My eyes roll closed in shame.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” continues Tree impassively, “but I know what’s going on with Lillian, and she needs to remain exactly where she is. What can I do to help you?”
I resist my body’s urge to draw in, to curl forward and swallow its own tail, to disappear in the face of this unbearable love. The last time I attended classes, I was overwhelmed by it. I’d never seen it before. Never felt it. Now I was threading bewildered through it, clipboard and water bottle in hand, stairwells swarming, face after face exploding with HULLO, HOW AHHH YOU, WHAT ZAHHHP and MAHNSUHH-HHHH, so lost in it, spun around in it, so painfully naked and womb-wrapped in it, no longer apart but a part somehow, and how now to harbor this private sorrow, this…
Annihilation.
The last time I found myself roiling within that slow-mo sea of white-over-blues, their eyeglasses crooked, tits too small and sideburns that won’t grow, all of them utterly futureless and every last one of them too fucking stupid to not love, I found myself half-buckled over, groping for an exit, a source of air, a means to behold something anything but this lingering simpering image of someone somewhere helplessly transfigured.
I’d feared that losing Ana’s love would kill me.
Losing love doesn’t kill you. Receiving love kills you.
The sirens have stopped. I hear shouts. Tree is no longer here. I am alone, curled on the mattress, cradling my shriveled and too-naked arm. It’s another incoming wave. I try to dig deeper into the mattress. I think I know something, and I’ll tell you what it is. Either we die completely each moment, or we live a slow death while someone somewhere else carries the note. Maybe Tree’s right. Maybe they summoned us here. The poker-playing fuck-tragic juvenile delinquents of this country. The fifth-floor boys with the biceps and the stare. The going-nowhere girls asleep on their own forearms. This whole doomed generation of too many, too little, too late, too yellow, too bad. A half-billion voices raised in clueless silence, and no one listening.
The metal door opens and slams. Busy footsteps disappear into the kitchen. Boisterous sounds. Lots of clanging. “Suzanne” returns, its background singers caked in mascara, their little puffs of song naively hoping to convince us that they occupy the same time-space continuum as the grave, dark man-whisper they attempt to ornament. Now comes the preposterous and defining stroke, the splaying of Brer Yeshua, not between two thieves but between two verses concerning a crazy rag-picker, hitting the same anomaly at a different octave and birthing a vision that towers even as it sags in surrender. Whispered into the right brain are weird yet instantly recognizable evolutionary code. Rabbi, rabble-rouser, messiah, martyr. We slip these garments over his head time and again, only to discover that he’s escaped through the arm hole and wandered again, barefoot and breathing, into the subcontinent to dream worlds into existence where phantasmagoric creatures rut in moonlit meadows and thirsty scrolls open themselves like the soft hands of a child, stealing into the municipal limits by night to send his snakes into our hearts, destroying our families’ hopes for us, sewing shut our futures with cotton twine and a thorn. He plummets so deep that he comes out the other side where all is reversed and his face Issis’s, his body Gaia’s, his thoughts Sophia’s, and all else, all else, the singularity he must now and forever cling to.
Trembling.
I’d give anything for two hours of sleep.
In the end, the patient little mushrooms ate his perfect body—but not before he had tasted theirs. Did I say that out loud? All of this is what you are. All of this, too-yellow children, is what you are.
“Julian.”
My eyes are so dry they make a grinding sound as they open. Tree is half-sitting in the settee chair. “How do you feel, baby?” she asks. I whisper that I feel a little weak, and she nods.
“I’m making a big vegetable soup,” says Tree. “And there’s a bowl of fruit on the counter. May I slice some up for you now?”
I gaze at her blankly.
“May I slice some up for you now?” says Tree.
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
“Because the moon,” I whisper.
“Julian. Look at me. Why won’t you eat something?”
“I don’t know. Something’s turned wrong, Tree. Something is incomplete.”
My voice quavered when I said that.
