Part Three

Early in 1971, a couple of days after his band, Lord of Light, played the Fillmore East, Ray Light was interviewed in a booth at the Odessa, the blowsy old Ukrainian Restaurant on Tompkins Square Park. Judy had taken him there when they were kids. He sat facing the front window so he could keep an eye on Marlene, who sat next to the parking meter where she’d been tied.

“It’s been awhile since you’ve been in New York,” said the rock critic for The Village Voice. This was a second-stringer—not Bangs or Goldstein. But then Ray was still young and his group was an opening act at the Fillmore—not the headliner or even the number two band.

The critic made statements instead of asking questions. He had hair that came down like a curtain to his shoulders without a curl or twist but with some gray strands.

Ray saw him as a failed PhD candidate who’d blown out his frontal lobes in the battle for cosmic consciousness. Not someone with whom he could make contact.

He said, “It’s been almost six years. I lived here until my family had me kidnapped. This is where I met my soul mate. And the private eye who snatched me.”

He planted this information in each interview. His bright smile gave it an eerie quality. Judy had taught him that trick.

“You were sixteen when you were returned to your family,” said the interviewer. The guy had done his homework and Ray believed this was going well. “They opened up my mind back there,” he said. “Shock treatment is better than acid.”

“You were close to Phillip Marcy, the playwright.”

Ray frowned for a moment like he was trying to think how best to put this. “I mostly called him the Man. Close? Well, he kept me handcuffed to his bed a few times. Recently we were in touch. In lots of ways he was a monster. But he taught me stuff.”

The reporter raised an eyebrow, seemed interested but a bit uneasy about asking what kind of stuff got taught.

Ray Light told him, “The Man said that if you don’t make your own story out of your life, someone will make his story out of your life. I guess he couldn’t take his own advice.”

Ray had known the Man was going to jump before he did. He had gleaned that from a kid in Seattle months earlier. They’d linked minds when the other recognized him on the street. Later in a hotel room, Ray caught in the other’s memory a picture of himself in Rolling Stone alongside a brief article on the suicide of Phillip Marcy.

He hadn’t thought much about the Man but after that vision, he talked about their time together in an interview in the San Francisco Oracle. When it came out, he sent it to the Man, then called him up and said he had a song, “Spangles, Bondage, and Speed,” that he wanted them to sing onstage. Not at the Fillmore but maybe at Max’s or On-dine in a midnight show.

The Man refused. Ray insisted. Ray spoke about him on the radio. When the Man jumped, the article in Rolling Stone was accompanied by a picture of Ray.

Now the Man was part of Ray’s story. A legend was being built. As the tour progressed there were whispers, and someone had nicknamed the group “Ray of Dark Light.”

The interview was winding down and Ray indicated he had an appointment. The reporter said, “This was fascinating,” but seemed anxious to get away, which was perfect.

Marlene danced on her leash when he returned to her. She had been the first thing that had gotten taken away from BD when he arrived begging to become part of the vision of the three of them that he’d once seen.

A couple of nights before, Ray had stood in the wings of the Fillmore East and looked through a peephole at the crowd filtering into the seats that soared up the roof of the old movie house. Here Joplin had shouted and moaned as the red and yellow plasma of Joshua Light Show exploded on the screen behind her and the packed balconies screamed back. Now Joplin was gone. Tonight’s main act was not going to fill the theater and there was a rumor the Fillmore was closing. The crown was in the street. Nobody knew who’d be the next king or queen.

The sound check had been done. The emcee was warming up the crowd. His drummer and bass player, steady guys who kept to themselves, waited behind him in the wings.

Judy came up beside him and put her hand on his arm, smiling. She could play keyboards and sing backup like Emmylou Harris. BD appeared carrying a tambourine and looking as if he still couldn’t figure out what had happened to him.

“And now the Fillmore East is proud to present, Elektra recording artists Lord of Light.”

There was good applause and some cheers as they made their entrance. The audience saw what Ray had picked out of BD’s mind years before. Ray wore black leather from head to toe. The first song would be

“Dollar a Day Boy,” about the girl who loved him and the cop who busted him. The girl now had a blond crew cut and a Marlboro in her mouth. In silk robes and hair to his waist the ex-cop moved like he was in a trance.

The trio paused and looked out at the audience. In that moment Ray linked with another consciousness. And in it he caught a glimpse of his future.

That glimpse was what had him standing at the eastern end of St. Mark’s Place on a February evening in a light, cold rain. He faced Tompkins Square and watched the lights come on. In the neighborhood around the park there were patches of black where streetlamps were broken, storefronts boarded up, buildings abandoned. It had always been a gritty neighborhood. Now speed and junk ruled and graffiti sprouted everywhere: death heads and Black Panther symbols, swastikas and cult signs.

People mourned the death of the East Village. Ray knew the good part was just starting. This time and place needed its own myths and he was prepared to provide them.

Hendrix’s gift while he lived was to stand on a stage amid the smoke and reverb and for a solid hour enfold ten thousand minds inside his own.

Ray could touch the consciousness of a few people. Among those were certain ones like Judy and BD

who could see not just his past but his future.

He had once asked a guru, a Jungian analyst in Taos who had done much mescaline, about this gift. The old woman had looked right through him and said, “You are a diver in the gestalt sea where there is no then or now or will be. The ones you find there know you entirely.”

Shock treatment and drugs had sharpened his ability to find these people. But lately what they showed him was small. He had few hints of what lay beyond the Fillmore performance and was afraid that his gift was gone.

Then on Friday night someone in the audience showed Ray himself all alone and in a spotlight in front of a huge iron gate. The gate was black and decorated with gargoyle heads with red and green moving eyes. His expression was desperate, possessed, and he sang into a hand mike. Singing at the Gates of Hell was how he thought of it.

The vision chilled and mesmerized him. He had to find out how he’d come to be at the gates and what would happen next. It bothered Ray that Judy and BD were not with him there. All he knew was that the one he’d touched was a woman, that her name was Rainier though it had once been different, and that she thought of herself as a witch and prophet. After the show and for the night and day afterward he searched for her and hoped she hadn’t gone back to Westchester or Queens. Judy still had contacts in the neighborhood. One of them was Chambliss. He brought the word on Sunday morning, murmured to them while they waited to cross Second Avenue. “Woman says she’ll meet you right after dark in Tompkins Square Park on the Avenue B side. Don’t bring nobody. She’ll take you where you can talk.” The folded twenties disappeared into his pocket. It was so obviously a trap that Judy and Ray laughed and made plans. At some point BD was called in. That night right on schedule Ray crossed Avenue A and walked into the park. Marlene began to growl before he sensed Rainier’s presence. He saw her under a streetlamp, a woman in her thirties wearing a long black dress and shawl. She kept her distance but looked at him wide-eyed and gestured for him to follow her through the almost empty park.

Over the years he wondered if his visions were self-fulfilling prophecies. But he missed them acutely when they dried up. To find what else this woman could show him he was willing to do to her things as bad as had ever been done to him.

She stayed about fifty feet ahead, walking rapidly and glancing back. As she reached the gates on Avenue B, he called to her to slow down. She turned toward him and so didn’t see the van with its headlights off as it rolled up behind her and braked.

The rear door of the van opened as Ray released Marlene, who sprang forward snarling. Judy jumped out of the driver’s seat and BD came out of the back to make a perfect snatch.

The Goosle

Margo Lanagan

Margo Lanagan lives in Sydney, Australia, and works as a contract technical writer. She has published three collections of speculative short stories: White Time, Black Juice, and Red Spikes. Her stories have won two World Fantasy Awards, two Ditmar Awards, four Aurealis Awards, and a Michael L. Printz Honor, and have been shortlisted for many other awards, including a Nebula, a Hugo, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Lanagan taught at Clarion South in 2005 and in 2007. She has also published poetry, and fiction for junior readers and teenagers. She maintains a blog at www.amongamidwhile.blogspot.com . Lanagan often twists Australian myth and children’s tales into something new, making them uniquely her own—as she does in this vicious follow-up to a well-known fairy tale.

There,” said Grinnan as we cleared the trees. “Now, you keep your counsel, Hanny-boy.”

Why, that is the mudwife’s house, I thought. Dread thudded in me. Since two days ago among the older trees when I knew we were in my father’s forest, I’d feared this.

The house looked just as it did in my memory: the crumbling, glittery yellow walls, the dreadful roof sealed with drippy white mud. My tongue rubbed the roof of my mouth just looking. It is crisp as wafer biscuit on the outside, that mud. You bite through to a sweetish sand inside. You are frightened it will choke you, but you cannot stop eating.

The mudwife might be dead, I thought hopefully. So many are dead, after all, of the black. But then came a convulsion in the house. A face passed the window hole, and there she was at the door. Same squat body with a big face snarling above. Same clothing, even, after all these years, the dress trying for bluishness and the pinafore for brown through all the dirt. She looked just as strong. However much bigger I’d grown, it took all my strength to hold my bowels together.

“Don’t come a step nearer.” She held a red fire-banger in her hand, but it was so dusty—if I’d not known her I’d have laughed.

“Madam, I pray you,” said Grinnan. “We are clean as clean—there’s not a speck on us, not a blister. Humble travellers in need only of a pig hut or a chicken shed to shelter the night.”

“Touch my stock and I’ll have you,” she says to all his smoothness. “I’ll roast your head in a pot.”

I tugged Grinnan’s sleeve. It was all too sudden—one moment walking wondering, the next on the doorstep with the witch right there, talking heads in pots.

“We have pretties to trade,” said Grinnan.

“You can put your pretties up your poink-hole where they belong.”

“We have all the news of long travel. Are you not at all curious about the world and its woes?”

“Why would I live here, tuffet-head?” And she went inside and slammed her door and banged the shutter across her window.

“She is softening,” said Grinnan. “She is curious. She can’t help herself.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You watch me. Get us a fire going, boy. There on that bit of bare ground.”

“She will come and throw her bunger in it. She’ll blind us, and then—”

“Just make and shut. I tell you, this one is as good as married to me. I have her heart in my hand like a rabbit-kitten.”

I was sure he was mistaken, but I went too, because fire meant food and just the sight of the house had made me hungry. While I fed the fire its kindling I dug up a little stone from the flattened ground and sucked the dirt off it.

Grinnan had me make a smelly soup. Salt fish, it had in it, and sea celery and the yellow spice. When the smell was strong, the door whumped open and there she was again. Ooh, she was so like in my dreams, with her suddenness and her ugly intentions that you can’t guess. But it was me and Grinnan this time, not me and Kirtle. Grinnan was big and smart, and he had his own purposes. And I knew there was no magic in the world, just trickery on the innocent. Grinnan would never let anyone else trick me; he wanted that privilege all for himself.

“Take your smelly smells from my garden this instant!” the mudwife shouted. Grinnan bowed as if she’d greeted him most civilly. “Madam, if you’d join us? There is plenty of this lovely bull-a-bess for you as well.”

“I’d not touch my lips to such mess. What kind of foreign muck—”

Even I could hear the longing in her voice that she was trying to shout down. There before her he ladled out a bowlful—yellow, splashy, full of delicious lumps. Very humbly—he does humbleness well when he needs to, for such a big man—he took it to her. When she recoiled he placed it on the little table by the door, the one that I ran against in my clumsiness when escaping, so hard I still sometimes feel the bruise in my rib. I remember, I knocked it skittering out the door, and I flung it back meaning to trip up the mudwife. But instead I tripped up Kirtle, and the wife came out and plucked her up and bellowed after me and kicked the table onto the path, and ran out herself with Kirtle like a tortoise swimming from her fist and kicked the table aside again—

Bang! went the cottage door.

Grinnan came laughing quietly back to me.

“She is ours. Once they’ve et your food, Hanny, you’re free to eat theirs. Fish-and-onion pie tonight, I’d say.”

“Eugh.”

“Jealous, are we? Don’t like old Grinnan supping at other pots, hnh?”

“It’s not that!” I glared at his laughing face. “She’s so ugly, that’s all. So old. I don’t know how you can even think of—”

“Well, I am no primrose myself, golden boy,” he says. “And I’m grateful for any flower that lets me pluck her.”

I was not old and desperate enough to laugh at that joke. I pushed his soup bowl at him.

“Ah, bull-a-bess,” he said into the steam. “Food of gods and seducers.”

When the mudwife let us in, I looked straight to the corner, and the cage was still there! It had been repaired in places with fresh-plaited withes, but it was still of the same pattern. Now there was an animal in it, but the cottage was so dim…a very thin cat, maybe, or a ferret. It rippled slowly around its borders, and flashed little eyes at us, and smelled as if its own piss were combed through its fur for pomade. I never smelled that bad when I lived in that cage. I ate well, I remember; I fattened. She took away my leavings in a little cup, on a little dish, but there was still plenty of me left. So that when Kirtle freed me I lumbered away. As soon as I was out of sight of the mud house I stopped in the forest and just stood there blowing from the effort of propelling myself, after all those weeks of sloth.

So that Grinnan when he first saw me said, Here’s a jubbly one. Here’s a cheesecake. Wherever did you get the makings of those round cheeks? And he fell on me like a starving man on a roasted mutton leg. Before too long he had used me thin again, and thin I stayed thereafter. He was busy at work on the mudwife now.

“Oh my, what an array of herbs! You must be a very knowledgeable woman. And hasn’t she a lot of pots, Hansel! A pot for every occasion, I think.”

Oh yes, I nearly said, including head boiling, remember?

“Well, you are very comfortably set up here, indeed, madam.” He looked about him as if he’d found himself inside some kind of enchanted palace, instead of in a stinking hovel with a witch in the middle of it. “Now, I’m sure you told me your name—”

“I did not. My name’s not for such as you to know.” Her mouth was all pruny and she strutted around and banged things and shot him sharp looks, but I’d seen it. We were in here, weren’t we? We’d made it this far.

“Ah, a guessing game!” says Grinnan delightedly. “Now, you’d have a good strong name, I’m sure. Bridda, maybe, or Gert. Or else something fiery and passionate, such as Rossavita, eh?”

He can afford to play her awhile. If the worse comes to the worst, he has the liquor, after all. The liquor has worked on me when nothing else would, when I’ve been ready to run, to some town’s wilds where I could hide—to such as that farm wife with the worried face who beat off Grinnan with a broom. The liquor had softened me and made me sleepy, made me give in to the old bugger’s blandishments; next day it had stopped me thinking with its head pain, further than to obey Grinnan’s grunts and gestures.

How does yours like it? said Gadfly’s red-haired boy viciously. I’ve heard him call you “honey,” like a girl-wife; does he do you like a girl, face-to-face and lots of kissing? Like your boy-bits, which they is so small, ain’t even there, so squashed and ground in?

He calls me Hanny, because Hanny is my name. Hansel.

Honey is your name, eh? said the black boy—a boy of black skin from naturalness, not illness. After your honey hair?

Which they commenced patting and pulling and then held me down and chopped all away with Gadfly’s good knife. When Grinnan saw me he went pale, but I’m pretty sure he was trying to cut some kind of deal with Gadfly to swap me for the red-hair (with the skin like milk, like freckled milk, he said), so the only thing it changed, he did not come after me for several nights until the hair had settled and I did not give off such an air of humiliation.

Then he whispered, You were quite handsome under that thatch, weren’t you? All along. And things were bad as ever, and the next day he tidied off the stragglier strands, as I sat on a stump with my poink-hole thumping and the other boys idled this way and that, watching, warping their faces at each other and snorting.

The first time Grinnan did me, I could imagine that it didn’t happen. I thought, I had that big dump full of so much nervous earth and stones and some of them must have had sharp corners and cut me as I passed them, and the throbbing of the cuts gave me the dream, that the old man had done that to me. Because I was so fearful, you know, frightened of everything coming straight from the mudwife, and I put fear and pain together and made it up in my sleep. The first time I could trick myself, because it was so terrible and mortifying a thing, it could not be real. It could not.

I have watched Grinnan a long time now, in success and failure, in private and on show. At first I thought he was too smart for me, that I was trapped by his cleverness. And this is true. But I have seen others laugh at him, or walk away from his efforts easily, shaking their heads. Others are cleverer. What he does to me, he waits till I am weak. Half asleep, he waits till. I never have much fight in me, but dozing off I have even less.

Then what he does—it’s so simple I’m ashamed. He bares the flesh of my back. He strokes my back as if that is all he is going to do. He goes straight to the very oldest memory I have—which, me never having told him, how does he know it?—of being sickly, of my first mother bringing me through the night, singing and stroking my back, the oldest and safest piece of my mind, and he puts me there, so that I am sodden with sweetness and longing and nearly-being-back-to-a-baby.

And then he proceeds. It often hurts—it mostly hurts. I often weep. But there is a kind of bargain goes on between us, you see. I pay for the first part with the second. The price of the journey to that safe, sweet-sodden place is being spiked in the arse and dragged kicking and biting my blanket back to the real and dangerous one.

Show me your boy-thing, the mudwife would say. Put it through the bars. I won’t.

Why not?

You will bite it off. You will cut it off with one of your knives. You will chop it with your ax. Put it out. I will do no such thing. I only want to wash it.

Wash it when Kirtle is awake, if you so want me clean.

It will be nice, I promise you. I will give you a nice feeling, so warm, so wet. You’ll feel good. But when I put it out, she exclaimed, What am I supposed to do with that?

Wash it, like you said.

There’s not enough of it even to wash! How would one get that little peepette dirty?

I put it away, little shred, little scrap I was ashamed of.

And she flung around the room awhile, and then she sat, her face all red crags in the last little light of the banked-up fire. I am going to have to keep you forever! she said. For years before you are any use to me. And you are expensive! You eat like a pig! I should just cook you up now and enjoy you while you are tender.

I was all wounded pride and stupid. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I can do anything my sister can do, if you just let me out of this cage. And I’m a better woodchopper. Woodchopper! she said disgustedly. As if I needed a woodchopper! And she went to the door and took the ax off the wall there, and tested the edge with one of her horny fingertips, and looked at me in a very thoughtful way that I did not much like.

Sometimes he speaks as he strokes. My Hanny, he says, very gentle and loving like my mother, my goosle, my gosling, sweet as apple, salt as sea. And it feels as if we are united in yearning for my mother and her touch and voice.

She cannot have gone forever, can she, if I can remember this feeling so clearly? But, ah, to get back to her, so much would have to be undone! So much would have to un-happen: all of Grinnan’s and my wanderings, all the witch-time, all the time of our second mother. That last night of our first mother, our real mother, and her awful writhing and the noises and our father begging, and Kirtle weeping and needing to be taken away—that would have to become a nightmare, from which my father would shake me awake with the news that the baby came out just as Kirtle and I did, just as easily. And our mother would rise from her bed with the baby; we would all rise into the baby’s first morning, and begin.

It is very deep in the night. I have done my best to be invisible, to make no noise, but now the mudwife pants, He’s not asleep.

Of course he’s asleep. Listen to his breathing.

I do the asleep-breathing.

Come, says Grinnan. I’ve done with these, bounteous as they are. I want to go below. He has his ardent voice on now. He makes you think he is barely in control of himself, and somehow that makes you, somehow that flatters you enough to let him do what he wants.

After some uffing and puffing, No, she says, very firm, and there’s a slap. I want that boy out of here. What, wake him so he can go and listen at the window?

Get him out, she says. Send him beyond the pigs and tell him to stay. You’re a nuisance, he says. You’re a sexy nuisance. Look at this! I’m all misshapen and you want me herding children.

You do it, she says, rearranging her clothing, or you’ll stay that shape. So he comes to me and I affect to be woken up and to resist being hauled out the door, but really it’s a relief of course. I don’t want to hear or see or know. None of that stuff I understand, why people want to sweat and pant and poke bits of themselves into each other, why anyone would want to do more than hold each other for comfort and stroke each other’s back.

Moonlight. Pigs like slabs of moon, like long, fat fruit fallen off a moon-vine. The trees tall and brainy all around and above— they never sweat and pork; the most they do is sway in a breeze, or crash to the ground to make useful wood. The damp smell of night forest. My friends in the firmament, telling me where I am: two and a half days north of the ford with the knotty rope; four and a half days north and a bit west of “Devilstown,” which Grinnan called it because someone made off in the night with all the spoils we’d made off with the night before.

I’d thought we were the only ones not back in their beds! he’d stormed on the road. They must have come very quiet, I said. They must have been accomplished thieves. They must have been sprites or devils, he spat, that I didn’t hear them, with my ears. We were seven and a half days north and very very west of Gadfly’s camp, where we had, as Grinnan put it, tried the cooperative life for a while. But those boys, they were a gang of no-goods, Grinnan says now. Whatever deal he had tried to make for Freckled-Milk, they laughed him off, and Grinnan could not stand it there having been laughed at. He took me away before dawn one morning, and when we stopped by a stream in the first light he showed me the brass candlesticks that Gadfly had kept in a sack and been so proud of.

And what’ll you use those for? I said foolishly, for we had managed up until then with moon and stars and our own wee fire.

I did not take them to use them, Hanny-pot, he said with glee. I took them because he loved and polished them so. And he flung them into the stream, and I gasped—and Grinnan laughed to hear me gasp—at the sight of them cutting through the foam and then gone into the dark cold irretrievable. Anyway, it was new for me still, there beyond the mudwife’s pigs, this knowing where we were—though I had lost count of the days since Ardblarthen when it had come to me how Grinnan looked up to find his way, not down among a million tree roots that all looked the same, among twenty million grass stalks, among twenty million million stones or sand grains. It was even newer how the star pattern and the moon movements had steadied out of their meaningless whirling and begun to tell me whereabouts I was in the wide world. All my life I had been stupid, trying to mark the things around me on the ground, leaving myself trails to get home by because every tree looked the same to me, every knoll and declivity, when all the time the directions were hammered hard into their system up there, pointing and changing-but-never-completely-changing.

So if we came at the cottage from this angle, whereas Kirtle and I came from the front, that means…but Kirtle and I wandered so many days, didn’t we? I filled my stomach with earths, but Kirtle was piteous weeping all the way, so hungry. She would not touch the earth; she watched me eating it and wept. I remember, I told her, No wonder you are thirsty! Look how much water you’re wasting on those tears! She had brown hair, I remember. I remember her pushing it out of her eyes so that she could see to sweep in the dark cottage—the cottage where the mudwife’s voice is rising, like a saw through wood. The house stands glittering and the sound comes out of it. My mouth waters; they wouldn’t hear me over that noise, would they?

