by Matt Cardin
Brian had awakened to the insubstantiality of his position. It had seemed impossible—in fact, neither of them had ever so much as considered the possibility—but it had happened nonetheless, through the agency of an unexpected injury, brought about by Susan’s unwitting help. Now Brian was gone—or, more accurately, he was more fully here with Lafcadio than he had ever been before—and it was Lafcadio’s turn to wake up.
Dull-brained Brian would never have thought of the possibility of intentionally inducing an awakening, even if somebody had described it to him. He had even proved incapable of realizing that the half-consciousness of his newly mutilated existence was a blessing in disguise, since it limited his external options and forcibly opened him to the enhanced consciousness of the inner world. Lafcadio was not so dull. He knew what had happened, and he was able to recognize its value and purposefully work to take himself to the next level.
The only question that remained was how to accomplish it. What means would he use to rouse himself from the relative dream of his life and rise to a greater reality? And again, it was not really a question in need of an answer, for Brian had already provided the solution. His awakening had been accomplished through involuntary suffering. Having reflected on the situation, Lafcadio came to realize that he could engineer his own circumstances and awaken himself through a voluntary act.
It had to be the right eye, of course, the one most directly wired to the left side of the brain. Once the channel of vision leading to the logical, rational, intellectual hemisphere had been destroyed, all that would remain would be the channel leading to the intuitive, emotional, mystical half. Then all the visual impressions of the sensuous world around him would be funneled exclusively to the wider mystical self that even now was hovering behind him in extra-dimensional space. And he would see himself left behind and transformed.
The gods bless you, Brian, he whispered to himself over and over during that long afternoon of creation, as he shaped the world on the canvas and contemplated the stainless steel hook he had hidden in his pocket. He would have gone ahead and mounted it on one of the exposed ceiling beams in the studio of his loft apartment, if it weren’t for the fact that this would have disrupted the correct sequence of events.
There was a protocol to follow.
The mounting of the hook, of course, was Cornelia’s job.
She arrived at eight, right on time. She wore the same satin black shirt and pants, but had exchanged the sparkling green jacket for a sparkling blue one. In her right hand she clutched a bottle of red wine. In her left she carried a rose, which she intended to present to her beloved artist in gratitude for including her in one of his magnificent creations.
She remembered the walk up the narrow dark steps to his loft all too well, even though it was three years since her last visit. The one-time exception to their formerly platonic relationship had been disastrous. They had both known immediately that it wasn’t working, even though the physical pleasure had been exquisite. It had seemed too much like incest, and she could tell from his pained expression afterward that he was experiencing his own private regrets. When he had moved down to bring his face level with her stomach, and when he had placed the palm of his hand across her belly in a lovingly gentle way, she had fought back tears that threatened to squeeze from beneath her lids and sear not only him but her. After a moment he had climbed from the bed and thrown on his clothes. She had done the same, and they had never spoken of the incident again.
The staircase had not changed. The off-white walls were still too narrow, and the brown wooden steps still creaked and popped even under the modest weight of her lean, toned body. At the top of the stairs, on the right, stood the brown wooden door to the artist’s lair. She smiled and felt a rush of happiness, thinking that this visit would surely turn out better than the last.
She rapped on the door with the hand holding the rose. The delicate bloom, so deeply red that it seemed almost to ache with the saturation of its own hue, bobbed on the end of the thorned stem like a human head. She watched it for a moment and then knocked again.
“Lafcadio?” Her voice rang out with a hollow resonance in the cramped stairway. Tentatively, she reached out with her left hand and tried the brassy knob. It turned smoothly, and the door whispered open to reveal Lafcadio’s living room.
She shut the door behind her and took the wine to the kitchen. The rose she laid on the dining room table. Then she went in search of the artist.
His studio was still located in the same room he had used three years ago. The walls and floor were dark and immaculate. The ceiling was high and crossed by wooden beams that gave the studio a rustic ambiance. A sheet of tarpaulin was spread beneath the easel, and upon the easel rested the artist’s newest creation. She stopped before it and took in the scene it displayed. After a moment, her heart began to pound.
The icy waste stretched away from her in barren rolls like lumps of fat. She could tell they were meant to mimic the human form by their arrangement into abdominal ripples, and by the snowy hillocks that sprouted like breasts in the upper half of the scene, and by the visage that gazed upward from the diamond-like mountains at the far upper edge. Overhead, a waning crescent moon cast a sickly light onto the surreal landscape.
When she looked back down to the ice itself, she saw that where the navel should have been, there was a gaping hole, like a wound ripped open from the inside. Streaks and splashes of crimson and orange jetted out from the hole like liquid fire, like hot blood and pus, and she thought she could see, buried somewhere deep within the chaos of ripe colors, the shape of a body curled into a fetal position. Its head was bony and bald, with an almost catlike aspect. When she leaned closer, she saw that its mouth was opened in a scream, and that one of its eyes—the right one—had been gouged out.
She knew who it was, of course, just as she recognized the chiseled face at the top of the picture. She almost had time to gasp before Lafcadio pounced on her from behind.
