Word Made Flesh

18

The names you used to call me

Sound so strange and they fill me with fear

But will we ever know if this difference is born

On your tongue or perhaps in my ear …

It’s “What Is and Isn’t Said,” a live version off the One Night in Wiesbaden album. The tune was done with a string section backing and Gilrein finds it greatly inferior to Imogene’s original a cappella rendition, so he asks the driver to turn off the radio and tries to stop wondering which interpretation Ceil was partial to, tries instead to focus on the more pertinent question at hand — why the hell two Bohemian gangsters might be vying to ice one insignificant ex — bunko cop? He relays the final directions to Wormland through the safety partition. He knows he should be humiliated, one of the last of the independent hacks paying a corporate grunt for a ride home, but all he feels is tired and jangled, certain only of the fact that it will probably be a good idea to bring the gun into bed with him tonight. The smart way to run this mess down is probably to go back to the beginning and start with Leo Tani, to find out what kind of book he was moving and who it belonged to and who has been bidding on it. But the best person to help him answer those questions would be Wylie Brown. And just a few hours ago, she handed him over to Kroger.

Or did she? It’s possible, if unlikely, that she had no idea Kroger’s animals were coming for him. But in Gilrein’s experience, cynicism comes faster and easier than faith and though he doesn’t actively want to believe that Wylie set him up, he can’t shake the familiar sensation of betrayal that’s resting in the hollow of his stomach like a snake with a skin made of diamonds.

So he tries sticking with the few thin facts that he’s got and their corollary suppositions.

Leo Tani was whacked because of the sale he brokered at Gompers Station. According to Kroger, the item sold was a book of some sort, which Kroger says belongs to him. Kroger is being dogged by Oster and the Magicians, who are working on contract for Hermann Kinsky. And all of them seem to think that Tani passed this book on to his favorite chauffeur. With both Kroger and Kinsky involved, it seems at least possible that the book in question may either originate in or have some connection to their shared native city, Maisel, the thousand-year capital of Old Bohemia.

Is Gilrein imagining it or did Ceil really mention wanting to visit Maisel some day? Was this an actual statement of his late wife or has he begun to insert her presence into every aspect of his post-Ceil existence?

He refuses to pick at the question. He’s too exhausted and maybe too apprehensive about the final answer, the fact that too much of himself died along with Ceil, that the balance of a lifetime this choked and numbed from unrelieved grief isn’t a lifetime at all but rather a limbo, a void, a holding cell of paralife, ghost life, where every sense is muted to the point of absurd triviality and ideas of possibility and faith and change are inconceivable.

The black cab’s headlights play over the sprawl of the farmhouse and the barn. Gilrein pays the driver and climbs outside, but instead of heading for the loft, he goes to the main house, unlocks the front door and makes his way down into the cellar. He grabs the flashlight from the shelf at the bottom of the stairs and follows its beam toward the rear of the house, and when the furnace cycles on without warning, he flinches so badly that he almost drops to the floor.

Some field mice run through the shaft of his light as it plays on the ground. When he comes to the wooden locker, he takes his keys from his jacket, finds the smallest one, and opens the padlock. He rests on one knee and unbolts the manhole cover, pulls the plate loose and sets it to the side, then climbs down into Subterranea.

It was Wylie who conclusively determined that the original labyrinth had, in fact, been constructed by E. C. Brockden himself. An earlier Brockden scholar, whom Wylie called, often and with a kind of glee, “a chronically pissed-off revisionist,” had posited that it was one of the later owners who was responsible for the book maze. Certainly there were sections of the tunnels that Brockden couldn’t possibly have forged given the materials used in their construction. But the initial conception, design, and assembly were all the work of Brockden, the man whom at least one limerick has memorialized as King of the Worms.

Subterranea was the start of Brockden’s final descent into madness, as Wylie had explained, a little melodramatically, Gilrein thought, the first time he took her down below. She had, of course, read deeply in all the specialty works devoted to the network of veins that comprised the underground library. She’d studied the photostats of Brockden’s original line drawings and compared them to the most recent computer-generated blue-prints commissioned by the Brockden Society. She’d familiarized herself to the point of memorization with the titles of all the books found lining the walls of the labyrinth and spent innumerable hours at the Southwick reviewing the manifest with a red pencil and either agreeing or disagreeing with the judgments as to which volumes belonged to Brockden and which had been added by later Wormland owners.

Measured in a straight-ahead, linear fashion, the corridors that comprise the labyrinth run on for close to half a mile, but the layout of the book maze is anything but linear. It turns and twists and wraps back upon itself and so, like human intestines or a wound ball of twine, the eight hundred yards of negotiable space occupy a subsurface cavern that lies beneath a circular plot of earth stretching only to the valley at the edge of the orchards.

