Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (22 page)

She
laughs, and oh, that laugh, that laugh is incalculably more frigid than
any
bath I ever give my beautiful ones, and it cuts me in a thousand secret, invisible, incorporeal places. She
knows
that, knows it well, and, so, She laughs again. When She is finished laughing, She sits up straighter, and crosses Her thin arms. Watching Her watching me, I’m struck again by how, in the apparent candlelight filling the dim and dingy room, the horns sprouting from either side of Her head appear as though they have been mold-blown from molten glass. An almost entirely opaque glass, tinted aubergine. They coil round and back upon themselves like a ram’s horns, or a satyr’s, though all other visible evidence paints Her as something female. “Your fingers, and
then
your tongue,” She says,so now
I’ve
become Narcissus. “This was before you placed the corpse in the freezer,” and I tell Her yes, that this was before. She wants to know, then, if I went back later, when the body had frozen, and I tell Her, honestly, that part wasn’t in my dream. Regardless, I would know. Did you go back to her, this blonde of yours, after she was frozen?” And risking so much and, in the end, risking hardly anything at all, I say to Her, “You love this.” She nods and tells me yes, there is
great
delight for Her in hearing these words spoken, and hearing also the accompanying dissonance inside my mind. “Was there not love in you?” She asks. “Each one of them, were they not your heart’s own truest love? Was there even one among that number to whom you were not entirely devoted?” I say She already knows the answer, but then I say, because She needs to hear it
spoken
, then I say, “No, there was not even one of them I did not, in turn, love. I took the same chance for them all. I placed myself in mortal danger for
all
of my beautiful ones, and so I
know
that I loved them. I
hurt,
looking into their eyes, and so I know I loved. I hurt
so
much, and
every
time in the most inaccessible recesses of my being, and so I know, and I
don’t
doubt that I did truly love them.” Then I hear the faint, discordant music that sometimes drifts through the dim and dingy room, like careless hands on a piano badly in need of tuning. Several times, or more times than several, I have come near to asking Her where the music originates, what it signifies, if it has some purpose. But I never have,and I don’t this time. I just wait for it to pass. She never even seems to notice it. “Why did this one go to the freezer?” She asks, though She already knows that answer, too. “Why the freezer, instead of the box? Was the box preoccupied?” And I shake my head, and, is the last jangling strains of the music fade, I say, “No. The box was empty. But there was no need of the box. The glue did the trick. It would have been pointless to place her in the box, to go to the trouble of burying her and having to dig her up again, when she was already dead.” And “Yes,” She says. “Yes, of course. I shouldn’t have asked that question. Of course, it would have been unnecessary and meaningless to place her in the box. And an artist must always conserve her energy. It mustn’t be squandered on futile endeavors.” I say again, so softly that even I hardly hear myself, “She
was
already dead.” She blinks (and it has occurred to me, repeatedly, that if I could
only
be sufficiently attentive, I would be able to catch a pattern to Her blinking; it must be something not dissimilar to Morse code, the blinking of Her eyes like clusters of ripe pomegranate seeds). She blinks. And She glances at the door. I have never yet seen that door open, but I assume it is more than
trompe-l’œil,
surely. The assumption is baseless, and I freely acknowledge that. What was it that Carl Sagan wrote? “A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.” So, yes, what a sad spectacle is that door. If it is a fake, only paint over plaster, what a waste of space. And if it
is
, in truth, an
actual
door, what a scope for misery and folly. She would say, “It might be hope.” And I would remind Her that April is the cruelest month, and She, dutifully, would agree. I’m not guessing. We have played that scene more than once. “Did you hear something?” I ask. “Out there, did you hear something?” She turns back to me, and She asks, “No, dear. Did you?” I tell Her that I didn’t. Because I didn’t. And She blinks. And She smiles. And Her predatory teeth glint in the candlelight. She asks, “Was she left long in the freezer?” I answer that, as best I can recollect, she was left two or three days. “Before you took her to the river,” She says, “there was more Your fingers or your tongue? Or both?” And now my head fills up with the vision of the blonde, her flesh gone hard as stone, and, since water ice is, indeed, a mineral, she
was
stone, yes, and she was fossilized, and I’d become Pygmalion inverted. She was not so thoroughly colorless as marble, but the frost that dappled the white, white skin of this Galatea was near enough, I think. “I kissed her frozen lips,” I say. “But Aphrodite took no mercy on me.” This causes Her to laugh again, and it seems safe for me to laugh, as well, and so I do. “I kissed her lips, ever at the risk of thawing them with my scalding breath. I laid my hand on the cairn of her breast.” And She blinks and says, “You’d shaved her, yes.” It’s not a question. “Yes, but that was before the bath, That was always at the beginning.” “So she was bare and smooth, as would befit such a sculpture,” my custodian, or caretaker, or tormentor says. “Of course,” I reply. “And I laid my hand there, between her legs, at her sex, and the cold was
