Interfictions 2 (38 page)

"No, I promise,” Arthur replied. “I'm fed up with this story, with these patterns whose infinite repetition has pretended to immortalize us. The human unconscious needs—
we
need to evolve. But I'm too old, too attached to the old order to give it a new ending. I embody wisdom and you change. It's your turn to take the throne. Do you want it?"

He picked up Balmung and gave Mordred an ambiguous look. “Here, take my phallus and give the earth back its fruitfulness."

Dumbfounded, Mordred contemplated the sword without touching it. He stuck his lance in the earth and leaned on it, and then frowned.

"I...” he stammered. He looked around him at the dying men, who would breathe their last only at the battle's end, when the scene was over. Then he turned back to his father—frowned, all hatred extinguished.

"Don't want it,” he said sulkily.

Arthur felt a wave of dizziness. He stared at his son.

"But ... you wanted it so much! You have to lead the kingdom to a new age. What'll become of the world? Of the island?"

Mordred shrugged.

"Dunno. Not my problem.” The words flowed naturally now, as if they'd just been waiting to ripen, to blossom, and give his ideas new meaning. “I was only making war on you because Mom hated you. And because you represented everything I didn't have and would never have. But if you just give it all to me, well, that's another story. It doesn't interest me anymore. I don't want to become you."

Embarrassed, father and son studied their armored feet for a moment.

"Just like that?” Arthur asked, panic creeping into his voice.

"Yeah, well—I like the idea of kissing it all off on a whim,” Mordred replied with a cynical laugh. He sat down on a soldier, who protested faintly.

More respectful, Arthur remained standing, pensive.

"I know how to leave,” he confessed at last. “But I can't. I have responsibilities to this world.” A pause. He took a deep breath. “No, that's not true. I'm just scared."

Mordred half-smiled. “This world, it's us. And I've had it up to here. “C'mon,” he said, getting up. “Let's blow this joint. Hey, do you know that guy in black who's waving at us?"

The Depths

In the bowels of the isle, far beneath the castle, in the heart of the earth, of the dragon, the shadow made its way among stony sculptures, columns joining floor and ceiling. In the sub-basement of the collective unconscious, the odor of sulfur reigned.

The figure came to an underground lake, an unfathomable mirror whose still waters no wind had ever stirred.

The Lady rose from the waves without a ripple, without a splash. The lake seemed to sculpt her shape from water, its impossible curves draped in a veil woven of space, time, and stars. In her right hand, she held the king's sword.

Facing the shadow, she set foot on the black stone where scarlet veins pulsed, tracing incomprehensible patterns.

In silent answer, the shadow's cape collapsed, as though the forces sustaining it had suddenly tired. With barely a rustle, the fabric fell empty to the floor.

A snake slid from the folds of the cloak and curled itself around the Lady's calves. By touches on her veil and the slip of scales across her skin, the animal asked, “You got it back?"

The Lady of the Lake traced a complex alphabet on the serpent's skin with her fingertips. “Yes. Despite his king's absence, Girflet still remained blindly loyal to the Geste. After three trips, he threw Excalibur into the water."

"But now there's no one left to reclaim it,” the snake replied with a few flicks of its tongue at the insides of her thighs. “Arthur and Mordred have left the isle. The enemies have called a truce and, without denying their natures, have taken their first steps on the path of evolution."

"Yes, but toward what?” the Lady asked, petting the serpent's scales most insistently.

"I know no more than they. I am only the gardener. They've taken the bridge, but its far end is still shrouded in fog."

The serpent climbed languorously toward her groin, insinuating itself under the cloth. Cool scales sent a shiver up the length of the Lady's spine.

"They say the true king will return one day. But even then, I don't think he'll need this prop any more.” She glanced at the royal sword and then chuckled, breaking the age-old silence of the cave. “You know, Lucifer, one day the human mind will no longer need the mystery we embody, and the death of myth will open these caverns to the light of day and reveal all their secrets."

