Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  There are advents and newness stalking me. I could be certain before that the Labyrinth shifts, but it does not change. Yet I am within something else now, a sequence of events, beyond sheer movement, pure and dazzling. It boils all around. the tiny pale blue hairs on my arms bristle like a boar. I am waiting for the portents to come. I feel them cackling around me like a copse of witches.

  The carried compass sends out trails of sickness like medieval sunbeams, lassoing organs into green grassfires. The slab of north lacerating my throat, spilled mercury and spoiled stew east roiling in my belly, south-arrow crackling in my bones like kindling. It travels through me as I travel through the Labyrinth, navigating the turns and traps, inhabiting slowly, imprinting the landscape. I have eaten Direction, and it has eaten me. Oh, the yin yang cycles of self upon self, oh zazen clay of form upon shape, oh wheels within wheels within scarlet-flaming wheels. Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the glabrous sky, bound with glowing spokes? What is it searing and smoking, scalding the hermetic moon in a boil of stone? What do you see dancing in primate patterns over and over? In this sign thou shalt conquer.

  How all we pretty snakes have a taste for our own tails.

  CANTO

  THE SECOND

  13

  It has been days upon days and still my eyes are slates.

  Crack the egg for the answer, the gold and the white. It lies within like the ascended scrap folded in a fortune cookie, malignant scrawl of notime.

  Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky?

  Answer: the Void. The Void and the Stone.

  I have stumbled into another layer of within, the sky and its signs are covered by intricacies of stone. This that surrounds—no circular Wall but a great Temple carved into existence in the center of the Road, luxuriating in columns and steps of striated granite, studded with quartz like roused eyes. Exhales into the viscous air like a sleeping dragon. Circus ropes of thick vine lie net-like over the Walls and crumbling balconies, weeping fat tears of wet crimson fruit, which comprises my breakfast in this abandoned place. Sky like a dove’s belly can be seen through vast cracks in the domed ceiling, crusted with flecks of ancient paint like flocks of birds. Copper bells gone to rust litter the floor, fallen in some antediluvian cataclysm. Mosaic with no picture to reveal, (as though any Revelation lies buried and smoking here)the stones of the floor have conquered their polish and lacquer, host to grass and occasional columbine. The wind prophesies in breaths of blades, slicing my inky skin.

  In the shadows of the altarstone I chew my fibrous breakfast, savoring the musky juice, beckoning the strange. It is not long in coming. The air is stale, still, except for the Cossack-wind that gallops through on occasional pogroms. Oh, the scrabble and scramble of sequence closing in like hands on a fly. Where am I going, beneath this frenzied sky? Clinging to my knowledge that there is nothing, no Center, am I blind to the wheels of fire? Oh, what do you what do you what do you see in the sky?

  I see the corner of the nave move silkily, shadow within shadow, suggestion of gesticulate limbs. I swallow the sliver of fruit on my tongue, peering closer, dreading the next in this idiosyncratic parade, this sequence. This episodic hermitage so full of opiate swans and painted mouths. How will it end, if an end is ever to be contemplated under an infinite train of Bo Trees and crusted snow, skipping projector illuminating this same arboreal testing ground over and over, the ascetic, the pearl, the slanting light? My turquoise fingers are sticky with apple-blood.

  It is not long in coming, the breakfast-strangeness. Obligingly a creature darts out of its sanctuary, making for my tiny Bo with determined speed. A handsome golden macaque with a bodhisattva face, clever twisting hands, his gleaming fur bristled with excitement, clapping wildly and slapping his palms on the stone slabs. He stops short an inch from my face and sniffs sharp and greedily at my shimmerings of blue. I have not moved, and how we must seem like Temple statues, the Monkey and the Deva, sea-blue and still as time.

  “Who are you?” He inquires on an intake of breath, words riding air like a camel.

  “I am the Seek—”

  “Ssst!” He interrupts me with a venomous hiss between enormous teeth. “I know all that. Who are you?” Each syllable punctuated by a slap of Monkey-palm against Temple floor. There is a long silence filled by a tabernacle of flapping birds over some distant Maze-territory, the slow, irrefutable crumbling of the Temple into divinatory dust, reading the future (nothing, of course) in its granite entrails.

