Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  But a lake is a deep-within place, within a forest, or mountains. And I am by the Sea, an edge-place, the end of the world. And somehow, because it is beautiful, and sparkling, and very expensive to stand on the seashelless sand, I feel I should not be so disappointed, that I am not allowed to be. But still, I will not come to you, will not succumb to the destiny you have written for me. This is not a quest, but a battle, and my will is as strong as yours.

  Let me tell you a little story. You know it already, of course, but here in Southern California, it floats between the boardwalk shops like half a memory. You see, on the voyage home from windy Troy there was a place called the Island of the Lotus Eaters. It was on the coast of Africa (which in the Western Mind is somehow all Sahara, all sand and desert with an occasional cheetah or jackal). But the flower-eaters island wasn’t like that. It was full of green, and lakes and rivers, and beautiful, bulbous blue flowers that grew everywhere like dandelions. They covered the rocks like foam, and rippled like laughter at the base of the swaying trees. Pale, child’s eye blue floated over the island, and the petals tasted sweet, like spun sugar, their fuzzy texture melting on the tongue. And the men ate the flowers, and they were always happy, and serene, and they could let the water pass through them. Through the flowers shining and dancing, through the skein of cerulean and silver-white, they thought their land was the best and the most wonderful, and no one wanted to leave. Their tall ships against the bleeding sunset seemed ugly, monstrous skeletons, which had once seemed so graceful and sleek. Happiness forever seemed to hang like a jeweled necklace in the air, the promise of an eternity without intellectualized discontented winters.

  And you know, the people here remind me of that a little. There is a thought that inhabits many of us, not quite generated of our own brains, that this is the best of all possible worlds. Sand and water alone somehow constitute paradise, and to be unhappy here is sacrilegious. To think this ocean different from the others and too warm. Everyone eats the flowers and never wants to leave. And I am a soldier-sailor, I want to go home, if my ship would steer that way, home from the Crusades through the musky domes of Los Angeles, the myrrh-scented incense of San Diego. The rain beads on cafe tabletops like tears, and gold-plated hooves stamp on sanctified alleyways, the smell of palm-wind and cinnamon weaving the air. I would walk these roads, if I could, where everything is gold, threads of light leading away from you, towards release and illumination. Beyond them lies destiny as I would craft it, in the mountains and rivers I have never seen. A hermitage of the crags and meadows, devouring time.

  Here, in these strange lands that lie on the homeward route from broken Constantinople, through the Red Sea and Santa Monica, gold dust covers my toes in a fine mist, it is spun out clear and pure, translucent in the windowpanes, beaten into coronas around the heads of dark-eyed women—alive? Dead?—with their bundles of rushes and blue-flowered rosemary, cobbled onto the rooftops that spread out in an infinite line, like the sea. The sun turns cities into novae.

  In a thick stream, gold is drunk in coffee-shops and eaten in musky theatres. I would pull this curtain of light over my body and hide from you forever. I can see its sheen billowing behind me like a sail, making me invisible, bearing me home in a wash of sun. This, that is Holy Land, drowns in its beauty and golden lights, until there is nothing but the light, covering everything, swallowing the body and smoothing the universe into a long, gold altar cloth.

  But I don’t want to eat the lily; I remember what happened to Eve. Never eat the fruit another offers you. Because then I will forget what fire and darkness are. I will forget my wounds, my blood, and without my scars and sacrifice, what am I? What am I without my pain? What if I did not storm and weep and rail at the sky, if I did not leap with madness or rapture, did not pound my fists against anything? What if I did not resist? Would I know myself? Would anyone? What if I were a simple man, kind and true, full of unadulterated light, walking the earth only outside my own door, not wandering like a nomad on a bedraggled camel? What if I were not driven to do these things? What if I were not filled with desire and expansiveness? Would I be anything? Am I anything without my drive to see, to experience, to devour?

  What if I never despaired, never doubted, never considered the ravening advance of time, never thought of death? What if I merely yielded to you? I would not know myself, would not recognize my own sinews. The flame that keeps my flesh crackling with light, if for a moment it were calmed and turned civilized, I would cease to be. I, the thing that is I, would vanish. If I did not resist you, did not clamor against you, did not open my throat to swallow everything, as though to ingest some power to allow me to keep out the tympani of your call.

  Can you see this? Or is the bear pacing within you, the creature that yearns only for the right question to be asked to release you? Is he deaf to all other questions save that One? But last night I was the lily, and I was content, and forgot.

  Last night I was a silver trumpet, and I roared out the beauty of caves for you to hear. The goblet of my metal rim gleamed in dim, smoky light. My voice was crimson and it sparked like a blacksmith’s forge. I thought of you, because of your silence, because of our oppositeness. It was good to be loud and colorful at last. I have felt so much gray and amorphous lately. But to dispel that ashen self, someone had to find me, and polish me, flick my keys with their fingers to test me out, and force air and sound out of my throat. Someone’s lips wrapped around me, forcing me to sing, pushing a wash of color out of me. It leaves me pale and shaking, but scoured clean. I have made something beautiful, and it is enough. I wonder if I will always need someone else to make me useful? How used to lying in a cedar box in an attic have I become, someone’s once-beloved instrument, a glimmer of metal with a corona, like a Byzantine Madonna? Someone once ran their fingers along me, almost faint with desire, the music in him rushing to bloom into the world. I once carried a universe of possibility. Before potentiality sharpened to a fine edge.

