by Robert Levy
“You underestimate me.” Guillard grasps the back of my head, his fingers digging into my scalp as he bends forward again to search out a glimpse of June, who has retreated once more. He possesses me, while he thinks of her. “I can take of whomever I please, at the time and place of my choosing.”
“Once, perhaps.” I reach behind me and remove Sonia’s ivory comb from where it tangles in my hair. “But not anymore.”
I snap open the comb, raise it up, and plunge the blade into Monsieur Guillard’s exposed neck. He heaves, blood exploding from his lips to splash my face as his hands move to stanch his wound, where my weapon found its mark.
“My father made me, it is true,” I say, and I raise the blade once more. Beyond the confessional walls, the crowd roars in disgust, shocked exclamations of perverse appreciation echoing across the rows. The cries are intended for Maxa, yet they sustain me. “But I have long since remade myself.”
I strike again, against the heavy hand shielding his face. An arc of blood whips free, and Guillard thrusts me away as he staggers to the confessional door. I spring up like a jungle cat and pounce on Guillard’s back. Another swing of the deadly comb, and this time I embed it deep between his shoulders. He stumbles against me, his hands moving to strangle me before returning to his own savaged neck.
“What…have you done to me?” he gurgles, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth.
“I have freed you from your earthly obligations, you accursed fiend. Now, you may rest at last.”
He wrests free and hurls himself against the door. Once, twice, and the door bursts wide, the wood splintered as he lurches bleeding from the confessional. The screams outside are louder now, and I scramble half-naked from the box, my dress bunched around my waist and my face and breasts spattered with blood. I grasp his coattails to slow his progress as he stumbles up the aisle toward the exit.
“June! June, help me!” I cry above the raucous audience. She materializes from her nearby post and throws herself in his path to prevent escape. Startled, he retreats down the aisle, and June and I seize his arms, dark blood pooling on the carpet beneath our feet.
A man seated on the aisle stares up at us in confusion. He studies the blade embedded in Guillard’s back before his gaze returns to the stage, where Maxa’s putrescent form is near collapse. His attention returns to us, however, followed by other audience members, and soon we attract more stares, a dozen theatregoers gaping in our direction as June and I try our best to hold fast to Guillard.
In a matter of a few heartbeats, the entirety of the Guignol has taken notice. They are unclear of our roles, especially that of the gore-soaked gentleman in our grasp. June glares at me and I look to the stage, to Maxa, who only moments ago had commanded the room as her own. I wipe blood from my face, take a deep breath, and I hold my head up high.
“Hail, Lady Death!” I raise my bloody hand to Maxa in salutation. “Sacred Goddess of the Underworld, we honor you as you undergo your ghastly metamorphosis!”
The audience, mesmerized, turns their attentions back to Maxa. “Now it is your turn,” I whisper to June, as Guillard struggles between us. “Go on.”
“Hail, Lady Death!” June calls out, and raises her own hand in imitation. “We…We support you in your really disgusting metamorphosis!”
Silence.
“H-hail.” Maxa manages to get the word out, black bile spilling from her desiccated lips. “Hail and welcome. S-sisters.”
The spotlight trained on Maxa shudders uncertainly before the powerful beam swings in our direction, and we are caught in its unforgiving light. Monsieur Guillard buries his face in his shoulder, but for a brief moment his monstrous visage is made visible, a hideous amalgam of features rendered as if from hot wax poured over cracked stone.
At once, we are shoved forward. The master of ceremonies presses us forward, and we soon find ourselves up the short set of stairs at the foot of the aisle and forced onstage. June, myself, and the expiring Guillard all stand beside Maxa, footlights bathing us in a blood-red glow. We have become a part of the show.
“Accept this sacrifice on behalf of your humble servants,” I incant, as loud as my voice will speak. I remember this vantage point well. “And let it be known to all that no man can escape your irrevocable embrace!”
“Accept the sacrifice,” June echoes. “And let it be known!”
