The lips purse convulsively, making a squelching noise that puts you in mind of someone worrying at a sliver of meat stuck between their teeth. The mouth opens and an immense human tongue lolls forth, expelling the mass of bloody tissue, bone, and hair that rested upon its tip. This lands with a soggy thump and is, most assuredly, no metaphor. The pulped organs and macerated bone shards, they’re Abi’s remains. You recognize them by the orange streaks in her matted hair. Something breaks in you, and you run through the kitchen, out the back door, expecting God to swallow you and spit up your bones…but you don’t care. If extinction’s what it takes to wipe that image from your brain, let it come.
The cloudy sky is ancient water-damaged wallboard, the motionless firs are stage props, the dim rush of the freeway is a sound effect. It closely resembles the world you once knew, but now you’ve seen what lies behind it, you know it was never what it seemed. The black chow mix in the yard next door is going insane, barking and hurling itself to the end of its chain. You move to the opposite side of the house and sit, resting your head on your knees. Grief sets in. Or maybe grief comes later, and this is merely shock. You welcome it, whatever its name. You seek refuge in tears, in the hot weight lodged in your chest, the absence in your skull. You still can’t believe what’s happened and these physical proofs of loss are all you have to rely on. Abi warned you not to interfere and you fucked up, you blundered, you bungled her to death. Grief and guilt mixed together are too much to bear. Shivering from the cold, you get to your feet and walk stiffly to the kitchen door. You can’t bring yourself to go inside and that’s when the problem of what to do next surfaces from the moil of your thoughts. Call the police. Run away. Join a monastic order and devote yourself to good works. Off yourself. That’s tempting, but you’re not that kind of coward. Not yet. The chow takes up barking again, like barking is its fucking religion, and that drives you back inside.
The phone’s ringing.
Could be it’s your mom forgetting again what time it is in Seattle, or your neighbor calling to complain about how you upset his dog, or a friend who knows you wake up early. Whichever, it offers you temporary relief from being alone. You pick up the kitchen extension and say hello.
“Is Abi there?” The inimitable voice of Mauve, the pixie from Oberlin.
“No.”
There follows a silence that she apparently doesn’t intend to fill.
“Abi’s…” you begin, but can’t finish.
“Yes? Is she all right?”
Your voice catches. “Not really.”
“What happened?”
Picking up the phone, you think, wasn’t such a great idea. “I don’t know you.”
“Goddamn it! Tell me what happened!”
Hearing her curse is like hearing Tweety Bird getting salty with Sylvester—it’s almost funny.
“Who are you?” you ask.
“Is Abi dead?”
It’s a question you can’t resist. “Yes.”
A pause, and then: “Tell me what happened.”
You glance up to the ceiling and, as if that flat white surface were a poignant reminder of Abi, or just by lifting your head you disturbed a frail emotional balance, you burst into tears.
“Do you know how many people died tonight?” Mauve asks. “Nobody gives a fuck how bad you feel. If you cared about her, tell me what happened. It’s the only thing you can do for her now.”
Haltingly, you tell her, you hold nothing back, and when you’re done, in her teensy voice, like a diminutive hanging judge, she says, “She should have paralyzed you.”
“I wish she had.” Then, thinking about what Mauve said, you ask, “Why didn’t she?”
“Because she loved you, because she doesn’t like hurting people. Fucking jerk!” A second later she says, “I’m sorry. You don’t deserve that. It’s not your fault.”
You don’t want to deny that.
“I have a…” Mauve begins, but you break in: “You said some people died tonight. How many?”
“A lot.”
“How many of them did I kill?”
“Don’t concern yourself with that. What you need to do now…”
You laugh. “Don’t concern myself?”
“You haven’t got time for guilt. Bottom’s got your scent now. It’ll find you again, you can count on it.”
Bottom, you say to yourself. Bottom dweller? Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom? Then you recall the sheet of paper that fell out of Sessions’s book. “What the hell is Bottom?”
After a second, she says, “The Bottom. Didn’t Abi explain it to you?”
