Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And then you do invite me, and as is usually the case, there is no need for clumsy words, for language which might be misunderstood. You deliver the invitation by means of some voiceless communion a hundred million years older even than the coming of mankind into the decaying, time-haunted world. You call me, and I have never yet failed to answer, and soon my tongue has better things to do than tell you stories for which I have not yet discovered endings.

  I have always been the sort who sleeps after sex, and so I have been dozing, drifting in that calm and utterly satiated space between orgasm and groggy wakefulness, that sleep which might almost recall the perfect amniotic peace of the womb. I do not dream here, and I am not plagued by the self-awareness that, in the old mythologies, drove the damned from this or that Helen and forever consigned them to the wastes that sprawled beyond the gates of Paradise. It is not a deep sleep, but rather like a stone skipping one, two, three, four times across still, dark waters, and yet, inevitably, consciousness returns with the utmost slowness, by imperceptible degrees. And, tor a time, I am staring at candlelight without the knowledge that I am staring at anything at all. But then you speak, and I am lost in the chaos of myself again.

  “Why are your hips so hairy, Grandmother?” you whisper, pressing your cool, wet nose against my cheek, and I cannot yet recall the correct reply. I can only be annoyed at how unfair it is to be asking me such a question, when I am still blinking and disoriented from the ignorant bliss of that post-coital slumber.

  Then it comes to me, and I hear myself answer, “Because I wore my corset too tight.” I only dimly wonder at how our usual roles have been reversed, certain that there will be some suitable explanation when you are ready to explain yourself and not before. And without turning to see, I can hear your smile, so similar to the noise aluminum foil makes when crumpled in the hand.

  “Grandmother, why are your knuckles so hairy?” you ask, nuzzling playfully at my left ear.

  And though my hands are hardly the least bit hairy, I reply, “From wearing too many rings on my fingers.”

  “Dear heart, I thought that you would sleep until dawn,” you say, and this is when it occurs to me that I cannot move my legs or my arms, and I turn my head away from the candles to stare into the more genuinely molten pools of your paradoxically freezing-scalding grey eyes.

  “I’m tied,” I say, and you nod, as though I need the confirmation. “There was hardly time enough for the alternative,” you respond. “The sun will be lip soon.”

  “Why am I tied?” I ask, and I want to laugh, even if I have not quite decided what is funny.

  “Grandmother,” you say, “this wine is very red.” And I do laugh now, because you have begun lapping delicately at my temple and your long, rough tongue flicks across my left eyelid.

  “Drink and keep quiet,” I tell you, struggling to sound appropriately gruff and reproachful, trying to remember hem you would deliver these lines to me, had the night not turned topsy-turvy. “It is your grandmother’s blood.”

  “Yes,” you whisper. “Yes, it is, indeed. Love, I read your story while you were sleeping. I hope that you don’t mind me having taken such a terrible, audacious liberty.”

  And, just as I have learned to write while you watch, just as I have learned that you despise unanswered questions, so too have I learned when to hold back the truth even though you will have no doubt that I am lying.

  “No,” I say, allowing the anger and the murky, sudden sense of violation I feel to wash through me and quickly fade, as I would do with anything which is of no use whatsoever. “I hope you did not find my handwriting too totally illegible.”

  “I think I know how it ends now,” you whisper and lap at my face again.

  “Is that why I’m tied up?” I ask, and I can feel the nylon ropes at my ankles and knees, at my wrists, which have been firmly bound behind my back so that my arms have gone numb and cold. Your ingenious, expert knots, and I know that wrestling with my bonds will only make them draw that much tighter, until they bite into my flesh. Not that you would mind the welts.

  “I sat here, while you slept,” you say, not even bothering to brush my question aside, negating it with no effort or acknowledgement at all. “I sat and read these pages, and it occurred to me, dear heart, that the cannibal in your story truly does love the woman she is so slowly devouring.”

  “I believe I’d told you that already.”