There’s no reason to believe that he’ll find books here on the city of Maisel. Brockden’s original stock mainly consisted of obscure theological tracts and fringe science texts. The more recent volumes deposited by the interim owners were a hodge-podge of forgotten novels and manuals of the occult and a sampling of the more notorious, hysterically paranoid political manifestos of the past two hundred years.

The logical course would be to head for the public library and pull everything on rare Bohemian tomes. But that would mean waiting and thinking and remembering, lying in the barn loft, soaking in the now compulsive recollections of how Ceil came into his life and how she departed, culminating always in a vivid skull cinema that can only screen one feature — the Rome Avenue Raid. And the last way Gilrein wants to welcome the dawn is by morbidly pawing over a series of past events that can’t be changed by hope or good deeds or even the exchange of one life for another.

So he climbs down into the hole and starts walking randomly, moving through the left tunnel when he comes to the first fork. How many times has Gilrein been through the labyrinth? Fewer than one might think. After Frankie first showed him the tunnels he ventured down alone two or three times, but on each occasion he found the maze more claustrophobic, especially when he’d reach the crawl space sections that could only be traversed on hands and knees.

But then, after the romance with Wylie began, he started to accompany her into the hole and was surprised to find that his phobic reaction had lessened to the point where they could spend hours following passageways to their walled-off conclusions. In fact, it was in the labyrinth that Gilrein and Wylie first consummated their relationship when she tripped on an unseen pile of books left in the walkway and fell backward into Gilrein. He caught her, but lost his own balance and they both went down to the ground, dropping flashlights and landing in an awkward but intimate embrace that, shocking the two of them, took on a life of its own and culminated, somehow, twenty minutes later, with both their jeans loose around their ankles and their legs and asses covered with cold, moist dirt.

“What would Edgar think?” was all Gilrein could come up with between breaths.

Wylie further shocked herself by loving his irreverence and she spent the sleeping hours of the next week in the Checker, keeping him company through all manner of quixotic fares in Bangkok Park and the Canal Zone, lecturing him in a loose and haphazard style on the life, madness, and death of Edgar Carwin Brockden.

Now, he thinks of all she taught him, can hear Wylie’s voice as he throws a light across the spines of the thousands of books that line the curving, narrowing, disappearing walls of Subterranea. And he thinks for the first time that though he may never share Wylie’s fascination with the life of Brockden, he suddenly understands the frustration she feels at the heart of her research. Because, though Wylie can tell you, in obsessive and intricate detail, what happened to Edgar Brockden, she can’t tell you why it happened.

No one can. Gilrein is sure of this. If all of these volumes of print gathered around him, here below the stony ground of Quinsigamond, somehow managed to transmogrify themselves and each grew tongue and larynx and the intellectual mechanics necessary for communication, they’d all fall silent when confronted with the unique components of one man’s insanity. Madness is always a singularity. Gilrein knows this no matter how many learned scholars of the mind might demonstrate patterns, systemic consistencies, series of long-proven repetitions. When a man falls away from any trace of rationality, it is a lone, unprecedented descent. And Gilrein’s certainty of this fact is a surety born, not of clinical observation and analysis, but of the kind of sharp and pressing and parasitical truth that lives at the bottom of the belly, without known origin or end, like a legendary and eventually doomed redeemer.

He lets himself wander, neither following an established route nor memorizing his current path. Every now and then he stops and faces a wall of books, reads a number of titles—The Heresy of Jesuit Education, The Meretricious Cost of Our Demise, The Lair of the Scarlet Filariasis—their gilt letters wearing toward illegibility. At one point he’s forced to duck down to a squat and waddle through a particularly low segment of tunnel. At the end of this segment he stops and shines his beam left and right. On the right hand wall, instead of books, he finds one of those rare notches that Wylie always considered the high point of their underground sojourns. At seven locations throughout the labyrinth, Brockden carved out of the rock face a small indentation or crevice and outfitted each with a ritual altar. To this day, the man’s original implements and tools remain displayed upon the altars — skiving knives and stitching needles; paste brushes and dried-up jars of homemade glues; brittle, desiccated pieces of scrap leather and small stacks of marbled paper and wooden screw vises. To Gilrein, the altars resemble temple sites for ancient ritual sacrifice, like places he’s seen in documentaries about lost cultures and mystery religions. But Wylie assured him that they were simply workstations where Brockden retreated to calm his fevered mind with lengthy sessions of bookbinding and repair.

“If that’s true,” Gilrein once challenged her, “his little hobby didn’t quite do the trick.”

“In the end,” she acknowledged, “I don’t think anything would have.”

