Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  That grim harbinger of Lilith, searching our field for mice and voles and careless rabbits, for dreamers who do not avert their eves. I know those sickle talons, how they tear the evening apart, how they tear my skin and pull me from one dream to another. Also, I have a scrap of paper on which you copied a few lines from Walden—“I rejoice that there are owls... They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chicadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.”

  The room where I sleep is littered with such quotations, the confetti of your thoughts. You would not keep a proper notebook or diary, though you never told me why. I never asked. I sleep here amid the thoughts you found and stole from others.

  The dream will change, most nights, as dreams are wont to do (even without the intrusion of owls). The fields vanish, and take the moon with them. Now there is the harsher light of the bulb above our bathroom sink, and you lying naked in a tub of warm and steaming water. I am sitting on the cast-iron rim, and I lean down and kiss your lips. You taste like life, I think, and your breath is sweet. Your tongue flicks across your teeth, over my lips, and I pull away.

  “It would be a very simple thing,” you say again. “You’re certainly strong enough to hold me under.”

  “But I would miss you,” I protest. “I would be alone.”

  “Always thinking of yourself,” you laugh.

  But then I am pushing you down, and it is easy, one hand on your head and another laid firmly between your breasts. In the first few moments, you are surprised and begin to struggle. But then you grow calm, a calm I read as resignation and curiosity, and your hazel-green eyes open wide to watch me from beneath the water.

  “It’s a game,” you whisper in my right ear. “It’s only a game.”

  I turn my head, hoping for even the briefest glimpse of you. But, for a very long time, there’s only the open bathroom window, and beyond the sash, a full moon shines down on fields of ripe pumpkins.

  “Six Indians,” you say, as we pick our way between the neat rows. “They felled the unfortunate Zoeth Howland on a March night in 1676. He was on his way to a Quaker meeting, because, you see, he was a Quaker.”

  This is not one of your usual tales. There will be no sirens here, and I want to tell you that I’d rather not hear it, that’s it’s not the sort of ghost story I fancy. Tell me about the nymphs, instead, I want to say, but I don’t. I’m not a dullard. I know better than to break the spell, once the incantation is begun.

  “The Narragansetts ambushed him, and then tossed the poor man’s mutilated body into the stream. Afterwards, the waters ran crimson with his blood, and it became known as Sinning Flesh Brook. Over the years, though, that became Sin and Flesh Brook.”

  “What was Howland’s sin?” I ask.

  “I am afraid, dear, that you’d have to ask those Narragansetts,” you reply, and now we have come to the easternmost edge of the field. We stand together on the banks of the very brook where Zoeth Howland’s body was discovered by his horrified Christian brethren. We linger here a short while, and then, without a word to indicate your intent, you turn south. I follow, inevitably I follow. And before long we have come to the swampy place where the brook drains into a nameless pond. The chilly night is not silent, but replete with the songs of frogs, and crickets, and of whippoorwills. I can hear a rowdy chorus of dogs barking at the farmhouse a few hundred yards to our southwest, and a breeze stirs and rustles the tall grass blades and goldenrod, the ragweed and the dry stalks of cattails. These are all accustomed, welcoming noises, and the chorus puts me at ease, helping me to dwell on other things than your tale of the murdered Quaker.

  My hands—certainly strong enough—holding you down in the tub, and the silvery stream of bubbles leaking from your nose and mouth.

  “You are bleeding,” I say, amazed at the sight, “but you are only bleeding air.”

  The fat moon gazes down on us, neither approving nor disapproving. We stand there at the edge of that wide expanse of unflowing water, looking out across the cold and glistening tract of mud, and you squeeze my hand very tightly. Almost so tightly that it hurts.

  “I would lie here forever,” you say, and then tell me again of the kindly, perpetual shadows cast by floating mats of duckweed and water lilies. You talk of sacred groves of filamentous green algae, the apocrypha of turtles, the arcanum of newts, and how you would know everything forgotten and forsaken during hundreds of millions of years of terrestrial evolution. You speak of the womb, the first womb, and tiny silver bubbles trail from out your nostrils.

