Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (10 page)

Nailed in the brilliant beam of the spotlight, the evenings attractions stand side by side, hand in hand, on the slowly rotating stage; the naked girl and boy who have come all the way from the Louisiana bayous or the Mexican desert or a Bangkok brothel, depending which version of the story you’ve been told. They are not twins or even brother and sister, though clothed just so, one might easily enough pass for the other. She is a year his senior, now only a few weeks from her twenty-second birthday, and already they have been on the road together for more than half a decade. Few have ever bothered with the futile argument that they are not beautiful. Their hair is long and straight and the lustrous black of mink, and their skin is the color of a cup of coffee that’s mostly only cream and sugar. Their eyes are dark and guarded, and tonight the girl and the boy do not look out into the staring, impatient crowd of freaks gathered in the Well, but, instead, watch the dusty boards and their own bare feet, keeping their heads down and waiting for the music that is their cue. They are here to be seen, not to see, and experience has long since taught them how much easier it is to sleep without dreams of the bottomless longing and despite and emptiness that stains the faces of the assembled onlookers, in the end, all their audiences are the same, always; every city and every country might as well be no more than different nights endured beneath a single roof.

When the phonograph begins to play and the musty air is filled with the strains of an opera recorded fifty years before they were born, the girl releases the boy’s hand, and, reluctantly, she takes a step back from him. He raises his head and watches her for a moment, almost smiling, because he knows their separation will be brief. She nods once, then spreads her arms wide and takes several very deep breaths, hyperventilating like a swimmer preparing for a deep and prolonged dive.

And then she is speaking to him-gently, reassuringly—though her lips do not move, but rather speaking directly to his mind in the secret vernacular that they have always shared and have come to believe must be some small compensation for the peculiarities of their physiology, and for their tiresome, meandering, nomadic lives, and, too, for the burden of all these eyes upon them.

Are you ready?
she asks, though not in so many words, and he replies that he is. The boy kneels upon the stage, on the thin woolen blanket that has been provided for them, and the girl gazes upwards towards the sagging rafters hidden in shadow, somewhere far overhead. The boy is turned towards the audience, his head bowed and his back set to the girl, and now both their almond bodies glisten with an oily sheen of sweat.

I love you,
he tells her, as he has always done before their demonstrations begin, and behind his chocolate eyes he can feel her smile, that private, incorporeal smile never meant for anyone else but him, hidden from view and from any possibility of exploitation. Something that is theirs and theirs alone, like the unspoken words that pass between them. She exhales loudly, and some in the crowd will later swear that they heard her laughing, too, though others will disagree. The boy leans forward, supporting himself now with his hands and strong arms as well as his knees, bracing himself for what’s to come.

The girl’s body shudders, as though she has already found the orgasm that some might well imagine will be the culmination of their performance. Her pink tongue slips across the gate of her teeth, past her lips, and it lingers there as both her hands descend across her hard, flat belly and to her crotch, which she keeps shaved smooth. There is a small tattoo an inch or so below her navel, and those with the best seats may discern the indelible symbol worked into her skin. Later, there will be confusion and even heated discussions ewer the identity of the tattoo, and over its purpose, whether it has been placed as a protective talisman or as an invocation or solicitation to wicked, unnameable gods. The truth is almost always a disappointment, disclosure more often than not a letdown, and only the boy and girl need comprehend it is no more than a private joke between them.

She has begun to massage the edges of her vagina, her fingertips tracing those familiar, sensitive contours, and now her tongue retreats before she bites down hard on her lower lip.

We should leave them like this
, the boy smirks, almost breaking her concentration.
These sad, deluded mutilations, these goddamn poseurs, it would serve them right, every last me of them.

Why don’t you shit up,
she laughs, though no one in the Well can hear her but the kneeling boy. And now the girl’s short, unpolished nails press expertly into the flesh of her labia majora, and the thin, hymen-like membrane sealing her shut splits open, and those with front row seats can plainly see the sudden gout of blood. There is no pain, but she knows that they
want
pain, so she twists her face into an agonized grimace and moans loudly enough that most of the crowd can hear her over the Puccini. Inside her body, coiled snug within the light less warmth of her womb, that quirk of her soul’s tenement stirs awake.