“No. What is it?”
“Jesus.” After a pause she says, “You totally need protection. I want you to take the next plane you can catch to Cleveland.”
The next plane. For a moment you’re thinking astral plane, plane of existence.
“Call me after you’ve got a flight, and I’ll meet it,” Mauve says. “You have my number?”
You check caller ID. “Yeah.”
“Get out of the house now. Don’t pack. Don’t…”
“What about Abi…her body?”
“You don’t have time to worry about her. Just get out. You’re not going to be safe ’til you’re here.”
“You can protect me?”
“Yes.”
You’ve been flipping back and forth between despair and mild hysteria, but her saying this jams you up into full-blown hysteria. “Excuse me,” you say. “But it looks to me like you’re seriously fucking up here. There’s these guys with twisted spines, people are getting swallowed and spat out. It’s like you’re playing things by ear, you know? That didn’t work. Let’s try this. Oops! Lost her! Well, you better come to Oberlin and we’ll see what happens. How can you protect me when you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing?”
“Okay,” Mauve says. “You have to keep it together or you’re not going to make it. This is not something we trained for, you understand? We didn’t study it in college. We found out something was happening that no one else noticed and there wasn’t time to educate the public. No time to build a consensus. Got it? We were just suddenly in the middle of the shit. We’ve had to learn on the job.”
“What’s the Bottom?” you ask again. “Are you talking about God?”
“If you don’t leave soon, you’re going to find out. I’ll explain when you get here. I can protect you. I may not always be able to, but I can protect you for a while.”
“Why? Why would you?”
“Because Abi would want me to. And because you’ve become a resource. I need another partner and you’ve been prepared…at least to an extent.”
The implication is that she intends to perform the ritual with you, or a similar ritual, and you tell her that you’re not interested in having sex with her.
“I’m not going to be your lover,” she says. “Don’t worry about that. Look at it as a job. An awful duty that might keep you alive.”
“So I’m supposed to come to Oberlin and what? Let you paralyze me?”
Angry, Mauve says, “I see why Abi didn’t tell you much—she’d have been explaining herself all the time. If you can put aside your skepticism, I won’t paralyze you. But if it needs to be done, you bet your ass I’ll do it. You’ll be taken care of, but you’re not going to be walking for a while.”
“How did your partner die?”
Silence.
“You had a partner, right? And something happened to him?” You wait for Mauve to comment and, when she does not, when all you hear from the receiver is silence, you ask, “Was it your fault or mine?”
“I’m done,” she says crisply. “You have a choice. Get out of the house or die. Catch a plane, don’t catch a plane. Absolutely up to you. I don’t really care. Give me a call if you’re coming.”
The bus to the airport is about a third full. At first you sit in the back, far away from everyone, but then you think that if anything happens, if the freeway, for instance, bursts asunder and
a giant claw thrusts up from the Bottom to snag the bus, you wouldn’t stand a chance; so you move up to a seat with a window that pops out. Wearily, you rest your head against it. Transmitted through the glass, the sound of the tires on asphalt is amplified into a whiney high-pitched insect choir—like Alvin and the Chipmunks on helium—chanting Abi Abimagique, Abi Abimagique, Abi Abimagique, over and over. You don’t need your loss pounded home and you sit up. It’s funny, albeit not funny ha-ha, that you’re off to Oberlin to hook up with a woman who sounds like no less a ball-buster than Abi, off into the same mystery, the same basic relationship, because you don’t think Abi loved you, not in the way you loved her. And yet no matter how firm Mauve’s expression to the contrary, the Tantra involves emotion. You and Mauve will have to arrive at some emotional accord, no matter how impossible that seems at the moment. Unless she’s bringing you to Oberlin for the purpose of revenge, to wreck your health and torment you as payback for the people who died, one probably being her partner…you hate that word in context of relationships. It’s no less redolent of inequality than wife or indentured servant; it merely omits the modifier. Managing partner, junior or senior partner, sex partner, and so on. It makes juiceless and dry the concept of a life together, and it presents the idea that handing over your heart to another animal for safekeeping involves a rational decision.