I creep in past the pigs to where the blobby roof edge comes low. I break off a blob bigger than my hand; the wooden shingle it was holding slides off, and my other hand catches it soundlessly and leans it against the house. The mudwife howls; something is knocked over in there; she howls again and Grinnan is grunting with the effort of something. I run away from all those noises, the white mud in my hand like a hunk of cake. I run back to the trees where Grinnan told me to stay, where the woman’s howls are like mouse squeaks and I can’t hear Grinnan, and I sit between two high roots and I bite in. Once I’ve eaten the mud I’m ready to sleep. I try dozing, but it’s not comfortable among the roots there, and there is still noise from the cottage—now it is Grinnan working himself up, calling her all the things he calls me, all the insults. You love it, he says, with such deep disgust. You filth, you filthy cunt. And she oh’s below, not at all like me, but as if she really does love it. I lie quiet, thinking, Is it true, that she loves it? That I do? And if it’s true, how is it that Grinnan knows, but I don’t? She makes noise, she agrees with whatever he says. Harder, harder, she says. Bang me till I burst. Harder! On and on they go, until I give up waiting—they will never finish!

I get up and go around the pigsty and behind the chicken house. There is a poor field there, pumpkins gone wild in it, blackberry bushes foaming dark around the edges. At least the earth might be softer here. If I pile up enough of this floppy vine, if I gather enough pumpkins around me—

And then I am holding not a pale baby pumpkin in my hand, but a pale baby skull. Grinnan and the mudwife bellow together in the house, and something else crashes broken. The skull is the colour of white mud, but hard, inedible—although when I turn it in the moonlight I find tooth marks where someone has tried.

The shouts go up high—the witch’s loud, Grinnan’s whimpering.

I grab up a handful of earth to eat, but a bone comes with it, long, white, dry. I let the earth fall away from it.

I crouch there looking at the skull and the bone, as those two finish themselves off in the cottage. They will sleep now—but I’m not sleepy anymore. The stars in their map are nailed to the inside of my skull; my head is filled with dark clarity. When I am sure they are asleep, I scoop up a mouthful of earth, and start digging.

Let me go and get the mudwife, our father murmured. Just for this once. I’ve done it twice and I’ll do it again. Don’t you bring that woman here! Our mother’s voice was all constricted, as if the baby were trying to come up her throat, not out her nethers. But this is not like the others! he said, desperate after the following pain. They say she knows all about children. Delivers them all the time.

Delivers them? She eats them! said our mother. It’s not just this one. I’ve two others might catch her eye, while I feed and doze. I’d rather die than have her near my house, that filthy hag. So die she did, and our new brother or sister died as well, still inside her. We didn’t know whichever it was. Will it be another little Kirtle-child? our father had asked us, bright-eyed by the fire at night. Or another baby woodcutter, like our Hans? It had seemed so important to know. Even when the baby was dead, I wanted to know.

But the whole reason! our father sobbed. Is that it could not come out, for us to see! Which had shamed me quiet.

And then later, going into blackened towns where the only way you could tell man from woman was by the style of a cap, or a hair ribbon draggling into the dirt beneath them, or a rotted pinafore, or worst by the amount of shrunken scrag between an unclothed person’s legs—why, then I could see how small a thing it was not to know the little one’s sex. I could see that it was not important at all.

When I wake up, they are at it again with their sexing. My teeth are stuck to the inside of my cheeks and lips by two ridges of earth. I have to break the dirt away with my finger. What was I thinking, last night? I sit up. The bones are in a pile beside me; the skulls are in a separate pile—for counting, I remember. What I thought was: Where did she find all these children? Kirtle and I walked for days, I’m sure. There was nothing in the world but trees and owls and foxes and that one deer. Kirtle was afraid of bats at night, but I never saw even one. And we never saw people—which was what we were looking for, which was why we were so unwise when we came upon the mudwife’s house.

But what am I going to do? What was I planning, piling these up? I thought I was only looking for all Kirtle’s bits. But then another skull turned up and I thought, Well, maybe this one is more Kirtle’s size, and then skull after skull—I dug on, crunching earth and drooling and breathing through my nose, and the bones seemed to rise out of the earth at me, seeking out the moon the way a tree reaches for the light, pushing up thinly among the other trees until it finds light enough to spread into, seeking out me, as if they were thinking, Here, finally, is someone who can do something for us. I pick up the nearest skull. Which of these is my sister’s? Even if there were just a way to tell girls’ skulls from boys’! Is hers even here? Maybe she’s still buried, under the blackberries where I couldn’t go for thorns.

Now I have a skull in either hand, like someone at a market weighing one cabbage against another. And the thought comes to me: Something is different. Listen.

The pigs. The mudwife, her noises very like the pigs’. There is no rhythm to them; they are random grunting and gasping. And I—

Silently I replace the skulls on the pile.

I haven’t heard Grinnan this morning. Not a word, not a groan. Just the woman. The woman and the pigs.

The sunshine shows the cottage as the hovel it is, its saggy sides propped, its sloppy roofing patched with mud splats simply thrown from the ground. The back door stands wide, and I creep up and stand right next to it, my back to the wall.

Wet slaps and stirrings sound inside. The mudwife grunts—she sounds muffled, desperate. Has he tied her up? Is he strangling her? There’s not a gasp or word from him. That thing in the cage gives off a noise, though, a kind of low baying. It never stops to breathe. There is a strong smell of shit. Dawn is warming everything up; flies zoom in and out the doorway.

I press myself to the wall. There is a dip in the doorstep. Were I brave enough to walk in, that’s where I would put my foot. And right at that place appears a drop of blood, running from inside. It slides into the dip, pauses modestly at being seen, then shyly hurries across the step and dives into hiding in the weeds below.

How long do I stand there, looking out over the pigsty and the chicken house to the forest, wishing I were there among the trees instead of here clamped to the house wall like one of those gargoyles on the monks’ house in Devilstown, with each sound opening a new pocket of fear in my bowels? A fly flies into my gaping mouth and out again. A pebble in the wall digs a little chink in the back of my head, I’m pressed so hard there.

Finally, I have to know. I have to take one look before I run, otherwise I’ll dream all the possibilities for nights to come. She’s not a witch; she can’t spell me back; I’m thin now and nimble; I can easily get away from her.

So I loosen my head, and the rest of me, from the wall. I bend one knee and straighten the other, pushing my big head, my popping eyes, around the doorpost.

I only meant to glimpse and run. So ready am I for the running, I tip outward even when I see there’s no need. I put out my foot to catch myself, and I stare.

She has her back to me, her bare, dirty white back, her baggy arse and thighs. If she weren’t doing what she’s doing, that would be horror enough, how everything is wet and withered and hung with hair, how everything shakes.

Grinnan is dead on the table. She has opened his legs wide and eaten a hole in him, in through his soft parts. She has pulled all his innards out onto the floor, and her bare bloody feet are trampling the shit out of them, her bare shaking legs are trying to brace themselves on the slippery carpet of them. I can smell the salt fish in the shit; I can smell the yellow spice.

That devilish moan, up and down it wavers, somewhere between purr and battle-yowl. I thought it was me, but it’s that shadow in the cage, curling over and over itself like a ruffle of black water, its eyes fixed on the mess, hungry, hungry.

The witch pulls her head out of Grinnan for air. Her head and shoulders are shiny red; her soaked hair drips; her purple-brown nipples point down into two hanging rubies. She snatches some air between her red teeth and plunges in again, her head inside Grinnan like the bulge of a dead baby, but higher, forcing higher, pummelling up inside him, fighting to be un-born.

In my travels I have seen many wrongnesses done, and heard many others told of with laughter or with awe around a fire. I have come upon horrors of all kinds, for these are horrible times. But never has a thing been laid out so obvious and ongoing in its evil before my eyes and under my nose and with the flies feasting even as it happens. And never has the means to end it hung as clearly in front of me as it hangs now, on the wall, in the smile of the mudwife’s ax edge, fine as the finest nail paring, bright as the dawn sky, the only clean thing in this foul cottage.

I reach my father’s house late in the afternoon. How I knew the way, when years ago you could put me twenty paces into the trees and I’d wander lost all day, I don’t know; it just came to me. All the loops I took, all the mistakes I made, all laid themselves down in their places on the world, and I took the right way past them and came here straight, one sack on my back, the other in my arms. When I dreamed of this house it was big and full of comforts; it hummed with safety; the spirit of my mother lit it from inside like a sacred candle. Kirtle was always here, running out to greet me all delight. Now I can see the poor place for what it is, a plague-ruin like so many that Grinnan and I have found and plundered. And tiny—not even as big as the witch’s cottage. It sits in its weedy quiet and the forest chirps around it. The only thing remarkable about it is that I am the first here; no one has touched the place. I note it on my star map—there is safety here, the safety of a distance greater than most robbers will venture.

A blackened boy-child sits on the step, his head against the doorpost as if only very tired. Inside, a second child lies in a cradle. My father and second mother are in their bed, side by side just like that lord and lady on the stone tomb in Ardblarthen, only not so neatly carved or richly dressed. Everything else is exactly the same as Kirtle and I left it. So sparse and spare! There is nothing of value here. Grinnan would be angry. Burn these bodies and beds, boy! he’d say. We’ll take their rotten roof if that’s all they have.

“But Grinnan is not here, is he?” I say to the boy on the step, carrying the mattock out past him. “Grinnan is in the ground with his ladylove, under the pumpkins. And with a great big pumpkin inside him, too. And Mrs. Pumpkin-Head in his arms, so that they can sex there underground forever.”

I take a stick and mark out the graves: Father, Second Mother, Brother, Sister—and a last big one for the two sacks of Kirtle-bones. There’s plenty of time before sundown, and the moon is bright these nights, don’t I know it. I can work all night if I have to; I am strong enough, and full enough still of disgust. I will dig and dig until this is done.

I tear off my shirt.

I spit in my hands and rub them together.

The mattock bites into the earth.

Shira

Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, lived in Israel and South Africa, traveled widely in Africa and Asia, and has lived in London for a number of years. He currently lives in Vanuatu, an island-nation in the South Pacific. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), is the editor of the anthology A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults, and is the author of the novella “An Occupation of Angels.” His stories appear in SCI FICTION, Strange Horizons, ChiZine, Fantasy Magazine, Postscripts, Clarkesworld Magazine, and many others, and in translation in seven languages.

Tidhar’s alternate history provocatively removes one of the flashpoints of world politics in order to imagine a better future for all.

Shira n. (Hebrew: )

1. Singing; Poetry; (Biblical) Song

2. A contemporary girl’s name

Nur remembered a paragraph from one of Tirosh’s poems, from the single book he published, two years before the twentieth century came to an end: “The morning rises: another train station. The skies are a dark blue and the streetlamps are lit; people, like the sunken chests of ancient treasures, sit in their depths. It is too early to begin a rescue operation: for a short while, before the sun rises, we are alone.”

She didn’t like the imagery, did not find in it the originality required to make the poem anything other than minor, but still…she thought about it now, because in his way Tirosh had captured, in the poem, a certain essence of what it meant to travel alone.

Damascus Station had an official name that was not used; for the city’s residents, at least, it had only one name, a linguistic combination that made those few who protected the language grow angry every time it was used: Dimashq- Central. Through the station’s transparent dome the sky appeared almost purple, and the cold air-conditioned atmosphere raised expectations for another day of khamsin. Nur thought she’d be glad not to be in the city during the heat wave but now, before boarding the train, a ticket in her hand and a small, friendly suitcase following her devoutly, she no longer knew how she felt. Even at such an early hour of the morning there were people at the station, and a few shops were open. Nur bought the morning edition of Al-Iktissadiya and then, on her way to the platform, discovered a small branch of Steimatzky. She had once read that one of the first branches of Steimatzky, that conglomerate of Hebrew booksellers, was in Damascus, in the early years of the twentieth century, an interesting fact without much practical use, one of the many she had collected at the university. Still, something in the historical connection attracted her, and on the spur of the moment she entered the shop. Unlike the large bookshops in the city centre, this one was in effect a hole in the wall, dark in the way of secondhand bookshops and with the same dry smell in the air. An employee who seemed no more than eighteen napped behind a counter, and the shop was otherwise empty. Nur went straight to the poetry shelves. The books appeared not used but merely old, as if they had been sitting on the shelves for a very long time without buyers or readers. But most of the poetry was modern, a poetry-of-After, and Nur was never able to get excited over modern Hebrew poetry. Poetry of the end of the twentieth century, of the fin de siècle, was her interest, and within it her dissertation focused on that unknown poet, Lior Tirosh, whose only book, Remnants of God, she had found by chance in the flea market of Damascus and of which she had not since seen another copy. If only she could use the database of the Hebrew Library in Jerusalem…but of course, the Small Holocaust prevented that years ago. She left the shop without a book and went to platform eighteen, the terminal for Haifa. The train was a many-eyed silver bullet. Dark windows seemed to her like mirrorshades. She found her carriage and climbed onboard.

At this early hour the number of passengers travelling to Haifa was small. Nur sat by herself in a seat by the window and waited for her journey to start.

The suitcase followed her to the train and now waited politely by her feet. Nur motioned for it to come closer and took out the book. It was this book that pushed her to go to this city, which she had never before visited. A book no one knew but her, or so it had seemed since she found it, while working on the completion of her thesis, “On the Vision of the Small Holocaust in the Work of Lior Tirosh.”

Remnants of God. The title, as ostentatious as it was, seemed to her merely a sign of youth, the sophomore title of a young—though talented—poet. Nur had found it in Ismail Emporium, a secondhand bookshop by the university. A slim volume in hardcover, and the date, in Roman numerals as ostentatious as the title, was MCMXCVIII. The name of the poet was unfamiliar to her, and the mark of the year—was that really a first edition, a poetry book from before the Small Holocaust?—made her shiver, and bargain almost angrily with the bookseller. Ismail, in the end, gave her the book almost for free—“Who buys Hebrew poetry, who? Only your crowd at the university, and you don’t have money anyhow”—and Nur took it to her small room in the university buildings and began to read the poems. They were a mixed assemblage. Many of the poems formed a sort of travel journal, with date-marks from Europe and Africa. Tirosh travelled a lot while writing the poems, and wrote about the places he’d been. There were also some love poems, and some poems in a more surrealist style. The poems of a young poet: He was not a Yehuda Amichai or a Dan Pagis, but he had promise. She kept returning to the poem that was, perhaps, the silliest, “Little God,” but that nevertheless successfully combined for her two of the subjects that had preoccupied Tirosh in all of his poems: In the skies the weather forecast was written with a spit-wet finger

On the radio the winds blew from station to station

Little God sat on a rock, catching yellow fish.

The weatherman said to expect a heat wave

Little God took off his clothes

Jumped in the water, amongst the yellow fish he swam

His little penis piercing the water layers without resistance.

The sea danced to the sounds of sunset

The winds calmed down, gone home to sleep

Perhaps watch a film

Little God stayed alone in the water

Happy among the yellow fish

Soon he may come out

Develop lungs grow hands

Stand erect, maybe even

Dress.

The poem showed Tirosh’s continuous engagement with the question of the existence of God, of the struggle between religion and the science he seemed to have believed in. The combination of God and evolutionary theory in a poem that drew on an English Nonsense tradition for its purpose was of little significance, perhaps, but interesting for Nur. In another poem he wrote: “God is a teacher in Malawi /

Had hardly finished High School / He doesn’t know what are vibrations / Or who is Neil Armstrong / But knows when to punish and when to reward.”

The doors closed with an exhalation of air, the suitcase retreated behind Nur’s legs and hid there, and the train was on its way, passing out of the transparent dome of Damascus Station, its face towards the distant sea. Nur put the book on her knees and watched the streets of Damascus wake. Tall office buildings hid the sun. The streets began to fill with people. There was a tension rising inside her, a reluctance to leave her city behind. Nur did not like to travel; she liked to read. And perhaps, she thought, returning to the subject that had occupied her in the last few months, perhaps that was why she liked Tirosh: He travelled, she felt, for her sake.

More than the other poems, however, it was the obviously political writing that interested Nur. Despite their small number they had a power, a combination of passion and anger, on the one hand the desire to get involved—and on the other, it seemed to her that the poet had wanted to stand with his arms crossed and say, Not playing, an image that never failed to make her smile. One of his quieter poems was “I, Jonathan”:

In Sweden, the Arab–Israeli conflict is reduced to the television screen. In Sweden, it is cold, the last of the Vikings emigrated to Valhalla many years ago. In Sweden, it is cold and quiet.

Magdalena rolls on the tongue the foreign words:

“Shalom,” “Home,” “The Western Wall”

Outside the snow falls, oblivious.

The descendants of the Vikings do not want to fight.

Neither do I.

From here everything seems blurry,

Like a dream

(like a violent video movie,

Like an original story by the Brothers Grimm)

It is cold and quiet and peaceful

And I tire of metaphors,

Tire of death.

The Vikings will no longer set out to conquer new lands.

Not anymore.

Magdalena is restless

She wants to go out, drink, dance.

I, a descendant of Absalom and David,

Still hear the King’s battle cry

The crying of his son in the oak.

And, in the distance, Jonathan

Looking for love

Who would go time after time

To seek his death on the battlefields.

Nur stretched her legs and settled deeper into the book. From here everything seems blurry, Tirosh had written, and though Nur would have preferred the poem without the lines that immediately followed, the forced similes of movie and story, the clear language, and the final metaphor attracted her in their simplicity. She could have written her entire thesis on these poems without a qualm, but it was the cycle of poems that closed the book, with its cryptic notes and hints of the future, that called her at last from the depths of the past and caused her to sit on the empty train at this hour in the early morning, on her way to distant Al-Khaifa.

Nur opened the book on page seventy-one and began to read that last, strange poem…

Tirosh once wrote a cycle of haikus about his trip through Europe. “The Mediterranean waves / in a temper / after two months of parting,” she remembered (Tirosh did not pay much attention to the number of syllables, regrettably, and the poems were not true haiku), and looked through the window: The Mediterranean looked calm and inviting, a distant flash of bright light was probably the enormous golden dome of the Baha’i temple, and the green mountain in the distance was likely the forested Carmel. She put her face to the window and gazed, fascinated, at the approaching city. Haifa, whom some called the Replacement City, was busy with erected mosques and synagogues and churches, but soon the train was past the religious quarter and into the city proper: Nur grew up in a neighbourhood whose residents were mostly descendants of the first aliyah to Syria after the Small Holocaust and now, in the slow journey through the city, the many signs that advertised new books in Hebrew brought her an unexpected pleasure.

The train slowed and finally stopped underneath a different dome, at a platform that announced itself energetically as the International Terminal. Nur rose and stretched, and the suitcase ran excitedly across the aisle like a rabbit released into freedom. Together they got off the train, and Nur found herself before a crowd of strangers, all but one calling names that weren’t her own.

“Nur? Nur Husseini?” A woman in a summery dress approached her, hand outstretched. “You’re Nur?

From Damascus University?”

“Shulamit?”

“Nu, so who would I be, Golda Meir?” The woman winked at her and Nur laughed.

“Very nice to meet you.”

“You, too. Are you hungry? Do you want to stop and drink something before we go back to the flat?

Don’t worry, I prepared the guest room and a whole pile of poetry books I want your opinion on. How was the journey? Did you bring newspapers?”

Nur said that no, she wasn’t hungry, that she would be glad to go straight to the flat, that she was grateful for the hospitality and would be happy to read the poetry books, that the journey was fine and that if Shulamit wanted a paper she brought with her a copy of Al-Iktissadiya, which she hadn’t read and was not going to anymore.

Without noticing, while talking, Nur found herself in the complex network of the Carmelit, Haifa’s ancient subway, made simple under Shulamit’s guidance, and then they were no longer inside the Carmelit but outside, in the cool air of the mountain Nur had seen from the train, and the Mediterranean was spread below them like the map of another world.

“Welcome to Haifa,” Shulamit said.

Her flat was on the third floor of an apartment block built, so she said to Nur, in the last years before the Small Holocaust. At this point, upon using the term, she stopped and looked at Nur with an examining gaze. “It is hard for my generations to use those words, at least in public,” she said. “If you talk to people in the street, you’ll see we hardly ever refer to the destruction knowingly. People say ‘Before’ or ‘After,’

without saying what.”

Nur nodded; it was the habit in the neighbourhood where she grew up, and at the university, which many Palestinians attended. Of course, she thought now, sitting on Shulamit’s flowery sofa with her face to the small balcony and to the breeze blowing in from the Mediterranean Sea, the problem was with the expression itself: the Small Holocaust, as if it were not important enough, painful enough, as if the event were almost insignificant. People did not know what to call the wound that had erupted in their history, did not know how to define in words what had happened, and instead denied its existence with their silence. There were those among the orthodox Jews who called the event “the Third Destruction,” and the academics still referred to it as “the Small Holocaust,” but to most people there was no name for the event that brought with it such devastation—but also led to the growth of a new and unexpected flower: peace.

Tirosh, who chased peace without success between the pages of his slim book, refused to identify with one side or another; Tirosh’s criticism, Nur thought, was of human nature itself. “There are words I do not like,” he once wrote, “especially ‘inevitable,’ when coupled with ‘war.’”

More lines rose in her mind. “What, after all, has happened,” Tirosh wrote in his poem “Shalom, Friend,”

whose title itself, so Nur argued in her thesis, ridiculed a collective ritual of mourning, “the prime minister was murdered / It isn’t the first political assassination in history; And I, I don’t belong to the children crying in the Square,

More to those who smoke marijuana on the beach

In Malawi, perhaps those who

Wander in an acid trip

(Hebrew is not a suitable language for writing

About drugs). People here prefer television,

News and terror attacks.

