Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (18 page)

So prayed the nymph, nor did she pray in vain
,

For she finds him now, as his limbs she pressed.

Growing nearer and nearer to her breast
,

Until, piercing each the other’s flesh, they run

Together; and incorporate, becoming one.

At last in one face are both their faces joined,

As when the stock and grafted twig combined

Shoot up the same, and wear a common rind.

Both bodies in a single body mix.

A single body with a double sex.

I pull the rubber plug from the drain, and the tub begins to empty, and, in this dream, I dry my hands on a yellow bath towel while I watch the water slipping away, exposing you, like ancient seas retreating to reveal landscapes long concealed by Silurian or Devonian brine.

The boy, thus lost in woman, now surveyed

The river’s guilty stream, and thus he prayed.

(He prayed, but also wondered at his softer tone,

Surprised to hear a voice but half his own.)

You brush a strand of coppery hair from my eyes, and kiss me lightly on the bridge of my nose. You have always loved my nose, or so you’ve frequently professed. When I complain that it is too big or poorly shaped, you have threatened to cut it off and keep it in a tiny wooden box, lined in claret velvet. If I do not appreciate it, you have said, then I should not be permitted to wear so fine a nose, and you would protect it from my scorn.

“Frankly, I’ve always detected more than an undertone of misogyny in that line,” you say, speaking almost so softly as to be whispering, and I wonder whom you are afraid will overhear. “‘... a voice but
half
his own?’”

“I don’t think that’s how it was intended,” I reply, staring at the lamp beside our bed, instead of into your skeptical grey-blue eyes.

“The implication is clear,” you say. “His voice was diminished in his fusion with the nymph. Not merely altered, and not made greater, but diminished. Ovid paints Hermaphroditus as cursed, as a victim, when he ought to number him among the blessed.”

I tell you that it hardly seems so clear cut to me, but there’s never my changing your mind.

Tim parent-Gods, whose heavenly names I bear,

Hear your Hermaphrodite, and grant my prayer;

Oh grant, that whomsoever these streams contain,

If a man he entered, when he may rise again

Supple, unsinewed, and become but half a man!

You place a slip of paper on my belly, just above the navel, and I cannot see what is written there. You have placed it with the words facing down, your handwriting laid against my skin, and I refuse to give you the satisfaction of seeing me reach for it, of knowing I am curious.

“What a little prick,” you say. “He’s cursed, if you
buy
that line of reasoning, and so he calls upon the wrath of the gods to likewise curse any
other
men who enter the stream, forever. I cannot even begin to see where that makes sense. It’s not even proper revenge...” and you trail off, then, turning away from me.

“How old were you?” I ask. “That afternoon in the greenhouse?” The question has never been forbidden, precisely, but I know that it’s hardly your favorite topic of discussion.

“What difference does it make?”

“Maybe all the difference in the world.”

You take a very deep breath, and sigh, “I was nineteen. A month away from twenty. It was late July. The greenhouse was going wild, by then. No one ever came to tend it anymore, not after my grandfather died.”

“That’s a shame,” I say.

“It was more than a hundred years old by then. The man who designed it had studied under the Belgian architect Alphonse Balat, who designed the Royal Greenhouses of Lacken in the early 1870s. But no one cared, not by then. No one but me, I think. It was like a church, all that glass and iron, those domes, and I would lie there beneath it, safe from the eyes of Heaven.”

“It was going wild,” I say.

“Isn’t that what I just told you?” you ask, more than a hint of impatience in your voice. “Yes, it had been left untended for a long time, all those plants left to grow as best they could without anyone to keep them safe from the winters, or to be sure that the hardier species didn’t crowd out and displace the more delicate ones.”

“It was July.”

“I just fucking
said
that it was July.”

I take my eyes off the lamp on the bedside table only long enough to count the owls in the trees, and to see that the moon has climbed higher in the New England sky, and has gone the bright glacial white of the sun off ice. But you’re already talking again, in that moment when we are lying together and I am not yet kneeling in the mud beside the pond. You’re talking about that day in the greenhouse, fifteen years ago.

“I never went back after that. They sealed the place up, chained the doors, and slapped on padlocks. Though, I could have gotten in, if I’d wanted to.”

“You’re skipping ahead,” I say.

