The shrine was small but still it was difficult to tell who was in there. The pilgrims’ faces were hard to see under the enormous rain ponchos. For those of us who wore glasses it was even worse, the heat of all the bodies making our lenses fog over, rain and perspiration dripping down our foreheads and cheeks, off the tips of our noses. Likewise distracting was the smell, compounded of wet primeval stone and candle wax, unwashed human flesh and foul undergarments. Despite what we came to learn later, the place seemed to be bursting at the seams with human beings and their manifold effects—about as far from empty as a space could be.
You were supposed to pay for those candles, the Keeper told the Cook. They weren’t giving them away.
The Botanist reached into the neck of her sweater and drew forth her rosary, still warm from where it had lain nestled in the cleft between her breasts. The rosary was strung with opals, milky white and limpid as her skin. I wear it all the time, she said. Even to bed.
A person wore garnets to ward off plague, amethysts to cure drunkenness, opals to confer invisibility—we were all perfectly aware of the applications.
Of course you wear it all the time, said the Archivist. Even for yoga.
Hey! said the Cook. Are you suggesting what I think you are?
I never know what you think, said the Archivist. Your mind is as impenetrable to me as a brick.
I was in the bathroom, said the Botanist.
If you say so, said the Geographer. She was mimicking the Botanist—we could all tell she was doing this because she was a good mimic.
She was, said the Astronomer. I watched her walk in.
The Archivist reached across the table to tap the Geographer sharply on the wrist. You’re supposed to be taking notes, he said.
What about your eye pillow? said the Keeper.
He peeked, said Jee Moon. I was looking.
Jee Moon! If only we could agree when we first saw her. The shrine was what the Topologist called an étale space, meaning slack like a slack tide, the stand of the tide, the time when everyone is waiting to take up the slack. In an étale space it’s always difficult to recognize who or what isn’t in it.
The thing is, she wasn’t one of us.
Like everyone with us in the shrine, she was something else. Like P or the Swede, like the saint or the principal. All of us were one thing and everyone else was another. Our mother and father had been one thing along with us but they’d reverted at some point to whatever they’d been before we existed. Those of us who’d had husbands or wives remained undecided about their status. Nanny was a special case but we couldn’t agree about her, either.
Besides, the Keeper said to the Cook, it’s true. Opals make a person invisible. Where do you think your chocolate disappears to at night?
Good question, said the Botanist. Every single night. Who do you think brushes the sleep from your eyes? Gives you your dreams? Sweet dreams, every single night.
The cairn we found on the beach had so much vitality we could almost see eyes on it, a nose, a mouth.
Whatever the thing was, we could tell it was alive, even though it was made of stone, a pile of stones but animate, with a girl who died long ago buried underneath. It is said that living worms spring out of stinking dung.
The girl who lay buried under the cairn was flat on her back, wrapped in bark and painted with red ocher, her arms at her sides, a large stone placed atop her sternum to keep her from getting up. She could do that—get up. The pared-down shape of her could arise and float anywhere she wanted. Her eyes were missing. Of course they were, after all this time. Back when she was alive, everyone had brown eyes, unlike the way it is now with blue and violet and hazel. She was a sacrifice; the people who killed her lit fires on both sides of her body. She was sixteen years old when she died.
A virgin sacrifice, said the Cook. She must have been a virgin.
The Keeper disagreed. Sixteen was all about sex, she said.
The brownness of the Keeper’s eyes had faded to a color harder to describe, still brown though glassy like the marbles in the bachelor chest. As far as we knew, no one ever played with them. No one ever used anything in that chest, except maybe our mother—we all remembered seeing her rummaging around in it, her eyes perfectly round the way they got when she was hysterical about something or excited. I know it’s in here, she was saying.
Like maybe when she lost her marbles, the Keeper said. But it wasn’t her marbles she lost—we all knew that.
When P was sixteen, the Archivist said, her idea of having sex involved two chairs facing one another with a basin between them on the floor. Not that they executed this plan. As he recalled he tried kissing her but it didn’t go well. They were walking past the Grand Basin after the birthday concert. All the fountains had been lit from below and were unfurling sparkling umbrellas of water. I need to sit, P said impatiently, as if the Archivist had been preventing her from doing this. They sat on a stone bench facing the water. She removed a shoe and shook out a pebble and we all found ourselves thinking of the Swede, the time the Topologist watched him shaking the pebble from his hiking shoe in the Aubrac. Is that better? the Archivist asked and when P turned to him to answer and he leaned in to give her a kiss, a stretch limo pulled up filled with beautifully dressed and hilarious prom-goers.
Ha ha, the Geographer said sourly. First kiss.
Hers was with a French boy, she said. He French kissed her and his tongue felt like a snail in her mouth, though snails tended to inertia and the French boy’s tongue was busy. It felt thick, full of sand, like what a person would put out to kill snails in the garden. It felt like the gray sand at Omaha Beach where the French boy took her to kiss her instead of showing her the bank of shingle she’d asked him to take her to see.
Plus no one puts out sand to kill snails, said the Botanist.