  “I only want to go home,” you say. “I only want to find my way back.”

  The screeching owl passes overhead again, or this is another owl entirely. It hardly matters which. I catch the lire in its terrible, glowing eyes. I catch fire. And, in its claws, the dream shreds again around me. So, now I am kneeling in the mud, and with both my hands I dig your bed. My fingers tangle in roots and disturb the affairs of worms and grubs. And you lie somewhere nearby, still and oddly silent, so I am left to do the talking. We are, neither of us, clothed, and in the moonlight your skin shimmers like mother-of-pearl, while mine seems dull and black as charcoal. It isn’t, but the dream makes it so. Neither is this the way these events transpired, not exactly, and so it is safe for me to dream this dream of laying you to rest.

  “Tonight, since you’re so awfully quiet, I will tell you a story, my love,” I say and smile, scooping out another double handful of muck from the widening, deepening hole. Digging, I have sunk in now up to my thighs, and the intimate caress of the marsh is not entirely unpleasant. I do my best to recount the tale of Hermaphroditus and the nymph Salmacis. It has always been one of your favorites, and so long as there are no vengeful Narragansett Indians and no slain Quakers, it suits me, also. I am well enough aware that I am mangling the beautiful dactylic hexameter of Ovid, and I am well enough aware how you would scowl at my sloppy recitation, if you were awake and could scowl.

  Now, undressed upon the bank he stood,

  And clasped his sides, and leaped into the flood.

  His lovely limbs the silvery waves divided’,

  Appearing even more lovely through the tide;

  As lilies trapped inside a crystal case

  Take on the a glossy luster of the glass.

  “He’s mine, he’s all my own,” the Naiad cried,

  And threw off all, and after him she flew.

  And she fastened onto him as he swam,

  And held him close, and wrapped about his limbs.

  “You’re doing better than you think,” you tell me, leaning down to inspect an especially large pumpkin. “You don’t give yourself enough credit.”

  In the tub, you have stopped bleeding air, and have finally stopped thrashing wildly about; the floor and walls are soaked. I am soaked, and my hair is dripping, but that was to be expected, wasn’t it; my own part in this baptism, if you will. Your hazel-green eyes are still open, and I wish I could see whatever it is that you must see so clearly now, no longer shackled by the burden of living only from one breath to the next.

  “Please,” you say, and look up at me. “Go on. I’m listening. You were just getting to the good part.”

  I nod, but for a moment I am too fascinated by the intricate collage of moments swirling about me, so many competing, incompatible pasts superimposed upon one another. I could very easily become lost in that spiraling maze of images and events. It would not be so bad, to linger always in so many days and nights that might have been, and all of them witnessed simultaneously.

  “I’m waiting,” you say again, and go back to inspecting the pumpkin at your feet. “Salmacis held him close, and wrapped about his limbs.”

  �
��That’s not really right,” I replied. “I know that I’m getting it wrong.”

  “You’re getting it right enough.”

  “I wish the owls were not listening,” I say, and you glare at me over your right shoulder.

  “Don’t be so shy,” you tell me. “Come on. What happens next.” The hole in the mud is almost wide enough to contain you, and I begin to concentrate on getting the edges as even as I can. It seems to me it should be made neat, the bed where you will sleep. But every time I try to smooth out a side or make a corner conform more closely to ninety degrees, the mud shows me it has ideas of its own, surrendering to gravity and sloughing and sliding back into its natural asymmetry. The marshy place at the end of Sin and Flesh Brook couldn’t care less for right angles; it is doing me a favor simply by permitting you this sanctuary.

  And then I am talking once more, and I’ve begun to wonder how I will ever get your body out of the tub.

  The more the boy resisted, the more he was coy.