She wondered what it was like, growing up in the world Before. In her world, the world that came After, television and terror attacks were things that belonged to another time, and the news in Al-Iktissadiya tended to the economic and scientific alongside large parts devoted to entertainment and even, here and there, to literature. In fact, the editor of one of the networks, whom she met at some book launch about a month before, had already expressed interest in publishing her thesis. She told this now to Shulamit, who returned from the small kitchen carrying on a tray a carafe of lemonade full of nana—mint—two tall glasses, and a plateful of cookies. “From the shop,” she said and poured Nur a glass of lemonade. “I still remember my grandfather baking us cookies, but I didn’t inherit his cooking ability, or the interest.

“I’m sure your work will have plenty of readers,” she added. “I read the copy you sent me and it seemed interesting, a little esoteric for my taste maybe, but interesting. What are you going to do first?”

Nur sipped the cold drink and smiled. She had liked Shulamit almost immediately, and felt much calmer now than she had as she was leaving Damascus. “I thought I’d start in the New National Library, try and find something in the archives that still hadn’t been through sorting and scanning. Then the Book Museum, the Haifa Museum, the National Museum, do the same thing, and then look in the secondhand bookshops—if there is one place where I can find something new by Tirosh, or even information about the man himself, it would be here.”

Shulamit nodded. “A good plan,” she said. “I’ll arrange a few meetings for you—there’s a collector of poetry books I know who might be able to help, and I thought you could also go out of town, there’s the archive in Akra and some others.” A smile framed her face; Nur thought it was a pleasant face, open and comforting, and the thought raised in her a smile in reply.

“It will be a lot of work for you to find anything,” Shulamit said.

“I know,” Nur said. “But the chase is part of the fun.”

Shulamit nodded in agreement, and they sat comfortably and drank lemonade, and discussed poetry.

At the end it took Nur less than seven hours to find the start of the thread in the maze, and it happened by chance, not in a dusty archive but at the dinner table.

“I invited a few people to meet you,” Shulamit said. “I hope that’s all right? I thought you could rest a little, I’ll order dinner from the Indian restaurant on the corner—these are all interesting people, and they all really want to meet you.”

Nur said that as far as she was concerned it was perfectly fine, and that she’d be happy to meet Shulamit’s friends. After a two-hour rest in the guest room—which was indeed comfortably prepared for her, and was airy and spacious besides—she washed, and admitted to herself that she did not feel bad at all. The morning doubts had passed and in their place an expectation remained, accompanied by an unexpected feeling of confidence. In the coming days, she felt with a certainty that surprised her, she would meet Tirosh: It was as though he waited for her, somewhere in the twisting streets of the city that sprawled below.

First to appear was Keren Nevoh, about forty, pretty, a lecturer on the Renaissance at Haifa University. She switched between Hebrew and a Lebanese Arabic that Nur found hard to understand. Eduard Abdallah—“But call me Eddie”—was thin and tall and talked enthusiastically about the mining initiatives in the asteroid belt. The last two guests appeared together. Shiri and Michal Livnat, identical rings on their fingers, holding hands. Michal explained with a shy smile that they had just returned from their honeymoon in Turkey. Shiri, it turned out, was a young poetess who worked in a combination of light sculpture and spoken poetry; while Michal, the quieter of the two women, was a project manager for a medium-size wetware company in Tel Aviv.

Keren volunteered to go with Shulamit to get the food and Nur remained to talk with Eddie, Shiri, and Michal.

“So what’s your thesis about?” Shiri asked. “Shulamit was pretty mysterious when I asked. She didn’t volunteer too many details.” She looked at Nur expectantly, and Nur felt sudden embarrassment. She didn’t talk much about Tirosh’s work and now, with an audience of listening Israelis, was unsure what to say. She explained about finding the book, about her interest in the years that came Before. About Tirosh’s political poems, and about his other poems also, the few love poems and the travel journal that read like a lyrical diary. She discovered in herself a confidence while she spoke, a passion for the subject that had never left her. She almost didn’t notice the passage of time, and was surprised when Shulamit and Keren returned, laden with food.

“Did you tell them about ‘Song of Myself’?” Shulamit asked. “Tell them, tell them. It’s fascinating.” As she spoke she prepared the table, laying plates heaped with food on the tablecloth.

“Isn’t that the title of a poem by Walt Whitman?” Shiri asked.

Shulamit nodded in agreement. “Yes, yes, this Tirosh liked to quote. The entire poem is some kind of an attempt to rewrite Whitman in Hebrew. In my opinion,” she said, and looked at Nur, who laughed and said that she was right, Tirosh was heavily influenced by Whitman in the poem, but he combined in it a larger number of references to other works than in any of his other poems. “For instance,” she said, “the Haggadah, the Bible, and other Hebrew poets from that period, like Yehuda Amichai and Chana Senesh.”

“What’s the poem about?” Eddie asked, and his expression seemed bothered, as if he was trying to remember something he had forgotten.

“That’s it, that in Nur’s opinion Tirosh is talking in the poem about the Small Holocaust,” Shulamit said with an undecipherable look.

“I don’t understand,” Michal said. “It was written Before, wasn’t it? So, what, you’re saying he predicted the future?”

“‘And lest I forget you, Jerusalem’?” Nur quoted. She felt a tightness in her throat, and the atmosphere in the room changed, became attentive, almost tense. “‘The city is built on a thousand years of shit and death, a Troy of / holy destruction, a bastard daughter to a multitude of religions / worshipping death.’”

The food sat on the plates. “‘I let the dead bury the dead / in large mounds of dust / let the living take care each of himself / All are the same in sleep and in death / each man and his unique oblivion disappear in a final aktzia / into the darkness of memory.’”

She fell silent, played with a fork nervously.

“Go on,” Michal said. She held on to Shiri’s hand like a shield. “Please.”

“I don’t understand,” Keren said. “Just because he writes like this about Jerusalem, it doesn’t mean…”

She turned her head to Shulamit, who sat at the head of the table, as if asking for help.

“He wrote more than that,” Shulamit said. “I don’t remember how it goes, Nur…?”

Nur made herself put the fork down on the table. “‘Let the sun rise,’” she quoted, feeling sweat now despite the cool breeze blowing in from the sea, “‘Let the atom bombs fall in a splendorous bounty of cataclysmic mushrooms, / let the morning shine on a brave, new world, / let the nuclear fallout spread like a sea of shibboleths.’” She skipped several lines and said, quietly, “‘let us fade like a blessed match, that burned and consumed hearts.’”

“The Small Holocaust wasn’t nuclear,” Eddie said. “But I see what you mean. He wrote as if one was the product of the other. As if some kind of holocaust had to, even should have, taken place.”

Nur nodded without words, grateful for his understanding. Shiri smiled. “‘Let the sun rise,’” she said,

“that’s Rotblit’s ‘Song of Peace,’ isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Shulamit said. “And that last line is from Senesh. I said he liked to quote.” She stretched in her seat and began to serve food. “Keren, toss the salad, will you? Eat, eat, before it gets cold.”

Nur and Eddie stood on the balcony and looked at the city’s lights. The sounds of conversations and traffic and competing music emanated from below.

“The entire meal something’s been bothering me,” Eddie said. “Like I’ve already come across this name once. Lior Tirosh. I have no idea how, it’s not as if I read much poetry, not to say in Hebrew, but I know I came across it somewhere.”

He fell silent and looked at the view. “It’s different in space,” he said suddenly. “In the halfway point between Earth and Mars there are two days of weightlessness, and then you can float in perfect silence and look out on the entire universe. It can change people’s perspective.” He laughed. “Even though most of us remain the same, whether we’re in space or not.”

Nur, who enjoyed the food and felt much better when the conversation moved from her work to other subjects, looked at the slopes of the Carmel and said, “Things aren’t bad here, either.”

Eddie laughed. “Your Tirosh, he didn’t sound like a happy person, from what you quoted.”

“He cared,” Nur said. “That’s what I like about him. The poetry sometimes fails, sometimes he can’t say exactly what he means. But he cares. Besides”—she shrugged and smiled—“of all the travelling and the marijuana he writes about, it sounds to me like he didn’t particularly suffer.”

She tried not to rise to Eddie’s comment about recognising Tirosh’s name. Did not want to be disappointed so soon into her journey, but she felt the stirrings of excitement taking root in her heart.

“If I remember,” Eddie said, “I’ll call you straightaway and let you know.”

Nur raised her wineglass in salute, and Eddie raised his grape juice against her.

“Cheers,” he said.

“L’chaim,” Nur said, and they both laughed.

Eddie called when Nur and Shulamit sat down with their coffee in the morning.

“I remembered,” he said in victory. “I knew I recognised the name from somewhere.”

“Where from?” Nur asked. She felt peaceful; since last night she was convinced that the contact would come, and now was not surprised.

Eddie sounded embarrassed. “Look, I have a friend who would know a lot more than me. I spoke to him and he’d be glad to meet you.” He gave her the address, in Hachalutz Street, in the old quarter of Hadar.

“Thanks,” Nur said, turning to Shulamit with a question in her eyes. Shulamit shrugged and whispered,

“Haven’t a clue.”

Eddie hung up—hurriedly, Nur thought—and she got up and put her coffee on the table. There was no point waiting; she decided to leave immediately and meet Eddie’s mysterious friend. Shulamit wished her luck and gave her a map of the Carmelit, and in a short time Nur had left the apartment and walked to the nearest station. She found her way to Hachalutz Street Station and there, surrounded by the smells of frying falafel, shawarma, and roasted eggplant which made her suddenly hungry, she walked up the street in search of the address, which turned out to be an apartment above a darkened bookshop that looked as if it had never been opened.

She rang the bell. “Mr. Katz?”

She waited, heard slow steps coming down hidden stairs.

The door opened slowly.

Mr. Katz was small of stature, with short silver hair and a dignified expression, like that of a lecturer on tenure.

“Nur?” He didn’t wait for an answer but began climbing back up the stairs. Nur looked at Mr. Katz’s back moving away, painfully slow. As they said in the neighbourhood… nu. She shrugged and smiled to herself and followed him up the stairs.

“Tea? Coffee?”

Mr. Katz’s apartment was a temple of books. Old books hid in glass cabinets, were piled on the floor in between, sat in boxes, winked behind flowerpots, rested on the windowsill; and on the walls…there were yellowing posters there: of monsters and spaceships, djinns and bronzed Amazonian warriors, weird creatures and the views of strange, other worlds…

“Mr. Katz?” Nur didn’t know what to say. “You’re not a poetry collector, are you?”

“Poetry?” Mr. Katz turned and faced her. “Poetry?” The hand that held the coffee spoon shook. “My dear, I have not read poetry since I was forced, at the age of eight, to recite Bialik’s ‘To a Bird’ in front of the whole class. No, Ms. Husseini”—he stretched as high as he could—“I collect science fiction.”

“I don’t understand,” Nur said. They sat by a table laden with books and drank coffee. Nur bit on a cookie. “Eddie said you’d know about Lior Tirosh.”

“Lior Tirosh,” Mr. Katz said excitedly. “Of course. You say he wrote poetry, too? Interesting. Very interesting. I’m very glad to meet another person who’s interested in Tirosh. Fascinating.”

“You say he also wrote science fiction?” Nur asked. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; she didn’t know what to expect, but…she refused to admit to herself that she was disappointed. Mr. Katz’s hand reached under the table and returned with an ancient-looking magazine; he laid it gently before Nur. “Groteska number forty-eight,” he said fondly. “The longest-running magazine in the history of Israeli science fiction.” He said it with the importance reserved for lecturers on the ages of the Enlightenment or ancient Greece. “The only one to come out both Before and After. Sixty-one volumes, a mixture of translated and original fiction.” He smiled, as if to himself. “And, of course, Tirosh’s stories.”

Nur opened the pages of the magazine. The table of contents included, among story titles such as “War in Zero-g,” “The Wolfmen of Tel Hannan,” and “The Passion Knights of the Purple Planet” (to which, she noticed, was attached a detailed illustration), a story titled “Where All the Waters Meet” and next to it, in small letters, the name of the author: Lior Tirosh.

Nur felt dizzy. Up until now she had expected to find it had all been a mistake, that there were two people called Lior Tirosh, and that here was simply the wrong one. But she recognised the title of the story as a line from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Marina.” In hands that had become suddenly greedy she turned the pages until she reached the story. She read it, the coffee cooling beside her, a lone cookie floating on the murky liquid.

The story told of an escaped convict, a murderer, who arrives by spaceship at a solar system where, in a giant asteroid belt revolving around the sun, lives a race of beelike creatures. The queen of the aliens is telepathic, and in her conversations with the hero she is revealed to him not as a ruler but as a sex slave, her only role that of producing offspring. The human hero and the alien queen fall in love and try to escape. They fail, and the hero remains, as a punishment, in eternal sleep on a wandering asteroid; doomed to meet his lover only in dreams, in the place where, as Eliot wrote, all the waters meet. Nur discovered her throat was dry. “How many stories did he write?” she whispered.

“I never counted,” Mr. Katz said apologetically. “He appears in about half the volumes of Groteska, in all the volumes of Scanners in the Dark and The New Adventures of Captain Yuno, in one or two issues of The Tenth Dimension and of Travels Through Space and Time…I’m afraid you’ll need to go over them one by one. It’s also worth checking the other magazines, and there were also some original anthologies.” He stood up. “The apartment is yours,” he said. “I have to go open the shop. If I don’t have a choice I might even sell something.”

He smiled, wished her luck, and turned to the stairs.

Nur remained alone in the apartment, surrounded by books like walls.

She didn’t know what she was looking for. A hint as to Tirosh’s activity, perhaps, who seemed to have abandoned the writing of poetry after the publication of his first book and turned instead to writing stories that found a home only in the yellowing pages of the science-fiction and fantasy magazines. An ex-boyfriend had tried to interest her in science fiction once, and gave her the al-Qaeda series of an American writer called Asimov, as well as some of the books from the Egyptian New Wave, but she had never been interested in that kind of writing: She preferred poetry, and autobiographies. Tirosh, she discovered, was indeed productive. His stories returned again and again to the subjects dealt with in his poetry, and if he did not document the places where he had been then he did the places that existed elsewhere, in his imagination. He returned again and again to human nature, to war and peace, addiction and pain, God and religion, the need for belief and for absolution. She moved her chair as the shadows migrated across the room, and read. Occasionally she prepared a cup of coffee. And read. Hours passed, and with them the day.

The room had turned almost entirely dark, and rain began to fall outside, when she found the story. She turned on the light. And read.

It appeared in volume thirteen of Groteska and was called, simply, “Shira.”

In the story, Nur read, a woman wanders across the Middle East, restless and without direction. In a secondhand bookshop in Damascus she finds an old Hebrew poetry book whose title is Remnants of God. The poems awaken in her something she does not understand, and on the spur of the moment she goes on a train journey towards Israel. A kind of holocaust has taken place in Israel’s past; Tirosh avoided describing it in detail, but hinted that Jerusalem no longer existed, and that the nature of its destruction and the amount of pain it had caused brought, after a few years, a peace born of shared victimhood, creating in this way a new Middle East that collectively mourned Jerusalem. In the story, the heroine arrives in Haifa—which Tirosh called “the Replacement City”—and on a dark and moonless night meets a strange man who may or may not be the author of the collection of poems she found. They spend the night together, and in the morning the mysterious lover is gone. The ending was left ambiguous on purpose, the story ending the way it began, at a train station in the beginning—or perhaps the end of—a journey, leaving more questions than answers.

Nur felt herself disappearing inside Tirosh’s fiction, and shook herself with effort. She thought about the maze he had created for her, of the route she followed…became lost in? “In your subjective time,”

Tirosh wrote in Remnants of God, “like a tourist in Daedalus’s maze, I am lost. Still charmed, looking in all directions. Not yet knowing that the thread is missing. And that you are built into the maze, and that there are no exits and no entrances.” As if in response to the weight of the words in her head, light steps sounded climbing the stairs and she looked to the door with relief, expecting Mr. Katz’s lined face. She was about to call his name.

But the face that appeared in the open door was not Mr. Katz’s. The man who stood in the doorway was of an average height, with dark, curly hair that had begun receding across his forehead. He had a nice smile, and he looked at her for a long moment with a gaze that made her blush.

“What’s the story?” he asked.

The question, with its dual meaning, made her smile.

He smiled back. Lines had began to collect at the corners of his eyes, but the eyes themselves were clear and scrutinised her for a length of time. On the spur of the moment she rose and moved towards him, pulling him into the room through the open door. Nur, she whispered to herself. What are you doing? But in her heart she knew that the only way out of the maze is to walk it, until reaching the end.

“‘Venus rises from the sea,’” he said, and leaned towards her. “‘Perfect every time she is revealed / Born anew into an old photograph.’” He knelt by Nur’s side and held her hand. “‘She brings with her the scent of salt,’” he whispered, the smile retreating to the corners of his mouth, “‘of drowned ships and ancient time / Venus calls in foreign tongues / cries only she understands.’”

“‘She brings with her many things,’” Nur whispered, the words of the poem rising in her mind. “‘But mainly memories / no matter, she will hold, calm, stroke…’” She fell quiet, looking into the eyes of the stranger before her.

His face was close to hers. His breath was warm, and he smelled of aftershave, and a little of sweat.

“‘The clocks move slower, tonight,’” he said.

“Who…?” Nur said. She didn’t know what to say, what to ask. She looked into his eyes; he had long lashes and eyes that were sometimes green, sometimes brown. He shook his head, a no without words.

“‘What do you teach me,’” he said into the stillness of her face, his lips close, so close she could almost feel, taste them. “‘To hold hands in a crowd / your voice in the dark against my body, the nature / of thoughts is that they pass, I can’t / commemorate you, in poem or / story or image / or memory / for its nature is to pass to fade to die…’”

“‘And finally forget you,’” Nur whispered. “‘Perhaps that composition called synesthesia, where the senses mix and merge, and sound becomes movement becomes taste/scent becomes touch/look.’” She bent close to him, unable to remove her gaze from his face. “‘All the things that needed saying have been said.’”

“‘And a confusion of the senses, you said,’” he whispered, and leaned to kiss her, “‘is the most beautiful hell…’”

Nur tasted his lips. She held him, passed her fingers through his hair. She undressed him slowly, stopping to breathe his body into her, to taste his naked skin; to preserve him in her mind.

“‘I try to explain to myself the movement of the moon in water,’” he spoke into her shoulder and she shivered and pulled harder at his shirt, almost tearing it, “‘in the darkness your nipples were coloured dark, and your lips had the taste of light to them.’” He kissed her neck slowly. “‘Outside the rain fell, and in your movement of undressing there was the movement of the moon in water, your eyes drowned in flame…’”

Nur held him. “No words,” she said.

He smiled, and they kissed. “No words,” he agreed. The rain knocked on the window. Already, your reflection fades.

Your image (breaking in the shop windows, in the fountains,

In the Seine) disappears. The same moon shines on both of us

In two different places.

Your name is missing from all the telephone directories.

She woke up in Shulamit’s guest room. The sun shone through the window, and Nur felt as if she had woken up from a long dream, a dream that lasted months and years.

By the side of the bed was her creased copy of Remnants of God. She opened it. In an unclear handwriting it said, “We’ll always have Haifa.” She laughed and threw the book on the bed. In the living room, Shulamit welcomed her with a coffee.

“Nu, did you find your man in the end?” she asked.

Nur smiled. “Maybe I just stopped looking,” she said.

“The morning rises,” Tirosh wrote. “Another train station.” Nur stood on the Damascus platform of the Haifa train station, the suitcase at her feet like a loyal puppy.

The train arrived at the station and the doors opened. Nur climbed onboard and sat by the window, and waited for her journey to start.

The Passion of Azazel

Barry N. Malzberg

Barry N. Malzberg’s latest collection of essays on science fiction, Breakfast in the Ruins, was published in the spring of 2007; the book conflates his 1982 classic Engines of the Night and all of the essays published since. His collection In the Stone House was published in 2000; several of his 1970s science-fiction novels have been reissued within the past half decade. Malzberg’s body of work includes a fair number of novels (The Cross of Fire) and short stories concerned with religion, but “The Passion of Azazel” is only the third work that has dealt with the Judaic. (Two 1970s short stories appear in Jack Dann’s anthology More Wandering Stars.) He has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for more than forty years; his first story, “We’re Coming Through the Windows” (Galaxy magazine, August 1967), was sold on January 11, 1967. With a fetching smile and an indescribable moué, Malzberg further notes that these last years of his seventh decade are becoming, unsurprisingly, a tortuous slog. With his inimitable cynic’s eye, Malzberg portrays a regular guy who decides to take control of his nightmares in an imaginative way, with results he certainly was not expecting.

And the High Priest shall take two goats…one as an offering and the other as a scapegoat…And he shall kill the goat which is the offering and sprinkle its blood…and he shall lay his hands on the head of the scapegoat and confess upon it all of the iniquities of the Children of Israel and the goat shall be sent to the wilderness with a man who is in waiting…

—LEVITICUS

The High Priest dispatched the scapegoat to the wilderness, where it was driven off a rocky cliff until its bones shattered like a potter’s vessel…and the face of the High Priest when he left the Holy of Holies…was like the lightning bolts emanating from the radiance of the heavenly host…

—MUSSAF PRAYER, DAY OF ATONEMENT

I believe you had a previous life as a scapegoat.” The hypnotherapist’s eyes were brooding but filled with sincerity and profoundly abstracted as if she were retreating into some inaccessible, entombed place.

“Of course that is quite a daring assumption, Schmuel. Still, you are so convincing. Your recurrent nightmares of falling, of being hurled from mountains to rock, carrying the sins of your community. The memories that emerged during your hypnotic regression. This goes beyond the Orthodoxy you were raised with, beyond the usual Freudian interpretation of ‘falling dreams’ as sexual repression or anxiety. Of course”—with a little smile—“isn’t Orthodoxy simply institutionalized sexual repression and anxiety?

But we won’t discuss that now.” She returned to her more serious tone. “A daring assumption,” she repeated.

The knowledge, long deflected, was shocking. Schmuel the scapegoat! But a relief, too. Recognition. Meeting the enemy and discovering your oldest friend. Could this explain the flashbacks, the night sweats, the depression, the riotous, collapsing images of falling, the helplessness, the sheer animal passivity of that descent, the shattering of bone? “If this is so,” the hypnotist continued, “it would explain a great deal. Perhaps it would explain everything. Reincarnation is not charlatanry, you know. There is explicit scientific evidence, an impressive body of research that grows all the time.”