Not much longer now
, she tells the boy, and he grits his teeth in anticipation and watches the dark spatters of sweat that have dripped from his chin and forehead and hair onto the thirsty boards of the stage.
It is drinking me
, he thinks,
the stage is drinking me.
And though the thought was not intended for the girl, it pleases her and earns for him a silent snicker.

Oh, I will drink you, little bird
, she says.
I will drink so deeply you will be a Saharan wasteland when I am done.
But she is also thinking something else, of tiresome, old unanswerable questions buried within the grey convolutions of her brain so that the boy cannot hear them.
What is it they need of me? What is it they have come to find? What do they mean to take away, and what will then be left?

They can take nothing but what I show them, and then they have to carry away only the insufficient memory.

When the sleek purplish tip of the hidden organ or appendage emerges from the folds of her labia, there are audible gasps from the audience. The girl encircles it with her left thumb and middle finger, and the spotlight glimmers wetly off that taut iridescent shaft. But before the watchers can mistake her for some common hermaphrodite, the head of the shaft swells slightly and the foreskin opens to reveal minute rows of needle-like teeth. At least, they look more like teeth than anything else, and so the girl has always
thought
of them as teeth. Another three or four inches of the shaft glides eagerly, effortlessly out from between her legs, through the caressing ring of her thumb and finger, and she shuts her eyes and takes another deep breath.

And as though it has become now a single creature, some colonial aggregation of simpler cells thinking and moving as one beast, the audience leans nearer the stage. Without gazing into all those watchful, salivating eyes, the girl and the boy understard that the crowd can be teased just so long and not a minute longer. For this precious, obscene spectacle, and for all those who have come before on other nights, and those that will follow after this night, the gapers and gawkers have made oddities of themselves.

They have surrendered to another will, believing themselves supplicants, believing desire the equal to devotion, believing that their personal sacrifices have brought them somehow nearer to the purity of those marked from birth by prenatal misadventures, by the precise vagaries of genetic recombination and the whimsy of mutagens and
in utero
cataclysms. But the boy and girl know that even the most drastically altered of this company would barely be fit for a cheap sideshow tent, and the gulf between all these token crucifixions and genuine martyrdom is deeper and wider than any haloed baptismal river.

Almost a full foot of the glistening organ has escaped from the girl’s vagina, and now it writhes in her hands like a serpent or eel, a ballet of lewd convolutions and contortions, and she bends her knees slightly, slightly thrusting her pelvis towards the boy’s ass.
Are you ready?
she asks him, and he silently reminds her that he is always ready, that the promise of this coupling pulls him from one dreary day to the next. She whispers something then, whispering aloud by the mundane conspiracy of tongue and palate and larynx, verbs and nouns, some assurance of love that he does not need, because all he needs now or ever is her inside him. There is no greater intimacy waiting anywhere to be found, not for these two, and she watches as the pulsating, vertical slit where his anus should be widens to receive her. She enters without another word, spoken or unspoken, and it only seems an act of violence to those who have been damned to merely observe. Once more, they would be disappointed by the truth. He closes himself firmly around her, and now the girl also sinks to her knees, consumed in ecstasy, lost in this congress which is always over far too soon. She is crying now, as he leans forward and backwards again and again, accepting inch after inch of her womb’s gift, and hardly anyone in the crowd fails to notice the flaccid, disinterested droop of the boy’s penis as he grinds himself against her. Silently, gasping, she reminds the boy to pace himself, that they’ve been paid for a full half hour, and it would not do to rush to the exhibition’s climax prematurely.

