Authors: Douglas F. Warrick
THERE IS A MAN WHOSE pupils are full of moths. Dry moths, dying moment by moment and collecting in drifts behind his eyes, deep down in that secret and endless world behind his face. A blue desert world populated only by the moths and a timid hermit with no eyes of his own, who only leaves his moth–wing hut to scoop up handfuls of dead moths and shovel them into his mouth.
There was a cautious status quo there once, in this windless world of Behindeye. The timid old hermit wandered and ate and he was mostly happy, if not lonely. But there was a change. The blind hermit found an infant in one of the heaps of dead moths, some wretched baby born skinless, born without lips so that his teeth struck out from his face like fence posts, born without a nose so that the skin of his face slid without interruption from his eyebrows down to the rough ridge of his upper gum line, and his slit nostrils opened his skull like sudden sinkholes. And when those moths who were still alive saw the infant, they saw a lizard–like horror, red and screaming, and they feared it, for moths fear few things as they do lizards. The hermit could not see those things, because he had no eyes of his own, so he took the infant back to his moth–wing shack, and he kept him warm and fed him dead–moth soup. And in a few years, the infant had grown into a lipless, skinless, noseless lizard–boy, red and screaming.
And this is what life is like now in the world behind some guy’s eyes. The hermit worships the lizard–boy as a god, for the lizard–boy leads him through the moth–drifts and provides for him in all the ways that a man without eyes cannot provide for himself. The moths regard the lizard–boy, the howling, mewling, gurgling, skinless, lipless, noseless, red and screaming lizard–boy, as a devil. “Grave Eater” they call him, and “The Meat Golem” because he has no skin (and because the moths are Jewish). In moth mythology, the lizard–boy is the negative aspect of the God of Abraham, who exists to define suffering with his screaming, with his grinding, slobbering teeth, and his skinless awfulness.
The lizard–boy is aware of none of this. Life is very painful for him. He often wants to die. But he loves the hermit so much. He watches him sleep at night, risking all–over nerve–burning agony just to use his skinless fingers to brush away a strand of the hermit’s hair from where it sticks at the spit–sticky corner of the old fellow’s mouth, and tuck it behind his ear. He does not know the word, “father,” and he wishes he had some name for this perfect, fragile, sweet old thing who saved him from certain suffocation in the moth–drifts.
Now, the moths watch him from the corners of the shack’s single window. They do not make any sound. In just a few seconds, they will kill the lizard–boy while the hermit sleeps. They do not need him anymore. They do not need a reminder of suffering. They understand now, and they have wept and prayed and howled, “Elohim, Elohim!” at the sky, and they thanked God for the lesson they have learned. And they have vowed to do away with this totem of suffering, now made obsolete. They have planned this night for years, passing down the stratagems through generations. Their fear, their work, their prayers, spanning a million — no, no a
billion
— three–day lifespans, and today,
TODAY
, they will lay to rest the aspirations of their forefathers! Today they earn the legacy of their ancestors! They have crafted sharp teeth for themselves from the tiny crystal bones of their dead and mounted them in their mouths. Was it painful? You’re goddamn right it was! Setting crystal spines into their soft tiny moth–gums, drawing fountains of their own blood, God, how they screamed and cried. But they are almost ready. In just seconds, they will be ready. No. Now.
Now they are ready.
They dive. There is blood and there are broken wings and moth powder scattered in poison clouds. The lizard–boy bawls and screams and swats and chomps with his grinding, slobbering, fencepost teeth, but theirs are sharper and faster and more precise. They shred him. The hermit wakes to the sounds of screaming, and he cries out, and he wants to know what is happening to his poor lizard–boy, his miracle god–son, what is happening, what is happening, my God, what is happening? He stands and he swats and he stomps, wading through helpless ragged screams and armies of moths that he cannot see, and he is useless. There is so much terrible noise. There is war. And it is not over for a very long time.
At home tonight, the man behind whose eyes exist the moths and the hermit and the dying, red and screaming lizard–boy, he rummages beneath the sink until he finds the bright white bottle of Clorox. He says to himself that this will probably hurt an awful lot, and he steels himself. This must be done. At the office tomorrow, they will talk. They will say it was an accident, an awful tragedy, poor man, blinded like that, he should sue! They will not know the details. They will construct the story themselves. But that will happen later. For now, he unscrews the bottle. And he pours and pours and pours until that sad and noisy world behind his eyes is eaten by a great white flood.