Tree’s brown eyes confer with mine for a moment and then another moment. Now she looks away. “I’m not cleaning this place up for you. You’re going to get up and do it yourself. The way you’re going to get up and do it yourself is by eating the fruit I slice up and then eating a little of that soup. And then you’re going to take a hot shower and get a good night’s sleep.”
The soft brown eyes return to my face. “I flushed those mushrooms down the toilet. And if you so much as look at another package of that ma huang… It’s Saturday. You’re teaching Monday morning. In clean clothes. I’ll think of something to say to your—”
Tree pauses and closes her eyes. “Somebody’s probing us,” she says. “Do you feel it?”
I blink.
“How long since you’ve cleared and sealed this space?” asks Tree.
“I haven’t, umm, exactly…”
“No wonder you can’t sleep,” she says, using her arms to push herself up from the chair.
Moving slowly, scanning with the palms of her hands, Tree picks her way through the debris-strewn room, pausing here and there to draw symbols in the air with her fingers, chanting words I can’t quite hear. Now she claps her hands three times and spreads her arms. “Lord God,” she whispers.
“What?”
Tree doesn’t answer. Too exhausted to follow the thread any farther, I let my eyelids fall.
“Lord God,” mutters Tree, but he’s no longer listening. Another wave has come raging in, opening beneath him a space through which he tumbles, spiraling down like a dry leaf, brittle and succumbing. He is a single point of awareness in a vast, cold space, surrounded by silent satellites that orbit obediently, each rotating slowly as it draws near. He sees that the surrounding satellites are rectangular boxes, each bearing a naked woman posed artfully, each curve illuminated by a sunless light. He focuses on one woman, her face freckled and familiar, her silent lips accusing.
I know her. She is a tight rosebud of sixteen. First love. First offense. She is cold and vanishingly thin as though methodically starved, her two brown irises enormous, wan and unfocused. Unwilling to gaze at her a moment longer, I look away only to discover another face I know too well, another young woman. And another. Is it possible that every woman of my tragic and loveless love life circles yet, perishes yet in these interstellar depths, their eyes bearing the same injury that long ago should have dried and hardened? Trying once more to turn away, I discover that I am surrounded by not one circle of satellites, but countless concentric circles of rotating boxes displaying cold and undernourished women, each orbiting as though around a sightless sun. Weakly I strain to see the farthest circle, but they reach to infinity and beyond, the numberless women, the innumerable generations, all spinning pointlessly in the cold vacuum of periodic lust and undying indifference.
I want to pull in, to swallow my own tail. I am no sun, no source of light nor warmth but only a singularity of self, sucking what remains of each bone, each woman in turn, sucking their still humid marrow until there is none. I want to turn away but there is no direction of escape. I try to close my eyes but they are already closed. I try to open them but they are already open. Again in front of me is the same freckled face, first love, first offense. Helpless, I watch her features morph into those of the girlfriend who shortly replaced her. Now she is the college coed who sold her Volkswagen to pay for an abortion. Now she is my first wife. Then my first lover on the side. My second lover on the side. Third. I long to turn away, but the two eyes hold me in place as they change their color and shape again and yet again, fragile faces forming and re-forming until
I no longer know whom I look upon and whom I do not. And now I know that it doesn’t matter.
The same blood pulses through each one.
Suddenly I am startled to encounter the face of my own mother as a young woman, her cheeks high and firm, her green eyes bright with promise. Those eyes arrest me. They ask me whether they are different from the eyes of all the others. As quickly as the question registers, the features surrounding the emerald eyes morph until I am looking into the face of my sister, astonished at her beauty. Now one of the eyes changes, and my breath stops. Glistening before me are blue and green irises I know quite well.
Her lips begin to move.
“We are each the same woman, Julian. Each a failed mother. A failed sister. A failed lover. Each a pair of hands that have touched you with imperfect love. Each a beating heart that came close enough for you to feel and to hold and to harm. And we’re more than that. We are no mere extensions of your want.”
Ana’s gaze holds mine for a long, punishing moment. Gradually the colors of her irises darken to two pools of gold-spattered umber, and it is Shatrina Carter’s face that looms before mine. “Say this after me,” she says. “I call upon the Masters of Light…”
I struggle to understand.
