Vesica

Celezar Eledras



















In a burrow beneath the sand dwelt a number of pale and monstrous crabs:
monstrous in their composition, which is unlike any creature on earth, except,
vaguely, the insectand then only where the carapace is concerned, which houses the
softer, paler, weaker inner body. That body is flesh and mucus. It contains guts that
spoil in death. However, in that regardthat of the inner bodythere is little to
distinguish such monsters from the likes of us. There are different schools to comment
on this. Some comment on the presence of a mind beneath the flesh, and others on
the notion of a soul. The differences are negligible when taken in all. What remains is
a commonality between us and the insects and the crabs beneath the sand: the mind,
the soul, the soft, pale, weak inner body, which ultimately will spoil.
The heart is always monstrous.
Within their enclosure, within their shells, the crabs awaited the end of day,
and in doing so were each fidgeting congruently with their neighborsand their
congruent fidgeting in turn gave the impression of a living machine comprised of
modules entirely distinct from one another. This machine was a consumptive one: all
it knew, all it comprehended, was overwhelming hunger. It was calculating, by means
of vast chemical clockwork, the precise hour of night at which it would satisfy its
hunger. But of course, the crabs being monstrous, the machine having been brought
sacrilegiously into being, the hunger could never truly be satisfied.
To say a crab is ugly is fair grounds, but fails to capture the grotesquery of its
being. The fish is dull and slimy. The insect is meticulousand horrifyingits horror
masked only by its diminutiveness. By some curse or chimeric alchemy, the crab
marries the two, and resolves dully meticulousand bottomlessly horrifying. Just now
the gelatinous eyes of the crabs swiveled. The mandibles parted, revealing the extent
of complicated inner mouthparts. At junctures in their shells were gills which flared
slightly in congruence with their other movements.
No mother conceived these. No mother could bear such stunted children. So,
inasmuch as their dim intellect was able, the crabs resented the happier children of
the world, who came out of pink tunnels full of flesh and blood.
Outside this insular place of crabs and sand, other movements, eagerly
anticipated, were happening
The sun was setting, and the moon was rising, a talisman of cratered bone
hung up in the sky to portend among cold polar stars. Faint light fell upon darkling
waters, catching in flashes scarlet and purple and ultimately silver, the light going
dimmer, paler, until even the bleeding west was leeched the color of china. Some stars
began to figure from out of the pale.
Attuned by a dumb sense to the dying of the light, the machine below the
surface now stirred itself into a frenzy. Its composite heart lusted.
The sun began to subside in rapid grades. Then it was gone. Darkness
remained. Stars constellated in profusion. To the moons mute witness came pouring
from cavities in the ground the children without mothers, the destitute and deformed,
muter themselves than all the night.
They came in excess, rioting down the beach. The mouthparts moved frantically
among every scrap of carrion and trash and driftwood. The eyes alighted with a crazed
exultance that was also the focus of their entire machine: worship of the one true God,
He of the Famine and Fire, who leaves the earth bare and its peoples unsustainable.
Here scurried demons on six nimble legs, voiceless and screaming.
It wasnt long before they discovered the newborn turtlesoffspring of some
leather-skinned mother now fathomless leagues beneath the sea, with her graceful
lethargy and the many wrinkles beneath her ponderous eyes. The machine circled
sandy pits wherein the leathery husks of shells lay puckered. These had been hidden
carefully beneath the sand, but now they were hatched, and in the pale moonlight the
offspring struggled in shallow tidal waters.
Here would be enacted one of the oldest rites of nature: the winnowing of the
weak. All things share in this compact, for God himself has put it forth. It is by this
and other laws crueler still that his wrath is kept placated.
Young and unlearned creatures, the turtles had no instinct for danger. They
went without hurry, all their delicate lives focused on the effort of movement. When
the crabs fell upon them, there was no resistance.
One crab pulled the leg off a newborn, and the turtle lay down and died. And all
down the shore in mute grotesquery, bodies were being pulled open, heads pulled off,
and all this done with motions so delicate as to seem almost frail.
Children are but weak, and children who prey upon children are weaker still.
To them, murder is a high pleasure.
And in certain old and sandburied texts its written that God himself enjoys
infanticide, though we say its not so.

XXX
In the morning they appeared on the islanda mother and a fatherand the
father struggled down to the beach bearing their entire load, which consisted of a
bottle of tanning lotion, two towels, two foldout chairs, and an umbrella with a white-
and-blue striped pattern. The sun flared from a sky of deep blue and a few puffs of
cloud the size of big fists carried on in a dreamy fashion.
Not a soul else remained on the beach.
There came at first the silence of things lacking, and then, as the mother and
the father more thoroughly observed their surroundings, the sound of wind stirring
among the sandand the sound of gulls screaming above the gentle surfcame, at
last, into focus.
The mother was waddling forward to the beach in her one-piece and her sun
bonnet and shades. She looked pink and flush with vitality, but the swell of her
stomach, meanwhile, granted her aspect the suggestion of a brood of larval beings not
entirely benevolent.
The father, ahead of the mother, was at task burrowing a hole into the sand in
which to plant the umbrella, which went up shortly thereafter, spreading its pale
raiment against the paler sky above. He set up the chairs. He unrolled the towels.
When the mother caught up to him, he reached up and caught her hand. He looked at
her. Andrew, he said.
The mother smiled. A woman is always glamorous smiling in shades.
Andrew, the father said again.
The mother knelt in the sand. She undid the straps of her one-piece and bared
the flesh of her shoulders to him. Maybe, she said.
The father squirted lotion into his hand and palmed her naked shoulders. She
tensed, shivering.
No. Listen, Michael and Andrew. Its almost biblical.
Isnt that a little trite?
Dont tease. Tell me what you think.
I think its a little trite.
She turned to him and he smeared lotion across her collarbone and across the
tops of her breasts. He dabbed her nose. In her shades was reflected a plastic world all
in silver and shadow. He watched black waves toss beneath a lurid sky. She smiled.
He saw himself smile back in gross distortion.
He took her thighs between his oiled hands and rubbed them down. He took
her arms. Then he lay down and let her do the same to him, laughing at the way the
cold made his flesh pimple.
They went down to the surf, hand-in-hand. Water broke on their shins in foamy
spumes. The wind tormented the blue ribbon of her bonnet. They waded in until the
cold brown water came up around their waists and they shrieked and laughed. Shells
and scrimshaw fragments of the seabed crunched beneath their feet. The mother was
hobbled by the nameless things inside her. The father put his arm across her back. He
felt a slick presence scuttle across his toes and he shook it off with abrupt and fleeting
terror.
They waded in deeper, and the water buoyed them up and they floated among
the vastness of the sea. They bobbed and spread their arms. Several gulls in the
vacuousness of a blue void were whirling like tatters around a heat spire. So far from
the shore, the waves subsided, and the water lapped at their arms and rolled across
their shoulders. Skinny legs pumped and kicked. Toes grazed the sand floor, stirring it
into a gathering smoke.
Beneath the sea: only distortions of sound, made into a gelatinous warbling.
Dark things gathered in the rising smoke.
Towards the afternoon, as they came stumbling back to shore through knee-
deep water, the mother wavered and fell to her knees. The father looked. He saw the
water darken around her. He saw the mothers face turn white. She grunted,
trembling, in a sudden acute pain. The father gathered her up in his arms and carried
her to shore. He laid her out beneath the shadow of the umbrella. Then he stood back
looking over her with something between heartbreak and disgust screaming in his
eyes. He didnt realize it but his fingertips were trembling.
Oh my God.
The mother opened her eyes and looked at him.
What? she said. What is it?
Oh my God, said the father.

XXX
The funeral was held at her own house.
A girl of early pubescence stood peering down into the white paneled coffin,
assessing with dreamlike indifference the thing that had once contained her
grandmothers soul. The vessel lay in pale repose. The dress which had been elected to
accompany this wizened effigy of rigor mortis and formaldehyde into the earth
resembled, more than any wearable fashion, a frilled black morass from which
sprouted the chalk white hands, the chalk white face, the chalk white hair. The eyes
were closed to look serene. The hands were composed, with their long delicate
fingerbones and their warped arthritic joints. The folds of the face had been smoothed
and caked with makeup.
Awkward in the face of death, she put a hand on the stiff white hair and said,
Im sorry youre dead now.
A relative touched her shoulder and nodded as if in empathy.
I guess Ill be going now.
Outside, the sun broke through the pale of dawn and began to dry the dew from
the grass and the leaves of trees.
Summer came sudden this year, and burned the ground brown.

XXX
She took the bus as far as it would go, nodding among the backseats with her
suitcases piled in beside her. She watched the wilderness of grey freeways turn to
yards of weeds and overgrown clapboard shacks, and she watched as these gave way
to an even more manic wilderness, unbound by fences, where markers of civilization
appeared then disappeared faster than she could look: the ruins of churches, primitive
circles of oil drums, rusted cars teeming with tangles of vines and tree roots.
Then, by subtle grades at first, the landscape was transmuted, growing wan
and scant, until all at once she was looking out upon a waste of placid sand dunes
among which squatted haunted sunbleached surf shacks and roadside diners like odd
relics of a bygone era.
When her ride was ended, she and she alonebent and wearied beneath the
immensity of her travel stuffstepped out into a sandy lot in which were contained a
gas station, a taxi service, and a general store. She went immediately to the payphone
and entered a quarter and a number. When no one picked up, she entered another
quarter and entered the number again. No one picked up. She started off toward the
taxi service.
The sun beat down on her. In its glare she was paler than usual, ghostly pale
among the shimmers of heat. Her eyes were round and black and bottomless, like
inkwells, and her auburn hair was bobbed in the style of an older time. She wore a
mens black shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the waist tied off, and a pair of white
shorts, and black shoes with buckles and socks.
The body beneath her clothes was skinny, like her mothers, and only just
becoming a womans.
In the cobwebbed silence of the taxi office, a man in a jumper sat behind a
desk. He had long clean white nails and a shaven jaw. His hair was immaculate.
Hidy, he said.
Hello.
The clean man thumbed through the pages of a magazine.
Something tells me youre looking for a ride.
Yes, sir.
Where to?
I want to go across the bridge.
The clean man looked up at her. You got a place to stay over there?
Im going to stay with my daddy.
Theres not but two houses on the island.
She smiled. Then he must be one of them.
She told him the address.
He scratched his chin and said, That he must.
She took a rusting cab across the bridge to the house on the island where her
father lived, which stood in angular silhouette on a hill overlooking the great grey sea.
The cab rolled uneasily onto the sand in front of the door. The place was dilapidated.
The salt wind had scoured it of all colorand the front porch, warped by the sun,
listed sideways into a bed of sand and weeds.
This it?
Yes, sir. Thank you.
Take care, darling.
Thank you.
She retrieved her luggage from the trunk and stood watching the cab shuttle off
like some enormous trash-clad beetle. A cloud of smog came bilging up out of the tail
pipe.
She pulled her suitcases up the sunken porch. She racketed on the screen door
with her fist. Shuffling could be heard beyond. A shape appeared behind the rotted
fabric, and the wet points of two eyes. Her father pushed the door open and looked
down at her.
Daddy.
Darling.
Two arms encircled her and held her woodenly against the scrawny wasted
body. She looked up at the salt colored straggles of his hair. She looked into grey eyes
in which the soul had receded or died altogether. Nothing remained of her father save
his flesh, his bones, his ligaments which were too tired to hold him together.
He stood gangling in the doorway in a shirt that had thinned and shredded to a
sheer translucent garment.
He looked among the suitcases. Then he turned and receded into the darkness,
dragging his feet in slippers. She picked up her suitcases and followed him down a
hall, into a ruinous living room where a fan stirred the thick air and a blinded window
looked out onto the beach and the sea. He gestured, and she sat in an armchair. He
sat opposite her. Her fingers fussed at the tattered seams.
A stripe of shadow fell across her fathers dying eyes. He seemed prisoner to the
light within his own home.
So shes dead, he said.
Yes, daddy. It was very sad. You should have come. They missed you.
Theres no schools here.
Its all been arranged for. Im on hiatus. I can start again whenever I like.
You dropped out.
Hiatus, daddy.
He sat for a moment in the halflight. Then he said, And what else?
She reached into her pocket and pulled out his inheritance check. She handed
it across to him.
He took it and put it into his shirt pocket without looking at it.
Slowly, he got up. When she listened she could hear the creaking of his joints.
He went on in the gloom among the plastic bags of trash which were heaped in
mounds along the walls, and disappeared. Bedsprings groaned.
Theres the couch, he called out. Coffee. Tea. Bread. Theres some dried fruit,
some cheese.
I can shop at the general store, she said. I have some money. I can cook and
clean.
There came no reply.
Daddy, she called out. Im very glad to be here.
I love you darling, her father said. I love you very much.
She was sitting in the stillness listening to the whiffing of the fan. Then she got
up and hauled forth one of her bags and made of the bathroom a hazardous looking
apothecary, bedecking the counter with creams and lotions, powders, brushes, tonics,
all devices, all contrivances for which the female mind might find a use. And having so
arranged them, her bag deflated on the floor, she took a look around the house. She
searched for picture frames or scrapbooks. No trace remained of a life before this hell.
She went into the kitchen. The linoleum was yellow and peeling. The fridge was sterile.
She poured herself a glass of water from the tap and went back into the living room.
She peeked between the blinds. Twilight was gathering outside, long flat
arrangements of clouds spread on the darkening sky. The ocean glinted violet and red.
A gull dived there, and surfaced and flapped away in silhouette.
Outside the window, just before the tide, stood a rude cross nailed together
from pieces of driftwood. Braids of woven grass and withered blossoms hung in a sad
mantle from the crucified arms. She laid herself out on the floral printed couch. She
closed her eyes. The purpling light banded across her long pale arms and legs.
It stormed in the night.
A wind came first, a dull concussion of thunder. She could feel the tension
seeping through the walls. She could feel an untold weight about to drop. The wind
picked up, the thunder became a dry lambast, proceeded now by ghostly strobing in a
hadean sky, galvanizations of spirits spidering away into the night. Something colossal
dropped from the skyand so heavy was its impact that she thought there must be
earthbound spirits too, undying convicts within the walls, convulsing and screaming
to be let out. Then at last the rains came, lashing against the window, drawing a black
curtain over the torrid beach outside, on which had been made forces unshored from
Hell's own plane: maudlin clowns and mawky bloated figures who were in the goriest
states of nudity, who were arm in arm with each other, and who, by turns, were both
laughing and sobbing, and accompanied by imps, trolls, hags, murderers, and
exulters in obscene delights. They were all dancing and making with this debauched
scene, and the rain fell to mask the nature of their revelry.
The wind ripped a shutter from the house and sent it smashing brokenly down
the beach.
In the delirium between sleep and dreams, she felt all this was a release, that a
great breath had been held awaiting her arrival, and now she was here and it had
been let loose at lastall madness, all possibilities of the realm of dreams.
She expired into deep sleep at last, huddled beneath a ragged quilt. For all
hours of the night she envisioned crazy flutists in the rain, and dead pigs in harlequin
garb with crusty red holes for eyes.
When she woke in the pure light of morning, she felt uncoupled, like the spirits
in her dream. She felt muzzy headed and strange, she could not name it exactlylike
she had woken on a far shore. She looked about. Was it true she had left all she knew
for a couch in a strangers house? And what had she known? Where had she been?
What was the name of the city of her birth?
She let these things subside. Hers was an ambivalence like the world itself, an
aimless thing, cool towards the horrors and permutations of life. To be adrift is to face
anonymity, which is a premature death, a life unmourned, a winnowing stare at ones
own inevitability. She stared and was unflinching. Having seen her grandmothers
white body voided in the earth, and having been motherless since birth, nothing in
this world seemed meant for her. So nothing must be her choice, and so she came
here.
When she flung the quilt back, her legs were slavered with blood and clots of
gore, and her naked sex was bloody and still bleeding. She looked around but her
father was still asleep. So she got up, taking great care to be silent, and waddled to the
bathroom and shut herself inside. She was sore, she was pained. An umbilical had
been hacked from between her legsand would she die or was this yet another kind of
birth? He had come so suddenly in the night, this surgeon, even though the curds of
black jelly seemed old and rotting.
She drew herself a bath and plugged her wound with toilet paper. Purloined
behind the bathroom door, squatting among the steam vapors and the horrid floral
wallpaper, she was tending to these effects of her inward alchemy, the movements, the
procession of events that could not be stopped.

XXX
The island:
A clot in the sea, far from sound shoresan upheaval from the piscean
dreamworld just under these glassy graygreen waters. From beneath it seemed a
mountain, rearing from murky strata of fishclouds and kelp gardens, from a deeper
point still: up from the Nightmare where all life is ghostlike and pale and all sound a
stranger, and from the primal void where creation confines itself to mysterious
protozoan organisms. Its roots extruded from the earths very skin, from a place that
knows no name, where you might chance to slip through a crack in some dream and
glimpse but once in all your life.
Its face was white, naked and white, and no matter summer nor autumn nor
winter the sun glared from the dunes whereupon marram grass and patchy scrub
grew. Her fathers house stood close to the open sea, and further down the shore in
the very water was the second house, a derelict shack. An oasis covered one shoulder
of the island like some displaced mainland arbor. There was the bridge back to the
world, standing on concrete supports. There was once a pier but no one remembers it
anymore. The only other points on the island were the burrows of crabs which, in
puckered arrangements on the beaches, seemed like poxy markings.
It was called Vesica, no one knows by whom.
The island was saclike, bloated and full with things meant for expulsion or on
their way out of the worldunwanted children and men dispossessed by love, ghosts
lingering for but a moment before their final annulment in Hell.
In a long ago time an explorer discovered a strange tabernacle washed up on
these shores, and within only a bunch of dust and a note which read:

Could all the world be false? Aye, its so. And I have seen the face of God and
the eyes were white and the cheeks drawn. I think it was a corpse I saw.

He imbibed the dust in a potion. He hashed it with herbs and made an incense.
There was nothing. Realizing the total absence of magic in the miracle of the
tabernacle, he read the note once more, taking its contents to heart. He instructed his
servants to disembowel him and leave his bladder behind in the sand. Not even the
crabs would touch it, and only with the passage of time did it return back into dust.

XXX
Her father didnt have a car, so she walked to the general store.
The day was hot and languid, and she cast a shadow that was both longer and
taller than herselfa skinny racers ghostwhich lay staggered across the gentle
traces in the sand. She went on down the sandy road, among red rusting cans and
fishing string and other sundry bits scattered by the storm. She kicked a can. She
kicked a spray of sand across the road.
The shadow of a cloud laved across her back and cooled her, then it passed and
the sweat came pouring, sticking her clothes to her fragile little body.
She kicked at a lump and watched a shell go up and then come down, rolling
across the asphalt. She stooped with her hands on her knees to get a better look. The
shell seemed a womblike shape divested from female flesh, now laminate and
hardened with the application of resins, and within was yet a weirder sight: on the
pink inner folds had been inscribed a vast intricate map unrecognizable to her, and all
around were arrayed constellations of ciphers, enigmatic hieroglyphs and equations in
runic scrawl. For long hypnotic moments she studied the shell. Thenwith as much
unreason as reasonshe picked it up, covetously stowing it in her satchel, and stole
off on her way.
Not a soul passed her on the bridge when she came to it. Halfway across she
stopped at the metal rail and looked out at the sea and the sunlight breaking and
flashing upon its waters. A wind came down the long concrete stretch and brought
with it a sound like a distant steam whistle. At once she felt alone, she felt dismal.
She took the shell out and stood gazing at the map so delicately engrailed upon
its inner folds. What strange souls in what strange lands were outlined before her?
And was that place lonely or suffering, and was it very far away?
She felt a premonition flicker and fade inside her, but she did not feel scared,
only complacent. She put the shell back in her satchel. She watched a train of clouds
go scudding off in the distance.
By high noon she came to the lot with the general store. A psychics tent had
been set up in a vacant corner of the lot, a looming shape of red canvas with a
bannister which read PALM READER, CLAIRVOYANT, MEDIUM. Bellying from corner to
corner of the bannister was a wire of lightbulbs that were painted red, and they
trembled in a slight wind, going jingle-and-clank, jingle-and-clank. There was no
caravan, there were no gaudy trailers to suggest who had pitched this affair or who
dwelt within.
The lights blinked on and off.
She stood watching a rumpled newspaper go scuttling across the lot in front of
the tent where no soul stirred. The entrance, limned in the bloody red light, seemed an
orifice, a hole from which no light came and into which no light entered.
She went on into the general store.
When she had paid for her things she went out into the shade of the veranda
where a few rockers creaked and set her things down. She sat down on the front steps.
The day was bleary and bleeding tar from the cracks of the lot. She could smell the
tang of her own sweat in her armpits.
One of the lanky boys who worked the cash registers came out onto the veranda
and unstrung his apron. He threw it over the railing.
Hey, he said.
Hello.
He dug in his back pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He offered her a smoke but
she said no thanks. He lit up. He leaned on the railing taking long drags and blowing
pipes of smoke out his nostrils.
God its hot, he said at last.
Yes.
Is it a long way for you?
Yes. Then she added, My daddy doesnt have a car.
Damn.
He took another drag and blew it out through his mouth in a jet toward the
sun, sneaking glances at her out the corner of his eye. She smiled and feigned
indifference.
Youre very pretty, he said.
Stop it.
He smiled. One of his front teeth was black and it lent his face a kind of
puckish charm.
I bet your daddys real proud.
I imagine he is.
You dont talk a whole bunch, huh?
Well, she said. Its not easy for me, exactly.
He pushed back from the railing and came down to sit next to her on the step,
snubbing his cigarette out on the scarred wood.
I get that, he said. Youre quiet. My friend Toms quiet too. He cant hardly
talk to girlsof course he likes them older, though. Like wives and mothers. I dont
know. But so, I bet if you were as bad as him you wouldnt even be able to talk to me,
huh?
She didnt say anything.
Well, he said. Well. And but anyway, I didnt mean anything by it. Just that
youre pretty and I thought Id say hi.
Hello, she said.
He laughed. Okay. Hello.
He told her his name and she told him hers.
I really ought to be going soon, she said.
Okay, he said. Listen, its not but a half hour more for me in there. Wait for
me and Id like to go on with you.
Go on?
Well, he said. Yes. Go on. Id like to get closer to you.
She stood up suddenly with her bags in hand and blurted, Im probably
barren, you know.
His face paled and his eyes grew big.
What?
You heard me, she said. Barren. Sterile. I cant conceive. So just get the idea
out of your head.
No, he said. Listen, thats not what I meant. I just wanted to go on. You
knowgo on.
She stepped out of reach of him, into the sunlight at the bottom of the stairs.
She was flushed now, flushed red even despite the paling heat.
Well, you can just forget it, she said.
Is that the only reason you do it? I meanthat is, are you very active?
In what way?
Well, sexually, I suppose.
Just forget it.
She went out across the lot with her back to him. She was aware of the patina
of sweat gleaming on her body and the strong desire to burst out of her skin the way a
potato might split its jacket on the grill.
Wait, he called out. Listen. I didnt mean anything. I swear. I didnt mean
anything.
She left him puzzling on the front steps, watching her recede across the vacant
lot like a mirage of adolescent male fantasy. He shook his head and lit up again.
Damn, he said to himself. Justdamn.
She stood beneath the sun trying to will the embarrassment to come leaking
out of her ears and pool and fry upon the hot asphalt. She felt unpleasantly close to
the situation. She wanted to become remote, she wanted to disassociate from all
things and become inhuman and insensate as the very stones of the earth.
And now hearing summer winds assail red canvas, and hearing the jingle-and-
clank of lightbulbs, she was off running, racing toward the psychics tent and the
darkness inside where she might hide herself. The canvas slapped against her in the
wind and she clutched a great sleeve of it and hauled it aside. She stepped into the
tent. She was in a foyer with a pointed canopy ceiling and in each corner a tent pole
standing darkly silhouetted. Strings of red lights bellied from pole to pole and were
blinking on a timer. She looked strange and ethereal in that light.
How much stranger that no one should be here. There was no table, no crystal
ball or portentress to address it. No furniture dressed the place. Even the concrete was
bare beneath her feet.
The wind snarled at the tent flaps and that was all. She went forward quietly,
feared absurdly that someone might be listening. Toward the back of the room was
another set of curtains. She looked over her shoulder.
Would he follow?
She pulled open the rear curtains and there found a weirder sight still: a hole, a
tunnel, she could find no other way to describe it, which was immediately before her
and around which the curtains were tightly furled. She stood looking in. No light
permeated that dark space.
Then, looking once more over her shoulder, feeling sheepish, she went into the
tunnel.
The curtains drew shut behind her. Darkness remained. She put her hands
before her and slowly went forward, prickling in the sudden coolness. Still came the
sense that she was being watched. She turned for the exit but it was gone, no thread
of light, no sound of wind. So she went on and on, dragging her feet in the dark and
going through the chill air. There was more space here than could be fit inside the
tent.
She closed her eyes and opened them and it was just the same. She crept on,
directionless. With the tranquility of dreams she did not feel afraid, but simply was,
ebbing in the void, going on where it was taking her.
A vertiginous feeling overtook her. She was weightless, she was sure. Images
resolved in the dark:
She saw a great swath of sand, and the sea beyond. Grey skies lowered over the
darkling waters. A cold wind stirred. Somehow, she knew this was an ancient scene,
in a time before everything. There was a secular quality to the beach, the wind, the
water, the severity of the greyness which pervaded everything. She was reliving some
older testament. No dry paper scripture confined this nature to its annals.
Men, or mannish things, came before the sea dressed in black cassocks with
horns of flame in their hands. They hardly constituted human likeness, their forms
were so rude, their proportions elongate and primitive. And they were greatly sized too,
huge as monuments. She saw the greatest among them come forwardwith an
enormous driftwood cross roped to his backand call to his followers. He led them
across a narrow sandspit, all of them devoutly following the other in single file, while
the dismal sea lay on all sides, until they came at last to the edge of the spit where a
colossal stone tablet had risen from the depths. The tablet was bilgy green, and hewn
into its face were commandments in a dead language. At the foot of the tablet, on a
stone dais, was sat a withered being with offerings of skulls and precious amphoras at
his feet. The crossbearer produced an amphora and laid it on the heap. He conferred
with this sage. The flames of the devout sputtered in the wind.
Then the crossbearer addressed his followers. The sage cried out, and turned,
and looked at her. His eyes were black. His face was concave.
These visions came unbidden, things borne from out of dreams.
Now the light of the sky was growing twilit, the far sea and the groups of giants
were resolving back into the dark. She was alone once more in a void which felt
displaced in time. What warp might she have stepped through? Some terrestrial
wormhole? Some passage which let on to a nexus, a convergence of happenings old
and yet to come?
These concepts were foreign to hershe had never been one to listen in school,
least of all to the sciencesbut in the way that a childs imagination is limitless, she
understood, or thought she understood, what was happening. So she was not afraid.
Haunted young thing that she was, divested of purpose, of all meaning to the world,
she felt more at home among the weird and the hallucinatory.
She was moving blindly in the dark when she entered a sudden room in which
towering red curtains served walls and an ancient crone was seated at a small round
table. The light which came from a lantern set upon the tabledim yet, the flame
mostly collapsing into smokeetched the folds of the curtains with deep shadows and
made them seem illimitably tall. The crone was pale, loose skinned, and she sat
severely hunched because her vertebrae had been displaced with age. Her left arm was
missing entirely. The socket had grown over with skin.
The crone gestured for her to come forward with the lacquered red nails of her
hand. Come in, she murmured. Come let me see you. Set your things down. Sit.
The eyes were hooded and faded but they regarded her with a draconian
authority.
I only came to cool off some.
Of course. Sit, then. Its only a quarter.
Are you supposed to be the one who reads the future?
If you wish.
She stared at the skin of the crones throat, slack and pleated, and at the
features of the face which were caved and which belied a sad heartbereft perhaps by
some ancient tragedy. She was reminded of the aspect of saurian creatures, monotone
and patient, concealing a cold intellect.
Its only a quarter, she said again.
For what?
For whatever you wish.
She placed a quarter upon the table. I dont know what I should ask.
The crone stared.
Tell me what my dreams mean.
Which dreams?
She gestured vaguely. There was a storm, she said. I had dreams. I cant
remember very well anymore. I dreamed I lived with my grandmother. She had a
garden and there was a marble cupid in the garden. There were pear trees on the
lawn. It was summer. I cant remember very well. When I woke up everything was
strange.
No, said the crone. Thats unimportant now.
Well I dont know what I should ask then.
Nor the last time.
Last time?
The crone closed her claws around the quarter and dropped it into a purse with
fish scales that hung from around her neck. She closed the purse catch.
You were old. When we were here last.
No, she said.
You were old like me. But that isnt saying very much, is it? Youre always
young. And very lovely.
I was never here, she said.
The crone leaned forward, and now her words came like vomit, and she spoke,
as her eyes expanded into luminous orbs, she spoke of a hundred lives lived, a
thousand, and she came rebounding each time, recalled by the mechanism of fate to
palaver with the crone, recalled by the fires of a world born again and again from its
own ashes, and she came each time asking of dreams of when she was new, never
minding the circular constancy of time, never minding the greater scheme, she came
asking of dreams, ignorant thing, asking of dreams, never minding. The crone seemed
to grow wild with the pain of old scars rupturing. Spittle flew from her lips. The skin of
her eyelids crawled back to reveal the extent of her blindlooking eyeballs.
She sat still in her chair through all this and was very frightened.
Then the crone subsided, her countenance became reptilian once more. She
moved her hand dismissively. Its just an old womans worries, she said. And then:
So you dreamed of your grandmother. Theyre dreams. What more do you want?
She just shook her head. Her throat constricted wordlessly.
Ill tell you another thing too.
Alright, she said.
You lied to that boy.
I didnt. Only a little.
You lied to him. Do you think all boys only want to plant their seed?
No, she said. I dont know.
Ill tell you, they do. I was divorced from my husband the moment he got a son
on me. Then it was just us against the world. But a boy without his father wont grow
right. Ill tell you that too. Now hes become just an awful creature.
Im sorry, she said, because she didnt know what else to say.
The crone seemed in a lost and reflective state for a moment. Then she said,
May I see the womb?
She stared.
The shell, said the crone.
She produced it furtively, taking a last glance at the strange pinkish thing, and
placed it upon the table. In the dimness of the lamplight the lines of the etchings
seemed deep channels.
Are you going there? she asked.
Yes.
Where is it?
The crone only shook her head dismally.
But your son is there.
Yes.
Im sorry.
Hes become a monster now. Such are bastards.
Im sorry.
Stop that, said the crone. You only say what you think you should feel.
Youre as heartless as any of them.
Well anyway. . . . she said, but her voice faded.
You should go now, said the crone. I have my preparations to make.
But you havent given me my quarters worth.
Ive told you plenty. Now get out. Youll see me again.
Will I? She was standing. She didnt know if she wanted to see her again.
The crone assured her that she would.
She was shown a way out among the curtains: a hole similar to the one she had
gone into, windowed by tightly furled red canvas. She said goodbye to the crone and
the crone said nothing. She entered the passage. The curtains closed shut behind her.
She was going in a blind labyrinth of corridors for a while when all at once the
galvanizations of blinking red lights showed her to be in the very foyer that had started
this odyssey.
She peeled back a flap of canvas and was met with a lot barren but for a few
cars and the movements of an evening wind. It was hot. It is always hot in summer,
whether daylight or no. Fire and revolution characterize the season.
She departed under the crepuscular fans of light which fell from a puffy sky.
She found herself strangely nostalgic. She was thinking of the one boy who had ever
known her body, and the movements of his own body which she had desired with a
red fervor.
The flaming wind burst, the sun rent scarlet lashes in the sky.

XXX
A convoy of wagons was moving across a dark plain. Heaped in the wagon beds
were tent poles and sleeves of canvas and carnival lights and packing cratesand a
multitude of the worlds oddities too: monkeys which recited poetry, bird cages
containing fowl not seen before in this life nor the next, a fetal cyclops preserved in
brine, a mummy, and piecework taxidermist efforts which combined parts from all
beasts to create every manner of leery glasseyed grotesque. Mustached and bearded
roustabouts in overalls rode among the stuff, holding fastly to retaining cords and
ropes. Gaudy crones sat on the tailboards, and bearded women, and heinous looking
knife throwers, sword swallowers, and fire eaters in their garish attire. A shriveled
blind man sat composed on a chair on top of his trailer, discerning with his bugging
eyes the secrets of an epoch long pastwhat was done will be done again, the
mistakes, the lives, and only the half-mad can glimpse this mechanism of time, the
world born again like clockwork and their minds leftover unshriven with amnesiac
forgetfulness, cursed with knowing.
The knowing, when it happens, is the worst thing of all.
In the back of the convoy, drawn alone, came the last trailer. It was simple and
red and without windows. One who knew resided within, cradled in darkness, one who
was revered by the deranged creatures who together comprised this carnival.
Now the plain was darkening further and the horizon narrowed to a red strip
like a faraway stand of flame. The convoy had enjoyed an especially fruitful run, but
traveling this desolate country in the early dusk, the wagons moving in a chain, it
seemed a flight of pariahs from some biblical reckoning.
The wagons came drawn by huge creatures in the shape of disfigured men.
They were bound in harnesses, in blinders and bits. Loutish gnomic drivers were
taking drinks from hip flasks from which poured some foul green effluviumand they
were lashing the beasts, lashing their scarred and bleeding backs. The giants did not
give outcry. They came slowly forward, drawing the wagons with an idiots grace.
Toward ultimate night the convoy came by a ragamuffin creature resting at the
foot of a tree: clad in beggars rags, with a face of fey cunning and both ears hacked
off. The convoy halted, the character consulted with one of the drivers.
Then he climbed in the back of the wagon and the proceeding started up again.


XXX
She dreamed of the mother dead these long years. And she dreamed of herself
too: a nameless tumescence in the swollen stomach, a calamity in girlflesh to kill the
mother by its very emergence. A white light shone. Phantoms moved. The voices of the
hospital sounded warped and faraway, as though heard from the bottom of an ocean.
In the dream, when the mother spread her legs and her bloody pubis bulged
forth, it was a scuttling carapace that came out instead of a babe.
She woke with the dawns pale light. She sat wrapped in her quilt trying to will
tears from her eyes. Her face would not change. Her eyes would not wet.
The sun came through the cloud cover and warmed the earth.
She walked along the glaring white sand with her arms and legs and face white
among the greater whiteness, and her eyes like two holes in the world. The soles of her
feet burned. Her hair was starched by the salt wind.
She would not go into the sea. She stood afar instead, watching dark waves fall
upon dark waves beneath a vaulted sky of faded blue. She walked. The sun fell upon
her naked shoulders. It pooled deep shadows in the hollows of her collarbone. In the
one-piece she wore, she looked an image from another era washed up and refurbished
by the tide.
Her arms and legs were just stickish, but whittled to a feminine pleasantness,
and her scapulae were both bony and jutting, as though in some past life as a
seraphim she had been divested of her wings and the anatomy yet remained. She did
not feel particularly angelic, but there was a profound sense of not belonging, and she
wished mightily that she could fly into the skys blue void and there take solace among
the nothing. Past the clouds and all breathable, seeable strata, she might become the
angel of oblivion at last, her countenance unmade.
She entertained these idle notions and was walking along the sandshe alone
against the backdrop of the sea and the screaming of the gulls.
Does it scare you? asked her father.
She turned. She hadnt heard him coming.
Yes, she said. Ive never seen it before.
Me too, he said.
They stood side by side watching. The shadows of clouds passed over the
rippled dunes.
After a while, she turned to him and thought to put her arms around him, but
then she looked into his eyes, and he looked at her, and they were as strangers, and
the thought soon passed. She ultimately did not surrender anything to him, nothing of
the crone nor of portentous dreams. It was a vow she had made to herself: no one
would know her entirely, no one would see within.
She said quaintly, That was quite a storm.
We dont usually have them in the summer, said her father. It must have
been a welcoming committee. Just for you.
He ventured a lonely smile. She smiled back.

XXX
Who lives in that house?
A man.
What kind of man?
An old man.
Have you ever met him?
No.
Then how do you know?
Ive seen him sometimes at night, her father said. He hunts deer in the
dunes, in the oasis.
She looked between the blinds at the house far down the shore. It was just a
little thing, with a flat roof and a wraparound staircase that fastened to the stilts and
seemed to be coming apart in places. It groaned in the wind, swaying. Gulls nested on
the rooftop.
I didnt know there were deer on the island, she said.
Stunted things, her father said. Pigmies.
How does he live up there like that?
By hardly ever coming down. Its his nest. Hes come here to die, I suppose.
I suppose.
She went to the house toward dusk, when the sea and the sky had coalesced
into a single grey expanse. The sand was grey beneath her feet, and cold and damp.
Grey clouds hung low over her head. They covered the sun so that only a vague and
directionless light came seeping throughgrey, like the dusk.
The house stood astride the sea like a spindly colossus.
She looked up at it, into the glare of cold sunlight over its roof. Barnacles grew
on the stilts and festoons of seaweed hung from the bannister of the staircase and the
intestinal looking understructure of the house. She began to ascend the stairs. They
creaked beneath her. There was no other sound save the wind and the quiet
murmuring of the sea.
When she reached the landing, the door was locked and the windows dark. A
solitary gull screamed at her. Clouds of sandflies aspired against cracks in the
doorframe. She knocked on the door.
Hello?
Nothing moved on the other side, nor beyond the dark windows.
Hello?
The gull screamed.
No one answered.