“My sweet!” he cried as he grabbed her shoulders and spun her around. She shrieked, then tried to laugh with relief when she saw his wild-eyed expression.
“Dear God, Lafcadio! You scared the living hell out of me!” Her hands trembled violently, and she rubbed them against her upper arms while still laughing in a shaky voice. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Not Brian’s, I hope?”
He stared at her for a moment. Then he laughed with her. “Ah, yes. You always see more than I give you credit for, my dear Cornelia. Let me thank you right now, since it may be the last chance I have, for your many years of friendship.”
“Well, of course, darling,” she said. Her weak laughter died down to silence. “And why should this be your last chance?”
He laughed again and said, “No, I don’t think so.” While she puzzled over this non sequitur of an answer, he reached into his pocket and pulled out something silver and shiny. He then took her hand and placed the hook gently on her palm. She saw that it was long and vicious looking, with a sharply curved point. The other end was threaded for screwing into a wall or ceiling.
“Up there,” he said, pointing to a ceiling beam high above his painting. “I’ve already set up a ladder, as you can see. Now, if I know you at all, you’ve probably brought some wine. Why don’t I open the bottle and let it breathe while you mount that hook?”
“Lafcadio, what is this for?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said again with a laugh. “Believe me, we understand each other very well. It’ll be fun! No matter how unpleasant it might seem for a time, it will be fun, believe you me.” He patted her shoulder lovingly and then departed for the kitchen, where she heard him pop the cork on the bottle. The hook was cold against her palm, and she looked at it almost in wonder.
As she climbed the ladder and labored to screw the hook into the tough oaken beam, she felt as if she had stepped into a dream. It was not her own, but somebody else’s. Yes, she was a character in somebody else’s dream. Below her, the painting was visib
le on its easel, and she stared down at her own icy face with mixed feelings of dread and awe. From her vantage point near the ceiling, the painting was inverted. Her icy reflection stared up at her with an expression of supernatural peace and wisdom. In the arctic waste of Lafcadio’s vision, she had become an avatar of spiritual insight. She could discern this without his giving her a word of explanation.
From the bottom of the painting, the fiery-bloody hole gaped with a fierce determination, its hot and juicy depths standing in stark contrast to the supernal peace above. The counterbalance left her feeling sick for some reason. When she looked up and saw that she had finished screwing the hook into the beam, she descended the ladder quickly and turned her back on the canvas.
Lafcadio returned and saw that she had accomplished her mission. “Excellent!” he said. “Would you please go and pour two glasses for us, darling? I’ve set them out for you already. Everything is waiting.” He stepped closer, and she forced herself not to flinch. “Thank you, too, for the rose. A wonderfully symbolic gesture, and all too appropriate in light of recent developments.” He leaned down and kissed her cheek. When he stood back up, his smile was warm and his eyes were calm. She felt herself relax, and allowed herself to hope once more for a pleasant evening.
“Will you explain this to me when I get back?” She gestured toward the canvas. He glanced at it, reflected for a moment, and nodded.
“Whatever you say, Cornelia. It’s our night.”
She smiled then; it felt good to break through the icy numbness that had overtaken her face without her even noticing it. At some point between her arrival at his flat and his return from the kitchen, her face had grown stiff and cold. Smiling was an effort, but it brought life back to her cheeks and eyes. Still smiling, she went to the kitchen and poured the wine into two stemmed glasses that were waiting on the countertop.
“Lafcadio,” she called. “I think you should tell me about Brian again. I’ve been thinking about it, and I have a theory. Maybe the incident with the hook was a dream of emasculation. Maybe it represents some sort of archetypal male fear of living in a matriarchy. A lot of intelligent people have been saying in recent years that we’re turning into a matriarchal society. Or I guess I should say, back into one, just like it was in prehistory. Do you think maybe you’ve tapped into a hidden fear in the male subconscious? Maybe you dreamed Brian into a situation where his fear of women had to come out.” She set the bottle down and lifted a wine-filled glass in each hand. The bouquet rose to her nostrils with a delicate aroma of vanilla and cloves.
“What do you think?” She turned the corner and stopped inside the doorway to the studio. “Lafcadio?”
The wine spilled, of course, when the glasses hit the floor, but the area of the stain was relatively small. Some droplets hit the cream-colored carpet of the hallway, marking it forever with a permanent speckling of purplish-crimson. The rest of it pooled on the hardwood floor like blood. It was a long time before Cornelia or anybody else thought to wipe it up, and by that time most of it had seeped through the cracks and into the pores, leaving an equally permanent stain on the wood.
Cleaning up spilled wine was the least of Cornelia’s concerns at the moment. She was transfixed by the sight of Lafcadio dangling high above her from the rafter, the silver hook buried deep in the socket of his right eye, his legs and arms twitching in spastic birdlike motions, his mouth working silently to shape a whispered stream of veritably Pentecostal gibberish. The gore spattering onto the hardwood floor touched everything around the painting. Some of it splashed onto the canvas itself, adding its own crimson hue to the reds and oranges of the fiery crater. Below the flailing artist, above the deep-gouging sinkhole in the belly of the frozen wasteland, the supernally peaceful face of Cornelia the Ice Goddess brooded silently in eternal bliss.