The serpent stopped. “That day is not yet come. I concede we're only tools, but there are still so many archetypes on the isle who haven't yet discovered the secret of the apples of immortality."

Before surrendering to the cold sensuality of the Bringer of Light, the Lady answered him with a final caress, smiling under her veil: “Yes. But something's going on in the human mind all the same."

Translated from the French by Edward Gauvin

When the French anthologist Lucie Chenu first asked me to write a story about the Arthurian myth, I enthusiastically accepted—only to curse myself later. How does one rewrite such an archetypal story, manage to find something new to say in a framework within which, I felt, everyone—especially much celebrated writers—had already tackled all the important aspects? Well, I thought, let's tackle all the aspects at once, then.

That is, for me, one of the greatest joys of being a writer: to look for resonances, echoes, relations between ideas, concepts, feelings, things in the world around us and inside us. To build some kind of synthesis (or synaesthesia?) from them, to imbue them with meaning in order to form a story. For me, there are no boundaries of any sort in the world—only those people build for themselves, consciously or not: limitations we should strive to tear down, in art as well as in everyday life. I do write in the SF&F fields, but I am really a child of surrealism and magical realism. I am convinced that all creations, all thoughts, do exist somewhere, elsewhere. Their physical impact on our world is proof enough of that—reality is not all material. The world is shaped by what we think; thought and action are two sides of the same coin. The world is a decision.

That is why I like to think that I build my life in the image of my writing—and not the other way round. Is this madness? Well, that's fine by me. Being crazy sure beats the hell out of consensual reality.

Lionel Davoust

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Stephanie Shaw

My obstetrician has four heads.

She stands in front of me, arms crossed, tapping one foot.

She only has the two feet.

We are in Evanston, a socially-politically-ecologically aware suburb of Chicago, and she wears sensible shoes, expensive clogs, and natural fibers to draw the eye away from the four heads.

I sit on the edge of the exam table, in a nest of feathers, twine, and bits of bone. The stirrups are up, flanking me, each giving me the great big hairy eyeball, just like my obstetrician. Only she has eight eyes.

My obstetrician holds out her hands.

She only has the two hands.

In them, she holds a small, opaque lump.

Fleshy and purple-veined, it is about the size, color and texture of a large plum tomato, recently blanched and peeled. She holds it out in front of her, cupped in her hands, like a priest about to bless the host. Almost imperceptibly, the lump shifts and sighs, whether on its own or under some subtle manipulation from her gloved fingers is impossible to tell, and I realize that (oops!) this is my amniotic sac, one of them. Containing (oops!) the fetus, one of them. I had somehow managed to misplace it, scatterbrained me, and my obstetrician is not angry with me, she is just very, very disappointed.

"Just because there are two of them,” she tells me, “does not mean we can afford to be careless."

I cup my palms, and my obstetrician dumps the thing cautiously into them. It is warm and sticky.

My obstetrician has four mouths, of course, lipstick faded after a hard day of blood and afterbirth. She has four noses, all of them very thin bridged and possessed of expressive nostrils, like the noses of young female movie stars. Her eyes number eight and they are so sincere that they have no choice but to be pale blue. She is varying shades of sandy, no-nonsense blond. One of the heads tells me that she needs to punch a needle through my abdominal wall and into my melon belly, so she can extract secret baby juice and read its code. Another deciphers my blood results and tells me that one or both of my babies stands an increased risk of arriving in this world with Down syndrome. One tells me to get into bed and stay there. The other says nothing, just snaps on a glove, reaches inside me, and punches me in the cervix to make sure it's still closed.

It is difficult to argue with a four-headed obstetrician—she has three more mouths than I, and many more degrees of higher education, and anyway, I have been taught not to argue with doctors. They are high priestesses, and best avoided altogether, if possible.

I cannot avoid them. I am manacled with a blood pressure cuff.

I breathe, as I have been instructed.

I examine the living tomato in my hands. I squint at it, trying to see the child inside, looking for claws or webbed feet, pearly horns or wisps of smoke from tiny, dilated nostrils. But the sac I have built is tough, and it resists my scrutiny. I see nothing but the throb of it. It doesn't believe in long-range predictions any more than I do.

