Last Stories and Other Stories

WIDOW’S WEEDS

Mrs. Wenuke Lei McLeod was an elegant widow of about forty-five. I met her through her younger sister Rileene, a former lover of mine who happened to be one of my wife’s best friends. While we were intimate, Rileene had led me to believe that she and Wenuke must be estranged, so it was half a surprise when she invited me to meet her at Wenuke’s place; but only half, because when love ends, many impossible things become possible.

Rileene had been a dark brown slender girl with curly black hair; I especially used to prize the sparkle of ocean spray on her bare brown breasts. She had wanted to marry me; I never trusted the stability of her inclinations. Indeed, less than two weeks after my wife’s death Rileene was unfaithful to me with a Cuban woman named Carmen, who knew how to cook so well that Rileene now went around in maternity dresses. Once her waist had begun to spread, I took equal delight in watching how her fat buttocks swung apart whenever she squatted down. As for the perilous transmutation of love into mere friendship, that Rileene and I had accomplished with small graceful sadnesses and scarcely any resentments. Over time we grew proud of one another. Strange to say, Carmen disliked me. I certainly bore her no grudge.

Apparently Carmen did not care for Wenuke, either. I was led to believe that Rileene found herself easily bored in her sister’s company; so, since her best companion could not be bothered to join her, Rileene picked up her little mobile phone, which was studded with miniature cowrie shells, and dialled me up.

The McLeod property had been in the Captain’s family since the very end of the nineteenth century; and at one time it must have resembled the residence of a Yankee sea-trader right down to the widow’s walk on the roof, but since the death of Wenuke’s husband, if not before, the jungle had nourished itself on the place. Creepers grew up the shuttered windows, and the front porch was rotten enough that Rileene, who knew it so well that she must bring guests here frequently, had to show me where not to walk. The roof was sagging with greenery. Orchids grew down from the knocker of the front door.

As for Wenuke, she wore green and seemed exceedingly quiet. Her youthfulness surprised me. The instant I saw her, I had to have her.

Watching me, she smiled, her slit skirts half revealing her thighs, in the fashion of banana leaves in the wind. Rileene soon departed. Wenuke awarded her a fluttery little wave.

As I sat with her beneath a grand old banana tree, whose broken dark leaf-sails shook in the wind, spewing lovely drops of rainwater into our faces, we rocked in a rickety lovers’ swing. Other men might have wondered how many had sat there with her, and whatever became of them. As for me, I was content with adoring the crescent-shaped shadows beneath her eyes. The Captain drowned in a tidal wave, Rileene had said. Fortunately, I have never been attracted to lucky women. Whenever a raindrop fell on her cheek, Wenuke licked it up with her surprisingly long tongue. My heart pounded. Presently she took my hand and led me inside the mildewed old house. I glimpsed vines growing up from the kitchen sink, a bathroom which was now a black hole in the rotten floor, bookcases screened by descending stalks of greenery. Wenuke took me up the black, rotten stairs, pointing to the places that were unsafe. Her bedroom was gloriously overgrown with ferns whose sweet scent masked the putrescence in the walls. The Captain’s photograph still hung from a rusty nail which I could have pulled out with two fingers. He wore a worried look, and mold freckled his bearded face. I cannot believe he would have liked me. But Wenuke, seeing me study the portrait, insinuated herself and turned it against the wall. When the nail slipped out, the picture shattered on the floor, releasing a fat old beetle, perhaps the Captain’s incarnation, that twiddled its feelers indecisively for a moment, then marched into a hole in the wall. Wenuke shrugged. I have never been attracted to sentimental women.

The bed was a stout mahogany four-poster whose canopy had rotted into something like a spiderweb; impatiently, Wenuke pulled it away by the handful, and once I saw what she was doing I helped her. We ripped away the sodden sheets. The mattress had long since reverted to moss of an almost shockingly emerald brightness. Wenuke was already unbuttoning her dress, which fastened from the back; I undid the last button for her.

I had guessed what she was, but that only increased my relish; for I knew myself to be a man of experience. Before I was entirely naked, she was already swarming all over me. Even her hair seemed to be twining itself around my throat. Her breath and body were deliciously humid, so that when I lay in her arms I felt all at once refreshed, intoxicated and suffocated. In any event, I could not get enough of her. The coffee-like odor of her armpits, her breasts like a cluster of green papayas around a white trunk, the perfect softness of her legs, her cool ginger-ginseng scent, these were like various desserts set before me on a porcelain plate at a fancy restaurant.

When she climaxed, she gave off a sudden medicinal smell.

On closer inspection I learned that the hair in her armpits was actually delicate green vines with leaves like miniature pearls. Her pubic hair was coarse and reddish-brown, like coconut fibers. Her saliva tasted like rainwater. There was a faintly sour-salty smell about her crotch after she had urinated, which she did only rarely and then in transparent brownish-green gushes.

She had a way of wrapping herself around me and drinking my sweat with her entire body; I could feel the trillion little mouths of her skin.

Just as influenza sometimes announces herself with a sweetly feverish lassitude — one wants nothing more than to remain on one’s back, enjoying the ceiling through drooping eyelids; and it’s only upon attempting to sit up that the discomforts of sickness become apparent — so what Wenuke was doing to me seemed but part of the sexual act itself, when she let down her long hair-vines and wrapped us both in cool green leaves. Sometimes I would dig my face into the crook of her arm, just to catch my breath, and afterward I would never be sure whether I had slept. In those years I often experienced dizzy spells, as do many men my age; and this sweet greenskinned woman of mine made me a trifle dizzier, but only when I sat up. But there came the time when I finally rose to dress, and she pulled me back down on top of her. Letting her win that contest, I entered her in a frenzy while she twined her legs around me, pulsating, biting me and sucking me. We slept. Then I truly needed to go; I had an appointment. I tried to sit up, but she would not disengage her arms. When I said her name, she opened her evil eyes with the sudden threatening boom of a wave against a lava-cliff.

Having enjoyed several experiences with supernatural lovers in the past, I was not in the least alarmed. The beautiful Chinese fox-spirits who suck semen out of a man until he dies can be beaten at their own game: sustained, repeated, remorseless penetration will kill them first, so that suddenly, in the middle of the act, the lovely longhaired lady squirming on the bed becomes a sad little fox-corpse with its tongue hanging out. As for the elf-ladies of Central Europe, I’ve found them innocuous, since all they truly desire is a man’s happy surrender for twenty or a hundred years, which in any case spend themselves ecstatically, like a single night. What he-man would pass that up? Everyone you used to know will be gone, of course, but one can’t be miserly in the game of love.

That is how life is for those of us who can be caught by the sudden, astonishing dearness of a strange woman’s back.

If you want to know, I was in love with femininity. That was why I hazarded myself with supernatural bedmates. In my quest for the most womanly woman of all, I sought out her who was not half derived from man, which is to say her who had never had a father.

Regarding the fox-women I do admit that in each case I felt bad for doing it, but then I thought: It was her, me or abstinence; and neither of us had wanted the last! She would have murdered me if she could.

I remember the first, who tried her feeble best to be good to me, but dared not cease even momentarily from being good to herself as she saw it, which meant protecting herself from what she was doing to me by draining my semen; once I began to show signs of anemia she cut herself off from my neediness. Unfortunately, it is impossible to divorce a fox and live; these beings do not accept abandonment, perhaps because once they have attached themselves to a given host, severance would cause them great suffering. At any rate, she had a lovely voice and long brown hair — but what is the use of remembering her? When she died, I remember how the white waterfall of urine gushing between her dark thighs turned into a snowy tail.

Departing the room forever, I emerged into the Chinese beauty parlor whose beautiful hairdresser, in a polka-dotted miniskirt, was rapping the shoulderblades of a happy man. — I think you have very good time? she demanded, continuing her business as rapidly as a chicken-and-rice vendeuse can slice with her cleaver.

And I remember the latest, who kept striding and kicking, prancing and flashing various shades of leg and breast while her lies alone smiled in the friendly darkness. She possessed the small unwinking eyes of a splay-legged turtle. Unlike the first, she not only preyed on men, but camouflaged herself as a prostitute. Light puckered up on the floor. My semen trickled down her black bikini, as slimy as a worm. Pretending to be happy and desirous, she dragged me into the back room.

At her funeral an old Chinese lady raised an incense stick above her head, clasped her hands at mouth level, silently praying before the shrine, her eyes tightly shut, her lips clenched; I suppose she must have been the procuress.

Below, in the creamy brown river, floating shacks on logs like old houseboats gone to decay reminded me of other lives that she and I could have lived; and I remember a hill of flower trees, coconut trees, papaya trees; a railing whose tiles were hot to the touch; and a street on which headscarfed women slowly strolled. The ones who were fox-spirits in that town frequented either the Tong Chong Chinese Club or the Lai Zhu Unisex Hair Salon.