“I call upon the Masters of Light… ,” she repeats.
“Tree?” I say, voice trembling.
“Do it,” she says.
“I can’t, Tree.”
Her hand touches mine. “I call upon the Masters of Light… ,” she says softly.
My eyes roll closed in surrender. “I call upon the Masters of Light…”
“And Archangels Michael and Gabriel,” Tree continues, and my voice trails childishly behind, “to assist in clearing away now and forevermore any and all alliances contracts and agreements, accords unions and fraternities, bonds links and attachments, that do not serve my highest good. These I do hereby negate cancel and rescind, dispatch destroy and disambiguate, in all times places dimensions and universes. I hereby release unto their truest destinies all whom I have enslaved usurped or detained, affronted offended foisted or forgotten. With deepest humility and thanks, I send any and all, each and every, to their warmest and safest harbors of rest regeneration and refuge, all praise Aphrodite Almighty, be it hereby and forevermore so.”
“. . . hereby and forevermore so,” I warble.
Tree’s gaze pierces me.
“I heard you say something about the beloved Master Yeshua Ben Joseph,” she says firmly. “Now I’m going to tell you something. There was a gap between the Father and the Son. Yeshua felt this gap, and it hurt his soul very deeply. He knew that he must refuse to be either Father or Son as long as either came at the expense of the other. So Yeshua went into the desert. It took him forty terrible days and nights, but he found an answer. He was the answer. He became the principle of unification, the third element that mediated Father and Son. He became something that had never been because someone had to do it, and once he knew that, it became his responsibility.”
Tree doesn’t blink.
“Yeshua became the Holy Spirit because someone had to. Someone had to bring in the solution, and that’s why you and I are here, Julian. That’s why we have gone to all this trouble. It’s why I have agreed to be this—ridiculous creature. It’s why you have agreed to occupy this terrible moment of trial.”
Tree looks away. When her eyes return, they are soft with pity. “Jules? Are you hearing me? Are you taking any of this in?”
I nod weakly.
“There’s a lot I could tell you about what Mr. Xu and I learned up on that mountain,” she says. “A lot, Julian. You aren’t ready.”
I watch Tree pull herself erect.
“You know what Xu means?” she asks. “It means allow. That’s Taoism and that’s Mr. Xu. The fruit’s in the fridge inside a plastic bowl. Listen, I don’t know who you made mad, but there was some very strange energy up inside this place tonight. I kept seeing the image of a minotaur with a woman’s body. You know anything about a female minotaur?”
Someone shakes his head.
“I did what I could. I left a little stone in each corner of the room. Don’t move them. They’re holding the shield in place. Now…”
She gazes at me tenderly. “May I bring you your medication?”
“I threw it away.”
Her gaze doesn’t flicker. “You threw it away.”
After a moment, Tree sighs. “I have to trust that you know what you’re doing, Julian. That’s all anyone can do now. You’re in the birth canal. What happens now, happens. God bless you and God bless you. And may God bless you.”
Tree limps slightly as she walks to pick up her purse. “Eat something and go to bed.”
“I love you, Tree.”
She turns to look at me, surprised.
I watch her open the American Teacher’s Door. The scent of rain enters the room. “And do something about this mess.”
The door closes behind Shatrina Carter. I am alone with what must be done.
With a mighty effort, I reach up to the settee table and take hold of the honey jar. Falling back against Lil’s folded pillow to catch my breath, I wonder if Tree was really here. I no longer smell the rain. Returning my attention to the jar, I remove its lid and look inside. The earthy scent of chrysanthemum honey fills my nostrils. The jar is almost empty, but enough honey remains to gloss the obscene ochre edges of one very large and very menacing mushroom.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
How does anyone sleep?
There’s too much within a single heartbeat. Especially very late at night when the glass shards of the past are making inroads in the entrails, and unfinished affairs are spinning and spitting hell-heat. How do you put an end to anything, ever? Instead we layer something else over the top, new lovers over old until their accusations are muffled then no longer heard. Until.