  Attics are soft and warm, they do not require my loudness or my weeping notes, they require only my inactivity, so that they can settle dust over me like a lover’s hand. How comforting that once was. But it is only like a lover’s hand, it is not. Softness and gold half-light sing the mind to darkness. And this place, the woven gold of the California desert, is an attic that wraps you in warmth like a chain. It is good to be quiet and think, but it does not quite satisfy the belly. And to be this brazen thing, to make something red, something else must supply the air, or I am silent. You understand, of course. You, too, require another to complete you. Your purpose is unfulfilled by solitude. Alone you are an old man sitting on the pier, drinking bourbon and feeding seagulls. Alone, passing teenagers toss a thoughtless coin into your gray felt hat, half-smile in pity and leave you in the dust of their red leather high heels. But this is not you at all, you are a King and it is the quest that makes you the King-Who-Waits. It is at your feet the salamander sits, showing his glinting emerald loyalty. But sometimes I smell your cigarettes from far away.

  I thought of that last night, as my trumpet-voice drank the smoke of cigarettes from quietly disintegrating club-goers, and moved through a woman’s hair with such softness, such an ache, taking a black strand of it tenderly from her mouth. I wanted to show you this thing, this thing that you sacrificed. You desire only the one who finds without seeking, how can I tell you what her hair felt like? How can I give you the serpentlyric I cried out over her dark head?

  You stand at the center of all human paths, but you know nothing of us, of me, who you call to yourself like a child, of the woman I touched, how beautiful she was. You don’t know what it is to want, except the one who can find your temple in the forest that is not of trees.

  I wish I were that one, that I were innocent enough, and patient enough, and that my hands did not bleed so.

  I am not your one.

  You play the harp, and your notes are silver and slinkingly soft, all glissando. You call me with this wind harp, call me to the dust
of the pilgrimage path through California desert instead of Byzantium. You call me to the rim of crusader’s footprints. But last night, at least, I was the trumpet, and not the kind that is mournful and low. The kind that deafens the harp.

  I can’t help that I am too loud. My voice would break the glass of your trees. I am all fortissimo, and I can’t change the need for that thumping clamor beating at the ears. I can’t always be the water and the silence that you inhabit in tortoiselight forever. I’m so sorry, because I want to know, I want to walk where you have passed, and I want to see the chalice shining through the tree-shadows. But you can’t make me into a crusader. This is not my quest, not my question, not my life, not my desire. Not my fault.

  Last night I was a hummingbird, and it was a thoughtless jewel of green and pink, existing in between dewmeals. I tasted the thick orange-red lips of bougainvillea like dusky honey, and the jacaranda flowers like pale cold wine. There is so much desert in California, I seize like one starved upon the beauty of a few bright things alive in the dark. It occurs to me that when I write to you of my night metamorphoses, I always tell you about drinking. Perhaps because I associate you with water, and rivers, and seas and rain. My father was afraid of the water, he ran from it, all the way to the desert. But to me, you are the king of waterpaths, and I think of that all the stories I tell you, you most like to hear about the liquids I encounter. It is why you found me in California, where the sea walks in my skin. It is how I commune with you, when I drink the lakewater, and feel the damp sky on my skin. When I am immersed in the water of your mind, I feel as though I have not disappointed you, and I am with you in the night.

  Because I have disappointed you, haven’t I? You wait and wait, silently watching the lake ripple in blackbirdlight, and you expect that any moment I will appear out of the shadows, cloaked in white light as you always knew I would be, and rest my head on your silver knee.

  I prefer my little lives to your uninterrupted living. Last night I flittered down the street that leads west to the Pacific, I reveled in the syntheticness of the streetlights which in the movies always glimmer like tiny moons, pure and perfect. But in the world outside Casablanca, they are orange-yellow, and insects thrum around them in a corona. I could have eaten a few, when they are in the light like that, they act like opium-eaters, swaying on a wind sweet only to them. But I was not (could not be) wholly hummingbird, and mosquitoes taste like bad vodka. You live in a mythical Morocco, you wrap yourself in the sea and white streetlamps. I feel their radiant falseness on my wings.

  Sometimes I hate you. Your silence claws my throat, your own private knife under my ribs. You know I will come to you, even when I run and fly with shutterblink wings to escape you. You know, and I hate that smugness, even though you are incapable of such a selfish thing as smugness.

  Or is it only that I want to see you without human faults? Perhaps if you are not human it will be easier for me to submit to you in the end. Then I will have had no choice, it will not be from failure of will that I yielded.

  They call you a King. The Fisher King. And if you are a King, a monarch with absolute power, not a gentle sort of steward, then it won’t be my fault that I couldn’t refuse to come, bearing the sun to you in my arms. It is who I am, what I was made for, for pain and the quest. If I deny it I will be driven below the waves by the weight of that denial of purpose. Is this how others will see me when all this struggle is over? Do I need you to be beautiful and sage, the father when he is still worshipped by his cherubic child? Will they need me to be perfect for them? Will they need my purity like I need yours? My inhumanity? Galahad the White, the Pure? Will a river of light be emblazoned on my shield, will that be my symbol?