XXX
Tom leaned to the bong and took another hit: a ridiculous creature, an arrested
development in his bermuda shorts and floral printed shirt. His pale and hairless
paunch granted his aspect an undo look of wisdomand haloed in smoke, clasping
the mouthpiece delicately between his fingers, he seemed a latterday Buddha bent not
on wisdom of the heart but the popular psychology of the days talkshow hosts. He
sent a cloud of white smoke billowing. Crouching opposite in the cabin of the trailer,
the boy with the black tooth seemed himself a fey conjuration, gangling and odd with
his one gold hoop earring and his huckleberry grin.
Globs of lava lamplight shifted across their faces.
I met a girl, said the boy with the black tooth.
Oh?
Yeah.
Tom closed his eyes and opened them slowly. First, he said. Tell me about
this dream, James.
What about it?
Everything. Tell me everything about it.
Its not so much.
Tom took another hit. He made a gesture for him to continue.
Well, said the boy with the black tooth. In the dream its as it is here.
In my trailer?
No. Just as in life. Everything feels regular.
But its not.
Well, everythings regular in the dream except my face. It looks like I got some
bad surgery or something, cos one sides all swole up and red and you can see where
the stitches were. Nobody says anything, though. I go to the laundrymat. I go to work.
Regular day. You know. Nobody says anything. Its only when I see it in the mirror
that I realize. But Im not scared. Its not a nightmare. Just looks like something bad
happened that I cant remember is all. Or something bad is going to happen that I
dont know.
Does it mean anything to you?
What? The dream? Naw. Its just a dream.
What about the girl?
What about her?
Does she mean anything to you?
The boy with the black tooth shrugged. I think about her some. I think she was
crazy.
In what way?
She said she was barren.
Was she?
Barren? I dont know. How would I know that?
Youd know it if you fucked her.
The boy with the black tooth snorted.
Youd know it if you fucked her and waited nine months.
Yeah, well. Yeah. I didnt, though.
No, Tom said very softly.
He wiggled his toes and arranged himself into a lotus position and closed his
eyes. The globules in the lava lamp changed hue from red to orange and then to
lavender, and a perfect radiant sphere was ascending toward the light like an eclipse
in motion. The carpet ran with the shadows of planets moving.
Its perhaps owing to a lack of self that your romantic ventures end up falling
quite short.
Short of what?
Expectations.
What the hell does that mean anyway?
The problem then runs deeper than I thought.
Stop that shit.
Stop what? Tom opened one eye.
That holier than Jesus crap. Stop it.
As you say.
Tom opened both eyes and went for another hit. He came up coughing and he
clutched his heavy breasts to correct himself. The boy with the black tooth shook his
head. He went for a hit himself. The bong snorkeled and thin fumes wheedled about
his head in an aura, in a faux corona as befit these gross junkyard angels from
another kind of Heaven.
Youre some kind of a mess, he said.
Tom made an inclination of his head that intoned agreement.
For the record, Tom said, I think shes definitely crazy.

XXX
When she returned to the general store, the psychics tent was gone from the
lot. She stood for a moment staring at the minivan parked where it had been. Then
she ascended the front steps into the store.
She went forward between aisles of miscellanea, beneath tube shaped
fluorescent lights cloudy with the husks of insects. The checkerboard tiles were
streaked and scuffed. She went past a refrigerated unit full of rotting produce.
She went to the front counter and asked the man behind the register for a pack
of cigarettes. He looked at her dubiously.
Its for my daddy, she said.
He regarded her once more. Then he put the pack down on the counter and
read her the total.
She gave him the money.
Do you know much about the woman in the tent? she asked.
The woman in the tent.
Yes, she said. The psychic.
Its a woman?
An old woman. Do you know about her at all?
Ive never been to see, said the man. I dont take kindly to geeks and gimps.
Medium, called out an older man in glasses from the back room. He came out
and wiped his glasses on his apron. Medium, he said again.
Medium, clairvoyant, and palm reader, if were going by the sign, she said.
The man in glasses smiled. Well, yes, he said.
Its all the same thing, said the other man.
No it aint.
So you say.
She aint a good one anyhow.
Good what? said the first man.
Good any of them.
Why not? she asked.
Shes crazy.
She didnt seem crazy.
No one seems crazy. Because whats crazy anyway? But she is. She lost her
baby. A thing like that will ruin a mind. She lost her baby, that was ten-fifteen years
ago. Ever since shes been showing up, same time every year, to the date. And what
shes got to say, well, hell, you heard it yourself I wager.
I heard she drives people nuts, said the first man.
Thats just horseshitif youll excuse my saying so.
I dont feel much crazy, she said.
Thats because you dont have the gene.
The gene?
Its a matter of genetics is how I figure it, said the man with glasses. Its what
youd call a predisposition. Like my mama, she had a kind of dementia. They had a
name for it. Youd never of known it from when she was just young, but the older she
got the crazier the stuff was she started talking. Took a real shining to geology.
Thought the world would end on account of calderas. You know. Infernos or some
such. Started talking to folk of ilk thought and they just fed her the wrong medicine,
you know? The crazies attract the crazies and they all just get crazier and crazier
together. Shes in the ward now and you cant hardly talk to her except to hear about
calderas. She lives in her own world is the way they said it to me. And darling, there
aint but room for one inside your own head.
My mama started to go after my daddy walked out, and that old medium after
her baby got dead. A thing like that. Some things will ruin a mind. Marvs the only one
I know talked to her and listened, and if I see a crazier man itd be too soon. Way I
hear, he takes her mail. Or maybe she just writes him and he writes back.
Marv, she said.
Owns Marvs. Thats just ten miles up the road yonder.
Closest eatery by my estimate, said the first man.
Yessir.
Well, she said. Thank you.
You take care now, be safe.
Yes, sir. I will, sir.
Dont be going crazy yourself little girl.
Yes, sir.
She went out onto the veranda and stood with her hands dug in her back
pockets looking out across the lot. A light rain had begun to fall. It pattered upon the
blacktop. She sat down on the steps in the shade of the veranda and waited for it to
pass. The minivan was gone. So were most other cars.
She shook a cigarette from the pack and lit up. She took a drag. She sat with
the cigarette smoldering between her knuckles, blowing blue curls of smoke up into
the air.
After long moments, she ground the butt on the step and got up. She went out
into the darkening lot where the rain was falling harder.
Inside the taxi office, a different man was sat behind the counter. He looked the
same as the clean man except subtly distorted as though seen through bad glass: a
jawline more recessive, dark with bristle, and shorter, grungier nails. He was
thumbing through a magazine with pictures of naked women inside.
When the bell rung above the door, he looked up at her and snatched at a
string of spider web hung from his bristled cheek.
I want to go to Marvs.
Marvs. The dirty man nodded.
I have some money. I dont know if its enough.
Hell, thats alright, said the dirty man. Thats just fine.
She took a taxi the ten miles to Marvs. The rain drove hard against the
windows. The world beyond threatened her: an arrangement of scenes once familiar,
now melting and blurred with the dark sky hanging down low.
The taxi pulled into a parking space in front of Marvs. She rolled the window
down to take a look at it. The place was gaudy and silver, with the fluting dcor and
neon lights of a roadside diner. Steam poured from a kitchen spout on the roof.
Will you wait for me? Ill only be a little while.
Sure, sure.
Is the meter running?
The meters running.
Ill only be a little while. I promise.
Sure.
She ran up the front steps into Marvs, ducking her head beneath the rain. She
pushed open the heavy metal double doors that let into a greasy warren of t-bird
shaped booths and jukebox music. She looked around. The place was dim. A fat man
with a plastic menu in his hand shouted something at her over the music.
She raised a hand to her ear.
Just one? he asked.
She shook her head. I need to speak with someone.
Who?
Is there a manager?
The fat man looked incredulous. Of course theres a manager.
May I speak with him?
The fat man put the menu down. He looked over his shoulder. He called a
gnomic looking old woman with a puff of blue hair on her head to come over and take
his place. Then he led her past the service counter, into the kitchen. They went
through clouds of steam where line cooks moved silently like stoics in practice,
turning meat on griddles, revolving in practiced pirouettes with platters and crockery
balanced on their hands.
An enormous man loomed toward the end of the kitchena great white living
turnip given flesh. He wore a cheap black suit without a tie and a comically tiny black
toupee scrunched upon his pinned head. Beneath his nose was a thin small black
mustachethe only hair on his otherwise vast waxen expanse
Words were exchanged in the drifting steam. Then the enormous man came
forward and peered down at her.
Do I know you? he asked.
Im not sure, sir, she said. But I believe you might.
He asked her name and she told him. He nodded. His bulbous throat stuck out
like a goiter. He relieved the fat man of his charge and took her by the shoulder,
leading her into a lime green office in the back of the kitchen. In here the racket of the
jukebox was contained to a faint undulation in the plaster walls.
They sat in silence. He fit massively into a leather swivel chair on one side of a
desk. She sat in a metal foldout chair opposite him. The enormous man rummaged in
a drawer and pulled out an envelope. He placed it upon the desk. He slid it across to
her.
Thats it, he said. Thats all there is. And I dont want to hear any more about
it.
She thumbed the envelope open and read the note within, which had been
hastily scrawled by hand:

Red is unfortunate but necessary. Be here when I say.

P.S. My son is not dead, contrary to what you might hear. He loved to play with
rubber balls but I think the circle was his favorite. Fear him.

A date and time were listed at the bottom. She folded the note and put it into
her pocket. She looked back at the enormous man.
Thats it?
Thats it, he said.
She tried to say something more, but he held his hand up.
I dont want to hear any more about it.
She smiled. She crossed her legs. Im afraid I dont have the money to pay my
fare.
He glared at her, reaching into his pockets. He went into a black leather wallet
and threw a few new green dollars across the table at her.
When she left Marvs, the night was black and lit only by the bright neon tubes
on the front of the place. The rain came down in a glimmering curtain. She ran down
the front steps and climbed into the taxi. The dirty man thumbed through his
magazine. He was ogling a brownskinned brunette with an athletic body and small
pert tits. He hardly seemed to mind that the fare she paid came up short.

XXX
She went back to the house. The door stood ajar. Within could be seen a room
all in shadow, where was seated a figure just dimly glimpsed.
Youre the one made all that racket the other day.
She smiled. Hello.
I was sleeping.
Im sorry.
No youre not. Come inside. Come into the darkness, where youre better
suited.
Pardon?
Dont lets start with that. You wouldnt be here if you werent suited for it.
She hesitated at the threshold gazing within. Then she entered. She stood in
the darkness looking at an armchair where a shape was slowly resolvinga man or a
thing once a man, now become a figure so mummied and emaciate here in the dark
harbor of the shack that she wondered if sunlight would burn his skin away to flakes
of ash. He was so thin he was almost just bones, bound in ancient ligaments, covered
in papery skin. He was the blue color of an unresolved fetus and completely hairless.
Nodding his bulbous naked skull like a madman, he gestured for her to close
the door. She turned and shut it, further preserving the shadows within. Sandflies
made dizzied sounds. The surf was heaving beneath them, muted by the floorboards.
Gradually shapes took form out of the darkness: a clay shrine in one corner
replete with candles now guttered to the wick, ricepaper scrolls unspooled and tacked
to the walls, censers hanging from the ceiling, a cobwebbed antique cabinet against
the wall by the kitchen door, and in all corners piled stacks of grimoires like half-
pillars to some crazy sorcerers paradigm of architecture.
She tried to see the ruined mans eyes and failed, finding only bony hollows
cored with shadow. He looked at her. He said, What do you want?
Just to say hello, sir.
Bullshit.
She bit her lip.
How old are you?
She told him.
Just a child. What a waste you are.
A waste of what?
He moved a hand vaguely. Everything, he said. Everything.
But you dont mean it like that.
Like what.
Like an insult.
It wasnt exactly a term of endearment.
No, she said. But youre here just like me. On the island, I mean. Youre here
too, and you must know how it feels. You wouldnt insult someone whos feeling the
same things.
She could see him clearer now her vision was adaptingswaddled in a filthy
blanket in his armchair, his neck and back stooped forward.
What do you want? he said again.
I dont know.
Figure it out, said the ruined man. Itll go harder on you otherwise.
What will?
This. Here. Hell. There are those of the damned, among whom I count myself,
who understand that vice and meaning are just the same, that self-perpetuation is the
extent of this sorry existence. They understand that God left us only this to define
human being. He gave us all a track, and darling good luck getting off that track. You
were born into it, darling. So figure it out what it is. Because the longer you spend
trying to be something youll never be, the more heartbroken youll be.
Ill have to figure it out then, she said.
Dont be facetious.
I wasnt.
Dont patronize me.
I wasnt. I swear.
As though to abate the temper of this latterday ghoul, she came over to him
shuffling forth a pack of cigarettes and offered him one. He took it between his
knuckles. She lit him up. Then she lit herself. They sat smoking in the quiet and the
dark. The streams of their smoke coiled together and then diffused in the dying light.
After a while she said, I met a witch in a tent.
The ruined man grunted. That bitch.
Have you seen her?
Of course I have.
Who is she?
Who cares. Her baby got killed and she thinks that gives her liberty to say how
things really are. She hasnt got a clue. She thinks the debt can be paid for all time.
She blew a spout out through pursed lips. What debt?
The debt must always be paid, said the ruined man. Everyone pays it from
the highs to the lows and thats just how it is and how its been and how itll always
be.
You mean to God, she said. For sins and things like that.
God, sneered the ruined man. God is dead. He has always been dead. We pay
it to him because he cant stand our living while he rots.
She went over to a table and snubbed her cigarette. She got herself a new one.
Do you want to go running home now?
No, she said. I just think youre a little bit crazy is all.
Then ruined man laughed. Swaddled in his blanket he seemed an oversized
grub, a pathetic beast out of marshland fable: the seamy forelobe with its faint
impression of an old mans face. And would it emerge from its pupa a greater, stranger
imago yet, or it would simply die nodding in the mud like some half-mad geriatric?
She was running her fingertips along the ornate filigree of a picture frame with
a yellowing photograph inside. There stood a family galvanized out of the past by the
sudden burst of a flashbulb: three small boys, and a mother with a baby in her arms,
and a stranger too, a man she could not recognize.
She turned the photograph over to him. Who are they? she asked.
He pointed out to her the faces and named the afflictions which bore them to
their graves.
The babe died without a name, not long after it was born. There was a fifth, a
monster. Emily hanged herself after the delivery. I tried with him for some time. I
failed. I put a spade in the back of his warped skull, I couldnt stand looking at him
any longer.
Im sorry, she said quietly.
Youre sorry.
Yes.
He got up, quivering slightly with the stress placed upon his ligaments. His bald
headed floated close to the ceiling.
He said, Everyones sorry, everyones just a sorry creature.
He went to a trunk in a corner of the room and put into motion an elaborate
and secretive processopening a bizarre sequence of locks with various warped keys
on an iron ring, and retrieving from the depths of the trunk a smaller wooden box
which he then opened with yet another key, this one produced from a cord around his
neck. He set the open box down and invited her to look within.
She experienced trepidation at first, but the arcane air of the whole exchange
compelled her at last to look.
The interior was paneled with red velvet. A skull rested there, no bigger than a
toddlers, bulbous and strange. It belonged to no human she had ever seen. She
caressed the ivory husk with her fingers. A hole had been stove in the back of the
skull.
Deformed, said the ruined man.
Did you put this one into the ground without a name?
No, he said. This one had a name. Naaman, like the leper.

XXX
With the accompaniment of the man in beggars rags, who began to speak more
comfortably the more the days passed, the convoy roved the wasteland. The carnival
was set up near derelict shanties and small postings, and timid folk came around to
see jugglers and geeks and living anomalies perform feats of human exoticaor to
simply gawp at the giants: beasts from a land farther than could be imagined. The
earnings were meager. The carnival lights, hung from strings and seen from a great
distance, seemed specs of red phosphor out on the waste, or tricks of the sun played
upon black waters. The souls who peopled this dire country kept to themselves with a
primitive and supreme paranoia. They were easily awed, their dirty faces held
enraptured by the sights before them. A bellydancer wearing a belt of medallions and
castanets on her fingers drew small crowds, holding them arrest with the motions of
her hips.
The man in beggars clothes earned his passage at first by sharing the tasks of
the roustabouts, pitching tents and arranging the attractions. He proved an affability,
a common touch, and he held the attention of all in his presence when he spoke. The
enigma of his character was attractive. At night, seated around the fire, he told of
petty thefts and the murder of a dancing girl he laid claim to, of his confinement
within the penitentiary, the tedium within and the fellow crooks and heisters, and of
his subsequent escape ten long years afterward.
It was well of them to put me to the rope my brothers, for man ought not let go
free that whats done him wrong. Wring the snake whos bit ye, and shoot dead the girl
that spurned ye. Lucile was her name, Lyle his own. He said I done it because she
called off our arrangement on account of some great and terrible guilt, but that
werent so. Boys, she was slick as an eel every time I came around, and you can
believe that. NoI shot her, and I put the bullet through her eye so you couldnt tell
her beauty no more, for I was fixing to skip town and I couldnt stand to leave her
there. She belonged to me, see. Way I figure, leaving her behind, she already done me
wrong with another man, and I just took initiative is all. Didnt make no different no
how. Murder is murder, and a caitiff am I. And my brothers, they put me to the rope
and hanged me sixty seven minutes all told, and done it three more times after that
before fetching me down. Well they puzzled some, they did. They scratched their old
heads. What they done eventually is got the old padre come over and look at me,
matters of Satan and all. And he nearly dies afeared, saying he sees all the aspects of
a false prophet in me, scripture stuff, a lotta hooin and haain. A lot of puckey, that.
Says look at my tattoos from yonder penitentiaries I been in, says theys the mark of
the Beast. Well they done tried everything after that, shipped me up to the big timers
and put me in the mercy seat, drowned me after that, even burned me some at the
stake like them witches at Salem what went afore. Turns out I dont burn so good
neither. What they done ultimately was to leave me hanging in an old cage until such
time as the Rapture. But hell, boys, I werent about to wait for no rapture in an old
cage. What I figure, there aint no Beast, not like they say. Its what youd call a matter
of perspective. From a certain angle God looks mighty beastly, dont he? And all his
angels made into devils. Ill tell you this for certainI believe in a great hand that
guides us all. And I believe I been touched by such a hand, my brothers.
The eyes around the fire were black and shining. Someone nodded without
hearing. A vagabond took a drink from a jug of whiskey and spat.
Now in days spent wandering the plain, he read auguries in the entrails of
serpents, discerned the meaning of dreams and portended their messages to the
dreamers. His import to the carnival came overnight. One day he was standing on a
packing crate dressed in an eccentric suit patched with floursacks and ties of rags,
and he was announcing the intent of fate and the people shouldered each other to
stand apart from the crowd and hear themselves addressed by name. They flung out
their hands to him as though between his bony palms he held absolution itself.
There was something of the martyr and the saint about him: the ragged red
holes where ears had been, his shaven head, the prison tattoos collected upon his
skull like variables in a divine cipher.
The roustabouts began to whisper of a sacrilege just barely understood, a
primitive fear awoken in them by the presence of magic and curses. They consoled
each other that it was not so. It must be dreams. It must be the poor business. But
the blind man recognized their nervousness, and reported on the person in the red
trailer, who he said had grown ill with premonitions since the newcomers arrival. The
next day the prophet was summoned to the trailer. It was a matter of grave concern,
for no one had entered the red trailer before, and it was surmised by the dimwitted
that to open its door would be to open some pandoran box, a final trick of the
carnivals by which the world would be ended in a gout of light and fire. But the
prophet ascended the risers and opened the door, and the world was no worse. The
idiots were hit about with the hats of their peers and harangued, and the prophet
entered the ruby dimness, and shut the door behind him.
When he emerged they were all pressing him to report on his meeting. He would
say nothing, only that it was a woman insideand a fabulously ugly one. Boys, he
said. Shes a she-troll or a gremlin or suchlike. Theyd of hunted her in Salem times
on ugliness alone.
This set them all to guffawing, but amidst the buffoonery he caught the soapy
old blind mans eyes, and they shared a knowing glance.

XXX
She marveled in the morning at how immaculate the beach looked with the sun
reflecting brightly off its face. It looked picked clean, scoured of detritus. Only shells
and fragments of shells lay scattered in the sand, each delicately fanned or whelked,
their traces sunbleached so that they seemed curious bones or wayward shards of
china. The tracks of crabs went suturing all over the placeand considered of them
the island might be some crumbling goliath zombie bound anew each night by skittish
six legged surgeons.
Their burrows made a pocked and lunar expanse of the beach. She went among
them, peeping in on the cellars of surgeons for any sign of their gory handiwork. But
the island was old, its innards had turned to dust. Little rills of sand escaped her feet
as she passed, flooding the holes, and occasionally a crab would poke up and gripe at
her.
Closer to the water, the burrows got bigger: no longer shady dimples in the
sand, but fist sized punctures at first, then gaping pitfalls where the sand was slowly
caving away.
And even closer, she stood in the mouth of a cave nearly as big as herself, a
rude architrave which let on to some lightless flooded grotto. The sound of lapping
water echoed on a stony roof like dumb wings flapping in the dark, and a stench of
rotting shellfish came crawling forth. She stood peering in. She could see nothing. She
cupped her hands around her mouth and called, Hello!
Distant at first and then thundering back with the voice of rapture, a ghost
screamed, O!
She nearly leapt back. She placed a hand to her chest, feeling her heart gallop
against the slender bones. Informed of that discomfort, she decided she wanted
nothing more to do with the grotto, and so abandoned the site of it, and returned to
the world without and the pale bright sunshine.
She walked down by the sea, closer than shed ever let herself go before. The
cold water washed across her toes. She shrieked and danced and slapped her feet
against the wet sand, but the sensation, accompanied by something bordering on
abandon, was gladly received. When the tide came back, she repeated herself.
Then she squatted down, lowering the bottoms of her thighs into the water. She
squeezed her eyes shut and shivered. The tide receded and came back. It lapped
against her buttocks, against her nubile sex, and she shot up and did a little run
down a stretch of beach.
Further down the shore, kicking sprays of water into the air, she stopped at a
sight which inspired revulsion but which also, she could not help it, captivated her:
some wretched homunculus the color and consistency of mucus was beached in the
sand, quivering slightly, and from which issued horsehair strings of viscera like odd
blue fibrils.
She crept closer, bending at the knees to scrutinize. It looked a thing shat out
without meaning or purpose, and she bore a sudden fidelity to all such winnowed
creatures of the worldand, unprecedentedly, she bore them hatred too.
A dim thing now that would ferment with puberty, she became instructed by
her hatred. She became informed of a plan. She scooped the newborn turtle up in her
hands. And without thinking much, allowing herself to be led by her deepest nature,
she brought this fragile bleeding life to the mouth of the grotto, and laid it down
among the shadows. She could not reason this action. It was the way she might have
behaved in a dream. No sound came back to her from the darkness. Nothing moved
save the infant, struggling on the basic level of impulse.
She looked on into the darkness. Here, she said. Take this. Its dying. Its
weak. Heres another ghost for you.
HERE said the darkness.

XXX
The driftwood cross stood central to a scene of twilight. Braids of grass and
withered blossoms, leached pale and juiceless by the efforts of a murderous sun, hung
from the crucified arms like the tatters of a broken king. The cross was transfixed
before the sky, and before the sun toothe twilight sun not murderous as the
morning sun, but rather heaving and sad and red, lurching down into an infinite
expanse of black seaand the ragged braids stirred in a faint breeze, moving to and
fro. The nails which bound the pale weightless planks constituted perhaps the only
real physical things inside this otherwise husked and nigh illusory shape.
She was coming down to the shore in the red twilight haze with a fresh braid in
her hands. As she went, she saw her father standing with the cross tonight: both he
and the cross in perfect silhouette.
Like a priestess of far older times, she came forward with the braid, the wind
catching in the black gauzy affair she wore and billowing it massively behind her, and
she looped the braid around the neck of the cross. She stood back. Among the staler
offerings it looked brightand condemned.
Her father's aspect as he watched was as leached as the bonecolored wood. She
looked at him.
Daddy?
Yes, he said.
Why did you bury her here?
He shook his head. She was buried where she died, far from the sea.
She looked back at the cross. Then whose is it?
An emotion distorted the features of his face. She could not read it. He hung his
head then, turning away from her. With his hands in his pockets, he walked back the
way he came, following his footprints back to the sad looking house on the sad looking
hill, which itself had been built facing out toward the sea in contemplation of what lay
beneath the cross.
She waited. The sky went dark. Stars spread above. She looked out at the sea
and the limitless expanse beyond it, and the way the stars hung above that darkness
like spangled tears falling away into nothingness. She wondered how tiny the box
beneath the cross must be. She wondered if anything remained of the body, even its
delicate ivory bones, or if the sea had taken it away box and all.
The moon sat high when she returned to the house. The screen door squealed
behind her then slammed shut. Her father sat in the darkness. He did not look at her.
She could see tears on his cheeks in the bright cold moonlight.
Andrew, he said to her.
She stood in the stillness and looked at him.
You would have been named Andrew.
Then he did look at her, and his eyes were more alive and pained than she
could have imagined.
We thought you would be boys.
She went over to him and sat at his feet and laid her head on his lap. She was
saying Oh daddy in a hushed voice over and over again.
He pushed his fingers through her hair.
Daddy, daddy.
In the outer dark are stars that have burned longer than all things have lived,
and in time these too will fade into such dust as only dim dreamers knowthe ones
who never wake.

XXX
In her dream she was swallowed, going in through a giants mouth, down a long
dark throat, and down through bowels that flexed all around with a warm lubricity,
urging her ever onward. Soft tissues and sluggish matter quaked. This renal interior
was bewenned and ugly in the extreme, warts clinging everywhere like fatty limpets,
the webbings of veins thick and ropey, and the sludgy lobes through which she passed
tinged a bilgy shade of green. Dead were stranded and decomposing in the mucilage.
She gazed at their yellowy grins in passing, buoyed as she was on a float of rotting
matter and going down the river. A valve opened somewhere and foul brown water
sluiced down the wall of a ponderous chamber she had entered. A lantern was
swinging out there, hung from a buoy. And in the outer gloom could be seen docks
cobbled up out of driftwood, and a whole covey of squalid shacks beyond. Dirty faces
peered from windows like castoffs swallowed in the belly of the whale.
What giant was this who would swallow entire civilizations? What hunger must
be so encompassing?
Now a valve was opening to her right, sucking her in, and she was voided down
a long dark drop. Below, webbed within the greater anatomy, she could see a bladder
like a great bloated island. The bladder was pulsing, opening up. She fell inside.
She found herself in a sea, warm and pink, etched with the shadows of veins.
Surely she had made a mistakethis must be the womb and not the bladder, a nice
place where life was nurtured. She found she could breathe the water. And she
became aware of herself too: a shadow of a pollywog or a thing similarly half-formed,
with rude waddling limbs and a tail for thrashing. She was a lone speck in the
vastness of this hold, a singular intelligence in all creation. The only sound was the
suck of great valves in the distance.
She felt at ease, without ambition. She did not mind her rude formfor who
was there to comment on the beauty now mutate?
She began to swim, to descend.
Strange animal that she was, tail thrashing, limbs groping, she quested in the
warm pink sea, toward lower regions where could be seen a landscape imprinted in
flesh: forests of slender valves like strange flutings, from which issued a thrush of
bubbles, and mountains and meandering ridges too, and deep trenches which seemed
clove from the flesh by some surgeons hand. All this fantasy was unpeopled: nothing
in the pluming clouds of bubbles, no one among the forests which were drawing and
flexing like so many nematodes in concert. She went anyway, because it was fabulous
and pink and alien. As she descended from the submarine sky, the landscape came
into greater perspective. Its vastness was more than she could imagine.
She had never flown before. Neither had she swum. In this womblike fairyworld
the acts were much the samethe flight of gulls reflected oddly by the membranous
gliders of the seaall things given wonder by the imagination of a child. Free from all
constraint, a deep peace resolved within her, transposed by that of the miraculous gulf
she traveled. She was utterly alone. Her voice carried no distance when she called out,
and no other voice carried its weight back to her. All that came were sounds warped
and made dim by the fathoms. She felt glad.
In all the invention of her mind she had never conceived an image like this
beforea place so blessed in a giant so foul. And already in this dream were
germinating the seeds of a self-mutilating thought: that in the swallowing, in the
death, was restitution from all lifes ugliness. She could be as they in the squalid
driftwood shacks. She could be as they who hadnt seen the sun in a thousand years
or more.
Now, determined upon a gash on the seabed, she was swimming down the
height of an enormous ridge and past a titanic pink tree of anemone tendrils which
swayed in a gentle current. She entered the gash and the shadow of its walls fell
across her. She went deeper. The pink horizon contained itself in a vibrant crack, far
above. She was going across the trench floor which seemed to span untold miles. What
treasure might be secreted here in the dark? What things lost in the bowels and lost
even to the memory of the one who swallowed them?
For the first time she noticed that she was faintly luminescent, some agent was
reacting with the nodes of her translucent body to produce a glow pink and faint.
There were other such reactions all around her, flares of pink, and they were blinking,
winking. She went on, a speck of phosphor among the greater swarm. This spectacle
of magic served counterpoint to the sheer dark walls that rose to either side.
It was in such a haze of fairydust that she discovered a city sprawling at the
bottom of the trench, a ruin. Here was a medieval affair, wrought in stone and iron.
Galaxies of pink fireflies burst among parapets, among curtain walls and cathedrals
and sullen motes, but no one was homeno one on the streets, nor inside the many
abodes or within the dark castle presiding over all. A dark iron steeple glinted pink
light. She went among bazaars untouched by time, among pristine avenues where no
one walked and no one ever had.
No one had built the city, and yet it was: a miracle, a meaningless occurrence.
Nothing had purpose except to be.
She swam up the thousand steps of the mightiest cathedral. She made circles
above the rows of empty pews in the faint light of the stained glass windows. A mighty
aspect of God stood wrought in bronze in the main hall. The eyes were dead. The arms
were spread in empty benediction. In the catacombs beneath the cathedral had been
carved niches for souls who never lived.
She swam in that utter darkness and found nothing.
She left the city where it lay sunken and unknown at the bottom of the sea. And
she went forth from the trench in the ground, receding back past the mountains and
the landscape that was stamped with the unconscious patterns of nature, out into the
sea and the pink horizon. Her gelatinous body wimpled with her efforts.
She felt sad. She felt alone.
For a while she drifted.
If she could create, it would not have been enough, nor if she could imagine a
place different than this. She began to understand the madness and demise of God. A
vain hope compelled her. She undertook this odyssey in search of something of
meaning. She hoped it would tell her her purpose when she found it.
Her limbs waggled. Her tail thrashed. She propelled herself forward into a space
bound only by the shadows of veins like strange mirages. This trackless expanse of
pink dizzied her. She became suddenly aware of the might of eternity, the faintness of
a solitary soul.
Then all at once a shape appeared. She spotted it from very farawaya
diminutive black speck, just like herself. It seemed not to move. She called out to it,
but her voice came strange and distorted in the pleasant sluggishness of the water.
She cried out again. She strained her tiny lungs. Her voice warbled all around her.
Then it faded and was gone.
She went to the shape, struggling with all her body. With progress almost
imperceptible, she moved toward it. She swam in the vastness of a gulf where no two
things had ever been close.
The shape did not move from its spot. If it was aware of her, it did not react.
She was near now, she was closing the distance. She was anxious. She was
desperate, she didnt know why. Then she stopped.
She looked on with her milky eyes at this scene of Gods utter hatred of her:
The shape was like hers, an unfinished thing, but curled like a fetus and
beginning to blacken with corruption. Chunks of anatomy had broken from its body
and now floated arrayed like horrid black microbes in the maternal pinkness of the
sea.
She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came. Flakes of rot went into
her mouth.

XXX
What happened to you?
You mean to my lovely countenance, said the ruined man.
Yes, she said. I guess so.
I was born this way, the way you see me now.
Youre making that up.
You think so?
I know you are.
You were born that way too.
No I wasnt.
But you were, said the ruined man. You were born with this form and you
carried it with you, shedding baby fat and shedding pimples until you emerged a
distillation of the core idea. Like an insect. Youre young. Theres still yet another
metamorphosis inside. When you emerge at last youll realize its how youve always
been. Just like how I did. Ive always been this.
Youve always been old?
If I wasnt always old then how would I get? Younger?
She shook her head.
You will always be young, always gorgeous. Youll see.
Moving somewhere in the darkness, Victorian clockwork counted out the
minutes and the hours. An ebon monkey was grinning down from a shelf of the
antique cabinet, holding in the bowl of its legs the skull of a bat or serpent, she
couldnt tell. She walked to the window, trailing her fingers along the contours of
tables and shelves. The floorboards listed with the sway of the sea.
The clockface when she passed it told a time of two-thirty, but an evernight
reigned in this house of the living dead.
She pulled aside a drape and looked out at the sea and the flakes of yellow
sunlight collecting upon its waters. A long shear came in and illuminated the thick
dust that had settled in the ruined mans house and the nicotine stains that crept
along the ceiling and walls like a yellow rot.
Shut it, he snarled.
She quickly did as he said.
A serpentine trail of smoke came out of the dark corner where the ruined man
was sat, coiling in the middle of the room.
Why do you think youre here? he said.
She shrugged. I had no place else to go.
Is that all?
She was gazing into nothing. She shrugged.
You dont speak much.
I dont enjoy it, she said.
I dont care. Speak. Ill not have rudeness in my house.
Indignant, she threw open the drapes once more. The sunlight laid bare the
ugliness within. The ruined man winced. Uninured to the sunlight, his hands clasped
like weird forelimbs and his fingerbones dangling, he rose from his seat, trembling. He
snatched the drapes from her and drew them shut. For an instant she saw him
exposed: a horrid mantis shorn of its carapace, gangling before her, looming.
Then darkness hooded them both. He went back to his armchair and seemed to
be shivering. The way his knees kept swerving gave an impression of extreme atrophy.
Daddy said you hunted deer, she murmured.
And what?
You can hardly walk.
He scoffed.
Only the clockwork moved, sounding out loudly the turning of wheels, the
clicking of the ratchet. After a moment, penitent girl, she came and sat on the table
ledge beside him, and confessed: My grandma died. Its hard for me to remember but
I think thats what happened. I dont know my mother. Shes dead anyway, so it
doesnt matter. My daddy never wanted me, but no one else would take me. I dont
mind much.
Your daddy wanted you, said the ruined man. All daddies feel the same about
their children. They would sooner take their place in Hell than let them see the face of
God. Your daddy wanted you but he didnt want you here. Do you understand? He
didnt want you seeing.
She shrugged again. I dont mind much.
Hes a fool anyway, said the ruined man. You could never be saved, could
you? Pretty little idiot.




XXX
Now came days spent alone, letting recent events of her life portend stranger
happenings yet. A grim augury was resolving: the end of the world perhaps, or some
worse reckoning yet to make her wish it were so.
Possessed by this melancholy, inspired by it, she went out one day and
explored the island with a sketchpad and pen in hand. She went wearing a sleeveless
black tunic and jeans rolled up to the knee, and her pale fineboned feet she left naked
to tread the cooled grey sand of an overcast day. She wriggled her toes in the sand and
looked out. Stormclouds were stacking over the sea, huge black hemorrhoidal bulges
in a pallid sky. A queer sun tinctured the island the color of a dream: hazy and
indistinct, and impossible to remember upon waking. A cold wind was snapping her
clothes.
Her melancholy heightened by the approach of the storm, and her inspiration
thereby piqued, she strayed farther from the house than ever before, going to the
unknown parts of the island.
She drew landscapes on her sketchpad in intricate detail: the softly humped
dunes, the beach wastes littered with scrimshaw, the grass standing bent and razored
in the wind like the bristles on the back of a flea. She drew the clouds lowering down
over a marine abyss. She drew the oasis that stood way off in the distance, a darkly
savage clumping like earthbound clouds or some other terrestrial moiling.
She sketched the ruined mans house standing sadly in the sea and then went
off to the opposite end of the island. All at once she seemed to have crossed some
boundary, and looking back saw her fathers house small and disassociated from her
world. When she looked back again, it was gone. She ventured closer to the shore
where the waves were getting choppy in the rising wind. Here the smoothed and
trackless sand became mapped with the burrows of crabs, and those holes seemed
like dark stars in a sky, like the hypothesis of cosmos where the absence of light is
predominant.
She sketched them like that, constellations and groupings of black stars: a map
by which to chart her minds descent.
Toward the edge of the island, the ground rose in a steep incline, and she
ascended and found herself standing on the top of a cliff. The remains of a pier jutted
from the precipice like a leprous stump. It swayed brokenly far above the sea.
A gull flapped and settled in the latticed understructure, high above the
concrete supports rucked with barnacles and garbage and seagrowth spongy and
black. They reared up from the tumult like pachydermal legs. Back toward the ledge
from which the pier issued, the cliff face dropped sheer to a jagged spray of rocks
where the sea broke violently. And, inexplicably, the face was carved into a narrow
stair that switched all the way to the bottom, and at each switch was a small cave or
niche in which one or two people could be fit.
Without semblance of caution, but with a surety that everything was fine, she
started down that serried set of steps. She went slowly. The undercarriage loomed
above her, full of nesting and rags of plastic tarp. She became aware of an abandoned
reconstruction effort. Here and there stood braces of scaffoldingand from the struts
hung globular lanterns now rusted by the salt wind. They swayed, creaking. The pier
moaned.
She squeezed herself into a niche and drew her knees up to her chin and looked
around. The only other thing within was a tin can, rusted so thoroughly as to seem a
relic of far older times. When she picked it up and looked within, she found only some
brownish water and a decomposing sand flea. She gazed at these things furtively as
though in breach of some ancient compact. Then she put the can back where she
found it.
The clouds were coming swollen and buoyant, like a flight of dirigible
cataclysms, and the sun in their midst seemed to be viewed from the other end of a
long tunnel: a cyclopean sentinel out there at the end of the world. The atavistic look
of the suns vigil, now being swallowed in a boil of thunderheads, gave her the distinct
impression of an apocalypse. She watched from her cave in the cliff face. The wind
began to shriek.
She was huddled watching this calamitous spread and listening to the pulse of
thunder in the sky. In time, the first few drops of rain began to fall, and she climbed
up and went back to her fathers house.
Her father commented quaintly on the sketches. He said that the pier had been
ruined in his day too. He said that her mother had gotten a splinter there once. She
asked him about the niches and he told her of vagrants and boozers who had lived in
the cliff like queer nomads, and how screaming and wailing around a bonfire one night
they had disappeared altogether, leaving behind only a slaughtered calf with its
bladder removed. She said that was odd and he said so too.
The storm never came but the lightning played all through the night, sending
blue shears of light through the blind slots and making the whole house blaze.
When she woke, the radio was on in the kitchen.
Crazy stuff, the radio man said. Roads tore up. Towns taken right off the
gridI mean right off. You believe that?
Crazy, said his assistant.
This guy said he saw a chick go up in the air and do the splits.
She came into the kitchen scraping the sleep out of her eyes. Her father sat in
the morning light with the radio beside him on the table.
What happened?
Storm came through, her father said. Total freak thing. It hit just about
everywhere, wrecked everything.
She yawned. She looked out the window at the pleasant landscape outside.
It doesnt look like it, she said.
Everywhere but here, her father said. The bridge is fine, the store.
Everywhere but here.
She smiled. Is this the end of the world?
He smiled back. Just maybe.