Before anyone can stop me, I put it in my mouth and am reminded of my grandmother's spaghetti sauce before I swallow it whole.

Now, bear with me, because here is where it starts getting a little weird. A little of the fairy tale comes into play here.

And why not?

A fairy tale often starts with a childless woman, doesn't it, one who would give anything to anyone—her soul, for instance, to the devil or the witch or the toad in her bathwater—for the gift of a child? And let me tell you something about this woman. It's not so much that she has love in her heart to spare or that she's known all her life that mothering was her destiny or that she woke one morning with all her nurturing powers suddenly revved up and ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting infant.

It's that she thought it might be kind of cool to have a baby.

After all, she has the reliable life partner; and she has the life insurance; and let's face it, she's never going to finish writing that postmodern sword-and-sorcery novel she started ten years ago, and suddenly, for inexplicable reasons, the majority of her art is about poultry.

But the main thing—the main reason she wants to have a baby—is that after an extended period of fucking in various efficacious positions, and even consulting a wizard or two, nature seems to be telling her she can't.

She cannot seem to get pregnant.

This woman, who, whatever else can be said about her, is almost certainly descended from a long line of mothers, cannot be one herself.

And so comes the mystical line of pharmaceuticals, the Clomid and the Pergonal and the subcutaneous injections administered daily, and the praying and the paying and the sacrificing of the nanny goat and the blood in the stone basin offered up to the goddess on the mountaintop and the witch in the woods and the occasional urologist.

And this woman perseveres. She is awarded a child. Or two. Or more.

And a four-headed obstetrician.

I open my mouth, unnaturally wide, place the sac on the back of my tongue, and swallow. There is heat; there is oregano and basil and bay leaf, red wine, a touch of cinnamon, just a pinch of sugar to cut the acidity. I am reminded of my grandmother's kitchen. I never liked my grandmother very much, but she made a kick-ass spaghetti sauce.

The nest of feathers on the examination table begins to unravel, and the feathers float separately upwards, as if there has been a shift in the density of the air around us. Slowly, I follow them. Scattering bits of ivory and agate from my nest, I rise from the table in full lotus position, my navel eclipsing my crossed ankles, serene as a long-haired Buddha, but only for a split second.

Then, I fluoresce.

I emerge from my thin, cotton gown tied only at the back of my neck, eyes lighting, gloriously naked, my blood-heavy belly swinging in slow-motion majesty, nipples magenta with maternal rage, my hair lifting in a sudden ripple of internal heat. My rib cage cracks open with the terrible popping sound of tendons under duress, a taste like lighter fluid on my tongue, a high-pitched keening at the center of me.

My obstetrician steps backwards, confused, attempting to shield all her eyes with two inadequate hands. Civilization, inhibition, thought, fall away as my limbs stretch forth into talons, wings evolving like time-lapse photography Darwin, dark purple, filling the examination room with Giant Bat Majesty.

I open my mouth and my tongue unfurls, sparking like flint; a jet of flame shoots out, triumphant, along with the words, “Fuck your amniocentesis, ladies!"

I eat them, and their speculums, none of them virgins. Then I notice something twitching out of the corner of my eye and turn to pursue it. I spend a pleasant hour in the wrecked examination room, just chasing my own tail.

That night, I wake to the sound of my ribs creaking under my own weight. The ratio of baby to bladder is not in my favor. The pillow I had so carefully positioned under my abdomen and between my legs when I went to sleep is flattened under all this potential. I hear my daughter sigh and shift in her crib, down the hall. I have been pregnant, or recovering from pregnancy, most of the last two years. I am a stunned dutch oven. The man beside me snores and sweats, but both of them lightly, and his knee against my back offers a comforting counter-pressure to the babies pressing from within. He will not be going with me, tomorrow, to see the specialist. We have already been told the birth is “high risk.” Before sleep, my husband shakes the information off like drops of water from his shower and shifts in between the sheets.