  But I know I am not capable of your silence, I don’t want any part of this wide-gaping fate. I want to be a hummingbird, to be thoughtlessly dazzling, an aviary seraphim without the burden of paradise.

  I want to be wordless.

  Instead I overflow with words, offering them to you like sacrificial bulls, and if the blood runs red enough over the garlands of jacaranda, will you, Jupiter-like, release me from this?

  Last night I was a salmon. Salmon go home. They have such a powerful drive towards the little stream of algaelight that threw them forth. It calls and calls them, a siren cry that promises life and death and sex all in one. You understand, of course.

  You call like that, too.

  Salmon are silver-rose scaled, and their eyes are pupilless and strange. This is what I was, but it was winter, and the spawning season waited on the turn of equinoxes. The sea slid through me like mercury. I swam thoughtless with thick ranks of silver-rose fish, and I was not separate from them, but they were my brothers and sisters and we were one liquid arrow of movement.

  Let me tell you a longer story. You know it already, of course. A woman told me this story in a tarot-reader’s shop in San Francisco, as she shuffled her cards with hands like a hawthorne tree. And I think that she knew from the lines on my palm that I would meet you when I grew up, because now I know this story is about you.

  Once there was a boy, and he was very bright, the most promising child in his village. His hair and his eyes and his skin were all gold, so that he looked like a young lion. His father was very proud of him, and smiled when he saw how strong and clever his son had grown. But he worried that since everything came so easily to this boy, that he would never be the kind of man to lead the clan. So one day when the boy was fourteen years old, lean and strong and skilled with his fishing-spear, his father took him away from the village, to the edge of the forest, and told him:

  “My son, I am very proud of you. You have become the strongest and cleverest of your brothers. The women in our village look at you with willing eyes. But though you are as tall as I am, you are not yet a man, and I fear that you will always be clever, but never wise. So you will go into the forest for seven days, and you will not take your fishing-spear. You will not take your hunting-knife. You will not take your water-skin. You will go away from the clan and seek the manhood you have not discovered in your father’s house.”

  The boy was afraid, for he had never been away from the village without his father or one of his red-haired brothers. But he knew that he should not show his father his fear, and turned silently to go into the forest. But his father called after him:

  “Wait, my child. Like all warriors who go into the wild, you must have a geas put upon you, a thing forbidden. Listen carefully, for if you break your geas, you will never lead the clan. Whatever you catch to eat, whether it be rabbit-flesh, or mouse-haunch, or fish from the river, you must roast it over a fire, and not touch it, or eat of it, until it has been scorched black. This is the way of your geas. Come back to me with your belly full of this scorched flesh, and you will be a man, and not merely a clever boy.”

  So the boy went into the forest, and he found it full of voices, the voices of trees, and streams, and the earth covered in dry leaves. For three days he could not catch a rabbit, or a mouse, or any fish, since he had not taken knife or spear. On the fourth day his belly ate at his spine, and he walked into the cold and racing river to catch fish the way he had seen the old men of his clan do to impress the boys, with their own hands and no spear. He walked into the river until it licked at his waist, and he shivered, peering into the swift water for a glimpse of silver fish.

  Three times he saw a fat salmon, and three times he plunged his thin hands into the water and felt the slick animal escape. He began to cry in frustration, even though he knew it was not strong or clever to cry, and his father would be ashamed. Night was coming, and he was certain that he would never have to worry about eating foul-tasting scorched meat, because he would never be a man, because he could not catch anything.

  As the shadows grew long over the water, he saw another fish, but this one was thin and small, hardly the length of his hand. Once again he pushed his hands into the icy river, and this time he felt the fish firm in his grip, and he drew it out with a whoop of triumph w
hich the oak trees heard with satisfaction. The boy made a fire to roast his victory, and soon the salmon was blistering away in the red-gold flames. The boy thought how proud his father would be, and how his broad-chested brothers would clap him on the shoulder and tease him over the size of his catch. The smell of the fish was rich and sweet, and it was beginning to blacken.

  But the boy was a boy, and very hungry. He looked at the fish, which was not at all scorched yet, and with the eyes of hunger thought it to be quite black enough for him to have a little bite. He put his fingers into the fire to tear off a piece of fish, but the flames burned his thumb and forefinger, and he put them to his mouth to ease the pain.

  And then the boy saw why he had been forbidden to do this. For some of the oil of the fish was on him, and when he tasted it he knew in a torrent all the things in the universe, and he understood the voices of the trees, and the river, and the earth covered with dry leaves. He knew the thoughts of his father and his mother and his red-haired brothers. He knew all the things that were and would be, and he knew that he could not now lead the clan.

  So the boy went deeper into the forest, further than any of his clan had been. And he was mad for a long time, with these things scorching his mind. But one day the madness passed over him, and he was a pool of standing water with the moon on his back, and he stayed in the forest, finding his fate in the deep-within places.