Those thoughts, irrelevant as they are, provide a short vacation from even bleaker thoughts—when you return from it, you find your head’s in awful shape, full of tears, recriminations, regrets, and you rest it on the window glass again, preferring insect choirs commemorating your dead girlfriend to the alternative. The rhythm’s changed ever so slightly:
…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…
you kind of get into it, singing drowsily along under your breath, and that starts you thinking how she was when she wasn’t all deranged about the cause, she could be so damn funny—she had this dry sense of humor you often mistook for insult and you didn’t understand until later how clever what she said really was
…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique…
that time in the lab when you made love by the light of the Bunsen burners, she wandered about afterward in the dark, materializing as she passed by the flames like a voluptuous spook
…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi…
you’re not sure you want to fly to Cleveland, because what if it’s a trap, what if it’s all the Bottom now, what if God now owns everything except this one scrap of protoplasm, you, and the rest has been swallowed up and spat out and reconstituted as evil
…Abimagique Abi Abi…
you don’t know anything, you have never known anything, and the chances are you never will, because here you are running off to meet this Stevie Nicks sound-alike who promises she’ll explain everything later, who likely wears gypsy skirts and plays a mean tambourine, stands four feet eleven and fucks like a champ, a woman to whom you’ll be no more than a dick, a launching pad
…Abimagique Abi Abi…
fuck it, you’ve had it with all the mystic claptrap, all the you-cannot-hope-to-understand-it-until-you-experience-it bullshit
…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…
you’re glad the bus is close to the exit that leads onto Airport Drive, it runs for miles past hotels shitty burger joints topless bars and if you decide you don’t want to know how it ends, you can tell the driver to let you out anywhere
…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi…
but who’re you kidding, you’re hooked through the gills, you’ll fly to Oberlin, you’ll have Mauve or, should you say, she’ll once have you, because that’s the only way you’ll find out what happened and is happening, and even if what you find out is bad, painful, the end, well, at least you’ll understand the reason why you went through all you did with
…Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…
you do know one thing, though it’s certainly nothing cosmic—she’s already unraveling in your memory, and part of the pain you feel comes from trying to hang on to her reality, and you’ll keep trying to hang on until the pain is all you have left of her
…Abimagique Abi…
there should be permanent memorials in the mind, shrines with candles, enormous tombs stuffed with tastes and sights, cenotaphs and gigantic statuary, and not just these gauzy tatters of memory
…Abi Abimagique…
and what does this say about you, about us, about the way we are as friends, children, lovers, about God and the Bottom and human nature, that when people die, all that seems to happen is they fall out of the dream we’re having about the world
…Abi Abi Abimagique…
THE LEPIDOPTERIST
I found this in a box of microcassettes recorded almost thirty years ago; on it I had written, “J. A. McCrae—the bar at Sandy Bay, Roatan.” All I recall of the night was the wind off the water tearing the thatch, the generator thudding, people walking the moonless beach, their flashlights sawing the dark, and a wicked-looking barman with stiletto sideburns. McCrae himself was short, in his sixties, as wizened and brown as an apricot seed, and he was very drunk, his voice veering between a feeble whisper and a dramatic growl:
I’m goin to tell you bout a storm, cause it please me to do so. You cotch me in the tellin mood, and when John Anderson McCrae get in the tellin mood, ain’t nobody on this little island better suited for the job. I been foolin with storms one way or the other since time first came to town, and this storm I goin to speak of, it ain’t the biggest, it don’t have the stiffest winds, but it bring a strange cargo to our shores.
Fetch me another Salvavida, Clifton…if the gentleman’s willing. Thank you, sir. Thank you.
