The Golden Cut

by Merl Fluin

“Why is this naughty?” she asked.

  “Because you can’t control it when you’re asleep.”

  With both hands he shoved her in the chest, once, hard.

  She fell backwards into the book. He was the book. He caught her in his arms and held her tight. He closed the covers of the book with her inside it.

  The darkness was warm and velvet. Plant tendrils curled around her thighs.

  21.

  They came to another door, this one closed. From beneath it dreadlocks of hair protruded, growing so fast that their movement was visible as they climbed. They covered the length of the door and the width of the walls either side, intertwining on the ceiling above. Some had thick dark fingernails at the ends. Cantos took TJ’s elbow and propelled her past them.

  The corridor was lined with closed doors, and many of the keyholes were upside down. At last they found a door that was open and went inside, Cantos leading the way. The room was small and dark, lit with lamps on a dining table that filled almost the whole space. Cutlery and glasses glittered at place settings for eight. The centrepiece was an oval platter. On it sat the bony, long-beaked head of a bird or perhaps a reptile.

  “Hungry?”

  “Um, no.”

  They grinned at each other. “Let’s keep going,” said Cantos.

  “I take it we’re looking for this famous thigh of yours. Do you know where it might be?”

  “I’ll know when we find it. Planes and spaces have a habit of sliding around inside this blessed hacienda.”

  The next room was an iron study. Over the door hung a ragged-looking bell, white as frost. TJ reached up to tap it.

  “No, don’t touch! It’ll freeze your fingers clean off. It’s made of mercury.”

  “Oh.” She snatched her hand back into her pocket. “What does it sound like?”

  “No idea. Ask me again when we’ve found the thigh.”

  On a desk in this room lay a book of tables, graphs, symbols and equations. Cantos raised an eyebrow. “The Analogical Calculus.” He flipped through the pages, then stepped away. “Too rich for my blood.” A green baize door to the left of the desk took him to the top of a flight of stairs. “TJ, you coming?” She went to him and he took her by the hand. “I don’t want to lose you,” he said.

  They descended the stairs to an underground level. Here the walls and floor were pale soft stone, the ceiling vaulted. Running water echoed around their heads, although its source could not be seen. Then they noticed a series of niches in the stone along the base of one wall. Each niche contained a hollowed-out basin, filled with water to about waist height. Strange creatures, fish and crustaceans, stirred in the pools. Spiny starfish swam with limbs that furled and unfurled like the spirals hidden on Cantos’s back. Sinuous leech-black worms displayed undulating frills around their bodies. TJ and Cantos watched as each worm split in half to form two new ones that split themselves gracefully in turn. Their tiny offspring danced and darted away.

  Cantos had let go of TJ’s hand. She looked up from the pool to find him. He was yards away, staring at something at eye level. She went towards him and saw that he was standing in front of a shelf that gashed the stone.

  On the shelf lay a perfect replica of a human thigh, moulded in gold.

  She put her hand on his forearm and smiled at him. He did not return her gaze. He reached out to touch the thigh with his finger, swiftly, lightly. He recoiled as if scalded, then reached out to touch it again. He bent and sniffed at it. Finally, slowly, he lifted it from the shelf and held it in his arms.

  TJ stepped back as he turned towards her. His golden hair was alight with the light of the Golden Thigh. It flowed around his face and onto his shoulders, sparking his eyes into green points.

  The Golden Thigh rested across his body and leant on his left shoulder like a royal sceptre. He cupped its lower end in his left hand. At its base, level with his crotch, a small shoot appeared, a germination unfurling from a perfect spiral of green. An eagle sat on his right hip; he cradled it in the crook of his arm. His body trembled, vibrating like the string of a musical instrument; he was a chord. “Everything is possible,” he said. His voice shook.

  TJ put her hand on the Golden Thigh.

  Irrie Corrie whispered in her ear, incomprehensible words. The room span. Its centrifugal force flung water and fish from the pools. Numbers, letters, symbols scrolled along her arm and across the floor. Her heart was a triangle, her head a cube. In her left hand she held a pair of scales, in her right an unsheathed sword. The colour drained from her hair and flowed into a circular patch on her forehead that throbbed with gold. She was pregnant, her child was an ermine, her child was being born as Irrie Corrie disguised in a cloud of purple. Everything was perfection; everything was horror.

  “Symmetry is the devil,” said Cantos. “I am the demiurge.”

  He filled the hall, his head a golden sky beneath the vaults, his limbs a geology. He kissed her. It was an equation.

  She scrambled out from beneath him and ran for her life.

  22.

  Hanging on a peg inside the open door of the nearest stable was a pair of silver vaulting rings. They were decorated with white ribbons, and one of the ribbons had TJ’s initials embroidered on it in silver thread. She took the rings and pressed them to her lips. The eye on the back of her thumb opened wide. For a while she stood there, leaning over the stable door and breathing in the smell of clean, untouched hay. She could hear the fuss of the chickens in the yard, the languid calls of peacocks beyond the colonnades. Then she snapped herself upright and set off across the corral, her eyes fixed on the wildflower meadow on the other side.

