VINE
an urban legend
by Michael Williams
a BlackWyrm book
Louisville, Kentucky
VINE: An Urban Legend
Copyright ©2012 by BlackWyrm Publishing
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portion thereof, in any form. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.
The characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A BlackWyrm Book
BlackWyrm Publishing
10307 Chimney Ridge Ct, Louisville, KY 40299
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN: 978-1-61318-125-6
LCCN: 2012935143
Cover artwork by Malliccaaii Green
Cover design by Dave Mattingly
Preview edition: April 2012
First edition: July 2012
Author’s Note
Vine is a wedding of Greek tragedy and urban legend. It is a choral novel, a story told by a number of voices. Episodes recount the narrative action, while choruses of various kinds – Prologue, Parodos, Stasima, and Exodos – comment and reflect on what is happening. Each section’s title sets forth its purpose, and each chorus section designates who speaks it.
For Mark Blum
Prologue
1 T. Tommy Briscoe
I have come back home, children, riding unscrupulous winds.
This amphitheatre is a wreckage now. The crew is breaking down or setting up. It’s hard to tell from standing here. But I do know you can’t paint what ain’t, so everything we build falls into geometry. The theatre is the heart of my city, the haunt of derelicts and squirrels. It’s the point of origin, the towhead in the river where the god rises out of the current, and settles, and takes human shape.
The whole world slopes to the stage. Up there is what they call the colonnade. They’s stone lions at guard by it, and up on the hill, past Magnolia and the church and the big rock there’s another statue—a girl rising up from the water like the towhead god. Hollow bronze so the Muses can hide in her like Greeks in a horse. And all around me bare plywood sets, the rubble of broke mirrors catching the streetlight and bouncing it off of my sequins.
For yes, I am dressed for the occasion, children. I am afire with spangles, glittering with borrowed light.
This circuit and journey have I done, I believe. I think I have traveled from the forests to the south of us with their copperheads and hawks, on up through the desolations of the cement plant ruins, smokestacks like ruined columns at the far border of the county, smoking above long grim expanses of smokeless tobacco shops, of auto parts stores lining one sturdy branch of highway, of tanning beds and peddler’s malls until you pass beneath the interstate and the city rises up in front of you. Now there’s a tangle of streets leading up to them insurance towers they rename monthly as one corporation unhinges its jaw and devours another.
Sweet homeless Jesus, it makes me glad to be a man of independent means.
There’s a bus stop by the university that is encased in sturdy plastic. It keeps out wind but permits the light, so it is a comfortable kind of deception, and I lie there upon its benches of a night before the morning comes and I offend the students. From the southernmost bench, children, you can see the museum, all classical horizons and white marble like it come straight out of ancient grandeur. It is geometry that houses blood and tears and jism, children. It tends toward thin air and away from our fluids and sorrows.
There is a story that they tell about the coins of the Roman Empire. They would mint them in Rome, of course, with the emperor’s profile in relief. And they say that the coins struck at Rome looked most like the emperor, but those minted in far-flung cities like Antioch, like London or Carthage, that those conjured the godly out of him. His face becomes more abstract. He starts out human, and passes through icon to end up as wind and notion.
Who was the sculptor who said that every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it? Well, he was right: the god don’t descend to stone. Instead the stone shears off of him, falls away as he busts loose into space.
Which is why I rejoice when I see the museum. Imagine the god born and rising from its terrible dust, taking shape on the fired clay of pottery and the marble of the statues. Imagine all creatures on parade, bas-relief on the limestone of an old sarcophagus. It is the god set on proving himself, the god coming home.
Come forth out of Italy, you girls in procession. Line the side of that flesh-eating box, and raise your lyres and scrolls and cymbals. And whether it has already happened, the god’s arrival, or whether it is to come or it rises and gathers light among us now, sing to me, out of the stillness of stony dance.
2 Parodos: Strophe: Polymnia
Polymnia: It is no invocation if nobody comes when you call.
After long slumber, I am garishly lit, far from the crossroads where they first laid me to rest. Now, with my sisters attendant, I march in frozen procession, unravished bride of quietness, daughter of memory.
Here the climate is temperate, the light bald and difficult.
Here scholars, tourists, and security patrol the alcoves before the house locks down.
Under glass like latter-day Lenins, our dreams and bodies on display, we stand in marmoreal and marching order. Clio behind me, then rumpled Erato, then Euterpe and Thalia and Urania, Terpsichore dancing, and finally Calliope and Melpomene as you would expect—all of us trooping the side of an empty sarcophagus. The stone bristles with invented life; the observers pass by, pretend to make something of this funereal lineup, this somber girls’ parade.
Do they notice the trace of red where the relief wrestles out of the marble? Do they still dismiss it as rust?
I am the one all pensive and meditative, leaning across the podium as my eyes strain at stony distances. Hair bound with filet mesh, one of the two turned back to regard the progress of the others. Two of them are masked: Melpomene, all tragic and anagnoritic, grape-leafy and buskined at the tail end of things. Thalia glares at us through comic eye-holes, laughing at what things have come to, laughing that this museum might be everyone’s last long tumble into night.