so
cold it seemed almost hot, beneath my palm.” Leaning forward again, She asks, beetling her violet brows, “That was all?” I say that yes, that was all. “The ice would not permit me entry, and that was always a
rule.
It was a rule that I never once violated. The ice was
final,
and the ice was not ever to be breeched.” “No matter your desire?” “No matter my desire,” I tell Her, trying hard not to sound bitter, though I
am,
and though She
knows
I am. I lose count of the masks I wear. The futile lies I tell Her. “I took her to the river, to a deep place below one of the bridges. There are gulls there, sometimes, and cormorants. The sun was almost up, but it is quite a desolate place. Still, I was cautious. Always, I was cautious. They never found me.” And then She asks a question that consists of a single word. “Police?” I don’t want to answer. I want to close my eyes, and sleep, sleep forever, and dream of my beautiful ones, and of a world beyond the dim and dry and dingy room lit with unseen candles. ‘“Police,” I nod. “I never fucked up. Or I never fucked up badly enough that they took note. I’m proud of that. I am.” She tells me that I
should
be proud, and now She stands, which She rarely does. She stands, rising to Her full height, which must be seven feet, at least. “You should be proud,” She says, repeating Herself. “You got my attention. Which is why it pains me so, that you avoid the mirrors.” No, I’ve
not
mentioned the mirrors. There are two in the room. When I sit up in the bed, my back to the headboard, facing Her, there is a mirror on my right, and another almost directly in front of me. She continues, staring down at me now. “If I were less understanding of your situation,” She says, “I would unquestionably be insulted, as you were insulted by your beautiful ones, each time they refused the gift you offered them.” If I explain that I mean no insult, I know that will only be another sort of insult, and so I don’t. “I am growing sickofour monotonous jousting,” She tells me, without there being a hint of anger in Her voice. “Worse, I am growing disgusted with your delusions. I watched over you so long, dear child, and, you
must
know, that was much more the source of your success than any cleverness of your own devising. The police did not see, because I didn’t wish them to see.” This is nothing I haven’t heard before, though the words pound the air with more force and more ferocity than is usual for Her. “I delivered you here, to me,” and I know precisely what She wishes me to recall in this precise moment. The gun that I placed to my temple, and the trigger I did not ever have the nerve to squeeze. The bottle of pills I never swallowed. And, then, the noose, tied expertly with yellow nylon rope, and, as they say, the third time is a charm. “No,” She says, speaking louder than before. “No, I
am
new less understanding, and I no longer
cave
about your situation. There is too much work to be still done for us to go on like this, me mollifying you, as though you are some lost and pathetic soul, consigned to her own private nook of Hell. As though you do not know. It sickens me, the way you
deny.
” And I don’t ask what it is She thinks that I am denying. I might, but She bends close and places a hand firmly on either side of my face. She has never been so near, and I have never before noticed the stinging odor of Her breath, like cinnamon and gasoline and chrysanthemums and bleach. I gag, and when I try to turn away, She forces my face in another direction, towards the vanity mirror on my right. “You
will
look,” She says. “Or I will take away your eyelids and leave you with no choice in the matter. It is
shameful
a
disgrace,
for one of
us
to fear its own reflection.” And here I am, in the instant that has ever been arriving, ever overdue, and She whispers, “An artist must always conserve her energy. It mustn’t be squandered on futile endeavors.” And I see that there are
two
demons in the mirror,
two
violet-skinned monsters,
two
sets of pomegranate eyes and aubergine horns. And the four wills melt away, and I see this is because they were never more solid than my guilty, fevered thoughts. “You are so beautiful,” She says, “Such terrible beauty. And I will
not
have you believing any longer the lies that men and women tell, the falsehoods that would have you believe you are
not
beautiful and not without your rightful place in this Creation.” I start to say something, amazed at the configuration of my own jaws, but She places a forestalling index finger to my orchid lips. “Apologize, and I
will
rip the tongue from out your mouth. You will not apologize ever again. There is no shame remaining.” So, I’m silent. I don’t explain that I’d only meant to thank her, and that it hadn’t even occurred to me to apologize. The walls have fallen away, and the stars go on in all directions, and the Void embraces me. “We’ve all been changed,”
She
says, “from what we were,” and I do not disagree. And in the mirror, now, there is only
one
of us reflected, one of
me,
only a single violet-skinned monster and just a single set of pomegranate eyes and one pair of glassy aubergine horns. And I laugh. I laugh until stars flinch, and dead women sleeping in the mud beds of distant rivers stir uneasily in dreams of dim, dry rooms.