  The meadow ran to the edge of an area of woodland, a dark green smear at the bottom of a sky full of birds. She climbed through the paddock fence and strode across the buzzing meadow. The air was warm and smelled of honey, but the mud clagged and stuck to her boots. When her feet struck a ball of slime mould, spores flew into her face and hair.

  The woodland had the dappled darkness of pondweed. Jingling the vaulting rings in her hand, she called Cowhead’s name as she walked. Only the crows replied. After a time she stopped calling and turned back towards the stables.

  This time the paddock contained a smaller enclosure, dark and brambly. TJ went inside. On the ground lay what appeared to be animal shit that had somehow sprouted into a bouquet of flaccid penises. She watched as the bouquet transformed into a ball with a black shiny surface. She bent lower to inspect it, then prodded it with a cautious finger.

  It moved. She snatched her finger away. It moved once more and revealed itself to be the carapace of a giant ant. The ant had enormous legs and was feeding them into its own maw.

  “Christ!”

  She pulled back, then looked again. It was not alive after all, just an empty carapace, a skin that had been sloughed off and left behind.

  TJ stood and glanced around at the rest of the enclosure. In a gap in the brambles she saw a parade of slow-moving shiny black ants. Some of them were obviously humans in costumes: white cotton underpants protruded above their waistbands. One of them crawled over and touched the empty carapace with one hand, prodding it gently, then a little harder, then turning it over and inspecting it before moving away. With a shudder TJ wiped her fingers on her trouser leg and left the paddock, calling Cowhead’s name with a new edge to her voice.

  She roamed the grounds, around outhouses, ornamental trees, water features and cultivated vines tended by no one. The sun shone as if it was always noon. Sweat ran beneath her armpits; heat prickled and scuttled across her scalp and down her spine. She entered the walled rose garden and dropped on a bench in the shade of the trailing thorns.

  Fierce whispers, urgent and low. It was Little Dove and False Uncle, somewhere nearby but out of sight.

  “This is a fuck-up. I thought we had a plan.”

  “Calm down, idiot. You’re panicking over nothing.”

  “They’re not going to buy it, not after this thing with the Star gang
.”

  “You always overthink everything. You and your Dry Way.”

  “And you and your Wet Way always take too many risks.”

  “It’s worked so far, hasn’t it?”

  “Has it? They’ll freak when they see him clumping around on that thing.”

  “Chickenshit. We go in with all guns blazing. Literally if necessary.”

  “ I assure you neither guns nor go-betweens will be required.” Cantos’s voice. “The Golden Thigh is a strategy in itself. Our more pressing problem is to do what needs to be done so that Alexandria will allow us to leave.”

  “It’s a pain in the arse. Can’t we just cut and run?”

  TJ got up and followed the sound of their voices. She found Cantos lying on lush grass under an apple tree with the twins on either side of him, their shoulders folded into his arms. All three of them were dishevelled, with bloodshot eyes and clothing half undone, limbs loose and lips glistening. They stank of ether.

  “We’re not going anywhere until I’ve found Cowhead,” TJ said.

  “Of course not,” said Cantos, pulling the twins in closer to him. “I promised, didn’t I? We’re going to help you find her. We just need your help with something first.”

  Little Dove or False Uncle opened her arms wide and beckoned TJ in.

  23.

  Cantos was on the table. He was naked from the waist down. His hands were steady but his voice trembled: “Buckle me in, it’s time to ride.”

  They were in the tall conical lecture room. The wood-panelled rows of empty seats stared blandly down on them as they prepared for the procedure. Little Dove and False Uncle fastened the leather straps around Cantos’s arms and legs. The last strap, a thick belt, went across his torso. The table pitched beneath his weight and the twins’ feet slid around on the floor.

  TJ stood away from them with her back pressed against the panelling. Cantos rolled his head in her direction. His face was white and shiny.

  “Will you approach a little nearer?” he asked. She took two steps closer and stopped.

  Little Dove or False Uncle clicked her tongue. “Hurry up and help him, and don’t stand in our way. We need to be able to get in and out of the cabinet fast.”

  His head rolled back and he stared upwards without saying any more.

  One of the twins went to the cabinet and selected a small bottle from the crowded tray on its top. She removed the stopper. A smell of alcohol and something sweeter mingled with the stench that rose from Cantos. The twin put one hand under his head and tipped the contents of the bottle into his mouth. He gulped, swallowed, spluttered, gulped and swallowed some more until his neck lolled. The other twin, stationed at his feet, peered along the length of his body with her head cocked to one side. “Was that enough?” she asked.

  “Damned if I know,” said the other, “how do I tell?”

  “Can he talk?”

  The twin at his head tugged at his earlobe. “You feel like talking any?” she said loudly into his ear.

  TJ giggled and covered her mouth. Cantos’s own mouth opened and closed, the muscles in his cheeks working.