In the same room with us, in the same light and treated air, the deaths continue. At night, usually, but sometimes during the day. The krater—the enormous vase across from us—is older than we are. Attic and glistening, like in symposia days when it was filled with wine.
Upon it the black-figure god smiles. His bride Ariadne smiles back.
What once was tribute has fallen to artifact now, here in an American museum. They found it south of Napoli and brought it here, emptied and relocated like a refugee, holding only still air and recollection. Its profiled Dionysus reclines on a couch, leering at his abandoned girl, ready to reclaim her across a shiny landscape of black and burgundy.
It was almost too late for leering. Only recently, he had begun to die.
Melpomene noticed it first. The glister of our stone as she nodded in the direction of poor painted Bacchus. The breathy classical Greek from big sister, whispering he is leaving us, the old drunk, old goatgluts, old prophet and piper.
Good riddance, and I hate to see him go.
In only a short, titanic breath—in less than an hour by your reckoning—the surface of the krater began to fade, its color more blanched and ineffable, like the thought of color rather than the thing itself.
And the world is supposed to vanish along with its gods, now, isn’t it?
But it won’t. Nor will the gods. You know that, desp
ite your ingrained desire for justice or drama. You know it will go on like this until the cows and the gods come home and out of the swirl of energy, all beings complete their forms.
But under glass, as I was saying. Impervious to touch. Not altogether bad, when you consider the children’s disobedient fingers tracing across the breasts of the Hellenistic sculptures, and the more focused adorations of the night watchman, who caresses the louche and radiant figure of a nearby statue of the god in question, of young Dionysus, small-dicked and callipygian. I have been tempted to call out to the guard, to say to him in my inveigling Muse’s accent, Enough of that, Gus, for that is the way the god don’t roll.
Except apocryphally.
What sealed us off you will learn in due time, but we were open in early spring, free to still air and unrefracted light, only a cautionary sign between us and fondling by bejeweled and liver-spotted hands, because who has yet seen an American heed a sign, or at least who doesn’t think that somehow he is the exception to its rule?
The he this time was a she, diminutive and nervous and eighty years old at least, no doubt taking do not touch to be challenge rather than instruction. Guided by a heavy and exhausted son, she walked past us, extended her gloved hand and brushed a finger against Clio’s scroll. Not even a pleasure sensory in such transgressions: just to have done what she did in defiance and in liberty and meanness.
We watched her leave, the infinitesimal dust on her sheathed fingertip permitting us voyage and accompaniment. For with the mischief she had consented, had freed us also, allowing my eyes and thoughts and pneuma and deep imagining to join her return into country she thought was safe until the end.
So here is what we saw, in the Spring of the Vine and Leopard.
3 Parodos: Antistrophe: Polymnia and the Muses
Polymnia: Be with us, Apollo Mousegetes, brother to the nine of us, as we pool in glazed aloumínio like lethal naiads, taking our stations beneath surface tension, watching from the rear-view mirror as Muriel’s finger trails over the car’s back windscreen, as she searches for evidence of dust. Be with us as her flat brown eyes shuttle in her little fist of a face, as she insists on riding in the back seat, goes on about how her son should clean the glass, goes on against his silence.
Thalia: I love it, this front-row seat to the théatron, the place of viewing, where we can watch the sacrifice, the prolonged orchotomy of sons by their ancient mothers. She is good with the knife, is Muriel Thorne, and Stephen wants to drop her off before she drops his balls.
Polymnia: Now he merges on the expressway, the declining sun at his back. Riding that undercurrent of surrender you feel when you join larger thoroughfares, as if the road you have found nurtures and buoys you now, as if its history carries you toward something meaningful. You do not reckon on the ground beneath that same road, deep beneath concrete and rebar, visible only in the thin, exhaust-battered median, how in it seed and root burgeon with wet life, blind as a passed-out satyr. How it shares your own receptive chemistry.
Thalia: She asks again why they had to go to the exhibit. Muriel doesn’t think they are so fabulous, the statues. There are ones in Cave Hill just as good, drooping Victorian angels in Louisville’s high-end cemetery, nineteenth-century postures of kitsch and melancholy. It is her dreamed-for final destination, she reminds him.
Clio: Oh, but who will plant her there, sisters? Who, indeed, since she plans to survive her son by decades?
Thalia: Set design, Stephen tells her. The visit to the museum was research for a play he will direct at Park Theatre. When she reminds him that he is unpaid at that venue, he is quick to correct her. They pay him: admission is free.
So this Buckeye, she asks, has to do with old statues?
It makes me laugh. Muriel Thorne, the old actress and mountebank, locally famous for her Medea, her Jocasta and Lady Macbeth. She knows the play in question, is glancing wickedly into the mirror to trammel her son’s gaze. If she were only attentive, she might notice me surfacing in the glass there to greet her. But instead she self-regards, revels in the son’s discomfort that atones for her facial ruin. She does not see my smirk and inspiration.
