CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (27 page)

* * *

“Still, she loves you,” hissed the quicksilver imp. “She has
devised terrible fates for you, so that you will be like her, hook-handed and mad, with mercury dripping from every pore. That
is what mothers do. They do not do it to be cruel, they do not sell
their daughters’ hearts to huntsmen and drive them alone and
weeping into the black wood of the world because they are
wicked, but only because these things are necessary to make a
woman in their own image, in order to make a lonely little girl
into a Queen.”

“I feel as though my scalp has been pierced by a poison
comb,” gasped the child.

The imp rubbed its silver stomach in satisfaction.

V.

The Mercuress places her other hand over mine. We are old, the two of us. We have grown old together. We hold the highest offices of our school. Alba the Mercuress and I, I, whose name does not matter. I am no more than a humble glass-blower, all my flesh scored with burns and scalds as Alba’s is scored with the tracks of the quicksilver that moves still through her veins. My lips are a blister, while hers are bloody and violent red, the last stage of her slow poisoning. We have suffered so for our brief brushes with the truth of this world.

Once I lived in the desert, among all that sand yearning to become more, to reflect light, to capture it, to remember it, and I supposed I yearned for those things, too. Personal history is inferior to institutional history. But there was a day when I was not a nun in the service of light, there was a day when I looked into a mirror hanging in a university and believed it was holy. Believed that there was a reason that every tale of strange things contained somewhere in it glass and a mirror. Glass shoes, glass coffins, glass houses, mirrors that whisper:
you are the fairest, the fairest of them all
, mirrors that are really doors that are really mouths that are really endless seas whereon the throne of God floats like a golden buoy. I believed instinctively those solemn pronouncements that each school repeats in its most secret rituals:
mirrors are memory, mirrors
yearn to hold us within them, mirrors are the way home.

Light has a will. Light experiences pain.

And because I could smile and incline my head and know all those things, because I could laugh at all tales and believe them too, I have been allowed to stay within that strange desert college, to boil the sacred glass and lay it flat again, to smooth it for Alba’s silver brush, to be the first face reflected in any newborn plane. Alba and I converse with our hands, our mouths, our glass, our mercury. We move in a rigid line, pantomiming the origin story that pierces us like a shard of mirror, showing our hearts on both sides. So it is that I, the stewardess of glass, lay down upon the frail body of the governess of mercury, as Koh lay over Tain, as the lovers of Abd-al-Qadir lay over his glassy belly, as the philosophers of Shedir lay over the aln-bed, and between the two of us, we make the world whole again, a perfect mirror.

* * *

“I am sorry,” the Queen said. “We dwell in a plague of mirrors.
It is best to give in, to understand that your youth is spent
staring into a glass, your middle-age is spent walking in glass
shoes, and upon your death you will be closed up in a coffin of
glass, in whose lid you may see yourself decay with perfect
clarity. This is the fate of a woman. Perhaps there are worlds
where it is otherwise. But here, the imp holds sway.” The Queen
did indeed look pained, and thick, rheumy tears formed in the
corners of her eyes.

“I feel as though a slice of apple has become lodged in my
throat,” choked the child, clawing at her neck. She looked up,
pleading, into her mother’s impassive face, her lips startlingly,
violently red, flush with poison, her face the tain of her mother’s
mirror.

The imp grinned for the third time, an expression
containing something of pity and something of triumph. “Did I
not promise just exactly this?” it cried. “A child with hair as
dark as ebony, with skin as white as snow, with lips as red as
blood?”

“You did promise.”

Satisfied, the imp sighed passionately and melted into
the finger of the Queen’s daughter. Slowly, the child collapsed
onto the worktable, and no breath fogged the mirror that bore
her up.

VI.

The Mercuress my lover pulls my hand from the page. Her bluish skin is warm with the last light of the day, caught in the crystal lanterns of my cell, where it dances and flickers, caught, captured, loved. Her mouth is so beautiful, so red. In the hall we can hear the voices of our brothers and sisters, squabbling over the chemical content of aln or what sign of the zodiac Abd-al-Qadir must have been. The novices, still flush with new knowledge, whisper and laugh, repeating to each other old tales of queens and imps and apples and snow in the corners of the refectory. How everything shines for them now, how every tale they have ever heard must be taken apart to find the secret story creeping there, just behind the glass. These are pleasant, comforting sounds, like those of children playing in the courtyard.

The bed in my cell is narrow. She will pull me onto her, and breast to breast we will sleep, whispering to each other of that perfect, lost world where we might have raced on glass tigers and swum in seas of silver too pure to ever harm us. The light will gutter and dim, spending its last crimson onto our joined skin, two old women watching each other in the mirrors of their eyes.

I will go to her. There is time enough for manuscripts tomorrow.

Forrest Aguirre

I. The Twain

“It’s coming.”

“THE CROW?!”

“Not the crow,” he shook his head, disappointed by the other’s naiveté. They had not spoken of the crow since The Rattle Incident, fifty some years ago. “No, not the crow. Contrariwise, inevitability, death.”

