Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (13 page)

There was a party, an especial sort of party for those with especial predilections. It was, in fact, the sort of party that Daniel and his twin-whom will not herein be named—frequented, for purposes having more to do with their own predilections than the money that men and women at these gatherings sometimes gave them in exchange for their company, their services, or nothing more than their stray thoughts. The twins were never poor, their mother having died and left to them a small, but sufficient, fortune deriving from the family’s granite quarries far away in Massachusetts, and also from holdings in diamond mines in Russia and Botswana. Fortunately, it was a small fortune that demanded very little of their actual attention, for neither possessed much in the way of business acumen. Their finances were managed by an aged and odd sort of fellow named Stebbins, and more than once he had waved his monthly fees in exchange for a few hours alone with the twins.

On the night of this particular party, both Daniel and his brother had drunk more than was their custom, and well before dawn, they’d left, accompanying an admittedly peculiar heterosexual couple dressed all in white leather and white silk and the man and woman both wearing white mil polish and white lipstick. They called for a car, and the limousine ferried the four of them uptown to a loft with hardwood floors and redbrick walls hung with an assortment of paintings by someone named Albert Perrault, whom the white couple explained had recently been killed in a motorcycle accident in France. The painting depicted various black-a-vised and only vaguely defined grotesqueries, all of which made Daniel uneasy to look at for very long, and so he didn’t. The furniture was upholstered in white leather, and the kitchen tiles were the same immaculate, snowy hue, as were the bedroom walls and bedspreads and satin drapes.

There were more drinks, and there were tabs of ecstasy, and then Daniel was tied to a white-enameled chair with lengths of nylon rope the color of cream. This was nothing unusual, in and of itself, and even the gag, with its white silicone ball, had sounded no alarms. The party, as noted already, catered to those with certain needs, and this was only the latest variation on a scene that the twins had played out numerous times before. The chair sat at the foot of that long white bed, where the man and woman took turns with his brother, while Daniel could only watch, aching for some release, or his turn upon the mattress, and forced to look upon the Perrault hung above the headboard. The canvas was enormous, and almost its entire surface had been painted the same charcoal grey. There was a figure at the center, which had looked to Daniel like a satyr, perhaps, and he thought, possibly, that the satyr was crouched beneath a tree, but it was hard to tell, as the painter’s style strayed to and fro between impressionism and the abstract.

And it was after his twin’s second orgasm, once the man and woman had each fucked him repeatedly and with a ferocity that had seemed to match, somehow, the murky threat of that grey painting above them, that the woman had produced a small syringe. Daniel’s brother was lying on his belly, wrapped snug in the ivory folds of those cum-soaked sheets, laughing at some scrap of profanity the man had whispered in his ear. Later, all the misdirection would be clear, but, in that moment, Daniel only felt his own neglected desire, the distracting, deafening throb of his erection. The woman jabbed the needle into his brother’s left thigh, and the convulsions began within only a few seconds. It was neither a pretty nor a painless death, though it was, at least, relatively quick. Indeed, his twin was dead before Daniel had fully begun to comprehend
what
he was seeing. He could not scream or cry out for mercy or help—the ball gag saw to that—and had to make do with muffled howls and curses. And when his brother’s paroxysms ceased, Daniel shut his eyes tightly, that lie would not have to watch what the man and woman did to the corpse.

And then he must have passed out, succumbing to the combined effects of shock and fury, alcohol and the tab of MDMA, because there were dreams. He stood alone in a charcoal pasture beneath the boughs of a charcoal tree, and the satyr played its pipes for Daniel and told a story of the beautiful nymph he had once loved, but who had spurned its love, and so the satyr had torn her to pieces and scattered the remains across this same charcoal field. The satyr offered to take him as its eromenos, and one question lingered on Daniel’s lips, too fearsome to be spoken—
And what if I should decline?

