Authors: Paul Harding
T
HE OBSIDIAN GIRL MOVES
through the trees at night. She moves across the fairway of the golf course, near the road, by the stone wall that acts as the hood for the footlights to the stage. She is all but invisible, the girl of black glass, appearing only as a wobbly blur. She is a dark lens. Through her, the dark underpinnings of the world are visible, but they turn whoever might see them to stone, or to ice, or to salt, or to marsh grass. Every night, just before dawn, she climbs down into the hill through a hidden trap door. She sounds like a crystal decanter rolling along the granite seams that lead down to the heart of the hill, where a furnace burns all day and all night and dark, vague men shovel coal into its white-hot mouth. When the girl made of black glass appears, the men lean their shovels against the walls of the chamber and retreat into the shadows. The girl steps in front of the furnace and the heat roars out and over her like a shimmering hurricane. She tilts her head back and holds her hands out at her sides. The heat blasts at her, and the tips of her fingers begin to glow. The outlines of her face and arms and legs begin to buckle and kink. Her legs give at the knees, and the rest of her slides off them and drops in front of them. She remains upright for a moment on the stumps of her legs, but then she topples face-first onto the dirt floor in front of the open furnace. It appears as if she is sinking into the dirt at first, but she is actually melting. The glass girl is melting.
The glass held the shape of a girl only while it was cool. But now it is molten and pools over the floor. There is no way to tell if the glass leaks out of the girl or if the girl leaks out of the glass.
There is a sound that no human ear can hear, coming from a place no human eye can see, from deeper within the earth but also from deep in the sky and the water and inside the trees and inside the rocks. The sound is a voice, coming from deep inside the throat of the world. The sound is a note from a register so low that it cannot be heard, but many people throughout the town are disturbed from their sleep by it. It is a note from a song the shape of which is too vast ever to know. It encompasses and sustains all that is human but is not loyal to the human, only to what is latent within the human. It terrifies. The awakened clutch their hearts and gasp and groan and press their hands into their temples. They fuss over their problems and feel in their guts that if they had not been born to trouble they would not have been born at all, and that their troubles are the only sign that they still cast shadows above this earth. The note is a part of great, vaulted cathedrals of chords that keep the universe speeding out from its own genesis. It is sensate, and down in the chamber of the hill it sounds both like weeping and like laughter, and both are at the grief of the glass girl, who throws herself in front of the fires every morning just before dawn and who, to her unending despair, is remade every evening, in a deeper foundry, and evicted from the depths of the hill, back to the surface, where the cool air flowing through the grass cools and sets her glass eyes and her glass brow, her glass brains and her glass
heart, and she begins another night as the brittle memories of a man who is the father of a girl she never was.
I
SPENT SO MANY
nights sitting in, stealing through, crawling over, and sometimes passing out in, the cemetery, and always behind Kate’s stone, so she’d be spared, that I came to think of it and the hills and the adjacent golf courses as a large, elaborate set, constructed on a rotating stage. The stone wall served as a hood for the footlights, and the putting green was the apron of the stage. The hills were counterweighted with enormous granite boulders and cylindrical lead weights the size of small towers and many tons of magnetic iron and other ballast. They were held in place during the day by brass cogs the size of Ferris wheels, which in turn were held in place by black iron pawls on pinions, deep, deep in the earth. Late at night, levers released from capstans and gears began to turn, and the top-heavy hills upended into their nocturnal arrangements in perfect silence and with such smoothly machined precision that it was almost impossible for the human eye to perceive, even on the brightest night, under the brightest, fullest moon. The hills shifted and recalibrated all night long and only the most alert, vigilant observer, exactly aware of what it was for which he watched, could sometimes sense just the finest tick of a shift in the corner of his eye. When he looked over, he would see nothing. But he would have the distinct feeling that the rise he was looking at was not quite in the same place as the last time he had noticed it. Only he could not quite remember clearly, already, and would doubt himself for a moment, until his attention was diverted again
by what appeared to be a new seam in the silhouette of the crown of the hill, and so on, for the rest of the night, as the stars rotated up from beneath one side of the hill, arced over it, and sank back down into the other side, until the whole set finally arrived back at its fully upright, daytime position, in the instant before dawn, and the first light of day crested the hill and the observer would see that the land was as it always had been, and would think how odd it is, the mind’s tricks, and what a strange trance he must have been in to think that the topography moved around at night, and he must really have been half—or more—asleep for much of the night, although he was certain that he had been fully awake the whole time. But after all, he would think as he rose to leave, that is how sleep always does overtake us.