And far above the pit, above the subbasement and the basement labyrinth and the two green doors, in the immaculately furnished attic of the antique shop, seven men and seven women and seven others who prefer to keep matters of gender fluid and undefined sit together on claret velvet cushions or in chairs upholstered with the tanned skins of unborn calves. On the walls hang three enormous flat-screen LCD video monitors, and these twenty-one watchers sip their cocktails and laugh amongst themselves and puff cigars or cigarettes or delicately flavored imported tobaccos from great bronze hookahs. Each of the three screens shows a portion of the gathering, the wide eyes and attentive, unflinching faces of those who have been granted access to the Well. At no point do any of the dosed-circuit cameras hidden all around the edges of the revolving stage swivel to reveal the girl and the boy. For here, in the attic parlor, are passions and proclivities far more subtle. They would say far more
refined
, were anyone ever to ask. They would point out that when Roman emperors loosed lions and tigers, leopards and starving wolves from the depths of the hypogeum upon the Colosseum’s innumerable victims, the mob was not watching the animals.

This is their puppet show, as it has always been, and these days they trade DVDs and VHS tapes and QuickTime files of the ordeals endured by the members of the audience far below, exacting, step-by-step documentaries of those many elective transformations, and then the twenty-one assemble here to watch and consider and compare observations. They find potential voyeurs, and they arrange their various alterations, and they also supply “the bait,” all those warped and misbegotten things the puppets come to see. It is a simple and efficient ecosystem, and everyone is fed that which they crave, and if there are deceptions, they are only the deceptions of camouflage and predation common to all robust biological systems.

“Ah,” one of the men whispers, setting his Scotch and water aside and pointing to one of the screens. “That one, there. Isn’t she exquisite?”

And the remaining twenty take note of the cat-faced woman seated next to the man in the grey gabardine suit. She is no longer watching the stage, but staring instead at a small-caliber handgun cradled in her lap.

“Do you think she has the courage this time?” one of the women asks, and the attic is filled with laughter.