And sometime later, after sunrise, he awoke hung-ewer on a park bench, thoughtfully bundled up in a white chinchilla coat. Daniel discovered a typed letter in the left-hand pocked of the coat, folded and sealed inside a white envelope, written in ink from a crimson typewriter ribbon explaining, quite convincingly, how any attempt to prove the man and woman’s culpability in the death of his brother would not only prove futile, but would surely be met with the occasion of his own death. Daniel sat there for more than an hour, surrounded by the winter and the city, the bleak landscape of leafless branches and black ice and newly fallen snow, manhole covers steaming on the street and the exhaust of all the yellow taxis rushing by. For a time, he held out hope that he was dreaming still, and the satyr would appear, in due course, to kindly lead him back through the charcoal painting to the bedroom where his brother still lived. He looked for hoof prints in the snow, and sniffed the air for its musky, goatish scent. In the end, he gave up and hailed one of the taxis, which drove him to Penn Station, where he took a train out of the city. It was almost dark by the time Daniel found his way home again, and this, then, is what we shall consider a more suitable beginning to the tale.

Other beginnings, all equally suitable and equally legitimate as starting points, might be detailed here, but the catalog would quickly grow tiresome, and the reader might lose interest and wander away. And so, regrettably, this affair must be relayed with discretion. There are some who say that one of the sacred duties of the storyteller is to divide reality, history, fallacy, myth, fiction, fact, and parable into discrete and easily processed units, sparing the ear and eye and mind all manner of indigestion. You may choose the garden, or you may choose the party, or you may imagine those earlier beginnings for yourselves.

3.

Scotch-taped to one wall of Daniel’s cluttered greenhouse workshop is a page torn from a 1932 edition of Robert Burton’s
The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621), pulled from the portion of that voluminous and obsessively subdivided manuscript titled “Bad Diet a cause. Quality of Meats.” A single sentence has been marked over with a neon-yellow highlighter, and it reads, “Mithridates by often use, which Pliny wonders at, was able to drink poison; and a maid, as Curtius records, sent to Alexander from King Porus, was brought up with poison from her infancy.” (The First Partition, Section 2, Member 2, Subsection L). Daniel chanced across the passage almost a year after his brother’s death, and, to quote Charles Darwin, “... from so simple a beginning...” was born Daniel’s scheme. In that single sentence from a book published the better part of four centuries ago, he found direction, and so began the gathering together of his fatal garden and menagerie, not to mention a vast cabinet of deleterious minerals, elements, chemical compounds, and microbes. Daniel soon discovered that this theme of incrementally tainted women delivered as a sort of passively assassinous gift could be traced back to the early Middle Ages and the
Purnanas
or
Suhrit-Sammitas
, said, by the faithful, to have been compiled by Vyasa Rishi, the Krishna Dvaipayana,at the close of the Hindu Dvapara Yuga.

No matter the source, it is the
fact
of the inspiration here that matters, those few words that set Daniel on this path, that gave him some hope, however expensive it might prove, of avenging the murder of his brother. And, too, there is the private detective retained to locate, identify, and keep tabs on the couple in Manhattan. By now, Daniel has five thick files on them, exacting profiles of their habits and history, and he has cause to believe his twin was not their first or their last victim. The detective, who has been paid, and paid well, to maintain the utmost discretion and secrecy, has linked them to disappearances of young men and women from Virginia to Massachusetts, Richmond to Boston, over a period of nine years. There appears to have been two victims since the death of Daniel’s brother. But he has not allowed these facts to rush him towards the pair’s reckoning, and he will feel no guilt for not having saved the lost he never knew. His twin is burden enough, and he will take on no more. Still, there is a map taped to the wall alongside the page from
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, and there are pins with colored heads to mark each murder committed by the two. They are not his responsibility, all those other deaths, but they are a useful reminder.

This morning, May turning to June, he draws into a three-tenth’s cc syringe half a milliliter of a drought concocted from the venom of a burrowing asp, .8 micrograms of quicksilver (specifically, mercuric chloride), and a drop of neurotoxin taken from the telson of a fat-tailed scorpion from the vast salt pan of Chott el Djerid, north of the Grand Erg Oriental of Tunisia. This is a new formula, and though he has run numerous computer simulations and tested it on rabbits and white mice, there is never any knowing, with certainty, the consequences in a human subject, especially one whose body has already been saturated with so many poisonous compounds. Daniel makes a fist and injects himself in the left arm, just above the bend of his elbow. He quickly jots a few notes, recording the time, his blood pressure and body temperature, and then retires to a sofa in the house adjacent to his workshop to wait out the coming sickness and to list what he can of the effects of the compound. He knows, in truth, there is very little reason for compiling such subjective details of his self-poisonings. He will live, or he will die, and very little else is important here. But the conceit that this is somehow a scientific undertaking helps to keep him focused through the pain and sickness and delirium, sometimes. And, sometimes, it does not.