The demon shrinks in our arms. A dead and dying thing, and even the weight of him seems lessened now. As with all wicked scourges dragged into the light, as with every shameful secret that seeks and fails to remain hidden, his terrible power is at once diminished.
Guillard crumples between us. I tilt my head in the direction of the rear of the theatre, and June helps me drag Guillard’s limp body from the stage and back down the aisle. We reach the confessional and thrust him inside, and I scurry after him, June slamming the door behind me. As the audience howls with renewed revulsion and awe at whatever fresh horrors Maxa’s flesh has yielded, I drop down to the floor and lower Guillard’s head into my lap in a tender pieta.
“How…” he croaks, his life force draining from him, energy depleting as his body begins its own process of mortal decay. “How…can this be possible?”
“Even demons may die, Monsieur Guillard. Indeed, it is the nature of things. In all your vast wanderings and great experience, did you never manage to learn that?”
He stares up and past me, toward the ceiling of the confessional, where his gaze remains eternally fixed. The iron tang of blood commingles with a renewed scent of the roiling ocean, as if I have returned to that rocky shore from the dream. Only now, the demon lover is no more. Now, the storm clouds have parted to let in the light, star shine pricking the heavy blanket of night until all the heavens are aglow.
I stagger to my feet and collapse upon the bench, and stare panting out through the screen, the audience returning their collective scrutiny to the stage. In a jerking motion, Maxa begins to straighten up like a marionette, her fortitude increasing as her body pulls itself erect. Her limbs lengthen and pulse, swaths of corroded skin rippling and stretching over muscle and bone, taut and unblemished until she begins to regain her familiar composition. The patrons gasp with amazement, their cries no longer those of terror, but rather of a holy form of rapture at this holy miracle of resurrection. The monster’s demise has brought her back to life.
Restored to a healthful splendor, the likes of which I had yet to see her possess, Maxa lifts her chin to the balcony and strikes a grand pose of triumph. The crowd leaps to their feet and rewards her with a standing ovation that lasts many minutes, long after she bows and leaves the stage. Finally the curtain draws closed, and beneath the renewed glare of the house lights, the applause continues unceasing, theatregoers left stunned and electrified and unsure of just what it is they have seen. The Maddest Woman in the World is whole again, and the chapel of pain and pleasure glows anew.
“Anaïs?” It is June, on the far side of the confessional screen. “Anaïs, is everything okay in there?”
“It is,” I say, and I am startled to find that the words are true. I stare down at the corpse of Monsieur Guillard, the stench of seaweed and brine wafting from his body, as if he is returning from whence he came. “Our terrible problem? I believe it has been solved. Thanks, in part, to you.”
I place my palm against the screen. June matches it with hers, our hands separated by the partition but still touching, still connected after all this time.
“What an act, am I right?” Her voice is tremulous, as if she has already begun the process of self-deception that will allow her to bury that which cannot be understood. “I’ve never seen anything like it! Did you see it, Anaïs?”
“I saw it.” An enduring weight lifts, my eyes flooded with tears as a wave of gratitude washes over me, the house lights shining like miniature suns over the sea. A malignant spell has been broken. “It was the performance of a lifetime.”
It is another month before I work up the courage to
return to Allendy’s office. I apologize to the doctor for cutting short our last session, and for failing to respond to his many subsequent inquiries after my well-being. “It was a difficult time,” I say vaguely, and smooth my dress hem against the edge of the couch. “My life became as a forest in a fairy tale, one I blithely traveled with neither map or compass to guide me. How quickly I became lost, and how fast the darkness descended.”
Past midnight, June already departed for her hotel, and Maxa and I endure the harsh bounce of cobblestones as we sit in the back of her actor friend’s truck. The space cramped and unlit with the weighty clothes trunk positioned between us, I count the minutes until the truck finally pulls to the curb. We emerge along an esplanade overlooking the Seine, the river swirling in the gloom below. Maxa’s friend helps us remove the trunk before he drives away, unwilling to help us any further. Alone beside the Pont Alexandre III, Maxa and I wait unspeaking for the others to arrive.
