“How does … is that water? How does it stay like that?”
“Oh. That’s the Voiv. I created it, melding and mixing, weaving and tweaking. Size constraints are easy to manipulate. Makes an excellent water tank.”
I feel lightheaded and find myself on my side, looking at the intricately tiled floor.
“Where are my manners? You are exhausted. Why don’t you just have a rest there on the floor, and we’ll …”
I’m in a room. This is a room, isn’t it? Where am I? There are walls, there have to be; I can sense them at a distance, but I can’t see them, and I can’t feel anything. A ticking sound draws me around to see an old-time movie playing. Black and white. The movie is stuttering. Seems to be three figures in it. I come up closer to the movie, but it’s not showing on a screen—film is skipping. I try to stay in one frame to see what is going on, but it keeps clicking past too fast to follow. Can’t close my eyes because I don’t have eyes, and the pictures are shuddering, shuttering past; I’m falling. Extend my hands but nothing is solid. A window. There’s one, a frame right next to me. Try to climb, climbing out of the room, and I grasp an object cool and hard.
… our lizarnoid visitor and touching his scales. Very springy. Laughable at the obnoxious twit.
—He could be useful.
Queen gotta have last word.
—Yes, he appears to be a hardy hybrid. Might have some use. Not uselessly muddled like everything else around here.
Ain’t she a broken fuckin fishie.
—Kaliban has got back with the fish and the water.
—Get the food ready.
—Yes, ma queen.
Queen Cuntress. Good thing the smile can’t ever leave my face. Not when this form’s got not just one expression. Suppose it’s a bitter fate but better than most.
Cross the room. Under the arras. Down the back stone stairs. The stable. Kaliban, pawing the stones. He can smell the water and waterlife in a bag. Toss the joist hook over his back. Snag the saddlebags by the strap. Lift them off. Why’s it always me? Go here, go there, catch this, catch that. Fuckin cuntsome cuntface … suppose others are worse off.
Drop the bags to the floor. The water gushes inside. Fragrance. Of. Heaven. This makes it worthwhile. Stick my head in one of the bags. Absorb the purity in my pores. Water clear. Seeping through me. A snort. A tap on me side through the bag. Stick my head out the bag. Kaliban’s disorganized, jigsaw face.
—All right already, witchdamdit, wait your turn.
Drag the mouth of a bag to his trough. Jump stomp stomp. Squirt out some water and a couple silverfish. Hooed the bags on the joist again. Roll the counterweight on the pulley rope. Knock it off the ledge. Down it plummet, down the well hole. The bags and me fly up the stair. Gather them onto the balcony. Drag them into the great hall. Princess Cuntlips. Reading her book. Fuck if I ain’t sick a being her slave. Suppose there’re worse lives out there. Could be eating my own guts to stay alive. Detach one of the bags. Pull it up over the brim of the stone table. Empty the contents into the table. Makin sure none plashes over. The water rushes from one side ta other, settling in place. Silverfish circle from one side ta other. The noid on the floor groans, sits up.
—Ah, my darling, you are uhwake. Are you well rest-ed?
Pretentious fuckin ack-sont.
The noid sits there, dumb as a plumb. Looking like cross-eyed cheese.
—I … feel tired. Was I asleep?
The noid stands up. Power in his awkward moves. Probably new an unused but could be dangerous. Better watch him.
—Do you have a label?
—Uh.
Bright as a burnt stick.
—I will call you Lizzy.
Princess sucking on her fingers. Dammed, don’t go into heat again. What was it? Oh yeah, stuck me up her cunthole and didn’t let me out for seven days.
—Come sit with us around the table, Lizzy.
Lizzy the lizarnoid punkarse gets to its hands and knees. Stands wonky.
—Come over hu-eeeeer.