  The tighter the Naiad clung to him.

  She kissed the struggling boy.

  Like the wriggling snake snatched on high

  In an eaglets claws, hissing in the sky,

  Around the foe his twirling tail he flings,

  And twisted her legs, and writhed about her wings.

  Then, lying on the floor of our bedroom, you roll over to read me another of your innumerable quotations, those slips of paper like gutted fortune cookies. I listen. I always listen. It is something from Swinburne: Love, is it love or sleep or shadow or light / That lies between thine eyelids and thine eyes?

  You were always reading me Swinburne. I have a manila envelope filled with your quotations and sealed with a glob of crimson wax. I will place it beneath you, herein the marsh at the end of the brook where Zoeth Howland was ambushed and met his untimely, messy end, three hundred and thirty two years ago.

  The restless boy still obstinately strove

  To free himself and still he refused her love.

  Amid his limbs she kept her own entwined,

  “And why, coy youth,” she cried, “why so unkind?

  Oh may the Gods thus keep us ever joined!

  Oh may we never, never part again!”

  And here I pause, staring a long moment into that amniotic gouge laid open before me. Womb. Cunt. Grave. All these and many, many other things besides. I am sweating despite the chilly night, even though my fingers have grown numb from the cold ooze. Already, a few inches of water have collected at the bottom, seeping up and also seeping through the sagging walls of the hole.

  “Should I go on?” I ask, though I’m uncertain if I am asking you, or asking the owls, or asking the voyeur moon.

  “No turning back now,” you say, scribbling another line of Swinburne on another slip of paper, staining your fingers with sepia ink.

  “I mean the story,” I say, in case you’d misunderstood. “Should I continue with the tale of the rape of Hermaphroditus, or have I said too much already?”

  “You truly think it was a rape?” you ask, licking at the ink oil your fingertips. “He didn’t have to enter the pool, after all, and it was Salmacis’ pool. In fact, if one favors symbolism over a literal interpretation, you might say the boy was the one initiated coitus.”

  “I have always leaned towards the literal,” I admit, and you grin, showing teeth gone the color of old ivory set into gums the color of indigo berries.

  “What happens next?” you ask.

  And now I am certain that there is more than one owl, that there are, in fact, at least a dozen, battening at the sky and perched in the limbs of what few small trees grow at the edge of the marsh. Those birds are also listening, also waiting, and the words fall from my lips like stones.

  So prayed the nymph, nor did she pray in vain,

  For she finds him now, as his limbs she pressed.

  Growing nearer and nearer to her breast,

  Until, piercing each the other’s flesh, they run

  Together; and incorporate, becoming one.

  At last in one face are both their faces joined,

  As when the stock and grafted twig combined

  Shoot up the same, and wear a common rind.

  Both bodies in a single body mix.

  A single body with a double sex.

  I pull the rubber plug from the drain, and the tub begins to empty, and, in this dream, I dry my hands on a yellow bath towel while I watch the water slipping away, exposing you, like ancient seas retreating to reveal landscapes long concealed by Silurian or Devonian brine.

  The boy, thus lost in woman, now surveyed

  The river’s guilty stream, and thus he prayed.

  (He prayed, but also wondered at his softer tone,

  Surprised to hear a voice but half his own.)

  You brush a strand of coppery hair from my eyes, and kiss me lightly on the bridge of my nose. You have always loved my nose, or so you’ve frequently professed. When I complain that it is too big or poorly shaped, you have threatened to cut it off and keep it in a tiny wooden box, lined in claret velvet. If I do not appreciate it, you have said, then I should not be permitted to wear so fine a nose, and you would protect it from my scorn.

  “Frankly, I’ve always detected more than an undertone of misogyny in that line,” you say, speaking almost so softly as to be whispering, and I wonder whom you are afraid will overhear. “‘... a voice but half his own?’”

