Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 (3 page)

The universe is bigger than anyone ever told me. Sky with its endless manifestations of cloud and spark tells me so. I stand in the courtyard and daydream about the kings and queens and the helping animals and unexpected friends that I will meet along the way. I wonder if I am to go traveling as the prince or as the foolish Hans, and whether gifts will be granted—or will I be chucked like a log into the witch's fire? Eagles fly overhead, screaming messages from another world. I do not know if their cries spiral from the throats of demons or seraphim.

In sleep, when I stare into my sister's open eyes, I realize that their blue is the color of mercy.

She is my vestal, and I, Blaise, am her fire.

Daydreaming of my fortune, I hear a voice and am surprised to find it my own, saying,
Let Vesta be with me, every furlong and fathom of the way
.

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Anil Menon

About the time Hitler had decided that a toothbrush moustache was just the thing to wow the ladies, the Hindu Gods gathered for a chat. Of course, not all the 330 million Gods met. Just the board: Lord Brahma the Creator, Lord Vishnu the Preserver and Lord Shiva the Destroyer.

Lord Brahma came on his majestic Goose (almost a swan, really), Lord Vishnu had his Garuda, and Lord Shiva arrived on his bull, Nandi, late as usual. It was futile to try to hurry Nandi; the bull ran the world's traffic and was a stickler about rules.

Since Lord Shiva had called the little meeting, the other two Gods waited for the blue-throated one to begin. Lord Brahma and Lord Vishnu were excited—curious (so to speak). When the Trimukha finally spoke, it was in fonts of thunder, italicized by lightning.

"I'm bored,” said Lord Shiva. “I'm tired of being the Destroyer."

Garuda shrieked, startling the Divine Goose. Lord Vishnu and Lord Brahma were perturbed, to say the least. Their perturbation altered the courses of a billion stars by a zepto-second. On a blue-eyed world, a thirty-year old Swede from Mjolby would die under a thirteen-ton avalanche of peas. So on and so forth.

"I am weary of Destruction,” said Lord Shiva, as if nothing had happened. “My sinuses are swollen with death. I'm tired of the endless games of dice with Lady Parvati, which I'm destined to lose in any case. The world needs a Destroyer, true, but enough is enough. Either I do something else, or I will destroy the Destroyer."

"But I say, old chap,” said Lord Brahma, “either alternative condemns the Universe."

"Couldn't care less,” said Lord Shiva.

"But my dear fellow,” twittered Lord Brahma.

Much to the bull's annoyance, the two prongs of the dilemma chose to settle on its head.

"I am bound by my necessities,” said Lord Shiva.

It's a terrible thing when a God speaks of necessities. Who is free from Necessity, if not a God?

(In fact, on a twin-mooned planet the color of agate, there's a species of carbon-abhorring, seal-like philosophers who consider Choice to be synonymous with God. Their prayers are acts of choice, and their theology, Economics.)

Lord Vishnu retreated to the shade of Shesha, the thousand-hooded Cobra that winds around the Universe and rests on the eternal quantum sea. His beloved consort, Laxmi, the buxom, kind-hearted Goddess of Prosperity, soothed his troubled brow.

"How can I preserve that which does not desire to be preserved?” asked Lord Vishnu. “My job is to preserve things as they are, not things as they want to be. How unprofessional of Shiva to renege on his duty. He knows the Bhagavad-Gita as well as I do."

"Let Lord Brahma worry about it, dear one."

But since Lord Vishnu was also Lord Brahma (the Brahman is One), he worried endlessly. In vain did the Divine Consort massage her Lord's lotus feet, in vain did she offer her milk-white, rose-tipped breasts, and in vain did she sing to soothe her Lord's dreams. Prosperity has no solution for ennui.

Perhaps a year passed. Perhaps a billion years passed. Who keeps track of Time when you're Time itself? At last the Divine Consort, at wit's end, appealed to her sister, Lady Saraswati, the Goddess of Wisdom.

"O wise and gentle one, learned in all the sixty-four arts, contrive a solution for my husband and your father."

"You only had to ask, dear sister. Here I was, knowing I must interfere but unwilling to do so."

At an opportune time, the Goddess Saraswati began to strum her seven-stringed veena. At first the music clung to her sari, reluctant to leave her side. But then it took wing; a rippling across lakes, a rising of birds, and the green rustle of trees making visible the wind. Lord Brahma had an idea.