Is she liking this thing? She couldna. Never likes anything. This ugly thing. Queen at head of the table. Head tilts forward, looking at our guest. Long lashes. Leans forward on her hands. Gigantic udders almost touching the water. Boring as relatives who never leave. Lizzy opposite me. Hypnotized by her udders. Dumb beast if I ever seen. He looks at the water. Fish duel like rapiers hither and thon.
—Watch.
Princess grabs a flopping finfish dagger. Swallows it whole.
—You haaave to eat waterforms alive, or they dee-cay in-stantly.
He looks at the water, stymied.
—What’s wrong? Are you shocked by hooww much water I haavuh in this one place?”
As if it know anything. Idiot thing. Why’re we wasting good food on it? We should eat it. Fuckin dry-heaves obvious.
Click. My iris contracts. My perspective snaps from the grey bottom of a shallow basin to my scaly face. Just in front of me: a stone table with an oval depression in it. Don’t remember standing here. My face. I’m at the table. On my left Beardoll, to my right the Queen. I remember now, I got up from the floor. I had been on the floor. Went over to the table. Did I? I did. She said something. What was it? What’s wrong, that’s right. What’s wrong? What isn’t wrong?
“Can you make me … human? Back to what I looked like before? I don’t know what, but I was not …” I gesture at my face.
“Oh, Lizzy. That big red hole in it could use some work, but otherwise it’s perfectly functional. But I understand. You want to be unified. I can make you back to what you were. The original monocult. Will take a little time. Need to rehearse the other parts before I erase them. I should write my spells down. So I can remember them. That’s what I’ll do.”
I hope you are okay out there, Sphinx. I hope you survive. Somehow.
She walks toward her chaise, and Dumkin leans toward me. “She goes ter get ’er waterdammerunged book. That fahkin piece-a-shite book. Better eat fast or yer’ll nevah.”
I scoop up a fish, and my senses sharpen in a narcotic rush. The witch recurs in time, ageless and vibrant, cast in fiery youth by her alchemy. Dumkin sticks his paw in the water coursing around the table with the flow of silveryfinfish—clear within clear; he scoops up a silverform and shoves it into his mouth; the animal slides into his throat, descending like mercury into a vibrating haze. It melts and thaws, a crackling fire winking out, extinguished. I scoop the finfish and swallow it and swallow it. Another. Tastes like wet sunshine. Swallow another and another and another.
“Come here. I want to share this book with you. It contains a spell that will change you.”
“Change me. I’ve had enough of that.”
She laughs melodiously. “Oh, Lizzy, you are funny.”
Dumkin snorts.
“All things change, don’t they? Good and bad. That is nature. That’s why nothing truly exists. Things are merely ideas. And a book … a book is a special idea. A mental form that merely appears solid. Thoughts. Ideas are nowhere. Where do they live? They exist, and they don’t exist. Intangible things have so much power. Books were once worshipped.”
She leans over and slides the “B” on her necklace into a slot at the base of her chaise. She turns it and pulls out a drawer.
“The intangible is tangible. Thoughts bump against each other like bodies. Every thought feels pain and pleasure. Here.”
She pulls out a large book and holds it reverently between her hands.
“I keep this book very close because it is a mirror I can hold up to myself and see what is inside.”
She sits down on the chaise looking at the book. She pats the chaise next to her. I approach cautiously. The book appears to be patchworked with thick strips of dull grey and deep brown, carnation and buff. The slow sky is baby blue behind her overgrown girl’s head. In the distance, the globe of water filled with darting silver. She squeezes the book between her breasts.
“I think you should open it. I think y
ou should read. You need to. It may lead you where you want to go.”
She lets the book fall from her cleavage into the palm of her hand. I’m slipping and sliding inside. She holds it out to me. Up close, I can see the cover of the book is made of many skins of many kinds of creatures. I take it from her, cradling it in both arms. I sit it on my knees and run my hands over the parchment-like irregular surface.
Dry. Smells of must and age.
