Interfictions (38 page)

I did all the predictable things: checked the dial tone twice, checked that the handset was in its cradle three times, started to call the embassy and stopped. How many times? I don't remember.
Don't tie up the line
joined forces with
Don't ask for news if you are afraid of what you might hear
to weigh me down with chains. I wanted to call. I wanted to shower and dress and go out for coffee as if this were just another day of waiting. How is this different? Because I have not been told that I am still in suspense. I am in suspension about my own suspense. I might be falling and not even know. I find that this is perhaps not unendurable—and is this the real human tragedy, that so little is unendurable? Or is it that we so often have no choice but to endure?—nevertheless, I also find I cannot do anything
but
endure. It is I who have been stripped to the bone. Without skin I am cold, without muscles I am immobile, without nerves I am numb. I sit in this last, smallest, darkest cell, this cell without a window or a door, this cell without even cracks in its walls, and I am at the end of my inventions. They sit outside the door, powerless and mute. I have carried myself into the dead heart of the maze, and here I sit still alone, waiting to become so small, so light, so close to nothing that I can evaporate into the air. Waiting. The only sound is the sound my blood makes as it marches past my ears. Waiting.

When the telephone finally rings, it clamors like a bugle, loud enough to shake down the walls. This house is two hundred and eighty years old, and bricks and timbers, floorboards and chimneypots that have stood for longer than my country has had a name are crumbling around my ears. Dust stops up my throat and burns my eyes so that I am blind with tears. There is light, but I cannot see; air, but I cannot breathe. I grope through the crumbs of brick and splinters of oak until I touch the smooth anachronistic plastic of the phone.

It rings again and lightning flashes through the bones of my hand. Dust glows blue and an ominous ruddy smoke-shadow hovers over the jackdaw piles of shattered beams. I lift the receiver to my ear.

"Hello,” I say, my voice harsh with dust. “Hello?"

An unfamiliar voice with a familiar accent says my name.

"Yes,” I say, a husk of a word.

"Please hold."

Hold? There is nothing beneath my feet, I am dangling over a void at the end of this telephone cord, of course I hold! The receiver clicks and hums, and then static bursts over me like a storm of bees.

"Go ahead,” says a voice as distant as the moon.

Thinking the voice is speaking to me, I say, “Hello?” and so I miss a word or two, perhaps my name.

"Is this thing working? Hello? Are you there?"

Ryan, rescued, is shouting at me from God knows where, a helicopter, a submarine, the far side of the moon.

"I'm here,” I say. “I'm here. When are you coming home?"

And suddenly the air is full, not of dust, but of wings.

I wrote this story in one great and glorious rush when I was visiting Ottawa, my nation's capital and a city that is older by a couple of centuries than my western hometown. I don't have a laptop so I was writing by hand in my notebook, which I haven't done regularly for years. Writing on the computer is my job and the product is (hopefully) destined for public exposure—still creative, still personally meaningful, but certainly the beginning of a communication with the world. Writing “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom” by hand seemed to draw out a much more intimate and inward voice than is usual for me, and perhaps it drew more of me into the character, too. The questions raised by the story have certainly always interested me in a very personal way. Where lies the intersection between the inner, imaginative life and that outer life even a writer has to live? How do they interact, the stories we live and the stories we dream? And is the one any more real than the other in the end?

Holly Phillips

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We carried him down to the river.

It churned: basalt, granite, marble, quartz—sandstone, limestone, soapstone. Alabaster against obsidian, flint against agate. Eddies of jasper slipped by, swirls of schist, carbuncle and chrysolite, slate, beryl, and a sound like shoulders breaking.

Fortunatus the Gryphon carried the body on his broad and fur-fringed back—how his wings were upraised like banners, gold and red and bright! Behind his snapping tail followed the wailing lamia twelve by twelve, molting their iridescent skins in grief.

Behind them came shrieking hyena and crocodiles with their great black eyes streaming tears of milk and blood.

Even still behind these came lowing tigers, their colors banked, and in their ranks monopods wrapped in high black stockings, carrying birch-bark cages filled with green-thoraxed crickets singing out their dirges.