She did not have to convince me.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And the Word was built from letters. Hebrew letters. The seventy-two letters of God’s Name. And from those letters, everything. The heavens and the earth. Mountains, rocks, trees. Mosquitoes, fish, human beings. Goats.

So here is Schmuel, six years after the regression, at another crucial point of his beleaguered and circumstance-laden life, just shy of rabbinical ordination, drowning in a sea of Hebrew letters—

I am spending less and less time in the Yeshiva classroom, less and less time studying the minutiae of religious laws governing kosher food and kosher sex, ritual handwashing and penitential fasting. Seeking more satisfying solutions, I am struggling to manipulate Hebrew letters in the back room of an arts and crafts shop on East Broadway under the watchful eye and sage tutelage of the wizened Rabbi Bentov. I am attempting to construct a golem. A golem in the form of a goat. Made of Hebrew letters, combinations of the letters in God’s Name. I will only construct the purest, most authentic golem—not constructed out of clay, with merely a few Hebrew letters engraved on its forehead, but the more difficult task of making the goat from nothing but the letters themselves.

So can a golem be made in the form of a goat? Yes, according to the ancient Kabbalists. But can I trust them? Working at this, poring over the Sefer Yetzirah on East Broadway in an unusual divination of construction and dedication, I cannot answer, have no way of being sure. But then again, how can one be sure of anything, from divine revelation to divine retribution? But I know I must try to make this golem—this thing that has fascinated and called to me since the first time I ever heard the word golem from my rabbinic father, thundering in one of his sermons against “today’s irresponsible celebrities who demean Kabbalah by making it no more than a machine to manufacture good-luck charms and golems.”

What is a golem, I had asked later. And had been thunderously told that I was too young and ignorant to understand, that a person may not study Kabbalah until he has mastered Bible, Talmud, commentaries, and Jewish law. Which only whetted my interest even more.

The golem, I had discovered upon peering through my father’s library when he was sleeping, was a creature in the image of a man, constructed from mystical permutations and combinations of Hebrew letters, animate in its last stages and potentially dangerous—although, according to several renowned historians, the stories of destructive golems were likely the product of anti-Semitic lore. Some Kabbalists, I later learned, had also made animal golems. Practice makes perfect? Were they like scientists who must experiment on mice and monkeys before experimenting on a human being? No, I found out. The animals were to become sacrifices. Goats were a favorite.

Young Schmuel, his little mouth open and his eyes round in the forbidden library, has transmogrified into Schmuel the soon-to-be-rabbi, the incipient Kabbalist, immersed in the terrifying and wondrous synergy of experience and history, symbol and reality. The journey from scapegoat to creator of goats. From tormented dreams to ferocious pilpul, to murmured incantations and esoteric combinations of Hebrew letters.

“Why do you want to make a goat?” asks Rabbi Bentov yet again. “If you do not plan to sacrifice it, what is the point? The ancients sometimes created human golems to help them with tasks such as drawing water from a well or protecting the village from attack. Today I get mostly rabbinical students who have other ideas, equally practical. They usually want to make a female golem. For marriage. You know how congregations prefer to hire married rabbis so their wives can bake kugels and organize sisterhood meetings. Why a goat?”

I could explain if I wanted to. But I do not want to. No one, not even my esteemed Kabbalistic instructor, can know about my memories, my real motives.

Schmuel on the hypnotist’s couch, that fateful day, meeting himself for the first time—

Hebrew chanting. “Please Lord, I have sinned, I have transgressed…Forgive my iniquities, as it is written, For this day of Yom Kippur shall atone for you. ” The true and ineffable four-letter Name of God is uttered, mysterious and austere. And a resounding wave of voices, “Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever. ”

I am hovering above the Temple of Jerusalem, looking down at a man dressed in white vestments. A priest. The High Priest. Surrounded by other priests, the Temple Mount thronged with thousands of worshippers, pilgrims from all over Israel.

I move closer and suddenly I am on all fours. Something is hanging from the foot of my spine. A tail. My hands and feet are hooves and my legs are covered with white fur. I am a goat. A he-goat. There is another goat next to me. My brother. We suckled together, we grazed together, and we were taken together to stand beside this High Priest on this holiest day of the year. I call to him and my voice is a bleat. He understands and bleats back.

We have been uneasy since we were wrenched from the bosom of our mother and the meadow of grass and flowers and led through the mountainous terrain of Israel to Jerusalem. Days of walking in the heat, with only occasional stops for hay and water. Where were we going? And why? We could not bear to look at one another, because our fear was mirrored in each other’s eyes, and there was no escaping it. Better to pretend we were merely being transferred to greener pastures.

But no pasture, no meadow, instead a stone courtyard spattered with blood, an altar, a sharp silver object wielded by the priest in white. I do not understand. I do not recognize these things. The priest pulls my brother away. Oh, no, no! They are holding my brother down, he is crying for me to help him, but they are restraining me. Let me go, I want my brother, but they pull me away as the gleaming thing, the long silver thing, sharp, sharp, is near his throat, and—stop them! His throat is cut, his head tumbles to the ground, his legs are still kicking, and, improbably, his horn in the dirt is still trying to butt its way to freedom, but he is dead. Even as a goat, I know this. I know terror and I know death.

The blood is running into a basin. The priest is dipping his finger in the blood, he is sprinkling it around. Then they lead me forward. I know what lies in store. I struggle and bite the restraints. I try to butt them with my horns. But they are stronger and I am pushed ahead to the murderous priest and his blood-spattered vestments. I am crying, begging God to have mercy on me, to save me on this holiest day of the year. I have not sinned. I do not deserve to die. The priest approaches. He lays his hands on my head. A gentle gesture, a benediction, and I briefly calm. Have my prayers been heard? His hands rest on my head as he again engages in the Confession. The people of Israel have sinned. Transgressed… Forgive… The people fall prostrate, blessing the Name again. Then the priest turns to a man who has been waiting on the side. “Take him away.”

I am led away. I have been saved! In my jubilation, I push aside the picture of my brother in his final death throes, push away my questions about the God who spared me but killed him. I am alive. The only thought that is important now, I am alive.

We are climbing a mountain steeper than any I trod in my journey toward Jerusalem. I am thirsty, my tongue dry as the sand, hard and cold as the stones underfoot. I try to lie down, but the man forces me up, dragging me forward. I stumble, my legs giving way, but he pulls again and I move ahead, pain and fatigue burning my thighs.

We are almost at the top of the cliff. Suddenly, he cuts the rope and I am free! He moves behind me and I collapse gratefully, relief crowding out the pain, the terror. Gray numbness overtaking me, I lie down and—

And there is pain. Red, searing pain. A sound as wind singing. It is the whirring of a whip as it lashes my hindquarters, the agony building until I must run away from it. I stumble, scramble to my feet, hurtling ahead to the top of the cliff, the whip landing again and again, as I surge forward, my lungs screaming, no longer allowing my legs the luxury of stumbling, so I run, forward, forward—

And then I am airborne, catapulting downward, my heart exploding with merciless knowledge as the blood bursts forth, and I tumble toward the ravine, and—

You will not get away with this, Lord, You, your priests, your people, your Torah—

And then the impact. The shattering of bones. The silence.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

Vengeance is mine, saith the goat.

“Call me Azazel,” says my goat.

The incantations finally complete, the letters still swirling, my newly formed goat has risen to his feet. He is white and bearded, a visage wholly becoming an Orthodox goat. He bleats but his words have a distinctly human aspect. “Let us go to the Yeshiva together and we will take them by storm.”

Rabbi Bentov steps forward, pride in his student’s accomplishment trumped by consternation. “What have you done? You used the wrong spell. Animals can’t speak, except for—”

“If you bring up the story of Balaam’s donkey, I will butt you with my horns. Are you comparing me to that ass?” Rabbi Bentov backs away. “And that is exactly the point,” Azazel continues, “to speak. To utter words. In the beginning was the Word—”

Rabbi Bentov holds up his hands. “But what will you do? I am responsible for anything that happens. I have taught Schmuel everything he knows about making a golem.”

Azazel kicks his hoof impatiently. “You are responsible for everything and nothing. Come, Schmuel, we have work to do.” He turns tail and trots away, with me in pursuit. We leave Rabbi Bentov gesticulating helplessly, muttering prayers and Kabbalistic incantations.

Off we go, Azazel and I, into the welter of East Broadway. I am no less surprised than the disconcerted Rabbi Bentov. Can golems talk? Can golems dispute, order, direct, pontificate? These are questions for the theoreticians, for the rabbi himself, but not for Schmuel or Azazel, who has not stopped talking since we left the arts and crafts store. “Consider the Israelites,” Azazel says. He has become chatty, confidential. “Not a goat but a golden calf. Isn’t that interesting? The goats have gotten short shrift in the Bible, let me tell you. Moses was praised for rescuing a lamb, not a goat. It was a ram who jumped onto the altar to save Isaac from slaughter, and Jacob did genetic engineering on sheep. Even the disgusting litany of prescribed sacrifices consists of mostly cows and sheep with very few goats—except for those who are tossed off cliffs. But”—he winks—“even though the goat has been neglected and scarcely worthy even of being victimized by atrocities, we do corner the market on the holiest day of the year. The most important sacrifice. Now, what do you think of that?”

On and on. He seems more interested in venting his indignation at the ignominious treatment of his (our?) species, his (my!) brethren than responding to my feeble attempts to interject with such practical questions as how we will walk the long distance to the rabbinical school, and what we are planning to do once we get there. He keeps up his pace of walking, as of speaking, stopping only to offer commentary about the neighborhood and its inhabitants. “Isn’t it interesting how New Yorkers keep to themselves?

No one greets us, no one waves hello—humans are the rudest, the most self-absorbed species. I know some of us”—he nudges me and winks conspiratorially, we are after all brothers—“don’t always mind our manners, but this is terribly disturbing.” I note that he does not refer to me as his creator but as his equal—perhaps correctly; after all, I have been a fellow goat in my last incarnation. Perhaps he even was my unfortunate brother, slaughtered just hours before my own death.

“Disturbing,” Azazel prattles on, “because their utter self-centeredness bespeaks their utter inconsideration for any species but their own. Pardon me,” Azazel calls to an obviously frum lady with a large wig, black stockings, and a long dress, pushing a double stroller with shopping bags dangling from the handles and a crying infant in each seat, a toddler clinging to her arm. So preoccupied is she with her children she appears oblivious to the talking goat and his partner. “Excuse me,” Azazel calls again and this time she stops, as if the sight finally registers. Her frum mouth opens in a little O of astonishment and contemplation as she drops her shopping bags and grabs her toddler. He is gesticulating rapturously in our direction. “Nice boy,” Azazel comments as we start off again, leaving the woman pointing and shouting in Yiddish. “Got to get them when they’re young. Before they start studying and preaching and praying. When they’re old geezers it’s too late, they deserve to be shoved off some cliff.”

I am panting, as much from the effects of hearing him as from the physical exertion of keeping up with the four-legged Azazel. He has the advantage, he knows it, and he’s wickedly flaunting his superior ambulation. I grab him by the tail.

He pirouettes, an elegant, almost dainty maneuver, and I narrowly avoid being butted by his horns.

“I just want to slow down,” I say, still panting.

“Did they give you a chance to stop and catch your breath when you were on your way to the cliff?” he demands. He winks again, an overused mannerism that’s becoming increasingly annoying. “Ha, got you now!”

“Why are you treating me like this?” I ask in a plaintive voice. I hear the little whine of the supplicant, the victim.

“Just because you suffered, you think you deserve to be coddled and pampered? We all suffer, friend. You chose to create me, now you have to listen to me. Or why did you create me anyway?”

Why indeed. I had thought—ridiculously, I now realize—that I would find companionship, simpatico. My goat and I would compare notes about what it is like to be a goat, to suffer at the hands of human beings. I could share the trauma of my memories, receive his warm, nuzzled consolation. But apparently he has an agenda of his own, and I now know that one can never account for one’s creation, that the very act of creation is the act of self-abnegation, of self-destruction. Goat or human, the end must be accounted for in the beginning.

These are philosophical reflections of some import, but they do not concern me so much as the state of my feet as I try to keep up with Azazel. Somehow, the frum lady appears to be pursuing us and keeping up with our lightning pace—nothing short of remarkable, as she is weighed down by wigs and children and packages and by sexual repression and anxiety (tip-of-the-yarmulke to the hypnotist). But here she is, her wig only slightly disarranged, her babies still crying, her toddler still laughing and pointing. We seem to be moving uptown, to Washington Heights, to the rabbinical school, through streets replete with old men and boom-box-wielding teens and gaudy clothing on racks, Spanish and Hebrew and German and Yiddish competing for purchase. Cheerfully, Azazel thrusts a horn into the clothing rack as sweaters and slacks tumble onto the sidewalk, the owner cursing in Spanish. “See”—his face assumes a goatlike smirk—“does he notice me? Only when his sales rack falls—and my, how angry he gets. But it is nothing compared to what the rabbis will do when we teach them a lesson.”

We? I feel sick. My mouth is dry, the mouth that uttered Kabbalistic incantations. My hands are shaking, the hands that formed the Hebrew letters that birthed Azazel. Waves of sickness overtake me as I contemplate what he might have in mind for the rabbis. The Yeshiva looms within sight, seen through the haze, the traffic, the disorder of Pinehurst Avenue, an unhappy edifice lurking by the river, and only then does the impact and circumstance of our journey come upon me. Exactly what am I to do? I will introduce Azazel to the Rosh Yeshiva—the dean of the rabbinical school—and I know that only then will the true purpose of the golem be revealed…but it is unclear what I intend to happen. The proximity to the Hudson River and the beckoning Jersey Palisades is disconcerting. Will the astonished rabbi be conveyed to the Jersey Palisades and thrown off a cliff? Will Azazel himself become a Jersey-bound golem, seeking rocky ascent on those shiny rungs of grass and stone, then a quick fall? Will he want me to jump to my fate yet again? I shudder. Surely I cannot know any of this; I am merely the vessel of vengeance, the agent of reconstruction: agent of the golem goat, I can only witness this last and terrible reparation. Or so I would hope. For at the heart of this speculation is a vast and consuming emptiness, once disguised as mastery, now in its truer incarnation as terror but beyond the possibility of answer. The school beckons. The Rosh Yeshiva is standing at its entrance, a volume of Talmud in one hand, a prayer book in the other. A frown tugs at the panels of his face, rippling through his beard: “So you have decided to grace us with your presence? Three weeks, and you don’t come to class, you don’t call, you don’t write, you don’t visit. I hear you fancy yourself a Kabbalist.” (He has heard? And from whom?) Azazel tugs at my hand. “Would you look at that? You show up with a goat and instead of marveling, he complains you’re cutting classes. The pettiness of human beings, especially rabbis, cannot be fathomed.”

“What do you have to say for yourself?” the Rosh Yeshiva asks me. “Please say it quickly. I have a class to teach.”

I clear my throat, an uncomfortable noise, rather like a bleat. I open my mouth but before I can say anything, Azazel leaps in. “Teach, teach, teach, class, class, class. Don’t you rabbis ever think about anything other than the Torah? The law? The teachings?”

The Rosh Yeshiva seems to notice my goat for the first time. “Schmuel, what kind of farce is this? Take that animal away.”

I am about to say that I created the goat but as usual, Azazel is faster than I and infinitely more talkative.

“That animal, is this what you just called me?”

“And stop putting words in its mouth,” the Rosh Yeshiva continues. “I don’t know what magic you’re using, sleight of hand, ventriloquism, to make it talk but it is very disrespectful—”

Azazel rises on his hind legs with indignation. “He is not putting words in my mouth! I can speak for myself thank you very much, and we have some business to transact, you and I. Liberation, my friend. And you will be the first liberated.”

The Rosh Yeshiva draws himself up to his full height, which isn’t very tall, and folds his arms, the Talmud and prayer book against his chest. “There is no greater liberation than Torah study,” he says stiffly.

“Ask her, ” Azazel replies, winking fetchingly at the frum lady, who has apparently been following us and has just arrived.

The Rosh Yeshiva’s face wears a terrible expression. “She is a lady. She has no place in a men’s Yeshiva.”

Azazel tap-dances from hoof to hoof. “Do you hear him?” he asks me. Then he turns to the frum lady.

“Liberation, right? Tell him how liberated you are. Free to follow your dreams. Free to jump off a cliff and fly, right?”

The babies are still crying, the toddler is crowing and pointing, straining against his mother’s grasp.

“Please, Moishy,” she begs her son, ignoring the goat and clutching the child. “Be good.”

“Oh, but he is good, better than all of you,” Azazel says, cavorting on the sidewalk.

“We have to go home, Moishy,” she says, beseeching more than telling. But Moishy has his own ideas. He breaks free, shakes off his mother’s pleading hand, and leaps onto Azazel’s back. “Play, play,” he crows.

“And the child shall lead them!” Azazel shouts. “Follow your leader, Rabbi!”

“I won’t go!” the Rosh Yeshiva shouts back. “This is a travesty. This is”—he waves his hands wildly—“this is an outrage, an abomination.”

By now, rabbinical students are pouring out of the building, gaping at the scene unfolding on the steps of the Yeshiva. A few eye me cautiously, and I can almost hear them thinking, That Schmuel, he always was a strange one, wasn’t he?

“You will come with me.” Azazel’s voice has taken on a distinctly menacing tone.

“Please climb down, Moishy,” the frum lady implores her child. He chortles and claps his hands, then throws his arms around Azazel’s neck. “Play,” he says again.

“A fitting leader,” Azazel says in a voice suddenly casual, nonchalant. “So follow your leader, Rabbis.”

The Rosh Yeshiva is about to protest when Azazel butts him—gently but firmly—with his horn.

“Schmuel, you know what you must do if he refuses to go.”

But Schmuel has become irrelevant, overshadowed by the more powerful goat—no doubt the brother, who has come to take revenge not only on the priests and assembled masses but also on his sibling who could not save him from slaughter. Irrelevant, I am struck silent. Inert.

“You know what to do,” Azazel repeats. He gazes at me and in that moment we are suckling together, grazing side by side, we are stumbling toward Jerusalem, and the High Priest—another rabbi—is tearing us asunder. Across the sword, our eyes meet and the words begin to fall quick and full from my mouth. My fingers are moving rapidly, forming Hebrew letters in the air.

The Rosh Yeshiva’s beard lengthens and whitens, his hands fall to the sidewalk, his feet become hooves, a tail sprouts from his hindquarters. He opens his mouth to speak but all that comes out is a bleat. I look around and my fellow students are also on all fours, the bleating thunderous against the now silent New York streets. White goats with black yarmulkes or black hats perched at odd angles atop their tufty heads, black jackets and pants hanging awkwardly over their furry forms. A great multitude of rabbinic goats.

And they stampede in their numbers along Pinehurst to Fort Washington Avenue, then onto the George Washington Bridge. Cars screech to a halt, horns blare, police sirens scream, but the goats continue their stampede, and suddenly, there are more, thousands of goats, some with black hats and sidelocks, some with colorful crocheted yarmulkes, all following the procession of Azazel, with little Moishy riding akimbo, shouting lustily. Then me, the humble servant-creator, the terrified servant-creator. Then the frum lady, huffing and puffing to catch up with her precious little boy, her shopping bags long gone, her infants still crying. And behind us, the streaming, bleating multitudes. Across the bridge, into New Jersey, up the Palisades Interstate Parkway to the State Lookout. To the cliff. The rocky cliff.

I feel even sicker than I did before. Azazel may be long-winded, he may be irreverent, he may be nasty, but just how nasty? How far will he carry the quest for revenge? I start to expostulate, to reason, to plead, but he silences me by butting me with his horns. He turns to face the multitude, who have stopped just short of the cliff, swaying uneasily as they look down.

“Hear O Israel,” he proclaims, and miraculously he is heard throughout the crowd, to the very last, most junior rabbinic student. “For centuries you have prayed for the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of the rituals, you have devoted your lives to studying the book that spawned the torture. You have served oppression, you have worshipped evil. You have sinned. You have transgressed. You have committed iniquity. You will bear your sins.”

He butts the Rosh Yeshiva, pushing him forward to the edge of the cliff. In and out of the crowd he weaves, his horns working deftly, as he prods and pokes and drives the herd to the edge. “Now, then!”

The Rosh Yeshiva falls first, followed by throngs of goats, a blizzard of fur and hooves and beards and tails and black jackets and sidelocks, the air rent with terror and entreaty.

“Now, Schmuel, now!” And he looks at me without so much as a twinkle of humor, Azazel and I in the communion of brothers. And in that moment, as our souls unite, I see my fingers once again forming letters in the air, my mouth moving frenetically, the incantations frantically tumbling as fast as the goats themselves.

And before the goats reach the rocky bottom they rise, a great white cloud of jubilation, a burst of hallelujah. Blessed be the Kingdom of Truth forever and ever. Higher and higher they go, until they are indistinguishable from the white clouds billowing across the sky, until they are the tail of a comet streaking into the night.

“Come on, Schmuel!” And I grab the hand of the frum lady, hoist the double stroller, and leap, the babies now silently sleeping. Azazel leaps with Moishy still gleefully clinging to his neck. As we are airborne we rise together. We fly amid the clouds, we soar, we swoop, we ascend in a whirlwind beyond the clouds, beyond the firmament, to the truest liberation, to the lightning bolts and radiance of the heavenly host.

The Lagerstätte

Laird Barron

Laird Barron was born in Alaska, where he raised and trained huskies for many years. He migrated to the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1990s and began to concentrate on writing poetry and fiction. He currently resides in Olympia, Washington, where he is working on a number of projects.

His award-nominated work has appeared in SCI FICTION and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Year’s Best Fantasy 6, and Horror: The Best of the Year, 2006.

Barron has, in a relatively short time, achieved a well-deserved reputation for writing powerful horror stories and novellas. “The Lagerstätte” is a bit different from his usual—but still quite dark.