And regarding the elf-ladies, I truly have no regrets at all. Thanks to them, I have already lived a thousand years.

Once an elf-lady married me, and then left me largely alone while she went out to enchant other flies into her spiderweb. I spent most of that century chopping wood for her. Grey hairs grew from my chin as slowly as the stained glass windows of ancient cathedrals ooze from rectangles into trapezoids. Brown creeks unhurriedly undercut the leaning trees of my solitude and occasionally some long narrow weasel-like animal clattered from stone to stone, chasing a fish. When she returned at last, with a hypnotized knight clinging to the tail of her white horse, she set the knight to breaking stones, dismounted and with a laughing kiss set me free. It had all been a game. I felt joyous and strong as I wandered back into the world, and found a fairy hoard of gold upon the way.

Ultimately, the play of light through banana leaves leads one to heaven, which I now inhabited with my naked Wenuke, who seated herself on a river rock, laving her drawn-up thighs, her desire to devour me as sweetly naked as a baby’s toes wiggling in its mother’s lap.

Whenever I left, even for a moment, I was attacked by her sadness at my back. Moreover, each time I tried to get up from beneath her, I felt weaker and she clung to me with greater determination. I had no illusions.

Once upon a time, a certain carnivorous woman sought to do to me as she had done to my nine hundred predecessors. Just as a smiling Thai mother dabbles her child’s face with sacred water while he grimaces, so this fiendish lover of mine began to baptize me with a silver poison drawn from between her legs; fortunately, I confounded her with my bezoar stone, and she perished in a single shriek. How and when would Wenuke make her attempt to murder me?

We sat alone together in her rotting house, and in the rocking chair which would have caved in beneath a child’s weight she knitted me a green pullover, the threads blossoming one by one as her needle drew them up toward the light, her face calmly poised over the growing garment that resembled a swatch of turf; sometimes she smiled, and sometimes peeped at me as if she might be plotting something; but what if it was only that she loved me? I had hollowed out the handle of my keychain and filled it with a military herbicide. Do you consider me a scheming betrayer? But I never killed any lady except in self-defense.

I was in love with every one of them, for they eschewed the tiresome unpredictability of human women, who might start an argument at any moment, or decide to leave me. At least the supernaturals always knew what they wanted.

The carnivorous woman I mentioned had murdered my best friend five hundred years before; and when I encountered her in that alien city I suddenly heard the ghost of my friend laughing his happy sniggering laugh, watching me from overhead in the night, knowing my misdeeds, and a pet phrase of his came into my head; he said it and laughed, said it and laughed, but in the laugh there was only bitterness; he was saying his pet name for the woman who had now become my lover. Well, who was he angry at? She had destroyed him, not I. Her kiss was as lovely as the sea’s salty spittle squirting up against the walls of my heart.

And then I saved myself from her and she died in that long scream.

Wenuke was certainly as tender as sautéed snowpea shoots in a careful Chinese restaurant.

She sucked the semen out of me with her mouth, and kept sucking, until finally, when she raised her face and looked at me, I saw it trickling from the corner of her mouth, and there were threads of blood in it. I felt so dizzy that I could hardly think. If I didn’t get away right now, I would die. I stood up, clung to the bedpost for a moment and staggered naked down those rotten stairs, expecting her to pursue me with her whipping tendrils, but she lay as if uprooted; and presently, just before I fled the house, I heard from upstairs the beginning of a keening like the sobbing of a child left alone at night with a cruel mother, a sobbing that continues hour after hour while the child tries to do what the mother demands, always failing to please her.

There was a blanket in my car. I threw it over me and drove away. Then I telephoned Rileene, who sounded strangely surprised and resentful to hear from me. She referred me to a discreet doctor who was very knowledgeable about such cases. He prescribed a diet of beef broth and blood pudding. Within two weeks I felt as right as rain.

Rileene telephoned me to say that her sister missed me very much. What could I do? I drove back to the house. Wenuke was waiting and watching for me up on the widow’s walk.

That first dusk we scarcely touched one another, and the darkness came by staccato stages, each as irrevocable as another spurt of India from an inkwell. It became pleasantly cool, and my elbows and shoulders tingled with mosquito bites no matter how much citronella I put on.

Her gaze was like some strange green rainforest pool.

I already knew who I was and what I wanted. I had become nearly as supernatural as she.

When the moon rose, she wrapped her long green fingers around my wrist and led me back into our bedroom.

For a surprise she had dug up some foxed old mirror and propped it up against the wall so that we could watch ourselves make love; and I was interested to see how thin and pale I had become. She looked as perfect as ever, of course. With a single tendril she began to stimulate my prostate; and I looked at myself. My panting reminded me of the way a lungfish’s inhalations puff out small sacs next to its anterior fins.

Gazing at me with desperate love, she brought her face close to mine and extended her tongue until it blossomed in my mouth, wrapping round and round my tongue a dozen times and piercing it with suckers until I was happily drinking my own blood.

Just as in Paris they open the long green coffins bolted to the wall of the quai, and the books and prints within get resurrected, so my capacity for affection — I nearly wrote infection—got once more disinterred from within my breastbone by Mrs. Wenuke Lei McLeod. I almost believed that she had no heart to hurt me.

But deep underwater in dreams, a nurse shark’s belly rising overhead like the moon, I woke to find myself struggling somewhere within her crotch, which was a deep weedy hole with black water shining across it like morning light on the blue sea. Blood was trickling from my nose and my nipples. I pulled out of her and tried to sit up, but could not.

On the other side of the bed, she knelt and motionlessly watched me, half smiling, silently weeping jasmine-fragrant tears.

I knew even then that she was as rare as a banana-colored eel, which every now and then, on long voyages, I have been lucky to observe languidly flicking its tiny front fins.

I threw myself wildly into her cool green body, and in her magic mirror I saw myself purple-faced and bulging-eyed, with the stuporous gape of a puffer fish, and just then one of her fingers sprouted deep in my anus, at which point I experienced agonizing pleasure and everything went black. When I knew who I was again, I found her sitting on my lap with all her myriad arms wrapped around me; and in the mirror I saw the white cilia of mushroom-gilled anemones wriggling like maggots.

When I finally left her for good, she wrapped herself around the bedpost like a black-and-green spider whose legs swell at the joints into leaf-shapes, clinging to a silk-wrapped victim, hanging in the wind.

After my escape from Wenuke, I wanted somebody more substantial, so I travelled to Greece, a country renowned for vampirism. After a few peasant funerals I found the right situation and was there alone, having bribed the mourners, when the girl’s cadaver rose up off the table, stark naked and ready. There may well be nothing on earth (or under it) as delectable as a fresh young corpse with a waxy yellow complexion, sunken eyes, conspicuous ribs and the sweet odor of decay. I was intoxicated by that odor! I fell in love with her.

I think I’m probably not as good a person as you make me out to be, the corpse whispered.

She left for a moment to recompose herself. Returning to the unmade bed, I sought her traces and found upon the pillow a long black hair. When I touched it, my heart raced and my penis stiffened.

I belong to you, I said. I’ll love you forever. I’ll be yours forever — well, at least for the rest of my life, which is the best I can do.

Oh, I hope not, she whispered in dismay.

I prized her. But whenever she thought that I was not watching, she commenced to make metallic grimaces and jaw-workings similar to those of a coal grouper fish; and I wondered whether she longed to gnaw me up or whether she were simply tormented at not being permitted to rot away in peace. Her kisses had begun to stink.

When I asked her how to make her happy, she replied that she had always wanted to visit other places. I took her to Paris. In memory of Wenuke I proposed to her in the Jardin de Plantes, where just behind our bench a sandyhaired young cop stood clasping his white-gloved hands just over his buttocks.

The last time I had confessed was at the funeral of my calm and faithful wife. The priest, who appeared to be quite certain of his knowledge, had assured me that in the afterlife I would be placed in a cell, bricked in up to my waist, so that I could see only the top half of my pure and faithful wife, who thanks to celestial virtue would be able to see all of me; she would pity me without missing or needing me. That had made me sad, but I soon consoled myself. Being a good Catholic, I now decided that I had better go to confession again. When I whispered into the little window that I intended to marry a ghoul or vampire, the father assured me that I would be doing no harm since such creatures lack souls. If anything, he said, I would bestow the blessings of God on her through the sacrament of marriage. That night I said a few Hail Marys just in case.

I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you, the corpse whispered. I kissed her forehead, which was as waxy as a banana leaf.

The priest sold us holy water, and we both drank it. On our wedding night I stripped my bride, flung her down on the bed and buried my head between her breasts, ravished by the overripe smell of her cleavage. One of her nipples came off in my mouth, and I swallowed it desperately. — I think I have a loose tooth, she giggled in a little-girl voice. — Suddenly I was stung with longing for Wenuke’s breasts, which had been like many immature bananas growing upward in their hard green cluster. But what could I do about that now? Here was my lawfully wedded vampire; I drove my stake between her legs.

