Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  But I feel it again, I feel the light breaking from my skull like seraphic needles. She will not forgive me, she will not believe me. Her navel spoke to me while her eyes shut my face from the room. It hissed that I was poisoned, poisoned by the Lake, and that I would never be pure enough for the cup to pass to me, I would never be clean of that witch. It hissed like a white serpent and called me damned, and my eyes bled for her, the stigmata of the ruined man.

  With my hands in her black hair I screamed the heron-hymns of my youth into her mouth, and she was afraid of me then. She wept and her tears burned constellations into my cheeks, and I’m sorry, I never knew, I didn’t know, my love, my love, I thought it was you. But the queen wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t forget. And now I am losing her, my Guenevere, I am losing her face in the multitude of faces, and her black eyes bleed into my mother’s, and the other one, the one who was not Guenevere, but wore her skin like a dress.

  I fell so far, so far. She spat on my hands, and my bones broke like a gate in the wind, and the moon rolled out of my mouth.

  Terce—The Psalm of Metamorphosis

  It was not only that a hole opened in the world or that in the hole was a garden in which I was the eaten fruit, it was not only that I reached out for a woman and drew back a burned hand. Perhaps I could never have done anything else, and it was all meant to happen as it did, and I was meant to circumnavigate this desert and no other, and pray only to the skulls of buffalo and hare.

  I was never innocent, I confess it, as freely as my asthmatic brain will allow. I was a verb, white as opium smoke. I acted, I never stood still. I was the thrust and cry. Somewhere along the way a thing snapped or bent in me and now I can feel my organs expanding like novae, galaxies of liver and spleen, nebulae of bile, of cilia, of obliterated marrow, pounding pulse-rate signals into the blackness of my vast interior—vast enough, anyway, to contain the tumescent moons that spin through me like plates.

  But if the geometry of my lover changed underneath me, it did not stop the motion of my hips grinding into her, it did not lessen the red marks of my teeth on her shoulder. The Euclidean planes of her face shifted like glaciers, and her eyes snapped from black to blue. I am guilty, it matters not if I thought that it was the body of Guenevere I loved—it was my fault. I did not die to escape that bed.

  But I was not innocent, though I came to that thorn-bed hoarse with faith. I saw it, I saw her lips swell and crack the skein of Guenevere, I saw the Elaine-fruit break its pod, I saw her shiver and her hair flay itself, black slitting to reveal red. I saw it and I did not stop, but I screamed, how I screamed as I felt myself caught inside her, caught as if on a nail in her womb, screaming as I shattered over her body, the glass of my bones pricking her nipples, and her mouth was a trumpet-blare, and the color of its triumph was red, red, red.

  The light sluiced from my skin, and her sternum sang my dirge, it gaped between her breasts and I called out her name, her true name which was Elaine, not the white but the clay. I called out her name and her name was the word and the word was the grail and the grail was her womb and my heart cracked like a rotted apple and I was dead in her, I was dead but my son was alive and I could see his face in her belly like the Shroud of Turin and I was lost in the maze of her breath, her wet mouth, her lily-sweat. I was not Theseus, not the hero with the thread of silver, but the mute and rabid Minotaur, raging against flesh-walls and tossing my horns at her phosphorescent ovaries.

  Her body seemed to be a cup, and I crushed the goblet to me, and wept into its bowl, and Elaine seemed to smile and promise that she was the only grail I would ever touch, and her mouth was the only life I could ever drink. It was over, over, over and I had betrayed my queen and I clung to the chalice of her, soaked in tears and blood and semen, and her fingers were laced over her liquid belly where the embryonic diamond had begun to swallow its mother in long draughts, the gilled Galahad-thing which I could not now escape.

  What a poor beginning for my son, all dressed up in the methane-blue betrayal of morning and grimacing in the light of my skin which was not the light of revelation. But whosoever drinketh from his mother shall have madness until the end of his days and the desert gaping like a jaw at his left hand. I stumbled from the bed and retched a pool of jaundiced stars into the corner, and Elaine was still as stone, listening to the grail-child unfold inside her like origami.