XXX
When the date came, she woke with the dawn, stretching her lean white body in
the faint light of her fathers living room. She gathered up all the clothes she owned
and went off into the bathroom. Trailers of pant legs and skirt frills spilled from her
arms.
She preened for hours in front of the mirror, among the mint green tiles and the
festering shower curtains.
She rolled her panties down her thighs. She stripped her tanktop, sodden with
the sweat of nightmares. She looked in the mirror at the impression of sleep on her
tired swollen face and splashed it with cold water. And she shaved the contours of her
body, the gaunt dips and dives where shadows pooled and no boy save the one had
ever been.
Her father came in to urinate while she crouched on the edge of the tub
lathering her legs. She whisked the razor in the water. He lowered his eyes. He
unlatched his belt and undid the fly.
Sorry, he said.
She smiled, sliding the blade against the grain. Daddy, please, she said. Its
your house.
The plunking of liquid on liquid came, the sour stink.
Then he zipped himself up and observed himself in the mirror, sneaking a
glance at the shade of pink she had elected for her toenails, and was gone.
Daddy, she called after him.
She heard the floorboards creak where he waited outside the door.
I saw you straighten yourself, she said.
She could feel his smile in the silence that followed.
She leaned forward with her hands on the edges of the sink, pinning her small
white tits between her elbows and gazing into the reflections of her eyes. She did all
this with practiced motions, with a grace removed from the character behind the face.
She blew a kiss to herself. She was not there.
Only in the eyes did she existin the black and bottomless holes punched
through the mask.
She pulled garments from the pile. Blouses and sheer black fabrics sailed
through the air. She was particular in her outfit: a black skirt without panties, and a
black halter top with the top buttons left open so that no one could deny her
womanhood. The swells of her breasts were just visible, and a cleft of young white
flesh.
Afterward, she applied liquid eyeliner, and the faintest amount of rouge.
She wore shades so that she was glamorous.
Before she left, she was sure to wipe the speckles of her fathers urine from the
toilet seat. Everything must be just so today. An importance hung in the airthough
she did not know what to expect.
She went to the general store, out into the shadowless heat.
She went across the bridge where no traffic moved and upon which the
sunshine blazed in a wide pale range. Even the sea in all directions seemed somehow
a desiccate expanse. A pelican came flapping down upon the metal rail with a fish tail
lolling from the side of its mouth like an absurd tongue. It gawped at her. It gazed into
its reflection in her shades. Then it chocked its head back, the fish sliding down its
gullet, and flapped off.
She went on.
In the general store, the air conditioning came over her in a wave, and she
walked with sweat cooling on her body to the front counter where the boy with the
black tooth stood. He smiled at the skirt and the tang of female sweat. Then he saw
who wore the shades.
Oh, he said.
She put her palms down on the countertop. She smiled. Hello.
Hi.
Do you remember me?
He screwed up his face in mock consternation. Well, lets see, he said.
Memorys not what it used to be. Have we met?
She just laughed.
Its hard to forget a person like you, he said.
Oh dear.
I told my friend Tom about you, he said.
And what did your friend Tom say?
He said youre probably crazy.
Has Tom ever met a girl my age?
Met them, sure. He doesnt go on with them, though. Hellbut I dont think
anyones ever gone on with a girl like you.
Well, she said. Im sure hes missing out.
He ventured a shy smile. She smiled back.
Then he said, Are you really like that, though?
Barren?
Crazy.
Probably, she said.
He searched for the glint of her eyes behind the shades and found only his
reflection, a dark shape limned in vague light.
Is that how it is? he said. Do you just play people?
I never played anyone, she said. Thats not how crazy is.
Youll have to tell me about it sometime, he murmured.
She leaned forward onto the counter. She removed the shades. She pinned her
breasts between her arms the way she practiced and smiled up at him. Take me to
Marvs and Ill tell you all about it.
He lost himself in her eyes. Marvs, he said.
Marvs.
You mean right now?
I mean right now.
Theres a taxi service right over there.
She moved her hand on top of his.
Im broke and I need a ride, she said.
Alright, he said after a while. Alright. But youve got to give me half a chance
this time.
Only half a chance, she said. No more.
He smiled again. She thought that in another life she might be wooed by the
roguish narrowness of his face, his one earring, the way his black tooth winked at her.
He pushed through the latch door to the other side of the counter and unstrung
his apron. The older man with glasses came out of the back room with his hands on
his hips.
Hey, he called out.
The boy with the black tooth slung the apron over his shoulder.
Hey, he said.
Son, I expect youll be back directly after you take a whiz.
I dont have to take a whiz, he said. Im going on with her.
Not right now you aint.
Yeah, I am.
They started off down the aisles, walking closely together.
Well goddamn, said the man with glasses. Whatll I do, then? Did you think
about that? Whatll I tell the old man?
Youll manage.
She turned as she was leaving and waved and said, Goodbye, sir. Sorry, sir.
The man with glasses looked after them. Goddamn, he said.
They stole out into the parking lot with the grins of the guilty upon their faces.
His hand brushed hers. She pressed her body close.
The car hed fashioned for himself was a rusted auto husk heaping with
salvaged innards and with seats spirited from junkyards by night, the roof all but
missing and replaced by a hood of his own devising cobbled up out of cardboard and
duct tape and fixed into place by bungie cord. There were no seatbelts. A bong rudely
fashioned from a twelve liter cola bottle and plastic tubing lay in the back like a
hierophantic instrument, among wrappers and magazines.
He got in next to her and lit up, blowing streamers into the close hot air, and
then turned the ignition. An engine dormant and half-dead convulsed under the hood.
Its rumbling pervaded the small space of the car. He rolled down the windows. Then
they turned out into the road and began in their absurd rusting craft to trundle off in
the direction of Marvs.
Dunes rolled by. Stunted trees flashed by, and patches of scrub and scant
shrubbery. The sky lay close overhead. A single puff of cloud strove in all that
boundless blue. Then they whipped past and it was gone.
She saw a deer crossing sign. She saw the speed limit.
Not a single car passed them.
The boy with the black tooth ratcheted up the speed and she felt the
momentum tugging at her bones. He smiled to himself. She smiled too.
Then she rolled up the windows and switched the air off. She paled in the heat
to near incandescence. Sweat beaded on her brow, on her upper lip. It glistened in the
cleft between her breasts. She eased the seat back. She spread her legs. She reached
out and took the cigarette from between his lips and sucked on it, blowing plumes out
through her nostrils.
He looked over at herlanguid and wet and inches from his grip. The armpits
of his t-shirt were soaked.
Watch the road, she murmured.
He turned back to the road and shook his head smiling. Damn but you are
strange, he said.
Crazy, she said.
He laughed and said, I must be too.
She blew a spout of smoke into the sour air.
When they got to Marvs, only a few cars were parked out front. He pulled into a
spot. All the hugeness of the sky was mirrored in Marvs silver faade. The place
looked dazzling and cheap, its glamor dimmed in the daylight. A man stood by the
newsstand reading a paper.
The boy with the black tooth leaned toward her with his elbow on the armrest
and a hungry look in his eyes, but she was already climbing out of the car. He followed
her. She stood in the heat fanning herself with her hand.
Goodness, she said.
He smiled dumbly and said, Yeah.
Will you go on and get us a table? A lady freshens before eating.
A lady, he said. This isnt exactly five stars.
She smiled. Will you get us a table?
You got it, he said, and winked at her.
He went up the steps and disappeared into the squat silver diner.
She stood for a moment in the heat and the silence waiting for something to
happen. The note hadnt been specific. She took it out again and read its contents.
She looked up the stairs where no one stood. She looked at the man by the
newsstand, a graying professorial creature in a sports coat with a coffee in hand. He
didnt seem to notice her and after a while he departed.
Then she was walking among the hotly gleaming cars sucking on the nub of her
cigarette and watching a penumbral doppelgnger do the same in the windshields of
the cars: some dark Other who she harbored even now beneath her white breast, her
pretty face. She drew on the nub. She flicked it, the Other did the same.
Suddenly there came a dull ache in her skull, a change of pressure in the air.
She looked for thunderheads but there was only the blue sky and paling heat. Her
temples throbbed.
Thunder rippled distantly.
At the edge of the parking lot a form like watered ink was gaining solidity out of
the heat. The thunder came again. Then it subsided. The figure came toward her. It
was a boy walking a bicycle. He wore a red bellhops uniform with a funny little cap
attached to his head by a chinstrap.
Madame.
Hello, she said.
I believe youre expecting me.
Yes, she said. I guess so.
I have something for you.
Oh?
A moment.
The delivery boy went to the basket of his bicycle and rummaged among the
many parcels. His movements were crisp and formal. His uniform was starched and
pressed and without a crinkle.
He retrieved an item from a brown paper parcel and handed it to her.
It was the shell.
How did you get this?
It was given to me, of courseto give to you.
He clasped his hands together and smiled, then added, Its meant kindly, I
believe even predestined to find itself in your hands. If youre a believing sort of
person.
I dont know about that, she said dubiously.
May I ask you something?
She nodded assent.
Do you put much stock in astrology?
She smiled faintly. Im on hiatus from school currently.
He shook his head. Star signs, Madame. Gemini, for instance.
Oh, she said. I suppose I dont know just yet. What do they mean?
He ignored this. You were born Cancer, werent you?
Well, yes.
We were all born Cancer.
What does it mean?
May I speak frankly, Madame?
I guess so.
Leave Vesica, he said. Leave here. Leave all this. What was before neednt be
so again. Its in your hands.
She nearly scoffed, but his utter seriousness held her arrest. You sound just
like her, she said.
Thank you, Madame.
Are you her son?
Heavens no.
Well anyway. . . . she said.
Your friend is waiting.
She turned, and found her misfortune: the boy with the black tooth was
standing on the front steps of Marvs watching, and not only that, but standing with
him was the great needful red demon named Jealousy. His eyes smoldered. His face
was cloudy. She turned back to say something to the delivery boy, but he was gone by
then.
Who the hell was that?
How to explain? And what was the point?
So she made no attempt. She looked at the shell in her hand, contemplating the
delivery boys words. The boy with the black tooth was obscene. His anger was
incredible with irrationality. Eventually he deserted her in the parking lot. His derelict
vehicle screamed down the road, leaving a wake of ashgrey exhaust fumes rising in the
windless air. She waited strange long moments in silence. Then she was on her way.
As she was walking down the shoulder of the road, a cab came to a screeching
halt beside her, and a window rolled down.
Where you going, darling? the dirty man called out.
She smiled. Home.
Wheres home?
She told him.
Hop on in.
There was a man in a business suit sitting next to her in the cab. He assessed
her. He looked unhappy.
Who is this?
Relax, man. Its no bother.
I said who is this youve let onto my ride.
Its no bother, man.
Let me out here. Ill hail someone else.
Just relax.
She smiled uneasily. The dirty man ratcheted up some twangy bolero that was
playing on the radio, and his rusting shuttle ripped down the long and blinding road
into the skys blue void.

XXX
There were two in particular who had begun to share a feeling of unease about
the prophet, and they condemned this feeling in the suspicion that his act was all a
sham. One night under the canvas dinner tent, the man named Charlie took him by
the shoulder, and the other, named Zafo, took him by the other. Roustabouts looked
up from their plates of baked beans to see this intimacy with the prophet, which was
somewhat legendary. The prophet permitted audience with no one, considered no one
his friend. When he spoke, it was as a preacher addresses his parish, including
simultaneously everyone and yet granting clemency to no single person. He slept by
himself at the foot of lonely trees. His sleep was always peaceful, no one disturbed
him.
Now holding him arrest by the shoulder, Charlie said to him, By what right you
tell folk what you tell em?
The prophet looked amiably between Charlie and Zafo. His face was grotesque
and yet contained an aspect of the angel. By what right? he said. By what right do
we take on crooks and killers? By what right do we swindle folk blind? Boys, it aint a
right what I do, its a fact of life.
Whos sayin what you say aint just puckey? said Zafo.
The prophet grinned. It is, he said. Its falser than all the women what I tell
them saps.
Then youre nothin but goldbrickin liar. About them powers. About bein
touched.
My brothers, you know not these things. It aint false what I said. I been
touched by a glorious hand. But it aint what you can call uponthe hand calls on
you. Its what youd call hubris for a man to think he can manifest such things like
magic. So I just lie like the rest of them, cos I am like the rest of them.
Aw shit, said Zafo. Hes just a liar.
Yessir, said Charlie. Then he turned to the men at large, eating meager
suppers, hunched over tins of coffee, and exclaimed, Hes like you and me, you sons
of bitches. Hes just a liar.
The prophet turned out to face his congregation as though to deliver another
sermon, and then said simply, Yessir.
But this admission was not enough, and asleep in their bunks that night, the
two were woken by a sudden fever of envy and violence. They took a bunch of stakes
and two mallets and went out into the dark swinging a lantern by its bail. They were
big and burly specters galvanized by the swinging of the lantern. Their overalls were
dirty. Their eyes were full of the night. They came by the tree under which the prophet
was sleeping, waking him with a blow across the head. Then they clutched an arm
each and spread him and drove stakes through his palms and a third through his feet.
The prophet did not die silently. He screamed like a coward.
They were kicking him with their boots, breaking his ribs, breaking his nose
and his jaw until his screams started to gurgle and finally fade. There were several
who came to witness this scrawny martyr spread and staked to the earth. In the
lamplight the swollen face seemed to be smiling. They all just stared. No one said
anything. No one buried the body.
He remained dead for three days.
On the fourth day, everyone woke from a dream in which the prophet had been
murdered by two men. Now the dream was dissolving, no one could remember the
names of the men. But invariably, they each came by the tree where he was camped.
The prophet was squatting in the earth making a necklace from string and human
teeth. He grinned as each of them came to see him.
He said, My brothers, its worse than death what God has done to those who
tried to harm me. Now theyre gone. Its mine and mine alone to bear the cross of their
memory.


XXX
Leukemia. Heart disease. Crib death. The ruined man laughed tersely.
The light was failing outside his windows. It lit dimly upon the drapes, mauve
red and now subsiding pale and purple into dusk. The ruined man had lit fragrances
in the censers hanging from the ceiling, and a smoke came seeping from the
perforations, milky and nebular, coalescing in the middle of the room like a strange
galaxy taking form there. A fog filled her head. She felt light. In the darkened kitchen
beyond had been lit a few candles which throbbed and sputtered. They were just dim
but she could make out the orange circles they shed, globes of light suspended in the
night like moons seen from the shore of some distant world.
Lung cancer, the ruined man said.
Rills of white smoke went creeping across the ceiling in all directions. She
watched them go, watched the terrain of fissured plaster become hallowed with these
sudden foggy waters. She took a cigarette from the pack and went for a match, but he
caught her wrist and forbade it, saying this was a sacred night, free from vice. She put
the matchbook away.
Then he was at a glass jar dabbing his fingers in oil and anointing his eyelids,
his lips. She watched. She couldnt make sense of it.
Auto accidents, he said. Manslaughter. A thousand ways. A million. Illusions
all. Pixies spinning in the air before our eyes, to distract us from sights beyond the
pale. The only true death is the death of God."
"I don't know God, she said.
"Don't be stupid. Everyone knows God."
"Not me, she said.
"His kingdom is within."
"He never came into my life."
"That's because he was already there, said the ruined man.
The moon like some poxy corpse's paunch came bellying up out of the black
waters above, among stars or submarine fires glowing palely out in Hades. Flakes of
lunar flamejust dimly at firstcollected upon the windowsills. The air became
strangely blue, as though the fires were frozen, and the blueness etched the dwellers
from the darkness: the lovely girlshadow with her thighs illumined like slabs of white
desire, and the withered revenant skulking behind.
Now the moon resolved closer to the window like some looming projection, the
blueness grew lighter. The moon seemed to speak a cautionary tale with its gulleys
and ravages, a parable of the ruin of time.
This too is the fate of all things, said the moon.
It lay mirrored hugely on the black sea.
Rot and ruin.
She imagined the fetal life expiring, then rotting beneath the cross. And she
imagined it swept up in sudden waters and ushered to the wide floodplain of Hell, the
endless tide of souls each sustained in agony by sheer cognizance of their
confinement.
The ruined man was fetching down from the antique cabinet an old looking
stone knife.
Is it the anniversary? she asked.
Yes.
Of who?
Who do you think? Naaman. You knew that.
Yes, she said.
You have the capacity for cruelness, asking questions like that. If it had been
anyone else it would have been cruel.
She smiled thinly in the dark.
Would you like to see how I commemorate my sons death?
She nodded.
Its in the kitchen.
He motioned and she followed him through the doorway, into a candlelit
kitchen stripped bare of linoleum and wallpaper. The windows were boarded. A smell
rank and wet pervaded the air. On the single table which bore the candles, in the
gloom, a shape was resolving: a faun lay sprawled upon the table, the candles put
about it as though for ritual purposes. The faun seemed half-living. It did not move.
Blood matted the back of its head.
There were other things on the table too, several strips of gauze, and a ceramic
bowl with some kind of blunt instrument inside. The ruined man called them a mortar
and pestle. Then he shook his head. Laymans terms, he said. Didnt you pay
attention in school?
Im on hiatus.
Theyre an alchemists instruments, he said. Do you know what an alchemist
is?
She looked once more at the mortar and pestle, then concluded sharply, You
cant make gold with those.
The ruined man sneered. Silver to gold is the least of the transmutations, he
said. Then: Go to the man with the extravagant tongue, fetch me herbs of lavender
and vermilion.
Somehowperhaps she had spent too much time in his houseshe knew
where to go without having to ask. She went back into the main room and confronted
the antique cabinet. On one of the shelves squatted a rather Buddhist looking idol, but
rendered perversely: its belly overfat and without charm, the lips peeled in a crazed
grin, and a tongue larger than all tongues hanging out in a lustful gesture. The tongue
served a handle. When she pulled on it the jaw dislocated to reveal a drawer, and the
depths of the idol too, in which were stored dried sprigs of herb and leathern pouches.
She got the herbs the ruined man requested and returned to him in the
kitchen. He took them without thanks and began grinding them to a powder in the
mortar. She watched, and she watched the faun too, the expansions and contractions
of the slatted ribs, the tremulous and wounded breathing.
What does this have to do with Naaman? she asked.
I killed him, said the ruined man, and then said no more.
Didnt the police find out? Didnt you go to jail?
Prison, he remarked. Do you think it's punishment I want? I'm not some
flagellating idiot. For a transmutation to take place, sacrifices must be made. They are
the change, the revolution."
She didn't understand, but she kept her mouth shut.
Without much ceremony the ruined man picked up the stone knife, which she
saw now was curved with cruel purpose, and slashed open the fauns throat. The
fauns eyes opened widely for a brief momentshe could see all of a starry universe
contain therein. Then they slowly went dim, and closed. Blood was pumping in a
steady gout from the slash. The expansions of the ribs subsided.
Next he made an incision in the fauns abdomen and put aside the knife and
reached within, into the steaming recesses of the animal. He brought forth the
bladder, and she looked at it and was awed. It seemed a thing about to burst, filled
with so much content. It bulged in the ruined mans hand.
After a moment of appreciation, the ruined man awed her further by treating
the bladder like a flask, tilting it in his hands, emptying some of its contents into the
mortar. A yellow reek of piss filled the air. Then he stopped the bladder with a scrap of
twine from his pocket, and set it aside. He began to grind the contents of his alchemy
into a paste, a mealy grey poultice, which he sniffed at last to be sure of some
unknown variable.
He was removing his shirt now, and his bony chest was wrapped tightly in
gauze, and as he removed these bindings she saw more clearly that a pap of older
poultice had been packed beneath the gauze, above his breast. He removed this dried
mass and set it with the discarded rags. Then he applied the more recent stuff to the
fresher gauze. He began to bind his torso, tightly and meticulously, so that the
wretched unguent could appeal to his heart directly.
In all this she was not invited to help, and nor did she ask to, simply standing
there, watching, certain of a growing sense of disorder and madness in her life.
The ruined man spoke:
"Since before the days of scripture, the secrets of alchemy were made revealed
to us, etched upon tablets, secrets of the laws God himself has writ. Since days of
Hermetica."
"Hermetica?"
"Writings of the old ones, said the ruined man. They had their ear closest to
his word."
"You mean the giants."
The ruined man didnt answer. He said only, By Gods own laws are we given
the power to transfigure our reality. I am becoming something different. I am defying
the track given me. I am becoming Other.
His words began to wander then. He spoke of days of scripture, and dragons
which lived in those times. He said that they were written as having been firey and
saurian but that it wasnt so. He spoke of the truth of dragons: great mouths,
impossible mouths, which ate it all, and were without bladders or even assholes from
which to expel their food, and so grew ever greater in size, until their utter immensity
was both solar and terrible. He said that the maws called dragons were godlike and
blasphemous. He said that hunger is the truest order of the universe. He said that all
things acquiesce to it, in the end. He said that the advancement of age and the rotting
of the flesh is the hunger of dragons who have grown larger than all creationwho
occupy the microcosmic plane that unifies all molecules and things smaller than
moleculeseating with infinite microbial mouths. He said that the destruction of the
universe was an act of hunger too.
When asked what thing could be so hungry, he told her the word Ouroboros,
which conjured frightful images.
Come with me, he said, and let me show you the hunger of the world.
He presented her a candle to hold and then turned back to the faun. She stood
in the gloom harboring the light. Her fingers trembled slightly to feel the steady
dripping of the hot wax. The ruined man now was handling the stone knife once more:
he hooked the blade in the lip of his incision and with a practiced movement opened
the belly entirely. He set the knife aside. He reached within and brought out a bundle
of guts. He hauled them forth, there were ever more. Her eyes widened to see this
expansive letting of the entrails, the endless intestinal tracts, the puffy lobes, the utter
grotesque majesty of these things kept hidden in the flesh. What remained of the faun
seemed to diminish.
The ruined man turned to her. Himself hairless and empty looking, and holding
the heaped entrails in his arms, he reminded her of those still life grotesques who
inhabit sarcophagi in crypts, who must be very hungry indeed: hungry for light, for
guts, for all the air they never breathed, all the lives they never lived. Pondering such
vast hunger, she thought, randomly, of crabs, and the way they seemed resentful of
the entire world.
Lets go out into the night. Bring the fire.
By the weirder stars reflected in the sea, she felt predestined to lead this
procession:
She was coming down the stairs of the ruined mans house with the light
cupped in her hands, and he was in tow, his arms overflowing with his bounty,
hobbling foot to foot like some generous bogeyman in the night. They went quietly. The
moon which was larger than all other moons seemed a remote wasteland above the
water, palely luminescent, and it annulled their need for a candle. Yet she carried it
anyway, for a reason she did not stop to ponder.
On the shore in the night, in the pale moonlight, the ruined man began tossing
out the offal in handfuls.
The crabs came immediately. She mistook them for rats at first because of their
scurrying and because of their multitudes. They came out of the dark, pale bodies in
the pale moonlight. They swarmed on the offal, eating without faintness, without
gratitude, working it in their mouthparts without relish.
The debt must be paid, the ruined man said gravely, looking on.
He was nearly indistinguishable from the night. He was a cadaver ensorcelled
and made animate by the oddness of this night that was like no other.
She asked him what he would do with the rest of the faun but he wouldnt say.
She observed this scene and tasted the sharpness of salt on the air, reflecting
on the senseless orders of nature, and, possessed by something poetic inside of her,
she asked, Do you think the world is very ugly?
The ruined man said nothing.
People always say the world is a beautiful place. They say the moon is
romantic. But it only looks sad from here, it looks destroyed. Most places are ugly.
Do you find me ugly? asked the ruined man.
I think youre just awful.
He grinned.
And what about you?
Im the ugliest, she said. If anybody bothered to look.

XXX
Tom offered him mushrooms from a ziplock bag, but the boy with the black
tooth refused them, instead sitting down on the couch beside the lava lamp. He was
oddly composed.
Whats ailing you?
Huh?
Whats on your mind.
Oh. Her.
Who?
The girl. The crazy.
Tom put the ziplock into a drawer and shut it. Oh.
I got jealous.
Jealous.
Yeah. The other day.
How did she take it?
Not good I guess.
Well, said Tom. It might be prudent to apologize.
Maybe.
Tom folded into a lotus position down on the carpet. He was shirtless and his
round white belly pooched over the waist of his shorts. Women, James, he said.
The boy with the black tooth grinned. Yeah, he said.
Incidentally, said Tom. Ive learned to exist without ego. You might find the
technique crucial in dealing with your current situation.
Now in English.
The impulse to fuck, say, and the impulse of jealousy are connected. To master
one is to master the other.
Bullshit.
In fact all impulses are connected on a deeper level. They all in their
infinitesimal way constitute the ego.
Bullshit.
Tom shook his head. No bullshit.
Can I learn it drunk?
Tom was in the kitchen fetching down a bottle of acrid tequila. Its even
conducive to the method.

XXX
She studied the shell. She obsessed over it, its womblike pinkness, the
fleshiness of the folds of its innermost compartments and the hieroglyphs engraved
therein. The shell spoke with the language of ages now extinct. She could not
understand it, even as it infected her mind. There came the image of a naked uterus
enfolded among red curtains, and a hand holding a fine blade with which to stencil the
hieroglyphs, drawing black blood in the execution. She could not explain it. It did not
make sense. Now threads of blood spidered across the carven uterus, black beads of it
trembled and then dropped away, collecting in an ocean of weepings of this absurd
artifact. The uterus shuddered and fretted, even excised as it was from the body which
sustained it.
She imagined covens of sea hags who divested themselves of all womanhood
with knives of stone and offered their flesh to an old and bloody God, who then
dispensed these pink whelks as gifts of madness to a race of doomed men: a map by
which we might chart the path to Hell, the Labyrinth of the mind, the Tartarus of
Greek nightmare.
The brine did not awaken this ancient flesh. And no meaning resolved among
the runic messages when she stared for long periods of time. She moved her fingers
along the tracings. She couldnt deny that there was something of the divine to the
shells wandering script.
She wished herself to be like the crone, versed in such knowing as this,
tormented not by the mystery of all things but rather by the ultimate truth of
everything. For the questions, and the maddening seduction of them, incited the worst
pain of all: the pain of the self-aware and of the idiot.
In the bathroom she would strip naked and pair the shells tone with her
paleness. She turned her back to the mirror and observed her perfect ass, and the
cups of her waist, with a strange and narcissistic desire. Her gaze would ultimately be
brought up to her scapulae, which, with the maturing of her figure, seemed to further
protrude and grow bonier. If she was a seraph, if she was a creature close to God, then
she was not blessed with his knowing, nor his power, but only with loveliness, and a
profound ignorance. She fluctuated wildly between self-admiration and a gross hatred
of herself. She felt absurd and idiotic.
Sometimes, sitting on the front porch watching the wheel of gulls above the
surf, she found herself idly doodling hieroglyphs upon her feet with a pen, one for
every toe. In time she invented meanings of her own for each one: declarations of the
weakness of men, the faults in our hearts and faiths and minds, the faintness of our
love, and even condemnations of she herself. The shell was a tirade against a race of
failures, the map a labyrinth in which to dungeon such unsightly progeny as the
human being. She liked that idea best. She smiled a little, touching her lips. She felt
she had descried some invisible meaning of the world. A revelation had been achieved,
and although she could not name it, she felt closer to Truth.

XXX
She lifted the skull from the confines of the box, somewhat awed by its
hugenessit was bigger than was possible for a child to support, let alone any human
beingorbular, hollow, paleand the broad dome was speckled with irregular eye
sockets like the dark whorls on the body of a birch tree. Of the face itself, there were
no eye sockets where regular ones should be, nor nasal cavities, and the jaw was lean
and bisected like some horrid serpents, fringed with small hooked teeth that receded,
row upon row, back into the recesses of the skull. There was a hole stove in the back
through which she peered into an infinite black space. She poked her finger through.
It was cold. She was reminded of the moon, round and white, blazing palely in the
night, its visage maimed with so many holes put through it.
Who was Naaman? she asked.
A king of old, said the ruined man. His flesh was corrupted by leprosy, until
the wisdom of a prophet healed him of his affliction. Or so the story goes.
But he didnt die?
No, said the ruined man. He didnt die.

XXX
Daddy.
She shook him awake. He lay on the naked mattress that had gone to ruin.
Springs poked up through the fabric and the whole frame pitched inward like some
wild carnival tent collapsed to be folded up and packed away. In its midst he seemed a
reveler wasted from the night preceding. His eyes opened.
Were you dreaming?
I dont dream, he said.
I need money, she said. I need to go to Marvs.
Marvs.
Yes, daddy.
Whats at Marvs?
I just need to go.
Do you know what? he said.
What?
He propped himself up on his elbows. I do worry about you, he said. I know
you dont think so.
Daddy, she scolded.
She looped a straggle of his hair around her finger.
He hesitated. Then he said, The moneys in the lampshade.
Thank you, daddy.
She went to the nightstand. She pulled out a furl of bills that was clipped to the
inside of the lampshade and counted out the necessary dollars. Then she put it back.
She smiled at her father and disappeared around the corner.
Please be careful.
Ill be back very soon, daddy.
And she went out through the screen door and heard it slam behind herand
he collapsed back into the ruin of his mattress as obsoletely as he had risen.
She didnt know what she would find or what she was looking for. In the
mystery of all things and all plans laid by God, there were answers so great as to ruin
her utterly. She knew this for certain. But she was in it now, and couldnt have helped
herself if she desired.
So she crossed the bridge with this note in her back pocket, written in neat
hand, sealed in an envelope addressed to no one at all:

What does it all mean?

A pickup truck whipped by her. An eddy of dust followed in its wake down the
long and desolate road. She watched after the pickup, watched it fold into mirage in
the crawling summer heat.
She went on into the taxi service.
The clean man sat behind the desk in the darkness. Her footsteps echoed all
around her. He made a steeple of his hands. He smiled.
Hidy, darling, he said.
She smiled and said, I must have met your brother.
I beg pardon?
Or someone in your family, she said. Does someone like that work here?
No brother, maam. No one else. Theres just me here.
What about at night?
I close up around sundown, he said. Of course theres Lomans, thats just up
the way a little. Theres Maxs, Speedys. Maybe you went up their way.
Maybe, she said.
He sat there smiling and ethereal in the silence.
Well, she said. I need to get to Marvs.
He said, That I can help with.
They zipped down the road, past a van, past a ragtop. The taxi left clouds of
smog in its wake that hung thickly in the air and seemed never to dissipate.
They passed a deer flattened to the side of the road in a pool of dried gore. A
rope of intestine trailed from the open belly. A tread mark imprinted into the gore
curved sharply away from the carcass and into the road, where it faded.
The clean man looked at her in the rearview mirror.
Bristly fellow, huh?
Yes, sir, she said. He looked like he hadnt shaved in about a week.
Shoot, said the clean man. If a man cant subscribe to a hygienic code, I cant
trust him. Simple as that.
She shook her head.
I wouldnt trust a man who cant shave to wipe his own ass right. I wouldnt
expect hed want to. Imagine the man.
Terrible, she said.
The clean man shuddered at the thought.
When they got to Marvs, she told him to wait for her and stepped out into the
pale lot where only a few cars were parked. She looked at the plume of steam coming
out the top of the place and piling against the sky. Then she went on into the diner.
The music was soft. The light of the jukebox melted green, then orange, then a
deeply intimate red.
In that light a dwarf in white shirt and bowtie sat on a stool at the hosts
counter. His fat head nodded in sleep. His nametag read Hello! My name is Edward.
She went past him and past the automobile shaped booths where a few old folk
sat like the living dead at lunchtime. The blinds had been shut to further dim the
place. On the walls and ceiling were arrayed artifacts: black and white photographs,
baseball cards, vinyl records, ancient license plates, pinup advertisements.
A traffic light hung from a fixture in the ceiling. It burned a constant red.
She found the enormous man bent over a table apologizing for the quality of a
meal. He affected a terrified smile beneath his small black mustache. He looked
oversized and soft and cravenly, raising his arms to the customers as if to fend a blow.
When he had said his piece, he turned and started away. He stopped when he
saw her standing in the pooled red light. His smile faded.
I thought I said I didnt want to hear any more about it.
You wont have to, she said.
Then someone will be along shortly to seat you.
She took the envelope from her back pocket and pressed it toward him. He
threw up his hands.
I dont want it, he said. I dont want it. I dont want any more to do with this
business.
Please, sir, she urged. Its important. Will you give it to him when he comes
back?
Who?
The delivery boy.
Theres nothing saying hell come back, said the enormous man.
If he does, will you?
He shook his head. I dont want it, he said. Im done with it. Do you know the
dreams Ive had since I started taking her mail? Can you imagine? Shes just bad
news. Thats all there is. Just forget about her too. Its for the best.
I cant, she said.
Then darling you are truly screwed.
She pushed the envelope at him. Please. Give it to him and Ill leave you alone.
I swear.
He looked down at it. Sweat beaded on the fleshy protuberance of his throat. He
seemed to quiver.
Finally he said, Whats one more sleepless night?
He made a screwed up smile to contain his nervousness.
She smiled and touched his arm and said, Thank you.
Dont thank me, he said. Thats the stupidest thing you could do.
Goodbye then.
Goodbye.
She left him standing there in the red light looking at the envelope in his hand
as though it might contain the warrant for his death. He did not open it. He did not
otherwise try to sneak a glance at its contents. He put it away in his jacket pocket
instead, and took his time walking back to the lime green office behind the kitchen.
Edward gazed after her when she went out to the door.
Did you enjoy your meal? he asked.
Absolutely.
She pattered down the front steps and stood on the curb looking out across the
parking lot. The clean man sat behind the wheel skimming a magazine of male
grooming accessories.
She went around to the back of Marvs in search of somethingshe could not
have known what, but some doomed prescience told her it was here.
The concrete in the shadows of those crumbling brick walls was strewn with
cigarette butts, and with shards of glass that collected her image into a hundred dark
inversions. She watched them as she passed. Rank grass poked through sections of
fissured concrete. A neat row of longnecks stood across a line of chalk like remnants
of an arcane rite.
She turned the corner, into an alcove in the brick where two dumpsters teemed
with flies and the sweet smell of rot.
She looked among the black trash bags, bulbous in that stew of putrescence
like polyps gestating. Filth caked the lips of the dumpsters. It covered the back wall.
Beneath its film could be glimpsed hieroglyphic structures of graffiti and territorial
emblems. Here beneath the grey greasy muck was the paganism of a new age.
Only one of those images stood out to her, however: a caricature of an ancient
woman with the skin hanging from her bones, with a third eye growing in the middle
of her forehead.
She stood looking at it.
The flies swarmed. An oily bubble seeped forth and burst.
Then a sound came, and she turned and saw a creature crawling out from
behind one of the dumpsters. She pushed her back up against the wall.
It took her a moment to realize it was a man, a vagrant. He was white and
naked, his body vermiculate with leprous fissures, and his face sunblistered beyond
human recognition. Yet amid that grotesque distension, his eyes stood out: they were
cataracted with yellow fungus, they shown bright and idiot. The vagrant came forth.
His wattled ballsack slapped softly between his thighs.
Hello, he whispered.
Hello.
A yellow butterfly that had been tucked behind his ear suddenly took wing and
started flapping madly all around in the alcove.
Im Marv, the tramp whispered.
Hello Marv.
Im free, he said.
What are you free from?
Im Marv.
Okay, Marv, she said.
Were you in to see her?
Not exactly, she said.
Her baby didnt just die.
What do you mean?
She cut its arms off and threw it into the void. So that it could never climb
back up and end the world.
Are you the father, Marv?
She spent many years inside a hospital. Did she tell you that?
No.
Shes crazy. As crazy as you or I.
I sent her a letter.
She will reply. But shes crazy. She doesnt want an end to this.
An end to the world?
Bingo, said the vagrant.
Surely thats beyond her control. Some things are beyond anyones control.
You shouldnt have sent her that letter. She wont help us.
Who?
The vagrant turned his head and regarded her with all the patience of some
languorous saurian. The pleated skin of his throat swayed. The cataracted yellow eyes
saw through to some depth of her which she kept hidden from all else.
He smiled.
Do you know that angels and devils are just the same? Its a matter of
perspective.
Are you the father of her child, Marv?
Listen. Do you know the color green? No one knows it anymore. There was a
green tablet. Hermetica I think your people say. Writings of the old. The true
commandments were writ upon it.
How do you know her?
LISTEN the vagrant roared.
She fell silent. Her heart was racing.
Tabula Smaragdina. The alchemists understood little, but made magic with it.
The angels, they are either all dead or mad, they used the secrets to escape Hell and
inhabit the flesh, and they walked among you for a long time and spoke of much. So
you see the scriptures are all true.
Please tell me something I can understand, she whispered.
Turn your back to everything. Permit nothing but nothingness.
Please, she begged, but by then the vagrant had retreated to a far corner
where he was sobbing and laughing and starting to scream. A plume of yellow
butterflies rose from behind the dumpster and spread in grotesque dissipation. The
vagrant was clawing at his face with ragged filthy nails. She watched the butterflies,
feeling a mounting dread inside her breast, feeling it grow graver and graver still, until
it was all too much to bear, and so she left hurriedly, leaving the vagrant behind in his
cave where he screamed and screamed and screamed.