  The twin at his feet ran her hands along his right leg and then his left, feeling around his thighs with the palms. “Which one did he say?”

  “Christ, I thought you were paying attention.”

  Her sister opened the cabinet, took a bundle of bandages from a shelf, returned to his thighs and wrapped his small, soft penis and testicles in the cloth, tidying them away from his right leg. Then she went back and gazed at the instruments on the tray.

  “What do you think? Knife first and then saw? Or should I just have at it?”

  “Whatever’s fastest,” said TJ. Both twins turned to look at her. “Do it fast, for god’s sake, and have everything ready before you begin.”

  The twin at his head went to the basket and came back with the Golden Thigh, placing it on the table at his side. The lines of muscle and vein on its surface were perfectly moulded, strong and graceful, but the inside was just a hollow cylinder. A narrow opening ran along the back of it like the seam of a silk stocking.

  TJ approached the table, removed the glove from her right hand and pushed her fingers inside the cylinder. She moaned as her knees gave way beneath her. Little Dove or False Uncle grabbed her by the arm and yanked her hand out of the cylinder. “None of that now, TJ. This is not for you.”

  The twin returned to the tray, picked up the saw and handed it to her sister. The sister touched the serrated blade to the top of Cantos’s right thigh. He cried and jerked his body.

  “Give him something to bite down on,” said the other twin. “I can’t find anything on the tray.”

  “Use my glove,” said TJ.

  A noise made the three women look up. A black bird had dashed itself against the spiral walls above them.

  The nearest twin took TJ’s glove and put it between Cantos’s teeth. Approaching to stand by his head, TJ stroked his forehead and hair with bare fingers. His eyes glittered between half-open lids. The other twin took a scalpel and made an incision from the soft crease under his hip, along his leg towards the knee for several inches. He bit down on the empty hand in his mouth.

  One twin asked the other for the saw. TJ closed her eyes. A moment later she heard the first twin asked for someone to grip his knee and hold it steady. There was a lot of noise.

  “Nearly done,” said Little Dove or False Uncle.

  TJ opened her eyes. At the end of the table one of the twins was laboriously shoving the golden cylinder up into Cantos’s body. The other crouched on the floor with his severed right leg between her thighs. She was sawing at it just above the knee.

  “Jesus, what are you doing?”

  “Man’s gotta walk, hasn’t he? Or do you want him hopping around on the world’s most expensive peg leg?”

  The knee separated from the stump of the thigh with a squelch and a snap.

  “Make sure you put the foot on the right way round.”

  “Fuck off.”

  The twin with Cantos’s calf in her hands rose and flopped it onto the table. Together with her sister she set about cramming it into the open end of the Golden Thigh, which now lay beside the pale, blood-streaked flesh of Canto’s left leg. He groaned loudly.

  “Shit, he’s waking up.”

  One of the twins removed the glove from his mouth and poured some more of the contents of the bottle between his lips. He coughed, spat it out, then turned and vomited onto the table beside him.

  “Sit him upright, he’ll choke,” said TJ. She rushed to unfasten the straps around his arms while the twins released the big buckle from his torso. Between the three of them they pushed and pulled him to a sitting position. Their hands left bloody finger marks on his back and shoulders.

  TJ unbuckled his left leg and the twins took hold of him under either armpit, swivelling him round so that his left foot dangled above the floor. The lifeless right foot stuck out at a wide angle. His head dropped forwards. Drool and vomit fell from his lips in long slicks.

  “Hope you weren’t planning to wear that glove again,” said Little Dove or False Uncle. “Well, what shall we do with the drunken sailor?”

  They half-dragged, half-carried him along many corridors and finally into a room with an enormous four-poster bed. The twins sat down heavily on the edge of it with Cantos propped between them. The bottom half of his shirt was stiff with blood. Ripped flesh showed at either end of the Golden Thigh, a gory counterpoint to the elegantly moulded artificial skin.

  TJ stood in front of him and took his chin in both hands. “Cantos? Do you understand what I’m saying to you right now?”

  “Right now,” he giggled. His head fell forwards again.

  She let go of his chin asked: “Any water to wash him with in here?”

  “Over there.” One of the twins gestured with an arm, then fell backwards onto the bed. Her sister did likewise. Cantos sat up between them.

  TJ fetched a bowl, a water jug and a pear
l-handled cutthroat razor from the nightstand. She cut strips of cloth from the bedding and washed his face, chest, neck and legs, wringing water from the wet cloth onto his wounds so as not to have to rub them.

  Finally she shaved his face clean. He opened his eyes and tugged at her beard with shaky fingers. “One is One and all alone and ever more shall be so.”

  She lay down and rested her head in his lap, her throat across the humming thigh.

  24.

  The twins took TJ up a sweeping staircase, through an arch at the top, along a twisting gallery lit with plate glass windows, and into a circular chamber. At the back of the hall a set of steps led to an ornate throne whose high back was surmounted with wings fashioned from piano keyboards. The room was white: white floor, white ceiling, white draperies adorning the white walls.