Where must Wenuke be now? I had sent her to a grey clear sea, calmer than its mosquitoes and raindrops.

By the next morning, my wife’s flesh had further discolored into a semblance of the soft yellows and greens of fluorescent corals. I possessed her in a fury, trying to persuade myself that the creaking of the bed might be her sighs.

Once upon a time, in the jungle on the way to Wenuke’s house, there had been lemon-colored flowers that smelled like armpits. Wenuke’s armpits had smelled like flowers. And now my wife, whom I had thought to be a vampire but who was only a harmless corpse, opened her black mouth to apologize for leaving me, then began choking and retching as ants streamed out of her. What sort of universe is this, that suffering continues even beyond death? Love and pity both demanded that I give her the only gift I could, oblivion. I went to the desk, found a letter opener, and with it sliced off her rotting head. Her yellow arms continued to reach for me, and her breasts wept ichorous tears.

Rushing out of there, I found myself on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, gazing into a bookstore window whose gold-stamped red and black leather merchandise gaped open to drypoints and aquatints. I remember a volume of Villon depicting an old man facing a noose, another Oeuvres of Villon open to a longhaired, gloomy medieval fellow gazing out of a dark casement, his hands on his knees; I also recall some NRF volumes of Malraux, whose spines bore luscious blue and orange inlays that reminded me of fungoid domes. Should I take up reading instead of love? But these printed adventures promised me no better happiness.

I walked for hours. Then like a grave there awaited me the empty bed, the rumpled bed, my loneliness a physical illness.

After that, my lovers got worse and worse. One night I found myself trying to pick up a sweetheart at Casa de las Mujeres, which was a closet in a hotel in a hot border town; but there was nothing inside except a yellow old skeleton with long black braids that the moths had been at.

Then there was a bronze woman who turned out to be malevolent; although I certainly have the fondest recollections of her cunt, which was dark, ornate and incense-fumed like the mouth of some Chinese temple encrusted with stone lions from which red balloons dangle like breasts. Slowly, slowly she lowered her head, grinning perpetually. Whenever she undid her chessboard skirt, it clanged on the floor. She liked to grip my upper lip between her rusty little serrated teeth. I suspected that it would end badly, so I started secreting a blowtorch in my pocket. One night, pale-mottled and — bellied but otherwise nearly stone-colored, she lay pretending to be sleeping, her snout upward as we lay together on our boulder. I knew that when the moment arrived, she would deny me any warning; so I felt almost sick with anxiety. Now my memories of Wenuke came back to me like the sky seen through insect-gnawings in a broadleafed jungle plant. Of course I had then been trapped in the analogous situation of waiting for her to strangle me with her green tendrils; but my distrust of Wenuke no longer felt real to me, being the habits which no longer served, and whose comforting instinctual run suddenly faltered into astonished sorrow. As for my bronze woman, however, when she opened her golden-green eyes and snapped her teeth at me, did she mean to sever my throat or was it merely in her mind to nuzzle me affectionately? I would not harm her on mere suspicion; after all, this was supposed to be a love match. And her cunt was so interesting; it was perfectly smooth and cold; she always oiled it for me.

She could not speak; she only roared. In the end I decided that she was harmless. But I never slept easily beside her. When I left her, tears hissed and squeaked down her mottled cheeks.

Back in the time when I used to pass my evenings in Wenuke’s house it sometimes took quite awhile for the sky to actually get black. When it was still a pale blue color, Wenuke would show me the first star, which was big and round and bright, and then the next two stars winked on quite suddenly, and often a firefly traversed a tree-silhouette, sometimes grey and blurry, and perhaps a bat came almost to my nose.

I remember the indefatigable screeching of insects, the gravelly voices of rivers and sometimes, when we climaxed, the clattering wings of disturbed birds.

Occasionally I considered writing a letter to Rileene, but inevitably concluded that she would think badly of me, or, worse yet, that she had conspired with her sister to kill me. But what if Wenuke had never meant me any harm?

Word came that my Greek corpse-bride had been resurrected, her skeleton-hands thrusting out of the ground like some Parisienne’s high-riding breasts. I received indisputable evidence that she was sucking children’s blood. That was low of her, but don’t we all decay? I remember for instance Wenuke, whose crotch became a deep weedy hole with black water shining across its depths.

Of all of them, that Greek corpse had loved me the most. But my grief at losing her had dissipated. It was gradually being revealed to me that Wenuke was the one I had been meant for. And we were parted.

If I could only avoid ever seeing Wenuke again, no matter how much I missed her, then I would not be forced to experience my new relationship to her, which must resemble the viewing of a lover’s corpse; she would still be there, but she could never be to me what she once had been. Each love has its habits, as I’ve said; and when that love breaks, the memories of those habits, or the attempted practice of them, comprise a skeleton of pain.

Meanwhile, there came a night event, a funeral, in fact; as you remember, I had met my Greek corpse at one of those; she knew that I would be at this new convocation, so I sent word to her by vampire bat to keep away; scanning the faces with a dread which would have erupted into anger had she been present in that cemetery of verdegrised urns on plinths, wilting marble mushrooms, I quickly began to feel her absence although I inspected each skull and mourner with an ever firmer despair; and when I saw that my ex-wife wasn’t there, I felt a patient ancient sadness.

The bronze woman was present, but I avoided her green frog’s grimace; later I heard that she had ripped a man’s heart out.

I went to California and stalked a high dark ocean-horizon from behind palms and bungalows; until one stormy night I spied a sea goddess whose garters were frilly white wave-tops and lacy sea-spittle. I especially remember a pointed brown-green breast gushing white froth. Swimming in her foamy white petticoats and her long green seaweed hair, she sang me the same melody she’d sung Ulysses, which made little impression on me; I’d heard it all before. Needless to say, I finally penetrated her, which was quite a trick, as you would know if you’d ever looked down through the foam, deep down into a green vulva. She had eyes like mirror-wet sand. Wringing out her dark sea-black skirt afterward, on her tiny lava-islet decorated with skulls, she offered me eternal life beneath the water; unfortunately, I was already diseased by that curse.

The elongated reflection of a seagull on wet sand kept me company once she swam away (she was hungry, she said). Then I was very much alone; and then, just as a dark wave rises suddenly out of the darkness, breaks open into spume and sprays you, longing for Mrs. Wenuke Lei McLeod came to me, and in my vision she was as humidly cool and perfect as jungleside sea air.

After that, there were slow late night sounds of heels on the just-shined tiles of hotel lobbies whose inset patterns now receded ever more vividly to ever greater distances. Beneath a potted plant, a longhaired slendernecked woman waited for midnight, her hands in her lap. I approached her, almost weeping. When she caressed my arm, her fingers reminded me of a crested iguana, slowly drawing itself along a branch.

And I thought, my God, my God, I am so weary of being a murderer; when can I find someone perfect enough to kill me? Who will she be? Will she first permit me to gorge my desires on her white-banded flesh and bluish face? And just before it happens, as her mouth suddenly tightens and for the very last time I stroke the preparatory pulsing of her tentacles, would it be hypocrisy or love if I asked her to remember me when it was over, and perhaps even put on widow’s weeds?

THE BANQUET OF DEATH

In keeping with this aphorism, we formed a society, Goldman, Mortensen, Sophie and I, and commenced to hold secret banquets at the graveyard. Mortensen could read the gashes and angles of any rune on a stone. It was he who had uncovered certain possibilities. Although I now suspect that he doubted Valentinus, for curiosity he went forward, which is to say downward. I no longer remember why Sophie and I committed ourselves. Being younger in those days, we owned more to lose, but our losses seemed proportionately less permanent. As for Goldman, whom we acknowledged as our cleverest executor, he managed by virtue of feeling needed. Before the moon had waned twice he achieved communication with the dead.

The first was a very tall yellow skeleton, who began shyly enough with three taps from behind the mausoleum wall; I hypothesized that its skull must be the percussive transmitter, at which Sophie put her finger to her lips. We must have been happy then. Goldman replied three times with the tip of his pickaxe, carefully or solemnly. Within the hour, he and the skeleton were conversing in Morse code. Mortensen, who possessed equal facility with that system, now took the pickaxe and excitedly tapped out: DEATH MAY DIE. After a long time the skeleton replied: DIE. Sophie gripped my hand. — YOU MUST SHARE DEATH, signaled Mortensen, and the skeleton tapped back: DIE. As soon as that fingernail moon had misted over, the tomb-door commenced to creak outward, and within the slowly widening column of blackness I saw my first animated death’s-head, which reminded me of another moon rising sideways, or perhaps of the peculiar yellow-white glare, which pretends not to be luminous but nonetheless imprisons our gaze, of a locomotive approaching in fog, before that single light has drawn close enough to subdivide into three. Anyhow, out it shambled, its long toenails clicking like a dog’s, and joined us at our abominable table. — But this is extraordinary! said Mortensen. May I remind you all to repress whatever horror you feel? — We know that, said Sophie, carving up the meat.