  Compline—The Psalm of the Desert Father

  I passed out of the world. I ran out of it. I sought out the driest of lands, those red and ochre, burned white and thirsty. I sought out the sermons of the saguaro and the yucca bell. I went deep into the waterless earth, the Lakeless air—in the yellow silt I broke open my skull, and four black opals spilled onto the rock.

  Each held a clemency I could not touch, each whispered of purification and hands cleansed of the imprint of Elaine’s body. Each reflected my face a hundred times, the hundred Lancelot-selves which I came to bury, the watery proliferation of mirrors I could no longer believe would bear my weight. I gathered up the stones in my arms and cradled them like daughters, daughters I never had, daughters with her hair like cats’ pelts, thick with wild scent.

  The sun told me a lie, and the lie told me a hymn, and the hymn told me that I belonged to the earth alone. The moon told me a riddle, and the riddle told me a rhyme, and the rhyme told me that only the white sage could heal me, the eating of smoke and darkness. The Mojave opened up to my limbs like a box of secrets, and I went to ground believing in absolution.

  The rocks know our story, I do not even have to say our names and they know my sin, they know that there has never been a creature I loved that I did not betray. Oh, but even these red and riotous stones I see through the sick-silvern veil of my mother’s skin. They ripple under her water and I am trying, trying, to empty myself of this liquid horror, to exorcise myself in the heat and bleach-dry bones.

  Can I never escape these endless bodies, bodies I have entered like a mendicant, asking only for a shower of coins from their eyes, the lustral basins of their throats in which my poor forehead pressed—can I never escape the bodies I have possessed, the plague of hers which were the objects of my aiming?

  I went to the waterless lands and still I saw the shore.

  I stood on a pole in the desert, and the afterimage of it flashed forwards and backwards, a pin holding a chain of like-footed martyr-lunatics trying to fit the sun into their mouths. If I stand very, very still, and never come down until the coming of the sea, I will be pure again, the wind will move through me like a hand, it will curl up in the cathedral of my skeleton and sing choruses to itself, it will rest in me and breathe, and breathe, and breathe.

  If I let my flesh wither to air, I will not be the sword or the lover-destroyer, I will be the saint of the ways, I will be forgotten and the world will close behind me like a drawn curtain. He will smile at her again, and she will laugh. I am the gray-blue stain between them, and if I go, if I go, if I stand and stand and do not move, it will be as if I never came to that castle between the blessing hills.

  It is so clear, the glare of light in the desert, the holy emanations of adobe huts and turquoise ring-traders, the desperate clenching of skin against the sand, the divinatory mesas with their pyre-colors. The red crumble of it, studded with those night-blue stones like a spray of seraphic blood—the jewels which have rolled from the skulls of all the mad saints who lost their names in this place, this desert which is all deserts, and if I am good enough, if I am empty enough, it will take my name, too.

  This is the end of the world.

  I tasted the dust and it was an undoing, and all the wine of the earth became water. I have come as far as I can, there is nothing for me beyond this. The grail was her waist in my hands, and now the cup will never pass to me, except that I touched its rim when I spilled a son into a needled womb, except that I lit with the tongue of that red-haired girl the twelfth star in the crown of heaven.

  The open rock begs for rain, and I am a ghost of cloud and s
alt—I wanted nothing, I swear, I meant only to embrace the mindless loyal sol invictus blaze of man and gold, I meant to be stupid and mute like all the other men adoring his light. But the moon is the ruin of me, it always grins, its landscape terrible and sere, knowing it holds me by the screaming scalp, and her apocalyptic touch woke me into shadow, gave me refuge from the topaz sheen of his nodding head, and I was in the Lake again, cool against the belly of a black-eyed mother.

  But help me now, help me, wheel of fire, burn me white and chaste and empty of all things but the red rock and the turquoise, make my bones translucent, fill me with light and I will be the spear instead of the cup, I will be tipped in oil and pointed ever skyward, I will stand still as a temple, only take this away, take her away, take all the hers from my tongue, I will never utter the word again, take it, take me, let me become the skull of a buffalo and the jaw of a flat-footed hare.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of death I will fear, I will fear and fall, I tremble in the shadowless weeds, I will know nothing but the emptying of my body, the liquefaction of my cyanic organs, the flagellation of my scalded back, for whosoever drinketh from me will inherit a throat of clay and dust, and whosoever eateth from my body will not die, but burn forever in the desert of the lost, and the sun will not forgive.