  “I don’t think that’s how it was intended,” I reply, staring at the lamp beside our bed, instead of into your skeptical grey-blue eyes.

  “The implication is clear,” you say. “His voice was diminished in his fusion with the nymph. Not merely altered, and not made greater, but diminished. Ovid paints Hermaphroditus as cursed, as a victim, when he ought to number him among the blessed.”

  I tell you that it hardly seems so clear cut to me, but there’s never my changing your mind.

  Tim parent-Gods, whose heavenly names I bear,

  Hear your Hermaphrodite, and grant my prayer;

  Oh grant, that whomsoever these streams contain,

  If a man he entered, when he may rise again

  Supple, unsinewed, and become but half a man!

  You place a slip of paper on my belly, just above the navel, and I cannot see what is written there. You have placed it with the words facing down, your handwriting laid against my skin, and I refuse to give you the satisfaction of seeing me reach for it, of knowing I am curious.

  “What a little prick,” you say. “He’s cursed, if you buy that line of reasoning, and so he calls upon the wrath of the gods to likewise curse any other men who enter the stream, forever. I cannot even begin to see where that makes sense. It’s not even proper revenge...” and you trail off, then, turning away from me.

  “How old were you?” I ask. “That afternoon in the greenhouse?” The question has never been forbidden, precisely, but I know that it’s hardly your favorite topic of discussion.

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Maybe all the difference in the world.”

  You take a very deep breath, and sigh, “I was nineteen. A month away from twenty. It was late July. The greenhouse was going wild, by then. No one ever came to tend it anymore, not after my grandfather died.”

  “That’s a shame,” I say.

  “It was more than a hundred years old by then. The man who designed it had studied under the Belgian architect Alphonse Balat, who designed the Royal Greenhouses of Lacken in the early 1870s. But no one cared, not by then. No one but me, I think. It was like a church, all that glass and iron, those domes, and I would lie there beneath it, safe from the eyes of Heaven.”

  “It was going wild,” I say.

  “Isn’t that what I just told you?” you ask, more than a hint of impatience in your voice. “Yes, it had been left untended for a long time, all those plants left to grow as best they could without anyone to keep them safe from the winters, or to be sure that the hardier species d
idn’t crowd out and displace the more delicate ones.”

  “It was July.”

  “I just fucking said that it was July.”

  I take my eyes off the lamp on the bedside table only long enough to count the owls in the trees, and to see that the moon has climbed higher in the New England sky, and has gone the bright glacial white of the sun off ice. But you’re already talking again, in that moment when we are lying together and I am not yet kneeling in the mud beside the pond. You’re talking about that day in the greenhouse, fifteen years ago.

  “I never went back after that. They sealed the place up, chained the doors, and slapped on padlocks. Though, I could have gotten in, if I’d wanted to.”

  “You’re skipping ahead,” I say.

  “Yes,” you reply, “I’m skipping ahead. Are you just trying to piss me off?”

  “No, I’m not. It’s just that you don’t usually skip ahead. I’m sorry,” and I imagine, fleetingly, that I am genuinely sorry, even if I can now permit myself the luxury of questioning my sincerity. “I never should have brought it up.” And then I lie, knowing full well that I am lying, and say, “I’m not sure why I did.”

  And this is when, perhaps, I see something resting in the shallow pool that has collected at the bottom of the hole that I’ve dug in the mud. It’s larger than a fifty-cent piece, but not as large as a silver dollar (I do not mean to imply that it is a coin). It’s disk shaped, and the color of bone, thicker at its center and tapering to a razor-sharp circumference. I reach into the pool, and, with my numb fingers, I lift it out. The polished upper surface glistens in the moonlight. There is some pattern etched into the disk, which puts me in mind of the sort of triskele or triple spiral found in association with many Neolithic and Irish Megalithic sites. I recall it from photographs I have seen of the New Grange passage tomb in County Meath. The disk is slippery, and I slice my thumb open.