In the service of mutual understanding, Goldman had prepared a vocal apparatus out of silk, leather, catgut and rubber, the bellows being powered by a shielded air compressor placed within the patient’s ribcage. It was almost comical to watch him hook it up to the skeleton, which might have been wary, wooden or irresolute (lacking facial muscles, it conveyed no such niceties). Sophie stared; Goldman turned on the device; the skeleton wheezed: I am dead.

But death may die, insisted Mortensen, leaning forward.

Die, agreed the skeleton. Accordingly, it began to grapple at its ribcage, breaking out bone-slats, pitifully striving to pull itself into yellow kindling, as if dissolution could be something to yearn for. — You’re mistaken! cried Mortensen. — Fortunately, Goldman the practical knew what to whisper. — I wonder what he said? I also wonder which premortem occupation taught him his tricks: Was he once a motivational counselor, an unlicensed abortionist or a combat sergeant? Strange to say, he lacked an interest in people. The outcome was that Old Bones gave over trying to destroy itself, its skull swivelling heavily down against its sternum even while it spied on us through the tops of its eyesockets. (The mystery of consciousness is no greater for a death’s-head than for, say, Mortsensen.) Sitting down in its own flinders, it chewed a cutlet, and its jaws squeaked like unoiled hinges.

Second was the sad brittle lady with the spiderwebs in her eyes. She persuaded Sophie to tickle her inside her ribs. I suppose she climaxed. Her friends had friends, and before we knew it we who still lived were outnumbered.

We always began with a toast: To death. But you already know that what our society intended was its extirpation. To what extent the dead lay ready to ratify that project remained debatable, no matter how interestingly they enunciated through Goldman’s apparatus. They resembled children in a way, or perhaps we were children to them; but they were less alien than loathsomely familiar. With the exception of the warlock, I acquit them of making illicit advances or offering temptations of any sort. They never even intimated that through their example we could shake off the misery of being alive. All we could hope for was a temporary compromise, so I believed; while Mortensen for his part demanded that we set out with the utmost straightforwardness to understand and obey the rules of death no matter how long that took. My reading of Valentinus was that whatever we might learn would derive from the reaction-process of consumption, not from the dead themselves. I might have been wrong about this, for whenever a corpse stalks toward me in the darkness, unfurling its putrid fingers, grinning, snarling or doing whatever else its rotting substance accidentally impels it to, even now I can’t help but imagine (I wouldn’t say hope for) a significant experience. Mortensen and Goldman disagreed as to whether the dead were enchained in forgetfulness or merely existed in a state of being which we had not yet mapped out. In either case, once we four and our new friends had consumed enough death, what lay beneath it must begin to show, like the fossil of a great beast in the bed of a receding lake. I refrained from voicing my minuscule differences of opinion, even to Sophie, since I had nearly reached that age (oh, but never quite yet!) when whatever we do is worse than useless; besides, seven years before, when our leader first opened unto us his sweet treasury of aspirations, we had hoped and believed. As dark as the way might be, the end was undeniably glorious.

Certain know-it-alls insist: Death is nothingness. — Lucretius pointed out that if this be so, there is literally nothing to fear. (The pain and grief of dying shine no relevance on the state of being dead.) But people do fear cemeteries, and still more the dead themselves — for in their progression away from us, corpses wax not merely pitiable but (if I may employ an unscientific term) hateful. Might this reaction of ours, which among living humans approaches the universal, be explained simply as the assertion of the life instinct? Mortensen posited otherwise (and when he did, a knowing eye sometimes began shining out of a hole in a hunk of fossil driftwood). Thus the four of us founded our society on the principle that death is a positive state, which the living acknowledge, although they pretend not to. The seeming malignity of the dead may be reduced to a projection of our desire not to comprehend them. Mortensen’s antidote: Partake of death generously, with opened eyes.

Because the benefit for which we banqueted was so material, none of us broached the matter of whether we had accepted sorrow into our partnership. Speaking only for myself, I now wonder if some prior melancholy could have in some way weakened my constitution, or perhaps even my judgment, in the years before I haunted cemeteries. Concerning Sophie and Goldman I cannot say, but in his youth Mortensen seems to have imbibed the horror of some dying person’s ever more futile, wordless and mad beseechings. Perhaps he had attended the deathbed of a slowly asphyxiating parent or spouse (there was a pallid circle of naked flesh on his ring finger). Valentinus teaches that once one crosses that particular divide, his gaze comes to resemble a cat’s — although as I recollect that passage I find myself at sea as to whether the crosser was supposed to be the watcher or the performer of death. On the subject of Mortensen, I sometimes thought to read desperation in his eyes. Wasn’t it something of just that sort which he meant to stamp out?

Sophie had the dreamy lips of a Sphinx. The first time that the dead lady kissed her, she barely managed not to scream. When we left the cemetery, she rushed to the bathtub to scrub herself; it took an hour before she called herself clean. Goldman reminded her that to get to the meat of death one does unpleasant things. She knew that, she said. Now I suspect that the only reason she declined to quit our society was her loyalty to me — although her smile always used to be sad in any case; and well before she first kissed me she had already begun collecting dead butterflies. As for my motivations, I should have asked Goldman, who remembered everything, and did not even express perplexity as to the effects of the foul medicine we so busily imbibed. He and I had first met at Mortensen’s famous speech, which asserted that we who live resign ourselves to death for no better reason than people were once resigned to slavery, operations without anesthetic, and any number of such evils. Mortensen, you see, was young once. He hated suffering of any sort. His blood circulated at a velocity sufficient for hope, or evil-fighting. Once the audience had departed the lecture hall — which process took less than two breaststrokes of my watch’s spider-arms since there were so few cultivated people in Boston, even including the county medical examiner and his staff — then we three ascended the steps to Mortensen at the podium, and the dusty purple stage curtain behind him became the opaquest entity ever when we clinked our water-glasses against his and toasted: To death! While he scarcely looked at Sophie, I knew that of all of us she had made the most delightful impression on him, not that it mattered to me. All I yearned for then was to accomplish something marvelous. Goldman was already proposing to fit us out with silver-plated pickaxes.

Although her sincerity attracted me, I barely knew Sophie in those days. She too must have grieved for some stale corpse. Soon enough I got fond of her and wished to save her from death; and had I resigned from the society there would have been no hope of that. For my own part, the more I banqueted, the less I cared about dying. Thus I seemed to be freeing myself from error.

Unfailingly strict, Mortensen quizzed her on the snake, the ibis, the eye. Although, indeed because she breathed the living’s natural resentment of the dead, she did not fail him. More than any of us, it seemed, she longed for our purpose to be achieved. So on the following night, when we strolled down to the domes among the cypress trees, all four of us ready if not exactly hungry for the Banquet of Death, she saw the snake before Mortensen did, and when the eye appeared (on the site of a Masonic burial), she chaffed him on not having spotted the ibis. By now the graves were already opening like the covers of drowned books in a tidal current, and that night we met the warlock, who could transform himself into a worm whenever he liked. From him we learned that the Black Depths, as his kind call this earth, extend down into bedrock, and through crooked channels to the Red Place. This news expanded Mortensen’s ambitions, not that I cared. (I mostly tried to avoid talking with anyone.) Mortensen, however, proposed to refrain from harrowing hell, since that might be construed as aggression, not to mention that it would destroy a previously unstudied system. Therefore we ought to form an alliance with its inhabitants, based on common interest. And so we wined and dined the warlock, famishing for knowledge and greatness.