Soon, we spy Therese and Sonia as they emerge from the other side of the bridge. When they reach us, the four of us nod at one another over the tattered trunk, a grim acknowledgment of our collective survival. With no small amount of difficulty, we carry the heavy trunk down the stone steps to the edge of the riverbank and pause at the bottom so that Therese can paint a crude sigil beside the lock and hasp. “To bind him, even in death,” she whispers, as she uses a gnarled finger to ornament the trunk with a viscous white paste that reeks of damp wood and pepper.
The twinkle of lights from distant houseboats, the crisp scent of the river at night, and we heave the trunk over the side. It hits the surface with a loud splash, and we watch it sink beneath the water until it is swallowed altogether. We ascend the stone steps, and it is as if the street lamps upon the esplanade burn with renewed strength. As if all the world is brighter now, at least to those who have endured.
“Fortunately, the clouds seem to have passed.” I light a cigarette and fix my gaze on Allendy, challenging him to contradict me. “I feel sure of myself, for the first time in many months, if not years.”
“I am happy to hear that. It is obvious, however, that you are still conflicted about treatment. Perhaps your childhood feelings for your father have been projected onto me. It is not difficult to see in our therapeutic relationship a classic representation of transference.”
Allendy lights his pipe and chews suggestively at the stem. He suspects unwholesome attractions but not their source, the perverse corruption that exists inside me still. Or perhaps he does know, and is attempting to tease a confession from me. I cannot say for certain.
“Regardless of any conflict,” he adds, “it is clear that you are ultimately drawn toward chaos. And toward those who provide it most readily.”
“Maybe so. Or perhaps I seek them out in order to end it. To stage a final resolution, one that will grant me a new purpose, a new ability to thrive.”
Once Therese and Sonia bid us farewell and depart for the left bank, I plead with Maxa to allow me back to her flat, to help her in breaking her opium habit this very night. She simply shakes her head, and smiles sadly. She delivers to me a gentle kiss, one cheek and the other, and last upon the center of my forehead. Even amid the sorrow of parting, she leaves me feeling anointed.
“Thank you for rescuing me,” Maxa says with the innocence of a child, the schoolgirl she was before her own trust was first broken. “I hope you understand that you have managed the impossible. But now we must go our separate ways, and never look back again.”
I remain at the entrance of the bridge and watch her leave, in the direction of her flat and the Grand Guignol. Once she is gone, I turn to face the river, and study the surface of the water as it flows past.
I wonder if something finished can ever truly begin again. If that which is dead remains departed, or if new life can spring forth from the old.
“I have weathered the storm,” I say to Allendy. “Come out the other side, with a rekindled lust for life. For light and for love, the warmth that only human connection can provide.” I draw from my cigarette and exhale forcefully, our smoke commingling in the air. “I have my husband, and my writing as well, and I am dedicated to them both. And yes, I still see Henry. He is there for me, when I am not occupied with Hugo. In that way, they are like my fiction and my diary, two alternate sources of inspiration. My needs are the same as those of many women, and I will follow them as long as I desire.”
“And what of June?” Allendy says. “What of your feelings for her?”
Later that night, I visit her shabby hotel room. I sink beneath her dress, June listing as I tug down her underwear and bury myself in her sex. She moans, and I find deeper and deeper destinations, my tongue and lips seeking out every part of her. June grips the edge of the dressing table, her long dancer’s legs splayed wide to accommodate me, not much time before a new dawn breaks over the Hotel Cronstadt and the whole of Paris awakens from its heavy slumber. Soon, there will be husbands to meet, and old debts to settle, and fantasies to turn away from forever. Not yet, however, because time has no meaning for us. Not here. Not in this endless moment that, delirious with death and sex, we finish between unwashed sheets, my body pressed to hers with Monsieur Guillard’s blood still staining our flesh. She becomes mine, and I become hers, in a way that no man can ever undo.