“Oh, that.” And he knew it was true, that “that” was coming. That despite the unchanging DUM on his collar—his clothes had not aged a day—the grey hairs that nowadays shed from beneath his unchanging beanie would continue to fall like desiccated leaves on the autumn ground, and that the pace at which they fell would approach a lifetime’s asymptote until time rearranged the equation completely, allowing infinity to shrink to naught.

“What now?” Dum asked.

Dee’s face waxed dour. “Contrariwise. No now.”

“Know what?” Dum was perplexed, not knowing what information he lacked, of course.

“No now. There is only one way out, and that—or avoiding ‘that’—is out of time.”

Dum nodded, hand to chin, soaking in Dee’s meaning. After a silence, the hand raised, finger pointed upward, his eyes widened.

“Perhaps we can slow time to a standstill!”

“It is not enough,” Dee said gravely. “We must escape. Clearly we could slow our aging, every two-bit apothecary offers cures for the maladies of senescence. But inevitability will reign supreme, no matter what our age. We cannot ignore it. It will sneak up on us and . . . ”

“The crow . . . ” Dum said ominously.

“Yes, the crow,” Dee agreed, non-contrariwise. “The crow, highwaymen, disease, the fickle nature of the queen.”

They both involuntarily cringed, thinking of what had happened to Queen Alice since she had hit puberty, maturity, then menopause. It was not a pretty picture. The crow seemed inviting, by comparison.

“You are right,” Dum conceded. “We need out. But how?”

“There are two of us,” Dee observed. “Perhaps we should look in different directions and share what we find with one another.”

“Agreed,” said Dum.

“Agreed,” said Dee.

“Agreed,” said they, in unison. And they turned their backs on each other.

II. Dum

In the beginning was the word. And the word was God. Is God. Will be God. God is the beginning and the end, thus the word is the beginning and the end. The ends need unraveling, the word needs breaking. Broken words means no beginning and no end means no time, no how. Contrariwise, no words means no time at all. And no times means no decay, unless I says so. I will decay the word and become God. “Be” because I Am, “come” because I will be. Because. “Be” because I AM, “cause” because I will make it be. Because I says so. And no one won’t stop me, no how!

III. Dee

Dum is becoming more and more unstable. I shan’t tolerate his irregularities much longer, no how. I am so close to discovering the secret, and I try to impart my knowledge to him in discrete portions, but he deconstructs my words, even deconstructs his own words mid-sentence. He seems obsessed with pulling apart my very meanings. He makes no sense half the time. Contrariwise, he borders on insanity. I wonder if, perhaps, it is too late for him, if senility has already dug its talons into poor Tweedledum’s skull. His brain seems scrambled.

Perhaps he misunderstood the concept of time and timelessness, blinded by time so as to be unable to see outside it. More likely, he was afforded a glimpse beyond the chronological curtain, into the ineffable, and was driven mad by what he saw. His comprehension might just have been too simple for the vision.

I should like to explain it to him, but I cannot complete a sentence in his presence.

I should like to explain to him that time is like a ball riddled through with tubes that pass through it (and through one another). The inside of each tube is made of the same stuff as the outside surface of the sphere. It is not a solid skin, though. It is a wall of threads braided around threads, each reinforcing the other, like steel bridge cables, only of finer material. Most go about their day-to-day lives incognizant of the structure, as unaware of time’s velocity as they are of the motion of the air, until the vortex of caducity sweeps them along to their doom.

I am afraid that my brother has already been carried away by that cyclone. He is unable to still his tumbling thoughts long enough to focus on the structure. To exit time, one must, paradoxically, use time in an effort to learn to control it.

I have begun my exercises thusly:

To slow time down, I bore myself with meditative regimens. Ennui is dolorific to one’s sense of time and, I believe, to time itself. It has a preservative effect on the constitution, slowing the heart and mind, keeping decay at bay.

I have also, at my peril, experimented with differing methods of speeding time up, hurtling myself toward my nemesis in order to see, more acutely, the tendrils that hold me captive, in an effort to find chinks in the eternal armor. The problem here is, the more I look in this way, the finer and finer resolution I see. The cable-like structure is repeated ad infinitum, and the more time I spend (the monetary metaphor is not lost on me) trying to unravel the wall towards which I speed, headlong, the less time I have to solve the puzzle. It’s like trying to capture the Cheshire Cat in a room whose walls are covered in smiling wallpaper. Time laughs at me as I try to solve its riddles. I am mocked for my desperation. I don’t smile much anymore.

IV. Contrariwise

“What do you have?” Tweedledee asked glumly.

“Halve the answer,” Tweedledum replied. The mixture of cheerfulness with a tone of command in his voice sickened his twin.

“Half the answer? The closer I get to the answer, the quicker it recedes.”

“Re-seed the question.” Again, that condescending tone.

“You are maniacal.”

“You are the one in manacles,” Dum danced in circles around his brother.

Dee fumed, then his temper burst.

“Stop this prattle!”

“RATTLE?!” Dum suddenly grew enraged. “What have you done with my nice, new rattle?”

“Not again!” Dee put his face in his hands, nearly sobbing with frustration.

“Of course,” Dum said, in a calm voice that evoked unpleasant memories in Dee, “we must have a battle.”

“Of course,” agreed Dee, accepting this burden with a heavy heart. “But you will need to get yourself dressed.”