Some early mornings I could almost hear the echo of the last gears of the stage clicking into place as the swoosh of the first sunlight ignited across the fairways and rushed down toward me at the outskirts of the golf course on the near side of the cemetery. I had the feeling of some familiar soul having just fled out of sight, that I had just caught a glimpse of the back of someone’s heel as she dashed offstage. It unsettled me, and I even had the notion that all the dead in the cemetery had just closed their eyes again, as they were compelled to do, but that they were telegraphing their irritation at a breach of address I had committed and at the indignity they felt at so nearly being caught up and about. I dreaded the notion that to the dead being awake was perfectly normal. I even began to feel not so much that the dead disapproved of me nearly catching them about on their own accounts—such a predicament might delight them, even inspire them to
mischief—but on the behalf of just one of their members, whose hurried flight they may have even protected by distracting me by tumbling back into their bunks, and their stagy, tight-lidded feigning of sleep. I sometimes had the sense that, in the instant before I caught sight of them, all the winged skulls on the headstones and all the statues of angels throughout the cemetery had had their eyes shut, too, as if their usual, unblinking vigilance over the dead was something from which even they, slate and marble that they were, needed rest, that the dead and the stone carvings on their headboards all rested hardly in peace and in truth led lives more hectic than those of the living.
I had cast Enon’s dead in the vignettes I made up for Kate, but as I became more and more unbalanced, they seemed to act of their own accord. Certainly, it was the drugs and my exhaustion and my sorrow producing these phantasms, but they haunted me nonetheless, and with increasing frequency and vividness. I understood how dire such hallucinations were becoming late one early summer night when I sat down to rest at the edge of one of the putting greens on the Enon Golf Club, near the street. I sat on the grass, put my legs out in front of me, leaned back against the stone wall, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. I opened my eyes and felt suddenly as if I were awaiting the beginning of a performance of some kind. The grass was wet and smelled vegetal for the first time in weeks, not like hay, not like thatch. Wind swelled and ebbed like a surf, and broke against the foliage in the rows of trees running up the hill between the golf course and the cemetery, sizzling through it and rushing across the open fairway in front of me. The green slope of the hill
was only just still green, lowering into black. A low, dark, nearly green band of thunderheads, in front of a scrim of solid, lighter gray clouding that held the very last of the day’s light, a suffused luminescence that seemed without source, not even light, not even a sight, receded behind the hill, so swiftly it made the hill appear to loom up above me, ready to topple onto my head. I rubbed the tops of my arms, chilled. The streetlamp in the parking lot of the golf course clubhouse flickered on, halfway up the hill, to my left, behind a break of beech trees, figuring their branches and leaves into a hive of citrine light. Ocean fog poured across fairways from the cemetery, salting everything in a cold mist. Caverns under the hill and granite shelves and the water in the water table vibrated beneath me, voicing an unnerving basso profundo. The wind funneling through the stone walls sounded a strange descant in the hollows. My bones and bowels and breathing slowed and fell into cycle with this dark solfège and I whispered the note “La.”
The heel bones of a pilgrim or cobbler ran across my flanks from beneath, and an arpeggio of ribs, and the smooth curve of someone’s skull.
Places, everyone. Please take your seats. If you please
.
The key of the overture is disturbing. I shift on my haunches and shiver at a coldness that has descended across the landscape, and feel a little nauseated. I have a sense that there is something telescopic about this production, as if I am actually on a stage, in the foreground, and not in the audience. The music I hear is not for me but for an audience on the far side of a proscenium, watching me watch for the entrance of other actors deeper in the stage. I put my head between
my knees and breathe deeply. My stomach is sour and my vision fizzy.
There is a cavernous open space behind me, stalls and vertically stacked galleries and state boxes filled with rowdy old phantoms and spooky pilgrims, elbowing one another and leaning over and whispering,
Look, he doesn’t feel so good now!
Mockery and laughter ripple through the audience, across the orchestra, all the way from the grand circle to the loge to the gods near the cloud ceiling. I look behind me and see only the empty street. This elicits a frank, unabashed guffaw from the hidden spectators, who find my inability to see them hysterical. This is at my expense; their laughter is delight not at how well I play the fool, but at the fact that I am one.