“June is gone,” I say, smoke snaking from my lips. “A tour of Italy, and then back to New York, for good this time. According to her own needs as well.”
“That is for the best, then. Abnormal pleasures, they…”
“Kill the taste for normal ones?”
“Something of the sort.” He taps his pipe into the ashtray. “I believe it would do you good to give the isolation accumulator another go. Step inside the box again, and face your initial resistance. Make a complete circle of it, if you will.”
“Doctor, I…” The whistling wind, the sound of the sea rushing in, out, in. Yellow eyes, peering out from the darkness, through the deep. “I do not think that would be wise.”
“Come.” He gets to his feet and extends a hand toward me. “Let us at least look inside together, shall we? What harm could there be in that?” Reluctantly, I take his hand, and allow him to help me from the couch.
Allendy tells me more about the accumulator’s efficacy, how a young doctor at the Vienna Ambulatorium is expanding on the prototype so that the boxes will soon be in the offices of analysts all across Europe, if everything goes as planned. I am not really listening, however. Instead, as he escorts me from the office, I think of this morning, of sitting under the elm in the garden to write in my diary as the bees buzzed through the humid air. Summer arrived early in Louveciennes. Beneath the great tree, I am lost in the act of creation, pages and pages filled with this story I have been so hesitant to tell, for at times it has felt so much like a dream. Yet it is no dream, not any of it. This is the very story of my life.
“Anaïs?” Hugo stands above me with his back to the bright sun, and I squint up at his silhouette, black against the wide blue sky. “I said, I am off to work. Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
“I am sorry, my love. I was in another world. But I have returned now.” We embrace, and even in this moment I am eager to return to my diary and darken its every page with ink. “Emilia and I will make sure everything is prepared for dinner. All you have to do is return.”
“I will be sure to do that. Until then, my darling.” We kiss, and when he turns to go, I settle again beneath the elm. “I almost forgot,” he says and turns back, his body rendered a shadow once more. “A telegram came for you earlier. It was from your father.”
“My father?” My voice trembles, I can barely draw breath. “What is it? Is everything all right?”
“Quite all right, yes. He is finally returning to France. In fact, he plans to be in Paris in a few short weeks. He wants to see us. Wants to see you, that is.” Hugo takes the telegram from his pocket and hands it to me. “Won’t it be lovely to have him so close, and after all this time?
”
“Of course.” I force myself to smile up at him. “What a wonderful surprise.”
I place the telegram inside my diary, close it up between these brown marbled covers. The way I attempt to trap so many things inside, even with the knowledge that someday it will all come pouring forth, no matter how hard I wish it otherwise. The truth, as they say, will out.
The loud clang of the garden gate as Hugo departs, and I stare back at the house, count the eleven shutters thrown wide until I reach the closed one in the middle. The sealed room, shut tight as ever. I clutch my diary to my chest, and attempt to calm my racing heart, which pounds with fear and apprehension.
Beneath the steady gallop, however, I sense another rhythm. A wilder beat, one that cuts through the air with steel wings, with a wicked and possessed anticipation. I bring my diary to my mouth and press my lips against it, the violent heat of desire overtaking me until I am certain I will be consumed.
Allendy leads me to the parlor, and I step past him and inside. My eyes fall upon the accumulator once more, the imposing wood-slatted box set against the far wall, the door flung wide onto its cold interior. As I slowly approach, I feel its powerful pagan draw, and stand before its open mouth as a naked child stands before the hungry throat of a cave. No powers or magical gifts granted, only my own essential humanity, a woman alone on her solitary journey.
June was correct: it is no longer safe, not anywhere in the world. Especially for women like us. I must choose my path forward wisely.
The creak of a loose floorboard, and Allendy’s hot breath brushes against my bare neck, his hands gripping tight to my shoulders. I think of the sealed room, of myself as a little girl, my father as he embraces me from behind. I remember the fear, commingled as it was with fascination, and yes, with a perverse kind of pleasure as well.
I turn, and I face him. I face them all.
