Hunger's Brides (27 page)
“I've loved the shadow of what I am and in that love I burn
. A narcotic for my pain!” he uttered slowly. “Is thisâmy vain apocalypseâa vision or a prophecy? The better I know myself, the clearer it is to me how this must end.”
My statuesque boy was turning to water before my eyes. Bright liquid poured into the spring from his lips, his eyes, his pores, his nose. I clutched at himâto keep him from melting away from me completely, to keep him from merging with the pool below. Startled from his liquid trance, he rose, reached high and broke from the tip of a stalactite a
glittering slender lance. I could have stopped him. I was standing right there. But I stood rooted to the floor as he drove the crystal horn into his waxen breast ⦠as his heart's precious blood flowed through the ultramarine in a violet flood.
This was my moment, my big chance. I could have mirrored his gesture, pulled the stony lance from his gory chest and plunged it into my own. But I still stood rooted to the ground. Did I love
myself so
much?
My moment passed.
After a time, I came to see myself for what I had becomeâa hollow oracle at the tomb of a dissipated superman, whose shade now contemplates
its
shade in the river Styx, while an abandoned universe goes crashing on the rocks.
My bones have turned to stone, my skin to scales of slate, my tongue to something I have grown to hate. And still they come with questions I can only echo and restate. So, daughter, you have come too late with yours. This is where I've gone. This is how it was. This is what's become of us.
He, a river of amethyst
I, a salted flood of petroglyphs
  that flows
    in archaic runes
    to an echoic floor,
  then driesâ
as all things do as each settles down to die
  another glittering
    petrified ring
      in the bole of God the tree.
Yet still the passion in her heart which drew,
Its food from bitter memory, lived and grew;
And sleepless sorrow made her body thin,
And wasting sickness shrivelled up her skin;
Till just a speaking skeleton was there.
Last stage of all, her voice was left alone,
And all her body's remnant turned to stone.
O
VID
,
Metamorphoses
45
Â
BOOKÂ TWO
              Â
I am that which is, has been, and shall be.
My veil no one has lifted.
The fruit I bore was the Sunâ¦.
1
Â
ONTENTS
World, in persecuting me, how do you profit?
This painted semblance you so admire
Recall the soul from its sleep
⦠that Woman, who but through sin
⦠And though among all Princes
Beauteous Intelligence, my bride
EEDY
G
IRL
        SHORTLY AFTER HER TWELFTH BIRTHDAY
, in August of 1985, Beulah began to keep a diary. We might reasonably infer that it was a birthday gift since the first entry is dated September 2. With the series spread out before me, I notice all her subsequent journals were coil-bound notebooks, but the first was in a quarto format, bound in a fine burgundy leather. The volume's grown-up aspect is marred only slightly by
My Diary
printed on the front, and by the little lock of gilded tinârather easily forced, as it turns out.
Once it is conceded that Beulah collected and made all of this available to me for some purpose, it follows that using one passage is as legitimate as using any other. I nevertheless find myself resisting. First because these early entries explain nothing; there can never be any unbreakable link drawn from biographical details to a particular work, career or psychology. This was one of the few topics on which I was confident Beulah and I were in agreement.
From problems of cause we pass to problems of content. The usual scruples about publishing any intimate document apply here. Moreover, several entries allude to acts that for the best of reasons remain taboo even in a permissive society. Permissive, yet one in which almost nothing remains of the private domain, and in which the public is inundated with denunciations, victim-scripts and the illicit, luridly exposed and confessed. More fatally, though, certain of these scripts have become stock items in publishing circles, almost a genre, and one recently coming in for a good deal of high-brow cynicism. For its practitioners, the most authentic horrors quickly lose their freshness even as the public appetite for them burgeons. So to air such things now amounts to a high-cost, low-yield venture in which everyone comes off the worse: the editor who opts to publish, the passé victim, the demonized malefactor and the media mavens moved to put their cynicism on display.
A few readers, of course, will claim that bowing to such scruples lets me suppress unflattering glimpses of myself or even incriminating evidence. So,
nota bene
, since I believe her journals constitute Exhibit A in my
defence, I've
decided to include virtually everything in her papers making significant mention of me.
Finally, there arise the inevitable questions as to veracity. It pains me to say this, but it is simply not possible for me to credit much of what Beulah has written.
Going at least as far back as 1985, she displayed a mania for weaving the events of her life into some vast, mythic struggle. Every windmill is a giant, every conflict with a parent or teacher, Armageddon. Regardless of what really took place she experienced it with a high quotient of pain. The mythologizing may well have been a tactic to make that pain meaningful and therefore more bearable. It may even have been the genesis of her obsessive interest in the myths surrounding her research subject.
Beulah herself seems to have taken pains to undermine the reliability of her accounts. At various junctures she has written little notes in the diary margins, often to an unspecified doctor. Which doctor?âthere were several in her past. Was it a particular individual or did Beulah compile some arch-antagonist by taking features from several people? In a few cases, I
was
clearly the doctor in question. But this meant she had reread her early journals with me in mind, annotating them to goad or provoke, to repel or to draw me in.
The pen used for the marginalia is sometimes indistinguishable from that of the narration, but at other times the ink is of a different colour. She was awareâor even intendedâthat these passages would be read, which raises the question: Could entire journals be fictionsâmaybe even written after the fact and backdated? At what points does a testimony pass from the subjective through the fictive into the expressly counterfeit?
In light of the foregoing, in drawing from her diaries I've opted to include excerpts of three kinds: entries involving me, entries with dates coinciding with her research notes and her travel journals from Mexico, plus a few entries from before her researches formally began. This should suffice to give readers a flavour, and a chance to arrive at their own opinion on the legitimacy of my decision to use some materials while suppressing others.
[26 Dec 1985]
Always before it started he'd come in and say You're a needy little girl Beulah You know that don't you. I knew. Always when it was over smile
gone soft he'd say You can have anything you want You're going to have it all I promise you. Promise? He promised. But he doesn't come anymore.
20 Mar [19]89
Last night before I went out he said I could have it all just like he used to when I was littleâif only I'd just get some help. Problems? They haven't seen anything yet.
31 Mar [19]89
They want me to See Someone again. Not just them this time. Everybody. It's all over schoolâthe other mothers don't want their perfect little girls near me. We'll all go see Doctor Togetherâdon't doctors' families get a discount, daddy? Discount daddy. We'll go as soon as the bruises go away. [â¦] Funny to hear him use those words. Eslut. I laughed in his face I couldn't help it what was I supposed to do him calling me an eslut? An estupid eslut. An especially estupid eslut. [â¦]
1 Apr [19]89
Goes away to Mexico now. A sudden little business trip thought he'd take in that medical conference after all. Or does he call it a composium? In daddy's absence there's been a little scrape with drugsâMy daughter misses his steadying influence Officerâ¦. So takin my tender age and solid family background n'all inta'count they decide to release me into the care of my doting mother.
Today mummy and I have to have a real talk. Give her some credit she made the effort. Have I ever considered what effect all this was having on my brother? Leave Gavin the
fuck
out of thisâOkay calm
down
. All right we won't talk about Gavin today. Let's talk about you. What'd I mean the other night? [â¦] I couldn't know what I was saying. My father would never do anything to hurt me. He's a doctor.