The moon is three nights past full, and I sit here alone at the edge of the low dunes while the tide goes out again. That moon, so high and cold and thoroughly disinterested, one great all-seeing, uncaring eye slowly beginning to close in the lazy, inevitable wink of lunar cycles. There’s a warm late summer breeze rustling through the green tangle of dog roses and poison ivy, cordgrass and sea lavender, back towards the brackish expanse of Green Hill Pond. And Block Island Sound stretches out before me, restless and muttering beneath the moonlight, describing time and the night with the rhythmic language of troughs and cresting waves and breakers. I come here when she calls, which is more often than it used to be. I come here, and maybe there are others she awakens, on other nights, but, if so, I have never seen them for myself. I drive down from Charlestown, always stopping somewhere along the way for a few bottles of beer, a pack of cigarettes, following her voice and carefully minding the gauntlet of traffic signals and stops signs. I never play the radio. On these nights, there’s room in me for no song but the one she sings, and it pulls me east and south towards the sea. By the time I cross the iron, concrete, and asphalt bridge where Green Hill and Ninigret ponds are connected through the narrowest of confluences, the song is the only momentum I need. All else has become distraction, annoyance, if I listen, and I freely admit there have been nights I’ve stopped there on the bridge. I’ve pulled over and stood gazing out across the soughing marshes, contemplating the life I lived before. She has left me my will intact—or so she swears—and I will say that it seems as though, in those rare moments of hesitation, my license to turn back, to simply
stop listening,
is right there before me. I only need the courage to turn away. I linger near my idling truck, hands shaking, smelling the stink of my own anxious sweat (which smells not so very different from the ponds and the sea), smelling the night, and I can
almost
comprehend the restraint and abnegation that would be required to turnaround and drive home again. I have never yet done so, and I don’t believe I ever shall. It is not my will. So, tonight I sit here at the edge of the dunes, beneath the indifferent moon as the tide slides steadily away down the berm, here and there exposing a few stranded jellyfish and an unlucky, gasping cod. Never yet has she asked me to come any nearer to the water than this. I think that’s part of our peculiar symbiosis: she leads
me
down to the sea, but I am the magnet that pulls
her
up from the depths where she sleeps away the days, wrapped safe from the hungry sun, shrouded in veils of silt and darkness. Half a mile out, there’s the wreckage of the
Caoimhe Colleen
, a trawler that went down during a gale, back in ’75. She sleeps in the wheelhouse, most days, coiled up snug as any eel, tight as an oyster in its shell. I don’t know where the sea hid her before the trawler sank; I’ve never thought to ask. It hardly seems to matter. I do, however, know that once, many years ago, she still slept on the land, keeping to one boneyard or another like any good cliché. I know she spent a decade haunting Stonington Cemetery, and the local teenagers still swap ghost stories that must have begun with her. And I know, too, that, farther back, she once rested among caskets locked safe inside a marble vault at Swan Point in Providence. It was there that she first thought of the water, and so traded the mausoleum for the succor of the muddy Seekonk River. The only time I ever asked her why—why the water, why the sea—she leaned close, laughing, and whispered, “You really have no notion how delightful it will be, when they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea.” Her laughter makes the night flinch, and sometimes I imagine it is harder than diamonds, that laugh. She loves Lewis Carroll, and there have been evenings I’ve gone to her when every word from her lips is something remembered from “Jabberwocky” or “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” When she bothers to speak at all, and there certainly are enough nights when we have no need of mere words for this necessary exchange. And now I realize that I have been woolgathering, partway drunk on convenience-store beer and drawing circles within circles in the sand. There was a noise, or, rather, there was the most minute alteration in the familiar sonic tapestry of the beach, the wind, the night, so I look up, and there she is, walking out of the waves towards me. She trails some dim bluish phosphorescence, something borrowed from dinoflagellates and tiny shrimp, only by accident or because she thinks it suits her. Beneath all the valleys and mountains and dry basaltic maria of the waning moon, she glistens. Not for me, but this is of no consequence whatsoever. I have never imagined myself at the center of anything, nor asked the paths of stars to bear some relevance to my own existence. She glistens, and it is sufficient that I am permitted to bear witness. For a while—I can never say how long—she stands over me, dripping and murmuring about the gravity of appetite and all the epochs that have come and are yet to come. Or this is only my straining imagination, and, instead, she mutters a bit of “The Lobster Quadrille,” or there is not
any
shape or sense to her voice. Or there is not
even
her voice. For the song requires so much from her, and there is no need to keep singing when I am sitting at her feet. She kneels before me in the sand, though I must be clear that she is not kneeling
to