  Sext—The Psalm of the Sun

  The mad go to the desert to become holy. Or the holy go to the desert to become mad. It is hard to tell the difference. In the desert, madness is nothing of note, among all those bands of gold dirt. The long bones of the sky metamorphosize the psoriatic brain to sainthood. They become wise men, holed up in caves clotted with beatific filth. Others seek them out, wearing white burns on their thighs, and demand that they create bread from dust, to demand that they be fed, at last, from a hand without shadows.

  These are easy words—shadow, sun, dust, mad. They do not touch the salt-scrim of the painted earth, the roads that wend over it like hungry fingers. They do not touch the foot of my spindled pole, the saint’s phallus, with its thin shade falling binary and severe onto a pebbled stone tablet. The shadow is not a law, to be scribbled and footnoted—it is an equation, the simple line AB, bisecting crust and mantle, web-gray and endless. Where it falls commandments shiver.

  And I above it, with one crooked leg, ridiculous bird that I am, wait to be hollowed, wait to have the muck and grime of her ground away, wait to be dried utterly, to be a magnificent husk, a cicada fossilized into amber on the basin floor.

  It is difficult to balance. Like St. Sebastian I can feel holes opening in my skin, pores elongating like throats, rods of light slamming into place, through liver and pancreatic labyrinths, marrow and sweetmeat. Yet I am still wet, water still trickles from my kneecaps, and where it falls the mathematical line wavers—yucca bells spring up, bloody and scowling, from the sand which admits no other life. I am trying so, I have made all the correct calculations, all the alchemical designs inked on my shoulders and scalp, I put myself into the jaw of the sun, and still the yucca bells bloom.

  It is the sun, always, which shows truth. When I woke and the sylph beside me was caught in the morning light, I should have killed her. I should have opened her breast before the milk could crack her veins and swell her into a mother. I could have sewn Galahad into my leg and left her a ruin, craggy towers and a vivisected torso. I would have walked with a limp, my thigh slowly becoming round and fat, an egg-thigh, and I this great deformed eagle, lumbering through clouds and the wind-reek of winter. With my moldering beak I could have smoothed the hairs on my leg and whispered to the blue-gilled Galahad, suckling at my sugar-white femur, his little hands opening and closing in the tides of my blood.

  And somewhere, somewhere secret, I could have cut open the muscle and spilled out a grail-son onto a nest of sand and pine needles, and hushed his squalls and brought him to the cactus-kings to swear fealty, as I once did, sweating underneath my helmet. And he would have been pure, then, motherless—I could have given him up to the coiled whips of the sun, cauterized his mouth to a thin line, a shadow, an equation.

  But I failed him, I let him be born in water and woman, like me, surrounded in that sickening blue, breathing her poison, adoring the sound of her breath. I let him float in the Elaine-lake, where nothing but the detritus of bloated carp can thrive, their coral scales peeling off like pages. I left him to be born in the mud and reeds, a sallow egg, roe, a tadpole—a swamp creature, whatever he becomes. Her fecundity is the rich stink of a dead marsh, and I abandoned him to that false grail, brimming with algae and wet grass.

  I am punished, oh, I am punished for it. The sun will not forgive me, it sits on my spine and gnashes its skies. I am not hollow, I cannot be, no matter how I affect this perfect pose, no matter the agave-eyed boys who come to sit at the foot of my pole and stare, playing blackjack on the bedrock, taking bets on when I will fall. I am filled with all this clay, dead loam from a dead river. My heart’s chambers press frantically on a glut of schist and volcanic dust. I am the ash-soldier, blasted against the adobe wall by Vesuvius, who could not forgive, either.

  But the desert is full of madmen who have found the grail. It is not impossible to find succor in the clattering embrace of ox-skulls and snake-hides. It is not impossible that I may be able to escape the last of them, the water-wraiths that rise from every well and draw me down into dark and silence, into the death of their lips. They pull a son from me, they pull betrayal, they pull what was pure and pale as a tooth from me—all these things spilling from my mouth like a magic trick, scarves shooting endlessly from a painted gut—cobalt, olive, silver, turquoise, orchid, smoke, ink.

  It is not impossible that I may find that cup of sage and sweetgrass, and vanish into grace.