By now I more definitely inclined against the miasma of vileness which ever overhung our banquets, like a wall of withered ivy. Perhaps you too would consider them dislikeable occasions. In the style of lovers and of alchemists, we sought to recombine opposites into some divine substance; so our repasts were invariably a mix of succulence and filth, our salad greens being jeweled with maggots, our bread baked from powdered bones, our savory meats basted with cadaveric fluid, while we drank fine old wine mulled with cinnamon and humerus-sticks, slurped up blood puddings topped with spun sugar, and (for our digestions’ sake) finished with prunes stewed in rancid ichor. Nibbling Mortensen’s earlobe, the warlock said he hadn’t eaten so well for a hundred years! He was glad to share with us both life and death; he quite admitted to liking our point of view. I wish you could have heard the sound his eyeballs made when he rolled them. The fact that he kept clear of Goldman, who was so superior in emergencies, stimulated my mistrust; for with his inventory of evil tricks he might prove yet more practical than our cleverest member. In short, what if he cultivated Mortensen in order to gull him? Valentinus implies that death extends up as well as down, so why did the warlock harp only on the Red Place? Forcing myself out of silence, I inquired what he knew about worlds above. The warlock replied with a truly unpleasant grin that he declined to traffick with Celestial Assassins. I most tactfully sank my canine teeth into my lower lip until dawn arrived, and the dead had clattered, sunk or oozed back into their graves, at which point I made known my concern that our research emphasis might be disproportionately negative. — First we must get to the heart of death and share it out, explained Mortensen. Think of rotten leaves in a drainpipe. Until they’re cleared nothing goes deeper. Then, when we’ve descended to solid rock, we’ll change course, and drink sky nectar! — Meanwhile our banquets wore on, and I had so far advanced as to gulp a bowlful of corpse-suet without even seasoning it with a sprig of the wild fennel that grew so rankly in the cemetery. Each night I saw new egg-white faces bending over their portions, slurping up marrow through artificial beaks fashioned of unicorn’s horn, while beneath the table dead cat-children prowled as wide-eyed as owls, opening their mouths in quest of food. On a gaunt horse whose bones kept falling off, a one-eyed man came riding. He reached into his chest, withdrew his heart and tossed it into our stewpot with a fuming splash. We toasted: To death! — Nor did the warlock’s blandishments raise my eyebrows anymore. That gentleman was nearly intact, although his face was moldy. He had even kept all his teeth. One night in late summer he invited us to tour the ocean floor, which even at this date lies mostly uninhabited by the dead, although certain drowned people have taken it upon themselves to represent the rest of us. He explained that the Mummy Lady on Sophie’s right would drown us in the stewpot, or else we could ask ghastly Mr. Mooncrow to gnaw our throats. — Well, actually, said Mortensen, we mean to stay alive, you see, forever if possible—

Oho! cried the warlock. Then we’ll be great friends. But see here: To live forever one must die.

I glanced at Sophie, who merely gazed around the company with charming openness, and presently returned the topic to the Upper Realm, where perfect truth is said to live. At this the warlock contradicted his own dig at Celestial Assassins by inviting her on a midnight promenade, commencing immediately. Destination: the Tree of Knowledge! That was how I first learned that the dead can be unfair. Frankly, I felt indignant; I thought I had gotten away from that. But I held my peace as usual, and so those two went their private way, while Mortensen shared tidbits with the Mummy Lady, whose little eyes were as lovely as gold coins. How far had we diminished death thus far? Goldman had already departed the table in order to measure the apparent speed of the moon between his thumb and forefinger. That left me friendless — for it had long since been clear that Mortensen and Goldman considered me a nothing. All I had ever offered them was Sophie.

By Mortensen’s command we now had to give up daylight altogether. On the final occasion, holding hands, Sophie and I walked our long street of dark cobbles, which were half silvered with New Year’s sunlight, and passed the old man squeezing oranges for juice in his hand-crank press, while the ladies smiled beneath the parasol of his wheeled stand, licking their painted lips. Once upon a time we too had been his customers. Even now Sophie declined to say what the warlock had showed her. — At least tell me if you ate anything, I said, but she answered: Don’t put me to the test. — Goldman and Mortensen were waiting at the cemetery gates. The former was calm, and the latter smiled with the same hopefulness as a child who expects something appetizing for dinner. Here came dusk. Reentering these shady, sky-roofed corridors whose domed, crossed, gabled porticoes and engraved stone-wreathed cells exhaled a half-imaginary odor of decomposition, we burgled a mausoleum and broke open four coffins whose contents would thicken tonight’s banquet. Here we promised to dwell until our knowledge could bring back the light. I admit that I would have hesitated, but Sophie swore her oath unflinchingly, and Goldman was so understatedly cavalier about everything that, reminding myself how grateful I had been on the night when Mortensen taught us to fix our meditations on the Dark Door, I too bound myself, at which a comforting dullness descended upon me.

Behind the concave-winged marble angel who clasped the gilded shell for FATHERS and FAMILY began a deep hollow where the Great Flood had wrenched away a full acre of old graves; and down there we held our nightly banquet, dining on overturned slabs, with crowds of new-made ghouls around us. Two or three times I thought about the street where Sophie and I used to live. It was as if I were at the bottom of a well gazing up at a blue marble of sky.

At first the banquets took place at what adepts refer as the time of the living midnight. — What is the color of death? Mortensen kept asking the dead. Soon he would have mapped the infinite. The warlock was with us from moonrise to dawn. He was gloomy, perhaps, but never asked for our pity. I nearly began to consider him a member of our society once I overheard him teaching Mortensen about the Bitter Sea. Rolling his last cigarette, Goldman recleaned the putrid bellows of his speaking-apparatus; while I modeled myself after the tall bronze soldier leaning on his saber before the wide rectangle of Pablo Riccheri’s tomb. Sophie was copulating with a swollen blue man — for isn’t miscegenation a sharing and exhausting of our common feast? After that I no longer wanted her.

We now ate nothing but cadavers and bones, aside from the occasional dead birds Sophie gathered just before dawn. From each repast to the next, it seemed, at least to me, that the light in our neighbors’ eyesockets was rekindled; and as centipedes and ashes commenced to fall from their ears they attended to Mortensen with diminished apathy. We four agreed that we were indeed in some measure depleting their deaths; so that what we had done for them, they could do for others; perhaps by midwinter we would be prepared even to meet the denizens of the Red Place. I asked the warlock which fruit he had fed Sophie, and he replied: That must be concealed from doubters such as you. — Enough now, said Mortensen, cracking open a skull for me. — Once I had eaten, nausea and misery kept me quiet. I reminded myself that the death of the One gives life to many.

There came the night when the dead began to look around them of their own volition, and so they perceived each other’s hideousness. Mortensen lectured them that the most hateful thing is to be dead in secret, because that avoids the question of what one is.

Die, said our tall yellow skeleton, in what I thought to be insolent or threatening style.

As it happened, this skeleton possessed a more excellent memory than most of the other dead; it could even remember kissing someone. I asked how we could kill death, and it said: Love.

Sophie demanded: What do you mean? If I loved you, could I kill your death?

The warlock said: Even Christians say you must give up your life to save it.

That’s not to the purpose, said Sophie, almost sharply. I was asking about you people who’ve already lost your lives.

We’re not people, laughed the blue man, behind whom several pairs of living eyes glowed as glossily as berries in various dead skulls.

We’re advising you to die, the warlock reminded us. Nothing but cowardice keeps you from taking that step.

Goldman was completing his explanation to Mortensen about the mathematical proportions of skulls in relation to their inner content, so it was to Sophie whom I whispered my question: Could the dead mean us evil? — She turned away, leaving me to my own miseries. Now Mr. Mooncrow was leading her inside a dome filled with murmuring ghouls. I knew what knowledge she would give and get of him. Truth to tell, each night the dead seemed more active. So did the many beautiful things which claimed the moistness beneath our banquet slab before dawn: the snails whose jet-black shells glistened like cloisonné, the clean-picked little skulls goggling up at us like bespectacled elementary-school students who hoped to be called upon by the teacher even as luna moths emerged from their nostrils; the hard seedpods filled with stars. Beneath the table, sweet small bats were parting purple-velvet leaves of funereal cabbage with their darling claws, so that they could watch our demonstrations. The bird-skulled woman bowed and pecked at her glass of urine-infused wine, as if she might soon pay attention to me. Perhaps if each one of us swallowed down more, we could reverse all imperfections, and achieve what Mortensen had begun to call the dark comfort. Watching me, or so I supposed, certain decayed banqueters worked their jaws, as if they were preparing to speak. Had Mr. Mooncrow uttered a syllable just now? Perhaps it was merely that my hearing was sharpened since I had so long avoided the hummings of the sun. (I should have asked Goldman about this.) Turning his back on the rest of us now that Sophie had gone, the warlock passed his hand over the ground, and blue hands began to claw themselves out of it. Meanwhile the Mummy Lady played with Mortensen — who, truth to tell, was undersexed; but he rose to the occasion, thereby fulfilling the interests of science. The warlock raised his glass to mine and toasted: To death.

Since my curiosity had not died yet entirely, I asked him whether there might be a Dead Book of the Dead with naked meanings in it, which would save its reader even at the cost of death to many others, but he replied: Has your name been spoken?

By whom? I said.

Then you’re among the ignorant, said he, baring his teeth. I walked away, but the skeleton followed me, saying: Die.

Goldman was digging a rectangular hole. Even he had begun to shrivel a little bit — but then, don’t we all? One of the articles of our society was that we must resist pitying one another, much less ourselves; anyhow, Goldman, surely the most sensible of any of them, was by that very token my most depressing companion, at least among the living, so his decay touched me less than Sophie’s. — When I took him aside, he said: Analyze the problem. Do what you have to do.

Die, the skeleton advised me.