Then the hill does loom up, blotting out everything behind it. It teeters, splits down the middle, like a curtain, and crumples into two heaps on either side of a dim gray pillar glazed in the faintest yellow light and set in relief against a background of sable darkness. Bones rise from the dark earth. There are clavicles and ribs, femurs and tibias, hands and feet. There are claws and great spines as thick as tree trunks that taper into tails, and rings of vertebrae that once encased marrow the size of pot roasts, and heavy garlands made from the gut-strung skulls of tens of thousands of rodents, draped over horses’ skulls that have been fused onto the delicate skeletons of human infants. The riot of interlocking bones turns and forms a towering girandole. I try to concentrate on the writhing, clicking, tapping, grinding, clunking monument, to get a clear view of individual bones, especially skulls, because when I look at it as a whole, it increasingly seems composed of animals that could not possibly have ever existed, and that it is assembling into
some horrific machine dedicated to manufacturing my deepest terrors. But then the middle of the machine spirals open like the aperture of a camera shutter, and Kate steps out.
She is fitted into an outrageous, gigantic emerald green polonaise. The dress is verdant and oceanic, mossy and Atlantic green. The bodice is constructed of willow branches, stripped to the green wood, girthed tight with eelgrass. Will-o’-the-wisps halo Kate’s head. Her hair is suffused and golden, flaring, solar.
Well, well, now
.
My
, my,
isn’t that interesting?
What fantastications are these?
I ignore the insults and the jeers from the balconies that continue to rise higher behind me, across the road, in the darkness of the cornfield. Kate is magnificent and beautiful, if not a queen then a princess, repatriated into the wood and the water and the starry sky and the cold ocean abysses broiling beyond the continental shelf, just beyond the rise, through the trees, not presiding but naturalized. Yes, I think, this must be her first pageant, an equinoctial communion, restoration after a satisfactory yearlong trial as a member of the deceased.
A menagerie of horse and pony skeletons prance around the stage in exaggerated, ambling gaits, draped in caparisons made from their own former hides.
A pillar of fire erupts from the top of the hill and towers miles up into the night until it breaks against the invisible ceiling of the atmosphere and fans out across the sky in flaming traceries. A great crown of fire burns miles above Enon, bejeweled with Ursa’s stars.
Kate watches the fire from her mark onstage, in front of
the whirling shutter of bones, which seem to rotate within their revolutions, alternating between the reliquaries of legends and dinner-plate leftovers, one instant the remains of leviathans and saints, the next drumsticks and short ribs. Kate cranes her neck to follow the fire up into the heights and I see that the rest of her does not move, that beneath her gown she has been clamped into some sort of frame. Her arms are raised to shoulder height and bent at the elbows so that the tips of her fingers nearly meet in front of her chest. She cannot move her arms. They are confined by some kind of armature beneath the gown and only her hands are free at the wrists. This confirms why there is stiffness in how she moves her head to look up at the fire. She cannot rotate her shoulders or her torso or her hips, or turn on her feet to get a better look at the braided column of flames roaring behind her. I can feel its heat from where I sit. She is much nearer to it, and although I have the thought that she is no longer subject to burning, I also have the sense that she is burning, and that she cannot move herself back from the heat. I can see now—not actually see with my eyes, but see in my head, know—that Kate has been fixed to some kind of rigid frame made of wooden strapping and hammered iron rivets, not so much to restrict her, perhaps, but to insulate her from the weight of the costume, a lesser kindness within a greater cruelty, sponsored by an ultimate benevolence, possibly if not probably, which I now see is laden with clots of gems and strings of pearls and made from bolt after bolt of silk brocade and lace, douppioni and zibeline, and trussed and knotted with leagues of silk ribbon, and mounted on a series of concealed panniers that spring out and upward, elevating Kate to
a preposterous height just as it occurs to me that they are present beneath the fabric. Kate rises and the skirts of her dress cascade from beneath her and across the green. I can hear pulleys and winches turning and squeaking. Kate’s ascent illuminates a system of fine silk threads, tied to the tips and the joints of each of her fingers, which rise above her and disappear in the upper darkness and lift and lower her fingers according to elegant but predetermined pattern. I squint to get a look at the darkness above Kate’s head, certain there must be a scrim of black velvet, perfectly lit to blend in with the real night, that conceals a rotating brass drum bristling with stubs that pluck the tines of a metal comb. Each of the threads connected to Kate’s wrists and fingers is looped around one of the tines. As the drum revolves, her hands perform an intricate set of poses. I am terrified that Kate is going to be immolated. I panic and try to rise but I cannot move. The crowd roars with laughter.