"Let Vishnu become the Destroyer. Let Shiva become the Preserver. I shall remain as I am, since every transformation, if it's to be smooth and continuous, must have a fixed point."

(A neuron fires on a blue-eyed world. It is 1909, and Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer puts down his coffee cup with a trembling hand. It has just struck him that a slowly stirred cup of coffee must have at least one point that remains unmoved. Years later, another strange fellow, John Nash, will show that this is exactly the same as saying that the game of Hex can never end in a draw. Brouwer, tetrahedron-faced genius, hears voices. He calls their counsel Intuitionism.)

Lord Shiva is elated at the solution.

"Henceforth,” predicts the Lord of Vows, “I shall preserve rather than destroy. Put away the dice game, dear wife."

So Lord Vishnu took over the Dept. of Destruction. Lord Shiva moved into the Dept. of Jams and Preserves.

There is a phenomenon, known to Unix aficionados as the mad-newbie syndrome. The newbie orders the removal of a trivial file and ends up removing the entire operating system, including the keyboard. There is rarely any laughter in the cubicles. It's a lucky mad-newbie that escapes castration.

Lord Vishnu was a mad-newbie. He sought to delete a silly, trivial, utterly pointless photon headed nowhere and nowhen. Lo and behold! Most matter in the Universe promptly disappeared.

"What the &!%!” screamed Lord Brahma, as he fell through Nothingness.

But Lord Vishnu was just getting started. A second delete removed quintessence from every conceivable object; anything could become anything else if it tried hard enough. A third delete removed the capacity to undo.

"Stop, O Naika!” said Lord Brahma, now truly terrified. Even terror has its creative manifestations. The origin of the monkey puzzle tree—so ugly that it has to reproduce asexually—is often traced to this utterance.

Lord Shiva was not singing tra-la-la either. He was able to retrieve the missing matter, but turned it so black that no one, not even the Gods, could see it in the dark. He was unable to undo the removal of the undo (naturally!), and so patched in a facsimile. But alas, now a double-undo of something was not the same as doing that something in the first place.

(A neuron fires on a blue-eyed world. It is 1923, and Jan Brouwer is putting the finishing touches to his paper, “?ber die Bedeutung des Satzes vom ausgeschlossenen Dritten in der Mathematik” which in English, means “On the Significance of the Excluded Middle in Mathematics.” The significance, just to be clear, is that not-not-X is not X. The voices tell Brouwer that the world doesn't have to choose between X and not-X.)

Lord Shiva resigns. So does Lord Vishnu. No words are exchanged as desks are cleared, and carton and poster carried out. The little experiment is over. There is no question of going back; the undo had been undone after all. If it has proved that Lord Vishnu is a lousy Destroyer, it has also proved that he is a good Protector. Obverse ditto for Lord Shiva. There is an exhausted peace in heaven.

The wives are not amused. They love their men, but there is only one world after all. They have their own meeting, in which they plait each other's lustrous hair, share jasmine-scented secrets, complain in rhythmic couplets and have a lot of laughs.

As Lady Parvati rose from her seat, her sideways glance at her sisters dissolved the mother in all things. Her girdle unfastened and slipped from her incomparable waist.

"Go, dear sister,” said Lady Laxmi smiling, as she helped re-fasten the jeweled girdle. “May success flower your path."

Arousal is a season of the Gods. The tormented navel, the rouge-stained feet, the moist surrender of thighs, the abandon of white lilies, the crumpled defeat of linen ..... the lovemaking of Gods, the Sanskrit poet Bhartrihari assures us, is a lot like ours, only more so. At some point, the goddess Parvati reached for her Lord.

"My Lord,” she said, her voice silvered with promise and peril, “please dance for me. You know I love it so."

"Beloved,” replied the Bhairava, “I know what it is that you seek. And yet."

So the Lord danced. The ancients say that the Gods, all 330 million of them, gathered to watch. Last time around, the great Kalidasa had burst into a thousand shards of poetry. A War God, Kumara, had been born. What could happen this time around?

"O Nataraja,” breathed the divine Parvati, her face aflame like a Kimsuka tree with a billion flowers. “When you raise your left leg just so ....."

The God froze his left leg in mid-air.

"And that arm. Yes. Just so."

The God froze his arms.

"Ah. That calm repose. That hand raised in blessing. Dearest! Just so!"