XXX
As a reparation for her earlier deceit, she met the boy with the black tooth once
more, and together they eloped for the day, going out in his woebegotten jalopy down
the road past Marvs, past desolate stretches of road and sand, until they met the
town proper. The first few buildings impended: the old aquarium with its fading blue
paint, the Marina Diner, the grinning plaster dolphin which served some garish herald
and for whom the town was a begrudging custodian: the boarded up houses, the
weedgrown yards and chainlink fences, the jewelers, the pawnshop, the barber and its
pole from another century.
They parked in a desolate lot in which the bumper sticker on a pickup truck
read EL INFIERNO ES REAL. Beyond was a wrought iron gate which let on to a garden
utterly choked with kudzu. A copper placard on the gate was turquoise with rustit
read something in Latin, she didnt know whatand the statue of an agonized man
was central to the garden, kneeling there dressed sadly in his mantle of kudzu. On a
stone bench, in a ballcap and denim outfit, sat sleeping an anonymous derelict. He
made no sound. They went past him, through the gate, and through the jungled
overgrowth where were nestled castoff longnecks and cigarette butts and tinkertoys
and rotting sneakers like the refuse of some unimaginable carnage.
Out into the town they came, the two of them feeling somewhat marooned in
this sudden civilization. The narrow cobbled streets were quiet and the lampposts
black and rusting. An old man was sitting beside the barber shop window and simply
staring. She could feel the incredible lassitude to which he had surrendered, the
resignation to forces unknown.
They passed him where he sat.
They were young, sex and vitality were there virtuesnever mind all else, leave
it to the endless tomorrowand she had almost wished to take the boy with the black
tooths hand as they passed the oldster, simply to spite him.
She felt dolorous and terrible. She wondered if in his brambled old nostrils he
could smell her flowering.
How many regrets would he then be informed of? She smiled to herself.
They entered a caf outside of which under a canopy stood wrought iron tables
spaced among planters full of crazy looking flowers. She ordered drinks for them. The
barista called her darling, and a kind of frothing coffee was spit into cups by an
antique machine.
Later, sitting outside under the canopy in the noontime shade, the boy with the
black tooth sniffed his drink.
What is it?
She took a sip. She shrugged.
Can I ask you something? the boy with the black tooth said.
Alright.
Where do you come from?
What?
I mean where do you come from that you ended up like this?
Like what?
Like how you are. Like peculiar.
You mean like how I dont want to go on with boys.
Thats just one part of it.
I think thats the only part that interests you.
Now look, said the boy with the black tooth.
Im looking.
It does bother me some, Ill allow.
Im sorry.
Well, he said, watching the deserted street. I guess thats as good as itll get.
What is?
That apology.
Is that all you wanted to hear?
That and a little piece about you is all.
Theres not much to know.
He didnt say anything.
What about you?
What about me what?
How about a little piece about you?
Theres not much to know either.
She smiled. You see? Were just alike.
Yeah, he said. A regular fit.
Towards dusk they were peeping into the ruinous reception area of the
aquarium. Everything was in disarray. Graffiti had spoiled the wallpaper images of
manatees and sea turtles in their submarine flight. And the semicircle reception desk
in its vacancy had become translated into a bartop strewn with bottles now drained
but for the last reeking dregs.
They turned away.
A jaundiced skyline was yielding up pink clouds. The sun was setting. The
whores came out as the streetlamps came on. They giggled and called out. An
amazonian black in pumps and a very fake blonde wig threatened to eat the meanest
pussy in town. They went past feeling flushed and timid. Dark clouds scrolled by and
the sky reeled into night.
They went down a cobbled avenue. There was no one about but the whores and
a few husked looking men. The centuried stones over which they passed looked blue
in the night, and so did the weeds and the dust which had aggregated in the gutters,
and to either side of the road the blind white streetlamps seemed moons coaxed down
from the sky and skewered upon long black spikes. The massing of their light diffused
overhead and screened the stars from the sky.
In civilization the only lights are earthbound, the eyes which see them are
blinded by their glamor. Only in the wilds, in the lonely haunted places, can the soul
be alone with the soul, and all cruel reality made revealed. She knew thisin an old
part of her mind, she knew thisbut she feared it too, and her fear gave way to
loathing, and she took the boy with the black tooths hand and began to run down the
avenue.
Breathless in the night, she turned to him, and smiled.
One of the whores called out, Sell it, honey!
After a while they had come before a low squat building with windows masked
by black tape, and they approached the front door, panting. She took the handle. All
at once there was music, and the music was louder than thought. She became deaf to
everything. She became numb. They were in a smoky and cavelike room. Overhead the
ceiling had been knocked out and the intestinal convolutions of ductwork laid bare.
Somewhere among the ducting were nestled strobe lights and the room fairly thrived
with their endless galvanizations. The room was dipped into shadow, it was dipped
into light. A baptism was taking place. And in the midst of these ablutionsgoing into
the lightshe felt reborn, and thengoing into the darkshe felt she had died, and
was deliciously free from sensation.
She rocked her hips and closed her eyes, clasping her hands together above her
head, and started to dance, and the boy with the black tooth danced too.

XXX
Her second period came toward the end of summer, and possessed once more
by that spirit of change and revolution, she ventured to the most forbidden part of the
islandthe oasis where at night the ruined man hunted deer. The day was blazing,
but upon the humus of the jungle floor lay dappled shadows wherein cool and spongy
carpets of moss were allowed to grow, and creepers which abhorred the sun, and pale
waxen shelves of fungus scalloped on the carcasses of fallen trees. It was silent here,
and that silence kept the place but for the rustling of small black birds who silently
massed on the branches like mourners in eternal vigil.
The pygmy deerfey and mythic to the islandmade themselves scarce, yet
somehow that desiccate ghoul was able to produce them all the same and make his
poultices. She had become more and more convinced of certain powers he possessed.
He must be a warlock, and the vivid and eldritch imaginings of children must have
credence.
Hot and uncomfortable, her bleeding stopped by a tampon from the general
store, she was standing at the threshold, the tightly bunched grouping of trees, and
was gazing into the hushed and secret sanctum within. She wanted to be naked. She
wanted to strip her clothes off and sweat and bleed without shame like an animal
but she could never allow her poise to falter. She could never allow her mask to slip.
In the wild secrecy of this garden she might find the closest thing to privacy as exists
in all the worlda restitution from the weirdness of life.
So she entered, going into the silence, under long gauzy cauls of grey moss and
primeval looking flowerchains. She was barefoot and didnt realize how badly the sand
had burned her feet until the moss began to cool them. Then she was seated on a log
and was tearing up clots of moss and with them leeching away the redness of her
solesa master apothecary already by the power of this place.
She swiveled her head to look up into the canopy. A black bird with black eyes
watched back. Long streamers of growth hanging from the gnarled and ancient tree
limbs were swaying like beards in a breeze. She stood and was looking around in the
slanted sunlight for the spoor of deer. There was nothing. The black bird took wing
and set the leaves to violently clashing. She watched it go in the graygreen shadows
until it was gone, and then went wandering without aim through the galleries.
There was a hallowedness to the jungle, an old quality untainted by the
progress of the world and its peoples. This must be an approximation of the first
garden, she decided. This must be Eden.
She passed a rotted hollow where termites were scurrying in and out of holes
like serfs fretting about a wooden castle. Their black bodies gleamed in the dimness.
Clouds of insects expanded in dizzied motes before hercaught in spectra in the
slatted sunlightand then subsided in the shadows beyond. The sweat had cooled on
her skin and she felt faintly chilled.
She soon had come into a curious glen where nothing stood save a black and
shriveled tree, the branches a spidery array, and all of them shorn of leaves. The trunk
was misshapen with cancerous wens. And nailed to that trunk, with tongues of sick
looking sap leaking from each point of puncture, were the ivory skulls of fauns, their
spines still draggling like beaded china tinkertoys. The split the nails had riven in the
skulls seemed elongate sockets for a third eye by which these fauns might have
glimpsed their own doom.
She came forward. The tree was sweet smelling. She entered the embrace of the
crooked limbs and put her hand out to feel a strange and stony skin. She came away
with the yellowish sweet sap on her fingers. The breeze came again, the spines swayed
and chimed a hollow music. The skulls grinned from their postings.
A sudden feeling of absence overtook her: the black birds would not enter this
glen, nor the insects which pervaded every corner of the jungle. Only this columnar
dark tree stood here, the long black roots perhaps reaching to a darker heart below all
things. The absence was of life, as though the tree was an altar, and the jungle and its
inhabitants gave it a wide and sacred berth.
She circled the altar and was observing its ornaments. The trees which
encircled the clearing were moving with unease, the leaves were murmuring, the
mossy veils whispering. All at once there came an awareness of another absence, and
then she saw it: a stillborn creatureof what exactly she could not have saidit was
too recent, too raw. It lay in a jellied bloody clump among the fungus where it had
been ejected from its mothers womb. She studied it, seeing past the placental filth
that caked it, seeing the pallid flesh, the scattered vascular system, the eyeballs yet
unformed. Already it was quaking slightly with the inward custodianship of maggots.
And she was sucking on her fingers, striving to taste in the sweetness of the sap
something deeper, a taste of mortality. She wanted to distill this moment in her
memory and she had no idea why.
Soon this clot of skin would transmute back into dirt as all things too. And was
it true that the earth accepted such rude offerings? How greedy the keeper of Hades
must be, how insatiable. Having sucked her fingers clean, she stood staring at her
outspread hands and reflecting on the insanity brought on by the blood between her
legs.
She left Eden shortly thereafter, going without further thought, the trees and
the altar and its skulls subsiding with distance into a dark arboreal gathering at the
edge of the island.

XXX
Its a hot one, said the radio man. Imagine that, kids. Hot hot hot.
She sat on the couch in a thin t-shirt, with her shorts balled up on the floor
and her panties somewhere among the shadows. The blinds had been shut and a
bright light around the edges burst to be let in. She spread her legs.
Her thighs were slick with sweat. Her buttocks left damp impressions on the
cushions.
I was drowning, said the woman in the radio advert. I couldnt make my
payments on time.
She moved her fingers, panting. The fan stirred the air without cooling it.
And heres a new sound with an old hit, said the radio man.
Oh God, she said.

XXX
The convoy traveled an imperial wood on the bank of a river: the trees large and
brooding, their leafless boughs jagged like stricken fingers. They went incognito in
order to avoid the local kings tariffs, which included the sudden and unprecedented
abduction of newborn babes. It was to this end that the usual carnival lunacy was
done away withthe lights, the music, the sensualityand instead the convoy wore
the pretense of solemn soothsayers and healers of God. For it was well known that the
King was close to God, even dangerously so, and rumored to be quite mad. At the
mouth of the river, where the water let out over a precipice, the end of the world could
be seen, and the Kings palace stood on that brink, its windows turned out toward the
abyss to gaze at the very face of God.
The convoy made every effort to avoid that palace, instead going among the
lesser holdings, eking a modest living from the gullible peasants who lived there. The
land was dangerous, the imperial eye watched closely.
They came upon an ancient silo one day, which housed a weapon of impossible
power now sheathed in rust. A temple had been erected around the ruins, and it too
was abandoned, the crumbling mortices webbed in vines and falling to pieces. The
giants balked like stupid animals and would not go near the place. The ear of one was
cut off to make an example of its insubordination. Then the rest came by the temple,
but they would not sleep that night, all of them slavering and worrying mindlessly. The
sound of their humungous breathing in those halls in the darkness at night was like a
haunting.
The prophet brought a lantern to the sacrilegious weapon in the silo. He
brandished it high to see it in fuller detail. He was awed by it. He had never seen
anything so like it before. Later, when he asked the roustabouts what year it was, he
was told a different answer by each.
Do you know what I reckon? he asked the blind man one day. What I reckon,
there are those among us who died afore.
Do you guess that your Lucile is here? asked the blind man.
Not unless this was Hell itself.
The blind man laughed insanely.
Hush that up, said the prophet.
Theres no Hell, said the blind man. Theres no death. Theres what you
realize, and what you dont yet realize.
On their fourth day camped at the temple, one of the dancers gave birth to a
boy-child, and the blind man shook his head to hear its shrieks, even as the prophet
kissed the forehead in blessing.
The name was John.
They left on the seventh day.
They performed sermons and staged healings in a dirty hamlet where the
degenerates who lived there rushed out to see the giants, all of them screaming
Nephalem! Nephalem! in joy and terror. There was a belltower in the hamlet, a
stubby prominence rising above the mounds and rotten sheds. No one kept itthat is,
no solitary person lived there, but different folk of the hamlet took turns each night
lighting the fires at the top and sleeping in its single bedroomand it altogether
seemed in its sad splendor to be a kind of holy site. It was given a wide berth by both
the habitations of the hamlet and the dirty paths trod by its inhabitants. The convoy
pitched their tents directly in its shadow. No one stopped them.
During their stay, the prophet saw the bell rung twice. Both times were in
response to some offense to the kings law.
The first time was in light of an illicit copulation between two lovers. The bell
was rung by a stripling lad with boils all over his back, who heaved at the cord,
grunting, and recoiled at the sound of brass exploding in his ears. The sound was
calamitous in the middle of that day which was quiet and dirty and by all accounts
innocuous. All the roustabouts turned their heads to see what was the matter. The
blind man was sitting with grim resolve on his face.
What could be so heinous about the sweet act of being with a woman? the
prophet wanted to know.
The king cannot abide the act of love, came the reply. He abhors the idea of
parenthood.
The lovers were lashed to a post to await the kings justicewhich came not
long after. Figures could be seen descending a hilltop into the woods in single file,
disappearing then emerging from among the trees like conjured forms from a dream:
pale lean and sickly looking monks dressed in florid red robes and wearing white
waxen masks with gaping eyeholes and mouths. They came forward in their single file
and said no word. They were answering the summons of the belltower with a light
tinkling of the bells they carried in their own hands. The hamlet gave them a
respectful berth, and so the convoy did by imitation.
The train of masks went by. The hems of the robes dragged in the mud.
The masks went to the lovers and untied them, and then bore them back away,
the sobbing man and the sobbing woman, into the dark woods in single file, ringing
their bells all the while like a procession of merrymakers.
No one said anything about the incident, and no one, so far as their neighbor
knew, dared guess at the fates of the lovers. But in their bunks for all the nights
thereafter, the members of the carnival dreamt of white waxen masks, and of the
warped eyeholes which looked stoven by wooden drills and which let onto a deeper
cranial abyss where the dim tolling of bells augured some ultimate horrible truth. The
prophet especially pondered the existence of such a God whose clergy were maudlin
freaks, whose kings practiced such arcane law.
The second ringing of the bell was by a weasel faced old man, who had
overheard the shrieking of the boy-child and poked his head into the dancers tent to
find its source. The dancer frantically tried to entice him, but he proved immune to all
charm.
The bell was rung. The babe was taken from the dancer to await the Kings
justice. The convoy was furiousbut impotent. They could do nothing to stop what
was coming.
Then the ringing of the bell was answered by the tripping of lighter, smaller
bells. The masks appeared, their robes heavy and bloodcolored in the setting of the
sun. The dancer was prostrate on the ground before them, blathering, saying, Dont
take him please. God, dont take him away from me.
The foremost of the masks went forward and collected the babe from its keeper,
taking it gently in the crook of his arm. Then the mask fell into rank with the others,
the dancer pleaded obscenely, and, all of them moving in perfect concert, ringing their
silver bells, the masks disappeared back into the brooding wood which had borne
them like so many happy red nightmares.
The carnival packed up and moved out that same day. The dancer was
disconsolate. She would not sleepneither would she eat or speak except to say that
death seemed sweeter now than all the wine, all the children. The roustabouts tried in
vain to reconcile her sorrow with other, brighter realities. Without John it was
hopeless. Some vital piece had been divested of her. A husk remained, a shape with
grief its only content.
She summoned the prophet one day.
He seated himself in the gloom of her trailer. He felt uneasy in the presence of
such human wreckage.
You say you been touched.
Yes maam.
You say you killed a girl one time.
Yes maam.
Its time you atoned.
Maam?
Do good by me. Bring him back to me.
He shook his head. It kindly dont work that way.
It do if I say it do.
I wish it were so.
Then youre a fuckin liar and a false prophet.
It aint what you can call on. The hand calls on you.
Bring him back to me. Or fore God youre a sinner.
He bowed his head. Yes maam.
The prophet went out into the woods to search for God. God was neither in the
scattered black branches of the trees nor in the red sun which looked huge and dim
and dying. The prophet began to suspect that whatever intellect had engendered this
world had long ago abandoned it, and now all that was left were ashes and the rising
wind. He was prophet of a senseless word, shepherd to souls just dumbly articulating
in the void. All things were forgotten, all worlds passed over.
The hand that makes is the hand that forgets. Even the conceiving mind dies,
and all creations thereof are left behind to squander existence itself.
The prophet wandered out of the woods, to the rivers edge. All manner of
detritus and salvage had been uncovered by the tide, now spread on the wild
embankments like a crazy kingdom of stuff unto itself: castle walls reduced to mossy
abutments and stubby blocks, and rusting auto husks rucked like great carapaces in
the mud, and entire buildings swallowed up by the cataclysm of ages past, drear and
hulking, poking up from the dross at lunatic angles like concrete colossi or the bones
of such beings. Cisterns and iron ducts let out upon the river, making a foul brown
putrilage of the very water, which chugged past sometimes bearing solemn men in
boats whose damnation seemed predestined and who neither looked at him nor raised
a hand in passing. He watched them go down this literal Styx to fates unknown. Some
of the men went by with halos of yellow butterflies around their heads, and yellow eyes
too. These seemed the most lost to him. He wondered at what things they had seen
that had driven them madand was that fate blissful or a worse yet kind of
damnation?
He crawled into the wreckage of a building in which the faint light of a fire could
be seen. He didnt find God inside but instead a mutant whose conjoined twin had
long ago died and now remained a black and necrotic vestige sprouting from his chest.
The rot had spread and the mutant was gangrenous, swaddled in rags. Despite the
awful stink, the prophet joined him at his fire. The mutant regarded him warily.
Im not afraid to die, he said.
You might be, said the prophet. If you knew what it meant.
Suppose you tell me then.
But the prophet shook his head. I dont know.
Isnt that just the way, said the mutant. All these clergymen say theyve got
the answer but the truth is they dont got squat. Its a wiser man can say I dont
know.
Its a wiser man, the prophet agreed.
Are you some kind of scholar?
No, said the prophet. Aint a scholar.
Then what?
He shrugged. Just am.
Isnt that just the way, said the mutant.
The prophet agreed that it was so.
As the mutant was sleeping that night, the prophet regarded him over the
flames: his twin, his dark Other, with its eyes swollen shut and its bloated face
blacker beyond all compare.
In the morning the visage was changedthe rot was paling, subsiding, the eyes
were open and rolling, and the limbs feebly articulating. Im alive, the mouth
whispered. Ive been lost and now Im found.
The mutant was astonished at this development. He told the prophet, You
must be a scion of the Lord himself.
I aint anything, said the prophet, and departed that same morning.
When he returned to the carnival, the air about the place was one of despair.
The roustabouts wouldnt enter the dancers trailer for fear of some curse, they said.
The prophet went inside. There were yellow butterflies everywhere and they wheeled
about her head in a halo. Her eyes had gone a filmy yellow too. She was smiling and
she was clasping her hands to her bare and stony womb.
Hes been returned to me, she sang out. Lord God hes been returned to me.

XXX
The boy with the black tooth sucked cola from a straw. It was hot despite the
cavelike dimness inside of Marvs and his glass beaded condensation.
Would you consider this a date? he asked.
No.
Then what do you call it?
Lunch, she said.
She peeled the waxpaper back from her hamburger. Grease pooled at the
bottom of the red plastic basket, thick and yellow. She smiled at him. She plucked a
french fry from the carton on which was depicted a fat mustached man and the
caption MARVS! below that.
Thats not Marv, you know, she said.
What?
I met him. He lives out in the back of this place, she said. He doesnt even
have teeth.
Look, said the boy with the black tooth. All Im saying is why not? This could
be a date. Its nice enough.
Its nice because its not a date, she said.
Is it because of me? Arent I good looking enough?
I think youre very handsome, she said.
Then what?
Then what, she repeated.
She raised the burger to her lips. The saturated bun poured grease. She looked
at him. He wore a sullen and inconsolable face.
Arent you going to eat? she asked.
Im not hungry.
Dont be like that, she said.
You play me, said the boy with the black tooth. You play me and I just go for
it.
You play yourself and blame it on me.
Well.
She shrugged. She bit into the hamburger and the grease came rilling down her
chin. She wiped her chin, giggling. The boy with the black tooth cracked a thin smile.
His tooth gleamed at her.
A strapping man with a crewcut came and filled their drinks from a pitcher. His
shirt was fitted to the contours of his muscles. His nametag read Hello! My name is
Edward.
She glanced at it.
Hey, she said.
Maam.
Youre not Edward.
Big Ed, he said. Not Little Ed.
He gestured to the hosts counter where Little Ed sat dozing with his massive
head propped up against a fist. She looked. She smiled. Big Ed smiled back, then
disappeared back into the murk beyond the red traffic light.
When she returned to her meal, the boy with the black tooths eyes were
smoldering.
What about him? he asked.
What about him?
Do you think hes good looking?
I think hes handsome.
Would you date him?
Absolutely not, she said.
He sank back into the fake upholstery of the booth and flung his arms wide.
I just dont get you, he said.
She smiled. Im really very simple.
Yeah yeah, he said.
The boy with the black tooth hunched over his meal with his elbows on the
table. He didnt touch his fried chicken. He stirred the ketchup with a french fry and
then let it set sideways into the gelatin, sinking to a deeper mooring at the bottom of
the fluted paper cup. His eyes sank too. He looked disconsolate.
Damn if Im not almost broke, he said.
You should spend more time working and less time trying to get a date.
Working, he sneered. Yeahmy job. The old mans got it in for me. I cant
stand it.
Well, you stand him up pretty regularly.
He looked at the blinded window, at nothing at all. Yeah.
You should strike out, become a highway robber. You could start right here.
He smiled out of the corner of his mouth. He shaped his thumb and index
finger into a gun and pointed it at her.
Yeah, he said. Alright, Big Ed. This is a stickup. Put the money in the bag or
Ill blow your goddamn brains out.
She giggled.
Id rob the Marv millions.
The whole vast estate, she said.
Id go out on a spree, go out all over the country. Whos gonna stop me?
Not the cops.
Hell no, he said. Not the cops. They dont give a shit about some two bit punk
with a bust tooth. They never did before.
Who then?
No one, thats who. Id settle down eventually. You know. Some east coast dig,
some big fuck you New England mansion. Far away from this shit fucking dump.
An ennui settled as the fantasy faded, heavy upon his shoulders. They fell to
silence.
They sat watching the interior gloom: the circulation of waiters and the folks
seated at their booths, the gentle flux of the jukebox lights. The boy with the black
tooth didnt touch his meal. Big Ed came by once more to refill their drinks and collect
their plates.
At one point they saw him out on the curb, sitting side by side with Little Ed
taking a smoke. They seemed strange permutations of the same soul.
After a while folk got up and started filtering out of the place. Only a few
regulars remainedold men and whores from over in town. They talked quietly at
their tables. The sun climbed down from its zenith into the west, where it began to
burn red. The jukebox played a quiet love ballad.
Big Ed came back around.
Did you want anything else?
Just the check, please.
He went to fetch it.
A crash came from the kitchen, the sound of pots and pans clamoring upon the
tiled floor. A voice hollered out.
Hellfire! someone shrieked.
The boy with the black tooth turned and looked. He leaped up from the booth.
Then she saw it too:
The enormous man was stumbling out of the kitchen into the red haze of the
traffic light with vagrant from behind the place perched on top of him. The vagrant
smiled. The vagrant raked filthy nails down the side of the enormous mans face.
The enormous man was screaming. His face hung in tatters. She saw the white
of his eye among flashes of fat and bone. She saw his tongue moving wetly through a
hole in his cheek. He pinwheeled his arms and hobbled from foot to foot in a gross
herky-jerky kind of dance. The blood was incredible.
Holy Jesus, said the boy with the black tooth.
Little Ed climbed onto a nearby table and tried to pry the slavering assailant
loose, but the vagrant palmed his face and sent him crashing back into the booth with
a shove. Glasses and kitchenware shattered in his wake. A fork with a shred of steak
still yet on its prongs clashed to the floor. Little Ed sprawled in the booth with his eyes
lolling and a jagged rip across his head welting blood.
God almighty, the enormous man moaned. His voice gurgled. Im sorry. Im
so sorry. Oh God.
Then the vagrant looked right at her, right through her. The yellow eyes seemed
not to see.
He tore the enormous mans shirt open and pushed his hand into the pale
doughy flesh beneath. The enormous man convulsed, then went rigid where he stood.
The vagrant dug around. He watched her. He retrieved his arm, sheathed in gore up to
the elbow. Ropes of entrails dangled from the clenched fist, puffy lobes the color of
gravy. They seemed to her in that moment of utter disbelief like sad balloon animals
stuffed full of shit.
A plate crashed somewhere. A woman fell to her knees howling in despair.
Big Ed came up behind the vagrant and hooked his forearm around his throat.
He pulled him free. The body of the enormous man thumped to the ground in a gaping
ruin. Big Ed hefted the vagrant into the air and then slammed him down on his back
with a mighty crack. There came a wild moment when nothing was certain. Then this
scene resolved into place:
The vagrant lay on the floor with limbs slack and blood pooling beneath his
skull. A sigh of expiration left his mouth.
The head was tilted to the side, toward her, and the yellow eyes still stared. The
smile on the face was one of rapture.

XXX
She stared up from the bottom of the bathtub. Her hair floated before her,
bubbles rose from her nostrils like prosaic organisms in an ancient sea. The ceiling
rippled. The light shimmered. She wondered if a person could drown themselves, if a
death by willpower was possible.
After a while she emerged gleaming with the water running off her skinny white
body. She patted herself dry with a towel. She did her hair up in yet another.
The day had donned with a kind of sterility: white clouds in a white sky, the
sun white and dazzling in their midst. The sand glowed beneath it. White gulls circled
above the sea, and the waves arced sharply to meet them, cresting in white foam. Her
fathers house seemed to exist in perfect oblivion in that light. The cracks around the
blinds and the front door blazed.
She went into the kitchen wrapped up in towels. The radio man said that Marv
and his attacker were pronounced dead on the scene.
And kids, thats why we dont go outside anymore, he said. Just another loco
day in loco USA.
He laughed crazily. He went on to talk about a magazine model in a swimsuit,
whose hips and whose tits, he said, were the stuff of Greek tragedies.
What a man would do to get his hands on her, he said. What a man would do
. . .
She opened the fridge and gazed at the things the boy with the black tooth had
lifted from the general store. She poured herself a glass of milk and drank it down in a
single greedy breath, feeling somehow more fertile for it, attractive the way that only
mothers can be.
Towards the afternoon, sitting in the living room, she braided grass and yellow
blossoms into a garland. Her father did not enter the house once. He sat in a ritual
manner in front of the cross. The blessed whiteness enfolded him, and among the
shapelessness of everything he seemed almost to float there above the sand. The cross
floated too.
She peeked between the blinds at him a few times, to make sure he still existed.
Early evening delivered the days first notes of colorstreaks of pink and gold
across the sky. She went out in that light down to the shore where her father sat
before the cross. She looped the garland around its neck. The gulls screamed
distantly.
Her father didnt speak and neither did she. For a while they passed the time in
silence.
Eventually he looked up at her and said, I cant get in touch with the family. I
cant get in touch with your uncle James.
I didnt know I had an uncle James.
Well, he said. You might not.
Whats happened?
The storm. The power lines are still down, maybe. Or who knows. The radio
man said the storm took the grid right off the grid. Whatever that means.
They watched the cross that was their only link to a world long forgotten. The
waves folded on the sea and the suns red light leered over the darkening water.
Then she said, Theyre both dead, you know.
The boys at the diner?
Yes.
Did you hear that on the radio?
I did. But daddy, I was there. I saw it happen.
Why in Gods name did you stick around?
I was there with a boy.
A boy, he said.
Yes.
Are you sure it wasnt the man from that house?
Daddy, she said sternly.
He shook his head and looked out across the sea.
I thought that the manager would have a message for me.
A message, said her father. Why?
I dont know.
He got up. The sand was blowing from his clothes in a skirling white apron. He
took her hand and made her look at him.
I dont want you to go back to that house.
Daddy.
Promise me.
Daddy, why?
I never wanted you here, he said. I never wanted you to come here.
I promise.

XXX
She returned to Eden, cooling her feet on the mossy carpets, breathing in deep
the antediluvian air kept by looming trees. It smelled damp and of green and fertile
things, it smelled faintly musty. It was early yet and all around the fronds were fretted
with drops of dew. Clouds of insects rose in gilden motes in the fans of new sunlight.
She was summoned by instinctknowing at heart that for all this fecundity
there stood in the gardens nexus a grim totem, auguring the total oblivion which is
the fate of all things, a blaspheme to the temple of fertilityand so she went deep
among the galleries, going past rows of watchful black birds and abutments of
limestone bearded with moss, and came finally before the altar of Eden.
The skulls grinned with weird permanency. The sockets let on to a dimness
where consciousness itself had gone to expire.
Now straying from the avuncular green smell of the garden and coming into the
altars ripe miasma, she rolled some sap onto her finger and sucked it clean. Then the
moments became as water rushing through a tunnel. She lost track of time. She could
not have told how long she stood there, but she gorged herself thoroughly, and was
standing against a black drop pinned with skulls and was watching two sisters grow
old together. Their skin grew papery and frail, it shed from their bones. Their skulls
went up to join the greater union. Behind a pulpit in the darkness stood a satyr, and
the souls of the sisters huddled naked and luminous beneath his gaze.
A gavel fell thrice.
And what do the defendants say, who split into two?
We were never one.
I never died.
Your harmonic convergence is lacking.
The court would have it known that the honorable judge Thurgood finds the
harmonic convergence of the defendants lacking.
I never died.
She never died.
This isnt my trial.
This isnt her trial.
Order order! This is a court and not some echo-whaifey.
The court would have it known that echo-whaifing is strictly forbidden.
Ive heard all I can stomach. The deciding of the outcome of this matter will be
conferred upon the pope himself.
The pope would have it known that he will not leave the Vatican until such
time as a papal throne is installed in the courthouse.
Very well. I hereby sentence you to await His Excellencys just arrival, confined
until such time in ultimate limbo.
The souls clung to each other and were as figures of torment in an artists
rendition. The satyrs eyes glowed hot, his marvelous genitalia was lightly downed. In
the silence that followed the skulls all gaped with a jurys muteness.
Meanwhile, beneath the stage, beneath the furnaces and the clockwork innards
that kept Odette and her murderers coming back night after night to repeat their
tragedy, sights beyond compare were taking place:
Gnomes lumpy and grotesque were lifting heaps of compost with pitchforks and
shucking them into bonfires. They danced around the flames in burntlooking
silhouette like mad pygmies, and on the horizon a crazy green moon waxed large.
On a cold and boreal plain on a winters day, the horns of the hunters sang out.
The salamandrine neck of a wyvern crept out from among the black spruce branches
of its nest. The beast furled its wings, and swung down into an icy green pool in an
explosion of water. The wings beneath the settling surface, the tail, the torsional body,
moved with utter grace. The wyverns nostrils breached and blasted air. On the plain
the hunters were circling, their breath was steaming. Their spears came out the other
side of a shaggy mutant red with gore.
This collected into a cataract of detail and was more than she could fit into her
eyes. She bent. She puked.
The demons of the altar of Eden danced back among the greater mlange of
skulls and branches and sweet sap smell. She waited a moment for her haunting to
subside. She felt she had slept a hundred years. She crushed the sleep from her eyes
with her knuckles. She blinked rapidly.
Recalling herself back from the jungle to her fathers house, she stopped to
perch upon a slab of limestone, standing in a sudden burst of sun at the edge of the
forest and letting the blades of light crucify her.

XXX
Jingle-and-clink went a series of lightbulbs, jingle-and-clink clink clink. They
were painted red and burning with mad red light. Thin winter steam crawled among
them where they depended from a wire, all of them huddled together, shivering. The
banner beneath which they hung read PALM READER, CLAIRVOYANT, PSYCHIC.
The crones tent loomed. She was in a dream, in a gravel lot bounded in all
directions by darkness. It was very cold and no moon hung overhead, nor stars. A low
wind was moaning somewhere in the dark waste without.
Jingle-and-clink, jingle-and-clink
She watched her breath rise in a pale vapor. She wrapped her arms around
herself and went forward, into the solitary radium of red light in this otherwise dismal
scene.
The delivery boy was standing by the entrance flaps, so still and so quiet, so a
part of the scenery, the redness, that she hadnt noticed him at first. His face was
mute. He didnt look at her.
Marvs dead, she told him. He was killed. They both were.
But he didnt seem to hear. He reached sideways and grabbed a flap of canvas
and pulled it aside for her.
Madame.
She went on into the foyer and the flap fell closed behind her. Strings of little
red lights winked all around. The lightplay was vertiginous, now dark, and now red,
each successive wink seeming to galvanize the room in renewed perspective. Now her
shadow stood against one wall, now the other. She went to the back of the foyer and
flung the curtains wide, looking into the hole in the canvas beyond, and then with
strange dream instinct was crawling within, into the maw, the curtains drawing shut
behind her, and was borne aloft in the dark dumb void that was the crones domain.
She was drifting, whether walking or floating she couldnt tell. She traversed the
void, the black ether. It was silent. All things here were mysterious and unknown. All
secrets were here, yet masked in dark plumbing depths. What consort of what mad
God could call this place home? How by all the powers of scripture and the lands of
promise had that one armed mistress brought such a dark carnival into being?
What pact had been made and what was the price?
She moved in this womb, secreted in her dream but for the old eyes that
watched her. A vision was forming ahead of her, in a rictus of red light. She went to it,
the vision gaining form and solidarityof a giant seated on a stone. She recognized
him, his black cassock, and the driftwood cross roped to his back. Seated mightily
upon the ancient stone, he dwarfed her utterly. His eyes looked black in the red light,
and his skin looked bronze.
I know you.
He peered down at her. Indeed?
"You were talking to that old monster. You were reading a tablet."
"Hermetica," said the crossbearer. "We found the God within the tablet and
became informed of our flawed design. There can be no perfect being, not even by the
God's own laws. So we led ourselves to the Hell within, to be punished for the crime of
being."
Are you looking for her too?
"I am searching for the God, so that he might unmake his failed creation and
put this weary servant to rest at long last."
Oh.
Would you seek him too?
She shook her head. I just want to go home.
"Then go," said the crossbearer. "I have nothing. I am nothing."
She heard melancholy and despair in his gigantic voice. She peered at him, and
the crossbearer seemed content to merely peer back at her. There came in that surreal
moment the thumping of his mighty heart.
Then she went away from him, and he merged back into the dark, the light
fading and he dimming, the sound of his humungous breathing subsiding into ancient
silence. She was off into the illimitable gulf. She was moving indeterminately, thinking
no thought but this one: darkness and despair. She could be shown wrong things
here. She would be touched by one who was touched by God. Somehow she took
comfort from that, from the truth of this place where all the world else was deceit.
Here was a realness, and age proven sorrows. They did not lie to her.
She was a dream within the greater dream, and she was sensing other
dreamers all around her, other sojourners, some of them burnt out and others bright
and striving like herself, and all of them parallel, all of them in dreams of their own.
She understood this only with a kind of gut knowingwith an animal awareness of
the worlds mysticism. In a far region in the back of her skull she could feel them
flitting like minnows, and then passing beyond her senses, leaving her alone the
starkness of the void, in the dim coldness.
In time came a soundthe swinging of chains, the creaking of taut leverage. A
figure just adumbrate hung in red light ahead, swinging gently back and forth. She
went to it, the figure resolving, rising half-shadowed from the light.
It was the body of a man. Barbed hooks had been put through his shoulders
and a collar fastened around his neck, and these transfixed to a higher point above.
The chains rustled. The body swayed, its shadow lurching.
The torso was tacked open, the ribs and sternum splayed. A bucket at the
mans feet contained his guts. After checking her trepidation, she came closer, peering
into the human recess open before her, and spied a stranger sight yet: within the
chest cavity, upon the sprung cage of the ribs, had been stenciled an intricate arcane
script, ciphers and glyphs and odd numerals she did not recognize. There was no
guessing in what rite or for what spell this man had been so spent.
Eventually, puzzling and troubled, she turned away. As she went from the
hanging man, he subsided back into the nothing, the darkness which enfolded all
things here like some vast protoplasmic nightsea bent on devouring the light itself.
She would be allowed to glimpse images for but moments through the skeins of that
sea, and then they would be enfolded, lost in the deeps, and she among them lost
herself, separated by untold fathoms. All these things were loosed in time and before-
time, caught and prismed in the penumbral tide, refracted through the centuries. She
was seeing what might bewhat might never bethings sorrowed by their sheer
ancientness. She was seeing shadows and ghosts.
She was seeing a mother in the gory throes of labor. The mother screamed, her
thighs spread, her cunt opened like some blood-red bivalve and the head of a child
crowned from the recesses, the folds of the human void.
She was seeing an angel gone mad from having seen the face of God. He was
laughing, he was sobbing, moaning, screaming.
Then a flame was quaking within the panes of a dismal lantern. The curtains of
red canvas appeared all around. The crone, one armed and grotesque, gestured for her
to sit. She came forward. She sat.
You said you would see me again.
The crone nodded.
"You didn't tell me what you did to your baby."
"He's not dead."
"You didn't tell me you spent time in a hospital."
"It wasn't pertinent."
"What's pertinent?"
"Relevant. Important."
"What's important?"
"Are you asking me what important is, or what's important?"
"I'm asking you."
The crone chuckled to herself. The hairs on the slack skin of her throat stood
out like silver pins. Then, all at onceas though it had been the case for quite some
timeshe was in the middle of a ceaseless monologue, spewing it forth without
apparent effort.
The crone was speaking in the language of dreams, using words which were
impossible to understand but which lingered long after waking, and she was
describing the circular nature of fate and the utter senselessness of it: the rebirth of
the cosmos, the stars where stars had burned before, the darkness where only
darkness had been, and God shaken from death to live and die in madness all over
again, his children doomed by their very genesis: she was describing several aspects of
fate in particular: the Madonna, the mother of the God: the archangel who was his left
hand: the king who was his right hand: a three-eyed seeress upon whom God had
sired a child, an anti-God, to end his torment and his creations: the consort, the
queen of Gomorra and Sodom and older places, places of greater decadence yet, who
lay with these aspects each in their turn and eased the suffering of their stations: and
a color of sublime lunacy, the color yellow, the Devil of the cosmos. She spoke of ages
medieval and older still, mythic times of fable and horror. Lastly she spoke of God, and
in grave tones.
God is dead, she said.
Nothing truly dies, the crone said very quietly.
He hates us all.
He is a scarred soul. Have some pity.
She felt suddenly resentful. Why should I pity anyone?
Because pitilessness and emptiness are paths to the Devil.
I dont know God, she said. I dont know the Devil. I dont care.
No, said the crone sadly.
Further indignant, bristling at the vagaries of this old shrew, she said, Why did
you even make me come here?
To this the crone could only attest that the world was the Ouroboros, the worm
that eats itself, and that the circle is the cruelest shape imaginable. Finally, she said,
Ive armed you with this knowledge now, and so armed you might find the strength to
break circles.
I doubt it, she said. I dont even know what youre saying.
No, said the crone. But I must try after all. Its the only thing keeping me.
The hooded and oracular eyes seemed suddenly immensely lost, the features of
the face not stoic but sorrowed.
There were leaves scudding in an autumn wind, and the sun in a sky of
transparent blue, growing smaller now, paler, showing through a membrane of cloud
from an impossible distance. The light could no longer reach, the world was dimming.
She reached for it, she reached for the crone and her words that she could no longer
hear and which were rising in vaporous curlicues of pink smoke from her mouth. Her
hand closed on empty space, on silence and deafness, and slowly she began to die as
the world died. A cold and foamy surf seized her. It produced her from its silver
spume, and receded and left her on the living room couch to lie there in sleep like a
peaceful drown victim.