In retrospect, it seems to Gilrein that Wylie had some difficulty directly approaching the subject of the Brockden family’s final days. But she found ways of chronically, if opaquely, alluding to it in a tone that suggested the clan’s horrific demise was somehow, two hundred years after the fact, her fault rather than the result of a man whose brain chemistry had become so unbalanced that he committed the most grievous outrage of all.

We rely on texts to tell us the story. Often, there’s nothing more to go on. And because there’s no alternative, no way to look back and capture our own perception of the truth, we elevate the texts to a level they may not deserve. We venerate them with our study. We consecrate them with the never-ending touch of our saliva-wet thumb. We come, finally, to accept them as more than a representation, a version, one version, of a long-lost reality.

But there were no historians nor anthropologists, psychiatrists nor pathologists present when Edgar Brockden, exhausted from the interminable suspension over his own unique abyss, let go of his ever-weakening hold on rationality and plunged down toward a chasm, a void, toward the mouth of Satan himself. There were no objective observers available to witness the last day. No one to give testament to the progression of facts, to construct a simple time line of fanaticism, delusion, hysteria, terror, and death. And in the absence of an eyewitness, we are left with a succession of theoretical accounts, some better than others and most agreeing on a few basic suppositions, but all of them, in the end, no better than a story. Of which, this is only one more.

We know for certain that on Palm Sunday of 1798, Governor Summer was visiting in Quinsigamond. We know that Governor Summer’s guest on his visit was Ambassador Peltzl, Emissary to the Court of St. Gotthard at Bratislava. We know that the Brockden family had been invited to dine with the governor and the ambassador at the Southwick Mansion. And we know that at some point that morning, Edgar Brockden announced to his clan that they would not be taking the carriage into the city to attend the dinner, but instead would celebrate “the new rites” in the family’s attic chapel. Lucy, though more concerned than ever about her husband’s obvious fatigue, the long nights spent in his chambers below the house, gathered the children without a word and followed the minister up the winding stairways to the top of the tower.

Upon entering the chapel, even the tykes must have been more shocked than amused to find the worship pews, which Brockden had spent weeks sanding and rubbing with oil, now lined with oozy layers of moss and mud, breeding ground for Brockden’s latest generation of vermis. Lucy’s reaction churned from disbelief to a righteous anger when she discovered the altarpiece similarly bedecked with a cover of damp topsoil and writhing with the tumultuous burrowing of countless parasitical vermicelli. To the fright of the little ones, she castigated her husband for this blasphemy, begged Brockden to clean up this insult to the bleeding heart of Jesus and pray for forgiveness, then ran back downstairs with Theo and Sophia.

Brockden didn’t come down until nightfall. His vestments were filthy with earth, his hair matted as if he’d used the worms’ habitat as a kind of pomade. But it was his face that betrayed the news that his condition had worsened rather than improved. His eyes seemed dislocated in their sockets, the muscles around them tight and trembling, the whites shot with branches of red and the pupils dilated into black wells. Lucy tried to pull off his garments, feel his skull for the fever, but he pushed her away. The children watched, holding each other and cowering under the table as their father slapped their mother brutishly across the face, bellowing, “Away from me, demon,” calling his wife “King Mab,” and launching into a screaming barrage of what sounded like some derivation of Latin, but could just as easily have been the nonsensical gibberish of a mind fallen beyond the community of language.

Lucy fell by the hearth and managed to grab a poker which she brandished against this raving stranger as she instructed the children to run to their rooms and block their doors. Brockden made at least one charge at her. Lucy screamed for God’s mercy and stabbed her husband in the area of the groin, slightly piercing a thigh, but causing the madman to retreat into the cellar hole and crawl down among his books and curving tunnelways.

No one has a completely reasonable explanation as to why Mrs. Brockden didn’t then retrieve the children, take the horses and flee into Quinsigamond for aid. There is a stodgy group of traditionalists who insist that a woman of faith could not abandon her husband in what was clearly his darkest hour. But a new generation of feminist readers has proposed the theory that it was the homestead Lucy refused to give up, that she had suffered and slaved as much as Brockden for their City of Words and wasn’t about to turn it over to a delusional louse with a new enthusiasm for glossolalia and spousal abuse.

Whatever the case, she hovered between the children and the cellar hole, trying to simultaneously calm little Sophia’s panic and guard against the return of the monster who resembled her once-loving husband. Brockden did not return to the house proper that night and one can only imagine the long hours Lucy spent seated before the cellar door with, perhaps, her husband’s own hunting musket across her lap.