Accordingly, I took up Goldman’s pickaxe. Mortensen would not approve, and indeed I rarely sanctioned my own deeds anymore; be that as it may, I smashed that skeleton, skull and spine, while other dead sat eating. Mr. Mooncrow and I collected the fragments and threw them into the stewpot, and Sophie, obediently opening her cunt, satisfied Goldman. I tried to remember the way her eyes used to be when she daydreamed. Saying nothing about my transgression, Mortensen ladled out the latest broth. The stench of his breath was worse than my coffin’s. To tell you truth, I hated my existence. I poured out rainwater from an antique ewer, but no one wanted any. Goldman’s corpse-women kept wandering to and fro among the tombs, gathering shrouds with which to feed the fire. Sophie scratched herself with her long black fingernails. Her hair was finer than spiderwebs. The warlock and Mortensen discussed the wisdom of worms, and the interesting operations of decomposing corpses. It was not unpleasant. In a very committed voice Mortensen asked Mr. Mooncrow what, if anything, the dead might feel for us, at which his interlocutor contented himself with so horrific a hoot that all the churchyard owls came wheeling round his grisly head; Mortensen muttered inexplicably: Give and take, that’s all. — I sat remembering how outside the cemetery one often saw a mother lift up her child as it smiled into her face. How many times had that action been carried out in this world? There was certainly no more need for it. I was sick to death of it, and so for a moment I nearly became desperate.

Mortensen and the warlock now raised a new toast to necrophores, while a furry, moldy woman paired up with a beautiful dead Gypsy to carry to our larder a body which might still be breathing — an appetizing development which appeared to fascinate the shy, worried-looking woman-thing whose chalky face glowed as she squatted between two graves, lowering her slender arms, casting off her mushroom garments. — Who strikes down the wicked? groaned the blue man.

Why the scene should have wearied me I cannot tell; anyhow, I strolled up out of the hollow, and arrived at a glowing hole in the hillside I had never seen before, doubtless because Mortensen was right, and ever more of whatever contained death was revealing itself as death receded, leaving decorations behind. As I looked in I could see a fair sepulcher, and within it a lady’s corpse, nude and greenish-yellow like some deliciously unripe fruit, and in a ring around her, five hundred worms were chasing each other in such perfect array that I marvelled. When I asked her name, she replied: I call myself alive, but am I rooted in anything?

Remembering the warlock’s words, even if not understanding them, I asked: Has your name been spoken?

Do you have the knowledge to name me, or would you eat first?

Mortensen had rehearsed us on the three perturbations of life: fear, grief and desire. All are but vain reachings after life itself, whereas in death there is nothing but peace — if one sets aside the dead’s angry hunger after the living. — So I said: Would you eat with me?

We’ll eat knowledge down to nothing.

I said: My first duty is to eat death.

When I climaxed inside her, it felt more as if she had climaxed inside of me. I was filled with her death. She asked no question afterward; better yet, I felt even less for Sophie, as if I were lighter in my guts; my gross matter was becoming moss. Sobbing, Sophie stuffed herself with dead meat. As for me, I was eating less than I was supposed to.

And someday, said Mortensen, we’ll make it so we won’t die. Not ever. And all the dead who aren’t too dead might even come back to life. And then cemeteries will never again be places of horror and sadness.

What will they be then? asked Sophie.

First they’ll be museums. And then, when we don’t even need to remember death anymore, they’ll become fields, gardens and homes.

Sophie cracked a marrowbone between her teeth and said: But if no one dies, won’t there be too many people?

That won’t be our problem. We’ll have solved the greatest problem of all time. Let someone else fix that one.

Mortensen sat smiling with love for the future. Goldman, whom I knew less than anyone, kept the fire going, and there were now three more shriveled corpse-women who always helped him, stirring the ladle round and round and moaning like the wind. So we made our toast: To death! Dead children took Sophie by the hand, and led her to places where corruption had advanced so far that there was nothing left to do with its traces but scrape them up and dump them into the cauldron. Before dawn we invariably withdrew into our open coffins, and Mortensen would edify us with such old poems as:

Search while thou wilt, and let thy reason goe

To ransome truth even to the Abysse below.

We three lay staring straight up at the spiderwebs at such moments, and a black marble statue of a nude woman watched over us. Sophie was asleep, her face a purple jelly-jewel, more ovoid than it used to be, her blue hands slightly swollen. My growing indifference to everything deepened my trust in Mortensen, who had so consistently proclaimed that the living and the dead are one.

Yes, we were sharing in death, although (with the possible exception of Sophie) we had not yet learned any Names, much less been called by our own. We had achieved first emptiness, then delusion, then the contemplation of delusion, so that we could commence to understand that even emptiness is a delusion. And so we did not care when the warlock, who might have been testing us but more likely was merely lonely, informed us that he knew the whereabouts of hidden treasure. I can’t say whether anything terrified him. Even had he offered to mix the most precious jewels with the most rotten carrion, it would not have fit our program, unless his stones were small enough to swallow whole. Likewise, Mortensen’s reminders of our purpose might as well have been an accountant’s sums. I felt certain that our project could never, no matter how brilliantly it might succeed, lead us into any freshness of being. That might have been another reason that all three of the other members of our society grew ever duller in my estimation.

But Sophie still sometimes reached out, however mechanically, for a dead child’s hand. Twice she devoured banquet-meat as she was expected to, then rushed off to vomit between the tombs. Many a shy corpse shambled after her.

Mortensen enthusiastically informed me: This so-called hateful state she’s in must be her dialectical maximum. It will intensify, and then she’ll be free.

Sophie whispered: I’m not worth anything. I eat filth and death.

Mortensen confided: She’s our treasure. She’s deeper than any of us.

There came the happiness of another banquet, where we and our dead friends all felt like ourselves, throwing the pallid exoskeletons of crayfish out of our abundant boiling-pot, so that the armless, legless dead could graze them up; and Sophie withdrew into the tall chalky corpse-weeds whose leaves were many-fingered hands. Agreeing with Mortensen that the finest course is to face everything, I drank off another bowl of a highly disagreeable soup — although it had begun to strike me that the eating of death might signify far less than I had imagined, for in death even the sorrow dies, leaving mere innocuous moldiness. Was this the secret we had devoured so much to find? If not, how would we know when we attained it? The greenish-yellow lady with whom I had eaten knowledge reached for another tidbit, moaning: Why did no one save my life? — which I interpreted as evidence that she was closer to us than were we to her.

Now it was winter. The corpses had begun to pillage each other’s coffins for firewood, and some of the bolder ones pulled the weaker apart, so there was always something to eat.

We’re on the verge, said Mortensen.

The warlock confided: Soon I’ll be Lord of the Ten Thousand Things.

Looking up from the fire, Goldman asked: What about us?

His three corpse-ladies sang: Die.

I thickened our broth with the contents of a much-cracked cremation urn, and Mortensen revealed more to us about the peculiar perfections and beauties of death, which do not lead to rest. For Goldman I cannot speak, but Sophie and I already knew everything.

One very cold night Mortensen, shivering, withdrew, and sat against a decrepit monument, saying: Too much unshared death! No matter what we choke down, we’ll never reach the bottom of the bowl! — At this, his interlocutor, Mr. Mooncrow, hooted, leaping over a family tomb. The fellow had been literally skin and bones, and now look at him! As for Mortensen, he’d become a creature of angles, gaunt and wretched. Thus both approached their zenith, there in the place of marble tombs eroded into dead white woman-silhouettes. Through the dreamy dullness which defined us I felt grief’s bite, but why? Wearying of my eavesdropping, I stole away to inform Goldman or Sophie of our leader’s despair; for in our line of work one of the last enthusiasms to perish is the desire to tell tales. I encountered Sophie first. She was cutting up a dead child. Her hair had gone grey, and she wore dead beetles for earrings. Almost pityingly (although she never opened her eyes), she replied: Now you see the obvious.

Then why go on eating wormy meat?

We’ll never get the taste out of our mouths now. And if we run away, we’ll die eventually and come back to this.

But if we reach the Red Place—

The same. Even when I eat their hearts I’ve stopped believing in sweetness.

Mortensen said—

He’s exhausting life and death. He’s almost won.

What about you?

I wanted eternal life for you. Don’t you remember what we promised each other?

No.

Instead I found myself remembering daylight, the time of the dead noon; I remembered standing where the terra-cotta sidewalk tiles are shadowed, and the old man pressing oranges into juice, the ladies smiling thirstily all around him as I stood ankle-deep in the paper ruins of the old year. My greenish-yellow lady was claiming prior acquaintance with me, while the blue man said: Whatever will become of us has already become of us. — Sophie was plucking somebody’s long white hairs out of her mouth.

I asked her: Did you ever eat the fruit of the Tree?

Look into the warlock’s face, she replied, and tell me what you think he’s eaten.