Escargots! said the Cook. But what happened at sixteen if it wasn’t sex?
There was a game, said the Archivist, and when the Cook laughed the Archivist said, No, I thought I was going to die.
That kind of game, said the Botanist. Life or death, she said, and we knew she was thinking of the boy who died, the one she told us she loved more than anything who supposedly died in her arms.
Sixteen, said the Topologist. Sixteen is a centered pentagonal number. The matrix of Y, N, X, I, I, t, n, u has sixteen dyads.
Also it’s an even number, said the Keeper.
She wasn’t good at math but she was good with animals and tarot cards. We weren’t allowed pets, due to Mother’s allergies, but Father had arranged for the Keeper to have horseback riding lessons. For an animal there is no difference between the future and the present, the Keeper explained. The tarot was the next best thing to a pet. Where did you find those? the Archivist asked the first time we saw the Keeper laying out cards for a reading. You’d better not let Mother see you doing that.
The whole idea is to open one thing up for another thing to get inside it, said the Iceman.
Inasmuch as the eggs of fowls change into living chicks, and worms burst forth from the earth after excessive rain.
Turning sixteen, though—it’s true, as Jee Moon reminded us. Some moments in a life are like that. Time stops flying by. Something happens. All of us did something we would rather not remember but we didn’t want to talk about it. The girl under the cairn—she had just been a girl. The lives people lived were different then but they were lives and they were lived in bodies like ours, with what felt like a beginning and a middle and an end. Maybe she never had sex but she had teeth. She bit into things and ate them. What she ate made its way through her body; it went in one end and came out the other.
It’s worse not to talk about it, the Keeper said. People imagine the worst. They imagine things are much worse than what you actually did.
That day on the train the Keeper was sitting in the dining car with her tarot cards arranged on the table in front of her, exactly the same way she sat at the banquet table in the Great Hall, shuffling and reshuf
fling the deck as if it were possible to alter fate.
Whose cards had she been reading? It could have been practically any one of us—aside from the Archivist, who claimed only to care about the past, we were always pestering her to predict our future. But then why did some of us remember seeing him standing there, shifting his weight from foot to foot, attempting to maintain balance as the train went around a curve? We remembered seeing him and we remembered seeing Mother—Mother leaning forward, desperate not to miss a word. Who is that? Who is that? she kept asking, pointing at a card that showed a tall man in a cloak surrounded by five cups, looking down sadly at the three cups that had spilled on the ground.
It’s a card of marriage, said the Keeper. Marriage, but not without bitterness or frustration. The five of any suit is always bad news, she said. Even the five of Wands, even though wands are made of ash.
That doesn’t look like your father, Mother said. Your father is short.
It’s not supposed to be a person, the Keeper said. It stands for something else. The way one card leads to another, like trail markers.
We knew what she was talking about. We had all been on the train that day, watching the snarl of gray leafless branches fly past and the thing we ended up remembering, the piece of trash caught trembling in them like a mind trying to compose itself.
Listen to me! said the Archivist, and we could hear it, the way his voice was shaking. There was the gallows above, the blank spaces below. That’s the way the game was played, he said.
By the time you see the black spot on your groin you know you’re doomed. It doesn’t matter whether you take good care of yourself, eat wholesome food, and avoid unwholesome behavior. You could be a saint, he said, and he gave the Topologist a scornful look. His eyes were extremely dark, unusually so, given his pale complexion—Saxon blood, as he had often explained. By the time the bubo forms there’s nothing you can do.
We often see a man pass away gradually limb by limb, said the Iceman. First the toes of his feet and the nails, then the feet and shanks, then the steps of chilly death creep with slow pace over all the other members.
Even without saying it we knew we were thinking the same thing. All those winters and summers of our lives lived together, every step we were making and had made before and would make again until, at last, we’d find ourselves coming upon the unexpected sight like a piece of trash caught in a snarl of leafless branches that made a sound and suddenly moved, slightly, on its own.
You would reach for it if only you thought it mattered.
P lived one block over in the Highgate Apartments; from the living room balcony you could see the prison and the bell tower at the university as well as the back entrance to our house. It was as if she lived there by herself—her parents both had important teaching jobs and were never home, even though their bedroom had air-conditioning. One thing all of us remembered was P lying on her stomach on her mother’s bed, drawing a row of ten dashes along the bottom of a sheet of university letterhead.
The whole world was too hot. The sloth of the shepherds left the flocks straying and cuckoos intruded into every poor bird’s nest. Men preferred fur to hair shirts, stuffing themselves with dainties. Charity had grown cold. Truth and faith were lukewarm but spite and harshness blazed up everywhere.
As for us, we were overwhelmed by the heat, though some of us handled it better than others. The Botanist loved the way sweat felt running between her shoulder blades. The Iceman thought he was going to die.
X, said the Archivist, who didn’t care about the weather one way or the other. He was sitting with his back against the padded headboard of P’s mother’s bed.
X? said the Topologist. What kind of guess is that? You’re supposed to start with the twelve most commonly occurring letters in the English language.
And what would those be? asked the Keeper.