“The correct order is waiting to be summoned,” she says quietly, touching the cover with the tip of her finger, her other arm warmly around my shoulders again. “Summoned like a sculpture in a block of flesh. Waiting to become if you have the courage.”
The bees are buzzing above us. Her eyes a turquoise sea, her head—I can feel the weight of it—her breasts intimidating and imposing.
“Words are power. Using the right words in the correct order can unlock the center. Free the shambling animal in your heart. Imagination writ limitless, limitations unwritten, change the unchangeable, affect the immovable, alter the flow of life itself.”
She taps the book.
“These words. In here. These words have been so cunningly arranged. Sorted and resorted, rearranged and reordered many, many times. In fact, these words form the capstone of many, many lives—not a literal shape, but an idea, the tip of a four-dimensional entity—that which our mind is a part of in the next spatial dimension. The wrenching split between our known space and the unknowable, a single electron clipped around the corner from the fourth to third; the trauma of that split causing the third mind to lose touch … to be blinded to the four-dimensional entity we manifestly are. Reading it unlocks a part of your brain, the part connected to other dimensions, which flowers like a fractal sigil.”
“This book has a table of conscience,” she says. “You already know the story it tells.”
Time is out of joint.
I slowly open the book to a page near the middle.
I stumble back from the table, backing through an archway, falling back, landing on my hands. What the fuck did I just read? She’s coming, saying, “What’s wrong now,” filling the archway. “Did the story upset you?”
Caught in the bite of her neon eyes, balanced on my fingers and heels with my back toward a wall, the floor unforgiving and stone cool; her hand of moonlight poised, palm toward me. Out of the corner of my eye: the frosted body of Dumkin. A crystallized tableau.
I drop out of it and kick him square in the head. He flips and rolls several times before stopping on his face.
“Is that all you got, nubcake? Caahmon!!!”
I run at him—the stone beneath my feet slaps like a jilted lover—kick instep to mid-section; he flies end over end, caroms off the wall, “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”—off the ceiling above me—I duck—“Yeeeeeeeowwwwwwww!”
Down the hall, vault down flights of stone stairs, pass the Clydes-hog. There’s a door—my red suit and helmet on a peg, grab them, fling the door open, outside. Run. Cotton grass, smeared sky—toward the shimmering sphere. Running. Kaliban with the Queen on his back chasing behind.
Running faster, the sphere growing, a full moon eclipses the light, and I can’t stop—kicking off. Flying
SMACK
hung on its membrane.
It’s pressing my body,
—I’m swallowed—
A bell rings through my bones.
I’m expelled, fired like a shot out into the warm air, sliding through the grass in a sluice of water to stop face-down between two feet. I take a breath. I look up: an eagle’s head with a beak as big as my face, a wide chest, close-cropped tawny fur, powerful lion legs, and godzilla paws with claws flexing. I close my eyes and put my head back down. It bawls like a child taking its first breath. I feel a damp swipe on the back of my head. And another. I roll over and get up. Four legs, a lion’s body, and upon its head and wings something in the family of golden eagle plumage: tortoise-shell brown and black and white. It tilts its head quizzically. The eyes, green as a poisonous frog, examine me. At my feet, my red suit, drenched.
I turn. Kaliban and the Snow Witch are at the deflated sphere now rent with two long tears. She has both her hands on it, concentrating.
He licks my head. Sore. My body weak. He licks across my arm, leaving a trail of thick saliva; I wipe it off with my hand … sticky. I hastily squeeze the suit out into the helmet, and we both take gulps of water from it. The suit seems to absorb the water, and it’s dry.
I fall onto his back. With a few bounds and lift from his mighty wings, we come to a sky-blue wall with a fissure in it. The sky is blue paint. I dismount, and we both crawl through.
“How did you find me?”
He opens wide, caws grandly a few times, and lolls his tongue out like an idiot. I throw my arms around his neck and am shocked to feel tears stream down my cheeks.