Very often, during his “treatments” (as he thinks of them), there are hallucinations and wild fever dreams. So, Daniel has hired a nurse who watches over him on these days and nights, that he will not in his frenzied thrashings do himself some irreparable harm, thereby ruining all his work and allowing the predatory couple’s spree to continue, unchecked.

And as this morning gives way to afternoon, and the pain and nausea wraps him in its razor folds, she sits nearby, watching, attentive should some intervention be required. And at last he sets his clipboard and pen aside, and surrenders to the tarantella rhythm of the pollutants coursing through his veins.

And
this
time, the visions come fast and hard, more brilliant and more lucid than is usual, most likely owing (he will later hypothesize) to some quirk of the scorpion’s toxin, to its precise arrangement of tiny proteins and the potassium and sodium cations. He closes his eyes, and the world spills around him like rivers of flame and ice floes and the displaced sediment and volcanic ash and scalding incandescent gases of pyroclastic flows. And, for a time, he walks those grey fields again with Albert Perrault’s Pan, the grass crunching like frost beneath his bare feet and the satyrs hooves. The mold-tinted sky is low and velvety, and the air around them stinks of turpentine and linseed oil. The grey fields end, finally, at a precipice, and if there is some opposite side to this chasm, it is so tar away that sight of it is lost in the distance and the scattered light of the painted world. He looks down, even though the satyr told him not to, and the blackness there roils and curls back upon itself, as alive as the serpents in Daniel’s workshop, and incalculably more treacherous.

“Orpheus wouldn’t listen, either,” says the satyr, “and that poor bastard’s still wandering about in there somewhere.”

“No,” Daniel replies. “Orpheus found his way out. That’s the way the story goes. He found his way out of the underworld, but... he looked back and so lost Eurydice.”

“Ah, now. Is
that
the way they’re telling it these days?” And the satyr laughs and stares up at that sagging, moldy, zinc-tinged sky.

“On her wedding day,” Daniel replies, wishing he could look away from the chasm, “Eurydice was pursued by Aristaeus, and she came upon a snake that bit her. And she died,” and then he says something about Virgil’s
Georgies
and hexametric verse, and he cites Hansel and Gretel and Lot’s wife as examples of the dangers of looking back, but the satyr isn’t listening.

“The son of Calliope and Oeagrus was hardly more than a silly little faggot, him and that goddamned lyre. Not so different from that brother of yours—or you—really. I figure the punk pretty much got what was coming to him, the day he met up with those “Thracian Maenads. That was Ovid, by the way, not your sainted Mr. Virgil.”

“Rut,” Daniel protests, “you
just
said he’s still down there, wandering and lost.”

The satyr sighs and spits over the precipice. “Don’t you go cutting words in
my
mouth, boy. I said he was still there, somewhere, but I never said he was
lost
.”

“But if he died in Thrace—”

“You make me tired, boy,” the satyr says, tugging at its wiry beard, and soon he loses interest in Daniel and vanishes into the shadows of the painted world. And so Daniel stands alone at the place where land ends, there at the edge of a canvas, and he wonders if Hades and Persephone would ever take mercy on him. And if they
did,
he wonders if he could then walk those winding, labyrinthine paths leading back to this field that Perrault painted, before his motorcycle accident, back to this limbo created for the one who delights
all
the gods. Back to the enormous painting hung above the bed where his twin died, the twin and surely others, and where the killers still sleep.

There are storms near dawn, shortly after the delirium and agony release Daniel to consciousness and the nurse’s care. He sits propped up on the sofa, still drenched in corrupted sweat, still dizzy and ill. He sips a hot cup of tea she has made tor him and watches the lightning, feeling the reverberation of thunderclaps deep in his chest. He sits and thinks of the gift sent to Alexander by the Indian giant, Raja Puru, the maiden “brought up with poison from her infancy.”