"Beloved."

His last words.

The God froze altogether. They say he stands there still, motion and emotion locked in Time's four-cornered crystal. Destruction, Preservation, Creation and Necessity.

Perfectly balanced.

So perfectly balanced that it is almost—dare we say it?

Yes.

Almost as if there were no gods at all.

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Edward McEneely

Mrs. Harvey found the Snorklepine in an ancient wooden chest that was about the size and shape of the ottoman her youngest took with him to college.

It had been curled up under a neatly folded Union Jack, frayed and tattered at the edges, large enough to cover a casket. Old photographs: a young lancer, Regular Army, Boer War-era. Newspaper clippings; A “Mentioned In Dispatches” cutting, the dull crimson ribbon over the bronzed Maltese Cross. A portrait of Queen Victoria. Under all of this, the Snorklepine.

He was maybe two feet tall, uncurled, but at the time his tiny feet were pulled up close to his round little body, somehow strangely reminiscent of both the porcupine and the wombat. He wore a bathrobe of some age; it had obviously been tailored to fit him. Spectacles dangled from the breast pocket on a thin gold chain, the lenses clouded with dust.

His eyes fluttered. He blinked, once, twice. He coughed, a cloud of dust rising from the chest. His paws fluttered about before settling upon the pince-nez, and he slowly raised it to the bridge of his nose.

"Good day to you, madam,” he said in a deep and burbling voice.

At first she thought it symptomatic of a deeper problem, that without any children left in the house, just her husband and the cat, she had gone mad. Certainly, her husband never seemed to see the Snorklepine, or, if he did, steadfastly refused to admit its existence. The cat and the Snorklepine settled into a guarded truce after the Snorklepine produced an ancient lunch pail fashioned out of tin and shared some smoked herring and cheese.

In a way, it was difficult to mind the improbable creature's intrusions. Most of its day was spent napping in a small deck chair that the Snorklepine unpacked from its sea-chest. The name of the liner it had come from was long since faded away, and only the slightest indentations remained where once had been words engraved with gold leaf, or so the Snorklepine said. Occasionally, he would write a list of food for her to purchase for him, gravely plying her with ancient shillings and pence along with it. He wrote with a full-sized presentation fountain pen of exceptional craftsmanship, inlaid with wood and silver filigree. Indeed, all of his official correspondences (and there were a great many, for such a wholly imaginary animal) were written out laboriously by hand with the pen, the Snorklepine mumbling and chortling to himself as he finished each letter and carefully sealed it in its envelope with red wax and a small signet ring made of bronze. Every day it carefully washed the bathrobe by hand in the bathroom sink, standing upon a stool purloined from the kitchen. In his modesty, he insisted that the door be locked during this time, and brooked no intrusions. As the robe dried, he would run a hot bath and exuberantly scrub himself whilst singing old songs: “Soldiers of the Queen, My Lads"; or “Good-bye Dolly,” both of which he had committed to memory and sang with more enthusiasm than skill in his watery baritone. When he had finished, he would shuffle into the kitchen and formally apologize if his singing had caused offense; gravely, he would hand her a wrinkled five-pound note and offer her his fervent hopes that it would be sufficient recompense. Every night he ate a dinner of several courses, always washed down by tea, which he prepared with his own small porcelain tea service. He had a fondness for cheeses as well as an obvious allergy to them, for after consuming them, his normal snuffling became even more pronounced. He had explained to her that this was the main characteristic of Snorklepines in general and that if none of his illustrious forebears had let anything stand in the way of cheese, neither would he.

When she asked about his forebears, he became very animated, and rummaged about in his trunk for a great while. Eventually, he returned triumphant, an enormous album fully as large as he was clutched precariously in his paws. Opening it to the first page, he showed her an old cameo portrait, cracked with age, of Admiral Lord Nelson on the deck of HMS
Victory
, a Snorklepine standing just behind and to the left of him, wearing a miniature blue jacket and epaulets. Others followed. A Snorklepine riding with Wellington at Waterloo. An old daguerreotype of a Snorklepine with a group of men on horseback; the Light Brigade, he told her, at Crimea. A nasty business. A Snorklepine standing with Victoria and Albert as they gazed at the swaddled Prince of Wales. A Snorklepine in the Lords Gallery at Parliament. Then, a portrait of the young lancer again, the Snorklepine sitting beside him.