“Yes,” you reply, “I’m skipping ahead. Are you just trying to piss me off?”

“No, I’m not. It’s just that you don’t usually skip ahead. I’m sorry,” and I imagine, fleetingly, that I
am
genuinely sorry, even if I can now permit myself the luxury of questioning my sincerity. “I never should have brought it up.” And then I lie, knowing full well that I am lying, and say, “I’m not sure why I did.”

And this is when, perhaps, I see something resting in the shallow pool that has collected at the bottom of the hole that I’ve dug in the mud. It’s larger than a fifty-cent piece, but not as large as a silver dollar (I do not mean to imply that it is a coin). It’s disk shaped, and the color of bone, thicker at its center and tapering to a razor-sharp circumference. I reach into the pool, and, with my numb fingers, I lift it out. The polished upper surface glistens in the moonlight. There is some pattern etched into the disk, which puts me in mind of the sort of triskele or triple spiral found in association with many Neolithic and Irish Megalithic sites. I recall it from photographs I have seen of the New Grange passage tomb in County Meath. The disk is slippery, and I slice my thumb open.

“My great grandfather, who had the greenhouse constructed, was especially interested in tree ferns,” you continue, without my having prompted you to do so. “And in temperate rainforests, like those in New Zealand and the Pacific Northwest. So, the plants didn’t suffer so much from the Rhode Island winters as one might expect. I can still remember some of the Latin names.
Dickinsonia antarctica
—the Tasmanian Tree Fern—that was one of my favorites. And
Cyathea medullaris
, or the Black Tree Fern. The Maori called it
mamaku
.”

“It amazes me, that you remember all that.”

“Lying there on the flagstones, in the moss and ferns and horsetails, listening to the incessant drone of dragonflies and mosquitoes, and with those gigantic fronds to form a drooping canopy above me, it was easy to pretend.”

“To pretend what?”

You’re silent For a minute or so, and I kneel in the mud, thinking about Zoeth Howland and the Narragansetts and Sin and Flesh Brook, watching the way the blood from my thumb flows across my palm and encircles my muddy wrist to make a living bracelet before dripping into the hole.

“It might have been the first day of all in there,” you say, finally. “It might have been any Carboniferous evening, or a Coal-Forest afternoon. I never wanted to be anywhere else besides the greenhouse, not really. I wanted those days to go on and on, unending. So the violation was not only of my body, but of that sanctuary. It might have been less cruel, if I had simply died.”

In the night, my blood is not red, but dark as the ink you scrawl your quotations in, and it could just as well be dripping from the nib of one of your fountain pens as from the torn vein in my thumb.

“Maybe if they had caught the man—” I begin, but you interrupt me.

“There was no man to catch,” you say. “It wasn’t any man who came to me that day.”

“Is that what you told them then? Is that what you told the police?”

“Yes,” you answer, turning to face me again, and so I look away from both my bleeding hand and the lamp. Your eyes are no longer blue. They have become the gaping tangerine eyes of an owl, but I don’t scream. I detest women who scream. You blink feathery eyelids, and with that beak could so easily part my soul from my skin. As an offering, I give you the last of the story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis:

The heavenly parents answered him from on high,

Their two-shaped son, the double votary.

Then they gave a secret virtue to the flood,

And tinged its source to make his wishes good.

The bony disk slips from my muck- and blood-slicked grip, and falls with a small splash into the pool, there in the hole I have made for your planting. I don’t reach for it again, knowing that I’m not meant to. It has what it needed from me, and I require nothing more of it.

“You’re hanging back,” you say, laying your head on my shoulder, fingering my nipples until they are both erect. “Holding out. Why is that? Do you resent my gift to you as much as Hermaphroditus resented the gift that the daughter of Zeus gave to him?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, closing my eyes, wishing there were nothing I had to feel but your touch.

“You do. You know
exactly
what I mean. It’s not the owls, or the moon, and it’s not the grave. It’s not even the drowning that matters. It’s what came later, and tonight you’ve dreamt everything and anything but that.”

“You never did have tact. Well, none to speak of,” I whisper and shut my eyes, which only results in my opening them in some other, less-traveled corridor of this turning net her ward spire. The place I have been trying, all along, not to see, the night I have resisted visiting; it hardly matters if what I view here ever truly took place or not, in an intrinsic, objective sense. We’ll let that question stand unanswered for the time being, as pausing to address it would only mislead and distort.