The red and the white lions dragged their manes in the dust; centaurs buried their faces in blue-veined hands.

The peacocks closed the blue-green eyes of their tails.

The soft-nosed mules threw up their heads in broken-throated braying.

The panthers stumbled to their black and muscled knees, licking the soil from their tears.

On camels rode the cyclops holding out into the night lanterns which hung like rolling, bloodshot eyes, and farther in the procession came white bears, elephants, satyrs playing mourn-slashed pipes, pygmies beating ape-skin drums, giants whose staves drew great furrows in the road, and the dervish-spinning cannibal choir, their pale teeth gleaming.

Behind these flew low the four flame-winged phoenix, last of their race.

And after all of these, feet bare on the sand, skirts banded thick and blue about her waist, eyes cast downward, walked Hagia of the Blemmyae, who tells this tale.

When we first found him, he was face-down in the pepper-fields, his skin blazed to a cracked and blistered scarlet, his hair sparse as thirsty grass.

The pygmies wanted to eat him. He must have been strong to have wandered this far, from whatever strange country—they should have the right to bisect his liver and take the strength, wet and dripping, into their tribe.

The red lion, Hadulph, nosed his maimed feet, and snuffled at his dark clothes.

"He smells of salt water and pressed flour,” he announced, “and he who smells of pressed flour knows the taste of baked bread, and he who knows the taste of baked bread is civilized, and we do not eat the civilized, unless they are already dead and related to us, which is a matter of religion and none of anyone's business."

I looked down at his shape between the black and red pepper plants, in their long rows like a chessboard. It looked like the end of a game to me: I stood over the toppled kingpiece, a big-shouldered knight who has managed, in her jagged L-shaped steps, to finally make forward progress. I rubbed the soft and empty space above my collarbone—like a fontanel, it is silky and pulsating, a mesh of shadow and meat under the skin, never quite closed, and each Blemmye finds their own way with it, but often we are caught, deep in thought, stroking the place where our head is not. I stroked it then, considering the flotsam that the desert wind had washed onto our hard black peppercorns like the sands of a beach.

"He is wretched, like a baby, wrinkled and prone and motherless. Take him to the al-Qasr, and iron him out until he is smooth,” I said quietly, and the pygmies grumbled, gnashing their tattooed teeth.

Hadulph took the stranger on his broad and rosy back, where the fur bristles between his great shoulder blades, and that is how Presbyter Johannes came into our lives on the back of one beast, and left on the back of another.

Behind the ivory-and-amethyst pillars of the al-Qasr, which he insisted we rename the Basilica of St. Thomas, I sat with my hands demurely in my lap, fingering Hadulph's flame-colored tail. We sat in rows like children—the pygmies picked at their ears, the phoenix ran sticks of cinnamon through their beaks, carving it for their nests, the monopods relaxed on their backs, wide feet thrust overhead, each toe ringed with silver and emerald. Grisalba, a lamia with a tail like water running over moss, combed her long black hair, looking bored.

John the Priest tried not to look at me. His hair had grown back, but it was white, whiter than a man his age should own.

I told him once while he ran his tongue over the small of my back that the sun had taken all his blood, and left him with nothing in his veins but light.

He, ever the good teacher, tried to make eye contact with each of us in turn, but he could not look at my eyes, he could not look down to the full curve of my high, sun-brown breasts, and the green eyes that stared calmly from their tips under a thick fringe of lashes. I blinked often, to interrupt his droning, and he tried to look only at where my head might be if I were a woman.

A-ve.

He repeated these words as if they had any meaning for us, sounding each syllable. We did not like Latin. It sat on our tongues like an old orange, sweet-sour and rind-ridden.

A. Ve.

A-ve Ma-ri-a.

A. Ve. Mari. A.

Grisalba yawned and picked at her tail, lazily slapping its tip against the chalcedony floor. Hadulph chuckled and bit into the consonants like elbow joints.

A-ve Ma-ri-a gra-ti-a ple-na. Ti like she. Ple like play. She plays, gratia plena, Maria plays, ave Maria gratia plena.

