The Ammonite Violin & Others (25 page)

Somewhat more intrigued than I’d expected to be, I return the bottle to its place on the walnut stand, and for a long while (or so it seems) I sit staring at this
gift.
I think you’ve used the word in its loosest sense. She seems so close to death now that I might kill her with only a half-hearted contemplation of her undoing. She is naked, her body slicked with placental secretions and offal and glistening drops of pine resin. Her eyes are squeezed shut and her blue lips tremble with cold or pain or both. She is pretty enough, I suppose, if perchance you’re into pussy. Her breasts are small and well-formed, but she’s so thin that I think it must have been a very long time since she’s bothered with getting enough to eat. And yes, even through the afterbirth I catch a whiff of that fragile, acrid perfume that led you to suspect she might be a pilgrim. Crush a handful of anise and dried foxglove,
Artemisia absinthium
, myrrh, a bit of fish oil, a pinch of mausoleum dust and antimony, and you’d get something not so very far afield from that singular fragrance. Her lips part and she gags, expelling a gout of some viscous, milky fluid, and then she’s coughing and rising weakly onto her knees.

“She’s certainly ruined the linens,” I say, and now you have dissolved into an angry swarm of red wasps, darting to and fro, and I hear your buzzing, honeycomb voice crawling about inside my head.
Play nice
, you say, and
Try not to break her all at once.
And then all those thrumming, flitting bodies you’ve divided yourself into are swallowed up by the not-quite-solid walls, and I am left alone with this bestowal, this ragged distaff handout, when all I really wanted was the humdrum pleasure of your cock inside my ass.

She’s watching me now, her watery eyes the color of ice at the core of a glacier, that exact opaline shade of blue. I can see that she begins to understand what has come of you, and though those eyes are filled with hurt and spite and hate, there is also an unmistakable glint of something like triumph.

She tries to speak, but only a hoarse wheeze makes it past her teeth and cyanotic lips.

“Take your time,” I tell her, and I think about offering the girl some of the liquor, but I’m not yet certain it wouldn’t be a waste, and it might be ages before you show up with another bottle of pear brandy. “You were looking for the way down?” I ask, and she nods her head.

“You’re lucky,” I say “Last time he brought someone down, they made the journey lodged somewhere between his stomach and small intestine. And what with all that hydrochloric acid and pepsin and what have you, there wasn’t a whole lot left by the time he spat the poor son of a bitch up again. I guess he’s getting better at those delicate uterine forgeries.”

She coughs, gags again, and grits her teeth, which I notice have turned to chrome. I could wait, were I that sort, and when she’s able to speak clearly again and answer (questions I might satisfy my curiosity—what path led her so near the portal; what was it she hoped to find here; what betrayal or loss or warping of her soul caused her to seek these deep-seated lands; has she come searching for someone who arrived before her? I like that last question best of all, for it opens up such exquisite realms of possibility. But I am not possessed of the sort of diligence or passivity, and besides, I’ve been bitten by pets before. Sometimes it’s most prudent to let curiosity go unsatiated. And even in these grey quarters, there is a sort of Darwinian imperative at work, survival of the most imaginative, the least scrupulous, and least fastidious. And I think there’s ambition in her eyes.

She reaches out and cradles my misconceived cock in her left hand. A rash of barnacles and the corpulent tendrils of sea anemones have begun to spread across her forearms.

“I know this game,” she croaks, and a little more of the milky amniotic liquid dribbles from the corners of her mouth. And in her grasp, my sex at once blooms into something very like the calyx of an epiphytic orchid, unfolding to reveal a sunburst of sepals and petals and a swollen, throbbing labellum. I do not scream, though some part of me—surprised by such unexpected pain and unexpected skill—wants very badly to scream. She reaches inside the bloom she has created, finding and stroking the four erect stamens, and when she takes her hand away again, the tips of her fingers are stained saffron with pollen.