October 2004

Virgil acquired the cute little blue-and-white-pin-striped Cessna at an auction; this over Danni’s strenuous objections. There were financial issues; Virgil’s salary as department head at his software development company wasn’t scheduled to increase for another eighteen months and they’d recently enrolled their son Keith in an exclusive grammar school. Thirty grand a year was a serious hit on their rainy-day fund. Also, Danni didn’t like planes, especially small ones, which she asserted were scarcely more than tin, plastic, and balsa wood. She even avoided traveling by commercial airliner if it was possible to drive or take a train. But she couldn’t compete with love at first sight. Virgil took one look at the four-seater and practically swooned, and Danni knew she’d had it before the argument even started. Keith begged to fly and Virgil promised to teach him, teased that he might be the only kid to get his pilot’s license before he learned to drive.

Because Danni detested flying so much, when their assiduously planned weeklong vacation rolled around, she decided to boycott the flight and meet her husband and son at the in-laws’ place on Cape Cod a day late, after wrapping up business in the city. The drive was only a couple of hours—she’d be at the house in time for Friday supper. She saw them off from a small airport in the suburbs, and returned home to pack and go over last-minute adjustments to her evening lecture at the museum. How many times did the plane crash between waking and sleeping? There was no way to measure that; during the first weeks the accident cycled through a continuous playback loop, cheap and grainy and soundless like a closed-circuit security feed. They’d recovered pieces of fuselage from the water, bobbing like cork—she caught a few moments of news footage before someone, probably Dad, killed the television.

They threw the most beautiful double funeral courtesy of Virgil’s parents, followed by a reception in his family’s summer home. She recalled wavering shadowbox lights and the muted hum of voices, men in black hats clasping cocktails to the breasts of their black suits, and severe women gathered near the sharper, astral glow of the kitchen, faces gaunt and cold as porcelain, their dresses black, their children underfoot and dressed as adults in miniature; and afterward, a smooth descent into darkness like a bullet reversing its trajectory and dropping into the barrel of a gun.

Later, in the hospital, she chuckled when she read the police report. It claimed she’d eaten a bottle of pills she’d found in her mother-in-law’s dresser and curled up to die in her husband’s closet among his Little League uniforms and boxes of trophies. That was simply hilarious because anyone who knew her would know the notion was just too goddamned melodramatic for words.

March 2005

About four months after she lost her husband and son, Danni transplanted to the West Coast, taken in by a childhood friend named Merrill Thurman, and cut all ties with extended family, peers, and associates from before the accident. She eventually lost interest in grieving just as she lost interest in her former career as an entomologist; both were exercises of excruciating tediousness and ultimately pointless in the face of her brand-new, freewheeling course. All those years of college and marriage were abruptly and irrevocably reduced to the fond memories of another life, a chapter in a closed book. Danni was satisfied with the status quo of patchwork memory and aching numbness. At her best, there were no highs, no lows, just a seamless thrum as one day rolled into the next. She took to perusing self-help pamphlets, treatises on Eastern philosophy, and trendy art magazines; she piled them in her room until they wedged the door open. She studied Tai Chi during an eight-week course in the decrepit gym of the crosstown YMCA. She toyed with an easel and paints, attended a class at the community college. She’d taken some drafting in college. This was helpful for the technical aspects, the geometry of line and space; the actual artistic part proved more difficult. Maybe she needed to steep herself in the bohemian culture—a cold-water flat in Paris, or an artist commune, or a sea shanty on the coast of Barbados.

Oh, but she’d never live alone, would she?

Amid this reevaluation and reordering came the fugue, a lunatic element that found genesis in the void between melancholy and nightmare. The fugue made familiar places strange; it wiped away friendly faces and replaced them with beekeeper masks and reduced English to the low growl of the swarm. It was a disorder of trauma and shock, a hybrid of temporary dementia and selective amnesia. It battened to her with the mindless tenacity of a leech.

She tried not to think about its origins, because when she did she was carried back to the twilight land of her subconscious; to Keith’s fifth birthday party; her wedding day with the thousand-dollar cake, and the honeymoon in Niagara Falls; the Cessna spinning against the sun, streaking downward to slam into the Atlantic; and the lush corruption of a green-black jungle and its hidden cairns—the bones of giants slowly sinking into the always hungry earth.

The palace of cries where the doors are opened with blood and sorrow. The secret graveyard of the elephants. The bones of elephants made a forest of rib cages and tusks, dry riverbeds of skulls. Red ants crawled in trains along the petrified spines of behemoths and trailed into the black caverns of empty sockets. Oh, what the lost expeditions might’ve told the world!

She’d dreamed of the Elephants’ Graveyard off and on since the funeral and wasn’t certain why she had grown so morbidly preoccupied with the legend. Bleak mythology had interested her when she was young and vital and untouched by the twin melanomas of wisdom and grief. Now such morose contemplation invoked a primordial dread and answered nothing. The central mystery of her was impenetrable to casual methods. Delving beneath the surface smacked of finality, of doom. Danni chose to endure the fugue, to welcome it as a reliable adversary. The state seldom lasted more than a few minutes, and admittedly it was frightening, certainly dangerous; nonetheless, she was never one to live in a cage. In many ways the dementia and its umbra of pure terror, its visceral chaos, provided the masochistic rush she craved these days—a badge of courage, the martyr’s brand. The fugue hid her in its shadow, like a sheltering wing.

May 6, 2006

(D. L. Session 33)

Danni stared at the table while Dr. Green pressed a button and the wheels of the recorder began to turn. His chair creaked as he leaned back. He stated his name, Danni’s name, the date and location.

—How are things this week? he said.

Danni set a slim metal tin on the table and flicked it open with her left hand. She removed a cigarette and lighted it. She used matches because she’d lost the fancy lighter Merrill got her as a birthday gift. She exhaled, shook the match dead.

—For a while, I thought I was getting better, she said in a raw voice.

—You don’t think you’re improving? Dr. Green said.

—Sometimes I wake up and nothing seems real; it’s all a movie set, a humdrum version of This Is Your Life! I stare at the ceiling and can’t shake this sense I’m an imposter.

—Everybody feels that way, Dr. Green said. His dark hands rested on a clipboard. His hands were creased and notched with the onset of middle age; the cuffs of his starched lab coat had gone yellow at the seams. He was married; he wore a simple ring and he never stared at her breasts. Happily married, or a consummate professional, or she was nothing special. A frosted window rose high and narrow over his shoulder like the painted window of a monastery. Pallid light shone at the corners of his angular glasses, the shiny edges of the clipboard, a piece of the bare plastic table, the sunken tiles of the floor. The tiles were dented and scratched and bumpy. Fine cracks spread like tendrils. Against the far walls were cabinets and shelves and several rickety beds with thin rails and large, black wheels. The hospital was an ancient place and smelled of mold and sickness beneath the buckets of bleach she knew the custodians poured forth every evening. This had been a sanatorium. People with tuberculosis had gathered here to die in the long, shabby wards. Workers loaded the bodies into furnaces and burned them. There were chutes for the corpses on all of the upper floors. The doors of the chutes were made of dull, gray metal with big handles that reminded her of the handles on the flour and sugar bins in her mother’s pantry.

Danni smoked and stared at the ceramic ashtray centered exactly between them, inches from a box of tissues. The ashtray was black. Cinders smoldered in its belly. The hospital was “no smoking,” but that never came up during their weekly conversations. After the first session of him watching her drop the ashes into her coat pocket, the ashtray had appeared. Occasionally she tapped her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray and watched the smoke coil tighter and tighter until it imploded the way a demolished building collapses into itself after the charges go off.

Dr. Green said,—Did you take the bus or did you walk?

—Today? I walked.

Dr. Green wrote something on the clipboard with a heavy golden pen.—Good. You stopped to visit your friend at the market, I see.

Danni glanced at her cigarette where it fumed between her second and third fingers.

—Did I mention that? My Friday rounds?

—Yes. When we first met. He tapped a thick, manila folder bound in a heavy-duty rubber band. The folder contained Danni’s records and transfer papers from the original admitting institute on the East Coast. Additionally, there was a collection of nearly unrecognizable photos of her in hospital gowns and bathrobes. In several shots an anonymous attendant pushed her in a wheelchair against a blurry backdrop of trees and concrete walls.

—Oh.

—You mentioned going back to work. Any progress?

—No. Merrill wants me to. She thinks I need to reintegrate professionally, that it might fix my problem, Danni said, smiling slightly as she pictured her friend’s well-meaning harangues. Merrill spoke quickly, in the cadence of a native Bostonian who would always be a Bostonian no matter where she might find herself. A lit major, she’d also gone through an art-junkie phase during grad school, which had wrecked her first marriage and introduced her to many a disreputable character as could be found haunting the finer galleries and museums. One of said characters became ex-husband the second and engendered a profound and abiding disillusionment with the fine-arts scene entirely. Currently, she made an exemplary copy editor at a rather important monthly journal.

—What do you think?

—I liked being a scientist. I liked to study insects, liked tracking their brief, frenetic little lives. I know how important they are, how integral, essential to the ecosystem. Hell, they outnumber humans trillions to one. But, oh my, it’s so damned easy to feel like a god when you’ve got an ant twitching in your forceps. You think that’s how God feels when He’s got one of us under His thumb?

—I couldn’t say.

—Me neither. Danni dragged heavily and squinted.—Maybe I’ll sell Bibles door-to-door. My uncle sold encyclopedias when I was a little girl.

Dr. Green picked up the clipboard.—Well. Any episodes—fainting, dizziness, disorientation? Anything of that nature?

She smoked in silence for nearly half a minute.—I got confused about where I was the other day. She closed her eyes. The recollection of those bad moments threatened her equilibrium.—I was walking to Yang’s grocery—it’s about three blocks from the apartments. I got lost for a few minutes.

—A few minutes.

—Yeah. I wasn’t timing it, sorry.

—No, that’s fine. Go on.

—It was like before. I didn’t recognize any of the buildings. I was in a foreign city and couldn’t remember what I was doing there. Someone tried to talk to me, to help me—an old lady. But I ran from her instead. Danni swallowed the faint bitterness, the dumb memory of nausea and terror.

—Why? Why did you run?

—Because when the fugue comes, when I get confused and forget where I am, people frighten me. Their faces don’t seem real. Their faces are rubbery and inhuman. I thought the old lady was wearing a mask, that she was hiding something. So I ran. By the time I regained my senses, I was near the park. Kids were staring at me.

—Then?

—Then what? I yelled at them for staring at me. They took off.

—What did you want at Yang’s?

—What?

—You said you were shopping. For what?

—I don’t recall. Beets. Grapes. A giant zucchini. I don’t know.

—You’ve been taking your medication, I presume. Drugs, alcohol?

—No drugs. Okay, a joint occasionally. A few shots here and there. Merrill wants to unwind on the weekends. She drinks me under the table—Johnnie Walker and Manhattans. Tequila if she’s seducing one of the rugged types. Depends where we are. She’d known Merrill since forever. Historically, Danni was the strong one, the one who saw Merrill through two bad marriages, a career collapse, and bouts of deep clinical depression. Funny how life tended to put the shoe on the other foot when one least expected.

—Do you visit many different places?

Danni shrugged.—I don’t—oh, the Candy Apple. Harpo’s. That hole-in-the-wall on Decker and Gedding, the Red Jack. All sorts of places. Merrill picks; says it’s therapy.

—Sex?

Danni shook her head.—That doesn’t mean I’m loyal.

—Loyal to whom?

—I’ve been noticing men and…I feel like I’m betraying Virgil. Soiling our memories. It’s stupid, sure. Merrill thinks I’m crazy.

—What do you think?

—I try not to, Doc.

—Yet the past is with you. You carry it everywhere. Like a millstone, if you’ll pardon the cliché. Danni frowned.

—I’m not sure what you mean—

—Yes, you are.

She smoked and looked away from his eyes. She’d arranged a mini gallery of snapshots of Virgil and Keith on the bureau in her bedroom, stuffed more photos in her wallet, and fixed one of Keith as a baby on a keychain. She’d built a modest shrine of baseball ticket stubs, Virgil’s moldy fishing hat, his car keys, though the car was long gone, business cards, canceled checks, and torn-up Christmas wrapping. It was sick.

—Memories have their place, of course, Dr. Green said.—But you’ve got to be careful. Live in the past too long and it consumes you. You can’t use fidelity as a crutch. Not forever.

—I’m not planning on forever, Danni said.

August 2, 2006

Color and symmetry were among Danni’s current preoccupations. Yellow squash, orange baby carrots, an axis of green peas on a china plate; the alignment of complementary elements surgically precise upon the starched white tablecloth—cloth white and neat as the hard white fabric of a hospital sheet. Their apartment was a narrow box stacked high in a cylinder of similar boxes. The window sashes were blue. All of them a filmy, ephemeral blue like the dust on the wings of a blue emperor butterfly; blue over every window in every cramped room. Blue as dead salmon, blue as ice. Blue shadows darkened the edge of the table, rippled over Danni’s untouched meal, its meticulously arrayed components. The vegetables glowed with subdued radioactivity. Her fingers curled around the fork; the veins in her hand ran like blue-black tributaries to her fingertips, ran like cold iron wires. Balanced on a windowsill was her ant farm, its inhabitants scurrying about the business of industry in microcosm of the looming cityscape. Merrill hated the ants and Danni expected her friend to poison them in a fit of revulsion and pique. Merrill wasn’t naturally maternal and her scant reservoir of kindly nurture was already exhausted on her housemate.

Danni set the fork upon a napkin, red gone black as sackcloth in the beautiful gloom, and moved to the terrace door, reaching automatically for her cigarettes as she went. She kept them in the left breast pocket of her jacket alongside a pack of matches from the Candy Apple. The light that came through the glass and blue gauze was muted and heavy even at midday. Outside the sliding door was a terrace and a rail; beyond the rail, a gulf. Damp breaths of air were coarse with smog, tar, and pigeon shit. Eight stories yawned below the wobbly terrace to the dark brick square. Ninety-six feet to the fountain, the flagpole, two rusty benches, and Piccolo Street where winos with homemade drums, harmonicas, and flutes composed their symphonies and dirges.

Danni smoked on the terrace to keep the peace with Merrill, straight-edge Merrill, whose poison of choice was Zinfandel and fast men in nice suits, rather than tobacco. Danni smoked Turkish cigarettes that came in a tin she bought at the wharf market from a Nepalese expat named Mahan. Mahan sold coffee, too, in shiny black packages, and decorative knives with tassels depending from brass handles. Danni leaned on the swaying rail and lighted the next to the last cigarette in her tin and smoked as the sky clotted between the gaps of rooftops, the copses of wires and antennas, the static snarl of uprooted birds like black bits of paper ash turning in the Pacific breeze. A man stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. He craned his neck to seek her out from amid the jigsaw of fire escapes and balconies. He waved and then turned away and crossed the street with an unmistakably familiar stride, and was gone. When her cigarette was done, she flicked the butt into the empty planter, one of several terra-cotta pots piled around the corroding barbecue. She lighted her remaining cigarette and smoked it slowly, made it last until the sky went opaque and the city lights began to float here and there in the murk, bubbles of iridescent gas rising against the leaden tide of night. Then she went inside and sat very still while her colony of ants scrabbled in the dark.

May 6, 2006

(D. L. Session 33)

Danni’s cigarette was out; the tin empty. She began to fidget.—Do you believe in ghosts, Doctor?

—Absolutely. Dr. Green knocked his ring on the table and gestured at the hoary walls.—Look around. Haunted, I’d say.

—Really?

Dr. Green seemed quite serious. He set aside the clipboard, distancing himself from the record.—Why not. My grandfather was a missionary. He lived in the Congo for several years, set up a clinic out there. Everybody believed in ghosts—including my grandfather. There was no choice. Danni laughed.—Well, it’s settled. I’m a faithless bitch. And I’m being haunted as just desserts.

—Why do you say that?

—I went home with this guy a few weeks ago. Nice guy, a graphic designer. I was pretty drunk and he was pretty persuasive.

Dr. Green plucked a pack of cigarettes from the inside pocket of his white coat, shook one loose, and handed it to her. They leaned toward each other, across the table, and he lighted her cigarette with a silvery Zippo.

—Nothing happened, she said.—It was very innocent, actually.

But that was a lie by omission, was it not? What would the good doctor think of her if she confessed her impulses to grasp a man, any man, as a point of fact, and throw him down and fuck him senseless, and refrained only because she was too frightened of the possibilities? Her cheeks stung and she exhaled fiercely to conceal her shame.

—We had some drinks and called it a night. I still felt bad, dirty, somehow. Riding the bus home, I saw Virgil. It wasn’t him; he had Virgil’s build and kind of slouched, holding on to one of those straps. Didn’t even come close once I got a decent look at him. But for a second, my heart froze. Danni lifted her gaze from the ashtray.—Time for more pills, huh?

—Well, a case of mistaken identity doesn’t qualify as a delusion.

Danni smiled darkly.

—You didn’t get on the plane and you lived. Simple. Dr. Green spoke with supreme confidence.

—Is it? Simple, I mean.

—Have you experienced more of these episodes—mistaking strangers for Virgil? Or your son?

—Yeah. The man on the bus, that tepid phantom of her husband, had been the fifth incident of mistaken identity during the previous three weeks. The incidents were growing frequent; each apparition more convincing than the last. Then there were the items she’d occasionally found around the apartment—Virgil’s lost wedding ring gleaming at the bottom of a pitcher of water; a trail of dried rose petals leading from the bathroom to her bed; one of Keith’s crayon masterpieces fixed by magnet on the refrigerator; each of these artifacts ephemeral as dew, transitory as drifting spider thread; they dissolved and left no traces of their existence. That very morning she’d glimpsed Virgil’s bomber jacket slung over the back of a chair. A sunbeam illuminated it momentarily, dispersed it among the moving shadows of clouds and undulating curtains.

—Why didn’t you mention this sooner?

—It didn’t scare me before.

—There are many possibilities. I hazard what we’re dealing with is survivor’s guilt, Dr. Green said.—This guilt is a perfectly normal aspect of the grieving process. Dr. Green had never brought up the guilt association before, but she always knew it lurked in the wings, waiting to be sprung in the third act. The books all talked about it. Danni made a noise of disgust and rolled her eyes to hide the sudden urge to cry.

—Go on, Dr. Green said.

Danni pretended to rub smoke from her eye.—There isn’t any more.

—Certainly there is. There’s always another rock to look beneath. Why don’t you tell me about the vineyards. Does this have anything to do with the Lagerstätte?

She opened her mouth and closed it. She stared, her fear and anger tightening screws within the pit of her stomach.—You’ve spoken to Merrill? Goddamn her.

—She hoped you’d get around to it, eventually. But you haven’t and it seems important. Don’t worry—she volunteered the information. Of course I would never reveal the nature of our conversations. Trust in that.

—It’s not a good thing to talk about, Danni said.—I stopped thinking about it.

—Why?

She regarded her cigarette. Norma, poor departed Norma whispered in her ear, Do you want to press your eye against the keyhole of a secret room? Do you want to see where the elephants have gone to die?

—Because there are some things you can’t take back. Shake hands with an ineffable enigma and it knows you. It has you, if it wants.

Dr. Green waited, his hand poised over a brown folder she hadn’t noticed before. The folder was stamped in red block letters she couldn’t quite read, although she suspected ASYLUM was at least a portion.

—I wish to understand, he said.—We’re not going anywhere.

—Fuck it, she said. A sense of terrible satisfaction and relief caused her to smile again.—Confession is good for the soul, right?

August 9, 2006

In the middle of dressing to meet Merrill at the market by the wharf when she got off work, Danni opened the closet and inhaled a whiff of damp, moldering air and then screamed into her fist. Several withered corpses hung from the rack amid her cheery blouses and conservative suit jackets. They were scarcely more than yellowed sacks of skin. None of the desiccated, sagging faces was recognizable; the shade and texture of cured squash, each was further distorted by warps and wrinkles of dry-cleaning bags. She recoiled and sat on the bed and chewed her fingers until a passing cloud blocked the sun and the closet went dark.

Eventually she washed her hands and face in the bathroom sink, staring into the mirror at her pale, maniacal simulacrum. She skipped makeup and stumbled from the apartment to the cramped, dingy lift that dropped her into a shabby foyer with its rows of tarnished mailbox slots checkering the walls, its low, grubby light fixtures, a stained carpet, and the sweet-and-sour odor of sweat and stagnant air. She stumbled through the security doors into the brighter world.

And the fugue descended.

Danni was walking from somewhere to somewhere else; she’d closed her eyes against the glare and her insides turned upside down. Her eyes flew open and she reeled, utterly lost. Shadow people moved around her, bumped her with their hard elbows and swinging hips; an angry man in brown tweed lectured his daughter and the girl protested. They buzzed like flies. Their miserable faces blurred together, lit by some internal phosphorus. Danni swallowed, crushed into herself with a force akin to claustrophobia, and focused on her watch, a cheap windup model that glowed in the dark. Its numerals meant nothing, but she tracked the needle as it swept a perfect circle while the world spun around her. The passage, an indoor–outdoor avenue of sorts. Market stalls flanked the causeway, shelves and timber beams twined with streamers and beads, hemp rope and tie-dye shirts and pennants. Light fell through cracks in the overhead pavilion. The enclosure reeked of fresh salmon, salt water, sawdust, and the compacted scent of perfumed flesh.

— Danni. Here was an intelligible voice amid the squeal and squelch. Danni lifted her head and tried to focus.

— We miss you, Virgil said. He stood several feet away, gleaming like polished ivory.

—What? Danni said, thinking his face was the only face not changing shape like the flowery crystals in a kaleidoscope.—What did you say?

— Come home. It was apparent that this man wasn’t Virgil, although in this particular light the eyes were similar, and he drawled. Virgil grew up in South Carolina, spent his adult life trying to bury that drawl, and eventually it emerged only when he was exhausted or angry. The stranger winked at her and continued along the boardwalk. Beneath an Egyptian cotton shirt, his back was almost as muscular as Virgil’s. But, no.

Danni turned away into the bright, jostling throng. Someone took her elbow. She yelped and wrenched away and nearly fell.

—Honey, you okay? The jumble of insectoid eyes, lips, and bouffant hair coalesced into Merrill’s stern face. Merrill wore white-rimmed sunglasses that complemented her vanilla dress with its wide shoulders and brass buttons, and her elegant vanilla gloves. Her thin nose peeled with sunburn.—Danni, are you all right?