When the flesh-and-blood Cornelia had recovered from her horrified paralysis, she raced up the ladder and began tugging madly at the legs of the artist, whose spastic motions were growing less vigorous as his strength expired. She grunted and lifted him up, heaving, thrusting. At last she succeeded. The hook ripped free, dragging a few bone splinters with it, and he dropped ten feet to the floor and landed with a meaty thud.
Of course the blood began to spurt from his eye then, in red gouts like finger-paint. It looked red even to him, even with his colorblind field of vision rapidly fading and growing distant, as if he were backing down a tunnel at incredible speed. The pain was even more vicious than he had anticipated: a white-hot ball of electric agony, searing its way inward from his eye to his brain. Cornelia was crouching beside him, pawing at him in a panic, weeping, asking him what to do.
In the midst of it all, rather wonderfully, he found himself floating in an airy sea of transcendent bliss, gazing down from a dizzying height at the outline of an arctic tundra below. The furrows stretched away toward the horizon like lumps of shiny vanilla ice cream, until they met with the mountains of two icy breasts, and even farther north, with the glittering-diamond surface of a gargantuan icon that presented its face eternally to the gaze of vast, moonlit sky.
I am home, he thought, even as the borders of his consciousness began to crumble and allow the pure seed of awareness to expand outward to the next level of selfhood.
The next thought was unexpected. It was different in tenor from any he had ever thought before, and yet it seemed familiar. Coming from his higher self, it was more intense and profound than what he was used to; the sheer truth of it seemed to touch the landscape below, to fill the frigid atmosphere between them, and to saturate the glaze of moonlight cascading down onto the icy hillocks like iridescent milk. The sound of it was the sound of the primal ocean depths, like a million voices whispering into his ear from every direction at once. For a moment, just a final moment of private desire, Lafcadio held onto the perspective of his small self and translated the thought into the language he was accustomed to thinking and speaking. The million voices coalesced into one, and it was the familiar voice of his own private self. He stared in stark horror at the words that seemed almost to float before him in visible waves upon the snow: No boundary means no escape.
For an instant he refused to believe them. He refused to believe that even in this new, blissful existence of ultimate transcendence and freedom, he was still unable to escape the clutches of his deepest-held fear. It simply could not be true, not with the unbounded horizon of a mystical frozen landscape stretching away from him on all sides like the receding outer edge of an ecstatic dream.
Then the grip on his old perspective proved too difficult to maintain. Even as he contemplated these mysteries, he lost his hold on Lafcadio and expanded fully, finally, into the wider perspective of the ancient Self that had always been floating and lurking behind the façade of his consciousness like the ghost of a future incarnation. At last the transition was complete, and he could leave behind all his fears, the old and the new, and glory forever in the exuberance of an unbounded aesthetic delight.
It wasn’t until he fully used his new eyes for the first time that he recognized the flaw in his plans.
Lafcadio was long-gone, left far behind in that dull, flat other realm where the senses could never get their fill because there was simply not enough to fill them up. But the memory of Lafcadio was not gone, and in this new existence, where consciousness had no boundaries, he discovered there could be no distinction between memory and present reality. The incarnate ghost of Lafcadio the Magnificent was still a presence, still a truth, and Lafcadio’s subjectivity was still inextricably intertwined with that of the higher Self who was even now dreaming him back into existence.
The dream placed him in the belly of the beast, deep within the womblike innards of the arctic landscape, where molten fire burned in scalding jets of orange and red, and where self-inflicted wounds assumed all the permanence and significance of religious stigmata. The old Lafcadio screamed in this fiery, freezing hell, and the new-ancient Self screamed with him. They were locked together in t
win perspectives of mutual suffering.
There could be no escape, for there was no boundary.
(And somewhere in a black-and-white world of cardboard lives and flimsy stage-prop dreams, Cornelia crouched over the body of her beloved artist and wept as she saw his dying features twist into an expression of horror. He gave one final, mighty convulsion, and then flopped onto his side and curled inward upon himself like a slug. She could not force herself to raise her eyes to the painting that presided over them like an icon of everything they had ever hoped to gain from each other. She dared not gaze at the image and see, within the glowing depths of her own icy belly, a transformed image of the bloody artist stretched out before her. As she fell backward onto the rough wooden floor and felt its warm, sticky wetness stain her hands and clothes, a momentary desire flashed through her mind, a habit ingrained from years of brash conversations. Absurdly, she wanted to demand, “Tell me everything.” But she knew that even if he could answer, she would not want to hear what he had to say.)
The Devil and One Lump
I woke up that morning and stepped right into a story that I might have written myself—back when I could still write, that is. And even then I only would have written such a story if I were a hack who dealt in shameless clichés instead of a serious student of the dark self.
For the Devil himself sat waiting for me in my living room on that beautiful, sunny morning. And he looked like he had been dispatched to my house right from central casting.