When Mortensen returned to the banquet, Goldman’s corpse-women were gnawing soup bones into pieces so that the marrow would come out. They sang: Die!

Mortensen instructed them: Get ready. Now. Live!

At once, Goldman sank the pickaxe into Mortensen’s head. He fell without resistance. Happily clacking their teeth, all the dead crowded round to get at the blood.

Goldman and I looked at each other with relief. Now that Mortensen had crossed to the other side, he would know everything for us, and tell us what to do.

And so we waited. Sophie sat naked in the weeds, eating Mortensen’s liver. I still halfway expected her to find a jewel inside. The warlock’s eyes were as beautiful as butterflies. Mr. Mooncrow rose horribly tall, and a hundred dead children awaited carnal knowledge.

Unlike the rest of you, said Goldman presently, I never deceived myself.

THE GRAVE-HOUSE

Once upon a time I built myself a house beneath a delightful tree, but late on a certain afternoon I began to get old. The sounds of the evening unnerved me as they had never done before. I drew my curtains in order to feel more safe. Then it got very dark, and I slept a long time. When I opened the door in the morning, I discovered bulldozers digging everything up. A man in a hard hat told me to get out; this property had been condemned for nonpayment. — Why not? I thought. I’m too old for this.

I bought myself a well-made house in the city and furnished it as comfortably as I liked. This time I made certain that everything was paid for. No noises ever came through the windows. My soft bed whispered ever more sweetly to me at night, and warm air sang to me from the ceiling ducts. I went to the door, but the door said: Do you really want to go out? Stay awhile; you’ll be so much happier here. — Warm sticky drops of something fell on my head. I looked up, and saw that the ceiling was salivating. This house of mine meant to eat me! So I rushed to the closet to get my coat, but the closet said: I wouldn’t do that if I were you. — I pulled at the doorhandle, but the closet remained as tightly closed as the vagina of my first girlfriend, who had never been in the mood. I sat down on the bed to decide what to do. The mattress felt softer than ever, and I became a trifle sleepy. — Now wouldn’t you like a little nap? my pillow whispered. I’ll give it to you just the way you like it. — So I lay back on my soft, soft bed, and my pillow wrapped around my face to kiss me. In an instant I couldn’t breathe.

After I ripped the pillow’s flabby folds off my mouth, goosedown started whirling around me like malignant snowflakes, seeking to choke me. I leaped up, stepped into my shoes and kicked the closet door until it squealed. When I turned the knob, it opened with a sob and a shudder, wetting my hand with its tears. — I thought you loved me, it said.

I do love you, I said. Now where’s my coat?

Wouldn’t you rather play dress-up? The weather report predicts a cold front. If you stay indoors with me today, I’ll show you costumes you’ve never seen. You can be either a king or a queen.

If I play with you today, will you try to stop me from going tomorrow?

I’ve always loved you, said the closet. It will never be easy to let you go.

Well, if I stay here forever, what do you have to offer me?

What do you mean? What way is that to talk to someone who would give you everything?

If you’ll give me everything, start by giving me my coat.

Are you saying it’s over?

Of course not, I said, stroking the shiny cool doorhandle in just the way it liked. I’m going shopping so I can bring you back some lovely, lovely clothes.

Do you promise? whispered the closet.

I promise.

I put on my coat, but just then the refrigerator spoke my name. It wished to offer me a really, really fancy piece of cheese. The instant I heard that, my mouth began to water, and once that happened, the ceiling dripped more saliva on me. That discouraged my appetite, so I went to the window to investigate the weather. But I lacked means to determine whether or not the closet had lied, because rain was running down the inside of the pane — the tears of my house, which feared that it might not be able to eat me.

Since the door refused to unlock, I broke the window with the base of a gooseneck lamp whose head kept hissing, swiveling round and attempting to bite me. By now the world had grown dark. I smashed out every last shard, threw that quacking, squawking lamp into the hole, and poised myself to escape from my grave-house. Perhaps I should have departed sooner. The bathroom door kept slamming to and fro, the lights glowed red, and the oven timer was screaming. To tell you the truth, I wished that I could have seen something more than blackness outside. How far down did the night go? — It’s past your bedtime, the house threatened. — Leaping into space, I said to myself: This is the last time I’ll ever allow myself to get old.

DEFIANCE

So Abraham took Isaac up onto the mountain, a three days’ journey, and tied him hand and foot upon the mound of firewood, so that he could be roasted after he was bled, but Isaac cried: Why, father? — It seems that Abraham could not answer. The slaughter-knife trembled in his hand. The boy shouted: Father, please, father, there’s a ram in the thicket behind you, caught by both horns! That’s what God intends! — The old man declined to look. Ruthlessly he raised the knife. Swallowing, the boy closed his eyes. — My son, said Abraham, you must look me in the face when I slit your throat. Then God will see that you give yourself willingly. — At this, the child commenced to scream, and so the two bondsmen came running. Until then Abraham had preserved hope that God’s messenger would call down from the sky that he had acquitted his heart and could slay the ram instead. But when the terrified servants panted into sight, the ram tore himself loose, so that there remained only human victims to choose among. What should the father have done? The servants were of unknown blood; for in their infancy he had found them beneath a blasted tree, their mother dead beside an empty water-skin, and he drove off the jackals which were already grinning in their faces. They owed him life, so why not reimburse himself from the both of them, in order to ransom Isaac, whom he loved more than anything but God? Besides, they ought to pay the forfeit for driving the ram away. So he rounded on them with his upraised knife, while Isaac seized the opportunity to untie himself and flee, since after all no one had obtained his consent to this business. He ran eastward of Eden, this being the direction which Cain had chosen before him; and thence the Lord permitted both those outcasts to depart, for He punishes unto the seventh generation, and had He slain Isaac then, there would have been no children to slay. Knowing that he could never again enter his father’s tent, nor lie in the lap of his mother while she groomed his hair, he aged a hundred years, travelling on into the fabulous lands, and God bore with him, for the sake of the seventh generation. And Isaac bowed low before God every day, offering Him the best of everything that he found, but he was not answered. And in the three-hundred-and-thirty-third year of his age he took to wife Dark-Eyes, a princess of the land whom he had allured in defiance of her father, for, being accursed, he owned neither sheep nor goats; no silver pieces lived in his belt; and his home was a certain cave whose entrance he sealed up from within every night, so that the jackals, men and angels who hunted him would wander away bewildered. Dark-Eyes’s father promised him death should he ever visit again, but Dark-Eyes loved him, although why that was she could no longer have said after the first hour of their elopement, when she finally saw his unhooded face. Therefore, thanks to God, she repented that she had given herself to him, and during those morbid cave-nights when he would have slept in her arms, she sat against the wall, cursing him and herself. So she perished, without creating a new generation for God to punish. Then Isaac in his grief entreated forgiveness of her dead carcass, covered her face in an old goatskin, the finest he had, and upraised his slaying-knife to end himself, for he hated the days of his life, and resolved to recompense God for what he had stolen from Him. But had he died then, there would have been no seventh generation, and so the Lord made it fall out that a certain proud and beautiful woman now came riding up upon a camel, calling Isaac by his name. Just as his father had done, he fell into hesitation, and presently rolled aside the stones from his cave, at which she lowered her pitcher to him that he might drink the wine of peace, and carried him away to the mountains where a shady, rapid river flashed near as white as sunlight beneath cloudy green leaves whose like he had never known, and here the gates of a marble city opened unto him, for she was a great queen, whose name was Joy. When she had led him into her palace he knelt before her, touching his mouth to her right foot, and swore an oath to serve her forever as her loving consort, since she had returned his life to him, and together they dwelled in happiness for seven times seventy-seven years, making many children, so that someday there would be a seventh generation to torment to the utmost and finally blot out. In his great gratitude he drew water for her like a woman, while she protected him like a man, so that even the angels could not find him (God, of course, knew his whereabouts), and he tilled the soil like a man, and she wove their clothes like a woman, and when they were alone he played the harp for her while she sang in her soft small voice, upraised her little hands, and slowly danced, naked but for three silver necklaces. Then came an easy trifling hour of sleep, which resembled both of their conceptions of death. And every morning she said to him: Drink, and every evening he said the same to her. And he fashioned bracelets to gladden her wrists, and she washed his feet in flower-water. Then one night after her hair turned grey she dreamed of the sharp-toothed tomb which already opened its jaws to receive them, and in this dark mouth of death flickered seven red serpent-tongues of eternal fire fashioned and lit expressly to torture them forever, so that God could receive the payment of the first generation, but Isaac kissed her, saying: So wan a curse as death bestows upon our extreme old age need not be feared, for our very souls are worn out now, from too much living. Speaking for myself, eternal misery can be no worse than what I suffered before I met you. — But she replied: I have never been in anguish as you were, so I lack practice and experience. Husband, I’m afraid! — Then he said to her: I promise to lie beside you forever, and so long as God keeps me in consciousness to be tortured, I will say your name in my heart, and call upon you, and make my love for you a prayer for all the ages, and I swear to keep faith that you will do likewise for me. — So they comforted one another, and when their tomb roared out for them with the voice of seven lions, they entered it willingly, and their children, the second generation, walled them up, at which everyone’s punishment began.

