Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (9 page)

“It doesn’t matter,” the eunuch says, as though, all her thoughts have been laid bare to him, and for all she knows they have. “Whatever words you have to offer, she will be flattered.”

And then, because there is more bleeding than usual, more than a mere taste for greedy, impatient fingers, he stops suturing just long enough to select a small blue and white china bowl from the jumble of utensils and dishes and bottles. He places it beneath her, to catch the trickle that has become a steady stream, and soon the floral pattern decorating the bottom of the bowl is lost to the life leaking from her body. For a moment,he watches her masturbate, marveling at the tiny spur of her clitoris and her pale, bloodstained fingertips.

“Any words will suffice,” he reminds her. “Any words that feel right to you,” and he picks up the needle and catgut again, and listens to her patchwork reverence and supplication while
she
listens to the sea. The dancers swirl madly around them, tracing careless eddies in the smoke trapped there beneath the steeply pitched roof of the house, and the moon watches on, jealous, but much too far away to give voice to her jealousy.

They come to this place as infrequently as once or twice a year, though there are surely those among them who would make the pilgrimage weekly were that an option. But such gems as are here displayed are few and far between, and in a market such as this it is a simple given that demand will always far exceed supply. They come from half a hundred cities, half a dozen countries, and they sit silently together, rarely speaking above a muted whisper. They sit on the hard wooden benches in the darkness, and each alone and all together they stare into the stark white spar of electric light spilling from the rafters and pooling on the boards of the tiny circular stage. No photography or audio recording of any sort is ever permitted here, and there are no exceptions, and for these women and these men the threat of exile from future gatherings is all that is required to enforce the prohibition. What is seen here and heard here is intended to be fleeting, the rarest delicacies made even more so because they may only be preserved by fleeting, fading, fallible memory.

It has no right name, this playhouse, though to some among its patrons it is known as the Well, a fitting appellation as it is little more than a wide shaft sunk deep into the soft sand and clay strata below the city. The walls are lined round about with bricks laid in precise vertically staggered bonds by the hands of Colonial masons, and what purpose the pit might have originally served has long since been forgotten. Entry is gained through the rear of an antique shop, by way of a locked door painted several shades of green. Behind the door there is a hallway that ends in a second green door, and behind that door are stairs leading down to an enormous basement. The basement is crammed and cluttered with crates and broken furniture and the iron skeletons of wasted machineries, and the winding labyrinth leading to the trapdoor by which one may reach the subbasement might as well be guarded by Pasipha’s bull-headed son. The path is never precisely the same, though most would swear that nothing ever seems to have been moved from the time before. By contrast, the subbasement is empty of everything save ages of accumulated dust and darkness, rats and the rubbery grey mushrooms that seem to need only the damp and the cold, stale air to thrive. Set into one corner is a cast-iron grate, six-sided and notched in such away that it may only be displaced by a pry bar shaped just so, and beneath the grate is the steel ladder leading down, finally, into the Well.

The air stinks of mold and, yet more faintly, of rot, and there are numerous shallow pools along the periphery where the ground-water seeping in through the ancient masonry accumulates. Here and there, the high walls have been shored against their eventual, inevitable collapse with a mismatched assortment of wooden braces and steel girders, some dating back to the decade before the War Between the States.

There is no declared dress code, but most come more or less formally attired. Masks are not permitted, any more than are photographs or tape recorders, for part of the price of admission is the bearing of one’s face to all the others who have come down to this pit hungry and anxious and wide-eyed. And somewhere there is a great leather-bound volume in which everyone who has ever sat here has inscribed his or her name with the nib of a pen long rumored to have been used in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Alcohol is not allowed, nor is smoking or the use of any other stimulant or narcotic; sobriety is requisite, for these exhibitions are too uncommon and too terrible and too wondrous by far to be squandered on those who cannot bear the experience clear-headed and self-possessed.

The audience completely encircles the dingy stage, which slowly revolves, left to right, by means of an unseen clockwork apparatus so that all will be permitted a good view. Binoculars and opera glasses may be employed, and access to the first row is determined weeks beforehand by a lottery.

There is still one additional requirement of this audience that bears mentioning here, the criterion by which those who would occupy these benches are sorted from the merely casually curious and the only superficially perverse. Each member of this audience is him- or herself a freak, not by any accident of genetics or birth or subsequent mishap, but through a conscious choice. And though none of them could ever begin to approach the profoundness of the deformities and calamities of human anatomy which they assemble to witness and to lust over, the commitment must be significant and irreversible. So, for example, we find here the lawyer who gave up all the toes on both feet, and the librarian whose tongue has been surgically excised, anti the silk-skinned young woman who wears an expensive auburn wig because all the hair on her body, head to toe, has been permanently removed by means of electrolysis. Here is a man who must most days bind his perfectly formed breasts, and the young heterosexual couple who have become impossible, discrepant Siamese twins, and the former prostitute who has allowed almost every square inch of her skin to be tattooed with graphic depictions of the least savory scenes found in the works of the Marquis de Side. No two are alike among these elective aberrations, for they must also always reflect the endless variety of malformation and corporeal blasphemy needed to satiate their shared hungers.

This is the place, and these are the rules, and this is the grand congregation of voyeurs. And tonight is no different from the hundreds of gatherings that have preceded it, except that each one is unique. There is no master or mistress of ceremonies, and the players—there are two tonight—have already taken their places. Somewhere in the shadows an old phonograph begins to play, Act II of Puccini’s
Mad am a Butterfly
released from scratched and brittle vinyl grooves by the grace of a diamond-tipped stylus. And now, for the most part, the murmurs and the nervous shuffling of feet ends, and, with no more fanfare than this, the pageant begins.