“I think perhaps he’s ready now,” she says, her voice still raw and rasping, but there’s a smug humor there, regardless. She begins to lick the sticky granules of pollen from her fingertips as the air around our bed swells with the eager, anxious hum of a hundred or five hundred or a thousand red wasps. All those restless wings scissoring apart the darkness, a hovering cloud of piercing stingers and candy-striped bodies, and I take another swallow of brandy and lie back on this mattress and shut my eyes and wait for whatever it is you have in mind.

How, I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley
(October 15
^th
, 1831)

“Wake up,” she whispers, as ever she is always whispering with those demanding, ashen lips, but I do not open my eyes. I do not wake up, as she has bidden me to do, but, instead, lie drifting in this amniotic moment, unwilling to move one instant forward and incapable of retreating by even the scant breadth of a single second. For now, there is
only
now; yet, even so, an infinity stretches all around, haunted by dim shapes and half-glimpsed phantasmagoria, and if I named this time and place, I might name it Pluto or Orcus or Dis Pater But never would I name it purgatorial, for here there are no purging flames, nor trials of final purification from venial transgressions. I have not arrived here by any shade of damnation and await no deliverance, but scud gently through Pre-Adamite seas, and so might I name this wide pacific realm
Womb,
the uterus common to all that which has ever risen squirming from mere insensate earth. I might name it
Mother.
I might best call it nothing at all, for a name may only lessen and constrain this inconceivable vastness.

“Wake up now,” she whispers, but I shall rather seek these deeper currents.

No longer can I distinguish that which is
without
from that which is
within.
In ocher and loden green and malachite dusks do I dissolve and somehow still retain this flesh and this unbeating heart and this blood grown cold and stagnant in my veins. Even as I slip free, I am constrained, and in the eel-grass shadows do I descry her desperate, damned form bending low above this warm and salty sea where she has laid me down. She is Heaven, her milky skin is star-pierced through a thousand, thousand times to spill forth droplets of the dazzling light which is but one half of her unspeakable art. She would have me think it the totality, as though a dead woman is blind merely because her eyes remain shut. Long did I suspect the whole of her. When I breathed and had occasion to walk beneath the sun and moon, even then did I harbour my suspicions and guess at the blackness fastidiously concealed within that blinding glare. And here, at this moment, she is to me as naked as in the hour of her birth, and no guise nor glamour would ever hide from me that perpetual evening of her soul. At this moment, all and everything is laid bare. I am gutted like a gasping fish, and she is flayed by revelation.

She whispers to me, and I float across endless plains of primordial silt and gaping hadopelagic diasms where sometimes I sense the awful minds of other sleepers, ancient before the coming of time, waiting alone in sunken temples and drowned sepulchers. Below me lies the grey and glairy
miss
of Professor Huxley’s
Bathybius haeckelii,
the boundless, wriggling sheet of
Urschleim
that encircles all the globe. Here and there do I catch sight of the bleached skeletons of mighty whales and ichthyosauria, their bones gnawed raw by centuries and millennia and aeons, by the busy proboscides of nameless invertebrata. The struts of a Leviathan’s ribcage rise from the gloom like a cathedral’s vaulted roof, and a startled retinue of spiny crabs wave threatful pincers that I might not forget I am the intruder. For this I
would
forget, and forswear that tattered life she stole and now so labours to restore, were that choice only mine to make.

I know this is no ocean, and I know there is no firmament set out over me. But I am sinking, all the same, spiraling down with infinite slowness towards some unimaginable beginning or conclusion (as though there is a difference between the two). And you watch on worriedly, and yet always that devouring curiosity to defuse any fear or regret. Your hands wander impatiently across copper coils and spark tungsten filaments, tap upon sluggish dials and tug so slightly at the rubber tubes that enter and exit me as though I have sprouted a bouquet of umbilici. You mind the gate and the road back, and so I turn away and would not see your pale, exhausted face.

With a glass dropper, you taint my pool with poisonous tinctures of quicksilver and iodine, meaning to shock me back into a discarded shell.

And I misstep, then, some fraction of a footfall this way or that, and now somehow I have not yet felt the snip that divided
me
from
me.
I sit naked on a wooden stool near
Der Ocean auf dem Tische
, the great vivarium tank you have fashioned from iron and plate glass and marble.