SHE RUNS. OH, YES, SHE runs. Her bare feet slap like hands against the rough, loose–packed dirt of her father’s carriage trail. Tiny rocks stick to her heels, gnawing divots into them, little pink craters like bite marks, and why yes, that does seem just about right, doesn’t it? Because Sunrise Mansion does have teeth. Sunrise Mansion devours.
She can hear the shrill, severe laughter of the Girls, and she feels like she has missed the set–up and punch line of a particularly cruel joke.
Somewhere up above her, in her father’s awful house, there is a fireplace. She feels the meanness and the promise of it, even though seventy years have passed since she has seen it in person, seventy years since she died. Her sides hurt and her lungs blaze white–hot in her chest, and all she wants to think about is the run, the dash, the great blind escape. Despite all of this, her father’s fireplace crawls up out of her memory and its image glows inside her head. The faces that stretch and strain from its surface, each one a stolen thing, a collection of sculpted Christs and gargoyle heads, each from a different place and a different time. The stones set into the face of the mantle, each with its birthplace carved into the surface. Westminster Abbey. The Birthplace of William the Conqueror. The Great Wall of China.
Some part of her thinks,
My daddy collects stolen ghosts.
The dress. The dress keeps tangling around her ankles and she keeps tripping, almost falling. Oh, her daddy gave her this dress, didn’t he? Oh, yes he did. He gave her this dress and…
§
And he says, “Isabelle, love. The pictures tonight?”
And they go. He in his white suit with wax in his mustache and she in her fine new dress. God, how pretty she looks! And she never thinks so, never ever, but tonight with her handsome daddy smiling beside her, she feels perfectly gorgeous. They park the car on the street and when they get out, someone walks up and shakes her daddy’s hand and says, “Good to see you, Mr. Governor,” even though Daddy hasn’t been governor for decades. Everything shines. That joy she feels, that pride… god, it leaps from her and wraps itself around everything! They watch
The Black Pirate
with Douglas Fairbanks. It is in Technicolor. In the dark next to her father, in his white suit with his pipe–stem sticking out of his vest pocket, everything in the whole wide world is painted in those colors.
On the way home, her father runs the car into a tree. And something sharp hits her hard in the forehead. And all the color drowns in itself. And everything is no color at all.
§
She tries not to cry. That was the subtle clutch of his big thick fingers around her ankle, so light that she didn’t even notice. It kept her next to him, even at thirty–five years old, old enough to be married, to go dancing, to experience all the wonderful things the world had to offer. Damn him. Damn her daddy.
She rounds a corner and sees the Girls standing in the middle of the trail and holding hands. They shift. Always. Their bodies can’t decide how they died. Now their necks are swollen and stretched and purple, and their heads twist away at strange angles and the blood vessels in their eyes have burst. Now their beautiful dresses, the elaborate Charleston Civil War chic they must have affected so well while they breathed, shred in a dozen places, fill with charred bullet holes, and their faces and their arms are pocked with the same, each dry and black and burnt around the edges, like open unblinking eyes. It’s the power of the living tongue, of what people say about the dead. They say the Girls were hanged. They say they died by firing squad.
It changes you after a while.
Isabelle shudders, and the Girls smile. Daddy’s voice dances through her head and she is swallowed by memory again. What had he said? In front of that great Frankenstein mantel? He had said…
§
“Do you know what happened to them?” he says, with his shirt open at the chest and his vest unbuttoned, sitting in his big leather chair in front of the fireplace. She is six, maybe seven, when Daddy finds the bodies. While the crew built the carriage trail through the wide and winding woods up the hill to Sunrise. Two bodies, mummified and buried. And Daddy reburies them, sets up a stone to mark their resting place. Now in the sitting room, he tilts his glass from side to side, watches the gin slide from edge to edge. “Spies, darling. Spies for the Union. Can you believe it? Tried and executed. Right here.”
It is a week, maybe two, after they found them, and Daddy looks so tired.