But first, these two, seated side by side in the second row because neither one was lucky in the lottery for first-row seats. The thin blond man, the head of his penis bifurcated five years ago that he might attend the gatherings, and, on his left, the red headed woman whose ears have been carved to delicate points and whose upper lip has been split and her nose flattened so that she bears some slight resemblance to a cat. This is his seventh time through the green back door of the antique shop and down the rabbit hole, while it is only her third. In that other, distant world, the one which could only just begin to imagine the necessity of the Well, much less the possibility of its existence, he designs computer games, and she is a novelist of mediocre, mid-list mystery novels. Both are past their fortieth birthday now, but, in the strictest sense of the word, both are still virgins, which is not to imply that either is in any sense innocent. Innocence, were it ever permitted entry, would not long survive amid the appetites and indulgences of this place. And though neither is innocent, each remains saddled with a lingering, incongruent naïveté, which might best be described as
expectation.

He wears a practical grey gabardine suit that smells slightly of dry-cleaning fluid, a silk necktie dyed a deep carnelian red. She is dressed all in fine white satin, as though in stubborn defiance of the native soot and grime of the pit, and of the journey to and from the pit. Her short nails have been lacquered almost the same deep red as his tie, and her long hair has been pulled back into a simple ponytail held up with white silk ribbon. He does not dare take his eyes from the stage, but she, the bolder of this pair, spares the briefest of sidewise glances at his face, his brown eyes, and his hands folded together neatly on his lap.

“Did you receive the letters?” she asks, and then she has to whisper the question a second time because he has not replied, and she thinks perhaps, in the excitement of what is to come, he did not hear. “Did you receive my letters?”

“Of course,” he says, and squints at the bright stage. “Of course, I got them.”

“But you didn’t write me back?”

“No,” he answers, sitting up just a little straighten “I didn’t write back.”

And when almost a full thirty seconds has passed without his volunteering an explanation or excuse for his silence, she takes a deep breath and asks him why. He licks at his lips and shrugs.

“I have been busy,” he whispers. “Busier than usual,” though he hasn’t. In truth, he has not even read her letters, which he keeps unopened in a bureau drawer, bundled together with a bit of twine.

“Oh,” she says, trying to not to sound surprised or disappointed, but sounding a little of both.

“I’m sorry, but I have been so very busy. The deadlines have been murder.”

“I understand,” she tells him, even if she doesn’t understand at all. “Well, at least I know they were not lost in the mail. I always worry, whenever I send a letter, that it might wind up being delivered to the wrong address, or might be mislaid by someone at the post office and never be delivered anywhere at all.”

“How many of them did you send?” he asks her, and she replies that there have been four since the last time they were here. That was not quite ten months ago, a bitter January night. He wore the same grey suit then, though his tie was the orange of a tangerine’s peel.

“Well, I have all four,” he says. “You really shouldn’t worry so much. I don’t think I’ve ever had a letter go missing, not that I can recall.”

“It happens,” she assures him. “Every year, fifty-seven million pieces of undeliverable mail end up in dead-letter offices. They mostly burn the letters. They don’t even try to find out who wrote them.”

“Fifty-seven million undelivered letters?” he asks skeptically.

“ Are you sure?”

“It’s not just letters,” she whispers. “It’s all sorts of things, parcels and letters and whatever else people happen to mail, but I imagine quite of lot of it is letters.”

“Still, fifty-seven million.”

“There were only four letters,” she says again. “So, you received them all? The last was only about five weeks back, I think.”

The mail nods for her and blinks, and now his hands are not merely folded in his lap, but clenched together so tightly that his knuckles and the ends of his well-manicured fingers have begun to go white and liter there will be crescent-shaped welts from his nails.

“If it worries you so much, maybe you should send emails, instead,” he tells her, though he treasures the four unread letters, which smell of expensive stationary and more faintly of lavender, and he can hardly stand the thought that she might take his advice and then there will never be another for him to add to the bundle.

“I always makes photocopies before I mail them,” she responds. “I have photocopies of almost every letter I have ever sent. That way, if one doesn’t reach you, I can always send a photocopy.”

“Well,like I said, I got them all. If there were only the four.”

“And the article I clipped from the newspaper, you have that too, then? You read it?”

“Of course,” he lies, knotting his hands together even more tightly than before, left squeezing right and right squeezing left, his palm gone sweaty and slick.

“As soon as I read about the murders, I knew that you’d want to see the piece. I knew that if anyone could fully appreciate their significance, it would be you. But I don’t know if you read the papers, or even watch the news on television, so I thought I’d best send you a copy.”

“Yes, that was very thoughtful of you,” the man with the bifurcated penis says, and then the phonograph begins playing
Madama Butterfly,
and if the cat-faced woman wants to ask him anything else, she’ll have to wait until after the exhibition is finished. She looks at the man once more, then sighs softly to herself and stares past the luckier people seated in front of her at the two figures on the stage. Only moments remain until it begins, whatever
it
is to be, and now the full weight of their expectation presses down upon this woman and the man seated on her left, these two who haven’t learned that the Well is not a means to some greater pleasure or some more magnificent, more recondite secret. That knowledge will come to them in the fullness of time, as it eventually comes to every member of the audience, for this subterranean theater has never claimed to be anything more than an end unto itself, a yawning cul-de-sac which has no more to offer than their eyes can see or their straining ears can hope to apprehend.