XXX
I doubt your daddy would approve, said the ruined man.
I dont care, she said. He doesnt know what I know.
And what do you know?
Thats just it, she said. Im not certain anymore. There used to be something,
a dream or something. An idea of how things are. But now I dont know anymore. The
more I find out, the less I know.
You overthink, said the ruined man. Its your age. Youre red hot, ready to
burst. Youre changing. So your mind is racing with the possibilities.
When does it stop?
It doesnt. Not for you. You were always this way.
Im always changing?
You were always beyond salvation.
Thats nonsense, she said, but she was scared of her becoming.
Everything is, darling. Did you think there was something more? Did you think
you were something more?
No, its just the opposite. I never wanted to be anything at all.
Well here you are. Isnt it horrifying.
Were you ever scared?
Scared?
Yes. Scared.
Of what?
Of anything at all.
I was never scared.
I think you were, once. Of losing everything.
Everything was always lost. Ive always been this way.
But you were scared, when you knew you had to lose it. When you killed him.
He didnt say anything.
She reached out and touched him in the darkness, the soft and hairless
dewlaps on the back of his scrawny neck. She hiked her skirt up. She was flowering
before him. She had never felt more full of mordant purpose than on this night:
pregnant with the culmination of all things in her life, dreams and portents, hollow
feelings, and sudden eruptions within her body.
Outside the sea was moving, heaving, and the moon was occluded and the
night utter black.

XXX
Tom, swelling in the diaphragm, blacking in the face, floundered through the
small space of his trailer. He was wheezing. The lava lamp and the corner table on
which it had stood lay toppled on the floor of the den, among other debris left in his
wake. He opened up drawers and pillaged through plastic bags of herbs, hash,
desiccate liver colored mushrooms. The drawers went crashing at his feet and their
contents sprawling. He tried imbibing but could not swallow. His eyes were bugging.
He went careening into the bedroom, windmilling his arms, and the curtain ripped
from its rings to drape upon him like a funereal shroud.
In the scene preceding this, he had dreamed a dream of a tabernacle washed up
on the beach, in which was contained the face of God rendered across an endless sea
of dust. He awoke feeling at first bizarre, then terrified, then quite physically alarmed,
for he had started violently and suddenly as though in an attempt to expel some
foreign body. The tabernacles image was huge inside of him, he was brimming with it,
and he swelled exponentially the more he struggled. He was a bloated orb now,
choking on his tongue.
They would classify him a phenomenon. They would write about him in medical
journals. His girlfriend, a forty-two year old mother of three named Jeanette, would
attend his funeral sobbing and thereafter tender the beginnings of a divorce. Let it not
be said that he never did good.
Wearing the curtain over his face, his breathing slowing now, Tom began to die.

XXX
On the day of the yellow butterfly, she felt close to emptiness. Recent events
had numbed her to a point that she wondered if anything was left insideand would
she then be able to withdraw entirely? Would anything remain? Would a black hole
exist where before had stood a girl? She wanted nothing more than to disappear
entirely inside herselfbut she didnt just want itrather she was gravitating toward
that state, naturally, and paradoxically. Whether sickness or despair, the outcome
would be the same regardless.
When the day dawned, she was dreaming, and she wasnt sure that she ever
stopped. The boy with the black tooth was there, and a dazzling midday sun. They sat
together on a concrete block at the edge of the lot, beneath a sky boundless and
strange.
A totemic looking sign to their right was punched through with holes and hung
with tin cans like crude ornaments. The sign read SCENIC OVERLOOK. Beyond could
be seen the paradise so named: a wasteland, bone pale in the sun, a sandy gut
between two dunes which led directly to the sea, strewn with weeds brittle and grey
and tiny fragmented shells toothe vessels of things from deeper regions now
shriveled into dust. Milk and honey abounded here for the disconsolate, for the vice
ridden and the lost. Even in sun such as this could demons walk and hearts break.
The boy with the black tooth was taking drinks from a jug in which rotting
chunks of matter swirled in a vile fluid.
Fired? she asked.
Fired, he said. Unless I show up to every shift here on out. The old mans got
it in for me.
Should you be working right now?
You bet, he said, winking.
He passed her the jug and she peered down into it. Something breached the
surface and bobbed there momentarily, and then dipped below and vanished into the
oily brown alchemy of the drink. She took a whiff. She screwed up her face.
Whats in it?
Good shit.
She drank. Her guts burned, her head swam. She handed the jug back over.
What do you remember about before? the boy with the black tooth asked
suddenly.
Before what?
Before the storm.
Theres always a storm, she said.
Im talking about this one. Im talking the big one.
I dont know what youre asking.
The radio man said there was a storm. Said it was like it was in scripture
times. Were all thats left here, he says.
Uncle John, she murmured.
What?
What does your friend Tom say about it?
Hell, he said. My friend Toms dead.
Oh.
Yeah. Well.
They sat passing the jug. The boy with the black tooth gave her the last sip.
Fleshy globs floated up against her lips and her head came off corkscrewing along
metal threads and went up and drifted and swayed fatly above her body. A flame in
her brain and a sudden expansion of hot air was buoying her perceptions. She felt
detached, and a little bit free.
She sat there enjoying the sensation and the pleasant vibrations in her body.
In this exalted state she was made witness to the sight of a diminutive shape
which was weaving through the air toward her, coming closer, now closer, seeming to
coalesce out of wayward strands of sunlight, and becoming a yellow butterfly. She
blinked once and it was enormously close. She blinked again and it was gone.
Now she became aware of a voice. It was the boy with the black tooth.
What?
I said do you believe in an apocalypse? Like the Rapture.
Arent you philosophical today.
Shit, he said, laughing. Thats Tom for you.
Maybe youre haunted.
Maybe I am.
Oh well, she said, and began to fall back into a trance, back asleep.
When she woke they were in his car and she thought they must have been
flying. There was nothing around outside but the sky and the sun which seemed
nearer than she thought possible. The sky was red. The sky was bleeding. At some
point she was puking on the side of the road. Then they were driving again.
Did you see the butterfly? she said.
What?
Then he turned to her, grinning, and said, Its a good look.
She felt behind her ear. There was a yellow butterfly nestled there, which,
disturbed, took wing and started caroming around inside the car. She watched the
huge wings in motion with a growing sense of discomfort. The boy with the black tooth
rolled down his window, and the butterfly was sucked out into the vacuum beyond,
whirling brokenly in the vortices left in the wake of the car. She was shivering.
She wouldnt let him into her fathers house when they arrived, and the boy
with the black tooth went away dejected. Then she called out.
I do believe in an apocalypse. I believe in storms. I think theres one coming.
I dont understand, he said.
I dont either.
He was holding her and she was shaking in his arms. Let me help you, he
said.
But she refused him.
So the boy with the black tooth kissed her forehead, and then departed, and
was borne back away into the night by the flaring red bursts of his taillights.

XXX
The waves crashed. The water swirled around her legs with tracings of white
foam, and a loop of seaweed caught on her ankle. She stood without fear and the sea
didnt fear her. They were both bottomless, in their way. She looked out and wondered
what distance she would have to go for the ground to drop out from under her. She
went that distance, floating for a while.
A gull bobbed on the beach.
When she came stumbling back ashore, she knelt in the sand and puked. The
tide took away the mess and she sat with her legs folded beneath her and an arm
across her belly.
She was very scared and very anxious. She didnt know who was left who she
could talk to. She had alienated all people, made herself a remote and glacial satellite,
and soon she would be nothing.


XXX
Her father knocked on the bathroom door, then let himself in. He closed the
door behind him and stood looking down at her in the bathtub. With her hair damp
and clinging to her skull and the flesh around her eyes dark with sickness, she
seemed a muse of great tragedy: a creature to inspire both passion and tremendous
horror.
She looked up at him.
The man from that house came by, he said. I told him you werent in just
now.
I dont want to see him, daddy, she said.
Hes threatened to come back.
Then tell him Im gone for good. Say I left. I dont want to see him.
Her father sat on the edge of the tub. He says you have something of his.
She turned her head away. I dontnot like he says. Hes just trying to scare
you.
You went back to that house.
Yes, daddy. Im sorry.
You promised.
Im sorry.
What did you steal from him?
Daddy, she pleaded.
But his hand flashed out and gripped her jaw. He wrenched her head around to
look at him. She could see a fierceness emerging from those barren grey eyes.
Tell me, he said.
Tell you what?
Tell me.
She glared. I fucked him, she said.
What?
I fucked him, daddy. Is that what you wanted to hear? I fucked him, daddy, I
fucked him, I fucked him, and I cant explain to you why, because youd never
understand it, because youre just a nothing in all of this. Do you know that? Youre a
nothing. Even if you are my daddy. I fucked him, because I dont know why.
As she spoke, she could feel a sensation in her throat, the crawling of the
despair, and she began to sob in the cooling water of the bathtub.
Then something strange happened, and a smile touched the corners of his
mouth. Is that all, darling? he said.
She blinked up at him. What?
The end is the beginning, he said. This is a beginning. Weve been blessed.
Daddy, no.
It can be like how it was supposed to be.
Please.
But the spirit was already receding from his eyesand, hunched at the edge of
the bathtub, the final threshold of his sorry existence gave way. He became a husk
cast from the kiln of Gods fire, now cooled of all heat and empty inside. He coiled his
fingers behind her ear. His smile lingered vapidly.
Well call him Michael, he said.

XXX
In the bathtub, she was too tired to cry. She held the razor in her hand. She
moved it across one wrist, then the other. It hurt. She liked that aspect of it.
The water was warm and she was drowsy. The water was red.
She closed her eyes, and slept.
In her sleep, in her dream, she opened a door and stepped through it. She
found herself in a meadow in which nothing existed save the color yellow: yellow sky
and yellow light, yellow butterflies flitting on the air, and yellow flowers at her feet that
spread flatly in all directions, until, in narrowing perspective, they seemed to join with
the sky in perfect yellowness.
She dug her toes in beneath the flowers, turning up clots of yellow roots and
yellow dirt. She spread her fingers in front of her face. She was amazed to find her
wrists opened, her pulse quickening in the yellow arteries in their beds of flesh and
sinew.
Here was a halfworld between the movements of time and the moments in-
between. Every second seemed carried to the infinite. When she laid herself out
beneath the sky and watched, nothing happened: no exchange of lightthere was no
sun, no moonand no reeling of the yellow vault. She held her breath and her lungs
sustained her. Would that death could be so halting, so still, she lamented.
Vexed by the stasis of her environ, she wandered. She couldnt decide if this
was an outrage, a robbery of her right to die, or a mercy. Her thoughts came sluggish.
She could think no true thought but that of yellow certaintythat things were indeed
yellowthe sky, the flowers, the butterfliesand that she was too, and that nothing
else remainedno memories, no words but those in her head that were fleeting. She
had forgotten how to read. She had forgotten how to speak. She said Yes and it was
good. She said No and it was coming back to her. She said I hate you daddy I hate
you and it was like reading from a script, because the lines had no meaning, there
was no face she could recall who they were meant for.
She said the word Door and was turning around looking for the door through
which shed come, but found that it had vanished into the stuff of air. And would she
have wanted to step back through to the other side? Would she dare return to that
world and its slow cascade of time and all the horrors associated? Here was simplicity,
an apex of one thing and one thing onlyof yellowof an emotionand it was a
manageable thought. Nothing was nuanced here, there was no adversity.
Yet still the thought of a door, a way out. . . .
She couldnt think to make up her mind and it was frustrating her, so she
walked for a while to gather her bearings. She was watching the butterflies go in the
air before her, lurching and caroming grossly about. They were everywhere. They
seemed horrid to her, weird monsters, with their spiraled proboscises and gigantic
wings. She imagined them going forth across the world trailing yellow pollen like
sleepdust from their wings, spreading this garden, proliferating it, until it overcame all
else, all opposition, all dreams.
It wasnt until one of them settled on her and she felt its legs on her bare skin
that she realized she was naked. She shooed the butterfly away. She stood looking
down the lengths of her sparse white legs, then bringing her gaze up her thighs, her
sex, her navel. She studied the graceful arcs of her ribs and her small pert tits. Just
dimly in her mind came an imageof a gaunt blackeyed beauty reflected in a
bathroom mirror. She touched the sharp angles of her cheeks, smiling a little at the
memory.
In search of more such images salvaged from the foggy ruin of her mind, she
went off again.
She must have made progress in some direction, because in time a new sight
appeared: a ring of stones and a garden of slender trees contained within. It was a
pleasant sight, so she went to it. She sat on a stone. She felt pervaded by the peace of
this place that seemed somehow the nexus of the whole vast plane of flowers. She shut
her eyes. She was unburdened.
Contained also within the garden, she did not know, she could never have
known, was yet a second thing besides the trees: a serpent, a worm fallen from
Heavenand nevermore was there a Heavenwhich was coming toward her now in
the shape of a man.
I am manifest, he said, grinning.
She opened her eyes to look at him.
He looked like a puckered and elfin grandfather his age had so thoroughly
shrunken him, and his eyes hung in big yellow blind sacks over the pouched flesh
beneath the sockets. He sat down on a stone beside her with a jaunty little hop. He
clutched his hands atop his knees.
He was wearing raggedy garments, odd looking garments of pale yellow that
seemed to reflect a faded nobility, a decaying pomp. He was wearing round pantaloons
and toeless rotting silk boots from which his clawed feet issued. His tunic was many
sizes too big and sewn together from bolts of different shades of yellow cloth.
He seemed rather silly: a deific gremlin in a pantheon of tricksters.
She giggled.
He giggled too, and then began to laugh more earnestly, laughing harder still,
until he was ultimately regaling her with absurd howls of laughter, and she was
laughing with him.
Who? she asked.
Who do you think? This is my garden.
Where?
But the man in yellow shook his head.
I want to think better, she said.
You want to think less, said the man in yellow. Think less. Thats the way.
No, she said.
Yes.
Yes, she said.
The man in yellow was looking her over. He did not blink.
She felt suddenly embarrassed of her nakedness, squeezing her thighs together,
bringing an arm up to cover her breasts. Dont look, she said.
Im blind.
No youre not.
He smiled, the lips peeling back from the ancient yellow teeth.
Do you know the definition of blindness? he said.
Definition.
Of blind.
Definition, she said, and began to cry, so aware was she of her own idiocy.
Dont cry, said the man in yellow. Think less.
She was sniffing back tears and snot. Think less, she said.
Blindness isnt bad. Deafness neither. Everyone is idiot, everyone dumb.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand. She smiled.
Now show me.
She lowered her arm and showed him her pussy, spreading her legs shyly. The
man in yellow leered openly. He smacked his lips.
Would you like to know something? he asked
Yes.
I cant stand the others. They killed me. So they buried me in my garden. Im
lonely. I want to play. I want to play with you.
She smiled dreamily.
The truth, he said.
Yes, she said.
Stay with me in a beautiful place.
Yes.
He held up one gnarled finger. First game: a favor. You scratch my back.
He was pulling his tunic over his head and getting up and lying down on his
belly on the stones away from her.
She looked.
His back, now naked to her, was fruiting with several huge red blisters. Not
only did they serve counterpoint to the completeness of the yellow that surrounded
them, but, looking at them, she sensed they had pained him enormously for a long
time. He even seemed sored by the mere weight of her gaze as it swept over each these
plump pus-laden fruits. They tautened the skin to translucenceand through that
aggravated membrane could be seen the thick viscous contents, fairly begging to be
squirted free. They invited her to give them release. So she got up, swinging one leg
over him, and straddled the man in yellows back. The lowest notch of his spine
bumped comfortably against her pussy. She placed her palms on his back. The man in
yellow cooed softly. She put her hands around one of the pustulesit was fat enough
that it necessitated the use of both handsand squeezed with a gentle firm pressure.
The pustule gave easily, a thick cheesy pus came spurting forth.
Oh yes yes yes, crooned the man in yellow.
She was smiling her dreamy smile.
Rid me of these evils, he said. Red is the enemy.
Red is the enemy, she said.
Red is the enemy.
She got to work on another. Her fingers were dripping clots of pus. The man in
yellow shivered and moaned at her ministrations. The blisters all gave as easily as the
first. Sometimes they let out with an audible gasp as the pressure released.
Red is the enemy.
Red is the enemy.
She became wet. The man in yellow was moaning. She smiled. She was losing
herself in the bliss, in each violent eruption, the letting of the curded junk.
Eventually the feeling crested, and then subsided. The man in yellow looked
back at her. His huge blind eyes werent blind at all, but saw something she didnt
want to see. She became suddenly aware of the absurdity of everything. The man in
yellow began to laugh. She looked at herself. Her arms were sheathed to the elbow in
pus. She began to scream.

XXX
Resuscitated in the same moment as she, the sun came burning redly back to
life, rising heraldic from the eastern cusp of the world to mount a sky of imperial
violet.
Her father sat erect on the edge of his bed as he had for days. His shirt and his
pants were brown from his gory work. A yellow fungus had begun to collect under his
fingernails, and inside his ears, and yellow butterflies were crawling about on the
ceiling above him, settling on his shoulders, their wings whispering just faintly.
In the living room, she was beginning to stir awake.
The colors of the light bled together in her eyes, so that she seemed to be
looking up from underwater. She moved her head. The pain was intense. She looked
out across the living room with a sense of extreme vertigo. She saw a butterfly making
dizzied rounds in the bleeding light. There was a butterfly on her chest too, opening
and closing its wings, but it was up and weaving away through the air before she
could focus.
She propped herself up on her elbows. The red light that filled the house gave
the impression of a fever dream. She observed her wrists, the rude stitching, the way
the flesh seemed swollen and black and dead. Her arms felt leaden.
In a way, when her thoughts returned to her, she thought she had succeeded
her goal: that she had come back a revenant, a queer golem cobbled from the bones
and skin of this poor girl, unable to feel, bulwarked against the agonies of the world
and the pain of conscious being. But memories came with the thoughtsand she
remembered, and was no more a revenant but a dumb child with nothing for her
efforts but the sutures in her arms.
She felt foolish.
When at last she rose, wrapped in a quilt, she felt extremely dizzy, and
extremely fevered, and the floor beneath her feet was colder than she had anticipated,
so she promptly fell back down on the couch and started shivering. The shivering
became compulsory and she wondered if by her mere rising she had been sent back to
the threshold of deathbut she didnt die, unless death were an unending series of
stops and starts. She thought it was just her luck that misery should be visited
without the promise of black finality. She smiled a little at her own callousness. With
that resuscitation of her humor, she got back up, and this time remained standing.
She went to the threshold of her fathers bedroom, into which a small number of
butterflies were syphoning, and stood peering inside.
He was sitting erect on his bed. He did not turn to greet her, or otherwise
acknowledge her presence, but she saw the brown blood which had soaked his clothes
utterly. And she saw the halo he wore, and the fungus which had hollowed him. She
recognized these primal signs, this awful color.
Daddy, she said.
He said nothing.
Daddy. Im alive.
Michael, her father said.
She let her gaze slip from him, and then let go of something deep inside.
She went into the kitchen, sitting down at the table, and tried to flex her
tendons, feeling their sluggishness beneath the skin, feeling the pain. She tried to turn
the radio dial but her fingers could not grip. She took it between her wrists and slowly
revolved the dial. The radio turned on, and the long keening whine of a transmission
began, followed by static, and then followed by the unmistakable voice of the radio
man. He was far away yet, so she twisted the dial back a notch. Then he was there,
inside the kitchen.
Welcome back, kids, said the radio man. Welcome back. Were always here,
arent we? Rain or shine, doom and gloom. Were always here goddamnit. Lets shake
those blues with something that really kicks.

XXX
God almighty, said the boy with the black tooth when he saw her wrists.
Do you think it makes me look pretty? she asked.
Hell, he said. Dont make jokes like that.
I wasnt joking.
Well, just dont.
He didnt say much more about it and neither did he look at her, despite her
best efforts to make herself appealing. She was dressed in only a black string top and
a black sarong tied about the waist, and in the blazing afternoon light could be seen
distinctly her sparse white thighs through the sheer fabric, and the cleft of her cunt.
The boy with the black tooth would not look.
They were standing in the shadow of the gas station roof listening to the syphon
of the pump. The boy with the black tooth leaned against his car. A cigarette dangled
from the corner of his mouth and he didnt seem to pay it mind. He let the smoke
trickle in a stream from the tip.
Do I scare you? she asked.
Thats not it, exactly.
But you dont want me anymore.
Hell, he said. Thats not it either. I just dont have a good feeling about you
and me, is all. I dont have a good feeling about where youre headed.
She smiled sadly. She touched his arm and said, Nothings very good in the
world.
Well, he said. Thats you.
Will you go somewhere with me? I want to show you something.
Where?
I wont tell you.
He eyed her dubiously.
She bit her lip.
It was dark when they arrived at Eden. The shadows of the world had become
long and deep, the moon boldly and whitely presiding over the dark morass of the
trees, and a wind was setting everything to motionthe ancient limbs moaning,
creaking, and the flags of moss swaying just gently.
The garden exuded a sadness deep and beautiful tonight.
The boy with the black tooth was sitting on the hood of his car watching her.
His headlamps made twinned circles on the threshold of trees. She stood in that light,
her eyes were closed, her head was back, and her hips swiveled and dipped lightly,
rocking, swaying. She danced, and her shadow was cast hugely behind her. He was
fixated. She opened her eyes. His found hers. She beckoned, turning sideways, and
slipped between the trees, into the dark.
She took him to the altar of Eden, where the skulls of fauns were fixed with
nails, and cancerous growths bellied out like bladders or things otherwise impregnate
with all the pus and vileness of the world. He flicked a flashlight on. He produced the
switchblade when she asked for it and handed it to her. She unzipped one of the
cancers. Like an eye suddenly sliced, the cancer began to weep a curded and rancid
yellow sap, cloudy with discoloration. The smell was sweet. The boy with the black
tooth was at once assaulted by sensationsrepulsed at first by this horrid letting, but
then, oddly, against better judgment, compelled by the sweet smell on the air. He was
shaken further when she dropped to her knees like a supplicant and began to suckle
at the cancerbut being no stranger to certain debaucheries, and unwilling to
surrender his sense of adventure in the face of fear, he fell in beside her.
His urge became dire. A fever overtook him. He devoted himself fully, sucking
the pus from the wound and swallowing with crazed need. There was a spell in the
night, a compulsion, which emanated from the altar and from the skulls that grinned
mirthlessly from their black postings. It enchanted these two youths to mindless
subservience, suckling as though upon the breast of darkness itself. The stars were
brought down to hang on ancient limbs like beads of cold and flaming dewand a
cosmic wind swept down among the darkened shapes of trees, bringing with it vortices
of nebular dust and fulminating violet gases.
The heart of all things belies yet another heart, a darker chamber in a
succession of dark chambers, and there are those in Hell who call it Heaven, who
understand that there are darker places still, further descents to be madeso say the
watchers between the trees who observe the children in the forest at night. And lo!
They are watching us all! When you allow yourself to lose yourself, they are watching
us all. They are dark between the trees, dark like owls, and their chameleon eyes are
bright and golden. Let not the heart be burdened by these horrors of the outer limits,
for upon seeing themeven having dreamed to dream of themthe mind sanctions a
part of itself for the containment of the memory, and banishes it forthright. Ignorance
and complacency are high virtues to that mind. Happiness is impossible without them.
All the gore of human begetting, of human industry and human enduring, must be
shed, as too the realities of the universe we might otherwise so easily guess. When all
this is just dreams, the only bliss in the world remains: the bliss of forgetting, of
uncoupling from reality. Yet they are watching in the spaces when we lose ourselves.
They are watching between the trees. They are wayfarers of a darker chamber than
can be imaginedand perhaps it is only in our minds, and perhaps it never existed.
Their chameleon eyes are bright. There is a preacher in an alleyway, and he has seen
them and cried out their cant: that Hell is Hell is Hell, and Heaven just a temporary
relief, and he has been excommunicated by his faith. He is a collector of vice: of booze
and smack and asphyxiation and flesh in the night in the backalley houses. Now his
blood is shooting up the droppers nick, he is seeing them again.
At some point the boy with the black tooth started screaming.
Meanwhile, she had taken the zippo lighter from his pocket and made a small
fire from some dry brush. She was trying to burn down Eden. The fire was only just a
bunch of smoke yet, and a faint shuddering light. The galaxy that was all about them
rotated its starry arms and all grotesquery of creation was rising from the void.
I hate this place, she said. Nothing means anything, so Ive decided to hate it
all.
Lord God.
I even hate you too. Just so you know.
I thought you must of been an angel.
What?
I said you must have been an angel. When I first saw you. Thats why I came
over and said hey.
I dont care about that now.
But now Toms dead. There are butterflies. I dont know. I think if youre an
angel Id rather go to Hell.
Now she was laughing hysterically, and there were tears on her face and she
was laughing and dancing wildly in silhouette like sex alive. The flames reached
higher. They illumined her legs, up to her thighs and ass and pussy, and he became
aware that she was naked, and that he was too. Embers rose among the drafts of
smoke and there were enigmatic butterflies emblazoned upon the night. He watched
the lithe grace of her back, the motions of her hips. He reached out to touch her, and
then fucked heror thought he fucked herwhile all about them the galaxy crackled
and seethed.
I hate you, she shrieked as he pulled her from the ruin all sweaty and
heaving. I hate you I hate you I hate you
She had subsided into a deep sleep long before he got his clothes back on and
the car running, and as they escaped the lurid red glow into the night the whole of
Eden seem a parable of creation: the necessary revolutions, the flames, the precursor
to a charry world and the rebirth that comes after.

XXX
Eden burned.
For days it burned, and no one stopped it, and no one seemed interested except
her, watching from the front porch. She watched the boil of thick black smoke come
off the tops of burning trees. At first, among thin streaks of smoke, a mass exodus of
birds had let out from the fireshumungous dark clouds of them, vast avian reaches.
They were so many and so dense that the movements of their migration seemed
almost imperceptible. Now they were gone and only the smoke remained, leaning in
mighty stacks in the direction of the wind, trailing out across the sea.
She watched the way fire tinged the pale morning sky pink.
And she smiled, because she had erased something forever, she had killed an
old and fertile thing of the earth. This was her power. The world and its agencies who
hated her so violently, now she was able to treat them to hatreds of her own. She had
looked into the eyes of a dead God and scorned his creation.
She would not eat. She would not sleep. In the night, glowing fiercely against
the sky, the fires of Eden enchanted her. The motes of distant flames reflected in her
bright black eyes.
Had the ruined man been in Eden and was he dead?
She almost wished for sleep, so that she might glimpse his ghost screaming in
her dreams.
She went into her fathers room and sat next to him on the bed. His eyes which
were veiled might have gazed upon the face of God, or might have been robbed
altogether of any lasting vision. Divested of the shape of a familiar world, he had
retreated somewhere deeper, had fallen under a pall.
Daddy, she said. Come and see what Ive done.
Michael, he said.
She took his hand and said, Wherever you are, I hope youre burning too.
That night, watching Eden burn from the front porch, she made another fire in
the metal cylinder trashcan in the kitchen. She burned all her sketches. They curled
and shriveled. Blackened scraps came back to her, rising on the thermals. Nothing
meant anything, so she would hold nothing dear.
Then she fetched the shell and went out onto the porch and cast it into the
darkness without, watching its arc, watching it hang suspended for whole minutes in
the glittering moonlight, in the flaming beads of the fires of Eden, and watching it
vanish like so much nothing into an impossible well. Goodbye to Eden and goodbye to
a better tomorrow. Goodbye to her father, whatever remained of him. Goodbye to that
faraway land stenciled in such exquisite detail. Goodbye to the womb and all acts of
creation.
She did not care anymore. She simply did not care.

XXX
Daddy, she said.
He wouldnt speak. The fungus filled his ears and there were yellow butterflies
haloing around his head.
She brushed a butterfly from his hand and said, There are butterflies in the
house.
He was sitting there nodding his head. He began to cry. He made no sound. The
tears trickled down his cheek and dripped from his chin and the tip of his nose.
Daddy, she said bluntly.
He had no expression but he was weeping.
She went to the hall closet and fetched his toolbox. Rust had sheathed the
implements within: the timerotted hammers and wrenches and sockets. She chose
from among them a roll of twine and a pair of shears and returned to her fathers
room. He was still miming his unknowable grief. Lips of red peeked under his eyes and
it seemed to her that Eden was inside of him now, burning, flaming, blacking his guts,
and that at any moment he might cave in on himself like a man of cinders and catch
the whole house afire.
How dearly she would have liked that, but she doubted the plausibility.
She sat beside him on the bed, touching his hand with hers, touching his hair,
petting him. She hated him and she hated her grief and she put his right forefinger
between the blades of the shears, squeezing until they cleaved flesh, until the bone
split and the finger parted with a leap of blood and fell to the ground. She bent to pick
it up. After binding her fathers stump, she was in the kitchen tending to her new
prize. She tied the twine around the knuckle, and then looped it around her neck.
She did not wear this pendant in the spirit of vengeance but rather
impenitencea brazen action to show for all that she had sinned, she was stained,
and did not care. She exulted in it. The finger dangled from her neck, among the thin
bones of her chest. The stub showed bright red against her ghostlike pallor.
She clasped it, feeling the stiffness of rigor mortis deny her. She tugged on the
twine to ensure its steadfastness. The torpor had not fully left her tendons, which were
still pained, and which delayed the movements of her fingers like sound beneath
water. The flesh of her wrists was still black. The sutures gleamed like threads of ink.
That night, she very nearly succumbed to sleep, spread on the couch, nodding
off once, twice, but was woken a third and final time by a profound sense that she was
being watched from the past.
She went, barefoot, in a luminous white nightdress, to the screen door. She
pushed it open. The night was quite empty but for the fires of Eden and the more
remote fires in the vaulted chambers above, cold and pitiless.
She was being watched, she was sure. The night was somehow female.
This existence is haunted, dear reader. We who are infinite unto ourselves are
infinitely perpetuated by the past, and the ghosts inhabit us like so much deranged
theatre.
She looked for her mother in the darkness. She did not feel particularly insane
just nowbut rather strangely, keenly aware of something that no one else was. The
watcher was inside of her. And there was the unmistakable presence of an idiot
unborn will, struggling to be born through the walls of her mind. She shut her eyes.
There was nothing out therenothing really. There was only her, and what had come
before.
She touched the finger at her throat. Someday he would be among them, his
ghost would be her charge too.
How she hated those who looked to her for comfort!
She thought of the boy with the black tooth. In her mind she was stabbing him
a thousand times.

XXX
Her stomach had begun to pouch just the smallest bit, and the pouching
accentuated the gauntness of her body: the deeply slatted ribs, the chestbones, the
arms and legs now wan and reedlike. She had surmised that if she starved herself the
thing might shrivel and die. With luck, she might shit the thing out. But its vitality
seemed to a point beyond all threat. Rather than devour it, the thing was devouring
her.
She was beautiful yetbut now in the way that antique things are beautiful: a
sorrowful and husked beauty, artfully made beyond compare but ultimately robbed of
some vital essence. Her face was dolorous and exquisite. And her eyes had become as
the coreless cavities in a skull. In their deepest wells could be seen faint glimmerings,
and these were her dreams.
She had the most delicious dreams of opening her belly with a razorblade and
lifting the thing out among the tangle of its ropey umbilical. She would sit the bloody
puppet on her fathers lap and sometimes laugh, and sometimes sob. Even in such
fantasies as these, her father was a derelict, lost to the world. And sometimes the
thing she lifted from her belly was the unfinished body of a girl she somehow knew.
These were waking dreams she experienced while watching the fires of Eden
from the front porch at night. Yet despite the euthanasia they brought to her heart,
and despite the warmth of the inferno, sometimes she felt sad. She felt cold. Only
under scalding showers did she feel truly insulated from all else. Pink and boiled, and
having hung her prized finger from the bathroom mirror while she bathed, she lifted
her arms, she proudly displayed her nude wastrels body, and raising her face to the
rinse, shut her eyes.
Here in the dark, cocooned in blistering heat, here and here alone could she
dream her most splendid dream: ascending winged from the dross of human
existence, an angel of bones, going out beyond the reach of God, and into the space
that must lie beyond boundless space: there, removed from all equation and all
annals, would she be disallowed to rejoin with existence. She would expire and the
earth could not reclaim her molecules. She would not be reborn. That was deeper than
death. That was impossible.
She dressed in a black skirt and blouse, and affixed a black bow to her hair.
She sat with her father and touched his mutilated hand. His eyes did not rise to meet
hers.
Michael, he said.
There were never any angels, daddy.

XXX
Like an uninvited dream one night, the ruined man appeared in her living room.
There was lightning outside, and so she concluded, without much reason, that the
world must be ending. In the random blue fans of light, the ruined man was slowly
revolvingrising, it seemed, from a dark patch in the middle of the room
transcendent of the physical laws which constitute the perceivable world. Unperceived,
however, were byways known to him and him alone. He was rising, growing thinner
and taller as he rose. His shriveled ligaments looked vaguely wooden in the lightning.
He was holding a club in his hand. As he revolved, he faced her. His shrunken hairless
face was lent a similar aspect of woodenness: a carven warped mask of hate with eye
sockets and concave cheeks delled with shadow. She thought that in this waking
dream he must represent the idol of her death and personal apocalypse. Then the
lightning flared outshe saw his eyes for the first timeand she started to scream,
and he moved in the room toward her. His movements were unreal, jointed sticks
moving up and down.
The wooden idol that looked like the ruined man was crawling over the back of
the couch toward her. He was watching her watching him. He cleared the couch,
cleared the floor between themhis movements were quicker than seemed possible, or
perhaps he wasn't moving at alland he raised his club high
Then yet a second dreamlike thing happened, and her father was racing
wordlessly from his room to intercept the ruined man. They grappled briefly. The
ruined man smacked him upside the head with his club. Her father went down flailing
on the ground. With the second smack, a spattering of blood and brains went up in
the air. The ruined man knelt, smacking him a third time, a fourth. The sound was
wet.
She was screaming and clawing at her face. Daddy, she moaned. Daddy
daddy.
The ruined man pulled his club from its lodging in her fathers broken skull. He
got up. By that time she was rooted where she stood. If she wanted to die, if she
craved that black finality, it wasnt like this. Yet she stood there anyway, words having
left her and dumb with shock. She stood nerveless on two feet.
The ruined man was coming for her in the darkness.
He reached out lustfullywhen all at once his gaze fell upon her pendant, and
a sudden mindless hunger seized him. She stepped out of reach of him, but by then
he had already got the pendant in his hand, taking hold, and ripped it from around
her neck. She pushed her back to the wall, watching with abject horror. The ruined
man was gnawing on the finger. He seemed intent on swallowing this flesh of the
father.
Then she turned, and ran.
She was bulleting from the screen door and down the porch steps, out into the
night where all around her lightning was striking images of the beach from the dark
wastes without. The sea was suddenly spread before her in an unending frieze, the
waves catching dishfuls of light like polished black mirrors.
She looked back over her shoulder at the house, seeing it stamped out against
the burning of Eden, hearing a sudden shrieking of the ghoul within. She did not look
again. She ran down to the grotto by the tide, a cave where resided darkness and only
darkness. A moments hesitation passed. Then she descended that cave, going where a
deeper inkblack and starless night was seeping through the stone sprockets and pipes
of the earth, where the air grew cool and thin, fleeing panicked down convolutions of
leaky stone bowels and into a subterrane where the earth deposits and no soul comes
back, where cognate things with the visages of crabs were laughing at her and hating
her.
Down these halls where God himself once had walked. . . .
She had only the clothes on her back, her black dress and ribbon. She didnt
even have shoes. She grew tired after a while, and sore, and curled up in the darkness
and went to sleep.