Now Mitch and Fifi were the worst of the hurricanes round these parts. And the worst of them come after the wind and rain. Ain’t that right, Clifton? Ain’t that always the case? Worst t’ing bout any storm is what come along afterwards. Mitch flattened this poor island. Must have kill four, five hundred people, and the most of them die in the weeks followin. Coxxen Hole come t’rough all right, but there weren’t scarcely a tree standing on this side. And Fifi…after Fifi there’s people livin in nests, a few boards piled around them to keep out the crabs and a scrap of tin over they head. Millions of dollars in relief is just settin over in Teguz. Warehouses full. But don’t none of it get to the island. Word have it this fella work for Walmart bought it off the military for ten cent on the dollar. I don’t know what for sure he do with it, but I spect there be some Yankees payin for the same blankets and T-shirts and bottled water that they government givin away for free. I ain’t blamin nothin on America, now. God Bless America! That’s what I say. God Bless America! They gots the good intention to be sending aid in the first place. But the way t’ings look to some, these storms ain’t nothin but an excuse to slip the generals a nice paycheck.
The mon don’t want to hear bout your business, Clifton! Slide me down that bottle. I needs somet’ing to wash down with this beer. That’s right, he payin! Don’t you t’ink the mon can afford it? Well, then. Slide me that bottle.
Many of these Yankees that go rushing in on the heels of disaster, these so-called do-gooders, they all tryin to find something cheap enough they can steal it. Land, mostly. But rarely do it bode well for them. You take this mon bought up twenty thousand acres of jungle down around Trujillo right after Mitch. He cotching animals on it. Iguana, parrots, jaguar. Snakes. Whatever he cotch, he export to Europe. My nephew Jacob work for him, and he say the mon doing real good business, but he act like he the king of creation. Yellin and cursin everybody. Jacob tell him, you keep cursin these boys, one night they get to drinkin and come see you with they machete. The mon laugh at that. He ain’t worry bout no machetes. He gots a big gun. Huh! We been havin funerals for big Yankee guns in Honduras since fore I were born.
This storm I’m talkin about, it were in the back time. 1925, ’26. Somewhere long in there. Round the time United Fruit and Standard Fruit fight the Banana War over on the mainland
. And it weren’t no hurricane, it were a norther. Northers be worse than a hurricane in some ways. They can hang round a week and more, and they always starts with fog. The fog roll in like a ledge of gray smoke and sets til it almost solid. That’s how you know a big norther’s due. My daddy, he were what we call down here a wrecker. He out in the fury of the storm with he friends, and they be swingin they lanterns on the shore, trying to lure a ship onto the reef so they can grab the cargo. You don’t want to be on the water durin a norther ceptin you got somet’ing the size of the Queen Mary under you. Many’s the gun runner or tourist boat, or a turtler headin home from the Chinchorro Bank, gets heself lost in bad weather. And when they see the lantern, they makes for it in a hurry. Cause they desperate, you know. They bout to lose their lives. A light is hope to them, and they bear straight in onto the reef.
That night, the night of the storm, were the first time my daddy took me wreckin. I had no wish to be with him, but the mon fierce. He say, John, I needs you tonight and I hops to it or he lay me out cold. Times he drinkin and he feel a rage comin, he say, John, get under the table. I gets under the table quick, cause I know and he spy me when the rage upon him, nothin good can happen. So I stays low and out of he sight. I too little to stand with him. I born in the summer and never get no bigger than what you seein now.
We took our stand round St. Ant’ony’s Key. There wasn’t no resort back then. No dive shop, no bungalows. Just cashew trees, sea grape, palm. It were a good spot cause the reef close in to shore, and that old motor launch we use for boarding, it ain’t goin to get too far in rough water. My daddy, he keep checkin’ he pistol. That were how he did when t’ings were pressin him. He check he pistol and yell at ever’body to swing they lanterns. We only have the one pistol mongst the five of us. You might t’ink we needs more to take on an entire crew, but no matter how tough that crew be, they been t’rough hell, and if they any left alive, they ain’t got much left in them, they can barely stand. One pistol more than enough to do the job. If it ain’t, we gots our machetes.
Dagger Key and Other Stories Page 46