—Yeah. Danni wiped her mouth.

—The hell you are. C’mon. Merrill led her away from the moving press to a small open square and seated her in a wooden chair in the shadow of a parasol. The square hosted a half dozen vendors and several tables of squawking children, overheated parents with flushed cheeks, and senior citizens in pastel running suits. Merrill bought soft ice cream in tiny plastic dishes and they sat in the shade and ate the ice cream while the sun dipped below the rooflines. The vendors began taking down the signs and packing it in for the day.

—Okay, okay. I feel better. Danni’s hands had stopped shaking.

—You do look a little better. Know where you are?

—The market. Danni wanted a cigarette.—Oh, damn it, she said.

—Here, sweetie. Merrill drew two containers of Mahan’s foreign cigarettes from her purse and slid them across the table, mimicking a spy in one of those 1970s thrillers.

—Thanks, Danni said as she got a cigarette burning. She dragged frantically, left hand cupped to her mouth so the escaping smoke boiled and foamed between her fingers like dry-ice vapors. Nobody said anything despite the NO SMOKING signs posted on the gate.

—Hey, what kind of bug is that? Merrill intently regarded a beetle hugging the warmth of a wooden plank near their feet.

—It’s a beetle.

—How observant. But what kind?

—I don’t know.

—What? You don’t know?

—I don’t know. I don’t really care, either.

—Oh, please.

—Fine. Danni leaned forward until her eyeballs were scant inches above the motionless insect.—Hmm. I’d say a Spurious exoticus minor, closely related to, but not to be confused with, the Spurious eroticus major. Yep.

Merrill stared at the beetle, then Danni. She took Danni’s hand and gently squeezed.—You fucking fraud. Let’s go get liquored up, hey?

—Hey-hey.

May 6, 2006

(D. L. Session 33)

Dr. Green’s glasses were opaque as quartz.

—The Lagerstätte. Elucidate, if you will.

—A naturalist’s wet dream. Ask Norma Fitzwater and Leslie Runyon, Danni said and chuckled wryly.—When Merrill originally brought me here to Cali, she made me join a support group. That was about, what? A year ago, give or take. Kind of a twelve-step program for wannabe suicides. I quit after a few visits—group therapy isn’t my style and the counselor was a royal prick. Before I left, I became friends with Norma, a drug addict and perennial houseguest of the state penitentiary before she snagged a wealthy husband. Marrying rich wasn’t a cure for everything, though. She claimed to have tried to off herself five or six times, made it sound like an extreme sport.

—A fascinating woman. She was pals with Leslie, a widow like me. Leslie’s husband and brother fell off a glacier in Alaska. I didn’t like her much. Too creepy for polite company. Unfortunately, Norma had a mother-hen complex, so there was no getting rid of her. Anyway, it wasn’t much to write home about. We went to lunch once a week, watched a couple of films, commiserated about our shitty luck. Summer camp stuff.

—You speak of Norma in the past tense. I gather she eventually ended her life, Dr. Green said.

—Oh, yes. She made good on that. Jumped off a hotel roof in the Tenderloin. Left a note to the effect that she and Leslie couldn’t face the music anymore. The cops, brilliant as they are, concluded Norma made a suicide pact with Leslie. Leslie’s corpse hasn’t surfaced yet. The cops figure she’s at the bottom of the bay, or moldering in a wooded gully. I doubt that’s what happened, though.

—You suspect she’s alive.

—No, Leslie’s dead under mysterious and messy circumstances. It got leaked to the press that the cops found evidence of foul play at her home. There was blood or something on her sheets. They say it dried in the shape of a person curled in the fetal position—somebody mentioned the flash shadows of victims in Hiroshima. This was deeper, as if the body had been pressed hard into the mattress. The only remains were her watch, her diaphragm, her fillings, for Christ’s sake, stuck to the coagulate that got left behind like afterbirth. Sure, it’s bullshit, urban legend fodder. There were some photos in the Gazette, some speculation among our sorry little circle of neurotics and manic depressives.

—Very unpleasant but, fortunately, equally improbable.

Danni shrugged.—Here’s the thing, though. Norma predicted everything. A month before she killed herself, she let me in on a secret. Her friend Leslie, the creepy lady, had been seeing Bobby. He visited her nightly, begged her to come away with him. And Leslie planned to.

—Her husband, Dr. Green said.—The one who died in Alaska.

—The same. Trust me, I laughed, a little nervously, at this news. I wasn’t sure whether to humor Norma or get the hell away from her. We were sitting in a classy restaurant, surrounded by execs in silk ties and Armani suits. Like I said, Norma was loaded. She married into a nice Sicilian family; her husband was in the import–export business, if you get my drift. Beat the hell out of her, though; definitely contributed to her low self-esteem. Right in the middle of our luncheon, between the lobster tails and the éclairs, she leaned over and confided this thing with Leslie and her deceased husband. The ghostly lover. Dr. Green passed Danni another cigarette. He lighted one of his own and studied her through the blue exhaust. Danni wondered if he wanted a drink as badly as she did.

—How did you react to this information? Dr. Green said.

—I stayed cool, feigned indifference. It wasn’t difficult; I was doped to the eyeballs most of the time. Norma claimed there exists a certain quality of grief, so utterly profound, so tragically pure, that it resounds and resonates above and below. A living, bleeding echo. It’s the key to a kind of limbo.

—The Lagerstätte. Dr. Green licked his thumb and sorted through the papers in the brown folder.—As in the Burgess Shale, the La Brea Tar Pits. Were your friends amateur paleontologists?

— Lagerstätten are ‘resting places’ in the Deutsch, and I think that’s what the women meant.

—Fascinating choice of mythos.

—People do whatever it takes to cope. Drugs, kamikaze sex, religion, anything. In naming, we seek to order the incomprehensible, yes?

—True.

—Norma pulled this weird piece of jagged gray rock from her purse. Not rock—a petrified bone shard. A fang or a long, wicked rib splinter. Supposedly human. I could tell it was old; it reminded me of all those fossils of trilobites I used to play with. It radiated an aura of antiquity, like it had survived a shift of deep geological time. Norma got it from Leslie and Leslie had gotten it from someone else; Norma claimed to have no idea who, although I suspect she was lying; there was definitely a certain slyness in her eyes. For all I know, it’s osmosis. She pricked her finger on the shard and gestured at the blood that oozed on her plate. Danni shivered and clenched her left hand.—The scene was surreal. Norma said: Grief is blood, Danni. Blood is the living path to everywhere. Blood opens the way. She said if I offered myself to the Lagerstätte, Virgil would come to me and take me into the house of dreams. But I wanted to know whether it would really be him and not…an imitation. She said, Does it matter? My skin crawled as if I were waking from a long sleep to something awful, something my primal self recognized and feared. Like fire.

—You believe the bone was human.

—I don’t know. Norma insisted I accept it as a gift from her and Leslie. I really didn’t want to, but the look on her face, it was intense.

—Where did it come from? The bone.

—The Lagerstätte.

—Of course. What did you do?

Danni looked down at her hands, the left with its jagged white scar in the meat and muscle of her palm, and deeper into the darkness of the earth.—The same as Leslie. I called them.

—You called them. Virgil and Keith.

—Yes. I didn’t plan to go through with it. I got drunk, and when I’m like that, my thoughts get kind of screwy. I don’t act in character.

—Oh. Dr. Green thought that over.—When you say called, what exactly do you mean?

She shrugged and flicked ashes into the ashtray. Even though Dr. Green had been there the morning they stitched the wound, she guarded the secret of its origin with a zeal bordering on pathological. Danni had brought the weird bone to the apartment. Once alone, she drank the better half of a bottle of Maker’s Mark and then sliced her palm and made a doorway in blood. She slathered a vertical seam, a demarcation between her existence and the abyss, in the plaster wall at the foot of her bed. She smeared Virgil’s and Keith’s initials and sent a little prayer into the night. In a small clay pot she’d bought at a market, she shredded her identification, her (mostly defunct) credit cards, her Social Security card, a lock of her hair, and burned the works with the tallow of a lamb. Then, in the smoke and shadows, she finished getting drunk off her ass and promptly blacked out.

Merrill wasn’t happy; Danni had bled like the proverbial stuck pig, soaked through the sheets into the mattress. Merrill decided her friend had horribly botched another run for the Pearly Gates. She had brought Danni to the hospital for a bunch of stitches and introduced her to Dr. Green. Of course Danni didn’t admit another suicide attempt. She doubted her conducting a black-magic ritual would help matters, either. She said nothing, simply agreed to return for sessions with the good doctor. He was blandly pleasant, eminently nonthreatening. She didn’t think he could help, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to please Merrill and Merrill insisted on the visits.

Back home, Merrill confiscated the bone, the ritual fetish, and threw it in the trash. Later, she tried like hell to scrub the stain. In the end she gave up and painted the whole room blue. A couple of days after that particular bit of excitement, Danni found the bone at the bottom of her sock drawer. It glistened with a cruel, lusterless intensity. Like the monkey’s paw it had returned, and that didn’t surprise her. She folded it into a kerchief and locked it in a jewelry box she’d kept since first grade.

All these months gone by, Danni remained silent on the subject.

Finally, Dr. Green sighed.—Is that when you began seeing Virgil in the faces of strangers? These doppelgängers? He smoked his cigarette with the joyless concentration of a prisoner facing a firing squad. It was obvious from his expression that the meter had rolled back to zero.

—No, not right away. Nothing happened, Danni said.—Nothing ever does, at first.

—No, I suppose not. Tell me about the vineyard. What happened there?

—I…I got lost.

—That’s where all this really begins, isn’t it? The fugue, perhaps other things. Danni gritted her teeth. She thought of elephants and graveyards. Dr. Green was right, in his own smug way. Six weeks after Danni sliced her hand, Merrill took her for a day trip to the beach. Merrill rented a convertible and made a picnic. It was nice; possibly the first time Danni felt human since the accident; the first time she’d wanted to do anything besides mope in the apartment and play depressing music. After some discussion, they chose Bolton Park, a lovely stretch of coastline way out past Kingwood. The area was foreign to Danni, so she bought a road map pamphlet at a gas station. The brochure listed a bunch of touristy places. Windsurfers and bird-watchers favored the area, but the guide warned of dangerous riptides. The women had no intention of swimming; they stayed near a cluster of great big rocks at the north end of the beach—below the cliff with the steps that led up to the posh houses, the summer homes of movie stars and advertising executives, the beautiful people. On the way home, Danni asked if they might stop at Kirkston Vineyards. It was a hole-in-the-wall, only briefly listed in the guidebook. There were no pictures. They drove in circles for an hour tracking the place down—Kirkston was off the beaten path, a village of sorts. There was a gift shop and an inn, and a few antique houses. The winery was fairly large and charming in a rustic fashion, and that essentially summed up the entire place.

Danni thought it was a cute setup; Merrill was bored stiff and did what she always did when she’d grown weary of a situation—she flirted like mad with one of the tour guides. Pretty soon, she disappeared with the guy on a private tour.

There were twenty or thirty people in the tour group—a bunch of elderly folks who’d arrived on a bus and a few couples pretending they were in Europe. After Danni lost Merrill in the crowd, she went outside to explore until her friend surfaced again.

Perhaps fifty yards from the winery steps, Virgil waited in the lengthening shadows of a cedar grove. That was the first of the phantoms. Too far away for positive identification, his face was a white smudge. He hesitated and regarded her over his shoulder before he ducked into the undergrowth. She knew it was impossible, knew that it was madness, or worse, and went after him anyway. Deeper into the grounds she encountered crumbled walls of a ruined garden hidden under a bower of willow trees and honeysuckle vines. She passed through a massive marble archway, so thick with sap it had blackened like a smokestack. Inside was a sunken area and a clogged fountain decorated with cherubs and gargoyles. There were scattered benches made of stone slabs, and piles of rubble overrun by creepers and moss. Water pooled throughout the garden, mostly covered by algae and scum; mosquito larvae squirmed beneath drowned leaves. Ridges of broken stone and mortar petrified in the slop and slime of that boggy soil and made waist-high calculi among the freestanding masonry. Her hand throbbed with a sudden, magnificent stab of pain. She hissed through her teeth. The freshly knitted pink slash, her Freudian scar, had split and blood seeped so copiously her head swam. She ripped the sleeve off her blouse and made a hasty tourniquet. A grim, sullen quiet drifted in, a blizzard of silence. The bees weren’t buzzing and the shadows in the trees waxed red and gold as the light decayed. Virgil stepped from behind stalagmites of fallen stone, maybe thirty feet away. She knew with every fiber of her being that this was a fake, a body double, and yet she wanted nothing more than to hurl herself into his arms. Up until that moment, she didn’t realize how much she’d missed him, how achingly final her loneliness had become.

Her glance fell upon a gleaming wedge of stone where it thrust from the water like a dinosaur’s tooth, and as shapes within shapes became apparent, she understood this wasn’t a garden. It was a graveyard. Virgil opened his arms—

—I’m not comfortable talking about this, Danni said.—Let’s move on.

August 9, 2006

Friday was karaoke night at the Candy Apple.

In the golden days of her previous life, Danni had a battalion of friends and colleagues with whom to attend the various academic functions and cocktail socials as required by her professional affiliation with a famous East Coast university. Bar-hopping had seldom been the excursion of choice. Tonight, a continent and several light-years removed from such circumstances, she nursed an overly strong margarita while up on the stage a couple of drunken women with big hair and smeared makeup stumbled through that old Kenny Rogers standby, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” The fake redhead was a receptionist named Sheila, and her blond partner, Delores, a vice president of human resources. Both of them worked at Merrill’s literary magazine and they were partying off their second and third divorces, respectively.

Danni wasn’t drunk, although mixing her medication with alcohol wasn’t helping matters; her nose had begun to tingle and her sensibilities were definitely sliding toward the nihilistic side. Also, she seemed to be hallucinating again. She’d spotted two Virgil look-alikes between walking through the door and her third margarita; that was a record, so far. She hadn’t noticed either of the men enter the lounge; they simply appeared.

One of the mystery men sat among a group of happily chattering yuppie kids; he’d worn a sweater and parted his hair exactly like her husband used to before an important interview or presentation. The brow was wrong, though, and the smile way off. He established eye contact and his gaze made her prickle all over because this simulacrum was so very authentic; if not for the plastic sheen and the unwholesome smile, he was the man she’d looked at across the breakfast table for a dozen years. Eventually he stood and wandered away from his friends and disappeared through the front door into the night. None of the kids seemed to miss him.

The second guy sat alone at the far end of the bar. He was much closer to the authentic thing; he had the nose, the jaw, even the loose way of draping his hands over his knees. However, this one was a bit too rawboned to pass as her Virgil; his teeth too large, his arms too long. He stared across the room, too-dark eyes fastened on her face, and she looked away and by the time she glanced up again he was gone.

She checked to see if Merrill noticed the Virgil impersonators. Merrill blithely sipped her Corona and flirted with a couple of lawyer types at the adjoining table. The suits kept company with a voluptuous woman who was growing long in the tooth and had piled on enough compensatory eye shadow and lipstick to host her own talk show. The woman sulked and shot dangerous glares at Merrill. Merrill smirked coyly and touched the closer suit on the arm.

Danni lighted a cigarette and tried to keep her expression neutral while her pulse fluttered and she scanned the room with the corners of her eyes like a trapped bird. Should she call Dr. Green in the morning? Was he even in the office on weekends? What color would the new pills be?

Presently, the late-dinner and theater crowd arrived en masse and the lounge became packed. The temperature immediately shot up ten degrees and the resultant din of several dozen competing conversations drowned all but shouts. Merrill had recruited the lawyers (who turned out to be an insurance claims investigator and a CPA—Ned and Thomas, and their miffed associate Glenna, a court clerk—to join the group and migrate to another, hopefully more peaceful watering hole. They shambled through neon-washed night, a noisy, truncated herd of quasi-strangers, arms locked for purchase against the mist-slick sidewalks. Danni found herself squashed between Glenna and Ned the Investigator. Ned grasped her waist in a slack, yet vaguely proprietary fashion; his hand was soft with sweat, his paunchy face made more uncomely with livid blotches and the avaricious expression of a drowsy predator. His shirt reeked so powerfully of whiskey it might’ve been doused in the stuff. Merrill pulled them to a succession of bars and nightclubs and all-night bistros. Somebody handed Danni a beer as they milled in the vaulted entrance of an Irish pub and she drank it like tap water, not really tasting it, and her ears hurt and the evening rapidly devolved into a tangle of raucous music and smoke that reflected the fluorescent lights like coke-blacked miner’s lamps, and at last a cool, humid darkness shattered by headlights and the sulfurous orange glow of angry clouds. By her haphazard count, she glimpsed in excess of fifty incarnations of Virgil. Several at the tavern, solitary men mostly submerged in the recessed booths, observing her with stony diffidence through beer steins and shot glasses; a dozen more scattered along the boulevard, listless nomads whose eyes slid around, not quite touching anything. When a city bus grumbled past, every passenger’s head swiveled in unison beneath the repeating flare of dome lights. Every face pressed against the dirty windows belonged to him. Their lifelike masks bulged and contorted with inconsolable longing. Ned escorted her to his place, a warehouse apartment in a row of identical warehouses between the harbor and the railroad tracks. The building had been converted to a munitions factory during the Second World War, then housing in the latter 1960s. It stood black and gritty; its greasy windows sucked in the feeble illumination of the lonely beacons of passing boats and the occasional car. They took a clanking cargo elevator to the top, the penthouse as Ned laughingly referred to his apartment. The elevator was a box encased in grates that exposed the inner organs of the shaft and the dark tunnels of passing floors. It could’ve easily hoisted a baby grand piano. Danni pressed her cheek to vibrating metal and shut her eyes tight against vertigo and the canteen-like slosh of too many beers in her stomach.

Ned’s apartment was sparsely furnished and remained mostly in gloom even after he turned on the floor lamp and went to fix nightcaps. Danni collapsed onto the corner of a couch abridging the shallow nimbus of light and stared raptly at her bone-white hand curled into the black leather. Neil Diamond crooned from velvet speakers. Ned said something about his record collection and, faintly, ice cracked from its tray and clinked in glass with the resonance of a tuning fork.

Danni’s hand shivered as if it might double and divide. She was cold now, in the sticky hot apartment, and her thighs trembled. Ned slipped a drink into her hand and placed his own hand on her shoulder, splayed his soft fingers on her collar, traced her collarbone with his moist fingertip. Danni flinched and poured gin down her throat until Ned took the glass and began to nuzzle her ear, his teeth clicking against the pearl stud, his overheated breath like smoldering creosote and kerosene, and as he tugged at her blouse strap, she began to cry. Ned lurched above her and his hands were busy with his belt and pants, and these fell around his ankles and his loafers. He made a fist in a mass of her hair and yanked her face against his groin; his linen shirttails fell across Danni’s shoulders and he bulled himself into her gasping mouth. She gagged, overwhelmed by the ripeness of sweat and whiskey and urine, the rank humidity, the bruising insistence of him, and she convulsed, arms flailing in epileptic spasms, and vomited. Ned’s hips pumped for several seconds and then his brain caught up with current events and he cried out in dismay and disgust and nearly capsized the couch as he scrambled away from her and a caramel gush of half-digested cocktail shrimp and alcohol.

Danni dragged herself from the couch and groped for the door. The door was locked with a bolt and chain and she battered at these, sobbing and choking. Ned’s curses were muffled by a thin partition and the low thunder of water sluicing through corroded pipes. She flung open the door and was instantly lost in a cavernous hall that telescoped madly. The door behind her was a cave mouth, the windows were holes, were burrows. She toppled down a flight of stairs.

Danni lay crumpled, damp concrete wedged against the small of her back and pinching the back of her legs. Ghostly radiance cast shadows upon the piebald walls of the narrow staircase and rendered the scrawls of graffiti into fragmented hieroglyphics. Copper and salt filled her mouth. Her head was thick and spongy and when she moved it, little comets shot through her vision. A moth jerked in zigzags near her face, jittering upward at frantic angles toward a naked bulb. The bulb was brown and black with dust and cigarette smoke. A solid shadow detached from the gloom of the landing; a slight, pitchy silhouette that wavered at the edges like gasoline fumes.

Mommy? A small voice echoed, familiar and strange, the voice of a child or a castrato, and it plucked at her insides, sent tremors through her.

—Oh, God, she said and vomited again, spilling herself against the rough surface of the wall. The figure became two, then four and a pack of childlike shapes assembled on the landing. The pallid corona of the brown bulb dimmed. She rolled away, onto her belly, and began to crawl…

August 10, 2006

The police located Danni semiconscious in the alley behind the warehouse apartments. She didn’t understand much of what they said and she couldn’t muster the resolve to volunteer the details of her evening’s escapades. Merrill rode with her in the ambulance to the emergency room where, following a two-hour wait, a haggard surgeon determined that Danni suffered from a number of nasty contusions, minor lacerations, and a punctured tongue. No concussion, however. He punched ten staples into her scalp, handed over a prescription for painkillers, and sent her home with an admonishment to return in twelve hours for observation.

After they’d settled safe and sound at the apartment, Merrill wrapped Danni in a blanket and boiled a pot of green tea. Lately, Merrill was into feng shui and Chinese herbal remedies. It wasn’t quite dawn and so they sat in the shadows in the living room. There were no recriminations, although Merrill lapsed into a palpable funk; hers was the grim expression of guilt and helplessness attendant to her perceived breach of guardianship. Danni patted her hand and drifted off to sleep.

When Danni came to again, it was early afternoon and Merrill was in the kitchen banging pots. Over bowls of hot noodle soup Merrill explained she’d called in sick for a couple of days. She thought they should get Danni’s skull checked for dents and rent some movies and lie around with a bowl of popcorn and do essentially nothing. Tomorrow might be a good day to go window-shopping for an Asian print to mount in their pitifully barren entryway.

Merrill summoned a cab. The rain came in sheets against the windows of the moving car and Danni dozed to the thud of the wipers, trying to ignore the driver’s eyes upon her from the rearview. He looked unlike the fuzzy headshot on his license fixed to the visor. In the photo his features were burnt teak and warped by the deformation of aging plastic.