  “Then perhaps I failed to comprehend. I needed to read it for myself, to fully appreciate the cannibal’s devotion.”

  Somewhere far away there is the keening wail of a police car’s siren, and I close my eyes, wishing now that I were still asleep and dreaming nothing at all. But then you place a hand beneath my head and lift it slightly, taking care that your short, curved claws will not tear at my scalp or the back of my neck. “I have been very busy,” you say.

  And, opening my eyes, I see now that you have been very busy, indeed. Gazing down the length of my bare torso, past the limp droop of my own sex, I see that you have wrapped both my legs in blankets, shrouding them in such a way that, in the flickering candlelight, I am greeted by the impression that I have no legs at all, the illusion of a double transfemoral amputation, and I do not need to ask to know that you have done the same with my arms all the way up to my shoulder blades. While I dozed, you have made of me an immobile, swaddled simulacrum of the cannibal’s lover, as you worked out the ending to a story that was not yours to end.

  “What I found,” you say, “is that the cannibal suffers a sort of epiphany.” And now you gently return my head to its place upon my pillow. “To quote James Joyce, ‘By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.’”

  “Ulysses?” I ask reflexively, not particularly interested in the provenance of the quote, having never cared very much for Mr. Joyce’s writing.

  You are propped up now on your right elbow, watching me. You frown and scowl, the way any good professor might when faced with an indolent schoolboy. “No,” you say. “It’s from Stephen Hero,” and you explain how this was the manuscript that Joyce abandoned in 1905, then later successfully reworked into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “The cannibal is about to cut out her lover’s tongue, even though she knows this means that she will also be excising her lovers voice, and that she will also be robbing her lover of the ability to share their feasts, to taste the flesh her lover is surrendering.”

  “It is my story,” I say, delivering the words with more deliberateness than I usually hazard with you. “It is not yours to finish. I had not planned for her to take her lover’s tongue, not until the very end, and I had not planned for her to suffer an epiphany.” You watch me for a time, then, and I cannot even begin to read the thoughts trapped in back of those seething granite irises. One might just as well try to guess the thoughts of a cat or a serpent or a tree. When some number of minutes have come and gone, you flare your wide black nostrils and cock your head to one side.

  “Grandmother,” you whisper, “you have such a very big mouth.” And I reply, “That comes from eating children.”

  “So it does,” you say. “Sometimes, we must open our jaws very, very wide to swallow even small things.”

  “The cannibal has an epiphany,” I whisper, shaping each word as though it were spun from glass or built of segments stolen from the most fragile insect’s shell. “She comes to understand that her love for the girl transcends her compulsion to devour—”

  “—and that in the absence of her lover,” you continue for me, handling the words with tar less care, “she would be left empty. An emptiness that no amount of gluttony would ever assuage. Surely, now you see how it could cud no other way?”

  “You have a finer sense of irony than I will ever have,” I say, conceding the point, and then I sigh and frown as though this sentiment is somehow undesigning, as if it has arisen from an epiphany of my own rather than from baser i
nstincts of self-preservation. But we have been playing these games for years, you and I, and you do not mind my masks, but ask only that I wear them well.

  “Are you too horribly uncomfortable, my dear?” you ask, and I shake my head, accepting the discomfort as I would accept any necessary evil, knowing it is finite, like your whims. “I needed to see you like this, to make yon a surrogate of the cannibal’s lover, so that I might begin to understand. You know that I will never be half the storyteller you’ve become, for I must always resort to such crude devices to find a conclusion.”

  “It is not so marvelous a talent that you should feel deprived,” I say and shut my eyes against the growing ache in my shoulders and the vacant chill where my arms should be. Beside me, you’re silent and still for a time, and I lie there, waiting, listening, wondering halfheartedly if this might be the night when your infatuation has inexorably run its course, and wondering again, as well, if I will be disappointed or relieved if that proves to be the case. And then you ask me, “Shall I tell you how it ends?”