One very still night.
How long has the plastic jar lain open in my hands? I can no longer tell whether the nasal whiskey-edged tenor still seethes here or it is I who populates the air with this dread, this spider-bristling presence, this multi-ratcheted overlay of unstill ghosts and unmourned ills. Mancer’s little penance pills.
Licking the last of the honey off my trembling fingers, I await the assault of the insinuating filaments. Let them come. Even one more day in this old skin is unthinkable. Should the sun touch it again, it will wither and explode into dust with the first breeze, revealing the horror now freefalling into this moldering pillow, this filthy mattress, this moment stolen from a rumored life, a body borrowed from the wrong constellation, the distance between two non-existent points where no one can possibly remain. There is only obliteration now. That and its frail, thin shadow.
Again he hears sirens, more insistent this time. If only he could surrender into death’s warm lap, disappear into the folds of forgetting’s final ferment. But he knows that no prisoners will be taken tonight.
Someone begins to sing his sorrow. No one hears. Suddenly it is he crouching shivering, clinging to a rotating box, spinning pointlessly through cold emptiness. Cruelly placed lights illuminate his sagging flesh, his vast white shame, and he wants to curl forward, to swallow his own tail, to scuttle beneath the fridge—but here is only punishing brightness, painful inquiry, injurious reply.
Did you think you could get rid of me so easily?
It is his mother’s cracked voice. Before him lies her withered form. A crone curled like a toenail clipping on a faraway hospital bed, eyes closed never to reopen. Yet she is. Why am I standing here? Panting in the kitchen. Gazing into the refrigerator. A plastic container melting dripping plastic down onto the lid of the pan of soup below, my own mouth melting, drooling, my very teeth falling two and three at a time onto the prim tile floor. Outside, the sound of breaking glass. I lean to look through the window at the improbable reality next door. Its rhythmical balconies. Their edges precise. Its eerily mustard streetlight munge. Green smoke is belching. Shirtless men ar
e pointing. It’s senseless. Monstrous. Two men scamper across a rooftop, bent at the waist as though chasing a small animal.
Unable to bear it another moment, he stumbles back to his mattress, throws himself beneath the covers, prays for unconsciousness, begs for clemency, applies for an easy death, but the mattress itself writhes beneath him, becoming the warm skin of some awakening animal who tenses, rears, bucks and turns its head to glower, its two horns threatening, the nostrils snorting smoke and flame, the dark unmatching eyes staring, the hot musculature arching, the naked skin glowing. She is severe. Magnificent. Not to be trifled with. The massive head withdraws, cants and then attacks, goring his tender bowels. A flick of her head and he is launched spinning into the great nothing. Off he tumbles, clawing, kaleidoscope wheeling, bits of glass grinding, hallway of mirrors opening, no image appearing. We see. These two words emerge in the foreground of his awareness as though someone has spoken. No one has spoken.
Gradually, fearfully, my eyes open. I am a single point of awareness at the center of a vast room composed entirely of thousands of unblinking eyes, each one alive and moist and self-adjusting. Irises of every shape and color. Of every description. Too much scrutiny. Too much light. I don’t wish to be here. The thought registers in every eye present, and each shifts minutely in response, absorbing every nuance of my silent utterance without judgment.
We see, is the consensus reply.
A knowing appears at my center, self-elaborating until it is a cogent thought understood an instant before it arrives: Into this place come those who wish to see what is seen.
So overpowering is the obvious, the numinous, that my resistance burns itself away the instant it appears.
The thought continues: You too are welcome to see what is seen, to share what is shared, to fear what is feared, to know what is known. Only this. For consciousness comes here to know itself.
I am helpless before this truth. Consciousness does come here to know itself. At this, a shudder begins but is as quickly gone. My protest belongs in some other place. I am focused inside a flame that burns at the center of itself. In another moment, everything that I know as me will flash into flame and be gone before it can possibly begin.
The Year of the Hydra Page 38