XXX
These things which I have written are real. I know this without evidence. And
the things which they portend are real too. I know this because I have known it before,
I have written it before. The pages have never been blank, and the words never just
thought. I am instructed by the same gravity which instructs all thingsnot fate but
something dumber, not God, but a different God, a deity in each our gory hearts.
Where else might God go to die but in the swamp of human being? Think of the fetor,
the decayeven such angels as we have imagined cannot stand it, and so flee us with
age, and ultimately death. So there is nothing, you see. There is no sense. All is
absurd but what fleeting abstractions we make for ourselves.
Go out from the squall and light pollution of the city, down a rural stretch, and
look upon the night sky and the stars paneled upon the walls of the universe. They are
inarticulate and random. They have no order but what order we have given them. And
God has no name but all the names.
I tell you Hell is real, and it is stranger beyond what I can describe. I have been
there my whole life. For it exists within, in the human void. This is the kingdom so
named in all the books of God. A human is this: pits within pits, chambers within
chambers. He is like an indefinite chain which hangs down into the darkness, and
each link is a gradient further from the light. I have known a few of these: Denial and
Despair, Acceptance, Revolution against the utter anarchy of it all, and the Tiredness
that comes after. These are only some, for I am a green pilgrim on this road. Clarity,
when it comes, may yet prove a damnation too much for me to bear.
There is a zoology to Hell, creatures and thoughtformsthe difference is
sometimes negligibleand they are aboriginal to this place into which we are infinitely
descending. You might balk in your arrogance to hear such a thing. But were I to tell
you that there are monsters in the hearts of men, would you then disregard me? We
are charitable with such thoughts when regarding the criminals among us. These are
no monsters, howeverno grotesques. The very notion of the grotesque is the distance
we measure between ourselves and reality. But make no mistake: the acceptance of
the grotesque, and the heinous realities thereby revealed, is a suffering of a different
sort. So there is no way out, there is no making your peace with it.
And there is madness too, delusions and aberrations of the mind which prevent
one from realizing his situation. Madness is a prison, a confinement. It is an occlusion
of the senses, in the eyes, or the ears, and most definitely the grey coils of the brain.
Yet, conversely, when taken in allreality as being infinite Hell unto itselfmadness,
then, becomes the only escape. For myself, I dare not see it that way. I have always
found punishment a more instructive experience.
The universe, as I have said, is Ouroboros, the worm that eats itself. What other
nature might fit creation but a self-perpetuating one? It is an idiot act, a
commonalitythe single commonalitythat links men to beasts to the very incognate
stones of the earth itselfand also, of course, as I have said, to the Ouroboros.
Perpetuation, the eating-birthing of the self, is the truest law of the orderless universe.
Viewed in light of that absurdity, death is deprived of meaning, and life too, especially
when considering that the worm cannot end, and so, molded in the same fashion,
neither can we. You will pass for a time, when you get old, or misfortune finds you. I
will pass. But it is farcical. The shape of a circle has no beginning, and no endbut
perpetuates itself, maddeningly, to a state of stasis and revolution. I think man must
have devised it to give voice to his torments.
We are Vesica, bladders unto ourselves, and when we expel our being at the
last, returned to the black predawn before all life, and when the Ouroboros succeeds
its idiot goal, we shall return from the swallowing, doomed to wear these skins again,
and walk these sorrowed steps again.
You will pass, if only for a time.
I will pass.

XXX
She was going through an adenoidal mass of passages, a swollen place that
seemed to constrict around her. The walls and ceiling and floor were seamless and
inward curving, and in the darkness she could just make out their faint pinkness.
Somewhere in this anatomical structure could be heard the beating of a heart.
The crabs had become strange lice scurrying in the corridors. She wondered if
they werent thoughts racing through the nodes, the circuits of her mind. And she
imagined them, these demons, crawling into the wombs of women impregnate: eating
the sons, or parts of them, and the sons therefore coming out dead or not at all, or
stunted.
Yet if the son should swallow the demon, he would be born a prophet, which
was another kind of damnation.
The heartbeat was becoming tremulous as she turned the corner into a vault in
which red light was brimming. The light was just faint, but enough to see the womb
about her. There were living veins inside the walls, which she saw in silhouette, and
stenciled upon the walls were ciphers and enigmas of exquisite calligraphyand
everywhere in the space inbetween, on surfaces which might otherwise be blank, was
a map of a place unending. She understood now that there was no going to that place,
inasmuch as someone could to go life, or go to death. She had been born there. Her
Hell and her punishment were the truest things in her life.
The lice were moving concurrently into the womb, into the light. She followed
them. There was a river in a pink furrow. The embankment was wet beneath her feet.
In a boat on the water sat hunched an ancient shape: an archangel, destitute in
appearance, clad in rags. He had, in a spirited effort, sewn his eyelids shut to the
atrocities of the world, but God had made him look, and slashed them off.
He was muttering in his boat, saying, he said he said he said look as I must look
and must always look and bear the brunt of my most shameful failures I understand I
didnt understand but now I do that there is no cipher no matrix no being divine enough
that can realize perfection so I am damned he said so you see I am damned he said and
he said perfection is just a perfect dream
She climbed into the boat and the boat rocked beneath her. The river ran on
through a pink exodus into a swamp which festered and steamed under a red nether
sun. She thought this must be the Styx. In the current floated red gore and placental
lilies. She looked at the archangel. He swiveled his head, averting his ruined face the
way an idiot might, or an owl. His eyes in their cups of grime were dripping soft tears.
He muttered, I saw a pale sea a pale sky a cloud a sun a Heaven O where O where art
thou? I saw a way out you understand a way through and through the tunnel to the
breach the way on the other side the way was green and writ upon a green tablet and
through it in the dream in suits of flesh we spoke of warnings in the signs but the God
was there too and sent us reeling back to Hell and so nevermore I dared to dream
She regarded him with eyes cool and unfazed, this image of a creature utterly
derelict. She was unimpressed.
From his ripped backside issued jagged tines where once wings had tried to
grow and where each time God had clipped his ambitions. Now he was strangely
barbed like a man shot full of arrows. The lice were crawling about in his whiskers
and on his face and scalp, but he seemed not to mind, and nor did he mind that with
the advancement of his various infections he was becoming something lesser. Yet what
could be lesser than this solitary attendant to a hateful master? Who so debased
might find a place lower in their very being?
She imagined the queen of Gomorrashe herself having never heard of the
place but once in all her life, in a dream, not understanding what it meant, but
knowing, somehow, what it was: the fleshpits, the gilt chambers, and the altars upon
which countless bodies had been made unclean beyond all cleansingand she
imagined her in the most lavish boudoir, shackled to the ankle of her king like a
concubine, spreading her legs and together with a thousand supplicants both spiting
and exulting in this most mawky of Gods creations that was called the human body.
She imagined the diadem, the chains, the silks and the furrows dug in the flesh by
nails which the priests of pleasure had so lovingly embedded in flagellum. It was sex,
and it was sacrilege.
Her hate had never been brighter. Its most sighted object was now clear to her:
it was she, herself, of course, who had inflicted all of this to begin with. There could be
no refusing the blame. Her Hell had been earned. There was only her hatred leftand
the ways she might inflict it.
She gazed boredly out at the swamp which glowered beneath the red sun. The
movements of the water were faintly sluggish.
Well, she said. Lets go.
The archangel got up and out of the boat and untied the rope. Then he got back
in and sat down and shipped the oars, feathering them lightly out across the dimpled
face of the river, and they moved out from darkness unknown into the maw of Hellor
at least one permutation of it.
For as infinite as God is, even in death, so too are the realms of Hell, the lands
unhallowed.

XXX
Eden was depleted. The trees were coal, the moss just a bunch of ash, and thin
fumes of smoke rose from the charcoaled skeleton like spirits in ascendance. No more
green tomorrows would grace the cinders there. No angels wept the indignity. It was
day, and the day was pale.
In the house, in the kitchen, the ruined man was making a poultice. Behind
him on the floor lay a gaping corpse, which he had drained in the bathroom, and
which he had gutted there tooall the bathtub heaping with entrailsso that the
body now seemed diminished, and rather like some strange taxidermists effort. The
bladder, of course, he had kept, and he was now applying the poultice to his breast,
thereby hastening his transmutation into the immortal dragon. Thus shorn of his
humanity, he would no longer be subject to Hell, but instead become a beast of that
place, whom all should fear. That alchemy necessitated such sacrifices that he
scarcely remembered what it was to feel grief.
He bound the poultice, turning to the body on the floor. He had brought his
stone knife for the gutting, his mortar and pestle for the transmutation. And he had
brought a neolithic hammer and chisel, the necessity for which was evidenced by the
corpse: for within the sternum, which was splayed, upon the ribs had been finely
chiseled ciphers and equations of intricate detail. The ribs were sprung, the human
recess a yawning black pit.
Now the ruined man was taking off his clothes save the bindings which secured
the poultice.
There are more roads in Hell, he said, than that which leads through the
self.
Then, like some horrifying mannequin, he stepped into the gory portal, folding
unnaturally, and disappeared inside the body, and inside of himself.

XXX
The nights were starless, moonless, and with the dawn came only the dim red
nether sun: a thing like a shriveled ember or a revenants heart, brimming with the
faintest glow. There seemed a measured pulse, a throbbing of the light when she
studied it long enough, yet there was no heartbeat that she could hear. Except,
perhaps, when she slept. In the utter and infinite darkness, all things ceased, all other
sounds stayed, and in that void could be heard the thinnest, most tremulous beating,
beating of the heart. She listened, hooded in darkness. Was it the pulse of the dead
and dreaming God? Was it the throbbing mechanism of fate?
Whichever the case, she despised it. She wanted to dismantle it, and
simultaneously rue the consequences and revel in the carnage that would
undoubtedly follow. She was going mad, she was sure.
Her loathing had come to define her.
She turned to the archangel in the dark, and said, Whatever it is, Id like to kill
it. I hate it. I hate you. Where are we going?
This sent the archangel into a fit of incoherent rage. He was laughing, he was
screaming, tearing at his maimed face with ragged filthy nails. The tines on his back
flexed with the vestigial impulse to flyfly to the face of God, and there seek comfort.
There was no God, however. There was only her.
After a while of his tantrum, he flung himself prostrate before her and put his
cheek to her humped stomach. He babbled, the mother the Madonna the mother of
creation all acts of creation in the womb all things divine come forth even the God and
this is holy this holy pussy oh yes oh yes oh yes yes yes
She stroked his head tenderlyin spite of herself, in spite of her own rage
because he was her guide and she had no one else to turn to.
It was soon dawn, the dim sun was crowning, and they went back out onto the
river. Time lost all meaning and semblance of meaning here, yet she was sure they
had been at it a long time. They ate the crabs that could be found subsisting in the
muck. They boiled them first. The archangel had things: pots and pans and tongs and
even a cracked mirror of unknown purpose, and all of these things bore a look of
antiquity: the mirror, once gilded, now was partly rotted with rust, blacked with grime,
and the cooking implements, it could be seen, were burned and chipped to ruin.
Climbing from the boat with this miscellany of items hanging from ropes around his
neck, and his sad rags flapping against his otherwise naked body, the archangel
looked like some kind of mad anchorite in this wasted world.
They slept in caves in the marsh at nightor tried to sleep. Often the archangel
would rant and rave until sunrise. And sometimes the nameless thing inside her
would start to kick, and refuse to quit until at last she gave it something resembling
love, touching it through the walls of her stomach and muttering sweet nothings.
Would that such monsters could drown in their lakes of amniotic fluidor that they
were deaf to all tenderness. But no, her monster was thriving, and it seemed to shiver
with pleasure at her false kindness. The very notion was revolting.
When the horror became all too much, she would stumble from their cave, into
the night, and start to puke. In her most desperate dreams she was puking the
monster up tooa clot of flesh, a work of evil alchemy wrought upon her by sperm
and fate. All mysteries of life and human suffering were contained in that unformed
body: upon its birth, the clarity of pain would be made known to her, and the riddle of
life wasted on a mind too weak and new to grasp it.
A new emotion attended her in these days of pregnancy, a fear, and it was more
than her hatred by far.
Waking from a restless sleep in a tiny crowded hole, she went out to where the
archangel was watching the sunrise, and said, You could tell God something, couldnt
you? If I had a message. You could take it to him, and he might listen.
let all suffering be the precedent of human experience let me be deaf to their cries
deaf to their shrieks they are lesser to me than had they never existed at all they are the
sick filth they are reviled no salvation Lord God said no communion with my Host he
said I am deaf I do not hear I am deaf I am dead for they have killed me
It was useless.
So she went out along the muddy embankment herself, far from the sight of the
archangel, and stood in the shade of an overhanging willow tree, and held
communion. I dont even really believe in you, and I dont think you believe in me
either, she said, but you just cant let this thing come out of me. Please, please.
Dont ever let it out. Please.
She was too tired and too brittle for earnest tears, but she let a few fake ones
fall anyway, in case he was watching.
By the gory light of day, they had shipped back out and downstream. Before
long, the muddy banks suddenly drew up about them, and were littered with all
manner of detritus. She saw crumbling minarets rising from the utter dross of the
land, leaning at sundered angles. And there were radio towers held aloft by crazy
looking webs of guy wiresand these summits looming above the littoral of junk below
seemed the pinnacle of a bygone civilization: the ironworkers pyramid. Fires burned in
oil drums at the foot of the towers, among auto husks and constructions of tin sheet
and tarpaper. The skeletons of overpasses stood partly toppled, bared to the threads in
places, and these also bore on their backs distant motes of fire and the shapes of
drear abodes.
Here in this weary amalgam of ages modern and medieval, the remoteness of
human existence was made clear: each quartered in their tiny space of Hell. Each was
near in suffering, yet alone within themselves. They could be seen squatting in mute
circles, or picking among the junkyards, looking out with eyes blank and joyless.
Ahead in the Styx an overpass bridged the shores. The archangel pulled the
oars, the boat swiveled slightly, and they drifted between the supports. Somewhere
above in the vaulted understructure could be heard the flapping of wings. She looked
but saw nothing. As they drifted out from under the overpass, she turned to see a man
gravely watching her from way up high. He shouted something she couldnt hear, and
then turned and disappeared into his shabby home. The overpass receded with
distance, and then it too was gone. The wasteland subsided back into wilderness save
but for a few wayward towers and the last of the fires yet with their tall spires of
smoke. They hauled up in the duskier light toward the end of the day on a shore that
was partly the deck of a rotting shipand there set about with their pots and pans
and things. They boiled the filthy water before drinking it.
The sun went down, starless night fell over everything. Yet all at once the river
seemed to blaze. She had to look up to make sure no stars were burning out in space:
for now the reflections of those elusive stars seemed to be coming down the black
current, a thousand pinpoints of flame, a terrestrial firmament. They were passing in a
graceful riot of light. There were bundles wrapped in white swaddling, and among
them tallow candles glowing bright in tin cups or paper lotuses, bobbing and drifting
in their passage and banishing for the moment the vast darkness that hooded the low
hills without. She watched them go. One of the bundles bobbed close by, and she saw
in an opening in the white folds the black and bloated face of an infant.
The heart was beating loudly this night, and somewhere a bladder was letting
out these spent offerings of life.
to the king to the king, said the archangel, to the king to the king to the king to
the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to
the king
King? she asked.
supplicant to the God, he said, and supplicants to the king the supplicant to the
God and they must pay he says a token a grub seedling from the womb they must pay it
he says for he cannot stand the act of love and in the scripture the true scripture
engraven upon all your weak hearts it is written that God himself enjoys infanticide
though you say its not so
King? she said. King who?
the leper king was healed was never healed they called him Naaman they called
him king
Naaman? Is that what you said?
to the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to
the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to the king to
the king to the king to the king to the king to the king
No. You must be mistaken.
But the archangel was resolute, saying, to the king to the king to the king to the
king
She went to the edge of the shore. All night long she pondered this, watching
the procession of light and the sad offerings wrapped in swaddling as they went by.
Some of the candles beached themselves in the mud, or were trapped in the bulbed
roots of tree stumps, and there flickered like will-o-the-wisps all down the riverway.
They were still there in the early morning, some of them just guttering, and they lent a
sense of ritual archaism to this otherwise untamed wilderness. There were still
bundles going in the current too, just a few of them. She looked over the side of the
boat and down at the serene and softly rotted faces of the children. They bobbed
alongside the boat. They were strangely calming.
Somewhere this pastoral morning a bell was ringing out. About an hour later
they passed an island in the river, and rising there from among the twisted trees was
the belltower so heardthough no one tended it now, and it was quiet.
Are you taking me to Naaman? she asked suddenly.
The archangel was quiet.
Does he want whats inside of me?
Still, he was quiet.
I wont let it out, she told him. I wont ever let it out. Why, Im not even
pregnant. Not really. Not if you think about it.
All at once the archangel exploded into laughter, rioting like a disgusting
mandrill and slapping his thighs, while tears cut traces down his grimy cheeks. His
head swiveled at the end of his scrawny neck and he was drooling and slavering. He
howled, he shrieked.
In the small space of the boat she felt supremely uncomfortable.
Eventually he subsided, but remained steadfastly answerless, and the secret of
what King Naaman wanted with the babes remained locked behind those insane eyes
of his. She regarded him from across the boat. Was harm intended for her? Could
there exist yet a worse harm than living this wearied life? She looked out among the
embankments. The world in its dim sad red mantle and its coat of garbage had only
threats left for its inhabitantsand yet it was just mangy, ragamuffin, and rather
toothless, she thought. For the world is subject to the same state of decay into which
all things are sinking. So she was unafraid of it. She had only herself to fear, and the
thing within her. She looked back at the archangel, smiling cruelly.
They hauled ashore at some point in the night. The archangel had among his
things a lantern, but they had no need for itat least not yet. The river of light and
death was brimming. The diffusion of the candlelight above the water was like a
strangely luminous mist. It reached up the embankment, and a good way inland. The
archangel led her into the low hills, toward a dark wood that could be seen at the edge
of the night. There were radio towers looming downriver. They came upon a tin sheet
hut in which a solitary figure was sat hunched before a transistor radio. The figure did
not turn to them, and they passed on.

XXX
He fell like so much ink down a deep and ponderous well. He became unbound,
a thing that seepedthat trickledthrough the cracks and crevices, to a deepness
below all things, below the layered morticework of the earth, the sediment and clay
and cold listless stone. He eschewed the notions of these things and vanished. He
descended into substrata where the oldest molecules yet in existence were arrayed on
their microcosmic plane of Hell
And there he became manifest.
The chest of a man is gaping. The heart is there imprisoned. From that vantage,
the ribs become pillars bent to absurd angles, and all life comes pouring in, muted by
the flesh, glowing redly through the blood.
He was standing, gazing up at the pillars which conjuncted into perfect arcs
across the skyand at the sun beyond that vault, glowing redly, and just dimly, like a
failing emberand he thought that the heart must have escaped at last, and he must
be viewing it from within. All around came the beating of the heart like a drum.
Stripped bare of all pretense, creation became, as he, unbound: limitless in its
expanse, yet somehow kept by the high vaulted ribs whose shadows fell in a striped
succession. He was standing on a plane of white dust tinctured red by the sun. He
was naked but for his rags. All things here were reduced to their basest elements, and
all elements pacified by their unity. So it was dust after all to which the universe
ultimately surrendered, despite whatever insights the abstracted eye might glean. All
that was just nonsense, he saw that now. It was dust, in the end, which the universe
was, on its basest planeand the truth of that was broader than the desert, the sea,
and vaster than the space which he now inhabited and the ribs which by some
impossible law were able to encompass it.
Seeing the enormity of that truthseeing its utter meaninglessnesshis eyes
grew bigger. He agreed with himself that there is no purpose but what a man makes
for himself. So, instead of surrendering in the face of the bleakness, he decided he
must have it all. He must eat it all.
He set off across the ocean of red dust, leaving in his wake a pitted trail on this
otherwise featureless expanse. He looked bloody in this lightan infant red from the
womb, born in the shape of an old gangling man. It had happened that way, too. He
alone was alive to recall it. The mother had died as he came flopping from the spent
bellyas all mothers of the Cancers.
Of course, the crone wasnt dead. But that child of hers and Gods would
eventually come up from the darkness and make her rue all existence. When the son
emerged, then everyone would rue existence. All things meet an end, all roads
converge to meet a black wall breaching from the nothing. Even the dust will be
unmade. And then, as in the primal beginning, so shall it be again: nothing from
nothing, pointlessness from pointlessness.
That knowledge had never made him particularly fond of butterflies. He was
born with it, and grimly satisfied with it. Perhaps in a past life he had been some
abortive scion of Gods, and now, in this realization of his truest being, reborn an
abomination.
When a serpent emerges from its final skin, old and huge and powerful, one
thinks not of a serpent but of the very idea of lethality.
Prophets are a spent lot. Only monsters remain.
He lifted his old vile face to the sun. The shadows collected in his clavicles. The
seams of his papery skin became incredibly deep, like crevices, and suggestive of the
unifying idea: that within himwithin all thingslies this same limitless expanse.
The poultice gave him strength, so, despite his stoop, despite his shriveled
ligaments, he walked with unfailing determination. He looked like a cave painting
effigy of a devil-man, a spirit in corpses skin: the shriveled hairlessness, the
nakedness, the crazed trembling gait, unsupported by the ruined muscles of the legs.
There was even something of the serpent about him, taking into account his elongate
shape.
Before long he came by a giant who had been turned into a colossal pillar of salt
standing in the dust. Time had largely eroded the features, but the vague imprint of a
stoics face could be seen near the top. As he sojourned, he came by sporadic others
standing out on the desert. They all stood motionless, casting shadows unilaterally at
a precise angle. The serene faces of the giants peered out and saw oblivion, which is
the face of God. With the beating of the heart could be heard a resonance in the stone,
the loosening of granules or pebbles, which sometimes came tumbling free. One pillar
had long ago toppled, and lay halved and moldering in the red dust.
Eventually he came to a stone tablet surmounting an ancient dais. It stood
directly under the shadow of one of the ribs. The tablet was not green. Upon its face
had been recounted a number of alchemical truths. They were just a laymans steps
on the Path, however.
He passed it by.
He sat at the base of a pillar, watching its shadow circumscribe a tract of dust
as the sun circumscribed the skyall things circularall motions guided by a gravity,
a mechanism, a dark hand. In the morning he discovered two other tablets both
standing in the shadows of ribs. Neither was green. On the third tablet had been
revealed the path, the laws, by which the giants had taken upon themselves their
petrification. He did not seek that fate, however, so he passed them by.
How sad, that even in his plan made revealed God spares us no horror. God
glimpsed in the matrices of creation some insight, some intrinsic flaw, and it was from
thus that his infinite compassions were become infinite hatred. So these giants took it
on themselves to become his truest flagellants. A profitable servant of such a God
knows only torment.
Now the bindings had shed from his body, as had the dried up poultice. A dark
stain appeared on his breast, a rotted hollow in which once his mortal heart had
resided. Within that hollow, as within the skull of a child now eleven years dead, was a
coldness. He poked a finger through. He put his hand through.
Then he was sitting naked in the dust with his face upturnedand he was
howling, howling at the sun, the red sun, the dim red sun which had sprung from the
caged ribs and was free in the ether beyond. He howled and howled. An incredible
stroke of thunder answered him, crashing down all around.
He discovered the green tablet not long afterward, standing freely in the light. It
surmounted a dais larger than all the others, a huge dais whose steps were heaped
with ancient treasure. Desperately, he clambered up the steps. The green tablet was
gigantic beyond all reason, bigger than creation, surpassing all else. Its shadow fell
over a swath of salt pillars arrayed at the foot of the dais. Upon the green tablets face
were recollected the truest, basest laws. He swallowed them, taking them inside
himself, and corrupted them, and became a Dragon.
Then, reaching once more inside the darkness, the coldness, he fit an arm into
his breast, then his head, then his feet, and then he had vanished into the kingdom
withinand there, once manifest, the Dragon would eat.

XXX
Ten thousand years ago, she dreamed of being murdered, and of the pink
shellof having it stilland the slow draw of death, and of going back into the shell,
returning to the womb, the pinkness of the folds and the place where the pretext for
all life is writ. There was a companion inside waiting for her. She thought it must be
her sister, but it seemed to be a man.
He led her into a wood where they danced and played. She turned his hands
palms up and kissed them, and then kissed him on the mouth. She felt like a dopey
schoolgirl. He had vast wings, which he spread in a proud display.
He said, You make me feel like ten thousand men when you kiss me.
Then suddenly she hated him. His wings were tattered. He was old, he was
wretched. The archangel turned, and tried to fly, but only fell down a well and died.
She dreamed of her mother in a boat going down a pink river.
She dreamed of being clubbed to death.

XXX
Thinking perhaps to rectify some old wrong, and feeling nostalgic and not at all
aware that memory sweetens pain like a bitter mercy, the boy with the black tooth
went out to see her. Months had gone by since their strange farewell in Eden. She
hadnt come in for cigarettes since then, he hadnt seen her about. He found himself
these days of late autumn missing her more than Tom. He unstrung his apron and
pushed through the latch door to the other side. He started down the aisles toward the
exit. His need was urgent.
The old man was standing in the door of his office with his hands on his hips.
Son, he called out. I been grinding an axe with you.
The boy with the black tooth turned. What?
You go youre axed.
I have to go, he said.
The old man shrugged. Dont come back.
I have to go.
He fled as though in answer of a summonsas though it was her siren voice
calling to him from the sea. It was only his mind playing tricks, howeveronly a sense
of romanceof altruismthat was obsolete in this unfeeling world spun by the
pinions of its clockwork through dumb cosmos and where the parochial whitebearded
God was an invention of fantasy and even then a thing to be feared. How uncanny that
Man in his fancies should discover the divine wrath, even in his dreams is he doomed.
The boy with the black tooth had been to church once. He had gone with an
ancient relative. The church was massive and gaudy, the ceiling domed and on the
dome a mural of creation riven by huge forking cracks. The boy with the black tooth
had sat stuffed in a pew alongside old peoples clothes filled with old peoples bodies,
their wattled skin, their heinous perfumes and hairdos the color of tin. Their minds
were noticeably absent, dreaming of daytime television, of early bird specials. He could
see it in their glassed eyes. He watched the webbed flesh of his great aunts throat,
stared at her huge lipsticked mouth.
Organ music started from a series of pipes along one wall that were like
conduits of an engine of incalculable purpose. The player himself was nearly a
cobwebbed revenant, so grey and bent, a mummied shape animate only by the will of
this engine which had sucked his soul up and which conducted his fingers, his body,
with a will all its own. The fingers moved, pumping out a mordant music to summon
latecomers to their seats. Then came a shuffling of loafers and pumps and a buckling
of the veneered wooden benches as these pearl-clad and suit wearing attendees came
to rest. Someone sneezed, he remembered. A baby screamed.
A priest appearedtoo new and young looking for the dramatic robes he wore.
He made a series of arcane gestures and altar boys attended him.
They rose from their seats and sat again, and rose and sat. After a while they
knelt, then rose back up, then sat. They said some words and sang some songs. His
single religious thought was a question: How could any God no matter how cruel
benefit from my boredom?
His great aunt had derided him as a rat and a guttersnipebut now in Hell she
might congratulate him his ignorance. How many years of her life had she spent
fearing the very fate that befell her? Praying to the imaginary patriarch for spells to
keep her from eldritch pits and gibbering cacodemons?
The boy with the black tooth didnt waste time mulling such philosophies in his
brain. He lived his life and that was all. He was a paragon and no one knew it.
Now he was shuttling off down the bridge in his Frankensteins vehicle. There
was nothing but the painted line flashing beneath the wheels and the guard rail going
past and the wide grey berth of the sky, so vast the shape of its dome could not be told
by the human eye. There were no other cars. Behind the steering wheel he was
bundled in a sweater and a bomber jacket and a furry woolen cap to insulate him from
the thin wind slicing through the duct tape that held the windshield in place.
When he reached the island he looked out at the sea for the first timeat the
indescribable quality of the grey choppy surf that made it look absolutely freezing. He
pulled in front of the house and got out. He went up the porch. He knocked on the
door for a while but no one came, all was quiet. Somewhere a gull screamed with a
voice heard in a waking dream.
Hey, he called. Hey. Hello?
He called her name.
He went around to the blinded living room window and peered in, cupping his
hands around his eyes. He went to the kitchen window and did the same. There were
only shadows and grades of dim grey light within. Turning from the window he spied a
second house further down the shore, a shanty place standing on stilts above the
water.
In the early sunset he was trudging up the shore to this dereliction. The cold
was intense down here by the water and he had his arms about him. He went along
the strip of wet sand watching the tide suck away his footprints and watching a few
baby crabs dance about on nimble horsehair legs.
He came by a pit gaping in the sand, a cave beyond which must be some
lightless grotto drowned by the tide. A smell of rotting meat came to him. He waved his
arms and shouted merrily, but no echo came back from the thick clot of shadows
within.
He went on to the house and up the rotting wraparound staircase. On the
landing he battered at the door and peered in through the windows. It was the same in
this house too, no sound inside, only silence, only darkness.
He went back to her house. He called out her name again.
There was no one. He came around to the kitchen window and tried it and
found it remarkably loose. So he raised it up, stepping through, first one leg and then
the other, crouching on the countertop inside and then descending soft and silent as a
cat onto his sneakers on the linoleum floor. He stood very still. It was dark and there
was no sound save the sucking of the wind through the open window.
A sour smell came to himreminiscent of that in the grotto by the seaand he
groped in the dark for a light switch and flicked it on. Then suddenly he convulsed.
Oh God, he said. Jesus. God.
On the floor lay a body yellow and shriveled with the top of its head crushed in.
The torso seemed to have exploded outward. Maggots furred the chest cavity and the
floor all around the body, and this faintly moist carpet was moving gently like a
singular organism comprised of infinite tiny fibrils.
He clapped a hand over his mouth to staunch the vomit shuttling up his throat.
He looked at the taut grin, the stoven head that let on to a brain now partly liquid and
black in color. The more he watched the worse it stank.
He went crashing through the house screaming for her, for anyone. He let
himself out through the front door and there in the cold was leaning over with his
hands on his knees trying to vomit or breathe and accomplishing neither, suffocating
and pale faced with shock. He toppled in the sand. He was there on his knees a long
time. Eventually he got back up and went out to the derelict house and up the stairs
again. He butted the ancient door and it came open without much effort, splintering
and flapping inward.
He stood with his shadow long before him in the pane of light on the floor. He
was prepared for a haunting: basilisks and the living deadfor the mouth of Hell
itself.
Slowly, he entered the house. Grotesques leered from a cabinet to his left:
desiccate monkey paws and serpent skulls and newtlike things preserved in brine and
a plaster casting of a face serene in death. Occult shapes loomed out of the dark. He
entered a barren kitchen where the windows had been boarded and a musty smell
pervaded the air. There were no signs of recent life nor indictments of further
manslaughter.
A cold November wind was banking off the sea as he made his way up the shore
to her house. It cut him to the bone. He was pale and shivering and his eyes beginning
to water. He thought no thoughts.
In the house he was on the phone for a while. Then he was sitting and waiting
in the living room. It was dark when the police cars and the ambulance arrived, and
the blades of their lamplights swung through the blinded window and illuminated him
shivering there on the floor like a fugitive.

XXX
The archangel took her to what once had been his nest in the woodsa vast
prominence, a moldering stone tower, which reared up high above the tops of trees
and which was surmounted by a nest of brambly tree limbs decorated with the ivory
bones of the children who had been his dinners. He had lived highly in those days.
But now, divested of his wings, he could no longer fly to reach his nestand nor could
he climb, he was too weak. Besides, King Naamans tariffs bereft Man of his newborns,
so the supply was dwindling. The fertile years were gone, the proud years gone, years
of horror and the voice of God. God was gone too. Now the end was coming, the sun
was dimming.
She stood at the foot of the monstrously medieval looking tower, peering up.
The archangel bumbled about behind her. Because he was naked, homeless,
flightless, he lived at the bottom of a well nearby the tower, which he showed to her.
The depths of that well seemed deep and dark as the tower was tall. A series of metal
rungs descended the damp mildewed pit. The archangel lit his lamp, hanging it from a
rope around his neck, and began to climb down. She followed. The puce glow of the
lampemerging from the closing shadows like the cyclopic eye of some
phosphorescent wyrm in the dredges and bowels of the earthrevealed to her a
narrow stone throat nearly black with slime. The smell of mold was intense.
There came a sense that she was being swallowed by a pathetic corpse,
lowering into the putrilage and dreck of bowels beginning to spoil. And, confined in
this gullet, the heartbeat became amplified, echoing between walls, swelling as it
dropped with her into the dark. She was truly plumbing the anatomy of Hell.
The archangel muttered from below her, his voice rising up from the elliptical
and subterranean sun that was his lantern: cisterns putrid cisterns and
underpassages and bowels in the nether places in the dirt I am going with the dirt going
with the All into dirt into muck the heights I soared no longer All is going All is going
dragging down down through the floor of the universe into nothing soon soon soon soon
soon an explosion slow in making an expulsion as in gassy guts swelling bloated flesh
swelling the whole dead body then pop like burst then All into muck All into dirt then
nothing soon soon soon soon soon
At last, when they reached the bottom of the well, the archangel brandished his
lamp high and divulged to her several rotting brick archways which let onto shadowed
passages. Here, in the gut of the world, the dripping of condensation in these passages
came back to her in ponderous cavelike echoes. He took her down one of these in
particular. At the termination of the passage, they came into a small lousy nest full of
rags and bones and turdssome of them petrified and others fresh and sluglike. A full
length mirror stood in one corner, the frame gilded with serpents. The archangel hung
his lamp from a peg and set his things down. He invited her within. The look on his
face was one that a happy idiot child wears.
Slowly, she entered. She had to control herself not to gag. The smell was
atrocious. The archangel clumped some rags together, fluffed them, and patted them
for her to sit, which she did. In the vague light, she was gazing at her reflection in the
mirror, amidst the tangle of hungry serpents: her stomach was now fatter than she
could believe, and upon her gaunt face was a nauseating look of maternal radiance.
Beside her, squatting in the gloom, the archangel seemed some hideous goblin from
the primordial before-world, when all was yet grotesque and unfinished.
He was gazing at his reflection too. What he saw wasnt himselfthat much was
evident by his vapid smile and happy dreamy eyes. Some fantasy or memory was
charming and deluding him.
She cast her gaze among the delicate ivory bones which littered the place. She
picked up the splinter of a rib and studied it momentarily. She dropped it, and picked
up instead a beautiful bulbous skull. The face behind the face of innocence grinned
emptily at her, and she was glad it had met its annihilation at the hands of this
wretch.
The archangel grinned wryly at her, putting a single finger to his lips. He
explained, still in the heart some fire some life some hunger unknown to the king that in
breach of compact of holy law here a secret dinner sometimes a glorious dinner
unknown to him
And the archangel began to giggle and slobber. She watched him gnaw
uselessly a tiny femur before casting it aside. Among the litter of skulls and ribs, she
wandered which were female, which were miscarried. Then she found the skull with
her eyes. She didnt know how she knew. It was like all the restthat is,
unremarkable. She didnt feel disappointed, however. She didnt feel anything. She
was watching the archangels reflection with open disgust, and he was watching her
back with all the affection of a dog.
Then he got up, and without explanation departed into the darkness. It was
some time before he came back. While he was gone, she could contain it no longer,
she puked, and her puking upset the demon life inside her. She could feel it flexing,
writhing like a huge grub. The sensation of a form so mature within her ownit would
burst from her, an imago shedding its withered huskthe sensation brought on a
revulsion and despair beyond all compare. She faced a worse annihilation than she
had ever intended for herself. It was a well in its own right, deep and dark, and at its
bottom was black horror, the sounds of her screaming demise, of a childs wailing.
The grub flexed inside her belly. She closed her eyes, squeezing out hot tears.
Here, alone in the dark with her terror, she lost composure. She began to cry.
Just die, she whispered. Please just die. Please. Please just die just die please
please please
Then, all at once, the movements ceased. She felt a weight settle in her
stomach. She opened her eyes, wiping tears from her cheeks. Sitting across from her
in the mirror was the porcelain wreckage of an antique china doll.
At that moment the archangel returned. He was carrying a basin of water from
what subterranean corner she had no idea. He briefly eyed the pile of her sick on the
floor and then set about boiling the water. He was muttering unintelligible nothings to
himself. As the water boiled, he lifted a bundle wrapped in rags from the junk on the
floor, and unwrapped it partially, handing it to her. She received it timorously, looking
down at the turdlike loaf in her hand. It was oddly odorless. The archangel was
making motions for her to eat it.
What is it? she asked.
The archangel only continued his motions. His lidless peeled eyes caught the
lamplight, reflecting it like motes of flame in the twinned gutters of a candle.
The loaf was mealy and flavorless in her mouth. She chewed with
consternation, forcing herself to swallow. Her throat filled with sawdust. The archangel
nodded, grinning, prompting her to eat more.
What is it? she said again. Are you feeding me children?
But the archangel wouldnt say.
Im not eating anymore until you tell me.
There was no more insistence from the archangel, so she put the loaf down. But
before long, a girl of no ordinary mien nor ordinary appetites, she picked it back up
and ate the whole thing. She felt strangely realized in the process. The archangel
gibbered happily, rubbing his hands together in the seductive manner that a cricket
might rub its legs together.
When the water had done boiling, he set it out to cool some, and ate a loaf too.
Then suddenly he gripped her foot in his claw. She immediately wrenched it free. But
the archangel was peaceful, holding his claw out for her. So, somewhat tentatively, she
put her slender white foot back in his grip. He lowered her foot into the basin of
steaming water, and then took her other foot and did the same with it. He retrieved a
rang, and, handling her toes each like a master craftsman handles materials of
exquisite delicacy, began cleaning her feet. The water was warm. It felt good. Her legs
fell bonelessly open. She could have pissed herself in that moment of utter bliss and
not have cared. Sometimes the ministrations of the archangel tickled her, and she
giggled, the sound ripping involuntarily from her throat. She hated that soundbut
rather adored the servitude on display before her. Bent to his task in supplication, the
archangel seemed entirely in his place. She thought the power might be hers to
dominate any will with her cold and beautiful hatred.
Here, in this Hell, inflated and fertile, she could be Madonna to a kingdom of
degenerates. They would come from worlds apart with basins of their own, and kneel
at her feet. How lovely it all could be.
Having finished with her feet, the archangel toweled them with a dry rag, and
began setting about looking for something. He retrieved a flimsy looking wooden comb,
and then started to comb the kinks from her hair, which had grown to a long ribbon of
black cascading past her shoulders. As he combed, the hair became illustrious, a river
of midnight silk. She watched this scene in baroque detail in the mirror. In the
dimness, two figures: the Queen of Gomorra, the Consort of Hell, black clad,
blackeyed, black haired: and at task behind her was her inhuman familiar, by turns
invested in his work and overjoyed to be so in proximity to his great love.
She was gazing into the reflections of her eyes as he worked: black wells
trenched into her skull at the bottom of which lay strange black waters. She entered
those wells, descending into the black water, and there became lost forever. That was
her fate.