  “No one, I suppose.” The answer was meeker than I intended. “I am my Wandering.”

  “At least you know it. I am myself, nothing more. And often not even that. I know my name, I found it in the belly of a sturgeon with a golden ring and salty Himalayan caviar. But I learned to ascend it in the hysterical ravage of the Turkish Baths at the Center of the Labyrinth.” The Compass in my belly lashed out in epileptic grandeur and I choked and sputtered. “There is no Center! There is none, nothing!”

  “Silly girl with no tail, did you think there was no Center just because you had not found it? I showed it my teeth, and it was afraid. Hoo!”

  The little Monkey danced triumphantly, waving his arms skyward and stamping his long feet. I could hardly speak for the pressure of sequence. How great lay the Lie of the Maze if there was a Center I had never guessed to Seek? How could I guess the shape of un-knowledge from the depths of the Road? I rasped coldly at him, grasping his golden fur.

  “Where is it? Tell me, tell me, please. I have to know. Where?”

  A grin of jubilant savagery seized his mouth, and he rubbed his iconic belly. “I ate it. It was afraid. Hoo!”

  What relief there is in the reassurance that the world is as you suspected. His absurdity revealed his lie. The Compass calmed to its usual pulse and the winds dried blue sweat from my brow. Madness knows madness, delirium draws its own. He was caught in the same narcotic web of enchantment and counter-enchantment, trapped in the same Golgotha of perception. I knew it for a Lie and was comforted.

  “All is the act of Devouring here,” he lectured, “it is how you conquer, it is how you survive, it is how you ascend. It is why you ate the Compass, and the Wall. This is a Labyrinth. Have you any doubt that its nature is inside? There are beyond a thousandthousand Walls. What did you think you had done by Devouring one corner of one? There are beyond a thousandthousand Centers. I ate one. Downdowndown. It tasted like a witch’s nipple dipped in morphine. Delicious. I ate my name, which was a Center of a three thousand and forty forever Centers, but mine. And so I become another in a writhing nest of Centers. You do not know your name and cannot achieve that kind of mastery—you do not know the tracks of your prey. I ascended its fish-eggs and padlocks. Now I am myself, whole. I carry the Center with me, and everywhere I go is the achievement of the Quest. With every step I conquer the Labyrinth, the world of my birth-tree and my first-milk.”

  “But you don’t, really. You trick yourself. There is no end to it. You can’t leave it. So it makes no difference. You and I are the same. You just have a better Lie to tell yourself.”

  His eyes glittered shrewdly. “Darlingblue, it is all a Lie. That does not make it lesser. Is it victory to abandon a thing like a wounded wolf? Is the truest expression of mastery is to Abscond? Not the vital thing, no. I choose. We are not alike, because I understand these things, and you do not.”

  “You think you understand. It does not make it so. After all, it is all a Lie. Even you.”

  “True. Even the purity of crocodiles is a derivation of moon-mother tea ceremony and a falsity. You have your Labyrinth and I mine. And I have had the Temple where you have had the Road. You have been Assassinated—it is something to see. Nevertheless, I have been waiting for you. I see the wheels in the sky and the shape of approaching. Hoo.” I shut my eyes, heavy-lead-bodied and grinding closed.

  “I am weary of all this. I do not wish to listen patiently to your reed-mat ministrations and nod like an ignorant postulant. I must keep moving.”


  “Yes, girlbodied thing, and I am going with you. For awhile.”

  “You are not welcome.”

  “It hardly matters.”

  “I will not listen to you.”

  “I will not speak.”

  “The Doors will catch us both.”

  He said nothing. I covered my eyes with my hand. “I don’t care. Come if you wish, Beast. Or stay. There is nothing new, even you.”

  I rose, striding towards the Temple steps like a wave. Lost, lost in sequence, in the hagiography of this opaque menagerie, it is, it was, it will be all slipping away. I feel the slide of earth beneath my bare and cyanic feet. The Monkey dove into my Path and planted his limbs like a portcullis. “You must do something before we leave this place.”

  Exasperated, I spit words like poison darts. “I do not need you.”

  This was predictably ignored. “You must give me the Stone.”

  “Why?”

  “To demonstrate a Thing. You do not want it anyway, you ran from the Angel like a river from the mountain.”