They arrived at the hospital and signed in and went into the bowels of the grand old beast to radiology. A woman in a white jacket injected dye into Danni’s leg and loaded her into a shiny, cold machine the girth of a bread truck and ordered her to keep her head still. The technician’s voice buzzed through a hidden transmitter, repulsively intimate as if a fly had crawled into her ear canal. When the rubber jackhammers started in on the steel shell, she closed her eyes and saw Virgil and Keith waving to her from the convex windows of the plane. The propeller spun so slowly, she could track its revolutions.

—The doctor says they’re negative. The technician held photographic plates of Danni’s brain against a softly flickering pane of light.—See? No problems at all.

The crimson seam dried black on the bedroom wall. The band of black acid eating plaster until the wall swung open on smooth, silent hinges. Red darkness pulsed in the rift. White leaves crumbled and sank, each one a lost face. A shadow slowly shaped itself into human form. The shadow man regarded her, his hand extended, approaching her without moving his shadow legs. Merrill thanked the woman in the clipped manner she reserved for those who provoked her distaste, and put a protective arm over Danni’s shoulders. Danni had taken an extra dose of tranquilizers to sand the rough edges. Reality was a taffy pull.

Pour out your blood and they’ll come back to you, Norma said and stuck her bleeding finger in her mouth. Her eyes were cold and dark as the eyes of a carrion bird. Bobby and Leslie coupled on a squeaking bed. Their frantic rhythm gradually slowed and they began to melt and merge until their flesh rendered to a sticky puddle of oil and fat and patches of hair. The forensics photographers came, clicking and whirring, eyes deader than the lenses of their cameras. They smoked cigarettes in the hallway and chatted with the plainclothes about baseball and who was getting pussy and who wasn’t; everybody had sashimi for lunch, noodles for supper, and took work home and drank too much. Leslie curdled in the sheets and her parents were long gone, so she was already most of the way to being reduced to a serial number and forgotten in a cardboard box in a storeroom. Except Leslie stood in a doorway in the grimy bulk of a nameless building. She stood, hip-shot and half silhouetted, naked and lovely as a Botticelli nude. Disembodied arms circled her from behind, and large, muscular hands cupped her breasts. She nodded, expressionless as a wax death masque, and stepped back into the black. The iron door closed. Danni’s brain was fine. No problems at all.

Merrill took her home and made her supper. Fried chicken; Danni’s favorite from a research stint studying the migration habits of three species of arachnids at a southern institute where grits did double duty as breakfast and lunch.

Danni dozed intermittently, lulled by the staccato flashes of the television. She stirred and wiped drool from her lips, thankfully too dopey to suffer much embarrassment. Merrill helped her to bed and tucked her in and kissed her good night on the mouth. Danni was surprised by the warmth of her breath, her tenderness; then she was heavily asleep, floating facedown in the red darkness, the amniotic wastes of a secret world.

August 11, 2006

Merrill cooked waffles for breakfast; she claimed to have been a “champeen” hash-slinger as an undergrad, albeit Danni couldn’t recall that particular detail of their shared history. Although food crumbled like cardboard on her tongue, Danni smiled gamely and cleared her plate. The fresh orange juice in the frosted glass was a mouthful of lye. Merrill had apparently jogged over to Yang’s and picked up a carton the exact instant the poor fellow rolled back the metal curtains from his shop front, and Danni swallowed it and hoped she didn’t drop the glass because her hand was shaking so much. The pleasant euphoria of painkillers and sedatives had drained away, usurped by a gnawing, allusive dread, a swell of self-disgust and revulsion.

The night terrors tittered and scuffled in the cracks and crannies of the tiny kitchen, whistled at her in a pitch only she and dogs could hear. Any second now, the broom closet would creak open and a ghastly figure shamble forth, licking lips riven by worms. At any moment the building would shudder and topple in an avalanche of dust and glass and shearing girders. She slumped in her chair, fixated on the chipped vase, its cargo of wilted geraniums drooping over the rim. Merrill bustled around her, tidying up with what she drily attributed as her latent German efficiency, although her mannerisms suggested a sense of profound anxiety. When the phone chirped and it was Sheila reporting some minor emergency at the office, her agitation multiplied as she scoured her little address book for someone to watch over Danni for a few hours.

Danni told her to go, she’d be okay—maybe watch a soap and take a nap. She promised to sit tight in the apartment, come what may. Appearing only slightly mollified, Merrill agreed to leave, vowing a speedy return.

Late afternoon slipped over the city, lackluster and overcast. Came the desultory honk and growl of traffic, the occasional shout, the off-tempo drumbeat from the square. Reflections of the skyline patterned a blank span of wall. Water gurgled, and the disjointed mumble of radio or television commentary came muffled from the neighboring apartments. Her eyes leaked and the shakes traveled from her hands into the large muscles of her shoulders. Her left hand ached.

A child murmured in the hallway, followed by scratching at the door. The bolt rattled. She stood and looked across the living area at the open door of the bedroom. The bedroom dilated. Piles of jagged rocks twined with coarse brown seaweed instead of the bed, the dresser, her unseemly stacks of magazines. A figure stirred amid the weird rocks and unfolded at the hips with the horrible alacrity of a tarantula. You filthy whore. She groaned and hooked the door with her ankle and kicked it shut. Danni went to the kitchen and slid a carving knife from its wooden block. She walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Everything seemed too shiny, except the knife. The knife hung loosely in her fingers; its blade was dark and pitted. She stripped her robe and stepped into the shower and drew the curtain. Steam began to fill the room. Hot water beat against the back of her neck, her spine and buttocks as she rested her forehead against the tiles.

What have you done? You filthy bitch. She couldn’t discern whether that accusing whisper had bubbled from her brain or trickled in with the swirling steam. What have you done? It hardly mattered now that nothing was of any substance, of any importance besides the knife. Her hand throbbed, bleeding. Blood and water swirled down the drain.

Danni. The floorboards settled and a tepid draft brushed her calves. She raised her head and a silhouette filled the narrow door, an incomprehensible blur through the shower curtain. Danni dropped the knife. She slid down the wall into a fetal position. Her teeth chattered, and her animal self took possession. She remembered the ocean, acres of driftwood littering a beach, Virgil’s grin as he paid out the tether of a dragonhead kite they’d bought in Chinatown. She remembered the corpses hanging in her closet, and whimpered.

A hand pressed against the translucent fabric, dimpled it inward, fingers spread. The hand squelched on the curtain. Blood ran from its palm and slithered in descending ladders.

—Oh, Danni said. Blearily, through a haze of tears and steam, she reached up and pressed her bloody left hand against the curtain, locked palms with the apparition, giddily cognizant this was a gruesome parody of the star-crossed lovers who kiss through glass.—Virgil, she said, chest hitching with sobs.

—You don’t have to go, Merrill said and dragged the curtain aside. She too wept, and nearly fell into the tub as she embraced Danni and the water soaked her clothes, and quantities of blood spilled between them, and Danni saw her friend had found the fetish bone, because there it was, in a black slick on the floor, trailing a spray of droplets like a nosebleed.—You can stay with me. Please stay, Merrill said. She stroked Danni’s hair, hugged her as if to keep her from floating away with the steam as it condensed on the mirror, the small window, and slowly evaporated.

May 6, 2006

(D. L. Session 33)

—Danni, do you read the newspapers? Watch the news? Dr. Green said this carefully, giving weight to the question.

—Sure, sometimes.

—The police recovered her body months ago. He removed a newspaper clipping from the folder and pushed it toward her.

—Who? Danni did not look at the clipping.

—Leslie Runyon. An anonymous tip led the police to a landfill. She’d been wrapped in a tarp and buried in a heap of trash. Death by suffocation, according to the coroner. You really don’t remember. Danni shook her head.—No. I haven’t heard anything like that.

—Do you think I’m lying?

—Do you think I’m a paranoid delusional?

—Keep talking and I’ll get back to you on that, he said, and smiled.—What happened at the vineyard, Danni? When they found you, you were quite a mess, according to the reports.

—Yeah. Quite a mess, Danni said. She closed her eyes and fell back into herself, fell down the black mine shaft into the memory of the garden, the Lagerstätte.

Virgil waited to embrace her.

Only a graveyard, an open charnel, contained so much death. The rubble and masonry were actually layers of bones; a reef of calcified skeletons locked in heaps; and mummified corpses; enough withered faces to fill the backs of a thousand milk cartons, frozen twigs of arms and legs wrapped about their eternal partners. These masses of ossified humanity were cloaked in skeins of moss and hair and rotted leaves.

Norma beckoned from the territory of waking dreams. She stood upon the precipice of a rooftop. She said, Welcome to the Lagerstätte. Welcome to the secret graveyard of the despairing and the damned. She spread her arms and pitched backward.

Danni moaned and hugged her fist wrapped in its sopping rags. She had come unwittingly, although utterly complicit in her devotion, and now stood before a terrible mystery of the world. Her knees trembled and folded.

Virgil shuttered rapidly and shifted within arm’s reach. He smelled of aftershave and clove, the old, poignantly familiar scents. He also smelled of earthiness and mold, and his face began to destabilize, to buckle as packed dirt buckles under a deluge and becomes mud.

Come and sleep, he said in the rasp of leaves and dripping water. His hands bit into her shoulders and slowly, inexorably drew her against him. His chest was icy as the void, his hands and arms iron as they tightened around her and laid her down in the muck and the slime. His lips closed over hers. His tongue was pliant and fibrous and she thought of the stinking brown rot that carpeted the deep forests. Other hands plucked at her clothes, her hair; other mouths suckled her neck, her breasts, and she thought of misshapen fungi and scurrying centipedes, the ever-scrabbling ants, and how all things that squirmed in the sunless interstices crept and patiently fed.

Danni went blind, but images streamed through the snarling wires of her consciousness. Virgil and Keith rocked in the swing on the porch of their New England home. They’d just finished playing catch in the backyard; Keith still wore his Red Sox jersey, and Virgil rolled a baseball in his fingers. The stars brightened in the lowering sky and the streetlights fizzed on, one by one. Her mother stood knee-deep in the surf, apron strings flapping in a rising wind. She held out her hands. Keith, pink and wrinkled, screamed in Danni’s arms, his umbilical cord still wet. Virgil pressed his hand to a wall of glass. He mouthed, I love you, honey.

I love you, Mommy, Keith said, his wizened infant’s face tilted toward her own. Her father carefully laid out his clothes, his police uniform of twenty-six years, and climbed into the bathtub. We love you, girlie, Dad said and stuck the barrel of his service revolver into his mouth. Oh, quitting had run in the family, was a genetic certainty given the proper set of circumstances. Mom had drowned herself in the sea, such was her grief. Her brother, he’d managed to kill himself in a police action in some foreign desert. This gravitation to self-destruction was ineluctable as her blood.

Danni thrashed upright. Dank mud sucked at her, plastered her hair and drooled from her mouth and nose. She choked for breath, hands clawing at an assailant who had vanished into the mist creeping upon the surface of the marsh. Her fingernails raked and broke against the glaciated cheek of a vaguely female corpse; a stranger made wholly inhuman by the slow, steady vise of gravity and time. Danni groaned. Somewhere, a whippoorwill began to sing.

Voices called for her through the trees; shrill and hoarse. Their shouts echoed weakly, as if from the depths of a well. These were unmistakably the voices of the living. Danni’s heart thudded, galvanized by the adrenal response to her near-death experience and, more subtly, an inchoate sense of guilt, as if she’d done something unutterably foul. She scrambled to her feet and fled.

Oily night flooded the forest. A boy cried, Mommy, Mommy! Amid the plaintive notes of the whippoorwill, Danni floundered from the garden, scourged by terror and no small regret. By the time she found her way in the dark, came stumbling into the circle of rescue searchers and their flashlights, Danni had mostly forgotten where she’d come from or what she’d been doing there. Danni opened her eyes to the hospital, the dour room, Dr. Green’s implacable curiosity. She said,—Can we leave it for now? Just for now. I’m tired. You have no idea. Dr. Green removed his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot and hard, but human after all.—Danni, you’re going to be fine, he said.

—Am I?

—Miles to go before we sleep, and all that jazz. But yes, I believe so. You want to open up, and that’s very good. It’s progress.

Danni smoked.

—Next week we can discuss further treatment options. There are several medicines we haven’t looked at; maybe we can get you a dog. I know you live in an apartment, but service animals have been known to work miracles. Go home and get some rest. That’s the best therapy I can recommend. Danni inhaled the last of her cigarette and held the remnants of fire close to her heart. She ground the butt into the ashtray. She exhaled a stream of smoke and wondered if her soul, the souls of her beloved, looked anything like that. Uncertain of what to say, she said nothing. The wheels of the recorder stopped.

Gladiolus Exposed

Anna Tambour

Anna Tambour lives in Australia with a large family of other species, including one man. Her collection Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales and novel Spotted Lily are Locus Recommended Reading List selections. Her site, Anna Tambour and Others, is at www.annatambour.net . If you are (or are not) enthused by dung beetles, raw quince, sea squirts, anarchic ants, or if you need to consult the Onuspedia (“An expert is someone who always makes sure of spelling”), see Medlar Comfits, her blog at http://medlarcomfits.blogspot.com . As you can tell from her bio, Tambour has eclectic interests. As does her narrator in this tale of obsession and discontent.

The weekend at Thoreau’s Retreat was Katie’s idea. Wilder Benn & Ho had just picked up the account. She was elaborately casual when she pitched this togetherness jaunt to me. It’s free, she said, and it might be “sorta fun in a perverted way.” “I’m perverted,” I laughed. The ads for Thoreau’s Retreat offer a Revive the Mood “Two nights’ accommodation for two. Complimentary nonalcoholic Vermont-grown champagne, resident sensei on call 24/7. Complimentary pocket guides to Vermont wildlife, use of Zeiss Conquest binoculars so you can spot, without disturbing, our natural wonders such as the Great Spangled Fritillary Butterfly and the rare Stinkpot Turtle; and a host of surprises.”

Thoreau’s Retreat is conveniently close to Killington, a fact left out of the literature. After Killington, Katie talked a bit as I drove. What stinks? the promotionals? ads? Thoreau’s Retreat? I didn’t answer, as that would have been interrupting.

I had my own theory about that come-on Thoreau quote next to the rates in the brochure—“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed?” —but I kept my thoughts to myself. Katie does not appreciate comments from people who don’t know anything, unless they are in a focus group. As soon as we arrived, there was a clash of shoe wear. Katie’s calves won’t tolerate flats, and her feet are naturally pointed. The looks I got were worse than those directed at her, as if I’d bound her into those high heels. I like them, but my taste is only a coincidence. She ignored the scorn but lost her above-all-this composure when the unpaved grounds sucked down her stilettos. The Revive the Mood Special didn’t come with complimentary Dr. Zen shoes.

As to the romantic atmosphere supplied by the sight of other guests, I had forgotten how much even people of wealth can, left au naturel, age to resemble black-and-white films. The gray-and-white, ultra-wrinkled couple checking in before us offended me. “What’s your excuse?” I wanted to yell, but because of Katie, I behaved myself.

We had to walk from the carpark through the commons to our cabin, which welcomed us with a rag rug, two rocking chairs, art over the bed in the shape of the largest picture I’ve ever seen of an asparagus spear, tastefully shot, captioned in faux nineteenth-century handwriting, “THINGS DO NOT CHANGE. WE

CHANGE.”—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, and the pièce de résistance of surprises: a jar of Metamucil cookies. The bathroom romanced us with a toilet, douche, stand-up shower, Japanese-style straight-sided cube of a tub, and a notice about the evils of laundering. The toilet had no paper seal to break. I dreaded the bed, but it was the saving grace of the place. Katie flopped on it with a historical romance, grimly determined to last out the weekend, but in no way wanting to compromise herself by experiencing more than she had to. Lucky for her, she didn’t have to dread the resort’s idea of food. It was no worse than her usual. I drove to Killington, where I got a pizza made by someone who thinks that ketchup is Italian. By the time I got back, Katie had found out that Thoreau’s Retreat offers no decadent room service, so she was waiting for me to lead her on another expedition over the grass to the

“Commons Lodge,” her heels aerating the soil, me helping to pull her free at each step. I sat with her in the restaurant while she ate. Despite and because of her condition, she stuffed herself full of celery root au jus.

I won’t tell you what Thoreau’s Retreat offers in the way of small-screen adult entertainment. For once, I went to bed before ten o’clock. Katie was asleep before eight. Horrorville it was, but two days without decent food wouldn’t kill me, and the weekend was a good idea. I felt a twinge of nostalgia for a time when I considered walking in the mountains to be exercise. Now a break for forty-eight hours was good for me, as it was so rare; and we needed to have time together enforced upon us, otherwise it never seemed to happen.

The next morning at dawn (the quiet woke me) I was taking the mountain air, perfuming it with a contraband Cohiba while I picked wildflowers for my pregnant wife, when a sparkle of dew caught my eye, and I noticed the gladiolus—not some flopsy yellow common garden flower, but a gladiolus, commonly called the “body” of the three-part bone. The sternum or “breastbone” as it is commonly known. I laid it on my hand and it looked as if the bone were formed for me: exactly the length of my wrist crease to the tip of my middle finger.

Bones, like the salt-and-pepper granite stones in Vermont, rise to the surface of fields each spring when the ground thaws. Sunlight glinted in the sharply defined facet for the third costal cartilage. The convex curve of the lateral border of the gladiolus faced the sky, two facets rising free of the earth. My mouth flooded with cigar juice as my fingers nosed the ground all around what I estimated to be the dimensions of the whole sternum. Then as delicately as I could, I dug with the tips of my fingers in the sodden but surprisingly hard ground—under the gladiolus, that broad blade of middle section, till it looked like a bridge over a valley. A fist-size rock had to be pried from the sticky soil before I could get to the manubrium. (The articular surface for the clavicle emerged, surprisingly for such dense bone, as a complex splinter surrounded by dark clumps of soil salted with frustratingly bonelike pieces of quartz.) The knees of my weekend chinos were so stained by this time that they would have made a homeless person blush. My fingertips felt abused, my nails looked disgraceful, and my back was sending urgent messages to my brain. Time was passing, though, so in a spirit of no rest for the wicked, I tackled the other end of the bone, the delicate xiphoid process…and spat a cigar stub that looked like a wad of cud when I pulled just wrong and snapped the delicate filliped point.

From my first sight of that tiny pool of dew in the bone facet, I knew this to be not the normal bones that pop out in thaws: cattle, sheep, and deer. That glimmering facet made my heart race. A human breastbone is unmistakable, and anatomy was my favorite subject in med school, however much I love urology. I knew as soon as the gladiolus was exposed in all its length that it had belonged to either a small adult male or a female about the size of Katie.

What finally lay on the palm of my hand—stretching from my wrist crease to the top of my middle finger—was the breastbone itself, the sternum. The body of it was a perfect gladiolus, but both ends of the sternum were damaged—the superior end intriguing as hell; the inferior, a blunt accusation. Ever since scaring myself as a kid with stories I read by flashlight, I’ve fantasized about finding someone, and here a someone was. Odd to find this, but then I suppose in real life it isn’t skulls that people “find,”

but bones that the average person would never know were human. How many people in, say, Brattleboro, let alone Killington or Thoreau’s Retreat, would know a human bone from wildlife? I felt a frisson at the thought of finding this before it was stepped on by an ignorant hiker. Chakra charts don’t teach diddly about bones.

I dug till my fingers said they’d sue me, and then I had to leave. With no tools, I couldn’t dig deep, nor far. I found no other bones, though I expected to find at least the tip of a rib. And I had hoped to find an answer to the mystery of the shattered manubrium, one of the toughest bones to fracture in the human body. I held my breath when I found a bit of metal. A bullet…But once I cleaned it with spit, the bit was only a pebble that I had mistaken for something important because it was time to go. Although I was in sight of the resort, the actual site was featureless, so I pushed the dirt back into the hole I’d made so it would all look like a marmot or some such’s rooting around for food, and I hid my Piaget under the fist-size stone that I planted in the middle of the site.

In the five-minute walk down to our cabin, I remembered the flowers, but it was too late to pick new ones. Instead I swept into the Commons Room and spotted a crystal bowl of crocuses. Perfect, so I took it. If you know what you’re doing and don’t explain, you can do anything. Katie was conveniently asleep when I got back. I placed the bowl by the bed and went to our bathroom where I wish my dentist could have seen how gentle and effective a cleaning can be. I used my toothbrush and Katie’s whitening toothpaste.

Job completed, the manubrium was intellectually appealing, although aesthetically flawed. I couldn’t look at the xiphoid process because it annoyed me. But the gladiolus was simply beautiful. I dried the sternum on my towel, rolled it in my clean shirt, and packed it in my suitcase while Katie snored—and I remembered to change my slacks just before she woke, just in time for brunch. She didn’t object when I said that we needed to leave by two o’clock. I said that I had forgotten about a case I had to check on at Mount Sinai, but I really wanted to get home because being so close to the bone site frustrated me. I needed equipment better than my fingers and some Thoreau’s Retreat Commons Room spoon. And I didn’t want to have to think, on my next dig, whether Katie would be awake.

Monday morning I was back at the clinic, and she was back at the agency. She rang me at eleven o’clock.

“Tell me all you know about incontinence pads.” The first time she’d ever shown an interest.

A typical month—we didn’t see much of each other, and there was no way I could get right back to the site. First, I had a rushed week, then it was off to England, to Freeman Hospital Newcastle Upon Tyne, where Haslam’s “Imaging in Loin Pain Best Practice” would have had me seeking him out during coffee at another time, and David Tolley’s Stuart Lecture, “The Changing Face of Urology—Are We Prepared?” was not obvious. As to my own paper, the topic of urological forensics is a well without end of fascination; but I wished yet again, as I presented my findings, that Katie’s verve were mine when it comes to communication.

But I had to get back to Vermont. Katie was by this time obsessed by Etheria (latest focus-group fave name, Katie said). She wanted me on tap, but not at hand.