Back into the grim haze that’s grey and grinning like a mad dog. We wend our way through an angry tumble of rocks and off-kilter telephone-pole trees that punctuate our path as if an earthquake had made an emphatic statement. I cling to Sphinx’s back, and he takes me far, somewhere, away. I’m skinless inside my plastic hassle. We’re stopped by the appearance of a column like a slice in space that appears off in the distance.
“Let’s go see what it is.”
We ease up to the pillar. A ravishing crispness bathes the earth; I can see every particle of dirt and rock and stick, every grain of sand, speck of black carbon. A shaft of brilliant gold descends through a small hole in the clouds. Not gold, it’s a cylinder of light. A moat of tiny, psychotic spikes of clear quartz form a circle, about twenty feet across, around the point where the light strikes the land. Outside that, the sand has been churned and fused into broken grey wasp-nest forms.
Smell of melting glass and smoldering cinders as we come closer still, Sphinx’s feet crunching over broken bottles, and I feel heat on my face, and I feel tense. The light envelopes me, and my suit glows bright red; every strand of fur on Sphinx’s back is a slice of eternity, my hand chimes in tune with each strand, line upon hyperventilating line, my swollen tongue; feathers on his head stand up, rustling darkly at the tips, white dart and white at the base, a warrior’s flag dark and light, yin and yang combing my soul into strips, sketches, scribbles, sand painting; the air shimmies as before an open furnace, color of friction in my mouth, scent of a rainbow. I shield my eyes to look at the cylinder, which is about a foot in diameter. As I squint into the beam, I notice across from us, shielded by thick prisms of light, an object freaking in every direction.
I urge Sphinx forward, exhilarated. Drunk on sunlight. We circle around the beam of light, my face burning. We simmer and swirl frantically in flamboyant harlequin. I can’t look directly: an object, a cube emits a dazzling prismatic spray. I slide off Sphinx’s back and walk to the cube, avert my eyes from the glare to the black grass—stepping on unconnected fragments of my mind—off-balance, the shrieking light—lean in to the container for support and put my forehead on it, shade my eyes, and look through: a human head and torso with thick arms that end in stumps connects Centaur-like into a dark horse—not a horse, the body and legs of a bull—no, not a bull, wider and heavier with shorter legs in front, longer legs in back. Shaggy brown fur ranges from the broad hump to about halfway along its back becoming close-cropped to the hindquarters. I know this, it’s part buffalo. Or bison. A bisonman.
It runs over me.
Through the bars of the showcoop I am see the Dog & Cat Twin arguing with itself. Its two heads askance at each other, hands gripping spears.
“Birds pant,” is the Doghead pounding the spear with their right hand.
“Birds’ pants!” is the Cathead pounding the spear with their left hand.
“What I am saying is birds were mammals. Which means they had personality.”
“What I am saying is they showed personality through their pants. And we should change her into the purple pants with sequins for the next show. For variety.”
&nbs
p; “Define personality.”
“Wearing different pants for different situations.”
“That’s a metaphysical definition of personality.”
“Metal’s physical.”
“Yes, but I mean hypothetical.”
“That’s parenthetical. Personality is a word, which makes it a concept. And each pair of pants is a metaphor.”
“Pants are not a behavior; it is necessary to observe traits over time.”
“So is personality defined by others as such, rather than the Self? I tell you, it’s unstable from every angle, and all suppositories are temporary. If you make essence depend on time then it no longer precedes existence, and your gist can’t be genetic.”
“A gist is the basis for a definition. We all get the gist of gravity. Even if we don’t know the exactitude of its force, we still get the gist when we fall down the stairs carrying a load of fancy crockery and hit the dirt amidst a pile of crockery scraps. Gouging your thigh will give you the warp of the woof.”
“Time is a hypothesis.”
“Personality used to be pinned down in a dogtionary. A totality of distinctive emotional traits and behaviors found exclusively in mammals.”
A Greater Monster Page 13