  How weary can I become before I vanish? I handed over the Stone, because it is what I am supposed to accomplish, what has been written for me to do, what is required to silence him, to further the Road another inch, another mile, another winter clutch of nights like a basket of hissing eggs. Someone asks me a thing and I do it. I am only the object.

  And into his little gold mouth it goes, sparking briefly with light glinting off his unsettling teeth. He smiled at me, a smile of perfect satisfaction.

  “See? Nothing changes. I am not consumed with the finding of the Source, the End, the Monster. It was afraid. Now I Have it and it will ferment. It will drive you mad; already you are a little loooony. But without the blessings of madness you will not survive. Hoo. Only the mad can find anything under the sun. Now it has all begun properly, and you cannot escape it.” He rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue like a party favor.

  “Why would you do this to me? I have never hurt you!” I heard my voice as from a distance, wondering tremulously at his green-flecked eyes.

  “Another time, Darlingblue. Explanations are a waste compared with the metamorphoses we will find under a thousand spotted leaves. Come, come, come.” His hoo was soft and warm while he took my hand blue as a Map in his leathery paw and half-sings:

  “Let us go then, you and I, while the evening is laid out against the sky . . . ”

  14

  And now we are two.

  The Walls wind thickly in long, womanly curves now, covered with a fine thin bead of playing cards and syringes, sweated movement of clubs and hearts, binary black and red, down to the invisible sea. Step for step I am matched by golden feet, slide-swish down the Road at twilight, into the night, into the stars and the black canvases, into the pendulums swinging from a nervous sky, earlobes of clouds belly-heavy with listening. It is not unpleasant, to have company. He does not speak because I have not. Lunacy, if I have opened my veins to its beastlight, surrounds like a nimbus. I can eat the Center, and be whole. It is possible. Temptation has fled in her red shoes and gargoyle petticoats, ravening through a forest primeval, drowned in a sleeping river with the Stone around her neck, to weight her to the sandy bottom. No more the grotesque desire, the terrible Lie of Purpose, the seduction of Meaning. I have wrestled with the Angel and pinned her opaline shoulders to the red, red rock. He took it from me like a tumor and perhaps there is now some hope.

  But they are all Lies, even Temptation. They whisper of Reasons, of coming and going, of Time, and of the possibility of a thing that came before. Dread dark bullroaring fear of a beforethis, frog-sounds in the marsh of midnight, dreaming of who I might have been before I Walked. It does not exist within me, my interior is the Mazescape of the Labyrinth, vein to vesicle to womb floating like a rough hewn-raft. I cannot locate it among the branching capillaries and smoky pneuma, I do not believe it is there. But I could not say. I cannot say anything anymore. Once there was no new thing in the Labyrinth, and I thought I understood. I survived. I cannot say anything anymore. I am not quite myself, not quite another. I draw the stars down upon my head with a sickle blade. I think he is right, that I am going mad. I do not fear it (hoo) but I think it is just behind me, on fox paws, printing patterns of circlescirclescircles on the dust of the Road.

  What do you see?

  Oh, what do you see but the salamander’s back splayed out against the sky, the fire-lizard caught in a frieze of Death, the silhouette of scorpion and desert? I see nothing, it is all black, no turns, no hiding places, no Doors with handles of gold. No cloudwalls drifting across the hooded moon, her mask of wax and spittle of cicadas, her ululations, her hair of whistling bats. Wholeness, unbroken, clay pot filled with jasmine tea, warbling in its earthen goblet, satori-sky of blossom and grass harp. When I was in my darkbody how beautiful I was, how singular, how like this perfect expanse of charcoal smeared across half of all, how hidden and cohesive was I in my sweet-smelling nightskin.

  We walk and walk and walk and there is no end. He chatters on, and I cease to hear, the voices within bubbling in my kettle-body. Cycling stains, marks of wood-stamps on my skin forced to open and receive, wedged open with an ash spear, my entire form slashed and drinking. And yet—

  What do you see?