You will be my goldfish,
you laugh.
Ton will be my newt. What better part could you ever play, my dear?

You kiss my bare shoulders and my lips, and I taste brandy on your tongue. You hold my breasts cupped in your hands, and tease my nipples with your teeth. And I know none of this is misdirection to put my mind at ease, but rather your delight in changes to come. The experiment is your bacchanal, and the mad glint in your eyes would shame any maenad or rutting satyr. I have no delusions regarding what is soon to come. I am the sacrifice, and it matters little or none at all whether the altar you have raised is to Science or Dionysus.

“Oh, if I could stand in your place,” you sigh, and again your lips brush mine. “If I could
see
what you will see and
fed
what you will feel!”

“I will be your eyes,” I say, echoing myself. “I will be your curious, probing hands.” These might be wedding vows that we exchange, These might be the last words of the condemned on the morning of her execution.

“Yes, you shall, but I would make this journey myself, and have need of no surrogate.” Then and now, I wonder in secret if you mean everything you say. It is easy to declare envy when there is no likelihood of exchanging places. “Where you go, my love, all go in due time, but you may be the first ever to return and report to the living what she has witnessed there.”

You kneel before me, as if in awe or gratitude, and your head settles upon my lap. I touch your golden hair with fingers that have scarcely begun to feel the tingling and chill, the numbness that will consume me soon enough. You kindly offered to place the lethal preparation in a cup of something sweet that I would not taste its bitterness, but I told you how I preferred to know my executioner and would not have his grim face so pleasantly hooded. I took it in a single acrid spoonful, and now we wait, and I touch your golden hair. “When I was a girl,” I begin, then must pause to lick my dry lips. “You have told me this story already.”

“I would have you hear it once more. Am I not accorded some last indulgence before the stroll to the gallows?”

“It will not be a gallows,” you reply, but there is a sharp edge around your words, a brittle frame and all the gilt flaking free. “Indeed, it will be little more than a quick glance stolen through a window before the drapes are drawn shut against you. So, dear, you do not stand to
earn
some final coddling, not this day, and so I would not hear that tale repeated, when I know it as well as I know the four syllables of my own beloved’s name.”

“You
will
hear me,” I say, and my fingers twine and knot themselves tightly in your hair. A few flaxen strands pull free, and I hope I can carry them down into the dark with me. You tense, but do not pull away or make any further protest. “When I was a girl, my own brother died beneath the wheels of an ox cart. It was an accident, of course. But still his skull was broken and his chest all staved in. Though, in the end, no one was judged at fault.”

I sit on my stool, and you kneel there on the stone floor, waiting for me to be done, restlessly awaiting my passage and the moment when I have been rendered incapable of repeating familiar tales you do not wish to hear retold.

“I held him, what remained of him. I felt the shudder when his child’s soul pulled loose from its prison. His blue eyes were as bright in that instant as the glare of sunlight off freshly fallen snow. As for the man who drove the cart, he committed suicide some weeks later, though I did not learn this until I was almost grown.”

“There is no ox cart here,” you whisper. “There are no careless hooves, and no innocent drover.”

“I did not say he was a drover. I have never said that. He was merely a farmer, I think, on his way to market with a load of potatoes and cabbages. My brother’s entire unlived life traded for a only few bushels of potatoes and cabbages. That must be esteemed a bargain, by any measure.”

“We should begin now,” you say, and I don’t disagree, for my legs are growing stiff and an indefinable weight has begun to press in upon me. I was warned of these symptoms, and so there is not surprise, only the fear that I have prayed I would be strong enough to bear. You stand and help me to my feet, then lead me the short distance to the vivarium tank. Suddenly, I cannot escape the fanciful and disagreeable impression that your mechanical apparatuses and contraptions are watching on. Maybe, I think, they have been watching all along. Perhaps, they were my jurors, an impassionate, unbiased tribunal of brass and steel and porcelain, and now they gaze out with automaton eyes and exhale steam and oily vapours to see their sentence served. You told me there would be madness, that the toxin would act upon my mind as well as my body, but in my madness I have forgotten the warning.