TOO LATE

It was getting late when I learned how much I liked the redbrick buildings; here’s one with an octagonal tower! I cried to myself; and although it was cold, the round light-balls of a Christmas tree far within the dark reflections of towers in the panes of brass doors on Yonge Street made me feel vaguely expectant, as if somebody might want to give me a present. Well, the phony snow and plastic evergreens in the window which announced RETAIL OPPORTUNITIES got me over it. I felt colder than ever; in fact, it was so chilly that I could only be warmed by a woman with the sleek fat rounded thighs of a Maillol sculpture. None of the parka’d prostitutes on Wellesley Street were shaped like that, but I followed one for thirteen blocks, just to be certain, and her availability made me happy. What were my fantasies but fantasies? All the same, when she finally got into a man’s car I felt sadder than ever.

In the door of a once ornate storefront now concealed behind brown papers, a puffyhaired Asian teenager smoked his cigarette. Nodding at him, I went to ZANZIBAR — The Girls Never Stop — IS NUDE HOT EROTIC LADIES SMOKING ROOM INSIDE and stood at the door waiting to see if the sign could be true, and before it got much later I had to admit that it was, for a woman in a camelhair coat clicked rapidly down the street, gripping both shiny black gloves in her naked right hand. The NUDE HOT EROTIC LADIES SMOKING ROOM tempted me, but, fearing the cover charge, I chose instead to stroll along University Avenue, adding my mite to the crowds with folded arms, Santa Claus caps, jackets and red balloons, awaiting the Santa Claus Parade! In their perambulators, babies outstretched their lobster-red mitts at the sun, and I thought: What if they’re right? — So I returned to the octagonal tower, determined to go up in the world.

The lobby resembled the wide-waisted skirts of a fifteenth-century German cruet, brass or bronze, polished almost to gold, like a creek bottom when the sun strikes right; and the elevator arrived at once — and almost too late just the same, I had better add, for it would soon be closing time. But I pushed the button, and soared so rapidly that the instants nearly went backward! If only I could have gone a trifle faster and higher, I might have lived forever.

From the fifteenth floor I could see clear into Charlevoix County: wiggly-squiggly lines of delicious coldness, the road, hills and houses, frosted over with raspberry vanilla and blueberry ice cream.

From the twenty-ninth floor, Canada’s trees rose snowily or not beneath my mountaintops, inviting me to admire the sea-view of Lake Superior. I could almost see a peaceful, stylized woman framed by pale green hills.

From the thirty-seventh floor I could see all the way to the beginning of the Great North, whose ruffled snow invited me like a loved woman’s frilly underpants between the shadowed knee-hills of frozen sky-stone, and my soul rode away on spectacular waves of snow, ice and clouds like eagle-armies above.

From the eighty-eighth floor I discovered mountains like immense blue teeth; then a bird’s wing of cloud above the fog.

The penthouse on the one-hundred-and-forty-seventh floor was windowed all around like a greenhouse. Up here I could easily make out the curvature of the earth. The first telescope angled due north, but maybe it was actually a kaleidoscope, because when I placed my eye against it, everything exploded into sunny blueprint abstractions of an astronomical character. Had I only spent my life learning and reasoning, I might have been able to interpret that message, but it was too late for that.

There was also a telescope pointed due west, and it showed me the brassy sun fleeing across the Pacific. This comprised futurity, and I longed to see my destiny here. After much labor I finally saw myself on one of the Queen Charlotte Islands, on my ninetieth birthday in a nursing home. I asked the lovely darkhaired nurse to kiss me, but she wouldn’t because I was so old and gruesome. So I begged her to spit in my mouth — that way I wouldn’t contaminate her — and she kindly did. I had to hurry now; this sunbeam was speeding on! For my birthday present I begged her for an injection of potassium to stop my heart; through the dusty window of the nursing home I could not quite read my lips when I made this plea, but because I knew myself, I knew what I was asking. The nurse smiled, stroked my hair and nodded. Just before her needle went in, I understood that after the carrion died, I would rise up from it, take her hand, and she and I would walk away together. She loved me! Wishing to gain some benefit from her love before it was too late, I raised the telescope up into the air, trying to spy on the two of us; but we were already gone, or else she had already buried me; either way, I had missed the train.

Hoping to do better, I pressed my face against the southern telescope. The instant my eye crossed the border, I was ambushed by grief; scanning streets where I had once been with a woman I had been far too late for, I felt the grief rise up in me like the numbness of an oncoming brain clot; I hoped to avoid focusing on where she lived; but the farther away I swiveled the telescope, the more anxious I became; why wasn’t I going where I should be? Not caring to miss my opportunity, I finally aimed my gaze at her living room window; she was watching television and eating ice cream with a nice young man who kept kissing her hand; my God, she didn’t even have hair under her arms; they were both too young for me; I’d been born too early, which is to say too late! Raising the telescope despairingly upward, I saw storybook airplanes ascending with live soldiers waving at me through the windows and descending laden with flag-wrapped coffins. Quickly I swiveled the telescope away, incredulous that I had failed to remain with the woman and the country that I still loved. And when I stood away from the telescope, it was as if I were departing from her city in the early morning dark, unable to accept that I had not made myself known to her. For some time, she had still loved me, and grieved in bewilderment that I would not be her friend. I had seen the same uncertain friendliness on the faces of the soldiers who had waved to me. They wanted me to accompany them on their mission; one corporal had even offered me his binoculars as he shot off to his death.

Needless to say, there remained the telescope oriented due east, where come spring the melting roads of Québec would be chocolate under the snow. I approached this eyepiece with a sense of excitement. And what would you know? I found myself peeping in on Lilian Terrace! That nice girl was in her high heels, and her nipples were very, very pointed. I spied a snowy landscape painting on an easel behind her, her garment draped over the chair. Well, after that, I wanted to be as Canadian as a beaver dam silhouetted beyond constellations of tree-forms rising up into the cirrus clouds and downward (reflectively) into splendid brass-dark pools. To hell with soldiers and ice cream eaters! Never mind that nurse! As for the sunny abstractions, I had time to figure those out whenever I wanted to. I felt so Canadian that I even wanted to take part in the Santa Claus Parade.

A gentle gong sounded four times: closing hour. So I rode the elevator back down to the lobby and went out into the snowdrifts in the ice-blued streets of Old Toronto, whose picket-fences were almost lost in winter; and the only ominous factor was the red maple-leaf flag at half-mast for me above Grosvenor Street. I felt hungry, but I gathered sunlight’s warm patches between shadow and wind.

A little girl’s hair blew straight back behind her as she rushed toward the parade, holding her father’s hand. A woman’s hair streamed behind her and her cheeks turned red and white with cold, just before the man she loved kissed her. A girl in a knit wool cap shivered and smiled. Among the parents and children holding hands on subways, bundled babies, couples holding hands nakedly in the cold, I searched for the Canadian girl for whom I had been meant, and the later it got the younger I became, until beneath the yellow-banded sky of late afternoon I found her, on a bicycle, her books in the basket behind her; and because she was meant for me, one of her books fell into the snow. I ran to pick it up. Smilingly, she asked me to walk her home. I was now so young that I had become too small for my wrinkled skin.

I accompanied her through tall narrow slices of shadow, sky on cloud between them, while she confessed that she had always been lonely. (A girl in a hooded white parka with rabbit fringes was shivering; I knew that I could make her warm, but I had to be faithful to the other one forever. Inspired by me, a man ducked down his head against the wind and hurried to the parade.) And now we had arrived at a bank of brick-celled house-flesh with tall windows bulging out, the roofs steep and peeling very sharply against the cold sky; they’d been maimed by a million frosts. I understood that even here life must sometimes be as dull as a sidewalk between office towers when the winter sun goes behind a cloud, but my face burned for that one girl in the lovely chill of Canada. I had become fourteen years old.

My girl went up the steps to a creamy door beneath a lavender snow-roof against a certain tall narrow yellow housefront. She went in, and it was too late for me to follow her, too late!

Grey hairs rushed out of my pores until I seemed to be covered in sealskins. I sought other RETAIL OPPORTUNITIES, but all the women screamed.

In Canada my friend North, who had once been nervous to the point of making others sad and angry, was now at last happy, with a paunch; his wife was lovely; they had daughters and a nice old house; they fussed happily in the kitchen, cooking scallops from Novia Scotia, talking about the old characters on Digby Neck. I too could have been a Canadian. I could have married the right person. I could have been younger. But it was too late.