F U, said the Cook. He had slid beneath P’s father’s bed and was sticking his head out from under the dust ruffle.
You look like Little Bo Peep, said the Topologist. She pointed her finger and laughed.
We all waited for P to draw the first element of the hanged man stick figure, the line perpendicular to the crossbeam indicating the noose. Instead she put an X in the eighth slot.
Of course it was entirely possible her word didn’t have an X in it. That was what we were thinking: she put the X in to give the Archivist an advantage. However mean she was—and P could be very mean—she favored him. It was no secret the way she nested the back of her head within the curve of his thigh, making numerous small adjustments to get the position right.
The venetian blind slats were closed. The room was dark, the wallpaper printed with dark birds and vines, the bedspreads quilted sateen, a shade of maroon so dark as to be almost black. Even though we were too young to understand such things, we’d been trained to recognize the room’s erotic implications, if only on a subconscious level.
Another letter, said P.
She snapped her fingers and looked over to where someone we would realize later looked a lot like Jee Moon had arrayed herself upon the petit point vanity bench, staring intently at something in the mirror that wasn’t her own face.
You’re mighty quiet over there, P said.
E, said the Topologist.
P ignored her. Really, she said. What do you think you’re doing?
There are two of them, the person on the vanity bench said. Two Es. Am I right?
This was way before Jee Moon and the Astronomer fell in love. He was just a boy then, lying on the floor by the windows, involved in a childish punching match with the Iceman. Every now and then they bumped against the wall hard enough to jostle the blinds, letting fall a slat of sunlight on the Astronomer’s face. Some of us were so close we could see his eyelashes wave at us, great semicircles of sweat emerge at the Iceman’s groin and armpits, the exact places where the symptoms would first appear.
It was very hot out. It was so hot that certain trees had started catching fire, the ones with leaves shaped more or less like hands, horse chestnuts and maples and sycamores, though it remained forever a mystery why this should have been the case. At some point the sirens started up.
Naturally we wondered what they signified. Often it was fire or a weather event. According to Nanny things were preparing to drop down on us from above, bombs or meteorites. People, too, people could prove hazardous, especially given the ills our flesh was heir to. Father had warned us about opening the door to just anyone; even the slightest touch could prove fatal. It remained unclear why one place was affected more than another, one house more than another. Not all streets were affected in the same way, or both sides of one street, or neighboring houses, the impact of the heavens not affecting all things equally. We knew this. We knew about neighborhoods. The effect of a lunar eclipse lasted as many months as there were hours of darkness. A greater number of the dead were carried to the grave after dinner than before it.
Oh dear what can the matter be, sang the Botanist. When she was a girl she was possessed of a sweet singing voice. Mother had an idea the Botanist should go on the stage, but eventually her voice grew husky and, pretty as she was, she ceased to enjoy being looked at.
Oh dear what can the matter be
Oh dear what can the matter be
Oh dear what can the matter be, the Botanist sang.
This time it was a prison break, though how were we to know? The prison wasn’t especially secure and the prisoners escaped regularly. The prison siren went off all the time. Besides, every siren sounded the same.
The Iceman got up and pried apart the blind slats. Someone was running around the corner, he told us, so fast they were nothing more than a blur, though maybe it was the heat that was making them blur, making everything out there waver and blow apart into ashes. It was definitely a he—the Iceman could tell by the breadth of the shoulders and the narrowness of the hips. This was definitely a male configuration, he claimed, despite the Keeper’s reminder that there were wo
men built that way too, athletic women, girls like the Geographer who could outrun a boy any day of the week.
She was napping now, the Geographer, having slept through the sirens. As we all knew, she would sleep through Armageddon, curled there at the foot of P’s father’s bed, her hands folded under her cheek, her lips parted, snoring.
Some nations wax while others wane, the Iceman said, and in a brief space the race of things is changed and, like runners, they hand over the lamp of life.
Meanwhile P’s nose had begun to bleed, dark red spots landing on her mother’s bedspread. She seemed unconcerned though—amused even—by the mess she was making.
Let me through, said the Keeper; she’d grabbed a handful of tissues from the velveteen-covered box on the vanity table and was trying to step over and around the outspread arms and legs of the Astronomer who was still lying on the floor in front of the window.
He’s going in our house! said the Iceman.
Who is? asked the Astronomer.
He turned to look, not out the window but at the face in the mirror above the vanity, and we could see him positioning himself at the start of a journey that we, ourselves, couldn’t begin to name, even though inside each of us there was a little knob of becoming, and inside each of those knobs, a lifetime. P lifted herself from her mother’s bed, her bloody nose lulling us into inattention as, at the same time, the sun concluded its slow circuit over the apartment building, making way for the moon and the stars.
It was New Year’s Eve. Lots of people had already set up blankets on the lawn surrounding the Vocational School. They came, as they did every year, to see the fireworks. For a while the Cook had been enrolled in the school and when he was, we got the best seats, on a flat section of roof near the exhaust fan. Our father used to be the one to bring us, for as much as our mother claimed to adore beautiful, transitory things, she also hated noise and crowds.
The Silk Road Page 6