No one knows that she is a fairy lady. No one alive, at least. No one who is only a human man or woman. In this modern day and this disenchanted era, there are none who might even suspect the simple truth of her. She herself did not know until the age of thirteen and the onset of menarche, when she woke one morning to find the bed sheets stained red, and from the blood of her menstruation had sprung minute sprigs of rye-grass and wild thyme. She wadded the ruined and oddly fecund bedclothes into a heap and hid them beneath bulging plastic bags at the bottom of a trashcan. The garbage men and their rumbling truck came and carried them away, and that night, an unruly procession of goblins and pixies arrived and danced in the flowerbed beneath her windowsill. They trampled the pansies flat, and nibbled the impatiens to ribbons, so that the next morning the woman whom the girl had always believed to be her mother blamed the damage on a neighborhood dog. The next evening, the fairies returned and sang for the girl, who, by proxy of blood, was no longer a girl, and who, of course, had never truly
been
a girl. They serenaded her in their high, reedy voices and played raucous, bawdy songs on petite flutes and lyres and drums no larger than a thumbnail. She sat on the floor and listened, though her heart ached to rush outside and join in their revelry. In the long, last hour before dawn, a hairy little bogie of a man perched himself haphazardly upon the window ledge and, more or less off key, and with no evident heed to the tempo set by the musicians below, he sang:

Fast, fast, through the greenwood speeding

Out in the moonlight bright,

Her fairy raid she is leading,

The dainty Queen so light,

And the baby heir of acres wide

She is carrying away to fairyland.

A changeling is left by the nurse’s side

And she in the young heir’s place shall stand.

And when his song was clone, he whispered to her that this must forever be a secret thing between them, a confidence. Before she could object or even think to ask why, the bogie quickly related to her all the mischief that had been done to people only
suspected
of being changelings. He noted, with an obvious, smug sort of pride, that virtually none of the condemned had actually been born to the Shining Court, for the Sidhe are generally much too cunning to allow the babes they leave in place of stolen human children to be found out.

She listened, only half believing, for her life had been easy and kind, and she was unaccustomed to such awful tales. Besides, they’d all happened a very long time ago, in a more superstitious age, in countries far across the sea. All those suspect infants left out to freeze on cold Welsh and English nights, abandoned on cairns or graves or in ditches, the ones flogged and the others placed on hot shovels and held over the coals. Sometimes, the bogie confided, an unfortunate was fortunate enough that it was only pelted with bits of iron or placed in a dung pile.

The logic was simple, said the bogie. Surely, we’d never allow our offspring to suffer so grievously, and would rush in at once to reclaim those left in the stead of their own wee pink whelps.