thinking of the new places and the new ways. At first she had merely lain in their bed waiting for Parnell to come upstairs to find her there, to speak to her as he removed his business clothes, to stop and turn his head slightly toward her when she did not respond, to creep over and touch her here and there. And she was in that state she had somehow perfected, of being there but not there, in her body but out of it too, somehow breathing though her lungs all but still, all but dormant, and she seemed to see him through her closed lids, which in those moments seemed to her as thin a membrane as the protective covering on the eye of a fish, she could see right through them, the image before her pulsing almost imperceptibly behind the tiny, spidery veins.

But this gave way soon enough to other places. The supply closet off the main hallway. In a plush chair in one of the parlors, Parnell having to pull her lifeless body from the chair onto the carpeted floor. Collapsed into a heap on the kitchen floor, half a sandwich left on her plate at the table. Once, in the little hedged bit of private yard they kept behind the home. And finally on the preparation table itself, surprising Parnell there as he came in tugging on a pair of surgical gloves, only a miracle he hadn't brought a policeman or distant relative of the deceased in there, of the one who lay under the sheet just feet away from Selena's supine, naked, chilled but latently vital form.