§
She hadn’t understood then, just a little girl, no real scars to compare to those of her father. But there was something else there, wasn’t there? Yes, something shameful and secret and warm kept all to himself. Her father’s vice. Stolen ghosts.
So it began with the Girls.
Now the Girls nod to Isabelle. And no, no, no, she does not want to go to them, does not want to walk within whispering distance, where she can’t tell which of them is doing the whispering, but yes, yes, yes, her feet move her forward, and now there is a Girl on either side of Isabelle, both dead and shifting.
“The key,” says one of the girls.
“Oh yes, the key,” says the other.
They giggle together.
She tries so hard not to let her skin go thick with gooseflesh as their whispers wash over her. She fails. She tells them she knows. They need the key.
There is a door set into the mantel of that terrible fireplace, that massive golem in her father’s house. A tiny tin door with a keyhole set in its center.
The Girls giggle again. There’s nothing nice about that sound. There is only something final. Because the Girls call the shots. They always have, ever since the crash and the death and the night she woke up as a part of her father’s ghost collection. Making plans, giving orders, whispering, “Run, Isabelle! Run for Sunrise!” so loud that indeed she had to run, if only to get away from their choked baby–doll voices. “Get us out,” they whispered (and still whisper). “You can get us out.”
So she runs. Like she has run every night since the last one of her life.
When she sees the house sliding over the horizon, the first tears come and she almost stops. Almost. Too angry and sad and dead to do that. So she hikes up that beautiful dress and clutches at the hem in one tight white fist and keeps running.
Damn her daddy. And damn the memories that keep pushing up into her head, her father with his hands on the wheel, it was hot in the car, the kind of summer night in Charleston that would melt…
§
It is the kind of summer night in Charleston that melts the wax her daddy puts in his mustache, and now, with his fists locked around the steering wheel, her daddy’s mustache is drooping. She can see the first beads of wet wax work their way down like vines and it makes her laugh like a little girl. Thirty–five years old and laughing like a little girl. She tells him she loves him. He smiles and says, “I love you too, Izza. You’re my baby girl.”
But Daddy looks sad, so sad, and she reaches over and puts her hand on his arm. And she asks her big beautiful daddy what’s wrong.
“Going to leave me, darling. Past time. Pretty young woman like you.”
And she tells him, no, Daddy, no, not yet, she’s not going anywhere just yet, but he lets loose one tight fist and waves her away.
“I know better,” he says, and the first drops of wax slip away and pad against the thigh of his white pants. Her daddy’s eyes are so wide tonight. So wide it scares her. They stare forward, no twitching, no blinking, and he drives like a man piloting a bullet.
They ride up onto the hill, toward the carriage trail and home. She puts her hand on his leg, over the place where the wax dripped, and catches the next few spatters. They are quiet.
And when her daddy says, “The only way to keep something forever,” she’s hardly listening anymore. Just breathing in the night, and swallowing the sounds. She doesn’t really hear him until he says, “Is losing it for good,” and jerks the steering wheel sideways. He has time to say, “Sorry, baby girl.”
§
She runs. She runs past the monument he built for her out here, the anchor he tied to her. The stone Madonna is gone, lifted up by the root, but her ashes are in there somewhere, and she shivers and knows that she should not be in two places at once. She runs up the old stone steps, slick and made green with age and mildew.
She does not stop running until her bare feet slide onto the cold stone porch. Has she come this far before? She can’t remember. She doesn’t think so. No time. No time.
The Girls are here, holding hands and sharing secrets. Shot. Hanged. Both. They wave, and Isabelle grinds her teeth against her tongue and screws her eyes shut and pretends they are not here. Still, they whisper. They say, “The key, baby girl.” Isabelle wants to scream.
She opens the door. And the three of them go in together. Sunrise Mansion breathes them in, and they are swallowed and damned when the Girls close the door. The front hall is too long, longer than it ever was when she lived, and lined with her father’s things. The ghastly old collection. Things once owned by the dead, and now owned by them again. And framed in the doorway to the sitting room, the cloister of the slippery–sick fireplace with its many faces, is her daddy. He stands with his back to them, his hands clasped behind him, in his white Mark Twain suit. He breathes, or he seems to. And Isabelle is split in two. She loves him. She hates him. She blames and forgives and reconvicts and once again pardons him.