Finally, I left work at seven PM one Friday, in a rented Land Rover. I slept somewhere as downmarket as Vermont goes, where I was unlikely to meet a bottle of anything de-alcoholed. Before dawn, I set out with the gear that I bought along the way: a collapsible shovel and a metal detector. Not being a Daniel Boone sort, I had thought I would never find the place again without the metal detector, but I knew it even in the moon-distorted light, and through the haze of pain I felt when I twisted my ankle between two rocks while I focused not down, but ahead. Approaching…almost…there. Logically, I should have known that I would recognize the spot, considering the number of times I had dreamed the find over the past weeks.

I didn’t expect my watch to be as ruined as it looked, but I’d already claimed it on insurance. When I began to dig, the only sounds I heard were owl calls.

By the time I had dug a hole big enough to bury a Yeti, the garbage truck was hoeing down its breakfast in Thoreauland.

I found nothing but bittersweet-chocolate-colored dirt and enough quartz pebbles to light Hansel and Gretel’s walk to the wicked witch of Mars. I unearthed nothing else. No ribs, vertebrae, skull, no bullet, bit of iron, wooden cosh—no implement or agent of death; and not even a sliver of shattered bone. Yet even the telltale heart had an explanation.

I hadn’t told Katie about the bone before, and didn’t plan to tell her. She is conventional about things like insurance and laws, and she would have expected me to alert someone. I don’t know. The authorities, she would have said.

And then I would have given up the precious thing for no reason, and it would be officiously boxed and lost, buried where no thaw would ever expose it.

A couple of weeks passed, busy as ever for both of us, but one Friday we were both able to knock off work by six for a little romantic dinner at a place I thought she’d like.

“Feel like going back to Thoreau’s Retreat?” I asked.

“As paying guests?”

“I guess so,” I said. I abhor wasting money. “What’s wrong? They too cheap to give you another weekend for research?”

“We lost the account.”

“Oh,” I said. I knew she’d feel bad about it, so I changed the subject. “What happened to Etheria?”

“Etheria?” Her fork split an asparagus spear down the middle. Her brow would have creased, if it could have, as she separated a sliver of cheese from the vegetable as carefully as if she were boning a fish. I couldn’t watch her eat. I hoped the baby wouldn’t come out looking like it had spent its time in her dieting for life.

“The incontinence pads,” I said.

She dropped her fork and knife on the white expanse of plate. “Do you have to do that?”

At that point in our relationship, our chemical attraction was something we could remember, but she didn’t choose to and she made it hard for me to put that attraction above the way she feels about my work, conveniently forgetting how we met. Why is what I do, of the two of us, the unmentionable?

She was at five months then, and a couple of weeks later suffered a miscarriage. I wasn’t surprised, but she was. It was incredibly tough. She’d planned for that baby. We both had. All the emotional capital she’d sunk into it. We almost split up after that but were so busy, it was easier not to. In that post-expecting period of adjustment we made time to make some resolutions together. 1. We would try to rediscover each other again;

2. She would try not to be patronizing about my work; and

2a. I would quit smoking the cigars that she said she smelled on my breath. During the next stage in our relationship, Katie and I stayed home in the evenings and watched movies together. I found the gladiolus invaluable as an aid. I used to sit with it. The facets for the third, fourth, and fifth costal cartilages fit my fingers so perfectly, the gladiolus felt like part of an intimate garment. As I touched the hand-warmed bone, I imagined what had happened. All sorts of lives and deaths danced as the movies played. Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor Camilled in black and white, to the happy tears of Katie while I fondled the bone. The English Patient, something that would previously have had me crawling the walls or snoring in relief, played all the way through while I dreamed with my eyes open, sternum in hand. Thelma & Louise drove cross-country while the bone submerged itself in flesh, grew attachments, developed a life and personality, found an accident waiting to happen, or a murderer. Katie could put anything on, even Fried Green Tomatoes, and I sat through it, rapt. But she found a new annoyance to complain about.

“Where’d you get that hideous bone?”

I’d already planned what I would say if she asked. “An anatomy kit.”

“Can’t you use a rubber ball?”

I said I liked the bone. It reminded me of med school.

She came home one day with a squeezy in the supposed shape of a brain, a stupid promotional that I can’t imagine why she thought I hadn’t seen. It insulted me as much as if I had proposed a name for that disposable urinary collection device that she of all people had as an account. She began to work late again and through the weekend, and so did I.

We rarely met, but when I was in her presence, I found that touching the bone soothed me. I could tolerate her presence.

One evening while she was watching, a few drops from my glass of water fell on the bone, magnifying a section. When I wiped it dry, light fell upon it in just such a way that I noticed something I hadn’t seen before, but I wasn’t sure of what I saw. The next day I was able to confirm. The anterior surface of the gladiolus was shallowly adorned with the faintest and finest of carvings—a Victorian monogram, scrolling frills, the finest of lines. Only five millimeters in diameter, I couldn’t make out the letters under any power of magnification because they were both too fanciful and too patchy; but I think there were three (and one of them was an L or a J) surrounded by a garland of flowers (forget-menots?). I cursed the cleaning I had done, so harsh I almost missed this.

The mystery of no other bones was now partly solved, though new mysteries leapt into my mind with the swiftness of bandits leaping upon a lonely Victorian coach.

The monogram could only have been carved by an expert, I am sure. A skilled engraver. This confirmed some theories I had wanted to firm up.

The more I felt along the gladiolus, the more I knew that its size was exactly Katie’s. I hadn’t thought of her sexually for some time, but now I was drawn to the wide space between her breasts. Her aversion to fat revealed far more of her now than when we met. The attachments of the muscles of her third costal cartilage were so visible that in some lights, they were shadowed as if they had no epidermal cover. She loved her muscles showing, so I could gaze there (when we were together) to my heart’s content (and imagine it at other times). When she was in the mood, as she sometimes still was, I could run my fingertips along her flesh. At those times, we were more powerfully aligned than ever before. I imagined her gladiolus, undressed and gleaming, curving seductively from damp earth…

I wasn’t obsessed or anything. The bone stayed home. Too risky to carry with me—nosy security, luggage loss, the off chance that I’d leave it in my hotel bed during some red-eye packing rush. Anyway, during a conference, I thought about the paper I’d deliver, and then about how I was. When I got home, sometimes Katie was home, too. But always, the bone was there to greet me. One night I came home about five AM from a conference in Vienna. Katie was in bed. Vienna had been bad. I’d had twenty-two hours to think about how boring I was, how I wished that Katie could sell my ideas. I undressed and got into my side, reaching for the bone on my night table, but my table was bare. It took me shining her light in her face to wake her up.

I had to ask three times before she woke sufficiently to understand. “Sorry, the cleaner threw it out,” she said. She flicked off her light and pulled the sheet over her head.

I can’t express sufficiently how bad I felt. Bereaved. Breathless. Heartsick. I moved my pillow so I could see better. I needed to wake Katie up enough to make love. I looked down at the shape of her face under the sheet. She was very still.

Too still to be asleep.

Cleaner, my ass! She was holding her breath, the bitch. As Poe said, “Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute.”

Daltharee

Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons. He teaches literature and writing at Brookdale Community College. His most recent novel, The Girl in the Glass, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. His short novel The Cosmology of the Wider World was published in 2005 and his second collection of short stories, The Empire of Ice Cream, in 2006. He has recently had stories published in the anthology The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales and in the Datlow-edited issue 7 of Subterranean magazine and will have a story in the forthcoming anthology The Starry Rift. Two of his stories were reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #19 and one in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #20.

Ford is able to move among science fiction, fantasy, and horror with great ease—as is ably demonstrated by this little tale that steps a bit into each.

You’ve heard of bottled cities, no doubt—society writ minuscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick-spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pinprick faces of the citizenry peering from office windows smaller than sequins. Hustle, politics, fervor, struggle, capitulation, wrapped in a crystal firmament, stoppered at the top to keep reality both in and out. Those microscopic lives, striking glass at the edge of things, believed themselves gigantic, their dilemmas universal. Our research suggested that Daltharee had many multistoried buildings carved right into its hillsides. Surrounding the city there was a forest with lakes and streams, and all of it was contained within a dome, like a dinner beneath the lid of a serving dish. When the inhabitants of Daltharee looked up they were prepared to not see the heavens. They knew that the light above, their Day, was generated by a machine, which they oiled and cared for. The stars that shone every sixteen hours when Day left darkness behind were simple bulbs regularly changed by a man in a hot-air balloon.

They were convinced that the domed city floated upon an iceberg, which it actually did. There was one door in the wall of the dome at the end of a certain path through the forest. When opened, it led out onto the ice. The surface of the iceberg extended the margin of one of their miles all around the enclosure. Blinding snows fell, winds constantly roared in a perpetual blizzard. Their belief was that Daltharee drifted upon the oceans of an otherwise frozen world. They prayed for the end of eternal winter, so they might reclaim the continents.

And all of this: their delusions, the city, the dome, the iceberg, the two quarts of water it floated upon, were contained within an old gallon glass milk bottle, plugged at the top with a tattered handkerchief and painted dark blue. When I’d put my ear to the glass, I’d heard, like the ocean in a seashell, fierce gales blowing.

Daltharee was not the product of a shrinking ray as many of these pint-size metropolises are. And please, there was no magic involved. In fact, once past the early stages of its birth it was more organically grown than shaped by artifice. Often, in the origin stories of these diminutive places, there’s a deranged scientist lurking in the wings. Here, too, we have the notorious Mando Paige, the inventor of submicroscopic differentiated cell division and growth. What I’m referring to was Paige’s technique for producing super-miniature human cells. From the instant of their atomic origin, these parcels of life were beset by enzymatic reaction and electric stunting the way tree roots are tortured over time to create a bonsai. Paige shaped human life in the form of tiny individuals. They landscaped and built the city, laid roads, and lurched in a sleepwalking stupor induced by their creator.

Once the city in the dome was completed, Paige introduced more of the crumb-size citizenry through the door that opened onto the iceberg. Just before closing that door, he set off a device that played an A flat for approximately ten seconds, a preordained spur to consciousness, which brought them all awake to their lives in Daltharee. Seeding the water in the gallon bottle with crystal ions, he soon after introduced a chemical mixture that formed a slick, unmelting icelike platform beneath the floating dome. He then introduced into the atmosphere fenathol nitrate, silver iodite, anamidian betheldine, to initiate the frigid wind and falling snow. When all was well within the dome, when the iceberg had sufficiently grown, when winter ruled, he plugged the gallon bottle with an old handkerchief. That closed system of winter, with just the slightest amount of air allowed in through the cloth, was sustainable forever, feeding wind to snow and snow to cold to claustrophobia and back again in an infinite loop. The Dalthareens made up the story about a frozen world to satisfy the unknown. Paige manufactured three more of these cities, each wholly different from the others, before laws were passed about the imprisonment of humanity, no matter how minute or unaware. He was eventually, himself, imprisoned for his crimes. We searched for a method to study life inside the dome but were afraid to disturb its delicate nature, unsure whether simply removing the handkerchief would upset a brittle balance between inner and outer universes. It was suggested that a very long, exceedingly thin probe that had the ability to twist and turn by computational command could be shimmied in between the edge of the bottle opening and the cloth of the handkerchief. This probe, like the ones physicians used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to read the hieroglyphics of the bowel, would be fitted out with both a camera and a microphone. The device was adequate for those cities that didn’t have the extra added boundary of a dome, but even in them, how incongruous, a giant metal snake just out of the blue, slithering through one’s reality. The inhabitants of these enclosed worlds were exceedingly small but not stupid. In the end it was my invention that won the day—a voice-activated transmitter the size of two atoms was introduced into the bottle. We had to wait for it to work its way from the blizzard atmosphere, through the dome’s air filtration system, and into the city. Then we had to wait for it to come in contact with a voice. At any point a thousand things could have gone wrong, but one day, six months later, who knows how many years that would be in Dalthareen time, the machine transmitted and my receiver picked up conversations from the domed city. Here’s an early one we managed to record that had some interesting elements:

“I’m not doing that now. Please, give me some room…,” she said.

There is a long pause filled with the faint sound of a utensil clinking a plate.

“I was out in the forest the other day,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” he told her.

“What do you do out there?” she asked.

“I’m in this club,” he said. “We got together to try to find the door in the wall of the dome.”

“How did that go?” she asked.

“We knew it was there and we found it,” he said. “Just like in the old stories…”

“Blizzard?”

“You can’t believe it,” he said.

“Did you go out in it?”

“Yes, and when I stepped back into the dome, I could feel a piece of the storm stuck inside me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“How did it get inside you?” she asked.

“Through my ears,” he said.

“Does it hurt?”

“I was different when I came back in.”

“Stronger?”

“No, more something else.”

“Can you say?”

“I’ve had dreams.”

“So what,” she said. “I had a dream the other night that I was out on the Grand Conciliation Balcony, dressed for the odd jibbery, when all of a sudden a little twisher rumbles up and whispers to me the words—‘Elemental Potency.’ What do you think it means? I can’t get the phrase out of my head.”

“It’s nonsense,” he said.

“Why aren’t your dreams nonsense?”

“They are,” he said. “The other night I had this dream about a theory. I can’t remember if I saw it in the pages of a dream magazine or someone spoke it or it just jumped into my sleeping head. I’ve never dreamed about a theory before. Have you?”

“No,” she said.

“It was about living in the dome. The theory was that since the dome is closed things that happen in the dome only affect other things in the dome. Because the size of Daltharee is as we believe so minuscule compared to the rest of the larger world, the repercussions of the acts you engage in in the dome will have a higher possibility of intersecting each other. If you think of something you do throughout the day as an act, each act begins a chain reaction of mitigating energy in all directions. The will of your own energy, dispersed through myriad acts within only a morning, will beam, refract, and reflect off the beams of others’ acts and the walls of the closed system, barreling into each other and causing sparks at those locations where your essence meets itself. In those instances, at those specific locations, your will is greater than the will of the dome. What I was then told was that a person could learn a way to act at a given hour—a quick series of six moves—that send out so many ultimately crisscrossing intentions of will that it creates a power mesh capable in its transformative strength of bending reality to whim.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

There is a slight pause here, the sound of wind blowing in the trees.

“Hey, whatever happened to your aunt?” he asked.

“They got it out of her.”

“Amazing,” he said. “Close call…”

“She always seemed fine, too,” she said. “But swallowing a knitting needle? That’s not right.”

“She doesn’t even knit, does she?”

“No,” she said.

“Good thing she didn’t have to pass it,” he said. “Think about the intersecting beams of will resulting from that act.”

She laughed. “I heard the last pigeon died yesterday.”

“Yeah?”

“They found it in the park, on the lawn amid the Moth trees.”

“In all honesty, I did that,” he said. “You know, not directly, but just by the acts I went through yesterday morning. I got out of bed, had breakfast, got dressed, you know…like that. I was certain that by midday that bird would be dead.”

“Why’d you kill it?” she asked.

There’s a pause in the conversation here filled up by the sound of machinery in the distance just beneath that of the wind in the trees.

“Having felt what I felt outside the dome, I considered it a mercy,” he said.

“Interesting…,” she said. “I’ve gotta get going. It looks like rain.”

“Will you call me?” he asked.

“Eventually, of course,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

Funny thing about Paige, he found religion in the latter years of his life. After serving out his sentence, he renounced his crackpot Science and retreated to a one-room apartment in an old boardinghouse on the edge of the great desert. He courted an elderly woman there, a Mrs. Trucy. I thought he’d been long gone when we finally contacted him. After a solid fifteen years of recording conversations, it became evident that the domed city was failing—the economy, the natural habitat were both in disarray. A strange illness had sprung up amid the population, an unrelenting, fatal insomnia that took a dozen of them to Death each week. Nine months without a single wink of sleep. The conversations we recorded then were full of anguish and hallucination.

Basically, we asked Paige what he might do to save his own created world. He came to work for us and studied the problem full-time. He was old then, wrinkles and flyaway hair in strange, ever-shifting formations atop his scalp, eyeglasses with one ear loop. Every time he’d make a mistake on a calculation or a technique, he’d swallow a thumbtack. When I asked if the practice helped him concentrate he told me, “No.”

Eventually, on a Saturday morning when no one was at the lab but himself and an uninterested security guard, he broke into the vault that held the shrinking ray. He started the device up, aimed it at the glass milk bottle containing Daltharee, and then sat on top of the bottle, wearing a parachute. The ray discharged, shrinking him. He fell in among the gigantic folds of the handkerchief. Apparently he managed to work his way down past the end of the material and leap into the blizzard, out over the dome of the city. No one was there to see him slowly descend, dangerously buffeted by the insane winds. No one noticed him slip through the door in the dome.

Conversations came back to us eventually containing his name. Apparently he’d told them the true nature of the dome and the bottle it resided in. And then after some more time passed, there came word that he was creating another domed city inside a gallon milk bottle from the city of Daltharee. Where would it end, we wondered, but it was not a thought we enjoyed pursuing as it ran in a loop, recrossing itself, reiterating its original energy in ever-diminishing reproductions of ourselves. Perhaps it was the thought of it that made my assistant accidentally drop the milk bottle one afternoon. It exploded into a million dark blue shards, dirt and dome and tiny trees spread across the floor. We considered studying its remains, but instead, with a shiver, I swept it into a pile and then into the furnace. A year later, Mrs. Trucy came looking for Mando. She insisted upon knowing what had become of him. We told her that the law did not require us to tell her, and then she pulled a marriage certificate out of her purse. I was there with the Research General at the time, and I saw him go pale as a ghost upon seeing that paper. He told her Mando had died in an experiment of his own devising. The wrinkles of her gray face torqued to a twist and sitting beneath her pure silver hair, her head looked like a metal screw. Three tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes. If Mando died performing an experiment, we could not be held responsible. We would, though, have to produce the body for her as proof that he’d perished. The Research General told her we were conducting a complete investigation of the tragedy and would contact her in six weeks with the results and the physical proof—in other words, Mando’s corpse. My having shoveled Daltharee into the trash without searching for survivors or mounting even a cursory rescue effort was cause for imprisonment. My superior, the Research General, having had my callous act take place on his watch, was also liable. After three nerve-racking days, I conceived of a way for us to save ourselves. In fact it was so simple it astounded me that neither one of us, scientific minds though we be, didn’t leap to the concept earlier. Using Mando’s own process for creating diminutive humanity, we took his DNA from our genetic files, put it through a chemical bath to begin the growth process, and then tortured the cells into tininess. We had to use radical enzymes to speed the process up given we only had six weeks. By the end of week five we had a living, breathing Mando Paige, trapped under a drinking glass in our office. He was dressed in a little orange jumpsuit, wore black boots, and was in the prime of his youth. We studied his attempts to escape his prison with a jeweler’s loupe inserted into each eye. We thought we could rely on the air simply running out in the glass and him suffocating. Days passed and Paige hung on. Each day I’d spy on his meager existence and wonder what he must be thinking. When the time came and he wasn’t dead, I killed him with a cigarette. I brought the glass to the very edge of the table, bent a plastic drinking straw, shoved the longer end of it up into the glass, and then caught it fairly tightly against the table edge. As for the part that stuck out, I lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke up into the glass. I gave him five lungfuls. The oxygen displacement was too much, of course.

Mrs. Trucy accepted our story and the magnified view of her lover’s diminutive body. We told her how he bravely took the shrinking ray for the sake of Science. She remarked that he looked younger than when he was full-size and alive, and the Research General told her, “As you shrink, wrinkles have a tendency to evaporate.” We went to the funeral out in the desert near her home. It was a blazingly hot day. She’d had his remains placed into a thimble with some tape across the top, and this she buried in the red sand.

Later, as the sun set, the Research General and I ate dinner at a ramshackle restaurant along a dusty road right outside of Mateos. He had the pig knuckle with sauerkraut and I had the chicken croquettes with orange gravy that tasted brown.

“I’m so relieved that asshole’s finally dead,” whispered the Research General.

“There’s dead and there’s dead,” I told him.

“Let’s not make this complicated,” he said. “I know he’s out there in some smaller version of reality, he could be filling all available space with smaller and smaller reproductions of himself, choking the ass of the universe with pages and pages of Mando Paige. I don’t give a fuck as long as he’s not here.”

“He is here,” I said, and then they brought the martinis and the conversation evaporated into reminiscence.

That night as I stood out beneath the desert sky having a smoke, I had a sense that the cumulative beams generated by the repercussions of my actions over time, harboring my inherent will, had reached some far-flung boundary and were about to turn back on me. In my uncomfortable bed at the Hacienda Motel, I tossed and turned, drifting in and out of sleep. It was then that I had a vision of the shrinking ray, its sparkling blue emission bouncing off a mirror set at an angle. The beam then travels a short distance to another mirror with which it collides and reflects. The second mirror is positioned so that it sends the ray back at its own original source. The beam strikes and mixes with itself only a few inches past the nozzle of the machine’s barrel. And then I see it in my mind—when a shrinking ray is trained upon itself, its diminutive-making properties are canceled twice, and as it is a fact that when two negatives are multiplied they make a positive, this process makes things bigger. As soon as the concept was upon me, I was filled with excitement and couldn’t wait to get back to the lab the next day to work out the math and realize an experiment.

It was fifteen years later—the Research General had long been fired—when Mando Paige stepped out of the spot where the shrinking ray’s beam crossed itself. He was blue and yellow and red and his hair was curly. I stood within feet of him and he smiled at me. I, of course, couldn’t let him go—not due to any law but my own urge to finish the job I’d started at the outset. As he stepped back toward the ray, I turned it off, and he was trapped, for the moment, in our moment. I called for my assistants to surround him, and I sent one to my office for the revolver I kept in my bottom drawer. He told me that one speck of his saliva contained four million Daltharees. “When I fart,” he said, “I set forth Armadas.” I shot him and the four assistants and then automatically acid-washed the lab to destroy the Dalthareen plague and evidence of murder. No one suspected a thing. I found a few cities sprouting beneath my fingernails last week. There were already rows of domes growing behind my ears. My blood no doubt is the manufacturer of cities, flowing silver through my veins. Crowds behind my eyes, commerce in my joints. Each idea I have is a domed city that grows and opens like a flower. I want to tell you about cities and cities and cities named Daltharee.

Jimmy