me. If she has ever deigned to play supplicant to any god or goddess, any demon or angel or pagan numen, it is a secret known to her and her alone. For my part, I like to think she has never prayed and never will. She kneels before me in the sand, naked save the limp strands of knotted wrack and ribbon weed woven into her black hair and hanging down about her shoulders and breasts, the sharp scatter of barnacles like freckles across her cheeks and belly, the anemone she has allowed to take hold in the cleft between her legs. One day, one evening, I know, she will become a garden, and no longer will she need sing across the nights to insomniacs and mad men, suicides and lonely women. If she does not forsake the sea, it will, in distant centuries, make her well and truly its own. She will be nourished not with the warm blood of creatures that walk beneath blue skies, but by the photosynthesis of kelp and pink leaf, by sponges and colonies of encrusting bryozoans straining the murky sound for zooplankton and detritus. She will wear lady-crab garlands and sand-dollar brooches. These visions she has passed along to me, over the months and years, and I think they are a sort of comfort to her, the possibility of an end to untold ages of predation, an end which she accepts with the resignation of one who has been so long in agony and understands that death is, at least, release. She will not end, as my human consciousness will one day end, for that luxury was stolen from her long ago, but she might yet be permitted in this sea change
to fade,
diminishing as all unperverted Nature diminishes. She kneels in the sand before me (which is only to say
in front
of me), her eyes the still hearts of hurricanes, and then she smiles the smile I have driven through the South County night to see. She leans forward, kissing me, and so I taste salt and estuary sediment and, beyond that muddy, saline veneer, the harsher flavors that I know are truly her own. Maybe she is speaking now, words hardly even breathed they fall so softly on my ears. Maybe she is thanking me for following the song again, or maybe she is merely reciting Lewis Carroll. Maybe she is describing some careless, wanton conclusion to our meetings, a crimson abandon that would leave my body torn apart and strewn among the dunes. But it’s all the same, really, as I am hers to do with as she will, no strings attached, no farthest limits to my devotion; I made that promise the first night and have not yet regretted it. Her tongue, rough as any cat’s, probes eagerly past my lips, and now she is pushing me down into the sand. She is the weight of all my joys and disappointments, the bitter weight of
living,
bearing down upon me. She rises from the ocean and delivers to me the merciless press of fifty or sixty pounds per square inch, and with a single inhalation she could collapse my fragile lungs.
Her sigh and cries would rend the skies for her lover that was drowned.
And when the kiss has finally ended (for, like a hall of mirrors, it only
seems
to go on forever), I show her my throat, my paltry, insufficient offering. She trills enthusiastic approval, though, so never mind my own insecurities and misgivings in this moment. We cannot ever know the minds of the gods we serve, and we cannot second-guess their approval or disdain.
O Mother, even a dullard becomes a poet who meditates upon thee raimented with space,
and at best I am a dullard as the terrible, exquisite crucible of her mouth opens so wide and her long eyeteeth flash the moonlight like pearls.
Creatrix of the three worlds, whose waist is beautiful with a girdle made of numbers of dead men’s arms, and who on the breast of a corpse...
and I do not flinch or cry out or attempt to pull away as those fangs honed hundreds of years before my inconsequential birth divide skin and fascia and muscle to find the hot stream of my carotid artery. I do not turn away from the pain, but embrace it, as she is embracing me in her long white arms. The pain is one part of my penance, one part of my reward, a sliver of agony to last me until the next time, which I understand, as always, may never come. She clamps her jaws tight about me, and in this instant we may almost be as one, the embanked river spilling itself out into the boundless sea, and yes, yes, I am but a dullard, at
best,
and this is not poetry at all, Shri Kalika Devi, Morrigan—virgin Ana, mother Babd, great crone Macha, Queen of all the Phantoms Circe, Nerthus, Al-‘Uzzuã, al-Manãt, al-Lãt, Demeter: the devouring, loving, enveloping, consuming mother who draws witches to their sabat bonfires and men to sacred crematoria and priestesses to shrines in secret groves surrounding bottomless, serpent-haunted pools. The circle drawn about a stone to render it a mystery, and my mind reels and is all but lost in this ecstasy that I am well aware is not
my
ecstasy, but hers and hers alone. I am, at most, vicarious. Dullard. Grateful, weeping dullard on a beach with the summer sea pulling back towards the fullest extent of low tide as she feeds. You do not satiate that hunger, but only placate it. She could devour the world and not be filled. Her thirst is as profound and abyssal as the “hole” proceeding a star’s collapse,and I am damned and blessed to circle this event horizon forevermore, until she is done with me. Let me pray here for death, which is the same prayer I would utter for life, being and unbeing, and the blood that escapes her greedy, sucking lips trickles down my throat and chest and spatters like ink across the brown-sugar sand. I close my eyes, that shrinking moon, the single eye of all goddesses, glaring down at me. I will not, even now, forget those few lines memorized from the Saktisangama Tantra—
... there is not, nor has been, nor will be any holy place like unto a woman...—
but these are only a lunatic’s ramblings, an idiot grasping at straws, and a dullard worshiping at the alabaster feet of the incomprehensible universe. I close my eyes, and the night falls away, and the sea is forgotten, and she is only my dream of purity and taint. She folds me open, and folds me shut, and when I awaken, shivering, in the morning to the giggle and screech of the gulls and the roar oft he tide coming up again, I shall say my wicked, heathen prayers, and imagine her sleeping in the ruin of the
Caoimhe Colleen
, and already I will have begun waiting all over again.