Very likely, it was sometime after dawn that she ventured down into the labyrinth. Though fear and sleeplessness turned her once-beautiful script into a nearly illegible mess, her journal entry for that day seems to describe finding Brockden before one of the bookbinding altars, his lantern long burned dry, working in the dark, attempting, by touch alone, to create a simulacrum of a book made from a combination of worm-mash and random pages from his dream journals. The fury and wrath had vanished from the man, but now he seemed, as his wife phrased it, “a ghost unto himself. He would not answer my calls, would not deem to look my way. I do not believe Edgar heard my voice fill the small space between us. Pray God he is not lost to us again.”

Dozens of articles have been written concerning Lucy’s use of the word “again.” The majority of Brockdenites interpret the usage as a reference to Brockden’s attack of the previous day. Others choose to believe something much darker about the nature of everyday life within the Brockden clan. Ultimately, we are left with two final artifacts. There is Lucy’s last journal entry from the morning of Good Friday, a single cat-scratch line which reads, “He speaks again, asking us, on this darkest of days, to join him below in prayer to the Redeemer for deliverance from the house of evil.”

And there are the bones of the entire Brockden family, found a full year after Lucy wrote those words.

The remains were discovered by a trio of boys who had broken into the farmhouse to explore and scavenge. In the cellar they came upon the open mouth of the labyrinth, crawled into the chambered belly of the earth, and to their horror, stumbled over the skeletal bodies of two children and two adults. Two centuries later, forensic science would be able to precisely demonstrate the hundreds of locations where Edgar Brockden’s skiving knives pierced all the way through skin and muscle and fat and cartilage to strike at the bones of his wife and children.

The remains of Brockden himself were found on one of his binding altars, dead by his own hand and swaddled in mounds of the muddy silt he used to incubate his worms.

Gilrein stands in front of the altar, shining his light over the surface, not sure what he’s expecting to find. He thinks again about Wylie’s story of what happened down here in the book maze, the drama she conveyed about the final days of the Brockden family. And he suddenly wants out of the labyrinth. It was a stupid idea coming down here. All of the claustrophobia he had felt prior to Wylie is returning with the impact of a drowning wave.

Before he can calm himself, take some deep breaths, and reverse his direction, the panic explodes and destroys any chance of simple reason. And he starts to run, to indiscriminately turn corners and break right and left and tumble forward without thought, motivated only by fear, an insidious and primal certainty that the walls of the book maze are literally narrowing, the arched ceilings lowering toward his head and the floors elevating, forming a perfect box, an airless vault, a coffin that will continue to collapse upon itself until it suffocates and crushes its occupant.

He throws himself around corner after corner, running in a crouch, and it’s as if his attempt to slow his breathing has exactly the opposite effect, causes his lungs to increase their frantic pace, the exhalations trying to overtake the need for fresh air. If he could only get air, find the path upward, break through, out of the earth. He reaches for the shelving, trying to pull his body along, the sound of his hyperventilation destroying his judgment, obliterating the memory of which path to take, of which path he’s already taken.

He falls to his knees and starts to crawl, scurrying like a beetle, like a cockchafer spastically making for its burrow under the threat of an enormous shoe heel. He feels the weight of the ceiling upon his back, pressing down, somehow alive and hateful, wanting to mash him into the ground, make him one with the dirt, obliterate him, grind his flesh back into the silt from which it was made and from which it emerged.

And then he can’t move at all, lies motionless on his stomach, the panic finally precluding motion, freezing him in position but for the continued heaving of his lungs inside his chest. He lies this way for an unknown passage of time, awash in the noise of his deafening suffocation, until he shifts his head slightly and sees, at the end of the corridor, the ladder that leads up to the cellar.

It takes some time to get to his feet, but once he’s erect he exits the farmhouse and runs for the orchards, just wanting to stand in the openness of the outside world. When his breathing finally returns to normal, he moves to the greenhouse and sits down on the love seat, finds Ceil’s notebook and pulls it up to his chest and hugs it against his body, the way you might bind yourself to a sleeping infant.

He doesn’t get up again until he realizes the simple reason that Edgar Brockden decimated his family.

Brockden picked up his skiving knives and hacked his family into scrap because, in struggling to receive the divine alphabet, he came to understand the profound ineptitude of the system called language. He came to understand how this inherent, unchangeable deficiency defines each of us, traps us, imprisons us, finally reduces us to a state of absolute isolation. Keeps us forever, uniquely, agonizingly, alone. In Brockden’s heart, the slaughter was likely an act of mercy.

Brockden carved his wife and children into nothingness because he could no longer speak to them. And because he came to know, with instantaneous certainty, that this kind of silence, when it descends and becomes a shroud, a cocoon that smothers every sense, is an entombment from which no one will ever awake and arise.