  “What comes after the epiphany, you mean?”

  “Yes. That is, the consequences of the epiphany.”

  “How else will I ever know?” I reply, and, even with my eyes shut, I see now that this is not the night (or the final hour before dawn) when at last I feel your teeth close about my throat, clamping down upon and collapsing my windpipe and severing my carotid artery and jugular veins, spilling oxygenated and deoxygenated blood alike. I will live to see the sun at least one more day, and it does not surprise me, knowing this, that I feel nothing much at all.

  “Open your eyes,” you tell me, though not unkindly, and so I do. “Ma mère-grand, que vous avez de grands yeux,” you smile, and the darkness all around our bed shudders, but does not withdraw. “C’est pour mieux te voir, mon enfant,” I answer in my turn.

  “Yes, that’s better,” you say, your smile becoming a wide grin to flash the razor gate of crooked incisors and yellowed canines and the untenanted spaces where premolars should be. At this instant, the paling dregs of night lingering or caged inside the room would roll back, retreating like ocean waves from slaty Jurassic shingle or white quartz sands, if it but knew how to withdraw without the age-old push of sunrise.

  And then you are speaking again, telling me exactly how my story ends, and I concentrate on the interplay of your tongue and lips and teeth and palate and larynx and all the things this easy dance of flesh reveals.

  “The surgeon—the cannibal surgeon—lays aside her clamps and scalpel, and she stares deeply into her lover’s one remaining eye. All the universe is cradled within that eye, which is the soft green of moss after a spring rain. And she says, ‘No, I cannot take your voice away.’ Before her confused lover can respond, the cannibal says to her, ‘I see now that there is more to me than appetite, and more to you than the capacity for surrender. Already, I have taken more than I deserve, and I will take no more, not now or ever.’”

  “So,” I say. “She loses her nerve.”

  “You are not listening very closely, mon enfant. No, in this moment the cannibal finds her nerve, or her resolve, or her balance, or self-restraint, or whatever you wish to name it. She discovers, looking at what she has made of her lover, that her love is greater than her lust. Do you not understand? You said it was a love story.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “In this moment, the cannibal finds a compassion that outweighs her lover’s need to sacrifice, and also her own perverse trophic desires. She promises that she will forevermore take care of her lover, and that they will have a long life together, and that she will do everything in her power to atone for the weaknesses of her mind and body. Twill make you comfortable,’ she says. ‘You will not ever want for anything that I can give you.’ Rut her lover, reduced by their many long months of feasting, is horrified—literally and wholly horrified to the innermost core of her being—and she begs the cannibal to please, please continue, swearing that she cannot possibly live like this, not as the broken abomination they have together made of her. She swears that she would take her own life, if all their gormandizing had not robbed her of that ability.

  “‘But look at me!’ the cannibal’s lover cries out. ‘I am hideous. I am a monster!’

  “But the cannibal kisses her and wipes away her tears and assures the girl that she is even more beautiful now than on the first day they met. Every single scar, every amputation, every morsel they have shared between them, she tells her lover, has only served to perfect her. Before she was, at most, what any woman might be. And where is the glory in that?’ she asks her lover. ‘Where is the beauty or the splendor in being no more than the progeny of insensible, uncalculating Mature?’””

  And then you fall silent, looking suddenly very pleased with yourself. I watch your grey eyes and slowly nod my head. “Is there more?” I ask.

  “No,” you reply. “There is no need of any more than that. How could this ending possibly be rendered any more impeccable?”

  “Are you going to untie me before you sleep?” I ask, no longer particularly interested in how my story—which, I know, is no longer mine—has or hasn’t ended. The muscles between my shoulder blades and down the length of my back have begun to knot and cramp. I need to piss, and would prefer not to do so in the bed. But it would not be completely unlike you to leave me this way until the sun has risen and set and you have some further need of me.