XXX
In the filthy nest of the archangel, the Consort lay with him, the bodies
entwined, the hands clasped. She had eschewed her black garments and she lay
naked, pale, scrawny but for her grossly distended belly which was cradled in the
nook the archangels angled body made. The motionless weight in her stomach felt like
a stone. The light within the lamp was failing, and had become a warbled brassy glow
occasionally eking their surroundings from the darkness. She did not need to see to
know she lived. It was enough to smell: smells of damp and mildew and fungus and
the rancid turds of the archangel, whose familiar warm reek was beside her in the
dark. It was enough to hear: sounds of dripping and breathing and the beating of a
heart, resonant even here in this deep warren beneath the earth.
At one point the brassy glow flared out and illumined the shapes within the
mirror. The archangel looked, and saw himselfhe saw himself truly, as he was, not
some enchanted flight of fancyand he flew up into a rage. He made of the chaos of
his nest a greater chaos, throwing bones and rags about, flinging his own shit against
the walls like a petulant monkey. His splotchy shanks trembled. He was pulling out
his hair in bloody fistfuls, screaming ALL THAT WAS THAT IS NO MORE ALL
BESMIRCHED FLIGHTLESS AND NEVERMORE TO FLY WHAT LOOKS BACK I HATE IT I
HATE IT
The Consort turned her cruel black sorcerous eyes on him, and a smile spread
on her face as effortlessly as the serpent yawns to swallow its meal. The smile, of
course, was false. Behind the pale mask was her revulsion of everything that she
beheld. Yet he fell into her gaze, and, enchanted, placated, he came back to bed beside
her. She could feel his heart galloping against her ribs, then subsiding, slowing, as her
nakedness lulled him into a childlike slumber. How very like a babe, she thought to
herself, while quietly cultivating her hatred of the maudlin creature.
She couldnt help but note, howeverand not without satisfactionthe success
of her seduction, via her maturing body, her magicks. The final metamorphosis was
taking place, she was becoming the extent of the promise of her being.

XXX
With thread and needle, the archangel began to stitch together garments for the
Consort from flaps of rag. If his gibberish could be interpreted, he was making a dress
today. She watched the thing come together in his lap. In a certain light, it seemed
composed of hides flayed from unfortunate soulsall brown and sallow scraps bound
in a webwork of rude stitching. After a while, the Consort grew bored. While the
archangel was absorbed in his work, she snatched up a bone, bound the end in cloth,
and set the cloth aflame. With this helter-skelter torch in hand, she went off to see
what lay down the other passages.
She was going in the dark through convolutions of rotting brickwork smeared
with slime and padded with black moss, and she raised her torch, brandishing from
the dark corners pale waxen shelves of fungus which never before had seen the light,
and families of grey toadstools huddled like the gathering of sprites who in the
presence of the human gaze reverted to sedentary faceless shapes. She wondered if in
her passing the brims of the caps raised and small moist eyes regarded her queerly.
Everywhere condensation was dripping. It was very hot and very damp. At the
termination of one passage, she watched a black river go gliding soundlessly past into
the subterrane. From the high vaulted ceiling hung stalagmites of fungus, their tips
like cheesy grey teats beaded with moisture.
There were no signs of habitation down any of the passages: nothing in these
byways but the onset of prodigious fleshy growths like a cancer taking hold.
Now her torch was sweeping the wet panes of brick with its molten glow, and
faint reflections, distortions, wheeled in the damp and faded as she passed. She
recalled, in another life, under strange stars, leading a procession with a candle in her
hands. The Consort couldnt remember. She was plumbing inner depths as well as
externalor perhaps she was receding from her previous incarnations, because the
further she delved, the more it faded, the more the Consort, Queen of Gomorra, was
actualized. She was real: a succubus made manifest by the hatred of a young girl.
Even such creatures as the archangel, born of the rib of God, could never hope to be
as pure a scion of God as she wasfor God, above all, hated.
She turned down a passage, which, after a while, forkedshe took the leftand
forked againshe took the left againand then deposited her into a labyrinthine
tangle of halls given flesh by the sheer abundance of grey gunky stuff on the walls.
The stuff exhaled an overpowering smell of mushrooms. A sloping path took her down
even lower.
Then she was faced with an architrave and a darkness beyond, impenetrable to
her torch, which had begun to smolder and put out lots of smoke. There came the
sense that she was peering into a dark mirror. She couldnt say how or why. She felt
herself staring back from the darkness.
Go away, said a sudden girls voice.
The Consort raised her torch futilely. Whos that? she said.
Its me.
Who?
Dont come in, said the girls voice.
Are you hiding in there?
Dont come in or Ill kill you too.
Who have you killed?
Just go away.
A playful smile touched the lips of the Consort. But Im so bored, she said.
Please tell me who youve killed.
All of them.
All of who?
They locked me up in here.
They didnt lock you up here. They probably locked you up in a loony bin.
Yes. But now Im here.
Did you kill your mommy and daddy.
And the other two.
Who?
Billy Paxton. They all saw me with blood on my dress at the winter dance. They
thought they would pull a joke on me. But I knew. I killed Sheila so she wouldnt have
to grow up like me. I sent her to Heaven. Except theres no Heaven. I killed mom and
dady for make me. I cut them open. They locked me up here.
Did you hate them? asked the Consort.
I hated them.
Youre just like me.
Im not like anyone, said the ugly girl.
I used to want to die, mused the Consort. That was before. Now Ive found
myself, I like to hate instead.
Thats you, said the ugly girl.
Yes.
Im not like you.
The Consort peered within, smiling. Twinned flames waved like flags at the
bottoms of her bright bird-black eyes. Do you think Im pretty? she asked cruelly.
Stop it, said the ugly girl.
But do you think Im pretty.
I dont look at people anymore. Nor them look at me. Thats how I like it.
Thats a pity, said the Consort.
Go away now, said the ugly girl.
The Consort shrugged, turning away, turning back down the passage. As she
departed, she called over her shoulder, Ill see you again, you know.
There came no reply from the dark occluded mirror.
It didnt take long for the Consort to realize she was lost, recalling herself
through tunnels familiar and unfamiliar, all of them gunked with the thick grey
mucilage, all of them growing dimmer in the failing glow of her torch. At one point she
saw the black underground river againheard rather than saw the whispery rushing
of the currentand then turned back the way she came. She turned down that same
passage many more times before finally ridding herself of it for good. It was likewise so
for other such familiar images. They reeled past her in her flight, again and again:
families of toadstools, precise cracks in walls, certain arrangements of fallen bricks.
She turned one corner
And was suddenly met, in the light of his lamp, with the hideous face of the
archangel, contorted with rage.
A scream caught in her throat. The archangel gripped her wrist, causing her to
drop her smoldering stick, and violently dragged her through the passages to his nest,
where he threw her down upon the filthy rags. He stood in the entrance, glaring down
at her. He was fairly foaming at the mouth. NOT NEVER, he screamed, NOT NEVER
CAN GO NOT NEVER NEVER NEVER
The Consort tried in vain to placate him with her smile. However, the archangel
was in a place beyond all reproach. He stormed around shrieking and spitting, clawing
the walls tills his fingers were bloody, tossing rags to and fro. Eventually his eyes
found hers, and he became lost in them, and calmed down a little. He squatted down
on his haunches and offered her a tasteless lump, which she ate. But the dark
suspicion never left his gaping eyes. For a brief moment she felt like a character from
a storybook, a princess abducted by some subterranean horrorand maybe she
wanted to escape, and maybe she didnt.
After she had eaten, the archangel produced the dress he had made and lay it
across its lap as though it were a brilliant antiquity. The dress was a crazy looking
grotesque affair, belonging to a ridiculous paradigm all its own. He proffered it to her.
Do you want me to wear it? the Consort asked.
The archangel nodded.
Then she had stripped her clothes and was standing nude with the garment in
her hands. She could feel the archangels gaze upon her haunches, her buttocks, each
notch of her spine. With a degree of effortbecause its design was so outlandishshe
was able to fit inside the dress, and stared looking at herself in the mirror in the
eccentric piece. The archangel got up and affixed a small charm of bone and twine to
her hair, in place of her black bow. Then he stood back, appraising her in silence. She
found his eyes in the mirror and smiled.
Its beautiful, she said.
He smiled too. But that night, as she slept, the archangel crouched awake in
the lamplight, his eyes wide in their flayed pits like an owls, and he was watching her
covetously.

XXX
Little Ed straddled the swivel chair. He caressed his managerial vestments: the
cheap black suit ill tailored to his proportions, the clip-on tie. He appeared to be
swimming in a vast polyester bathrobe. His nametag read:

Executive Manager Edward

On the other side of the desk, in the metal foldout chair, the boy with the black
tooth sat grinning nervously with his hands wringing in his lap.
They sat opposite each other in the silence of the lime green office.
A manila folder lay opened on the desk. Little Ed held it up like a curtain
between them. His eyes scanned the contents.
Says here you worked out by the island, he said. How was that?
Well, said the boy with the black tooth. Decent enough, I guess. But I
thought it was high time to move on. You knowbroaden my horizons.
Says here you were fired.
That too, I suppose.
Can you cook?
Yessir.
Can you cook under pressure?
Yessir.
We get pretty busy weekend nights.
Sir, said the boy with the black tooth, I can cook all day long and not break a
sweat. Doesnt matter if its busy, slow. Whatever. I can cook all day long.
Little Ed looked at him over the top of the folder. A band of stitching wound
across the great distended melon of his head, where the hair had been partly shaven
away.
The boy with the black tooth leaned forward. He gawped at the bruised and
blackened flesh.
Boy, he said. That bum sure whooped you good, huh?
Little Ed glared.
Sorry.
When can you start?
At your earliest convenience, sir.
Then go in back and get yourself a paper hat and apron. Go find Big Ed. Show
him what you can do.
Yessir. Thank you, sir.
The boy with the black tooth got up and started for the door.
And son, said Little Ed.
He turned.
Wash your hands.
Yessir.
When the day was done, the boy with the black tooth came down the front steps
and into the parking lot. He unstrung his apron. He leaned against his car digging in
his pockets for the pack of cigarettes.
Another goddamn fucking apron, he said, lighting up.
He took a long, caustic drag and held it in his lungs. The smoke came seeping
between his teeth and out his nostrils. It wreathed around him in an unpleasant
smog.
Christ almighty.
He coughed. He took another drag.
Dark evening clouds gathered above, and stars peeped out from the paling sky.
The sun seemed swollen and liquid. Its mauve haze reflected redly in Marvs silver
structure.
He watched a spout of small night birds go up shrieking in silhouette, and he
watched as they disappeared somewhere in that smoldering sky. He thought of her
he thought of Eden burning, and how that riot of flame had made even the midnight
sky seem to glow pink.
And vaguely, he was becoming aware of an ache in his head, a throbbing pain.
He held his temple with one hand.
A stroke of thunder sounded in the peaceful sky, followed by the tinkling of a
small bell.
He looked across the parking lot and saw a strange thin boy waking a bicycle
toward him. He wore a red bellhops outfit and a funny looking cap on his head.
You again, said the boy with the black tooth.
The delivery boy looked at him. Do we know each other?
Not directly, said the boy with the black tooth. Mutual acquaintance.
I see.
They stood for a quiet moment in the early autumn haze. The clouds glowed
vibrant pink as they fled before the setting sun.
Then the delivery boy said, I need to speak with Marv.
Great big fat guy or the bum?
The manager.
Well, said the boy with the black tooth, theyre both dead anyhow.
The delivery boy seemed stunned. His pale face went paler. His eyes widened.
How?
The one killed the other.
I see.
Kind of funny that way, said the boy with the black tooth.
Yes.
Whatd you want him for anyway?
He was an emissary.
A what?
A go-between.
Oh, said the boy with the black tooth. Like a fence.
If you wish, said the delivery boy.
The boy with the black tooth grinned. Youre a kinda funny guy, huh?
The delivery boy looked anxiously at Marvs. He fingered the chinstrap of his
small round cap. I have a message, he said.
Well, whos it for?
You know that.
The boy with the black tooth grinned. Hell yeah I do, he said. Like I said,
buddy. Mutual acquaintance.
Will you deliver this to her? Its urgent."
The delivery boy went to the basket of his bicycle and returned with an
unmarked envelope, which he handed to the boy with the black tooth.
The boy with the black tooth took it and stood staring down at it. Yeah, yeah.
Sure, sure, he said. Anything for a buddy.
They regarded each other in strange silence.
Thunder stroked somewhere in the new fallen night. The delivery boy made a
formal bow which the boy with the black tooth returned with a mocking inclination of
his head. He grinned. Bemusement sparked in his clever eyes.
Then the delivery boy turned and left without another word, climbing onto his
bicycle, and was preceded into the night by the rich tinkling of his bell. The boy with
the black tooth watched after him. He waited until he was out of sight before wadding
the letter in his fist and casting it to the curb.

XXX
It was night and yet the river was swarming with the light of many candles. The
Dragon was coming up a muddy embankment toward a cluster of tarpaper dwellings
on the rise, and he was dressed in raggedy robes like some latterday drukpa, with a
hood drawn up over his head. He looked no less an odd wayfarer than any other who
inhabited this Hell. His apron was smeared red with clay. He clutched a reed in his
hand for a staff. For an instant he stood, barely apart from the darkness, and looked
back toward the river with ghastly hollows where eyes should be, and then turned and
continued on his way toward the dwellings. Somewhere on the horizon as he came
closer could be seen the shell of a cathedral looming in its ruin. Emptiness crowded
the blownout window sashes and the wind moaned as it sucked through the stony
dells and hollows within. A vast graveyard rambled from the front steps of the
cathedral down from the head of a slope some ways, and it was at the foot of this
graveyard that the settlement crouched.
Now the Dragon was entering among the derelict houses, all of which were
quiet, the doors shut, as though the coming of the Dragon was a thing that could be
sensed for days. All around, through cracks in slatboard shutters, could be felt the
gaze of watchful eyes. The Dragon passed over each house once. Here and there hung
carcasses of crabs from driftwood racks. The troglodytes of this outpost had looted
from the cathedral a stone cross, which now stood transfixed and monolithic in a
square in the center of town. The Dragon crouched in the shadow of that cross. He
filled his hand with mud, and stuffed his mouth and swallowed. Then he grinned at
the shacks, his teeth smeared black. He approached one at random. He knocked three
times.
When no reply came, he pushed the door gently open, and stepped into the
wedge of light inside. He pushed his hood back. His naked bulbous pate caught in the
rivers diffusion of light like a palely glowing moon. The hollows of his face were deep
with shadow. He looked around. In one corner crouched a dark figure. Two other,
smaller figures were crouched against the far wall. The Dragon dropped his reed
clattering to the floor.
I didnt ask for trouble, said the man.
No, said the Dragon. You didnt.
Please just go away.
Its too late, said the Dragon.
The Dragon knelt and opened his mouth wide, and then opened it wider, and
wider still, until it was gapinguntil the blue coils of his guts could be seen, and his
dark and bottomless hunger. The man flinched. The Dragon closed his lips around
him. And, chocking his head back, his gullet flexing mightily, he swallowed him whole.
The two women got up to run, but the Dragon was already turning around.
When he departed the settlement, each house stood emptyeven the crabs had
been sucked from their racksand the wind pulled the doors open and shut to
applaud the pall of silence descending upon the rooftops, greater than the silence that
had gone before, like an incredible vacuum of the human spirit. Faint impressions
were upon the dirty mattresses, and in the dust on the floors of the houses, and
standing against the walls. These could not be detected by the eyesnor heard nor
smellednot like the absurd notion of ghosts and phantasms, but rather they could
be felt, as someone in immediate danger feels his doom impending. In the brimming
dawn, the empty sashes filling with red light, the cathedral windows looked out like
eyes made baleful by the witness of great horror.
The Dragon was clutching great fistfuls of earth, dragging his grossly distended
gut behind him in the mud. In essence he looked like a sick bladderan overstuffed
sac of flesh, bulging here and there, with thin blue capillaries strained to the point of
bursting spidered across its surfacewhich could not let out, or, more perversely,
refused to let out, preferring instead to remain swollen foreverand his meal was
attempting to force its way up his throat, so he must let his jaw hang dislocated like a
serpents. He was worming his way colossally down the slope, toward the river. And
once there, basking in the filthy current, he lay buoyant and hideously grublike, with
his jaw hung open so he could swallow every candle and bundle that came his way.
Ahhhh, he moaned, as bilge water came up his throat, redolent with gibbets of
fetal meat.

XXX
The archangels love was too much. So the Consort escaped one day while he
had gone to fetch water. As she ascended the rungs of the well, she could hear him in
the darkness below, his desperate shrieks and insane appeals to a higher authority
was it God to whom he begged?and the sound of his voice became amplified in the
well, rising up after her like some bombastic nightmare loosed from Abaddon. The
image of sunlight in a circle far above seemed somehow a mirror. She would breach
that threshold. Her heart swam up her throat. Her hands were sweaty on the rungs.
The nightmare shuttled up the well after her, spitting mad frenzied curses:
HE WHO WALKS IN THE KINGDOM OF GOD WALKS IN THE HEART OF MAN HE
SAID I AM GOING I AM GOING FOR YOU HAVE KILLED ME FOR I AM WITHIN THE
HEART AND THE HEART IS WITHIN ME WITHIN WITHOUT WITHIN WITHOUT WITHIN
WITHOUT FOR SO LONG FOREVER TO MAKE YOU WANT TO PUKE THE ENDLESSNESS
OF IT GOES ON YOU UNDERSTAND YOU NEVER UNDERSTOOD BUT HE SAID IT HE
SAID ENGRAVEN ON ALL YOUR WEAK HEARTS SUNDERED THE KINGDOM DUST JUST
RED DUST JUST BURNING RED DUST TO MAKE TO SCORCH THE FEET TO BLISTER
EVEN WE THE FAITHFUL SERVANTS BLISTERED EVEN BORN OF THE RIB BURNING
BURNING WE CRIED OUT BUT NO HE SAID LOOK HE SAID ENGRAVEN ON THE HEART
OF THE MAN HE SAID WITHIN THE MAN HE SAID WHERE I DIED HE SAID THESE
WORDS ENGRAVEN THUS: NEVERMORE-TO-DREAM-FOR-IT-IS-ALL-A-DREAM SO WE
ARE BURNING THE REVELATION BURNING US BUT STILL THE URGE SO I AM ABJECT
SO I AM FAILURE BUT STILL THE URGE THE SIN TO DREAM O TO DREAM! O TO
DREAM! O GOD TO DREAM AGAIN! YOUR FACE YOUR EYES IN A PALE DREAM I SAW
IN A DAZZLING DREAM SO I DARED BUT EVEN IN THE DREAM SHE IN THE DREAM
SHE IN THE GARDEN ON HER BACK FORETOLD THE DOOM SHE SPREAD HER LEGS
AND BETWEEN THE LEGS SHE SPREAD FORETOLD THE DOOM THE PIT GAPED LIKE
A SERPENT MOUTH
YOU MAKE ME FEEL LIKE TEN THOUSAND MEN
YOU MAKE ME FEEL

When she finally regained consciousness, lying under the latticed bare black
branches in the woods, she felt like she had slept for days. Neither the tower nor the
well were anywhere in sight. There was woodsmoke on the air. She sat up. Before her
lay the remains of a campfire and across the fire from her sat a man upon a stump.
The man was sitting in front of a rotted hollow. Framed by the aperture of the hollow,
he seemed to have emerged from the gaping vestibule of a disfigured woodland
goddess. He was disfigured himself: his ears missing entirely, leaving gory red holes
behind, and his face caved and sallow and several teeth missing from the wide lipless
mouth, and strings of numbers tattooed all over his shaven skull: 66154 80208 32189
760208. He was dressed odd, toowearing an ensemble of improbable fabrics stitched
randomly together, the result of which was something a man might wear who was
crazy or who dabbled in magic, or bothand it was as eccentric looking, she suddenly
realized, as the dress she wore. She tried to get up, to move. But the man stayed her
with a gesture of his hand. Now he was coming toward her.
Youre in much pain, he said.
The Consort watched him sedately. Youre very ugly, she said.
The man grinned. I thank ye, maam.
What are you supposed to be?
Aint supposed to be anything.
But what are you really?
They call me prophet.
Who?
Those I go with.
And are you?
It kindly dont matter, he said. Its not what you can call on. The hand calls
on you.
She shook her head. I dont know what youre saying.
The prophet was squinting into her eyes, and his gaze became transfixed. He
momentarily seemed to lose himself. Lucile? he said.
What?
Then his gaze went to her belly, where the nameless weight resided. You went
with another man. . . . He sounded sad.
Ive never met you in my life, said the Consort.
No, the prophet murmured.
Anyway, she said, Im not even pregnant.
The prophet laughed out loud. Thats good, he said. Thats a good attitude to
take here.
Because of Naaman.
Yes maam.
Naaman. . . . she said, and was beginning to grow drowsy again. The pain in
her gut was like a labyrinth of stony branches emanating from a single awful point of
germination. Her guts were skewered. Her bladder was skewered. She saw the child in
the grip of the branchesand the child was colossaland the child was stony, like a
fruit that had ripened and then calcified on the branches of the great tree of
knowledge, which was holding him aloft into the voidand the child would end her
world, which was the entire world. The fever was not hot as she had expected, nor
cold, but of a more directly physical nature. The stone was growing through her
stomach.
When again she woke, it was night, and she thought there must be stars in the
sky: but they were just lightbulbs painted red and depending from wires, shivering
against the void. Voices came. Somewhere a man was delivering verbal ablutions to a
host of sinners, and another was extracting the willthe supposed willof God from
thin air, and from every direction came numerous garish voices declaring that at the
ends of the world dwell heathen beasts which this carnival had roped into submission.
She was overwhelmed by this tantric fit of sound in the strange red night.
Beside her, on a packing crate, the prophet was mopping the sweat from her
brow. She remembered suddenly: they had walked to the carnival grounds together.
She had been conscious. And, she remembered in horror, she had screamed the whole
way.
Whats happening to me? she asked.
The prophet gestured at her stomach. You got sick. It needs to come out.
But Im not pregnant.
The prophet laughed. Lord but youre committed.
Im not pregnant.
Well, said the prophet. Thats your prerogative. I was like to of left you
behind, but shed like a word.
Who?
The prophet gestured, and she looked, and saw, central to the trailers and the
red canvas tentscentral to the scaffolds and the mock preachers who stood upon
them with arms outstretched in benediction, and the throngs of sinners who gathered
at their feet begging pardonthe vast white canvas sheet on which was painted an
unnamed saint and the words O COME ALL YE FAITHFULand the strings of
lightbulbs webbed over all like a counterfeit firmamentcentral to these blaring sights
stood a solitary trailer, which was plainly unadorned. The trailer was red. There were
no windows.
Who lives in there?
The prophet shook his head. Some kinda daemon.
Is she a prophet too?
I just cant figure that out, said the prophet.
Well, said the Consort. I dont want to see her.
She aint one what you can refuse.
Im refusing.
You can run from it, said the prophet. But it aint will do you good.
Is that your prophecy?
Just Gods will, I reckon.
I dont believe in God.
The Devil, then.
Not him either.
Theyre both the same thing, he said. Dont you know that?
Then theyre both dead.
The prophet laughed. Yeah, but that dont mean so much after all. Theres a
hand thats guiding this all. I tell you that for certain.
She was writhing in the throes of fever. The solitary red trailer was before her
like a rock amidst so much illusion.
Alright, she said at last. Let me see her.
The prophet helped her to her feet. He went and got a parasol from a bearded
woman and came back and gave it to her to use as a cane. Leaning on the parasol in
her insane looking ragamuffin dress, she looked like a soul come home after years
abroad: a creature utterly of the carnival. The prophet helped her walk. Doglike
creatures in harlequin garb were dancing and laughinghigh thin childlike laughter
ringing like tin down the corridors of her smoking brainand they pranced and jigged
among the folk. No one seemed to notice but her. She went to pet one, dressed in
green-and-red motley, and it bared its vicious teeth and called her by name. Beyond
the purview of the red lights, among the dark silhouettes of trees, watched golden
chameleon eyes set in broad red faces. A rattish looking toothy devil scampered across
her path and vanished in a bloody smear somewhere in the corner of her eye. For a
brief instant the archangel stood before her. She faltered. The prophet caught her. He
held up her hair and mopped incredible amounts of sweat from the back of her neck.
He was talking, saying something she couldnt hear. She wondered if her brain was on
fire.
An old blind man sitting in a foldout chair was watching her with apparent
interest.
As their odd voyage took them closer to the red trailer, she turned in time to see
several stumpish wagon drivers standing in the beds of their wagons, dressed in
striped and garishly colored pantaloons. They were showing off with sweeping gestures
of the arm a selection of hulking creatures which were bound in rope to stakes in the
ground. These subdued giants simply sat, staring, on their haunches. She stopped to
inspect one. In the eyes could be seen a repressed intellect and the vestiges of a mind
broken and nearly entirely gone. Someone called them Nephilim but the word was
foreign to her. She listened to the labored breathing. She told the giant she wasnt
pregnant and then laughed raggedly. The giant moaned. She went past it and past the
whole row of giants. One of them was decorated with human bones. One of them had
blood crusted eyes and its nose had been hacked off to make it look funny.
The prophet aided her as far as the risers of the red trailer. Then he let go. She
clattered up the steps, throwing open the red door, and vanished inside.
She was standing in a small dark tunnel which lurched beneath her feet, and at
the other end of which, in the small light of some candles arranged on a table, sat a
shriveled one armed dwarf-woman. It was her left arm missing. The remaining arm,
meanwhile, was monstrously elongate as compared to the rest of her body, and ended
in a claw. The arm was sprawled, and the willowy fingers of the claw open, supported
by a pedestal.
The dwarf in her stale nightclothes seemed dead or dying. She was sitting in a
chair in recline, central to a jungle of arcane looking medical apparatuses, the tubes of
which nestled beneath her skin with cold steel needles. Administering to a conduit of
brass knobs and leversneither looking at the Consort nor saying anything in
greetingwas the delivery boy. He worked with scientific precision. He drew on one of
the levers and a black fluid descended one of the plastic tubes into the dwarfs arm,
and the ligaments started spasmodically.
The Consort approached this macabre assembly of machine and flesh. The
papery eyelids fluttered open, the rheumy bluegrey eyes beheld her. All at once the
dwarf came alive, and seized up as if in a tantrum. The eyes went wide.
You. . . . came her strangulated voice.
Yes. Me.
. . . .should not be. . . .
What do you want?
. . . .cannot be. . . .
Im not pregnant. If thats what youre thinking.
. . . .here. . . .
Somewhere in the darkness a sheepskin respiration apparatus was working like
a billow, expanding and contracting, drawing then squirting out air in exaggerated
wheezes and sighs. The dwarfs throat was working with visible effort. Then she
uttered, Name. . . .
She explained that she was the Consort of the denizens of Hell, the Queen of
Sodom and Gomorra and older places still. She didnt know how she knew, but she
knew nevertheless.
No. . . .
Yes, said the Consort. I wasnt beforeor maybe I always wasI dont know.
Its hard to remember. But I am now.
. . . .all. . . .in vain. . . .
The Consort shivered uncontrollably. She was dying, her brain was boiling.
This is a waste of time, she said, and turned and started to leave.
When she was at the door, the dwarf opened her mouth and tried to scream,
but only managed a feeble gurgling sound. Poor creaturewretched homunculusshe
was too weak, divested from the body of the arm. So the warnings fell on deaf ears.
The Consort turned and looked back. The dwarf had gone into an apparent epileptic
fit, the claw was rending gouges into the wooden pedestal. The delivery boy
administered a sedative. Then she turned, opening the door, falling down the stairs
into the delirium of red lights, and fled into the night.
Naked twisting trees hulked from out of the dark like figures in despair, then
congealed or entwined, the webbing of black branches becoming corrupt masses of
nervous tissues. She was going in the brainspace of a God long dead: plumbing
thoughts delirious with their own putrefaction.
Bright circles like cigarette burns stained her retinas. Beyond themas seen
through wormholescould be glimpsed worlds, lives, apart from this: green pastures
and marble cupids, and crabs amassing on a dark beach at night, the smell of
placenta at the very moment of birth, and a silent palace on the desert where sex was
made sacrilege and the menstrual blood flowed like a river. What lives or fantasies had
inhabited this frail shell before her now? What had gone before? What had she
dreamed? And was she dreaming now?
She looked up and found her parasol aloft and spread against the night sky. It
was rainingnot rain nor rose petalsbut raining the vulva cut from infinite virgins.
She laughed wildly, whirling the parasol. The sky above was black. The sky was an
enormous pussy from which could be born all things, including the end to all things.
By way of a slowly surfacing consciousness, she became aware of a torch
burning in the night, and stumbled into a moldering belltower in which two hags
livedtwo sisters. She thought they were just piles of rags, so she tried to wear them,
but the hags shrieked and flapped their arms like giant evil birds, and shooed her off.
Then she was slumped against the wall and smiling, saying, I dont know who I am
anymore.
Whats that? croaked one of the hags.
I dont know, said the Consort.
Pregnant!
Whats that?
Pregnant, said the other hag.
They crawled forward on their hands and knees to get a better look at the
Consort. Their shawls fell open, their long flat nipples waggled to and fro. Old cracked
eyes observed the stomach. Then, after long moments, they went scuttling up the
stairs, and shortly thereafter came the colossal tolling of a bell.
No, she said. She could scarcely hear her own voice. She was clawing at the
air, fending herself from the grasp of aural specters given formdemigods and
cacodemonswho had coalesced from the ringing of the bell: gibbering with parrot
beaks and with leprous cavities which constituted mouths, reaching for her, singing,
laughing, chanting. Was she afraid? What could these lunatics herald that was not
already evidenced by Hell itself? A deeper truth? What deeper truth?
Go away. I hate. Im hateful.
A man with a puffy pink infants face was rising from his rocking chair, opening
his shirt. Those were not what the contents of a mans stomach should be.
Now he was gone. They were all gone. The belltower was empty but for the peals
of the brass, which filled the air quite solidly, and filled her ears too, roaring down
their corridors in giant warbled convolutions of sound. Then she became aware of the
sudden presencehaving appeared as though they never leftof a collection of white
waxen masks with gaping eyeholes, and the clamor of small light bells, which
surrounded her completely. The larger brass bell subsided. So did the smaller ones.
Then silence descended in that dreamy moment. The hags appeared at the foot of the
stairs, cowering. The masks appeared to be evaluating her. She did not try to fend
them, and they took her away at last.

XXX
In Eden, among trees made into coal, and among hills of ash like wintry shoals
and grey and smoke colored rubble, a single shape remained: a twisted tree, with the
skulls of fauns nailed to its trunk. The skulls were now blacked and charred, as too
the nails that fixed them, but they remained, resolutely grinning, and their spines
remained too. And the boy with the black tooth who stood in this ashen scene in the
dead of winter was supplicant to the altar, having learned something in his dismal
time on this earth. He felt hard in his heart. He felt like the world might never end and
he would have to carry this heart for all time.
The birds had come back to roost but seemed somehow transfigured by the
flames. No longer small, but of a swollen size, and with the mottled naked heads of
buzzards, they came dropping blackly out of the wintern skies like conjured basilisks.
They were noisy now too, gracking and rattling in their wattled throats. They ruffled
their wings and the bleak January wind picked up the ash in little loops.
The boy with the black tooth observed this transmutation, and he understood,
primally, in an old part of his mind: in the stormwracked world without, a different
kind of alchemy was taking place, a transfiguring that would unshore all creation.
The next morning, he bundled up in his warmest clothes and went and watched
his parents in gentle repose in the grey winter light. Their chests gently rose, gently
fell. Then he got into his car and drove, going past Marvs, and past Toms trailer, and
he kept going until there was no going back, and he left forever.

XXX
The palace of the King stood on a precipice overlooking the void itself. The
palace was falling to pieces. It was tall and narrowvirtually a composition of stairs
between single chambersand the windows likewise tall and narrow, and fitted with a
cloudy red glass which, in its deepest skeins, seemed to contain webbings of nervous
tissues or vascular systems. Besides the curious glass, nothing else about that house
of stairs and sad dim stone chambersusually illumined by a single sputtering
torchnothing else was alive. The palace was infinitely ascending, or descending,
based on ones perspective. The foundations, as well as the labyrinthine
understructure, had been destroyed by the erosions of the cliff, so the palace leaned
vertiginously out over the yawning black abyss as though to ponder its own slow
uncreation. At head of the tall body, behind a huge round window like some cyclopic
eye, was the court of the King, where dwelt the only two inhabitants.
There was no wall surrounding the palace, no gate, no mote, only a vast tract
of marshland flooded by the river. A few menhirs stood in the silty waters, engraven
with symbols of the cross and the circle. Several masks swept past these, buoying the
Consort on a red silk liter. Something terrible had occurred inside her. She had
become septicshe couldnt help itand the shit was pouring from her mouth in
horrid brown sipes. It caked her lips. The stench of it, when she was conscious, made
her weep.
Now a huge stone archway was passing overhead, and she was inside a dark
and spacious antechamber which hadnt received in several lifetimes. She looked. A
figure was shuddering into existence in the gloom. It approached. It was small and fey,
she could see, walking at a seductive gait, and it was. . . .
It was a fauna pale faun, naked of its fur, and walking upright like a man.
Pendulous between his legs hung a pair of prodigious human genitalia.
Welcome home, said the faun, in as soft and loquacious a voice as she had
ever heard. Unfortunately you are ill with child. It must be removed.
She tried to protest, she tried to say she wasnt pregnant, but by that time she
was being swept up an infinite number of stairsor perhaps she was descending
them, plunging downwardpast the veined red windows which throbbed like the
inward parts of some titanic and slowly calcifying beast, even as the fever surged
through the corridors of her body. She was screaming. The wind was in her ears, and
in the wind a memory of bells ringing, and of voices, real or imagined, which lectured
her on the subject of the pitiless cosmos. Then she was in bedsheets, black bedsheets,
and she was naked. Her stomach was open before her like a horrible flower. She saw
her intestines lifted from her. She saw something else lifted from her too. She started
to sob.
There now, said the soft voice. All is good now. Sleep now.
In a haze of sedatives and the smell of formaldehyde, she obliged the voice, even
despite her horror, her despair, and fell, wrapped in bedsheets, into a black enclosure.
Later, she wondered if she had truly slept, or if she had receded from the
trauma into a state of dormancy. She woke wrapped in sheets, on a bed that was
central to a round and mostly barren chamber. There was a candelabra stood beside
her bed to compensate for the lack of torchlightthe two arms shaped like a mans in
crucifixion, and the third central arm, itself topped with a single candle, was shaped
like a mans head bowed in either grief or penance. The legs of the candelabra were
wrought into hateful looking serpents, which entwined the mans legs and appeared to
be swallowing him. A faint odd smell of burning incense lingered in the air beneath the
much heavier, older smell of centuries accrued in this decrepit dark bedchamber. She
cast her gaze around the perimeters of the room, watching the naked walls and the
shadows in the stairwell. She did not feel quite herself. She was hurting badly.
A jubilant day, said a sudden voice.
She turned. The huge bulbed and faintly amber eyes of the faun regarded her
patiently. The black animal lips were affected in a mock smile. His mien, so far as she
could tell, was entirely servile and polite despite his unashamed nakedness. He was
pouring a draft of steaming liquid into a gold vessel, which he extended to her.
She drank, convulsing at an overwhelmingly bitter taste.
You must drink. Its medicine to make you feel better.
When she had finished, he poured her another draft.
What are you? the Consort asked.
A familiar.
I dont know that word.
You think of Gods will, for instance. You think of a prophet.
Youre the will of God?
The fauns cupped and downturned ears twitched independent of each other.
Of your King, he said.
Are you Naaman?
No, Queen. A familiar, as I have said.
Im not your queen, she said miserably. She felt defeated and sick.
But you are, if you remember. A jubilant day. You have been married to your
King.
No, she said. That wasnt me.
She was in a fog. She couldnt remember. Beneath the softly righting flames, it
could be seen that the crucified mans eyes were wide with terrorwide beneath deep
bony hoodsand that his mouth was drawn in suppression of a scream. The man
wasnt stoic at all, but rather being subjected to torments beyond his control. Perhaps
the flames atop his arms and head were yet another form of torment.
But it was you, Queen. Your King has chosen you for bride.
Will there be a ceremony?
There is no need.
Has he been to see me?
There is no need.
Will he even speak with me?
There is no need. All is known. God has made all known to Naaman. So there
is no need for him to speak.
Then I hate him.
Yes. It is your wont, Queen.
I remember that. I remember hate.
Yes.
Then, recalling a sudden vivid sensation of her stomach being cut like leather,
she looked intently at the faun. Im not pregnant, you know.
Indeed no longer, said the faun.
Where is it? she demanded.
The pallid reverent face of the faun floated in the darkness, smiling. The child
had long been dead, said the faun. It was rotting and your body made of it a
wondrous pearl. You were very sick. I had to cut much apart.
Where is it? she said again.
I confess to certain appetites, Queen. A stone child is a miracle.
You ate it.
My King and I. It was cracked like a mollusk, and eaten that way.
Seized by the absurdness of this exchangeby the absurdness of everything
she crumpled, without control, into a sobbing fit. She put her face in her hands, and
her shoulders were rising, falling as the sobs came hiccupping out of her chest. The
faun put a hand on her shoulder. He was making shushing sounds which necessitated
bizarre contortions of his prehensile black lips. His teeth flashed in the midst of those
contortionsbroad, flat, whiteand he appeared, rather than conciliatory, to be
wheezing with laughter.
When her sobbing had subsided, she gazed tiredly up at the faun and tried to
explain, I prayed to God. . . .
Yes, said the faun. All is known. God was dead by that time, of course. But
he had made it known to us that the Queen would birth a miracle. And many more.
She blinked at him. More?
Smiling, the faun said, Yes, Queen.
No, she said. I dont want it.
It makes no difference. All is known.
Then the faun drew back the sheets. She saw her abdomen: a mounding tract
of flesh greenish and swollen, horrifically bound by stitches. Now the faun was
crawling onto the bed. The gentle candlelight pooled deeply in the slats of his ribs and
cascaded across his beautifully marbled white flesh.
Youll rip me apart.
I will mend you again.
As she watched the ceiling in an attempt to relocate her consciousness to
someplace far away, she noticed that the margins of the ceiling were crenulate with
blackened human figures each in a mirrored pose. These grotesques appeared to be
crouching, their arms raised as if to fend some unseen threat. As she stared, the
image resolved. She came to a sudden realization: the grotesques were actually
fireblackened human bodies crozzled to the stone, and all of them the cowering
remains of the same young girl.