  Wisps of logic, penetrating like armies with furred hats and shaggy horses when the world had ordered itself without. We build our Walls high as—

  (—the topless towers of Ilium)

  We push our shield-line against theirs—bronze on bronze,

  (—And will I combat)

  Gates bruising the clouds—

  (—come, give me my soul again, here I will dwell)

  Our arrows pierce horse-hide and fire-mail—

  (—yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel)

  Our horses gnash with teeth like tearing steel—we do not want it here—

  (—I will be Paris, for love of thee)

  And the fire, how high the fire on the turrets, devouring—

  (—Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter)

  The dissonance, the half-knowns, I cannot, I cannot. I hold my head as though a Monster (the minotaur tossing his horns at my skull) were going to burst from my hairline.

  Oh, for the blackness, the smooth and cool hand of that dark heaven on my face, I cannot disembodied drift deadwood between knowing and unknowing, I am being torn by hooks—in the gills of my seabody, the salmon silver gills breathing an air-that-is-not, slits in my flesh like gulping vaginas, vagina dentata and the masked knife, rifts and breaches, continental drift splitting my tectonic bones, pullingpulling apart, whispering intimations the voice within, hinting and grasping. Intimate, grave, the song, a frazzled beard brushing my cheek, and down I go into this pool of sick, this avenue of buoyant retch, heaving waves of bottlenecks and Chinese dinners, aluminum siding and bile-soured wine, bread crusts and fish tails and fulminating bananas, ox hearts and newspaper hats and diner menus, sheet music, guitar strings strangling plucked chickens, watery blood and pulp of novellas, hat-rims and shattered upholstery, shoe-heels and shoehorns and turkey livers, tomcats with semen-sticky red fur nosing in this vile flood of me through the Center of the Road, column of vomit floe of madness and dis-ease down those smug cobblestones.

  The Monkey, oh, he looks at me with pity crinkling those black flickering green eyes.

  (—And none but thou shalt be my paramour)

  The sounds of that sibilant pentameter, those lisping lips worming over my throat, flickering screams of lizard-fire and the paradisiacal yammering of truetruetrue! His pity is a hammer splitting my skull, silver knob bursting through a firework display of blood and bone, spurting upwards, cerebral ejaculate, bang crash of fontanel puckering and blowing high as a whale’s spume. The brain exposed, that Labyrinth of twisting pink flesh, wrinkled as an old man’s belly, and it is really all belly, all gut, the depth from which it rises, madness and sublimity, from the Center, from the Devouring-Place, from the primordial swimming
cauldron of murky stew-self.

  I claw at the Road, ripping my fingernails and chipping teeth. I have fallen, downdowndowndowndown. The Monkey moves his long brown fingers over my forehead in a tender circling motion, calming, consoling, cooling the fever blistering the peaceful azure sky of skin. His voice is soft as rain:

  “Within the bowels of these elements,

  where we are tortured and remain for ever,

  The Labyrinth hath no limits,

  nor is circumscribed in one self place;

  for where we are is the Labyrinth,

  and where the Labyrinth is, there must we ever be.

  Hoo.”

  I slept.

  15

  The pancreatic morning breaks sickly and yellow.

  Again, the thumping body, the hang-over from delirium. This, at least, holds to pattern, grinding millstones in my grisly head, scarlet shame frothing and gurgling like spoiled port, grapes trampled underfoot, stains of burst fruit spreading like sin. As I wake the Monkey is perched bird-like on my chest, picking expertly at my aquamarine hair, grooming me as he would a member of his troop.

  “It is poisoning you, the Stone, cyanide in your pretty blue cells,” he informed me with some cheer as he mussed with my curls. I answered sleepily. “It was just a rock. I escaped the Angel. How can it hurt me?”

  “Hoo, hoo, Darlingblue! I escaped the Angel when I took it from you. You are still within Her. She wanted you mad and gibbering, and you are obliging. It is all going so well. You did not swallow it, so you could not master it. It licked at you like a grassfire. I took it so that you could not conquer it, so that you would follow the path that lunacy has laid out in such profound bricks. If you were your singular body, you could not follow me, tread so heavily this Road. Only the mad are Seekers-After. You are burning, girlchild. It is beautiful to see. The Stone is Doubt. It is Pernicious. You ought to pay more attention, you know. You have lost your eyes and are changing bodies like ball gowns. Were you so malleable and myriad before She came with Her swathes of ice?”