Another night, a night late in spring when the moon is only a slender, waning crescent, and the fields north of the Old Bulgarmarsh Road in Tiverton have yet to sprout. I have been back alone many times now, and this is not returning to the scene of the crime, as much as it is returning to the scene of the consequences of the crime. Though, I think, you would insist there has been no crime committed. I only acted as an extension of your will, in accordance with your desires. I was only ever the instrument of your suicide. And on this night, I go down to the banks of Sin and Flesh Brook alone, following it south to the swampy place where it meets the nameless pond.

Tonight, there are no owls. Rut the whippoorwills cry like lost children.

I follow a narrow, uneven dirt path that has become familiar as my face in a mirror, and that must have only been a deer trail before I found it. Stepping through the briars and skunk cabbages and the high cattails, then just past the gnarled and rotting trunk of a dead hemlock tree, I can find this spot in my sleep. The mud is deep here, and already I am in up to my ankles. I never bother with shoes on these pilgrimages, no matter the weather; they would only be ruined. I have worn a loose, sleaveless dress you made for me, a simple floral cotton print, and no jacket, despite the cool of the evening. Neither did I see the need for undergarments.

This is each and every night I have ever made the trip. But always it is the
first
time, and always I swear a futile promise that it will be my last. No one who has joined the Heleads has need of
my
meager devotion, and maybe, I think, it’s only (at best) an insult to you, my coming here, something that was never apart of your plan. I stand there in the mud, shivering, my ears filled with whippoorwills, my head filled with loss and regret and memories like a millstone around my neck.

“It wasn’t any man who came to me that day.”

And it will be no woman, nor any mere woman’s shade, who comes to me tonight.
Woman
is far too small a word, I think, as you rise from the thick mud, a form already so dimly recollected coalescing from whatever is at hand and from bits of dream and, possibly, your own whimsy. On this dark night, the weeds might almost pass for your black hair, and the marsh slime for the skin you gave up months ago. But it is restless, this temporary body, always shifting, as though too great an effort is required to hold the form, and maybe in the years to come you will grow more skilled in this alchemy. Your face comes and goes, one second a perfected likeness, down to the scar on your left cheek, but it melts, coming apart, dissolving, and only a crude and featureless parody of it remains.

Your wet voice is the primordial voice of all bogs—your tongue and teeth, larynx and palate spun from a weave of sundew and peatlands, fishbone, white cedar, sweet gale, bog rosemary, dragonfly larvae and empty turtle shells, waterlogged carpets of red maple leaves, the scurry of predatory water bugs sewn into a gurgling out wash of crayfish and sphagnum, sedges, cranberries, leatherleaf, and the treacherous, seductive traps of insectivorous pitcher plants. Your shoulders writhe with clots of leeches, like living epaulets, and here and there a frog or small snake has been caught up in the suddenness of your accretion, and they squirm in and out of view, as do the gasping mouths, eyes, and fins of perch and pout and calico bass. There are other things, more fantastical and unlikely components of your being—the creeping, segmented shells of trilobites, perhaps. The whorl of an ammonite’s shell. Rut this might only be my imagination. The weeds hang down your shoulders and back and cover your ass like a mane.

“My gift,” you say, and there’s a rheumy, squelching sort of a sound as you raise your arms so that I can see what you have hauled up from the bottom of the nameless pond at the end of Sin and Flesh Brook. And I do not have words to describe what you hold in both hands, but I know, instinctively, that is has grown, somehow, from a disk of bone-like matter engraved with triple spirals and anointed, fertilized, awakened by my own blood. It has swelled, ripening, and sprouted countless chitinous spines. On the side turned towards me, there is something akin to a proboscis or snout, and from beneath it spills a wriggling tendril. It shines slickly in the night, twisting and thrashing this way and that, and as I watch, the tendril bifurcates, and where it was at first smooth, it quickly becomes festooned with an assortment of quivering prongs and thorn-like projections. And all these words are a sorry excuse for the sight of the thing, whether I have seen it with my eyes or with nothing but my mind. It is horrifying, and it is sublime, and I have never yet beheld anything else so beautiful.