XXX
The ex-priest was sitting alone on the bare steel frame of the cot. The springs
strained but barely under the weight of his bony haunches. The mattress, pitted,
vomit stained, lay curled like an enormous slug against the far wall, where it had been
hurled in a nihilistic rage. He wore his habit stillfor fetishistic reasonsbut also
because it was all he had left, besides his dope, his sneakers, socks, and a wad of ill
gotten bills kept hidden under the loose corner of the carpet. The night preceding, a
girl just barely twenty had come to him, already with her cunt rotting and the insides
of her willowy white arms plaguey and tinged greenish, and he had paid hera paltry
sum, necessitating in a sad performance on the mattressand then she had wiped
herself, pulled up her panties, and left him transfixed to the bare steel frame in his
sorry state like a figure crucified. His left arm was farther along than either of hers,
the holes had become pits, the flesh necrotic. It pained him terribly. The smell, he had
come to find, more than anything, was the worst: a smell like rotting teeth, brown and
shitty, which drove him to constant nausea. So, despite his intolerance of the outside
world and the pale dream it represented, he left his apartment window open, and the
foul invisible effluvium of his rot went curling out into the city streets below.
He looked like a skeleton dressed in waxpaper flesh, the lines of his face drawn
gaunt, and his eyes in perpetual shellshock as if in witness of something which no one
else in all the world was seeing. His hair, standing in a frizzed morass around his
balding skull, was whitethough he was young, for a man of the cloth.
As she had lay spread eagle atop him, reaching down between them to
jumpstart his limp and unwilling cock, his head had lolled to one side, and he saw
images resolve in the otherwise featureless sallow wallpaper: stars dimming in the
void, the dead worlds heaving past, and the faces of landscapes, junkyards, glimpsed
in dreams sliding away into the cataract, along with the brief flickering images of
agents of God whose nature was beyond all guessing, with their golden chameleon
eyes and broad red faces: and then beyond everything, when it was all leached away,
beyond the black wall there was nothing, absolute nothing, and even that went sliding
past, and it all began again.
This was not new to him, but it had become his reason for everything. Despite
this, he had resolved not to die. To die would be to die, and nothing more.
He found himself repulsed by his bladderthe bladder and the inevitability that
it must swell and let out at some time or other. When he was intoxicated or otherwise
in a mood, he stood out on the streetcorner preaching a new doctrine: that we are all
bladders, growing ripe with content, and when we let out at last it wont be into the
idyllic Heaven, but rather into another dream where again the flesh will imprison us
and then into another dream, another bladderand again and again, enough to make
you sick. His arms spread, his eyes cracked, he screamed that this dream is just one
of the infinite dreams of the Ouroboros. No one but the vagrants paid him any heed
and then only to ask him for dope. He came to despise the vile sacs inside the
passerby on the street. He had spent time incarcerated, and later hospitalized, for
having attempted to cut out the bladder of a transit bus driver.
He might have died, said the doctor, which made him laugh hysterically.
Now he was sitting on the skeleton bedframe with his arms spread at his sides
and his hands open in mock benediction. It was in this state that the Dragon found
him. The Dragon appeared in the open doorway of the apartment. He was confined to
the shape of a haggard old man in robes. The ex-priest looked at him.
Go away, glutton, he said.
Let me in, said the Dragon. Let me eat you.
It smells awful in here.
The Dragon smiled hideously beneath his hood. Thats no true reason, he
said.
I dont believe anything can be eaten, or remain eaten, said the ex-priest.
Then it wouldnt be an imposition.
It would be a discomfort.
Whats that?
One more in a long series.
Pah! No true reason.
I have no reason to get up from this frame. I have no reason to ever dream
again. I have no reason to let you eat me.
Listen, said the Dragon. I have seen what you have seeneverything is just
dust. Let me consolidate all dust in my belly. Come join the union.
Look further. There is not even dust. Beyond the dust, there is nothing.
Beyond the dust there will be me. I am Ouroboros.
Ouroboros inside Ouroboros? I doubt it.
And who are you, then?
I am God. I am Vesica. I am Heaven. I am Hell. I am everything. I am nothing. I
am not even the dust.
Youre mad.
Its precisely because Im not mad that I am all these things. I have seenmy
mind has grasped, and Ive become actualized. I hold everything within me. You are
within me. And I am within everyoneall those bladders, and the bladders within the
bladders.
Here the Dragon forewent all tact, and said simply, Then let me eat you, so
that I can swallow both everything and nothing.
To this the ex-priest could only assent, saying, Come inside.
Then the Dragon was gone from his doorway. The bleakly lit corridor beyond
was empty. The ex-priest sat a while in silence. Warm drops of saliva had begun to
rain on him, and he looked up, finding a bottomless black mouth where his ceiling
had beenthe prehensile lips of which were curling down around him.

XXX
The second miracle was lifted from the Consorts stomach in the same way as
the first. She watched the thing come up in the hands of the faun like some vast
prehistoric egg. It was a month before she had convalesced sufficiently to roam the
palace unaided, during which time the faun visited her regularly. Then one day the
faun arrived with a cane, a junctured length of bone fragments held together by resin
and surmounted by a curved ebony handle in the shape of a serpent. He held it up
between his hands. She took it, rising from the bed. When the faun tried to assist her,
she dismissed him.
You are weak.
Yes, she said. But I despise you. Go away.
So dismissed, the faun gathered her thingsher tosspot and soiled bedsheets
and washing basinand disappeared into the darkness of the palace. She dressed
herself and then went to walk about, descending the curving stairwell in the gloom.
The descent was always easiest. She had dressed from the lavish wardrobe now
afforded by her status as royalty. Today it was a black silk gown that was long and
shapeless but which nevertheless succeeded to accentuate her lithe figureand
sprouting from which, her long thin fingers and doleful white face seemed spectral
shapes of pallid light floating in the darkness. The content of the years had scored
itself in the lines beneath her eyes and around her mouth. She had grown bonier,
leaner, and taller, as befits a woman grown, which she had become. Her beauty, less
than flowering, was statuesquethat is to say, immobile. Hers was the beauty of the
prisoner, of the alabaster statue standing so wistfully in the drear medieval gallery.
Her hair fell past her buttocks in a gorgeous cascade. When she was naked, she
could enrobe herself in it.
Her cane sounding on the stairs, she passed rows of tall narrow windows
through which trickled thin spindles of red light. She stopped in that light to inspect
her hands, moving them, observing the rising of the cords beneath the white skin, and
the tracings of the smooth blue veins. She wandered if even this flesh belonged to her.
Or had she stolen it from some nave young girl? She couldnt be sure of her right to
anything anymore, except to her hatred. So her hatred walked with her down the
stepsher familiarand it lay long on the stairs like a shadow, though she knew it
was anything but a shadow. Her hatred was a mirror, an abyss. When she peered
down into that woman-shaped abscess, she witnessed the infinite fragmentations of
herself peering back. Invariably, they all were suffering or mad. So she didnt hope for
a way out. She was merely indignant.
Perhaps more than herself, she hated her Queendom. In the soft tissues
delicately fanned in the red glass, she saw the pathways of her reincarnation, her
sojourn into Hell. Here, after all the suffering, was the revelation of her throne: a
prison in the crumbling stone palace. Nothing more than a sense of belonging made it
true. Here was her fates decree. Here was her destination. The realization, when she
was alonewhich was oftenmade her cry.
The chamber immediately beneath hers was completely bare, yet its ceiling was
similarly ringed with bodies crozzled to the stone. Each successive chamber was the
same: the bodies sometimes men and sometimes women, sometimes children, the
poses varied, bent in supplication or with legs flung wide, and all of them mummied,
shrunken, blackened. The mirrored bodies in mirrored poses seemed to speak of
natures inescapable even across the many lives liveda prison in the flesh. She came
to understand the palace as a temple to this unending circle.
Sometimes, standing in the sallow marshes of the palace grounds, she would
put her hands on the menhirs as if blind, feeling with her fingertips the engravings of
every cross and circle. Such ritualism pervaded these old stones. She tried to grant
them meaning in her head. But then, standing at the edge of the precipice, peering
into the void over which the whole palace stooped, she eschewed those notions,
thinking only of blackness.
One day, in lieu of his more regular visitations, the faun brought her a full
length mirror framed within a span of silver angel wings in which, in sockets, shone
huge white opals like blind eyes. At the sight of angel wings, she started laughing
hysterically. The faun stood by with inexpression on his reverent face.
When she had begun to tearfully subside, he told her, Today is good. Your King
will see you.
Naaman wants to see me?
Yes.
Why?
Because it is so, said the faun. Make yourself pretty and we will see him.
Utilizing the mirror, she dressed herself in an elaborate black dress with an
immense train, which the faun carried for her as they climbed the stairsdespite her
telling him no, the faun insistedand, her cane clacking upon the steps, she rising
past the red windows, they came to the court of the King, where sat Naaman upon his
throne.
The floor here was gleaming black marble veined with red, as was the dais of
many steps atop which stood Naamans throne. Upon an ebony table lay the halved
pieces of the Consorts miracles like empty stone bowls. The Consort felt vaguely sick
as she processed them. In the direction the throne faced was a marvelous round
window which peered out across the entirety of the void. At the foot of the dais was an
ebony seat.
The Consort was standing central to the court, facing Naaman:
Dwarfed by his elaborate black thronethe crown of which bore a cross
encircled by a serpent swallowing its own tailNaman was enshrouded all in red, his
features hooded from sight. Beneath that red shroud could be seen only the indistinct
contours of a body lumpy and disfigured. Naaman breathed, but there was no sound
of his breathing. The court was completely silent.
What does he want? she murmured to the faun.
He wants nothing.
The faun gestured for her to take her seat at the foot of the dais, and she sat.
Naamans presenceshriveled and infantilewas nevertheless looming behind her.
But he neither stirred nor made a sound. The court was silent. That was all.
They sat facing the void and the void, as the day grew long, not only faced them
but seemed to fill them. By the days decline she felt completely hollow. She felt she
had glimpsed Truth.
After his usual visitation that night, the faun brought to her bedside the
enrobed King Naaman, bearing him lightly in his arms. He handed the bundle off to
her and then was gone. She sat up for a moment observing the shape in her arms.
Then she reclined once more. As she lay in her repose, a thin hand stirred among the
folds of red cloth, clutching feebly to her. She was watching the flames twist and right
themselves along the arms of the crucified man. Now her station was coming into
focus at last: hers wasnt the power to wage a conquest of seductionrather it was a
sacrifice, a responsibility to provide succor to these mutate forms of Hell.
Is that all I am? she asked nobody at all.
XXX
By sheer dint of her hatred, this happened:
The winged mirror was brought to the court, where the Consort was sat
motionless on her regal seat, and the mirror was stood directly in the woman-shaped
hole on the floor that so resembled her shadow. The Consort informed the faun, who
held the mirror standing, that this was appropriate. She bid him keep it there. By now
the Consort was fat with her third miracle. She did not care. Sitting at the foot of her
Kings daisthe days now colored by their silencewatching the void through the
windowshe had become leached of all but her essential elements. Her womanhood
remained. Her hatred remained. The body was stripped of all trappings of previous
incarnations, now become an abstract piece of ornamentation to Naamans court. The
black dress she woreif it could be so identifiedfinding no parallel in any of the
fashions of the sanewas more comparable to some byzantine work of architecture:
replete with a collar fitted tightly to her slender neck, which, at the end, splayed in an
array of tentacular diversions: and humongous cumbersome pauldrons that spread
like wings and from which depended slivers of gleaming onyx from threads. Her bodice
was sleek but mantled by a heavy gilt chestpiece depicting a lusty serpent. Her skirt
was spread like an ocean on the floor. From her lower lip and from her eyelidswhich
had been piercedhung precious black jewels. And her hair, that raven majesty,
cascaded from her pauldrons and down the length of her entire back, and it too
spread on the floor. The Consort had been worked upon until the flesh became
secondary to the gilding. She was entombed by her station, by her royalty. She was an
extrusion of the palace itself.
Now, with as much grace as she could muster given her rigid carapace, she
clutched her cane, rose from her seat, and set upon the mirror. Her vast skirt dragged
behind her. Even as the Consort advanced, the shadow did not move. It lingered
motionless across the mirror. Peering into the mirror, there was no reflection, nor even
a glint of light. In fact, framed by the enormous angel wings, the mirror was a gateway
just now: beyond was a musty underground labyrinth. A breath of damp and fetor
exhaled from beyond.
The Consort reached through the mirror, and suddenly dragged forth a
disgusting girl-shape in white hospital scrubs and slippers. Repulsed, she flung this
creature to the ground. The ugly girl began to sob.
Yes, said the faun, displaying for the first time a note of pleasure in his voice.
Despising his pleasure, the Consort dismissed him, bidding him return the
mirror to her chamber. Then she returned to her seat. In the shadow of her hatred,
the ugly girl retreated to a small huddled form on the ground, shivering. Here was a
shape sadder than all the mutations in Hell. The knuckles and forearms were weedy
and elongate, covered with coarse hair. The face was apelike, the mouth wide and
bland, and one of the ears was just a little twist of flesh like a pigs tail. Perhaps most
pathetic of all was the black bow clipped to the hair.
The Consort smiled to see all this. Weve met before, she said.
Ive never met you in my life.
Tell me about Billy Paxton.
No.
Tell me about Billy Paxton and the winter dance.
Please, she moaned.
I can see you clearly. Tell me.
Wracked with some unknowable agony, the ugly girl sprawled in the shadow,
and relented. He said he knew what I was thinking. He said I thought nobody would
dance with me. He said I thought I was lower than garbage.
Yes, said the Consort.
He said he would dance with me.
But he didnt.
Here the ugly girl could only spit and cry and wipe the mucus from her broad
flat nose with the back of her hand.
Tell me how you killed him.
No.
Tell me.
I cut him apart. I played in the blood. They locked me up here.
Look at me now, said the Consort, who wore upon her face a look of cold
pleasure.
I dont look at anyone and no one looks at me.
Look at me. Im beautiful.
Please.
You must do as I say.
Slowly, the ugly girl raised her face, and beheld the visage of her Queen. The
Consort glared back, smiling. In the face of such wicked beauty, there could be no
hope. The ugly girl shrieked, and convulsed on the veined marble floor, lanced by the
Consorts utter hatred.
You are here now, she said. Forever. You are mine.

XXX
Hugely rotund, the Dragon filled the riverbed, barreling down its channels with
jaws agape to swallow all minutia of stuff before him: mud and slime and trash and
feces, the swollen black babes in their swaddling, and crabs who scrambled in vain to
evade the huge jaws, the black and rotting teeth. In shallower waters his backside
would breach and seem a living island moving in the current, dressed in a mire of
broken glass and tin cans and hubcaps. Nomadic eyes watched the passing from
secret hideouts along the embankments. Afterward, in the wake of the beast, timorous
words were exchanged. What had been seen must not be so.
But no, we saw it going in the water. It was a living monster. We must never
talk of it again.
Some who saw the living islandor saw the shadow of the beast pass under the
watercame to appreciate yellow butterflies. They would sit out in their rockers at
night, and the butterflies would come, and kiss their eyes, or kiss their lips or ears.
Then they wore dainty yellow haloes, and stopped passerby, groping for wordsDo
you know the Dragon? The Devil-Who-Hungers?and the passerby then would either
stop to enjoy the butterflies, or dismiss them as ramblers and get on with their day.
A frightful old woman with yellow eyes flung herself at the feet of a panicked
man, gripping his jeancuffs with yellow nails, howling Stay with me in a beautiful
place!

The Dragon slept in caves until he grew too big for them, and then simply
beached himself on the embankments. There he lay vast and ponderously fat, the folds
of his flesh bleached from his time under the water, hairless and scattered with veins.
His noxious farting and snoring would warn off nomads for miles. But sometimes
when he woke, one or two of the curious would be present, poking around to witness
this spectacle. When he shoved off back into the water, only vague traces of them
remained. It was the same case for everything he swallowed. He permitted nothing to
be free of his gut, not a single molecule, and, as his hunger sophisticated, he even
swallowed the memories of these thingsand it all was making him fatter, and fatter.
He moved by wrigglinghis arms and legs now totally vestigialand by moving
so, he left huge and vermiculate furrows in his wake: a singular spoor in all Hell by
which to track the comings and goings of the Dragon. Some who were of strange
inclinations came willingly to where he lay with jaws gaping, and they entered that
ponderous dripping cavern, entered the voluminous intestines, like the lamb who
knows Gods design and is acceptant of its fate. Sometimes they did this with
razorblades, and sometimes with the exhaust pipes of cars. Sometimes, with
gimmicks, they didnt even know they were doing itbut in Hell, they were walking
into the Dragons maw, enthralled as if in a dream.
He became greedier.
Whole settlements vanished, and the memories of them vanished too. But in
dreamsrestless dreams in which there was a greater sense of reality than in the
waking worldpeople began to experience a sense of things lacking. They said it was
storms. They said huge black apocalypse clouds were crossing the sea. Everywhere,
places were vanishing or going mad.
"So you had bad dreams, said the radio man. So what? I dreamed a great big
storm came up and knocked the world down. And shit, look what happened! And I
dreamed Rona Fischer from my high school gym class came back and fucked my
brains loose. Well, let's not get too personal. The point is this, kidsyou take the good
with the bad. If all your nightmares come true, don't stop there. We all got dreams too,
hey?"
Amen, said Rona Fischer.
One place in particulara squalid clumping on the summit of a tall cliff, which
overlooked the yawning river belowthis place was soon a habitat for butterflies, and
came to adopt the custom of leaving out offerings, and the Dragon, being no stranger
to the idea of cultivation, allowed this place a thrush season of breeding. A brace of
scaffolding became erected from the precipice. From that brace, on certain candlelit
nights, the newborn were hung by their umbilicals. These went not pitching down into
the river, in accordance with the law, but rather were left out for the Dragon. Haunted
yellow eyes watched as the huge black vacuum breached from the water, framed
within the huge teeth and the huge lips and the folds of limpid flesh that radiated out
from around it, and as the mouth came crunching shut, receding back into the dark
and leaving the umbilicals swinging loose. Somewhat parodically, the inhabitants of
this place named it the Harrow.
Eventually, as word of this sacrilege got around, a belltower was rung. The
masks of the King were made manifest. Stooped and anemic looking in their slack red
robesand the pallid masks that floated where heads should be stoven through with
holes like windows into nothingthey rang their bells out. There were a great many of
them, they were stepping from a sudden puff of red smoke which had produced them,
all going in single file. At the back of the line, without a bell, a single mask was
pushing a cart in which to pile the condemned. It was a long way to the Harrow, to the
top of the cliff, but the masks crossed the terrain of the lower marshes, negotiating
creeks and mudpits, and did so without complaint nor even a single word. Their
meticulousness was the stuff of insects. As they went, they came by admirers of
butterflies who were going to join the Harrow, and these were wrestled into the cart.
The bells chimed at every capture. By the time they had gotten seriously underway,
the cart was heaping with broken crushed bodies, and the whole pile screamed and
writhed.
As the masks were crossing a bridge over a leg of the river, the water beneath
them suddenly darkened and broke, and the Dragon came lunging forth: he passed
overhead in a sweeping arcan enormous expanse of fleshand in that single passing
wiped clean all traces of the masks and their cargo. The Dragon dealt with momentary
indigestion before lurching back out into the broader current.
In spite of that defeat, the crown was silent. Naaman's response, or his lack
thereof, bore a subdued nature, even expectancy. Prophets and poets and bohemian
sorcerers were scrounged up to deal with the aggressor, all of them meeting the same
end. After that, all efforts to halt the end of the world ceased. The world, dejected, lay
on its side.
Meanwhile, unabated by the Kings law, butterfly enthusiasts flocked to the
Harrow. They came with tacks in their mouths, with hammers in one hand and pots of
tar swinging from the other. A junky cityscape was made of the Harrow, which
sprawled down the entire neck of the cliff, squalid tower upon squalid tower, cobbled
up out of tarpaper, tin sheet, cardboard, until the whole place resembled some vile
rookery crowding out the very sky. The thrush season went madder. The scaffold had
to be fortified, then extended. Thus outfitted, it hung with infants sometimes three
hundred thick, and the scaffold seemed a fruitstand the goods of which were in a state
of near constant shrieking and wailing. The Dragon accepted these gladlessly: he
demanded ever more. So the mothers and fathers hung themselves from the scaffold,
and did so happily, cheering as the mouth rose to meet them. It became a sensation.
The men and women battled for a place on the scaffold, the ecstatic and vibrating air
reached a fever pitch. The lunacy crested. The people hung. The Dragon ate.
Then came a day when all the Harrow stood silent, the ropes hung slack, for the
Dragon had eaten all there was to eat, and now ate the very place itself, and all
memory of the place, and moved on.
The radio man, rubbing his head in the early morningwhile Rona Fischer
beneath his desk had her head between his kneessaid to the microphone, Does
anybody remember anything anymore?

XXX
When the time came at last to contend with the Dragon, the last living prophet
was summoned to the court of Naaman. His summons came in a dream.
He witnessed a fleshless bull thrashing in a lake of blood. He watched the
bunching of the naked red muscles, the marbling of bloodsoaked fat. The horns were
huge and sleek. The eyes were frenzied. The prehensile lips articulated the words
perfectly:
COME. COME.
Silhouetted against a huge red sun was the palace of the King.
When he woke at the foot of a tree, it was beneath a dimmer, sadder sun. The
prophet packed up what things he had accrued during his stay with the carnival and
made his rounds of saying goodbye to the roustabouts, the freaks, the criminal
wastrels whom he called his friends. Before he departed, the dwarf in the red trailer
called him for an audience. No one said anything, but the prophet knew. It was a
knowing which, as the days of his renewed existence passed, resolved with more and
more clarity. The prophet knew, for instance, that he would die very shortly. So he
went to the red trailer in the early morning.
As he crossed the carnival groundsall the attractions cast sadly in the new
light, everything spent from the wild night precedinghe pondered the immanency of
his death. He wondered what death meant. He wondered if he had not already died.
Running such lines of thought, he concluded that death meant little, or at the very
least that a man dies many times over the course of his life.
He passed the blind man, who he hadnt seen all morning, sitting in his chair
near the front steps of the red trailer. The blind man didnt bother regarding him.
Arent you going to miss me buddy?
The blind man gestured dismissively. Ill see you again.
The prophet peered at him a moment, then nodded, and ascended the risers,
opening the red door, and entered the trailer. He stood in the darkness and the floor
listed beneath him. Beyond this enclosure loomed the impression of a vast emptiness,
a space devoid of stars, and the trailer all around groaned like a capsule beneath deep
sea pressure. Across the cabin from him, in faint candlelight, the sheepskin apparatus
puffed and sucked, and the dwarf lay cradled motionless in her immense and intricate
series of supports. The delivery boy stood primly by her side.
The prophet crossed to the dwarf, who came suddenly to life and began to
speak.
Gone. . . .
Yes, maam. Its time.
. . . .no. . . .go. . . .
The prophet shook his head. It aint a choice of mine. I got to go.
Now the dwarfs throat seemed full of dust, and she was making sounds but no
words. Her monstrous claw was drawing circles in the air with its thrice-knuckled
index finger.
The delivery boy turned to address the prophet. The madame, he said, wishes
for you to know this: you have gone before. You have always gone. It is always the
same. She wishes you to stay. She wishes you to break a circle.
The prophet screwed up his face and shrugged helplessly. I cant break a
circle, he said. Its just a shape.
The delivery boy said no more. The dwarf had resigned to her deathlike stasis.
Maam, said the prophet, and turned and left.
He journeyed a vast kaleidoscopic land pieced together from gloomy prehistoric
forests, and dry grasslands where above the tall sere grass floated balloons containing
lost dreamssome of the balloons containing fireflies, and others dark stormclouds,
or vari-colored eyes, or smoldering gunshot woundsand one balloon in particular
containing the face of his Lucileand he traveled the trashscape banks of the river
Styx where a few smokestacks emerged from the slagheaps like enormous throats full
of cinders and fire. He had taken from the grasslands the balloon containing Lucile,
and he sat on the remains of a harvest thresher and he observed her face: her pale
skin, her black hair, her black eyes. His heart ached for a life that was remote from
him now. Then he let the balloon go, and it went sailing up sadly into a sky choked
with smog. He wandered in a marsh the mud of which had been rendered iridescent
by the corpse of a nearby oil tanker. Random and sporadic couplings of chemical
compounds launched sudden fires and noxious fumes into the air. Red and blue and
green and violet smoke erupted as though from a magicians arsenal. Somewhere in
one of the woods he encountered a quarry that was bottomlessly deep, but which was
piled almost to the top with millions of dead black beetles.
He wondered what any of it meant, if it meant anything. He wondered if it was
real. Perhaps he was dreaming and in his dream traveling through himself to the point
of his ultimate destination. He wondered if true distance lay between any two things,
or if it was all a matter of perspective. He concluded that the only distance existed in
delusion.
So he dreamed on, closing the distance.
Then he was standing before the palace, before the edge of the world. He
entered the antechamber where no one received him. The sounds of his footsteps
echoed hugely from the vaulted ceiling. He ascended up a labyrinth of stairs, past
narrow windows embedded in which were tissues like odd strata, and past dark and
barren chambers. In one of these chambers was an ugly simian looking girl
imprisoned inside a mirror, who begged to be let out. He went past her into the
darkness.
At last he reached the court, where an assembly had gathered just for him: a
faun, a rather abstract looking queen in black geometrical garb, and the king himself,
concealed in red swaddling, who sat atop his elaborate throne. He noticed a table on
which lay the halved pieces of giant pearls, and he noticed one in particular, still
intact, which resembled a grotesque human infant. The faun came forward and
bowed.
You are here.
Yessir, said the prophet.
You may approach the King.
Yessir.
The prophet ascended the steps of the mighty dais, past the Queenwhose eyes
spared him no regard, but were trained on the limitless void spread beyond the single
huge round window. He had the fleeting impression that her soul was familiar but
masked within unfamiliar flesh. He passed her, mounting the step just below the
crown. If Naaman observed him, he gave no indication. Then a thin hand motioned
him to come closer, so he did. Naamans hood leaned forward. A whispery voice in his
ear informed him of his task.
The prophet understood. The naked bull was thrashing in his mind.

XXX
The police dragged the waters around the island and found only an ancient
amphora in the shape of the Madonna that was filled with poisonous filth. They
unearthed the bones of a calf on the island, but that was all. No one knew what to
make of the cadaver or the ciphers inscribed upon the ribs, and ultimately the case
went cold, the implication of murder linked without evidence but with vague
superstition to the anomaly of Toms death. They confiscated the ruined mans
artifacts for observation, interring them eventually in a dusty warehouse along with
the amphora, never again to see a life outside of obscurity.
The derelict shack would collapse into the sea and be made into driftwood. The
fathers house would subside into ruin. Drifters would squat there from time to time,
stripping the wood paneling bare and making fires from it. They would know nothing
of the lives that took place there. They would be blind to the ghosts of those events,
which, with the passage of time, the eons still to come, would repeat themselves, and
do so without ceasefor no reason other than because it is so.

XXX
Because his knowing had advanced to a point of terrible clarity, the prophet
didnt have to travel at all. It was for this same reason that he now looked forward to
his own death. The knowing had become too much. It burdened him. So he hoped this
would be the last time.
The prophet dreamed, and in the dream were contained all things, all other
dreams, all worlds, even the infinite aspects of the dead-but-living God who lay central
to the universe and whose dreaming, in the beginning, had begat all other such
dreamers as weand the prophet also saw in his dream all us living within our
infinitely capacitating kingdoms, which are separate but Oneand, lastly, he dreamed
of the Dragon. He closed the distance, because there was no distance. Then he was in
the crumbling vestibule beneath the palace, which let on to the tangle of lower
passages, themselves having been crushed and closed off by the erosion of the cliff out
of which theyd been hewn. He was holding a holy paper lantern given him by the
faun, which was painted with crosses and which cast those symbols vastly upon the
walls in the shuddering red light. Contained within the rubbled passages, and thereby
trapped by his own immense fatness, was the Dragon, whose face extruded into the
vestibule like some unspeakably grotesque fleshy tuber. The eyes were lost beneath
flaps of fat, and the mouth dominated what remained of the face, yawning open like a
portal. The prophet saw nothing but darkness within, smelled nothing but
putrefaction. The Dragon laughed, and his rumbling laughter pervaded the vestibule,
shaking the walls about them.
Because his world was tactilein the sensorial mire of physical beinghe could
only perceive his surroundings, assess what was eatable, and therefore couldnt
escape. You couldnt even do away with me, sneered the Dragon. You could only
imprison me.
The prophet shook his head. Excuse my doing so. But it kindly just dont
matter anymore.
Oh?
The oblivion is coming.
I knew another such as yourself, said the Dragon, who saw everything in
such pointless terms. I swallowed him whole.
Thats what Im betting on.
Do you seek such release?
Not as such, said the prophet. But all the sameits time.
Yes, said the Dragon.
Yessir, said the prophet with frank resignation.
The jaws gaped, and the prophet stepped within, the red glow of his lantern
preceding him down the dark wet labyrinthine passages of the Dragons inner regions,
where he disappeared forever.

XXX
While the palace was in slumber, the ugly girl made her escape. She crept
cautiously past the chamber where her Queen lay in a beautiful sprawl among black
bedsheets, and then went hurrying down the stairwell, past an infinite number of
similar but barren chambers, and past a number of tall narrow red windows which
slitted the walls as though the palace itself were gilled. To her unconscious mind came
a vision of grab gills flexing in conjunction with the beating of a heart.
She stepped into one of the chambers, because crusted to the ceiling were a
ring of bodies, which she knew beyond all doubt belonged to her. There was no
explaining the knowing. The shriveled features were beyond recognition. But she
knew. The ugly girl began to tremble, weeping. In repose, the incinerate bodies had
been arranged into positions of strange supplication. The knowing became deeper
though the conscious understanding was in a fog of discombobulation.
Then she fled the chamber, down the labyrinth of stairs, and down past the
antechambernot into the world withoutbut down into the vestibule beneath the
palace, where the Dragons face emerged in its vast hideousness. The Dragon woke
when she entered, and began sniffing around.
Who? he bellowed.
Its me.
Who?
Its me, she whispered. Please keep it down. Theyll wake and catch me
otherwise.
The Dragon swung his jowly face back and forth, sniffing at the musty air. Im
blind, he said. I cant see from under all this bulk.
They say youre very powerful, said the ugly girl.
To this the Dragon could only respond with his rumbling laughter.
If I help you, can you get me out of this place?
Trapped! roared the Dragon, setting the walls to quaking.
The ugly girl desperately tried to shush him, then said, Isnt there anyone who
can let you out?
No one but the biggest, strongest man. Maybe only God himself. And I may
have swallowed him!
The ugly girl crouched miserably on the floor, shivering lightly. What am I
going to do? she said to herself.
The Dragon blasted a noxious wind from his nostrils. There is another way
out, he said. I keep it inside of myself. Its especially for girls such as yourself.
She looked at him dubiously.
Or you can surrender to your captors.
Theres no other way?
There is no way out, darling. We are made as we are, with no other purpose
but what purpose is given us. You are at the apex of your being.
She didnt understand a word of it, but the Dragon nevertheless gaped his
mighty jaws, and she peered within, past the huge rotting teeth, down the corridors of
the Dragons throat.

When the Consort woke that morning to find her captive missing, she flew into
a cold rage, dressing herself swiftly, and went sweeping down the flights of stairs in
search of any spoor of the ugly girl. There were no footprints out in the marsh, nor any
sign of her in the mirror. So the Consort went down to the vestibuleher cane in one
hand and a candle held outstretched in the otherand confronted the Dragon, who
smiled lazily at her approach.
Another girl, he said, sniffing. Am I so lucky?
You brute! she shrieked.
Now, darling, he crooned elegantly.
She was mine!
And now shes breakfast.
You brute.
The Dragon licked his chops with a long wet tongue. Now he sniffed the air with
more intent, and said, Your Highness. Weve met before, havent we?
Ive never met you, she said. And well never meet again. Ill seal this
vestibule. Youll never get another scrap of food.
Its not just the flesh I eat. Hope. Dreams. Light. Air. Thought.
You wont have any of it.
Tell me, your Highness. Whos my gaoler?
Your King is Naaman.
The name is familiar. Ill eat him too.
The jaws reached out for her and closed with a dull wet chop. She stepped out
of reach and spat. Then she hurled the candle furiously and went sweeping back up
the stairs, into the light, while behind her the Dragons laughter filled the passage and
ascended and spread on the sky like the limbs of a muscular red oak.

XXX
She smashed her mirror: the shards of dark glass spread like fragmented
universes across the stone floor. From each one peered a face uglier than the last,
moving up through bottomless wells of pieced light. So she crushed them beneath her
hands, beneath her feet, until there was just dust left. Her palms and soles were
slathered with blood. She inspected them. She uncurled her fingers, seeing that the
hands had become like flaming autumn leaves, or deep red oceans into which she
might dive and hear the beating of her heart. She tore all ornamentation from her
body, eschewing the silks, the brocades, and emerged a pale lithe nude imago of
statuesque graceand became suddenly aware that her sex was bleeding too. She
smiled manically. To her mind came a vision of her sex as a lake of blood which had
overflowed and drowned all the horrible world, and over which a beautiful red sun was
rising, alighting like flaming puce on the still red surface. The blood reached down the
insides of her thighs in long red fingers. She felt wild and free, having shed her
blackened husk.
All this was a sign of the final revolution, the binding of a cycle.
Then she was the Consort. Then she wasnt. She was laughing, she was crying.
She convulsed, smearing bloody trails across the naked stone walls. Im going crazy,
she said.
Wrapped only in bedsheetswithout the aid of her caneshe hobbled up the
stairs, and her incredibly long black hair dragged on the steps behind her.
Naaman was absent from his throne. There was only the faun, who looked
enigmatic and rather small standing in the middle of the quiet empty court. He turned
his gaze on her. Your King is gone, Queen, he said. He has gone to be with his God.
This is the end.
She laughed.
Things have happened. They always happen. The Queen is sat. The prophet is
dead. The Dragon is heeled. So this is the end. All things end. All things end.
I dont care.
But suddenly she was alone in the courtalone with the throne and the dais
and the regal seat and the empty ebony table. Alone, she turned to face the void
beyond the portal.
She had the impression of a circle becoming complete. Stormclouds amassed in
a distant world. Somewhere among them an old crone was howling in despair. A
serpent was rending its own intestines from its body, pulling them forth in long blue
ribbons clenched between the lean jaws.
She peered into the void. The sheer slopes of the cliff trembled as something
loosed itself. The ground quaked beneath her feet. From the dark unbottomed abyss
rose the anti-God, the agent of the Ouroboros, come to unmake all creation and even
creations God. He was more than she could bear. He was manifest.
Several butterflies like angels of bitter mercy descended on her and lifted her
away from the sight of it to a happier place, where nothing existed save the color
yellowyellow sky and yellow flowersyellowness within her own heartand in
which, in a garden of yellow trees, upon a mossy stone, sat a little old man with big
blind yellow eyes, who was smiling sadly at her.

XXX
The boy with the black tooth had given up smoking.
He was living in a shotgun shack in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes at
night across the brown sere fields could be seen licks of lightning, silent lightning,
which seemed to suggest a carnage to come. He could not be certain there was a world
left out there. He had only met freaks and crazy survivors in his travels. Some of them
wore haloes of yellow butterflies. Some seemed intent that this was Hell. It was
summeror he thought it must be summerand the dirt was pale and parched,
blowing away in great sheets, and the air was terribly dry, and full of lightning. He got
his water at night from some pipes in the ground nearby.
Then came a day unlike any other, and the sun rose westerly.
He was sitting in the slatted light of his shack staring at nothing at all, when he
noticed a yellow butterfly go flitting by outside, and he turned on his transistor radio
and listened to the radio man succumb to hysteria and start to rant and rave.
The radio man spoke of storms. He spoke of butterflies. He said the world was
ending and that it was more than any man can bear. He said to lose your mind. He
said to get happy.