A. Ve. Mari. A. Gra. Tea. A. Plea. Na.

"I wonder what his sweat tastes like?” Grisalba murmured in my ear. I grinned, but he could not chide me, for that would mean glancing down past my nipple-eyes to the mouth-which-is-a-navel, and he would not risk it.

No, no. She plays. She; play. Shall we try the Pater Noster instead then?

Pa. Tear. No. Star.

The strange man lay on one of the fallen pillars in the central hall of the al-Qasr—the smooth tower of violet stone had crashed to the floor one day while the quarter-moon market bustled in the portico—tile-shards of gold and splinters of ebony came tumbling after it, and we could all see the stars through the hole it made, like coins dropped into the hand of heaven. A brace of tigers looked up from arguing with a two-faced apothecary about whether she should be allowed to sell the powdered testicles of greater feline castrati as aphrodisiacs; the lamia paused in their venom-dance; I placed an arm beneath my breasts and lifted my eyes from the scribe-work before me to the ceiling. We all looked back and forth from the fallen pillar to the hole in the roof, up and down, up and down: work to sky to ruined architecture.

Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes
, I had copied out from one greenish sheet of pepper-leaf paper to another.
Animals and their variegated parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies exist, and we say that these and the like exist by nature.

The pillar had chipped its complex torus, and bitten into the onyx floor.

All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are constituted by art. Each of them has within itself a principle of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration).

The constellation of Taurus-in-Extremis, the Slaughtered Cow, could be seen winking through the broken wood, and ebony dust drifted down on a soft breeze off of the river.

Even motion can be called a kind of stationariness if it is compulsive and unending, as in the motion of the gryphon's heart or the bamboo's growth. On the other hand, a bed or a coat or anything else of that sort, insofar as it is a product of art, has innate impulses to change.

Rich black earth had spurted up around the ruptured floor. The pillar's belly was swathed in it.

As an indication of this, take the well-known Antinoë's Experiment: if you plant a bed and the rotting wood and the worm-bitten sheets in the deep earth, it will certainly and with the hesitation of no more than a season, which is to say no more than an ear of corn or a stalk of barley, send up shoots.

I could just glimpse the edge of the sardis-snake which guarded the entrance of the al-Qasr, ensuring that no folk who are not lamia and thereby licensed, could bring poison under its roof. Behind it and far off, the Cricket-star flickered as if in chirruping song.

A bed-tree would come up out of the fertile land, its fruit four-postered, and its leaves would unfurl as green pillows, and its stalk would be a deep cushion on which any hermit might rest. It is art which changes, which evolves, and nature which is stationary.

The quarter-moon market gave a collective shrug and went about itself, stepping over the purple column and leaving it where it had fallen—wasn't it better, the cyclops murmured, to let a little light in, and have a nice place to stretch one's feet? I glanced back at my thrice-copied treatise, tiresome as all secondhand treatises are, and finished the page.

However, since this experiment may be repeated with bamboo or gryphon or meta-collinarum or trilobite, perhaps it is fairer to say that animals and their parts, plants and simple bodies are artifice, brother to the bed and the coat, and that nature is constituted only in the substance in which these things may be buried—that is to say, soil and water, and no more.

By the time we laid the stranger out on the pillar, it had grown over with phlox and kudzu and lavender and pepperwort, and we rested his battered head on a thatch of banana leaves. He moaned and retched like a sailor coughing up the sea, and I held him while he wracked himself clean. It was past the fishing hour when his eyes slitted open and his moth-voice rasped:

"Thomas, I came searching for Thomas and his tomb, the Apostle, where is the Apostle?"

Hadulph and I exchanged glances. “What is an Apostle?” the lion said.

We lay down on the altar that is a throne that was a sacrificial mound before the al-Qasr was the Basilica, and when we woke, the nave that was the portico was full of roses and partridges and orthodox hymns, and peacocks lay sleeping on my shoulders. Their blue heads pressed on me like bruises: the pulse of their throats, the witness of their tails.