Stephen reminds his mother that she knows better. That it is Bacchae, not Buckeye. That she has the faculties to remember as much.
She opens her purse to bring forth lipstick, reminding him he is a grown boy, cautioning him against silliness, wondering if Greek tragedy is not too toplofty for free entertainment.
Now Stephen sees a window between cars, and lets it pass, choosing to remain in his lane. He waits, passes the next sign.
She asks if the play is ugly. If it features sex and cursing.
Stephen assures her that he will do his best to make it so.
Polymnia: Now he veers through traffic, down an exit ramp to a long accompaniment of horns and squealing brakes. Miriam looks at him, stunned, a long streak of red on her cheek and the lipstick smudged against her jaw. Accident has painted her mouth wide, like Heath Ledger’s Joker’s or like a sunning snake’s. We laugh as Stephen smiles and heads south, gliding into one of those long, level stretches of boringly pretty old highway. The farm is on the left, the little distant stand of trees by the pond and salt lick. The drive is almost over. She can be deposited, cajoled, and left to her telephone, to right-wing radio that she claims to hate but loves because her heart indeed pumps acrimony.
What Stephen does not see—what only a goddess herself would notice, her eyes expectant on a green, half-imagined glade behind the car—is the shadow rising over the pond, indistinguishable at first from the reflection of new leaves and the shade cast by the dip of the sun below the high hill that Stephen’s car is now ascending. That darkness slowly resolves into something more solid. Dead branches, impervious to the new spring, bend before a stronger, invisible power, their reflections stirred by something surfacing into expectant dusk.
4 Parodos: Strophe: Polymnia and the Muses
Clio: He still calls it dope, though doob for a while in the ’70s. He saw the revival of reefer, was too white for spliff and blunt, too old for chronic. Almost too old for the smoke, stronger than he could have imagined in his college days, stronger also than in the paraquat-infested ’70s.
Polymnia: Thunder grass: dope that creeps up on you, rumbles at your horizons, then climbs the back of your neck, sending warm consolation from your jaw to your ears and occipital, displacing you and paling the light by the courtside fountain until it becomes a summons to false bravery, a walk in the park in the dead of night when a man of 63 is subject to all dangers, from muggery to buggery to drowsing satyrs to coiled dragons guarding unspeakable treasure.
He has cast and read the yarrow stalks. The fourth hexagram, about teaching the ignorant in infancy, when the game begins. Something in the commentary eludes the translator—slippage in the alphabet, perhaps a tremor in the Tao.
He takes a long hit of transforming smoke and readies himself for the walk.
Clio: The court where he lives is pricey beyond his means, but close to schools and stages. His job is piecemeal, cobbled roles in local dramatic productions, directing dinner theatre. Enough to get by, for rent and for bourbon and the occasional dime bags, so that lulled by substances, he can almost believe that some turn in his life forty years ago has led to a place calm and passable.
Polymnia: Pleasantly buzzed tonight, he plugs in his old Walkman, older Zeppelin in his ears as he walks the court, the fountain at its center spotlit and glittering, the statue of the girl framed by a brace of cherubs, flourishing a bronze scarf in a cascade of water.
Clio: Galatea, they think. Who began as a statue, carved and loved into life by Pygmalion, her story receded back into bronze. Commemoration of the city’s Southern Exposition of the 1880s, that celebration of a South rising out of Reconstruction. Now she stands guard as her surroundings lapse into litter and crack and property crimes, a tempest slowly compassing her affluence-protected little cove.
Polymnia: It is easy for three of us to conde
nse from river-valley air and soak through the tight seams of the statue, Melpomene wrestling to the hollow center of the bronze girl, filling the form with divinity insubstantial, looking out through her eyes, following Stephen’s gaze as it trails up and down the perfected bronze breasts and thighs like the wayward hands of museum guards.
Pygmalion himself. Rubbing bronze declivities in his thoughts, lurid to the tune of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy”:
There’s an angel on my shoulder,
in my hand a sword of gold.
Let me wander in your garden.
And the seeds of love I’ll sow.
Thalia and I slip into the crouching cherubs, understudies to our more theatrical sister. Early on you learn your part.
Clio: This theatre is a tradition in this city. Ground zero and omphalos, venue for a free, uneven Shakespeare festival. Promising directors and actors make first appearances here over the years, and their promise strips away, carried off by mosquitoes and the heat of July, by an audience so inattentive that only the free seats draw them. For ten years Stephen has prowled the margins, directing and producing a play each June—amateur productions, 20th century popular fare, warm-up for the Shakespeare that people will pretend to watch.
Polymnia: No Lear, no Macbeth for our boy. Even his modestly proposal of Henry V dismissed: he is, after all, from Louisville, and his city eats its young. So he offers instead The Fantasticks and Our Town and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, all of which he has come to loathe in the long Junes of the new millennium.
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