  You nod, but your eyes are watching the window and the first faint rays of morning leaking in through the fabric. “So, I’ve found you at last, you old sinner,” you say, your voice gone as dry as an autumn wind and as cold as a mid-winter’s sun. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

  Subterraneus

  Below the streets, and then below all that lies below the streets—basements and sewers, cellars and subway tunnels, lines for gas and water and electricity, cable television, the crawlways dug two hundred years ago by smugglers and pirates and those whose motives have been entirely forgotten. Below asphalt and grey concrete and moldering brick and sedimentary bedrock so honeycombed and hollowed that it’s surely a miracle the earth does not simply collapse beneath the combined weight of skyscrapers and automobiles and however many millions of human beings come and go overhead. Here, then, below all that lies below, is this ancient void carved not by the labor of picks, nor dynamite, nor machines, but by the hands (if we may call such appendages hands) of the ones who so long ago forsook the sun and moon that both are now little more than doubtful half-remembrances. The weathered limestone walls glow faintly with the chartreuse light of phosphorescent fungi, at least a dozen species of various grotesque shapes, found nowhere in the world but this cavern, aligned with the Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, yet likely to remain forever unknown to prying, categorizing science.

  And those who come here now, those few who find their way down, they come by choice, each and every one of them. None are ever brought here. None are lured, and none are shown the way. None are ever dragged kicking and screaming like the victims in some B-grade horror film. A month might pass between visitations, or a decade. The ones who keep this pit are patient and have long since learned to wait, relying upon providence and happenstance and whatever incomprehensible drive does, on occasion, lead one from above to seek them out.

  She was half dead, by the time she found them, and now she is at best only half again that alive. Her name is Beryl, by chance—or not by chance—and for three years has she seen this deep place in dreams, for three years has she heard their voices and seen their faces. She hangs now suspended a few feet above the mire and stinking, motionless water that is their burrow. She did not resist when they came to her with the steel hooks and chains, because she’d seen all that in dreams, as well. As the antique hand winch—itself a marvel of rust and Colonial-era ironwork—was turned and the chains slowly grew taut, she did not cry out. When at last Beryl’s naked, shivering body was lifted from the squelching mud, she did not scream, though the pain was
more than anything that she’d ever anticipated. The pain was never in her dreams of them, but she can now believe it nothing more than some splinter of the reward for her perseverance. This, she thinks, is no more and no less than what was always meant to be.

  They crouch directly beneath her, gazing up with famished, thankful eyes, eyes black as inkwells. There is already blood, drawn by the hooks piercing the skin of her calves and buttocks, back and shoulders, and it dribbles across their upturned faces like rain upon the parched faces of men and women who have survived a drought of ages. It is only the first, teasing drops before the storm, however, and they sit together in the mud with mouths open wide and their long tongues lolling to capture every drop spilled. Later, there can be waste, when the deluge begins in earnest. Later, the blood can pool, congealing in the ooze and spattered wantonly across the fungal walls.

  Aside from the winch and chains and hooks, they have little in the way of tools. Their claws are sufficient to their modest needs. But there is one item, and if their memories were less undone by time and the slow madness that has come upon them across the centuries, they would recall how this one thing came to them, washed up on a rocky Massachusetts beach and discovered by a man whose name was once Zebidiah If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Wilmarth. All their names have long since been forgotten, for what need have they of names? The artefact found lying among sand and whelks, kelp and wave-polished bits of pink Cape Ann granite, is kept on a high ledge in the burrow, wrapped in a mildewed bit of burlap sackcloth. It bears some resemblance to a surgeon’s scalpel, but no more than it resembles a buttonhook or the high whorl of a snail’s shell. In 1789, Wilmarth showed the peculiar object to a scholar of archaeological studies at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, but the man was unable to determine it’s age or origin or even the material from which it had been crafted. For, at times, it seemed most certainly made from hammered bronze, while at others, and under certain wavelengths of light, it took on the characteristics of cobalt-stained glass of a sort known from excavations in Egypt and Eastern Asia dating back to the mid second millennium BC.