  Prime—The Psalm of the Roadside Stand

  Apples and cherries, grapes and oranges, peaches, apricots, plums and ears of corn like arrows. The desert has no right to these things, this sugar water bursting at variegated skins. I have no right to them. I dimly recall, when I first came, being disappointed that the Mojave was not empty, was not the wasteland I craved. Black-eyed witches and nicotine-toothed magi chewed tobacco and held out hands full of fruits and jewels—I reeled from them, my skull full of tangerines and white jade, groping for hermitage amid all these unmovable faces.

  It was the apples I feared most. Everyone knows that red means poison, means a swollen tongue turning black, means years in a glass coffin. And when I was a boy, my mother’s breasts tasted of apples, her hair like apple-leaves, and under the surface of the Lake, my mouth was always full of the papery sweetness. I put my mouth to her throat and it was like pulling fruit from a branch, huge and red as a heart.

  And there they lay, exuding that same earthy smell, in row after row of identical red—I covered my eyes and behind the lids were only ghosts, with their slim arms full of apple-roots. I went into the salt-flats, where the cool flesh of those fruits could not survive, and I ate mice, cracking open their delicate bones for the marrow.

  And still, I could not escape these peddler-crones, holding out their beans and dried peppers like relics to be kissed, mouthed—these idols in orange and scarlet—habanero, poblano, ahi, guadillo, mesilla, shiny with wax and the tender hands of the faithful. Even in the emptiest of flatlands, one will appear as if she had grown out of the rock, slate-gray hair braided under a green bandana and a wide-brimmed hat, and wordlessly hold out the husk of a pepper, desiccated into gold, insisting.

  The stars last night huddled for warmth in the shadow of the cliffs, and I shared my fire, my mouse-feast, and the rattling pepper-net I could not refuse, which they quarreled over like wild dogs, tearing into the red and yellow skins, snarling and lapping at the spiced rope.

  Afterwards, the stars sat around the flames and I confessed that I was mad, that I was fleeing the water and the threat of apples. They hunched together, coronae bristling like tangled branches, and told me that the curvature of the moon meant rain was coming, they told me that the lizards and
sparrowhawks were dancing for rain, that the poppies were singing in opiate harmonies to call down the rain. They told me that the Grail comes up from the bleeding soil, that the rain tells it secret things, and it spins up like wild onion. The bowl of its cup is blue, the leaves are dusty white, sage-white, willow-white, and I will know it by its water, for it will hold the rain perfectly still and not spill a drop.

  They accused me of heresy, of turning from the water that gave them the perfume of saguaro flowers, washed their haunches, and fattened the snakes under their feet. I was no madman if I could not weep, they snapped, and weeping is nothing but water. They stroked my stomach with fingers that smoked and sizzled, promising that I would never dry myself to the ruby shell of a roadside pepper, that I would never bind my flesh with those rough ropes or taste the sun’s meat.

  I wept, under their hands like midwives, and they mocked my tears for water. They pointed at the moon, overturned like a broken bowl, and pulled at my jaw, trying to fashion it into a lunar basket, lips and rushes woven water-tight. They told me that no one with hands so dry could touch the cup of the desert, which was an avatar of liquid things: blood, sweat, milk, tears. They laughed like ravens over carrion at my legs which had not borne a child. They prodded at my old wounds. They sidled into my ears and whispered the names, the terrible names I could not let into me, those acetylene syllables searing through my inner ear, the secret ear which hears only shame:

  Arthur. Guenevere.

  It was a poor madness, they said, which remembers all its sins.

  But I do not have to remember—the desert knows those names, they are written on every hut and dry riverbed, they are in the cave-wall glyphs and scrawled like graffiti on the Anasazi cliff-houses, they are stamped on every fruit in every stall, on the tongue of every turquoise trader, emblazoned on the door of every red-tiled mission with their great lonely bells. It is deafening, it is blinding, and in the night the names couple wildly and reproduce themselves in new crevices, on the backs of whipsnakes and iguana, burros and turkey vultures. Even the stars mouth those names, mash them with toothless gums, roll them over their cold tongues and push them into the earth again, where they will germinate, and under the moon’s first rain will detonate into lilies and poppies and knowing anemones.